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.

The Business: The Holdouts Always Lose

Mark Kern's going to make all the right people mad.

They want this narrative to be true.

That gamers reject AI therefore you should not use it.

But I haven't seen one game where using AI tanked sales:

- They tried to it on Clair Obscure, and gamers kept buying.

- They tried it on Crimson Desert. Gamers kept buying.

As much… pic.twitter.com/LpfilpsZZx

— Grummz (@Grummz) April 26, 2026

Not just Vidya. Tabletop too is like this. They just lie about it.

The reason is the same as it ever was: LLMs are such a massive advantage that you AUTOMATICALLY lose against someone using it because they can ship more product faster, find and fix issues sooner, and do so with less human talent.

Retards and hobbyists eschew competitive advantages, and end-users show via Revealed Preferences that they don't care about anything but the results. In media where speed of output is directly and immensely rewarded with user and customer loyalty and thus revenue--Vidya, Tabletop, Novels, Comics, etc.--you are going to see the adopters win and the holdouts lose over time, and sooner than later.

This is why Wizards of the Coast flat-out lied to the audience. They know what it takes, so they're going to do it and then lie about it until the stupidity burns off. Every other would-be competitors is going to do the same thing because that is what the commercial pressure will force them to do to stay in the game; holdouts get pushed out.

What will have to happen for a lot of people is to admit that they are really hobbyists; it is okay to be a hobbyist. Doing it for love of the game, and setting prices to just cover costs, is fine. Long-time readers know that I've said so for years, pointing to Basic Fantasy as the model proving this to be true.

If you want to be a commercial operation, you are going to use LLMs. This is no longer negotiable.

It's okay not be a commercial operation. It's okay to be a hobbyist doing this for fun. It's okay to just cover your costs so publishing isn't costing you money. This is your way out, holdouts: surrender your pretentions of commercial viability and return to hobbyist status. Otherwise WOTC crushes you, and the Clubhouse will not open for you.

The Culture: Ross and I Talking About The Clubhouse

The podcast I recorded a while back is now up on YouTube.

This episode got recorded before UMBROS took off, before the Frenly Clubhouse stood up, before John Norman succeeded in his IRL efforts, and so on.

A lot of what I have written about, and said here, has started coming to pass. The future belongs to us- not WOTC, not the Soup Aisle.

The Culture: Accept That They Will Never Just

Since I linked to it yesterday, here's Devon Eriksen's epic post about "They Will Not Just".

"I have a plan for GoodThing!"

"Great, let's hear it."

"First of all, everybody has to just —"

"Okay, pump the brakes, there, smart guy. How do you plan to get people to just?"

"Well, they should just —"

"Perhaps, but how are you going to get them to just?"

"They should!"… https://t.co/Blol3PKkRj

— Devon Eriksen (@Devon_Eriksen_) May 5, 2025

That post continues:

"They will not. They will not just. Never in the history of humanity have they just. They did not just in antiquity, they did not just in the Bronze Age or in the Iron Age.

"The Egyptians did not just, the Hittites did not just, Romans did not just, nor did the Chinese. The Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Vandals, and the Huns were united solely in that they did not just.

"Europe did not just in the Dark Ages. The Mongols did not just, nor did the Bulgars or the Cossacks or the Turks.

"The Muslims have never just. The Plantagenets did not just, or the Tudors. Nor did the Royal House of WIndsor. The Spanish did not just in the New World, or the Dutch, or the English, and the natives did not just, either.

"Thomas Paine did not just, and no one just on Punkatasset Hill, nor did they just at Miriam's Corner.

"Napolean did not just at Austerlitz and Wellington did not just at Waterloo. And the Tsars have never just.

"The South did not just, before or after the Civil War, and the North did not just, either.

"South America has never just at any point in its history, nor has Africa in its lack thereof.

"The Memsheviks and the Bolsheviks and the Marxist-Leninists and the Stalinists and the Maoists and the practitioners of People's Glorious Revolutionary Juche Idea said they would just, but they never did. Pol Pot did not just when he was executing people for wearing glasses or not having a husband, and Sendero Luminoso never just because they were too busy boiling children alive.

"Otto von Bismarck and the Second Reich did not just, the Third Reich did not just, either, and after that, the Jews certainly weren't going to just, not that they ever did.

"Some Americans wanted to just, but they didn't, because they couldn't, because only a few of them wanted to, and so even the ones who wanted to had to stop.

"The Chinese will not just, the Russians will not just, the Americans will not just, the Martian colonists and Belters of the 22nd century will not just, either.

"Genetically engineered post-humans will not just, Artificial Intelligences will not just, and the Ascended Hive Consciousness of Conjoined Minds at the center of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud will not just, no matter how much they manipulate time and space the way we shape plastic and steel.

"No one will just, perhaps ever again.

"Why? Because it is suicidal to just unless everyone just, and they will not. Don't you get it?"

"Well, I can see you want, because you are a —"

"No you can't see what I want! We are not discussing what I want! I want Helen of Troy to return from antiquity in all of her radiant and legendary beauty, and give me a foot massage! I want Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Siddhartha Gautama, and Elvis Presley to visit Los Angeles in a flying pink Cadillac and announce to the world once and for all if god is real, and if so, which one, and what he, she, or it wants from us.

"It does not matter what I want! I am not the God Emperor of Mankind, with teeming billions of soul desperately eager to hear my slightest whim so they can work to make it real!

"It does not matter if I am a, because we are not talking about what I want. I am telling you FACTS. This is what will and will not happen, regardless of whether or not everyone should, or whether or not I am a, or whether or not it would nice if the moon was made of cheese!

"Don't you get it? If you want people to just, you need a plan to incentivize them to just, and it has to be something that has NEVER, NOT ONCE, in the history of the world, ever been tried before, because every single thing anyone has ever tried in order to get people to just has failed!

"So what do you have? What is your brilliant scheme, how are you going to get everyone in the world, everywhere, every single living thing to agree to simultaneously just?"

"I'm going to write a comment. Telling them they should. On Twitter."

"Oh, will you? How nice."

"It's going to be three whole sentences."

Incentives matter.

You are a fucking retard if you design any system where the results you desire are not incentivized. You must use both the Carrot and the Stick, in both obvious and subtle ways, to get what you want out of others.

This is what Game Design is about. This is what Coding is about. This is what Lawmaking is about: What uses of Carrot and Stick will most reliably get the results that I want out of the users?

And you're going to find out that you've got hard limits to what you can do to make that happen.

The Business: Stupid Is As It Does

Jon Del Arroz at Fandom Pulse reports on Tabletop news.

TLDR: Current Edition is for wankers, Daggerheart is for bigger wankers, and Acquisitions decided to side with the biggest loser.

Wizards of the Coast continues their pivot of the company into a Lifestyle Brand company, and all of these retards think they can do the same thing so they do it faker and gayer.

It's all going to fail for the same reason that everyone that isn't The Only Game That Matters fails: there can be only one!

The same that happens to the vast majority of Tabletop product has already happened to Daggerheart: sold more than played. Why? Because the friction increase from defecting from the dominant Network Effect means YOU DON'T GET PLAYED!

"If they just-">

THEY! WILL! NEVER! JUST!

They want to play the game- the one they already know. They will not waste time not playing when they could be playing; that is what Network Effect dominance looks like, and it is why everyone loses to D&D and has lost for 50+ years.

Revealed Preferences are Revealed; whenever they run into that friction, after having learned D&D, they bounce EVERY SINGLE TIME!

This is why Daggerheart is a Fantasy Heartbreaker. This is why the only serious "competition" has been clones of The Only Game That Matters and those few who got lucky with a First Mover advantage (that turned out to be irrelevant).

These people are narcissists, and narcissism leads to stupidity.

No one will play Not-D&D because some retards on screen pretend to do so anymore than they play D&D now.

They may enjoy the fake show, and collect books, but they will never play. They are not us; they are not gamers- and they never will be.

WOTC gets this, which is why the counter is as soft as it is; they only need to be as good as to beat them.

Meanwhile, the Clubhouse carries on doing the real game because Jon is right: this is a hobby where being a commercial pursuit is stupid.

The Culture: Remember To Not Give Money To People Who Hate You.

You don't have to give money to people that hate you. You have options.

PDFs are free. I have 432 PDFs at home. POD, on the other hand, well for that you need to ask around and be prepared to pay- especially if you want a high-quality hardcover.

Remember that Captain Harlock is the friend of all free people.

Because, for the users, Piracy is nothing more than a calculation between convenience and cost.

The Culture: They Keep Doing It Because You Let Them

Commie Propagandist gets roasted.

This libel, slander, and defamation will confinue until pain gets inflicited upon them. Take their assets, their revenue, their credit- everything. Leave them in a ditch for stepping out of line. Do it repeatedly. Ensure that they connect Cause to Effect. They will stop when they are forced to stop. No sooner.