The Culture: Normies Are What Drives Universes Beyond

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This past week Roll For Combat showed that most in Tabletop are incompetent and incapable of becoming competent; the pattern of being able to perceive the pattern, and yet remain unable to deduce what that pattern means (aside from C-Suite at Wizards of the Coast, and then only partially so) and adjust accordingly, demonstrate this critical disability that disqualifies all of them from being taken seriously.

What is the persistent pattern over 50 years?

• "D&D" is the only brand name that has any Normiesphere penetration; everything Dancey said about Network Effects continue to be proven true daily
• All forms of adventure are achievable with D&D; the d20 System era proved this conclusively
• Players don't give any fucks about lore or anything else; they just want to kill shit and take it stuff (lorefags do video and read books' they don't play)
• Players hate Not-D&D, refuse to play anything else, and revolt if pushed- hence 50 years of "How do I get them to play Not-D&D?" articles, posts, and videos.
• WOTC, and TSR before that, had this data on hand all this time
• The vast majority of players are Normies who are dead weight boat anchors that should have been kicked out and kept out long before the Death Cult showed up and catering to them has been a colossal mistake

Mike Mearls has been independently confirming all of this.

Why does WOTC's C-Suite have better grasp on this than most Tabletop "designers" and publishers?

Because they see this as a business first. They can take decades of patterns, suss out the common elements, and draw conclusions that they can act upon. Universes Beyond (i.e. the Fortnite strategy) is one of them; throwing all the IPs together so players--Normies--can be whatever they want so long as they keep up their Beyond subscription and conform to platform rules without going outside WOTC's Walled Garden is one of those moves and it is (from their perspective) a smart one.

Why?

It conforms to the persistent pattern of Revealed Preference:

• Everything is "D&D" so everything might as well be officially branded as such and make rules-compliant
• Everything already is adventure by different product labels, so using the same structure for everything works just fine and conforms to Normie Revealed Preference for never going outside of D&D for love or money- Normies Don't Work For Their Entertainment
• Everything is an excuse to hang out, hack stuff, take their shit, and do cool shit for lulz (hence why All The IPs, All Together, All At Once, Everywhere, All The Time works)

We already saw this being successful with the other Normie-friendly IP, Magic.

From the Corporate point of view, which is still slaved to Dodge v. Ford, catering to these Normies and their Revealed Preferences is a no-brainer. The issue, alas, is that doing so means that Normies get used to cover for all sorts of far more pernicious predation and that's what I'll get into on Monday.