We had a playgroup that used all proxies because real cards are prohibitively expensive. We encouraged creativity and as a marker we printed out a proxy deck of the top deck at the time: Tendrils of Agony, a deck that could infamously win on turn 0 or turn 1. We told everyone, "If you just want to win, here you go. Play out a hand, see if you can combo out to kill 4 players or so with 80 damage, then pat yourself on the back and the rest of us will continue the game without you but you can declare yourself the winner".
We had a tiny robust evolving meta as players one-upped each other with ridiculous board states and obscure situations and decks that surgically cut out the knees from other decks which had to diversify to compensate. It was great fun though in the end we settled for doing roleplaying over mtg - it gave all the fun and only the gm had to put in great labor over it.
At least the problem statement has been cleared up a bit:
- You need Elites to organize your hobby lest it dies or never even comes to be.
- You need those same Elites to resist the siren call of meta-gaming the meta to the detriment of a higher calling/meta. (Thus creating a consoomer class)
- You need those Elites to be your Elites.
I think that perhaps if you could design the hobby from the ground up with that in mind, wherein you teach your players those facts via the game mechanics, maybe it could just work?
I see the same thing in comics. They have made all the mainstream issues hyper violent or woke unaesthetic stuff. On a wall of current issues, perhaps two out of 100 are actually good to core comic book fans.
I think Robert Conquest’s second law applies here in that committed leftists will infiltrate and push any organization that does not stand for conservative or traditional values explicitly. If they can do it to Warhammer for goodness sake with its hyper masculine kill the xenos, then nothing is safe unless it is explicit like Warhorse Studios that produce the successful AA “Deliverance: Kingdom Come” video game series whose owner is openly anti-Woke.
Hopefully this can be alleviated as these sorts of games inevitably move more online, thus making it easier for people with common values to play them together. I am also a big fan of these sorts of games, but when I try to play them in-person, the pool of people I can potentially play with is extremely limited by lots of obvious factors, and is often more hassle than it's worth when I've got a lot else already going on in life.
I sympathize and I really would like to have a stable offline community that I could count on for some regular gaming. Unfortunately, the constraints imposed by meeting up IRL lead to such communities being inevitably leftist for the same reason that everything more generally is leftist. If you want a cool kids club with no libtards allowed, it's pretty much only possible to do that online right now. We can sit here and dream of a day when that might change but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Some of the most important formative experiences I had was tryharding at MTG as a teenager and being tutored by a bunch of edgy 90s nerds at my lgs back in Brazil, I dont think that scene exists anymore and its a shame something like that is gone, it was like a boys club but with cardgames and trpgs.
I appreciate your point about gaming providing a pro-social outlet for men and boys, which I think we (or at least I) often forget is one of the most important aspects of certain types of gaming. I also had high hopes for Netrunner and mourned it's loss (although I still play it with the two other people I know who already know how to play). The gaming situation seems analogous to so many other platform lock-in situations that plague our existence where the meta twiddling alters things in such a way that it enshittifies the game, but where else are you gonna go now that everyone you know plays MTG, i.e. Netrunner is like blogging with two friends and MTG is like the facebook. Perhaps the best way to create spaces for good gaming is just within adjacent IRL communities where the gaming is a benefit, rather than the core focus, of the group.
I've always thought that it would be cool to make a FOSS card game with some kind of point system for building card stats and allocating attributes and abilities (I'm sure there's already hundreds out there that I'm too lazy to sort through), but I think this post suggests why it might be doomed to fail outside of a few dedicated players (and maybe that's just fine if it does create space for folks to just have some fun), or become inundated with sub-par noise like 3-D printing files or self published books.
On a similar note, when looking to fork a good game for a "community" to recover it... what about D&D?
I got into D&D at 2nd Ed, and it was vastly transformative for me in great ways:
-Got great at basic math
-Memorizing facts/tables
-Learning history
-Appreciation for how much manual labor went into producing things like armor, wagons
-Learning to be resourceful and keep varied "soft skills" like proficiencies because you never know when they'll come in handy
-Appreciating lopsided/asymmetric skill sets and learning to work as a team
-A real fear of death at level 1, lol but srsly, your decisions are very careful when you can permanently lose your whole character by hitting 0 HP in your first battle even once
But yeah, the rules were clunky.
WOTC buys D&D for 3rd Ed, did a lot of cleanup on rules, which I thought was a big positive. But they also ruined a LOT of that list above.
-No race restrictions on class
-Less lopsided/asymmetric play between classes
-Less fear of death lol
Trying to zoom past because this could be a whole article, but the point was, when 4th Ed came around? WOTC went full cash cow, in fact the rules were changed SO much, that it was obvious to me that they weren't even catering to their own fans -- they were trying to steal World of Warcraft fans. It was basically Tabletop WoW, and it sucked.
That was when the "community" *did* fork something like a D&D 2.5 and created Pathfinder, which I have never played, sad to say. That game I think has only had one major update in 20 years, and still has a player base, including Aydin Paladin.
Would that be an example of a success story you're looking for?
Could anyone else with insight to the history, "community," with Pathfinder experience speak to this for me?
ADnD 1e is by far the best wargame I’ve played in. It has everything needed to endlessly generate scenarios and for any given character to dive deep in the dungeon for enough coin to hire mercenaries and go find some new corner of the map to domain in and get back to winning.
I’d highly recommend anyone read Bradford Walkers Substack series on the Clubhouse as the only plausible path to retaining these hobbies as enjoyable
Oh no, I wasn't recommending it to you to play. I was looking at the story *around* Pathfinder, the dynamics of WOTC butchering their product in the name of consumerism, and the community reaction of fans picking up the old product and developing it in a direction that served them better, and in this case, it seems to have kept longevity. I don't know that there's a particular elite figure being the steward for the project or anything, I really don't know anything about Pathfinder. So I was pointing the question at the rest of your readers, surely some of them have played it and know the story around it. To them, I ask: Is the Pathfinder story an example of what Dave sketches out here for a hypothetical "rescue" of a product by a community from its consumerist property holder? Is this a proof of concept example?
40k has been broken since the release of 3rd edition in 98, IMHO. 2nd edition was known to be completely unbalanced and that’s what made it fun.
It was so easy to build a list that completely broke the game that the only way to play it was through a series of unspoken gentleman’s agreements (though shalt not use the Vortex Grenade or Virus Outbreak cards). It was a sandbox game but one that was more tactically and narratively compelling than any of the editions released since, if you gave it the chance.
3rd edition began the trend of trying to standardise balance by adding in force organisation restrictions and the like. But it’s an observable fact that the more proscriptive your ruleset, the more incentive you give to gamers to ‘break it’ with min/maxing and the like. 2nd edition let you take an entire army of assault cannon terminators of you wanted. You might contemplate it briefly and think better of it. 3rd and its successors tried to build a cage for these excesses and all it achieved was to reward the best jail breakers.
And I won’t miss an opportunity for done transatlantic snobbery - 3rd was partially a response to the growth of the US tournament scene and a desire to expand that market. More proof that you Americans ruin everything ;).
Well the reason why many people would be annoyed with someone bringing a fully proxied deck is because if you can print cards, you can simply print the best decks of all, decks much better than what a casual player would have access to with their limited number of cards. Some decks and card are simply better than others, and most often its the most expensive that are best. By limiting yourselves to what you can actually buy, your "powerlevel" so to say is more limited and balanced
I'm on the forlorn road of trying to homebrew mtg formats to somehow get it right. I'm not a regular player really, but my affection for it sticks. It would be great fun if there were some little substack corner where we could generate a bank of proxies, perhaps with a few theme varieties. Recently picked up "star realms", but it feels a little like methadone.
We had a playgroup that used all proxies because real cards are prohibitively expensive. We encouraged creativity and as a marker we printed out a proxy deck of the top deck at the time: Tendrils of Agony, a deck that could infamously win on turn 0 or turn 1. We told everyone, "If you just want to win, here you go. Play out a hand, see if you can combo out to kill 4 players or so with 80 damage, then pat yourself on the back and the rest of us will continue the game without you but you can declare yourself the winner".
We had a tiny robust evolving meta as players one-upped each other with ridiculous board states and obscure situations and decks that surgically cut out the knees from other decks which had to diversify to compensate. It was great fun though in the end we settled for doing roleplaying over mtg - it gave all the fun and only the gm had to put in great labor over it.
At least the problem statement has been cleared up a bit:
- You need Elites to organize your hobby lest it dies or never even comes to be.
- You need those same Elites to resist the siren call of meta-gaming the meta to the detriment of a higher calling/meta. (Thus creating a consoomer class)
- You need those Elites to be your Elites.
I think that perhaps if you could design the hobby from the ground up with that in mind, wherein you teach your players those facts via the game mechanics, maybe it could just work?
A good summary
I see the same thing in comics. They have made all the mainstream issues hyper violent or woke unaesthetic stuff. On a wall of current issues, perhaps two out of 100 are actually good to core comic book fans.
I think Robert Conquest’s second law applies here in that committed leftists will infiltrate and push any organization that does not stand for conservative or traditional values explicitly. If they can do it to Warhammer for goodness sake with its hyper masculine kill the xenos, then nothing is safe unless it is explicit like Warhorse Studios that produce the successful AA “Deliverance: Kingdom Come” video game series whose owner is openly anti-Woke.
Hopefully this can be alleviated as these sorts of games inevitably move more online, thus making it easier for people with common values to play them together. I am also a big fan of these sorts of games, but when I try to play them in-person, the pool of people I can potentially play with is extremely limited by lots of obvious factors, and is often more hassle than it's worth when I've got a lot else already going on in life.
The whole reason I play these games is to get offline.
I sympathize and I really would like to have a stable offline community that I could count on for some regular gaming. Unfortunately, the constraints imposed by meeting up IRL lead to such communities being inevitably leftist for the same reason that everything more generally is leftist. If you want a cool kids club with no libtards allowed, it's pretty much only possible to do that online right now. We can sit here and dream of a day when that might change but I'm not getting my hopes up.
The IRL stuff if coming together TBH.
Some of the most important formative experiences I had was tryharding at MTG as a teenager and being tutored by a bunch of edgy 90s nerds at my lgs back in Brazil, I dont think that scene exists anymore and its a shame something like that is gone, it was like a boys club but with cardgames and trpgs.
It should be "am wont to do", not "am want to do".
For once I can blame that on someone else since this was a transcript of a speech.
Agree with basically all of this and have been in your exact shoes, with the exact same interests.
You should check out flesh and blood, it ain't perfect but it's the closest I've ever seen
I appreciate your point about gaming providing a pro-social outlet for men and boys, which I think we (or at least I) often forget is one of the most important aspects of certain types of gaming. I also had high hopes for Netrunner and mourned it's loss (although I still play it with the two other people I know who already know how to play). The gaming situation seems analogous to so many other platform lock-in situations that plague our existence where the meta twiddling alters things in such a way that it enshittifies the game, but where else are you gonna go now that everyone you know plays MTG, i.e. Netrunner is like blogging with two friends and MTG is like the facebook. Perhaps the best way to create spaces for good gaming is just within adjacent IRL communities where the gaming is a benefit, rather than the core focus, of the group.
I've always thought that it would be cool to make a FOSS card game with some kind of point system for building card stats and allocating attributes and abilities (I'm sure there's already hundreds out there that I'm too lazy to sort through), but I think this post suggests why it might be doomed to fail outside of a few dedicated players (and maybe that's just fine if it does create space for folks to just have some fun), or become inundated with sub-par noise like 3-D printing files or self published books.
On a similar note, when looking to fork a good game for a "community" to recover it... what about D&D?
I got into D&D at 2nd Ed, and it was vastly transformative for me in great ways:
-Got great at basic math
-Memorizing facts/tables
-Learning history
-Appreciation for how much manual labor went into producing things like armor, wagons
-Learning to be resourceful and keep varied "soft skills" like proficiencies because you never know when they'll come in handy
-Appreciating lopsided/asymmetric skill sets and learning to work as a team
-A real fear of death at level 1, lol but srsly, your decisions are very careful when you can permanently lose your whole character by hitting 0 HP in your first battle even once
But yeah, the rules were clunky.
WOTC buys D&D for 3rd Ed, did a lot of cleanup on rules, which I thought was a big positive. But they also ruined a LOT of that list above.
-No race restrictions on class
-Less lopsided/asymmetric play between classes
-Less fear of death lol
Trying to zoom past because this could be a whole article, but the point was, when 4th Ed came around? WOTC went full cash cow, in fact the rules were changed SO much, that it was obvious to me that they weren't even catering to their own fans -- they were trying to steal World of Warcraft fans. It was basically Tabletop WoW, and it sucked.
That was when the "community" *did* fork something like a D&D 2.5 and created Pathfinder, which I have never played, sad to say. That game I think has only had one major update in 20 years, and still has a player base, including Aydin Paladin.
Would that be an example of a success story you're looking for?
Could anyone else with insight to the history, "community," with Pathfinder experience speak to this for me?
Sounds good, but I prefer competitive games or war games
ADnD 1e is by far the best wargame I’ve played in. It has everything needed to endlessly generate scenarios and for any given character to dive deep in the dungeon for enough coin to hire mercenaries and go find some new corner of the map to domain in and get back to winning.
I’d highly recommend anyone read Bradford Walkers Substack series on the Clubhouse as the only plausible path to retaining these hobbies as enjoyable
Oh no, I wasn't recommending it to you to play. I was looking at the story *around* Pathfinder, the dynamics of WOTC butchering their product in the name of consumerism, and the community reaction of fans picking up the old product and developing it in a direction that served them better, and in this case, it seems to have kept longevity. I don't know that there's a particular elite figure being the steward for the project or anything, I really don't know anything about Pathfinder. So I was pointing the question at the rest of your readers, surely some of them have played it and know the story around it. To them, I ask: Is the Pathfinder story an example of what Dave sketches out here for a hypothetical "rescue" of a product by a community from its consumerist property holder? Is this a proof of concept example?
40k has been broken since the release of 3rd edition in 98, IMHO. 2nd edition was known to be completely unbalanced and that’s what made it fun.
It was so easy to build a list that completely broke the game that the only way to play it was through a series of unspoken gentleman’s agreements (though shalt not use the Vortex Grenade or Virus Outbreak cards). It was a sandbox game but one that was more tactically and narratively compelling than any of the editions released since, if you gave it the chance.
3rd edition began the trend of trying to standardise balance by adding in force organisation restrictions and the like. But it’s an observable fact that the more proscriptive your ruleset, the more incentive you give to gamers to ‘break it’ with min/maxing and the like. 2nd edition let you take an entire army of assault cannon terminators of you wanted. You might contemplate it briefly and think better of it. 3rd and its successors tried to build a cage for these excesses and all it achieved was to reward the best jail breakers.
And I won’t miss an opportunity for done transatlantic snobbery - 3rd was partially a response to the growth of the US tournament scene and a desire to expand that market. More proof that you Americans ruin everything ;).
Having a meaningful and ongoing campaign will tend to solve balance in ways no points based system can.
Men in competition are perfectly willing to gang up and make the king of the hill defend his position
Well the reason why many people would be annoyed with someone bringing a fully proxied deck is because if you can print cards, you can simply print the best decks of all, decks much better than what a casual player would have access to with their limited number of cards. Some decks and card are simply better than others, and most often its the most expensive that are best. By limiting yourselves to what you can actually buy, your "powerlevel" so to say is more limited and balanced
I'm on the forlorn road of trying to homebrew mtg formats to somehow get it right. I'm not a regular player really, but my affection for it sticks. It would be great fun if there were some little substack corner where we could generate a bank of proxies, perhaps with a few theme varieties. Recently picked up "star realms", but it feels a little like methadone.