You can tell that he can't solve the problem because he's a Fake D&D Cargo Cultist, so his Just So priors prevent him from accurately identifying the problem and thus from solving the problem.
He cannot comprehend that Tabletop is about the Fantasy of Agency, about being The Man In Command, as befits this being a form of wargaming.
He's never played Braunstein (and I do mean Weaseley's original here) and it shows. He's been told to catch up, and he'll be dragged kicking and screaming to the truth along with everyone else.
When the GM’s whim overrides the written rules, the rules stop being a system to engage with and become a set of suggestions that might matter or might not, depending on the GM’s mood. Players learn quickly that deep understanding is wasted effort. Why study the mechanics when the GM can nullify them with a shrug? Why plan a clever strategy when the GM can “adjust” the encounter on the fly? Why worry about how the dice land when the GM can override them at any time? Why question inconsistencies when the answer is always the same: “Because I said so.”
Get your shit in order. Then your game will stop sucking.
The #BROSR blogs and publishes the receipts proving it.
The former is Normie-acceptable in price and difficulty. The latter is pricy as fuck for Normies, but has the depth that most Normies will cap out on. You can go harder, but this will satisfy most of those wanting your bog-standard dungeon crawl kill-loot-powerup experience. The former is more PVP while the latter is PVE.
Yes, your Gloom/Frosthavens and your Descents and your Mordheims (etc.) are all out there. That's more than most Normies will tolerate; these are within Normiesphere expectations for what a game is and is expected to work. The only one I'd even bother with getting out is Orcs and the Gates, if you can find a copy because (again) Normiesphere-ready.
(I should get an affilate link for the amount of linking to Amazon that I do.)
Wednesday last week, Diversity & Dragons posted this.
Sensitivity Readers.
That means pushing the poz, which means that Hasbro has begun gutting Wizards of the Coast of its excess capital via laundering it through stunts like this.
Note I said "excess"; Hasbro wants WOTC to be an operational subsidiary, which requires capital, but as a digital publisher using a lot of LLMs you don't need a lot of people (and thus salaries) or machines (thus physical capital); you need a handful of people and some IT infrastructure (because of Beyond), which is a far leaner operation than WOTC is now. (Go look at the Gatcha operations.)
For all the complaining going on, there is only one publisher in the Commercial side of Tabletop constantly in the Top Five that isn't a poz-pusher: Palladium Books. All others are of the Seattle Set, meaning that those publishers depend on WOTC and WOTC's funding sources for their own operations; most of the also-rans, being Death Cult fronts, are also poz-pushers to varying degrees when they are not Pop Cult heretics.
The Clubhouse side, being non-commercial, can push back effectively against this. No commercial operator can due to Network Effects smothering their efforts, coupled with the far more active efforts WOTC made to cut off recruitment of their castoffs and rejects and the continued refusal to actively market and advertise themselves in order to create their own customer acquisition funnel as well as a customer retention strategy- something every business worth a damn actually does.
There's some gap on what goes down on Earth after the First Space War (specifically after the end of the original series). We know that (a) there's been an immediate push to start launching colonies into space to settle and tame Earthlike exoplanets, an effort that would succeed within a generation or so (e.g. Macross Plus).
We also know that the Zentran Fleet was not 100% annihilated, and that remnants did not 100% assimilated into Earth civilization; splinters remained an issue for generations after the First Space War (e.g. Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Frontier, Macross Delta).
Unfortunately, because of HARMONY FUCK YOU GOLD, Western licensing for play in this period is between shit and fuck-all. Therefore we'll have to make due with Robotech material because Palladium came up with some good asspulls that (with a little massaging) would fit just fine. Behold!
Like I said, there needs be massaging.
As these are long out of print, it would probably be wiser to call upon Captain Harlock to deliver some PDFs instead. You'll also need to make use of sites like MAHQ.net and the Macross Mecha Manual to fill in the gaps (in stat terms) that Palladium's former licenses could not provide for.
The top-level players control the factions vying for control. Other players can come in when Convergence inevitably occurs and combat occurs.
You'll need to change what Palladium published to conform to the Macross timeline, removing the HG RT BS, but otherwise keep 90% of the design structure. This means that you don't need to write up stuff from scratch using HERO, GURPS, or Mekton Zeta.
(You'll be able to replicate this for playing Southern Cross and MOSPEADA.)
To an RPGer this is a wild notion. “Doesn’t this defeat the whole point of the game? Session play?”
Slowly in our clubs I see it dawning on us that we’ve had D&D backwards for 40 years. The campaign itself comes first in the original sense of the word.
In Tony Baths Ancient Wargaming you simply roll to see the resolution of combats, the entire point of the game is actually the intrigues, movements on the map and tracking the details of kingdom and man. Have an in depth tactical resolution, or not, the game as a whole is the point.
It is an utterly revolutionary concept, but we are circling back to the beginning of it all.
I’m beginning to see dawning, a hope for a hobby hidden and crippled for 40 years.
Not your man. Not you. Not the Referee. Not Muh Narrative. The campaign ITSELF is what matters.
The integrity of the campaign matters, which is why the rules need to be obeyed and not LOLSORANDOMed into fucking Calvinball by incompetent retards who think they're smarter than the game.
I'm not a Dolemwood guy. Don't see the point of it.
But it's worth it get a passing familiarity because then you can easily follow along such articles to find and appreciate things like this:
The Duke’s player’s intention for this Braunstein was supposed to be a ducal summit to redraw borders. Instead, the capital was invaded, the Duchess was kidnapped, Baron Hogwarsh was murdered by a (star) man wearing his face, a senior Church official died in the streets, and half the great powers of Brackenwold watched it happen. Whatever this setting was before this, it is not that anymore.
Hie over to Substack if you're not already there, find the Bros and their friends (including myself), and read along.
On Friday last week, the Pundit dropped the following.
The Pundit gets what the issue is.
This is not a question of "You got Skiffy in my Fantasy!" because that's been part of the game since before its official publication in 1974, made brick-to-face obvious with the crossover rules for Gamma World and Boot Hill in AD&D1e.
No, the issue is Brand Collaborations. This means that Wizards of the Coast are pursuing the Fortnite model, which is where there are license deals made to allow for officially-licensed adaptations for The Only Game That Matters in Current Edition, and as we now see that's going to be fed directly into D&D Beyond where it will remains there as an exclusive offering to draw in new users and retain existing one- further reinforcing platform lock-in, weaponizing the Network Effect to cut off the acquisition of customers to all of the Temu Tabletop tinkerers bottom-feeding off of The Only Game (And Publisher) That Matters.
This will work because it already has for Magic: The Gathering.
This also will cut off license opportunities for everyone else, because WOTC will have the money and the time to suck up any and all such Brand License opportunities going forward and thus deny one of the lifelines that many Temu Tabletop publishers used to keep their operations going heretofore. WOTC is not a high risk proposition for a Brand; even Palladium and Paizo are now, and they're the perenial also-rans. As it is for other Big Corpos, so it will be for everyone else- such as the Burroughs, Howard, and Vance Estates.
You won't be able to court a dormant, but attractive, brand to go with your Temu Tabletop product going forward- not when WOTC is able to pay more, reliably, to a far larger target audience and thus open the door to yet further brand collaboration deals.
If WOTC (and Hasbros) has the sense that God gave a diseased donkey suffering from syphillis and dying of AIDS, they will make it clear that they are the only Tabletop party in town so they should just ghost everyone else. That's it for the PDF Merchants; you can only reskin B/X so many ways, the customer pickup pool from WOTC's castoffs is drying up, and they have neither the skill nor the will to do what it takes to compete and win. The Dying Time is here for them.
If you think this is not an issue on the commercial side, you STILL do not comprehend Network Effects. Pundit is wrong about the lock-in being a bad move because that has already proven itself to be a success. C-Suite is very happy with this; most players now use Beyond exclusively, disdaining print media entirely, precisely because being in the cloud allows for users to log in and play anywhere that supports the client. The shift to being Vidya is already halfway there, and the profits prove it.
Commercial Tabletop is over for everyone but WOTC. What remains is the lagtime between Cause and Effect. It may take a few years, but it's coming all the same. Only the Clubhouse survives.
The LOLcow has a point that the Cargo Cult refuses to face.
He cut that video on the 29th.
He is entirely correct. There are now far more, perhaps an order of magnitude or so more, Brand Fans than hobbyists.
Wizards of the Coast is not stupid. Cargo Cultists needs to stop retreating to this attitude; the business pivot over the last decade or more, while successful now, is not new. TSR tried this multiple times, including when Gary was at the reigns and before the Blumes couped him out with the help of the Buck Rogers heiress.
WOTC has successfully decoupled the hobby from the only brand name within it that matters, a policy now also being followed by Games Workshop to similiar (one may argue superior) success. There are entire audience segments for Warhammer that will not touch the plastic crack with a 10 foot pole, but read/listen to the books, play the Vidya, buy the merch, and watch/listen to lore videos until the cows come home.
WOTC has begun doing the same thing. Over 2/3rds of Baldur's Gate 3 players will never touch Tabletop, have no interest, etc.; there are people who read/listen to books but won't play anything, and now we have the Actual Play/Movie/TV segment that watch Critical Role or the movies and yet will only ever buy branded merch of some sort as they find gaming of any kind to be low status pursuits for losers.
C-Suite wants all that money, and they are getting it.
This is also playing into the pivot of Official Edition into an all-digital, always-online, subscription-based live service model- ultimately to be done remotely by phone in small chunks, facilitated by bots. It also plays into the planned Brand Crossover campaigns recently announced, following the Fortnite model because it works.
The bifircation is not only inevitable, it is not only here, it has been ongoing for years and only accelerating- and no, there is nothing the Cargo Cult can say or do to stop it because it is working. The shareholders are happy; everyone else gets to pound sand.
This is a game with defined procedures, we can and should get better the more reps we put in.
— JDSauvage: Fabulous PRIZES Contributor (@jd_sauvage) May 23, 2026
Simple as, folks. This is a skill; you can get better at playing the game, so Git Gud. Scoring systems and other feedback make this happen, some with the carror and some with the stick.
Pat reported confirmation of what Wizards of the Coast are doing to Official Edition.
The Temu Tabletop Twats that make up the PDF Merchant front of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play are FUCKED.
This is WOTC weaponizing their Network Effect domination to kneecap the Cargo Cult, as I have previously explained. WOTC is Normiemaxxing. Normies LOVE this stuff; it is far more convenient and easy for them as proven by their Revealed Preferences for them than any other option in the commercial side of Tabletop; the Cargo Cult cannot defend against it because WOTC is where the action is and thus Normies see Cargo Cult offerings as the shit proposition that they are.
Fortnite works because you can just show up and play. Official Edition works because you can just show up and play. Anywhere, anytime, there it is. No Cargo Cult alternative can offer this. They can only parasite off of Official Edition, as it always has, and now WOTC's cutting them off.
Watch for the next step, which is to kneecap the Cargo Cult further by annoucing solutions to Schedule Your Fun that will be what I have described: the ability to play anywhere, at anytime, for as long as they want, from your phone because of bots running the game and filling out the party.
Solving that, and implementing that solution bit by bit, is what is next and thereby close off the Cargo Cult's acquisition funnel. Prospects will refuse to defect because Temu Tabletop cannot do what it was
And yes, Jeffro is still putting in work to make the hobby better.
The weird consensus that emerged across countless tables that the AD&D weaponless combat procedures are unplayable is just completely off the wall. That the complaints against these rules came from people that would dismiss old school era D&D combat as being dull and devolving into people taking turns bashing each other with a sword…? Even crazier!
It really is a shame that people overlooked the awesomeness of these rules for so long. Just think of how uninspiring cavalry charges ended up being in countless campaigns due to people not using the overbearing table!
Interesting video, very illuminating. Some surprising positions are taken here, which I will paraphrase:
You can’t play AD&D RAW.
Characters retire at 9th level due to the lethality of play at that tier.
Delegation of high level NPC’s to players is declared to be destructive to the campaign.
Strict timekeeping… but not 1:1 time. (Players can skip a year into the future to go play in JapanWorld or whatever.)
NPC’s are not active in the campaign world in the same way that the PC’s are… though they are active. They have goals with arbitrary “clocks” set on each stage of their activities. Players see the result of this progress as they travel the world and pick up rumors.
A formal concept of “drift” is introduced— i.e., that the rules of the 45 year campaign necessarily change over time and that the rules of the various long running AD&D campaigns will naturally diverge over time.
The AD&D referee is thus expected to make elaborate house rule additions, use articles from Dragon Magazine including “NPC Classes” and so forth.
Each of these axioms or assertions work together to suppress the emergence of the sort of gameplay dynamics that the BrOSR have championed over the past several years. And based on Rick’s account of his campaign, it sounds as if this framework results in something relatively close to what we call “conventional play” that is sustainable for A VERY LONG PERIOD OF TIME.
Naturally, people would like to know who is right. Rick… or the BrOSR? Phrased another way, the question is “which side in this dispute is playing the game described by the AD&D core rulebooks?”
An in depth breakdown of precisely where and how each side fails to live up to the greatness of those extremely influential rules volumes would of course be very VERY tedious. In any case it would be pointless to go through with such an effort. Because Rick has already announced that he is not even trying to play RAW.
I am not sure that I have heard him say anything like this before. It seems like an extraordinarily strange position to take, though. What could possibly motivate it?
The most reasonable explanation that I can think of is that attempting to play AD&D RAW is going to lead you to play more like the BrOSR than not. And Rick hasn’t been doing that and doesn’t want to do that, so he has now conceded “RAW” to us.
I am glad that he did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZUgeMReBb4
What Jeffro had to say about my article on the Elf City Battle.
Several things to note here:
Braunstein Play generated a unique battle scenario that is unlike anything in any game module.
Player engagement was maintained over a long span of time without the benefit of standard “wargaming” practices as codified by (for example) the varied and well developed products of G.M.T. Games.
The game elements and factions can be anything a player is excited about. No game design or product purchase is required for people to play what they want.
There is a significant population of people that will get better wargaming experiences from these techniques than they would from traditional wargaming products. People don’t need to know much or buy anything to participate in these types of games and it is not terribly hard to get them to keep coming back.
The results of this battle scenario will significantly impact the campaign state and new conflicts and scenarios will develop organically from the outcomes of events spread across the campaign map.
The AD&D combat rules which have been on most of our game shelves for many decades and which THE ENTIRE WORLD said were terrible and which EVERYONE house ruled in the exact same half-dozen ways have qualities which contribute greatly to these people being able to resolve anything that happens in this cutthroat free-for-all.
Combat rules which look smarter or better on paper are not actually being used to produce gameplay of this quality or duration or scope.
And note the painful cognitive dissonance that results from contemplating the fact that nobody played rpgs or wargames this way between 1980 and 2020… while simultaneously rule sets on basically EVERYONE’S shelves pretty well told you what you needed to know in order to do this stuff.
Everything about this is extraordinary start to finish.
The "folk tradition" that sprung up around D&D is not a game. It is a failure to play a game.
There is of course a modest range of well established variations within the tradition. You have innocent children who play pretend while occasionally roll dies or make rough sketches of monsters and wizards. You have unimaginative adults who hide behind a screen and pretend that the players have only just barely managed to beat the big bad evil guy with their last hit point. You have paid actors that pretend to be amazed and utterly dismayed with their coworker improvises a brief soliloquy while their PC bleeds out in a pivotal scene. But these diverse manifestations of the folk tradition have one thing in common: they are not games. Some people are explicitly pretending to play a game. Others are clumsily or perhaps sometimes charmingly tinkering with and playing WITH the pieces of an actual game and occasionally dabbling with some actual procedures from a game. But the activity they are engaging with is not itself a game.
Now, one might be inclined to raise any number of objections at this point. Most of us are familiar with the passages from the rules texts and the accounts from the bad old days that are appealed to in this context in order to lend an air of legitimacy to this "folk tradition". This is of course in vain. Because anyone that is committed to this activity to any degree will tell you that the first rule of this "game" is that there aren't any rules to this game. Only the most imaginative sort of people, they assure us, can look at a relatively complex game, ignore 80% of it entirely, change the rest at will, and then throw out all of the rules entirely during the heat of play because, after all, why would you want to "break immersion" and "kill the sense of dramatic tension" by pausing play in order to consult a rules manual?
This is very persuasive to some, I suppose. And sure, the phrase "playing D&D" is of course today synonymous with all of the hokum and balderdash I have alluded to above. And all of the people that pretend to actually believe these things insist very loudly that they are having a great deal of fun. Nevertheless the fact remains they are not playing a game. And the disciplines of game design and game development have nothing to do with what they are doing and what they advocate for.
The people that make products to sell to such people could be called any number of things, but in no world could they honestly and accurately be described as being game designers. The correct term, I think, would be "hacks".
The Comments confirm his observations about why how you roll your man matters.
The hangup people have over this is that they still think that they are married to their character sheet. That's because they play wrong.
This stops being an issue once you play proper--you play Braunstein--and thus are forced to stop being married to a sheet; the rules of the game force you to play a roster of mans, each of whom is in different places at different times doing different things, and you can add mans to that roster at any time.
Having a roster means you cease to be overly invested in any of them, and being overly-invested is a dysfunction of the hobby that plays right into the rest of the Known Issues in Tabletop.
And there's been consequences in that event's wake immediately that are ongoing and effect everyone else. Players must do more, and players deserve less.
"Genres" are fake, especially in Fantastic Adventure Gaming. While naysayers can claim that universal systems aren't proof, 1990 did see definitive proof that every last Normie on the planet cannot deny and it came from Michigan's Most Boomerific Comic Book Guy.
"Muh Fantasy" is in there.
"Muh SF" is in there.
"Muh Horror" is in there.
"Muh Post-Apocalypse" is in there.
It's all there, all thrown together into a single pot of stew, and in that glorious janky mess of dysfunction that is Palladium it is made crystal clear that it's all just Fantastic Adventure in various shades and grades- nothing making it so blatant as using other Palladium products as "parallel dimensions" or "pre-RIFTS eras".
This is the game that has the no-shit-it's-really-him Old West legend Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (yes, The Sundance Kid) as a significant character along with Boomer Truth Regime Obligatory Nazis, Cartoonish Evil Demons (of various kinds), Space Opera that you'd swear was stolen by Marvel for their own superpowered Space Opera comics (because yes, Uncle Kevin is that old), Barely Legally Distinct Not-Gundams/Not-MADOX01s/Not-Powersuits (from Bubblegum Crisis)/Not-Landmates (Appleseed), and so on along with Not-Jedi/Not-Lensman and such.
That RIFTS is not openly acknowledged as the obvious truth nuke that it is regarding that Genre Is Fake shows how Cargo Cult dogma (derived from the SF Fanatic Cultism, backed up by Lester Del Ray's diktat) is just Commie Demoralization by another name.
