Review: Level Up (Advanced 5th Edition)

There is a set of people out there for whom Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition (hereafter, for simplicity, "LU") from EN Publishing is exactly what they have been waiting for--for several years now.  If you are a D&D 5e player that is starting to (or have been for some time) chaffing at the limitations and restrictions in the game system as presented (particularly in terms of character creation and mechanical support for non-combat activities), but you otherwise like playing 5e and are not really interested in checking out a whole new game and structure, then LU is an extremely compelling product.  And even if you are not (and I am not exactly in that particular space), it's impossible not to see and be impressed with the game design craft at work here.

The initial challenge in approaching LU is to understand exactly what it is, something that didn't really become clear to me until I got the PDF copies of the three core books in my hands [Note: as of this writing, it is only available to Kickstarter backers, of which I was one].  The simplest way to explain what is going on here is that LU takes D&D 5e, strips it down to the skeleton (dice mechanics, action economy--things like that), and then rebuilds it from scratch.  While nothing you will see is unrecognizable for people who have played d20 games, I was not expecting the scope of the changes LU makes to the 5e paradigm (I think, in part, because the EN Publishing people made a strategic choice to undersell how much work they were doing--more on that in a bit).  Not only is it a different, albeit recognizably so, game from 5e, it is very clearly designed to be used on its own, as a replacement to the 5e rulebooks as opposed to a supplement to them (and, like D&D, LU consists of three core books--the Adventurer's Guide, the GM-focused Trials & Treasure, and Monstrous Menagerie).  LU is not a set of house rules to 5e, nor is it an expansion in the mode of something like Xanathar's Guide to Everything, but instead its own game.  The best comparison of the relationship between 5e and LU is between Pathfinder 1st Edition and D&D 3.5, and even that might undersell it.

In fact, there are so many changes that summarizing all of them would be tedious and unproductive.  But I think the changes can be grouped into two major buckets, with a couple of other interesting single shot ideas that are worth talking about.  Major idea #1 of LU is to make good on the (IMO, wholly unfulfilled) promise of 3 pillars of play in D&D 5e--combat, exploration, and social/roleplay.  To that end, Trials & Treasure has a lengthy section providing mechanical support, with examples and random tables, for non-combat, environmental-based encounters.  There is also a robust set of journey rules, similar to those found in the now out-of-print Adventures in Middle Earth (in turn based on The One Ring rpg).  And while I love the AiME/The One Ring journey rules, I think LU's version is better in that it contemplates a wider variety of non-combat challenges.  There are puzzles and lore-based challenges and weather and a whole host of different ways for all PCs to engage with the exploration portion of the game, all of which is simply not present in 5e as written.  And no one can say that the exploration mechanics are a throw-away or something tacked-on, as Trials & Treasure devotes about 120 pages to these new mechanics.

The social pillar is less mechanically engaged, but there are some actual rules (including rules for awarding XP!) for social encounters along with advice on how to run them.  But LU approaches the social dimension in a slightly different way, bringing back the once ubiquitous but now somewhat out-of-fashion stronghold and domain management rules.  There is also a Prestige rating, measuring how well known a particular PC is, which provides concrete mechanical hooks for the standard "unknown wanderer to world-renowned hero" arc of most fantasy campaigns.  Critically, every PC has class-related abilities that interact with both the social dimension and the exploration piece, making them a central part of play as opposed to an afterthought or something only specialized characters interact with.  For example, the 1st level Cleric selects a "Sacred Call" ability which provides circumstantial social advantages, while at 3rd level the Cleric selects a "Sign of Faith" which is an ability that provides meaningful, if cabined, advantages while traveling.

This transitions into the second big-picture change in LU--all of the classes are rebuilt and redesigned.  Part of this redesign is adding class abilities tied to the exploration and social pillars, as mentioned above.  But it is more than that, and the changes can be seen most clearly in the martial classes.  Martial classes now have access to combat maneuvers, which are divided up into "combat traditions" (think different kinds of martial arts in the real world) that unlock progressively more powerful abilities along a fairly simple tree.  There are also a short list of maneuvers that are now available to all characters, fleshing out the combat turn.  Most of the discrete class abilities given to martial characters in 5e are wrapped up into the maneuver system, giving martial characters more options to choose from at each level.

Indeed, choice is a consistent theme of all of the revised classes is LU. In many places where 5e simply assigns a particular ability at a particular level, LU provides options.  It's not nearly the breadth of options found in the feat system in Pathfinder 2nd edition; instead, there are usually three or four specific options for a particular level.  As a result, it sits in a middle place between 5e and Pathfinder 2e on the character creation complexity scale, a place that I think is going to be a sweet spot for many people who are looking to ratchet up the character creation mini-game.  My one comment here is that, given that there is increased choice at all levels, I wonder whether including the 5e sub-class system was the right choice.  I get that it helps establish a theme for PCs within the broader class concept, but much of that work is being taken up with the individualized abilities that classes get at most levels, so some of that work is duplicative and maybe a bit more complex than is necessary.  On the flip side, the design for the subclasses in LU is broader and more archetypical than especially the post-PHB 5e subclasses, which often goes in the direction of rather specific character concepts.  I like this better, and the subclasses are well-designed and easy to adapt to almost any possible setting one might be inclined to use. 

A couple of other quick notes on character building.   The game mechanical construct of "race" in 5e is replaced with Heritage (which might be called "species" in a sci-fi context) and Culture, allowing for greater character diversity and avoiding essentialism.  Along those lines, Background is now the character creation piece that provides ability score bonuses and penalties.  This is a small change, but an elegant one and one that makes perfect sense in world--if you were raised as a scholar, it stands to reason to get an Intelligence bonus.  I am less sold on renaming some of the core classes (Barbarian is now "Berserker," Monk is now "Adept," Paladin is now "Herald").  The thinking, I suspect, is to expand the conceptual space encompassed by those classes, but honestly I found it to be more confusing than helpful.  Those names are so ingrained in the collective consciousness of D&D players that re-wiring the brain takes some doing.  A small thing, ultimately, but something that I kept tripping over.     

One last point on character creation--and this is maybe my favorite addition in LU--every PC now has a Destiny, which provides a core character motivation, a way in which the PC gains Inspiration (as opposed to the unstructured and arbitrary "good roleplaying" from 5e, which I hate), a particular way the PC can spend Inspiration to do something thematic for the character, and a grand quest to fulfill the Destiny which provides a special character ability.  It's simple, easy to expand with new Destinies, provides a concrete roleplaying anchor for a new character, and gives them a reason to do things in the world and interact with it.  Love it, 10/10.

On the miscellaneous side, it's worth talking about the Fatigue and Strife system.  I've complained on a couple of occasions about the Short/Long Rest mechanics in 5e, and in order to maintain compatibility those rules are ported over to LU.  However, some of the dimensions I don't like are mitigated by the "Roughing It" sidebar on Page 425 of the Adventurer's Guide that specifically ties full heal-ups to being able to rest in favorable conditions--unless you have a bedroll, are not cold, are not in the rain, etc., you only get half the normal Hit Dice back after a night's sleep.  But the real punch is in the Fatigue (which replaces 5e Exhaustion) and Strife rules, which represent physical and mental strain, respectively.  Those conditions can only be recovered in a "haven," defined as a home or other ideal location for recovery.  And Fatigue and Strife are no joke--the last level of Fatigue means the PC will just die at a story-appropriate time as determined by the GM, and max level of Strife causes permanent mental conditions with concrete game mechanical effects.  This walks the line of creating real opportunities for attrition-based play, without completely gimping a PC's combat effectiveness.  You also gain a level of Fatigue the first time in an fight you fall unconscious, providing a real if perhaps modest penalty for going to 0 HP and avoiding the consequence-free rebounding from the brink of death to being fine that characterizes the 5e death and healing rules.

The problem with all of this, to the extent it is a problem, is that LU is really a package.  Because the pieces interact with each other and fit together pretty tightly, it's not optimized to be a tool-kit of ideas that you can drop into an existing 5e game.  For example, you might think to just add the journey rules to an existing 5e campaign.  You could do that, but the journey rules are designed around the PCs having all the exploration-oriented class abilities.  And if you add those elements, you might as well rebuild all the PCs around the LU class model, in which case you might as well just take on the whole package.  Likewise, because of the way LU redistributes the pieces of what 5e groups under "race," if you want to use the Heritage/Culture system you also have to use the LU Backgrounds, or at the very least re-work the existing 5e Backgrounds to provide ability score modifiers.  The changes that LU makes to the 5e system are pervasive and extensive (I haven't even mentioned that they have redesigned most of the core spells), pushing you at every turn toward adopting it wholesale.  Honestly, probably the most modular portion of the whole project is the redesigned monsters, all of which are both recognizably similar to the stock 5e versions and yet more interesting and dynamic in play.  

Which leads to what I think is ultimately the big question with LU.  This is a project targeted at existing 5e players and DMs, and one of the core marketing pitches for LU is that everything is compatible with existing 5e materials like adventure paths and supplemental material.  And that is true, in the sense that the stats that you will find for opponents in existing published material mean the same things in LU, so there is no direct conversion needed.  But that presentation undersells, I think deliberately, what LU is and what it is trying to do.  Which, ultimately, is to be its own game, albeit one that is backwards compatible with 5e.  As someone who has gotten burned out and frustrated with 5e, and especially with the apparent unwillingness of Wizards of the Coast to do anything interesting or creative with the game for many years running now, this is not a problem for me.  I have no problem moving on from 5e with only casual picking over the carcass for bits and pieces to integrate.  But I wonder whether LU will be a bridge too far for many people in its target audience.  Yes it is compatible and yes many of the core elements are the same, but LU is otherwise very different from 5e.  Given the "stickiness" of the 5e fanbase to changing games, I wonder if this will find its audience.  There are vague hints of a revised set of the 5e core rulebooks in 2024 for the 50th anniversary of D&D, but whatever that looks like I doubt it will be as well done, thoughtful, or as expansive as LU.  It would be a shame if this product doesn't find a home because it looks like too big a change.

There are also some minor quibbles.  I mentioned the changing the class names thing previously.  There are places where they went a little too hard in the direction of edge-case, fiddly rules for my tastes--for example, the Fatigue rule I quoted above is slightly wrong, as you can recover the Level 1 Fatigued condition without resting in a haven, but not any higher levels of Fatigued.  Right now, the PDFs are in a Beta version, and are in need of some smoothing over.  

But, at the end of the day, LU is an outstanding product that is worth putting in the work.  It keeps most if not all of the things about 5e that work well, and it improves the rest of it in basically every way.  While I liked what I saw from Pathfinder 2nd Edition, I think LU also has many of the advantages of that game with less fiddly-ness and complexity.  If given a choice between starting a campaign in 5e, Pathfinder 2e, or LU, I would choose LU.  If I have time over the holidays, I think I'm going to dust off the materials for my old campaign world and convert it over to LU, which would fit it perfectly.  If you were not a Kickstarter backer, and this package is remotely appealing to you, I would strongly recommend keeping an eye out for its general release.  It's a really, really impressive piece of work.

Interested in a 5e Alternative? Try 13th Age!

The fine folks at Pelgrane Press released a 19 page "Quickstart" guide to 13th Age today, which you can get for free here.  I have said before that 13th Age is my favorite of the various D&D-derived d20 fantasy games out there ("F20" in the parlance of 13th Age), so anything that draws attention to the game is good in my book.  Plus, it seems like folks are starting to poke their heads around for alternatives to 5e for a variety of reasons, and so the timing of the release seems fortuitous.  There is also a Humble Bundle full of 13th Age goodness, that I would get except I have all this stuff already.  

However, in reading the document, it seems to me that someone who only knows 5e might be a little confused looking at the Quickstart guide, because it assumes you know some things that you may not.  So, in a gentle effort to assist, here are some things that might be helpful to someone coming in to this Quickstart from 5e:

1.  The Basics are the Same, with One Big Exception.  When 13th Age says that it is a "d20" game, what the means is when a PC or NPC is trying to accomplish some task, the player or GM rolls a d20, adds some sort of modifier based on a character ability, and tries to get equal to or above a target number.  So, when you see on the pre-generated character's character sheets a "+6 vs. AC" for the Half-Elf Fighter, that means you are going to roll a d20, add 6, and then compare the total to the AC of the target.  In other words, just like 5e.  

The big difference is that there is no general Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic, so you are almost always rolling one d20 for checks (I say almost, because the Barbarian's Rage mechanic grants the equivalent of Advantage to attack rolls--see the "Hell-Blood Fury" power on the Hellsinger pre-gen).  The Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic in 5e covers two big categories of situations--character abilities (i.e. "when you do X, you get Advantage/impose Disadvantage on your target") and situational modifiers (i.e. "when you are in situation X [say, in darkness], you have Disadvantage on attack rolls").  13th Age handles the former, in general, via numerical bonuses or penalties.  So, if you look on the Half-Elf Fighter's character sheet, you will see the "Threatening" Class Ability, which imposes a -4 penalty to enemies trying to disengage from the Fighter; in 5e, that would probably be handled with Disadvantage.  As to the latter, 13th Age, encourages the GM to ignore situational modifiers in favor of faster, more streamlined play.  But if the GM really insists on using situational modifiers, he or she can slap a +2 or -2 on the roll and move things along.

One thing this means is that 13th Age has a little bit more in the way of on-the-fly math than 5e.  It is nothing on the scale of some of the other F20 games that one could play (D&D 3.5/Pathfinder 1st Edition and D&D 4e come to mind), but it is noticeable in comparing the two games and how they play.  The truth is that Advantage/Disadvantage is a really clever mechanic (albeit a bit too "swingy" IMO), and so this is probably a net negative for 13th Age, but I don't think it is enough of a negative to outweigh the positives.   

2.  Player Input into the Story of the Game.  13th Age comes out of a school of game design that involves the players in a collaborative process with the GM of building the world.  Probably the easiest place to see this is on Page 7 of the Quickstart, which discusses the "One Unique Thing" concept.  Here, the player gets to define something about their character that is Unique, and then it becomes true in the context of the campaign.  So for example, one of the uniques provided on Page 7 is "I'm the only halfling acrobat to escape from the Diabolist's Circus of Hell."  If a player were to pick that unique, then the rules assume there is such a thing as the Diabolist's Circus of Hell in that particular campaign, and the GM should at least give a thought to what that is, how in interacts with the world, etc.  A similar thing can happen with Backgrounds--if the players opt for more complex Background choices like "Captain of the Dwarven Mountain Rangers," then the "Dwarven Mountain Rangers" are an organization in the world.

Another place to see this is on Pages 14-16, with a discussion of the Montage mechanic.  Rather than the GM describing the PCs travelling between the starting point of the adventure and the main location of action, the players come up with the events that occur on the journey, as well as the solutions to those problems in a free-form roleplaying format.

This really gets kicked into overdrive, though, with the Icon mechanics.  The sample adventure that the Quickstart points you toward--Wade Rockett's Crown of Axis--does not have a pre-set antagonist.  Instead, the antagonist is determined by which Icon relationships the players take and which ones are active for that particular adventure.  As discussed in the Quickstart, the GM could even have no pre-set story, and just use the Icon rolls as the basis for improvising an adventure on the fly.

This model is not the default style of play for 5e.  It's true that there is nothing in 5e that would stop a group from running their games this way, but there is also nothing in 5e that would suggest that you can or should run it this way.  Moreover, the published adventure paths for 5e from Wizards of the Coast presume a much more "bright line" distinction between the players and the DM--the DM creates and governs the world, and the players play in the world that is created.  As a result, this style of play is likely going to be a bit of a shock to the system for 5e veterans, both on the player side and the DM/GM side.  GM's might feel like part of their authority or creative freedom is being usurped by the players, and players might feel uncomfortable or unsure about being able to basically say things into existence.  Moreover, the idea of giving players narrative agency is so foundational to 13th Age's DNA that taking it out likely removes any real reason to consider the game.

For those that are hesitant, I would strongly encourage you to give this style of play a try.  It might feel a little strange at first, but my experience is that it greatly increases player engagement and lowers GM task loading.  I use this style, and Montages in particular, in basically every game I run.  It's really good and really fun for everyone at the table--trust me.

3.  Healing and Rests.  It would be easy to skim over the "Healing and Damage" section on Page 14 from a 5e perspective and think "OK, recoveries are basically Hit Dice, and a full heal-up is a Long Rest."  Not quite.

In 13th Age, all healing comes from spending a recovery and rolling the recovery dice to determine how many HP you get back.  What spells and potions do is act as a trigger that allows the PC to spend the recovery out of their pool.  If you look at the Forgeborn Cleric pre-gen, the "Heal" spell allows the target of the spell to spend a recovery during the fight--the spell itself doesn't actually provide any HP.  Healing Potions (Page 17 of the Quickstart) do provide some bonus HP, but the core of it is drink the potion, spend a recovery, get a recovery's worth of HP back.  Without those triggers, you are limited to the Rally action (which you can always use once per fight, and then you get a 50% change to use again) or waiting until after combat where you can spend recoveries freely (this takes the place of the 5e "Short Rest" mechanic, as is assumed to occur after every fight).

In other words, recoveries are not a way to heal your PC they way Hit Dice are in 5e; they are the way to heal your PC.  Even the rare cases where some power or spells lets a PC heal using a "free recovery" (i.e. it doesn't cost a recovery from the pool), you still roll the recovery dice to determine how much healing happens.  Note also the rule for what happens when you try to heal if you are out of recoveries--the amount of HP recovered is halved, and the PC takes a -1 to all attacks and defenses.  All of this shakes out to generally providing more healing for low level characters than 5e, but putting a limit on the total amount of healing that can be provided to any one character.

Likewise, it is true that mechanically a Long Rest and Full Heal-Up are the same, in the sense that it is a complete reset of all HP and class abilities.  However, the timing when a Full Heal-Up occurs is fundamentally in the hands of GM, with the default being after four combat encounters/the length of one game session.  This is true no matter how much in-game time passes between the battles--if the PCs are on a long wilderness journey that takes 30 days, then they can't get a full reset for 30 days.  I'm not going to pretend to be unbiased here--I think 13th Age's system is significantly better than 5e's Long Rest mechanic.  Having the PCs completely heal after 24 hours, as is the case in 5e, makes it very hard to do challenging, attrition-based adventures that last longer than that 24 hour time frame.  This places the GM in a conundrum between in-world adventure pacing and in session adventure pacing, while 13th Age makes the two the same.

Also note the death and dying mechanics, which are just different enough from 5e to be annoying and easy to miss--the threshold to succeed on a death and dying roll is 16 (not 10 as in 5e), but you only need 1 success to spend a recovery (and thus be out of the dying state), and it is four failures (not three) before you are actually dead.

4.  Spells and Ranges.  Spells in 5e that do damage are divided into spells that require a spell attack roll (against AC) to hit, and spells that automatically hit but allow the target to make a saving throw.  In 13th Age, basically all spells require the equivalent of a spell attack roll.  Instead of targeting AC, most spells target one of the other two defense stats in 13th Age--Physical Defense or Mental Defense.  But, with that exception, spells work exactly like weapon attacks.  On the flip side, "saves" are used in 13th Age only to end ongoing effects, whether in the form of conditions or ongoing damage (see Page 13).  Saves are not tied to any attributes, and are (generally) unmodified d20 rolls.

The other thing to note is how spells interact with the movement and range mechanics.  By default, 13th Age does not use a grid, unlike 5e which very much defaults to grid-based movement and ranges (notwithstanding the fact that it implies otherwise in the rules text).  Enemies are either nearby or far away (one move or two moves to get to them, respectively), and spell ranges are similarly delineated as touch, nearby targets, or far away targets.  There is also no calculation of cones or cubes for multi-target spells; instead, you target a random number of enemies at a certain range band and you have to roll separate attacks for each.  This is much more loosey-goosey than 5e--if you look at the spellbook for the Wizard at the end of the pre-gen file (Page 52), you'll see that Lightning Bolt targets "1d3+1 nearby enemies in a group or in a (rough) line."

The last big thing to note about spells is that they have varying recharge timers.  On that same Wizard spellbook page, you will see that Acid Arrow, Blur, Charm Person and the Utility Spell can be used "Daily" (which really means once until a Full Heal-Up), which is the same as spell slot spells in 5e.  Note that, on your Daily spells, you may use each of them only one time each, as opposed to mixing and matching when spending spell slots in 5e.  Whereas Magic Missile is "At Will," and thus works like a 5e Cantrip that can be used an unlimited number of times.  There are also "per battle" spells, like Heal and Spirits of the Righteous on the Cleric sheet, which as the name implies reset at the end of a fight (and so are kinda like Warlock spell slots that recharge on a Short Rest).  Unlike 5e, these recharge timers are tied to the spell, not the class feature, and so a spell caster can mix and match between spells with varying recharges when preparing their spell load-out.

5.  The Escalation Die.  It's easy to gloss over the Escalation Die (Page 14) but it is a key part of 13th Age.  Every round of combat after the first, the PCs get a cumulative +1 to all of their attacks (which includes spell attacks).  What this means is that the PCs get better at fighting the longer the combat goes on, which means that it makes sense for players to wait until later in combat to pull out their "big guns" like Daily spells.  I would suggest, if you are running 13th Age, simply telling your players about this from the beginning, as the system is designed around making those sorts of strategic decisions.

Seriously, 13th Age is really great.  If you are a 5e player and looking to try a fantasy ttrpg that is familiar but with a different feel, you really should give 13th Age a shot.        

Some Thoughts on The D&D and Wizards of the Coast Problem

I've been trying for a while to organize my thoughts on where I think Dungeons and Dragons is, and is heading, and turn it into something cohesive, without much success.  But this morning I read this piece in Wired by Matthew Gault, which I think does a good job of framing the question and serving as a launching point for further discussion.  There are a couple of specific things in the article that I want to dig into, but for my core thesis I want to pull the camera back a bit.  I believe that the problems and controversies identified in the article are ultimately a product of the original design goals of 5th edition D&D, goals that have been upheld (at times slavishly, IMO) throughout the life cycle of 5e--to be the singular expression of D&D (and, really, tabletop role-playing games in general) that services all aspects and segments of the fanbase.  5e is designed to be all things to all people--the OSR people and the 3e-era crunchy optimizer people and the streamer people and the story-focused people and the emerging group of people that you might call the "D&D lifestyle" para-gamer group, and probably a dozen other niche sub-groups.  The "all things to all people" agenda, ambitious and maybe grandiose under the best of circumstances, is running into the core and maybe inevitable challenge with agendas of this type--what do you do when the "all people" you are trying to service want different, mutually incompatible things?

Let's start from the beginning, and go all the way back to when Wizards of the Coast first took possession of D&D when it bought TSR in 1997.  As ably described by Ben Riggs in his Plot Points podcast (soon to be a book), TSR at the time of the purchase had serious management problems, was hemorrhaging cash, and was weeks away from going out of business and having the D&D IP scattered to the four winds in a bankruptcy proceeding.  Having purchased D&D, Wizards now had to find a way to make money from it.  To this end, Wizards engaged in extensive market research, and came to an understanding of the challenge of selling D&D that I think defines Wizards' strategy to this day.  From their research, Wizards concluded that fundamental market challenger to the published D&D product (2nd Edition AD&D, at the time) was not other rpgs, nor other sorts of games, but other editions of D&D (for evidence, see this interview with Ryan Dancey, head of rpg development during this period, beginning at 19:00; I've also seen an interview from Monte Cook saying the same thing that I can't find right now).  Lots of people out there were playing the old stuff, older editions, and so not buying the current stuff.  Thus, Wizards concluded, if you could bring all of the D&D players back onboard the boat (i.e., playing, and thus buying, the current edition), then you would have a successful and profitable game.  What became 3rd edition D&D was thus fundamentally an inward looking project, with the goal of bringing back the already-playing, but not buying, segments of the D&D community in the fold.

This strategy, successful with 3e (at least in the beginning), was departed from with 4e.  Whatever you want to say about the merits of 4e, it was a project that at least in the earliest stages had a very clear creative vision about where it wanted to move the game.  If you would like to read about that vision, go to the DM's Guild and read "Wizards Presents: Races and Classes" and "Wizards Presents: World and Monsters" for the cryptic, borderline stream-of-consciousness design notes on the game prior to its release.  As we now know, the end product that was 4e was deeply polarizing to the fanbase, and thus explicitly counter to the "everyone in the boat" approach that worked with 3e.  Thus, when the plug was pulled on 4e and the roll-out of what would become 5e was announced, the team at Wizards doubled-down on the idea that this was going to be the edition of the game for everyone, by which they meant all existing elements of the D&D fanbase.

The cynical person could frame the lesson of 4e from the point of view of Wizards using the words of Homer Simpson: "You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try."  A big component of the anti-4e sentiment was that 4e changed too many of the fundamental concepts of D&D, and that people didn't want those things to be changed.  As a result, 5e was always a deeply nostalgia-driven and backward looking project from the jump, driven by the elusive goal of making something that "felt" like prior editions of the game.  And that backward looking field of view has persisted throughout the 5e product line.   Of the twelve narrative products (counting Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat as one product, which was the original intent) that have been produced for for 5e, two of them (Tales of the Yawning Portal and Ghosts of Saltmarsh) are straight-up compilations of previously published adventures converted to 5e, five more (Princes of the Apocalypse, Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, Tomb of Annihilation and Dungeon of the Mad Mage) are reworks or re-imaginings of older adventures, and three others (Out of the Abyss, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, and Rime of the Frost Maiden) are theme-park style tours of locations that were heavily trod in the 1st and 2nd edition Forgotten Realms products.  Ten out of twelve (and the other two, especially Tyranny of Dragons, use ideas and adversaries from older products) is more than enough to prove a pattern of mining the old product catalogue. 

Now, I am of the view this backward-looking focus has had a ruinous effect on the quality of the 5e line from a creative standpoint (creatively, I think D&D, not including third-party or DM's Guild material, is pretty close to being at a low ebb at this point).  And I think that Wizards has "gotten away with" mining the back catalogue as a result of the flood of new folks into the D&D space during the 5e period--if you haven't been playing since the 80s or 90s, Strahd is new to you.  But I also think it needs to be acknowledged that there is a segment of the D&D fanbase that is relentlessly and exclusively nostalgia-driven.  If you go on the forums, you can find long, breathless threads discussing the possibility that Spelljammer, which hasn't been in print for 25 years and was of marginal popularity at the time, is coming back for 5e (I mean, really. . . . Spelljammer?)  They want D&D to be exactly the way it was when they first started playing, or the way it was in some particularized era.

Turning back to the Wired article, there is a short series of quotes by Orion Black about lead Wizards designers Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins:

“On a business level, Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins [D&D’s senior story designer] make all the decisions,” they say. “Those two praise this god of D&D, and the image they have of this god is very specific and they can not anger this god. Anything they can change, they have to work through their concept of faith and do some mental gymnastics.”  

What struck me in reading this quote is that I am fairly confident that there is a core segment of the D&D fanbase that would argue that this is precisely what Crawford and Perkins should be doing.  Their job is to preserve and defend this already existing thing that is D&D.  The number one commandment, especially for someone like Perkins who was in the trenches during 4e (Perkins, let's remember, is the guy who led the charge to retcon massive swaths of the Forgotten Realms for 4e, and experienced the corresponding backlash), is "thou shall keep D&D feeling like D&D."  So, I'm not particularly surprised to read that Crawford and Perkins (at least according to Black) believe that any proposed changes to address racial issues must first be strained to remove any big chunks that would really change the core of experience.  You don't have to frame this as a weird religious hang-up, when it can be just as easily explained as responding to a portion of the fanbase that wants that core experience to be sacrosanct.

So, at a high level of abstraction, you have a group of people who believe that D&D needs to change in some fundamental ways, running up against a different group that wants D&D to remain the same, full stop.  While I would not deny that a significant dimension to the push-back is driven by reactionary attitudes toward race, or other reactionary positions generally ("anti-SJWs," "anti-wokeness," etc., etc.), I think it is wrong not to acknowledge that it is also about not wanting change in and of itself.  Along those lines, I think Austin Walker and Black hit the nail on the head in the piece--much of the appeal of D&D to a significant percentage of the fanbase is that it provides morally uncomplicated bad guys to kill.  Introducing less stereotypical, more morally nuanced portrayals of "monster races" materially impacts in a negative way the appeal of the game from that point of view.  The proposed changes are to some degree zero-sum.

Rather than acknowledge this fundamental conflict, Wizards seems committed to continuing to try to be all things to all people.  The half-assed material in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything ("just homebrew it!") is a predictable result of trying to harmonize what can't be harmonized.  The moment Wizards comes out and says "this portrayal of [insert antagonist species here] is no longer canon in D&D," the backward-looking crowd will say "it's not D&D anymore."  So, they won't do that, and instead try to find some formula that placates the change-oriented crowd.      

There is another subtext here, and this gets to many of the Walker quotes in the piece.  Many folks who talk and write about tabletop role-playing games view themselves as fans of tabletop role-playing games, of which D&D is a single, albeit the oldest and most popular, example.  I certainly include myself in this category.  But there is a core group of the D&D fanbase that are fans of D&D and D&D only.  And this is not simply a product, as some would frame it, of people not being aware of other options.  While there are tribal subgroups around certain other tabletop rpgs, I think the tribalism surrounding D&D is the most aggressive and persistent.  If you are someone who is a fan of tabletop role-playing games generally, and D&D goes in a direction you don't like, then you can just switch over to a different game.  But if you care exclusively about D&D qua D&D, then this is an existential issue.  And because the more committed party in a long struggle usually wins, I think the no change crowd thinks they can wait out the Daniel Kwans and Orion Blacks and Austin Walkers of the world.  

And I have to wonder if Wizards deep down thinks they can stall until the folks that want change move on to different games.  At the end of the day Walker (and this should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his work) thinks you should be playing a different game or games anyway, while I think Kwan has switched over his streamed game to the new Quest rpg.  Plus, if I were running D&D for Wizards, I'm not sure how ready I would be to listen to a guy like Walker, who fundamentally thinks my game is a stepping stone to other, better games, when he tells me what changes I should be making to D&D.  If all you care about is D&D, Walker's advice comes across as a poison pill, or at the very least a self-conscious attempt to have D&D mimic the other, different styles of game that Walker already favors.  It's easy to dismiss or sideline what they are saying on that basis.

None of which is to say that what Walker and Black and Kwan are doing or saying is wrong or offered in bad faith.  Or that I disagree with them in terms of the direction they would take D&D--in addition to making the game more representative in the ways they identify, I think distancing D&D from the nostalgia shackles that Wizards has imposed on itself opens up sorely needed creative space for the game.  It is merely to say that I am skeptical that Wizards will make meaningful and material steps in the directions that they outline, and that my skepticism is a result of the fact that I think the problem is deeper than the question of racial portrayals.  Doing what they outline requires Wizards to commit D&D to a particular creative direction, one that will, by definition, alienate some segment of their fanbase.  And committing to a clear creative direction is precisely what Wizards has tried very hard to avoid, especially in the 5e era but during its tenure as the owners of D&D generally.

All of which leaves D&D in a very strange place visa ve the tabletop role-playing hobby as a whole.  On the one hand, you have this explosion of games and game companies with very clear and strong creative agendas.  This includes not just the "indie" scene, but also a dozen or so "mid-major" publishers--Chaosium, Modiphius, Pelgrane, Free League, Monte Cook Games, etc.--that are in my view producing products every bit as innovative as what is coming out of the indie space.  Even Paizo, say what you will about them, took a big swing with Pathfnder 2e creatively.  And then you have D&D, as popular as it has ever been but adrift creatively, and maybe more to the point not appearing to be trying creatively.

As I was writing this, I was looking through the Chaosium forums discussing the current edition of Runequest.  I found an old thread prior to the release of the game, discussing the decision to base the new edition on Runequest 2nd edition, an almost 40 year old version of the game.  Keep in mind that when that decision was made, the Moon Design folks had just taken over Chaosium, and a new, well reviewed, edition of Runequest (now branded as Mythras) had been released a couple of years prior.  Much of the forum post is taken up with people either getting mad or begging the Chaosium leadership to reconsider and adopt, or at least work off of, the Design Mechanism version.  In response, Chaosium Creative Director Jeff Richard basically said "I think RQ2 is the best version of the game, I don't think the subsequent editions really improved the game in a meaningful way, and we want the new edition to be backward compatible with the RQ2 material."  And, so, that's what they did.  Maybe that was the wrong choice--there are some clunky elements in RQG.  But Richard and Chaosium folks have a very clear creative vision for their games, and they implement it in their products.   

I find the contrast between that and what D&D is doing (or not doing) to be a stark one, and one that doesn't seem to be sustainable.  I'm not saying "D&D is doomed!!!!!" or anything like that, but I have this feeling that we have passed "peak D&D," at least until there is some change of direction from Wizards.  I just don't know how much more Wizards can mine the past before they lose all but the most committed nostalgia-driven players.  One way or the other, I think Wizards is going to have to address this deficit, not simply with regard to its problems with racial portrayals, but as to the game as a whole.