D&D is Dead

It’s a click-bait title for sure, but HEAR ME OUT.

2001 was when I first played Dungeons & Dragons, from an old copy of 2nd Edition that was in my friend’s older brother’s room. We were 14 and it was the beginning of summertime. I know we didn’t play it correctly by all the rules, but we had some dice and we did our best estimation of what the game is all about.

It changed everything.

Suddenly, we were telling stories just like the movies we were watching and we were using nothing but our imaginations on the floor of a bedroom at 1am. Later that year, The Fellowship of the Ring comes out. It’s a cinematic triumph and the best damn high-fantasy to ever be put to screen, and gave us fully realized imagery to what we imagined in D&D.

This era did prove to be a turning point culturally for film, music and gaming. Just a few years later, Blizzard releases the massive phenomenon World of Warcraft, which continued to grow the high-fantasy genre in the pop world.

This, in my opinion, is also the turning point for table-top RPGs. With LOTR, Hollywood has used the best technology up to this point to give us rich visuals that only amazing artwork had done in the past, and it’s well-known that D&D 4th Edition was highly designed to appeal to WoW players, with many considering it lackluster, which eventually led to the creation of D&D 5th Edition, which is arguably the best version. So good, in fact, that it comes out of the nerd/geek shadows and becomes legit pop-culture.

2020, the pandemic accelerates the use of D&D Beyond, an online tool, and it eventually becomes the official D&D website. It now takes minutes to make a character, rather than hours, and you no longer have to scrub through books to find things, and the calculations of abilities, attacks and spells is automatically done for you.

This is where it dies.

I was completely on board with D&D Beyond when I first discovered it, finding it a truly amazing tool, and the idea of playing online as often as we wanted opened the flood gates of the obsession. Watching YouTube creators on their opinions of classes and subclasses, looking at all the extensive extended content, making upwards of a dozen characters, etc. This is, however, what I believe led to the breaking down of the actual understanding of the game, and the cherished element of getting together with friends for an extended period of time to tell stories together (schedule permitting). It was hard to plan a game—sometimes we couldn’t find the right time until months apart.

Many players would agree with me that nothing, nothing, beats playing in person, for a long chunk of time…Like, 6-12 hours long. Since that is so rare, you would obviously jones to play and had to wait a long time before you got to play again, so you know what you did? You read the shit out of the core rulebooks, you came up with campaigns to eventually play one day, and studied the hell out of the abilities your character had. This required a hefty investment, but it further exercised your use of imagination outside of the game. It created a constant sense of wonder about the sheer scope of the game and the worlds that could be created.

Now, I know plenty of people have spoken about the dangers of the instant gratification of social media and streaming video and audio, etc, so I’m not going to toot that specific horn…but it relates. For many of us, the very foundations of D&D was a practice of working within parameters of not having any crazy fantastical imagery to see at the click of a button via streaming video, or endless supplies of digital tools to make the game “easier,” or literally tens of thousands of hours of people playing online to watch, or money to buy the plethora of accessories and books.

We had our minds…and school supplies.

Everyone knows D&D is a game of imagination and collective storytelling. It’s also a game of math and a little bit of memory. Now, I’m not saying the math/memory is the part that makes it fun…I’m simply demonstrating with all of this, that the game took a little work/study to immerse yourself into it. You had to read (a lot), do math, improvise, imagine, and it never hurt the experience if you memorized your spells and abilities. This is a game you buy as a book. A game sold in bookstores. A game invented to essentially “play” a book. A game you can play if the electricity goes out. Remember, THIS WAS A NERD’S GAME…As tempting as digital tools can be to accelerate certain aspects of the game, I believe they ultimately take away from what players used to get out of the game. The 5E system is brilliant in how it has already taken a huge amount of the arguably superfluous math out of the game, so the rest is on us players to show up.

This is not a renouncement of D&D. My closest friends and I still hold it to be a sacred rite still performed once a year as an entire “guys weekend.” (6 dudes, 3 days, all day D&D). This is simply to say, D&D is it’s own game. It’s not a video game. Other than the necessary set of polyhedral dice, you can create an arsenal of supplies with one stop at a Staples. There are certainly ways to bouje it up with maps and minis, but once the computer starts to do the thinking for you, the game loses some of it’s identity, and makes you lose as a player in a game that distinctively has no winner.

I say “D&D is Dead” because the trajectory of the game—the escalation of digital supplies, digital tools, excess of subclasses and additional sourcebooks with controversial changes to the core foundations of the entire genre, etc. is clearly the result of an overall overstimulated boredom and lack of serious investment into the aforementioned reading, imagining, improv, and mathematics.

The game will always be sacred to me, but it’s time to bring back the “junior high” of it all and head to staples and get that pencil and graph paper out again…it’s time to be nerds again and not merely geeks.

Revival of Intentionality.

I’ll end with this: very shortly after the peak of digital music via iTunes and the introduction of streaming music, a vinyl record revival occurred. It was partially started by the hipsters that were being counter-culture or alt, but the spirit was there: Intention. The vinyl revival has lasted longer than a fad; it’s been over a decade. It has stuck because people realize the intentionality behind pulling out a record, listening to the whole thing, looking at the artwork and reading the liner notes, rather than the autopilot of just putting a song on and having an algorithm come up with a playlist. It’s about respecting the craft of album making—of storytelling—that was intended originally.

Yes, you have to get up 20 minutes in to flip it over, but it makes you care more about it.

Yes, you’ll have to remember when to apply your proficiency bonus + ability score modifier + if you have advantage + spell DC…but it makes you care more about your character.

So if you’re like me and felt your D&D light dim a little bit over the past couple years, do what I did: Whip that pencil and paper out again, have the core rulebooks nearby, maybe get some Gale Force Nine spellbook cards and bask in the lo-fi magic of Dungeons & Dragons.