# For Good or Ill tags: #thoughts #references/twitter ![[for-good-or-ill (cover).png]] *Dice-twenty-faces-twenty icon © Delapouite / game-icons.net (CC BY 3.0)* I don't necessarily like to be reminded that I'm old. I know that I'm older than quite a lot of the current crop of people in the RPG scene, particularly the indie RPG scene. The old grognard neckbeards of the OSR sometimes have a few years on me, but the difference in experience goes back a long way. There's a bifurcation in the paths that we chose to walk. Mine went off into indie experimentalism, and theirs stuck firmly in classic traditionalist **D&D** and **D&D**-adjacent games. Yet here we are, having walked different paths, ending up at the same destination, at least in part. ## Sacred Ground [@Dra8er](https://x.com/Dra8er) opened with a full-throated tirade about a hobby being invaded — the table as sacred ground, the rot being dragged in by tourists who don't want to play a game so much as hold court.  > 🔥 🚒 > > The TTRPG table used to be sacred ground. It was the one place you could leave the exhausting, polarized grind of the real world at the door, sit down with a crew, and actually build something collaborative. But lately, there is a terminal rot creeping into the hobby, and it's being dragged in by tourists who don't want to play a game, they want a stage for their political theater. > > We have a strict, non-negotiable no politics rule at the club. You come to roll dice, to explore the world, and to survive the campaign. But the social atrophy of the last few years has bred a loud, hyper defensive segment of people who physically cannot function without forcing their ideological baggage into every single breath. They are locked in a perpetual state of bad faith combat. You can sit at the table and say, "I like waffles," and these folks will instantly slam their hands down and scream, "Oh, so you hate pancakes?!" It is completely exhausting, and I am entirely done accommodating it. > > Just recently, I had to bounce a guest from the table who simply refused to respect that basic boundary. And what happens when you tell these perpetually online actors "no"? They don't reflect. They don't apologize. They immediately resort to extreme character assassination. Because I enforced a rule of conduct to protect the peace of a space I built, I was suddenly branded an "evil Nazi" and targeted with threats to "do damage" to my venue. They spat the term "Old Guard" at me like it was the ultimate insult. > > Let me be crystal clear: I wear "Old Guard" as a badge of absolute honor. Since cracking open my first box set in the late 70s, I have poured decades of blood, sweat, and capital into this hobby. I've painted the terrain, organized the long running campaigns, and transitioned our operations into a private gaming sanctuary specifically to protect the game from this exact kind of invasion. > > This behavior is a direct symptom of the spectator era of tabletop gaming. The mainstreaming of the hobby didn't create a massive wave of new players, it created a wave of passive consumers. We are dealing with people who treat the game like a trendy lifestyle brand, wearing the logo like a fashion statement while expecting the table to cater to their personal performative fan fiction. They don't want the grit of a real system or the camaraderie of a shared world. They want a captive audience. And when they realize the table isn't about them and their real world grievances, they lash out and try to burn the room down. > > Well, you aren't burning down my room. The spaces we've built are fortified against this nonsense. The table is a place for escapism, for rolling crits and suffering the consequences of the dice. If your primary goal in picking up a character sheet is to virtue signal, pick fights, and turn the game into your personal soapbox, find another venue. The tourists can keep their spectator sports and their outrage. The real gamers are busy playing. > > RANT OVER 🤘 ## Same Destination I suppose I am technically a member of the old guard by sheer dint of my age and involvement, but I never considered myself part of that side of the hobby. I was always over in the experimental "crazy, let's see what my will hath wrought" sort of portion of play. Sure, I started with **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** and **[[Robotech]]**, went through **[Palladium](https://palladiumbooks.com)**, played a lot of **[[Shadowrun]]** and **[[Cyberpunk (RPG)|Cyberpunk]]**. I've done my time in the classically designed trenches, but I've also made the transition into the indie space, which is wildly more experimental. I did that before the 90s were over, which I suppose did make me a bit of a pioneer at the time. But I find nothing to argue with in this statement, because the infection of look-at-me political posturing very likely started on the indie side of the house. It was a good chunk of the reason that I took a break from RPGs in general for several years. Games were increasingly becoming a mouthpiece for the author's political grift, intended for an audience of everyone that agreed with them and deliberately calling out anyone who didn't as lowborn scum. Some of this you just learn to put up with because, as the phrase goes these days, 'twas the tism, my lord, but after a while it's tedious, ruthlessly, painfully tedious in ways that it absolutely didn't have to be. I don't have room for this kind of bullshit at my table either, nor do I have to. If you want to play the game, we can play the game. That's what I want to do. If you want to preach to me about your *One True Wayism* of the week, man, I got better things to do. In that sense, I suppose I am a member of the old guard, for good or ill.