Where to Start

If you've read this post and then this, you're up to speed.

First step, end the "story" in your campaign. Don't play it out to the end, don't wait for a convenient moment to get out... just tell the players honestly, "I don't want to decide any more what happens next. I've been doing it for a long time, I don't think it's my job, I'd rather you guys took responsibility for what your characters do." Then, have some NPC kill the big bad, have the gods lose interest, have the dweomer inexplicably lifted, whatever, just set everything to zero. "The party now finds there's nothing specific that they have to do next. You're sort of near this town, the road leads to such and such... what do you do?" Then shut the fuck up.

If the players say, "What do we do?  What do you mean, 'what do we do?' We wait for you to tell us what the next adventure is."

Your answer: "I'm not there. I'm busy elsewhere. Leave a message. My people will get back to you. Right now, you're on a road, there's a village over there, the other end of the road goes to another place, and you're hungry. What do you do?"

The discomfort that follows is the sound of people who have become dependent upon the DM to provide them with a purpose... and, honestly, losing that is uncomfortable. You're looking at a withdrawal, and as with any withdrawal, expect a kind of low-level panic to set in. If there's anything that might teach you just how awful you've been by feeding the player's dependency, it'll be watching them utterly fall apart when you cut them off.

And your compulsion will be to think, "Oh, I better help them, I better give them the drug again" — though that's not how you'll word it in your head. In your head, you'll phrase it as "responsibility," "kindness," "respect for your players," "decency," all sorts of bullshit words like that designed to cover up what you've been doing for months or possibly years. You've been getting them accustomed to the structure you've offered, and don't kid yourself: you have benefitted highly from their dependency. You've sopped that dependency up all these years... and if you're right now saying in your head, "But I'm not a bad person," sorry, you're wrong. Don't believe me. Just watch your players as they wallow around without your drug.

Their helplessness is evidence of the illusion you've harboured for a long, long time. You've told yourself that your control is "necessary" to their experience, when what you've really offered is a drip drip drip of narrative control, designed to take away the players' agency. And now, with that drip gone, they're looking around, waiting for the next cue, unable to make a decision between two lengths of road. Without your assurances, "go this way," "do this next," however many layers of NPC and role-play you've slathered over that to account for your control-compulsions, the players are anxious at making the wrong decision, anxious that something wrong is going to happen if they decide wrong (there is no wrong decision, but they don't know that) and they're desperate for you to step in for them. And they'll be desperate for a long as it takes, if there is a threshold you can get to where you'll sigh and say, "Okay, go to the village, there's an adventure waiting for you there."

If you can hold out, however... if you can wait for them to get a hold of themselves, you'll witness something you rarely see in your game. The players will ask each other what they want to do. They won't be talking to you. You'll be able to actually leave the table and the game will go on, until you're needed.  And that, probably, will unsettle you.

Because, dear DM, you've gotten off on the drug just has they have. They've been dependent on you running the show... and that's exactly what you've grown to depend on also. Because running the show makes you... important. And that's probably a lot of what makes this gig work for you. Yeah, it's a lot of work, it's thankless sometimes, things don't work out and there's all this group management shit you have to do. But aside from all that, no one can question your "importance." And that makes you feel good... not only when you're playing, but all the time. Because when you're out at the bar with these others, you're still "The DM," aren't you? I mean, that's what they call you.  All the time. Feels pretty good.

This is where the game lives. It exposes how symbiotic it all is. The players' paralysis mirrors the DM's appetite for being indispensable. The structure that's been built — with the deliberate instigation of the company, I might add — was never purely for the players' benefit, it was always for yours. You kept them waiting for cues, you kept providing their purpose, you glommed their approval for points and treasures and magic items, which you've given to sustain your "generosity" in giving things that actually cost you nothing. And now that the players have lost their script, you lose your stage. Watching them talk to each other, it feels a lot more like you versus all of them... and they outnumber you. If you don't feel uncomfortable watching them fumble around like fools because they can't pick between left and right, you'll feel uncomfortable knowing that you could just tell them, right now, and they'll obey.

Every time in the past, when you nudged them toward the "right" road, you reinforced your own authority... and they let you, because it absolved them of having to decide. It felt cooperative, even giving, but the truth is that it's always been a compact based on your absolving them of the need to decide. It felt cooperative, and you called it "collaborative" as though that word had a meaning, but really, it's just been YOU.

That's why, really, I don't think you can lay off. I think that's why, at the opening of this post, when I said, "Drop the adventure," every bone in your body vibrated with the instinct, "No way." Because you're an addict, and no, not the good kind. There are no good addicts.

Addiction hides under noble words: preparation, world-building, storytelling, leadership. You tell yourself you’re working hard for others, but what you’re really doing is feeding the need to stay central. You build campaigns that never end because endings mean loss of control. You create layers of hidden logic, arbitrary tables and pseudo-mechanics that obfuscate player understanding while assuring your privilege. You give and give because giving keeps the gratitude flowing. And all of it feels virtuous. Even the players say so.

But I see you. I've run under you and I've discarded your games. And so have players, because they get sick of your mechanics. Once they're visible, they can't unsee them; and so they quit your game, they quit D&D, and they find something that stops them from feeling unsatisfied... as your world does. Because your world, for all it's storytelling and concern, is really just a sham, a fake, a dishonesty.  And I'm not here to defend you, beard for you or ignore you. I'm here to call you out, because real D&D is honest.

Almost everyone normally reading this blog? They all dropped storytelling years ago, or they never picked it up. They saw what it was, right from the start. They didn't need me to tell them. They got it, bang, right out of the gate: "bullshit." And they've never thought about it any other way.

You ought to join them. You ought to look at your friends stumbling around in the dark and forsake your need to empower yourself, and consider the benefits in empowering them, by letting them off your leash. Yes, true, they'll make a mess of it. They've never been off a leash. Most games, company branded, are like yours... awful. So of course the players are incompetent.

They've never played D&D before.

The Act of Regaining Sanity

If there is a way out of the grimdark described in the previous post, it probably begins with refusing the premise that the culture's current vocabulary defines what D&D is. It means stepping completely outside the expectation of the game, discarding any idea that D&D needs to be sold, justified, praised or engaged with as a part of a larger whole. At it's root, the game is played with around four to seven people, no set number, around a private table that does not need to explain itself nor defend itself against any other set of voices, anywhere. D&D doesn't need an ideology. It doesn't need a foundation beyond the desire of a small number of people to play it. There need not be any official rules, there need not be a game community, there need not be another person anywhere on earth playing the game. And the games themselves need not be spoken of, discussed or defended to any person outside of those actually playing. All positions to the contrary just contribute to the general noise that conflicts with the game in progress. Get rid of the noise and the rest becomes clear.

At this point, the imaginary spectators who might judge the game having been removed, the ground appears. The DM is not curating an experience. The players are not attempting to achieve an ideal. There's no one left to ask, "are we doing it right," nor is there any reason to think that a "right" exists. The DM ceases to perform. Aspects of the game that were invented to "improve the experience" are thrown away, not employed, not added, not invoked.  No session zero exists because the remaining people just TALK to each other. No backstories are needed because it does not matter where the characters come from or what they did or who birthed them, because none of that has anything to do with the game. There are no "stories" because the players do not need to make "sense" of the experience, they don't need continuity, it doesn't matter if the process of game play is fragmented or if is lacks reason. It's a game. We play it to play the game. Not to lift ourselves up in some way that has nothing to do with the game.

The DM is not a storyteller, not a curator, not a therapist, not a host or a caretaker, not responsible for making sure others enjoy the game, not someone who takes responsibility for why someone else is there. We're people each taking part and that's all. I'm not here as DM to ensure that you feel seen. I see you, that's my part done. Your "feeling" seen, that is your problem. If you're here for emotional support, you're not here to play. You should go somewhere else.

The demand to be "seen," to be supported, to have one’s personal arc honored — those are all extensions of the broader social climate where every interaction is expected to affirm identity. The noise we don't want here. When a player's character dies, no one at the table is responsible for the emotional management of that fact but the player... and in this small, appreciated and isolated group, we expect every player to carry their own baggage. The DM is not a porter.

In this quiet, stripped-down form, play can breathe again. It looks smaller, quieter, more sensible than what we've been taught to expect. The characters are just people, not heroes. The events are just events, not pre-ordained story arc milestones. Fate does not exist. No one needs to perform silly voices; no monologues are necessary. The party can say, "We fill the sailor in on the details," in a perfectly normal tone of voice and the sailor is up to speed. Just like that. No one needs to give an impromptu speech when a danger is overcome. The DM can simply say, "You see the Prince and he wants you to fetch a jewel from a castle on a nearby island. I'll give you the name and location." That's it. No long winded back and forths, no putting the players on the spot to speak correctly in a Princely setting, no non-game relevant pressure being put on people who aren't interested in being actors and don't find performing in front of even their friends comfortable. "Acting" can't be measured, there are no points for it, the characters don't gain skills from it and its not necessary to game play. Those who miss this feature? They need to get that drug from another dealer.

The DM describes, the players respond; the world moves forward. Without the need to perform the emotion of their characters, they're free to express their own emotions. To get excited when a die roll lands well, without concern for whether the character "ought" to be excited. Intra-party conflict ceases when the need to perform evaporates; just as we're all friends in real life here at the table, our characters are all friends as they fight zombies, harpies or jellies. It's an honest occupation... we're killing to survive, we're killing to rid the world of bad things, we're killing for money. It's not a reflection on our real world behaviours or outlook. It's a game. It doesn't have to justify itself. It's merely what happens.

Suddenly, all the events within the game are a display of honesty. When George comes to Chris's aid in a fight, it does not matter that George is playing "Ethan" and Chris is playing "Telmar."  The real life George is helping the real life Chris. It's actually supportive, what one friend would do for another. In a game of risk and reward, good choices, bad choices, consequences that amount to, at worst, having to roll up a new character, no one has to wonder about what their game play says about them. We're not competing against each other.

The DM isn't the enemy. The DM is the facilitator. The steady rock upon which the players rely; the generous benefactor who gives treasure because its fair, the reasonable judge who lets the player argue the veracity of a new rule interpretation, the reliable friend who is prepared to overlook a character death by providing a last minute appearance of a friendly cleric able to raise the dead. This is far more honest and reasonable than cheating at dice behind a screen... which a DM doesn't need to do if everyone at the table can appreciate the observation, "Hey, you know, I don't think Ethan should have died either. Whatta ya say I just have a cleric show up?"

When the DM doesn't have to perform, when the DM doesn't count his or her value by the "status" they hold, there's no reason to impose an invulnerable Chinese wall between the DM's presentation and the players' perspective. The DM can make a mistake and say, "Oops, your right, that didn't hit, don't know what I was thinking," and gain respect through honesty and fairness. The DM can begin a session with, "You guys were right, that rule really isn't working like I hoped, I'm good to drop it," without feeling that he's failed, and without feeling humiliated or a loss of face, because the players are liable to go, "Oh thank god, though I did think it had some benefits."  The game doesn't have to be perfect. The rules don't have to be inviolable. The DM does not need to sit on a throne on high and cast dictates upon the peasants. We're friends, we're playing, and the DM is just another participant.

Nearly every public discourse that has taken place in the last 30 years has struggled to deconstruct, harass, exploit, vilify or otherwise destroy all this. Players who will never play in our game scream their demands at how our game ought to be played; DMs we will never play with or beside scream their epithets about what's right and what's wrong and why we need to change what we're doing to fit their expectations. A company that will never personally give us a thin dime of financial support, nor take one tiny step to assure that a game space we rely on will still be there following the next quarterly change in presidental leadership, demands not only that we continue to buy their product and consider it "official," but that we need to upend all the rules of our present game occasionally so then can sell a new version to appease their shareholders. The internet has been the enemy. The voices that exploit D&D as a prop for their enrichment, who prance and preen themselves as bookwriter and game makers and performance artists, have done everything possible to ruin our game play for purposes that are obscure and, at best, merely disruptive.

It's time to walk away from all of it. If you ever really want to just play D&D.

Admit that this cult thing really isn't working for you.

A Cult of Failure

I asked ChatGPT the question, "Why is traditional D&D not like Matt Mercer D&D?"

"Traditional Dungeons & Dragons usually keeps a sharper focus on the mechanics of the game—dice rolls, initiative order, dungeon crawling, tactical combat, and structured adventure modules—while Matt Mercer’s style, made famous through Critical Role, leans heavily into performance, cinematic storytelling, and character-driven drama. In a classic tabletop setting, the Dungeon Master’s main job is to present challenges and adjudicate rules, often keeping the world impartial and focusing on pace and fairness; players interact with that framework through problem-solving and teamwork. Mercer’s approach turns the table into a stage, where the DM performs every NPC with distinct voices and personalities, the narrative often takes precedence over the mechanics, and the game’s rhythm bends around emotional beats rather than initiative or exploration pacing. Traditional D&D might be closer to a collaborative board game with storytelling elements, while Mercer’s version is closer to an improvised ensemble drama that happens to use D&D rules as scaffolding. Both come from the same foundation, but one prioritises the game, the other the story."

It helps to conceive of any answer received from chat as a list of statistical probabilities. With perhaps hundreds of thousands of documents at its disposal, those elements that make the cut in an answer are going to be those that are referenced most often. For example, "initiative order" is largely superfluous to the manner in which D&D is played; of all the elements I might name related to the game, I would probably go a day and a night before the word "initiative" passed my lips, if at all. Yet because it is a point of considerable contention within the zeitgeist, it appears here because it's common... and so it is with most of the answer above.

I've spoken before about the emergence of corporate boardroom jargon inserting itself into the game's perception. "Collaborate," "storytelling," "voices"... these are such words, which have next to nothing to do with gameplay, but which emerge because the tsunami of correspondence where these words are automatically attached to every discourse, regardless of any sufficient definition, guarantees that virtually any answer to a question about D&D generally will dredge these words forth. They are the SEO of D&D parlance.

Which is essentially the problem with any sort of knowledge distribution throughout the internet: concepts cannot be prioritised so easily as words; while certain vague words, in turn, have become the flag standards under which misunderstood concepts march. Collaborative sounds positive. It gives a vague idea of what it's meant to convey. Surely, it's something that matters around a D&D table, for definitively, it's a thing "produced or conducted by two or more parties working together." That sort of sounds like what goes on.

But... how, exactly? How is the collaboration improved? Oh, of course, through communication... which is another one of those convenient jargon words that covers a lot of sins but doesn't really have the specificity needed to base a structure upon. All these "weasel words" represent a language that claims a clear meaning but in fact wriggles out of any actual commitment. They allow a company, or a seller, to imply authority and goodness, without having to show evidence of result or take ownership of same. You're told that D&D is collaborative. How? You figure it out.

In fact, the problem is such words succeed because they DO state a given fact. D&D is collaborative. It is also played by human beings, who must by definition be alive, and distinguishable from one another, and probably having come into existence through a gestative process, while being able to breathe air, eat food, sleep occasionally and a host of other extremely obvious things that have exactly nothing to do with game play.

My point is that when traditional D&D took hold, "collaboration" was not a word used to describe the experience because it was obvious in a plainly unhelpful, irrelevant way. Knowing the game was collaborative didn't help me DM it; it didn't help the players play it; it didn't help in the preparation of the game, nor in game play itself, nor in managing players with complaints. It existed, in the way that air does, but we didn't describe the game that way because to do so would have produced flat, blank stares and a probable comment like, "Thank you Captain Obvious."

The language has emerged through the need to explain the game to those who don't play, or to rationalise it for marketing, or as streaming, for the sake of discourse. People want to be part of something "collaborative." It promises an absense of being lonely. And now you have people patting themselves on the back for being a part of it, like it was something hard to achieve, or as though D&D were special in some way. A workspace is collaborative, three people standing in line at a Tim Horton's is collaborative, sitting at a bar drinking beer is, and so it sex, and so is watching TV with others, or going to a theatre, or even driving to work in your car next to thousands of other cars. Human existence, by and large, is remarkably collaborative. Doesn't mean a fucking thing.

The problem arises from deciding that this isn't something we just "do" (the actual definition of the word) but that it's something we're trying to achieve (the goalpost not actually existing). Put four people in a room and tell them to "achieve collaboration" and you soon have a problem. No one has any idea what the end result is, while at the same time we're flooding the net with an insistence that there IS an end result.

Oddly, what's intended to be a good thing rapidly becomes something that no one knows how to succeed at, which manufactures anxiety. Once collaboration becomes an objective instead of a condition, it creates a culture of failure, in the sense that each player's compulsion becomes a certainty that they're not a part of it, while at the same time accusing each other of failing to engage collaboratively enough. DMs worry that they're games are "properly collaborative," so that they anxiously fill reddit with missives begging others, supposedly with the secret knowledge desired, to explain how to make their games "more collaborative."  Which, semantically, is like a cult of people asking how to make water more wet.

Try as we might, there is no gradation for collaboration... yet this is the hamster wheel the game culture has locked itself into, through a catastrophic failure in the ability to understand the meaning of words.

But it seems to work so well for Critical Role, right?

I've had a few red-faced true-believers scream into my face over the years that the performance isn't scripted, based on... zero personal knowledge about the cast or, indeed, improvisational theatre. I indulged in some improv off and on during my theatre days... I went to high school with this fellow, as far as I know the nearest person to someone famous that came out of those classes. He was quite good at improv. Which is beside the point, but I felt a compulsion to discuss a collaborative thing I did outside D&D.  Oh, wait, I bought a coffee today from the market up the road. Okay, two things other than D&D.

I'll let you in on a secret. Do a fair bit of improv, which involves inventing characters, motivations and dialogue on the fly, and you'll find pretty quickly that you reuse material. In fact, you wind up building a lexicon of go-to stuff that you can plug into any situation, often with just a tweak or two. For those who used to watch the old show, Whose Line is it Anyway? — Brit and American versions — it's easy to pick up on that after two or three episodes. Some of the performers had a great range, others not so much.

Critical Role doesn't try to hide it — they wear their actor credentials right there on their sleeves. Any one of them would drop the show in a blink if they got a real part... it's one of the reasons they began. Problem is, really, none — including Mercer — are particularly talented. That's not just my opinion. The recent D&D movie with Chris Pine was a terrific opportunity to give Mercer a walk-on role, one that would have been worth at least half a million theatre tickets... and the opportunity wasn't taken. Guess why.

As collaboration, the ensemble is not playing D&D, they are performing a narrative art form in which the game itself is utterly immaterial. The world they're playing in is defined by editing, lighting, timing, rehearsal, professional familiarity with each other and a guaranteed commitment to "making it look good" for people not actually present when they're performing. If your D&D group at home had to be conscious that whatever they said or did at your game was going to be broadcast on the internet, they'd certainly be a lot easier to run. And if they, yourself included, as a group received around 18.6 million a year in annual revenue for playing (estimated) they'd certainly care a lot less about whether or not your last call about their ability to use a spell that way was wrong, in their opinion. It wouldn't really matter, would it... since all your calls would be based on, "what would the audience like?"

Too, it wouldn't hurt if you had 91 overall employees to help you "collaborate."

The everyday tensions that make running difficult — engagement, rules disputes, awkward silences, players not showing up for games — get neutralised by the economics of being paid money for appearing. It doesn't necessarily make Critical Role evil or fraudulent — though I personally would have rathered it had never existed — but it does make it something that no table anywhere can achieve without those resources or motivation. It's therefore ridiculous for a DM anywhere to suppose, "I want my game to be like Critical Role." But then, people are very often unrealistic about things they don't understand.

No one is helping, either.  From those people who cannot rationally, patiently or usefully explain what traditional D&D is to those who insist repeatedly that concepts like "storytelling" or "backstories" work in a game setting, the entire discourse is an unmitigated disaster. Throw into that a vast number whose education is sorely lacking with regards to history, literature, human behaviour, language or the necessary emotional quotient to manage other human beings, regardless of the age, and the landscape is now completely dystopian. If I were to judge the culture (stress on "cult") by the youtube videos out there that spout, "I ran a game that cost $5,000," I'd say it's gained an unmistakable fanservice vibe, not far from those groups of people who still get together at shows to gush over their pogs and beanie-babies. On that level, it's never going away. But it isn't D&D in any sense that I recognise.

In the 1943 film, Edge of Darkness (watch here), the failed nazi writes the following page at the point of his greatest despair:

It stresses how culture, as it becomes more and more popular, steadily accumulates a litany of useless words that fail to contribute anything to the discourse, while essentially taking over the discourse. Actual design is replaced with a performative economy, where "looking" like a DM takes greater precedence than being one, largely because it's easy to costume up (even if we're talking a table and a DM screen, as simple as costume as you can get) than to have any sort of ability. And when that lack of ability emerges, when the attempt to play the game that's not even understood fails, the discourse is all "woe is me," "why aren't I liked" and "why don't my players show up for my games?"  Essentially, the only question is, "Why has the performance failed?"

Talking about D&D has been boiled down to a language of aspiration, nothing more. From the clowns writing endless blog posts about the next product to the reddit fans bemoaning their ills, its a lot of people who want to be admired in some fashion, who want popularity, who find there's none at the crooked road's end that they've trod. And that feels like a cheat, a lie that's been perpetrated upon them by a community and a company that promised "a world of imagination" and delivered only carping, criticism, emotional decay and loneliness.

All in all, it's become a pathetic grimdark.