The Business: The Problem Is Normie Psychology

Last week the Pundit cut a video where, among other things, he lamented that what gets him traffic is complaining about Sorcerers By The Sea.

He is not the only one. Every single RPG Guy on YouTube cuts a video, or includes in a video, exactly that complaint sooner or later. The best of them pull up Analytics to show the receipts to prove it.

It's no better in written media either. All of my best-performing posts deal with SOBS and Current/Next Edition, SpaceMace 39K, Mouse Wars, and other Pop Cult topics.

"Why can't I get people interested in getting away from (Things Everyone Complains About)?"

Because they are Normies. Casuals and Tourists are Normie variants. Normies don't go out of their way for ANYTHING.

The Normie would rather complain about something everyone uses than switch to an alternative because otherwise they are not part of the norm anymore, so as much out of Ego Defense as anything else, the Normie exhibits all of the psychological behaviors that are already confirmed with Network Effects.

Yes, this has been the case before the invention of Network-driven electronic communications.

Being that many of you are wargamers, military historians, or deal with supply chains in some capacity I can frame this in such terms: Normies don't go out of their way, even if they don't like what they have, because the Opportunity Costs of going Out Of Network are considered (rightly as often as not) unacceptably high versus the benefits of actually getting the satisfaction of having a good or service that actually does what they want.

To convince the Normie to switch from The Dominant Option, which is always the one with the best Network Effect, you have to do the following:

• Get in their face.
• Acknowledge their position.
• Convince them that the dominant party either cannot or will not fix it to their satisfaction.
• Then offer the alternative that does.

Notice that this is how Jon Del Arroz does this when he does his videos on the mainstream media industry in the West, and he does the alternative pitching once or twice in each video. When done twice, he'll do it once up front and again--as a reminder--at the end.

That's how the Pathfinder people are so able to bring Current Edition people over, and it--without even trying--is how the Bros got people looking into Braunstein- especially now that BROZER is a thing.

That is what you have to do to get Normies to look at your stuff: get in front of their faces, acknowledge, complain, then offer alternatives.

Just talk to the sales professionals, the marketers, the people who pay their bills doing this stuff on behalf of those very not-dominant parties in a market niche. They may different on details, but they will confirm that this is sound fundamentals and fundamentals wins the championship.

The dominant players in these niches know that this is a viable threat. Don't think so? Then why does the market leader in MMOs, Tabletop Adventure Games, etc. all react by going full Walled Garden and racheting Fear of Missing Out to the maximum? To make maximum use of the leverage that being the dominant Network in a niche grants to you.

Cater to Normie psychology most and you win. Simple as.

The Culture: The Boomer Problem

Joshua Hiles lays out the Boomer Problem in the hobby:

Every interaction I have with “original D&D guy” is just an unappealing sludge compounded of boomerism, greed, and lack of self-awareness.

It started with; “you’re not even allowed to talk about this or we’ll sue you” and has moved on to complaining about young’uns being rude because they won’t obey some decrepit dude who refuses to directly address them.

DO NOT go to the old heads if you want to run and play games. Read widely. Experiment boldly. See what works.

I thing has to be worthy of respect to be respected. A thing has to be despicable to be despised. I’ve seen plenty of the latter since entering this space and none of the former.

My elders should be respectable.

This is what the Bros have run into when recovering what the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play threw into the Memory Hole.

I cannot explain to you why Boomers are like this. I don't know. All I can say is that it is fortunate that we don't need to pick the brains of these people because they hold on to that knowledge--if they actually have it--with white-knuckle intensity and vice-like grips. I'd like to say that this is some aberration, but as others who've tried to get Boomers to pass on anything--tangible or not--they've received from their predecessors, it is not.

We have had to reconstruct everything the hard way, walking the same paths that those same predecessors did generations before, to reconstitute a deliberately broken medium back into a functional state.

No thanks to the Boomers, who refused to teach or hand down a damned thing as they had taught or passed to them, and then wondered why their little social clubs dwindled over the years and "those damned kids" kept pestering them.

Yes, I am again pointing out that Boomers and Boomerism are the cause for the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play.

Fortunately such an obstinate cohort is already on the way out and will soon be gone. I would like to say that they would be missed, but that would be lying. Instead, it now the Bros that are the cornerstone of the hobby and the medium. As the publication of BROZER shows, they are not going to be so miserly because they understand how culture works.

The Boomer Problem is now solved.

The Culture: Pop Cult Orthdoxy Is Not For Corporations To Decide

Author Brian Niemeier wrote, some years ago now, about corporate fandom and dubbed it "The Pop Cult".

This is the key element he identified then:

"...the PopCult doesn’t offer any answers. It’s pure escapism. The problem is it’s an escape from self-mastery and virtue into the clutches of soulless megacorporations."

Since then what we've seen is that the members of the Pop Cult are not so easily herded. Psuedo-religions are still religions, and as such the Faithful can and do reject the direction of the leadership if they (a) detect that the leaders are going where they ought not go and (b) they sense that there is a critical mass that agrees on (a).

This leads to the question: "Who decides what is Canon?" It was presumed that the Pop Cultist would slavish conform to whatever their idols told them. This turned out to be not true. What Is or Is Not in Canon, once the Creator is gone, is for the Audience to decide: not the Corporation.

Why? This is why.

So a friend did some digging and apparently Alan Merrett, the guy upheld as the source of "female Space Marines used to be canon," is a pathological liar who was disliked by his coworkers and helped Games Workshop make some of it's worst business decisions. pic.twitter.com/xptfrXJsgr

— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) October 12, 2024

Good stewards recognize this fact. That is why they are scrupulous about the property that they sheppard, especially if their compensation is directly tied to its long-term health (and thus value).

We see this being the case (most of the time; there have been mistakes) with the Howard and Burroughs Estates. It was the case for Tolkien until Christopher died and the new stewards did some truly Boomer-style things to what their ((great-?)grandfather created.

One need look only at Lucasfilm, Marvel, and D.C. to see what happens when good stewards are not in place.

"But how can the audience make those decisions?"

Force of numbers. In addition to SpaceMace 39K, Mouse Wars, BattleTech, and many others under incompetent or traitorous management are increasingly cut out of the culture by the audience.

Or do you think that corporate seething at user-driven online publishing isn't just about Mainstream News losing their Narrative monopoly? No, far more important for day-to-day living is that those same platforms allow the audiences of various properties to completely cut out corrupt and incompetent corporate management from the conversation and thus push them out of what is and is not in the canon. No amount of Official Pronouncements means jack shit without buy-in.

Proof? Sorcerers By The Sea outright bribed a cohort of YouTube channels to shill for Corporate Positions because they had considerable audiences, were rather effective and efficient at it, and could be bought with the pocket change usually reserved for tipping the pizza delivery guy.

Why? Well, you get things like this out of them and this is far more effective at determine what Is and Is Not than what they say or do.

I can go on.

The corporate stewards that seethe over this are, at best, Mammon Mobsters mad that the audience will not mindless Consume Product and then get excited for Next Product. You see this most with Stupid British Toy Company and the Devil Mouse.

But the ones that hate it most are the Death Cultists that serve Molech, and as their entire apparantus for taking the openings made by Mammon Mobsters acting as 5th Columnists to turn the corporate operations into recruitment funnels into the Death Cult. As these corporate actors (unlike those in more important segments of the economy) do not have the ability to just use State power to silence these dissidents they have to compete using personal connections with Fellow Travelers in either those platforms or related ones (like Stripe or Patreon) to do it instead, and in the meantime find or build up a compliant group of shills spouting the party line.

They have to do this, because otherise their attempts at being sly about their Death Cult pozzing will keep getting exposed and thereby rendered impotent.

Oh, and that includes their attempts to regain their previous cloak of invisibily via BRIDGE.

This is what corporates and propagandists don't get: the audience gets not only a say, but the final say.

That audience? VETO! VETO! VETO!

And those attempts to pozz non-Anglo media? Already meeting even heavier resistance than the Western pushes ever got. No blackpilling folks. This can be beaten.

Especially once you account for audience use of Print On Demand technology to keep what is considered Orthodox available. We just want our Hunchbacks, and we'll have them the way they must be one way or another.

The Culture: BROZER Now Available POD From Amazon

BROZER is now available at Amazon. It, like Basic Fantasy, is sold AT COST. Come get your print copy.

This is a big deal, as what had formerly been gatekept is now freely available once more to all who want to see How The Real Game Works.

Every Clubhouse and hobbyist should have a copy; remember that's it's free in PDF.

We already have one podcast talking about it, and it's not Dunder Moose.

There will be more. The Beacons Are Lit.

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Speaking of Uncle Kevin, he's got the XMas Grab Bags going again. Still $60+Shipping/Handling. Here's the link. If you want Palladium stuff, and you don't want to buy used, this is your best value.

The Culture: Uncle Kevin Begins Telling His Story

What's the tell that a turnover of leadership is coming? When the current leadership starts doing retrospectives.

Despite my take on Uncle Kevin and the company, don't take this as me criticizing either party for doing this.

What has been a consistent beat on this blog? The need to preserve the history of the hobby and carry it forward. What is this doing? Exactly that.

It is good, therefore, that Kevin is taking the time to tell his story in his words from his perspective. I welcome this series, and I look forward to seeing more of it. You should too, no matter what is said here or in later episodes. Take it from someone that trained in the discipline: this has value no matter the content.

I am certain that past Palladium employees, partners, and contractors have their own tales to tell; some of them have, at various times, been made public. (Alas, finding them as of this moment is difficult due to Wayback Machine being borked by the DDOS attack on the Internet Archive.) In time, I hope, all of them come out and are collected together to piece together the most accurate accounting of what happened. (If you think that's not a thing, consider World War 2 discourse before and after the Soviet Union archives opened to the West in 1990s. Major sea changes happened and are still happening.)

Why do I say that this is a tell that a leadership turnover is coming?

First, the obvious: Uncle Kevin is a Boomer. Boomers are old, well past usual retirement age old, and increasingly taking up spaces in the warehouses for discarded people we call "Assisted Living Centers" these days and "Old People Homes" for when Boomers threw their parents into them. He can't keep it up forever, and he may not want to, but just up and selling out ain't how people like him--who, to his credit, did build up a publishing company in a niche market from nothing and keep in running for generations despite many (self-inflicted) calamities--want to go out. They want to secure their place in their world first, then transition out into retirement.

Second, Kevin wants (and, to be fair, deserves) to be respected for his deeds. That ain't happening if he doesn't talk them up first, letting others repeat them to ever-wider audiences until he reaches a satsifactory level of recognition and reknown. This isn't not something to fault him for; this is typical End Of Career stuff, Lifetime Achievement Award stuff, and in this niche you don't get the Academy to just hand you your moment and an award on prime-time TV. You have to toot your own horn, remind everyone of what you did and how it made Current Year possible, and be shameless about saying "I did that!" Stuntmen, SFX guys, concept artists, novelists, etc.- everyone at that point wants the acclaim for the work they did over their career, which means they're looking to take their leave and this is the Swan Song.

Third, by talking up himself and Palladium now Kevin makes any potential sales offers lean harder in his favor. Yes, including any from those already working for him that offer to buy him out. That's just playing the business game. Can't hate the man for that; it's just smart business, and he's survived enough to learn a thing or two about business by now.

Therefore I'm expecting this to be an implicit announcement of his intention to retire, thus this is part of his farewell tour before he ties up loose ends and hands the business off to someone else (and deposits a fat check to use as his retirement fund). I'm assuming that he doesn't just shut the company down, or retain ownership and just become hands-off on operations, both of which could happen, but most Boomers like him are looking to cash out and that's why I say this is leading up to him selling the company and heading into the sunset.

In any event, this is the beginning of the end. May it be a good one.

The Culture: Lancer, Braunstein, & Something For Consideration

Gelantinous Rube went on with Dunder Moose last night to talk Lancer and Braunstein.

Rube having a filter for prospects is a good idea. I'll be revisiting at the Clubhouse next week because this filtering mechanism and procedure is a load-bearing feature of the Clubhouse, but for now let's focus on the immediate utility.

This is the sort of thing that we're going to see more of now that BROZER is out and people are going to do this themselves because Conventional Play fails to satisfy.

What we're going to need is the ability to discriminate. Each Referee has an upper limit on what he can handle, and filtering out players that (a) would be a net-drain on the campaign, (b) would be a problem player, and (c) would not enjoy what you want to run sounds cruel or mean but being up-front like this respects everyone's time by declaring from the get-go what Is and what Is Not regarding the campaign.

You'd think this was the norm, but there's several YouTube channels making years of content all about the fact that this is not the case.

Yes, I think you should be selective, be discriminating, and be upfront about doing this. Your experience as Referee will be better. Your experience as a player will be better. Your time in either role is better respected, and the quality of play is improved by filtering out the bad fits before the fact.

This filtering process, scaled up, is the Prospect Procedure for gaining admittance to (and membership in) the Clubhouse.

The Culture: The Real Hobby Restores The Virtue Of Long Time Preference Behavior

The Bros behind the lines in Soviet Canuckistan had the sort of observation I'd not seen in a while.

Magic systems are always the worst part of RPGs

I take it back. Carcosa had a good magic system.

"Ooooooh our sword and sorcery game is a savage world, where magic is weird and chaotic and unstable, practiced only in infamy!!!! Roll damage against your foes... and you might get a MUTATION!" Yeah boo hoo players love mutations thats not a "cost" to magic thats a perk.

Carcosa had it figured out. The only way players will actually treat magic like a terrible, evil force is if it has a cost in human life. Subtle themes and slow-burn consequences completely fly over their heads.

You can read the original Twitter thread rolled up here.

The last part I bolded for emphasis, and it points to a bit of psychology that's long been a known issue in game design, especially in Tabletop, due to how badly the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play fucked up the hobby.

The reason that subtlty is wasted is because the player never sees the bill come due and thus never has to suffer the consequences for doing this or that.

This is, quite frankly, a Time Preference Problem.

Time preference refers to the tendency to value immediate gratification over delayed satisfaction. In economics, it is the relative valuation placed on receiving a good or cash at an earlier date compared to receiving it at a later date. This concept is also known as time discounting, delay discounting, or temporal discounting.

In essence, time preference represents the amount of future utility that is equivalent to the current utility of consuming a good or service. It is often illustrated through the example of saving money and using it to acquire additional goods or services in the future. A person with a time preference favors having a good sooner rather than later, and therefore prefers having a good immediately to having a somewhat greater good later.

Guess what the Bros' restoration of how this hobby actually works does? Put Time Preference consequences where the player can see it and feel it, WHERE IT HURTS.

How?

What does Time Preference mean? Valuing Current!You over Future!You, such that Future!You may not even be conceivable as an concept; this is known due to criminology studies of repeat violent offenders, who not only lack Theory of Mind but also cannot conceive of a future more distant than the next day- if that.

When we speak of crminally behavior, one of the tells is "High/Short Time Preference" (i.e. the unwillingness or inability to consider or decide in favor of delaying gratification in favor of future benefits). Subtly falls under this category in Game Design terms because it is not something that hits a player right then and there, at the point of decision, to tell him that he done fucked up; to make a wrong decision where subtlty is in play is to forgo a future benefit in favor of immediate utility- selling one's birthright (future benefit) in favor of food (immediate utility).

And like the proverbial tragic character, then get mad when the consequences "come out of nowhere".

When you're playing the Real Game, with Strict Timekeeping that forces you to bench a man due to Time Jail, sloughing off consequences other than getting hit in the face on the spot becomes impractical because those subtle costs stop being subtle.

They stop being subtle because the player gets to see those costs--to eat those costs--on the spot without recourse. Get infected with Lycanthrophy? In a Romero-style zombie scenario and get bitten? Better hope your man can find a cure before he's turned, and since he's benched in Time Jail you can't just ignore those consequences.

That mutation is the same thing.

Yes, shoving the costs--including all of the horror and moral hazard--up at the table works. However, the other way to put it where the player sees it is to remove the capacity to ignore the future by making the future come into the present.

Time Keeping pushes the future into the present by removing that is, at that point, an illusion of time; when you're drawing up the bill for the action at the table, all those consequences are put front and center before the player.

Which means that while that afflicted man rides the pine, the player is forced to realize that he had better have a plan to deal with those consequences when that man comes off the bench or it's going to snowball out of control.

It's just the same as all those players that ignore logistics when playing high-tech or consumable-intensive mans. Your giant robot gets fucked up? Hope you can fix it. Run out of ammo? Fast Eddie Lo ain't going to deliver if you can't pay. Cyborg body gets bodied? Hope you can swap to a spare while you find a mechanic to fix it.You get the idea.

Now watch as the Bros find more ways to make the subtle obvious.