Cashing in on the Illiteracy

I just saw this, and it's really linked into a lot of the posts I've been making lately.

 

It seems to be an advertising point for D&D-adjacent products that you don't need literacy , and you can use tools to do the heavy lifting for you. I don't know if this is an AI product, but it does seem to be a package that combines the features of a virtual tabletop and a rapidly accessible database of the rules. It's a tool, it might be a good tool, it might not....but like every tool it probably needs a degree of expertise in it's use and in the environment where it's to be used. It could be right in certain circumstances, it could be wrong in others. A player wouldn't know unless they had read the rules. It's a shortcut that offloads the burden of literacy onto something else and then says "trust us".  

I know I'm not the target audience for this, because I see TTRPGs as having the infinite scope of artistic potential, while this reduces a single game to a paint-by-numbers. Don;t get me wrong, I'm sure there is a market for this sort of thing, but the kind of people who buy this will be even less inclined to buy the sorts of products produced by indie game designers because they'll struggle with the concept of a game that doesn't have an app associated with it, in much the same way that they assume every TTRPG needs to be a bloated mess like D&D so they look at indie games now and wonder "where the rest of it is". 

Oh...as a post-script for this message, a couple of days ago I got a "Whatever happened to that scarecrow game?" message. Just like I predicted 18 months ago. 

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