The Business: Colville Reveals Why It's A Cargo Cult Behind Conventional Play

This is how completely dogshit those Conventional Play luminaries that the Cargo Cult promotes are.

"We don't need Magic-Users By The Water!"

This, Colville, is the spirit behind what you have done.

And comes off like Rebel Moon does to disaffected fans of Uncle George's Space Opera: a shitty piss-take on the '80s knockoffs of Star Wars.

This is not how you sell your alternative to The Only Game That Matters, Colville. When even Paizo struggles to compete (and they are), and Palladium forgets that its own knockoff is actually a stand-alone product line and not a RIFTS supplement series, any would-be claimant needs to bring their A-game and you're not even at B-tier.

The business of fantastic tabletop adventure wargames is a business utterly dependent upon Network Effects. Colville knows this; he had it drilled into him over 20 years ago when D&D3e showed up and instantly dominated the entire hobby for almost a decade- blowing apart a massive drumbeat of "D&D is dead" style of discourse that had been the case (and leading to games like White Wolf's Exalted finding purchase for a brief shining moment).

So, as the existential threat of Current Edition going from tabletop to vidya approaches, this is the freakout reaction we can expect. The Cargo Cult cannot conceive of any paradigm other than this one, which is born of their completely wrong-headed miscomprehension of what this hobby is and how it works- and we can expect attacks on the #BROSR (which will thrive by comparison) to escalate because the Cult can't touch Magic-Users.

This, right here, is why I call this a Cargo Cult.

Colville sincerely believes he can take a Former Edition, tweak things to satisfy Tourists who can't handle games (because they can't handle even a simulacrum of reality, which is what a game is), and all of the revenue and social status that Magic-Users garnered from doing it will fall upon him.

Crowdfunding aside, that's not how things work in reality.

There is no network for this game. Therefore there is no market for it. Why pick this game over Current Edition (whatever that is), which always has the biggest Network Effect going for it, or skip even those hassles and instead play the far superior videogame versions of Conventional Play- Baldur's Gate 3 is far more popular than Current Edition.

This is insanity, and it will come to naught.

There is no future for Conventional Play in tabletop. Return to the Clubhouse or leave for videogames.