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.