The Culture: The Coming Collapse Will Also Be A Great Filter

The Basic Expert put out a good article on his Substack feed yesterday.

The general OSR enjoyer worships a fake version of D&D, which has led to me calling it cringe. They love and worship the version of D&D they misunderstood when they were twelve and have not advanced their knowledge, understanding, or skill of the game since then. This is proven by the fact that if you bring up some cool obscure rule as I have, you are not met with, “Wow, that’s neat!” or, “Woah yeah, we used that sometimes to good or bad effect.” Instead, you are met with, “Well, I have played for forty years (incorrectly, but don’t tell me that), and let me tell you how you are a bad person for bringing this forgotten part of the game up.”

Spicy, but correct.

I have asked questions about how certain rules work, hoping the “muh 40 years” crowd could enlighten me. Instead of explaining the rule and answering my question, I’m often met by someone who explains how they handwave a rule, ignore it, or homebrew it.

That doesn’t answer my question and only deepens my view that these guys have never understood D&D correctly or opened their books in forty years. This is harsh, but let me explain why. I have no nostalgia for old-school D&D. As I stated, I started in 4e (the most hated edition). My interests and viewpoints are not from nostalgia and are not clouded by nostalgia. My view is purely from a “what kind of game do the old rules produce, and what do they say?”

That feels very familiar.

Oh, and he had problems with the Pundit.

The issue with RPGPundit became so annoying, with him making appearances on various streams and streaming himself, that I got a lawyer involved and discussed my options. I know I am not the first creator to have to resort to this with him. All for the crime of talking to someone he didn’t like. At the time, I was getting ready to launch my Kickstarter for Macuahuitl offset prints. Given the climate of the hobby, being called an anti-semite concerned me. I thought it would potentially impact the success of my Kickstarter campaign. Thankfully, it did not; I sold about 500 copies of the book through it and was 150% funded in 6 days. But at the time, I wasn’t sure. A creator much larger than myself in the OSR was going so far as to compare me to Goebbels as I was ramping up for this campaign on Kickstarter!

Did not know that he talked to a lawyer about that. That's how bad it got? Damn, Pundit being in Uruguay must have got him thinking he could do shit that he couldn't in Canada.

And man Ryan's physiogamy says "Gamma Male". No wonder he's an insufferable faggot.

What's the big takeaway from all of this? The OSR is LONG past its sell-by date. It accomplished its original objective (preserving Past D&D Editions), hit a bonus goal (preserving past products generally), and then failed to get the fuck off the stage.

Know when to take your damned leave.

TBE here is right to call this as a grift. Pundit acted like Ethan Van Sciver here, trying to turn a movement into an organization that he controls so that attention (and therefore sales, revenue, and The Ability To Pay The Bills) gets monopolized.

But SOBS' Big Move is going to wreck all of that, and the reason that's going to happen is something TBE mentioned in passing.

We even saw a while back, when the Cyberpunk Edgrunner show was popular, that 5e people were discussing how to adapt Edgerunner to 5e, not knowing that Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red already exist for this exact purpose. In fact I saw many within the OSR ridicule the Bell of Lost Souls article about how 5e people know nothing but 5e and try to shoehorn everything into 5e.

The bolded part I added for emphasis.

You old-timers know what is going on here. For the new folks, this is Network Effects & Revealed Preferences In Action. You could show up, drop copys of 2020 and Red on the table and walk them through what to do and how to do it, and they will still refuse to entertain anything but a Current Edition adaptaion.

Why? Because 2020 and Red are not Current Edition. They are outside the User Network. The immense amount of time, effort, etc. it takes to get someone firmly into one big User Network to get out of that Network--to forgo all of the benefits of being in that Network and the value being a User has--to go into a competing one, especially one that is smaller (and thus less valuable and less beneficial) is like hearding cats after hosing them down with a power washer.

This is what all Tabletop commercial publishers are facing with the SOBS Big Move. ALL OF THEM! That includes the Pundit, the Professer and his vanity product, and even TBE's own offerings.

So long as all you offer is Conventional Play, you will lose to SOBS EVERY! SINGLE! TIME just like you lose to videogame RPGs over 90% of the time already.

Your products have no future as commercial offerings at all. You may have a future as a self-funding hobby operation, but you have to abandon the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play to do it.

In short, you have to abandon commercial operation in favor of following Chris Gonnerman's example of a self-funding hobby operation and you need to redesign your products to operate in the Clubhouse environment as that will be the only viable form that the Tabletop hobby can have after the collapse and its calamitous consequences take their toll.

None of you are not going to make it, not as you are.

You either follow SOBS to being all-digital, you downshift to a hobby operation and make your living doing something else, or you end up doing a Budd Dwyer impression a few years from now as everything turns to ashes and you wonder where all the gamers went.

Choose your future, or suffer what SOBS forces upon you. I don't care either way; I've got the Clubhouse, and that is enough for the hobby to endure.