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.
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.
Last Thursday Chubby Funster cut this video on the new Vampire edition.
Aside from dumping the offenders face-down in a ditch or giving them one-way trips to the Titanic, there are ways to gatekeep.
The first, and most obvious, is to (a) stay within the Network by (b) either using a previous edition or (c) putting our your own fork and filtering out those who do not- and making acquiring copies of that edition piss-easy to do. You are competing on pre-existing presence being your means of lowering friction. If your edition is easy to acquire and use than the new crap, you seize control of the Network and now YOU control what Is and what Is Not.
This is how you win: make your edition less frictive than theirs, take the high ground, seize control (and thus the gates), then freeze them out.
The man behind Star Wars Theory put out a fan film that clowned on the Devil Mouse.
I am not exaggerating; compare this to what we saw out of D23 for the new season of Ahsoka and you can see that it does make Disney look poor by comparison. SWT isn't the Axanar gang; he doesn't have professional actors, costuming, practical sets, etc. and the expense that goes with it. He's made a CG fan film, but he did it right and thus it puts to mind the trailers for SWTOR that Blur did years ago- trailers that also clowned on the official live-action media.
This is what is coming.
No, Disney can't stop this- try as they might. The savvy will just lie about it, then upload it from jurisdictions that tell Disney's lawyers to pound sand to ensure that once up it stays up (even if you may need a VPN to access it).
"But Muh Copyright!" stops meaning anything when you have a global Internet and several countries that are more than happy to host this stuff Because Reasons. Couple that with the ready availability of hardware to burn things to disc, flash drives being cheaper than batteries, and all other forms of DIY distribution being available (including Torrents and FTP servers) and you have the conditions for the long-awaited Fan Coup.
Network Effects are real. Fighting within them matters. This? This demonstrates Proof Of Concept, and with it comes the test of what defines Uncle George's Space Opera now that Uncle George has abandoned his creation. You can argue that this should be spent on original creations, but then I must respond with the Enemy's words: "No one will watch it."
The people want the Brand. Now the tools are here for the people to make their own Brand media, and they will with increasing skill and frequency henceforth. Revealed Preferences are Revealed.
It's time to reconsider some games now that we have some practical experience in proper play that allows for Research & Development For Competitive Advantage to actually manifest on the table.
Those two posted above are examples. You can include Heavy Gear and BattleTech.
Because it is long past time to bust another myth- that this is exclusively the province of the publisher.
This is going to play out the same way that mass-manufactured goods trumped the local craftsman.
Normies want The Same, But Different. They want books, movies, music, etc. that are clearly within strict boundaries, but vary within those boundaries like shades of color in paint--Maroon vs. Raspberry, even though both are Red--and as we've seen in physical goods the capacity to churn out mass quantities of the same thing with quality equal to what a human craftsman can make on average always wins in competition.
Book sales prove it, supported by Kindle Unlimited page reads.
This is what the refusniks have to contend with: the Revealed Preferences of Normies have consistently shown that they prefer the mass product over the handcrafted one because, when given the choice, they choose the former over 80% of the time- usually over 90%. The hysteria over AI is just that; when they get the blind test, they choose the bot.
You won't fix this by banning it; the savvy will just lie, the cunning will go where the bots aren't banned and do it there, and you still lose because the bot masters can and will Zerg rush you to win- which is already happening. Full industrialization of literature is here, like it or not.
The only consolation to be had is that achieving the full power of this technology still requires real skill, acumen, and mastery of the craft. You need the eye, if not the hand, to make the most of what this offers. That D&D app that Jon Del Arroz made can be vibe-coded to Minimal Viable Product status, but it still needs a competent coder to go from Viable to Finished.
Most people Thing That Works and as cheap as they can get it. They don't want, and will not buy, a hand-crafted version of what is mass-manufactured and available at Walmart- just ask all the axe and knife-makers.
And the human writers that stand after AI culls the weak? They are going to be those properly conversant with the Old Masters- they are exactly the highly-skilled, well-read, and knowledge-possesed masters who can make the most of this technology.
Which is not most of those whining about it- especially in OldPub.
I look forward to see you drowned by superior bot-manufactured work, because that means we're closer to the literary analogs of Art Nouveau and Art Deco- two styles that cannot exist without mass industrialization and output.
This concept of friction needs to be seen in other contexts to grasp what Wizards of the Coast is after. Let's look next door at Blizzard Entertainment.
You can see that friction is clearly on the mind of the Dangerhairs and Remorseful Trolls at Blizzard.
While what I've embedded above is supposition, it is clearly informed supposition and likely is 80% correct given both present trends and past performance. The Retail game, the one that's all whatever it is coming out of the Political Commissar's Office there this week, is very much a disposable and seasonal game now; you play the patch, not the game, and if it weren't so loaded with Fear Of Missing Out triggers you'd be able to come and go at will (much like FF14).
The argument being made here--that the new Classic rollout is to deliberately silo the legacy audience into their own paypig pen so that Retail can become whatever the Dangerhair Brigade wants it to be without fear or shame (or expectation of shouldering the company, i.e. consequence free if a failure) is mostly correct.
What's wrong is the idea that this is where new players will go. No, that's for Retail.
Why? Retail is being made increasingly frictionless. Normies, Casuals, Tourists- they go where friction doesn't exist. That's why WOTC wants them too. Make your game piss-easy to play--Free To Play, No Scheduling Your Fun, Lots Of Pay For Convenience (that is often Pay To Win in Asian titles; they love to flex like that for some reason)--and Normies (et. al.) swarm you, but are fickle and fair-weather so you need to keep them coming back frequently with new stuff. This is the basis for the Seasonal Model: MAXIMIZED NOVELTY!
If Retail WOW goes this route, all of the things legacy players claim to hate (but, via Revealed Preferences, show that they do not) are going to be maxed out and present trends (such as AI party members) will be fully standardized such as by making their use mandatory for a first-time through an instanced content option (and it will be sold as "The Story Mode"). Crafting, gathering, etc. will be depreciated in favor of doubling-down further on Doing Stuff (dungeons, Delves, raids, PVP, etc.) that can take no more than an hour- and that's for clearing a raid, so for everything else it 30 minutes or less- often a lot less.
In Tabletop, this translates to WOTC pivoting iteratively (drawing it out over years, not all at once via an edition change) to the things I mentioned: AI DMs and party members, gameplay being based on the Encounter and not Adventures or Campaigns (and Encounters being timed at 5-10 minutes so you can do them on a smoke break at work on your phone), paid enhancements for convenience (e.g. pay to Never Fail Saving Throws), and plenty of Branded tie-ins (oh look the Ninja archetype got a new subtype thanks to the Naruto/Boruto collab, and you can adventure out of the Hidden Leaf Village now) to keep drawing in new (and luring back lapsed) players.
Frictionless Convenince means that All Content Is Always Available on the player's side. You want to play using the Newtype rules for the Psion class, have a background with the Swordmasters of Ginaz, be the daughter of Storm Shadow, and fight with a lightsaber? You can, because Restrictions Are Friction and Big Gaming doesn't want to scare the Normies.
Frictionless Convenience on the Referee's side doesn't exist because WOTC's taken the Referee out back, shoved him into the ditch, and shot him in the head. The bots do that now, and so long as what the players want is Brand Safe it's AOK! Sure, the bots can only do what WOTC allows, but most Normies won't go beyond that anyway (and never have) so this is no drawback for WOTC.
This also means that WOTC is, within a decade (maybe within five years), going to be like Blizzard in the hunting down of alternatives.
Unlike Blizzard, WOTC won't be siccing Attack Lawyers on Your Temu D&D. What they will sic them on is attempts to breach their Walled Garden, in the form of trying to make content for The Only Game That Matters, and the Temu D&D crowd will do it because with the gates to the garden being shut and a gatekeeper installed it'll be like USAID money drying up: lots of people who front like they matter are going to start closing shop or lashing out because they can't suck off WOTC's teats or eat WOTC's scraps anymore. They are also going to find out how badly they needed WOTC for acquiring customers because this new Universes Beyond scheme kills their core offering: We Have The Fantasy WOTC Doesn't.
Which brings me back to Ryan Dancey and his 1999 revelation of Network Effects.
Part-and-parcel of that revelation is that Normies don't want to waste time relearning How To D&D. That's because they see ALL of Tabletop as D&D, and every Cargo Cultist pretending to be a publisher knows it- the more honest ones confess it. (Yes, MMOs are still the same way; all of them are WOW.)
Every single difference is a point of friction. Points of friction add up to Quit Moments VERY FAST for Normies. That's why they never take up alternatives, but instead kitbash D&D into what they want- assuming they bother at all, and very few do. They instead just quit the hobby entirely, something that happened with increasing frequency over the last 50 years as competing media began being able to give them the less-frictive alternative media offerings that they wanted out of D&D but did not get. They didn't see any other Tabletop product as something other than a D&D knockoff, so they assumed that they were all the same and thus a waste of time. Oldfags did not do jack shit to dispel this mistaken notion. (They say they did, but their actions proved that they did not.)
This is why WOTC's gambit will succeed if they can figure the tech end out. Now that vibe-coding is a thing, that's far more likely to happen such that I can count on it being the case; the Dangerhairs can vibe-code to Minimum Viable Product state, hand it off to someone who knows what he's doing with code (and it will be a man, since we know there is no woman or Jeet with the skills needed available over there) to finish it as Work For Hire, and then be on call when the H-1B maintaining it inevitably fucks it up (usually by subcontracing it to his cousins back home on the downlow against company regulations and in return for kickbacks).
Yes, there will be the legacy game we know. It will be depreciated in perpetuity, siloed into its own paypig pen (because that's what buying PDFs and PODs on Drivethru is), in favor of the mobile-friendly game where you play by the Encounter and may or may not have other players in your party- like you will know or care, as you're in it for Phat Loot and whatever else counts as high status play by then and they will never listen to your pitches because they're moving between one-shotting Storm Shadow to farm for his sword, doing Ranked in Apex with the boys, stream-sniping Dr. Disrespect in Warzone for lulz, and having Netflix on a second monitor playing at 2x speed- and you want that guy (or gal, or whatever they think they are this week) to show up at a specific time and place to do the same fundamental activity, but slower? Bitch are you high?
No, you Cargo Cultists get Unlimited L Works now due to this.
There is a way out, but that means admitting Jeffro Johnson and the Bros were right about everything and you are nowhere near ready for that ego-death yet.
Therein he posted a video of himself demonstrating his use of Agentic AI. He showed the vibe-coded agent that lets him do solo play of Official D&D.
Sit with that.
This is exactly what Wizards of the Coast is pivoting towards. All of the signs, for over a year now, point this way. As WOTC is Big Corpo, this takes time to execute and not just because they have Danger-Haired Dipshits on staff. The rest of the company's operations need to be brought inline, and then the Narrative massaged to make acceptance of these changes a fait accompli.
Jon showed--not told, SHOWED--how WOTC is going to kill the Cargo Cult.
The reason? Frictionless convenience. That agent is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. It never says "No". It can add additional AI-controlled party members, run sessions wherever on the map and (once mobile-deployed) wherever you get reception, run for as long as you want, all the time.
Cargo Cult Dexters have no leverage anymore. "Not at my table" gets you kicked to the curb; the bot is always there, doesn't cheat, doesn't fuck with the rules Because Reasons, and doesn't play favorites. As Cargo Cultists deal with attrition on the regular, recruiting replacements is required; agents like this kill that deader than disco because you will NOT convince the Casuals, Tourists, and Normies that WOTC targets to put up with friction of any kind once they are aware that agents like this exist.
The Cargo Cult model dies whimpering due to this.
Only the Clubhouse, rooted on Braunstein, can compete because it doesn't try to fight WOTC on its own terms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last Sunday, the 2nd, JD Cowan dropped a post about the Enshittification of Culture.
He saw in that, thanks to the very pretentious faggot at Write Conscious, that the same pattern whereby Commies turned Adventure Fiction into "Sci-Fi" and ghettoized it into a forum for their fetish faggotry got played out across all of the Culture Industry.
The blueprint for the sort of literary takeover that destroyed OldPub is epitomized by the siffy cultists way back in the 1930s, who then seized the industry in the 1940s and turned a market for normal people into their own fetish playground. The pulp revolution over the last decade specialized in the rejection of their frame of "Don't Read Anything Before 1940" to discover just how much fantastic writing was buried for petty political reasons and deliberately left out of print. You can read more about this specific problem in The Last Fanatics where I discovered it for myself as I was writing about it. If one cares about art at all, OldPub is a failure at preserving any of it.
For a more general picture of what is going on now, I suggest the above video showing how the Literary Cartel used the Fanatic blueprint to do the same thing to the wider industry. Books about nothing written to no one and heavily leaning upon gimmicks and the promise of becoming a micro niche celebrity is what the Literary Cartel decided to do to their industry. It's like its own Oprah's Book Club, complete with the advertisement of religious cult figures for whatever ideology OldPub wants to foist on you.
The video in question, by the way:
There is no saving this without exercising State power to seize the industry, cull the enemies therein, replace them with sane people while in receivership, and forcibly reform the industry back into something functional and sustainable that can justify its existence.
Network Effects, motherfucker. You WILL grok this.
What did Dancey say?
TLDR: "Most people only ever played D&D. It's D&D or Nothing."
Then he explained why by introducing, for most of us back then for the first time, what a Network Effect is and how it works.
That's how the Open Gaming License, the d20 System, and the best time for Cargo Cultists to be around and making money came to pass before he got replaced at Wizards of the Coast and Yet Another Retarded MBA Faggot ruined the good thing.
Ryan, as he explained at the time, was being magnanimous. He wanted everyone to enjoy the prosperity that The Only Game That Ever Mattered brought, so he made it piss-easy to play nice; save for a few outliers, most Cargo Cultists did.
What Ryan downplayed, but did not omit, is that most of Tabletop, well past the 80/20 threshold, is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT.
Cargo Cultists did not believe him them. As most of them are Oldfags, they still don't; they think that somehow not being bankrupt and out of business means they are relevant.
Relevant means "Can be found in Walmart or Target, and is readily played by everyone in a manner that doesn't invite mockery by mainstream media."
No one on Stranger Things played Theater Kid Fag Non-Game or Temu Oldfag Houserule Non-D&D. They played The Only Game That Mattered.
That understated fact, backed up by data at the time, was never contradicted after the fact. The one thing that has not been talked about, but plays a huge factor into the strength of a Network Effect, is control over friction.
The holder of an Effect controls competition within the network by controlling the friction generated by non-compliance.
Friction, in this context, is measured by inconvience. Tabletop is notoriously inconvient; if you're a commercial operation, solving that issue is your top priority, and nothing is more inconvient than getting people to play at all followed by deciding on what to play.
WOTC's new pivot solves BOTH. Going mobile-first solves the Schedule Your Fun part; you can play whenever, however. Going All You Can Eat Brand Crossover Buffet solves the what you play part by standardizing the form of play while increasing the options within it.
Going against this increases the friction, exponentially so now that WOTC will be mobile-first, which is detrimental to convincing people to go with your Temu Tabletop offering over Official D&D in commercial terms. Only non-commercial alternatives, which don't compete on the same level, are viable now- and no, that doesn't mean serial busking on Kickstarter. That means going with a different organizational model entirely, such as the Clubhouse, which solves the same problems differently.
Don't take my word for it.
This is, of course, terribly frustrating to those of us who release products intended to be played. But the reality of the network effects and switching costs of RPGs is inescapable. If people didn't buy for art and lore, there'd be almost no indie industry at all.
These people would be better off making this shit as glorified Coffee Table Art Books like Dinotopia, with playable notes as a separate PDF for download.
This is why I say that Tabletop is no longer commercially viable. There is only non-commercial alternatives and delusional Cargo Cultists.
At GenCon, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what I said was the play: the Fortnite strategy.
People do not grasp what this means.
All of the Brand collaboration releases for Magic are allowed in all formats. You want Aragorn and Optimus Prime and Y'stolha Rhul in your deck? You can.
This is exactly what WOTC's target audience--Normies, Casuals, Tourists--want: all together, all in one place, all under one ruleset, all Officially Sanctioned, in a mandatory crossover environment.
That is the Fortnite strategy. That target demo is a Low Agency Demographic. They do not trust Unapproved People. They only trust Brand because Brand is Approved. Brand is Authority.
The Big Deal here is granting permission to these Low Agency people to do what their Revealed Preferences say that they want: to have an All You Can Eat buffet of Approved Stuff that they like, priced cheaply, to play with in the Approved Sandbox.
They will not--have not, never have--just done it themselves. They do not accept the validity of homebrewing. They do not accept the premise of users just doing things. They show, again Revealed Preferences at work, that they need permission from someone they view as the authority on the matter- which in this case is the Brand. WOTC knows this. Hasbro knows this. Their Brand counterparts either know it or quickly catch on.
This goes well beyond HERO allowing Marvel vs. DC fights to be resolved.
As it is in books, so it is in games: NORMIES WANT "THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT" ALWAYS!
That means NETWORK EFFECTS! Who is the Big Dog in Tabletop? WOTC and D&D. What do Normies only play? Official D&D. What does this move do? Load up the only game that matters with all the stuff that Normies want in the only place they will ever look. This is a very full, and growing, Walled Garden. Couple that with the announcement of Official D&D going mobile-first and you can see the plan--the pivot--in action.
All the Cargo Cultists are still deep in denial.
So are a lot of others that ought to know better, but due to those influences still refuse to see reality for what it is.
This is not a Death Of Physical. This is a Death Of Schedule Your Fun. This is a move towards what Normies proved--and have proved for over a century, by Revealed Preference--that they reward: CONVENIENCE AND FRICTIONLESS ENGAGEMENT!
Being mobile-first means that they can and will play Official D&D at work on their breaks, between doomscrolling binges, on their commutes, etc. and they will happily drop a fiver on a new race, class, etc. if it means they get a leg up on everyone else at the table. All that remains are the AI-controlled bot players and Referees.
Yes, you will live to see Snake Eyes, Optimus Prime, Estiniam Wyrmblood, Cloud Strife, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Tirian Fordring team up against Abaloth the Devourer in an official D&D module and the Normies will eat that shit up, making WOTC and their partners BILLIONS.
And because of this, "RPGs" will be defined as "Officially Licensed Brand Crossover Let's Plays".
No one will ever look at your Temu D&D again.
Commercial viability outside of this is OVER. Yes, even for Palladium; they'll just be among the last to die.
While I have little respect for Glickner, and none for that goblin with the receding lairline that shits out copy for him, that Derek guy gets it right more than not and Glickner if he in his very narrow range of expertise tends to be right half the time.
Derek said that Hasbro would push WOTC to spread their Fortnite strategy in Magic: The Gathering to The Only Game That Matters. WOTC is doing exactly that.
This is going to work. It worked for Magic. It will work for Official D&D because WOTC's target audience--those hopelessly yoked to Beyond--are exactly the sort of Casuals, Tourists, and Normies that want to do The Current Thing and have no problems treating D&D like an all-you-can-eat buffet.
They want it all. They want it in one place. They want to pay one price to get all of it. They want one set of rules to play all of it. That is the Fortnite and Roblox model AND IT FUCKING WORKS! They know it works because they have the data showing that it works, and they have sufficient institutional knowledge of what Network Effects are, how they work, and why they work that way to prove that this is the smartest strategy for them, Commercial Corpo Tabletop.
For the hobby as a whole? That's a different question.
Being that RFC is made up of Cargo Cultists, they cannot fathom why despite acknowledging that this is going to work and work like gangbusters there is no viable form of competition within the commercial sphere- and that includes everyone that begs on Kickstarter for money.
To the extent that they are played at all, it is because they are within D&D's Network Effect and leverage that to their advantage. That said, they aren't played nearly as much as boosters and publishers want you to believe; none of them solve the Six Session Suckout, the dropoff of interest is akin to that between Normal and Savage raiding in FF14-
Not exaggerating; that sort of "Fuck This Shit I'm Out" has been consistent across the generations, as Ryan Dancey revealed over 25 years ago. The Brand matters, as it is the heart of the Network Effect.
This is why Only D&D--real D&D--Can Kill D&D.
So just play D&D--real D&D--and leave the poseurs selling Temu D&D behind.
Here is the evidence we do have:
There were a number of campaigns being run was TINY. The expertise of setting them up and running them resided in a SIMARLY SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE.
All campaign instruction documents before AD&D were rough prototypes. No earnest development could have occurred because each campaign was distinct from all others in its theme, concept, and scope.
The people playing in these campaigns may have some nice war stories. But they have no idea what was actually going on due to the rules being entirely in, for example, Dave Arneson's head. (This is the “just asked Wesely” cultural ethos of the era.)
Any commentary on 1:1 time type rules will immediately give you insight into the level of understanding of gameplay dynamics a person has. (See Lewis Pulsiphers's remarks on that from an old White Dwarf magazine as a PRIME example.) We have published material that shows that key figures were unfamiliar with second order effects of the rule and what type of play structures it could feasibly support.
Wargamers of the sixties were not a preliterate culture. Many of them are still alive today. What did they do when there was a resurgence of interest in campaign play? Did they suddenly decide to show up with the “practice and demonstration and mentorship and play reports and conversations at the table” that would help us achieve success at the table?
NO THEY DIDN'T.
In fact, they did the opposite of all that. They elected to outright oppose the efforts to recover campaign play. Because “not even Gygax played that way”, “only David Wesely can run a Braunstein”, etc.
AD&D was the first time in history that anyone elaborated on the subject of campaign play dynamics at all. Apart from Gygax, every one of these “preliterate wargamers” walked away from the very game rules that even make such campaigns possible.
They didn't know what they had. And there would be evidence to the contrary if they did.
The Oldfags, too many of whom being Boomers, did what Boomers do and refused to pass on their patrimony.
The worse part is that what Jeffro describes here is something I've seen across the board from Boomers over the years. It's not just a Tabletop thing. They genuinely do not comprehend why they do (or did) what they did, only that it works/worked that way (at the time) so of course it always does so what's the problem? Why bother questioning a damned thing? It Just Works That Way.
This is why they get mad when you show the receipts. You are telling them, to their faces, with facts and evidence, that no It Does Not Work That Way You Fucking Retard and had you bothered to Read The Fucking Manual and properly comprehend--work through--what you read you'd be agreeing with us and not being an arthritic anklebiting asshole.
Now you know why I've come to call them "OldFags".
And those who echo them might as well be Oldfags, so they get the brush too.
The LOLcow gets it. Too many Cargo Cultists refuse to see it.
He didn't say the phrase, but he does comprehend Network Effects. In particular, he comprehends the key element of a Network Effect: control over friction.
Conformity to the Network's dominant party is how and why Wizards of the Coast gives no fucks about the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play; they set the rules, and they know because they have witnessed it in action FIVE TIMES in 27 years that all they need to do is inflict some pain via ramping up the friction on the non-compliant and all other parties will bend the knee.
"But Palladium-"
Is a D&D Knockoff and always has been; it is in the network, run by a man who still thinks it's 1980, which is why people come and go between D&D and Palladium.
Paizo's deep in the shit and unlikely to survive. Lots of other resentful bottomfeeders are in the same boat. Palladium will endure because its flagship took over the space vacated by Gamma World, until its Boomer founder finally fucks off and his successors somehow screw the pooch.
There is no future pushing product. There is only a future in providing a service.
WOTC's pivoting to a service model.
Everyone else is getting crushed, and those not yet showing signs do so at the expense of their neighbors- staving off the inevitable. Things are playing out as I said before; this is an Outside In collapse, an implosion, taking those furthest out first as the frontier collapses inward towards the core in an implosion function.
What WOTC wants is everyone else serving The Only Game That Matters. This is more benevolent than it sounds; a truly Full Corpo regime would pursue extinction of other parties, but WOTC instead wants subjugation in perpetuity and by transitioning the Network Effect into a Walled Garden via Beyond (already the case) this is enforcable in the same way that inflicting a curse does- at a structural level.
WOTC wants to offload the costs of product support to external parties, but retain most of the revenue (and thus profit) from that product support.
They're going to get it because as most Casuals, Tourists, and Normies only go to the dominant party in a niche that means they only use Beyond and thus are readily captured by the Walled Garden. That market vastly outsizes everyone else, and they outspend everyone else (as they are conditioned to be mindless consumers), so WOTC will have the leverage needed to keep everyone else in line. If you want to pay the bills doing this going forward, you are WOTC's bitch.
Unless you seek out the Clubhouse.
(Side Note: UMBROS is now available as Print On Demand via Lulu.)
Remember what I said about the private server scene being the MMO equivalent of Tabletop's Retroclone movement?
Well, we just saw yet another expression of that being the case. Yesterday, Project Ascension launched their latest game mode: Conquest of Azeroth.
Since a lot of you are neither current nor former World of Warcraft players, I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I'm playing Ranger and Witch Hunter right now and enjoying it. I tried Barbarian during the pre-launch Stress Test, which took a bit to figure out but also turned out fine. Trying the new Support role with the Ranger class. Can't say about the rest.
What I want to explain to you is this:
There are Vidya analogies to Tabletop issues.
World of Warcraft is the D&D of MMOs.
Due to long-running antagonism to its legacy audience, there's been splintering that lead to cloning of past editions; this would lead to official Classic realms, but that was not enough, and neither did the recent Remix limited-time servers do that either, but rather a "Classic Plus" (Vanilla with different decisions implemented, and more content added) is what folks want.
Private servers fulfill this demand- as retroclones do for people who want their specific flavor of B/X (etc.) put into a single plug-and-play product. This is mostly a WOW thing, but private servers are also how dead MMOs carry on (e.g. Star Wars Galaxies).
Blizzard has become more hostile to this over time, and operators are becoming more savvy about protecting their operations- and not just in immediately rebranding and relaunching after a shutdown (as Turtle WOW did, twice). Other corpos are no friendlier.
Network Effects dominate MMOs harder than they do Tabletop, as Josh Strife Hayes proved a while back, so the only viable way to compete is to fight WITHIN the Network Effect.
Therefore, only WOW can kill WOW- and thus a superior private server is a threat to Blizzard.
Due to the nature of the medium, and the specific game, something like the Bros happening is going to take a different form than it did in Tabletop.
Instead you're seeing OSR, not BROSR, insurgencies; they're doing the retroclone thing because that's what works. Some wipe their asses with IP law (like Ascension), some pretend it's real and do the "legally distinct" thing, but both of them are doing clones of MMOs with proven audiences because the risk calculation of MMO launching for anyone that is not Le Big Corpo now is too high to be acceptable- and recently failures only doubled-down on that perception (Ashes of Creation also being outed as a scam).
That's why the real expansion is in competing with the dominant Networks from the inside, and as private servers have already proven to work they're going to keep working.
The next step will be to find a way to make a WOW server that finds a way to do Braunstein style play--which, in this context, means somewhere between EVE Online, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot by way of Guild Wars and its sequels--as was done in many a MUD before that.
And the crazy thing is, I bet some guy--and it's going to be a guy--is going to be the one to take things like Winning Secrets and find a way to make that happen.
>Me as Ferigno vs 2 faction leaders and MU3 riding a bronze dragon (also a faction leader) >win init, cast fireball on riders, 32 damage >MU3 reacts quickly and absorbs spell into Staff of the Magi he held >staff is already at full charge, explodes and does 204 damage to all https://t.co/3dVjdrbHUK
Go ahead, Conventional Play, try to reproduce this organic campaign-changing event by your own practices without resorting to Narrative Logic and thus to forcing results.
You can't. You cannot reproduce the occurance of three faction leaders attempting, and failing through their own incompetence, to kill one mutual enemy leader because you will not ever hand faction leaders over to players to play, and you will not let them engage in PVP combat, so you have to do your Theater Kid agency-nullifying moves to badly ape the result; Uwe Boll does this better than you.
You also can't comprehend this happening away from the table, or with someone else running things while you handle another group's actions, with the results having impact upon everyone else- if not right away, then shortly thereafter as consequences at the Second and Third Order manifest and fallout forces changes in the State of Play.
You Cargo Cultists cannot comprehend this being in players hands to determine. Meanwhile, we who deal in Braunstein do.
