D&D: The Wheels are off the Wagon

How did we get here?

Every bit of news about D&D is bad news, jumped on by the community for hate clicks and anger. There can be no good news about D&D, since everyone is automatically primed to assume the worst. The new person in charge can turn it around and make the game more community-focused and open. I hope they can, but I know better. This is Wall Street we are talking about.

But I wish him and the new D&D team well.

They have a huge mountain to climb.

I think that if we go back, Wizards' old management team trying to pull the OGL was the death knell of D&D. Before this point, we could give the game and company the benefit of the doubt, and we could take things at face value, recognizing that their actions had both good and bad sides. After the OGL 1.1, the community recoiled in horror, and Wizards was forced to save major face and release most of the rules (rules can't be copyrighted anyway) into the Creative Commons.

Since then, everything D&D has done has been viewed as predominantly negative.

The OGL has been discarded by many creators as outdated. A few games limp along with it, and some of my favorites are still tied to this. Some creators have released entire sets of rules into the public domain, which is a wonderful gift to the community.

The OGL split the community and hardened the lines of division.

D&D 2024 was more of a sensitivity reader edition of the rules than an improvement for players. Characters are killing others with knives and swords in this game, bludgeoning each other with maces, and burning enemies alive. It will never be a "kids' game," ever, and the D&D cartoon proved how impossible that goal is. The zeitgeist of 5E, where a character can take a shotgun blast to the face and sleep it off in 24 hours, shows you how "cozy" this game has become.

D&D was altered in ways no one had intended. Many have stuck with D&D 2014, which remains a deeply flawed version, as there has been no compelling reason to switch to the new books. The economy is also in a downturn, and there is no pandemic for people to stay home.

The publishing world sucks. Gaming sucks. Venture capital companies come in and tell you your game has to be a certain way, or they won't sign the checks. You obey and put on a smile that is nothing more than the next mask you wear to keep people happy. I see all these Wizards executives leaving for other companies, some of which I like, and I have two thoughts: I hope they do well, and I hope they don't bring the same issues with them.

And I hope the new ones are free to make the game they imagine it to be.

Open 5E has garnered some attention, but the D&D market is vast, and if it crashes, it will likely take down most of the small players. I like ToV, but 5E is a game designed for web-based companies to extract subscription money and digital VTT sales from your pocket. They could have designed the game to be easier and not need online character creation tools, but they did not make that choice.

5E was always a flawed game.

It was designed to sell support services.

The game protects you from any danger and character death to an extreme degree. Original D&D is actually playing the game. 5E is watching the game play-through on YouTube. The irony is that Wizards feels high-level characters need to be protected, since no player wants to feel they wasted months of time and sessions of gameplay on a dead character. The higher levels in 5E are not fun, and those characters are the most protected. In original D&D, this was the point of the game. Your story, every character's story, has an end. If your character's story does not have an end, and they turn into an unkillable GMNPC, that is a terrible way to end a story.

In fact, stories without an end are not stories.

Now, the downfall of D&D (and comics) is taking down a significant part of the role-playing game industry, with the Diamond bankruptcy and those on the fringe of profitability in a tight market likely not surviving this. It feels like all of nerd culture is dying. Marvel, DC, comics, D&D, consoles, and even AAA gaming are all on life support.

They all got too greedy.

Everyone takes the fall.

Welcome to the post-D&D hobby.