The Business: Network Effects Dictate If You Win Or Not

We're doing this. Too many of you either forgot or didn't get the memo.

YOUR LIFE IS GOVERNED BY NETWORK EFFECTS!

Tabletop is utterly dependent upon Network Effects for their value. Your fucking product is USELESS ASS-WIPING PAPER without a user network.

The reason that The Only Game That Matters is Dungeons & Dragons is because D&D has the largest user network. Every single user is connected to EVERY OTHER USER because they all play the same game. This is what Ryan Dancey got on about 25 years ago when he pitched the Open Gaming License to Wizards of the Coast for D&D3.X; time proved him correct and continues to prove him correct.

Every other competitor to The Only Game That Matters that did not tap into the dominent network faltered and continues to falter. The utility for anyone coming into the hobby to learn ANYTHING other than D&D is a diminishing utility that is fast eroding as macro-level economics and global geopolitics continues to collapse and shift. Why? Because this is a hobby billed on being dirt-fucking cheap to get into and stick with, which sets very firm AND very low expectations regarding cost- this is why D&D Beyond, despite everyone and their uncle complaining about it or about WOTC, is still where the majority of hobbyists are and remain to this day.

You cannot compete within the hobby while being without the dominant network. YOU CAN ONLY LOSE SLOWLY.

"but-"

You have the apperance of competition because people somehow think begging on a crowdfunding site is not actually begging, and because publication costs are so low now that very small operations can--even after the tarriffs--can crack out product without needing to be Big Corpo, but that it all it is: APPEARANCE. Seeming. ILLUSION!

In reality, there is D&D and there is Fuck You Get Lost.

The reason? The utility of a Tabletop product is physical; you can't play by yourself, so you must have others who agree to play and that means that the game that gets played is the one everyone agrees to play. That's going to be D&D 99% of the time. It's just a matter of what edition to play, and the rest is details.

Therefore there is only competition within a network, especially in Tabletop, which means there is only competition within the D&D Player User Network and the further you get from that core--centered around Beyond--the worse your commercial viability becomes. Wizards of the Coast does know this, which is why the smarter people in the corporation decide to exploit that position at every turn; they just suck at succeeding at exploiting that position, but it doesn't matter because--contra D&DTube's Usual Faggots--alternatives to The Game That Matter are irrelevent because everyone does not agree on what to play other than D&D.

You have legacy subnetworks out there--Palladium being the oldest surviving one that still matters--and they survive by tapping into that D&D network through familiarity or similarity to a D&D edition, and you can slot the OSR into this for the same reason; it's why so many of them are/were B/X clones or built on those bones (e.g. Mutant Future cloning Gamma World).

The few other notable Tabletop properties out there are likewise Old As Fuck and remain on top because they are the dominant property through a dominant Network Effect, and so many of them have reached Escape Velocity where it no longer matters if the game itself is in print or published by this or that corporation or whatever; BattleTech was an outright dead game for years at a time and it still dominated Giant Robot gaming in Tabletop, with Heavy Gear only ever as a Number Two, and that's how D&D is overall.

(N.B.: This is why Star Wars in its d6 form remains so dominant despite there being d20 and Whatever That Fucking Abomination Is. Furthermore, it shows that 40K and Fantasy can be maintained should G-Dubs ever completely lose the plot.)

Tabletop has not been a Blue Water economic sector for generations; it was saturated by 1980, and crowded by 1990. The last serious shake-up was D&D3.X and Dancey's attempt at applying Copyleft principles to Tabletop, and we saw what happened as soon as he was out of the picture; at least that fuckup ended with the release of Current Edition into Creative Commons, and the forking of 3.X into Pathwanker, but in terms of actual "I am a serious businessman pursuing serious commercial endeavors" Tabletop hasn't been shit for dick since 1980. If you're not a Boomer or a Joneser, you're not a real player and you never were.

The hobby's commercialization was a gross mistake, one that entropy itself is now correcting, through the relentless power-flexing of the Network Effect. It no longer matters what WOTC does or does not do; D&D is now the Forever Game, with a Network Effect that cannot be beaten because it has escaped the control of any IP owner or controller, and thus it is to Tabletop what Xerox is to photocopying or Google to search engines- no, even worse.

This is why I say "Just play D&D". If you actually want to play, that's how it is and now that's how it will always be. The next Traveller edition will (again) be built on D&D's bones, and all of them will in due course. You go where the action is, and the action is the Network.

The Business: The End Of The B/X Influence On The Boomer OSR

Tenkar talks a shift in the Boomer OSR

It's about time that B/X start being seen as the limited game that it is.

It does not help at all that the actual B/X products are now legally available, and through that can be made available in print as required.

The problem is that, as we saw over 40 years ago, players showed by Revealed Preference that they want more than B/X offered. We are well beyond Moldvay/Cook and Mentzer; most folks want what AD&D offeres, which is why that is the strain that Wizards of the Coast tapped from 3.X forward and not the B/X line.

Expect to see more of this as the Collapse continues and more people fall back to Revealed Preference Consensus.

The Culture: The Beast Shows That Wizards Can't Design

Grifting Beast ceases his grift to show that Wizards of the Coast lost its institutional knowledge.

This book is a design document for videogame content production, not a playable product in itself.

Beast was not the only one to notice that this is a clear demonstration of lost acumen; this came up in the Comments.

This should not be a surprise to anyone that's been following the situation for any length of time. Corpos Gotta Corpo, so of course they're going to axe the guys that actually know how to do things because those guys are expensive to retain and don't do anything obvious for the MBAs in C-Suite to make Line Go Up. Let the Death Cult take their scalps and replace those guys with Fellow Travellers because the replacements are cheap bitches to hold the line until the LLMs can replace the placeholders.

What Beast does not do, and he is unable to NOT not do this, is ask why adventure design is needed at all.

The issue here is that Current Edition needs Adventures because Current Edition is not a complete product. It is a lobotomized product, no different than a videogame that cuts content from initial release to sell as DLC or expansions down the line.

This is par for the course in Conventional Play's Cargo Cult, and it plays into why the commercial viability of Tabletop in this form is coming to an end; Wizards of the Coast publishing products like this just argues for the superiority of Vidya alternatives because when you buy the Vidya you can actually play the crap scenario without herding cats and Scheduling Your Fun.

I have said previously that one of the biggest mistakes in the early days of the hobby was in not going hard on training prospective players on how to play the game by going hands-on with a training cadre dispatched to stores and cons to do just that. You can't do that without a complete product, and a complete product is designed so that using the product generates playable content directly as a result of play as you play it. That's AD&D1e. (There are others; I have mentioned them previously.)

A proper product, a Real Game, does not need Endless Product Slop. It doesn't need "preparation". You show up, you roll mans, the Referee uses the game, everyone gets to enjoy discovering what's there, and Hjinx Ensue.

Instead, Conventional Play and its its Endless Product Slop is a business model better suited to boardgames and videogames- especially Vidya. That's why those alternatives are far more successful commercial endeavors than Tabletop's Conventional Play ever will be, and this WOTC product slop shows it.

Play a Real Game and you will never have to spend money on anything but the rules ever again.

The Culture: An Expert Panel On Why Your Adventures Suck And How To Fix Them

Dunder did another expert panel.

The takeaways:

• Play first. Take notes.
• Clean up your notes as your first draft.
• Have others run your scenario as part of the revision process; they will find what you missed.
• Revise, re-test, repeat until the flaws are fixed.
• Polish the presentation and you're done.

You have other things that need to be accounted for in order to maintain the Fantasy of Agency, some of which are known things in this discourse (i.e. Jaquayes design principles for the physical plant; you need multiple access points and a non-linear plant layout), and some are not (technical writing acumen, cognitive load).

The need for deep acumen in the system you design for matters (and it explains why Palladium has so few of them; can't have deep acumen when there's sweet fuck-all system to have acumen for); you have know the ins and outs of how the game works, and you should be designing to reward players possessing that acumen, in order for the experience of play to remain consistent regardless of who's running their mans and who's the Referee.

But it would better to have a complete product that makes the need for these things irrelevant. AD&D1e, Classic Traveller, and more are exactly this.

The Business: How Many Actually Know Your Product Exists?

On Saturday this past weekend, this story came over the feed.

Every issue spoken of here applies to Tabletop.

In addition to the Network Effect--rant incoming on that, as it is obvious that people need it have it drilled through their skulls--most Tabletop games do nothing and go nowhere because they are neither seen nor heard due to incompetent and insufficient marketing.

What we see with Steam is Gaben and company, out of their own self-interest, devising a Visibility Boost solution that is tailored to the interests of a specific Steam user. It is similar to what Google (formerly) did with both search and content (i.e. on YouTube), and for the same reason: to boost the user engagement with the platform in the very manner that users want- to use their own Revealed Preferences, as shown in the user data, to serve up More Like What You Like to them.

DriveThru and every other Tabletop storefront that is not tied to a publisher needs to do the same thing.

The other thing that Steam, and anyone that follows their lead, needs to do is to go to the publisher and show them how to work this system to get their news, products, and updates put into the feeds of their target audience. Do that, and now you have both users and publishers happy with you and you get your cut without complaints because you not only delivered that added value you showed both ends of the transaction what you did and how they can use it to their advantage.

You want to get people to play "Haughty Heresy Huntresses" by putting it before that 40K crowd? Boy, it would be nice if you had a platform that had those features so you didn't need to blow upto 100% of your production budget just to get it before their faces and hope for a pick-up rate of 10% at best that will, most likely, only be a party trick gimmick that doesn't actually get played.

This won't help you overcoming the dominent Network Effect, but it can help you tap into it and compete from the inside.

The Business: The Collapse Is Still Ongoing

The collapse claims another.

Kira has the context.

New World is now a zombie game.

You're going to see this happen more and more as (a) the collapse continues and (b) the dominant Network Effect flexes its power by proving why it's the dominant Network in that niche. For MMOs, that's World of Warcraft; it's the game that everyone knows and will agree to play, such that it defines what MMOs are and how they work, confirmed by would-be alternatives only able to change up the variables- a practice that, inevitably, ends up feeding the winning Network just as Ryan Dancey said would happen 25 years ago.

You're going to see this more and more.

CCGs are going to collapse on Magic. Wargames on 40K and Historicals. Adventure Games on D&D. Normie games will fall back on The Games Everyone Knows (Monopoly, Uno, Clue, Catan). Risk-taking by going outside the Network is already falling off, and what is now slow will become sudden within the next year or so.

In the Single-Player space, this will be a collapse on Brand and Genre; only the proven forms will survive, and only the proven Brands therein will remain strong while all else struggles. Be ready for more Metroidvanias, more Roguelikes, more knockoffs of Vampire Survivors, and so on.

This is the time to hunker down, retreat, retrench, and prepare for the next window of expansion- not the time to launch, to risk, to dare as it's clear that this is a Dying Time that needs be weathered.

Winter has come. Sit out the cold and the snow, doing that underground planning and preparation, so that when Spring comes you are ready to act- to move.

The Business: The Professor Shows Why Vidya Is Better For Conventional Play, Again

Professor DM did a review.

Why in the world is this not a videogame?

This is nothing like what the hobby audience wants; the tell is that it's a variant of Pendragon, and while I respect that game I know damn well that it doesn't even rise to the level of Call of Cthulhu or Champions in terms of Games People Actually Fucking Play. This is "Fighter: The Game" to most, and you could easily do this as a boardgame and have better success- oh wait, there is one.

And as for videogames, well, let's just say that some subsets are saturated; you'll want to try something different.

(There's more. Look at your leisure.)

But look again at how this Tabletop product is pitched, and you'll see what model of game this would be better served being as a videogame.

This, but mixed with Rogue Legacy (so each run contributes to the success of the next), would be far more successful than wasting it in Tabletop.

As it is, this is a very pretty coffee table art book vanity project pretending to be a proper game that no one will play because no one but the owner (maybe) wants to; they want "real RPGs" where they can be what they want, and the vast majority of people do not want to be knights, and never have.

That means D&D. Just play D&D, where you can do solo knight adventures on the side anyways.