We had a discussion before the D&D session started yesterday, which though disjointed in the direction basically revolved around the question, "Was D&D destined to become what it has because that was really the only way it could have?"
Now, I have to be very careful here, because Matthew Colville wants us all to know that "some folks", a "they" who want to rally a community, manipulate the community. And how do "they" do this? You can tell that someone is doing that because "they" begin their message with, "Does anyone else..." or "I think players would prefer it if..."
Sorry, couldn't help dragging this in. You can find this piece of genius at 54:23 of the video, in which Matthew explains how some people invoke some people to make an argument that justifies they're cause. It's a delightful piece of recursive cognitive dissonance, said with the straight face of a man who has utterly no clue that he's engaging in it. The youtube video is a day old as I write this.
My reason for bringing that up is that it would be impossible to argue about anything related to human endeavours without supposing some kind of imagined collective preference: players wanted a thing, audiences rejected a thing, the community moved towards a thing. Arguing that we can't argue on what groups do fits is a profoundly blind way to suppose we can argue about anything except whether or not we like vanilla ice cream.
I don't wish to argue about my favourite ice cream flavours, so I'm going to have to engage in some discussion about trends. That will, of course, be unlike every other writer and creator on the internet, so please forgive me.
On the whole, I tend to agree that D&D was destined to turn out as it has — but not because the game was inherently written or designed in a specific way, which a spectacularly waffling Mike Mearls more or less blathers about in this interview, from about a year ago — but because at some point the makers of D&D decided that it needed to be a "business" rather than "game designers." This makes sense, and there's an argument to be made that this was inevitable also, given the lack of foresight, intuitiveness or social intelligence of the creators, especially Gary Gygax. In 1973, "game designer" wasn't a profession or an ideal one sought to achieve; what one imagined was that having created a great product, it was a chance to become Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley... or, at the very least, Avalon Hill. That is the message behind the creation of Tactical Strategy Rules. The designers of a few wargames built more or less upon a single concept with various flavours supposed that they were suddenly going to propel themselves into the world of Corporate Scale Wealth. They had stars in their eyes and, as usual with such beings, they tripped over a straw in their blindness... that straw being that none of them knew jack shit about business.
No one can argue that D&D didn't "take off" as a phenomenon. Within just a few years it had reached a scale where mainstream media was aware of it. The problem being, of course, was that mainstream media's approach was all bad. 1982's Mazes and Monsters — funnily enough not mentioned at all in this very good two hour interview with Tom Hanks, where he spends a lot of time talking about how he got started in Hollywood (or, possibly, I missed it), was a mainstream media disaster for any company thinking it was would become huge based on the game's popularity. Further media investigations, which gave equal air time to D&D's detractors, did not promise a rosy future. But by then, the die had been cast, the cubic gate had been crossed. TSR was churning out modules instead of game structure, Gygax was bloviating egomaniacally upon the pages of the Dragon instead of accepting his responsibility as a guru and the rotunda was full of other game companies with knives waiting for TSR to come through the portico. Money merchants would seize the body, stand on it to orate their justifications in butchering the game as it had only barely become known and now, here we are, with Augustus gasping his last while we wonder what sort of Tiberius will next take over the company. In fact, the time frames almost match perfectly to the metaphor.
D&D was never going to be a financial success for numerous reasons, the first being that adults did not understand the premise of the game. That's not a judgment or an accusation, or a measure of adult imagination, it's a simple recognition that the game as structured did not fit with "game" in the minds of older, contented people who had been playing games all their lives. My parents and those of everyone I played with were not "bored" of board games or cards or backgammon or chess or, hell, horseshoes. They appreciated all those traditional, direct, sometimes gently physical games, which could be played competitively or not, restfully or not. They enjoyed those games, they could understand them, they could be explained in five minutes and a pleasant evening could be had taking tricks, pegging, jumping and getting kinged, hammering a couple stakes into the ground twenty paces apart and playing with a beer in hand. Those things were, in 1982, still universally viewed as fun and, more importantly, enough. They felt no special urge to spend hours to understand hundreds of nitpicky confusing rules to produce an experience not unlike, as my mother would say, "playing house."
Second, the "success" among it's adolescent audience was just as constraining. In the 1700 person high school I attended at the start of my game experience, about twenty students altogether played any kind of tactical or role-playing game... and even they could not agree on what was better in 1980. Some preferred Rolemaster, others Chivalry and Sorcery, others Traveller, others Top Secret... D&D was the premiere game among that set, but statistically that meant it was played by 12 out of 20 of that 1700 student body. One does not build a successful corporation on this kind of market share.
Third, the game had a time clock built into it's practical age window. Children become adults who don't have the time to spend six hours in an intellectual activity when what they really want to do it spend Fridays and Saturdays washing the intellectual out of their brains with suds, nachos and yes, obviously, far harder things. This isn't to say that we didn't, our small groups, prefer an intellectual activity of our own rather than spend Friday nights either drunk or stoned, but it is relevant that we were in a very, very small minority, that dwindled frequently as we aged. Again, while Janie and Jimmie could still get together for a rousing game of poker on a Friday night at 20, and continue doing that for the next twenty years, our experience was filled with excuses like, "Um, sorry guys, but I've got a trig final on Monday and I've got to study for it." Followed by steadily and slowly never seen Nathan again.
One realises that the hobby they love isn't really popular when it loses players because they get cars and can run off to the mountains and ski all weekend, among actual thousands and thousands of people. Our little rooms of a few score obsessionists did not compete, nor did we imagine in our wildest imagination that they ever would. When I hear people like Mearls say, "12 million" play D&D, I think, um, yeah, sure. So many that when I say I play in a room with three people in it, I still get blank stares or, at best, that look that conveys, "Oh, you're one of those people." 12 million people my ass. There's a corporate fiction.
ChatGPT tells me that,
"The much-repeated 2017 claim was actually “12 million to 15 million in North America alone,” offered while the executive declined to disclose concrete sales numbers. That substitution is significant: the measurable commercial fact was withheld and replaced by an enormous, unverifiable population claim.
"The category has only become looser since then. Wizards described D&D Beyond’s ten million users as everyone who had used the service since 2017, while Hasbro later announced more than fifty million “fans” and D&D Beyond thanked eighty-five million people worldwide. Those statements do not measure the same thing, and the steady inflation from players to users to fans allows almost anyone who has passed through the brand’s orbit to be counted."
Far be it for me to argue with that level of market research.
To get around to the point, then... given the way the game was approached in the 1970s, given the priorities that were asserted, given the media's reaction to the game, given the limited viability among participants — the inevitable poison was that what was valuable about the game was mercilessly exploited in the same manner as "junk bonds."
I'm begging the metaphor here, so I'll admit that I don't mean the phrase in the manner of promising exceptional returns for an instrument, whose underlying condition is doubtful, because at this moment it can be sacrificed for greater profit. In a sense, D&D was treated that way, because I believe the corporate engine that took over TSR did not believe, truly, that D&D as a concept was going to last. As such, they changed the focus of the game's gestation for considering what might improve the game's value to one where exploitation of the existing asset — that being the players — was best achieved by offering modules that ignored any pretense of improving play or game development. What modules did do, and any other product that could be sold on the backs of the aforementioned asset, was make money, today, for the money managers. No one, I think, was as surprised as they were when D&D proved resilient enough to keep growing as a culture.
By the late 80s, though, seven years of junk shit had been moved onto the market, complimented by additional junk shit that tried to exploit new young players by literally rewriting the game as "basic D&D," so that as an intellectual property, D&D was done. The masters at the helm were all like Mearls — dumbass fan boys bent on doing whatever felt "keen" today, which amounted to shit thrown at walls and then scraped off even after it did stick, because more wall was needed to throw more shit at. I've covered all that part after 1989 before, so I don't want to do it again now.
To write it in the shortest way possible, "developing the game" hasn't been a relevant principle underlying D&D since 1979. Everything since, beginning with the death throes of a badly run TSR under Gygax flopping around like a fish in a boat, followed by money merchants who did not care at all, has been about maintaining a product cycle. Every product produced since 1979 has been produced for that purpose, to make money because money was either needed, and desperately so, or because money could be generated from doofs who did not fucking understand the game they were playing even as more of them grew to like it. The business history of D&D is founded on the simple reality that there are plenty of people dumb enough out there to believe that D&D is played by 85 million people worldwide.
Because there are those who will quibble, let me be frank. Yes, individual designers since 1979 have sincerely attempted to improve the game. There have been rule books that have included good rules and settings, with good material, that can be advantaged by a present-day discriminating DM. But none of those things occurred because the company deliberately set out to empower those designers. They happened because the designers found a large enough gap in the surveillance that they got away with producing something viable and sometimes brilliant inside a corporate structure that simply failed to catch them at it. None of those brilliant designers were regaled or shown appreciation; all of them were eventually moved out the door, in favour of people who would just shut up and take orders. If a product did happen to advance the game, it's important to understand that product wasn't commissioned to do so. Sometimes, smart people just won't take orders.
Fair enough. This is what did happen. And arguably, the pips were going to come up that way from the start... and that being so, if I'm going to blame anyone, it has to be Gygax's parents. They're the ones obviously responsible for producing a puffed-up pompous blowhard of a son, one incapable of self-awareness or humility... the damage being done sometime in the 1950s, before two D's were put together.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can get into a time machine and show a video to Gary's parents of their egotistical magniloquent of a son, causing them to hit him more or perhaps less or maybe increase the amount of greens in his diet so that he grows up able to play nice with the other kids. What then?
A less vain, more self-aware Gygax might have recognised that D&D was not the foundation of the next Parker Brothers, but a difficult specialist game with a small, unusually committed audience. He might have accepted that the real task was not to expand the company as fast as possible, but to spend twenty years discovering what the game actually was.
This was more or less what half the players argued in the session last night. Effectively, if D&D had been freed from proving itself on the market, if it had addressed the inconsistencies, if it had not struggled to add excessive irrelevant details to play in the manner of "alignment" and deliberately urging the DM to be a morality cop, perhaps D&D wouldn't have gathered the reputation it did as a socially immoral culture exploiting children's morality to sell content. Less visibility in those early days might not have ultimately solved those problems, but perhaps it could have mitigated the narrow market, the aging-out problem, the media panic or the difficulty of sustaining long campaigns among the players. If the designers, not organised into a non-human faced "TSR," but as a bunch of ordinary dudes just playing with the concept, had better managed their presence in the Dragon magazine by actually having a plan for what they published — that magazine being read by literally every player, pretty near fanatically — then perhaps some kind of rational forward momentum could have been created that would have made 2nd and 3rd edition unnecessary. If they had simply ignored the need to be "more popular," because they were hobbyists rather than corporatists, then perhaps in the long run they'd have ended up owning their game rather than having it eventually delivered to Hasbro — a corporation so evil that they considered the children's toy market a fair game for fucking over people younger than 12... and their parents too.
But, of course, many of the beloved products would never have been made. And these are all a lot of "ifs," requiring faith and human patience and unimaginable levels of restraint for people engaged in what remains, after all this time, still essentially a "children's game," played by those who are still expected to quit when they get to college.
I do believe that other "beloved" material would have been produced... that would have been, really, far more popular and valuable than what the community tends to bleat habitually about today. But that is neither here nor there, since we will never know.
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