The Business: Tabletop Has Reached "Does It Take Glock Mags?" Level Of Maturity

I do not think that there is any design space left in Tabletop. It's been 50 years. What works is now not only well-known, it's well-trod and proven itself outside of Tabletop by being moved to Vidya. We are 20 years past end of the explosive growth and its transition into maturity; not we are in Establishment, and all that is left is refinement into a final form that fits all proven use-cases- unless interrupted by outside events.

The Slop Merchants keep trying to pretend that there's room left, but "LOLsorandom" non-design isn't a design paradigm- it's an excuse to spew blather and bullshit while pushing the duty to make it work on to the end user. Yet we see time and again via Revealed Preferences, Network Effects, and Lindy Effects what does and does not work in this medium- and what failed promises actually work better in other media (i.e. lots of overcomplicated designs work far better in Vidya than Tabletop, but Tabletop still demands a solid structure to make it a proper game at all).

Therefore there is only room to backtrack, to review, to inquire, to investigate what is and what was to find what works and what doesn't- what is and what is not a real game- and for those that fail to measure up, to figure out what needs to be done to rectify it into a real and proper game instead of a line of Endless Product Slop.

Once a given category of thing--an object, a pursuit, a practice, etc.--is known in a nigh-Platonic sense it is not surprising that all change turns into convergence upon that category's final form where what it is gets nailed down and set in stone as Best Practices until an outside factor disrupts it- whereupon that convergence process will begin again once that outside factor is accounted for.

Tabletop Adventure Games, as a medium as well as a hobby and a product category, has reached that point. The recognition of this inevitability came 25 years ago, with the Open Game License and the d20 System Trademark License, but not even Wizards' current management blowing both of them up could stop this from happening. This is what the common hobbyist wants, from the most casual to the most hardcore, as shown by Revealed Preference over time.

Therefore we are now in a retrenchment period. The smart thing to do now is not wild experimentation. The smart thing to do now is to revisit, review, relearn, and remaster--to master for the first time for so many of you--the real games that exist and to interrogate them throughly as the #BROSR has done.

There are Big Things left to be had--I will post one at the Clubhouse today--that I am surprised hasn't been pushed harder or by more people as it answers a lot of complaints, and there are things being uncovered about this hobby born because Prussians had to find a way to cope with Napoleon flexing so hard on them yet to be found. (We're already seeing signs that Levels are not just an artifact of Chainmail.)

But the wild experimentalism? Done. We have defined what this is and how it works by now, so all that remains is to refine to perfection.