The Business: This Is How Irrelevant Conventional Play Is Now

The collapse of the commercial end of the tabletop hobby isn't just wishful thinking. The receipts are coming out in the wake of D&DTube's collapse; see the video in yesterday's post.

Tabletop, in business terms, is so bad now that no one other than Wizards of the Coast is even a factor in the entertainment business world. WOTC, in turn, is still far more about Magic than D&D and both brand will end up being used for entertainment niches other than Tabletop.

WOTC doesn't have any competition within the hobby. WOTC competes with Roblox, Netflix, Fortnite, WOW, and 40K. Not even Pathfinder and Palladium is on the radar now; that's how completely dominant the Network Effect for D&D (and thus for WOTC) is. There is no commercial viability in Tabletop anymore. Everyone else has to beg to get anything out there now; that's not commercial enterprise, but digital busking at best- usually it's actually non-commercial operations pretending to be commercial enterprises.

The only business left is Wizards of the Coast. Everyone else is in denial; if they couldn't beg via crowdfunds, they'd already be out of the game entirely.

The best thing that could happen is to force exactly that to happen; most would just shut down and go away, proving that this is just about their fucking egos. Only a dedicated, authentic few would accept that they are non-commercial hobbyist publications and just give their stuff away (or at cost in print) because that's how tabletop actually works. The window for making a living doing this already closed; those that remain are zombies slowly falling apart.

Diamond Distribution going under is going to force more hands than you think, but not as much as you may like.

"But (thing)"

Is going to get "Nah, I ain't learning that" far more often than not, especially from the Normies, Tourists, and Casuals. Network Effects still exist, and are stronger than ever; they want The Game That Matters. You can get away with Past Edition, or Very Good Knockoffs, but weird variants that can't be played Cold (no prep) or Stupid (no prior knowledge), which is what all those darlings D&DTube pushes are full of, turn those people--and they are the overwheling majority in the hobby--off with disgust like you shat on their shoes. They would rather go play Fortnite than learn your dogshit non-D&D product, and they have. Cope.

There's a reason I say you can stop your library at D&D, Traveller, and maybe one of RIFTS, Call of Cthulhu or BattleTech. Everything else hits that Effect barrier and gets rejected, and those three can and do wear out their welcomes fast. (It's another reason Vidya versions of Conventional Play trump Tabletop; you don't need others to sign on to play.)

"But my-"

Four to six people in a room does not a hobby make. That's a vanity project to stroke your ego, and no amount of shilling from fuckwits on YouTube changes that.

The only way out is to rebuild from a standard game that exists outside Your Fucking Table, connecting all players into a single networked and decentralized campaign. That means Conventional Play is not an option going forward, though many people (who have incentives to insist otherwise) will say that isn't so, and boy are they going to eat shit and start looking at how expensive hemp rope is before long.

I said it last year. Now it's becoming too obvious to ignore: the only future is the Clubhouse.

There is no business to be had anymore. There is hobbyist publication for the Clubhouse, or there is nothing; we're just watching the remaining zombies slowly fall apart and, at long last, die. This also means that a lot of slop merchants had better start pivoting to something else that brings in the big bucks, because this ain't it anymore. It never should have been.

The Business: The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play Sees The Colony Drop Coming At Last

The PDF Merchants are figuring out that they are not competing with Wizards of the Coast, but all forms of entertainment and they Just Can't Even.

Even after accounting for the fuckery that WOTC engages in to massage the numbers, things are in freefall for Conventional Play.

What did I say so often last year? That Tabletop was in a state of collapse. What did this PDF Merchant and his pals provide the receipts for? Proof that Tabletop is in a state of collapse. The commercial viability of this hobby is already in a state of absolute freefall, which is why damn near everyone other than WOTC has to beg on Kickstarter to put anything out.

"Games are not too expensive" bullshit being pushed is going end up with a massive uptick in piracy, and that includes Print On Demand piracy because that's been figured out now and all it will take is for someone to explain in a public-facting (but deniable) fashion how to do it successfully, coupled with a lot of non-commercial hobbyist publishing that sells at or just over costs and will be equal to or superior in terms of product quality.

Yes, including unfucked versions of The Game(s) That Matter. PDF Merchant Man has to confront that he's slaved to the Network Effect (and he does) and make his peace with it.

Why? Because Network Effects can work FOR you as well as AGAINST you. Being able to partake of the Network without giving money to people that hate you, or are just plain retards that should not be rewarded, is increasingly being realized as a viable path of action.

And if you can produce an unfucked rules manual for The Game(s) That Matters, you can partake of the Network without giving the Master any money- and that's the first step to becoming the Apprentice, gettng into position, shivving the Master and taking his place.

They can cope all they want, but what I said is still the case: follow WOTC to Vidya, stop commercial operations and just be a hobbyist outlet, or quit entirely.

And because so many of these slop merchants consistently prove themselves to be pants-on-head retards, I would rather that they be made to quit. The Hobby would be better for their passing.

The Culture: The Publishers' Abuse Of Hobbyists Is The Cause Of This

The Angry DM has an opinion.

Yes. If you’re a game designer and you know (a) that players are averse to reading rules and (b) that enjoyment of your game hinges on reading the rules, you’re an absolute frigging moron if you publish your game as a series of two-hundred word textbooks.

— The Angry GM (@AngryGamesInc) January 23, 2025

He's someone that's been burned by decades of Games That Disappoint.

When you are abused that badly for that long, habits like "Don't read the rulebooks" form and stick- and, when you are no longer in that dysfunctional cesspit, become maladaptive. It doesn't help that other gaming media don't cultivate active player exercise of agency either, as AGM notes in that thread ("yellow paint" and so on), and this is a known issue generally.

Talk to anyone that pays their bills by doing Advertising and Marketing. You have to get into peoples' faces and smear what you got into them to get and keep their attention because they tend to go about their lives like horses wearing blinders while also being severely near-sighted.

It is necessary, but not sufficient, to require every player to have their own copies of the rules. It is necessary to also walk them through the rules and procedures of the game, especially if the rules manuals themselves have substandard technical writing. (Looking at you, Gary.)

The flipside is not being nice and squishy to someone that was told what was expected of them, but to hold firm: "You fucked up, so now your man is dead. Reroll, go again, and read the fucking manual this time."

A healthy, functional, and competent hobby scene has hobbyists Read The Fucking Manual and work through how to play the game--how the rules and procedures work--specifically due to the fact that player skill and acumen is a necessary element to succeeding in playing the game. This is how and why cardgames, boardgames, and videogames successfully engage and retain their audiences- and Tabletop has failed to do so for 50 years.

This has to stop, or there no future, but as things are there are serious commercial disincentives to do so; these have to be exposed, isolated, and mercilessly hammered until they stop or (far, far, far more likely) the commercial end collapses and only non-commercial hobbyist publication remains.

There is no more tolerance for piss-poor technical writing or manual presentation. There is no more tolerance for making product to be displayed and status-signaled, maybe read, but never played. (All of you know exactly what I am talking about.)

There is room only for Real Games. That's not a lot; at this time, less than a US Army fireteam in number. Everyone else can, and should, just fucking die for everyone's good.

The Culture: Dunder Moose Talk To The Compleat DM Tonight!

Dunder Moose welcome Joel Peterson, The Compleat DM, to his channel tonight at 8pm Central Time.

@TheCompleatDM, Joel Peterson is a busy guy. He's a YouTuber, making a video game called Procyon Frequency. He's in the BROXT! He's testing Alchemic Rakers mass-combat game for Shadowdark! When does he sleep?

This thumbnail was inspired by the shot of the Trump family watching the Bidens get on Marine 1 after the Inaguration with the helicopter blade bouncing tantalizingly in front of their faces.

I'll be there in the chat. Hope to see you there too.

The Culture: The Full Picture Of The Real Hobby Comes Into View At Last

Jeffro did the thing.

It's coming. Can you feel it, @Deities_Decrees? pic.twitter.com/MTu3ZOW0nB

— GelatinousRube (@RubeJelly) January 21, 2025

We are now coming to the full picture of the Real Game.

Now it will become fist-to-face obvious why you have to play AD&D1e exactly as it is written: all tables are connected. How are they connected? The Planes and the Gods. The Prime Material Plane is dividing into an unknown, and theorhetically infinite, but the other Planes are not. All gods, all pantheons, all divine servants and extraplanar entities all exist in those other planes.

ALL. OF. THEM.

I told you a long time ago that this game's Braunstein all the way down. Now you're seeing the game's rules and procedures providing the infrastructure necessary for that to be achievable in a practical manner. The game is a wargame from the Cosmic level all the way down to a fresh cohort of 1st level mans delving a monster lair for the first time, and since so many people who will see this are illiterate let me show you one very obvious example of this in action. This is just after The Great Schism of 1980.

Two gods arguing over what one's favorite did to another's, with the superior using his power to punish the inferior by afflicting the favorite thereof. Then the cosmic pettiness goes on, using mortals as proxies in their squabbles.

If you think this isn't something you can do, you are mistaken; the rules of the game are right there, in black-and-white. This is a wargame. Contra Cargo Cultists like Sandy Peterson, who still insists that this is all one big Get Along Gang routine, this hobby is about players engaging in PVP over objectives until someone wins or everyone loses and it goes up and and down the scale ladder on a frequent basis to play out moments of Convergence where points of conflict occur.

This is going to be huge.

The Business: The Only Alternative To D&D IS D&D

I'm seeing a lot of videos (etc.) like this circulating.

To which I have said: "WASTE OF TIME! You all know why, so allow me to link to the explaination and be done with it."

You all know what I linked to.

And yes, your life is driven by them. Cope.

In practical terms, the only viable alternative to Current Edition is Past Edition- either straight up TSR editions (i.e. AD&D1e) or the (very, very best) knockoffs (i.e. ACKS) because only those options are proper turnkey products that require no Endless Product Slop to be viable games.

I have, over a score of times over the decades, been told to my face "I don't want to learn another game" when playing something other than D&D comes up. I have, more times than I can count, played D&D only because it was the only game everyone would agree to play. I have, more times than I can count, not been able to even get people to perk up until I said "D&D".

This is despite being intimately familiar with Palladium Books' entire product line, all of R. Talsorian's products, every edition of Star Wars published, TORG, Feng Shui, Legend of the Five Rings, HERO, Gamma World, and GURPS among other Not-D&Ds.

It's been this way for a very long time. From Dragon #67:

Just as TSR sells far more D&D games than are sold of all other competing fantasy role-playing products combined, DRAGON Magazine has a circulation which is over twice that of all of its competitors. To claim that any other FRP game system has the acceptance of D&D gaming is absolutely contraverted by hard facts. When AD&D gaming is included in the totals, there is no contest — it is a slaugher. Similarly, DRAGON Magazine dominates the field, but even with its relatively large circulation, it reaches less than 25% of the total D&D/AD&D game audience. Now we have some perspective.

All these D&DTubers trying so hard to shill for these suck options are either willfully ignoring what Ryan Dancey explained as if everyone was five years old in 1999 (because it was the basis for the Open Game License) or are delusional in thinking that all of them together can do jack against Wizards of the Coast. They won't; their predecessors didn't, and that includes Pathfinder- which benefitted from a unique circumstance that won't happen again, and fell off hard as soon as Current Edition arrived over a decade ago.

Your only option, if you are serious about supplanting WOTC, is to do as I explained previously- which is to do what World of Warcraft did to dethrone EverQuest as Master of the MMORPGs: find the most valuable users in the network, find out what WOTC is not doing for them that they want done with the game, make that and sell it to them, and then make it piss-easy for everyone to defect to the rival network.

That not even Paizo, uniquely positioned to pull this off, failed to do so tells you how incompetent most wanna-bees are in Tabletop's commercial sphere.

Right now, outside of Past Editions, the only other product that could possibly pull it off is Adventurer, Conqueror, King but that requires Macris to be far more savage and ruthless than he's been to date. Of all the would-bees out there, his is the only product that is actually a complete turnkey product that has all required rules and procedures in place- it is a Real Hobby game, not a lobotomized incomplete product (which, sadly, is the norm in this hobby).

Could someone else do it? Sure, but at this time the only possible competitor would be Games Workshop and they have neither the will nor the capacity to do so despite having a ready-made property that has successfully bloodied D&D's nose before- that is a failure of GW's management first and foremost. No one else is even in close, not by an order of magnitude, and even worse no one else is trying at all- including Paizo and Palladium.

There is no alternative to D&D but D&D. Cope, seethe, mald, but it is reality all the same. I'll be over here using Method 3 to see if I finally have a man that can make a successful run for Bard (AD&D1e version, which is a super-powerful class if you can get into it) after 40 years of trying.

Or trying to unfuck something that should work, but doesn't.

The Culture: This Hobby Really Did Go Down The Wrong Path

Night Danger posted a fantastic thread on Twitter the other day. Here's what he said:

"According to Donald Featherstone, Tony Bath served in the Royal Navy during World War II and his immediate family suffered when his father's grocery store was bombed.

It was asserted by Jon Perterson in his 2012 book on the evolution of roleplaying that Bath set his rules in a period far removed from modern combat, but this is contradicted by Donald Featherstone and Phil Barker who state that Bath wanted ancient warfare type rules to recreate the wars from his favourite fantasy world, the tales by Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian.

Although the rules were for the medieval period, the goal was to apply them to the world of Hyboria. This is also supported by various photographs of these early games that have captions referring to Hyborian armies.

Bath's act of generosity was giving his rules away for free. They were a set of instructions, without an introduction; a set of rules for an enthusiast to take and play their own games."

- Intro to Tony Bath's 1956 Medieval Rules, edited by John Curry

TONY BATH BELIEVED IN A HOBBYIST CULTURE!!! HE BELIEVED IN THE COMMON GOOD!!! HE BELIEVED IN PRETENDING TO FIGHT GREAT ANTEDILLUVIAN WARS AGAINST DARK SORCERY!!!

Put another way, he didn't commercialize his hobby.

If you want an obvious example of why that's a bad idea, go look at Games Workshop. They are infamous for changing their games to milk their targets for every last penny in a short period of time, including the promulgation of Corporate-Approved Play via its stores and events as the way to play the game and through that artificial Social Proof scheme they enforce the wholesale change of product lines specifically to get targets to CONSUME PRODUCT to stay Corporate Approved.

Notice that this does not account for any Death Cult pozzing. This is pure Mammon Mobster bullshit.

The hobby is better served by having people take a ruleset and showing others how to play it as it is written. That's service, not product. Back then that meant having locals who knew the rules inside and out teaching the game to others on a regular basis in local stores and clubs. Today you can do that with a YouTube channel, and you can do that with just a smartphone and some basic knowledge of how to shoot and present- you can do this on your own and on the cheap.

"But without Brand the hobby will shrink!"

You mean all the locusts, parasites, and clout-chasers will get flushed out once the hobby ceases to be commercially viable? Sign me the fuck up!

This hobby is far, far better off with a much smaller--but far more committed--population of hobbyists who are in it because the practice of the hobby in and of itself satisfies an itch that cannot be satisfied otherwise.

The irony would be that, being no longer a commercial pursuit, it would become a quieter scene because all of the Soup Aisle derelicts would be flushed out with the Tourists and Casuals (used as stalking horses for the Death Cult); the latter sustain the former because the Soup Aisle are ready recruits for all sorts of dumb shit that the Death Cult pushes- just like their counterparts in other cultural niches do.

And without the rejects and their enablers, the overall quality of the hobby would improve- and its net status would be far better than before. It's be something you'd find men like Peter Cushing playing again.