Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Your Life As A Gamer: Conventional Play After The Collapse, Part Two

There Is No Future For You Here

I have pointed out repeatedly that videogames are superior across the board at solving the problems of Conventional Play.

  • Schedule Your Fun: Videogames have no schedule issues (where the least committed holds the rest hostage); even MMO raids routinely have hot-swapable rosters.
  • Play The Man, Not The Game: Rules Zero turns play into Calvinball, which turns into Mother May I when the Referee figures out the full extent of his power when abused this way and like any other abusive relationship you end up having to learn how to read the Referee to succeed- thus what matters is not Player Skill, but Mindfuckery.
  • The Game Is Not The Game: "Storytelling" is an excuse for abusive behavior in itself, with all of the dysfunctional dynamics that entails, and turns the hobby into the Longhouse.

The Road To The Storm

Videogames solve all of this. You can't ignore the code, so you're forced to Git Gud or fail. You can play when you want, with whom, for as long as you like. There's no one able to just be LOLsorandom because Muh Narrative and Muh Fiction and Muh Drama to play Mean Girl Games. You boot up, show up, get on with it, and and go away when you're done. Performance is measured objectively, and increasingly with user-facing receipts available to analyze to improve performance.

Tabletop cannot compete with this, which is why more and more prospectively Conventional Play people onboard to videogames and more existing hobbyists switch media and don't look back. They want to play a game, and Conventional Play on tabletop has failed and is failing to deliver. That is, and has been, the trend for over a decade now- closer to 20 years.

And, as with Wizards' plan to abandon tabletop for vidya, there is no plan to address this issue. Largely because there is a mass denial that it even exists, a denial that is as much due to incompetence in reading the data as it is in accepting the results.

What there is, aside from the denial, is a lot of bumbling and flailing about trying to address symptoms that get into someone's face and not strike at the root of the issue: that Conventional Play is entirely wrong due to have a premise that is a flat-out lie.

So there is no future here. Anyone with a clue that wants to stay with Conventional Play will follow Wizards' play and become a vidya-based business (and property) with tabletop (at best) an afterthought. BattleTech is best positioned to do this now, as is 40K and Fantasy, with Shadowrun proven to be capable of making that jump; Earthdawn would slay as a videogame property in the mode of Pillars of Eternity and other CRPGs of that style.

Even shitposters can see that this is an obvious move for Conventional Play.

If you want to build your creations into a real fortune, you go into videogames- and you leave tabletop behind.

The Return To A Real Hobby

Or you can choose to surrender all pretense of commercial viability, accept that the #BROSR is right about tabletop, and return to the club-focused hobby scene (The Clubhouse) and earn your fortune elsewhere.

Sure, your publications will (at best) be self-sustaining, and you will have to redesign them to operate in a Clubhouse environment, but they will still be there- and they will still be mostly unplayed because most hobbyists don't want what you offer.

You won't have to worry about onboarding hobbyists because the need for mass numbers will not exist; you need only maintain a local membership sufficient to satisfy local demand.

You won't have to worry about massive operational expenses unless you're operating the Clubhouse itself as a business, and that business model is not that of a retail store pushing product.

You'll instead have the hobby environment of old recreated and with it a need for massive product catalogues, 99% of which you will never use, goes away for good.

Choose

Which way?

The next two days will address each option.

Because where you are now? It's going to go away; you won't be able to stay for much longer.

Monday, March 18, 2024

Your Life As A Gamer: Conventional Play After The Collapse, Part One

It's going to happen.

The tabletop RPG hobby, as we know it ("Conventional Play"), is screwed.

Single-handedly propped up for generations by just one company--first TSR, then Wizards of the Coast--has led the entire (cottage) industry to never develop the capacity to replicate what the Big Man alone achieved: to get product, and thus the very idea of the hobby, in the places (and thus the places) where Normies go.

Every competitor has always ridden the Big Man's coattails at best. Yes, even when there was a successful licensed game (e.g. various Star Wars editions) this was the case.

With Wizards abandoning tabletop, and no one ready or able to replace Wizards (alone or in a group), nothing will prop up Conventional Play. This is the end.

The Local Store Closes For Good

It starts with remaining WOTC product selling through. Those shelves go bare, as there is nowhere near enough product left to fill that void.

The savvy stores, as they have before, replace that product with something else entirely. As more publishers leave the market, be it due to bankruptcy or to business operations pivoting out of that market, the stores either pivot themselves to adapt or they follow the publishers into collapse. The result is the same either way.

A store that stops being a game store is as ruined as one that is burned to ash.

The number of stores in an area dwindle until only one is left. That one holds on for a time, maybe a long time, but sooner or later it either stops being a game store or it folds.

You no longer have a local store.

"But I buy online."

What makes you think you can always have access to that stuff? DriveThru can lose entire libraries with the snap of one's fingers, either by legal diktat or by other means- some fair, some foul. Amazon can just yeet what you want off their storefront at anytime, and most publishers can't do a damned thing about it- or won't even if they could; the same goes for all of the used product stores.

Yes, including the realspace ones.

If you think this can't happen, talk to the Brazillian hobbyists. They're dealing with this right now.

"But piracy!"

Is an imperfect patchwork workaround, not a solution, because unless you're willing to ensure that those files are also ready and able to be used to make physical product via Print On Demand (and you know how to do guerilla listings) you run the risk (increasing by the year) that the file remains readable as well as maintain its integrity across both OS and software display iterations. And that assumes that they just won't be yeeted Because Reasons.

In short, phyiscal media is better all-around.

"But my group-'

Will slowly, inevitably, wither and die because you have no one recruiting new hobbyists to replace those you lose to attrition- you relied on TSR and Wizards too long for this and none of the now-all-but-extinct publishers never have and never did fill that void, so neither did the common players.

And it's only going to get harder becase this is your competition.


That's right. Just boot up, do the tutorial, join friends, and GET ON WITH IT in 10 minutes or less.

Want a full Conventional Play RPG campaign? Show up, link up, GO!


And all those MMOs are still out there eating Tabletop's lunch daily.

The hobby you enjoyed for 50 years is about to fall away. You can deny it all you want, but it will happen--it is happening--all the same.

Now it's time to talk about what you're going to do about it.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

The Business: Why Most RPG Publishers Should Just STOP

Thanks to Roll For Combat for actually talking about this, although not with the intent to dissuade.


Recap is here.

Far too many of you are complete incompetents that have no business publishing product at all.

I am no Entrepreneur Grifter. I will tell you flat out that you suck, you will always suck, that there is no demand for your crap, and you would be better off giving up and going back to a Big Corpo dayjob doing your 9-5 until you hit Retirement because the only way you will make this work is to do what the Pundit did and most of you will never even consider moving to a Third World country to play the geo-arbitrage game.

"But-"

It's not enough to put in the work. You can grind at it for years on end to hone your craft, and none of it will matter if you make Non-Games or other products that cannot justify their existence because they cannot address an unmet demand.

And buddy, every single viable niche has had it demand met SEVERAL TIMES OVER.

This is not only a mature and recovering medium, it is also wholly discovered and saturated.

What do you offer that existing products--real games--do not already fulfill? Rolemaster is a great game, but it still has no justification because AD&D1e existed and did all it offered just as well (or better) with a massively superior Network Effect going fo rit. All Flesh Must Be Eaten tried to carve out a space as Survival Horror, but it did not work because Call of Cthulhu satisfies that demand just fine and it had (and has) a superior Network Effect. The only reason Star Wars eclipsed Traveller is because the former had a superior Network Effect powering it before its original tabletop RPG adaptation, and even with the former's fading that remains the case (even though Traveller is a superior game).

You get the idea- which is why all would-be competitors to a Leader are better off being specialized alternatives to it instead, something TSR bumbled into with Gamma World vs. AD&D1e.

Remember that most RPGs are unfit for purpose and surplus to requirements; 99% of them could disappear tomorrow and no one would even notice, nevermind miss them.

You are wasting your time and capital trying to do what far better men, in far better times, failed to accomplish (barring the willingness and ability to copy the Pundit, and that is still no guarantee of success or worth). At best, do it as a hobby in itself; for all but a few of you, STOP NOW! You are not doing anything worth the effort; you are better off using one of the few real games and mastering it.

"But it could be a tax-"

No. That's pants-on-head retarded. Don't even finish that thought.

Do. Something. Else.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Business: Wizards' Abandoning Of Tabletop Is Undeniable Now

More Conventional Play people are admitting that Tabletop is in chaos.


Play at 2x Speed for your own convenience.

Wizards had no plan for tabletop; this is because they are abandoning tabletop for vidya. Therefore no one else in Conventional Play has a plan because no one, when presented with this fact, put forth an alternative.

There is nothing there to replace what Wizards has done since it took over from TSR (who did this heavy lifting before Wizards). No attempt to get into Normie stories. No attempt to develop a competent Normie-to-Hobbyist onboarding process. No attempt to shape the Narrative Frame about the hobby. No attempt to do ONE DAMNED THING to replace what Wizards has done.

The Cargo Cult got confronted with evidence put before their eyes that The Cargo Shall Stop and they double-down on their dogma. This will end up in the business and cultural equivalent of the final days of the Jim Jones cult.

You don't want that.

You can either flee to Vidya or repent and come clean to the Clubhouse. Choose. Now.

And you have good reason to come clean, because Wizards confessed that the #BROSR is right about D&D and RPGs.

Conventional Play peeps, you just lost the argument against the Bros. You're done.

And Roll For Combat just showed the other day yet more evidence for why Wizards is abandoning tabletop for vidya.

And Clownfish reminds you yet again of another big tell that the medium shift is the plan.

Friday, March 15, 2024

The Culture: Art Therapy Tools Are Not Games

The Critical Role crowd shill a product called Daggerheart. They call it a game. It is not.


Thanks to Zuby for posting the receipts showing that this is not a game.

This is Art Therapy in the mold of all those "Powered By The Apocalypse" products are Art Therapy pretending to be games.

They are Ungames.

And, given who pushes them and why they do so, this is where the Death Cult wants to take the medium because turning anything into a propaganda tool to use as an attack vector for pozzing populations. You can already see this in the degradation of videogames from a Ludocentric medium to a Narrative centric one.

This is something I will point out for everyone to see: The Death Cult fears competency. Competency is built up, for all but a few outliers, through trial and error- what videogames calls "Rogue-like" because it builds off the D&D-inspired Rogue.

Real RPGs are all about that. You roll your man, you try, you fail (man dies), you reroll and go again. Iterative improvement in player skill is part of the hobby.

That's not in Art Therapy products, and given how nebulous the design language is (as it all revolves around "the fiction", hence The Narrative, so Narrative Tropes and Norms apply) this can easily turn into a Struggle Session given the opportunity by a nefarious Game Master.

A more throughout article on how nefarious these ungames are is now on the table for a near future date.

Don't end up like Caesar did on this day in 44 B.C.; take this warning seriously- this Art Therapy is not just a suck product, but a tell for where the Death Cult wants this medium to go.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Culture: Alternatives Arise, Conversations Continue, & Opportunities Open

Rollin' Bones continues to deliver. Two recent episodes.


Dunder Moose interviewed Dorrinal of Geek Gab.

And Gelantinous Cube requests Patrons to come play in his campaign.


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

The Culture: They Defamed Gary & Dave Deliberately Because They Hate You

We're staying on this beat for another day.

Let me make the following clear:

  • The cited video interview is a Public Relations stunt.
  • The video, therefore, may as well be scripted.
  • The video is edited with the intent to show what is presented IN THE CREATOR'S EYES what is best/acceptable to know.
  • They wanted to defame Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and all the rest of that founding cohort.
  • They did that deliberately and with malice aforethought.
  • They are not sorry that they did it- only that it drove an unwanted reaction.

Do you get it yet? They hate you and want you dead. They are too chickshit to just murk you themselves, so they do this gaslighting bullshit in the hope that your mental stability is weaker than theirs and you self-delete or get murked by the State instead.

There is no fixing this. There is only burning it down and salting the ashes.

You can start by ceasing to fund your own demise.

The Clubhouse (and the Bros) will stand when this is over. Conventional Play will not.

Choose. Now.