The Culture: Roll For Combat Demonstrates Why Conventional Play Must Die

Roll For Combat talks Hobby As Brand Identity.

First, Muh CONSOOM PRODUCT!

Second: MERCHANTS DESERVE LESS!

It took a while, but they did hit on the core of the "problem": Wizards of the Coast, and TSR before them, used Economies of Scale to artificially set the price below what would otherwise be profitable specifically to get prospects into the Acquisition Funnel and thus link them into the User Network.

This means that everyone else has to get into that level or get dumped, and that's before "Who will play this with me?" comes in to derail the purchase.

The reality is this: Dead Tree--something you can hold in hand--has value, and intangible digits does not. Secure locations you can gather and play in have value. Useless widgets that exists only to Spread The Brand like you're appropriating religion to shill cheap crap to suckers does not. The entire "industry" is in the Upside Down and needs to be brought upright again.

This is why not only do I not fear the collapse, I welcome it; this should never have become a Consumerist pursuit of Pop Cult Idolatry, but here we are and it's long past time to smash all the idols- and, so doing, restore the hobby back to its roots as a hobbyist avocational pursuit as it was back when this got started. We need the Clubhouse and the Real Game, not whatever that is.

Back Winning Secrets for more.

The Business: The MMO Guy Gets Why Network Effects Work

Josh Strife Hayes, again, uses World of Warcraft to explain Network Effects in gaming.

Dungeons & Dragons also set an impossible standard for Tabletop.

Yet that standard is what Normies, Casuals, and Tourists expect and demand from all Tabletop products. They expect to be able to go wherever and play The Game--not your game, The Game--and if they can't do that, they quit.

Tabletop, therefore, cannot be a "Thousand True Fans" thing and Wizards of the Coast knows this. That's why their smarter, more successful moves are those that reduce or kill an element of friction keeping those three segments from playing the game (and thus connecting to and engaging with the Network Effect).

Publishers that refuse to acknowledge this are those that fail. Ryan Dancey recognized this, which is why he tried to reduce that friction by introducing the Open Gaming License (reducing/eliminating friction between products). Some of his successors at Wizards of the Coast have tried to do this from other angles--this is why Beyond is now the primary arm of the D&D busienss and not any form of retail; digital Walled Gardens have far less friction than dead tree books and in-person meetups--while others fucked things up.

What Network Effects do is reduce friction in the most fundamental manner: the ability to do the thing at all. The larger the Network, the easier it is to do the thing and the more likely that other friction-reducing powers come to bear to further reduce overall friction inhibiting Doing The Thing. If you play D&D, you are likely to Do The Thing; if you play it properly--i.e. as the #BROSR has described--in a Clubhouse environment that is globally-networked that reduces friction to near-zero; you'd have to play WOW to get a comparable situation.

Just Play D&D.

The Culture: Jeffro Talks Winning Secrets With Jack McCarthy

Jeffro was on with Jack McCarthy last Sunday.

This one is good when it comes to Jeffro going on the attack.

He's good about hammering this point: Dungeons & Dragons is a Braunstein.

He's also good about hammering that wankers like Grifting Beast constantly try to steal from the Bros in order to get in front about the parade. His culture commentary is some of the best partes of this Winning Secrets promotional tour.

The Culture: Jeffro And The Superversive Crew Talk Winning Secrets And The Culture

Sunday saw Jeffro go on with the Superversive crew.

Winning Secrets is going to be a world-shaking book, first in Tabletop and then--because Tabletop exercises stupidly-outsized cultural influence globally via Dungeons & Dragons--into other culture-shaping media, where it is not out of line to conceive of Jeffro being a hidden pillar in the future culture to come by the end of the century as Gygax and Arneson was for the 20th (and preserved that of the 19th via Appendix N).

This not being a Gaming show, we get to see Jeffro talk about the intellectual and spiritual side of the hobby.

You want the other side of the matter? You'll get it here.

The Culture: Winning Secrets On The Gab!

Jeffro and Rule of Thule appeared on the Gab over the weekend.

Daddy Warpig mentions a Tweet showing that the Bros weren't making shit up.

The TORG Infiniverse campaign, and EVERY SINGLE PUBLISHED SOURCEBOOK, MODULE, AND THE INFINIVERSE NEWSLETTER ITSELF ran on 1:1 campaign time from April of 1990 until it ceased publication in 1995.

Some 6,000-10,000 fans across the world playing, with their GM's submitting… pic.twitter.com/TVwX89r7wz

— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) March 7, 2026

Jeffro mentions that SJ Games handled Car Wars the same way.

But no, the Bros are going further. The Bros are solving the problem that turns most prospects off from the hobby because competing media does what Conventional Play does so much easier, better, and cheaper- something Wizards of the Coast is painfully aware of and seeing it as a problem.

You want a copy? Back Winning Secrets.

The Culture: Take The Next Step And Put The Pieces Of The Machine Together

Jeffro mentioned this channel during the Dunder Moose stream. Earthnote is, like Grifting Beast, seeing that the Bros are getting traction. What he is not yet doing is outright stealing what the Bros did and claiming it for himself; he is in the "Hey, there's all these parts lying around; what do they do?" stage before he starts asking what happens if you put the parts to gether. Below's a couple of his videos showing it.

The thing that follows, but so many so far have shied away from, was expressed so well the other day by Jon Mollison.

That’s the part critics never seem to grasp. They think the BROSR is claiming ownership of individual ideas. But the real insight wasn’t about any single mechanic. It was about the interaction of those mechanics. The way they reinforce each other. The way they produce emergent play that no single rule can generate on its own.

Put them together. Rebuild the machine. Turn it on, and watch it go.

Because yes, when you combine the parts you get a synergy that makes the machine greater than the sum of those parts. You didn't listen; now we're here, and you're playing catching.

The Business: Those DungeonTubers May Be Lying To You

We have Influencer Scandal Time.

These are just the ones that got caught.

We know that Wizards of the Coast bribes YT channels to shill. Some are honest about it. Some.

It is worth looking to see who isn't, and who else (there aren't many, but on the other hand DungeonTubers are cheaper than crackwhores to buy so it could be done) is playing the John to these whores.

And folks wonder why I oppose commercializing the hobby.