The Culture: A Window Into Death Cult Strategies In Gaming

A Death Cultist in Tabletop has independently echoed everything that Sorcerors By The Sea has signalled for the last few years.

Sorry, not sorry I’m on an economics kick.

The TTRPG industry is about $1.2b a year in sales.

D&D alone is ~50 million players.

That’s $25 a year/player.
(I spend 3x more a month myself).

Those are dismal numbers because players expect this hobby to be cheap. It needs fixing.

— 🐾 Mosey (@MoseyDm) May 17, 2024

With predictable reactions and comebacks.

Yes, this man's sneering elitism will contribute to cultivating a growing mood of disgust towards him and his ilk, but that's not what I want you to see here.

For SOBS, they're coming at this from the perspective of Mammon. SOBS is run by Line Go Up NO MATTER WHAT sorts. That's not what motivates this guy.

For this guy, he's a Molech Manthing, which means I get out the Mystery Grove quote again.

Why I point this out is because of something that Arch hit upon in his podcast about the recent self-destruction of Trench Crusade.

In that podcast, Arch points out that Death Cultists push what they push because it is a signifier of the target's capitulation to their demands and thus their conquest of yet more territory. The Cultists on the inside started purging their enemies (i.e. people like us) from the Discord server and got the leadership on their side.

How does this connect to the manthing at the top?

One of the ways to push out unwanted people from a social space is to impose a Price Of Entry that is too high for enough of them to surmount, but quietly put in backdoors (so to speak) that reduces those costs to Fellow Travelers. Any that can pay the public price can then be pushed out by having Community Managers ban then under a pretext that makes it look reasonable to low-information observers and out of touch magistrates.

That is what our man up top is arguing for: a Price Of Entry so high that most of his enemies will be pushed out before even approaching the Walled Garden, then using Terms Of Service to ban those that get into the Walled Garden, ensuring that this is how Pozzed Edition works to push the poz:

• Induce Sunk Cost Fallacies by imposing a high Price Of Entry to access an all-digital Walled Garden.
• Use Fear Of Missing Out coupled with deliberately overpowering elements of the game that promote the poz so that only those who (a) pay up get to (b) partake in gameplay where the only way to win is to conform to Death Cult ideology.
• Make the Opposition reflect the enemies of the Cult, and the Opposition's objectives reflect the enemy's culture and beliefs.
• Make the experience of play a Humiliation Ritual for all of its enemies.

If you've paid attention to what SOBS published for Current Edition this is already apparent, and Fellow Travelers in the Also-Rans and Never-Weres took up that signal and did a similar thing from time to time.

(You folks need to read Macris' article where he independently discovers the Stand Alone Complex, and you'll see how the Death Cult uses it for its own ends.)

And remember that the Death Cult accepts the destruction of a contended objective to be a win, albeit a lesser win, because they would sooner deny something to the enemy (us) than allow it to fall into enemy hands. So long as gaming remains a commercial activity, this remains a viable objective; you can't do this to non-commercial activities done by and for hobbyists because instant forking from pozzing is trivial to execute- cut out damage, rout around it, and carry on.