Donejons & Drag-ons
Why I’m Finished With Modern D&D
Note from Chris: Today’s post is a guest essay from Dominic Martyne, Professional Dungeon Master and American Historian. He discusses his dissatisfaction with changes to the D&D game in recent years, frustration I suspect is more common among the gamer community than D&D’s makers, Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro may be aware of. Take it away Dominic:
Some years ago I wrote the definitive article on whether or not the D&D game was “racist.” The quick-and-dirty answer is, “Yes, but only insofar as a concept of race necessarily entails racism.” As we jump to today, I’ve gradually been buying numerous other games to run at my tables to broaden my offerings as a professional Game Master. In what follows, I’ll be detailing many of the bad moves Wizards of the Coast has made so far this year to sour me on their new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. We begin in the frosty January of this year, with the very license which made D&D king of the RPG when the third edition came some twenty years ago...
A long time ago, Wizards of the Coast gave blanket permission for people to use the D&D 3rd edition rules to develop their own materials for the game. This allowed people to publish and sell their own adventures and supplements, and gave us what’s called the Open Gaming License. This past January, they tried to revoke it, end it, and to twist its meaning to take fuller control of the 5e marketplace. The resulting backlash was so thunderous that the entirety of the 5e ruleset has been placed in the Creative Commons. While it may seem that they retreated, they plan for the new edition of the game to effectively be a new one, despite their “5.5 edition” talk.
This controversy certainly came at a mind-boggling time, because two months later would be the premiere of the long-awaited Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. While I’ll admit I went in order to get one of those d20 popcorn bowls, the movie doesn’t seem to have done well for the studio. I’ll further admit I didn’t like the film because I never felt like the party was in danger, especially when the fat red dragon was flopping around on screen like your aunt’s overfed cat. Hasbro has also sold the production company, a move I remember well with the first Final Fantasy movie.
Let’s now add to this their price increase, which will be happening in 2023. I’ve bought a bunch of these books over the years, and they are not worth $59.95, especially with the production problems they have had for years leading up to this. Some of the pages in my Xanathar’s Guide to Everything look designed for 3-D glasses. It’s worth noting that the new edition’s books will come with a PDF of the book, but that’s only if you buy directly from WotC. As such, they also plan to kill the local game store, have consistently buggered Magic: The Gathering releases, and even sent the PINKERTONS after a guy who (idiotically) streamed cards he had gotten ahead of time.
Further, it’s been quite some time since I’ve felt some inspiration in the adventures or books presented, and I always had a standing order for the new releases at my local game store. Rime of the Frostmaiden (2020), can easily be run as D&D crossed with The Thing, and the horrific tundra atmosphere makes for a great mood to play in. Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021) was designed to always have a dialogue resolution to combat, and Radiant Citadel (2022) would be like if Deep Space Nine had no Bajor, Dominion, or even the Cardassians. Being an explicitly Socialist utopia in concept, you would have to rewrite the adventure to get a Quark in the mix. The company has also dumped long-established lore after backlash to Volo’s Guide to Monsters. Next, this recent cherry: it was revealed that AI art was used for their upcoming book, Bigby Presents: Glory(hole) of the Giants. Hilariously, this was revealed while a presentation regarding upcoming releases was being given at Gen Con.
Finally, there’s the virtual tabletop they’re developing, because they believe the future of Dungeons & Dragons is digital due to sales during the pandemic. A digital tabletop with a digital store to sell digital dice sets and digital cosmetics and digital loot boxes- they want a videogame! It also implies that they will try every scumbag marketing technique which plagues that industry, where the vomitous phrase, “recurrent user spending,” is invoked to conjure up infinite money. The natural conclusion I come to is that this isn’t a game being made for nor marketed to me. The company is scummy, their writers are mediocre at best, and it’s been observed that many players can’t even create a character without a damn application to guide them.
I’ve avoided any “culture war” nonsense here because that would be a waste of energy.
As for me and mine, I’ll gather my party around the gaming table with real dice, real books, and real adventure.
Because an imaginative game about funny dice and fighting dragons shouldn’t be done online by default. It shouldn’t be leveraged to pry money out of people’s pockets. You publish the book, it gets used however the DM sees fit, and that’s it. Of course, all this must lead up to the question of, “Shouldn’t you keep up with the modern game, since it’s your business?”
The answer is that my players want to try different games, different editions, and they know they’ll get a quality experience out of every game I run. It helps that there’s always beer in the fridge. But at this stage, I’m far more interested in the great number of other roleplaying games there are, ranging from Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play to even Basic Dungeons & Dragons through the Rules Cyclopedia book.
No one can chain the imagination.