The engagement bait posts have finally landed in the D&D circles on Twitter. At least this time, the post is going around without that stupid Kevin James image attached. At the risk of diving into a realm where I invite the worst dorks you know to come in and tell me I’m wrong, I’ve got some thoughts that’ve been buzzing around in my head for years now that I’m gonna try to parse through here.
When I saw the post going around, I had two gut responses immediately for my controversial D&D opinions. The first, and probably least controversial, is that the game does not lend itself as well to roleplaying as CR and its fans want to believe. There’s been tons and tons of moaning and humbugging about Critical Role and I’m not here to shit on those actors or their production company. They’re just trying to get their bag and they managed to do it by playing a goofy game online for ten years. That’s good. What’s bad is the expectation their legions of fresh D&D players have put on the game. They expect rich storytelling and deep characters with trauma-filled backstories and a novel’s worth of dialogue their DM can pull out of their ass. This has been largely bad for the game, but not for the reason “gatekeepers” (a useless term) want you to think.
Here’s the other problem: CR is a company. They exist to make money. Because of this, they have to tone their show to appeal to the widest possible audience. This means turning off any of the (to use the McElroys’ word for it) “bad vibes” that could arise in the natural flow of storytelling. They have to do this to keep the show on Twitch/Youtube; they can’t play out a plotline about tiefling genocide when it’ll make those viewers uncomfortable, right? What follows is a generation of conflict-adverse D&D zoomers and zillennials who become distraught whenever something akin to violence occurs.
There’s no shortage of the people coming out in droves to chide Wizards over whatever perceived or projected injustice they printed in a supplement about literally enslaved monkey-men. Or the weird hubbub that emerged after the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 around the tieflings/druids conflict. People claimed the way the druids treated the tieflings (racistly) made them uncomfortable. That’s good, though. Racism should make you uncomfortable. Those feelings you have when you engage with a fictional story with real-world parallels are supposed to be introspective moments where you consider how you might improve yourself and the world around you, instead of decrying how bad it made you feel that they called someone a fantasy slur.
I am begging you to stop imprinting on fantasy stories. I am begging you to read any book. Conflict arises in the real world based on perceived and invented boundaries and differences drummed up by racists, fascists, and worse. It should feel good to roleplay kicking those peoples’ teeth in.
The second impulsive hot take I spat out was about how most modern D&D players have never opened a rulebook from any previous edition (there’s a non-zero chance a significant portion have never opened any rulebook, even). The game’s transition to a roleplaying-heavy experience (due in small part to the success of CR and other streamed shows) has made the combat and actual rolling mechanics feel secondary to the social pillar of the game. This ties into the previous gripe, but also has its own dire consequence: without an understanding of where D&D’s roots in wargaming, the player base has shifted away from what the game was originally intended to do - which is, replicate a wargame experience on a small, dungeon-crawling scale.
This goes deeper, though. It’s easy to say, “sure, but D&D isn’t a wargame like it was 50 years ago.” And you’d be right! But, the current incarnation of D&D is weighed down by its years and years of solidly wargaming mechanics and it’ll never be able to shake them while remaining as a recognizable D&D game. I mean, the 5e Player’s Handbook is 50% combat rules.
Take it this way: in 2008, WotC released 4th Edition and it was a huge flop. They tried to move away from the bloated D20 system that they had (in their eyes) erroneously granted everyone access to, thereby allowing a swathe of technically-official books and supplements that they really wished they hadn’t. Because of this we got weird products spawned from the dankest basements of the midwest like The Book of Erotic Darkness.
In an attempt to distance themselves from that sort of narrow-appeal products, they launched 4th with a completely new combat system. PCs maxed out at like four or five powers each; two at-wills and a combination of encounter and daily powers that would get swapped out at each level. Basically no abilities could be used outside of combat, and the ones that could had all the flavor and excitement of plain oatmeal.
This was D&D’s first major departure from the standard wargaming style and it was an abysmal failure. We knew the d20 system was fine, and the massive failure of 4th edition was what ultimately saw the meteoric rise of Pathfinder, which was effectively a 3.5 skin with some balancing at the time. 4th failed because it was trying to take the core pieces of the d20 system (roll a d20, add relevant modifier, compare to the DC) and append a digitally-inspired gameplay experience onto it. I mean, they even started designating classes as Tanks, Healers, or Damage. The open-ended gameplay of a D&D campaign was suddenly siloed into Overwatch with extra steps.
Now, WotC is again trying to move away from the wargame aspect of D&D. The entire system was “dumbed down” to remove rules bloat and make game management easier on DMs. The Advantage/Disadvantage system and a compression of the top-end of skill checks meant that player’s bonuses were, on average, lower per level. I’ll relent that 5th finally got skill checks right in a simple, if uncreative way.
5th Edition is split into three “pillars” of play, each ostensibly as important as the other. The pillars are combat, social, and exploration, and supposedly the game supports each the same. Here’s the issue, though: I’ve yet to play a D&D game where all three are touched on consistently. This isn’t to bash any of my previous DMs; they’ve all been great and we have amazing memories of our campaigns together. Where I take issue with the pillars is the false promise of mechanics to support each of them.
Anyone who’s tried to run Tomb of Annihilation knows that the exploration mechanics are lacking, especially when the exploration is scaled up to a hex-crawl across many square miles of jungle. My group’s campaign was frequently mired for days in-game rolling survival checks to advance one hex, then rolling for encounters, then progressing on until something happened. The party knew their goal, they knew their objective, but then spent several sessions simply traveling there. I know many DMs would say to just omit the boring travel bits, but that would mean ignoring something like 40% of the written content in a book I just paid $50 for.
Social interaction, on the other hand, is almost entirely up to your DM to resolve. If they aren’t a trained actor/improviser/writer, they’re going to have trouble. Getting information to your characters is its own struggle, but what if they want to interact with those NPCs, rather than just listen to them? Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception pull the players into declaring mechanical rolls to achieve ends, and are frequently muddied by the actual things PCs say to NPCs. And I’m not just talking about the group of murder-hobos we’ve all been a part of; I’m talking about well-designed social encounters with stakes that won’t be mitigated by persuasions.
For all its failings, 4th did try to address this by rolling out the “skill challenge,” where the party as a group has to pass X skill checks out of Y attempts to succeed. This could be as simple as climbing a rock wall; each player describes what they do to scale the wall (“I use a rope,” “I cast fly,” “I find handholds along the surface to climb,” etc) and the DM determines the type of check for each action. Players take it in turns resolving their actions, and then the cycle repeats. Turning skill checks or social interactions into pseudo-combat wasn’t the best solution, but it kept with the design philosophy of the time, which was to remove rules bloat and streamline games.
My point here is that D&D doesn’t work well when it deviates from the basic concepts that were set out for it in the first edition. For a game originally with such finely-tuned and math-heavy mechanics like THAC0, simplicity just doesn’t translate. And when your game is bloated with rules, you have less players willing to invest in the start-up to learn the game. And therefore less cash, which rules everything around me (WotC). Decisions get made to make the rules palatable to a wider audience, that wider audience demands more palatable settings and flavor than previous editions, and the company relents because this new fanbase eclipses the original. They ditch the weird settings like Dark Sun and Kalamar in favor of market research-backed Strixhaven and Ravnica. Ability scores are no longer tied to race, because that’s perceived as ethno-essentialism or something like that. Psionics were erased for being too complicated. Prestige classes are gone and instead a rigid subclass system locks PCs into one of three flavors for each class. Seriously, if we get another supplement that's just like “what if this martial class… but divine?” or a stapled-on wild magic ability I’m gonna scream.
What we’re left with is a game that doesn’t trust its current fanbase with complex story elements beyond such as “slavery bad” nor does it trust them with the mechanics to engage in complex wargaming and character-building.
Really, what I’m saying is a lot of TTRPG fans could do with the smallest amount of class consciousness to realize that Wizards will always make decisions that make them the most money. The game will continue down the path WotC has set it upon, and you should probably invest in physical copies of your favorite previous editions before it becomes unplayable.
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