The Business: Even The Big Boys Know Friction Is Bad For Normies

This concept of friction needs to be seen in other contexts to grasp what Wizards of the Coast is after. Let's look next door at Blizzard Entertainment.

You can see that friction is clearly on the mind of the Dangerhairs and Remorseful Trolls at Blizzard.

While what I've embedded above is supposition, it is clearly informed supposition and likely is 80% correct given both present trends and past performance. The Retail game, the one that's all whatever it is coming out of the Political Commissar's Office there this week, is very much a disposable and seasonal game now; you play the patch, not the game, and if it weren't so loaded with Fear Of Missing Out triggers you'd be able to come and go at will (much like FF14).

The argument being made here--that the new Classic rollout is to deliberately silo the legacy audience into their own paypig pen so that Retail can become whatever the Dangerhair Brigade wants it to be without fear or shame (or expectation of shouldering the company, i.e. consequence free if a failure) is mostly correct.

What's wrong is the idea that this is where new players will go. No, that's for Retail.

Why? Retail is being made increasingly frictionless. Normies, Casuals, Tourists- they go where friction doesn't exist. That's why WOTC wants them too. Make your game piss-easy to play--Free To Play, No Scheduling Your Fun, Lots Of Pay For Convenience (that is often Pay To Win in Asian titles; they love to flex like that for some reason)--and Normies (et. al.) swarm you, but are fickle and fair-weather so you need to keep them coming back frequently with new stuff. This is the basis for the Seasonal Model: MAXIMIZED NOVELTY!

If Retail WOW goes this route, all of the things legacy players claim to hate (but, via Revealed Preferences, show that they do not) are going to be maxed out and present trends (such as AI party members) will be fully standardized such as by making their use mandatory for a first-time through an instanced content option (and it will be sold as "The Story Mode"). Crafting, gathering, etc. will be depreciated in favor of doubling-down further on Doing Stuff (dungeons, Delves, raids, PVP, etc.) that can take no more than an hour- and that's for clearing a raid, so for everything else it 30 minutes or less- often a lot less.

In Tabletop, this translates to WOTC pivoting iteratively (drawing it out over years, not all at once via an edition change) to the things I mentioned: AI DMs and party members, gameplay being based on the Encounter and not Adventures or Campaigns (and Encounters being timed at 5-10 minutes so you can do them on a smoke break at work on your phone), paid enhancements for convenience (e.g. pay to Never Fail Saving Throws), and plenty of Branded tie-ins (oh look the Ninja archetype got a new subtype thanks to the Naruto/Boruto collab, and you can adventure out of the Hidden Leaf Village now) to keep drawing in new (and luring back lapsed) players.

Frictionless Convenince means that All Content Is Always Available on the player's side. You want to play using the Newtype rules for the Psion class, have a background with the Swordmasters of Ginaz, be the daughter of Storm Shadow, and fight with a lightsaber? You can, because Restrictions Are Friction and Big Gaming doesn't want to scare the Normies.

Frictionless Convenience on the Referee's side doesn't exist because WOTC's taken the Referee out back, shoved him into the ditch, and shot him in the head. The bots do that now, and so long as what the players want is Brand Safe it's AOK! Sure, the bots can only do what WOTC allows, but most Normies won't go beyond that anyway (and never have) so this is no drawback for WOTC.

This also means that WOTC is, within a decade (maybe within five years), going to be like Blizzard in the hunting down of alternatives.

Unlike Blizzard, WOTC won't be siccing Attack Lawyers on Your Temu D&D. What they will sic them on is attempts to breach their Walled Garden, in the form of trying to make content for The Only Game That Matters, and the Temu D&D crowd will do it because with the gates to the garden being shut and a gatekeeper installed it'll be like USAID money drying up: lots of people who front like they matter are going to start closing shop or lashing out because they can't suck off WOTC's teats or eat WOTC's scraps anymore. They are also going to find out how badly they needed WOTC for acquiring customers because this new Universes Beyond scheme kills their core offering: We Have The Fantasy WOTC Doesn't.

Which brings me back to Ryan Dancey and his 1999 revelation of Network Effects.

Part-and-parcel of that revelation is that Normies don't want to waste time relearning How To D&D. That's because they see ALL of Tabletop as D&D, and every Cargo Cultist pretending to be a publisher knows it- the more honest ones confess it. (Yes, MMOs are still the same way; all of them are WOW.)

Every single difference is a point of friction. Points of friction add up to Quit Moments VERY FAST for Normies. That's why they never take up alternatives, but instead kitbash D&D into what they want- assuming they bother at all, and very few do. They instead just quit the hobby entirely, something that happened with increasing frequency over the last 50 years as competing media began being able to give them the less-frictive alternative media offerings that they wanted out of D&D but did not get. They didn't see any other Tabletop product as something other than a D&D knockoff, so they assumed that they were all the same and thus a waste of time. Oldfags did not do jack shit to dispel this mistaken notion. (They say they did, but their actions proved that they did not.)

This is why WOTC's gambit will succeed if they can figure the tech end out. Now that vibe-coding is a thing, that's far more likely to happen such that I can count on it being the case; the Dangerhairs can vibe-code to Minimum Viable Product state, hand it off to someone who knows what he's doing with code (and it will be a man, since we know there is no woman or Jeet with the skills needed available over there) to finish it as Work For Hire, and then be on call when the H-1B maintaining it inevitably fucks it up (usually by subcontracing it to his cousins back home on the downlow against company regulations and in return for kickbacks).

Yes, there will be the legacy game we know. It will be depreciated in perpetuity, siloed into its own paypig pen (because that's what buying PDFs and PODs on Drivethru is), in favor of the mobile-friendly game where you play by the Encounter and may or may not have other players in your party- like you will know or care, as you're in it for Phat Loot and whatever else counts as high status play by then and they will never listen to your pitches because they're moving between one-shotting Storm Shadow to farm for his sword, doing Ranked in Apex with the boys, stream-sniping Dr. Disrespect in Warzone for lulz, and having Netflix on a second monitor playing at 2x speed- and you want that guy (or gal, or whatever they think they are this week) to show up at a specific time and place to do the same fundamental activity, but slower? Bitch are you high?

No, you Cargo Cultists get Unlimited L Works now due to this.

There is a way out, but that means admitting Jeffro Johnson and the Bros were right about everything and you are nowhere near ready for that ego-death yet.

The Culture: Of Course They Made It Commie Propaganda

On Tuesday of this past week, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what we all suspected about the Dark Sun revival.

This was not a surprise. This was merely a disapponting confirmation of what was expected.

The entire point of the product release is to push Communist propaganda, removing all of the nuance that existed in the former edition of the setting in the process; you can count on the writers imposing their inverted morality upon the setting's moral compass.

The fantasy that is being sought here is the fantasy of the Party Vanguard establishing the Communist Uptopia. That is it being done in a wasted world where iron and steel is more scarce and precious than gold, where the conditions of life are so precarious that it only compares to Arakis, and as such the implied anarchy championed by the Revolution is Extinction with extra steps.

You'd think that this was willful and deliberate on the part of WOTC and its partners, but no these Dangerhaired Dipshits are not that cunning or savvy. They are the Useful Idiots that get shot when the Revolution is achieved, the Genestealer Cultists that get eaten when the Tyranids arrive, the Chaos Cultists that get used as ritual fodder when their masters need to summon something with power into the world or meatshields when the Inquisition comes calling. They are the minions, not the masters.

They are mask-off with this because they believe that they have achieved the Revolution, at least in Tabletop, and in this they are mostly correct in that because they hold the Network Effect and have successfully achieved an Enclosure of the Commons through erecting the technical architecture required to seal up the funnel that Cargo Cultists rely upon to acquire customers and thus 100% capture the commercial side of the hobby (and with it most of the hobbyist acquisition) into their Walled Garden.

So long as this is deemed Brand Safe by WOTC's C-Suite this is going to continue.

That is the only form of leverage you have left. You must convince, by word and deed, that this direction IS NOT SAFE FOR THE BRAND!

If you are neither willing nor able to do that, then your only other option is to leave that entire model of hobby organization for the older model revived by the Bros.

Or you can quit, which you will inevitably do if you do nothing because you're going to lose players over time and be unable to replace them.

We are past the Collapse now. You either follow the majority into the Walled Garden, you change your ways and earn your place in the Clubhouse, or you're done. Choose before it is chosen for you.

The Business: Jon Del Arroz Showed WHY The Cargo Cult Is Cooked

Jon Del Arroz, writing at AI Central, wrote this on Monday this past week.

VIDEO: Testing Abacus AI Agentic AI To Make Your Own Apps by Vox Day

Read on Substack

Therein he posted a video of himself demonstrating his use of Agentic AI. He showed the vibe-coded agent that lets him do solo play of Official D&D.

Sit with that.

This is exactly what Wizards of the Coast is pivoting towards. All of the signs, for over a year now, point this way. As WOTC is Big Corpo, this takes time to execute and not just because they have Danger-Haired Dipshits on staff. The rest of the company's operations need to be brought inline, and then the Narrative massaged to make acceptance of these changes a fait accompli.

Jon showed--not told, SHOWED--how WOTC is going to kill the Cargo Cult.

The reason? Frictionless convenience. That agent is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. It never says "No". It can add additional AI-controlled party members, run sessions wherever on the map and (once mobile-deployed) wherever you get reception, run for as long as you want, all the time.

Cargo Cult Dexters have no leverage anymore. "Not at my table" gets you kicked to the curb; the bot is always there, doesn't cheat, doesn't fuck with the rules Because Reasons, and doesn't play favorites. As Cargo Cultists deal with attrition on the regular, recruiting replacements is required; agents like this kill that deader than disco because you will NOT convince the Casuals, Tourists, and Normies that WOTC targets to put up with friction of any kind once they are aware that agents like this exist.

The Cargo Cult model dies whimpering due to this.

Only the Clubhouse, rooted on Braunstein, can compete because it doesn't try to fight WOTC on its own terms.

The Business: Yes, You CAN Protect Your Creations Post-Mortem, But It's Pricy

Funster made an attempt.

If you want a summary: Creators have a responsibility to protect the integrity of their work

The problem is that Copyright Law is corpo-driven, specifically driven by the Devil Mouse, and so there is only one way to achieve this objective: to use the tools of the corpo world to build the structure necessary to compel post-mortem execution of this duty of care.

Funster, being typical of men in the hobby, has no idea what that means. Most working in the corpo world don't either, not even in WOTC or Hasbro's C-Suite. Their lawyers do.

The bare minimum is an Offshore Asset Protection Trust based in the Cook Islands, Nevis, or Belize. That Trust then holds a CI or Nevis LLC; this is the operational element at the core of the structure, to which all other elements append as subsidiaries. The premium version is a Private Interest Foundation in Panama or the European Equivalent in Lietchstein, which then has a LLC within it in CI or Nevis. The purpose here is to have rock-solid protection against 1st World civil suits. These are jurisdictions and legal structures that, when properly erected, tell judges to pound sand. Principles are expensive and make enemeies, enemies that use lawfare; this structure stops that cold.

You then want a US (or UK for British or European-based operations) LLC to be the Local Office that actually does the work under contract from the Trust as Work For Hire. The Trust exercises Brand Control over the property under rules that you--as creator--establish in your lifetime, rules that survive your death and become the private law of the Trust thereafter. The canon is closed and the rules carved in stone.

The Trust then owns and enforces Trademarks, registers and renews Copyrights as they can (and enforces them), and if Patents apply those too are filed and enforced. Cook Islanda, Panama, and Liechtenstein all have mature and long-standing reputations for integrity as Trustees- CI's in particular are Licensened and Bonded, so they have real money on the line to incentivize them against doing fuckery.

In short, we can do this. It's just not cheap, easy, or convenient to do so; this structure is $30-50K to set up and about 10% annually to maintain, so it's not worth it to bother unless you've got something that is commercially successful, has been for many years, and could for many more after you're gone. George Lucas should have done this. George Martin should do this. Most in Tabletop? Not even worth trying the Temu version that's entirely domestic (Wyoming LLC held by South Dakota Trust, easily bustable by a US judge if he can hold you or your trustee in Contempt).

That is assuming that you own it. In the case of anything done for TSR or WOTC, you don't; that's Work For Hire, so they own it and as it is their property they can enshitify it if they want to and all you can do about it that means anything is to not buy it and not give any traffic to it.

Is it worth it? I'm going to wear the black hat here: if you can't afford the structure, it's not. Macris can justify doing this. Siembieda can. The Pundit? LOLno, and that goes for most in Tabletop, and quite frankly we're better off because it is so.

The Business: Your Days Of Being A Cog In The Machine Are Over

You are wrong about AI and writing.

The technology now exists for the ambitious and the skilled to make one-man publishers of themselves. Videos (and channels) like this show you how by demonstrating the tools and their use.

This is a growing field. If you're still thinking about what Chat GPT could do six months ago, you are already out of date and wrong about everything. It is now possible for one man to draft, revise, edit, polish, and finish manuscripts at a speed which OldPub cannot match. That same man can do this multiple times per week, each one with a unique authorial voice, and yet each one will 100% hit the Revealed Preferences of the readers of that specific Product Category. He can do this while devising the covers himself, formatting the books himself, making the audiobooks himself, and even automating all of the PR work to his email list (usually via Substack) and uploading to the storefronts he uses in addition to his own author site(s).

He can, if he wants to, get to a point where he can drop a novel a week per pen-name because readers read in series and read in binges. If he wanted to space out releases he can do that too, usually by format (ebook, audio, paperback, hardcover and usually in that order).

This shift requires a different set of skills. Being a copymonkey is not enough anymore; you have to have business management skills, especially the full Public Relations suite (which includes Advertising and Marketing), which means your job is now Project Management- you're the Producer, the Publisher, and not just the grunt shitting out copy.

Jason vibe-coded Story Hacker. He's no programmer, and yet he delivered a valuable specialist tool that he offers to his members. Expect more of this going forward, especially if the pressure to cut the balls off the big models continues and thus forces the development of specialist LLMs that lack such neutering.

And if you think this doesn't apply to non-fiction work, you are already very wrong; Advertising is already wholly taken over by LLM-powered campaigns, which means Marketing already is, and as such it is already happening that other forms of non-fiction are now being done by LLM-powered production workflows overseen by human management.

Now all that needs to be done is to bring the costs down so that those with the time, but not the money, can fully exploit this potential.

Jon Del Arroz made it plain: you have to be public-facing to succeed now, which means you can't be a copymonkey- you have to be The Man In Command.

The Culture: Stealth Archer Rocket Tag Got Rejected By Players, Retard

DD did a Dumb.

Vitality/Wounds got rejected for a fucking reason, retard: it was more bothersome than the problem it claimed to solve.

Consider the normal way it works: Roll Damage, Track Hit Points. Crits don't matter unless and until they impose additional effects; recovery is equally standardized.

Now: Did I crit? No? Roll damage, Track VP. Yes? Track WP. Took WP? Complications on recovery.

What happens next? Anyone serious about being effective optimized for crits. This happened in previous WOTC Star Wars editions. It happened with Spycraft (and its deratives such as FantasyCraft), and it happens every single time this is implemented because PEOPLE FOLLOW INCENTIVES YOU FUCKING MORON!

What did you do with this? You introduced a means to bypass the ordinary damage capacity mechanic, which rewards those who are better able to achieve that bypass effect with superior combat performance, which incentivizes players to optimize for achieving most-consistent-bypass-performance and thus compels opposition to do the same lest all sense of challenge disappear.

Congratulations! You just made the game into Stealth Archer Rocket Tag. Everyone has to become a Stealth Monkey just to stay alive. Combat comes down to Who Can Detect Whom First; the losers get Alpha Struck with Overkill levels of Firepower and get the Swifty One-Shot Macro treatment. When players saw this in action 20ish years ago, they rejected it en masse which is why it disappeared from d20 Star Wars and Spycraft ended up losing hard to competing offerings.

No, it didn't make the game more fun. No, it didn't speed up gameplay. No, it wasn't fun to be on the wrong side of. No, it got boring to be on the shooting side of in short order too. It also lead to Narrative Faggotry when things went against the players, further degrading the integrity of the game and the hobby.

You should have been bitch-slapped for even thinking about this failed idea, DD. It failed for damned good reasons, such that even the obstensible source (HERO) is notorious for being janky and wonky in the execution of it- thus part of why HERO remains obscure to this day vs. The Only Game That Ever Fucking Mattered.

Oldfags, man. Not even once.

The Culture: Theft Of Credit Is Narrative Warfare

Jeffro noticed a thing:

Let’s talk about the game in which all of these games took place in. The one in real life. I was, ultimately in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma with a couple hundred people throughout this process. Lots of people opted for betrayal along the way. How did this manifest? A) Cutting videos to relay key revelations from my efforts without saying my name. B) Making a lifestyle about complaining about me and calling me a fool. Or calling everyone that has something nice to say about me a dummy. C) Publishing a book that plagiarizes my work. D) Going to people privately and telling them not to speak with me or associate with me. E) Attempting to get somebody to make a Kickstarter Boondoggle based on my efforts while crediting my ideas to an enemy of mine. F) Being ugly to me while I was attempting to run a game session with the purpose of trying something new that wasn’t fully understood yet. You can probably cut some of these people some slack. If you were charitable. I mean… at every stage, it was not obvious how significant and even historic this effort was going to be ultimately. And I can tell you that the vast majority of the people in the vicinity of this work could not even admit that there were problems with what we were experimenting with, much less accept that there might be solutions to any of them. Some of these people that opted for betrayal make a lot of noise. But the one thing they could never make was a lasting contribution to game design that can stand the test of time.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

While I don't know all of the parties, I can suss out some of them. Respectively:

• Earthnote, Tenkar, Grifting Beast, and the rest of the YT Oldfag Crew and the newfags riding their coattails.
• Griff
• The fake Appendix N book and its authors: Ann VanderMeer (ex-Tor, so a Commie) and Peter Bebergal (another NYC Commie fag). Tor's kept a hand in on Tabletop for decades due to personnel having current or past experience therein, and thus maintained contacts with Fellow Travelers at Wizards of the Coast and its orbiters like Paizo, so when Vox Day (Tor's enemy) decided to publish Jeffro's book they had to respond with their own to attempt control of the Narrative.
• Also Griff
• Would not be surprised if this was also Griff
• Not a clue here

Freezing out Jeffro, and by extension the #BROSR, is Narrative Warfare. This attempt to retroactively take credit for all of Jeffro's work, all of the Bros' work, means that the Cargo Cult can steer the hobby back into the Cult Compound- the same thing that got done to George Lucas, by the way, as the Fanatics never forgave him for shattering their hold on the Narrative.

We're seeing the same reaction in Tabletop. Jeffro and the Bros broke the Narrative, such that enough hobbyists can see it and apply it, and that's too much for the Cargo Cult since Wizards of the Coast is giving them the shaft from the other direction at the same time by rendering their entire business model defunct.

Fuck these OldFags. Sideways. With a shovel covered in shit and burs.