The Culture: Dunder Moose Talks About The Lichseed Trilogy

Last night on This Is Dunder Moose:

Part One is here.

You can back it here.

What came out is that there remains a lot of Conventional Play problems in the hobby.

We saw that a lot of Current Edition problems stem from Wizards of the Coast's management committing a massive category error. They sold a wargame and pitched it as a Writer's Room exercise. Muh Narrative talk attracts Theater Kids, which has a massive overlap with Narcissists.

There's a lot of Conventional Play problems, but the big one that keeps coming back is that videogames do it all better with superior convenience and lower cost.

Yes, lower, assuming you actually get manuals and don't leech off others or let the bot do it for you (like most Current Edition players already do).

For the price of a rulebook or less, you can get one or more of the following:

• Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara (and other similar games, like Knights of the Round or King of Dragons, and there's a lot more like those)
• Solasta: Crown of the Magister
• Baldur's Gate and its two sequels
• Icewind Dale
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker
• Planescape: Torment
• The Gold Box Dragonlance games
• The Gold Box Forgotten Realms series
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

There's plenty more just on Steam. GOG also has many of these titles, and others.

All of them are Get-Along Gangs doing it all together to chase the ruby, with little viable deviation from that script; many of the other titles that are in this niche do the same structure, and are about the same price.

This means you can scratch the same itch without any inconvenience, any schedule issues, or any willful fuckery by other people. Want massive multipler? Private servers for the D&D equivalent, despite recent legal actions, are doing fine- you can play for free, come and go as you like, and not be left behind.

Tabletop can't compete, not even The Only Game That Matters, and it's part of the reason for the long slow decline of the commercial side of the hobby; prospective players will opt for Vidya 9 out of 10 times because Vidya does all that Conventional Play does without the problems.

Boardgame and cardgame counterparts are just as damaging to Conventional Play; not as convenient, but otherwise just as appealing and defeats Tabletop- why commit to that when you can scratch the itch with Heroquest, Descent, Dungeon!, Gloomhaven or a similar game that doesn't demand that sort of commitment?

If Tabletop wants to survive, it must abandon and disavow Conventional Play. The Bros showed the way: play the Real Game.