The Culture: Theft Of Credit Is Narrative Warfare

Jeffro noticed a thing:

Let’s talk about the game in which all of these games took place in. The one in real life. I was, ultimately in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma with a couple hundred people throughout this process. Lots of people opted for betrayal along the way. How did this manifest? A) Cutting videos to relay key revelations from my efforts without saying my name. B) Making a lifestyle about complaining about me and calling me a fool. Or calling everyone that has something nice to say about me a dummy. C) Publishing a book that plagiarizes my work. D) Going to people privately and telling them not to speak with me or associate with me. E) Attempting to get somebody to make a Kickstarter Boondoggle based on my efforts while crediting my ideas to an enemy of mine. F) Being ugly to me while I was attempting to run a game session with the purpose of trying something new that wasn’t fully understood yet. You can probably cut some of these people some slack. If you were charitable. I mean… at every stage, it was not obvious how significant and even historic this effort was going to be ultimately. And I can tell you that the vast majority of the people in the vicinity of this work could not even admit that there were problems with what we were experimenting with, much less accept that there might be solutions to any of them. Some of these people that opted for betrayal make a lot of noise. But the one thing they could never make was a lasting contribution to game design that can stand the test of time.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

While I don't know all of the parties, I can suss out some of them. Respectively:

• Earthnote, Tenkar, Grifting Beast, and the rest of the YT Oldfag Crew and the newfags riding their coattails.
• Griff
• The fake Appendix N book and its authors: Ann VanderMeer (ex-Tor, so a Commie) and Peter Bebergal (another NYC Commie fag). Tor's kept a hand in on Tabletop for decades due to personnel having current or past experience therein, and thus maintained contacts with Fellow Travelers at Wizards of the Coast and its orbiters like Paizo, so when Vox Day (Tor's enemy) decided to publish Jeffro's book they had to respond with their own to attempt control of the Narrative.
• Also Griff
• Would not be surprised if this was also Griff
• Not a clue here

Freezing out Jeffro, and by extension the #BROSR, is Narrative Warfare. This attempt to retroactively take credit for all of Jeffro's work, all of the Bros' work, means that the Cargo Cult can steer the hobby back into the Cult Compound- the same thing that got done to George Lucas, by the way, as the Fanatics never forgave him for shattering their hold on the Narrative.

We're seeing the same reaction in Tabletop. Jeffro and the Bros broke the Narrative, such that enough hobbyists can see it and apply it, and that's too much for the Cargo Cult since Wizards of the Coast is giving them the shaft from the other direction at the same time by rendering their entire business model defunct.

Fuck these OldFags. Sideways. With a shovel covered in shit and burs.

The Business: Normies Prove They Want The Bots

The big reason anti-AI people hate it is because they suck and the robot does what people want better, faster, and cheaper.

The authors I know who actually make a living doing it (and don't beg for their sustainance or have a patron covering their bills; I mean "does this as their 9-5" and lives off the proceeds entirely) embraced AI.

They don't just prompt a LLM. They use multiple LLMs, they tooled up an entire automation chain using those LLMs, they added agents to those automation chains to do other things (cover generation, manuscript formatting, uploading to storefronts, etc.), and through this industrialization of the process they not only can establish and sustain a unique voice but can accelerate their pace of publishing from X/Year to X/Month- an entire 12 book series per year easily, and possible to do so per quarter, per pen name.

Revealed Preferences Are Revealed, folks. They want a very specific experience from every specific product label in media; they reward with time and money those that deliver exactly what they want on the nose 100% of the time. Robots can do this far better than all but the best human writers. The lower 80% are the losers here; the upper 20% are the ones that still have a career w/o patronage of any kind.

Every author is a factory now. Factories take time to tool up, but once that's done they can mass-produce identical widgets wicked-fast and deliver them to market faster. You ain't going to John Henry your way out of this, and you ain't going to strangle it with regulation either- not when the globe is available and China doesn't give a shit about your faggot rules. Adapt or die.

The Culture: Still Trying To Stop The Inevitable

Today in Oldfags Trying To Steal From The Bros.

He completely ignores player-directed development.

Braunstein does this better, and because the receipts are being shown repeatedly the influence spreads without pause. Oldfags have to get out in front or get rolled over, and so we have channels like this trying to steer things back on to the reservation.

Fuck this guy. Fuck all the Oldfags.

Braunstein or death.

The Business: You Cargo Cultists Got Warned. You Didn't Listen. Now It's Time To Die.

Roll For Combat did a full stream before the GenCon announcement explaining Wizards' plan for Official D&D.

All of this is Officially Sanctioned (i.e. Brand Approved). All of it is Officially D&D (i.e. WOTC Approved). All of it is meant to be one giant buffet, mashed up like Super Robot Wars, all the time with all the lore and all the Known Places available All The Time.

I am not joking about the Autobot Death Knight with the +5 Buster Sword.

I am not joking about WOTC taking away table autonomy under the pretense of Brand Safety and Key Performance Indicator Improvements.

I am not joking about WOTC wielding the Network Effect to kill what remains of the commercial environment outside of their control--control, not entirely in-house; getting those others 100% dependent upon WOTC for their existence is better than being in-house--and forcing the commercial side of the hobby entirely within the Walled Garden that it owns and controls.

YOUR BUSINESS MODEL IS DEAD, RETARDS!

You can either pivot to a service-based model, quit, or go non-commercial.

WOTC took one choice from you. Soon it will take the other commercial option if you don't haul ass now, but you won't so I'm looking forward to WOTC forcing you to quit since you also don't have the balls to admit this isn't viable and just do this as a hobby.

Fuck ALL of you. You were warned. You didn't listen. The Collapse hit, and I delight in your suffering.

You were warned about Network Effects. You were warned about Revealed Preference. You were warned about the change in the commercial environment. You did not listen. You did not adapt. Now you die, and you die slowly and painfully as you bleed out over quarters or years before attrition forces you to shut down for good in a pathetic wimper. Fuck. You.

The Business: Mark Hagan's Game Is Trying To Come Back

Superheroes With Fangs And Poseur Angst is attempting to reclaim relevance over 25 years after its moment ended.

I'll post the Summary:

• Difficulty System: The new approach involves subtracting dice from a player's pool based on difficulty
• Drama System: A narrative resource for Storytellers, functioning similarly to legendary actions in other tabletop systems to enhance scene complexity
• Quickening: A new mechanic resembling hero points, earned through specific rolls or failures, which can be spent to add dice or gain successes
• Combat and Stats: The video highlights a transition to a more streamlined initiative system based on Wits (35:11), the introduction of Baneful damage and a significant shift in how Vite (blood) and Willpower function as core resources
• The video details significant shifts in clan structures, such as the Gangrel gaining Celerity and the Giovanni becoming their own standalone clan
• New disciplines like Corruption and the restructuring of Necromancy are explored in depth
• Maturing Powers: A standout feature where discipline powers become more potent as a player gains more dots in that specific discipline
• Conclusion: The host offers a balanced view, praising the move toward a middle ground between the classic V20 and V5 systems while also expressing frustration with the reduction of the skill list and the current handling of Flaws. The overall tone is optimistic, encouraging players to look past internet negativity and provide constructive feedback directly through the official survey

You'd actually be better off playing the Official D&D adaptation.

Fuck this. Mark Hagan wasn't nearly so incompetent as this.

The Culture: No One Wants To Do Homework For Entertainment

I said a long time ago that Normies don't work for their entertainment. They sure as fuck don't do homework.

This is not how it's done.

Normies have a toleration for two prior movies or series before they quit in big numbers; this is known to the Hellmouth, which is why Trilogies are a thing and long-running franchises have soft resets between them as well as recaps/reintroductions and why there are few exceptions to this rule.

Feige could easily sort all of this continuity stuff in the opening minutes of this movie--Bond films have used the opening credits sequence to do this, and Jackson did this with the LOTR films with the loredump as the sequence--but he's turned out to be a collosal retard so no we have to witness this incompetence in action.

This applies to Tabletop.

As Macris noted recently, most Tabletop products are bought to be read and not played; they are not real gameplay products, but instead disguised Setting Bibles and Adaptation Pitches with extraneous game shit attached.

This is why, in addition to the Cargo Cult, we have the majority of buyers being Lore Nerds and Worldbuilding Wankers who inhabit a space without engaging with it at all and get mad at anyone--publishers and players alike--that do.

Cargo Cultists that play hate being constrained by Lore as it gets in the way of their autonomy. Real Players, being The Man In Command with agency, make the lore their bitch by assuming the roles of those able to shape it and then doing so.

The reality is that players only care about what happens in play. Everything else does not exist. This is why making players run all actors with agency in Braunstein forms is the hobby that works, why Cargo Cultists keep crying about shit games, and why publishing publishes disguised Setting Bibles because the real hobby does not need or want what they find viable commercially.

No one wants to do homework for entertainment. Feige's just the latest to figure this one out the hard way.

The Culture: The Bros Have Shown The Way

The Bros published two Braunstein scenarios so far.

• BROZER
  • PDF at DriveThru
  • Print at Amazon
• UMBROS:
  • PDF at DriveThru
  • Print at Lulu (Paperback, Hardcover)

When I finish BRODUM, that will be three scenarios.

Notice that we're not doing this for the money. These are free in PDF and at-cost in print. No begging on Kickstarter. No shilling at the cons.

These are made to be played, not gawked at. They are made to be used, not read for entertainment. They are meant to be easily replaced if lost or damaged. They are not art books in disguise. They are not meant to pay the bills. They are not meant to be Setting Bibles in disguise, or pitch documents for videogame/TV/film/etc. adapatation.

They have just enough to start a campaign. No more. No less.

That's what the ethos has to be now- a return to form as it was in the beginning, but with better technical writing, editing, and layout.

You need a map, a scenario, and a ruleset. That's more than enough to play for years on end, and that's what Cargo Cultists and Corpofags hate and fear about this hobby.

Too bad they're retards that can't see the obvious business model, but that just means it's wide open for hobbyists to take up that space before they get the meme and move into that space themselves.