D&D is a Fad: Chat + Timelapse Wargame Table Build

There's a lot of talk about how Hasbro's mismanagement and the OGL disaster may have just killed D&D. I have a different take. Let's talk about it while you watch me layout a weird World War Two wargame table.
Timestamps
What I'm Building: 0:00
Fire and Maneuver Mods to Bolt Action: 1:32
Why Modern D&D is a Fad: 4:50
The Unbearable Burden of Zoomers in the Hobby: 20:12
The Next Tabletop Fad: 27:55
New Table Plan: 33:00
Timelapse: 33:36
Splendor of Fire online wargames magazine: www.splendoroffire.xyz/2024/0...
If you want to support the channel, subscribe on Locals: attentionspanlabs.locals.com/
Or you can buy my heroic adventure novels and game books: amzn.to/2KqtTYD
Hey, I'm also on Bitchute, Rumble, and Odysee!
www.bitchute.com/channel/CB3T...
rumble.com/c/c-1388503
odysee.com/@AttentionSpanLabs:a

[@weirdwwii8775]

Be sure to film it! Not enough Weird WWII battle reports out there in the mix! In the 80s, a comic con was a $5 entry and thousands and thousands of long boxes of comics, boo-leg tee-shirts and VHS tapes and creators that would sign your shit for free. That was it, and it was BLISS!

[@attentionspanlabs]

Agreed. There is small comic show around here that is sort of like the old days, but it's still $15 to get in and they don't have cheap old issues. I did film the battle. I hope to post it this week.

[@juddgoswick2024]

I went to one like that in Carterville, GA last Fall with my nephew. It was small and cozy, but fun. It was his first Con, too.

[@thomaswilliams5005]

This was a good summation of things I hadn’t real thought about, but was going through my mind.

[@attentionspanlabs]

As always, I appreciate you listening and commenting.

[@PlanetToborTV]

I've had similar thoughts lately. Thanks for the video, was fun to watch you put together a scenario.

[@attentionspanlabs]

Glad you enjoyed it. Battle report coming soon!

[@Corvinuswargaming1444]

Games Workshop has also shifted Warhammer into a lifestyle brand basically and the current playerbase made me abandon playing their games a while ago

[@attentionspanlabs]

Low IQ vulgarians obsessed with list building and rules lawyering and "gaming the meta." It's not real wargaming.

[@Corvinuswargaming1444]

@@attentionspanlabs yes absolutely, no room for scenario or narrative based gaming. The creative energy in Warhammer games either left the wargaming hobby entirely or moved on to other games.

[@attentionspanlabs]

@@Corvinuswargaming1444 You may be interested in joining our fellowship: www.guilded.gg/r/zzrRpDYpVR?i=dzkaNalm

[@Corvinuswargaming1444]

@@attentionspanlabs i’ll check it out, thanks

[@btrenninger1]

I've had the same experience. Tried to recruit new interest. Set people up with minis and paints and nothing. I think passive entertainment has so many options that anything that takes effort just gets the path of least resistance. Not sure what to do. Or, if anything is to be done. Makes it hard to complete my own projects because who will play them?

[@attentionspanlabs]

All of society suffers because people have a lack of hobbies, and all of the personal improvements that hobbies cultivate. All that the average youth of today seems to offer is endless neuroses and a mouth that is always open but says nothing.

[@username12120]

I think it's a mix of both new, and younger, prospects being intimidated by the degree of effort and personal investment("You mean I gotta BUILD and PAINT these things? What if I mess it up?!") and a feeling of this shit is old and analogue, why would I do this and deal with it all(dice rolls, comparing stats and scores, scenario set up and take down, etc.) when I can get a video game to do this for me? I dunno what a solution could be beyond mentoring them through it and encouraging them along the way when even getting to that point is a slog and a tooth pull.

[@attentionspanlabs]

@@username12120 I played lots of Nintendo and Sega as a kid, and then a lot of MMORPGs in college, but these days they hold almost no interest for me compared to the old analog stuff. I believe almost all of it can be attributed to their severely attenuated attention spans and mental/physical/moral lethargy. Personally, I think that if the Zoomers and younger generation were forced to go on Brain Balance and the Feingold Diet, we might see an explosion in our hobby such as would herald a new golden age.

[@username12120]

@@attentionspanlabs I used to play a lot of videogames when I was younger too, also lost my taste for them now in my 30s. Just can't muster the care for it anymore, would much rather be fiddling at my hobby desk or off playing a game of whfb 6e with one of my clubmates. Maybe you're right about the attention spans and lethargy. I bet if I had mummy's iPad shoved in my face as kid I'd be just as flakey and uninterested now.

[@attentionspanlabs]

@@username12120 As a rule we don't let our kids use our phones, and the tablets only for certain specific activities, but they still go crazy to get their hands on them. It is a kind of drug: the flashing lights, the sounds, the colors. See also: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qnvXdpWsiLSXlac

[@Corvinuswargaming1444]

a lot of narcissistic parenting affects children’s ability to make or maintain friendships. When parents act like doing something to support a child’s interests or going to see friends are burdens the child is just going to give up

[@attentionspanlabs]

I notice many parents who insist on making their kids participate in endless after school extra-curriculars so they don't have to deal with having them around. Very often they dumped these same kids off at day care or Pre-K during their most formative years, too. The kids have no free time and no idea how to do things without instruction and a schedule planned by someone else.

[@Corvinuswargaming1444]

@@attentionspanlabs definitely. I am almost 30 and remember so many people when I was in middle/high school in constant school or travel sports year round basically. Its very unfortunate

[@juddgoswick2024]

D&D would benefit from the fad leaving it, but it is WotC's ownership that has done it the most harm. The primary issue with "tourists" in hobbies, is that they speak more than they listen. If a wise person joined a hobby, they would quietly listen, encourage the old salts to talk their thought processes out when possible, and absorb everything going on. These kids think they have improvements before they even learn the craft. For example, watching a wargamer doing early deployment recently taught me what a flank denial formation was. I then looked it up and learned more about such formations. That was a month back for me. Wisdom is what is lacking. "Two ears, one mouth."

[@attentionspanlabs]

Amen. This is a valuable lesson for everyone at all times.

[@LeonardHarris]

Is than an otyugh crawling around in the other room? Regardless of what that is, I think the D&D fad is dying because of the major missteps by Hasbro and WotC. I don't want the TTRPG hobby to go back to the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s, where I couldn't find a game to save my life and the one time I did find a game the people were so weird that I seemed normal in comparison. Now i've got a regular weekly game on roll20 that's been going strong since 2018 and while we're all D&D nerds we all can pass for normal people too (ok me not so much). It is as close to Heaven on Earth as is possible. If the number of people playing shrinks or the preference goes back to wanting to play in person, I see bad times for the hobby. As for getting teenagers involved, you have to start when they're much younger like 6 or 7 and they already need the desire to live life, which so many young people as you point out seem to lack.

[@attentionspanlabs]

Re: otyugh - I can't tell if you're taking about the miniature or my kid 😂 As you know, I can't handle Roll20 style gaming. I can do online RPGs, play by post and so forth, but I hate anything that smacks of a work teleconference.

[@fmsyntheses]

Corpos took over all aspects of gaming a long time ago and lured in the normies, who ruined everything. There is a chance they'll return to something like default when the normies leave, but political opportunists occupy positions of power I think it's unlikely that they'll abdicate in all of these hobbies, because they like power. My ideal world would be to return to a culture in which someone would curl their upper lip and look at you askance if you told them you liked anime or videogames or tabletop games. Where people would casually resell old video games for nothing because it was just nonsense for kids. But that's a pipe dream.

[@attentionspanlabs]

"My ideal world would be to return to a culture in which someone would curl their upper lip and look at you askance..." Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I would much rather go back to the mainstream being bemused or contemptuous about fringe hobbies, for it is better than the cycle of economic exploitation followed by cultural invasion that comes with their attention. As G.K. Chesterton wrote: "And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."

[@darthkek1953]

40K has your back

[@attentionspanlabs]

@@darthkek1953 Depends what one means by 40k. If it's the players, the people that actually like it, then one hopes. But GW has been fully on board the corporate lifestyle brand train since 8th edition (at least!).

[@joezilafro5300]

Yes Hasbro had ruined D&D with SWJ crap trying to appeal to newer generations while alienating the older generations, but the millennials have no attention span to even play D&D, let alone a tabletop or board game. My friend's son really wants to play in our gaming group like BA and K47 and even Grim Dark Future Fire Fight but when we have him join in he loses interest and wonders off. I thought maybe since covid that tabletop gaming and rpg's would gather new bodies (I even got my wife to play D&D Adventure Board Game) to the hobby but that seems to be not the case. With the closing of a lot of FLGS or the lack of , gamers are not going to pick up new blood since there are not that many places to demo or even do pick-up games. I really like the board set up , my only fear with cloth on the board is miniatures not being able to stand in certain areas due to the cloth not laying flat . I'm looking forward to seeing how the K47 squad splitting works out as far as markers or tokens to use instead of order dice , I believe there are 3d printable order tokens on thingaverse to would work.

[@attentionspanlabs]

According to the official labels, I'm a millennial since I was born in 1983. The people we are dealing with are Gen Z or whatever comes after them. I now add your experience to the half dozen others I've heard. We were told that normies (in terms of societal average) could play these things, but it turns out they can't, and their presence is disruptive. I'll post the battle report soon, but as far as marking the split squads (it only happened twice, I think, in the game we played), we just used whatever we had on hand. There are 'DET' markers that come with Stargrunt and they would be ideal to use. Generally they did not get farther than six to eight inches away from the rest of the squad. I think as a GM I would have added penalties or required order tests if the detachment went 12" beyond the base squad.

[@joezilafro5300]

@@attentionspanlabs I should have corrected myself on the generation, what I should have said was Gen Zer's not millennial.

[@darthkek1953]

HeroQuest isn't a bad intro to fantasy board gaming. Yes, it's simple. But it has lots of bits and great theme. Also, a bonus, is it is simple.

[@attentionspanlabs]

@@darthkek1953 I haven't played the new Heroquest, but I regard the 1989 Heroquest as one of the great achievements in the genre. My son loves playing it, especially now that we have painted some of the miniatures.

[@darthkek1953]

@@attentionspanlabs great! if you have the old you do not need the new. :-D