Friday, February 13, 2015

D&D 5: A Cultural Icon?

From yesterday:

Why one of D&D's biggest video game devs thinks that tabletop game has lost its way

I read this, and it is an interesting read. My first thought, of course he wants to push Pathfinder, he's making a game with Paizo. That's not a surprise. But he is connected to the D&D community, the creators there, and he has a long history with the brand.

He wonders if D&D can survive in such a big corporate structure. Now, Disney is also pretty huge, but they also own other huge things and they are good at running big things, like Marvel, Pixar, the Muppets, and now Star Wars. Big companies can run big things. But can they run small things? Or do these small things need to become big?

He wonders if D&D will never be as big as an evergreen and always profitable Monopoly, and thinks if the game was run by a smaller, TSR-like entity things would be better. Part of me wonders if this isn't some frustration over the electronic gaming for the brand (which has always been locked up in one way of another), but I do feel there is a genuine feeling of concern here.

Monopoly is a different game than D&D. It's more a collection of ideas under a common theme. You can argue it is more marketing and a pop-culture phenomenon than it is a game. It's like Pokemon in a way, Pokemon can be a lot of things, and it is a product that can be turned into a million different products since it is a strong brand with identifiable pop-culture icons. Same thing with Monopoly, the Monopoly guy, the car, the board, the look, the colors, the way it's played, the shoe, chance cards, and the dog. All those pieces can be reshuffled and remixed into a billion Monopoly products.

Forever.

Now D&D.

What is it? If you strike out all the things that are not in the public domain or SRD (and thus in Pathfinder), it is the unique collection of sort-of copyrightable product identity. Beholders. Mind flayers. Owlbears. Drow. And basically anything unique to the game that can't appear anywhere else, such as the game worlds and other trademarked pieces. I don't feel those are a unique and identifiable set of cultural icons, they are just funny-shaped monsters and a couple worlds that once dominated the NYT fiction charts.

I don't feel the 'product identity' pieces of D&D will ever achieve cultural icon status. Pathfinder didn't need them, and it is hard to get excited about a monster you are supposed to hate. A beholder is no Pikachu. D&D's problem is that the 'cultural icons' are the player characters, each one is player created, unique, and it is hard to market an icon that every player creates a unique instance of. If you were playing Elminster or Ash Ketchum, fine, but D&D for every player is a unique player character.

And these player characters exist in every roleplaying game, Pathfinder, GURPS, Legend, Traveller, and so on.

D&D is not every fantasy adventure. It tries to be because it is so generic and malleable, but the same experience exists in a million other games. It exists in World of Warcraft. It exists in Game of Thrones. Assassins Creed. Any dungeon crawling game on Steam. Any Final Fantasy. You can get that D&D experience anywhere, because fantasy roleplaying is not defined by having a beholder and drows or any other piece of product identity attacking the player characters.

Those are just monsters, and they can be any monster in any world, because it doesn't matter anymore. People don't care that the creature in the next room is an 'official' D&D brand displacer beast. Again, Pathfinder proved you can create a whole new mythos to replace D&D's and people will accept it and be excited by it. They are just monsters, they are infinitely replaceable by a new shape with a scowl, fangs and horns.

The worlds are something else. Those are fiction. Those are stories. To me, they feel like a complete mess since 4th Edition, and their futures are unclear, except as being legacy supported settings with little real future support. They need a reboot badly. They need their timelines wiped out. They need a creative team to recreate them for this generation. Like Batman, they need to become cultural properties of their own, and reset from time to time to keep them relevant and fresh.

The worlds and unique NPC characters are likely the best path out of this quandary, but those exist often as a force hostile to player characters. Nobody wants powerful GM-NPCs competing with their player characters. Nobody wants railroad-like modules that force a story on a party.

Roleplaying and D&D is like a box of art supplies. You create what you want to create with it, and one crayon is as replacable than the next. It doesn't matter to your picture if your red crayon came from a box of non-Crayola brand colors. It's a crayon. You roleplay. In a fantasy world. With a set of rules. Specifics do not matter. It's a hobby.

To some, it matters that they are all Crayola crayons. Fine, if that is how you want to color your picture, it's cool. If you want to play D&D and your group enjoys the experience, very cool and more power to you. It is a good game and enjoy it. But for the huge population of players enjoying fantasy gaming and roleplaying, it is a larger community with many diverse options where everything can be played and enjoyed. As a company trying to make something in this environment "big" like Monopoly "big", I don't see how you do it since everything is so replaceable and individual-player creator-focused.

Maybe D&D has lost its way, or maybe it is still relevant and on the path, but in another way. It inspired a million other games and worlds, and on this fertile ground a garden of options and opportunities grew. As a large cultural phenomenon I can get excited about, like a Star Wars?

No. I don't feel it.

As an interesting set of rules that gives me a new option to play with others? I can handle that, along with all the other games I enjoy. "Monopoly big" really doesn't matter to me.

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