D&D 4 and 5 were designed with the goal of getting you into digital services. Every major pretender to the throne these days likely has that same goal, to lock you into a platform, VTT, online system, or other digital support stream where you will be paying monthly fees for fake digital goods.
And it seems every company is trying to redefine fantasy to something they created, that they control the language of, that their special terms and lingo is how people speak in the hobby. You see this with the stupid redefining of terms, like race for species, lineage, kin, and 101 other synonyms for the same word.
This has zero to do with being sensitive and respectful. All of that hemming and hawing is fake social seeding of silly ideas spread by corporate planning and co-opted social media influencers.
This redefinition of terms is 100% about which corporation controls the language of fantasy gaming.
You control the language, you control the genre, and you control gaming.
Then, you force gamers to your support-and-services platform.
And I am slowly getting the feeling every major new system is somehow fake, or offering us gaming with strings and terms attached. I need to exclude Shadowdark and Pathfinder here, since the former is an OSR-style board game and the latter is a 3.5E fork and evolution. Though Pathfinder 2 does lean on the digital services pretty heavily, and running a tax-form-like character sheet by hand in that game is next to impossible.
My new definition of "what is a role-playing game" will include a hard requirement for being able to run a character sheet by hand, without software, without websites, and without digital tools. It seems like a Luddite requirement, but it is essential to separate the wheat from the chaff in the hobby.
If you require software to play the game, you are no longer a role-playing game. You are a computer game with tabletop features. If that character creation software, VTT, digital books, DLC, or paid service ever goes away - your game is dead and your players no longer have the ability to play it.
Oddly enough, Daggerheart is still on the "in" side, as this is more of a card-based game. This is a strange definition of what is a role-playing game, but if I own my Daggerheart cards, I will be able to play that game forever. D&D 5E is definitely out of the hobby by this definition, as there is no good way to play the patched, modern edition of the game without an online platform.
Even in Tales of the Valiant when I try to do a character by hand, I miss half of the things that should be on the sheet. 5E sucks when trying to craft a legal character, as there are dozens of special "oh, and you get this too" things that get post-it-noted onto a character sheet for special situations. Level Up A5E has twice the special tack-ons that ToV has, at least a dozen per character.
The "no digital" definition also plays into the "stop killing games" movement in a way, in that single-player games needing an "online requirement" and them "going away once the servers are shut down" is essentially a lie to consumers, giving corporations a digital plug to pull ownership from things you think you own. Even when there is no functionality in that "digital plug" to begin with, it adding nothing but an on/off switch the shareholders and flip to get you to "buy the next thing."
You seen this with D&D 4's digital services being removed from support.
The same will happen to all major tabletop games, someday. How many billion dollars will it take a media conglomerate to buy? Once a walled-garden is in place and consumers have no choice, it will be sold. Not having a walled garden devalues the brand, and it is the only thing preventing a major deal from going forward.
This is never about you and your games.
This is about the shareholders.
You see this countless times with services to "buy digital movies on" shutting down, with no compensation for people who "bought" movies on the service. Stop killing games? Right. Stop killing media. The problem is a subset of a huge issue. A war on private ownership by the communal-capitalist alliance. Ownership of everything from housing to entertainment to even food. Overseas investor money will come in to "own" your media and entertainment, one piece at a time.
Stop lying to yourself and sniffing the fantasy-scented corporate opiates.
You see this with the current round of buyouts and media consolidation, where entire forms of entertainment are bought up and fire-walled away, with certain wrestling promotions split up between services that would cost multiple times what they once were just to enjoy the same thing, or less. If this trend continues, entertainment will only be for the rich.
Role-playing games? The ultimate DIY entertainment that nobody owns. They can't have that. People will not be allowed to create their own entertainment without renting the ability to do so.
How can you do your part to stop this?
Refuse digital services.
Stop renting anything.
Stop supporting the redefinition of the language of gaming.
Never buy a digital book or book DLC on a VTT or platform.
Roll your characters by hand.
Own your PDFs and physical books. Own your physical media.
And stop supporting live-service tabletop games.
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