The latest dispatch from Goonhammer confirms what we have feared: the digital tools we rely on are becoming as unstable as a Wild Magic surge. Between Discord’s UI overhaul and Hasbro’s relentless push for D&D TV, the hobby is facing a serious identity crisis. If that was not enough, we have got a literal hazard on our hobby desks with a major basing sand recall that is making the rounds.

Let us talk crunch. Discord’s new updates are a nightmare for anyone running a VTT or using dice-rolling bots. They are burying the features we actually use—like high-bitrate audio for atmosphere and clean screen sharing for battlemaps—under layers of social media bloat. For the GMs who spent years building custom servers with intricate permission sets, this is a massive nerf to utility. We do not need a discovery feed; we need a stable platform that does not lag when the dragon breathes fire. If the interface becomes any more cluttered, we might as well go back to Play-by-Mail.

On the fluff side, the announcement of a dedicated D&D TV channel feels like another attempt to commodify the Forgotten Realms until the setting is bled dry. We saw how the OGL fiasco of 2023 tried to lock down community creativity, and this multimedia push feels like the next step in trying to dictate what official D&D looks like. Instead of organic lore built at the table through player agency, we are getting scripted content designed to sell subscriptions. It is a high fluff-to-crunch ratio that offers nothing for the actual mechanics of the game.

The table feel here is, frankly, gritty—and not in a good OSR way. The basing sand recall is a reminder that the physical hobby has risks we often ignore. If you have been using that specific brand to grit your 40k bases, stop immediately. It is a massive blow to the hobby’s look and feel when the very materials we use to make our minis pop are being pulled from shelves for safety reasons. Between the digital platform rot and the physical recalls, it is a tough week to be a hobbyist, but at least we still have our physical dice and paper character sheets. They cannot recall your imagination or your THAC0 charts.