The inaugural post

Have you tried not playing DnD?

Snark though it may be, this contentious response is often a valid question. Every roleplaying game has issues, and we hear about those issues on the internet in relative proportion to how popular the game is.

DnD is so universal that it is the kleenex to rpg , so its problems inundate hobby discussions, right behind cool stories of your character or that thing your GM did. Unlike most other smaller titles however, it inculcates a singular focus and obsession in those affected by the brain-wyrm. As a result, many of the problems we see are not issues of experience, or the person, but of a stubborn refusal to look beyond the Brand Name Ampersand Game.

This is so much like playing Skyrim and only Skyrim, modding it beyond recognition. There are obvious differences between Skyrim and the next game, between style, story, mechanics, etc. It raises questions. Perhaps “is there something wrong with you?”, “do you not see the differences?”, or “your mother and I are worried about you. Why don’t you come eat?”

This memetic response, “Have you tried not playing DnD?” is a response to that disease. The most notable problem with the Game, DnD, is that it results in this brain-wyrm infestation in the first place.

Why does this brain-wyrm occur?

Nerd intellectual properties are weird. To Nerd or Geek is to some effect inherently obsess. They frequently develop a sort of rivalry between one and the major competitor. Comics/Cinematic Universes DC v Marvel, Star both Wars and Trek, and in this case, DnD v literally any other game.

With sports, this kind of rivalry attitude often makes sense: the competition is literal. The fans nearly certainly have a connection to their team of choice: regional representation, alma mater, etc.

For nerds, this was most prominent about a decade ago, I think, when the whole “geeks are cool” pop culture mainstream caught on to that geeks often have disposable income and are willing to spend it. Maybe the Avengers’ (2012) third-highest-grossing-film-of-all-time release was the major inflection event.

In any case, this is a toxic fanaticism, and it is fed by a consumer culture (not unique to nerds) which leads to self-image being composed around the IPs that people enjoy.

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And for Hasbro’s case, that’s of obvious benefit to them. Consoom! But consoom their products. Hasbro has explicitly made the point that they want DnD to be a lifestyle brand. I’m here to tell you, for a lot of DnDers, it already is.

Marketing

DnD wears its top-dog status with pride, purporting -on the 5e Player’s Handbook- to be the “world’s greatest roleplaying game”. It is marketed this way to people who do not know any better. And they believe it, because they’ve at least heard of DnD, but not the next most popular system, CoC , let alone how to pronounce Cthulhu. It paints, with its excellent interior and cover art, fantastic scenes of heroism. To WotC's credit, all kinds can be found represented in the PHB . It is an unchallenging fantasy with no overt themes which would prevent self-insertion.

On its face, there is nothing which could turn players away.

And there’s a lot to be said for the meteoric rise of actual-play shows and podcasts like Critical Role and Dimension 20 (of the two, the author prefers the latter). This had perfect coincidence of timing with podcasts getting real dang popular. At the time, twitch and youtube were pretty good platforms for both creators and consumers. The culture of sharing stories about your badass character and the badass things they did wasn’t a niche activity on weird forums in corners of the internet anymore; this was mainstream. And Hasbro couldn’t have asked for a better organic marketing than popular, likeable people broadcasting the use of 5e .

It amuses me to use “Mercer Effect” to describe this, but that’s laying a lot of sin at his feet.

It amuses me also that the edition of DnD that the kids would have been playing in Stranger Things is in many ways completely unlike the modern edition of DnD extant at time of broadcast.

Complexity

Despite the core resolution mechanics being in effect fairly simple, 5e is a surprisingly crunchy game. The newly initiated will have no frame of reference for what is rules-lite, or what inherent tone is being imparted on their play.

But they will learn a crucial -and wrong- lesson from reading the rules

RPGs are complex, hard to learn, and take a lot of time investment

DMs will no doubt learn this lesson thrice as hard, since they’re going through typically both the base rules, and the DMG , and probably also acting as guide and teacher of the system for their friends. Everyone involved in this situation develops a sunk-cost fallacy about their choices.

RPGs can be lite and breezy, low/no-prep, heavy on style and creative expression without feeling arbitrary.

DnD is not uniquely bad. It is, in my opinion, just okay at its core focus -heroic fantasy combat-. But 5e is complex enough that it turns people off the prospect of learning another game. My experience is that many people barely read their class powers to know how those work.

I mean, I can’t blame folks:

• Lots of corner cases spelled out explicitly -e.g, flanking, grappling- which feel like they improve the tactical options, but really limit options
• The phrase “Action Economy” strikes fear in the heart of veteran players
• Vancian casting has always been a fucking ludonarrative mess. Has anyone actually read the Dying Earth books?
• The utter frustration of trying to cross-class to make a custom character idea only to discover it does nothing particularly well as a result.
  • The weirdly anti-DIY attitude in some parts of the subculture.
• The DMG starts with fucking worldbuilding advice instead of concrete advice on how to run the game!?
• etc

The DnD rules often make very little logical sense (e.g, HP is not (only) meat), there are a lot of golden calf holdovers, and you are on some level required to attain some amount of system mastery to get anywhere in more than a couple 1st-party adventure modules.

Why, then, would people not negatively anticipate the prospect of learning a new system? Most people get introduced to new games as a player, during session zero, without having read the book themselves. There’s a shortage of GMs, a lot of people don’t want to GM without having played a game, and GMs are probably more (spiritually and monetarily) invested than their players in DnD.

I promise you, most RPGs don’t have this kind of learning curve

What about other editions?

In the 80s and 90s, the competition was a lot closer. Lots of new, notable RPGs burst onto the scene, and continue to receive new editions today. So did a lot of niche stuff, and a lot of trash. Champions, Traveller, GURPS, Tunnels and Trolls, and so on were all welcome responses and developments to D&D, and then to each other.

B/X , 1e, 2e, largely stayed in their lane. Grognards might have a lot of opinions about how a wargame-cum-dungeon crawler would work, as is tradition. Anecdotally, not a single person I’ve spoken to, who played games at that time, declared any kind of single-minded devotion to them as people do to 5e now.

It may have helped that TSR didn’t stop making RPGs with AD&D . They continued to develop a lot of other box sets, largely pretty niche titles. D&D definitely got the bulk of support though, with a consistent churn of adventure modules.

In the immediate wake of 3e in 2000, “D20” system shit was everywhere. Lots of venerable settings had conversions published for the D20 system. Lots and lots of shovelware. But, the OGL was successful: it cemented 3e as the game, and supplanted most competition. I think 3e is the first edition where we see the beginnings of this bizarre brain-wyrm.

My history with DnD

I grumble without any veterancy of 1e AD&D campaigns.

• 2009: I pore through 3e and begin GMing for my friends. I don’t know any better, but I know those books backwards and forwards. We don’t do much but we have fun.
• 2010ish: I read through the 4e Starter Set and run it for myself. I think it’s neat.
• 2015: I get to actually play games instead of running them. It’s 3e. I grow to dislike it, but the entertainment from the stellar GM balances out.
• 2016: The same group gets larger, more toxic, the rules get frankensteined with shit from 2e, and some other grafted on bits from things I don’t yet recognize.
  • I go looking for the 3e Unearthed Arcana SRD. I realize that the problems I’m having are symptoms of the rules, and the rules can be changed.
  • Wikipedia leads me to GURPS. I’m intrigued. I pick it up the next time we visit the FLGS. Something clicks for me about it.
• 2017ish: I run some one-shots with GURPS . I’m delighted with how lite it is in play, how modular it is, how much I can intuit. I swear off running brand name DnD.
• 2017: I’m playing Pathfinder and 5e with a different group. 5e throws me off with how dissatisfying it is when you play to the rules.
  • I learn about Blades in the Dark, and regret I couldn’t get a Special Edition copy during the KS campaign. I run it. It breaks my 5e GM’s brain. I love it, and BitD totally reorganizes my thoughts about how GMing works.
  • I hear about the OSR . I read through B/X retroclones. It all makes sense now!
• 2018: I start picking up games knowing I’m never going to play them and only read them and steal from them for games I do run. Things get out of hand from here.

My inciting incident was ultimately peeking behind the curtain. Thinking a little too hard about how the game worked (“wait, armor doesn’t work that way…”) led to reading the Armor As Damage Reduction rules. My descent into madness, the burden which I now share with you, was the then-shocking revelation that the system matters, and it can be changed.

Fin

If you are similarly burdened with such concerns, join me. I will be your guide.