But, as I am certain he is aware, the workers HAVE NO LEVERAGE.
They can be, and will be, replaced as fast as possible regardless of what comes of this unionization effort. They have proven themselves to be a threat and a liability; they do nothing that cannot be done just as well, if not better, by others or by Super Intelligence. Therefore they WILL be replaced.
This is the same stupidity as we see in Anglophone voice acting circles, where unions are there to be Globohomo Death Cult fronts aimed at operators to keep the latter in line; it is no surprise that, like VAs being replaced by bots doing Machine Translation, these chucklefucks will get the boot and be replaced by something like this.
House Style Guide in Markdown text, coupled to a World Bible (ditto), can let WOTC churn out Endless Product for the cost of compute and only need human eyes to do QC checks before it goes to print. Get good enough at the validation loops and even that won't be needed.
That's what WOTC is going to see; don't be surprised to find C-Suite (which, now, is also Hasbro's C-Suite) quietly pivoting to adopting this now behind the scenes as they get ready to cut these boat anchors loose.
Get fucked, faggots. You deserve what's coming for you.
Grifting Beast has been a lying faggot for years, but this shows a bit more ambition than usual.
Below is a series of videos all building up a conclusion.
The conclusion is that the Cargo Cult is right and both WOTC and the Bros are wrong.
You have to be in the grips of a psychotic break with reality to believe the former; WOTC knows far better than Grifting Beast what is actually going on in the commercial side of the hobby, has a far superior position, and reshapes the commercial side to fit its preferences as it wills that to be and fuck everyone else- thus is the power of control over the Network Effect.
You have to be a two-faced liar and con artist to believe the latter. That Grify-boy has to do this AT ALL is proof that the Bros are not only right and correct, but that our way of play is superior and desirable.
Fuck this gay-assed faggot, sideways, with a shovel covered in shit and burrs and then get deported to his spiritual homeland of India.
You want to help a Bro? Take Rump's survey; link here.
This is why you always have the rules at hand during play.
Most players suck at reading comprehension, especially poors and younger generations since they got shit or no teaching on grammar and comprehension, so they are prone to getting things wrong like described.
This man explained what is really going on better than anyone else, including myself and other Bros, on what is going on and thus why Rules As Written is the only valid way to go- especially as it puts the blame, responsibility, and thus onus on the designer and publisher, where it belongs to get this right and correct.
Pity him, for Le Redditors and the Theater Kids are going to come for this man screaming for blood.
PDFs are free, gamer. You just need to know where to look, such as the Internet Archive.
That's assuming you need Harlock to hook you up. Play via Discord? Dicebots are free. Don't even need a VTT. Rules? Free. Dice? Free. Play space? Discord is free. You need not spend a penny, gamer.
This is what Wizards of the Coast aims to fix, and they're going to fix it by forcing a trade in costs in return for frictionless convenience. WOTC can, and will, get people paying for the game by microtransacting the hell out out it. People are already hopelessly yoked to Beyond; WOTC has already won here, so now we're just going to see repeated victory laps as the Cargo Cult gets crushed.
Only the Clubhouse competes and wins by not competing on the same terms.
Last Wednesday, Roll For Combat talked Official Edition's previews for Universes Beyond.
They are doing the meme again.
They are willfully denying that D&D has a Brand Identity. They are willfully confusing D&D as a brand and d20 as a brand. They are showing their ass that they don't comprehend how this business actually works and two of them pay their bills pushing product for it. That's how incompetent most people are in Tabletop.
It is no surprise that the Cargo Cult gets rooked so hard by Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro now that this incompetence is clear.
It is also no surprise that the #BROSR rooks the Cargo Cult either, as they actually see things for what they are instead of what the Cult deludes themselves into seeing.
The shill channels are cutting videos on the new WOW tie-in book for Official Edition.
Told you that this was a defacto merger strat. Now you're seeing it in action.
You can expect more of this when the Mouse Wars book hits.
The Networks are merging.
The end goal is that THERE IS ONE ENTERTAINMENT MONOCULTURE where all IP engagement is corpo-controlled across ALL media.
People refuse to look past their own noses, so I won't be surprised to see people being unable to comprehend this being the objective, but it is.
WOW Forever pioneeers official controller support for the MMO. That can be done with a Steam Deck, which means it's a half-step away from being playable on mobile.
Tabletop, via Official Edition, is also moving to being playable on mobile.
The mobile app for Official Edition is a few years away. The merging of the two games into a single property briding over multiple media is even further away, but it is now clearly on the table; Fortnite paved the way, and this is the next step in that same business model.
I underestimated how bad the commercial side of the cataclysm that came upon the Cargo Cult is, and how devastating this damage shall shake out to be.
I don't care about Hearthstone, Overwatch, or Heroes of the Storm.
Given how both the core Blizzard audience and Blizzard itself treats these games, neither do they. Therefore I haven't paid any attention to their announcements.
Warcraft matters. Starcraft matters. Diablo matters. Those three IPs sit on top--control the Network Effect for--their respective niches (MMO, RTS, ARPG) Everything else does not because it does not (CounterStrike, League of Legends, Magic- those three rule the Effects in those niches).
I implore you--Vidya and Tabletop alike--to stop being fucking retarded faggots about this. You want to know why Blizzard and WOTC signed that deal allying together?
NETWORK EFFECTS, MOTHERFUCKER!
Each recognizes the other as the dominant Network. Only a superior Network can defeat an enemy Network. They both see Fortnite and Roblox as their real enemies, so their alliance allows them to join forces on a long-term plan to defeat those threats by first consuming and assimilating their own also-rans. This is going to be far easier to do on the Tabletop end, and not just with Official DND, as it will be in Vidya but it can be, and will be, done.
Blizzard has AI expertise. WOW is making AI DMs and players. You better believe that Blizzard's expertise will be applied to WOTC's aims.
You Tabletop and Vidya people gainsaying me now are going to be apologizing to me before this is over.
Maybe you shouldn't announce anything years before its purported release.
Pure vibes. Nothing of substance. Just a statement of intent, and I'm certain someone's going to get a talking to about the implications of letting a precious brownoid of uncertain provenance get the cannon fodder treatment instead of Whitey come Monday.
While this isn't a Star Citizen situation, it is a bothersome one nonetheless. RTS is not popular now, so Blizzard can't just C&D some PServer and take their code and with it their R&D. They need to deliver off entirely their own merit, and that's as lacking at Blizzard as it is in other Western AAA studios.
Consider that all of their announcements are either appropriations of others work, or "Break Glass In Case Of Emergency" releases.
Folks wanted this for decades. Only now are they getting it, and some of what's shown here echoes what's coming to Classic and is in Forever.
Furthermore, due to the crossover with Wizards of the Coast, all of this will come to Tabletop in Official D&D sooner or later- the WOW book is already up for sale.
THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE ARE NOT SEEING BECAUSE THEY CAN'T COMPREHEND SECOND ORDER EFFECTS!
This makes WOTC's annoucements at GenCon even more paradigm-shattering than I thought.
Lots of problems solved by their Cargo Cult and Theater Kid priors being taken out back and shot.
Meanwhile, over at Substack, Jeffro recently talked about unfucking this crap.
Why would you “convert” your game to a Braunstein? This is just weird framing all around.
Consider:
1) You can delegate monsters to an adversary player in order to work out how a particular entity will respond to player activity.
2) You can set up a session Braunstein in a single region of the campaign map and then fold the results into the overall campaign state.
3) You can run more traditional style adventure scenarioswhile exploring a mix of competition and cooperation both during session play and also in down time.
4) You can set up a fluid conflict between two distinct adventure parties to be played out over several sessions.
5) You can run a sessionless battle scenario over a span of several weeks with troop movements and a mix of strategy and tactics.
None of these options require a consensus or significant cooperation from more than a handful of people for any length of time.
The only person preventing you from doing this is you.
Not there won't be resistance, but until the AI DMs come online it's Dexter or Death for these people so wear the black hat and Dexter them for their own good.
That resistance has its root in its wrong assumption of what this hobby is, as Rule of Thule explained.
It’s not an objection to something happening elsewhere, it’s an objection to something real happening—to the game being actually played.
Consider an abstract game played in a vast abstract space. Within the spaces are two kinds of players: Navelgazers (Ns) and Conquerors (Cs). The Ns believe that all players are Navelgazers and have a shared common understanding of rules that don’t actually exist in the game such as “don’t be unkind towards the pieces of other players” or so on.
The Ns are playing a fundamentally different game from the Cs because they presume restrictions and protections etc. which do not truly exist (i.e. they are not actually rules of the game). When they see something that is the product of real play, they will immediately identify that it doesn’t accord with their presumptions. “No one who was trying to Avoid Unkindness [or other such presumptive descriptors] would have engineered this situation.”
As soon as they see signs of the game being played to win, they are immediately on the defensive. This explains much of the maligning of powergamers, as Meffridus intuitively understood, because they represent the same threat: that someone will undo the fake game by leaning into the real one.
David Sirlin talked about this concept in the context of versus fighters. There are players (he calls them “scrubs”) who come into a tournament with the idea that e.g. certain moves are “unfair” or “cheap” and, despite the obvious signs that these moves are clearly powerful, will be shocked and appalled when they are blasted to pieces by other players “abusing” them.
The scrub’s false internalization of the rules has caused him to become blind to the game’s actual rules and has led him, on his path of player development, to not only navigate false spaces but to arbitrarily close doors whose opening is necessary for him to achieve his real potential.
In the arena of RPGs, we see that scrubs have found ways to form coalitions. They have the ability to aggregate in collectives. Their particular internalizations are not only sanctified by Rule Zero, but each distinct collective can claim membership under a united Rule Zero collective—so long as they acknowledge all the others—and they feel emboldened to claim that no one can tell them they aren’t playing the game, even when they’ve thrown out half the rules and added others.
These coalitions are akin to a rogue tournament scene where everyone involved must abide by the new made-up rules, and anyone who insists on following the plain rules can be exiled. We can see the effects of this everywhere. I think it’s no coincidence that Sirlin’s book is titled Playing to Win.
We got further confirmation that everything I said Wizards of the Coast is doing to Official D&D is happening.
The former WOTC CEO is now back in control, directly running WOTC from Hasbro's C-Suite.
He can, he has, and he will again bulldoze inside opposition to his agenda and will go ahead to implement exactly what I said previously was the objective for the official game.
The AI DMs and player bots are coming. The frictionless convenience of a phone app-based business and gameplay model are coming. The legacy model of business and organization are on borrowed time. The Cargo Cult is Cooked. There is this, and there is the Clubhouse. The Cargo Cult collapses.
Many--as seen in the comments--still don't see what time it is. They can't comprehend second-order effects. They can't comprehend trends and directions. They think that they can just ignore it, not realizing that they've been coping--and failing--for decades at this point in doing so as their pool of prospects shrinks year on year depending on how frictive they are at their table.
These Dexters deserve the destruction falling upon them.
First, Roll For Combat and Yet Another Fucking Hackmaster Edition.
I am not, and never have been, a fan. It was tolerable as a joke in the comic. It is not when it's a deliberately fuckedup AD&D knockoff on the shelf wasting space and wood pulp. The best thing that could happen is for this begging episode to fail, but it won't because Cargo Cultists Gotta Cult but--like past editions--it will be collected and read, not played. Waste of time and money. Fuck these guys.
Then there's Matt Colville, whose shameless bullshitting got rightly roasted by the Oldfags.
Shameless theft of Traveller, Gamma World, Real D&D, and some of the odder Final Fantasy games is his new grift. He needs his kung-fu sealed. Do not give this faggot your time or money either. Ever.
Just play real games--just play D&D, real D&D--and forget that these lying faggots ever existed.
A One-Two for Roll For Combat. First, last week's show.
And two weeks ago.
Glickner and Derik repeatedly display that they do comprehend how fake, broken, and dumb the Cargo Cult is and yet they immediately turn about and continue to double-down on the dumb at every turn instead of acknowledging the trend and how this means that their model is on its way out. They cannot acknowledge, if not comprehend, second order effects. Neither can they perceive trends and directions.
Vidya continues to make the Cargo Cultist offering look as bad as it is.
Light No Fire in particular is a threat to Temu D&D and even to Official D&D because you have a Domain Game.
Better than others like it (Valheim, Enshrouded, Pax Dei, etc.), this threatens the Cargo Cult in particular because of--you guessed it--reduced friction compared to Cargo Cult play and it being full of fake and gay lameness.
Want to play solo? You can. Want to get the boys together? You can. Build up your own domain? You can.
Lots of what makes Vidya in general a superior alternative to Official D&D and Cargo Cultist knockoffs is here, is refined, and is going to be far easier to acquire and play (and get others to play with you) at a cheaper price compared to Cargo Cult non-gaming.
Unlimited L Works, Cargo Cultists. All the Ls. All for you. All the time.
On Tuesday of this past week, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what we all suspected about the Dark Sun revival.
This was not a surprise. This was merely a disapponting confirmation of what was expected.
The entire point of the product release is to push Communist propaganda, removing all of the nuance that existed in the former edition of the setting in the process; you can count on the writers imposing their inverted morality upon the setting's moral compass.
The fantasy that is being sought here is the fantasy of the Party Vanguard establishing the Communist Uptopia. That is it being done in a wasted world where iron and steel is more scarce and precious than gold, where the conditions of life are so precarious that it only compares to Arakis, and as such the implied anarchy championed by the Revolution is Extinction with extra steps.
You'd think that this was willful and deliberate on the part of WOTC and its partners, but no these Dangerhaired Dipshits are not that cunning or savvy. They are the Useful Idiots that get shot when the Revolution is achieved, the Genestealer Cultists that get eaten when the Tyranids arrive, the Chaos Cultists that get used as ritual fodder when their masters need to summon something with power into the world or meatshields when the Inquisition comes calling. They are the minions, not the masters.
They are mask-off with this because they believe that they have achieved the Revolution, at least in Tabletop, and in this they are mostly correct in that because they hold the Network Effect and have successfully achieved an Enclosure of the Commons through erecting the technical architecture required to seal up the funnel that Cargo Cultists rely upon to acquire customers and thus 100% capture the commercial side of the hobby (and with it most of the hobbyist acquisition) into their Walled Garden.
So long as this is deemed Brand Safe by WOTC's C-Suite this is going to continue.
That is the only form of leverage you have left. You must convince, by word and deed, that this direction IS NOT SAFE FOR THE BRAND!
If you are neither willing nor able to do that, then your only other option is to leave that entire model of hobby organization for the older model revived by the Bros.
Or you can quit, which you will inevitably do if you do nothing because you're going to lose players over time and be unable to replace them.
We are past the Collapse now. You either follow the majority into the Walled Garden, you change your ways and earn your place in the Clubhouse, or you're done. Choose before it is chosen for you.
Vitality/Wounds got rejected for a fucking reason, retard: it was more bothersome than the problem it claimed to solve.
Consider the normal way it works: Roll Damage, Track Hit Points. Crits don't matter unless and until they impose additional effects; recovery is equally standardized.
Now: Did I crit? No? Roll damage, Track VP. Yes? Track WP. Took WP? Complications on recovery.
What happens next? Anyone serious about being effective optimized for crits. This happened in previous WOTC Star Wars editions. It happened with Spycraft (and its deratives such as FantasyCraft), and it happens every single time this is implemented because PEOPLE FOLLOW INCENTIVES YOU FUCKING MORON!
What did you do with this? You introduced a means to bypass the ordinary damage capacity mechanic, which rewards those who are better able to achieve that bypass effect with superior combat performance, which incentivizes players to optimize for achieving most-consistent-bypass-performance and thus compels opposition to do the same lest all sense of challenge disappear.
Congratulations! You just made the game into Stealth Archer Rocket Tag. Everyone has to become a Stealth Monkey just to stay alive. Combat comes down to Who Can Detect Whom First; the losers get Alpha Struck with Overkill levels of Firepower and get the Swifty One-Shot Macro treatment. When players saw this in action 20ish years ago, they rejected it en masse which is why it disappeared from d20 Star Wars and Spycraft ended up losing hard to competing offerings.
No, it didn't make the game more fun. No, it didn't speed up gameplay. No, it wasn't fun to be on the wrong side of. No, it got boring to be on the shooting side of in short order too. It also lead to Narrative Faggotry when things went against the players, further degrading the integrity of the game and the hobby.
You should have been bitch-slapped for even thinking about this failed idea, DD. It failed for damned good reasons, such that even the obstensible source (HERO) is notorious for being janky and wonky in the execution of it- thus part of why HERO remains obscure to this day vs. The Only Game That Ever Fucking Mattered.
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.
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.
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.
Roleplaying Star Trek and not having to deal with any humans sounds fantastic. pic.twitter.com/iF4ZijRyrI
— Jon Del Arroz | Sci-Fi And Fantasy (@jondelarroz) August 9, 2026
He's been to, and thus has seen, what the common Cargo Cultist is like.
For those unable or unwilling to get admitted to the Clubhouse, this is their go-to option to get away from those losers while staying in Tabletop.
You can't get derailed (unless you're utterly dysfunctional) by some low-rent loser, get held up by the least invested player, get tyrannized by a power-tripping Dexter, or have any other Known Issue in Cargo Cult Tabletop gaming if you just play on your own.
Those who do this, and then want the social aspect, post to social media their receipts. Some do videos on YouTube. Some post to Twitter, Instragram, etc. They use the parasocial aspect to show people how they play the solo game, and in so doing advertise for it; the smart ones get affilate links and then link to the game's online storefront page to get some cut of the sales.
The move is to solve the Known Issues by changing the product to remove the risk factors; you can play when, where, how, and as long as you like if you're the only player- the same value proposition that you have for single-player Vidya, only without the need for electronics.
This is also a losing proposition long-term, unless you want to change how this hobby is defined into a solo pursuit. The only route that preserves the hobby is the Clubhouse.
