The Culture: Normies Are What Drives Universes Beyond

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This past week Roll For Combat showed that most in Tabletop are incompetent and incapable of becoming competent; the pattern of being able to perceive the pattern, and yet remain unable to deduce what that pattern means (aside from C-Suite at Wizards of the Coast, and then only partially so) and adjust accordingly, demonstrate this critical disability that disqualifies all of them from being taken seriously.

What is the persistent pattern over 50 years?

• "D&D" is the only brand name that has any Normiesphere penetration; everything Dancey said about Network Effects continue to be proven true daily
• All forms of adventure are achievable with D&D; the d20 System era proved this conclusively
• Players don't give any fucks about lore or anything else; they just want to kill shit and take it stuff (lorefags do video and read books' they don't play)
• Players hate Not-D&D, refuse to play anything else, and revolt if pushed- hence 50 years of "How do I get them to play Not-D&D?" articles, posts, and videos.
• WOTC, and TSR before that, had this data on hand all this time
• The vast majority of players are Normies who are dead weight boat anchors that should have been kicked out and kept out long before the Death Cult showed up and catering to them has been a colossal mistake

Mike Mearls has been independently confirming all of this.

Why does WOTC's C-Suite have better grasp on this than most Tabletop "designers" and publishers?

Because they see this as a business first. They can take decades of patterns, suss out the common elements, and draw conclusions that they can act upon. Universes Beyond (i.e. the Fortnite strategy) is one of them; throwing all the IPs together so players--Normies--can be whatever they want so long as they keep up their Beyond subscription and conform to platform rules without going outside WOTC's Walled Garden is one of those moves and it is (from their perspective) a smart one.

Why?

It conforms to the persistent pattern of Revealed Preference:

• Everything is "D&D" so everything might as well be officially branded as such and make rules-compliant
• Everything already is adventure by different product labels, so using the same structure for everything works just fine and conforms to Normie Revealed Preference for never going outside of D&D for love or money- Normies Don't Work For Their Entertainment
• Everything is an excuse to hang out, hack stuff, take their shit, and do cool shit for lulz (hence why All The IPs, All Together, All At Once, Everywhere, All The Time works)

We already saw this being successful with the other Normie-friendly IP, Magic.

From the Corporate point of view, which is still slaved to Dodge v. Ford, catering to these Normies and their Revealed Preferences is a no-brainer. The issue, alas, is that doing so means that Normies get used to cover for all sorts of far more pernicious predation and that's what I'll get into on Monday.

The Business: Willfully Ignoring Reality Because Admitting It Is Ego Death

Copium from the Pundit.

He--and everyone else echoing this bullshit--are doing the meme.

Pundit knows that Beyond is all that matters.

Beyond is thriving.

As much as I would rather see Bob The World Sharter exiled to the Sun, his "D&D Killer" video showed conclusively that Wizards of the Coast IS UNTOUCHABLE. Credit where it's due; he brought the receipts proving that there is no competition within Tabletop for WOTC at all- not even close.

This is why I can dismiss Pundit's ponderings. The Network Effect in Tabletop is so dominant, and so solidly in WOTC's hands, that not only are they insurmountable now they are now PERMANENTLY untouchable. In order to threaten WOTC, someone bigger from another business niche has to step in and do to it what it has done to Tabletop. That isn't going to happen, not with Blizzard and Disney in their corner- and, via Magic, other major Brands making strategic alliances with WOTC for mutual benefit.

This is what Oldfags and Cargo Cultists confront daily: utter irrelevance, and with it the death of their egos due to over-investment in the idea that their plucky outsider band can make things happen in the Big Time. They think they're the Rebel Alliance, when--at best--they're this sad sack.

Most are not even that; they're the Faceless Wretches that (deservedly) got yeeted by the Empire.

That's not how Network Effects work. You can't fight and win from without on your own; you can only do so from within. From without, it's purely a matter of size; the biggest Network always wins because the bigger consumes the smaller and digests it into itself. WOTC doesn't fear the Oldfags or the Cargo Cult; it fears Fornite and Roblox- hence Universes Beyond, which is WOTC's attempt to work WITHIN THAT NETWORK EFFECT.

The sooner people comprehend this, the better they will be.

The Business: Come Get Your New Glitter Boy Book

In case you missed it, Uncle Kevin's got a new thing up on BackerKit.

Campaign link is here.

Yes, it's already funded, three times over as of this post, so it's a safe bet.

Best value is the $20 softover with the addon for the Mechanoid book to come later.

Yes, this does mean that even Palladium has to resort to begging these days. Deal with it. Christmas Grab Bag season is around the corner, by the way. Expect those to open up again in a few weeks.

The Business: Mearls Clowns Himself

Funster comments on Mearls confessing that he's incompetent.

TLDR: Everything shit about 3e was there in Current Edition edition, but worse.

Mearls clowned himself twice now, and seeing him try to fob this off as Not Really His Fault is some womanly bullshit worthy of a Gamma Male.

Never hire this man to do jack shit again.

The Business: I Told You This Wouldn't Happen

Bob The World Bullshitter confesses the obvious.

NOT ONE WAS WORTH SHIT!

No, Hololive playing Blaggartheart isn't going to change anything.

There is D&D and there is Nothing, so far as the commercial side goes and mostly true on the hobby side.

Just Play D&D.

The Business: WOTC, Alas, Can't Lose Here

Pundit talks WOTC and Mouse Wars.

Is he correct? Yes.

Will it matter? No.

This will do fine, despite itself, and satisfy WOTC and Disney's expectations. There's more than enough people who will get it, use it (some straight, some after modification), and be satisfied with it that condemnation will do nothing.

And once people realize that they can mix in WOW stuff with D&D and Mouse Wars, that's when It Gets Worse.

The Culture: Of Course Just Using The Tools As Designed Threatens Them

Jeffro made this observation about a Clubhouse article I posted on Monday.

This one fact completely ruins D&D advice videos.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Given what bullshitters like Grifting Beast, SuperPedoMike, and other of that sort are known to do I am not at all surprised that (a) using a real game and (b) letting the tools do the work makes all of their busking bullshit irrelevant.

You can see the workflows in the rules. They do create what Gygax promised when used as directed.

The Culture: Streamers Do Have Value To Vidya Publishers

Been following the WOW Forever beta. The Roach King has been doing more practical testing than anyone else.

Asmongold is on record stating that he thinks Blizzard, at best, tolerates him.

They do need him, as they need all the streamers, but him more than everyone else due to his massive personal Network Effect. If he plays any MMO or similar game, that game sees sales and user engagement rocket off into the stratosphere.

For multiplayer in particular you need someone who can bring a massive network of users with him to stress the servers. Asmongold can and has done this, and he's doing this again now. Every day during this beta he's got 70K+ members in the various Olympus guilds (including Hoelympus, run by his girlfriend Kaise), and they stress the hell out of the servers all day every day.

In Tabletop, we all know of the Mercer Effect being one of the drivers driving the adoption of Current Edition. He is a streamer. Critical Role, and others like is, are all streamer shows. That they do this as a stunt event at cons shows the value of streamers for all entertainment now. STOP BEING DUMB ABOUT THIS!

This is what is required in pushing the needle. You ignore this at your peril.

The Business: No, Becky, Your Would-Be Union HAS NO LEVERAGE!

Grim's not wrong here.

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.

The Business: Show Your Workflow, Designfags

This video is not posted for shits and giggles.

If you cannot animate your game's workflows in a similar manner, exposing your design logic for piss-easy inspection, it's shit and should be refined until you can and do.

Simple as.

The Culture: Tabletop Makers Need To Work Harder To Justify Their Existences

I am thinking of something that should be talked about.

Put away the Theater Kid faggotry and its performative signalling. Put away Braunstein. Put away the Cargo Cult and its stupid norms.

Think like a Normie that isn't in the hobby, but only sees it as the precursor to the Vidya versions. Specifically, think of the single-player adventure game where you control one man, doing things by himself without superpowers or items that emulate those effects. In short, your classic Fighting Man (or a boy growing into one); this is the sort of tale you see in the old days, almost all of which are in the Public Domain now.

What does that game look like?

"That's-"

No, not really. You're not looking at easily scaling things up from man-to-man to mass combat and this isn't a musou so he ain't a one-man army either; if he's facing two on one, he's in trouble, especially if they just pile on like it does in real life- and that's just other men. Monsters can easily be too much to handle even if it's just one of them.

"GURPS?"

No, not really; it, and HERO, are Dev Kit products. They are not games. They are tools to develop ideas into games.

You're looking at a ruleset that gets into the weeds a bit. Like Palladium, this is a circumstance where blow-by-blow matters. Like Traveller, this is a circumstances where you taking a hit is a serious problem. Your Pace of Decision is at the Second level, not the Minute or greater level, because the level of abstraction you're after here is one where what you wear, where your gear it, how hurt/hungry/thirsty/tired you are matters, and all of that factors into your man's performance. This is a level of abstraction that--normally--is anti-thetical to good, satisfying, or proper gameplay.

Yet few products that attempt to get this close to the single man perspective try to be readable technical manuals that Normies can read, comprehend, process, and apply in minutes and in small amounts as required. (Rolemaster being a particular offender here.)

If you're going to insist on publishing adventure game products, the least you can do is justify your existence by getting away from the space utterly consumed by D&D and its Network Effect as well as those already occupied by products/brands with similar status (e.g. HERO, Call of Cthlulhu, Traveller, BattleTech, RIFTS).

You lot need to sit down and think through what justifies your product being independent of those Networks and their Brands. Me doing this think-aloud piece above is that sort of work, because none of them do it well and few of them even comprehend the question- nevermind try to answer it.

Try to answer the question above: "What does the adventure game focused on one adventurer, with no powers, look like?"

Right now, it looks more like Sword World (and that's still a far cry from the answer) than anything else. You need to carve out the niche you claim to champion BECAUSE IT DOES NOT EXIST!

The Business: You Still Aren't Escaping The Bots

Your reminder to not discount Super Intelligence in media production. This is a foreigner with a YouTube channel and access to several models.

Quoting the (translated) description:

"Original Sci-Fi Animation Project: *Space Battleship: Cyclops* – Concept Film.

This concept film was created to bring to life the world and story of an original sci-fi work set in deep space. It is not the main series itself, but rather a production designed to explore the project's world-building, visual style, and narrative potential.

Audio: Japanese | Subtitles: English | Opening Theme: "Zankou no Kanata" (Beyond the Afterglow) | Artist: TR1AD | Planning & Production: Taisho Shin.

*Note: Generative AI was used in a portion of the video production process; however, the project—including planning, composition, direction, and editing—was crafted as a cohesive original video work. © Taisho Shin.

Is there some jank? Yep. Still there. Given the consistency of his character and vehicle designs, I expect that those were generated seperately and then reused as references for the composite shots. Voices were nothing I hadn't heard before; machine translation likely used for generating the subtitles too, explaining some of the tonal oddity in the dialog.

And this guy's an Anglophone who did a pilot.

This is what you can currently do.

Also janky, but you can tell this is already comparable with what the studios in Japan pump out season on season; it's already on the verge of making that business case of cheap and fast animation obsolete and forcing those studios back into higher-end work that takes longer due to quality control to continue justifying their existences, much like the OVA boom did decades ago.

Yet here one guy has a complete pitch for a series or film. The other has a pilot. Not some storyboards. Not a manga chapter. Not some concept pieces and a summary of a light novel or webcomcs. A fully animated pitch trailer or pilot episode, ready for throwing at studios, who can then take what he likely has as his production bible and then immediately accelerate to series or film production.

This, right here, demonstrates at least months and likely years of saved production time purely by showing the prospective production committee what the finish work looks like- and those designs are so friendly to merchandising that you know they'd sell if the full series/film is good and satisfies its audience.

You will have to reckon with this totally wrecking the established film/TV/animation industry within a decade, such that the only alternative that will be viable will be considered "artisinal" and thus solely at the sufferance of patronage to finance their production because it's already this good and only getting better. Expect SI to get incorporated into commercial animation workflows deeply at all stages within a few years, and from there what's already happening in books, comics, and games will come in full force for film and TV.

The Business: Dear God, A Glitter Boy Supplement

Uncle Kevin's still making RIFTS books.

TLDR:

It’s time to suit up — the Glitter Boy Codex is coming soon!

This is the first Rifts sourcebook dedicated to the most recognizable power armor in the Megaverse. 128 pages of pure Glitter Boy glory: history, variants, factions, legendary suits, tech — the kind of high-stakes Mega-Damage mayhem only Palladium can deliver.

Whether you’re a wandering Glitter Boy hero, a mercenary pilot living the dream, or a Game Master who wants to drop a chromium legend on your table, this book is for you.

This is being crowdfunded, but the campaign isn't live as of this post.

The Culture: Captain Obvious Reports From The Scene

This week in Fucking Duh.

Cheap? Nah. Worse (for Merchants, that is).

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.

The Business: Cargo Cultists Continue To Willfully Not Notice

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.

They can't die fast enough.

The Business: Tenkar Tells It Truly

One of the OSR Oldfags confess that their Temu D&D can't be done as a boxed set anymore.

Boxed sets are stupid.

Shut up and stick to books. Maps and so on can be published digitally and made available for home printing or as Print On Demand.

FUCK OFF-SET PRINTING! You're a joke pretending to be a business; you do not have the capacity to absorb that cost. POD exists; use it exclusively for print products.

Or, maybe, you can stop pretending at all and just do this as a self-funded hobby and not worry about all this crap.

The Business: Network Effect Convergence In Action

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.

The Culture: Castalia Publishes The Most Popular Three Kingdoms Version In English

Castalia House continues to innovate.

In this case with machine-aided translation work, making it far easier and thus cheaper to translate non-Anglophone literature into English (and vice-versa).

In the last week, one of the biggest such projects hit the stands: fff

THE EPIC RETELLING OF A CHINESE CLASSIC

Yoshikawa Eiji's Sangokushi is the most widely read retelling of the Three Kingdoms saga ever written. Serialized from 1939 to 1943 in the Chūgai Shōgyō Shinpō newspaper, it was read by tens of millions and has remained continuously in print for over eighty years. Where the original Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a historical chronicle, Yoshikawa reimagined it as a living novel: his Liu Bei is not a symbol of virtue but a complicated man struggling with ambition and doubt, his Cao Cao is brilliant and terrifying in equal measure, and his Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are as vivid as any characters in modern fiction. It is through Yoshikawa, more than through any other writer, that East Asia's greatest epic entered the mainstream of modern Japanese culture and, from there, inspired the manga, anime, films, and video games that have carried the Three Kingdoms story around the world.

The Peach Garden begins in the last days of the decaying Han Dynasty, when the empire is rotting from within and peasant rebellions are consuming the provinces. In a marketplace, a straw-sandal weaver named Liu Bei meets a fugitive butcher named Zhang Fei, and shortly after, a warrior named Guan Yu who is on the run for killing a corrupt official. The three men swear an oath of brotherhood in a peach garden to live and die together, and to restore justice to the realm, then set out with nothing but their pledge and their weapons to make a place for themselves in a world that is coming apart. From that oath, everything follows: the rise of warlords, the burning of cities, and the first stirrings of the war that will tear China into three kingdoms.

This original Castalia House translation is the first volume of a complete English translation of all ten volumes of Yoshikawa's Sangokushi.

Currently available only in Kindle, you can expect a print version to become available at a later date- thought you may want to subscribe to Castalia's newsletter to ensure that you get told when it happens instead of relying on Amazon.

The Business: Expect WOW Forever In Official D&D

Yep, we're still on the BlizzCon beat.

Yes, they're talking a good game.

Yes, they will deliver on what they promised in that panel.

What they didn't tell you is that they are able to do so this fast by taking the code from Turtle WOW, Ascension, Project Epoch, and some other Classic Plus Private Servers when they shut them down and then appropriate it to fit their own Brand Safe version of Classic Plus.

No, unlike Conquest of Azeroth, this will not use all-new classes (I could not die as a Witch Hunter tank by the time I hit 60, and I tried). No, unlike Mysteries of Azeroth, we aren't getting proper High Elves. No, unlike Project Epoch, they aren't putting in low-level transit accelerators (i.e. ground taxis across zones). None of the new zones are those from any PServer and neither are the new dungeons.

But the concepts? Oh yeah. Camping? That's from Ascension. New subzones and their placements? Many are in or near what we saw in those PServers. The remixed classic raids? Totally from Ascension. Hyjal as a zone? Already done in PServers, and as that post-Third War scenario. Adding expansion to existing factions, new Battlegrounds reflecting known flashpoints, etc. are all their versions of what these PServers already proved to work.

It's fitting, after a fashion, that this is Blizzard doing what it was already known for: taking things that work and then polishing them to a Normie-friendly sheen.

And all of it is going to come to Official D&D in the years to come thanks to Universes Beyond. This is the WOW version that is made with Official D&D in mind.

So first you play it virtually, then at your table. Enjoy what Total Memetic Domination looks like.

The Business: Official WOW Classic Plus Confirmed

BlizzCon's going on this weekend.

Blizzard killed Turtle WOW earlier this year, and killed Ascension last weekend (which also killed Project Epoch). That pressaged the arrival of Official Classic Plus, confirmed now.

There's a prelaunch sale going on right now on the official servers with the usual bonuses that are also usable in Retail and/or Classic servers.

This is what would get me paying Blizzard again. Retail is not only too pozzed, but the system requirements are starting to strain my machine until I can upgrade the graphics card. Classic is worthless past Wrath of the Lich King.

And, once again, Network Effects prove their worth. Blizzard OWNs the MMO Network Effect, especially within its own IP. Private Servers are now tolerated insofar as they (a) keep lapsed subscribers in the Network and (b) do the R&D that Blizzard either can't or won't do anymore because holy shit are so much of Forever's offerings exactly what the dead PServers been known for (Undead Paladins was the tell). Let them figure out what works, what new ideas hit, then C&D and shut them down to get their code to incorporate into the official game.

Wizards of the Coast would do that if they could, hence yet another reason for their pivot.