Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
To pick a particular point:
> Users pay nearly as much for digital versions of the core game books as they do hard copies
This comes up a lot, but as someone who's bought both physical copies _and_ the DNDB versions, _you're not paying for the content_. You're paying to have to tightly integrated into the live character sheets, with all of the complexity of the vast rulesets implemented in code in multiple apps. Rulesets that I can then sync into (3rd party) tools like FoundryVTT via (3rd party) tools that talk to the APIs. It's kinda magical and certainly _this_ community could understand why that is a significant task.
And content sharing means that not everyone actually has to buy this stuff. A group can pool, or a tooled up DM can run games using whatever content (including the in-app build your own homebrew content) they have to hand. Its a pretty good balance.
Maybe Hasbro will run it into the ground, that would hardly be surprising, but it seems like we're a long way from that happening. In the meantime there are plenty of other TTRPGS out there if you don't like this one – DND is a gateway into TTRPGs, not a monopoly.
What I find galling is that I have to buy the same content on different platforms instead of buying my digital content from WotC, and logging into Roll20 or D&D Beyond with a WotC account with my entitlements.
Both D&D Beyond and Roll20 can negotiate with WotC on how payments would be split up, or whatever. The current model is hostile to me as a consumer, and I don't like it :P
Also Foundry is much better than roll20 IMO as a long time player and GM on both.
What if D&D was _just_ the amateur-ish first edition and AD&D had a (proper)name change? Say, "Fantasy Adventures"?
Or what if the name change happened between AD&D and the WotC 3rd edition? Would that be the it then?
When did "D&D" die? Did it "die" for you when it changed from the version you played as a teen/young person to the next?
Cause I played AD&D im my teens and when I see people playing the new stuff I ca recognize most of the "spirit" of those game days of old. Doesn't really seem to matter that much that it has been "commoditized" and is now much more professionally made
P.S.: maybe that feeling of awe brought by the rarity of it all is gone - the feeling I got when acquiring a New Book, that none of my friends had seen, usually a partial bootlegged xeroxed version, that I had to travel to an adjacent town by bus in a veritable real-life "quest" to get... maybe that is gone. But I'm sure other wonders can replace it.
P.P.S.: it now occurs to me that this feeling is similar to the feeling of discovering and sharing secrets in videogames; which died with the internet
It's been a long time since I've had a steady group to play with even though there are more people playing it now than probably ever before.
There was a huge marketing push to make the game more attractive to a broader market along with the release of fifth edition. This grew the game enormously because fifth edition is a lot more "streamlined" than previous versions.
Fifth edition has a lot lower emphasis on mechanics. Character builds are like selecting a cable package, and at some point you realize that every package is showing the same shows.
There is a lot higher emphasis on character backstory building and roleplaying, which has also been hyped massively by the success of Celebrity podcast games such as Critical Role.
I find it all so dull. I like the numbers and crunch, theorycrafting crazy builds, I like games that reward a deep knowledge of the ruleset. 5E is none of this
And it seems 5e is all most people want to play anymore.
No. 4th edition was the most streamlined, to a fault. Thank god they worked some decent mechanics back into 5E.
> I find it all so dull. I like the numbers and crunch, theorycrafting crazy builds, I like games that reward a deep knowledge of the ruleset. 5E is none of this
Be glad you missed out on 4E.
That being said, most people I know of who also missed the crunch played Pathfinder instead.
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3.5E was clearly too crunchy, and the crunch had some exploits that were made obvious by the internet sharing those exploits. Pathfinder closes a lot of those loopholes and was just superior for the internet age.
3.5E probably was fine pre-Internet. But now that you can just "download a build" with all of the crazy exploits making level 1 overpowered, you can't just have untested crazy builds like that anymore.
EDIT: The age of Pathfinder 1.0 is over though. Its been a good run, and Paizo has a huge amount of respect from me for taking care of the venerable 3.5-like system for so long. Maybe my next campaign will be Pathfiner 2.0, but a lot of my players are old-dogs who don't want to learn a new rule system.
It just didn't have any roleplaying attached to it, and the combat systems sacrificed verisimilitude for game design. It honestly had more in common with Gloomhaven than D&D, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
1. Prepared casters using the right spells to "solve" encounters -- Glitterdust and Invisibility purge "solves" invisibility. "Fly" solves flying enemies. "Wind Wall" solves enemy arrows.
2. Beatsticks having a good enough build to handle all the cases that #1 can't handle. Ex: maybe the Druid doesn't have "Daylight" to counter the deeper-darkness the enemy Lich cast, but the Beatstick might have scent (Barbarian) or blindfight to handle the case anyway.
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These spells and situations were so incredibly varied, and it really is fun to play with. Haste beats slow. Dimensional Anchor beats Dimension door. Etc. etc.
Pathfinder specifically made fighter-types deal incredible amounts of damage, ensuring that they'll be relevant. (Fighter Archer will almost certainly outdamage Wizard fireballs).
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4th edition felt like... everyone was playing roughly the same thing. Wizards spell options were largely just damage, and not so interactive. You had nothing like the "Daylight vs Deeper Darkness", or "Force Cage vs Dimension Door", or "Invisibility purge vs Invisibility Sphere" system before.
So there just wasn't any real amount of "division of labor" going on in 4th edition. Everyone was basically a beatstick.
3.5 / Pathfinder had the issue that if two players played the same role (ex: a Fighter + Paladin), it felt redundant, and one of the players will feel left out.
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Gloomhaven is probably a good description of 4E. But 3.5 / Pathfinder was more like DOTA or Overwatch. Players are in a team, and there's no class that can fulfill all roles. By subdividing the party's jobs between different players, everyone has something to contribute in the dungeon.
As long as the DM ensured that the party compositions were decently balanced and with less redundancy. (Even if two fighters were chosen, you can still play different roles with different weapons. Archer vs Beatstick for example).
There's even revised versions of the original systems.
Check out stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOPmh7lkQIE&t=370s
Or you can just use your old rulebooks. No one's taking away your old books.
Emphasis added.
RPG's are an inherently social activity.
For less Covid times I've had reasonable luck meeting gaming groups on meetup.com or your friendly local gaming shop. You might have some luck there.
The last game I was in actually was Kingmaker, so I was quite delighted to see it made as a CRPG
Anyone who favoured a build over a story and using your imagination would have been told to join a war gaming club, or to take up chess.
For the mainstream, it's a way for a group of friends to group roleplay. You don't really want someone to be left behind because of a bad build. If someone's boyfriend stops playing because it's too hard, eventually the couple drops off, which leads to more people abandoning the game.
It's still board game-ish and not a full roleplaying system. Something like FATE is more suited to RP, but you have to actually write characters in depth. There's more emergrnt stories, but that's too much effort for people who just want to kick orcs and roll dice.
The character builds metagaming has branched into Pathfinder and roguelikes, where you get a tighter loop of whether your wizard build can kill liches.
More widely appealing, bite-size, far less varied. Far less interesting. So it goes with mass-market culture. The good news is there are plenty of more interesting artifacts out there…but now we have to do the work of looking for them and sharing them when we found them.
That said, thank goodness for places like /r/unearthedarcana...And Pathfinder 2e, though I've been struggling to find a group.
When someone starts like this, the "problem" is usually the one who says it, not the game. You found yourself a game that you enjoyed, you would have played something else if you didn't like it. Add a good bit of nostalgia to it and any change will make you unhappy. But no change will get you bored, you can't win, that's the curse of growing up.
Just move on, you probably won't play D&D all your life and neither will your friends. If you find a group to play the older editions your loved, you will probably be disappointed... Or continue playing, who am I to judge? It is rare but maybe the passion is still there.
The funny part is Wizards of the Coast makes that other game that is all about numbers, crunch, knowledge and theorycrafting. In fact, when I was roleplaying, rule lawyering was heavily frowned upon, we didn't care about numbers except as a guideline. To those who focused on numbers and rules, we told them do go play Magic instead, which, btw, is a great game we also played. But we made a strong distinction between tabletop RPGs, based on storytelling, and mechanics-based games.
I can also understand why it would isolate many traditional DnD players, due to the reduction in features. Do you think that's a decision weighted by the decision makers at Wizards of the Cost and assessed accordingly?
I'm sure they weighted it, and then money won out
I have gone from being core demographic of theirs to not a customer of theirs at all, but for everyone like me they've pushed away, they've probably on-boarded twenty new customers. Right decision for them, sucks for me.
> for everyone like me they've pushed away, they've probably on-boarded twenty new customers
That’s not just a money decision, that’s also an audience decision—making something that more people will enjoy, bring more life and more ideas into the hobby, and introduce the fun of TTRPGs to a much bigger group of people. That sounds like a huge artistic win as well as a good financial decision.
Respectfully disagree.
I don't think I'd argue for that. But I would argue that making something that appeals to a very narrow, static group of people is probably less artistic than something that appeals to a wider group of people.
Or think of it like a band—they release an album, it attracts a group of fans. They can keep making the same thing over and over again and attract the same group of people—and many bands do this. But it's very static. Or they can expand their horizons, explore music more, and experiment. They'll lose some old fans who are looking for the same sound that they've always gotten, but if their experiments are successful, then they'll reach new people who are interested in some of their new ideas. And some of those people might listen to the band's older catalog, and develop an appreciation for music they might not otherwise encounter. And maybe their experiments fail, and they lose their original audience, without attracting a new one. That happens all the time, too. But at least they pushed the boundaries, instead of playing it safe.
Plus, I suppose you could argue that capitalism has succeeded in this case by giving us a competing solution: for those who prefer emphasis on mechanics, there's Pathfinder.
What a wonderful instance of missing the forest for... a tree. I was avid tabletop gamer around five years ago, and the only complaint I heard from the real aficionados was that truly great games were coming out faster than they could play them. In other words, the problem was that there was too much high quality art for someone to get to experience it all (and when you want to play the good ones many times...BAH!). Gone are the days when a game like Twilight Struggle could dominate the BGG 'top game' charts for nearly a decade.
So the claim that "Capitalism Kills Art" might make more sense if we weren't living through an undisputed golden age in tabletop gaming--the very artform from which the author drew this case study!
Sure CR has been commercialised but it's still just as creative as their first streams where they had zero expectations we just get a couple more ads and a much more polished presentation.
Why is that?
That's probably largely true of 5th Edition. It's a focus group led, neutered, milquetoast version of Dungeons & Dragons. All of it's official product releases are whittled down to the least possibly offensive common denominator. And the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.
But the auteur creators aren't gone and creativity hasn't been killed. From Patrick Stuart's (the writer, not the actor) projects like Silent Titans[1] to the bizarrely delightful Mörk Borg[2] to Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands[3] to the space horror game Mothership[4]...
There's an insane amount of creativity in the design of tabletop roleplaying games today, and I haven't even moved that far from D&D-alike gameplay.
What's more, these auteurs are making good money without optimizing for maximum money as if they were MBAs with a drug habit to support or SV startups with "angel" investors demanding an insane return. Look up the Kickstarters for any of those projects in the paragraph above.
Even for a Jacobin piece, this article is extremely myopic, poorly researched, and comically fatalistic.
[1] https://shop.swordfishislands.com/silent-titans/
[3] https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/the-ultra-violet-gra...
Second attempt, actually. WOTC had a monthly-subscription webapp offering in the 4th Edition era, with (digital) subscriptions to the magazines, a character builder, and promises of a virtual tabletop that AFAIK never shipped.
> That's probably largely true of 5th Edition […] and the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.
…which is absolutely supporting their argument, isn't it? "Hasbro's steadily killing the artistic and creative part of D&D" and "there is an insane amount of creativity in RPG culture" aren't mutually exclusive! One doesn't disprove the other. They can both be true.
If the author thinks that the latest version of D&D published by the biggest corporation is the 'real' one, that just shows that he has adopted the corporate ideas he claims to reject.
In some places, the author focuses narrowly in on TSR and Hasbro and D&D as a specific property. In other places, the author makes broad, sweeping, silly statements about the hobby as a whole, and implies equally silly despairing nonsense about other hobbies (which is beyond the scope of this thread to even look into).
> Without the market’s demands and the accompanying dictates that stifle creativity in favor of profitability, TTRPGs could have been part of the public domain, with gamers free to build and expand on whatever ideas they wanted, either their own or ones drawn from other sources.
> Game Wizards is not just a captivating story about how one man lost control of his dream. It’s also an object lesson in the way capitalism invariably strips even our leisure activities of their communal joy.
The author is playing a semantic game and moving the goalposts in order to commiserate where there is no imposed misery. Just consumers who sometimes make choices that lead them into boring walled gardens, while still having the choice to walk out of those walled gardens and find the rest of the forest.
Goodness, "slick" and "glossy"! I curse capitalism and its running dog, nice paper. Much purer to only sell xeroxed copies at GenCon.
I don't know if the author has read the rules for Chainmail, but they were clearly not designed to be universal. Gygax sold a very specific system. D&D and AD&D were the same. Much later, the OGL provided a way to sell derivative products based on that system, but in any case the key word is sell. 5th edition D&D is no less adaptable than 1st edition — if that's your metric — and probably more so.
What did they play in the Soviet Union that was killed by becoming a sold product?
If you want an example of capitalism killing art, the mention of Marvel and DC toward the end might work better. They ended up a duopoly, with control over the industry's IP.
gawd there's such good podcasts for this multiverse though. like, not a lot of people, but hearing the couple real smart know it alls chat up these multiverses is so so so good.
Amazing settings, terrible rules, math never really works out. The nWoD game system is at the same time overly simple and horribly complex. Doing 80% of things in the game, super simple, story telling system, rule of cool, narrative driven combat! Then entire sections of rules for grappling and brawling and gaining advantage and positions and suddenly you realize someone make a D10 version of submission wrestling.
Mages, fun, horribly broken. The back story about Atlantis, awful. Everything else? Pretty darn cool.
The supplement books throw out equipment that just up and breaks the game.
Then from what I read they mistreated workers, kept managing to fail to move their successful IP into other forms of media, and ended up going bust.
Honestly their games are complex as hell to run. 2 years of trying and I never was able to keep everything in mind that I needed to in order to "do it right."
And to repeat, nWoD Mage is so broken. So very very broken. But fun in an explody sort of way.
the Atlantis thing was so weird & so much anti the point of mage to me. humans just being awesome (if they dared to, could awake themelves) was way way better.
The primary fan base for World of Darkness was aging goths. nWoD was doomed from the get go because the existing, shrinking, fan base was going to be pissed at any changes at all, but the material was still too "90s" to draw in new fans.
Then White Wolf tried to just re-release old Vampire stuff, but who cares at that point, since the majority of those fans, while very vocal, had aged out of playing a game that requires obscene amounts of preparation.
And then let's not even mention the obscene WTF investment it takes to get started playing. You get to read a base book, and you have to read it as a novel because White Wolf was incapable of arranging a book for use as reference, and then you get to read at least 1 book for the actual system you want to use.
And then you have to find players willing to do the same.
Each book is full of dense prose in a hard to read font. When I started playing nWoD I was in my 20s. Soon as I hit 30 those fonts became WTF hard to read.
While amazing to sit down and read through as just a book, the (very well made) books are useless when it comes to actually running a game. I had to write up my own condensed guide to the rules.
White Wolf was trying to do a thousand things with a tiny team. They kept publishing new splats (Mummy!) while their existing splats had giant holes in them.
And finally, EVERYTHING WAS A SHADE OF GREY. There wasn't ever a big bad, or as a ST the big bad was so amorphous I had shit to work with and I was expected to work my arse off fleshing out the thin plot threads the source books gave me.
At least old WOD had fucking bad guys. "The technocracy goons are going to kill you!" vs nWoDs "Strange secret organization may or may not be doing bad things, or maybe they are the good guys, who knows, fuck it, you figure it out yourself".
Like, sometimes I don't want to construct complicated worlds of political intrigue. Sometimes I just want the players to have something they can go blow up and feel good about it. I mean sure because it is WoD I'm going to make them feel a little bit bad about it, but holy shit grimdark shades of grey gets old after while.
For instance, Thanos' motivations in the movies created an actual cultural conversation, whereas in the comics he just wanted to impress the female personification of Death.
I'll take "dialogue on Malthusian catastrophe theory" versus "purple space incel wants to get his dick wet" any day of the week.
Any RPG system, if the DM knows the rules really well, is easy to sit down at a table and play. Back when I DM'd a lot I'd run one shots for people all the time, so long as I knew the rules (or subset of rules for what we'd be encountering that session), everything was smooth.