Our descent into Jake Alley's mind begins with
an article he wrote about the evils of competitive gaming. I took a look at it, originally, because it included a few fucking
fantastic examples of how Jakey tabletops, since a few people here, including
@Francis York Morgan,
@Yellow Yam Scam, and
@AnOminous expressed interest in what he might be like in such a game.
Wonder no longer:
I'm going to tell you right now: He's playing Warhammer 40K.
This will become more clear in a sec, but bear with it.
For the uninitiated: There's a rule in 40K where if your unit reaches a table edge, it's off the board and considered to have retreat.
This is a rule specifically there to instate the game's retreat mechanics and morale system in the earlier editions. It's also done for balance reasons - a few units with sufficiently long-ranged weapons near a table edge could play keep-away
forever if they have a transport handy, so the rule helps keep the game's pace going and prevent players from being cowards and stalling other players out in missions with long time limits.
Jake considers this rule to be "stupid" because he thinks it's there to keep you from hugging a table edge when it's really there
to prevent the exact tactic he was trying to use in stalling the other guy out. From the sounds of it, he and his friend were playing a Meat Grinder mission where victory points are won based on portion of enemies killed and units surviving at the end of six turns (longer with variant rules).
Jake was clearly trying to turn a decisive victory for his friend into a partial success via VPs.
He got called on it when he made a bad move. It clearly was an HQ choice or something high-value, because denying his friend that unit would have notched him from decisive to partial.
Quick note for non-40Kfags: This is one of the only rules that the 40K rulebooks are
absolutely clear on:
If you end a turn on the table edge, your unit retreats. This rule is enforced at every single event, every single game mode (even tangent ones like Kill Team and Combat Patrol!), and it's done specifically to counter exploitative tactics like Jake's.
TL;DR: Jake tried to pull a fast one and got called out, and his response was to
ragequit the hobby entirely. Ragequit 40K. Which means he has miniatures that he presumably spent a great deal of money on. Idly, what army do you think he played? I'm gonna guess Space Marines because Jake has no creativity whatsoever.
The core tenet here with all this is that Jake is not a very good player. Not at video games, not at strategy games, not at RPGs, and not at traditional gaming in general. Indeed, if you read through this article, you can see that Jakey has a big problem, which is that if he ever runs into a legit competitive player, he becomes completely demoralized and ragequits whatever game he was playing. Chess? He leaves. Go? He leaves. Starcraft? He blames his computer for that one, but still basically leaves because he can't compete.
He then cites how his own D&D groups have been ruined because everyone goes melee, and blames competition:
Once again, note the
absolute fucking abdication of his own responsibility.
That said: No
actual GM has this fucking problem. None with actual
players, that is. I'm going to come right out and say it: Jake Alley doesn't have actual players. Assuming he's not just making this shit up (an easy thing to assume given what we know already), then his only playerbase comes from cons.
The only assholes who put numbers ahead of everything in RPGs are complete newblets who know absolutely nothing about PNP RPGs and the errant Munchkin who attempts to assume godhood ASAP. Them and the guys trying to figure out the depths of how the system works and how to optimize, but since Jake doesn't have a repeat playerbase, we're moving onto the meat and potatoes.
Anyone with even the most casual knowledge of D&D knows that Wizards and Clerics are two of the most powerful fucking classes in the game through magic alone, and a quality GM can give advice and ideas to players during character creation to help a party gel as a unit. Parties
need balance, regardless of the system. It's possible to run a game without a pivotal class (say, without a healer or without a mage), but the players are either going to rely much more on consumable items (which gets pricey in a hurry unless the GM adds them to treasure pools), bizarre strategic work-arounds (a rogue with use magical device can work as a healer in D&D at low levels if he gets a wand of Cure Light Wounds), or by having characters that aren't necessarily the perfect choice but can do the job step up to the plate (Bards can act as healers, as can Paladins).
Assuming Jake here isn't lying about GMing (and I would suggest he is, given that he never leaves Twitter or indeed,
the basement), Jake's bemoaning here gets across that he has no idea how to manage a game and that most of his players are, at best, entry-level faggots
who have no idea what they're doing. Since Jakey himself has no idea how to responsibility, he blames "competition," when it's really his own fucking ineptitude. He acts like he's blameless here, when he could, at any point, encouraged the group to variate their tactics and classes. Hell, he could have fucking set up encounters to take advantage of the kick-in-the-door style his players were fond of.
But he doesn't, because
problems are never Jakey's fault.
Emotionally he's fucking below Nora.
I'm reminded of an old Christopher Marlowe quote right here:
"I am envy... I cannot read, and therefore wish all books burned."
This basically encapsulates Jakey in games in a nutshell:
He can't git gud, so he seeks to invalidate others' gitting of gud.
He can't win, so he tries to dismiss any game he loses as not worth his time.
He's beat to market in his own ideas, so he fucking gives up.
And most critical: He can't compete - so he fucking
doesn't, and then lambastes anyone who
can.
It applies to
everything. To his home life, his hobbies, his romantic pursuits.
And none of this is so eloquently surmised than his final paragraph in this fucking cesspool of ideology and self-loathing:
If you've read this far, then you'd realize that his support of Nora and Quinn now makes total sense. He is surrounded in both cases by people who are failures as big as he is and essentially
exist to tear others down. Helping Quinn was as close as he was ever going to get to anything resembling mainstream success.
His enlisting in Nora's army was practically a bygone conclusion once he was exiled, for he truly has nowhere else to belong.
