It’s now 2025, so it seems appropriate to kick the year off with an update on what the path forward looks like for Tabletop Joab.
There’s a fair bit to cover here and I’m just writing from the heart, so let’s just dive right into it.
Google, the Ultimate BBEG
Let’s start with the elephant in the room…
Towards the end of 2023, Google started making some major changes to search results that devastated a ton of sites. These updates started getting both more severe and frequent throughout 2024.
In the D&D content space, this means that sites like mine have had a very hard time.
Monthly traffic on this site is down by about 90% compared to its previous average (up from 98% down), and that’s after a year of major attempts and experiments to recover the traffic as much as possible.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen other sites that have historically ranked alongside Tabletop Joab in search results lose the same or even more traffic.
As a result, it’s not surprising that so many D&D and TTRPG blogs have entirely stopped publishing new content. After all, what’s the point of writing, editing, formatting, and publishing content if it’s not going to be seen?
Yet I’ve seen at least one other site land astounding rankings with low-value AI-generated slop. (The words, the images, and even the “team” are all very clearly AI.)
While many people are moving away from Google because of the generally unhelpful search results, the fact is that it still dominates the search market. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and others just simply don’t have the pull.
I suppose we’ll have to see how things go with Search GPT, but I have major reservations.
However, this issue also extends to YouTube, with Mann Shorts and How To Be a Great GM calling it quits just this very week. And they’re far from the first to do it, with WebDM and Taking20 both also being major inspirations for me to start this very site.
It makes one wonder…
Are the days of being a TTRPG content creator over?
New Content
However, I’m not calling it quits on Tabletop Joab just yet.
Despite the bleak outlook, I take a lot of pride in what this little site has accomplished, especially when it really started just as something to share an interest and help others have better games.
In my mind, the goal has never changed.
Through this project, I’ve made friends from all over the world who have found their way to my little Druid Grove on this part of the internet. It’s something I try to honor and would never trade for anything.
So, I figure we should talk about some directions I’m considering taking the content as we navigate whatever lies ahead.
DnD 2024
Obviously, the biggest change to D&D in 2024 was the release of the DnD 2024 rules.
I’ve tried to think of the best way to incorporate those changes into this site’s content without having to:
- Basically rewrite every article.
- Publish near-duplicates of existing content to clearly distinguish between 5e and DnD 2024 rules.
- Make the existing articles even longer (when the average is around 3000-3500 words).
So I’ve done some experiments with articles like my Shocking Grasp guide and Healing Word guide with good results. I wrote each for D&D 5e but included a section that covers the changes made going into DnD 2024.
As such, I’ll likely be doing this with the subclass guides on this site.
For example, there will be a section of the Celestial Warlock guide that briefly goes over what kind of changes were made.
Unless a subclass gets entirely redesigned from the ground up, I think this will satisfy the content goals while hopefully keeping the guides as helpful as possible.
New subclasses for DnD 2024 will be getting dedicated subclass guides at some point in the near-ish future.
This will also tie in with the much-requested subclass rankings for DnD 2024 now that my group and I have been able to really get first-hand experience with the subclasses in the new ruleset.
(Also, I’m really happy with the cover images I’ve got ready for those articles, and I hope you all like them too!)
Show Your Fangs with Vampire: The Masquerade!
But I have to be honest when I say that, 5 years and well over 400 articles later, I’m getting a little burned out on writing D&D content.
However, this past year, I did start getting back into another TTRPG that I have missed dearly…
Venturing into the World of Darkness, I’m very excited to start publishing some content for Vampire: The Masquerade. If this content performs well, I would love to also cover Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Hunter: The Reckoning.
I’ve gotten positive feedback from friends so far on how I will be approaching this new content. I’m also particularly happy with the cover images.
Over the past several months, I’ve been writing these VtM articles and will likely be publishing them in large chunks rather than just doing a daily “drip” for like two months.
For those who want to learn to play a game that is more narrative-driven with plenty of horror themes, this content will be coming very soon!
Embracing Insanity with Call of Cthulhu
In 2024, I also finally started playing a game I’ve wanted to get into for a very long time: Call of Cthulhu.
I was very impressed with the CoC Starter Set and immediately began diving in to the other books. It’s been a lot of fun and I would like to possibly publish some Call of Cthulhu content if time permits and if there is reader interest.
I wouldn’t necessarily say this is a goal for my 2025 upload schedule, but it is something that would be fun to do. If I get a wild hair after doing the DnD 2024 and VtM guides, this will likely be the first game I reach for.
Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see CoC content on this site!
Health Challenges
Though now we come to the part that I’m not happy about…
Mid-December I had an unexpected health issue that saw me ringing in the new year from the hospital.
While I really don’t care to share my diagnosis here at this time, it’s heavily changing my life from the ground up. Recovery isn’t totally out of the question, but the odds are much more that I’m stuck with this new debuff.
We’ll have to see what this means for my upload schedule on this site and, to be honest, I’m really just playing it as I go.
More than anything, TTRPGs and this site have been an outlet for me. With this health issue that I’m now having to learn to live with, it’s more important than ever to have that outlet.
Even beyond what I’m physically able to write and publish, I realize that it’s important that creating this content and running Tabletop Joab stay fun for me. I don’t know if that’s possible if I stick to my old upload schedule of two articles a week and certainly not my pre-hospital-visit pace of (almost) daily.
To those who are regular readers of my site (and, most likely, those who are reading all of this), I ask for your patience.
Supporting the Site
And, alas, we come to the potentially awkward part…
As this site’s traffic barreled downwards, it seemed that the ad placements went absolutely bonkers. I assume this was so that publishers would theoretically still get similar earnings despite falling traffic due to the nightmare Google updates.
But when I noticed what was happening, I was absolutely shocked and embarrassed.
I’ve always tried to keep a healthy balance between the number of ads on this site and being able to monetize the site well so that I can afford to make more content.
However, it was just too much, so I made the decision to reduce the number of ads to the lowest that my ad network would let me.
This leads us to a very… uncomfortable… problem…
This site no longer makes enough to even get a meal for one at a casual restaurant once a month. As such, I am left with three options:
- Draw attention to my Ko-Fi page. It’s a way that you can directly support this site. Even just a few dollars a month helps keep this humble Druid fed.
- Increase the number of ads on the site and hope that it doesn’t go absolutely bonkers again.
- Call it quits, at least for now. In my current situation, I have to figure out how to stay afloat and I’m just not able to spend time on things that don’t help me do that.
Final Thoughts
Whatever lies ahead, know that I treasure the readership that this site has developed over the years. It’s been a crazy journey that’s been fun, educational, and challenging in the absolutely best ways.
And none of it would be possible with you.
For that, I humbly thank you and wish you a wonderful and fulfilling year full of tales of adventure, bravery, and loot that you’ll look back on fondly for years to come.
Until next time…
Cheers!
