The Business: The Licensing Lifeline Just Got Cut

On Friday last week, the Pundit dropped the following.

The Pundit gets what the issue is.

This is not a question of "You got Skiffy in my Fantasy!" because that's been part of the game since before its official publication in 1974, made brick-to-face obvious with the crossover rules for Gamma World and Boot Hill in AD&D1e.

No, the issue is Brand Collaborations. This means that Wizards of the Coast are pursuing the Fortnite model, which is where there are license deals made to allow for officially-licensed adaptations for The Only Game That Matters in Current Edition, and as we now see that's going to be fed directly into D&D Beyond where it will remains there as an exclusive offering to draw in new users and retain existing one- further reinforcing platform lock-in, weaponizing the Network Effect to cut off the acquisition of customers to all of the Temu Tabletop tinkerers bottom-feeding off of The Only Game (And Publisher) That Matters.

This will work because it already has for Magic: The Gathering.

This also will cut off license opportunities for everyone else, because WOTC will have the money and the time to suck up any and all such Brand License opportunities going forward and thus deny one of the lifelines that many Temu Tabletop publishers used to keep their operations going heretofore. WOTC is not a high risk proposition for a Brand; even Palladium and Paizo are now, and they're the perenial also-rans. As it is for other Big Corpos, so it will be for everyone else- such as the Burroughs, Howard, and Vance Estates.

You won't be able to court a dormant, but attractive, brand to go with your Temu Tabletop product going forward- not when WOTC is able to pay more, reliably, to a far larger target audience and thus open the door to yet further brand collaboration deals.

If WOTC (and Hasbros) has the sense that God gave a diseased donkey suffering from syphillis and dying of AIDS, they will make it clear that they are the only Tabletop party in town so they should just ghost everyone else. That's it for the PDF Merchants; you can only reskin B/X so many ways, the customer pickup pool from WOTC's castoffs is drying up, and they have neither the skill nor the will to do what it takes to compete and win. The Dying Time is here for them.

If you think this is not an issue on the commercial side, you STILL do not comprehend Network Effects. Pundit is wrong about the lock-in being a bad move because that has already proven itself to be a success. C-Suite is very happy with this; most players now use Beyond exclusively, disdaining print media entirely, precisely because being in the cloud allows for users to log in and play anywhere that supports the client. The shift to being Vidya is already halfway there, and the profits prove it.

Commercial Tabletop is over for everyone but WOTC. What remains is the lagtime between Cause and Effect. It may take a few years, but it's coming all the same. Only the Clubhouse survives.

The Business: The LOLcow Is Right About Corpo Tabletop

The LOLcow has a point that the Cargo Cult refuses to face.

He cut that video on the 29th.

He is entirely correct. There are now far more, perhaps an order of magnitude or so more, Brand Fans than hobbyists.

Wizards of the Coast is not stupid. Cargo Cultists needs to stop retreating to this attitude; the business pivot over the last decade or more, while successful now, is not new. TSR tried this multiple times, including when Gary was at the reigns and before the Blumes couped him out with the help of the Buck Rogers heiress.

WOTC has successfully decoupled the hobby from the only brand name within it that matters, a policy now also being followed by Games Workshop to similiar (one may argue superior) success. There are entire audience segments for Warhammer that will not touch the plastic crack with a 10 foot pole, but read/listen to the books, play the Vidya, buy the merch, and watch/listen to lore videos until the cows come home.

WOTC has begun doing the same thing. Over 2/3rds of Baldur's Gate 3 players will never touch Tabletop, have no interest, etc.; there are people who read/listen to books but won't play anything, and now we have the Actual Play/Movie/TV segment that watch Critical Role or the movies and yet will only ever buy branded merch of some sort as they find gaming of any kind to be low status pursuits for losers.

C-Suite wants all that money, and they are getting it.

This is also playing into the pivot of Official Edition into an all-digital, always-online, subscription-based live service model- ultimately to be done remotely by phone in small chunks, facilitated by bots. It also plays into the planned Brand Crossover campaigns recently announced, following the Fortnite model because it works.

The bifircation is not only inevitable, it is not only here, it has been ongoing for years and only accelerating- and no, there is nothing the Cargo Cult can say or do to stop it because it is working. The shareholders are happy; everyone else gets to pound sand.

The Culture: Git Gud With Post-Game Reviews

JD Sauvage made this plain over a week ago.

This is a game with defined procedures, we can and should get better the more reps we put in.

— JDSauvage: Fabulous PRIZES Contributor (@jd_sauvage) May 23, 2026

Simple as, folks. This is a skill; you can get better at playing the game, so Git Gud. Scoring systems and other feedback make this happen, some with the carror and some with the stick.

The Business: Wizards' Cutting Off The Cargo Cult Confirmed

Pat reported confirmation of what Wizards of the Coast are doing to Official Edition.

The Temu Tabletop Twats that make up the PDF Merchant front of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play are FUCKED.

This is WOTC weaponizing their Network Effect domination to kneecap the Cargo Cult, as I have previously explained. WOTC is Normiemaxxing. Normies LOVE this stuff; it is far more convenient and easy for them as proven by their Revealed Preferences for them than any other option in the commercial side of Tabletop; the Cargo Cult cannot defend against it because WOTC is where the action is and thus Normies see Cargo Cult offerings as the shit proposition that they are.

Fortnite works because you can just show up and play. Official Edition works because you can just show up and play. Anywhere, anytime, there it is. No Cargo Cult alternative can offer this. They can only parasite off of Official Edition, as it always has, and now WOTC's cutting them off.

Watch for the next step, which is to kneecap the Cargo Cult further by annoucing solutions to Schedule Your Fun that will be what I have described: the ability to play anywhere, at anytime, for as long as they want, from your phone because of bots running the game and filling out the party.

Solving that, and implementing that solution bit by bit, is what is next and thereby close off the Cargo Cult's acquisition funnel. Prospects will refuse to defect because Temu Tabletop cannot do what it was

The Culture: Going Deeper Into The Roots

And yes, Jeffro is still putting in work to make the hobby better.

The weird consensus that emerged across countless tables that the AD&D weaponless combat procedures are unplayable is just completely off the wall. That the complaints against these rules came from people that would dismiss old school era D&D combat as being dull and devolving into people taking turns bashing each other with a sword…? Even crazier! It really is a shame that people overlooked the awesomeness of these rules for so long. Just think of how uninspiring cavalry charges ended up being in countless campaigns due to people not using the overbearing table!

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

The video, by the way.

And here's a few books to get you started:

• Donald Featherstone’s Wargaming Campaigns
• Tony Bath’s Ancient Wargaming: Including Setting up a Wargames Campaign and the Hyborian Campaign

(NB: I have these on a Wish List also.)

There's more there to read, but these are good starting points.

The Culture: No, It's Not Unworkable Or Unknowable

One more example of what Jeffro's been saying.

Interesting video, very illuminating. Some surprising positions are taken here, which I will paraphrase: You can’t play AD&D RAW. Characters retire at 9th level due to the lethality of play at that tier. Delegation of high level NPC’s to players is declared to be destructive to the campaign. Strict timekeeping… but not 1:1 time. (Players can skip a year into the future to go play in JapanWorld or whatever.) NPC’s are not active in the campaign world in the same way that the PC’s are… though they are active. They have goals with arbitrary “clocks” set on each stage of their activities. Players see the result of this progress as they travel the world and pick up rumors. A formal concept of “drift” is introduced— i.e., that the rules of the 45 year campaign necessarily change over time and that the rules of the various long running AD&D campaigns will naturally diverge over time. The AD&D referee is thus expected to make elaborate house rule additions, use articles from Dragon Magazine including “NPC Classes” and so forth. Each of these axioms or assertions work together to suppress the emergence of the sort of gameplay dynamics that the BrOSR have championed over the past several years. And based on Rick’s account of his campaign, it sounds as if this framework results in something relatively close to what we call “conventional play” that is sustainable for A VERY LONG PERIOD OF TIME. Naturally, people would like to know who is right. Rick… or the BrOSR? Phrased another way, the question is “which side in this dispute is playing the game described by the AD&D core rulebooks?” An in depth breakdown of precisely where and how each side fails to live up to the greatness of those extremely influential rules volumes would of course be very VERY tedious. In any case it would be pointless to go through with such an effort. Because Rick has already announced that he is not even trying to play RAW. I am not sure that I have heard him say anything like this before. It seems like an extraordinarily strange position to take, though. What could possibly motivate it? The most reasonable explanation that I can think of is that attempting to play AD&D RAW is going to lead you to play more like the BrOSR than not. And Rick hasn’t been doing that and doesn’t want to do that, so he has now conceded “RAW” to us. I am glad that he did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZUgeMReBb4

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Read The Manual. Do what it says. Simple as.

The Culture: Commentary On The Elf City Battle

What Jeffro had to say about my article on the Elf City Battle.

Several things to note here: Braunstein Play generated a unique battle scenario that is unlike anything in any game module. Player engagement was maintained over a long span of time without the benefit of standard “wargaming” practices as codified by (for example) the varied and well developed products of G.M.T. Games. The game elements and factions can be anything a player is excited about. No game design or product purchase is required for people to play what they want. There is a significant population of people that will get better wargaming experiences from these techniques than they would from traditional wargaming products. People don’t need to know much or buy anything to participate in these types of games and it is not terribly hard to get them to keep coming back. The results of this battle scenario will significantly impact the campaign state and new conflicts and scenarios will develop organically from the outcomes of events spread across the campaign map. The AD&D combat rules which have been on most of our game shelves for many decades and which THE ENTIRE WORLD said were terrible and which EVERYONE house ruled in the exact same half-dozen ways have qualities which contribute greatly to these people being able to resolve anything that happens in this cutthroat free-for-all. Combat rules which look smarter or better on paper are not actually being used to produce gameplay of this quality or duration or scope. And note the painful cognitive dissonance that results from contemplating the fact that nobody played rpgs or wargames this way between 1980 and 2020… while simultaneously rule sets on basically EVERYONE’S shelves pretty well told you what you needed to know in order to do this stuff. Everything about this is extraordinary start to finish.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

You don't need to buy a damned thing other than the rules to play satisfying campaigns. Ever.