My Life In Fandom: Geek Gab Returns Today!

Geek Gab returns today at 1pm Central Time. There is no guest, so this is whatever Daddy Warpig and Dorrinal come up with. Count on D&D talk, and maybe some other trashfire media discussion. I'll be in the chat.

The discussion on yesterday's post (and Macris' article, linked therein) is reason enough to revisit this on the replay. When that pivots to #BROverloft, the #BROSR take on Ravenloft--full of shitposting gonzo nonsense--shows how the Braunstein approach works in practice.

This interaction between players, each playing at least one Patron-level party, are sufficient to keep a campaign rolling indefinitely. The Referee need only be present when a neutral arbitrator is required. Otherwise he can sit back and watch the fun, record the results, and keep the rest of the players up to speed. Otherwise he need only worry about NPC actions and running standard play sessions.

This revelation directly plays into the business model of tabletop RPGs. You can't sell endless supplements for a game that does not need them. You can't sell widgets to people that don't need them. This means that, for most people in this business or observing it, there is no commercial viability to the medium.

That's because they are thinking of moving product. They don't think of the game as a means to the end of a business that faciliates connecting players and making campaigns easy and convenient to run. That's going to be hard now, thanks to the presence of services that are free to use like Discord (and it ability to host bots that can do things like dice rolls) supplemented by email lists, text messaging, and YouTube channels for info dissemination (for the video-savvy)- either as video releases or for livestreaming.

In short, I think some parties (like a certain Seattle company) missed the boat and won't be able to catch up.