Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 22, 2024, 11:55:17 PM

Quote from: jhkim on February 22, 2024, 08:54:20 PM

Quote from: Valatar on February 22, 2024, 08:20:56 PM
People have loyalty to a brand because they can't easily perceive the people behind the curtain.  Just look at Blizzard, it took years for them to burn through their community's goodwill even after all of their talent had clearly departed and they were just putting out garbage.  People will notice only if a real front and center person like Gygax leaves a company, the rank and file who actually do most of the product work aren't known to the average customer and it can take years before it really dawns on most people that the goose laying the golden eggs is long gone.

In the case of TSR, not only did Gygax leave -- but TSR actively tried to destroy Gygax's career with lawsuits like when he made Dangerous Journeys. 

And over twenty years after TSR folded, people are holding up TSR as "Remember back in the good old days when we could trust and be loyal to a corporation."

Gygax did call his first project Dangerous Dimensions and that was just stupid on his part.  Whatever the lawsuit was by TSR to stop him from selling to Games Workshop, again stupid on Gygax's part because he should have used what money he had to talk with a good IP lawyer to be able to design a new IP and not be sued by TSR.  Whatever he did he failed on it.  He also hired that idiot harpy who went after him non-stop.  Mind you I never knew Gary at all and this is all hindsite, but god damn man did he make a series of bad business decisions that fucked him over.  I like the man and his work, but he rolled a 3 for his Business Acumen.

It really is hindsight, I don't think anyone but the most paranoid of people would have expected what happened with Lorraine to occur at the time. To my understanding she was hired at the suggestion of her brother who was and apparently remained a friend of Gary's. The entire point was to help him retake shares and get things back on track by advising him and whatnot. That's not what happened though as history shows.

Of course, Gary made plenty of poor choices other than that.

Well that was Gary's coke phase in LA, so there was that, and his judgement was probably shit having a bunch of tits being shoved in his face to do lines.  If he'd have stayed off the stuff, I'm willing to bet TSR might have turned out differently.  The 3/3.5 from WotC was good as was the Mike Mearl's edition of 5E was good, but we might have gotten something else if TSR stayed together.

Quote from: Brad on February 22, 2024, 09:21:49 AMI worked for a marketing company for 12 years and brand loyalty is like 80-90% of the reason customers will keep buying your product, even when it sucks. The most loyal customers will complain and write nastygrams and badmouth companies on social media AND STILL BUY THE PRODUCT.

The woman who hired Dylan Mulveney for Bud Light said something very similar in her interview. The idea was that "inclusive" marketing will always increase sales because the previous customer will complain but, ultimately, continue to buy the product while the "inclusive" ads will attract the new customers on top of that.

Of course it didn't work out so well for Bud Light, but I wonder if there is a decline overall in brand loyalty or if Bud Light was an outlier.

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 23, 2024, 12:53:44 AM
..and his judgement was probably shit having a bunch of tits being shoved in his face...

The number of bad decisions made when a pair of tits are shoved in your face are numerous.

Personal experience.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on February 23, 2024, 08:44:36 AM

Quote from: Brad on February 22, 2024, 09:21:49 AMI worked for a marketing company for 12 years and brand loyalty is like 80-90% of the reason customers will keep buying your product, even when it sucks. The most loyal customers will complain and write nastygrams and badmouth companies on social media AND STILL BUY THE PRODUCT.

The woman who hired Dylan Mulveney for Bud Light said something very similar in her interview. The idea was that "inclusive" marketing will always increase sales because the previous customer will complain but, ultimately, continue to buy the product while the "inclusive" ads will attract the new customers on top of that.

Of course it didn't work out so well for Bud Light, but I wonder if there is a decline overall in brand loyalty or if Bud Light was an outlier.

I suspect the woman who hired Dylan Mulvaney was correct in that brand loyalty would offset a certain level of 'inclusive' marketing. However, in the words of Spinal Tap: It's such a fine line between stupid and clever. She went well beyond stupid in hiring Dylan Mulvaney. Perhaps if she had shown better judgment in her 'inclusive' marketing efforts the majority of loyal customers would have either ignored advertising that might have been modestly annoying to them, or not even noticed it. But she did not do that! She turned it all the way to 11.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on February 23, 2024, 08:44:36 AM

Quote from: Brad on February 22, 2024, 09:21:49 AMI worked for a marketing company for 12 years and brand loyalty is like 80-90% of the reason customers will keep buying your product, even when it sucks. The most loyal customers will complain and write nastygrams and badmouth companies on social media AND STILL BUY THE PRODUCT.

The woman who hired Dylan Mulveney for Bud Light said something very similar in her interview. The idea was that "inclusive" marketing will always increase sales because the previous customer will complain but, ultimately, continue to buy the product while the "inclusive" ads will attract the new customers on top of that.

Of course it didn't work out so well for Bud Light, but I wonder if there is a decline overall in brand loyalty or if Bud Light was an outlier.

The problem the Woke have had of late, pretty much ever since The Bad Orange Man broke their brains by winning, is they lost the ability to be incremental.

As long as things kept creeping their way they felt like thet could take their time and turn things up a single notch at a time.

In D&D's case; use the white male human fighter in slightly mocking ways (ex. he's the dead victim in the art for "raise dead" in 4E) here. Pick art that makes the women uglier there. Add another subversive race to a supplement. Tweak the pantheon a bit to make a deity a little more "21st century Seattle" acceptable.

Just keep moving the Overton Window a little more immoral authoritarian every now and then and they'd get to their utopia eventually and everyone could pat themselves on the back for doing their part.

Then they experienced a setback. Their entire bullshit "arc of history" narrative took a shot to the groin... and so, faced with that, they stopped nudging and started shoving. Shoving as hard and as far as they could to make it as hard as possible to claw back the other direction.

You can't fix Bud Light (or D&D) if it's been destroyed as a brand. They make things so toxic that no one but their fellow travelers would WANT to touch it... effectively preserving (more like embalming) their gains by ensuring no one will care enough to reverse them.

If not for the loss to the Bad Orange Man I think we'd be about 5 years less far along the Wokeness curve and Bud Light would have used some hot lesbians as their recent spokespeople instead of an aggressively flamboyant trans-activist. The legalization of gay marriage would have settled out enough and hot lesbians still have sex appeal to the majority of Bud'd customer base that there'd be grumbling, but not the sheer volume of outrage that resulted.

And we see that across the board on all woke stuff... a complete abandonment of subtlety... and that's been shocking enough to the normies that you get Bud Light's collapse, Disney losing billions (and the value of Star Wars and Marvel all but gone), and the collapse of Hasbro/WotC.

In the summer of 2020 when the race riots were peaking that is when Wotc lost its fucking mind.  It put up warnings on all 4E and earlier content on DMsguild and DrivethruRPG to let people know its time to pirate because these guys are asshole.  They then moved Mearls off D&D, the guy who made 5E a success.  Then they started cutting book production and modules by people who have spent time in RPG development and instead hired on race and put out Prom for D&D module and No Cracker Allowed module, their rules became contradictory and damaging to the game because the people making them don't play the game enough to understand that a 1st level spell that causes disadvantage on a creature and advantage for a player at first level spell is a stupid broke idea. 

D&D is fixable, its called letting Hasbro go bankrupt and getting sold off as an entity.  We are going into the great depression 2.0, hasbro stock will be bought for pennies on the dollar by a company that weathered the great depression 2.0 and they did based on putting out a good product that people would pay for.  I believe we are 5-10 years before Hasbro goes tits up and we get a better IP holder.  The best thing that happened to the US is Joe Biden destroying the dollar and putting on the WEF dog collar because all his DEI firms are going bankrupt and he's destroying woke culture one financial quarter at a time.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 23, 2024, 01:46:19 PM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on February 23, 2024, 08:44:36 AM

Quote from: Brad on February 22, 2024, 09:21:49 AMI worked for a marketing company for 12 years and brand loyalty is like 80-90% of the reason customers will keep buying your product, even when it sucks. The most loyal customers will complain and write nastygrams and badmouth companies on social media AND STILL BUY THE PRODUCT.

The woman who hired Dylan Mulveney for Bud Light said something very similar in her interview. The idea was that "inclusive" marketing will always increase sales because the previous customer will complain but, ultimately, continue to buy the product while the "inclusive" ads will attract the new customers on top of that.

Of course it didn't work out so well for Bud Light, but I wonder if there is a decline overall in brand loyalty or if Bud Light was an outlier.

The problem the Woke have had of late, pretty much ever since The Bad Orange Man broke their brains by winning, is they lost the ability to be incremental.

As long as things kept creeping their way they felt like thet could take their time and turn things up a single notch at a time.

In D&D's case; use the white male human fighter in slightly mocking ways (ex. he's the dead victim in the art for "raise dead" in 4E) here. Pick art that makes the women uglier there. Add another subversive race to a supplement. Tweak the pantheon a bit to make a deity a little more "21st century Seattle" acceptable.

Just keep moving the Overton Window a little more immoral authoritarian every now and then and they'd get to their utopia eventually and everyone could pat themselves on the back for doing their part.

Then they experienced a setback. Their entire bullshit "arc of history" narrative took a shot to the groin... and so, faced with that, they stopped nudging and started shoving. Shoving as hard and as far as they could to make it as hard as possible to claw back the other direction.

You can't fix Bud Light (or D&D) if it's been destroyed as a brand. They make things so toxic that no one but their fellow travelers would WANT to touch it... effectively preserving (more like embalming) their gains by ensuring no one will care enough to reverse them.

If not for the loss to the Bad Orange Man I think we'd be about 5 years less far along the Wokeness curve and Bud Light would have used some hot lesbians as their recent spokespeople instead of an aggressively flamboyant trans-activist. The legalization of gay marriage would have settled out enough and hot lesbians still have sex appeal to the majority of Bud'd customer base that there'd be grumbling, but not the sheer volume of outrage that resulted.

And we see that across the board on all woke stuff... a complete abandonment of subtlety... and that's been shocking enough to the normies that you get Bud Light's collapse, Disney losing billions (and the value of Star Wars and Marvel all but gone), and the collapse of Hasbro/WotC.

This is quite insightful.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 23, 2024, 01:46:19 PM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on February 23, 2024, 08:44:36 AM

Quote from: Brad on February 22, 2024, 09:21:49 AMI worked for a marketing company for 12 years and brand loyalty is like 80-90% of the reason customers will keep buying your product, even when it sucks. The most loyal customers will complain and write nastygrams and badmouth companies on social media AND STILL BUY THE PRODUCT.

The woman who hired Dylan Mulveney for Bud Light said something very similar in her interview. The idea was that "inclusive" marketing will always increase sales because the previous customer will complain but, ultimately, continue to buy the product while the "inclusive" ads will attract the new customers on top of that.

Of course it didn't work out so well for Bud Light, but I wonder if there is a decline overall in brand loyalty or if Bud Light was an outlier.

The problem the Woke have had of late, pretty much ever since The Bad Orange Man broke their brains by winning, is they lost the ability to be incremental.

As long as things kept creeping their way they felt like thet could take their time and turn things up a single notch at a time.

In D&D's case; use the white male human fighter in slightly mocking ways (ex. he's the dead victim in the art for "raise dead" in 4E) here. Pick art that makes the women uglier there. Add another subversive race to a supplement. Tweak the pantheon a bit to make a deity a little more "21st century Seattle" acceptable.

Just keep moving the Overton Window a little more immoral authoritarian every now and then and they'd get to their utopia eventually and everyone could pat themselves on the back for doing their part.

Then they experienced a setback. Their entire bullshit "arc of history" narrative took a shot to the groin... and so, faced with that, they stopped nudging and started shoving. Shoving as hard and as far as they could to make it as hard as possible to claw back the other direction.

You can't fix Bud Light (or D&D) if it's been destroyed as a brand. They make things so toxic that no one but their fellow travelers would WANT to touch it... effectively preserving (more like embalming) their gains by ensuring no one will care enough to reverse them.

If not for the loss to the Bad Orange Man I think we'd be about 5 years less far along the Wokeness curve and Bud Light would have used some hot lesbians as their recent spokespeople instead of an aggressively flamboyant trans-activist. The legalization of gay marriage would have settled out enough and hot lesbians still have sex appeal to the majority of Bud'd customer base that there'd be grumbling, but not the sheer volume of outrage that resulted.

And we see that across the board on all woke stuff... a complete abandonment of subtlety... and that's been shocking enough to the normies that you get Bud Light's collapse, Disney losing billions (and the value of Star Wars and Marvel all but gone), and the collapse of Hasbro/WotC.

Excellent post.

But to hear it told by the resident apologist around these parts? TSR excising demons and devils (which they never did-renamed them sure) only to add them later is far worse than WOTC actually removing text from PDFs. As it whole sale editing and changing text.

That one was crazy when people go to the lengths to justify.

How does this relate? It only seems to matter what content is remove in terms of agreement.

But to round back, you're on the right track.

This whole thing is just disgusting and stinks of jealousy. That aside, the "interview" was insanely racist.

Quote from: Angus MacDeth on February 20, 2024, 06:28:26 PM
Of course Wizards of the Coast can't resist reminding their "fans" that all D&D books published before 2014 are "problematic." They've been doing it in the disclaimer to their "legacy content" on DriveThruRPG for years, while continuing to sell those products. This is no different.

The whole thing reminds me of Fate of Cthulhu from Evil Hat, which begins with a multi-page screed condemning H.P. Lovecraft (and anyone who enjoys his work) as an unrepentant racist and admonishing the reader against actually enjoying the stories without which the game they're peddling WOULD NOT EXIST.

Apparently, it's okay to profit off the imagination and talent of people you claim are abhorrent, as long as you condemn them loudly enough.

They're also one of those companies that want to use the Pulp setting, but make the gumshoes and adventurers women, because verisimilitude or respect for the genre loses to 2024 politics.

Quote from: Angus MacDeth on February 20, 2024, 06:28:26 PM
The whole thing reminds me of Fate of Cthulhu from Evil Hat, which begins with a multi-page screed condemning H.P. Lovecraft (and anyone who enjoys his work) as an unrepentant racist and admonishing the reader against actually enjoying the stories without which the game they're peddling WOULD NOT EXIST.

Trying to catch up here some. Does anyone have a timestamp or transcript about the attack from WotC that's being referred to in this thread? Pundit doesn't give a link with his video. I think the link below is the video in question, but it's forty minutes and I haven't watched it yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhxVlgehNpc

I can give a reference to Fate of Cthulhu. This is the disclaimer from page 6:



The next page goes on to character creation rules.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 22, 2024, 09:05:18 PM

Quote from: jhkim on February 22, 2024, 08:54:20 PM

Quote from: Valatar on February 22, 2024, 08:20:56 PM
People have loyalty to a brand because they can't easily perceive the people behind the curtain.  Just look at Blizzard, it took years for them to burn through their community's goodwill even after all of their talent had clearly departed and they were just putting out garbage.  People will notice only if a real front and center person like Gygax leaves a company, the rank and file who actually do most of the product work aren't known to the average customer and it can take years before it really dawns on most people that the goose laying the golden eggs is long gone.

In the case of TSR, not only did Gygax leave -- but TSR actively tried to destroy Gygax's career with lawsuits like when he made Dangerous Journeys. 

And over twenty years after TSR folded, people are holding up TSR as "Remember back in the good old days when we could trust and be loyal to a corporation."

They Sue Regularly

And to this day there are morons who believe that was all Gygax's doing.

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 22, 2024, 11:55:17 PMHe also hired that idiot harpy who went after him non-stop. 

Gygax did not hire Loraine. The Blumes did and gave her shares in the company so they could oust Gygax. Loraine eventually booted them as Kevin Blume was the root of many of TSR's financial troubles.

Quote from: Grognard GM on February 24, 2024, 12:29:44 AM

Quote from: Angus MacDeth on February 20, 2024, 06:28:26 PM
Of course Wizards of the Coast can't resist reminding their "fans" that all D&D books published before 2014 are "problematic." They've been doing it in the disclaimer to their "legacy content" on DriveThruRPG for years, while continuing to sell those products. This is no different.

The whole thing reminds me of Fate of Cthulhu from Evil Hat, which begins with a multi-page screed condemning H.P. Lovecraft (and anyone who enjoys his work) as an unrepentant racist and admonishing the reader against actually enjoying the stories without which the game they're peddling WOULD NOT EXIST.

Apparently, it's okay to profit off the imagination and talent of people you claim are abhorrent, as long as you condemn them loudly enough.

They're also one of those companies that want to use the Pulp setting, but make the gumshoes and adventurers women, because verisimilitude or respect for the genre loses to 2024 politics.

There were female pulp heroes way back.

Thing is modern WotC can not even imagine things like that and so instead they will find something with a guy in it and defile it.