The Obligatory D&D5 Post

I was back and forth about doing this, but my old friend (and game creative god via Fallout, Mage, the Decipher Star Trek RPG and now, Star Trek Online) Jesse Heinig thought I’d have something useful to say. So here we are: D&D is getting another edition.

Man, they really want everyone to like D&D again. Of course, it’s not as if D&D fans ever turned away from the game as much as the glut of editions, clones and hacks has made it possible to toss your allegiance behind any version you like. This is the real purpose of an open beta playtest. The fact is that for a project of this size, most of the major decisions have already been made, and qualitative feedback wouldn’t be worth it with such a large playtest pool. They may get quantitative feedback that tells them what to cut, since at this stage 5^th is probably overdesigned, not unfinished in the conventional sense. And if the fans really hate something, that might get cut. But by and large, the playtest is there so that influencers believe that D&D is their game again, and that they made it – which of course, they didn’t.

Hand in hand with this you’ll see a marketing campaign where Hasbro/WotC gets an intern/SEO-SEM monkey to crunch data and figure out who would be the cheapest people to convert into influencers, and throw them bones. Again, these people may be told they’re helping to design 5e when in fact, the game almost certainly finished. The time needed to design, iterate, edit, commission art, and lay out a game of D&D’s scale make it unlikely that its final design is significantly unsettled – and if it is, we might see something uncharacteristically shoddy, because there won’t be enough time to do a better job.

(At its core, though, I think any new game will probably have good rules. These guys know what they’re doing.)

Now earlier, I said, “Toss your allegiance behind,” it not “play” it. Most of the cloned D&Ds support the creator’s campaign, some convention play, and endless discussions about D&D that remain unsullied by multiple groups actually playing the thing. Allegiance is what it’s all about. Hasbro believed that allegiance could be driven by the D&D brand. It was wrong.

Let’s be straight: D&D is a shitty brand. Beyond the tabletop scene, D&D represents video games and an archaic hobby for weirdos. It experienced a surge based on the general trend reviving 80s male geek culture. As D&D has evolved, it’s made itself all but impenetrable to outsiders by focusing on systems minutiae that most would-be roleplayers don’t care about. The eminently accessible experience of roleplaying involves making one’s way through a story world, but the D&D brand doesn’t represent this; it signifies complex systems that evoke little beyond a core dungeon-crawling scenario.

The brand is not the game, of course, but the brand’s shabby state is indicative of the whole problem with looking at D&D as a brand, instead of a set of signs that say something about what D&D is and what it means to people. D&D is a set of linked signs rather than a unitary practice. We have the game’s worlds, systems, communities and attached businesses, and the strategies they use to assert similarities and differences. D&D’s owners have long attempted to set D&D apart from other roleplaying games, right down to avoiding any description of D&D as a member of that category in the core texts. WoTC took this a step further and denigrated prior iterations of D&D itself, but this strategy was bound to backfire, since playing D&D (or even just talking about it) requires deep identification: a personal narrative of getting into the game, making characters and campaigns, and weaving it into personal histories.

From 3e onward, WotC rejected the most accessible parts of these narratives, where we could describe what the heroes did and the worlds they lived in, in favour of systems. There was a great deal of anxiety about getting rid of “fluff.” But the fluff cuts across systems, because we can all share these stories and appreciate them in a way we can’t though BAB, THAC0 and powers. When people talk about “disassociated mechanics,” and rules support for types of stories, they’re trying to escape from this trap.

WotC’s trying to repair the damage by telling fans they can make any D&D they want, but the primary concern seems to be satisfying the weakest way to bring them together: rules. This might be the only option left, as the company has made such strident efforts to devalue an approach that looks at characters acting in story worlds, that most off the remaining fans have transferred their allegiance and sense of identity to systems. But those systems can exist without D&D branding, and the rise of alternatives has proven that the hard core, used to bring told that their attachment to this aspect of the D&D brand can be insulted, spat on and kicked to the curb, will commit to these system-focused communities without the two-consonants-and-ampersand label.

So I think 5e’s taking the wrong approach, though it probably feels inevitable to the designers, and much hope lies in marketing it as something these fans – a group that barely cares about the brand – can see as theirs again. By making the Forgotten Realms a canonical setting there might be a glimmer of understanding that there needs to be a common, accessible way to describe the experience without recourse to rules (something which a highly customizable game will make difficult anyway) but I suspect the company is still ruled by a culture dominated by game systems before story experiences, for no other reason that rules represent a more measurable achievement that fits the culture of corporate oversight.

Now I got started with D&D in two ways: I stole the red box when IU was a kid and ran it for my friends, and played in the original Dragonlance modules. Although I ended up running AD&D, the Mentzer era box sets represent something special to me, and strike me as the best model for any new version of the game. I know my nostalgia’s tinting my analysis here, but I’d like to think there are rational reasons for this approach.

First, the core set doesn’t get discarded. Starter sets have traditionally been designed to be discarded in favour of the “real” game, but this makes the activity of playing D&D something to be dropped as well, like any other birthday toy you play with for a month and shelve. The red box is always relevant.

Second, subsequent sets add rules at a reasonable pace, and with explicit links to a new way to play the game. The dungeon-wilderness-domain-epic quest-immortal formula adds options without depriving players of a common narrative about the game (a hero’s journey from underground expeditions to lordship, and world-changing stories). For the most part, new rules feel like they support a story that can be understood without recourse to specialized terms. I can think about battles as battles before getting into mass combat systems. And in most cases, these systems can be projected backwards to enhance fundamental, red box play. This form of presentation seems to work for games such as White Wolf’s Scion and Green Ronin’s Dragon Age, and on a personal note, the blueprint in the five box scheme has definitely influenced my conception of D&D’s story arc without being a straitjacket – and look at that! It made me think of D&D as a thing united around its product.

But that’s just me.