My dad has been playing table-top roleplaying games (TTRPGs) regularly and irregularly since he was a teenager— to my memory, mostly World of Darkness games published by White Wolf and some of the pre-Disney acquisition Star Wars games, but not mainly D&D. He still calls it that, though— D&D. Dad has D&D tonight. I call it that, too, even though in the decade and change since I went to college and started playing (regularly and irregularly), I have only played full campaigns of Dungeons & Dragons twice.
It’s easier to tell people that I have D&D over the weekend, though, even though that isn’t what I’m playing at all. People have heard of the brand name (the Kleenex), but if you actually mention the product (facial tissue), you get blank stares. And everyone has heard of D&D now— it has escaped the containment of weird nerds and Baptist ministers. Through the assiduous and constant effort of Hasbro’s marketing department and brand partnerships, Dungeons & Dragons is more popular that ever.
It fucking sucks.
It’s a nightmare to try to critique Dungeons & Dragons for the same reason it’s hard to critique any beloved piece of popular nerd culture. These are works that are beloved by people because they speak to a certain experience— of being six years old and seeing Darth Vader for the first time, of spending weekends sitting beside your best friend rolling fistfuls of dice at a slavering monster. Critique of Dungeons & Dragons is received as critique of the experience. If this game is bad, is my level 14 sorcerer bad? Am I bad? Similarly, when you try to pitch something new to the table, the reaction is largely defensive. I don’t want to learn a new rulebook, I’ve never heard of that, I don’t want to buy new books.
Players deserve so much more than Dungeons & Dragons. There are problems with Dungeons & Dragons, problems with its corporate ownership and stewardship and problems with its philosophy of play. This is a manifesto; this is the manifesto: Play a Different Game.
Play a Different Game: Dungeons & Dragons the Corporate Entity
Dungeons & Dragons has been the center of litigation since its inception. Gary Gygax is broadly credited as the creator, but Dave Arneson, who took him to court over unpaid royalties (twice!) has reason to take umbrage with that. Gygax passed in 2008, though, and the most recent suits involving his control and management of the company happened before I was born. There is money to be made here, and everyone has known it forever, which is why Gygax’s company and Dungeons & Dragons parent company TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) was bought out by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. Wizards was acquired by toy giant Hasbro in 1999.
Hasbro’s ownership of Dungeons & Dragons has been nothing short of a bonanza of capitalization. Since 1999, there have been three new editions of the core book— 3.5 in 2003, 4th edition in 2008, and 5e in 2014. Every new edition of the game requires a new set of Players’ Manuals, but it also prompts publishing (and purchasing) new supplements and sourcebooks. Your fourth edition characters surely need fourth edition monsters in fourth edition locations to fight, and all of Dungeons & Dragons is structured to keep players and gamemasters locked in the ecosystem. Your cleric worships a god; which god is listed in the manual, and that god’s copywritten name and distinguishing features are right there, too, as well as the copywritten place that the god originates from. You can even buy a module and go on a pre-written adventure in the temples devoted to the service of this god. There is so much lip service given to playing your character and your table and your world, and all of it happens in the hope that players keep using the intellectual property that Hasbro owns. The problem Hasbro owning Dungeons & Dragons of course is that tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are, intrinsically, conceptual.
When Mattel sells a Barbie doll, there is a physical object that enters the owners posession. The doll was made to bewilderingly exacting specifications, out of materials that were tested and selected by comittees of designers and engineers. A Barbie is explicitly specified, and all dolls that are not Barbies are easy to define as they do not meet those specifications. When Hasbro sells a copy of Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook (2014, ISBN: 9780786965601), they are selling conceptual tools for managing gameplay and narrative. The product itself, when you get down to brass tacks, is the cross between a boardgame manual and a daily planner, buried in hundreds of pages of smoke and mirrors to obscure that fact.
Hasbro’s resulting relationship with their consumer base is parasitic; it should be percieved as nothing less than an attempt to stamp a © on the player’s imagination. A video from October of 2020, well into the era of “pandemic gaming” shows Hasbro’s efforts to fully conflate “D&D” with the concept of TTRPGs as a whole.
This video is an embarrassment, a marketing executive’s fantasy of linking a brand to a product so completely as to make the competition entirely invisible. This is a video made out of disregard for the hobby and condescension for the players. Hasbro demonstrates this contempt in more than their marketing, though– in 2023, Hasbro’s attempted changing the Open Game License in 2023.
The Open Game License (OGL) is a remarkable thing, and it is abundantly clear that the people in charge of Dungeons & Dragons hate it. Under the OGL, third-party publishers can produce additional material for Dungeons & Dragons and sell it, legally. This includes homebrew modules and adventures, specialty character classes, custom character sheets with their own design, and even entire systems. Both Pathfinder and Mutants & Masterminds are successful, well known TTRPG systems that spring from the OGL. In 2022, Hasbro announced that there would be changes to the OGL which would limit the kind of content allowed under the license and require third-party publishers to report sales and income to Hasbro so that Hasbro can collect royalties on third-party works (this is a huge oversimplification, and Linda Codega’s reportage from the time can be found here). This ratfuck was so poorly received by players and people in the industry that Hasbro walked it back with great reluctance, although changes to the OGL still glimmer on the horizon.
The change to the OGL was only attempted; Hasbro has very successfully pushed the Dungeons & Dragons brand in the past few years. Now, you can walk into any Target store and get a graphic t-shirt with Hasbro’s signature ampersand on it. You can also get Dungeons & Dragons © NERF guns and Dungeons & Dragons © Lego sets and Dungeons & Dragons © plush Owlbears and for a while, Dungeons & Dragons © cereal— all of this is in addition to brand synergy with products like Stranger Things and the 2023 movie. Hasbro is not only making money from selling Dungeons & Dragons, they are making money from selling the idea of Dungeons & Dragons.
The official website for Dungeons & Dragons is “D&D Beyond,” which is also the name of the game’s proprietary digital subscription service. Players can make accounts for free and generate “up to six characters” before hitting the paywall and having to subscribe to either the “Hero” or “Master” tier. Besides being about to make “unlimited” characters, subscribed users get early access to new editions of the rule books, can “use homebrew content in your games”, and “Master” tier subscribed users can “share purchased books with your friends.” Digital TTRPG tools are something of necessity, particularly following in the wake of the pandemic; the idea of paying money to make “unlimited characters” or “use homebrew content in your games” or “share purchased books with your friends” is an abomination, a craven attempt at clawing even more revenue out of the players. More than craven— the attempt is naked. At a 2022 investor meeting, the CEO of Hasbro and the CEO of Wizards of the Coast called the brand “under monetized” and expressed hope that they could see “the type of recurrent spending you see in digital games.”
A new copy of Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook hovers right around fifty dollars in price— this is just the barebones guide to generating a character and some beginning information for running a campaign. This is not an adventure or a complete Monster Manual. The idea that a fifty dollar book requires an additional subscription to be used digitally is an insult.
There is something insulting about the nature of D&D Beyond itself, though. D&D Beyond started as a ‘partnership’ between Wizards of the Coast and Curse, an independent gaming company in 2017. Wizards of the Coast sold D&D Beyond to Fandom in 2018, and it was under Fandom’s ownership that much of the tools to support the fifth edition were developed and deployed. Hasbro then paid Fandom $146.3 million dollars to reacquire D&D Beyond in 2022. This is silicon valley VC nonsense: the tool was not immediately profitable, so it was sold off, and once the tool could be leveraged to generate rents off of your already exorbitantly expensive product, it is repurchased. Dungeons & Dragons rests in the capable hands of a whole passel of brilliant business boys.
Hasbro is bad, a bad company. Players should not support the kind of bullshit Hasbro is attempting to pull, and they should not give Dungeons & Dragons any more money or imagination than they already have.
Play a Different Game: Dungeons & Dragons the Game
Dungeons & Dragons belongs to the D20 genre, which means that rolls made on a twenty-sided die are used to determine the success or failure of different actions (the name itself comes from a Wizards of the Coast marketing push for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition). Broadly, players roll a twenty-sided die (a D20) and add a modifier. If they meet or exceed the numeric difficulty of the task, they succeed. If they don’t, they fail.
This is the mechanical heart of Dungeons & Dragons, and everything comes after it. Is this system any good? Is Dungeons & Dragons even good?
I think this question can be harder to answer, given that the proposed “goodness” of a game is a subjective experience— and again, critiquing an experience makes people defensive. The problem is that Dungeons & Dragons rests on a game philosophy that is explicitly at odds with how most people want to experience a roleplaying game and how most people conceptualize a roleplaying game.
The literary referent for Dungeons & Dragons is usually pegged as The Lord of the Rings, in part because Dungeons & Dragons has widely popularized a number of creatures and concepts that were previously unique to The Lord of the Rings (including orcs, hobbits, ents, and balrogs— the Tolkein estate threatened copyright action as a result of this, which lead to the names of several of these entities to officially change in Dungeons & Dragons). The Lord of the Rings has plenty of combat and battles, but it is also fundamentally a series about relationships, both between the members of the Fellowship and their relationships to the larger world. Players are not wrong for wanting Dungeons & Dragons to be a The Lord of the Rings simulator, but the problem is that the game is so clearly a Conan the Barbarian simulator. ‘Barbarian’ has been a character class for the game since its inception and Gary Gygax was a vocal fan of Conan the Barbarian throughout his life (his furious pan of the 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie is worth reading). The game’s emphasis on combat, as well as pillaging, and the modules’ emphasis on ruined temples and hostile civilzations recalls the pulp thrills of Robert E. Howard much more than J.R.R. Tolkein’s linguistics problem-set backstory. What is Hyborea if not a Forgotten Realm?
The origins of Dungeons & Dragons is in wargaming— these games function closer to chess, a puzzle of tactics to thwart an opponent. Dungeons & Dragons is perhaps best understood as a fix-up of a number of different mutant mechanics that evolved out of the scene in the lates sixties and early seventies— miniatures and hex based combat from one game, named characters with specific identities from another game, person-to-person roleplaying and improv from another game. Ultimately, though, the purpose of wargaming is not building relationships to other characters and players— it’s simulating war.
Gamemasters (GMs) and players alike decry the tendency of Dungeons & Dragons parties to devolve into “murder hobos.” The term is shorthand for characters who primarily travel rootlessly through the game and solve all their problems with violence or killing, often without engaging with the narrative consequences of that violence. The problem of this problem is that there is nothing in the game that provides players a real alternative to this playstyle. The bulk of opportunities for advancement are framed around combat, and the majority of interesting things for your character to do are combat-based. This makes sense, given the game’s roots in wargaming, but it means tools for roleplaying are largely stapled in by the GM.
Is that fair? Playing as the GM requires a fantastic amount of effort; the GM broadly prepares the conflict that the players encounter, as well as all of the bells and whistles necessary to set up that conflict. The GM also clarifies any relevant errata— how does this spell work? What die do I roll? Do these abilities stack? In addition to understanding the game as it is written, the status quo of Dungeons & Dragons effectively requires the GM to wholecloth invent and improvise entire mechanics that make anything other than combat worthwhile. The proposition of playing Dungeons & Dragons is either playing a combat-oriented system as it is written (already daunting given that all of the information needed is in a half-dozen, seven-hundred page books), or it is developing and establishing an unwritten network of house rules to make the game do things it plainly was not designed to do.
If you accept that Dungeons & Dragons is a combat-oriented dungeon crawler— if you play Dungeons & Dragons because of its origin as mutant wargaming— is it even a good one of those? Increasingly, Dungeons & Dragons editions have embraced an ethos of difficulty that encourages “balance.” Roughly, if the players get into a fight that is too difficult for them to handle, the GM is encouraged to fudge the numbers and knock the difficulty down a few pegs. Additionally, in the fifth edition, it is so, so difficult to actually kill a character. Players who fall to zero hit points only die outright if they fail three saving throws—- on the player’s turn in each combat round, the player rolls a D20, and if the result is a ten or higher, they succeed. Players need three successes in order to “stabilize.” Players have a 55% chance of making each individual success they need, and as long as they make the successful roll three times before they make the failure roll they have a 45% chance of making three times, they live. The system’s thumb is firmly on the scale.
It makes sense that it’s this hard to kill players— leveling is a slog and getting to the point where your character truly feels yours can take a full working week of goblin murdering. It also makes sense from a business perspective—- Hasbro would prefer players not use all six of their free digital character sheets on one encounter.
GMs are caught between a rock and a hard place. The system is designed toward combat, but the combat can’t be too hard. The players want robust, improv-based roleplaying but there are no tools or systems in the book to encourage it.
What is the purpose of a TTRPG? There is not consensus, and the gaps between expectations of play and what the system provides leads to friction at the table and exhaustion for the GM. There is a mindset in the gaming community about the purpose of GMs and the purpose of players. Many people approach TTRPGs with the mindset purpose of the GM is to thwart players, and the purpose of players is to overcome the GM. This makes a certain amount of sense if the approach is that of a wargame, but it also encourages GMs to percieve the game as theirs and players as actors in their grand vision. Instead of treating the game as a collaborative space—- a story that the GM and players are building together—- the game becomes the GM’s story that they have to shepherd the players through. To be a “good GM” in this culture requires preparing combat encounters (creating enemies, maps, and loot) but also entire world populated by non-player characters with their own quirks and motivations and relationships. If you do all that work to set up the game, it makes sense that you want it to pay off, and for players to encounter it. This is a style of play that is indistinguishable from playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Is a TTRPG just an in-person version of a CRPG closed garden? Or is it something else, something more collaborative, something shaggier, something more spontaneous, something more imaginative?
Dungeons & Dragons as it is published, as it exists as a standard edition in millions of player’s hands, has a contradictory and poorly stated philosophy of its own gameplay. Players, including GMs, deserve a game that is designed to actually foster the kind of engagement that brought players to the table in the first place.
Play a Different Game: the Alternatives
Dungeons & Dragons has been coasting on its name and its popularity. Suggesting people can play something else often prompts reactions from apathy (“I don’t want to learn a new system”) to defensiveness (“What’s wrong with playing D&D?”).
Pathfinder is a D20 system that plays very, very similarly to Dungeons & Dragons and is published open-source by Paizo, a company that is not owned by Hasbro. Although I have fundemental issues with D20 systems and their philosophy of play, going from Dungeons & Dragons to Pathfinder is a minimal mechanical hurdle, and purchasing and using their resources does not give money to Hasbro. If your players are intimidated by trying a new system, Pathfinder may be an easier sell.
However, we are fortunate enough to be living in something of a golden age of independent TTRPG design. Talented designers have been thoughtfully approaching many of the issues of play I have articulated here for years now, and their works are often much more approachable and affordable than Dungeons & Dragons. Players that want to roleplay, and want mechanics that tie leveling up to roleplay, may enjoy Dungeon World, which is only $25.00 for print + digital bundle. Dungeon World is a joy to play and a delight to run. For a “D&D alike” that you can go from purchase to play in four hours (not an exaggeration), it really cannot be beat. For players who are interested in dungeon-crawling, in dying, in hilarious defeat, there are a slew of games that are part of the Old School Revival (OSR) that happily accomodate such desires (Mörk Borg and His Majesty the Worm both spring immediately to mind).
There is a real joy, though, to browsing the the DriveThruRPG storefront and itch.io for games. It can be intimidating to approach new games, but the rewards are rich. In much the same way that actual-play podcasts like Dimension 20 and Critical Role brought new players to Dungeons & Dragons, it can be helpful to listen to an actual-play of a new system to get a sense of what live gameplay is like (for example, Friends at the Table has used dozens of systems across ten years of podcasts). But in much the same way that every Dungeons & Dragons game started unsure and new, the best way to start playing something new is to just start. Today can be the first day of the rest of your life.
Playing TTRPGs is one of the most enriching hobbies of my life. I love to get together with my friends and tell a story together. I love to see my friends act, I love to work with them to imagine a world. There is so much to love in this hobby, so much genuine human joy to find in it. It bothers me that a rent-seeking corporation puts out such a shoddy product and that product is how the entire hobby is identified. We deserve so much more—- we deserve well made, coherent games that are affordable and produced by people and companies that perceive us as more than dollar signs. You deserve more. Play a different game.
