The Business: You Underestimate The Wizards' Ability To Pull Off The Big Move

If Wizards of the Coast are abandoning Tabletop for Vidya, what does that mean?

Remember all that talk about the Modern Audience? That idea; WOTC seeks replace the hobbyist audience for something far more Normie-friendly. The Normie does not want the Fantasy of Agency and all that it entails. He doesn't want the Clubhouse. He wants, as Revealed Preferences showed over 50 years, a far more Consumerist mode of engagement; this is why Vidya got Normie acceptance while Tabletop has always struggled- and every single time a subset of Conventional Play got into the Normiesphere, Conventional Play diminished in direct proportion.

Yes, this means that Normies playing for the psuedo-boardgame aspect quit as soon as Heroquest and Dungeon got in their sights, and so on.

The problem has been figuring out how to monetize it, and that's where the retention of a certain subset of the hobbyists comes into play: getting them to make the stuff that Normie Consumers devour. Behold the proprietary VTT.

Normies ain't going to do this. That's going out of their way, and they don't do that. Hobbyists do; give them a cut and they will make stuff like this all day everyday. WOTC outsources bespoke content to those willing to get paid pennies on the dollar for it (because most will be bot-generated slop, which Normies have proven that they will consume), Normies get Endless Product Slop that they don't have to go out of their way to consume, and WOTC gets to rent-seek both ways with minimal costs.

You think that's absurd? D&D Beyond exists. This is going to become the next iteration of that business model, and it will take off once it goes live and monetization is announced. The Mammon Mobsters in C-Suite have got to be over the moon at how the Line Will Go Up once this is live; they will have succeeded in their aims in going after the OGL, reinforced the gatehouse keeping Normies from the wider hobby (to the point of it being impractical to even try to pierce the Normiesphere), and replaced Hobbyists for Normies as the audience.

"But we-"

ARE. NOT. THE. TARGET. AUDIENCE.

Literally not made for you. This is made to be shoved into the faces of Normies who want a fun fantasy boardgame to play for a few hours, with no ongoing commitment, and fully able to be trivialized by swiping your card. Yes, Normies LOVE Pay To Win. If casinos weren't so heavily regulated, you'd see them selling microtransactions to boost your odds of winning and the size of payouts and they would make more than enough to justify doing so.

You will be able to use this on your PC, your tablets, your snitchbricks, your consoles, your Internet Of Things fridge, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that if you wait a bit you can even be able to play via telling Alexa what to do while you eat the pizza delivered to your door.

That's where this is going.

"But that's not what I want."

Good. Normies do. That's why it's going to happen, and it's why WOTC gives no fucks about books sales, retail, or anything else in the legacy audience realm.

You are seeing what Official D&D will look like after the Big Move. Not yet final, but man you can see it from here. Are you getting it yet? This is bifurcation in action, after which Normies will become nigh-impossible to bring to your table (if you stick to Conventional Play) because there is nothing at all you offer that this does not do better while catering to Normie expectations and sensibilities about what Is and Is Not acceptable for entertainment.

Y'know, just like how Normies did for videogames before that.

You'd think after 50 years of this that hobbyists would get the memo, but they keep yeeting the Scroll of Truth out of their sight no matter how many times it smackes them in the face.

Clubhouse, Walled Garden, or Quit. That's what you've got. That colony drop can't be stopped.

The Culture: Cultural Ground Zero Doomed The Cargo Cult Too

We forget, at our peril, that the hobby exists within a wider culture.

For Tabletop, the impact hit with the death of TSR and Wizards of the Coast taking it over.

Yes, Ryan Dancey both gave and took away with D&D3e. He gave with the Open Game License. He took away because that formalized the dominance of D&D in Tabletop, which opened the door to the Colony Drop we have ongoing now.

"But-"

No. Things did not magically get better since 2000. Things did not ordinarily get better since 2000. The acumen of those designing and publishing products did not improve. The viability of the field continued to do that expand-contract cycle that Josh Strife Hayes talked about recently, but the contractions hit harder and harder taking more and more out with each cycle as the confluence of Network Effects and wider economic issues forced the hands of hobbyists to concentrate only on what is guaranteed to get played and not only on what amused them. Despite the rise of the PDF Slop Merchants and retrocloning, that downward spiral persisted through to the present; more and more commercial actors rely on patronage instead of commerce to get by.

Too many are blinded by scenester myopia, forgetting the wider world within which the hobby exists.

"But-"

No.

The big flaw in a lot of copeposting by people thinking that their darling will do what better men in better times could not is that they think that their darling will somehow get around WOTC's massive gatehouse and pierce into the Normiesphere.

No. Normies don't work that way.

Even goober Pop Cultist idol worshipers like this J. Scott Garipey get it.

Stop thinking that your darling will replace The Only Game That Matters. You won't. You won't because you have no route through or around the gatehouse into the Normiesphere, and what you offer to them looks and feels just like the board and videogames they know- but worse in every single way.

Yes, including your indie darling.

"But-"

No. You will only appeal to Cargo Cultists--most of whom will follow WOTC to Vidya over the next several years, leaving you behind; the rest will be like Normies and quit the hobby entirely instead of playing Current Edition, just like we see with those that quit Warhammer and other analogus products--and the Real Hobby.

Your only route to long-term viability in Tabletop is to cut the Cargo Cultists out and focus on the Real Hobby- and thus on the hobbyists, on those in the Clubhouse.

A few of your darlings will be able to make that transition. The rest won't, and they deserve the pitiful death that awaits them; though the cause itself is out of their control, how they deal with it is- and denying its reality is the worst choice to make, guarnteeing destruction. You cannot argue with a space colony about to hit you on the head.

The Culture: The Point Of Divergence Is Found

Over at the Clubhouse I penned an article that nailed down the core appeal of this hobby. You should read it.

"The Fantasy of Agency" refers to command, because that's what you did then. The Referee was just that- a disinterested third party adjudicating the results of player actions. Autonomy, while necessary, is not sufficient to fulfill this fantasy: the player must establish and maintain control over events to be satisfied. It is not enough to be Conan the Wanderer. He must become Conan, King of Aquilonia.

This is what everything that the #BROSR has pulled out of the Memory Hole is about. This is what all those stories about the Old Days is about. This is what far too many products promise but fail to deliver.

• Multiple independent parties.
• Operating under a Fog of War.
• PVP is always on the table because multi-player is required.
• Strict Timekeeping to keep all parties honest.
• Disinterested Referees adjudicating all (inter)actions.
• Total Non-Stop Braunstein campaign play.

All of this gets wrapped up in "The Fantasy of Agency", because this matters when you are The Man In Command and therefore are responsible for making and executing plans to chase and achieve Objectives.

In a hobby that is bifurcating, thanks to Wizards of the Coast executing on the Big Move from Tabletop to Vidya (and gutting what remains of said fantasy from Official Game, completing the work that the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play began), into something that is Normie-friendly and the Real Hobby that focuses on the Fantasy of Agency.

We now see how the Colony Drop will end Conventional Play on the Tabletop.

The commercial end will (if they can; many will not) follow WOTC because that's where the money will be. The non-commercial end will rely on patronage of one form (begging on crowdfunds) or another (a proper Clubhouse environment), and those that stay in Tabletop will refocus and retrench upon the Fantasy of Agency to differentiate themselves from the mutant videogames that WOTC wants to push into the Normiesphere.

That's a bifurcated hobby, folks and the key point of divergence is if there is a promise and delivery upon the Fantasy of Agency- to be The Man In Command.

That's our Narrative Frame going forward. "We are the hobby that delivers on the Fantasy Of Agency, from top to bottom."

Focus on this point. Everything fits into place, and we can unfuck this hobby in record time now that we have a Frame and a Name- and also a way to filter out those that do not belong, along with a route to redirect them to what they are actually after.

The Business: The Bots Produce Playable Content Faster (Receipts Shown)

Below, in its entirely, is what I got from throwing this prompt into Grok on Twitter:

Devise a campaign scenario for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition. This campaign involves players controlling all significant factions and notable actors in the campaign, in the manner of Braunstein, whose interactions emergently generate playable adventure scenarios that need to be resolved at the table.

There are at least three and no more than six factions. They are all contending over an objective, but not all for the same reason. Each faction has a separate Win Condition. There is also a separate Loss Condition that, if met, ends the campaign with no one winning. They are contending within an area of 1000 square miles; the terrain can be fantastical in its variation, befitting a fantasy campaign full of swords and sorcery.

List the factions, their leader, approximate size, starting location, and Win Condition. Specific what the central point of contention is, and how it is tied to the Loss Condition.

And this is the response:

Setting: The Shattered Veil

The Shattered Veil is a 1000-square-mile region where reality frays at the edges. At its heart lies The Riftspire, a towering, crystalline obelisk pulsing with arcane energy. This ancient artifact is said to grant dominion over the fabric of the world—or unravel it entirely. The terrain is wildly varied:

• Northern Peaks: Snow-capped mountains riddled with dragon lairs and icy caverns.
• Western Glowwood: A forest of luminescent trees, home to fey creatures and hidden portals.
• Eastern Bonefields: A desolate wasteland of skeletal remains and necromantic miasma.
• Southern Deepholds: A network of dwarven ruins and lava-filled chasms beneath the earth.
• Central Riftlands: A chaotic plain of shifting ground and magical storms surrounding the Riftspire.

The factions vie for control of the Riftspire, but their reasons differ, and their ambitions threaten to destabilize the region entirely.

Central Point of Contention: The Riftspire

The Riftspire is an ancient artifact of unknown origin, radiating power that can reshape reality. Legends claim it was forged by a forgotten god to bind the world together, but its energies are now leaking, causing unnatural phenomena: time distortions, monster surges, and breaches to other planes. Each faction seeks to harness or destroy it, but tampering with it risks catastrophe.

Loss Condition: If any faction destabilizes the Riftspire beyond repair (e.g., through reckless magic, physical destruction, or overuse of its power), it collapses, unleashing a planar rift that consumes the Shattered Veil in a cataclysmic void. The campaign ends with no victor—all factions lose.

Factions

Below are five factions, each with a leader, approximate size, starting location, and unique Win Condition. Players can control faction leaders, key lieutenants, or even rival adventurers within these groups, with interactions generating scenarios like ambushes, diplomatic summits, or dungeon delves.

1. The Order of the Saffron Veil
   • Leader: High Seeress Lysara Veyn (Lawful Neutral, Human Cleric 12th level)
   • Size: 200 members (50 elite templars, 100 acolytes, 50 support staff/scouts)
   • Starting Location: A fortified monastery in the Northern Peaks
   • Win Condition: Seal the Riftspire permanently to prevent its power from corrupting the world, using an ancient ritual known only to Lysara. This requires access to the Riftspire and three sacred relics hidden across the Shattered Veil.
   • Motivation: The Order believes the Riftspire’s power is a divine test; failing to contain it will doom the mortal realm to chaos.
2. The Emberclaw Syndicate
   • Leader: Zargoth the Blackscarred (Chaotic Neutral, Half-Orc Fighter/Thief 10th/8th level)
   • Size: 150 members (80 mercenaries, 30 thieves, 20 wyrmling dragonkin, 20 hired mages)
   • Starting Location: A smuggler’s stronghold in the Southern Deepholds
   • Win Condition: Claim the Riftspire as a weapon to dominate trade and extort neighboring kingdoms, using its reality-warping power to create portals and monopolize resources.
   • Motivation: Greed and ambition drive Zargoth, who sees the Riftspire as a tool to elevate his syndicate into an empire.
3. The Circle of the Verdant Pact
   • Leader: Great Druid Elaris Moonshade (Neutral, Half-Elf Druid 14th level)
   • Size: 120 members (40 druids, 60 fighters and beast companions, 20 fey allies)
   • Starting Location: A sacred grove in the Western Glowwood
   • Win Condition: Destroy the Riftspire entirely to restore natural balance, believing its existence poisons the land. This requires a primal ritual using the blood of an ancient creature tied to the Riftspire’s creation.
   • Motivation: The Circle views the Riftspire as an abomination that disrupts the natural order, blaming it for the region’s magical corruption.
4. The Bonecrown Legion
   • Leader: Lich-Queen Veyraxis (Neutral Evil, Lich Magic-User 15th level)
   • Size: 300 members (100 skeletons, 80 ghouls, 50 wights, 20 death knights, 50 living cultists)
   • Starting Location: A necromantic citadel in the Eastern Bonefields
   • Win Condition: Bind the Riftspire’s power to Veyraxis’s phylactery, granting her eternal dominion over life and death. This requires a dark ritual performed at the Riftspire’s base.
   • Motivation: Veyraxis seeks godhood, believing the Riftspire’s energy can elevate her beyond mortality.
5. The Riftborn Cabal
   • Leader: Kaelith the Unseen (Chaotic Evil, Drow Cleric 11th)
   • Size: 80 members (30 arcane scholars, 20 assassins, 20 summoned planar entities, 10 elite guards)
   • Starting Location: A hidden tower in the Central Riftlands, near the Riftspire
   • Win Condition: Open the Riftspire fully to summon an extraplanar entity (e.g., a demon lord or elder being) that will grant the Cabal ultimate power in exchange for servitude.
   • Motivation: Kaelith and her followers crave forbidden knowledge and power, seeing the Riftspire as a gateway to cosmic forces.

How It Plays Out

Players take on roles within these factions—leaders, lieutenants, or adventurers—and pursue their Win Conditions through diplomacy, espionage, or open conflict. Scenarios emerge organically:

• The Order of the Saffron Veil sends templars to recover a relic from the Southern Deepholds, clashing with the Emberclaw Syndicate.
• The Bonecrown Legion ambushes a Circle of the Verdant Pact caravan carrying ritual components.
• The Riftborn Cabal tricks two factions into fighting, weakening their defenses around the Riftspire.

Each faction’s actions risk destabilizing the Riftspire. For example:

• The Emberclaw Syndicate’s portal experiments cause tremors.
• The Circle’s primal ritual draws aggressive magical beasts.
• The Bonecrown Legion’s necromancy taints the Riftspire’s energy.

The DM tracks a hidden “Instability Score” (e.g., 0-10). If it hits 10 due to faction actions, the Loss Condition triggers, ending the campaign in ruin. Players must balance their ambitions with caution, creating a tense, emergent narrative resolved through classic AD&D mechanics: exploration, combat, and roleplaying.

I can add on to this if I like.

Turns out that this is much like I did for the Tower Campaign, save that the Spire has no one acting on its behalf. The Instability Score mechanic should be known to the Faction Players, including any unaligned parties that creep up.

Why a map that big? To have plenty of room for those unaligned parties to appear, since Fog Of War is in effect and thus only the Referee knows where everything is for certain, forcing a balance of exploration, diplomacy, and combat to ensue. Scale it down if you want big action faster. Then make your campaign map, some starting dungeons to delve (got to have that gold and treasure, yo) and go!

All this took longer to copy, paste, and mark up for reading than it did to generate. You can run this using just the three core rulebooks, though you'll want the Fiend Folio and Deities & Demigods. The only thing a PDF Slop Merchant offers you is the minutes saved generating a hex map for the overworld and a grid map for starting dungeons.

Yes, I said "minutes". The online tools are already good enough to make buying premades pointless; the tools are free, and you can just print them out.

That is why the days of PDF Slop Merchants are over; what you see now is the dying momentum of a machine whose engine just died, carried forward for a while as it slows until it stops stone dead, and the sooner awareness of this hits critical mass--this is so easy and convenient that Normies will adopt it--the better things will be all around, except for the Merchants.

Save your money. Master the tools you have instead.

The Business: That Indie Darling Isn't Lindy In A Hobby That Demands Lindy

Roll For Combat trying to meme an Apprentice into being. It will not work.

You can't take this claim that this indie game will become "the next D&D" seriously, not when this same podcast just a few weeks ago confess that every publisher in the industry (having seen the receipts) agrees that The Only Game That Matters has no competition at all within the hobby.

"But the money!"

Means nothing compared to the size of the Network Effect. "Indie darlings" abound in the Culture Industry; they don't move the needle. You are not a contender unless and until you can do what you can with The Only Game That Matters: come into anywhere, say "I'm running (X)", and get a full table instantly. In short, you need to have pierced into the Normiesphere and this indie darling ain't there and will never get there. The Only Game That Matters did decades ago and successfully made itself the gatehouse filtering out Normie.

And yes, the panelists admit this.

There is no way that this will become one of the Also-Rans. It will be a darling for a while, and then something else will replace it. It is not Palladium Books. It is not Call of Cthluhu. It is not HERO. It is not GURPS. It is not ACKS, Shadowrun, Traveller, BattleTech, or Cyberpunk.

In short, Shadowdark is not Lindy. The games that it apes are still around, do it all better, and the best of them are actual full and complete games that not only looks like it offers the core fantasy of the hobby but delievers upon it.

Enjoy if you like, but years from now it will gather dust on the shelf next to Sorcerer and Burning Wheel because people Just Want D&D.

The Culture: Behold The Future Of Conventional Play

The Walled Garden's proprietary Virtual Tabletop is out there.

This is integrated into the core business of Wizards of the Coast: D&D Beyond.

This is what the bots will integrate with, allowing you to play The Only Game That Matters without the downsides of Conventional Play on Tabletop (most of which involve other people), and by having content generator tools incorporated you can make stuff to sell in Beyond's integrated cashshop.

If you ever lived through the early days of hobbyists competing to make the most lethal dungeons, welcome back, baby!

If you hate the creep of MMORPG sensibilities into The Only Game That Matters, you're fucked, mate.

What is going to come is going to be users engaging in competition to optmize party performance vs. content (dungeons, mostly) optimized to compel party optmization in order to clear the content and get paid. If that reminds you of what World of Warcraft has suffered through over its 20+ years, good- that is Working As Intended.

Guess where the best options will be? Behind the paywall. Guess what is going to pressure people to pay up? The inability to clear content without doing so. The tyranny of Best Or Benched will come to The Only Game That Matters, and the target audience will pay up because that will be the easiest and least offensive option (as they are Normies) to get in the group and thus be able to get paid and level up.

Yes, even if the Referee is a bot- especially if the Referee is a bot. (The bot won't cheat; you meet the Tank/Heal/DPS Check or you wipe- the bot is Crom, it does not care and it cannot be cajoled or bargained with, as it is a Terminator.)

This is not the hobby you signed up for, but it will be the hobby that Normies see going forward. This is why I say that bifurcation is happening, and that Tabletop is going back underground as an inherently occult practice. The publishers know what's going down and are angling to follow WOTC if they can, with a few notable holdouts (like Palladium Books), so you have no excuse now to not stand up your Clubhouse- it's going to be the only place where the hobby will be found.

The Business: Hasborg CEO Confirms Big Move

The CEO of Hasbro is affirming everything I've said about the Big Move.

What Cox said about AI being part of the game is not an idea; it's being implemented- he's downplaying what's really going on for Public Relations purposes.

The Big Move dynamites the chokepoint in the hobby as Conventional Play sees it: Referees. Replacing human referees with bots is happening, guaranteed because players are already doing this themselves with external tools. This is Revealed Preferences in action, and it's happening because this conforms to what Normies want out of entertainment.

Hasborg and Wizards of the Coast are Mammon Mobster outfits. They are slaved to Line Must Go UP! They are not stupid; they know what the issues with popular uptake are. If they can redesign the entire structure of play while moving the property to where the Normies are (Vidya), they would be stupid not to do so. That's why the bots are coming into The Only Game That Matters: Normies are far more likely to play if they don't have to Schedule Their Fun, deal with Tinpot Tyrants as Referees, don't have to worry about LOLSORANDOM rules fuckery, etc.- the things that made Vidya beat Tabletop in the 1980s.

Yes, there will be bot Referees, bot-generated content, and bot-run allies for your man sooner than later- especially since the proprietary VTT is a thing. All of this will be playable on your snitchbrick, and Pay To Win monetization will happen, all because LINE MUST GO UP! Death Cult pozzing has nothing to do with it.