When the GM’s whim overrides the written rules, the rules stop being a system to engage with and become a set of suggestions that might matter or might not, depending on the GM’s mood. Players learn quickly that deep understanding is wasted effort. Why study the mechanics when the GM can nullify them with a shrug? Why plan a clever strategy when the GM can “adjust” the encounter on the fly? Why worry about how the dice land when the GM can override them at any time? Why question inconsistencies when the answer is always the same: “Because I said so.”
Get your shit in order. Then your game will stop sucking.
The #BROSR blogs and publishes the receipts proving it.
And yes, Jeffro is still putting in work to make the hobby better.
The weird consensus that emerged across countless tables that the AD&D weaponless combat procedures are unplayable is just completely off the wall. That the complaints against these rules came from people that would dismiss old school era D&D combat as being dull and devolving into people taking turns bashing each other with a sword…? Even crazier!
It really is a shame that people overlooked the awesomeness of these rules for so long. Just think of how uninspiring cavalry charges ended up being in countless campaigns due to people not using the overbearing table!
Remember what Arch did yesterday? Hilary Lane comes in for the layup.
The reality is that Public Relations professionals--the secularlization of ancient cult indoctrination techniques--knew this over a century ago; again, read Propaganda by Edward Bernays and Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (they're the two founders of Public Relations, the category that holds Advertising and Marketing as jobs).
Pay attention to her usage of a woman's perception of Korean men being warped by K-Dramas as an example. This is how Public Relations techniques can create an illusion of How Things Work, and if the systems of everyday life don't match up to the illusion then that disparity becomes the liminal space wherein weaponized resentment becomes the festering wound from which Death Cult political action roots itself.
Yes, this is how Hannah the Post-Wall Heifer gets radicalized (an irreversible process, like Chaos Corruption) into voting for Death Cult people and policies so long as they can hold out believable promises to guarantee that Hannah gets a state-mandated K-Drama Korean man issued to her for her enjoyment.
Hilary brings the receipts. She shows the troon in Minnesota justifying child access to porn (specifically child porn) as being necessary and proper for the cultivation of troon identity. Talk about giving away the game.
Watch it. If you are an honest man, you will see that she is indeed right- and the tell is that all the right people are furious with her.
This is becoming more than just about porn-addled shitlibs Hannahs.
If I'm posting Doomcock, it's not to signal-boost him.
No, this is not about how bad this Fake Trek is anymore than how bad Mouse Wars is.
What I am going to put to you is that those of you thinking that the demolitions of these franchises (and others) by the Death Cult are coming to an end are going to be disappointed. No, not for the very obvious reasons--the replacements are acolytes of those departing, so it's only going to get worse--but for a reason that only David Stewart (and myself) have said: The Normies are not going to abandon the Brand.
Normies do not go out of their way for a damned thing, and Normies do not trust anything that lacks the (seeming of) institutional support. They'll keep coming back to these two Brands because they are The Ones That Matter; Your Favorite Not-Film/TV Thing does not matter because that support does not (seem) to exist.
This is the vain hope akin to all the D&D YouTubers thinking that Wizards of the Coast are fucked and Current Edition is dead.
You are not getting that Netflix deal. You are not going to be scouted by Hollywood (or its counterparts elsewhere). You are outside the Normiesphere, and because you are outside that bubble you do not exist.
The fight for the culture is fought in the Normiesphere. That's the battlefield, because the Normies are both the prize and the battlefield; they, as an aggregate, determine what the culture is by what they consume and demand. This is why AAA Gaming matters, while Indies (outside a few Noticed By The Dorito Pope) struggle to make headway, and so on.
It's why the Death Cult seized, and holds, the gates separating the Normiesphere from Everything Else.
How then to deal with it? I've told you this several times before; it applies to all cultural elements.
You want to fight? You have to do so FROM THE INSIDE!
This is why The Orville matters while Your Totally Original Take On The Premise, Really, You Mean It does not. The Orville has institutional support, and thus is within the Normiesphere; your Indie Darling does not, so it is not, so no one sees it and thus it has no impact on the culture.
It is not enough to do good work. It is not enough to get good word of mouth. You have to be seen by the Normies to matter. That means finding a way into the Normiesphere and hijacking the Network Effect to your advantage. Seth had good relations with FOX, so he got to do his Trek Fanfic Show. Vic Mignolia had some acting pals, some time, and some money so he could do his his own Trek Fanfic Show which got an audience and even Shatner's approval of Vic's performance as Kirk.
This is where we are now, like it or not, and the enemy knows it; that is why they are relentless about seizing and holding Brands and gatekeeping the Normiesphere- and it's why they are so relentless in pursing any they don't control (see the recent fuckery regarding 40K). They can only rule when they have Total Narrative Supremacy, so they have to have Total Media Control across the board- not even your hobbies and passtimes are exempt.
The good news is that it is possible, increasingly, to cut the corpos out of the loop entirely and hijack the Network Effect for ourselves. The release of generative AI means making your own Brand stuff is easier than ever, and it's not hard to do better than incompetent Death Cult corpo crap. Just take a look at how fans clown on the Mouse. Even the shitposters mocking it all are putting out better stuff than the Mouse, and because it has the Brand Normies will watch it.
Fight where the war is, not where you wish it was. Fight in the Normiesphere, inside the dominant Network, where the people that matter will see it and care about it, and seize its Effect for your own advantage.
It also means that creating outside the Normiesphere now must be done for its own sake, and as that realization hits expect a lot of people to GTFO and go where the action is.
This is where I remind you that there is a professional side to the hobby.
That's right, the counterpart to travelling around the map and swording monsters for their loot is military training for warfighting officers.
You want to know one of the many reasons for why I say that this is not a Narrative medium? Here you go: this is the civilian-allowed counterpart for what people get paid to do, and (as our host Perun notes) when they fail to learn from it massive fuckups that wreck lives for GENERATIONS happen. Yes, the better ones also account for small factors (i.e. PCs in our parlance) operating on their own for their own ends, but that's unfortunatly rare these days and its shows in the results.
This is what Braunstein grew out of. This is where the hobby comes from. It is only right and proper to conclude, and the receipts prove, that the hobby is a wargaming hobby where those who engage in it properly gain acumen and habits that serve to improve their daily lives and career prospects.
This is why I have no patience for, or tolerance of, the naysaying wannabee novelists and pixiefucker degenerates crying how this isn't "fun" (i.e. a consequence-free power fantasy) or "a story" (i.e. their Mary Sue masterbation fodder). This is a game; games have rules and procedures that determine what you can and cannot do, and games have winners and losers determined by who hits what Win Condition first. Being a 52nd Level Troon Gooner punching the minions of Hugo Boss in the neck does not change that. Neither does changing the rules Because (Bullshit) Reasons mean that you're not a cheating faggot that should have their hand chopped off (like they used to do in Vegas).
"Nazi" and "Fascist" are just weaponized words. Appeals to morality are just weaponized attacks using our decency against us. Yet, as the British discovered over the last weekend, they are not the majority that they pretend to be and when that becomes apparent to them they freak out and start reverting to type: instant appeals to hard power, if they control State organs, and outright criminality when they don't.
They didn't kill Kirk from a position of strength. They killed him as a stopgap move due to weakness; the reactions--including Trump agreeing to make Antifa a designated terrorist organization, something that has far-reaching consequences--are the revelation of this fact.
And Sam Hyde made it plain: either we get them now, or we're dead.
The first two or so minutes of Sam Hyde’s new video is probably the most powerful video content ever posted on this site. Not a single word of this superfluous. If you haven’t watched the full video, watch it now. pic.twitter.com/4dtKM5OWwT
We cannot co-exist. They have declared it so; there is no turning back now. There is only war. If our State power and majority status is not enough, then we'll be forced to do it ourselves the hard way. It won't be the first time.
Fortunately, the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization is exactly that war mobilization.
Years ago, back during the Gamergate days, I said that the final line of defense for the enemy was the banking sector. I am now being proven right.
This is not just bitter bloated bitches screetching into their husbands' ears to add this or that to the Mastercard-10 List (the list that says "LOLno payment processors for you").
This is part of a larger pivot within the institutional positioning of the Death Cult and the Mammon Mob, seeing that they can't poz Eastern media before it eats their lunch, so they are reacting by choking off access to enemy offerings across the board as fast as they can.
Millenial Woes did a good essay about this shift in the enemy's consensus due to a combination of institutional dominance and social/economic incompetence. Go read it. It's generally uplifting, but not without caution; because the enemy has hard power, and it now feels (correctly) threatened, it is using that hard power as hard and fast as it can.
Cutting off the non-compliant from payment processors is what we're hearing about now. Flat-out banking access revocation is next, and remember that in many places in the West you cannot use cash to pay for things anymore so a loss of electronic banking access is tantamount to having your money stolen. Most people cannot withstand that pressure. The enemy knows this; they engineered the system specifically for this reason- and hate Crypto, as well as cash and workarounds like what Gab and Unauthorized use, accordingly.
It's scary. It's going to harm people. It's stil a sign that we are winning. Take heart, praise God, and pass the ammunition.
MentisWave had to remind people that Woke Is Not Dead.
Trump can't do all the work. Some of those bodies need to be piled on by us.
This means that the war isn't over, that we cannot relax, and that we must instead press the advantages we have to continue the fight until this enemy that seeks our very extinction--their words--has instead suffered their own; they are the Terminator, and we remain on Death Ground.
This video article talks about Marvel and Mouse Wars, but this is not confined to those franchises.
TLDR: The young men of the emerging generational cohorts (the Zoomers, and soon to be followed by Gen Alpha) tuned this crap out.
Turns out that when you say "We don't want you!" they listen and go elsewhere. Now that's being felt at the bottom line, with more and more failures. What WDW Pro did not address is that this same thing also applies to the rest of Hollywood, the rest of Western mainstream media (e.g. the failure of Doctor Who), and in Vidya and Tabletop.
The Culture Industry, as controlled by the Death Cult and backed up by the Mammon Mob, relies on Millenials and Gen Y; these are the cohorts now moving into institiutional power in the West and slowly taking over from the Boomers and Jonesers.
What Brian Niemeier said--that the Boomers are handing off to the Millenials as their meme clones--is coming to pass; the other displacements are part-and-parcel of this process.
Go figure that those frozen out are deciding that they can just go where they are treated best instead, and there are places where they are wanted--valued, treasured--out there. Only now is the Death Cult noticing, and boy are they freaking out over the idea that their designated punching bags can escape from the prison prepared for them. You want to know why there is renewed censorship being pushed? This is part of it. You want to know why there is increased detontation of the economy for them? Here it is. TINA must be enforced or the Death Cult loses.
Tabletop has done worse than tried and failed. They did not try at all. Vidya, at the very least, tried and failed to reach the young adults.
The problem is that Tabletop is in a situation similiar to, but not indentical too, what happened in OldPub: ideological capture, supported by the Mammon Mob, calcified around Millenial/Gen Y segments suffering from Troll's Remorse and other vectors for becoming pozzed as Boomers did to the mainstream entertainment industry in the 1980s when they seized control.
The result is that more and more of the existing audience check out of the new releases outside of the core franchse (i.e. other than The Only Game That Matters), such that even Le Indie Darlings no longer move the needle- despite all the chatter claiming otherwise. The data makes it clear that there is only competition within the dominant network and its associated brand; everyone else, even ones that can claim a following of any size, are irrelevant--no one outside of Tabletop cares about RIFTS, despite 35 years of it being in the Top Five, and the same goes for all other brands--
The only big change was the adoption of Virtual TableTops as the norm for play, which--despite Sigil failing--WOTC did achieve to further enhance Official D&D's position of dominance; most people refuse to buy anything they can't use on a VTT (especially WOTC's D&D Beyond), and WOTC's been slowly pushing everyone over to the most recent revision of Official D&D. (That's why Foundry, etc. are so popular on Steam and why Discord/Guilded is so widely used.)
The retroclone push began over a decade ago. That slowed, but did not stop, with Current Edition, and especially as the Old Ways regenerate the hobby the experiences young men crave will draw them in just like Roguelikes and Soulsborns did. The Great Retrenchment means that those young men, if they play at all, will play the older editions because that is where the experience they seek can be done. Just play D&D.
That's right, Temu VOTOMS has a third Vidya adaptation in the works now.
Good question.
I posit this as an answer: Those Quebecoi Andys actually did the smart thing with the post-3rd Edition collapse and refocused on a Brand that could be salvaged. This lead to a refocus on the origins of the Brand as a skirmish-scale wargame (Blitz) which led to a spinoff (Arena) while keeping old material available as PDFs and POD offerings. This decision satisfied two of Dream Pod 9's desires: the desire to rebuild the Brand back to something that breeches the Normiesphere (and it did; there were PC games and a TV series) and compete with BattleTech (which it does), and the desire to use Gaming as a backdoor into the more popular and profitable Narrative media industry.
What you see is exactly that happening. That's why there was big hype for the 4th edition of the Tabletop adventure game two years ago, and now this new Vidya adaptation.
What you don't see is Dream Pod 9 learning why that collapse happened: using the wrong medium for the job. You also don't see Dream Pod 9 realizing that they, like FASA and its successors, are going to run into problems if they get too big for their britches because the owners of Armored Trooper VOTOMS want a Western audience.
Dream Pod 9 is going to have a bad time in court if the owners or desigated agents thereof decide on lawfare. This won't be like G-Dubs going after MCA Hoegarth over "Space Marine"; Prior Art is not on DP9's side, and the resemblace is brick-to-face obvious to casual observors--the Reasonable Man standard--so they're relying on the hope that they are sufficiently Legally Distinct to not get bent over in a courtroom, and that presumes an American or Canadian court. Japanese? Nope; they're fucked. Somehow I doubt that DP9's corporate structure is sufficiently robust to make such events irrelevant. (That's a hint, you Temu Frogs; you have enough to make it worthwhile so do it already, and he does take Canucks like you lot as clients.)
Over at the Clubhouse I'll talk about how Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Gear Krieg,, and CORE Command should be used- and thus should be developed, published, and supported.
Last night, Dunder Moose did an After Action Report on his experience with Horde Wars and we got a preview of Dropship.
This After Action Report has commentary from all sides. You'll want to see this to get how Fog Of War matters in ensuring that players are playing property, and to get a sense of how despite having plenty of power your man can still get got if he's unlucky or you play stupid.
Dropship is Man-centric Space War Adventure. The potential exists for this to be a replacement for other titles in that niche: 40K, BattleTech, Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, etc. and that's going to be a viable value proposition for a lot of people out there right now.
If you've seen previous livestreams about either game, you'll know that this is a fast-moving action game that delivers on that fantasy of heroes against big odds; you want your Seven Samurai, here you go. (Dropship if you want that Starship Troopers experience.)
You can get Horde Wars Advancedhere and Dropship will be available Soon(TM).
Also, the man behind these games is also behind the upcoming history tome: "Dungeons & Dragons: An American Institution". You can support that here.
Five sessions in, and my impression of RECON 1e is that it could be used as a core system to trim the fat off of Palladium/Megaverse.
Only 3 main attributes. Combat uses the same percentile mechanic as the nonweapon proficiencies. Impact grid for area effect weapons.
Minimal tinkering, and it could handle almost anything in the setting."
It's Palladium. Not only is this permissible, it's necessary because Uncle Kevin can't be bothered to make a complete and coherent product- nevermind a real game. Quoting JD:
"Word to the wise, AD&D 1e this is not.
There is 0 support for 0 prep play.
Do your homework."
And yes, this does mean that Tabletop's been doing this scenario better for decades. AD&D1e + Gamma World 1e is a good enough mix to do this premise, and there's plenty of other past products published that address the premise directly. Some of them are even playable.
It also means that, given the same prompt, hobbyists will ROFTstomp the Del Ray Empire flat within weeks and then celebrate.
Harmony looks so happy in that clip, doesn't she?
In the meantime, go read Forgotten Ruin. They even made their own tie-in game.
"Walker, why did the Death Cult go so hard on Tabletop?"
I'll let Feral Historian answer that.
The Death Cult needs Clout. Cultural Relevance generates Clout. The Cult cannot generate Clout; it has to parasitize Clout-generating things to use Clout to push the poz.
Whe is something relevant? When it becomes Above The Fold and breaks into the Normiesphere bubble, getting into their faces and insisting upon itself.
It's that last part in particular the the Death Cult wants because the Cult, being a totalitarian ideology, must establish and maintain TINA: (T)here (I)s (N)o (A)lternative. That means, in practice, it must not only insist upon inself it must crowd out all possible alternatives. Tabletop in particular is vulnerable to this due to any given product being wholly reliant on the size of its user network for its value, and the Cultists at Wizards of the Coast would have gotten away with it had D&D in particular not breached the containment of any legal owner and become an egregore to itself.
Believe it or not, but 40K is already most of the way to that point now. It just needs sufficient viable alternatives to Official Edition to finish that transformation. (By contrast, World of Warcraft has also made that transition due to proliferation of private servers permitting containment breach.) Once done, it cannot be taken by the Cult because it cannot be taken by anyone anymore than one can take a tidal wave or a thunderstorm.
That moment has peaked.
The colony drop will destroy so much Death Cult infiltration by destroying what they used as propaganda fronts. While the biggest endures, it has lost control of what it attempted to turn; the same is playing out now in tabletop wargaming, and soon we'll see it happen in other tabletop gaming niches (you can just do things, like make your own cards or minis).
The Clubhouse will stopgap the hobby, preventing this from happening again, once it's all over.
He didn't mince words. This is the end result of Gramasci's Mark Through The Institutions and its generations of multi-level Narrative Warfare, with the explicit intent to invert all morality in order to make possible their seizure of power and extinction of enemies.
Yes, extinction. Unlike others in Modernity, these folks understand that if your people are the only people then your paradigm--and thus power--is the only one. Everyone thinks the same way, so they act the same way, because you can't act on thoughts you don't have.
They are fanatics. They always have been. They always will be. They insist upon themselves, and they react so strongly to depictions of demons and bugs (and other monsters of a similar sort) because those fictions expose their true form to the audience- and they, moreso than anyone else, comprehend the power of entertainment media to shape thought and opinion.
They hate 40K because they see what happens when people think at all about how the Imperium is correct to be what it is. They seized Trench Crusade because it holds the same truth despite all that they have done to confuse it. They hate DOOM and Frieren because both show that there is only guaranteed way to solve the problem they present. They deliberately insist upon BCE/CE because they hate God (which is what changing the label, but not the basis for it, signifies) and wish to confuse people's ability to know why that distinction exists.
They know what they intend to do--are doing, slowly--to us: extinction and replacement. They therefore fear that this will be done to them as a justified defensive measure, like the Crusades were, so they are desperate finish the job. Except that they can't, not in time.
Arch, in the main, is right: they did overextend as a direct result of fanaticism. However, that same fanaticism is what allows them to regroup every time because what is required to permanently solve the problem is never done- and they tell you EVERY SINGLE TIME what it takes, yet no shot-caller believes them and that results in today's victory becoming tomorrow's genocide.
Why do they hate 40K? Because 40K acknowledges what must be done. Why seize Trench Crusade? Because it acknowledges what must be done. Same with DOOM and Frieren- and once that is acknowledged by a critical mass of people with agency, it is over for them AND THEY KNOW IT. That is also why there's been 100+ years of propaganda against it, an entire global regime paradigm making it forbidden, and more: because it's been done before, successfully, in the Old Testament, multiple times.
There is no co-existence with these people; they said so- believe them. There is only war. Your choices are extinction or conquest. I choose conquest. The Fourth Turning is here.
We take this moment to remind you that (a) the Dragon Awards exist and (b) you can nominate for the finals now.
Jon Del Arroz has taken the time to put together a slate. See below.
We need YOUR help to make a big move for sci-fi and fantasy book culture.
The good news is, it’s easy.
Our goal: get great works by incredible authors nominated for major awards. This helps lift a lot of authors, and if we all work together, we have enough votes to ensure nominations.
Our first target will be The Dragon Awards.
After an extensive search, here is who to nominate for the Dragon Awards 2025.
Best Science Fiction Novel: Tsunami of Turmoil by Blaine Pardoe
Best Fantasy Novel: Shadow of a Smoking Mountain by Howard Andrew Jones
Best Young Adult/Middle-Grade Novel: The Prisoner And The Pirate by Jenelle Leanne Schmidt
Best Alternate History Novel: To Turn The Tide by S.M. Stirling
Best Horror Novel: Dark Bloom by Molly Macabre
Best Illustrative Book Cover: Behold: Humanity!: The Inheritor's War art by Rick Ronor
Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel: The Hidden Emperor by Jon Del Arroz and Miz Krimzon
Best Sci-Fi Or Fantasy TV Series: Star Trek: Prodigy (Paramount)
Best Sci-Fi Or Fantasy Movie: The Wild Robot by Chris Sanders
Best Digital Game: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 by Focus Interactive
Best Tabletop Game: ACKS II: Treasure Tome by Autarch
The form will take about five minutes to fill out. Please make sure to put in the above list of works and this push will 100% work to get these great authors all nominated. If we all come in, this WILL work.
Once you’re done, email me at jdaguestposts@gmail.com to confirm you’ve submitted so we can track how many people have done so.
Thank you so much! Let me know if you have any questions.
Jon Del Arroz
Fandom Pulse Awards Committee Organizer
Don't come at me about organizing voting slates. This is how the enemy wins. Organized minorities will beat unorganized majorities every time, which is how the Death Cult seized and holds power (and doesn't give two shits about the people). In order to win the game, you play the rules better than the other guy; this is playing to win, and as no one has any better candidates to stand up these will be what we get behind this year.
You can stop being Normies and LOLberts and actually get some wins if you organized and discipline yourselves as the enemy has, or you can continue to be Normies and LOLberts and keep getting rolled. You cannot win and continue to be Normies and LOLberts. Reality does not work that way. The Sad and Rabid Puppies should have shown this conclusively by now.
Jon took the time to organize a slate. Vote it. Report your vote once you did so. Once the finalists are announced we'll do this again and do our best to get Our Guys wins.
Lather, rinse, repeat year-on-year until it's nothing but Our Guys collecting all the trophies. That's what the enemy does, and it works. You may not think that it matters, but it does because Normies take awards as shortcuts to meaning "Good" so they buy that stuff and (more importantly) their fellows in institutions use those awards to justify pushing it on to people in schools and workplaces.
This is about the culture, downstream of which is politics, but upstream of that is power and power demands organization and discipline to seize and hold. Stop being losers about this; do what it takes to win or you'll find your posterity denoucing you because your enemies seized their minds and poisoned them agains you.
Diversity & Dragons covered this earlier this week.
Yep, usual Death Cult hitpiece bullshit.
Yep, usual Narrative Warfare playbook: do a more or less clean initial effort to get in the door, then start slipping in the poz after this point; if this resembles how the sorts who engage in predatory relationships operate, you're ahead of the game. Cult psychologies do cult things.
Which means that everything he's published to date is suspect. That's a damned shame, because man that's a lot of work to double-check.
I wish I could say that I am surprised or disappointed. I am neither. That's how bad it is.
This weekend we got a reminder that Tabletop's poz problem came from within:
Of course he had an excuse, which (in typical Death Cult fashion) is pure projection.
TTRPGs can be a bridge, but fascists want to burn that bridge. They want one party rule tied to ideas of nationalism and elitism that despises the other and constantly projects a sense of fear that they use to derive power.
I didn't say anything about people who vote Republican
— Jason Bulmahn, Game Designer (@JasonBulmahn) August 9, 2024
By now it's not hard to translate that Death Cult cant: "This is Our Thing, not Your Thing. Get out before we destroy you."
Cultists like him are rotten in the commercial end of Tabletop. They run Wizards of the Coast. They run all of the adjacent operations, such as Paizo (and everyone else out of Seattle), they dominate bottom-feeders like you see on Roll For Combat or cringy wankers like J. Scott Garipay, and they are the majority of the D&DTube loser Tourists.
— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) December 26, 2024
"But why then?"
First: This is a Network Effect issue. Being the dominant actor in a market niche that relies on Network Effects means that your brand defines the niche, and if your business starts the transition from being a tabletop gaming brand to being a Intellectual Property brand by extending your brand into tie-in media that has sweet fuck-all to do with tabletop gaming then you are heavily incentivized to turn your brand into a cult idol to worship via Consumerism.
That's what Games Workship did, and is doing, with 40K while trying to more openly poz Fantasy. (See the feminist Bretonian shit in the newer stuff.) Are they backing off? Yes. Are they ending it? No. Like DEI rebranding as BRIDGE off-stage, expect this fuckery to get a reintroduction down the road in a more subtle fashion. That I am pointing this out leads to the big isssue.
You want to get all those dissatisfied eyeballs off The Brand and to something that you know is more to their liking, maybe of your creation or maybe not. You want to exploit the Master's fuckups to either become the Master or the Apprentice in this niche. How do you do that?
As Jon Del Arroz explained the other day, the dissatisfied 40K player and fan just wants 40K to not be shit. They don't want an alternative; they want the broken brand to be fixed.
What if it can't be fixed? That's the case for Current Edition D&D. That's the case for the Big Two in comics. That's the case for OldPub, AAA videogames, and so many others.
(Note: Again, I think that "The Woke is being put away" is a scam; go back to that JDA stream where he calls this out as exactly that. It's being rebranded; it's not going away- and that's why Games Workshop's move on 40K is not yet a win. Everyone that made this problem ARE STILL THERE!)
What you do is what JDA has successfully done with Fandom Pulse: use the Master's Brand to draw attention to the alternative, affirming the audience's complaints with the Master before presenting the alternative that satisfies those complaints. This is how the Apprentice positions itself to shiv and replace the Master. That's why John's videos always mention his books and comics in the context of being a more audience-pleasing alternative to Brand failures.
This applies to Tabletop also.
The best way to get hobbyists mired in the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play is to (a) start with Current Edition or a would-be Apprentice, (b) affirm the complaint that Cultists have with Brand (now they are receptive to persuasion), and then (c) transition the Cultist to the Real Hobby step-by-step by showing them the alternative that better satisfies their needs.
The other way is to bully the retards running the Brand until they relent, but that may not be a lasting result without whole personnel purges to flush out the guilty and replace them with the loyal, something that audiences are notoriously unlikely to accomplish without open warfare. ("Why mention that?" Go ahead, fuck with some sicario's favorite character in a corporate property, see how that works out for you.) Without deliberate organization by a rival, moneied, elite cohort (see The Populist Delusion), this is not viable long-term. Getting the audience to switch to an Apprentice and helping it shiv and replace the Master doesn't, so it is.
And that is how 40K's Tourist Failure revealed how to fix the hobby.
TLDR: The value of ANY game is directly proportional to the number of players, because games work just like telephones- their value is derived from the ability to use it.
THAT is why there is such a thing as "too many wargames". In any marketplace so driven, there is room for a Master and an Apprentice- no more. Everyone else is an also-ran/never-were that is wasting their time and would be better served supporting one of the two that matter (by default, the Master, but this is wargaming and GW is stupid).
Why two? It keeps the Master from being complacent, and there is one example to demonstrate that in action: EverQuest vs. World of Warcraft. The former WAS the Master of MMOs, but it got complacent and failed to keep its users happy; a small, organized minority got together, formed WOW, and OVERTOOK Everquest by providing that user network a competitor that did what EQ would not. Now EQ is a has-been with no route back to dominance, while WOW's ruled the roost in MMOs for 20 years (despite having a few Apprentices come along, currently FF14).
It is true for all forms of multi-player gaming. The vast majority of would-bees are better off shutting down and just supporting one of the two that matter.
(Link and Bolding is mine.)
The refusal to admit that Revealed Preferences exist (and are Revealed; most prospective players prefer Vidya for all the reasons I mentioned yesterday), Network Effects exist (and explain everything about why (X) is The Game That Matters), and that demographic change has turbo-fucked things so hard that Tabletop is reduced to having people e-begging for handouts instead of conducting business like they're supposed to, and you can see why Tabletop Minions is a paste-eating retard.
Alas, so many tabletop hobbyists aren't much better. The Soup Aisle has so many derelicts in them, and some pretend to be competent businessmen.
*Me not listen to customers and stock things no one care about.*
(months later)
"Why business fail?"
The C-Suite at WOTC and GW holds the common gamer in contempt for good reason, as man that thick-headed stupidity is all too common. A brilliant man showed up, solved a long-running problem, explained how and why it did so, and no sooner was he out of the picture than they immediately fuck it all up and the dysfunctions immediately return because bruised egos wouldn't admit they were wrong.
(Yes, that is also the real story of every Kitchen Nightmares episode.)
As in adventure games, so in wargames. Same medium, same solutions, same OH GOT IT BURNS levels of stupidity.
This is why I look forward to see you all fold like Superman on laundry day. When that happens:
