The Culture: The Beast Shows That Wizards Can't Design

Grifting Beast ceases his grift to show that Wizards of the Coast lost its institutional knowledge.

This book is a design document for videogame content production, not a playable product in itself.

Beast was not the only one to notice that this is a clear demonstration of lost acumen; this came up in the Comments.

This should not be a surprise to anyone that's been following the situation for any length of time. Corpos Gotta Corpo, so of course they're going to axe the guys that actually know how to do things because those guys are expensive to retain and don't do anything obvious for the MBAs in C-Suite to make Line Go Up. Let the Death Cult take their scalps and replace those guys with Fellow Travellers because the replacements are cheap bitches to hold the line until the LLMs can replace the placeholders.

What Beast does not do, and he is unable to NOT not do this, is ask why adventure design is needed at all.

The issue here is that Current Edition needs Adventures because Current Edition is not a complete product. It is a lobotomized product, no different than a videogame that cuts content from initial release to sell as DLC or expansions down the line.

This is par for the course in Conventional Play's Cargo Cult, and it plays into why the commercial viability of Tabletop in this form is coming to an end; Wizards of the Coast publishing products like this just argues for the superiority of Vidya alternatives because when you buy the Vidya you can actually play the crap scenario without herding cats and Scheduling Your Fun.

I have said previously that one of the biggest mistakes in the early days of the hobby was in not going hard on training prospective players on how to play the game by going hands-on with a training cadre dispatched to stores and cons to do just that. You can't do that without a complete product, and a complete product is designed so that using the product generates playable content directly as a result of play as you play it. That's AD&D1e. (There are others; I have mentioned them previously.)

A proper product, a Real Game, does not need Endless Product Slop. It doesn't need "preparation". You show up, you roll mans, the Referee uses the game, everyone gets to enjoy discovering what's there, and Hjinx Ensue.

Instead, Conventional Play and its its Endless Product Slop is a business model better suited to boardgames and videogames- especially Vidya. That's why those alternatives are far more successful commercial endeavors than Tabletop's Conventional Play ever will be, and this WOTC product slop shows it.

Play a Real Game and you will never have to spend money on anything but the rules ever again.