Something that pops up in my notes from time to time is folks thinking I'm being excessively kind in my criticisms of Dungeons & Dragons, and I'm going to spin this off into a separate thread to address that without putting anyone on the spot. First, if your own critique of Dungeons & Dragons is rooted in the idea that it's the Worst Game Ever, that speaks more to the limits of your experience than it does to anything else. Dungeons & Dragons in any of its iterations far from the worst the tabletop roleplaying hobby has to offer – like, you have no fucking idea! Second, I tend to be even-handed in my discussion of D&D's rules because, fundamentally, the rules are not the problem – or, at least, not the principal cause of the problem. In many ways, the indie RPG sphere has never escaped the spectre of Ron Edwards, sternly pronouncing that the mechanical process of playing traditional RPGs causes actual, physical brain damage, and that this brain damage is responsible for the bad behaviour we often observe at the table. We don't say it that way anymore, but on some level a lot of us indie RPG designers still kind of believe it. This is understandable. As game designers, we're naturally inclined to think of problems at the table as game design problems. When we see a problematic culture of play, our impulse is to frame it as something which emerges from the text of the game, and which can therefore be mitigated by repairing the text of the game. Confronted with the obvious toxicity of certain facets of D&D's culture of play, we go combing through its text, looking for something – some formalism, some structure, some piece of rules technology – which we can point to and say: "this is it; this is where the brain-worms live." The trouble is, this is not in fact where the brain-worms live. Certainly, the text of a game, particularly a very popular one, can have some influence on the game's surrounding culture of play, but that text is in turn a reflection of the culture of play in which it was written. The Player's Handbook isn't an SCP object, spewing infectious infohazards everywhere when you crack open the cover – hell, I'd go so far as to say that many of the problems of D&D's culture of play operate in spite of the game's text, not because of it! Basically, what I'm saying is that I don't see any contradiction between being the sort of pretentious knob who writes one-page indie RPGs about gay catgirls talking about their feelings (which I am), and speaking favourably about this or that piece of rules tech from whatever flavour of Dungeons & Dragons is in favour this week (which I do), because I recognise that you can't game-design your way out of a problem you didn't game-design your way into. The fact that one of the biggest problems facing the tabletop roleplaying hobby is something that can't be repaired by fucking around with dice-rolling procedures is a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of indie game designers, and I won't say I wasn't resistant to it myself, but it's something that's both useful and necessary to accept. (None of this means that the text of Dungeons & Dragons in any of its incarnations is beyond criticism on other grounds, of course, and I've never been shy about highlighting those criticisms where they're warranted. The only way you're gonna arrive at the conclusion that I'm some sort of D&D apologist is if you're starting from the presumption that The Real Problem Is The Rules.) prokopetz #are actually just artefacts of the scale of the playerbase #and the huge diversity in goals and knowledge of the people who partake in it (via @galileosballs) The scale of D&D's player base is definitely key to the problem, but not incidentally so. A large portion of the issues with D&D's culture of play stem from the central problem that it's a culture of play which prioritises maximising the number of people playing Dungeons & Dragons at any cost. We see this in the positioning of D&D as a universal entry-level game, necessarily accompanied by a refusal to acknowledge that game rules can be opinionated about how the game ought to be played, to the extent that a very large portion of DMing best practices consists of advice on how to work around the fact that the story the rules want to produce disagrees with the story the group wants to tell. We see this in the way that basic differences of opinion regarding what playing a tabletop RPG actually entails are reframed as quirks of player temperament, to be managed like unruly children – or, when this fails, as bad behaviour to be punished; witness, for example, the strident condemnation of "metagaming" as a player's cardinal sin, in spite of the fact that no two groups can agree what metagaming is. We see this in how DMs are expected to shoulder 100% of the actual work of making the game happen, even to the point of effectively playing disengaged players' characters for them, and how DMs who ask their players to learn and understand the rules are criticised for "gatekeeping" the hobby; and, when this has its inevitable consequences, in the treatment of DMs experiencing constant creative burnout as a normal and expected part of running a game. Now, ask yourself: who actually benefits from a culture of play which prioritises maximising the number of people playing Dungeons & Dragons at any cost, even to the detriment of individual groups?
