Narrative Warfare: Fake D&D Nears Complete Convergence

The Pundit has obvious--and correct--opinions on Fake D&D and Wankers By The Beach's "OneD&D" announcement.

Pundit gets into it, but this is better summarized below.

100%. D&D as a service. Season passes. Subscription services. The works. I think that's why wotc hired a bunch of former Microsoft employees a while back.

— The Basic Expert (@TheBasicExpert1) August 20, 2022

The goal is to turn Fake D&D into a Cult Compound.

The reason for a digital-only Game As Service model is not just to squeeze whales for revenue. It's to cultivate psychologically weak people, congregate them into a virtual cult compound, and then use that virtual space to turn them into very literal cultists. The cultist becomes psychologically dependent upon the cult--upon the cult leadership--to maintain their ability to function at all, such that denying that support is a very real and viable threat that the leadership uses to maintain control and destroy those that are liabilities.

Existence of physical copies is a threat to this model, hence the push for a live service and a digital-only presence. After that, it's relying on the Network Effect and a massive PR presence to induce people into going along with it and given past events Wankers has good reason to believe that this half-assed effor they're making will yet succeed.

Nevermind past editions, or other versions of the game; this is at the point where Wankers is competing with itself in its current form yet again (something done before with the 3.0-3.5 change) and men like Crawford were around to see how merely the presence of print product was enough friction to inhibit uptake by the audience enough to deem the whole thing a failure. (Proof? 4E and 5E exist.)

The way around this, for the smaller players, is to disavow the weak-minded fodder and double-down on the strong-minded wargamer roots of the hobby and its business. (Yes, that means Regress Harder.) Then they need to get louder, much much louder, and shout from the mountain tops that they exist and serve to cater to those Wankers foolishly threw away; better a loyal and deep following than a shallow and fickle one.

It also means changing the business model away from pushing endless ancillary product and towards ongoing hobby cultivation and support; less Consumerism, more Hobbyist Acumen and promotion.

This also means that other players will need to be smaller, more agile, like their indie author counterparts. It means accepting either the task of figuring out how to make things like Print On Demand work for boardgames and wargames or do what Cheap Ass Games (once) did and make rulesets without selling the tokens to go with it- and let players get their own. As real RPGs are wargame derivatives, and thus should seamlessly slot into such, that includes those games also.

Strip your costs down, make products that are to be used and not read like coffee table books, and prosper. If you're successful enough, you can think about crowdfunding an art book down the road.

It's long past time for the tabletop gaming business to start talking to the indie authors, because you're in the same boat and need to learn the same tricks to make it in this new environment- or close up shop now and do something else because you are not going to make it anymore.