Lots of problems solved by their Cargo Cult and Theater Kid priors being taken out back and shot.
Meanwhile, over at Substack, Jeffro recently talked about unfucking this crap.
Why would you “convert” your game to a Braunstein? This is just weird framing all around.
Consider:
1) You can delegate monsters to an adversary player in order to work out how a particular entity will respond to player activity.
2) You can set up a session Braunstein in a single region of the campaign map and then fold the results into the overall campaign state.
3) You can run more traditional style adventure scenarioswhile exploring a mix of competition and cooperation both during session play and also in down time.
4) You can set up a fluid conflict between two distinct adventure parties to be played out over several sessions.
5) You can run a sessionless battle scenario over a span of several weeks with troop movements and a mix of strategy and tactics.
None of these options require a consensus or significant cooperation from more than a handful of people for any length of time.
The only person preventing you from doing this is you.
Not there won't be resistance, but until the AI DMs come online it's Dexter or Death for these people so wear the black hat and Dexter them for their own good.
That resistance has its root in its wrong assumption of what this hobby is, as Rule of Thule explained.
It’s not an objection to something happening elsewhere, it’s an objection to something real happening—to the game being actually played.
Consider an abstract game played in a vast abstract space. Within the spaces are two kinds of players: Navelgazers (Ns) and Conquerors (Cs). The Ns believe that all players are Navelgazers and have a shared common understanding of rules that don’t actually exist in the game such as “don’t be unkind towards the pieces of other players” or so on.
The Ns are playing a fundamentally different game from the Cs because they presume restrictions and protections etc. which do not truly exist (i.e. they are not actually rules of the game). When they see something that is the product of real play, they will immediately identify that it doesn’t accord with their presumptions. “No one who was trying to Avoid Unkindness [or other such presumptive descriptors] would have engineered this situation.”
As soon as they see signs of the game being played to win, they are immediately on the defensive. This explains much of the maligning of powergamers, as Meffridus intuitively understood, because they represent the same threat: that someone will undo the fake game by leaning into the real one.
David Sirlin talked about this concept in the context of versus fighters. There are players (he calls them “scrubs”) who come into a tournament with the idea that e.g. certain moves are “unfair” or “cheap” and, despite the obvious signs that these moves are clearly powerful, will be shocked and appalled when they are blasted to pieces by other players “abusing” them.
The scrub’s false internalization of the rules has caused him to become blind to the game’s actual rules and has led him, on his path of player development, to not only navigate false spaces but to arbitrarily close doors whose opening is necessary for him to achieve his real potential.
In the arena of RPGs, we see that scrubs have found ways to form coalitions. They have the ability to aggregate in collectives. Their particular internalizations are not only sanctified by Rule Zero, but each distinct collective can claim membership under a united Rule Zero collective—so long as they acknowledge all the others—and they feel emboldened to claim that no one can tell them they aren’t playing the game, even when they’ve thrown out half the rules and added others.
These coalitions are akin to a rogue tournament scene where everyone involved must abide by the new made-up rules, and anyone who insists on following the plain rules can be exiled. We can see the effects of this everywhere. I think it’s no coincidence that Sirlin’s book is titled Playing to Win.
Last week and over last weekend, Gamza laid bare what Games Workshop is doing and why.
The TLDR is that GW is doing this:
Which means this.
This requires the infantilization of the audience, and Cult Psychology is the proven method to achieve this state.
By doing this, a successful Brand Cult (a Pop Cult) is able to get away with ridiculous things without relying on technical architecture because you make it emotionally painful to contemplate Doing It Yourself instead of swiping the card to buy the Approved Merchandise.
Couple that with deliberately and frequently unbalancing the game and creating a competitive environment--and no, you don't need a playmode of direct PVP to do this; compeititive PVE can and will do this just fine as the MMO world proved over 25 years ago--and you have what you need to create the very Pay To Win conditions we see today in so much gaming media.
Wizards of the Coast's many announced changes will have the aim of creating this effect within its own Walled Garden, and because it is already a proven business model it will succeed and part of that success will come from privledging sweaty tryhard Whales over everyone else- just as we see with 40K, MTG, World of Warcraft (Retail AND Classic alike, and spread successfully to FF14 too, via Race To World First events).
You cannot maintain a commercially viable operation in such an environment, anymore than any MMO game could after WOW hit big. The pattern, repeated across generations and across continents, proves that once this takes hold in whomever wields the Network Effect it will dominate that entire sector of the economy and culture thereafter in a positive feedback loop.
The changes are already felt; every would-be competitor to 40K and Fantasy end up having its players demonstrating the behaviors that make copying GW's moves a no-brainer, just as every MMO post-WOW ends up aping WOW sooner or later because that formula works.
You cannot avoid this now and stand a chance of winning in the commercial space. You can only go non-commercial as a glorified hobbyist or be a grifting faggot like Colville and stay in the Cargo Cult. Otherwise you have to quit the Cult entirely, abandon all pretension of being Le Hecken Game Designer, and just be a hobbyist at the Clubhouse.
Last week Future Fiction Academy dropped this video.
This is what you folks need to comprehend: AI allows ONE MAN to become a full Publishing House.
You can train a LLM to write in a specific authorial voice. You can set up Setting Bibles, Style Guides, and other authorial documents that get called up when generating copy and then the automation string executes the draft/revise process while you do higher-order operations that demand full attention to properly execute or discharge other obligations (such as looking after children or elders). You can then hit up Midjourney, Grok, etc. to generate your covers, which then plug directly into Canva to produce both ebook and print covers; you can also do this for automatic layout of manuscripts to ensure desired fonts (and font sizes, and drop-caps, etc.), generate the Table of Contents automatically, format the book for both print and ebook, etc. while you are handling the marketing and advertising- including booking podcast appearances.
This is what has OldPub freaking out; this technology cuts out all of those Crazy Cat Ladies and their Boss Bitch juniors in New York and London, killing their capacity to wage Narrative Warfare via gatekeeping and financial control. This is why there is all this performative faggotry directed at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. to make a Scarlet Letter of AI despite all online tech already incorporating it as levels these people cannot notice and do not perceive.
It's getting cheaper and cheaper to do this. It's getting easier and easier to do this. More and more tools are being made that can plug into workflows like this, either via the use of agentic AI or by hand (e.g. you generating your own art via Grok or Midjourney to insert into a layout tool). As I said previously, this forces authors into higher-value skillsets because being a copymonkey doesn't work anymore. You need to be a publisher, not a writer, and publishing means entrepreneurial business skills and acumen.
In other words:
You better learn how to sell. No AI can do that for you.
I know the ritual. Folks in the family want to know what I want for my birthday, and since it's two months before Xmas I might as well put my Wish List in order.
Additions this year include: a year of Twitter Premium, upgrading my PC's graphics card (not by much; I'm aiming for the 6GB version of my current card), a Palladium Grab Bag (if live by that point; if not they will before XMas) and this print of the original cover art for A Princess of Mars, a hardcopy of D&D: An American Institution, and someone somehow finding a print copy of the Robotech: Expeditionary Force Marines Sourcebook.
One-two of videos showing why GW is fucked and deserves it.
Yes, this will happen and sweet fuck-all will work to prevent it.
The next step will be to be able to print models with the desired color scheme imparted in the printing process, killing that tedious bitchwork that is painting the damned widgets.
This will force GW to stop being focused on pushing minis and instead focus on what their real business value is: providing secure locations to play the fucking game.
It would be nice if they also bothered to put money into producing proper fucking rules and manuals, but they won't because tri-annual edition churn has been their business model since the 1980s and they ain't stopping now even though they are in dire need of doing exactly that.
So go ahead, pirate that shit and print away. Fuck GW, and flat-out lie to them if they ask if your minis are Official Product.
We got further confirmation that everything I said Wizards of the Coast is doing to Official D&D is happening.
The former WOTC CEO is now back in control, directly running WOTC from Hasbro's C-Suite.
He can, he has, and he will again bulldoze inside opposition to his agenda and will go ahead to implement exactly what I said previously was the objective for the official game.
The AI DMs and player bots are coming. The frictionless convenience of a phone app-based business and gameplay model are coming. The legacy model of business and organization are on borrowed time. The Cargo Cult is Cooked. There is this, and there is the Clubhouse. The Cargo Cult collapses.
Many--as seen in the comments--still don't see what time it is. They can't comprehend second-order effects. They can't comprehend trends and directions. They think that they can just ignore it, not realizing that they've been coping--and failing--for decades at this point in doing so as their pool of prospects shrinks year on year depending on how frictive they are at their table.
These Dexters deserve the destruction falling upon them.
First, Roll For Combat and Yet Another Fucking Hackmaster Edition.
I am not, and never have been, a fan. It was tolerable as a joke in the comic. It is not when it's a deliberately fuckedup AD&D knockoff on the shelf wasting space and wood pulp. The best thing that could happen is for this begging episode to fail, but it won't because Cargo Cultists Gotta Cult but--like past editions--it will be collected and read, not played. Waste of time and money. Fuck these guys.
Then there's Matt Colville, whose shameless bullshitting got rightly roasted by the Oldfags.
Shameless theft of Traveller, Gamma World, Real D&D, and some of the odder Final Fantasy games is his new grift. He needs his kung-fu sealed. Do not give this faggot your time or money either. Ever.
Just play real games--just play D&D, real D&D--and forget that these lying faggots ever existed.
