The Culture: This Is War, Not Theater

The Basic Expert is right to get on Grifting Beast over this.

Grifting Beast is a double-talking faggot, but that's no surprise to any regular reader here. When you cultivate a Conventional Play audience of Pop and Death Cultists, being forked-tongued is a survival trait.

Flat out, what Beast is after is The Fantasy of Agency. The problem is that nothing he plays delivers on that fantasy because it never permits the players to root themselves in the source of Agency: power. Both in the having--and using--of it as well as the pursuit and development of it, Agency stems from that one root. This is why wargamers easily get what the hobby really is but those that never have routinely fall into the fallacy of applying Narrative media (passive media, spectator media) to what is a Sport medium (which is what wargaming is- sport, i.e. training for war) of active engagement.

The Culture: Watching The Game Is Not Playing It

The Professor is conflating things.

The audience for the hobby is not the audience for shows about the hobby.

Furthermore, as the Professor notes, the space for these kinds of shows is even smaller than for the hobby: no one cares about anything but Critical Role or ever will.

Conversion from passive binge-watching viewer to active, engaged hobbyist is low, something even Wizards of the Coast acknowledges. The reason, as those at all honest or competent will admit, is that what you get out of watching the game is not what you get out of playing it.

It's the difference between First and Third Person, between Real Time and Pause-Enabled: Detachment.

When you watch a show or film, you are not there as if it was you doing it. At best you are along for the ride, as a witness, and often (too often) not even that. You are able, especially if you're watching this online or on home video, to skip over what you don't like or care about and get to what you do. (Less so when watching with others, but that's also on the decline.) You're the spectator in the stands, not the man in the arena.

When you play, that's you in the shit. You're doing it--and, again, your brain treats virtual and literal experiences as the same thing--for real for all intents and purposes; you will screw up, you will act suboptimally, your man suffers for it, but you also reap the benefit of seeing your struggles payoff- and the satisfication of seeing your plans turn out to be correct.

Yes, the hobby is far closer to sport and war than Hollywood, and that's why the audiences do not cross over.

The Business: A Detailed Analysis of Bot Impact on The Hobby

Introduction

Tabletop adventure games have long been a bastion of human creativity, where Referees and players compete for mastery of fantastic worlds. However, the advent of artificial intelligence has introduced transformative changes in design and publication, potentially altering the hobby in ways that are irreversible. This survey note explores how bots have impacted the hobby, drawing on recent trends and community discussions, and argues that these changes are likely beyond human capacity to revert.

Bot Transformation of Product Design

Bot has revolutionized product design by enhancing the creative process, particularly for Referees. Research suggests that bot tools, such as ChatGPT, act as digital muses during the "Dreaming Phase," providing data-driven inspiration for worlds and scenarios. For instance, bots can draw from vast databases of lore, mythology, history, and culture to generate detailed environments, as seen in campaigns like "Valley of the Lost Orcs," which used bots for a North African tribe-based setting Chain of Thought Prompting and PCTET prompting approach. This speeds up scenario-building and introduces coherence and detail, offering templates, frameworks, premises, and maps.

In the "Building Phase," bot streamline content creation by generating lifelike NPCs with objectives, motivations, and secrets. It ensures scenario coherence and adjusts difficulty to maintain player agency, as evidenced by prompts like those in 5 ChatGPT Prompts to Start a Fight in Your D&D Campaign. Bots also allow conversation with campaign content for consistent NPCs and experiences, enhancing the depth of character development. For example, players can chat with bot-trained characters that remember past sessions, facilitating personalized arcs and adaptive world reactions- all enhancing solo play.

During the "Running Phase," bots act as a co-GM, providing real-time support for improvisation, managing logistics like stat blocks, descriptions, and dialog, and resolving rule disputes. This enhances live sessions, as seen in the first encounter of "Valley of the Lost Orcs" with an AI assistant Using ChatGPT in Live D&D Sessions for Enhanced Character Roleplay. AI also enriches storytelling by generating immersive narratives with minimal preparation, focusing on narrative depth, as exemplified by the player view of the "Elven Trees of Travel" artefact with image and description.

Finally, bots foster a collaborative environment through platforms and tools, enhancing community engagement. This includes sharing campaigns (assets, NPCs, foes, items) on platforms, turning solitary creation into collaborative experiences, such as sharing "Valley of the Lost Orcs" with friends.

Bot Impact on Hobby Publication and Marketplaces

The publication of products has been democratized by bots, lowering barriers for independent developers. Bots enable creators to generate art without hiring artists, crucial given financial and time constraints, as noted in discussions on AI’s Role in Tabletop Games. Platforms like Dungeon Masters Guild see an influx of bot-assisted creations, fostering a more diverse ecosystem. For instance, Quest Bound plans to incorporate bot tools, starting with writing companions and Referees for solo play, eventually including image generation, with labeled rulesets for transparency.

However, this shift has sparked controversy. The Conventional Play community has had strong reactions, with some subreddits like the largest subreddit for Dungeons & Dragons banning bot-involved work due to fears of displacing artists. Community debates focus on balancing support for independent creators and artists, with no clear answers, promoting ongoing discussion. Creators are encouraged to ask, "Am I able to include an artist? If not, does the value balance the lack?" while players should consider, "Does the publisher have means to include artists? If so, did they?" when backing Kickstarters or buying modules, pressuring intentional bot use.

Bots also impact publication through art generation, lowering costs for indie publishers with tools like Midjourney for maps, patterns, and textures. Interviews with 10 TTRPG designers, artists, and actual-play actors highlight ethical concerns, such as copyright, IP risks, and artist economies, with questions raised like "How close to theft?" Bias with bots, such as struggles with nonwhite faces and whitewashing Indian characters, and potential misuse (e.g., fetishization, found nude AI illustrations in 22 seconds) add complexity. Legal uncertainties, like Disney vs. indie RPGs and DMCA notices, further complicate the landscape, with Midjourney considering blocking its name.

Why These Changes Are Irreversible

The changes are irreversible due to several factors. First, bot integration into workflows is deep, with tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney becoming indispensable for efficiency. Independent developers rely on bot to compete, making it unlikely they will abandon these tools. Second, community adoption is significant, with players and GMs expecting features like bot-generated NPCs, dynamic encounters, and real-time assistance, as seen in platforms like Quest Bound. Reverting would require a significant cultural shift, which seems unlikely given the ongoing adoption.

Third, technological advancements continue to push boundaries. Bots are integrating with augmented reality, enabling 3D game environments and interactive puzzles, and supporting autonomous NPCs like NPC-GPT for dynamic conversations without GM input. Future products could feature 6-second turns with pause options, blending turn-based and real-time play, and virtual world-building with thriving economies, as envisioned in Revolutionizing TTRPGs: AI, Augmented Reality, and the Future of Role-Playing — Mind the Dungeon. These advancements suggest a future where bots are central, making reversion impractical.

Community and Ethical Considerations

The Conventional Play scene is divided, with some embracing bots for their potential and others worried about losing the human touch. Ethical concerns, particularly around AI-generated art, are prominent, with projects like "The Zone" initially using AI art (Disco Diffusion) but later replacing it with human illustrations due to sourcing and artistic impact concerns. This reflects ongoing struggles to balance innovation with respect for human creativity, with calls for systemic solutions like universal basic income and better working conditions to support artists.

Conclusion

Bots have already irreparably changed the hobby, transforming design, publication, and gameplay in ways that seem beyond human capacity to revert. While controversies persist, the convenience, efficiency, and new possibilities offered by AI, coupled with its deep integration and community adoption, suggest a permanent shift. The challenge is to harness bots thoughtfully, ensuring it enhances human creativity and maintains the core values of collaboration, storytelling, and imagination.

It's not like the majority of people can tell the difference between bot-generated and man-generated content anyways.

The Culture: We Have Recovered The Real Hobby

The Black Pants Legion and Sven van der Plank inadvertantly explained How To Run A Real Campaign.

You start at the top where players control The Great Men, then go down to the bottom to play as The Grunts, and ocsilate between the two perspectives in a Perpetual Feedback Loop until someone wins or everyone loses.

As these video selections go, that can take a very long time- both in-setting and in real life. (And yes, the Warhammers and the Five Ringers and the Secret Warriors are all the same thing in terms of campaign play structure.)

That is a good thing.

It is also good that players can choose to only play on a given level; some only care about the big picture, while others only care about the man in the thick of it. Conventional Play cannot, by design and admission, accomodate this and many products pushed by publishers don't even try.

You want a hobby by and for functional adults? Use the original model that didn't chain you to a fucking schedule like it's your job. We want more of the below, and less of the freak show.

My wife after being taken to a game convention with a sizable wargaming contingent (zero 40k):
“Wargamers are COMPLETELY different from other gamers; they seem to be functional mostly married adult males who are intelligent and can focus for long times and aren’t slobs”

— grim schneider (@grimschneider) May 4, 2025

That's why "But this doesn't work for me" is a bullshit complaint: the campaign IS NOT ABOUT YOU. You're not the only man; you're one guy running one table and there's a lot more doing that in a real campaign, all playing on the same map in the same campaign, with mans and players floating between them as they will.

Which is exactly what you see in the BattleTech videos above, when translated to Real Gamer terms.

That is why the #BROSR is the leading edge; we brought back How Things Actually Work, how the machines work and how the social dynamics work- we are #ObjectivelyCorrect.

The Business: The Bot Apocalypse Is Here AND IT'S EASY

It's getting to be this easy to make PDF Slop.

"But that's about making YouTube slop."

Content Is Content. Watch the video; see how this particular application works. If you wanted to churn out slop at scale, it's doable here and now as a one-man shop.

Find your source materials, including the games you're clearly going to rip off for their mechanics, and put them on the virtual board to be linked into the chat. Go back and forth with the bots you're connected to to massage the texts generated into what you want, then export and assemble the manuscript together in Google Docs or LibreOffice (or whatever you can get for free).

Use Midjourney or another artbot to generate your covers and interior illustrations (what few you need), Canva to cover the gaps, and there you go. You can turn out, as a one-man band, slop from ShowerThought to Final Product in a week.

"But what about AI disclaimers?"

Irrelevant. People already can't tell the difference between hand-written and bot-generated; the Romance book market already proved this conclusively. So long as you're not so sloppy as to keep the prompts in the text, no one will know unless you run your mouth. If you still feel vulnerable, use a pen name and be done with it.

While Poppi isn't free, most of the bots you can plug into it or feed output into it is; you can use this not only to make the slop products, but also to make the slop marketing media needed to promote the slop product- all by yourself.

It is because the bots are mostly free, and the tutorials to learn how to use them are mostly free, that will compel the commercial collapse of media production due to a massive deluge of content creation by one-man operators. You can benefit from this, or you can be drowned to death; I choose to benefit, which is why I've subscribed to Vox Day's new Substack column about the bots.

The Culture: Turns Out More Than SF & F Is Fake

Night Danger makes a bold, but correct, claim.

Video going up later on Lovecraft, "Cosmic Horror" isnt a real departure from Gothic, and why contemporary artists fail to capture what Lovecraft was doing

— Night Danger (@WithNightDanger) June 14, 2025

Here's the video.

Death Cultists will not react well to this. Then again they don't react well when they are confronted by reality.

Night Danger gets it. It's the matter of the Sublime that makes the difference, and it is this quality--a non-materialist quality--that is what makes fantastic literature its power. It is what makes horroric tales scary, yet satifying. It is what makes heroic tales thrilling, yet safe. It is what makes tales something more than the ordinary, and thus it is what separates a lot of slop media from the pinnacle they immitate like a Cargo Cult.

The same is true for those in Tabletop trying to use this hobby to chase a high they had with some source material, not realizing that they're using the wrong tool for the job and then getting mad when nothing they do "fixes" what they see as "broken". Why? Because when you're playing Tabletop, you are--for all intents and purposes--not separated from the danger or awesome incident at issue. You are in First Person mode, so it many respects when your man kills the dragon it is real to you and it's also why recreating what Lovecraft (et. al.) did in literature does not work; there is nothing keeping you from it- whatever it is.

Virtual experiences, so far as your brainmeats are concerned, are as real any literal ones. Trainers know this; that why they do it.

You can't do the Sublime without destroying the power of the Tabletop medium.

That's why, in addition to Gothic Horror being fake, Tabletop-as-Narrative-Medium is also fake. Virtual Experiences can only had in First Person mode; this is why Videogames are better at Muh Narrative faggotry than Tabletop because you can do that.

The Business: If Your Product Doesn't Solve A Problem, Fuck Off

JD Sauvage put it plainly.

RPG discourse is poisoned by incessant chatter about classes and systems.

I. Don't. Care.

Even if you have crossed the Rubicon and actually have made a heartbreaker you want me to buy, the question I have is this.

What actual hobby game problem does your heartbreaker solve?

— JDSauvage 🏴‍☠️🎗🏵⚡️⚡️ (@jd_sauvage) June 11, 2025

This is why I give no fucks about Your Fucking PDF Slop.

I see toys. I see gimmicks. I see things that I know from decades of being around will end up working better in videogames, boardgames, or cardgames. What I don't see is the solution to a problem.

I've solved 90% of my issues simply by reverting back to AD&D1e and Classic Traveller because those are full and complete games that work out of the box as advertised. No need to buy anything else, ever, or have to buy shit that I don't want to just to get it to work.

And what remains?

Either it's turned out to be a benefit (anything that gets Tourists and other Stalking Horse sorts to bounce off so Death Cultists can't sneak in) or it's symptomatic of something bigger. (e.g.why Pink Slime Fantasy dominates; turns out you can blame Del Ray for that because he's the man who took Tolkien and deliberately misunderstood it to reduce it to a Mad Lib template and that's what it takes to take off as a Tabletop Game form).

You can't do that? Get out. Commercial or not, get out.

(N.B.: None of these chucklefuck "designers" ever consider that you can do away with Classes and Levels just by making all Character Improvements take time and money.)