WBH Digest 2025-04-25: The Campaign Continues

Welcome back friends to the With Both Hands Digest! I logged off of Twitter/X for Lent and that ended up turning into a sabbatical from WBH as well. I spent my time engaging in spiritual disciplines, thinking different thoughts and doing different things from my normal routine, and I feel strengthened and invigorated afterwards.

To start let's compare and contrast two Substacks about D&D. This is where I think the most interesting conversations in the roleplaying hobby are happening right now. We have Bradford Walker and Rick Stump, two people I've talked to on this subject, offering us contrasting visions of what it means to play a campaign.

Games For The Clubhouse (Revised)

Revising The List In Light Of Recent Reports

Walker's Lakeside ClubhouseBradford C. Walker

Specifically this footnote:

A game for this hobby consists of a wargame scenario wherein multiple independent actors operating under a Fog Of War, each pursuing separate and distinct Victory Conditions whose fulfillment instantly ends the campaign, that cannot be resolved in a Win-Win fashion. A universal Loss Condition, whose fulfillment instantly ends the campaign with everyone losing, is not required but is a very common occurrence and I recommend it.

The Ongoing Campaign

Role Playing Games as an Endurance Event

Worlds and TimeRick Stump

This has profound implications for why and how a ‘traditional’ campaign looks like and how it evolves. Win-win and lose-lose scenarios are fairly common; there cannot be a “victory condition” but likewise there cannot be a “defeat condition”; within the campaign as a whole a TPK is at most a minor inconvenience; while wargaming is an inherent part of traditional Fantasy Action Role Playing games wargame sessions are just one of many types; NPCs become much more important; and (the main point of this article) there is no defined campaign end.

Let me put this another way. When I started playing in 1977 the base assumption was not ‘once we defeat the evil wizard the campaign is over’ nor was it ‘once we all reach 16th level the campaign is over’ it was that if Bob was running OD&D and you played in his campaign that campaign would continue until Bob stopped running OD&D or people stopped showing up. By 1979 when AD&D 1e finished rolling out that grew until ‘the campaign will run as long as Bob or other DMs that are part of it are DMing some version of D&D in the same setting’.

I think that there is a possibility for an interesting synthesis here. I could, and very well might write a whole essay on just this subject. There is a very real difference in gameplay here that produces a different gameplay experience, but these two points of view are closer to each other than either is to conventional play, by which I mean taking Critical Role as the apotheosis of roleplaying.

This video expresses very well the way I feel about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game offers up a very pure kind of mythic experience that is close to the heart of adventure and wonder.

We are currently in the Octave of Easter, when the Church celebrates Christ's victory over death. This ancient homily for Holy Saturday reminds us of how total that victory was. Christ descended into Hell in order to bring His victory to those who already had died.

Via Daily Timewaster, this Substack from KittenBeloved looks at what AI is good for, and what it's not:

AI is not coming for your job

From the beginning, the current AI boom has been characterized by one sentiment: it’s never been more over. For knowledge workers, there is palpable terror that intelligence too cheap to meter will shortly make every laptop jockey across the world unemployable as a matter of simple economics. Forget third-world sweatshops hollowing out the American manufacturing base, the true threat was always the one that Ned Ludd warned us about: automation making humans obsolete. And unlike the weavers of the 19th century, there will be no ladder of prosperity into the service economy for the human redundancies to climb. This is it, the final obsolescence for any member of the proletariat selling keystrokes for their daily bread.

KittenKitten

I use AI tools every day. They write a majority of my code for me. This is what it’s good at: looking at the extremely formulaic structure of computer code and producing a plausible guess at what should come next. It guesses right, or close enough to right, often enough to save me a lot of effort. The phrase is becoming cliché already, but it’s true that these tools are glorified auto-complete. This isn’t an insult — autocomplete is a godsend, and LLM tech radically increases its utility. It lets me get a lot more done, and that’s a good thing.

But I’m also aware of what it’s not. It’s not a substitute for human judgement. It’s terrible at true originality and ideation, hopeless at analysis and design outside of well-worn patterns. It can’t experiment and iterate to save its life. It’s good at greenfield development, generating output from whole cloth, but remarkably bad at integrating what came before and expanding upon it. 

Not only is Devin vaporware, the vibe coders larping as him via Cursor are creating world-class messes they don’t understand that the tool can’t fix for them. Like a novice programmer, their power to generate code far exceeds their ability to understand or maintain it as it grows.

None of this is to write off the obvious utility of AI tools. Knowledge workers will see a large boost to their productivity by using them, just as they did from adopting the word processor, the spreadsheet, photoshop, CAD, and Salesforce. The robots are wonderful servants, and in time we’ll wonder how we ever got by without them.

But knowledge workers won’t be replaced by our tools, or at least not by these ones. LLMs aren’t capable of true intelligence, reasoning or agency the way a human is. They’ll need their human benefactors to hold their hands and verify every little task, now and in the future. And we should be thankful they’re here to help, not fearful they’ll replace us.

But, there is one problem here, and it is the second to last paragraph. Knowledge workers haven't seen a boost to productivity from software tools. This problem has become so well known it has a name: The Solow Paradox.

Productivity gains stubbornly refuse to show up whenever anyone looks real hard at the impact of software on business results.

Unlike Kitten, I don't work as a programmer, and I despise the use of LLMs for important work. At least in my field, drugs and medical devices, software tools have made it easier to produce lots of documents, and we do, but the underlying business of making and selling therapies isn't impacted that much by the new tools, because lots of their output isn't really important to those fundamental tasks.

This video from Jon Mollison about the ultimate impact of tariffs should be viewed in conjunction with this post from Dwight Cenac, creator of High Noon.

The Board Game Industry Is Burning — And It’s Their Own Fault

A brutal takedown of the board game industry’s tariff hysteria

High NoonDwight Cenac

I really liked Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts by Misha Burnett, so I'm happy to encourage people to back this second volume of Erik Rugar stories put out by Cirsova.

Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts by Misha Burnett Book Review — With Both Hands

Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts [Amazon link] by Misha Burnett is what you get when you combine a gritty police procedural with the mad genius of Tim Powers. Detective Erik Rugar is a world weary investigator, but his problems are illicit thaumaturgical substances and unregistered wizards. That

With Both HandsBenjamin Espen

Bad Dreams & Broken Hearts [Amazon link] by Misha Burnett is what you get when you combine a gritty police procedural with the mad genius of Tim Powers. Detective Erik Rugar is a world weary investigator, but his problems are illicit thaumaturgical substances and unregistered wizards. That in and of itself is a pretty good setup, but then Burnett adds a dose of the routine absurdity of normal life. Or at least what passes for normal for a cop.

That's it for this installment, I've got stuff in the pipeline that should be coming out soon!