The Culture: No Tolerance For Delusional Cargo Cultists Anymore

The delusion is obvious here.

"Everyone" is playing The Only Game That Matters. They are not playing Faggot Bullshit Theater Kid Pirate Fanfic Crapfest.

There, saved you a few hours of wasted time. Go play D&D.

The Business: Even The LOLCow Sees Why The Cargo Cult Is Cooked

The LOLcow gets it. Too many Cargo Cultists refuse to see it.

He didn't say the phrase, but he does comprehend Network Effects. In particular, he comprehends the key element of a Network Effect: control over friction.

Conformity to the Network's dominant party is how and why Wizards of the Coast gives no fucks about the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play; they set the rules, and they know because they have witnessed it in action FIVE TIMES in 27 years that all they need to do is inflict some pain via ramping up the friction on the non-compliant and all other parties will bend the knee.

"But Palladium-"

Is a D&D Knockoff and always has been; it is in the network, run by a man who still thinks it's 1980, which is why people come and go between D&D and Palladium.

Paizo's deep in the shit and unlikely to survive. Lots of other resentful bottomfeeders are in the same boat. Palladium will endure because its flagship took over the space vacated by Gamma World, until its Boomer founder finally fucks off and his successors somehow screw the pooch.

There is no future pushing product. There is only a future in providing a service.

WOTC's pivoting to a service model.

Everyone else is getting crushed, and those not yet showing signs do so at the expense of their neighbors- staving off the inevitable. Things are playing out as I said before; this is an Outside In collapse, an implosion, taking those furthest out first as the frontier collapses inward towards the core in an implosion function.

What WOTC wants is everyone else serving The Only Game That Matters. This is more benevolent than it sounds; a truly Full Corpo regime would pursue extinction of other parties, but WOTC instead wants subjugation in perpetuity and by transitioning the Network Effect into a Walled Garden via Beyond (already the case) this is enforcable in the same way that inflicting a curse does- at a structural level.

WOTC wants to offload the costs of product support to external parties, but retain most of the revenue (and thus profit) from that product support.

They're going to get it because as most Casuals, Tourists, and Normies only go to the dominant party in a niche that means they only use Beyond and thus are readily captured by the Walled Garden. That market vastly outsizes everyone else, and they outspend everyone else (as they are conditioned to be mindless consumers), so WOTC will have the leverage needed to keep everyone else in line. If you want to pay the bills doing this going forward, you are WOTC's bitch.

Unless you seek out the Clubhouse.

(Side Note: UMBROS is now available as Print On Demand via Lulu.)

The Business: This Commercial Gaming Scene Can't Collapse Fast Enough

While made about Vidya, this applies to Tabletop also.

The details vary, but the general state of Tabletop being in a state of collapse is the same.

As usual, Network Effects means that only The Only Game That Matters is going to be a viable commercial enterprise after the collapse concludes. More Tabletop "companies" are actually glorified buskers begging on Kickstarter for their money instead of forming a proper business plan, gathering operating capital (via a bank loan, from family/friends, etc.), and executing that plan in the hopes that it works out.

That's not a business sector. That's a mass psychosis pretending to be a cottage industry.

We're seeing more of the same in Vidya, with more and more "indies" and "AA" going cap-in-hand via crowdfunding instead of doing the smart thing and just plugging away slowly in your time away from your day job until you have enough to go for Early Access on Steam.

More people pretending to be commercial operators need to be forced out of the scene, one way or the other, and that's going to be done by hook or by crook because the economy is no longer willing or able to accomodate this mass delusion in either Tabletop or Vidya- nor should it. More people need to go back to productive day jobs and stop pretending to be Muh Creatives. Their enablers on YouTube need to follow them.

Put on the hardhat and go do your factory shift; it's what you're actually good for, and thanks to Trump reviving Hamilton's economy policy you'll actually have one to work at sooner than later. (Including printing, fuck you Glickner.)

The old days are done, and with it are the priors presumed as true (but never were).

The Culture: A Reading List To Compliment Appendix N

JD Sauvage did everyone a solid over this past weekend and posted a nice reading list; some Appendix N overlap, but not all of it.

The full thread is here. Below is the first post.

The reason for the list? Talk about getting away from Pink Slime Fantasy slop, which means reconnecting to the fantastic literature that existed commonly before Lester Del Ray's 1975 diktat that make "Muh Tolkien" Clone into said slop.

You may balk at some of them, but you shouldn't; everything not of Appendix N that he included fits just as well if not better. (Flash Gordon and the original Buck Rogers novel certainly do, as they are derivative of A Princess of Mars as much as Brackett's novels about Eric John Stark are.)

Through that connection, notably at the pont of Dunsany, one needs to use these to bridge back to the mythic and thus past literature to mythology. (Yes, history is important, but we're talking about a failure of imagination and that stems from a lack of connection to the mythic via mythology.) Treating the myths of old, and the folklore that arised from them, as real as history and physics are- to see these as the means by which our ancestors (and some peoples today) see how life works and why it works that way.

This is what was lost during the 20th Century. It can be corrected now.

Once that connection is restored, that meaning needs to be expressed anew in ways that matter here and now. That's how this flattening is reversed.

The Culture: No Tolerance For Shit Gameplay Anymore

You miss out on some great observations if you're not in the scene. Hence me bringing them to you here. This is a collected Twitter thread which began here.

“An adventure may take 8 hours so we need to use pause time” carries the assumption that the party enters the dungeon and probably won’t leave until it is cleared. AD&D is built primarily on “get the money and run.”

“Creative” DMs: I am putting together a series of encounters that culminate in one moment! My players do not have the will to tell me it wasn’t really exciting.

Actually creative DMs: I have to weave together the results of gameplay to create a cohesive player driven story.

That’s the problem with prep addiction! The DMs either get really down on themselves for not producing an amazing narrative or they get high on their own supply!

Fortunately we can play The One Ring where apparently all the “story leads” are already in place.

Just italicized the title of a product, but otherwise presented as written originally.

Most players and Referees are dogshit faggots at this hobby, including the Oldfags (especially the Oldfags) and deserve to be shamed for their faggotry until they either shape up or ship out.

This also means that "D&DTube" is fucking useless and likewise deserves nothing but scorn and ridicule until they delete their channels or change their ways.

Don't think this hasn't been noticed by those wankers. It has, or you wouldn't have bullshitters like Grifting Beast constantly trying to get in front of the Bros and steer that ship back on the reservation; it hasn't worked, but rather backfired every time.

We know how to win. We're just going to have to do it the hard way.

The Business: The Bros Proved That The Hobby Is Not Commercially Viable

Jeffro observed the following:

You need to appreciate just how new all this is. There is all this stuff that people can see suddenly. And there has never been so many eyeballs on this one domain before. If the insights are not compiled down into essays or documents like Brozer and Umbros… then we lose out on the next round of developments and refinements. The people collecting Superchats and publishing clones cannot assist in this effort. A failure to synthesize the gains of this summer will rob the future of not just a slightly better campaign but entire realms of possibility. “Well, surely someone must have gone further along on this during the golden age.” No. “Well, surely this is just a minor technique here that is unimportant in the grand scheme of things.” No again. “Well, at the end of the day, aren’t you just doing what the old rules say to do.” Actually, no. I honestly don’t think that what we are looking at can be sold. And there is something about that that makes it that much more important that we communicate what we have observed and developed to whoever is going to move the ball down the field two to five years from now.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

He's right; this can't be packaged and sold as a product.

It's arguable that it can be rendered into a service, and it is unlikely that it could- not a commercial operation, in any event.

This, I say, is part--not all, but very clearly part--of why the Oldfags, the Cargo Cultists, and the PDF Merchants are so mad about the Bros. By restoring the Real Hobby, they reveal what had to be lobotomized in order to cripple it into something that could be commercially viable.

The Bros proved that all of the problems with Tabletop are self-inflicted, starting with Oldfags like Sandy Peterson confessing that they couldn't read (and still can't) so they gutted the game to conform to their illiteracy.

This, in turn, proved Jeffro right again: Tunnels & Trolls was the first Cargo Cult product that is "an RPG" as that cult defines them- not The Only Game That Matters, which is based on (and derivative of) Braunstein.

Boy are they going to be mad when the folks now demonstrating that Traveller also works as a Braunstein show it by their own receipts as they're being published.

The Culture: A Worthwhile Zine By The Purple One

This was worth it.

PDF is here.

Worth having on hand in concert with Winning Secrets and How To Win At D&D.