The Business: The Collapse Means No Competition From Without- Only Within

Three elements to this sandwich.

I said quite some time ago that we were in for a collapse.

That hit a few months ago. At the time I thought it would be confined to Tabletop; I was wrong- it's across all media. What I did get correct was that this would be an Outside-In collapse pattern of implosion, where--despite the Professor attempting to gainsay this--the historical pattern was, and is again, that Normies (the majority) and their adjacents (Tourists and Casuals) will abandon everything but the top brands in that sector: they are going to retreat to the safety of Brand and Dominant Network.

Why? Despite that too being dogshit, why?

Because it is What Everyone Knows And Agrees Upon. Everyone will collapse back on D&D in Tabletop. Everyone will collapse upon Mouse Wars (which is going to blackpill so many). Everyone already has returned to World of Warcraft. Magic, 40K, etc. are all going nowhere while all of their competition within those niches are increasingly falling away: they're shutting down, downshifing to a self-funding hobby, or (vainly, as it turned out) attempting to swap media to remain viable.

Viable, that is, as a commercial enterprise (i.e. as a business) and thus as a means of farming and accuring prestige and status. All of that is over unless you're The One That Matters.

It doesn't matter if you have talent, or grit, or even acumen and the intelligence to fuel it. You cannot command the attention required because you are outside the dominant Network and its associated Brand.

There are only two ways to fix this, both of which you cannot pursue: be backed by an institutional player (thus negating all risks you otherwise must face), or be independently wealthy (so this is already just a hobby for you), but if you are chosen by one or the other then you can compete from without that dominant Network.

You're not.

Therefore you must learn to compete from within the Network. This is the realm of the "spiritual sucessor" and the "legally distinct not-a-spinoff" where we can and do see success arise, sometime where the offering is a quality work (Xenonaughts) and sometimes not (whatever that not-a-Potter-smutfic thing BookTok femcels are getting off to as they complain about how Wrongthink it is about as of this post). It is this ill-acknoledged element that led to the success of RetroClones in Tabletop; they cloned (a past edition of) The Game That Matters, so folks played them when Official Game did the same stupid shit that WOW did with Shadowlands and Warlords of Draenor (and came back when WOTC did what WOW did with Legion and Dragonflight): come back in greater numbers than what left.

We are a civilization dominanted by Network Effects in all things, from entertainment to firearms ("Does it take Glock mags?") to geopolitics (rail gauges, yo), and more.

The collapse we're seeing are the marginal players and non-aligned actors going first- those least loyal or least valuable to the dominant Network. The collapse will stop when everything surplus to requirements, defined as "Not 100% aligned with the Network", has fallen away or been rendered irrelevant. Convenience, ease of end-use, and conformity to the standard are the measures for survival; successful competition leverages these while tweaking on the margins, like we see with private WOW servers or D&D retroclones.

The bots--"AI"--will only accelerate this process, and it has already begun.

The Culture: Dunder Moose Does The ArneCon Post-Mortem

Last night Dunder did another panel show.

For your convenience, here's the Kickstarter page link.

This turned out to be a nice small convention. I should pay attention to the con's page to see about going next year since it was so close that I may be able to commute.

I concur with the comments of the merits for a small convention, especially for creatives, as it permits real-life contact with friends, associates, and colleagues that larger conventions--often far more oriented towards the business side of the hobby--do not; this mirrors comments I've heard from professional and semi-pro creatives in adjacent entertainment media (and my own experience).

This is the sort of convention that is for the hobby, not the big corporate ones. (Mostly) local hobbyists assembling to partake in events that otherwise are impractical; this is a good way to link up local or regional Clubhouses on a regular (if not frequent) basis while allowing for far-traveling hobbyists to play the role of the foreign merchant from that exotic Elsewhere. It was how Car Wars did its annual tournament series: from Clubhouse champion to regionals to The Big Show at GenCon.

I maintain that the future of the hobby is to return to a non-commercial basis. Small conventions play into that. Consider this.

The Business: Owlcat Made The Point For Me

This video about Owlcat's upcoming sequel to Rogue Trader made the same point I did about Conventional Play.

What did they say?

• Openly confesses that, as with Rogue Trader, it is the Vidya adaptation of the Tabletop product of the same name.
• Follows the same format of adaptation as RT, which is to translate the Tabletop gameplay structure to a single-player CRPG.
• Is specifically programmed to produce the intended gameplay experience of the Tabletop product, as RT was, without worry about faggotry on either side of the Referee's screen. (Until the Spiffing Brit proves how perfectly balanced it really is.)
• Will actually get played, unlike the Tabletop products.

Doubt that last part? You better believe most of the folks who bought it either never played it, or can't keep folks playing it because it's not D&D.

Will this succeed? Yes, it will. That means the next one will be Deathwatch, letting you make up your own Space Marine while you have your Kill Team do things for the Ordo Xenos somewhere in the Calixus Sector that the Traders and Inquisition couldn't handle.

With that will come the full confirmation that Conventional Play is better, cheaper, easier, and more accessible in Vidya than Tabletop because you actually get to play the damned game as intended, you play when you want, for as long as you want, without needing to Schedule Your Fun.

The Real Hobby cannot avoid the comeback because it will become increasingly obvious that Vidya will be better for Conventional Play going forward.

The Culture: Arch Recognizes That This Is Existential

At last, Arch arrives at the correct conclusion.

Which dovetails nicely with a Dark Herald article at Arkhaven this past weekend. Key points:

• Generation Born Into Decline
• Warhammer 40k is their mythic mirror
• Tone Resonance: Irony Without Illusion

TLDR: "For Gen Z, Warhammer 40k isn’t nostalgia. It’s mythic realism — a world that reflects the one they’ve always known, just turned up to 11 and rendered in gothic sci-fi.

Which means it is piss-fucking-easy for the Right to win them over for life. Meme the fuck out of the enemy using 40K!

This is the last step Arch needs to take to go from commentator to leader, and chances are good he'll be bullied into it by the enemy sooner than later; his lingering LOLbertism is steadily eroding and soon he'll be where Gen Z is: wholly embracing the Imperial Truth out of survival. The Pontius explained this in one of his videos, and what he said of the Imperium in 40K applies to all children and adults in the West (and I am including "adjacent" nations like the Japanese and Koreans here): THIS IS EXISTENTIAL!

The future can be summarized thusly, if we are to survive: "An open mind is like a fortress with its gate unbarred and unguarded."

We are done.

The Culture: Macris Talks With Jeff Talanian On Gygax & More

Last night Macris had on Jeffrey Talanian, head of North Wind Adventures, designer of HYPERBOREA, and writing partner of Gary Gygax for 3 years.

Big Takeaways:

• Gygax had to be bullied into putting stuff into Castle Xagyg.
• The AD&D Hit Dice for Monsters rule was meant to be varied like for Classes, but by Size instead of Class.
• Hyberborea is still in development, with supplementary products.

Macris observed that big Conventional Play IPs other than D&D tightly integrate rules and setting, but every D&D edition is as tightly integrated as a whore with her wardrobe (despite appearances to the contrary) and outperforms all of them combined.

(Note: Yes, those D&D editions do imply a setting by their rules, and it is in overlooking that where people go astray. The Clubhouse has an article about this.)

This works for commercial sales to a point, but overdo it and you start arguing for Vidya over Tabletop because Vidya can always beat Tabletop for rules-setting integration and it has superior appeal for most people who would be prospective players at all. Why Schedule Your Fun and all that, often at considerable expense, when you can just wait for a Steam or GOG sale and get that same itch scratched in the comfort of your home?

More and more are seeing that this is where the answer to the collapse is for Conventional Play. This will be brick-to-face apparent later this week.

The Business: You Should Show Them How To Play

Say what you want about Critical Role (I have). It has been a boon for Wizards of the Coast because, despite doing it wrong, it shows people how to play the game.

YouTube is something solo operators can use to level the playing field with bigger competition. You can't flood the shelves with slop and win; the bigger players have that sewn up. The smarter way to compete is to use YouTube to show prospective players how to play your game.

Not one of these are done by the publisher, and many of them are owned by a company that could be doing this as part of their marketing but NOOOOOOO- especially those owned by WOTC (Gamma World, Boot Hill).

It doesn't take much. A dude, a webcam, a copy of the game, and footage of said dude actually using the game. There is no excuse for any Tabletop publisher to not do this; shoot with an eye for TikTok/YouTube Shorts/whatever short-attention-span brainrot comes up and you'll get massive returns while spending pennies and maybe a week of time shooting and editing- and you can outsource the editing.

"But that-"

GunTube, motherfuckers.

Channels devoted to the pew-pew are such a big asset for that industry that the better channels routinely get provided not only new guns to shoot (and to shoot), but often get ammo provided to them as a form of sponsorship. I can tell you, from first-hand experience, that the Total Cost of Ownership for firearms dwarfs that of Tabletop Adventure Games by orders of magnitude and I am in a mostly-free US state (for now). The returns are worth the effort for guns; they definitely are worth it for Tabletop.

Don't believe me? This new lever-action just dropped from Taylor's & Company. You better believe I want to check it out because I saw this video.

This works for cars, planes, trains, yachts (you should see some of the yacht channels), houses, appliances, and so much more. Why in God's name don't you think just shooting a video where you show the viewer how to play the game step-by-step would not work is boggling because--again, despite showing it wrong and thus setting errant expectations--Critical Role does this and it has been nothing but a boon for WOTC.

You don't need to be Critical Role. You need to be Joe Fucking Friday: Just The Facts. You don't need to be perfect; just admit when you fuck up and annotate the video with the correct information. By doing this you set the expectation of what this game and what it is about conclusively and decisively, preventing decades of disingenious bullshit and bad-faith blather by bad actors out to skinsuit your creation for their ends. Define your creation or they will define it their way against you.

The Culture: Your Modules Suck (Part 2)

You don't need modules if you have a competently-designed game.

There is a reason that the #BROSR returned to AD&D1e; it is a competently-designed game. There is a reason the Bros play Classic Traveller; it is a competently-designed game. Other games that prove themselves are those that are competently-designed.

What does this mean? The use of the game in its ordinary capacity automatically generates playable content. AD&D1e has its appendices, CT has its routine procedures, and other competent games lean hard on real-world referents such that you can just read real-life texts and apply real-life to the campaign (e.g. Twilight 2000).

If you need to regularly consume supplementary products to play the game, you do not have a competently-designed game; you have a Funnel Product into an Endless Product Slop business model meant to not-so-microtransact your wallet to death.

This is good for business. It is terrible for the hobby, and it always has been. It was only tolerable because the Original Gamers--the Boomers--refused to put in the work to teach everyone else how to use the tools that they had- that they created and published. Yes, even by way of articles, convention panels, and in-store demos that was a viable thing to do in the 1970s; you train a small cadre, they train more, and soon everyone's up to speed on Best Practices.

But no, it was easier to usurp the gamers' mental faculties and do their imagining for them and no one among them is clean.

The use case for this practice died when YouTube arrived. The means for one-man operations to teach people how to use their game exists; failure to use it is a sign of gross incompetence. Letting your audience do it for you is almost as bad.

You can monetize your videos, folks; that replaces your Endless Product Slop model, serves your audience, and reduces your costs down to something that actually matches what you lot really are: diletantes with delusions of grandeur, denying that your hobby will never be better for generating income than working a normal day job.

Make a proper game. Teach people to use it. Give away the PDF and sell the print version at-cost. That's where the hobby really lies; all else is vanity. As the Collapse continues, more of you will see this first-hand and not be able to delude yourselves any further that this is how it has to be.