The Business: Ryan Dancey Told You This Was Coming Nearly 30 Years Ago

Network Effects, motherfucker. You WILL grok this.

What did Dancey say?

TLDR: "Most people only ever played D&D. It's D&D or Nothing."

Then he explained why by introducing, for most of us back then for the first time, what a Network Effect is and how it works.

That's how the Open Gaming License, the d20 System, and the best time for Cargo Cultists to be around and making money came to pass before he got replaced at Wizards of the Coast and Yet Another Retarded MBA Faggot ruined the good thing.

Ryan, as he explained at the time, was being magnanimous. He wanted everyone to enjoy the prosperity that The Only Game That Ever Mattered brought, so he made it piss-easy to play nice; save for a few outliers, most Cargo Cultists did.

What Ryan downplayed, but did not omit, is that most of Tabletop, well past the 80/20 threshold, is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT.

Cargo Cultists did not believe him them. As most of them are Oldfags, they still don't; they think that somehow not being bankrupt and out of business means they are relevant.

Lex Luthor Wrong GIFfrom Lex Luthor GIFs

Relevant means "Can be found in Walmart or Target, and is readily played by everyone in a manner that doesn't invite mockery by mainstream media."

No one on Stranger Things played Theater Kid Fag Non-Game or Temu Oldfag Houserule Non-D&D. They played The Only Game That Mattered.

That understated fact, backed up by data at the time, was never contradicted after the fact. The one thing that has not been talked about, but plays a huge factor into the strength of a Network Effect, is control over friction.

The holder of an Effect controls competition within the network by controlling the friction generated by non-compliance.

Friction, in this context, is measured by inconvience. Tabletop is notoriously inconvient; if you're a commercial operation, solving that issue is your top priority, and nothing is more inconvient than getting people to play at all followed by deciding on what to play.

WOTC's new pivot solves BOTH. Going mobile-first solves the Schedule Your Fun part; you can play whenever, however. Going All You Can Eat Brand Crossover Buffet solves the what you play part by standardizing the form of play while increasing the options within it.

Going against this increases the friction, exponentially so now that WOTC will be mobile-first, which is detrimental to convincing people to go with your Temu Tabletop offering over Official D&D in commercial terms. Only non-commercial alternatives, which don't compete on the same level, are viable now- and no, that doesn't mean serial busking on Kickstarter. That means going with a different organizational model entirely, such as the Clubhouse, which solves the same problems differently.

Don't take my word for it.

This is, of course, terribly frustrating to those of us who release products intended to be played. But the reality of the network effects and switching costs of RPGs is inescapable. If people didn't buy for art and lore, there'd be almost no indie industry at all.

— Archon | Autarch Games (@archon) August 4, 2026

These people would be better off making this shit as glorified Coffee Table Art Books like Dinotopia, with playable notes as a separate PDF for download.

This is why I say that Tabletop is no longer commercially viable. There is only non-commercial alternatives and delusional Cargo Cultists.

The Business: Too Many Don't Grok How Normies Work And Thus Miss Why WOTC's Move Matters

At GenCon, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what I said was the play: the Fortnite strategy.

People do not grasp what this means.

All of the Brand collaboration releases for Magic are allowed in all formats. You want Aragorn and Optimus Prime and Y'stolha Rhul in your deck? You can.

This is exactly what WOTC's target audience--Normies, Casuals, Tourists--want: all together, all in one place, all under one ruleset, all Officially Sanctioned, in a mandatory crossover environment.

That is the Fortnite strategy. That target demo is a Low Agency Demographic. They do not trust Unapproved People. They only trust Brand because Brand is Approved. Brand is Authority.

The Big Deal here is granting permission to these Low Agency people to do what their Revealed Preferences say that they want: to have an All You Can Eat buffet of Approved Stuff that they like, priced cheaply, to play with in the Approved Sandbox.

They will not--have not, never have--just done it themselves. They do not accept the validity of homebrewing. They do not accept the premise of users just doing things. They show, again Revealed Preferences at work, that they need permission from someone they view as the authority on the matter- which in this case is the Brand. WOTC knows this. Hasbro knows this. Their Brand counterparts either know it or quickly catch on.

This goes well beyond HERO allowing Marvel vs. DC fights to be resolved.

As it is in books, so it is in games: NORMIES WANT "THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT" ALWAYS!

That means NETWORK EFFECTS! Who is the Big Dog in Tabletop? WOTC and D&D. What do Normies only play? Official D&D. What does this move do? Load up the only game that matters with all the stuff that Normies want in the only place they will ever look. This is a very full, and growing, Walled Garden. Couple that with the announcement of Official D&D going mobile-first and you can see the plan--the pivot--in action.

All the Cargo Cultists are still deep in denial.

So are a lot of others that ought to know better, but due to those influences still refuse to see reality for what it is.

This is not a Death Of Physical. This is a Death Of Schedule Your Fun. This is a move towards what Normies proved--and have proved for over a century, by Revealed Preference--that they reward: CONVENIENCE AND FRICTIONLESS ENGAGEMENT!

Being mobile-first means that they can and will play Official D&D at work on their breaks, between doomscrolling binges, on their commutes, etc. and they will happily drop a fiver on a new race, class, etc. if it means they get a leg up on everyone else at the table. All that remains are the AI-controlled bot players and Referees.

Yes, you will live to see Snake Eyes, Optimus Prime, Estiniam Wyrmblood, Cloud Strife, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Tirian Fordring team up against Abaloth the Devourer in an official D&D module and the Normies will eat that shit up, making WOTC and their partners BILLIONS.

And because of this, "RPGs" will be defined as "Officially Licensed Brand Crossover Let's Plays".

No one will ever look at your Temu D&D again.

Commercial viability outside of this is OVER. Yes, even for Palladium; they'll just be among the last to die.

There is this, and there is the Clubhouse.

The Collapse is not only here, it is Past Tense.

The Culture: The Real Hobby Incentives After-Action Review To Upgrade Their Performance

Jeffro comments on Dunder's running adventures in the BROXT's UMBROS campaign.

This whole scenario makes no sense. Like, I really don’t get how guys like Dunder can hang around the scene for as long as he has and then still do this off the wall stuff. Judging from the way this discussion has gone the past couple of days, it is likely because he lives in kind of a cloud of people that reflexively fight any attempt to elucidate matters. Why would you put a canned OSR product into a bro campaign? Why? We already know from Trollopulous 2020 that players like doing whatever they want whenever they want with no planning. We know from Trollopulous 2023 that a couple of pages of one-page dungeons is easily enough to sustain ten or twelve 4-hour sessions. How do you look at all of that play experience and say, “man… what these campaigns need is some dude’s product dropped into it”? And didn’t we see earlier this year Dunder was talking about how he had made up all of these Settlers of Catan boards to represent kingdoms and [blah blah blah blah zzzzz] huh?! dude! what?!! Seriously, what is wrong with you?! If you are running D&D, then you need just enough of a scenario so that the players can be delighted that they have successfully stymied and thwarted whatever it was that you were trying to do. Any more than that is wasted effort. But wait. You drop this megadungeon product into the campaign because you are so taken with it. AND THEN YOU MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO GET TO IT. Okay, this alone is just awesomely funny. The BrOSR I remember would have teased Dunder relentlessly for this. Personally, I love this image of the plucky survivors running this massive gauntlet, dying in droves, players baffled and exasparated, everyone wondering just what in the heck is wrong with this campaign, and then finally… desperately… after ten or twelve or twenty sessions the players have arrived at the ENTRANCE of the adventure location and… a gigantic wolf eats half of them while they are vulnerable from breaking through the ice. The two surviving dudes get to the entrance somehow and realize that they can’t get in because someone sold the key. And the DM says that, yeah… well if you had all kept it you would have died from it because it was radioactive. Guys. That is a freaking masterpiece of game mastering awesome. IT SHOULD BE IN A MUSEUM. I mean, that is just deep meta-commentary on the nature of life, art and gaming. This is all going on in a backdrop of exploding frogs, some kind of wheelchair goblin charity benefit, and then something to do with an entire solo session with some random guy just because Dunder felt bad that he died pointlessly in the first session. But no, seriously. Here is what is so stupid. Dunder puts Fun Adventure Product™ into the campaign. Yeah, okay. Fine. Stupid. But whatever…. He then makes it practically impossible to get to the Fun™. Sotto voce: everyone has fun anyway because playing D&D is fun and stupid stuff happens no matter what you do Dunder then at every opportunity beats his breast, talks about how challenging it is to run a bro game, confesses to all in Evangelical fashion that “he has not arrived” and that he is still learning, still growing, still making mistakes. Dunder… one of the best Braunstein players in the world. He is just a babe, see?. A novice. An initiate. He has not yet attained to even a tithe of the gaming brilliance of the worst player from Trollopulous 2020. And on and on and on. He is putting out these session reports of all kinds of weird and crazy stuff. But it’s all wrapped in the framing of “something is not working. SOMETHING IS WRONG.” He has run what to the entire rest of the world is a “campaign”. And theme of the campaign was: *the players never got to the campaign.* Man that is amazing. Like I mean seriously, this is the zen koan of D&D campaigns. That is just such a deep comment on the life prospects of Gen Z right now. Incredible. Art imitates life! And that flushes out the other thing that is completely off about all of this. Let’s say Dunder made an intrinsically unplayable scenario. Let’s just agree that happened, because everybody seems to think this is the case. Even Dunder. But here’s Dunder… he has this stupid idea for a campaign which will never work. And then… all the players just dutifully feed themselves into the meat grinder week after week because, after all… that’s just what you do. You go to the table and you just do whatever it is that the DM his hinting that you are supposed to do. Because, I mean, there is just no way that you could play D&D any other way. I mean, that’s what D&D is. It is a game of pretend. The people who sell it pretend that it is a game. The DM pretends to create an adventure. And the players pretend to play it. Then the DM pretends the players won. Except you didn’t. The key was radioactive and there was a wolf at the doorway to fun. How is it that nobody involved ever thought for a moment that maybe deciding in advance what the campaign was supposed to be about was never going to work? Don’t you know by now that you just lay a few things out and then something will happen and then piece by piece, everything develops and fits together somehow and then something wild happens that is colored by things that were developed across a dozen sessions and OH MY GOSH THAT WAS JUST THE MOST AMAZING GAME. The idea that the players even went along with Dunder’s stupid idea for even a second is what really gets me. “This game is stupid and unfair,” said at least one ungrateful and unimaginative player. Maybe they won’t own up to it now, but SOMEBODY said it. And yet somehow none of those players ever attempted to take control of the game. “This game is not about getting into the Game Module of Fun™. This game is about me. This game is about finding a Troglodyte that looks like Steve Buscemi. We are going to use funds from a Goblin Charity front to create a gang of mutated freaks to take over level three of a dungeon that doesn’t exist yet. And Troglodyte Steve will be my henchman.” Or whatever. This is Meffridus 101. And no, Meffridus did not teach people to play AD&D RAW even the weird and dumb rules that the gross nerds never figured out. Meffridus taught players to take control of the game. The way Oghma did when he visited Trollopulous. That’s the craziest thing. None of these people washing up into a bro game ever thought to do that? Really? I don’t get it. If none of you can walk into an unfair game and then just make up your own victory conditions, then I don’t know what to tell you. You failed Bro 101. You all don’t need any of this #SuperAdvanced Braunstein theory. You need to go back to body builder memes and ridiculous hashtags that are weirdly inspiring. At any rate… thank you for running the bro campaign that proves we need bro campaigns. I guess it had to happen to someone. And honestly… that is just about the most Dunder thing I can imagine.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Don't think that the Bros don't criticize their own. That happens.

This is exactly that in action, and wiser heads will pick up what Jeffro laid down here.

"Wait. Why are we trying to do it all at once? Why didn't we secure the entrance to the Moon Pool first, set up a base camp there, and secure the road back to town? That would allow further pushes to start closer to the action, let parties react faster to developments, and allow for serendipitous opportunities to manifest that we could capitalize upon. Every time we get to another location like this, we move the base camp up and repeat the process until we're camped outside the target location and we have a secure logistics train all along the way."

Jeffro has a clear point here about seizing control of events: "Meffridus taught players to take control of the game. The way Oghma did when he visited Trollopulous."

What I wrote above is the most obvious form of doing just that.

At every point there is plenty of opportunity for player-driven action. Securing the route from town to the Moon Pool alone means beating a road down, clearing that route of bothers of all sorts, establishing and maintaining patrols, and then setting up the secure base camp--with supplies, Expert Hirelings, defenses, etc.--on the other end like any other serious expedition into dangerous territory.

Once that is done, action predictably goes two ways. One direction goes down into the Moon Pool as intended. The other goes out into the surrounding area, tracking down threats and resources- the former to kill, the latter to secure. Revenue from both forms of activity go into the maintenance of the camp and its garrison securing the route back to town.

Meanwhile, the Moon Pool needs to be swept and cleared of both threats and treasures while securing the route through it. Once secured, it must be occupied. The base camp slowly extends and expands into the Moon Pool in the wake of the expedition's sweeper teams. Meanwhile, the surface camp can now expand into a small armed town secured by a tower or motte as valuable resources extracted from below get used to build up the surface plant; maybe this becomes the seat of a rising adventurer's claim of dominion.

Does this slow the process? Sure.

Does this also make it something other than futile throwing of Polish mine detectors into the field? Also yes.

There is a considerable lack of a sense of agency at play here. A lack of currency does not mean a lack of economy; those prices become abstract Units of Account, used as a measure, but realized instead through non-coinage forms of exchange: oaths, contracts, in-kind barter, etc. as we see in a lot of tribal and clan-based societies.

This is a fantasy of agency- of being the Man in Command. Act like it.

The Culture: You Want To Be There On Wednesday For This

You'll want to be there for this one.

If you don't have this book, and you can't get it via your county library, Amazon has you covered.

The Culture: There Are Others On The Road That The Bros Blazed

I knew that others were similiarly dissatified with Cargo Cult norms.

Some of those others, with more experience with Vidya than Tabletop, used that Vidya experience to attempt to address the issue. This guy that gets paid to run Official Edition games went with that Vidya-informed approach and made a "MMO".

Project Aurora is literally the craziest undertaking I've done in my life. A Dungeons & Dragons online MMORPG the takes place on a VTT within a persistent living and breathing universe where its focus is not just the D&D game, but a full-fledged commitment to provide as much content inside the D&D game as well outside of the D&D game.

A Universe where the sheer number of people in a D&D game from where there is 6 players and 1 DM isn't just doubled or tripled, but significantly scaled more than 10 fold while keeping continuity, player agency, social interactions, professionalism, community, the ability to forge a legacy making a name for yourself being the forefront of everything that is Project Aurora.

Just, the Attempt alone to make something as vast in concept is mind-boggling to even think about as you've probably clicked on this video to learn more of what the heck this project is, what's it trying to accomplish, will it even succeed and is it worth getting invested in.

This is, for all intents and purposes, an Analog Private Official Edition Server. I took a look at the YT channel's catalog.

Yes, it runs out of a Discord server. Yes, it presumes Cargo Cult norms where it does not explicitly contradict them. Yes, it brushes up against concepts ajacent to--but surpassed by--Braunstein (specifically West Marches).

Yes, he's trying to get paid doing this. That's likely where he's going to run into problems once he gets big enough.

But he's got the incentive to come to where we are. Send that man a copy of Winning Secrets and direct him to BROZER and UMBROS. Then tell him about the Clubhouse.

The Culture: Substack Is Where The Receipts Are Now

You need to be on Substack.

Umbros Docket: The Second Battle of Firsthaven by Angry Steak

Run: July 14, 2026

Read on Substack

This is where the receipts get posted.

This is where Jeffro can be found.

This is now where the real discourse exists.

The Business: Wizards Confirms The Fortnite Strategy

Wizards of the Coast dropped their keynote at GenCon.

What I told you is on the cards is confirmed.

WOTC's taking Official D&D down the Fortnite route of All The Brand crossovers while outsourcing its own IP to aligned 3rd parties to make stuff and going mobile-centric with MXT. Time for the smug face. pic.twitter.com/bnQAF6U4SY

— Bradford C. Walker (@MrBCWalker) July 30, 2026

Major Announcements

Dark Sun returns (Season of Survival, 2027) as D&D’s first mature-rated fifth-edition setting. The harsh world of Athas features defiling magic, psionics, and sorcerer-kings. Releases include the gameplay expansion Dark Sun: Blood and Power, the adventure expansion Dark Sun: Edge of Oblivion, a map pack, DM screen, and a limited-edition Player’s Handbook with alternate art. It introduces the Scion/Psion class and carries content warnings for violence and mature themes (shrink-wrapped with a warning). Localized editions (French, Italian, German, Spanish) follow later in 2027.

Universes Beyond launches as a new crossover initiative:

• D&D: World of Warcraft (Season of Champions, November 2026; early access ~Nov 3, full release Nov 17) brings Azeroth to the table with 13 classes (new/reimagined subclasses and specializations), 16 species (including Dracthyr, Vulpera, etc.), 60+ spells, monsters, dungeons (including reimagined iconic ones), factions with renown, mounts, and more. A map pack with Icecrown Citadel content and other accessories are planned.
• A Star Wars collaboration (Season of Rebellion, 2027) was teased, with more details to come.

D&D Icons (led by Joe Manganiello) pairs legendary creators with the studio:

• Dragonlance with Tracy Hickman.
• Greyhawk with Luke Gygax (drawing on Gary Gygax’s notes, partly through Melf’s perspective).
• Drizzt Do’Urden content with R.A. Salvatore.

Greyhawk: Crown of the Witch Queen is a full-length adventure expanding on Drelnza (vampire daughter of Iggwilv/Tasha) from classic material.

Studio partnerships for more setting content: Ghostfire Gaming (Ravenloft, 2027), Visionary Productions (Eberron adventure featuring the Lord of Blades, 2028), and Kobold Press (Forgotten Realms content, 2028).

D&D Beyond

updates emphasize making the game easier to play together:

• Live Looking for Group tools (Event Finder for stores, rebuilt Discord LFG, limited-time cheap sessions via StartPlaying).
• Upcoming features: rebuilt search, DM prep tools (scene manager, map pins, etc.), mapless encounter tools.
• New mobile app (early 2027) powered by a new rules engine.

Other notes: The Warlock video game protagonist’s patron is the archfey Tasha (voiced by Maggie Robertson); full gameplay reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live (Aug 25). The official actual-play series Dungeon Masters will visit Azeroth then return to the Forgotten Realms (Icewind Dale). Arcana Unleashed (Season of Magic) arrives in September 2026 with subclasses, backgrounds, feats, spells, and more.

The presentation positioned these as additive to core D&D worlds, with staffing increased to support both classic settings and crossovers, aiming to bring more players to the table across formats. Official details and the full roadmap are available on D&D Beyond and the Dungeons & Dragons site.

Told you so.

All that's missing is the AI bots to run games and fill out parties; those are still in the works, so we'll hear more about those down the road.