Right now, a man by the name of Jeffro Johnson is running a Classic Traveller scenario of his own design.
Using the 1981 version of the rules (i.e. The Traveller Book version) he decided to start a campaign by running a Braunstein scenario on a planet that he rolled up on the charts in that rules manual.
His blog posts (to date as of this post) on this are worth reading, so let me link them:
The Problem
In the form of play I call “Conventional Play”, which is a Cargo Cult masquerading as a business sector, the players are the Get-Along Gang operating as a team against one opposing force. This works fine in the context of a party of adventurers delving into a dungeon. It is terrible for anything else.
Since the hobby commercialized in the 1970s alongside it spreading outside the Upper Midwest university-focused wargame clubs, there were two problems that quickly became apparent. The first is that the presumed shared knowledge of how this hobby works was not actually shared. The second is that many who took up the nascent hobby had no idea to implement anything other than Dungeon Delves by the Get-Along Gang.
Commercialization, in the form of publishing endless reams of playable content, was the answer soon settled upon because it solved the latter problem by ignoring the former.1
This was not the correct response. The correct response was to address the gap in hobby skill and acumen by publishing tutorials with Explain Like I’m Five2 levels of specificity, but that required a degree of maturity and professionalism that was not present at the time (or long thereafter).
This did not happen because those publishing the seminal games of the 1970s decided to turn the hobby into an industry. Industries are commercial pursuits, and success in commercial pursuits requires the identification of incentives that result in profitable business operations.
Teaching the new cohort of prospective players how the hobby really works ran, and runs, contrary to the incentives that commercial pursuit rewards. Letting them wallow in Learned Helplessness (willful misidentification of the problem) allows the sales of endless reams of products that claim to provide the solutions but never do.
That problem is “Where is the playable content?” The follow-up, stated as often as not, is “Because we don’t just want to do dungeon delves. The false solutions come in the form of adventure and campaign modules, later whole entire lines of products such as settings, rules expansions, etc. and the introduction of storytelling tropes to work around the holes left unfilled by not addressing the gap in the hobby skills that all these people had and have to the point were reintroducing them is controversial.
The Solution
The Clubhouse solves the problem by reintroducing the social infrastructure that was abandoned by 1980 in pursuit of commercial incentives. With the infrastructure now in place, the true paradigm of play that birthed this hobby can be easily re-established and taught to a long-unserved population.
The answer is Braunstein. Not the specific wargame scenario that Dave Weasley invented, but the form of play that this scenario introduced. That Traveller game I linked up above is a planet-specific Braunstein scenario. Everyone involved is run by a separate player, and the mode of play compels Player vs. Player conflict so there is no need to purchase any additional products.
This is difficult for those used to the Get-Along Gang approach normalized by the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play to accept, especially as said Cargo Cult declared PVP to be anathema decades ago, but it does solve all of the problems that hobbyists so often complain about: boredom, being held hostage by the least committed player, power-tripping Referees, Theater Kid/Frustrated Novelist Syndrome, and so on- such that all of this has been mocked in hobbyist-created comics for decades now.3
What makes this the solution is that, in a Clubhouse environment, those who do standard adventure scenario play (scenarios, by the way, generated emergently due to the consequences of Braunstein play) and those who prefer the bigger Braunstein play need not be the same people.
A Clubhouse campaign can easily involve a score or more players, but not all of them are at the table at the same time. In this globally connected world, that is most likely to be the case.
Those that cannot be present can be on the Braunstein level of play, running factions of varying sizes (from individuals to entire empires or more).
Those that want to be Forever Adventurers can show up, play whomever is available in their roster (or roll up a new guy4) because you are not married to your character sheet, and leave again without issue.
Going Forward
The Clubhouse is the alternative for the hobby because it offers an anti-commercial alternative that is viable because it worked before. Restore the conditions and you restore the functionality. Without the commercial incentives to keep players ignorant and in a state of Learned Helplessness, the hobbyists are incentivized to learn and master the full set of skills, habits, and acumen that lead to success in this hobby.
Skills, habits, and acumen that are directly transferable to everyday life and all of its pursuits.
That is what justifies the existence of the Clubhouse. If I had the financial means to do it, I would build a literal Clubhouse (as described previously) with a physical location, amenities, and even paid staff like those London social clubs do.
We deserve far better than to be banished to basements.
I will not rant about how the Baby Boomers failed their children by failing to pass on the patrimony they received from their parents and elders here, but that is what happened.
Yes, from the Evil Overlord List under Item 12. If you can’t do that, you don’t know it well enough yet. Knights of the Dinner Table, et. al.
Knights of the Dinner Table, et. al.
Characters are free. You can roll up as many as you like to play. I have 435 characters in a ZIP file ready to go. This is a joke, but only because I only have 12.