A lot of people in the tabletop game industry are freaked out about the tariffs, particularly the RPG side of things.
Good.
You think I care what happens to the companies who said I wouldn’t be missed? This is what I voted for. Let them burn.
But today’s post isn’t really about dancing around the fires of their own creation. This post is an observation about how they don’t really have any convictions. They just want to make your life worse, and if the rationale for making your life worse just so happens to make their life worse, well that’s different because *jazz hands*
Consider the following:
We’re all supposed to eat locally produced food and stick with foods that are in season, and pay a premium for it, to make the weather bettter. But when it comes to their walls of unplayed board games and unplayed RPG books, asking them to game using locally produced material is the worst thing since unsliced bread? Gedouttaheah wid dat.
There are only two ways to read this situation:
- They don’t really believe it, which absolves you of any need to believe it.
- They do believe it, and care more for the care of extreme strangers than their own kith and kin. They are happy to see the American middle-class vanish completely if the alternative is spewing less hate at their neighbors.
For the true hobbyist, the industry is a liability. It’s a magnet for bad actors looking to go full P.T. Barnum and separate the fools from their money. It’s a way to lower the barriers to entry by fundamentally changing the nature of the hobby, while exploiting its reputation. It’s a way to attract scenesters who care more about being seen doing the hobby than they do about doing the hobby. It actively makes the hobby itself worse in a host of ways.
And when it’s gone, we happy few will be perfectly content to continue tinkering away in our basements and trading notes with each other. We will continue to tend the little garden of tabletop gaming once the locusts have stripped the field bare and moved on. Guys like us built the hobby from scratch, and we can preserve it from the same raw materials.
They need us more than we need them, never forget that.
And enjoy what comes next. It’s going to be even more fun to watch.