The Culture: Git Gud With Post-Game Reviews

JD Sauvage made this plain over a week ago.

This is a game with defined procedures, we can and should get better the more reps we put in.

— JDSauvage: Fabulous PRIZES Contributor (@jd_sauvage) May 23, 2026

Simple as, folks. This is a skill; you can get better at playing the game, so Git Gud. Scoring systems and other feedback make this happen, some with the carror and some with the stick.

The Business: Wizards' Cutting Off The Cargo Cult Confirmed

Pat reported confirmation of what Wizards of the Coast are doing to Official Edition.

The Temu Tabletop Twats that make up the PDF Merchant front of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play are FUCKED.

This is WOTC weaponizing their Network Effect domination to kneecap the Cargo Cult, as I have previously explained. WOTC is Normiemaxxing. Normies LOVE this stuff; it is far more convenient and easy for them as proven by their Revealed Preferences for them than any other option in the commercial side of Tabletop; the Cargo Cult cannot defend against it because WOTC is where the action is and thus Normies see Cargo Cult offerings as the shit proposition that they are.

Fortnite works because you can just show up and play. Official Edition works because you can just show up and play. Anywhere, anytime, there it is. No Cargo Cult alternative can offer this. They can only parasite off of Official Edition, as it always has, and now WOTC's cutting them off.

Watch for the next step, which is to kneecap the Cargo Cult further by annoucing solutions to Schedule Your Fun that will be what I have described: the ability to play anywhere, at anytime, for as long as they want, from your phone because of bots running the game and filling out the party.

Solving that, and implementing that solution bit by bit, is what is next and thereby close off the Cargo Cult's acquisition funnel. Prospects will refuse to defect because Temu Tabletop cannot do what it was

The Culture: Going Deeper Into The Roots

And yes, Jeffro is still putting in work to make the hobby better.

The weird consensus that emerged across countless tables that the AD&D weaponless combat procedures are unplayable is just completely off the wall. That the complaints against these rules came from people that would dismiss old school era D&D combat as being dull and devolving into people taking turns bashing each other with a sword…? Even crazier! It really is a shame that people overlooked the awesomeness of these rules for so long. Just think of how uninspiring cavalry charges ended up being in countless campaigns due to people not using the overbearing table!

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

The video, by the way.

And here's a few books to get you started:

• Donald Featherstone’s Wargaming Campaigns
• Tony Bath’s Ancient Wargaming: Including Setting up a Wargames Campaign and the Hyborian Campaign

(NB: I have these on a Wish List also.)

There's more there to read, but these are good starting points.

The Culture: No, It's Not Unworkable Or Unknowable

One more example of what Jeffro's been saying.

Interesting video, very illuminating. Some surprising positions are taken here, which I will paraphrase: You can’t play AD&D RAW. Characters retire at 9th level due to the lethality of play at that tier. Delegation of high level NPC’s to players is declared to be destructive to the campaign. Strict timekeeping… but not 1:1 time. (Players can skip a year into the future to go play in JapanWorld or whatever.) NPC’s are not active in the campaign world in the same way that the PC’s are… though they are active. They have goals with arbitrary “clocks” set on each stage of their activities. Players see the result of this progress as they travel the world and pick up rumors. A formal concept of “drift” is introduced— i.e., that the rules of the 45 year campaign necessarily change over time and that the rules of the various long running AD&D campaigns will naturally diverge over time. The AD&D referee is thus expected to make elaborate house rule additions, use articles from Dragon Magazine including “NPC Classes” and so forth. Each of these axioms or assertions work together to suppress the emergence of the sort of gameplay dynamics that the BrOSR have championed over the past several years. And based on Rick’s account of his campaign, it sounds as if this framework results in something relatively close to what we call “conventional play” that is sustainable for A VERY LONG PERIOD OF TIME. Naturally, people would like to know who is right. Rick… or the BrOSR? Phrased another way, the question is “which side in this dispute is playing the game described by the AD&D core rulebooks?” An in depth breakdown of precisely where and how each side fails to live up to the greatness of those extremely influential rules volumes would of course be very VERY tedious. In any case it would be pointless to go through with such an effort. Because Rick has already announced that he is not even trying to play RAW. I am not sure that I have heard him say anything like this before. It seems like an extraordinarily strange position to take, though. What could possibly motivate it? The most reasonable explanation that I can think of is that attempting to play AD&D RAW is going to lead you to play more like the BrOSR than not. And Rick hasn’t been doing that and doesn’t want to do that, so he has now conceded “RAW” to us. I am glad that he did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZUgeMReBb4

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Read The Manual. Do what it says. Simple as.

The Culture: Commentary On The Elf City Battle

What Jeffro had to say about my article on the Elf City Battle.

Several things to note here: Braunstein Play generated a unique battle scenario that is unlike anything in any game module. Player engagement was maintained over a long span of time without the benefit of standard “wargaming” practices as codified by (for example) the varied and well developed products of G.M.T. Games. The game elements and factions can be anything a player is excited about. No game design or product purchase is required for people to play what they want. There is a significant population of people that will get better wargaming experiences from these techniques than they would from traditional wargaming products. People don’t need to know much or buy anything to participate in these types of games and it is not terribly hard to get them to keep coming back. The results of this battle scenario will significantly impact the campaign state and new conflicts and scenarios will develop organically from the outcomes of events spread across the campaign map. The AD&D combat rules which have been on most of our game shelves for many decades and which THE ENTIRE WORLD said were terrible and which EVERYONE house ruled in the exact same half-dozen ways have qualities which contribute greatly to these people being able to resolve anything that happens in this cutthroat free-for-all. Combat rules which look smarter or better on paper are not actually being used to produce gameplay of this quality or duration or scope. And note the painful cognitive dissonance that results from contemplating the fact that nobody played rpgs or wargames this way between 1980 and 2020… while simultaneously rule sets on basically EVERYONE’S shelves pretty well told you what you needed to know in order to do this stuff. Everything about this is extraordinary start to finish.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

You don't need to buy a damned thing other than the rules to play satisfying campaigns. Ever.

The Culture: The Tribal Chief Is Still Around

Jeffro is on Substack.

He is active there.

Behold an example of what he posts there.

The "folk tradition" that sprung up around D&D is not a game. It is a failure to play a game. There is of course a modest range of well established variations within the tradition. You have innocent children who play pretend while occasionally roll dies or make rough sketches of monsters and wizards. You have unimaginative adults who hide behind a screen and pretend that the players have only just barely managed to beat the big bad evil guy with their last hit point. You have paid actors that pretend to be amazed and utterly dismayed with their coworker improvises a brief soliloquy while their PC bleeds out in a pivotal scene. But these diverse manifestations of the folk tradition have one thing in common: they are not games. Some people are explicitly pretending to play a game. Others are clumsily or perhaps sometimes charmingly tinkering with and playing WITH the pieces of an actual game and occasionally dabbling with some actual procedures from a game. But the activity they are engaging with is not itself a game. Now, one might be inclined to raise any number of objections at this point. Most of us are familiar with the passages from the rules texts and the accounts from the bad old days that are appealed to in this context in order to lend an air of legitimacy to this "folk tradition". This is of course in vain. Because anyone that is committed to this activity to any degree will tell you that the first rule of this "game" is that there aren't any rules to this game. Only the most imaginative sort of people, they assure us, can look at a relatively complex game, ignore 80% of it entirely, change the rest at will, and then throw out all of the rules entirely during the heat of play because, after all, why would you want to "break immersion" and "kill the sense of dramatic tension" by pausing play in order to consult a rules manual? This is very persuasive to some, I suppose. And sure, the phrase "playing D&D" is of course today synonymous with all of the hokum and balderdash I have alluded to above. And all of the people that pretend to actually believe these things insist very loudly that they are having a great deal of fun. Nevertheless the fact remains they are not playing a game. And the disciplines of game design and game development have nothing to do with what they are doing and what they advocate for. The people that make products to sell to such people could be called any number of things, but in no world could they honestly and accurately be described as being game designers. The correct term, I think, would be "hacks".

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

You'll find more of that there.

The Culture: It's About The World, Not Your Man

Dude makes a valid point.

The Comments confirm his observations about why how you roll your man matters.

The hangup people have over this is that they still think that they are married to their character sheet. That's because they play wrong.

This stops being an issue once you play proper--you play Braunstein--and thus are forced to stop being married to a sheet; the rules of the game force you to play a roster of mans, each of whom is in different places at different times doing different things, and you can add mans to that roster at any time.

Having a roster means you cease to be overly invested in any of them, and being overly-invested is a dysfunction of the hobby that plays right into the rest of the Known Issues in Tabletop.

The Culture: Or You Can Do Braunstein And Get The Same Result Faster And Easier

They keep trying to get in front of the Bros.

They are again doing the meme.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

Meanwhile using Braunstein play I had no problems getting things to happen once players bothered to stop turtling.

Battle Report: The Sack Of The Elves' Capital by Bradford C. Walker

It Was A Bad Day To Be A Knife-Ear

Read on Substack

And there's been consequences in that event's wake immediately that are ongoing and effect everyone else. Players must do more, and players deserve less.

The Culture: RIFTS Proves That Genres Are Fake And Gay

"Genres" are fake, especially in Fantastic Adventure Gaming. While naysayers can claim that universal systems aren't proof, 1990 did see definitive proof that every last Normie on the planet cannot deny and it came from Michigan's Most Boomerific Comic Book Guy.

"Muh Fantasy" is in there.

"Muh SF" is in there.

"Muh Horror" is in there.

"Muh Post-Apocalypse" is in there.

It's all there, all thrown together into a single pot of stew, and in that glorious janky mess of dysfunction that is Palladium it is made crystal clear that it's all just Fantastic Adventure in various shades and grades- nothing making it so blatant as using other Palladium products as "parallel dimensions" or "pre-RIFTS eras".

This is the game that has the no-shit-it's-really-him Old West legend Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (yes, The Sundance Kid) as a significant character along with Boomer Truth Regime Obligatory Nazis, Cartoonish Evil Demons (of various kinds), Space Opera that you'd swear was stolen by Marvel for their own superpowered Space Opera comics (because yes, Uncle Kevin is that old), Barely Legally Distinct Not-Gundams/Not-MADOX01s/Not-Powersuits (from Bubblegum Crisis)/Not-Landmates (Appleseed), and so on along with Not-Jedi/Not-Lensman and such.

That RIFTS is not openly acknowledged as the obvious truth nuke that it is regarding that Genre Is Fake shows how Cargo Cult dogma (derived from the SF Fanatic Cultism, backed up by Lester Del Ray's diktat) is just Commie Demoralization by another name.

The Culture: You Cargo Cultists Are All Liars

No more well-known a figure than Mike Mearls confirms that Cargo Cultists are Calvinball Cockups.

Don't lie to me about this. Most of you CANNOT READ FOR SHIT AND SHOW IT BY YOUR ACTIONS!

You are the meme, you lying Oldfags.

I will not hear anymore your claims of knowing how to play. YOU. LIE. You have lied, for some of you, over 40 years and counting.

You will have to prove that you actually play the game before I will hear a word you say henceforth. Post receipts. IF IT IS NOT SEEN IT DID NOT HAPPEN!

The Culture: The Oldfags Still Trying To Seize Back The Discourse

The Bros are the only reason that videos like this get made now.

We have so gotten in the Oldfag's head that they are forced to cut videos like this now, hoping to regain control of the discourse.

Note that, again, this is a Basic video. Not B/X, but Basic all the same, and they are again forced to read the fucking manual (or at least try to fake it convincingly) to attempt the argument.

Attempt, because the reality is that they remain trapped by their priors. They presume Get Along Gang play, with all the baggage therein, so this cannot help but come across as an irrelevancey because there's no player-controlled opposition (or even player-controlled unaligned party) pursing their own agendas operating in the same area able (willing or not) to intercept and interfere.

Until they accept that Braunstein is foundational, they will always come across as (a) chasing the Bros and (b) Trying Too Hard to fit something they don't really do into their Cargo Cult dogma and practice. This is no different a reaction that the Neocons and LOLberts in the Republican Party trying to fuck over Donald Trump and MAGA and constantly failing due to not comprehending just how hated they are by the base and the people at-large because it's the same phenomenon driven by the same principles and thus has the same reactions and leads to the same result.

Good. Death to the Cargo Cult.

The Business: Yes, WOTC's Copying The Fortnite Model

Clownfish did another follow-up on what Corpo Game is up to.

As I said to them, alas this is nothing new.

From the source material to the early crossovers (before Lester Del Ray's diktat took hold post 1980) and longer, this has been a thing and it's been as stupid as it is now; there's a reason that TSR went HAM on third parties in the 1980s and 1990s, and not just because they wanted all of that for themselves.

There is one other thing I want to make clear: Wizards of the Coast are just copying the Fortnite model. They're doing it because it works, as we've already seen with its use in Magic.

All the Cargo Cultists are going to lose their acquisition funnel to WOTC because what C-Suite wants the hobby to be is more appealing to Normies, Tourists, and Casuals than what they offer- and this is proof that (a) C-Suite sees where the money is and (b) they have an idea (if imperfect) on how to slowly pivot Official Game to conform to this business model that is orders of magnitude more profitable all around.

You're fucked, Cargo Cultists. Adapt or die.

The Culture: More People See That Vidya Is Superior For Cargo Cult Play

The Basic Expert cut a video last week.

And yes, Videogames do EVERY LAST FUCKING THING that Cargo Cultists insist as Dogma BETTER THAN THEY DO!

This is why I have neither patience nor tolerance for that faggotry anymore. Vidya does the Cargo Cult model better, so fuck that on Tabletop. Therefore I will only do Braunstein--the Real Game--in Tabletop because that's how the game is structurally built to be played.

As for Muh Narrative, write books you Theater Kid wankers. You'd actually enjoy yourselves by doing the thing you actually want to do.

The Culture: Proof That They Reject The Evidence In Favor Of Their Dogma

Last week, on the 13th, Roll For Combat did a panel about Muh Settings and Muh Mega-Modules.

You will see this repeatedly: admit that both Corpo C-Suite and the Bros are right, then CogDis right back into Cargo Cultism.

Admit that Wizards of the Coast wants to go all-digital, remove all the friction from playing, and switch over to being a Live Service model because it is the superior and proven way to make Conventional Play commercially viable and then turn right around vaccuuming Copium so hard that you'd swear they'd suck a Gas Giant to death in an hour over how they continue to justify their failed model.

Admit that Braunstein is the superior and proper mode of play for the hobby, and then turn right around and talk about Narrative and DMs being petty shits is okay and other Known Issues.

Admit that both sides are superior for meeting the hobby needs of adults with careers and families, and then turn right around and talk about how this hurts product development of the very PDF Merchant dogshit they're continuing to spew out like Jeets shitting on the beach.

Admit that all of the commercial pressures are fucking them in the ass, that WOTC is doing the smart thing on their end (while admitting that the Bros are doing the smart thing on the hobby end tacitly), and then turn right around to snort Copium like Tony Montana at the end of Scarface.

And we know how he went out. The Cargo Cult won't be so lucky.

Yuri Bezmenov famously stated that "a person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures, he will refuse to believe it."

He elaborated on this concept in several key ways:

• Irreversibility: Bezmenov argued that once demoralization is complete, it is "irreversible" for that generation, requiring 15 to 20 years to educate a new, patriotically minded generation to replace them.
• Resistance to Proof: He claimed that even showing a demoralized person "authentic proof" or taking them to a concentration camp would not change their mind; they would only understand reality "when a military boot crashes his balls."
• Core Definition: He summarized the tragedy by noting that "exposure to true information does not matter anymore" because the demoralized individual's perception of reality has been fundamentally altered to reject sensible conclusions.

This is what the Cargo Cult does to its True Believers, and just like the Useful Idiots that Yuri talked about regarding Communism there is no future for the Cult in a world where WOTC gets their way (and they will, so far as the commercial side is concerned) and the Clubhouse freezes them out seeking them as the zombies that they are.

Bifurcation is now inevitable, and the Cult is doomed; their own members admit it.

The Culture: Beast Can't Read

Grifting Beast is again ankle-biting the Bros and promoting Cargo Cult Dogma because he needs the Cult to buy shit he shills.

No, it's not Calvinball. It's not a folk tradition. It's no different than Chess; it's a game with a strict ruleset that is there to be used and obeyed. Using it wrong--"folk traditions"--doesn't stop being wrong because you did the meme.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

Because no, Grifty-Boi, you can't read. So many of you can't, so you resort to Calvinball to cope with being unable to read what Gary wrote and comprehend what he said.

Proper gameplay means that all of your problems cease to exist.

• You can play when you want, how you want, for as long as you want because there are gamemodes and procedures that focus on it- Schedule Your Fun isn't an issue.
• Strict Timekeeping means that the world is always in motion and thus opportunities for Happenings to play out are always there, and mandatory upkeep costs keeps all mans on the map focused on securing and protecting their logistics lest they be knocked out of play.
• No Calvinball. The rules say what they say, they are what they are, and everyone is bound by them- including the publisher. The Word Is The Authority, not the Referee, the publisher, or any other man. They can be read, studied, known, and mastered- same as Chess, UNO, Scrabble, or any other game because that's what this is.
• The focus is on being an independent actor operating under a Fog of War pursuing objectives. Some are individual mans, some control factions, and there are no permanent parties so you mix up who you play and who you play with on a regular basis.

This is presuming that Grifty does suffer a reading a comprehension problem. Far more likely is that he's doing this shit again.

These people don't know a goddamn thing about game design, so they fuck with things things that they shouldn't and then wonder why shit doesn't work.

Initative is one of them. It's there to manage information flows in combat by keeping things confined to one subset at a time; the more granular the procedure, the worse things are at the table and the more you argue for digitization and automation (i.e. Vidya) instead because that level of complexity is better done in competing media but that would mean that Grifty can (a) read and (b) consider Second and Third Order effects, and we see that he can't.

Shut up already.

The Culture: Remember To Not Give Them Money

Reminder that the other twat that started The End of Globohomo is still doing her racket.

And as for the recent shit racket release:

Go ahead, review bomb that shit.

Then, if it is actually worth playing, pirate that shit.

We're playing by Chicago Rules now. It's all Fair Game. Have at it, gang.

The Culture: Time Is A Flat Circle

The LOLcow sees what Ryan Dancey saw 26 years ago.

NETWORK EFFECTS, MOTHERFUCKER!

Folks gainsay Garipay here, but he's right: all competitors ultimately feed The Only Game That Matters, which is why they are not competitors at all. This is the old-time Blizzard playbook, and it works.

Dancey published the receipts on this when he announced the OGL back during the pre-release and early post-launch phase of D&D3e; he explained, in person at cons and at-length on forums, how this worked- the very process Garipay explained in his video above.

This is not new. This is how "The Industry" has always worked, because it's a bunch of tinkering twats doing Cargo Cultism because sweet fuck-all know jack shit about game design despite all pretensions to the contrary- as shown by their results.

(The ones that do know anything go into Vidya and actually make a living doing this that can afford children, at most keeping Tabletop as a sidegig like Mike Pondsmith did.)

This is why I immediatley dismissed the Darlings as the flashes in the pan (if that) that they were, along with the rest of the PDF Slop out there, as completely irrelevant; any good ideas--LOLNO--would filter up to The Only Game That Matters in due course.

Just play D&D- and play an edition that actually works. Braunstein is far more relevant and influential that this crap.

The Culture: Slopaganda Is In Tabletop Too

This applies to a lot of PDF Merchant shit out there.

Once you realize they're not really games you can use the existing word for crude, state-backed psyops

Slopaganda https://t.co/mKsKD3lzQy

— Brian Niemeier (@BrianNiemeier) May 10, 2026

The only difference is the covert Corpo backing.

Instead, it's nepos and those with nepo-baby friends or connections making these "to make a statement" or something equally fatuous on one hand and delusional incompetents on the other making their Fantasy Hearbreaker.

(Blanked) By The Apocalypse. (Blank) Hack. Flowery Bullshit Vaguely Based On Fagshit Books From Fellow Travellers Decades Ago. The Writer's Hobbyhorse & Fetish As A Game. All of them and more litter the shelves and would be better off throw on the pyre and burned- and the "games" too.

Either way, as I have said many times, it is a waste of time and money to make and to buy. Stick to The Game That Matters. Learn it, study it, master it because that one gets played and the rest sit on your shelf.. JUST. PLAY. D&D!

The Business: The Grogs Don't Get Why It's Being Done

Oldfags being unable to think like corpos again.

The problem with Official Game is not Muh DM Support.

The problem, so far as C-Suite is concerned, is the need for Dungeon Masters AT ALL.

It's been over 10 years since Current Edition's launch. D&D Beyond has achieved hegemony on the commercial side of the hobby. Wizards of the Coast knows this, which is why they feel secure shitting all over the Cargo Cult and the Oldfags in the OSR. They don't need the Cult anymore.

From the perspective of C-Suite, DMs are the problem. The solution is to remove the need for DMs entirely. The technology now exists to do that, and Wizards of the Coast (at Hasbro's insistance, driven by shareholder pressure) is working on doing that.

Why? Because there are FAR more players than DMs for Official Edition. Those people are hopelessly yoked to Beyond, so they are not going to leave The Only Network Effect That Exists for Your Dogshit Alternative.

Think like a Corpo. What's your clockblock? DMs. What's easier, getting players you trained by be passive raidloggers to run the game or replace the block with a bot?

Beep-boop, motherfucker. DM Bot is online, and it will be a better DM than the vast majority of shit DMs out there for all the same reasons that Vidya curbstomps the Cargo Cult: doesn't cheat, doesn't do Calvinball, always consistent, always available, and (this is the corpo-friendly killer app) only uses Approved Options and Content.

It will be rolled out first as an aid, then functionality will be added until it can openly shove the shit-tier DMs out of the chair entirely because DM Bot Is Always There.

Revealed Preferences show consistently that users prefer convenience over everything else, which is why WOTC is being told to do this and why it will succeed once implemented. Players want to play the game; DMs are the cockblock. Remove the block, and players play more; players that play more pay more to get more stuff that gives them advantages when they play, and Microtransactions are what Hasbro is pressing WOTC to turn Official Edition into and C-Suite will comply or get replaced with people that will.

Seattle's FIRING You!

This is what it means to be hammered from above by the Corpos. Meanwhile, the Cult and their Six Session Suckouts can't get over themselves so they won't be admitted to the Clubhouse where the Real Game will remain after the Corpos finish doing their job on the Official Edition.

No one wants what the Cargo Cult sells, or they wouldn't be coping so hard over WOTC's pivoting in a manner that solves the Cargo Cult problem from their perspective just as the Bros solved it by restoring what the Cult shoved down the Memory Hole.

They're already dead.

The Culture: "Winning Secrets" Is In The Wild

My physical copies of Winning Secrets and BROZER arrived on Friday last week.

When this becomes available, you should get a copy. This is, along with BROZER and UMBROS, the (at-present) collection of receipts that combine into a remedial teaching manual for what the hobby of Fantasy Adventure Gaming is and how it works.

The Business: WOTC Drones Justify Their Own Extinction

Last Wednesday, Pat cut the following video.

First: This is really about 100 Arena devs vs. Hasbro, not D&D.

Second: LOL.

These wankers have no leverage. Hasbro C-Suite will take this action as justification for liquidating these people, outsourcing/H-1Bing/AI replacing their positions, and then a review will see if the corporate structure needs to be shifted around to secure assets against any future liability threats.

What these people do not comprehend is that they are Hired Guns in positions where they are disposable, expendable, and fungible cogs in a machine. This will result in Hasbro accelerating their plans.

When--not if--this is done, there will be the usual wave of performative outrage before Network Effects do their thing and shut them up because they cannot endure the friction of not being in the scene where it is easiest to play. They will bloviate, and they go right back to giving Hasbro money to continue being viable in competitive play.

Don't think the D&D side of WOTC isn't aware of this. They are.

Hasbro is well aware of the liabilities in WOTC's offices and want to remove them. Some already got punted; the rest will go once the business model revision to rely on bot-generated content and art (and cheap labor otherwise) is complete and--as has been the case for 50 years--those self-possessed poseurs who think they matter will find out fast that all they can do is grift on Kickstarter until that goodwill runs dry.

And, quite frankly, fuck all of them.

The Real Game and thus the Real Hobby, being non-commercial, continues on without any of them unimpeded.

The Culture: The Calvinball Cargo Cult Can't Consider Cascading Consequences

By now you should have noticed the pattern.

These Oldfag Grognards would not be cutting these videos if the #BROSR didn't have any impact on the hobby. They have to do their worst to appropriate the language, do Word Fuckery to it to redefine it back into their Cargo Cult cant, and thus steer the bus back into the Cargo Cult Compound where their Calvinball Cavalcade can do its damage.

Our summary: "This video argues against the modern TTRPG approach of pre-scripting NPC moods and faction motivations, advocating instead for the use of the 2d6 Reaction Roll as a procedural engine for a living, unpredictable sandbox campaign."

This is ripped from B/X, which is the preferred edition of the Oldfags because it enables their Calvinball preferences (and explains why so many OSR toliet rolls are forks of it) and--as is so often the case here--attempts to do their Word Fuckery tricks by isolating something from the Real Game, treat it as a separate issue that miraculously doesn't effect anything else, and then argue that you can just LOLSORANDOM your way out of the problem because Calvinball.

First: Fucking with ONE part of the machine affects ALL OTHER PARTS. This brings on cascading system failure, which--like Commie governance--justifies yet further Calvinball until you get something that doesn't work without Calvin there to do Calvinball things- including exuding the huckster charisma needed to sucker rubes into going along with it. (This is what leads to Six Session Suckouts, by the way.)

Second: IT IS NOT YOUR JOB TO FIX A BROKEN PRODUCT! If the product you buy does not work when used as instructed, that's on the publisher to fix- not the end user. If the end user does not use the product as directed, that's on the user and not the publisher- the user needs to fix himself (by conforming to the rules as-written), not the product, and the publisher does not need to change the product to conform to the user.

Third: None of these Oldfags have any reading comprehension, and they do not comprehend Second Order (nevermind Third Order) Effects. There is no consideration for what this one change wreaks upon the rest of the machine; they are no different than the sheboons complaining about grocery stores and pharmacies closing in their area after months or years of shoplifting, looting, assaults upon staff, fraud, property damage, and public disturbances. No difference at all in mindset between "I changed this rule, so why does this other thing not work" and "Dey closed da Walmart after the last time da popo shot Deshawyn ova nuffin."

Good thing that Bros blog their receipts, showing how wrong all of this is, and publish collections thereof like Winning Secrets and remedial teaching aides like BROZER, UMBROS, and (soon) BRODUM to shatter that hold on the Narrative and teach people how to play the Real Game.

The Culture: Fuck Game Balance

The Pundit makes an attempt.

What is left out is the thing that ensures that Muh Game Balance gets shot and tossed into a ditch: BRAUNSTEIN.

As I and others among the Bros have found out first-hand, the Real Game--multiple independent actors, operating in conflict, under a Fog of War--guarantees that balances gets tossed into the ditch because competing actors want to win and that requires achieving a power differential in their favor- i.e. to deliberate upend the balance in their favor.

This is, as every last martial artist and military sage ever keeps saying, Fair Fights Are For Suckers.

In a proper campaign, beligerants will only be in a balanced fight when both sides fuck up and fail to cock the table in their favor. This means that sometimes you get curbstomped, and sometimes you do the stomping; in the Real Game, most hostile encounters start and end on the Surprise Round. Those who get it can seize control of the fight, making it theirs to determine how it goes; those who are able to routinely seize control via Surprise will dominate most encounters due to having the capacity to choose when they fight and when they do they go first- and they tend to bring the most.

Then let things happen. So what if shit goes south? That's not the Referee's problem.

The Business: Yes, Blizzard Broke MMOs

In the name of making it easier for the dads on the dev team, Blizzard permanently broke the game and thus the entire product category.

The correct response was to do the following:

1. Make dungeons harder, but make the loot better- both in potency and in acquisition. "Fuck You, Pay Me" always applies. Loot must drop for everyone involved, and be immediately useful; you should always get either an upgrade or (if none are to be had) the gold equivalent. If you put in work, you get paid GUARANTEED.
2. Make certain that all mans of a given role can perform necessary functions. Tanks and healers should not be doing interrupts or crowd control; that's the DPS' job, and fulfilling such utility cannot be a DPS loss or they won't do it. Healers should be situationally aware, not locked on the healthbars; either healing happens while doing utility or DPS work, or they have off-OCDs that light up to be instant nukes after doing enough GCD heals whose net effect is DPS neutral.
3. Mobs should always have something that requires CC on pain of either instant death or loss of control- not just bosses.
4. Bosses should require Tank mitigation to endure being hit at all; against Healers and DPS, squish.
5. Instant spec-change/gear-change upon entrance to the required group role, assuming that you are foolish enough to not hard-lock classes into them in the first place. This is one place where FF14 is correct in its design.
6. Design dungeons to be completable in 10 minutes or less on average. That means cutting bosses to one, and reducing trash to a handful of packs at most. Winged dungeon complexes should be the norm. This is the core problem, not the grouping issue. The reason for pre-DF being a pain was due to the time required; cut it down to something you'd see in a Scenario out of MOP and you'd see participation skyrocket. Going with a winged complex approach means that you can turn one area into three or more distinct dungeons to run, and each run would actually feel like a proper delve and not a reckless roller coaster ride.

In short, increase the friction in the content, reduce the time commitment, and spread around the tools to handle the friction..

The Culture: This Is How You Get Calvinball

Again with the ankle-biting bullshit.

This only persists because of piss-poor reading comprehension coupled with out of control ego issues.

READ THE FUCKING MANUAL! DO WHAT IT SAYS!

This also means knowing what is not said, and through proper reasoning figuring out what Is and Is Not allowed. That's how I broke open the Fighter's unspecified Command Presence ability.

That's not Le Ruling; that's reading the fucking manual and comprehending what is there- something Grogs like this have failed to do for their Muh 40 Years.

Turns out that no, you don't need to "cover the gaps" because the Real Game didn't have any; you just read shit wrong because you're incompetent at reading.

We are done playing Calvinball, OldFags, and that's exactly what you push with this bullshit. Stop thinking that you're smarter than the designers; you're not, and you never were.

The Business: Grifting Beast Is Shilling Beast

Speaking of grifters.

This is naked shilling. It might as well be a paid ad.

The Real Game organically generates all the playable content you will ever need.

This is why you don't need modules; the Real Game has everything you need to generate everything required to play the game indefinitely. Stop wasting money on shit you don't need and does not help.

Yes, this means that this hobby is not commercially viable if you're of the mind to think that this is a Consume Product sort of thing; that's Striver Bullshit, and we ain't got time for that here.

It is viable if you think Buy Once, Cry Once, Use Forever is how things work. Alas, that's not how too many in this hobby think. Good thing they're a dying breed.

The Culture: Some Snakes Are Smarter Than Others

I told you the grifters had to get out in front of the Bros, and here we are.

First lie hits not a minute into it: "D&D is not one game."

Yes it is you lying motherfucker. You read the manual, you do what the manual says, you get what the rules prescribe. Lather, rinse, repeat. Everyone playing it properly plays the same game. This is up there with "Free Parking" in Monopoly being done wrong in its pervasive presence despite being obviously incorrect as in "READ THE FUCKING MANUAL YOU MORON!".

He gets it wrong be he's played the game wrong for Muh 40 Years. They are the same thing: Fantastic Adventure Wargaming. "Epic" doesn't exist anymore than "Grimdark" does; both are fake genres. The structure of play is always the same; same inputs means same outputs.

I'm going to have to explain how this actually works. Fine, here's the Quick & Easy Launch Process.

1. Get your AD&D1e core rulebooks.
2. Get one sheet of graph paper.
3. Get one sheet of hex paper.
4. Get one notepad or notebook.
5. Open the DMG. Go to Appendix A. Roll 1d10/2. See those five starting room allotments? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Roll, then write the winner down on the sheet of graph paper in the middle of the page. Stop. That's your starter dungeon.
6. Go to Appendix C. Roll 1d8 and look at the chart where you determine what terrain type an outdoor hex is; look across the top, as normal. Then roll 1d4 to determine which corner that generated hex is in.
7. Using the Settlement subchart for that chart, determine the starting settlement size and who is in charge. The dungeon will be nearby.
8. Tell folks you're running a starter dungeon delve, and which Method to use to roll up a man. Set a date and a time; use Appendix A exactly as it's written and you'll do fine as I've shown for over a year. Done. Never do any work unless and until play forces it.

No negotiations. No Session Zero bullshit. Your mans are about broke and dungeons are where they can get paid. No one--including the Referee--has a fucking clue about what's going on beyond that initial 24-30 mile hex and until someone goes beyond it that wider world doesn't exist The rules work as intended when you use them as directed to create the promised play experience. Stop fucking with it.

This is where he bullshits hardest; you don't need to do anything more than this to start with, and you should never do anything more until it is required. He lies about in the same breath as confessing to the Six Session Suckout of Cargo Cult Non-Game Play and praising The Keep On The Borderlands, which uses the above paradigm.

The Professor is one of the better grifters due to his seeming reasonableness making it hard to detect when he's playing Word Sorcery games to trick you. "I plan one session ahead" is that sorcery; you shouldn't plan at all because that's the players' job (Fantasy of Agency, remember?) and all you do is administer things. Planning means that you are assuming the role of the Adversary, when that is not your job. That's what players do, not you.

It's that one subtle shift that introduces the poison of Narrative Logic into a pure Ludological hobby. Reject all Narrative logic by sticking to Braunstein structure; this is how you beat that bullshit.

This is a far simpler thing to comprehend than many have been told to expect, so PDF Merchant grifters have to complicate it to create a space where they profit.

The Business: Once Again, Gaben Does Nothing And Wins

My Vidya brothers, I feel you, and I join you in praising Gaben.

You should take note of this and use it for your benefit.

With Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all shooting themselves in the foot you had better believe that Steam giving you the tools to clearly see if your rig can run it is yet another customer-friendly element that everyone else somehow fails to understand or care about.

Want something that's going to work? Have your rig be at least as good as a Steam Deck, then look for Deck OK labelling. Later on Steam Machine labelling will work. Only buy what gets the Green Check.

Or buy from GOG. Those games are so old that you can run it on Grandma's email checker.

This is another place where Indies and AA are rooking AAA across the board; design for the low-end specs of your target audience. This is why World of Warcraft worked- you could run it on the basic bitch machines of the day and do fine, as I know from personal experience.

The Business: You Still Have To Deliver, Vidya Peeps

Corps in entertainment hitting the FO phase of "FAFO" never gets old.

> becomes president of Blizzard

> removes almost all quality assurance

> quality declines

> leaves Blizzard

> “wow this game sucks”

Yeah you did that, dipshit https://t.co/J0o7zYpDMG

— Khorgnir, Edict Breaker (@Khorgnir) April 27, 2026

Blizzard isn't the only one. Square Enix, via Creative Unit 3 (the FF14 crew) had this going on since Dawntrail hit its own pre-launch hype.

SE just began its own new hype cycle after years of shitting the bed with the current expansion and letting Troons and Death Cultists ruin it for everyone- led by Chief Commie Kate Cywhateverthiscuntsnameis. They got to run wild while Yoshi-P and his man Koji Fox did their best to salvage FF16, which is how the EN version in particular shat the bed so hard that everyone else got smeared by association.

It is hoped that this will be fixed with the new stuff coming, announced over last weekend at the North American FanFest.

(No, Lanse here isn't a fan; he hates Kate and the Troon Squad, but doesn't spare Yoshi-P for letting them do it.)

AAA Gaming across the board has been shitting the bed due to both Death Cult and Mammon Mob fuckery, mostly in the West but Japan isn't immune.

Meanwhile, AA Gaming and Indies on both sides of the Pacific keep delivering. I'm far more hyped for this than the just-announced Evercold.

There's more I'm looking for--Light No Fire for example--but AAA? Not really. Not until there's some serious purging of the ranks.

In a related note, I am available for hatchetman work.

The Culture: It's All The Same Thing

These are all the same story.

Different costums. Different set dressing. Exact same story, BEAT FOR BEAT.

Yet they will tell you that these are three separate genres. That can only one of two things; either those specific genres are fake, or the very concept of "genre" is nothing more than a product label the same that you put books separate from shoes separate from toothpaste.

What this is, consistently, is a Drama. That's the substance--the narrative structure--that defines what a story is; too many professionals and wanna-bees mean "product category" when they say "genre" and that's how publishers, distributors, developers--all the business types--see this topic, and they always have.

Too many creatives--such as John Truby--confuse "product label" with "narrative structure" when they say "genre"; if you doubt this, get your library card out and go read Truby's book on Genre.

We see how fake "genre" is again with Appendix N, where Adventure Fiction is split between two equally fake genres: "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction".

"Horror" is also a fake genre.

If they are not real, what are they? The lead in Kristen McTiernan's latest interview makes this plain: Audience Expectation Templates-cum-Product Categories.

And in Tabletop, we have two well-known Brands that prove how fake genre is: TORG and RIFTS. (There are others, but these are go-to.)

It's all the same thing. For us, it's all Fantastic Adventure. That's what we do; the rest is just varations of costumes and set dressing, as the substance--the strucutre--is always exactly the same.

Which is why well over 99% of all Tabletop products can't justify their existence, are surplus to requirements, and and thus have no right to exist and must be abolished.

The Business: We Already Have A Proof Of Concept For Tabletop LLM Production

Told you that holdouts lose.

It feels like just yesterday I was giggling at ChatGPT's goofy attempts to make Magic card mechanics. Now ChatGPT can design a 110-page RPG from scratch and playtest it with simulated players. How long until it can just one-shot a 1,500-page rule set like ACKS? https://t.co/359tqRlarS pic.twitter.com/dxFmOt5Yjh

— Alexander Macris (@archon) April 23, 2026

You can read what got generated here.

We can bring harnesses and apps and models together another way as well. I asked Codex to create an entirely new tabletop roleplaying game, basically its own version of Dungeons and Dragons in a fantasy world of its own invention, full of all of the tables and rules you need to play. I also asked it to simulate players experiencing the game and revise the rules based on what it found.

The article where this process gets explained is here.

I'm not going to say that the game is good. Nor am I going to say that it's worth engaging. What this is, however, is PROOF OF CONCEPT.

From Idea to Product in minutes; this is what Wizards of the Coast will use to maintain dominance over the commercial side of the hobby, both for any in-house work and especially to oversee any third party works going forward- it is trivially easy to take the licensor's manuscript, filter it through the Brand Fit filter as a rewrite, and then do some spot-checks before letting it go live on Beyond.

That linked paper comments on what needs to be considered.

In addition to being technically neat, there is a lot to like about the actual content. The setting is interesting and novel, and the rules appear to make sense, drawing on existing game patterns while adding unique elements. However, a closer inspection also reveals the jagged frontier of AI ability is not entirely gone. Every generation of AI models has struggled with actually building long-form fiction. If you are a frequent reader of AI writing you see the same problems here: a love of the uncanny; overly complex ideas that do not fully pay off; weird metaphors (“weather and architecture are the same argument at different speeds”); too many ornate sentences (“the holy things that surface when a sea forgets it was once a road,” is cool once, an entire book of that is exhausting); dialogue where every character speaks in the same clipped tone; and the name “Mara.” So, even amongst all the amazing technical progress, there are still rough edges.

Holdouts are going to lose hard and fast now that it's shown that a professional-quality product can be made by one man in the fraction of the time it formerly did. Remember that Revealed Preferences are Revealed; people only care about the result, not about how that came about- claims to the contrary are not supported by the action that matters. This will lift the floor of what is considered Acceptable Output in all hobby publications, commercial or hobbyist, because the means to do so are now in the hands of common men who need only to learn how to use their words to make the machine do as they will.

This is not just about Tabletop. This is about all forms of media production. The folks crying about it are already being rooked by those that use the tools, making "detectors" and "bans" as useless as broken condoms. There's a reason that Vox Day and Jon Del Arroz can turn shitposts into full product releases within a week, soon a weekend, and have an entire trilogy of novels in digital and print up on Amazon within a month and make serious bank doing so- they know the tools and can strike while the iron is hot to profit on a meme wave while it's relevant. (If you know how Vox writes, that's massive.)

The last refuge for the holdouts is on Prestige Release Formats: high-cost, high-expense hardcover productions with lots of addons (appendices, annotations, etc.) where a single copy is at least $100 and likely some multiple of that. Anything that can be done On Demand just had its pricing crater as a consequence of how fast and easy it is to produce the content that those formats hold and deliver to the end user.

Which means that the already-waning commercial viability of the hobby just got nuked. GOOD.