Throwing Shit at a Wall and Hoping for the Best

Following up yesterday's post, I got a comment from JB of BX/Blackrazor, that in turn led to this 2002 article from the WOTC,  the very same year that Ryan Dancey got turfed from the company (taking JB's word on that).

I don't know how much business-talk gibberish you've personally encountered in your life; I've encountered a lot, particularly during the unhappy time I worked for a $30-billion company.  Dancey's pulling a rabbit out of a hat here, hoping that what worked for an industry utterly unlike his own will work for him:

"In about twenty years ago, a guy named Richard Stallman was a grad student at MIT. During his time there, he participated in a community of software developers who shared code between themselves and were at the cutting edge of computer programming. When those people started to leave the university and go into private enterprise, they stopped being willing to share their code, because the standard corporate philosophy is to keep secrets rather than share them.

"Stallman thought that was a mistake. He feels that the best way to get good software is to let everyone see the source code, and be able to make changes to that code if they think the changes necessary. Stallman in fact considers this a "natural right," up there with the right to free speech, the right to assemble, and the right to practice a religion. He's a little on the extreme side, but he has been proven (at least partially) correct."

Whereupon Dancey then clumsily tries to apply this logic to the development of D&D, apparently being confident that once open content is released, it will be like a magic spell that rejuvenates the creativity of D&D game design.  I want to stop for a moment and say that yes, open source design definitely works.  It worked for Europe and Western Civilization after the invention of the printing press, which enabled people everywhere to see the work that other people were doing and then build on that.  We certainly don't have to pull up Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman to prove that.  On some level, I grant that it is an important way of looking at things.

But Torvalds and Stallman didn't just throw doors open.  They had a vision of what they wanted to accomplish.  They understood when to shut that door against cranks and incompetents and they knew what wouldn't add to their vision.  Dancey here has NO vision.  He doesn't know what D&D should be or where it should go ... he's hoping the grass roots will tell him.  His approach to what to publish is scattershot thinking.  They're going to learn something from Palladium, Warhammer, Rolemaster, Diablo and Everquest.  They're going to create a "new" book of creatures, spells and magic items, as if THAT hasn't been done all through the 1990s.  He has No Ideas.  Not of his own.  Dancey is a business manager.  He might as well be selling Lawn Furniture, Bathroom Fixtures or Women's Panty-shields.  Business is business.

In the video I linked yesterday, in the part where Nicholas Means is describing the Skunk Work's design of the U-2, there's an important lesson for every designer (22:22 in).  The CIA knew that what the U-2 could do, spy on Russia, had a window of practicality ~ about 18 to 24 months, before the Russians would figure out how to shoot it down.  So they didn't sit around making a bunch of these planes and resting on their laurels.  They immediately started a new and better design that would replace the U-2 before that practicality ended.

Companies that do not do this go out of business.  And good fucking riddance.

A company as old as TSR/WOTC was in 2002 should not have still been making splat books with creatures, spells and magic items.  They should not have been employing people who brought these ideas to meetings.  They should not have been thinking about what they could learn from companies that had never had the participation level of D&D.  If necessary, Dancey should have laid off everyone not directly connected with revisioning the company, brought in some game experts and spent time determining what future D&D needed to be.  Not more rules, not more junk, not a reinvention of the wheel, not emphasizing that D&D had been a far, far better game in 1979 than it was in 2002 by releasing more material from the past and proving that point to a wide number of their customers.  But he didn't do that.  And he was rightly fired.

What we have now IS a vision for the new D&D.  One that works ... for the company.  A gutted, infantile, simplistic, minimally scaled version that enables 10-year-olds and adults with the mental capacity of 10-year-olds to play the pretend games they liked when they were 10.  And it sells.  It sells great.  It translates well to cheesy low-budget productions that advantage quirky personalities in the late Youtube age, it translates well to brick-and-mortar game stores eager to keep afloat but bringing in customers and selling them candy and energy drinks along with plastic swords, dice and character sheets.  It translates well with DMs who don't want to design and with players who don't care.  And right now it is one of the few departments that is keeping a failing, collapsing Hasbro barely afloat.

What it doesn't have is a future.  Despite every effort, American toy sales aren't going to turn around and Hasbro will go under.  Youtube is changing into something glossy and expensive, and clearly what we're seeing online related to D&D isn't keeping up on viewer numbers.  So don't count on too many more seasons of your favorite D&D web series.  Brick-and-mortar stores are definitely going to die.  Sorry.  There's just so much pop you can sell and Covid is seriously going to execute a lot of them right out of the gate.  This will be a huge part of the WOTC's getting young kids hooked on D&D crack with their parents approval not working as well in 2023 as it did in 2018.

Likewise, we can count on No One at the company working diligently to build the visionary plane that will replace the D&D equivalent of the U-2.  I have no doubt that the company has, thinking it had built something sustainable, begun to realize that it isn't.  And that a few people are starting to sweat at night realizing that time moves on and D&D isn't.

D&D needs a new direction.  And I don't think anyone working there has the slightest idea that it does, much less what a new direction would be.