The Culture: SOBS Abandoning Tabletop Kills Conventional Play On Tabletop

I am going to keep hammering this until those Grogs in the Soup Aisile get it.

Yes, it's the Professor playing the algorythmn again with his own take on the matter.

The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play is in denial. "None of this affects me."

LIKE HELL IT DOESN'T!

Sorcerers By The Sea is about to redefine what "RPG" means by redefining what "D&D" means. Why? Because, in real terms, they own that definition because for Normies "D&D" is SYNONYMOUS with "RPG". Therefore a RPG is whatever Current Edition D&D is, and the only meaningful differentiation comes from videogame adaptations (such that you now have to say "Tabletop RPG" because RPGs are presumed to be videogames by default).

This, you Soup Aisile retards, is NETWORK EFFECTS IN ACTION! You should have paid attention the first time over 20 years ago when Ryan Dancey used them to successfully shackle all of you to SOBS's table vis the Open Gaming License.

Yes, all you smug-faced faggots going "But I never used that!", that includes you too. Every single one of you relies on SOBS to get propsetive customers and players across that threshold and into the headspace where Normies accept that Tabletop Adventure Games (because that's what they really are) are a thing and that Current Edition isn't the only one.

All of you rely on SOBS to do all of your market research, customer profiling, prospect outreach, public relations, marketing, and advertising for you. Yes, even you selling Not Fantasy products. Yes, even you PDF merchants out there. None of you do this yourselves; you couldn't if you tried, and you don't know where to start- for many of you, I might as well be be an adult in a Peanuts cartoon.

Oh, and you Grognards that have playing for 40+ years and somehow completely failed to pass on all of your Totally Awesome Skill And Acumen At Gaming are just as fucked.

You are all fucked for the exact same reasons: Network Effects and Revealed Preferences.

First, a reminder of what those terms mean:

SOBS has the massive User Network. SOBS has enhanced this Network's power through catering to the Revealed Preference of its most important users.

This is what a lot of people in the business side of the hobby completely refuse to accept is real: SOBS MAKES THE GAME THAT THE USERS ACTUALLY WANTS!

What the users in the Network want, as revealed by what they do, is that they want the game and the penumbra around the game to do away with all of the Known Issues with Conventional Play.

• Schedule Your Fun: Good luck getting Normies playing your Not-Current Edition Conventional Play game when they can just play on their phones whenever, wherever, for however long they want.
• Mother May I: Good luck selling them on your product with no actual rules when they mastered a real game and can optimize their man's performance instead of trying to read your mind about what is or is not allowed at any given time Because Reasons.
• One True Party: They can play with anyone, from anywhere, and all of them play the exact same game. Show up, hit it, get paid, done and never worry about someone not making it the following week for whatever reason. Good luck selling folks used to that on your Conventional Play game with all that Get-Along Gang One True Party bullshit.
• No Takies-Backsies: They put in the work, they get paid, as predictable as time itself. No retro-active fuckery of any kind for any reason. All that's missing is PVP; add that and you have a game that wins in the marketplace.

You Cargo Cultists are going to find out the hard way that most people do not want what you offer to them. Most people want the future SOBS will sell them, just as they prefer videogame versions of Conventional Play over your offerings and have for decades. Remember: what they say does not matter- only what they do, and they do not do the things that indicate that they want what you offer. Not as a business proposition, not as a social entertainment. They never have.

You are going to find this out as your groups wither away due to attrition coupled by the increasing difficulty in replacing those losses. You are going to find your sales dropping off a cliff without SOBS there to funnel prospects before your storefront. You are going to find traffic in online forums increasingly turn bitter as these realizations hit you, and there I will be with the Jeremy Clarkson Smug Face: I TOLD YOU SO!

You will follow SOBS to Vidya, you will repent and admit the #BROSR is right as you return to the Clubhouse (and the only viable alternative to what SOBS is selling), or you are going to quit the hobby entirely. Choose now and get it over with, or have SOBS choose for you when they complete their big medium shift and yank the pillar propping up your Cargo Cult out with them when they move.

The stores, the companies, the scene- it's all going to collapse in record time once the source of the dynamism is gone.

I look forward to seeing how many of you will act like Boomers forced out of your bubble to find that the consequences of your own actions have finally forced you to pay attention and deal with them.

The Business: The Quarterly Call Confirms That Vidya Is The Destination

The Pundit got the memo, and has some details to add.

Sorcerers By The Sea loses money on anything physical.

Only digital is profitable for them. A lot of that is likely due to the incompetency of their DIE Regime Clients not being corrected by competent management because there is no such thing at SOBS anymore.

Put in yet another former videogame executive into the C-Suite as CEO, establish that only digital meets revenue goals, and it could not be any clearer as to whree SOBS will take the Brand and thus the User Network for Current Edition.

More and more people are picking up what I put down. More and more people are forced admit that I have the correct conclusion. More and more people are going to freakout over where this is going, because if the Pundit can see that Tabletop Conventional Play is fucked (and no, the OSR isn't immune) especially as a commercial operation then that damn will break sooner than later and people are going to start openly admitting it.

And more and more people are going to get hammered by Network Effects if they think they are going to continue more or less as things are once that medium transition is done.

The collapse of Official D&D as a thing is a cataclysmic cultural collapse and if SOBS screws up this transition then we're looking at a total annihiliation of Tabletop as a commercial concern within a decade.

Conventional Play needs SOBS to sustain itself. There is no one able, willing or not, to fill that void; no one gets movies made, gets into Walmarts in the middle of nowhere, or otherwise shoves itself before the faces of Normies (who--I remind you--never go out of their way for a God-damned thing and NEVER work for their entertainment) to get them to play at all so there is no more intake into the Cargo Cult to offset those bled off by attrition.

This is what the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play fails to comprehend: they are utterly dependent upon the market leader to get their own users into their sub-networks. Again, for Normies "D&D" IS SYNONYMOUS with "RPG" (and "RPG" for Normies also means Conventional Play, which videogames do better across the board: NUMBERS DO NOT LIE!) They need to scraps from SOBS's Big Table or they'd collapse as a commercial concern.

No matter how this works out for SOBS, Conventional Play in Tabletop is doomed and lives on borrowed time. You either return to the Clubhouse or you follow SOBS to Vidya. Some folks just need to find this out the hard way.

The Culture: One More Seismic Shift Leading To The Preference Cascade Coming Tonight

Tonight Jeffro Johnson joins Black Lodge Games to talk about his recent experiments in Traveller and his total Muppet ban.

I'll be there in the chat. You should be too, and if you miss it then watch later and leave your takes in the Comments.

It's okay to talk to Jeffro, folks.

The Business: More Outlets Confirm My Take On The SOBS Story

Clownfish is the latest to report on the new SOBS shot-caller being like the last.

The plan that Williams began is still on course. Hight is there specifically to advance the abadonment of Tabletop for Vidya.

Current Edition Stans will cope, seethe, and mald like Karl Marx whining about not getting enough handouts from his supporters to pay the bills and go on holiday. They will cry, bitch, moan and then--like the Brand/Death Cultists and paypigs they are--they will go along with it so they can stay in the User Network and benefit from the Network Effects so they can stay in the all-important Current Edition Network and not suffer Fear Of Missing Out as they give money to people who hate them (as Marx hated his supporters and held them in contempt).

(Hit that link. Watch that video. My contempt is justified.)

Other D&D channels are picking up this story because they are becoming unable to ignore what I've been saying for about a year now. Soon they will begin making their choices on which way to go. Some will follow the SOBS Slobber channels, get on their knees, and shill for them for free- not even being paid whores. Some will go into denial and flee deeper into their delusion bubbles that Conventional Play is Eternal; we'll see them do Bud Dwyer impressions more and more over the coming years as reality hammers them into pieces. No few of them will quit the hobby entirely for something else, and the rest will clamor at the gates of the Clubhouse crying for asylum.

Asylum that all but a very few do not deserve and shall not get.

No forgiveness without repentance. No admittance without reformation; only those that return to the Real Hobby get past the gates.

The Culture: Remember, Traitors Before Invaders

Arch finds a Leonard.

(NB: "Leonard", from Big Bang Theory's character, is a turncoat hobbyist or 5th columnist supporting the pozzing thereof.)

Like Arch, I am done giving these faggots the benefit of the doubt. This graybeard twat in the thumbnail whined about how bad his store business is in another video a while back. I told him to his face that his business model is fucked, that there's no future in it, and he had better pivot to another model that has a future--that has mad fucking money to be had therein, and told him what to do and how to do it--and he flipped the fuck out like the Gamma Male retard he is because he refused to admit that his model is fucked.

This twat is like Wil Wheaton, Jon Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and all the rest.

Only the Stick works. Everything else bounces off his Secret King Delusion Bubble. Stick until they shatter. Then Stick until the shards are dust.

The Business: The Sorcerers Cast Mass Charm On The Influencers

Pat reports that a lot of Current Edition channels are cheap whores.

Sorcerers By The Sea bought those channels to help promote Next Edition via sponsorship.

The audience is not happy about this, and they are right to be unhappy, as this proves that (a) they have no integrity and (b) they can be bought stupidly cheap.

If you're going to be a whore, charge dearly for your favors; you should have pushed for six figures upfront and generous backend residuals in return for setting your reputation on fire and pissing off your audience- no one respects someone you can afford at the cost of skipping an item or two on the Dollar Menu. That's how cheap these folks sold out for, relative to the buyer.

"But why sell out?"

Pat explained it: YouTube amplifies existing Network Effects on top of artificially cooking things via algorithm manipulation, so the only Tabletop videos that get sufficient traffic to make advertising revenue non-trivial is Current Edition and speculation on Next Edition. The commercial incentives reward being a sellout whore. This is why you get someone like Professor Dungeon Master shitting on SOBS one day and then shilling for them the next, to the point of eagerly being bribed so they can keep the attention, the clicks, and thus the revenue flowing their way. Advertising shares, product/service sales, and neo-patronage alike pushes this.

In short, this is Mammon and not Molech making this happen.

Did everyone take their 30 pieces of copper (because they couldn't be bothered to negotiate for silver)? No. Did enough? Yes.

Which means that when Next Edition becomes Current Edition, not only will these cheap whores shill for it like they're part of the 50 Cent Army shilling for the CCP, they will line up to shill for the medium shift as more and more things get announced and the game (and Brand) transitions out of Tabletop and into Vidya.

At least the Hellmouth ticket-takers get well-paid and benefit from patronage for their treachery. These people are just Useful Idiots that make folks like the Pundit look like saints by comparison. May they taste naught but ashes in their mouth for the rest of their days.

So long as commercialization of this hobby exists, this will only get worse. The better future starts by going anti-commercial, returning to being amateurs, and going back to the Clubhouse. Earn your living elsewhere.

The Culture: Braunstein Talk With Griffith Morgan

Jon Mollison will have a livestream tonight with at 6:00 P.M. Central Time.

Braunsteins, that not-so-missing link between wargames and RPGs, are all the rage these days, and one of the foremost authorities on those heady early days of tabletop RPGs is with us to talk about the birth - and birthing pangs - of the hobby.

I'll be in the chat so I'll see you there.