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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Clownfish did another follow-up on what Corpo Game is up to.
As I said to them, alas this is nothing new.
From the source material to the early crossovers (before Lester Del Ray's diktat took hold post 1980) and longer, this has been a thing and it's been as stupid as it is now; there's a reason that TSR went HAM on third parties in the 1980s and 1990s, and not just because they wanted all of that for themselves.
There is one other thing I want to make clear: Wizards of the Coast are just copying the Fortnite model. They're doing it because it works, as we've already seen with its use in Magic.
All the Cargo Cultists are going to lose their acquisition funnel to WOTC because what C-Suite wants the hobby to be is more appealing to Normies, Tourists, and Casuals than what they offer- and this is proof that (a) C-Suite sees where the money is and (b) they have an idea (if imperfect) on how to slowly pivot Official Game to conform to this business model that is orders of magnitude more profitable all around.
Last week, on the 13th, Roll For Combat did a panel about Muh Settings and Muh Mega-Modules.
You will see this repeatedly: admit that both Corpo C-Suite and the Bros are right, then CogDis right back into Cargo Cultism.
Admit that Wizards of the Coast wants to go all-digital, remove all the friction from playing, and switch over to being a Live Service model because it is the superior and proven way to make Conventional Play commercially viable and then turn right around vaccuuming Copium so hard that you'd swear they'd suck a Gas Giant to death in an hour over how they continue to justify their failed model.
Admit that Braunstein is the superior and proper mode of play for the hobby, and then turn right around and talk about Narrative and DMs being petty shits is okay and other Known Issues.
Admit that both sides are superior for meeting the hobby needs of adults with careers and families, and then turn right around and talk about how this hurts product development of the very PDF Merchant dogshit they're continuing to spew out like Jeets shitting on the beach.
Admit that all of the commercial pressures are fucking them in the ass, that WOTC is doing the smart thing on their end (while admitting that the Bros are doing the smart thing on the hobby end tacitly), and then turn right around to snort Copium like Tony Montana at the end of Scarface.
Yuri Bezmenov famously stated that "a person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures, he will refuse to believe it."
He elaborated on this concept in several key ways:
Irreversibility: Bezmenov argued that once demoralization is complete, it is "irreversible" for that generation, requiring 15 to 20 years to educate a new, patriotically minded generation to replace them.
Resistance to Proof: He claimed that even showing a demoralized person "authentic proof" or taking them to a concentration camp would not change their mind; they would only understand reality "when a military boot crashes his balls."
Core Definition: He summarized the tragedy by noting that "exposure to true information does not matter anymore" because the demoralized individual's perception of reality has been fundamentally altered to reject sensible conclusions.
This is what the Cargo Cult does to its True Believers, and just like the Useful Idiots that Yuri talked about regarding Communism there is no future for the Cult in a world where WOTC gets their way (and they will, so far as the commercial side is concerned) and the Clubhouse freezes them out seeking them as the zombies that they are.
Bifurcation is now inevitable, and the Cult is doomed; their own members admit it.
The LOLcow sees what Ryan Dancey saw 26 years ago.
NETWORK EFFECTS, MOTHERFUCKER!
Folks gainsay Garipay here, but he's right: all competitors ultimately feed The Only Game That Matters, which is why they are not competitors at all. This is the old-time Blizzard playbook, and it works.
Dancey published the receipts on this when he announced the OGL back during the pre-release and early post-launch phase of D&D3e; he explained, in person at cons and at-length on forums, how this worked- the very process Garipay explained in his video above.
This is not new. This is how "The Industry" has always worked, because it's a bunch of tinkering twats doing Cargo Cultism because sweet fuck-all know jack shit about game design despite all pretensions to the contrary- as shown by their results.
(The ones that do know anything go into Vidya and actually make a living doing this that can afford children, at most keeping Tabletop as a sidegig like Mike Pondsmith did.)
This is why I immediatley dismissed the Darlings as the flashes in the pan (if that) that they were, along with the rest of the PDF Slop out there, as completely irrelevant; any good ideas--LOLNO--would filter up to The Only Game That Matters in due course.
Just play D&D- and play an edition that actually works. Braunstein is far more relevant and influential that this crap.
My physical copies of Winning Secrets and BROZER arrived on Friday last week.
When this becomes available, you should get a copy. This is, along with BROZER and UMBROS, the (at-present) collection of receipts that combine into a remedial teaching manual for what the hobby of Fantasy Adventure Gaming is and how it works.
First: This is really about 100 Arena devs vs. Hasbro, not D&D.
Second: LOL.
These wankers have no leverage. Hasbro C-Suite will take this action as justification for liquidating these people, outsourcing/H-1Bing/AI replacing their positions, and then a review will see if the corporate structure needs to be shifted around to secure assets against any future liability threats.
What these people do not comprehend is that they are Hired Guns in positions where they are disposable, expendable, and fungible cogs in a machine. This will result in Hasbro accelerating their plans.
When--not if--this is done, there will be the usual wave of performative outrage before Network Effects do their thing and shut them up because they cannot endure the friction of not being in the scene where it is easiest to play. They will bloviate, and they go right back to giving Hasbro money to continue being viable in competitive play.
Don't think the D&D side of WOTC isn't aware of this. They are.
Hasbro is well aware of the liabilities in WOTC's offices and want to remove them. Some already got punted; the rest will go once the business model revision to rely on bot-generated content and art (and cheap labor otherwise) is complete and--as has been the case for 50 years--those self-possessed poseurs who think they matter will find out fast that all they can do is grift on Kickstarter until that goodwill runs dry.
And, quite frankly, fuck all of them.
The Real Game and thus the Real Hobby, being non-commercial, continues on without any of them unimpeded.
This is naked shilling. It might as well be a paid ad.
The Real Game organically generates all the playable content you will ever need.
This is why you don't need modules; the Real Game has everything you need to generate everything required to play the game indefinitely. Stop wasting money on shit you don't need and does not help.
Yes, this means that this hobby is not commercially viable if you're of the mind to think that this is a Consume Product sort of thing; that's Striver Bullshit, and we ain't got time for that here.
It is viable if you think Buy Once, Cry Once, Use Forever is how things work. Alas, that's not how too many in this hobby think. Good thing they're a dying breed.
Different costums. Different set dressing. Exact same story, BEAT FOR BEAT.
Yet they will tell you that these are three separate genres. That can only one of two things; either those specific genres are fake, or the very concept of "genre" is nothing more than a product label the same that you put books separate from shoes separate from toothpaste.
What this is, consistently, is a Drama. That's the substance--the narrative structure--that defines what a story is; too many professionals and wanna-bees mean "product category" when they say "genre" and that's how publishers, distributors, developers--all the business types--see this topic, and they always have.
Too many creatives--such as John Truby--confuse "product label" with "narrative structure" when they say "genre"; if you doubt this, get your library card out and go read Truby's book on Genre.
We see how fake "genre" is again with Appendix N, where Adventure Fiction is split between two equally fake genres: "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction".
"Horror" is also a fake genre.
If they are not real, what are they? The lead in Kristen McTiernan's latest interview makes this plain: Audience Expectation Templates-cum-Product Categories.
And in Tabletop, we have two well-known Brands that prove how fake genre is: TORG and RIFTS. (There are others, but these are go-to.)
It's all the same thing. For us, it's all Fantastic Adventure. That's what we do; the rest is just varations of costumes and set dressing, as the substance--the strucutre--is always exactly the same.
Which is why well over 99% of all Tabletop products can't justify their existence, are surplus to requirements, and and thus have no right to exist and must be abolished.
It feels like just yesterday I was giggling at ChatGPT's goofy attempts to make Magic card mechanics. Now ChatGPT can design a 110-page RPG from scratch and playtest it with simulated players. How long until it can just one-shot a 1,500-page rule set like ACKS? https://t.co/359tqRlarSpic.twitter.com/dxFmOt5Yjh
We can bring harnesses and apps and models together another way as well. I asked Codex to create an entirely new tabletop roleplaying game, basically its own version of Dungeons and Dragons in a fantasy world of its own invention, full of all of the tables and rules you need to play. I also asked it to simulate players experiencing the game and revise the rules based on what it found.
The article where this process gets explained is here.
I'm not going to say that the game is good. Nor am I going to say that it's worth engaging. What this is, however, is PROOF OF CONCEPT.
From Idea to Product in minutes; this is what Wizards of the Coast will use to maintain dominance over the commercial side of the hobby, both for any in-house work and especially to oversee any third party works going forward- it is trivially easy to take the licensor's manuscript, filter it through the Brand Fit filter as a rewrite, and then do some spot-checks before letting it go live on Beyond.
That linked paper comments on what needs to be considered.
In addition to being technically neat, there is a lot to like about the actual content. The setting is interesting and novel, and the rules appear to make sense, drawing on existing game patterns while adding unique elements. However, a closer inspection also reveals the jagged frontier of AI ability is not entirely gone. Every generation of AI models has struggled with actually building long-form fiction. If you are a frequent reader of AI writing you see the same problems here: a love of the uncanny; overly complex ideas that do not fully pay off; weird metaphors (“weather and architecture are the same argument at different speeds”); too many ornate sentences (“the holy things that surface when a sea forgets it was once a road,” is cool once, an entire book of that is exhausting); dialogue where every character speaks in the same clipped tone; and the name “Mara.” So, even amongst all the amazing technical progress, there are still rough edges.
Holdouts are going to lose hard and fast now that it's shown that a professional-quality product can be made by one man in the fraction of the time it formerly did. Remember that Revealed Preferences are Revealed; people only care about the result, not about how that came about- claims to the contrary are not supported by the action that matters. This will lift the floor of what is considered Acceptable Output in all hobby publications, commercial or hobbyist, because the means to do so are now in the hands of common men who need only to learn how to use their words to make the machine do as they will.
This is not just about Tabletop. This is about all forms of media production. The folks crying about it are already being rooked by those that use the tools, making "detectors" and "bans" as useless as broken condoms. There's a reason that Vox Day and Jon Del Arroz can turn shitposts into full product releases within a week, soon a weekend, and have an entire trilogy of novels in digital and print up on Amazon within a month and make serious bank doing so- they know the tools and can strike while the iron is hot to profit on a meme wave while it's relevant. (If you know how Vox writes, that's massive.)
The last refuge for the holdouts is on Prestige Release Formats: high-cost, high-expense hardcover productions with lots of addons (appendices, annotations, etc.) where a single copy is at least $100 and likely some multiple of that. Anything that can be done On Demand just had its pricing crater as a consequence of how fast and easy it is to produce the content that those formats hold and deliver to the end user.
Which means that the already-waning commercial viability of the hobby just got nuked. GOOD.
Not just Vidya. Tabletop too is like this. They just lie about it.
The reason is the same as it ever was: LLMs are such a massive advantage that you AUTOMATICALLY lose against someone using it because they can ship more product faster, find and fix issues sooner, and do so with less human talent.
Retards and hobbyists eschew competitive advantages, and end-users show via Revealed Preferences that they don't care about anything but the results. In media where speed of output is directly and immensely rewarded with user and customer loyalty and thus revenue--Vidya, Tabletop, Novels, Comics, etc.--you are going to see the adopters win and the holdouts lose over time, and sooner than later.
This is why Wizards of the Coast flat-out lied to the audience. They know what it takes, so they're going to do it and then lie about it until the stupidity burns off. Every other would-be competitors is going to do the same thing because that is what the commercial pressure will force them to do to stay in the game; holdouts get pushed out.
What will have to happen for a lot of people is to admit that they are really hobbyists; it is okay to be a hobbyist. Doing it for love of the game, and setting prices to just cover costs, is fine. Long-time readers know that I've said so for years, pointing to Basic Fantasy as the model proving this to be true.
If you want to be a commercial operation, you are going to use LLMs. This is no longer negotiable.
It's okay not be a commercial operation. It's okay to be a hobbyist doing this for fun. It's okay to just cover your costs so publishing isn't costing you money. This is your way out, holdouts: surrender your pretentions of commercial viability and return to hobbyist status. Otherwise WOTC crushes you, and the Clubhouse will not open for you.
Roll For Combat offers its own explanation for D&DTube's collapse.
"We grift on Patreon and Kickstarter, LOL!"
Yeah, that won't last. Just ask The Butterface That Fucked Five Guys And Ended Globohomo.
What is barely touched upon is the confirmation that LOLCow Garipay said: they have nothing useful or interesting to say.
Instead they pivoted towards the insulting proposition that simps on Patreon, Subscribestar, Kickstarter, etc. are so locked in and down that they can ignore YouTube. That is the talk of a cult leader (or wannabee) and not a honest hobbyist, or even an honest merchant and once it becomes clear that the cult leader isn't even Jared Leto levels of charismatic that means they need to deliver and they have nothing.
This guy didn't realize it, but he proved that "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" ARE FAKE GENRES!
TLDR: All that changes are the trappings and the setting. The narrative structure is IDENTICAL so they play out EXACTLY THE SAME WAY!
This is why Andre Norton and Leigh Brackett can write "science fiction" that is really "fantasy" with a bare whiff of justification for the tale's telling: they are both doing Fantastic Adventure fiction, same as Burroughs, Meritt, Moorcock, Howard, Smith, and everyone else in Appendix N.
It's also why Shadowrun is just D&D With Chrome & Guns; changing the trappings and the setting didn't change the substance of gameplay one damned bit.
Dune (and its knockoffs, 40K and Fading Suns) is just a resetting of The Sabers of Paradise (go look that one up).
Star Wars (the original) is The Hidden Fortress plus The Dambusters.
Never, ever mistake a Product Category for a Genre; the former is a Brand Name thing, while the latter is all about narrative structure- seeming vs. substance.
"Fantasy" does not exist. "Science Fiction" does not exist. There are other fake genres; they also do not exist.
First, and foremost, they immediately went all Muh Relativisismsmsmsmsms and Muh Graygoo Morality. That alone makes them incapable of surviving the changes that are upon the hobby; it demonstrates such a degree of intellectual capture that they get rendered fragile due to inability to pivot as required to conform themselves to the environment that they are now in.
But the real killer? Despite being plugged into the discourse, they again show the meme is true.
They maintain the Cargo Cult Just So Cult Non-Game priors. This is why they hold that wrong opinion.
They cannot conceive of proper play, and recoil like vampires confronted with the Cross when they do encounter it, so they expose their capture into this small-minded thinking by their reaction.
They can't adapt. They won't adapt. Therefore they will be crushed as the ground shifts out from under their feet and the weight of Wizards of the Coast's Walled Garden crushes them from above while the #BROSR cuts off their retreat from below, trapping them in the middle where they get squished and killed as a direct consequence of their own willful and proud ignorance of how this hobby really works- the fate these Endless Product Slop merchants deserve.
