Influencer Culture

I get the feeling Wizards pays YouTube to drown out every alternative gaming video to D&D, and thus, this paid influencer culture on that site keeps thriving and spreading like a colony of mold. I see some very nice coverage of Pathfinder 2, but most D&D channels have crawled back into the cave, and all I see are D&D videos.

And I saw videos there that said, "D&D gets so many more views! Thus, no other game is worth covering!"

Also, recently, "The mainstream media is attacking D&D! We have to protect D&D!"

When the recommended video push cash runs out, we will have a better view of the actual market. Money is being burned to keep the hot air flowing into the balloon. I don't see YouTube as a truthful indicator of what's popular other than the fact that paying them tips the scales, and we know nothing about what game would be the most popular if that money were gone.

There is a lot of coverage; in reality, VTT numbers better indicate what is being played and popular. It is still D&D, but it isn't as lopsided as YouTube would have you believe. Call of Cthulhu is the 2nd most popular tabletop game (by VTT rankings), but I see fewer videos than GURPS videos, so YouTube as a "reality metric" is heavily biased and skewed.

I am unsubscribing from my D&D influencer channels because of their constant noise. Every week, it is Wizards drama, or even the lack of drama is drama, and I just get the feeling the entire D&D influencer culture is getting desperate again. Can we cover something else in 5E YouTube besides optimization guides, tier rankings, and drama? Maybe review adventures? Do inspiration or lore discussion? World building?

All those "class tier lists" that D&D influencers make mean nothing if nobody loses the game. What does it matter how high my DPT is when no character dies? I can pick D or F-tier classes, spells, and gear and still win the game. Nothing matters. Even if most of the party is sub-optimal, chances are there will be a few hardcore optimizers at the table, and what you do won't matter much anyway.

In fact, picking bad choices may make the game more challenging and fun for the rest of the table.

I get it; even the channel owners who are honest about their views and share the data say the drama receives ten times more views than "useful game content." There comes a point when "useless information is useless," and I no longer care about the drama and hype. I don't care about ranking charts for games I don't play. Whatever dumb thing Wizards does next is the next dumb thing I don't care about, nor do I want to invest any time in my life caring about dumb things Wall Street companies do.

Why is everyone wasting their time?

Oh, clicks equal money.

Some creators have been mocking the clickbait titles, which is probably healthy. However, I have lost interest even in the situation's humor. It is all noise. I would prefer to create and play rather than engage in this endless, pointless, circular discussion. There was a point of 5E videos with mild interest, then cuteness, disinterest, and now aversion.

Blogs died 15 years ago, and ad money can't be applied to blogs anymore. I am not an influencer of anybody, nor do I get money for views. I keep this blog up out of my love for blogs like the classic Grognardia, an excellent endless stream of thoughts and experiences that inspired me to start this one.

Even my thoughts shift and change, and I rediscover games I had put in my garage and try them again. I gave Pathfinder 2 a lot of heat for the first books of the second edition, and the tone of their world is off some of the games I like. There is too much technology in some books. The game was challenging for me to learn since the books I got for it were too big, had too many classes, and had too much stuff in them. I bounced right off and could never grasp the system to the point I was comfortable with it.

I swear that someday, I will make yes/no checklists for these books as a "campaign crafting guide" just so I can better organize my thoughts and have something I can hand players to say, "This is in, and that is out."

Yet, here I am again with the remaster, giving it another try. The remaster is ten times better without the OGL and SRD content, and we finally have a game that fits the fantasy theme but has new stuff in it. The ideas are fresh. The new monsters we have not seen before. The spells are different.

I give it another try since I am fair, and people are having fun with this. I need to see if I can, too.

Don't listen to people who say the remaster books aren't needed. They are the better and more focused game.

Every game that dumped the OGL and SRD has gotten better. From Castles & Crusades to ACKS II, the designers are forced to show us "their ideas," suddenly, the game isn't "D&D with alternative rules." When I have SRD stuff, I default to it because I am lazy. Oh, hey, here is, uh ...the green dragon! Yeah, that green dragon. With the new monsters and breaking of the SRD, I am reading the new monsters and liking them better. The door is open for me to make my own. The players' expectations and assumptions about the world are broken.

What is out there?

We don't know.

They said a dragon was in the hills; what type do you think it is?

I have no idea. This world isn't SRD. For all we know, it could be a death's head dragon, and who knows what that does?

All of a sudden, I feel a sense of dread and fear. Even though Pathfinder 2 is a new-school game, that feeling of fear and dread is very old-school. Also, it is possible for characters to TPK and die in Pathfinder 2, which makes it an actual roleplaying game instead of play-acting rules.

The remastered books are also better for your own campaign worlds. The Core Player's book does not include GM information or a world guide. It is just a player's book. This empowers me to fix the campaign world and adopt more old-school "settings" to fix the world to my liking. I could do that with the earlier books, but not if the game was such a beast to learn I did not even want to start.