The Business: Conventional Play Has No Future

Victory Has Defeated Them

In case you missed it, the Video Game Awards went down this past week. Baldur's Gate 3 won Best RPG and more.

Why does this matter to you, a tabletop hobbyist? Because the Mediocre Masses that #suckatrpgs are the people that made this happen, and one look at any Actual Play videos show you why.

Larian Studios--the folks behind Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel--know their market and audience. They delivered on what they promised.

What did they promise? The Conventional Play experience in videogame form.

Every. Single. Thing. that the anklebiters in support of Conventional Play, the Cargo Cult norms wrecking tabletop, are here in abundance.

• One True Party
• No timekeeping
• Everyone Does Everything Together
• Muh Narrative! Muh Storygaming!
• No unexpected or unwanted consequences
• No real challenge, threat, or test of skill or acumen
• Muh Representations
• Muh Adventure Path
• Muh Module Play

All of the Current Edition, Cargo Cult, and Death Cult axioms are present- with the benefits of not needing to schedule your fun time, put up with disruptive shitstains pretending to be men, or have a campaign crap out after six sessions due to the suck across the board tanking interest and thus participation. (No "DM Burnout" issues.)

In short, this is a superior expenditure of money and time for those seeking Conventional Play outcomes. Less money required, less frustrations for play encountered, and--if you get stuck--there are many walkthroughs turning the experience into a glorified Virtual Novel eliminating the last sliver of "game" to be had.

It made All The Money, got All The Awards, and even if there are no more games in this series planned you can bet that the moneymen at Magic-Users By The Water and Hassle Brothers have noticed and are screaming at C-Suite to get more of that and less of the money-losing and PR-cluserfuckery that is tabletop for them.

Magic-Users have acted like good Daleks and responded with "WE OBEY!" with their transition process to turning Current Edition into a videogame with a walled garden, riddled like a Stage 4 cancer patient levels of microtransactions and FOMO mechanics, just to get the same results on a recurring basis.

What does this mean for you sad Cargo Cultists out there?

You have no future, as either hobbyists or in business, because a combinational of culture fuckery and technical advances have allowed videogames to make it cheaper--believe or not--and easier for those seeking that experience to achieve it than to bother with tabletop play at all.

As this is a recent development, you're seeing this at the inflection point- albeit just past that point, when the effects start happening and early signs show themselves to those paying attention (like Yours Truly).

Action games--most famous being the Diablo series, and then all those like it (e.g. Path of Exile, Grim Dawn)--are now following this up with Rogue Trader which shows that most people looking for a SpaceMace 39K experience will find it there than bothering with any of the Cargo Cult tabletop products.

Tactical games like XCom and Xenonauts, especially with popular mods installed, catch out those thinking that they need only ensure that a skirmish-level game layer need exist to remain competitive. There are far more players of the videogame versions than any tabletop alternatives.

And man, are there far more players of the PC version of BattleTech than the tabletop game- such that MegaMek is now getting more attention (which is deserved) due to folks hearing about it as a mid-step between the two.

Even the seemingly-immune like Palladium will feel the effects in due time because the intake of new players to replace those lost due to attrition will drop as more of these Cargo Cult products prove themselves inferior to videogame versions of the same- chief of them being scheduling, followed by buy-in costs, and then the lack of a need to learn anything but what is shoved into your face by the game.

For the common gamer, videogame versions of Cargo Cult products are superior products because they demand less of them and have no interpersonal issues to deal with.

Or, as Jeffro might say, they don't need to learn how to dance and how to behave at a dance to get what they want out of going to a dance.

There is no future for the Cargo Cult now; the technology has arrived to replace them, and the money is there to finance that happening. It is now inevitable.

The Only Future Is The Past

I am not joking. The only future for the tabletop hobby requires that the Cargo Cult repent of its errors and accept--en masse--that #JeffroIsRight.

Sooner than you think, the only games left will be those that can be played properly as the Bros have described. (Yes, ACKS has a future. No, Special Snowflake Drama Time does not.)

And for those thought Too Big To Fail, I remind you that inertia is a thing- and inertia, once the force that generated it is gone, inevitably winds down. Sooner or later, something only moving by inertia comes to a halt due to friction slowing it down. That applies to cultural inertia as with everything else, with time being the friction.

If you think this can't happen to Your Favorite Game, then I remind you of the fate of a well-known game of the 1980s: Twilight 2000.

It went from Everyone Knows to What's That within five years in the 1990s, when the World War 3 fantasy of the 1980s didn't happen and what happened instead destroyed any cultural capital that was needed to keep it viable once the Cold War ended with a Globohomo Victory and Globalization became ascendent. By 2000, it was forgotten- and so was Game Designer's Workshop.

Just as sad a fate was Earthdawn, which went from Darling to Dust within a decade. Even now, most gamers have either never heard of it or forgot about it. Were it not for the videogame adaptations, Shadowrun and Cyberpunk (faded due to cyberpunk's loss of relevance once it arrived, and it sucked worse than envisioned) would be just as lost.

There is sweet fuck-all for liminal space in the culture for tabletop RPGs as it is. Having almost all of them rendered irrelevant due to superior alt-media offerings means that only those that do not compete on Cargo Cult and Convetional Play terms are viable business or hobby offerings hereafter.

And that means that Only The Bros Survive. The future is the past. Only Real RPGs have a place in this hobby henceforth.

from Imgflip Meme Generator