The Culture: The (Lack Of A) Future For Tabletop (Part One)

The Hobby Scene You Grew Up In No Longer Exists

Despite the regular reporting by Acceptable Channels on YouTube that Current Edition and its Publisher are going to abandon the Tabletop medium for Videogames, the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play remains convinced that Nothing Ever Happens (despite the fact that changes with Current Edition made Things Happen more than once over the last 25 years). That's a willful ignorance of reality that's going to prove devastating and compel an Extinction Level Event degree of change in this cultural niche.

I see that I need to Explain Like You're Five as to why this is the case, so here I go.

Networks, Normies, & Numpties

When TSR got eaten by Sorcerors By The Sea (SOBS) in the late 1990s (i.e. Cultural Ground Zero), Ryan S. Dancey stepped in to audit the books. Tabletop adventure games had been around for 25 years by that point, so it had become a mature marketplace and the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play.

By this time the first market survey of the field got done as part of putting together an action play for The Only Game That Matters, and it was this survey that established beyond any doubt that Only This Game Matters. It was so bad even at that time than the only serious competition for Current Edition were Past Editions.

What Dancey found out was that the Tabletop medium, like the emerging MMORPG marketplace, is entirely dominated by Network Effects. Since this definition keeps getting missed, I'll post the explanatory video again.

This is why Dungeons & Dragons is The Only Game That Matters, and there are a handful of Also-Rans that turn out to be the D&D of their not-fantasy niche: Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, RIFTS, BattleTech (and so on). Each player of The Game That Matters has an easier time pitching and playing that game instead of its competitors, and once that network reaches a critical mass it becomes insurrmountable from without- it can only be killed from within. ("Only D&D can kill D&D.")

Network Effects leverage Normies and their bias towards Normalcy; it's why you can get a Normie to play Current Edition easily and some Past Editions with a bit of effort, but good luck getting him to play some Theater Kid Art Therapy project- that's some weirdo thing, not a Socially Acceptable Thing As Seen On TV. (N.B.: This does matter; why do you think Stranger Things has Vecna in it?)

Network Effects also gatekeep out Numpties that don't want to conform to the expectations set by the Network for how to use the Thing. For all the Theater Kids you see on YouTube, you don't see far more of them because they end up the subject of 4chan threads on Shitty Weirdos that get turned into Neckbeardia videos. The Social Proof of a strong Network Effect creates a Social Pressure that can do a lot of good or bad depending on who sets the Narrative Framework for the Network. (e.g. The Mercer Effect and its damaging influence on Normies coming into the Network.)

Again, this was all formally recognized in 1999, and served as the basis for the creation of the Open Game License for what became the d20 System- the engine powering D&D3e, released in 2000. So far, I am not saying anything that hasn't been said before- either here or elsewhere.

Narrative Frames & Network Effects

The Network Effect for D&D, as it reinforces the dominant Narrative Framework via Social Proof and Pressure, set the expectations for the entire medium. This got missed at the time because there was precious little dissent from the Conventional Play paradigm. The Cargo Cult was in full control of the Narrative and thus set the frame.

The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play arose in the 1980s when the hobby broke out of its original college-focused Clubhouse environment. The new people, taking up the game, did not have the Clubhouse cultural norms or the wargaming background that informed the editions of the 1970s (be they D&D, Traveller, or whatever); letter columns in the magazines and newsletters of the day show this.

Because they did not understand it, and the Boomers didn't bother to teach what they knew, they created a broken non-game out of what they could understand. The reactions of the early Publishers only reinforced this mistaken impression, and by the mid-1980s what began as a mistake had established a dominant position (with the help of some bad actors on the inside; reminds me of the dynamic between Fanatics and the Campbellites that went down 50 years prior) and reshaped the Narrative about the medium to suit them.

With the Publisher (TSR then) now run by the Cargo Cult, Conventional Play became the norm as AD&D transitioned from the real game at its launch into the non-game it became as of Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures- and others followed suit.

This was the dominant Narrative until the #BROSR broke it.

The Only Game That Matters set The Only Frame That Matters and, until a profound period of internal decline and weakness, it became sucepitble to external attack- and, even then, the only viable competition was a Past Edition and its Narrative Framework.

That, right there, should tell you plenty about how much being the dominant Network in a medium is and how important Narrative framing is to taking and holding that Network.

The Frame Broken Must Be Reforged

TSR (and then SOBS), using its position as the dominant Network, promulgated the Narrative frame that defined what this hobby and medium is and how it worked. This proved so dominant that it defined the gameplay activity IN OTHER MEDIA TO THIS DAY.

What has not happened is that Tabletop remained the dominant medium for the business side of the hobby; Videogames took that over well before Ryan Dancey did the survey that led to the OGL, such that when D&D3e went into development they explicitly used Diablo II as inspiration for design and to explain that edition's core gameplay loop.

This, as some said at the time, would not prove to be viable long-term. To no one's surprise, the trend that begam with the early days of Ultima and Rogue would continue and accelerate; today Videogame versions of Conventional Play dwarf Tabletop by at least an order of magnitude, have unassailable Social Proof and Acceptability (such that Tabletop could only dream of), and are now cheaper and easier to purchase and play than Current Edition.

It is no surprise that SOBS' C-Suite, still dominated by ex-Tech and ex-Mobile people, decided to abandon Tabletop for Videogames several years ago and are still on track to make that leap in the next couple of years with the Edition Churn that's also been planned and is in development as I post this.

As I said above, "Only D&D Can Kill D&D", and that's just what SOBS' C-Suite (with the approval of Hasbro's C-Suite) have done.

Conventional Play, long accostumed to SOBS (and TSR before them) being the load-bearing pillar propping up the entire medium, has no plan to deal with this.

Without the dominant Publisher pushing the Conventional Play Narrative via its Network Effect, Convetional Play cannot survive; something has to take its place. Given that only Past Editions can compete with Current Edition, that puts the #BROSR into position to reassert the original Narrative frame at the cost of killing Conventional Play.

That is why I say there are only three outcomes for what is about to hit the medium. The rest of this week explores those outcomes, but I can tell you one thing right now:

THERE IS NO FUTURE FOR CONVENTIONAL PLAY!