Losing Touch With Reality

My SCA experience changed me.

The one thing "doing it all for real" highlights is how utterly childish and fantasy-land D&D and many of these fantasy games have become. We have talking frogs, bear people, planar magics, every class with infinite-use video-game blaster powers, glowing magic coming out of our hands, impossible weapons, combat tactics that would get you killed in the real world, death is impossible, and being able to sleep a night's rest and heal off a shotgun blast to the face.

Today's tabletop role-playing games have turned so silly and childish that I can't really call them games anymore, because part of the definition of the game is "there needs to be winners and losers."

And all of these games tell you outright, "everyone wins."

In Tomb of Horrors? Your character dies, you lose. Just like it was in AD&D. We started to go off the rails with the "too heroic" AD&D 2nd Edition, and the railroad "novel adventures" that defined that game and era, and eventually led to bankruptcy.

Since then, D&D has been defined by two of the most toxic forces in gaming: the MMO and the mobile game. Both of these gaming models turn loneliness and FOMO into profit, and those are harmful to our well-being and mental health.

Bits, bytes, MMOs, and having your face stuck in the digital coffin of a phone mean you will die lonely and alone. You will not have a life. They engineer these games this way because they know that if they provide a "fake answer" to the problems they create, they can monetize the solution.

I found an escape. The SCA. A real place with real people, and no phones. Playing pretend, but doing it for real. No gaming, just the reality of trying to do this all ourselves.

Granted, if you "find a D&D group" that is also an escape, but in the post-COVID era, it is very hard since so much has moved online, and Wizards is turning D&D into a "digital first" experience. The era of the local game store and finding people to play with is ending. Those stores, face-to-face groups, and places will slowly die off like the Detroit automobile. Wizards will kill them all in the search for profits. The character sheets, chat rooms, and best place to find a game will be in the connected graveyard of D&D Beyond, where face-to-face interactions go to die.

D&D (and 5E) is designed to require a heavy backend support model to play. This isn't like AD&D, where you could play on a sheet of school notebook paper. You need thousands of hours of software and web development to ship character sheets, storage services, online systems, portals, websites, backend servers, and support teams just to run a character sheet.

What is this?

It is corporate D&D.

Paid subscriptions required.

5E can't really be played alone, and the model pushes you online. The game is designed to slowly strip away your connection to reality, with too much of the fantastic and not enough to keep it grounded. D&D isn't even fantasy, the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance anymore; any connection to history has gone through a messy divorce, with the original creators called terrible things. Those sins caused the game to lose touch with what it was, and today it joins the rest of "fantasy slop" that World of Warcraft, mobile games, and Wall Street push on us like "the next Fortnite."

I need my fantasy games to connect to history and reality. Sorry, that is non-negotiable. The fantastic isn't special anymore when it is commonplace. The planar multiverse sucks and is just a writer's cop-out for not wanting to put in the work or learn the lore. I will gladly pay the company that has a writing and creation staff that cares about the lore, rather than these outfits that "hire anyone out of college" and tell them, "do whatever you want."

Sorry, lazy Wall Street holding company, not good enough, no money for you. I couldn't care less about you being a way to pay people in your college clique. Care about the lore, because the "old school players" will be the first you come crawling back to when your new edition fails. And we will be the first ones kicked out the door when you get popular.

We'd better get something from it.

I like ToV and the 5E I built.

It is still inferior to the game and connection to reality and history that we had.

History and tradition matter more than the next big popular "mobile game thing."

Wall Street has that backward, and it will never, ever change.