The Culture: Cultural Ground Zero Doomed The Cargo Cult Too

We forget, at our peril, that the hobby exists within a wider culture.

For Tabletop, the impact hit with the death of TSR and Wizards of the Coast taking it over.

Yes, Ryan Dancey both gave and took away with D&D3e. He gave with the Open Game License. He took away because that formalized the dominance of D&D in Tabletop, which opened the door to the Colony Drop we have ongoing now.

"But-"

No. Things did not magically get better since 2000. Things did not ordinarily get better since 2000. The acumen of those designing and publishing products did not improve. The viability of the field continued to do that expand-contract cycle that Josh Strife Hayes talked about recently, but the contractions hit harder and harder taking more and more out with each cycle as the confluence of Network Effects and wider economic issues forced the hands of hobbyists to concentrate only on what is guaranteed to get played and not only on what amused them. Despite the rise of the PDF Slop Merchants and retrocloning, that downward spiral persisted through to the present; more and more commercial actors rely on patronage instead of commerce to get by.

Too many are blinded by scenester myopia, forgetting the wider world within which the hobby exists.

"But-"

No.

The big flaw in a lot of copeposting by people thinking that their darling will do what better men in better times could not is that they think that their darling will somehow get around WOTC's massive gatehouse and pierce into the Normiesphere.

No. Normies don't work that way.

Even goober Pop Cultist idol worshipers like this J. Scott Garipey get it.

Stop thinking that your darling will replace The Only Game That Matters. You won't. You won't because you have no route through or around the gatehouse into the Normiesphere, and what you offer to them looks and feels just like the board and videogames they know- but worse in every single way.

Yes, including your indie darling.

"But-"

No. You will only appeal to Cargo Cultists--most of whom will follow WOTC to Vidya over the next several years, leaving you behind; the rest will be like Normies and quit the hobby entirely instead of playing Current Edition, just like we see with those that quit Warhammer and other analogus products--and the Real Hobby.

Your only route to long-term viability in Tabletop is to cut the Cargo Cultists out and focus on the Real Hobby- and thus on the hobbyists, on those in the Clubhouse.

A few of your darlings will be able to make that transition. The rest won't, and they deserve the pitiful death that awaits them; though the cause itself is out of their control, how they deal with it is- and denying its reality is the worst choice to make, guarnteeing destruction. You cannot argue with a space colony about to hit you on the head.