The Divide

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Wizards betrayed the community with the OGL, and life moved on. D&D YouTubers got back to work, and I don't blame them - they built their channel on a game and have to pay the bills. I get it. Many just want to forget that time and don't want their social lives disrupted. What Wizards tried to do was so horrible and shocking that it still seems unreal.

And many walked away.

We now have this divide in the community between D&D and everything else. Wizards is betting big on a flawed system, and they have just a scant few years to make things profitable before One D&D's creative team is replaced by a new management team, and we get a 6E in three years. They even said their timeline was short and needed to make this point-five version a success.

They have everything against them, even Baldur's Gate 3. The mods alone for that game will kill any interest in the VTT for the next ten years if the game gets to be like Skyrim. I feel bad for the job they have ahead of them and wish them luck. But the same team that tried to take it all away is still there, and I can't support that unless things change.

So we have the divide.

Those people play D&D, and the rest of us play everything else. There is a little crossover, but the divide is forming and growing. Some will not even play anything, but D&D. Others won't touch it. The current management needs to change for me to be on board, but another part of me feels Wizards, TSR, D&D, and 5E are sunsetting.

A 'fantasy world model' starts with giant rats and goblins and ends at battling the gods through the same old tired tropes and collection of fantasy monsters that feel level one to twenty tired. Half-elves, drow, demons, and many things I grew up with are being erased from the game. The game is, by default, planar adventures. The builds are too tight and preplanned, and the fun in the game comes from breaking it with multiclassing.

The apathy is there. None of it feels fresh and new anymore to me. But still, others have fun with the game, which is okay. I am not some zealot telling people what they should play. I still play a 5E clone, Level Up Advanced 5E, and it is my 5E experience that feels right for me.

The divide is still there, though.

When I read the Aquilae Bestiary and saw these traditional monsters spun up in Dungeon Crawl Classics and how they became 'cool' again - something changed in my head. I realized the 40+ years of copying monsters from B/X to 5E and making them the same old 'weak goblins,' 'pushover orcs,' and all the other same-old power curves that every game - from B/X to 5E - repeats over and over again made me think how the OSR has its faults.

We endlessly Xerox the past.

We will never have anything new.

We will never see these monsters outside that B/X or 5E lens.

The divide may not be between 5E players and the rest of us. The divide may be between those who cling to the past and those who want to experience a few new things in this life and see things differently before the sand runs out of the hourglass.

I get what Goodman Games is trying to do with Dungeon Crawl Classics. Don't feel beholden to the past. The only way to have that 'brand new feeling' again is to take on challenges you have never seen before. Fight monsters you know nothing about. Adventure through lands so strange they defy explanation. Solve unsolvable missions with no frame of reference in anything you experienced before.

That is how you feel young again.

This is rediscovery.

Seeing those old monsters cast in a new light broke the chains in my head and made me realize how my mind had slipped to one side of the divide, stuck in the past. Subconsciously, I saw a monster and thought, 'Weak low-level trash mobs.'

That worldview is based on B/X.

Something OSR games and 5E celebrate and perpetuate, for the good and the bad. That entire 'D&D progression' feels enshrined in fantasy gaming so strongly that we can never escape it, even if you play OSR or 5E - the model is the same. The rules are different, but little else is.

When I saw the monsters again in a new light, my mind told me things could be different. Granted, the power level in the Aquilae book is still along OSR lines, but I saw breaks in that pattern. Sometimes, all it takes is seeing a few patterns, and your view of a situation changes. Would I play with the old monsters in DCC? Even though I know what I am doing, I am subverting the tropes and tearing down the old order.

And that is doing something very new for me.

Good guy orcs? Evil silver dragons? Why not? Burn it all down. Break free.

DCC starts with the B/X fantasy tropes as a foundation. Thief, warrior, mage, cleric, elf, dwarf, halfling. Then they go to the stars. Well, the B/X monsters can too. Start with the tropes and break them ruthlessly.

And you talk about the divide and realize it isn't between 5E and everyone else. The current people at Wizards need to keep selling you that old worldview since it makes money. OSR games ship it because it is familiar and what we used to do. Even some of the 'new OSRs' like Shadowdark play off those tropes and adhere to that old world model.

It is funny since in 1974 there was a divide too.

D&D was the new way of seeing things, not the old.