The Uncertainty Principle

I have been thinking about setting up a window on Discord and then publicly working on my D&D world for several hours at a time, as a sort of inspiration for others to work on their D&D worlds, under the auspices that it is easier to find motivation to work if you don't feel you're the only one doing it. I remember that now and then my friends and I used to do that in the early 80s, and that it was sort of a good time. Not that we ever got much work done, since it's easier to talk and work... but still, it felt motivating and it was easier to work by ourselves in between those occasions.

Like many creative writers, I often start from a proposition that suggests some sort of wanted clarification... the kind that invites a muse to insert itself. Thus when I think of something like the Discord concept, I start to pull it apart in my head. The subject really isn't, "do other people want this?" I'm like to think I'm writing things because they have to be said, not because they please others. If they do please, that's well and good, but that's a byproduct, not the goal. The following question though, is, "do I want this?"

That's harder to answer. On some level it feels beneficial. I assume people have some interest in my work process: how do the maps get made, what does rewriting or designing a wiki page happen, what things do I consider important enough to work on. D&D is a constructive product. It is a thing we make. We can buy it, yes, but someone still has to make it, and they have some process by which they do that... so arguably, if we want to transcend from "user" to "maker," some form of learning that process is necessary. That stands to reason.

Not everyone understands that transformation. I didn't when I started; like most, I assumed random tables were necessary to create ongoing gameplay; I assumed that more of something already good would always be a good thing. It took time for me to understand that more spells, more monsters and more magic items really didn't improve game play... while more kinds of things to buy did. It took time to understand that rebuilding rules did not just mean rewriting the language, or providing more details: most of the time, it meant a complete reworking of the premises for what the rule was trying to solve. I spent an enormous amount of time rewriting experience tables based on Gygax's original structure before understanding that original structure couldn't be effectively redesigned. It was based on the wrong premises. That could apply to dozens and dozens of approaches to the game's original rules, which weren't "broken," they were fundamentally flawed. They didn't need "fixing." Then needed to be thrown away and replaced with things that actually addressed the problems at hand.

Take, for example, mapmaking. The internet continues to be full of artists telling us how to "draw a map for our fantasy campaign," as though the example on the right in anyway actually helps a DM run a game session in any substantial way. This example, ends with a map that has exactly one centre of population, one label that says "Thieves Bridge" and one that says "The Werwoods." This accomplished through untold number of hours learning how to draw even this well, to produce information that takes me exactly one sentence to say to my players: "You're in a village called Riversmeet, downstream from the Thieves Bridge and near the Werwoods. What do you want to do?" Now, how does this map help me with the other FOUR HOURS of game time I have to create?

The ability to draw has absolutely nothing to do with dungeon mastering. If I take a piece of paper, scrawl two blue lines on it, add  "swamp" on blank area of white, "forest" on another blank area, "mountains" below the forest and then make a circle where the rivers meet, then add the names of this map above, I've accomplished EVERYTHING this artist did. I still have to run the game. The relationship between map and game is not clearly understood and it is not clarified by having a mediocre artist on the internet prove that you, Dear Reader, can't draw as well. The problem is a lot more difficult that the snake oil being sold here. The artist has merely reframed "running D&D" as an "artistic problem"... one the artist can solve. And having substituted the problem, the artist solves the "problem" you, Dear Reader, didn't need solved... but heck, it looks cool.

Others thought so too in 1982 when I learned I could draw a map this well; I sold them maps for their D&D worlds for as much as a hundred dollars a map. Guess how many worlds those people got off the ground.

Yes, that's right. I used to scam D&D players too. Maybe that's why I hate the company so much... it's because of the dark part of myself that I hate so much.

This post is not to talk about the relationship between maps and D&D, but to point out that there are hundreds of like conditions that modify and affect the game, none of which are in themselves a solution to the way the game is adjudicated. It isn't just making the world, it is making it alive, giving it dimension, giving the players motivation, offering meaningful rewards or when to say "yes" and when to say "no." Even watching a good DM run does not actually offer much clarification here, because the DM must needs hold back during the running in terms of what's been actively thought in his or her head, so that the player never quite sees how the sausage is made, even when that sausage is being made right in front of them. It is a strange but fundamentally misunderstood element of the game's structure as an instructive tool. The teacher has to withhold information from you about, say, the plight of the Anasazi natives, while still expecting you to pass the test anyway.

A proper solution would require that the learner sit with the DM while the game goes on, so that the DM can whisper details into the learner's ear, but not in a way that reveals to the players what's being whispered, or even what specifically needs communication, because humans can sense the importance of things merely by what's paid attention to. A parent need only follow a child's line of sight to guess at what the child might be thinking... so that as children begin to reach the age of six, they begin to understand that the best way to get something is not to look at it. Once the DM says something, then whispers to the learner, the jig with the players is, as they say, "up." Thereafter, the running is sullied and anything that has been whispered to the learner is no longer of value in learning game play. It is, more or less, D&D's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This is not to say that DMing can't be "taught." It's just that it can't be taught the way that a surgeon might teach a medical student how to resection a bowel. In the latter case, the surgeon can freely be exact and complete with the information given: the student must watch the surgeon's hands and attempt to reproduce the physical effort being demonstrated in an manner exact enough to allow the procedure to be accomplished gracefully. But it is the reverse in dungeon mastering... which, I want to stress, is not as important as learning to be a surgeon. As an example, this one is merely convenient. With dungeon mastering, the physical process of creating the substance of the game world can be duplicated... but the student has to "watch the DM's mind" to comprehend how the campaign can be run gracefully.

And in almost every sense, initially, that seems an impossibility.

None of this is made easier with bromides. Sorry, this is an Ayn Randian reference to the white salt-like crystalline powder that was added to a glass of water in an era before the invention of peptol bismol and all the other neat little chemicals that followed, designed to remove stress caused by ulcers that, in turn, were believed to be caused by worry. Thus, "bromides" are phrases that are designed to relieve your emotional stress in the way that the powder once relieved your physical stress. "Time heals all wounds," for example, and "everything happens for a reason." D&D is stocked full of them: "The DM's job is to make sure everyone has fun," or "Never say no... always say 'yes, and...'" or "D&D is collaborative storytelling."  These stock phrases are there to make the DM feel like they have a nice little role to perform that doesn't, in fact, require the least little bit of talent or doubt. After all, who doesn't want the players to have fun?

These bromides exist because the various persons attached to every form of role-playing game, regardless of their position or stance on some edition or some alternate rules structure they're promoting, find themselves helplessly in the same position: we can provide the rules, we can provide the premise for the rules, we can offer arguments that say our game is worth playing... but, unfortunately, and we're no different from anyone else, we cannot help you run this game. At best, we can offer this bromide: it is easier to run than someone else's game.

Thus, you can find yourself buying, say, Cairn... which is an outlandishly simplistic sort of, um, if we stretch the definition to include "bullshitting about stuff with your friends," RPG. Cairn is so simple to run that a child can run it — though, admittedly, that is also true of D&D. I'll therefore be a little clearer. Cairn is so easy to run that a child who has never read a book longer than Dick and Jane could probably run it. I'm not sure myself that that's, um, compelling for me. It seems to be compelling for others. I'm simply not in the market for an RPG that requires less intellectual effort than checkers.

The simple system, however, still requires the DM (in this case, the "Warden") to engage in "fiction first" and "neutral arbitration," which requires an invented causal connection between the situation at hand, the players' attempted actions and the consequence, all of which has to be essentially "made up," since the sparse rules do not address this problem. A capable Warden can make the game appear to be a "game"... but an incapable one does not, and there's no structure that's suggested that teaches someone incapable to be capable. So even with the easiest rule system imaginable, in some way the DM still has to "DM" (as a verb)... regardless.

Oh well, it was a nice try.

So where does this leave us? Going over in my mind the environment that existed when I learned how to DM, something I did not know how to do in the womb, I must assume that had something to do with my obtaining the skill. To some degree, surely, my interest in writing and reading mattered, as did my experience with maps, geography, statistics, drama, religion (I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church four months before encountering D&D)... but those are just incidental facts having to do with a certain degree of academic prowess. On the whole, I'd ascribe my transformation from user to maker to these things:

First, parents who did not play board games by the rules. A long history of board games was certainly of a help also, but in my case, the peculiar habit by mother and father had of adjusting rules to "make games better" was ingrained into me at a young age. Specific examples included paying dividends in Stock Ticker below par, which makes a very different game; being able to play in more than one direction in Scrabble; adding more children than the game allowed in the Game of Life; playing two full years in Payday as opposed to one; discarding protection cards from Mille Bornes. There were others, but that was a long time ago.

This history is supported in that my players liked to play cards, and together knew many scores of card games, including as many, many ways to play gin, poker and whist/bridge. In fact, it was quite common for us not only to sit down to play canasta, but to decide, beforehand (which meant, our parents deciding) which kind of canasta we were going to play this time. That meant that from the age of 6, I had no reason whatsoever to believe (a) that games could not be altered or restructured; (b) that changing dividends, directions of play or duration of a game wasn't something that simply were parts of whatever game was being played; and (c) that "official" rules meant anything to the way a game was played.

This is directly continuous with my later understanding of D&D's flawed premises. Long before consciously setting to adjust D&D, I had already tried my hand at adjusting numerous games with my family and friends, just because we wanted to. The maker, in our minds, had nothing to do with that.

Second, I began playing D&D when the "culture" had not yet come into being. Some culture existed: there were other versions of role-playing game and other genres like Gammaworld, Traveller, Top Secret, Paranoia. There was the Dragon magazine that tried its best to sell products. But these were like any other game culture at the time. There was no strict "official" group of people saying, defacto, "gaming is this" or "gaming requires this thought process." We thought nothing of playing a couple games of Ogre or Awful Green Things from Outer Space before settling down to actually playing D&D, since we were in school, we'd often get together at six pm and play until midnight. None of our parents knew what was going on, because there were no news stories yet; they were grateful that when we got together we wanted the kitchen table and not the television room. Thus, more or less, we were left to ourselves, to decide for ourselves what the game meant to ourselves, without voices other than other campaigns we knew of to tell us what was supposed to mean.

The parental thing matters. When I was 15 (not nine or ten as many early players around nowadays were when they started gaming), it was 1979. The parents biggest worries were threefold: drinking, drugs and sex. If we had been like other teens of that time, we'd have been out of the house on a Friday or Saturday night... and even if that meant, as it did for many teens, just hanging around talking by the river or in a park or walking along some road somewhere, it meant being out of our parents' sight, and their not knowing if we were engaging in drinking, drugs or sex. Being at home, around the kitchen table, where plainly no drink was, where plainly none of us were on drugs, and plainly we weren't having sex, was seen as a win-win-win for many, many parents. Moreover, because I grew up in a part of the world not run by a maniacal christian-nutjob cabal, where christian politics did not decide civic votes on things, there was no Satanic Panic where I lived in Canada. NONE. Why would there be? Our parents were all educated, as I grew up middle class; they weren't the sort who really, in actuality, believed in the devil. So that part of it just wasn't part of my past. At all.

Third, I started my gaming experience in the company of a lot of DMs. Besides myself, in my immediate high school peer group, were three other DMs: Scott, Joel and Asif. We rotated every weekend, but if Joel wasn't up to it then someone else would run that night, so that a straight rotation tended to be flexible. I also played in a separate D&D game with the Shane, who was my first DM, and a game of Empire of the Petal Throne, and a separate game using Rolemaster, and then later a game of Chivalry and Sorcery run by a friend from Hong Kong, Calvin. By 1982, in just 24 months of gaming, I'd played as a player with probably eleven or twelve other DMs in at least seven or eight different role-playing games, including all those named above plus Tunnels and Trolls. Thus I saw a lot of DMs play a lot of different styles of DMing, so I could take what seemed to work in one campaign and apply it to myself, while having the capacity to compare table management of any one person with many others.

Mind you, this was not the modern game store experience, where ten DMs all run the same four or five people each, without anyone changing tables. In those days, if you did not like the way a DM was running a game, you got up, crossed all of twelve feet to the next table and said, "Hey, can I get in here?" Nearly always, the answer was "Yes." Why wouldn't it be. Everyone wanted new players. So if you weren't flexible as a DM, there were lots of options around, because DMs were not treated as sacrosanct. DMs gained players from other games all the time and it wasn't seen as "stealing." It was seen as "sorting" or "trying" different groups to find where you belonged. That behaviour drastically lowers the capacity of any DM to simply act abusively entitled... and it trains someone wanting to DM not to be that.

Fourth, no one pretended to know what they were doing. We were all muddling through, reading everything we could about medieval worlds and culture, watching whatever movies we could find like The Last Unicorn, Conan the Barbarian, Krull, Deathstalker, Conquest... some of this was very bad stuff. We shared, talked, sat in libraries reading every book on a shelf or at least leafing through them... and where it came to the game itself, we retconned, asked others "were you fine with that decision?" and "do you think the rule means this or that?" We seriously did not know, and we knew we did not know... and like I said, there were no real entities around to tell us we should know.

So we... made it up. If it worked, we kept doing it. If it didn't work, we'd sit around after a session sometimes for hours and talk about why it didn't work. We'd walk home from one guy's house and talk the whole time about D&D, and what could change, and why the rules were written in a particular way, and how they could have been written in some other way. There was no sense that someone of "authority" was going to come along and fix the rules for us. No one talked about "Gygax" as a person that mattered. The game was a set of books. We didn't care about who wrote them any more than we cared about who wrote the rules of Monopoly, RISK or Careers. Game rules were just game rules. We didn't care whose feet we stepped on... because it wasn't like any of us had any reason to think the game makers would care.

Okay. So what?

Let me say, I'm not nostalgic for all that because I'm still doing all that. Nothing about my approach to my game has changed. I've stopped looking for other DMs for advice because for 30 years now they've been giving me precisely the same non-advice bromides that they acquired from the books: more monsters, more spells, more magic items, more feats, more character classes... those are all good things, because they offer more choice. I have yet to hear anyone tell me that more choice does anything but paralyse a player who is new to the game, but heck, I'm bored with all of that anyway. More things make D&D more "collectable." For a lot of people, I think, being able to say that once they had a tiefling is much the same as an old girlfriend I had whose room was full of little mushroom knickknacks, because she liked them: mushroom lamps, mushroom pictures, mushroom statues, little gnomes on mushrooms, sheep hiding under mushrooms... that's what choice is. Something that can be collected over time.

I pay attention to "official" D&D and rail at it at times not because I'm obsessed, but because I believe that a great many DMs would do much, much better with their design and their games if they would just turn their back on all present D&D culture. Including this blog, I suppose, if need be, but certainly upon anything that defacto does not help run the actual week-to-week game. Repeating bromides like mantras will not make anyone a better DM. Allowing voices on youtube to dictate mapmaking skills or how to choose adventures for a party only promotes dependency, not experimentation. Don't assign monsters to a party according to the experience of someone not at your game table. TRY picking monsters at random and learn from your own experience what has worked and what might. Try everything, at least once. If you've never used that monster, do. If you've never handed out that magic item, do. What can it hurt. Experimentation brings knowledge.

And if there's something in your game that you don't like, throw it away. Don't ask permission, don't wait for the company to abandon the game element, do it yourself. There's no one who can stop you but your players... and if you're only permitting something you hate because they like it, you're just making yourself a slave to their whims.

Stop doing that. Respect yourself, for heaven's sake. Better that you have no players and you're free to work on your D&D campaign in peace, than that you let others boss you into doing things you hate.

No, there's no "right way" to run D&D. There are certainly plenty of wrong ways. Oh yes, are there ever. Stop running D&D the wrong way. Start there.

If you've played with less than ten other DMs in your lifetime? That's not enough. Play whatever game they're playing. Watch them. Listen. Learn. And when you find you're not learning from them at all, or not any more, then stop running in their campaigns. They've taught you all they have. You can move on now.

Play other games. Play board games. Play war games. Play sports. Hell, LARP, though personally I can't imagine. Collect experience. It's what your player characters do. It's your turn.

And last but not least: talk about what you're doing, or want to do, with anyone willing to listen: including your kids, your wife, that co-worker or people on the bus. Walk along a deserted road and talk to yourself. You have got to learn how to express what you're thinking out loud so you can do that with players, without thinking about what you're doing. Talking because you care about what you want to say will overcome nervousness about possibly not saying the right thing every time. Talk and talk until your mouth is dry and your throat is sore and you have a headache. DMing is the art of talking. Talk more. And get used to talking more.

My thoughts about sitting on Discord and working on my world was not to enable talking... but to help enable others to sit and actually work on their D&D world, as a habit they need or want to acquire. It was that. I did not hope that it would spark a conversation. Rather, I thought it would be just fine if there were a group of people who knew that between certain hours on a certain day, they'd get out the books and the stuff and the thought process and work on that world.

But... I don't really believe that people do need other people, like the sociologists tell us. In the end, I think people are way too, uh, self-conscious to actually want to seem vulnerable around others. And the problem with "working on the D&D world" is that in this culture of so many voices, and so many authorities, and so few opportunities for experience, admitting to working on a D&D world just feels too... uncomfortable. I think that's what this culture has wrought for a lot of people.

So I didn't try the experiment last night, between 5 and 9 my time, MST, like I was going to. But I am still thinking about it.

Swaggerability

So, for modern D&D, the problems are at last solved. In a way.

I haven't been on rpg.stackexchange for a while, but I felt it might be good to actually write about D&D... and, once upon a time, I could get an inspiration there. Questions used to circle around how to run, how to manage a character class, how to construct a town for a game and so on. Here, have a look at the last day of questions there now:

• What effects not mentioned in its spell description does Greater Restoration cure?
• Invisibility and Aura of Vitality
• Does Tactical Charge consume the creature's normal movement for the turn?
• Is there anything below a 9th-level spell that ends Lord Soth's fear?
• For a character primarily a Cleric, what is the lowest opportunity cost to get Sylunes Viper?
• Can monks use Psychic Blades as monk weapons, and do they benefit from monk unarmed damage scaling?
• Do you have to run a Braunstein "always on," or do I get to have a life, too?
• Suitable Dave Arneson pilgrimage location.

Phenomenal, ain't it?

The headings remind me of a list of cheat codes to be found with a logistics-heavy video game, where there are a massive number of elements the game offers and the players are seeking to get the most out of each. It's grasped that with the game's structure as it is now, there's a way to maximise the most efficient ways to use the abilities and classes, which presumably someone knows, and all I need to do in order to be a better player is to build up a practical knowledge of how these abilities can be massaged to function a little better. We've completely moved away from "what do I want to do in the game" to "how do I do what I already do, or want to do, better."

Thus we can understand that the problem to be solved is the acquisition of more power... but differently from the old school way, where fighting brought experience, so that once the player passed the next goal post, power was given. In this frame, power is granted spontaneously through knowledge... specifically, how can the internet show me the way that a reinterpretation of this spell allows my character to excel right now, circumventing my former interpretation, or the DM's interpretation.

Sort of like learning how to game an airline rewards program: what combination of credit cards, transfer partners, status matches, fare classes, loopholes and timing tricks will give me the benefit now, or something close to it, if I better know how the system can be interpreted and combined.

It is so like a board room to create this kind of system — and, frankly, a fictional optimisation format that in fact doesn't cost the creating company when the user succeeds, unlike a system that tries to build new customers and thus people learn they can drop their monthly cost for something by unsubscribing on a Tuesday and resubscribing on the next Friday. D&D in this mode provides a complicated system that promises superior performance in a structure where "superior performance" doesn't help with your gas bills, your grocery bills, your credit card bills or even your chances to date better and hotter partners. No, here the optimisation is of one's own personal swagger-index: how smart can I appear to be through looking up something on the internet and then trotting it out at the next game setting, to win the oohs, the aahs, the grumbling or the resentment of my fellow players and DM? Very smart, apparently, if I'm cracking that low-end acquisition threshold for obtaining Sylunus Viper.

I'm not so sure the game's value is to be found in its swaggerability. I suppose, given that it's a group behaviour, there's some conscious need to rewrite the structure as a machine for producing social prestige, while the games enormously complicated present rule structure does create endless opportunities to massage one's superior command of it. The more components, exceptions, interactions and obscure acquisitions there are, the more room exists for some player to arrive with knowledge others lack. And since the distinction is "visible" — look at what my player can do now! — there's a straight off emotional payout that's there for the exploitation... if this is the sort of thing that really pumps your nads. Me, I'm a little, ah, six-seven about it. I don't think of anything as "mastery" if I'm copping it off line to excite my friends. My friends wouldn't be excited. They'd turn and say, with disdain or contempt, pick your sauce, "You read that on the internet, didn't you?"

In all honestly, there's nothing easier to design than prestige that doesn't have a price tag... especially when what we're talking about here is a pre-existing platform with a former legitimacy that is now being manipulated to extra more "value" of a kind, once the players are locked in. D&D is a lovely test case for Doctorow's enshittification ideas: everything about the game, almost from the beginning, long before the internet existed, has been a gradual manipulation of the edge parameters in order to produce one after another marginal advantage; let's give the ranger a bonus with the bow... no, let's double the bonus... no, let's permit the ranger to fire twice... no, lets rebrand the ranger as an "archer" so they can fire the bow even more often... wait, wait, you'll love this, let's increase the damage of the bow to a state so high that it obliterates enemies on a hit... no, three enemies at a time... no, five enemies at a time...

(sorry, I used a time machine and went into the future to grab some of those examples at the end there; I know I shouldn't, but it's just sitting in the corner gathering dust, and it did cost a fair chunk of change; there's a guy I know who says that I can make it run better if I eat three oranges before getting inside; apparently, the orange pulp enables the machine to better grasp my... well, nevermind; I'll write that post another day)

The interesting twist to all this is that the upgrading of an element of D&D need not take the form of making the product worse in the short term. An upgrade that really does expand the potentiality for game play is beneficial... but of course, there's always a desire to shortcut any thresholds to that upgrading if a need is perceived that this is needed.

For example... I've created my sage ability system specifically to increase the players access to abilities without incorporating a point-buy system. But it relies on a threshold that looks, initially, easy to crack... players only need between 8 and 12 thousand experience, or thereabouts, to get one study that unlocks a host of "authority-status" abilities, which makes the player feel pretty important. But since the next threshold after that requires another 50 thousand experience (on average), that threshold starts to hurt. No doubt, if the system were in widescale use, I'd be hearing all the time about DMs dropping the threshold, or increasing the number of points the players randomly rolled at each level, to soften the climb. Because that's what people do. They see others suffering, they can see easily how to relieve the suffering... and that relief becomes more important than any nuanced perception of how the game is damaged. The relief is blatant. The damage is theoretical and metaphysical. There's no contest in the minds of some people.

We see the same arguments in how much treasure "should" parties be given, or how fast "should" parties advance in a given number of sessions, or whether or not treasure "should" count as experience or not. These shoulds are not rational arguments... they fall into the realm of arguing if the players starting Monopoly should get $2,000 and not $1,500 to start, or if a player that's been to jail three times should suffer a "three-strike rule" and have to stay there nine turns instead of three, or whether a player should have to surrender $500 to every other player if they sneeze during game play. We could double rents after midnight, give the poorest player a subsidy or require a luxury tax every time someone passes Go with more than $2,200 cash on hand. All of these are completely justifiable rule possibilities, however strange they might sound. Would any of this "improve" Monopoly?

Yet we argue over such things in D&D with vehemence and absolutism because we already know the game as it is already played. The luxury tax rule isn't better, but it's different... and if we've been playing Monopoly for forty years and we're forced to play again for whatever reason, anything different is better. Because the game as written is fucking boring. At least, to our sensibilities now.

Which brings us to the substance of the stack exchange list of rules and how the game I played as a boy has transformed into this: the unfortunate and hard to imagine idea that for the vast number of players, including many of those who say they "love D&D," the game is boring. That is why the old school renaissance wasn't sustainable. That's why the endless exhortations to return to AD&D for whatever reason just won't work. It's not new enough, it's not interesting enough, it's not enough. It's boring. We're bored with it. We don't want to play a game that's boring. We want to play a game with really kewl things in it like "Sylunus Viper" and "Psychic Blades." YEAH, baby. Bring that shit on!

Or, to look at this another way, it is a question of materialism.

The things I like about the game are not the abilties or the spells or the magic items. The Eye of Vecna has as much romanticism and mystery for me as a reversible ratcheting socket wrench with a flex head and telescoping handle. It's a tool, made for a purpose in the game, not a thing that is beloved or that makes my heart race in my chest to imagine handing it over to a party. It's a powerful tool, too, quite capable of destroying a campaign once given... as is any pile of abilities, spells and magic items.

Those people who claim to have been playing D&D for two thousand years, who still gush over these things leave me cold. I can't remotely get weepy about Castle-what-the-Fuck on the Dell or the Smudgy Flume Hill. I just don't care. D&D is not about material things for me. It is about the same things that keep me from being bored in the real world: can I think faster than the players, can they think faster than me, can it be close enough that we're both excited to see how it all plays out. I keep connecting D&D to sports and not board games because for me, board games are procedural hells where it's obvious who's going to win by the third turn, while it may be the bottom of the ninth and the team at bat is four runs behind and we still don't know for sure how it'll end. Not that I watch sports, no... because I'm not interested in see whether or not other people I'm not invested in win... I'm pretty comfortable someone will and I'm not up to getting excited about laundry. But when I used to play sports, then yes, I got pretty worked up by whether or not WE were going to win.

I guess there are some my age who find it helps to remember that "getting worked up" by watching other, younger people getting worked up. Only I don't. My memory serves just fine.

I still get worked up, after all. See my last post.

Also, the game post this last week is an excellent example of this principle. The players did not know to the last half hour who might die, or if anyone would, right to the very bitter end when someone did. Everyone participating was fast talking, stressed, forlorn on some occasions, even anguished and desperate as things just would not come together to get everyone out safely. Tempers were not expressed... but there was quite a lot of just plain discomfort in the voices of the contestants, while I was struggling not to play the trogs as smarter than they actually were. An excellent session. Not because I "made trogs interesting," which would be bullshit, I did nothing but play the game as written, but because the game as I've designed it and as I run it IS interesting on occasion in a really spectacular fashion. You know, like soccer can be... if you don't go into it with an American's expectations.

I really hate the soccer talk but if there's something I hate worse? It's the dreck babble leaking out of the house next door about how soccer isn't a real game because too often the combined score is less than three... jeebus...

When I played soccer (I did it just about the time dinosaurs were no longer permitted on the field), I both won and lost quite a lot of 1-0 games... and I don't remember any where I turned to another player and said, "gee, this is boring. Why do we play this game?"

That said, I don't think trying to figure out the best way to pimp out my character's ride with a lot of stackexchange reads is going to make me feel anything but dirty. But that's me. Like I said, I used to run with dinosaurs. That... does something to a person.

Old Man

Recently, listening to a discussion about how easy it can be in a big city, like the one I live in, to just go out and find a D&D game, I can't say I disagree. I know of a bar where they play on large wooden tables; two game stores where they play on folding tables; and I suppose either the university or the city college must have some kind of club that I could get into, alumni or no. But public D&D isn't what it used to be for me, and hasn't been since I passed 55.

First and foremost, there's food. There's something immensely comforting not just in being able to go to one's own fridge, pantry or coffee maker for sustenance during a game, there's the pleasure of eating it on plates or in one's own bowls or from one's own cup. Invariably, out of the house, there's a limitation on what can be had; on how much it costs; on how it's served, or for that matter policed by the space. I've done the thing where chips aren't allowed or where the pop has to be in-house or there's no coffee or tea at all allowed, because we can't bring it in from somewhere else. Not everywhere has all these rules, but surely something is disallowed... which is understandable, because it's not my home. Their place, their rules. Which only makes it clear that I want to play in my place, by my rules.

Next, it's seating. Thirty years ago I could comfortably sit on a wooden bench with no back, or a cheap grungy school chair, without discomfort. Now, not so much. At home I have a nice comfy chair with an extra cushion, with arm rests, that I can ignore for five or six hours... but there's nothing more distracting that having the points of one's hip bone being aggravated by a bench that consists of a log that's been split, planed and lacquered to give that "je ne sais quoi" that makes one wish for a sofa. The solution, of course, is painkillers: two every two hours, tempting the death of one's liver, so that the seating can be ignored and the game run with focus.

The aspirin, however, will not solve the larger problem: heat. As one gets to be an old man, that old self-generated furnace that used to be stoked on its own body-fat just doesn't run like it used to. Add that to rooms specifically designed to be enormous enough to manage the sound, the multiple tables, the need to turn the air over continously and the need for younger people to rate the ambience at 68-degrees (19 celsius). I appreciate that need. I had it once myself. In younger days, yes, I could play in a school cafeteria large enough to fit two tennis courts, with a 12-foot room, sitting in a plastic-and-green steel chair, while perfectly comfortable. Now, I'm pulling a jacket overtop my sweater overtop my t-shirt and still rubbing my hands together so I can nimbly handle the dice. My place might be a little warm for the players, but they can always open the patio door, even in the winter time, and even go outside if it gets to be too much. I have no option in a public space to do the same, since the door is 60 feet away; half the time the door only leads to a hall that costs another hundred feet to get outside, where one might warm himself in the sun like a lizard... if it isn't raining.

Then there's the noise. My space has carpets, large wooden furniture, paintings that soak reverberation and a stucco ceiling. The lighting is soft, pleasant and adjustable... as opposed to the cafeteria like space that is hard tile, hard laminate tables, acoustic ceiling tiles that largely fail and a constant thrum that can always be heard despite the echoes of ten groups of players shouting at DMs. I hear just fine; I don't have a problem there. But while once I could sit and play in a room with sixty or eighty like players, nowadays it's the headache that follows, that again acetaminophen just can't quite cut.

All this comes well before the strangers themselves must be considered. But the point of this is not to talk about the strangers I might play with... because long before that, long before I meet them, I'm already uncomfortable. In a way that I can do nothing about.

Contrariwise, as one accumulates nice things, as the world around one's space becomes that much more aesthetic, one begins to wonder just who should be invited home. Once upon a time, when I owned a formica table with a broken leg that could easily be kicked out, when people sat on benches found in dumpsters, when the cups were plastic, and the carpet a shag-variety that had been tramped down for ten years by former residents, a food-fight could have broken out and we'd have laughed about it. But now I get antsy about people who won't use a coaster rather than set their dripping coffee on my hardwood game table. It's silly, I know. But you work to own these things, you care about them, you hope to keep them in good condition for the short time you have left on this planet... you sort of want the kind of players who have their own nice things and know how to care for them. The last thing needed is some rube who, at forty, is still living in assisted housing.

This is the part where the gentle reader nods their head and thinks, "Yeah, old man, can't deal with a little noise or a less-than-plush chair. Poor guy. Might just as well shoot himself now."

To which I reply with the old man's taunt. "If you're lucky, and you don't die, one day you will walk in my shoes."

Reclaiming the Game

At some point, questions about why D&D was structured the way that it was, why the players were expected to kill monsters to achieve victory points (er, ah, experience), why it used dice, why did gold allow level increase, why combat was given so much space, why the DM had the final say, why was randomness built into play, why did good and evil exist — and a great many other questions — became more important than how the game was played.

This seemed inoculous at first... just spitballing around parts of the game to question their efficacy and perhaps find where improvements could be made. Or, perhaps, just to have fun with the concept, "Isn't it funny that we're all murder hobos." Words said in jest, the enjoyed talk about a game that had seized our imagination. We alike the game enough to ask questions. That was all.

But then, an ideology inserted itself. A very small number of people began to ask questions like, "If we're enjoying a game about murdering these creatures without cause, what does it say about us?" "Isn't wanting treasure in the game essentially a sort of greed?" "Are alignments even ethical?" "And who says the DM ought to have the final say?"

These are normal questions. In a strange way, however, they reflect the suppositions that outsiders, specifically religious outsiders, were also imposing on the game's logic. Only in the 1990s, after the S.P. had passed, other social changes were infringing on the game's licence. "Isn't killing monsters a little violent?" "What about orcs — why are they the bad guys?" And then this was paired with the dissatisfaction that emerged in the 1990s.  "I'm tired of rolling up characters." "I want my characters to be able to do more." "I want characters that are more powerful."  And of course, that's precisely when the next system was designed to provide — at the price of character generation being made more difficult, more time consuming, making it less practical to kill characters. That tax was, in fact, disastrous when more organisation in more public spaces brought more people to the game for two and three hour session play... far less than the five or six hour periods that were more common in private homes in the 1980s.  Hell, on one occasion, our group, about seven people, decided we'd have a 24-hour game session, from noon-to-noon, over the Easter holiday.  Didn't work, of course. By five a.m., seventeen hours into the game, we were all bleary and struggling to add numbers on our character sheets. People began to crash on sofas and the floor so that by nine a.m., there were just two of us left. We woke everyone up and closed the game.

Not that it matters, but I've always been able to give players time to generate characters because my games never ran from 7 'til 9... yet I've known many such persons who've never played more than three hours of D&D at a go. That changes one's perspective.

To bring this home, however, I want to stress that the moral questioning that began to surface in the 90s — the concern over violence, the anxiety over representation — wasn't malicious; it was the cultural air that we had begun to breathe, not just while playing but all the time. Every venue, from campus to the workplace, were wrestling with the same questions: not how to do a thing, but what was the morally right way to do it. D&D was inevitably folded into that conversation.

The trouble is, a game doesn’t hold up well under that kind of scrutiny. It wasn’t built to provide ideology. "Orcs" were bad because that was the Tolkein shorthand. "Death" was okay because the game grew out of little chits played in a wargame atmosphere. "Alignment" was invented because it was perceived that non-creative minded people would need something upon which to structure character and motivation. Logic didn't count, because no one in 1975 could have guessed that any of these things would matter in 1995. And because 1995 had come to treat the originators as "creative gods," it was impossible for true believers to accept that these were just college guys with no more foresight about the future than anyone else.  No, no, what had to be true was that Arneson, Gygax and the rest had a plan, an ideal, a hidden message in the concept that explained precisely why orcs had to be bad... while treating any contrary perspective as heresy.

A culture that had begun with poking fun at the silliness and irrationality of D&D slowly morphed into parsing "ancient texts" from the 1970s, such as the comic shown here, to reveal "truths" about the game that had never been given serious consideration. For example, why shouldn't thieves be able to jump up and grab hold of the ceiling when attacked? Hm? After all, mages cast magic... it's not like the game is realistic.

This was all part of the "internal meaning" that was being grafted onto a game that had none. The mechanics, the tropes, the tone... these were there to make the game run, not to justify or formalise an "ideal" of D&D. Perhaps the best reason for returning to an earlier version of the game isn't because it's simpler or less repleted with detritus, but because the books themselves don't make any attempt to describe the game in ideological terms.

I've always despised the phrase, "It's just a game," because I've always interpreted it at "it's a bit of fluff, not worth getting excited about." I am excited by the game and I resent any suggestion that D&D is no better than, say, Settlers of Catan or any boardgame for that matter.

But perhaps there's an argument to be made, one I hadn't considered until now, that "It's just a game" ought to be a sort of compact against all this nebbish moralistic bullshit that has arisen these last two decades. The orcs don't represent "black people," it's just a game you nit. No, your character does not have a wheelchair, it's the 14th century and it's just a game. It doesn't have to be a shrug, it can be a line in the sand, a moment of reason and reproval, saying that "Hey, I like this soup and I want you to stop pouring your shit into my pot."

A line in the sand is what many players had to do in the 1980s, against hatemongers, against school principles, sometimes against parents. "I'm playing this game, and if you won't let me play it here, I'll play it somewhere else." When we were kids, and parents tried to dictate what we ought to like, we paid them lip service and then we kept doing it anyway.  We need a little of that. A little less concern for what other people think, a little less willingness to bend just because they think the game is about something else. The game doesn't need an ideology. It isn't played with a million other people. It is played with only a few, who happen to play a game that shares some characteristics of what others are doing. But that doesn't make us a "community," it doesn't make us a "culture," it doesn't convey any responsibility or reason to cater just because we also happen to do this thing.

Mostly, we think when we grow up, that we were foolish wanting to do what we liked when we were teenagers. For myself, yeah. I should have done less stupid things. But I don't count D&D as one of those. And nobody, not my parents, who are passed on now, not my high school principle (who I convinced in his office that we weren't harming anybody — he was actually a pretty good guy), not my peers, and not the fucking WOTC, is going to stop me from playing this game the way I want to.

We could use more of that.

Second Step

This continues from the last post.

Ban backstories. These, above all, are an infringement of performative culture upon the game's rules. A backstory is a way of voting yourself a set of accomplishments, which then you think you're allowed to crow about, while everyone else is expected to buy in. The character who whole-hog embraces the backstory is one who can see no difference between an invented triumph and one that's earned. Both allow him or her to boast, both allow preening and the prancing that comes of self-importance, both permit a safety net of imagined competence that can be defended with words, making die rolls and real consequences inviolable. The monologue of the invented character is there to pull focus... which is precisely why such persons should never be allowed to play.

D&D is a game, not a performance. It is a series of events taking place in game, where the numbers bestowed — experience, wealth, status, toys  — reflects an ongoing series of risks that brought concrete benefits. Nothing... no item, no association, no privilege, no satisfaction, no skill, no asset should manifest in a way that is self-assigned. The dice can assign these things, every player ought to have the ability to roll on a large table of chance, with winners or losers, but nobody is blessed merely because they wish it so. You start a game, you get the same number of pieces as everyone else. You join a game, your value is your ability to play. That's the only measure. D&D is NOT a game of "imagination." Like every other form of entertainment that exists, imagination plays a part, but it doesn't make you special.  The only person your imagination serves is you, and it only counts when its in your head. The rest of the time, you must play the cards your dealt, you must play the character the dice dredged up, you must take the good and the bad along with everyone else. There's no special car for your originality and there's no seat for your imaginary friend. If your imaginary friends want to play, they'll need to roll their own dice.

It's rarely said, but the compulsion to backstory is vanity run amuck. Human activities have long suffered the admission of those who insist that they ought to be made the centre of things, for no other reason that they believe they are that. The "backstory" has empowered these people. It has given them a licence to be themselves — that is, execrable — while being able to point to official literature that justifies that claim. And we, who owe nothing to officials, who owe nothing to those who invented this nonsense, who never needed such nonsense in our games, are now expected to bend the knee simply because some fool put it in a book somewhere.

The functions that we place most highly where it comes to human collaboration and involvement are work, study, love, friendship, family and personal sacrifice for the greater good. None of these things recognise vanity as anything but an impediment. NONE of the organisations based upon these ideals rewards such vanity. Why D&D should go its own way, while branding itself as a special form of collaboration where the vain selfish assholes of the group are catered to, I can't begin to imagine. But here we are.

We're not even supposed to call it vain. We're supposed to reward it.

Yes, reward the loudest person at the table and make the game orbit them. Reward the prattling fool who insists on delivering a three-minute segment of their backstory every session. Reward the one that must remind us during every combat about the one who killed their father, who must be avenged. Reward the player that cries on cue, that won't act because it's "out of character," who steers the game because every event must be about their backstory. And with what should they be rewarded? Applause, of course, and our laughter, though we've heard the joke a dozen times. But if we can't laugh, then our tired groans will do, for those too prove that the player is the centre of the universe, again, compelling the emotional state of all others present, without relent.

Stopping this is easy. As DMs, the setting is ours. The characters were born into it. When Geoff says, "My father was murdered by assassins and I must avenge him..." then say, "Your father is a porter, he works at the Calf and Lamb inn and he drinks too much. He's an NPC, and I'm the DM."  There, settled.

When Mary says, "I was born in a far off land, where I am known as the lost princess Sheia..." then say, "You were born in the back of a milk truck while they were trying to get your mother to the midwife; your mother still calls you 'Diddlebums.' You really hate it. But your mother is an NPC, and I'm the DM."

This is a clean, surgical way to handle it. By reasserting the world's reality, not by arguing, but by defining the setting, as the DM by the rules is directed to do. We don't debate their invented past; we overwrite them with something ordinary, grounded and specific. It’s reclamation. We’re reminding everyone that characters are born into the setting, not imported from some parallel stage. The moment we reclaim authorship of origin, vanity loses its foothold.

These interventions work because they're decisive and unambiguous. We don't make a story about why the player's backstories don't fit; we just demonstrate,  in play, that the world already exists and doesn’t bend to a player’s imagination. "Your father is a porter," "You were born in a milk truck" — these aren’t punishments; they’re reintroductions to reality. These players need a little more reality. They need to remember they're playing with other people, not themselves. They need to be reminded: you exist here, in this shared space, according to the same rules as everyone else.

Handled this way, the table resets. The players learn that identity isn’t a gift they bring — it's something they accumulate with sessions, at the same time as their peers. Our job isn't to validate their self-mythology, but to give the world shape. Our world, not theirs. Let them run the game if they want to make up characters.

Then, once the premise is clear, and the players cease assuming their importance, they can start engaging with the game in front of them. With their ego on the hook above their shoes in the front hall, to be worn elsewhere. Whereupon the game returns to what it was always meant to be: a shared act of exploring, adventuring and overcoming, grounded in the present, where the effort is to help each other along, paying each kindness forward as they go.

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.

Why I Ruin D&D for Everyone

I went to see the dentist yesterday for a cleaning.  I've been going to the same office for a decade now, and have never been restrained about what I do or what I'm interested in.  My dentist even bought a copy of my menu.  So yesterday when the new hygienist began our conversation with, "You're the D&D expert, aren't you?", it wasn't much of a surprise.

Being in her 40s, she was interested in talking about her son's interest in the game and in her own attempts to play it... with the latter concentrating on how hard she found it to make decisions.  "I didn't know what to do," she told me, slipping the napkin around my neck.  "I had to ask others to tell me, so I found it all very confusing."  I thought it might end there, but she really dug into the game, asking me if I thought much of it ought to be based on die rolling or decision-making, if there was a right way to play, what it was like being a dungeon master (she had to be reminded what the term was) and so on.  She was plainly trying to figure out her son's interest, but of course I was more interested in hers.

I pointed out that most of the time we're not put in a position where we have to make life-critical decisions in real life.  Each day we get up and know more or less what we're going to do.  Decision-making is limited to whether or not it's a good idea to get a second donut with our coffee today, or should we wear the white shirt rather than the blue one (though we nearly always wear the one we most like that's clean today), or if we should phone our mother today or put it off until tomorrow.

Nearly all of the time, that's as far as we go.  Any deeper decisions, such as should we move to a better neighbourhood, should we start changing our diet, should we go to Gimli this year like every year or spend a lot more and see Belize, we kick daily down the road until we're "ready" to address that more difficult thing.  We know we will, we know we can, but really, it's still February and that's not going to happen until late July (though, really, go to Belize in Jan-Feb), so we don't have to face that problem right now.  We'll manage in it April.  Or later.

D&D, however, played in the traditional way, demands a decision every couple of minutes.  What we store in our packs, what weapon we pick as our character's mainstay, what spell we choose, what order we freaking walk in when we enter the dungeon... these decisions are crucial — and ever more so as we become familiar with the game and recognise, down the line, that we have picked the wrong weapon because it doesn't work in this small space or its too heavy, or it doesn't hit with enough game resonance to count.

This decision-making process isn't just paralysing, it's alien to the experience that most people have day to day.  It's something a child manages better, because school (still, though not as much) puts them in situations where they have to answer for themselves, explain why they said something, accept the adjudication of elders and figure out how to improve their lives by getting around these three impositions.  They are forced to make decisions because so much of their lives are not in their own hands; but once they become adults, and make the really big choices (what am I going to do for money), that daily decision effort fades away, year by year.  By the time they're in their 30s, they're mostly free of it.  And they especially don't like being pushed by others into making decisions they don't care to make.

That's why a lot of closely knit friendships tend to evaporate in their 30s.  The process of getting up in the morning, getting the kids off to school, doing the two or three things to maintain the house in order, going to work, getting food ready, finding a moment's peace and so on becomes routine and decision-free — and tiring — and it begins to feel like we don't want to decide which bar we're going to drink at tonight or what special thing we're going to do.  It's easier to go to the same bar.  It's easier if no new people show up, who have to be spoken with in a special way.  It's easier if no decision, after our long day, needs making.

And single people?  Well, they have time to make decisions, don't they?

So, when people stay with D&D into their 20s and 30s, their approach to the game starts to shift too.  Having figured out the basic details, those already discussed, and knowing who ought to lead when entering the dungeon — well, they pretty must just want to run in a dungeon, right?  I mean, we know basically what happens, and what's expected of us, and what the right decision is, so it feels like our... well, like our daily grind, but less boring.  D&D has the viscerality of slaughtering something, collecting something new, solving some small puzzle (within reason) and the camaraderie of others who "get" the game as we do.  We don't want to make a lot of deep, complex decisions... a mystery is fine, but we're not really looking for a gut-wrenching dilemma to solve, one that's going to prey on us after the game is over, making us wonder, "Did we do the right thing?"  We don't want that.  We just want a good, gently immersive game, that allows us to put all that other stuff aside and narrow the walls of stress and difficulty down to manageable proportions.

I didn't explain all this to the hygienist, but I did point out the way she must have felt when she didn't know what decision to make.  She admitted, she didn't want to do anything "wrong."  That is a big thing in the minds of a lot of players.  They don't want to screw up, they don't want to look foolish... and they really don't want to let down others by failing to do what they should have done.

There are always those who solve this problem by doing stupid things, all the time — because if they do this deliberately, it's not a mistake, its a character choice.  It is far, far easier to look at a situation and solve the puzzle, "What is the dumbest possible thing I could do right now?", than it is to solve the more difficult conundrum, "What would be the smartest thing?"  By doing the former, it discards the necessity of doing the latter.  Problem solved.

Get these people out of your game as soon as you can.  If you examine their real lives any, you'll find that they're systematically ruining their futures in all kinds of ways you don't want to be near, when it happens.

This is also the reason why players drift towards performative D&D.  It is the game done for show, rather than out of any genuine conviction or commitment.  Such persons are seeking social approval or  signal virtue, evident by the way they disparage those who find such things unimportant or even tacitly repulsive (like I do).  Unable to be politicians, such players still want their opportunities to make grand speeches, to preen, to cock the walk, to feel important when in fact they know they're not.  They may not be capable of getting attention in the real world, but they've discovered that D&D offers them a small enough audience to enable them to effectively impress, where no real competition exists.  They can't act their way out of a paper bag; they'd look moronic and gauche on a real stage; in a public venue as small as a coffee shop they'd induce everyone to roll their eyes and want them to just go... but at a D&D table, these people are Stars!  It's their one real chance to have the life they fantasise about living.

It's easy to see how the present evolved game has carefully scrubbed out the decision-making element.  There are no real consequences for bad play, retconning is considered an imperative for every "responsible" DM and the goal is "fun" not risk and consequence.  Oh, the word "risk" is still employed... but again, in a performative, superficial sort of way.  Like a dumbshow, a pantomime we play through, knowing nothing can go wrong.  But then, playing the game this way, we don't want things to go wrong.  When the ball rolls around and bounces on the roulette table and ends up in "00", we still win.

It really is a kind of hell.  It's literally a Twilight Zone episode, A Nice Place to Visit, where the gangster gets excited at first about his afterlife because he consistently wins at the roulette wheel and the slot machine.  Inevitably, though, this gets boring, forcing him to examine what's really going on.

As a DM, I don't do any of this.  I like making decisions, and I like being pushed into things where I have to make one.  I like situations that are difficult to solve, which I can puzzle out for hour after hour.  It is one of the reasons I write or read fiction, so that I can decide how the thing that motivates the main character drives this behaviour and that consequence, which ends in a resounding, satisfying ending. It's why I read books that don't follow a hero's journey, that often end in tragedy or remorse, because it's unexpected and revealing as regards human nature and character.

S o when I run a game, no, I don't want to create a dungeon and run people through it.  If it isn't a dungeon, it isn't constructed like a dungeon ought to be.  When I propose a problem, I don't create the solution also; I don't bother.  I want to impose something consequential, that might really happen — some sort of cruelty is taking place, perpetrated by one people onto another — where no solution exists because through the human experiment, no solution ever has existed.  Yet the player's hands are unbound; they're not expected to solve it, they're expected to manage themselves within it.  This fascinates me endlessly, and it fascinates the players who try my game and like it.

I don't need to make everybody happy, just a small collection of people.  Those people can be picked and chosen to be just like I am.  Those who want to engage on a weightier, meatier level will find the peculiar sort of enjoyment at my table they can't get anywhere else.  Because it's not wanted.

That's the thing.  I ruin D&D because I keep pointing out, with arguments that explain how frivolous, shallow and unengaged most players are, and want to be, that whatever they're doing isn't remotely the sort of game that D&D could be.  I don't see the game as a diversion or just a thing to do Saturday when we're not playing poker or watching a film together.  It's an art form for me, an intellectual pursuit, a thing that requires expertise and effort to do well.  Exactly what most people do not want the game to be, primarily because that's not what they want their lives to be.  They're not interested in being "better" as people.  They're doing all they can just to keep from being bored when they cook enough food to fill their bellies.

Moreover, I won't just shut up.  I won't let people just throw out a few words to defend their performative style of play and accept in on a principle I don't agree with.  I won't live and let live.  They're wrong, and everything decent thing that exists in this world, that comes about because of EXPERTISE and EFFORT, those things those people don't want to be part of, proves it.  Hold up a mirror to these people and they know they're being shallow and selfish.  The only argument they have it so tell me to put my mirror away, so they don't have to look at it.

Anyway, no, I did not say all of this to the hygeinist.  I pointed out that she usually didn't make decisions about things where the consequences mattered, and that's why the game made her uncomfortable.  She agreed.  She's just an everyday person, with no skin in the game, so it's easier for her — bereft of emotional props and rationalisations — to just see that, hm, yes, it was hard to decide what the right thing to do was.  There was no sense of being judged, no reason not to just see that... as her subsequent conversation showed.  I wanted to suggest that she might just try again, being a little more aware that the decisions she needed to make weren't that consequential... but if she wants to try the game again, if her son will let her, then she will without my urging it.

I wish that when I talk to D&D players, I didn't have to spend so much time getting around all the bullshit they've been told and which they've embraced... because it really creates a divide between D&D as a game and D&D as a culture.  The latter has utterly ruined the former... not just for noobs, but for themselves, because really, there's nowhere to take the performative game.  It just lurches on until it becomes undead, like a television show entering it's 8th season.  Everyone quits and for the rest of their lives they say things to me like, "Oh, D&D?  It's all right I guess.  I played it a bit in university... but after awhile, I just didn't see the point."

Mm hm.  That's mostly it.  What's the point.  It's not like it matters.  Sort of like those ten books most people can remember having read in high school or college; To Kill a Mockingbird and what not.  The ten pieces of literature upon which all their decision-making wisdom is based upon — that bleak, hard to comprehend lexicon that makes Star Wars, the Marvel Universe, Transformers and the Game of Thrones look like such gems of emotive, signalling genius.

Ah.

I ask for too much.

Daði

In Breaking Bad, the workers for Pollos Hermanos place a small star on the buckets of chicken slop that have drugs concealed inside them, so that the receivers don't have to open every slop bucket.  This post needs a star to indicate that it doesn't end in a link.

I want to tentatively recommend a youtube D&D content producer, Mystic Arts, specifically yesterday's misnamed video.  I resist giving any outright praise; the presenter's attitude contains that sort of performative smugness that I fucking hate, specifically because it's designed to make the listener feel the speaker really believes what's being said... and because, in this case, as the speaker, Daði, has revealed himself to be of this school, it's the shitty voice that film arts school teaches graduates to adopt.  Some graduates buy in very hard on this.  The video doesn't quite reach the level of ire-inducing face-breaking that I reserve for guys like Colville, but I would rather this fellow just talk like a human fucking being.

He has some valuable things to say regarding presentation, which some readers here could advantage.  Daði has identified a problem that's rarely addressed, one I don't have simply because I don't stop talking during a game session until I've successfully put the players in a position that they have to act in order to protect themselves or achieve their fore-stated goals.  There are many examples of this in my game play scattered throughout this blog and other places.

Frustratingly, Daði has identified this as "the DM hasn't presented them with a game."  In this instance, the word "game" is terrifically non-distinctive, which greatly weakens the value of his argument.  It is a little bit like saying that the two teams are standing around because the referee, or the umpire, hasn't yet given them a "game" to play.  This is true, but it's not the parlance we'd expect.

Using this quote from 5.5 player's handbook,

"The rhythm of play is as follows: the dungeon master describes a scene; the players describe what their characters do; the DM narrates the results of the adventurer's actions... the dungeon master tells the players where their adventures are and what's around them, how many doors lead out of a room, what's on a table..." [and so on]

This is a reflection of an old, old habit, and not the result of a badly made game (though it is one).  Description is not an adequate motivation to play.  Players cannot be soothed with "easily digestible chunks of information" alone, though Daði makes a game attempt at arguing as much.  Asking my party mate to read a scroll I cannot read does not make for "exploration," nor is it "problem solving," any more so than my shorter daughter asking me to reach to the top shelf to get down a pot that gets used twice a year.   Rolling a die to see if a term is remembered isn't "exploration" either, it's a totally random, tiresome old-school game feature that continues to rely on the argument, "not knowing" is scarier than "knowing."

I'll take a moment and explain this one.  Two characters don't know the meaning of "the screaming mass."  Suie the druid has a chance of knowing what this is and makes an intelligence check.  In game, if Suie succeeds, the party learns what this term means.  If Suie fails, they don't... and must withstand the agony over not knowing, which supposedly gives the die roll meaning.

It doesn't.  It never has.  Why wouldn't you want your players to know what this is?  You could provide them with a deeply disturbing terrifying description of the mass, which is far, far more engaging and immersing than the teaser of two words... and you're using a game mechanic that has, as it's "feature," the ability to muzzle the DM's capacity for creating immersion.  This is idiocy.  It is based on a cinematic premise (Daði is a self-described filmmaker) that ALSO assumes that every answer in a film will be answered within 20 minutes of it being mentioned.

D&D does not move at anything like that pace... and it shouldn't.  It's not a movie.  Therefore, we should discard "movie rules" about information giving, which trusts to keeping the viewers locked in because, in reality, this concept won't take more than three episodes of binge watching to reveal.  If it takes more than three episodes, then the watcher's going to get tired of waiting and turn off.  There are rules to these damn things; you can't apply those to D&D because unlike three episodes of a streamed show, which last just over 2 hours, a session goes twice that just to resolve a combat (in 5th, that is).

But this is a quibble.  Daði has the right idea... it's only that he suffers from the miscomprehension that these tiny, incredibly dull details are sufficient to drive actions, regardless of how they're presented.  If your players are jumping at the description of a rolling staff, as though this is the best thing that's ever happened to them, then we're presenting the level of interesting that can only be found in reality television shows.  You know, the sort where the premise is that every episode will show a different iteration of more or less the same discoveries and responses, such as watching the enormous face of a sleasy asshole who purchases crap, only to sell said crap to other sleasy people.  In every episode.  All episode.

Fundamentally, Daði is arguing for the gamefication of a game that is already a game... only all the parts of the game that used to be there in earlier versions has been gutted and removed for the sake of new "game" concepts.  This isn't good, but it's a logical result.

Gamification is the practice of incorporating game-like elements into non-game activities to make them more engaging and motivating. It involves using features such as rewards, challenges, and competition to encourage participation and enhance the user experience. By tapping into people's natural desire for achievement and "fun," it's hoped that something that's really dull and boring, like the workplace, or education for children, can be made engaging.

However, gamification is a bad thing.  Ian Bogost has referred to it as "exploitationware" that exploits psychological triggers for profit.  Heather Chaplin, writing for Slate, describes gamification as "an allegedly populist idea that actually benefits corporate interests over those of ordinary people," suggesting it serves more as a tool for corporate manipulation than genuine user engagement.  Kevin Slavin of MIT has criticised gamification as flawed and misleading, particularly for those unfamiliar with gaming.  Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist, has studied how gamification techniques, initially designed for immersive game experiences, are now pervasive on smartphones, affecting various apps from social media to investment platforms, often leading to detrimental consequences like fostering addiction and promoting unproductive behaviors.  It's not accidental that this kind of thinking has drifted into modern D&D, which is more concerned with making the new version feel like a game rather than it actually being one.

On the whole, gamification reduces the context of rewards and achievement to shallow, supposedly reward-based systems, such posing a group of doors for players to open, or like Balder's gate, a set of premade things to click on, to provide "something," to use Daði's word.  This is barely above the level of encouraging monkeys to press a lever to get a mango, then calling it a game suitable for humans.

Overall, it treats players as though this alone will be enough to satisfy their interest level.  It's short-term engagement, unlike the longer lasting adventure-driven model where players are unsure for a long time if they'll survive the quest.  If, on the other hand, we remove survival as a concern, and make the success at the quest a certainty, it removes the overall stress that's related to long-term goals.  Short-term goals, on the other hand, those associated with gamification, employ the same psychological principles that drive gambling.  Suie isn't really learning what "the screaming mass" is, she's learning whether or not her die roll is successful, without the knowledge or reward being given having any real meaning.

This short-term engagement is expected to take the place of long-term growth, which 5th edition has done everything in its power to kill.  Judging from the content, 5.5 is not taking another direction.  Daði's video pretends that providing these "rewards" for "problem solving" have meaning... but, in fact, his particular version of this only works if the game itself is irretreivably dull and broken.  Which it is.  Since the goal has long since ceased to be, "become great."  This has been replaced with, "Enjoy being great.  Leap at a rolling staff."

Factionalism

I went searching for a direct line GNS Theory and 4th edition.  I had little luck.

Ron Edwards introduced GNS theory in 1999, upon co-founding the Forge with Ed Healy. Healy's presence on The Forge was more behind-the-scenes compared to Ron Edwards, who was the more prominent public face of the site. Healy was instrumental in setting up the technical and organizational aspects of the website, enabling it to become a pivotal platform for independent RPG designers. While he did contribute to discussions, his role was focused on facilitating and maintaining the community infrastructure.

After The Forge, Healy went on to pursue various projects. He became well-known for his work with the gaming company, Gamerati, which focused on marketing, news and support for the gaming community. I simply wasn't able to find any information of Healy stating if GNS Theory affected his thinking or not; certainly, Gamerati didn't focus on game design. I include this note because it was missed in the previous post.

GNS Theory was officially published in 2003 by Edwards himself ... but while it inspired quite a lot of discussion online, it did not seem to influence the thinking of James Slavicsek, Rob Heinsoo, James Wyatt or Mike Mearls, the standouts among the design team who began 4th edition's development in earnest, around 2005. Reading Heinsoo's articles at Pelgrane Press, he's quite the fanboy; seeing this video, it's hard to imagine anyone putting a multi-millon dollar property into his hands ... but of course, this could all be a posture he adopts for the fan boys. Slavicsek described Heinsoo as "our mad genius" in an interview in Kobald Quarterly #5; in the same article, he describes James Wyatt as "the storyteller" and himself as "the stat junkie."

The same article (I think; it's hard to tell) makes a case for the design team pretty much throwing a lot of shit at the walls, no doubt thinking they knew what they were doing, but of course we know now that 4th edition was such a disaster that the company had to abandon it in just six years (from 2008 to 2014); which is, from a company standpoint, a disaster. Such a rapid replacement of a major product, based on dissatisfaction from the fan base, reflects a serious misalignment between the product and the customer needs. The failure of 4th edition terrified the company, forcing them to go to the fans to avoid another like fuck-up ... though, as I'll argue, they were unable to do anything except replace 4th with another fuck-up. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Without direct evidence, it's probable that 4th edition's designers were merely attempting to conform with broader trends and principles in game design, rather than any sort of direct embrace with GNS theory. By the mid-2000s, a great mass of information was floating around as table top gaming evolved.

Nonetheless, however the team got them, there are a few coincidences that are worth noting. 4th edition places a strong emphasis on creating balanced and tactical combat mechanics. This was added to ensure that players enjoying "strategic challenges" and competitive play (gamists) would yet find the game rewarding. The introduction of a standardised set of powers and abilities for all the classes was a move towards that.

And although it was criticised for being too mechanically focused, 4th edition does include tools and guidelines that support storytelling. DMs are given frameworks and advice for crafting engaging narratives (it's very, very clumsy advice, but the push is clearly there), officially promoting the argument for many players that the game ought to be about storytelling and character development (narrativists). And, 4th paid a fair bit of lip service towards the ideal of creating a cohesive and immersive game world, providing settings and materials that helped maintain the game's internal logic. "Points of Light" established a world where small pockets of civilization existed amidst vast, dangerous wilderness. ''Core World" provided a shared world-building framework that DMs could use as a foundation for their campaigns, including details on geography, cosmology, history, and cultures. 4th edition provided detailed descriptions of monster backgrounds, the logic of how magic worked and how different planes interacted with the material world. All this was catered to that specific player who wanted an immersive experience (simulationists).

Whether they meant to or not, the designers ended up with a shotgun approach to game design, addressing a wide array of player needs and preferences. By struggling to appeal to everyone, and in doing so, it heightened the divisiveness between different player factions.

The result was a mess, due to its overemphasis on combat mechanics, which made the game feel more like a tactical exercise than a role-playing experience. This focus alienated players who preferred the narrative and immersive aspects of earlier editions. The significant changes to core mechanics and the introduction of video game-like powers led to a loss of the traditional D&D feel, which frustrated long-time players. Additionally, the complexity and learning curve of the new rules added to the dissatisfaction, making it harder for some players to engage with the game. Despite its ambitious goals, the attempt to cater to diverse player preferences resulted in a divisive and often criticized edition.

The gamists were alienated by the attention given to narrative depth and immersive world-building; those who wanted storytelling and simulation despised the structured combat system, which in turn led to a serious push back against ANY kind of structure when these same people were requested to give their opinions on an upcoming 5th edition.

We must argue that none of this is Edwards fault. Most likely, Edards merely identified and articulated the different factions as they were forming right in front of him in the 1990s. He didn't create the divisions, he merely highlighted them, offering a positive perspective that understanding these differences could lead to better game design.

But to be clear, he wasn't all that forward thinking, either. He didn't see his categories AS divisions. He may have articulated the divisions as ideals, but he oversimplified the underlying dynamics and missed the antagonistic nature of these factions. Players did not merely wish to play the game differently, it became evident in the next ten years that they were actively opposed to how others played the game. Each would strive to reshape the game to fit their ideals, and very definitely at the expense of other play styles. This became brutally apparent with the negotiations surrounding 5th edition. The company's choice to embrace community involvement in the way it did was unprecedented. The D&D Next playtest invited players from all over the world to contribute their ideas, preferences and critiques. Thinking they could unify the disparate factions, the company instead encountered deeply entrenched groups that each had their vision of what D&D should be, with these visions generally being in direct opposition to one another. As feedback rolled in, it became clear that reconciling these diverse play styles would be fucking impossible ... at least, for the level of genius functioning at the WOTC then as now.

According to the company's rhetoric, it decided to implement a "modular approach," allowing Dungeon Masters to tailor the rules to fit their group's preferences. This meant including optional rules and guidelines that could be adopted or ignored based on the play style of each group. By doing so, they aimed to offer a core system that was broad and adaptable enough to accommodate different styles of play without forcing a one-size-fits-all solution.

In reality, the company made a pragmatic decision. It chose a core system that would appeal to the largest faction. Those not picked were sidelined and, as best as the company could without committing itself, thrown some bones to keep them quiet. The priority, as with any company, was to ensure the commercial success and broad appeal of the new edition, primarily tailored the core mechanics and gameplay elements to suit that faction of players that represented, as the company saw it, the greatest number. The company has, as such, put all its eggs in one basket, committed to a game design philosophy that prioritizes narrative flexibility, character development, and the "rule of cool." This has effectively sent a message that if some players don't like the new direction, they should find another game to play.

This has led to a kind of exodus, where mechanics-focused players seek out other RPG systems that better align with their play style, or they revert to earlier editions of D&D that better satisfy their preferences. The expectation for these players to "just go away" manifests in the lack of support and development for more mechanics-intensive content within the current edition. Consequently, the game has become less inclusive of diverse play styles, favoring a homogeneous approach that prioritizes the narrative-driven experience.

The approach has caused problems for the company. The exodus of mechanics-focused players has contributed to dissatisfaction within the community, and the company has struggled to balance the diverse needs of its player base. The dissatisfaction has led to discussions and even grumblings about the need for a new edition that might better address the varying preferences and bring back the players who felt alienated by the fifth edition's direction. This is evident in the choice of calling said new edition, "One D&D."

This is supposed to unify the game's rules and experience across different platforms and play styles. Sound familiar? And, predictably, the initiative has encountered several challenges and criticisms, reflecting the complexity of trying to unify such a diverse player base under a single system. The initiative has indeed faced difficulties, some of which stem from the inherent tensions between different player factions and the ambitious goals set by the company.

One disaster has been the push for digital integration and the expansion of online tools have been met with mixed reactions. While some players appreciate the convenience and modernization these tools offer, others are concerned about the potential loss of the traditional tabletop experience. Issues such as software bugs, accessibility, and the potential for increased costs associated with digital content have also raised concerns. Mostly, it's seen as a cash grab by the company, without actually offering any benefit to the game that's worth the money.

The iterative nature of the playtesting and feedback process has exposed further difficulties. While the open playtesting aims to be inclusive and responsive to player input, it has also led to same disagreements and frustration that existed 12 years ago, that the company has never practically addressed in any manner. "Just go away" basically has the ring of, "Surely, after 12 years, they'll have all left by now." Instead, the dissatisfied players are still here, still angry about what they think matters and still identifying the larger portion of the company's supporters as the enemy.

Meanwhile, everyone ever connected to that part of the company that could have supported the gamists and the simulationists (though it seems really stupid to keep using these terms) are long gone, having either quit or conformed to company policy. There is no future, in short. What we have are three different games, not one game. 

The company's insistence, more than 30 years old now, on using "D&D" as a recognisable name, has crippled it's ability to just making another game for people who want a different game. In 1992, after 2nd edition failed to make the dent desired, the company should have had faith in itself and invented the "Adventure Story" game, or some such, and driven a new product to eventually become more popular than old Dungeons and Dragons.  Instead, afraid to dig in and do the work, they've made such a fuck-up of the landscape that they'll never get out from under. 

So, not Edwards fault. In fact, it just shows that Edwards was another in a long line of poorly educated and highly overrated game designers, who were fed money and respect for being "stat junkies" and "mad scientists" rather than PROFESSIONALS, whom the company should have hired. 

A lot of money was involved.  Educated thinking was not.