The Culture: The Enemy At The Gates Can Be Defeated

This past week friend of the Retreat Jon Mollison hit 5K subscribers on The Joy of Wargaming so he did a special stream between shifts at the dayjob.

If you think this is out of place considering the past week, watch the stream archive. He gets to the point of how the mechanism works, and why it is done, right away.

The hobby's return to the Clubhouse has some painful points to pass, one of which is the breaking of the illusion of Consumerism over the minds of hobbyists. Consumerism is the cornerstone of Conventional Play as a business model, a conspicuous consumption paradigm that incentivizes publishers to produce crippled products in order to sell supplements that "fix" them just as readily as microtransactions in videogames do the same thing- because it is.

Couple this with pushing Adventure Modules and even entire series of such as The Acceptable Way To Play (and thus more product lines to push) and it is not hard to see why Bad Actors would not recognize the potential to colonize the minds of hobbyists with Official Approval Diktat.

From pushing Consumerism to pushing the Death Cult is a short step to take, and as such was an inevitably development in this cultural degeneracy.

Reversing this course is painful to the egos of a lot of people bound up in the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play as it means that (a) they have to admit that they are wrong, (b) admit that they got tricked by people that they don't want to admit tricked them, (c) admit that the Bros are right, and (d) become Bros. That, folks, is Ego Death and most people (as they are Normies) cannot handle that unaided- and that includes most hobbyists.

The thing to do as Conventional Play collapses is to be ready to assist those hobbyists into the post-collapse hobby scene. Those ready, willing, and able to become Bros get into the Clubhouse. Those that do not get redirected to where they are better served because tabletop is no longer for them.

There need be no acrimony. This is pure Customer Service. Each hobbyist is here because they want something from it; the post-collapse scene will serve some, and not others- most will not be served and need to be redirected to alternatives that give them what they want. By (a) getting those no longer served to admit that this is so and (b) helping them find a new thing that does serve them the parting is amicable and mutually benefitical.

The only people that need go away mad are those that came here for other than honorable reasons to start with.

For them, they get yeeted. How they get yeeted is the only decision they get to make.