The Culture: The Return Of The Real Hobby Accelerates Bifurcation

Today's thought courtesy of Alchemic Raker.

The DM's role as the Confluence Coordinator, which by necessity will occasionally "clip" player agency: this is part of the player's unspoken contract.
The players desire this confluence which only the DM can provide, and grant that ability to the table's unbiased party - the DM.

— AlchemicRaker (@AlchemicRaker) March 20, 2025

This is catching on.

I will give you a good, practical reason for why: it saves money.

By reverting to the Real Hobby's model of play, you remove the need to purchase external product to use at your table. You need only the rules manuals. The actions of players, playing factions pursuing objectives in the campaign, compel conflict by their interactions. Those are your adventure modules; not only are they free, they are bespoke creations that only you and your table get to experience.

Yes, that includes players adding things to the campaign: powers, gear, locations, creatures, etc. so you don't need Endless Toy Catalogs either.

This puts Conventional Play people in a bind because they lose their appeal; why buy when you can make your own easily for free, something that's only going to become obvious in the next year or so as a critical mass of hobbyists use the bots and see for themselves how easy it is.

Couple this with an effort to produce a series of concise procedural manuals--something that Tabletop designers and publishers are notoriously unable to do--preferably with flowchart graphics to illustrate the process, and the threat of any commercial actor (great or small) making a given game or product disappear by deliberate or accidental action disappears.

This means that the bifurcation of the hobby is not just top-down driven. It is also bottom-up.

Good.