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Today I'm kicking off a miniseries of Dice Exploder episodes all about the Tarrasque in the room: Dungeons & Dragons itself. But before we get into that, I wanted to lay out for context where I'm coming from, what my relationship is like to "the world's greatest roleplaying game™" is like, and what questions I was hoping to answer with this series.
If you listen to this show, you probably come from a community that's skeptical of D&D. I'm not personally a fan. But it's unquestionably doing something for many people, and I don't buy that they simply don't know any better. So what's the deal? What's good about Dungeons & Dragons?
Further Reading
At 50 Years Old, Dungeons & Dragons Is An Artifact post by Lin Codega on Rascal News
Dungeons & Dragons Is A Comedy Game on the Dice Exploder blog
Homage to the Players Handbook by Tim Hutchings
Socials
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
(Note: this transcript is drawn from my script for this episode and is slightly different from the actual recording, including missing a couple quotes from episodes to be published in coming weeks. The gist is all here though.)
Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder! Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and delve into the darkness of its depths. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and it’s just me this week! This is a special little mini episode, a prologue to the short series I’m going to be doing over the next few weeks all about the elephant in the room, the big daddy himself, the game I have somehow yet to cover after three full seasons: it’s Dungeons & Dragons, baby.
Over the next three weeks, my cohosts and I are going to try and tame that dragon, tackle that behemoth, eat that Tarrasque, and pin down that most elusive of questions: what is the deal with D&D?
But before we dive into that, I wanted to lay out, cards on the table, where I’m coming from and my relationship to The World’s Greatest Roleplay Game, a phrase that I recently learned wizards of the coast has trademarked.
Because for some people, “what is the deal with D&D” is a weird question to ask. I mean, it’s D&D! It’s the fun game we play with our buddies every week. We show up, the DM has a story for us that we get to contribute to, and we have fun. Or we’re DMs, we love pouring over our books and prepping our campaigns and sharing them with our friends.
And if that’s you, awesome! And also... welcome! Please let me know how you found this podcast, because I think that’s not most of my listeners. I hope this series is interesting for you even though I made it for my much more storygamer audience. And this introductory episode that you’re listening to right now is for you, to try and get you on the same page as me before we head into the series proper.
So lets start with my personal relationship to D&D.
I started playing D&D in the third grade or so with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons second edition. My dad had played a little while he was in grad school, and he’d always wanted to play more, and now he’d made a small person to do that with him. I grabbed a few friends and at least one other dad, and we played for a bunch of years. My dad would DM his game, the main event, but he was too busy to do it all the time, which is how often I wanted to play. Being a precocious young kid and top tier social ringleader, I started DMing all the time myself.
I remember the rush of third edition’s release, pouring over all those new books. I ran games that would last all night and games that fell apart after half an hour of character creation. I read those books over and over, and I loved them.
By the time college rolled around, 4th edition had dropped, and I ran a several year campaign of 4e Dark Sun that absolutely ruled. But college is also where I was introduced to Fiasco, the quick and dirty Jason Morningstar game that does Coen Brothers style stories, my absolute favorite, in one sitting. I ADORED Fiasco. It was nothing like D&D. There weren’t any numbers anywhere near it. You didn’t even have a character sheet. It didn’t require hours and hours of writing and prepping my own campaigns, we could just sit down and go. It felt like something I could share with my friends who wouldn’t be interested in a long form D&D campaign, and listener, you better fucking believe that share it I did. I played SO MUCH Fiasco with everyone on campus who would listen, and it fucking ruled. Fiasco was a revelation.
That was the first chip out of my love for D&D.
Through Fiasco, I found Fate and Shadowrun and other games to try instead of D&D. When 5e came around, I was ambivalent about it. What could it offer me that these other games couldn’t do better?
Turns out: campaign books. I fell in love with Tomb of Annihilation in particular, and I ran the shit out of it for two different groups. Just reading a book turns out to be a lot easier prep than inventing a world whole-cloth.
But after a few years of this, I discovered indie games on demand at GenCon, a little community for pickup games and the best thing at GenCon, where you can find all kinds of Fiasco-sized games about all kinds of fucking nonsense - the kinds of games Dice Exploder usually talks about. And through this community, and the online spaces it connected me to, I started to get more and more jaded about D&D.
It wasn’t just that the prep was a lot of work, combat took forever, and it was hard to get new players interested. I also started growing up enough to listen to the people who called D&D ridiculously colonialist and racist.
Are all stories told with D&D colonialist? I don’t think so. But the game is fundamentally based on a story of going into an untamed wilderness and slowly gaining power over it and feeling justified in doing so because the wilderness’s inhabitants are largely evil.
Are all stories told with D&D racist? Probably not. But it’s weird that some races just have less intelligence than others, and orcs and goblins definitely exist in part to be people you can feel okay about murdering.
And then you have, like, the goblins in my fav, Tomb of Annihilation. They’re just really horrific stereotypes, like you’d see in the Indiana Jones movies but dialed up even further... Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
Anyway, a lot of people more knowledgeable and familiar with these topics than me have written about them. My point is at this time in my life, I started reading those people, and it made D&D much more uncomfortable to sit with.
I remember another breaking point. I ran this session, probably the best session of D&D I ever played, where where the party went clubbing in Waterdeep with a copper dragon. They showed him the town. I let each of them make up a bar for the party to visit, and each was a delight. It was probably the peak of my D&D experience, and we never rolled a single die. We certainly didn’t do any combat.
I was proud of that session for a year, until I saw someone online talking about how much disliked it when people bragged about whole sessions where they rolled no dice. “I’m glad you’re having fun,” they said. “But does it sound to you like D&D is actually helping you have that experience? Or are you having such a good time because you’re finally escaping the rules of D&D?”
That did it. I entered my villain era. I thought D&D is evil. People who still played it just didn’t know what they were doing. Hostages to Hasbro’s marketing machine. The trick of D&D is that it’s so complicated and so all consuming that it makes players reluctant to learn new games, not knowing how easy other games can be.
In a lot of ways, I still feel this way. D&D combat is a slog - the only people I know who like it will immediately start telling me all the ways they’ve changed it to make it move quicker. Hasbro is evil. D&D is colonialist and racist. It is so dominant.
I evangelized about this, tried to convert people to the kinds of games I like. My proudest moment was introducing a couple friends to RPGs via Fiasco and For the Queen. One of them then got invited to a D&D game separately, went because of how much she’d had with RPGs, and despised it within seconds. “Who wants to do that much math?” she said. “Why should it take so many hours to get to the good part?” Meanwhile she was taking For the Queen to dinner parties without me and getting people to play. Godspeed young padawan. If we want RPGs to be a mainstream activity like board games, that’s what we need - casual games for dinner parties. Not lifelong weekly commitments to the never-ending math fest combat slog.
But my sister and her husband were locked in on D&D. Sometimes we’d talk about it at holidays or whatever, and I’d try to convince them they were having a bad time. This, uh, did not go well. They were, in fact, having a good time. What the fuck was I on about? Yeah, they may have loved the Stewpot one shot I ran for them, but the thing they wanted to do week to week was play actual D&D in their ongoing campaign.
And that brings is more or less to the present. I see all these problems with D&D. I went back to it for a few months recently, and it just was not fun for me. It’s success, the near-monopoly it has on the hobby, is undoubtedly a product of its seven+ figure marketing budget, its 50 years of history, and the fact that it’s designed to be played forever, keeping players from trying other games.
But it feels undeniable that there is still something really successful and rewarding about it for a large number of people baked into the actual game that it is. Even if RPGs were as widely successful as board games, even if D&D did not have a soft monopoly on the hobby, I think a large number of people would still end up playing D&D. There is something about it that captured my imagination when I was 10 and kept me up reading those rulebooks again and again long into the night.
So... what is it? I know all kinds of problems with D&D, but where is the good? What do people love about it that they can’t get from other games? I founded Dice Exploder on a spirit of open-mindedness and trying to bring as much of the hobby as I could together in one place. And in that spirit, I want to take a harder look at the biggest game of them all.
In this series we’ll get into some of them, but I want to lay out some here, too.
D&D tries to have something for everyone. The people who love to kill stuff can do the combat. The people who love to do silly voices can talk to people. You can fit a group of friends with different interests all at the same table, even if everyone would rather be playing the game more tailored to their particular interest.
You get to roll dice a lot, and those dice are high variance. There’s always a 5% chance of a critical miss and something basically slapstick happening. There’s always a 5% chance of a critical hit and something amazing happening. This often leads to a silly and chaotic game that fits well with hanging out, having a drink, and laughing with your friends.
The first five minutes of character creation are amazing, when you’re still just picking your race and your class. It’s as simple as going over two pick lists (one for race and one for class), and it immediately gives you two stereotypes to play into or against, and to mash against each other. Is your elf druid the same as everyone else’s? What does it mean for a dwarf to be a wizard? Two words, “half-elf barbarian,” begin to ask questions and tell a story about who you are and where you’ve come from and what you might become. That’s incredible.
The lore and the ritual of it. Most games do not come with endless books of lore for 10 year olds to read through. To my friend who hated D&D within seconds, that’s a turn off. But to 3rd grade me, that was exactly the thing that got me hooked for a lifetime. But it’s not just the content of the books, it’s opening them for the first time and seeing the possibilities, smelling the pages. It takes you into this almost mystical world of ritual and wonder. It’s the cool shapes of these weird dice.
Finally, there’s the community. Vast, endless subreddits. Gaming stores all over the world. And just, like, random people you meet at a dinner party. Yeah, there might be a community for Blades in the Dark, but it doesn’t hold a candle to D&D. There are people to talk to and connect over D&D. That’s the whole point of the hobby, even.
Something I think is interesting about all four of those points is that there’s very little in there about the actual rules of the game. I mentioned the high variance of the dice, but I see that as almost a cultural attitude towards play that’s been created by accident. The pick lists of race and class are great, but the second you’re telling new players their class abilities, their eyes glaze over. In my mind, the thing that makes D&D special is the container it has become. The rituals, the lore, the history, the community.
Through editing this series, I’ve thought again and again about Tim Hutchings’ “Homage to the Player’s Handbook.” Tim, who spent a bunch of time in the fine arts world, took the original first edition D&D player’s handbook and for every page, he used watercolors to paint the basic shapes and outlines of the text and art on the page in thick lines and blobs. It’s a hazy, impressionistic sketch of tables, columns, and darkened artwork.
Strip away the rules, the text, the authors, but still it remains so, so recognizably D&D.
What does that mean?
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Alright, let’s look ahead to this miniseries. We’re gonna kick off with Tristan Zimmerman of the Molten Sulfur Blog, who talks with me about The Adventuring Day, a basic design principle and/or mechanic underpinning D&D 5e, and in some ways all previous editions: the idea that the game should be balanced for parties to go through roughly 6-8 combat encounters between each long rest. This one assumption affects everything in D&D with a number on it, even though I’ve never met another living soul who actually plays the game like this. Where did it come from? Why does it persist? To answer that, we go back to the game’s origins.
Next up is Sam Roberts, from the Game Exploder jam episode, talking with me about D&D 3e and 3.5e prestige classes. Sam thinks of these things as a noble failure, a compelling attempt to marry story and worldbuilding and mechanics that the game almost immediately undercut in its execution.
Third comes an episode about Rule Zero, a sort of oral tradition maxim that’s cropped up around D&D that says “the first rule of D&D is that the DM is always right.” Returning cohost Ema Acosta and I muddle our way through trying to make sense of the culture of play around D&D, what rules matter in the first place, and whether D&D is more of a medium than individual game.
Finally, later in this season I’m hoping to tackle the idea of how D&D has been warped and changed by incredibly popular actual plays like Critical Role and Dimension 20. These shows depict something much closer to the D&D that I was always most compelled by at the table, even as they’re in some ways far closer to scripted television or an improv show at a comedy club than anything described in the core D&D rulebooks. How and why are they doing what they’re doing, and how is it different from what happened at the weekly D&D game I was in earlier this year?
All that and plenty of non-D&D episodes: coming up on the next few months of Dice Exploder.
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Two shoutouts to additional thought son D&D before I go. First, if you want more from me about D&D, you can read my blogpost “D&D is a comedy game.” Second, I highly recommend the essay “At 50 Years Old, Dungeons & Dragons Is An Artifact” by Lin Codega on Rascal News. Lin gets into all this much more eloquently than I do.
Special thanks to Sam Roberts this episode for giving me notes on it before recording.
As always you can find me on socials at sdunnewold, or on the dice exploder discord.
Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey, and our ad music is Lilypads by my boi Travis Tessmer.
And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.