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Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

69 points by podiki 5y ago

oh_sigh 5y ago
This is just "The thing I loved is now ruined because the new thing is not the same as the old thing", except seen through the lens of the author who also looks at the world in terms of class struggles and interacts with the world through anti-capitalist agitation. If you ask 100 old nerds about modern day DnD, you'd probably get about 75 different answers for what ruined it.
bluefirebrand 5y ago
I've been playing DnD since the 90s and it feels like Wizards of the Coast is slowly wringing out all that I enjoy about the game with each edition that is released. It's been a long time since I've had a steady group to play with even though there are more people playing it now than probably ever before. There was a huge marketing push to make the game more attractive to a broader market along with the release of fifth edition. This grew the game enormously because fifth edition is a lot more "streamlined" than previous versions. Fifth edition has a lot lower emphasis on mechanics. Character builds are like selecting a cable package, and at some point you realize that every package is showing the same shows. There is a lot higher emphasis on character backstory building and roleplaying, which has also been hyped massively by the success of Celebrity podcast games such as Critical Role. I find it all so dull. I like the numbers and crunch, theorycrafting crazy builds, I like games that reward a deep knowledge of the ruleset. 5E is none of this And it seems 5e is all most people want to play anymore.
- ehutch79 5y ago
  You do know there's other systems besides D&D. There's even revised versions of the original systems. Check out stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOPmh7lkQIE&t=370s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOPmh7lkQIE&t=370s Or you can just use your old rulebooks. No one's taking away your old books.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    > And it seems 5e is all most people want to play anymore. Emphasis added. RPG's are an inherently social activity.
    - deadbunny 5y ago
      Maybe it's just my group of friends but if someone says "hey I've made a campaign for $system, who's in?" We generally jump at the chance to try somethig new.
      - bluefirebrand 5y ago
        This is a (maybe) feature of longterm gaming groups, not something you will find trying to meet new people to form a new group.
        deadbunny 5y ago
        While it probably doesnt help for in person playing there are Discord/reddit communities for pretty much any game under the sun that have "Looking For Game" sections. For less Covid times I've had reasonable luck meeting gaming groups on meetup.com or your friendly local gaming shop. You might have some luck there.
- warning26 5y ago
  Honestly I like 5E better and I suspect I'm not the only one, so it's not necessarily a step backward. Plus, I suppose you could argue that capitalism has succeeded in this case by giving us a competing solution: for those who prefer emphasis on mechanics, there's Pathfinder.
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    Pathfinder 2E is also a step in this direction. So yes, while older systems still exist with the style I enjoy, people tend to gravitate towards the new, which is unfortunate for me.
- PradeetPatel 5y ago
  From a commercial perspective, Reducing the on-boarding friction and an increase in diversity & inclusion effort would lead to attracting a broader market, thus leading to an increase in revenue and market share, which ultimately would (hopefully) generate more value for the stakeholders. I can also understand why it would isolate many traditional DnD players, due to the reduction in features. Do you think that's a decision weighted by the decision makers at Wizards of the Cost and assessed accordingly?
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    > Do you think that's a decision weighted by the decision makers at Wizards of the Cost and assessed accordingly? I'm sure they weighted it, and then money won out I have gone from being core demographic of theirs to not a customer of theirs at all, but for everyone like me they've pushed away, they've probably on-boarded twenty new customers. Right decision for them, sucks for me.
    - mcphage 5y ago
      > I'm sure they weighted it, and then money won out > for everyone like me they've pushed away, they've probably on-boarded twenty new customers That’s not just a money decision, that’s also an audience decision—making something that more people will enjoy, bring more life and more ideas into the hobby, and introduce the fun of TTRPGs to a much bigger group of people. That sounds like a huge artistic win as well as a good financial decision.
      - bluefirebrand 5y ago
        This might be the first time I've ever heard anyone argue that something being engineered for lowest common denominator mass-market appeal makes it more artistic. Respectfully disagree.
        mcphage 5y ago
        > This might be the first time I've ever heard anyone argue that something being engineered for lowest common denominator mass-market appeal makes it more artistic. I don't think I'd argue for that. But I would argue that making something that appeals to a very narrow, static group of people is probably less artistic than something that appeals to a wider group of people. Or think of it like a band—they release an album, it attracts a group of fans. They can keep making the same thing over and over again and attract the same group of people—and many bands do this. But it's very static. Or they can expand their horizons, explore music more, and experiment. They'll lose some old fans who are looking for the same sound that they've always gotten, but if their experiments are successful, then they'll reach new people who are interested in some of their new ideas. And some of those people might listen to the band's older catalog, and develop an appreciation for music they might not otherwise encounter. And maybe their experiments fail, and they lose their original audience, without attracting a new one. That happens all the time, too. But at least they pushed the boundaries, instead of playing it safe.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > There was a huge marketing push to make the game more attractive to a broader market along with the release of fifth edition. This grew the game enormously because fifth edition is a lot more "streamlined" than previous versions. No. 4th edition was the most streamlined, to a fault. Thank god they worked some decent mechanics back into 5E. > I find it all so dull. I like the numbers and crunch, theorycrafting crazy builds, I like games that reward a deep knowledge of the ruleset. 5E is none of this Be glad you missed out on 4E. That being said, most people I know of who also missed the crunch played Pathfinder instead. ---------- 3.5E was clearly too crunchy, and the crunch had some exploits that were made obvious by the internet sharing those exploits. Pathfinder closes a lot of those loopholes and was just superior for the internet age. 3.5E probably was fine pre-Internet. But now that you can just "download a build" with all of the crazy exploits making level 1 overpowered, you can't just have untested crazy builds like that anymore. EDIT: The age of Pathfinder 1.0 is over though. Its been a good run, and Paizo has a huge amount of respect from me for taking care of the venerable 3.5-like system for so long. Maybe my next campaign will be Pathfiner 2.0, but a lot of my players are old-dogs who don't want to learn a new rule system.
  - kuang_eleven 5y ago
    D&D 4e remains one of the best, most varied combat systems in tabletop roleplaying. It gave well-balanced, tactical combat with a well fleshed-out item and character progression system. It just didn't have any roleplaying attached to it, and the combat systems sacrificed verisimilitude for game design. It honestly had more in common with Gloomhaven than D&D, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      3.5's combat was highly based around: 1. Prepared casters using the right spells to "solve" encounters -- Glitterdust and Invisibility purge "solves" invisibility. "Fly" solves flying enemies. "Wind Wall" solves enemy arrows. 2. Beatsticks having a good enough build to handle all the cases that #1 can't handle. Ex: maybe the Druid doesn't have "Daylight" to counter the deeper-darkness the enemy Lich cast, but the Beatstick might have scent (Barbarian) or blindfight to handle the case anyway. ------ These spells and situations were so incredibly varied, and it really is fun to play with. Haste beats slow. Dimensional Anchor beats Dimension door. Etc. etc. Pathfinder specifically made fighter-types deal incredible amounts of damage, ensuring that they'll be relevant. (Fighter Archer will almost certainly outdamage Wizard fireballs). ------ 4th edition felt like... everyone was playing roughly the same thing. Wizards spell options were largely just damage, and not so interactive. You had nothing like the "Daylight vs Deeper Darkness", or "Force Cage vs Dimension Door", or "Invisibility purge vs Invisibility Sphere" system before. So there just wasn't any real amount of "division of labor" going on in 4th edition. Everyone was basically a beatstick. 3.5 / Pathfinder had the issue that if two players played the same role (ex: a Fighter + Paladin), it felt redundant, and one of the players will feel left out. ------ Gloomhaven is probably a good description of 4E. But 3.5 / Pathfinder was more like DOTA or Overwatch. Players are in a team, and there's no class that can fulfill all roles. By subdividing the party's jobs between different players, everyone has something to contribute in the dungeon. As long as the DM ensured that the party compositions were decently balanced and with less redundancy. (Even if two fighters were chosen, you can still play different roles with different weapons. Archer vs Beatstick for example).
- kozikow 5y ago
  Pathfinder is great for optimization nerds like us. If you can't find tabletop group check out pathfinder:kingmaker and pathfinder:wotr computer games. I think I spent equal time on character sheet than actually playing. Some META builds are borderline funny, e.g. top one from https://www.neoseeker.com/pathfinder-wrath-of-the-righteous/builds/Main_Character https://www.neoseeker.com/pathfinder-wrath-of-the-righteous/... : Monk1, Sorcerer4, Loremaster 1, Dragon Disciple 4, Eldritch Knight 10, Lich 10.
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    I did switch to Pathfinder for a while but then I moved cities and trying to find a new, Non-5E group has been fruitless. The last game I was in actually was Kingmaker, so I was quite delighted to see it made as a CRPG
- mr_toad 5y ago
  I find this amusing, because in the 80s “rules lawyer” and “min-maxers” were derogatory terms. Anyone who favoured a build over a story and using your imagination would have been told to join a war gaming club, or to take up chess.
- muzani 5y ago
  D&D has a bit of a identity crisis. It's a lot of things to a lot of people. For the mainstream, it's a way for a group of friends to group roleplay. You don't really want someone to be left behind because of a bad build. If someone's boyfriend stops playing because it's too hard, eventually the couple drops off, which leads to more people abandoning the game. It's still board game-ish and not a full roleplaying system. Something like FATE is more suited to RP, but you have to actually write characters in depth. There's more emergrnt stories, but that's too much effort for people who just want to kick orcs and roll dice. The character builds metagaming has branched into Pathfinder and roguelikes, where you get a tighter loop of whether your wizard build can kill liches.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  > I've been playing DnD since the 90s and it feels like Wizards of the Coast is slowly wringing out all that I enjoy about the game with each edition that is released. When someone starts like this, the "problem" is usually the one who says it, not the game. You found yourself a game that you enjoyed, you would have played something else if you didn't like it. Add a good bit of nostalgia to it and any change will make you unhappy. But no change will get you bored, you can't win, that's the curse of growing up. Just move on, you probably won't play D&D all your life and neither will your friends. If you find a group to play the older editions your loved, you will probably be disappointed... Or continue playing, who am I to judge? It is rare but maybe the passion is still there. The funny part is Wizards of the Coast makes that other game that is all about numbers, crunch, knowledge and theorycrafting. In fact, when I was roleplaying, rule lawyering was heavily frowned upon, we didn't care about numbers except as a guideline. To those who focused on numbers and rules, we told them do go play Magic instead, which, btw, is a great game we also played. But we made a strong distinction between tabletop RPGs, based on storytelling, and mechanics-based games.
- blueboo 5y ago
  At first I thought, OK, they’re letting us focus on storytelling—role playing! I too have a romance for the gnarly mechanics (love 2e) but it’s the collapsing of richness in the worlds and characters that dismays me. Now it’s clear we’re marching steadily towards a Marvel superheroization of the experience. More widely appealing, bite-size, far less varied. Far less interesting. So it goes with mass-market culture. The good news is there are plenty of more interesting artifacts out there…but now we have to do the work of looking for them and sharing them when we found them.
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    This is my issue with 5e. Where are all the cool classes? Where are all the neat races I can play as? Where are all the cool things I can do with my characters (prestige classes, etc.) to make them seem unique? Instead, there's just your main classes and a few subclasses, with your standard races. Like, I just wanna play as a kitsune summoner without having to just 'flavor' everything that way. I want it to actually feel unique instead of having to rely on imagination to make it feel that way. That said, thank goodness for places like /r/unearthedarcana...And Pathfinder 2e, though I've been struggling to find a group.
rendall 5y ago
I wanted to read an article about how capitalism kills art, but it took 7 paragraphs for the article to kind of sort of start talking about how capitalism killed D&D, and then it wasn't about capitalism, but about mismanagement.
- toxik 5y ago
  It’s at times like these that I miss /.’s voting system. Would’ve been nice to see a -1 Clickbait
  - muzani 5y ago
    Normally I flag clickbait, because even the title goes against HN guidelines. But this is one of those that is just useful enough.
- bussierem 5y ago
  Yeah I kept waiting for the article to get to the point, and then it ended.
- this_user 5y ago
  If capitalism "kills" art, then we should probably analyse at what point in history art was actually flourishing. The result will be that we need to restore feudalism.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    I think the author is really complaining that opening something up for the masses kills art. It like pop music or McDonald's, they appeal to huge audiences but are not the peak of artistic expression.
    - mikkergp 5y ago
      It's a weird criticism that shallow things existing somehow negate or overshadow the increase in "deep/amateur/artistic" things that follow. Like McDonald's negates all of the food carts or Taylor swift negates how much easier it is for amateur musicians to get their music to you in the modern internet age. It's only an obsession with Nostalgia that could make you think that experimentation and expression in role playing games is somehow worse now than it was in the 80's, just because the biggest game is now owned by Hasbro.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
Take a look at DrivethruRPG and tell me how capitalism killed art...
blockwriter 5y ago
I spent my adolescence playing games similar to Dungeons and Dragons. One common sentiment that seems to pervade amongst its older devotees is an inability to see the game for what it was, which is to say largely a trifle and diversion for adolescents. There are those that think the game has outlived its origination because these companies make big pushes to diversify an audience that has always been compromised of uncouth suburban teenage dudes. There are those that place an undue stake in the game’s proliferation because it validates their difficult youths. At the end of the day, it is not worth analyzing too deeply. Thinking of games like this as art is a categorical error in my opinion.
- mcphage 5y ago
  > Thinking of games like this as art is a categorical error in my opinion. Why is that?
  - blockwriter 5y ago
    In part because what is engaging about it is not vested wholly in its aesthetic value. This, of course, does not necessarily preclude a work from being considered art. I think my refusal to consider games of this nature, or indeed games of any sort, as art comes down to the medium. Literature extends literature in a transcendent manner, putting like into a like medium that is wholly expressive and formally complete, whereas games of fantasy enrobe themselves in the trappings of purely aesthetic mediums; but the medium of games leaves room for gaps in its progenitor’s sublimer forms. This is only one man’s opinion though, I concede.
    - Octopodes 5y ago
      I tip my fedora to you, good sir.
marcusverus 5y ago
> But Dungeons & Dragons is also a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends and deforms any artistic endeavors to its own ends, and how, whatever the specific details of the situation or the intentions of the people involved, the demand for profit will always subsume the desire for aesthetic value or artistic integrity. What a wonderful instance of missing the forest for... a tree. I was avid tabletop gamer around five years ago, and the only complaint I heard from the real aficionados was that truly great games were coming out faster than they could play them. In other words, the problem was that there was too much high quality art for someone to get to experience it all (and when you want to play the good ones many times...BAH!). Gone are the days when a game like Twilight Struggle could dominate the BGG 'top game' charts for nearly a decade. So the claim that "Capitalism Kills Art" might make more sense if we weren't living through an undisputed golden age in tabletop gaming--the very artform from which the author drew this case study!
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Indeed. It sounds like the author just wanted to complain about their hobby becoming mainstream. I play 5e on and off and the community around it seems stronger than ever. The fact that something like Critical Role can exist seems to speak very strongly against their points on its own. Sure CR has been commercialised but it's still just as creative as their first streams where they had zero expectations we just get a couple more ads and a much more polished presentation.
rektide 5y ago
someone roast White Wolf (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, exalted, more) next please. gawd there's such good podcasts for this multiverse though. like, not a lot of people, but hearing the couple real smart know it alls chat up these multiverses is so so so good.
- com2kid 5y ago
  Easy peasy. Amazing settings, terrible rules, math never really works out. The nWoD game system is at the same time overly simple and horribly complex. Doing 80% of things in the game, super simple, story telling system, rule of cool, narrative driven combat! Then entire sections of rules for grappling and brawling and gaining advantage and positions and suddenly you realize someone make a D10 version of submission wrestling. Mages, fun, horribly broken. The back story about Atlantis, awful. Everything else? Pretty darn cool. The supplement books throw out equipment that just up and breaks the game. Then from what I read they mistreated workers, kept managing to fail to move their successful IP into other forms of media, and ended up going bust. Honestly their games are complex as hell to run. 2 years of trying and I never was able to keep everything in mind that I needed to in order to "do it right." And to repeat, nWoD Mage is so broken. So very very broken. But fun in an explody sort of way.
  - rektide 5y ago
    the roasts arent wrong but they're also not all that meta. they're largely specific flaws, not cultural. the Atlantis thing was so weird & so much anti the point of mage to me. humans just being awesome (if they dared to, could awake themelves) was way way better.
    - com2kid 5y ago
      OK how about this: The primary fan base for World of Darkness was aging goths. nWoD was doomed from the get go because the existing, shrinking, fan base was going to be pissed at any changes at all, but the material was still too "90s" to draw in new fans. Then White Wolf tried to just re-release old Vampire stuff, but who cares at that point, since the majority of those fans, while very vocal, had aged out of playing a game that requires obscene amounts of preparation. And then let's not even mention the obscene WTF investment it takes to get started playing. You get to read a base book, and you have to read it as a novel because White Wolf was incapable of arranging a book for use as reference, and then you get to read at least 1 book for the actual system you want to use. And then you have to find players willing to do the same. Each book is full of dense prose in a hard to read font. When I started playing nWoD I was in my 20s. Soon as I hit 30 those fonts became WTF hard to read. While amazing to sit down and read through as just a book, the (very well made) books are useless when it comes to actually running a game. I had to write up my own condensed guide to the rules. White Wolf was trying to do a thousand things with a tiny team. They kept publishing new splats (Mummy!) while their existing splats had giant holes in them. And finally, EVERYTHING WAS A SHADE OF GREY. There wasn't ever a big bad, or as a ST the big bad was so amorphous I had shit to work with and I was expected to work my arse off fleshing out the thin plot threads the source books gave me. At least old WOD had fucking bad guys. "The technocracy goons are going to kill you!" vs nWoDs "Strange secret organization may or may not be doing bad things, or maybe they are the good guys, who knows, fuck it, you figure it out yourself". Like, sometimes I don't want to construct complicated worlds of political intrigue. Sometimes I just want the players to have something they can go blow up and feel good about it. I mean sure because it is WoD I'm going to make them feel a little bit bad about it, but holy shit grimdark shades of grey gets old after while.
isoskeles 5y ago
> jacobinmag.com Into the trash it goes. Do they somehow believe D&D was invented by central planners in USSR?
- davidw 5y ago
  "I stubbed my toe this morning. Here's why it's capitalism's fault". I mean there's a lot of room to improve and tweak our economy and society, and I'm no free-market absolutist. Far from it. But takes like the one in the title are a big eye-roll.
colinrand 5y ago
I played sometimes as DnD as a kid growing up, and remember it was pretty straight forward to plunk down with friends in and afternoon and just have fun with it. I tried playing with my kids last year during lockdown and OMG...it took me 2 hrs to read the basic rules, 4 hrs to set up the characters, and then another 2 hrs to find where my kids had run of to because they got so bored with it!!! In the end, one loves it but it takes so much effort to set up and play that it can be overwhelming.
- com2kid 5y ago
  You already knew how to play 2nd ed, so it seamed simple to you. Any RPG system, if the DM knows the rules really well, is easy to sit down at a table and play. Back when I DM'd a lot I'd run one shots for people all the time, so long as I knew the rules (or subset of rules for what we'd be encountering that session), everything was smooth.
- ygjb 5y ago
  I think you are probably misremembering the ease of play with older editions. I have been playing D&D in various iterations, and have older books going back to the original AD&D 1st edition and BECMI box sets and 5e was far easier to pick up and play, and is way more accessible to young children than previous editions.
- lupire 5y ago
  This you forgetting how much free time and few distractions kids had before Internet.
polemic 5y ago
It's discombobulating to read an article about DND being "killed" while we're in the middle of what is surely its golden age. There are people making real money running games, creating maps and assets and 3rd party software, there's new an interesting _optional_ official content published regularly, and a vibrant homebrew community. To pick a particular point: > Users pay nearly as much for digital versions of the core game books as they do hard copies This comes up a lot, but as someone who's bought both physical copies _and_ the DNDB versions, _you're not paying for the content_. You're paying to have to tightly integrated into the live character sheets, with all of the complexity of the vast rulesets implemented in code in multiple apps. Rulesets that I can then sync into (3rd party) tools like FoundryVTT via (3rd party) tools that talk to the APIs. It's kinda magical and certainly _this_ community could understand why that is a significant task. And content sharing means that not everyone actually has to buy this stuff. A group can pool, or a tooled up DM can run games using whatever content (including the in-app build your own homebrew content) they have to hand. Its a pretty good balance. Maybe Hasbro will run it into the ground, that would hardly be surprising, but it seems like we're a long way from that happening. In the meantime there are plenty of other TTRPGS out there if you don't like this one – DND is a gateway into TTRPGs, not a monopoly.
- ygjb 5y ago
  As a D&D player i don't mind paying for physical media, and I don't mind paying for electronic versions of the media that are integrated with D&D Beyond or Roll20. What I find galling is that I have to buy the same content on different platforms instead of buying my digital content from WotC, and logging into Roll20 or D&D Beyond with a WotC account with my entitlements. Both D&D Beyond and Roll20 can negotiate with WotC on how payments would be split up, or whatever. The current model is hostile to me as a consumer, and I don't like it :P
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    Check out FoundryVTT and the d&dbeyond importers module[1]. It's not a solution to the entire problem but if you own the content on DNDB you can import it into Foundry. Also Foundry is much better than roll20 IMO as a long time player and GM on both. 1. https://foundryvtt.com/packages/ddb-importer/ https://foundryvtt.com/packages/ddb-importer/
amelius 5y ago
If you want to see how capitalism kills art, just watch one of the latest Marvel movies.
- xupybd 5y ago
  Wasn't Marvel always a money making machine?
- krapp 5y ago
  In many ways the Marvel movies are high art compared to the comics. And that includes comparing them as visual media. They improved upon and streamlined many elements from the comics. For instance, Thanos' motivations in the movies created an actual cultural conversation, whereas in the comics he just wanted to impress the female personification of Death. I'll take "dialogue on Malthusian catastrophe theory" versus "purple space incel wants to get his dick wet" any day of the week.
karaterobot 5y ago
> He wasn’t initially interested in selling the slick, glossy product line we see in bookstores today; he wanted to sell a set of rules, essentially guidelines for play that could easily be adopted and adapted to whatever scenario other hobbyists cared to cook up. Goodness, "slick" and "glossy"! I curse capitalism and its running dog, nice paper. Much purer to only sell xeroxed copies at GenCon. I don't know if the author has read the rules for Chainmail, but they were clearly not designed to be universal. Gygax sold a very specific system. D&D and AD&D were the same. Much later, the OGL provided a way to sell derivative products based on that system, but in any case the key word is sell. 5th edition D&D is no less adaptable than 1st edition — if that's your metric — and probably more so.
sfRattan 5y ago
Others in the thread have already mentioned how truly ridiculous and histrionic this Jacobin article is, so I'll skip to the plainly false part of their conclusion: that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&D. That's probably largely true of 5th Edition. It's a focus group led, neutered, milquetoast version of Dungeons & Dragons. All of it's official product releases are whittled down to the least possibly offensive common denominator. And the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever. But the auteur creators aren't gone and creativity hasn't been killed. From Patrick Stuart's (the writer, not the actor) projects like Silent Titans[1] to the bizarrely delightful Mörk Borg[2] to Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands[3] to the space horror game Mothership[4]... There's an insane amount of creativity in the design of tabletop roleplaying games today, and I haven't even moved that far from D&D-alike gameplay. What's more, these auteurs are making good money without optimizing for maximum money as if they were MBAs with a drug habit to support or SV startups with "angel" investors demanding an insane return. Look up the Kickstarters for any of those projects in the paragraph above. Even for a Jacobin piece, this article is extremely myopic, poorly researched, and comically fatalistic. [1] https://shop.swordfishislands.com/silent-titans/ https://shop.swordfishislands.com/silent-titans/ [2] https://morkborg.com https://morkborg.com [3] https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/the-ultra-violet-grasslands-and-the-black-city https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/the-ultra-violet-gra... [4] https://www.mothershiprpg.com/ https://www.mothershiprpg.com/
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  While I have my issues with Jacobin, the article isn't about "RPG culture", it's specifically about Dungeons & Dragons. You say their conclusion "that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&D" is false, yet then go on to say > That's probably largely true of 5th Edition […] and the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever. …which is absolutely supporting their argument, isn't it? "Hasbro's steadily killing the artistic and creative part of D&D" and "there is an insane amount of creativity in RPG culture" aren't mutually exclusive! One doesn't disprove the other. They can both be true.
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scruffyherder 5y ago
D&D always has been a commercial product of the west. What did they play in the Soviet Union that was killed by becoming a sold product?
nitwit005 5y ago
D&D has plenty of competition, quite a bit of which is free. They do have some IP, but it's not like they own the idea of adventuring or magic. If you want an example of capitalism killing art, the mention of Marvel and DC toward the end might work better. They ended up a duopoly, with control over the industry's IP.
lupire 5y ago
previous rebuttal of the poor argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29117738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29117738
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pixodaros 5y ago
I think the author needed to DuckDuckGo "old-school renaissance" and "indy RPG." There is a vast cottage industry of hobbyists with their own RPGs, some based on the D&D engine (the Open Game License is definitely not "just another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro") and others on better-designed engines. Or you can buy $100 worth of books from any edition and do what you like with them. If you don't like the Paizo and Hasbro takes on D&D, there are more published alternatives than you could ever play.
garbagecoder 5y ago
As opposed to socialist art, which is so pure. Jacobin: fuck YOU mom and dad! I hate this college!
t0bia_s 5y ago
Have you ever heard about The Window? 42 pages PDF of rules for DnD like gameplay. Simple, effective, much more enjoyable... http://www.mimgames.com/window/ http://www.mimgames.com/window/

69 points by podiki 5y ago

This is just "The thing I loved is now ruined because the new thing is not the same as the old thing", except seen through the lens of the author who also looks at the world in terms of class struggles and interacts with the world through anti-capitalist agitation. If you ask 100 old nerds about modern day DnD, you'd probably get about 75 different answers for what ruined it.

bluefirebrand 5y ago

I've been playing DnD since the 90s and it feels like Wizards of the Coast is slowly wringing out all that I enjoy about the game with each edition that is released. It's been a long time since I've had a steady group to play with even though there are more people playing it now than probably ever before. There was a huge marketing push to make the game more attractive to a broader market along with the release of fifth edition. This grew the game enormously because fifth edition is a lot more "streamlined" than previous versions. Fifth edition has a lot lower emphasis on mechanics. Character builds are like selecting a cable package, and at some point you realize that every package is showing the same shows. There is a lot higher emphasis on character backstory building and roleplaying, which has also been hyped massively by the success of Celebrity podcast games such as Critical Role. I find it all so dull. I like the numbers and crunch, theorycrafting crazy builds, I like games that reward a deep knowledge of the ruleset. 5E is none of this And it seems 5e is all most people want to play anymore.

ehutch79 5y ago
You do know there's other systems besides D&D. There's even revised versions of the original systems. Check out stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOPmh7lkQIE&t=370s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOPmh7lkQIE&t=370s Or you can just use your old rulebooks. No one's taking away your old books.
- Aloha 5y ago
  > And it seems 5e is all most people want to play anymore. Emphasis added. RPG's are an inherently social activity.
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    Maybe it's just my group of friends but if someone says "hey I've made a campaign for $system, who's in?" We generally jump at the chance to try somethig new.
    - bluefirebrand 5y ago
      This is a (maybe) feature of longterm gaming groups, not something you will find trying to meet new people to form a new group.
      - deadbunny 5y ago
        While it probably doesnt help for in person playing there are Discord/reddit communities for pretty much any game under the sun that have "Looking For Game" sections. For less Covid times I've had reasonable luck meeting gaming groups on meetup.com or your friendly local gaming shop. You might have some luck there.
warning26 5y ago
Honestly I like 5E better and I suspect I'm not the only one, so it's not necessarily a step backward. Plus, I suppose you could argue that capitalism has succeeded in this case by giving us a competing solution: for those who prefer emphasis on mechanics, there's Pathfinder.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  Pathfinder 2E is also a step in this direction. So yes, while older systems still exist with the style I enjoy, people tend to gravitate towards the new, which is unfortunate for me.
PradeetPatel 5y ago
From a commercial perspective, Reducing the on-boarding friction and an increase in diversity & inclusion effort would lead to attracting a broader market, thus leading to an increase in revenue and market share, which ultimately would (hopefully) generate more value for the stakeholders. I can also understand why it would isolate many traditional DnD players, due to the reduction in features. Do you think that's a decision weighted by the decision makers at Wizards of the Cost and assessed accordingly?
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  > Do you think that's a decision weighted by the decision makers at Wizards of the Cost and assessed accordingly? I'm sure they weighted it, and then money won out I have gone from being core demographic of theirs to not a customer of theirs at all, but for everyone like me they've pushed away, they've probably on-boarded twenty new customers. Right decision for them, sucks for me.
  - mcphage 5y ago
    > I'm sure they weighted it, and then money won out > for everyone like me they've pushed away, they've probably on-boarded twenty new customers That’s not just a money decision, that’s also an audience decision—making something that more people will enjoy, bring more life and more ideas into the hobby, and introduce the fun of TTRPGs to a much bigger group of people. That sounds like a huge artistic win as well as a good financial decision.
    - bluefirebrand 5y ago
      This might be the first time I've ever heard anyone argue that something being engineered for lowest common denominator mass-market appeal makes it more artistic. Respectfully disagree.
      - mcphage 5y ago
        > This might be the first time I've ever heard anyone argue that something being engineered for lowest common denominator mass-market appeal makes it more artistic. I don't think I'd argue for that. But I would argue that making something that appeals to a very narrow, static group of people is probably less artistic than something that appeals to a wider group of people. Or think of it like a band—they release an album, it attracts a group of fans. They can keep making the same thing over and over again and attract the same group of people—and many bands do this. But it's very static. Or they can expand their horizons, explore music more, and experiment. They'll lose some old fans who are looking for the same sound that they've always gotten, but if their experiments are successful, then they'll reach new people who are interested in some of their new ideas. And some of those people might listen to the band's older catalog, and develop an appreciation for music they might not otherwise encounter. And maybe their experiments fail, and they lose their original audience, without attracting a new one. That happens all the time, too. But at least they pushed the boundaries, instead of playing it safe.
dragontamer 5y ago
> There was a huge marketing push to make the game more attractive to a broader market along with the release of fifth edition. This grew the game enormously because fifth edition is a lot more "streamlined" than previous versions. No. 4th edition was the most streamlined, to a fault. Thank god they worked some decent mechanics back into 5E. > I find it all so dull. I like the numbers and crunch, theorycrafting crazy builds, I like games that reward a deep knowledge of the ruleset. 5E is none of this Be glad you missed out on 4E. That being said, most people I know of who also missed the crunch played Pathfinder instead. ---------- 3.5E was clearly too crunchy, and the crunch had some exploits that were made obvious by the internet sharing those exploits. Pathfinder closes a lot of those loopholes and was just superior for the internet age. 3.5E probably was fine pre-Internet. But now that you can just "download a build" with all of the crazy exploits making level 1 overpowered, you can't just have untested crazy builds like that anymore. EDIT: The age of Pathfinder 1.0 is over though. Its been a good run, and Paizo has a huge amount of respect from me for taking care of the venerable 3.5-like system for so long. Maybe my next campaign will be Pathfiner 2.0, but a lot of my players are old-dogs who don't want to learn a new rule system.
- kuang_eleven 5y ago
  D&D 4e remains one of the best, most varied combat systems in tabletop roleplaying. It gave well-balanced, tactical combat with a well fleshed-out item and character progression system. It just didn't have any roleplaying attached to it, and the combat systems sacrificed verisimilitude for game design. It honestly had more in common with Gloomhaven than D&D, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    3.5's combat was highly based around: 1. Prepared casters using the right spells to "solve" encounters -- Glitterdust and Invisibility purge "solves" invisibility. "Fly" solves flying enemies. "Wind Wall" solves enemy arrows. 2. Beatsticks having a good enough build to handle all the cases that #1 can't handle. Ex: maybe the Druid doesn't have "Daylight" to counter the deeper-darkness the enemy Lich cast, but the Beatstick might have scent (Barbarian) or blindfight to handle the case anyway. ------ These spells and situations were so incredibly varied, and it really is fun to play with. Haste beats slow. Dimensional Anchor beats Dimension door. Etc. etc. Pathfinder specifically made fighter-types deal incredible amounts of damage, ensuring that they'll be relevant. (Fighter Archer will almost certainly outdamage Wizard fireballs). ------ 4th edition felt like... everyone was playing roughly the same thing. Wizards spell options were largely just damage, and not so interactive. You had nothing like the "Daylight vs Deeper Darkness", or "Force Cage vs Dimension Door", or "Invisibility purge vs Invisibility Sphere" system before. So there just wasn't any real amount of "division of labor" going on in 4th edition. Everyone was basically a beatstick. 3.5 / Pathfinder had the issue that if two players played the same role (ex: a Fighter + Paladin), it felt redundant, and one of the players will feel left out. ------ Gloomhaven is probably a good description of 4E. But 3.5 / Pathfinder was more like DOTA or Overwatch. Players are in a team, and there's no class that can fulfill all roles. By subdividing the party's jobs between different players, everyone has something to contribute in the dungeon. As long as the DM ensured that the party compositions were decently balanced and with less redundancy. (Even if two fighters were chosen, you can still play different roles with different weapons. Archer vs Beatstick for example).
kozikow 5y ago
Pathfinder is great for optimization nerds like us. If you can't find tabletop group check out pathfinder:kingmaker and pathfinder:wotr computer games. I think I spent equal time on character sheet than actually playing. Some META builds are borderline funny, e.g. top one from https://www.neoseeker.com/pathfinder-wrath-of-the-righteous/builds/Main_Character https://www.neoseeker.com/pathfinder-wrath-of-the-righteous/... : Monk1, Sorcerer4, Loremaster 1, Dragon Disciple 4, Eldritch Knight 10, Lich 10.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  I did switch to Pathfinder for a while but then I moved cities and trying to find a new, Non-5E group has been fruitless. The last game I was in actually was Kingmaker, so I was quite delighted to see it made as a CRPG
mr_toad 5y ago
I find this amusing, because in the 80s “rules lawyer” and “min-maxers” were derogatory terms. Anyone who favoured a build over a story and using your imagination would have been told to join a war gaming club, or to take up chess.
muzani 5y ago
D&D has a bit of a identity crisis. It's a lot of things to a lot of people. For the mainstream, it's a way for a group of friends to group roleplay. You don't really want someone to be left behind because of a bad build. If someone's boyfriend stops playing because it's too hard, eventually the couple drops off, which leads to more people abandoning the game. It's still board game-ish and not a full roleplaying system. Something like FATE is more suited to RP, but you have to actually write characters in depth. There's more emergrnt stories, but that's too much effort for people who just want to kick orcs and roll dice. The character builds metagaming has branched into Pathfinder and roguelikes, where you get a tighter loop of whether your wizard build can kill liches.
GuB-42 5y ago
> I've been playing DnD since the 90s and it feels like Wizards of the Coast is slowly wringing out all that I enjoy about the game with each edition that is released. When someone starts like this, the "problem" is usually the one who says it, not the game. You found yourself a game that you enjoyed, you would have played something else if you didn't like it. Add a good bit of nostalgia to it and any change will make you unhappy. But no change will get you bored, you can't win, that's the curse of growing up. Just move on, you probably won't play D&D all your life and neither will your friends. If you find a group to play the older editions your loved, you will probably be disappointed... Or continue playing, who am I to judge? It is rare but maybe the passion is still there. The funny part is Wizards of the Coast makes that other game that is all about numbers, crunch, knowledge and theorycrafting. In fact, when I was roleplaying, rule lawyering was heavily frowned upon, we didn't care about numbers except as a guideline. To those who focused on numbers and rules, we told them do go play Magic instead, which, btw, is a great game we also played. But we made a strong distinction between tabletop RPGs, based on storytelling, and mechanics-based games.
blueboo 5y ago
At first I thought, OK, they’re letting us focus on storytelling—role playing! I too have a romance for the gnarly mechanics (love 2e) but it’s the collapsing of richness in the worlds and characters that dismays me. Now it’s clear we’re marching steadily towards a Marvel superheroization of the experience. More widely appealing, bite-size, far less varied. Far less interesting. So it goes with mass-market culture. The good news is there are plenty of more interesting artifacts out there…but now we have to do the work of looking for them and sharing them when we found them.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  This is my issue with 5e. Where are all the cool classes? Where are all the neat races I can play as? Where are all the cool things I can do with my characters (prestige classes, etc.) to make them seem unique? Instead, there's just your main classes and a few subclasses, with your standard races. Like, I just wanna play as a kitsune summoner without having to just 'flavor' everything that way. I want it to actually feel unique instead of having to rely on imagination to make it feel that way. That said, thank goodness for places like /r/unearthedarcana...And Pathfinder 2e, though I've been struggling to find a group.

rendall 5y ago

I wanted to read an article about how capitalism kills art, but it took 7 paragraphs for the article to kind of sort of start talking about how capitalism killed D&D, and then it wasn't about capitalism, but about mismanagement.

toxik 5y ago
It’s at times like these that I miss /.’s voting system. Would’ve been nice to see a -1 Clickbait
- muzani 5y ago
  Normally I flag clickbait, because even the title goes against HN guidelines. But this is one of those that is just useful enough.
bussierem 5y ago
Yeah I kept waiting for the article to get to the point, and then it ended.
this_user 5y ago
If capitalism "kills" art, then we should probably analyse at what point in history art was actually flourishing. The result will be that we need to restore feudalism.
- xupybd 5y ago
  I think the author is really complaining that opening something up for the masses kills art. It like pop music or McDonald's, they appeal to huge audiences but are not the peak of artistic expression.
  - mikkergp 5y ago
    It's a weird criticism that shallow things existing somehow negate or overshadow the increase in "deep/amateur/artistic" things that follow. Like McDonald's negates all of the food carts or Taylor swift negates how much easier it is for amateur musicians to get their music to you in the modern internet age. It's only an obsession with Nostalgia that could make you think that experimentation and expression in role playing games is somehow worse now than it was in the 80's, just because the biggest game is now owned by Hasbro.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Take a look at DrivethruRPG and tell me how capitalism killed art...

blockwriter 5y ago

I spent my adolescence playing games similar to Dungeons and Dragons. One common sentiment that seems to pervade amongst its older devotees is an inability to see the game for what it was, which is to say largely a trifle and diversion for adolescents. There are those that think the game has outlived its origination because these companies make big pushes to diversify an audience that has always been compromised of uncouth suburban teenage dudes. There are those that place an undue stake in the game’s proliferation because it validates their difficult youths. At the end of the day, it is not worth analyzing too deeply. Thinking of games like this as art is a categorical error in my opinion.

mcphage 5y ago
> Thinking of games like this as art is a categorical error in my opinion. Why is that?
- blockwriter 5y ago
  In part because what is engaging about it is not vested wholly in its aesthetic value. This, of course, does not necessarily preclude a work from being considered art. I think my refusal to consider games of this nature, or indeed games of any sort, as art comes down to the medium. Literature extends literature in a transcendent manner, putting like into a like medium that is wholly expressive and formally complete, whereas games of fantasy enrobe themselves in the trappings of purely aesthetic mediums; but the medium of games leaves room for gaps in its progenitor’s sublimer forms. This is only one man’s opinion though, I concede.
  - Octopodes 5y ago
    I tip my fedora to you, good sir.

marcusverus 5y ago

> But Dungeons & Dragons is also a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends and deforms any artistic endeavors to its own ends, and how, whatever the specific details of the situation or the intentions of the people involved, the demand for profit will always subsume the desire for aesthetic value or artistic integrity. What a wonderful instance of missing the forest for... a tree. I was avid tabletop gamer around five years ago, and the only complaint I heard from the real aficionados was that truly great games were coming out faster than they could play them. In other words, the problem was that there was too much high quality art for someone to get to experience it all (and when you want to play the good ones many times...BAH!). Gone are the days when a game like Twilight Struggle could dominate the BGG 'top game' charts for nearly a decade. So the claim that "Capitalism Kills Art" might make more sense if we weren't living through an undisputed golden age in tabletop gaming--the very artform from which the author drew this case study!

deadbunny 5y ago
Indeed. It sounds like the author just wanted to complain about their hobby becoming mainstream. I play 5e on and off and the community around it seems stronger than ever. The fact that something like Critical Role can exist seems to speak very strongly against their points on its own. Sure CR has been commercialised but it's still just as creative as their first streams where they had zero expectations we just get a couple more ads and a much more polished presentation.

rektide 5y ago

someone roast White Wolf (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, exalted, more) next please. gawd there's such good podcasts for this multiverse though. like, not a lot of people, but hearing the couple real smart know it alls chat up these multiverses is so so so good.

com2kid 5y ago
Easy peasy. Amazing settings, terrible rules, math never really works out. The nWoD game system is at the same time overly simple and horribly complex. Doing 80% of things in the game, super simple, story telling system, rule of cool, narrative driven combat! Then entire sections of rules for grappling and brawling and gaining advantage and positions and suddenly you realize someone make a D10 version of submission wrestling. Mages, fun, horribly broken. The back story about Atlantis, awful. Everything else? Pretty darn cool. The supplement books throw out equipment that just up and breaks the game. Then from what I read they mistreated workers, kept managing to fail to move their successful IP into other forms of media, and ended up going bust. Honestly their games are complex as hell to run. 2 years of trying and I never was able to keep everything in mind that I needed to in order to "do it right." And to repeat, nWoD Mage is so broken. So very very broken. But fun in an explody sort of way.
- rektide 5y ago
  the roasts arent wrong but they're also not all that meta. they're largely specific flaws, not cultural. the Atlantis thing was so weird & so much anti the point of mage to me. humans just being awesome (if they dared to, could awake themelves) was way way better.
  - com2kid 5y ago
    OK how about this: The primary fan base for World of Darkness was aging goths. nWoD was doomed from the get go because the existing, shrinking, fan base was going to be pissed at any changes at all, but the material was still too "90s" to draw in new fans. Then White Wolf tried to just re-release old Vampire stuff, but who cares at that point, since the majority of those fans, while very vocal, had aged out of playing a game that requires obscene amounts of preparation. And then let's not even mention the obscene WTF investment it takes to get started playing. You get to read a base book, and you have to read it as a novel because White Wolf was incapable of arranging a book for use as reference, and then you get to read at least 1 book for the actual system you want to use. And then you have to find players willing to do the same. Each book is full of dense prose in a hard to read font. When I started playing nWoD I was in my 20s. Soon as I hit 30 those fonts became WTF hard to read. While amazing to sit down and read through as just a book, the (very well made) books are useless when it comes to actually running a game. I had to write up my own condensed guide to the rules. White Wolf was trying to do a thousand things with a tiny team. They kept publishing new splats (Mummy!) while their existing splats had giant holes in them. And finally, EVERYTHING WAS A SHADE OF GREY. There wasn't ever a big bad, or as a ST the big bad was so amorphous I had shit to work with and I was expected to work my arse off fleshing out the thin plot threads the source books gave me. At least old WOD had fucking bad guys. "The technocracy goons are going to kill you!" vs nWoDs "Strange secret organization may or may not be doing bad things, or maybe they are the good guys, who knows, fuck it, you figure it out yourself". Like, sometimes I don't want to construct complicated worlds of political intrigue. Sometimes I just want the players to have something they can go blow up and feel good about it. I mean sure because it is WoD I'm going to make them feel a little bit bad about it, but holy shit grimdark shades of grey gets old after while.

isoskeles 5y ago

> jacobinmag.com Into the trash it goes. Do they somehow believe D&D was invented by central planners in USSR?

davidw 5y ago
"I stubbed my toe this morning. Here's why it's capitalism's fault". I mean there's a lot of room to improve and tweak our economy and society, and I'm no free-market absolutist. Far from it. But takes like the one in the title are a big eye-roll.

colinrand 5y ago

I played sometimes as DnD as a kid growing up, and remember it was pretty straight forward to plunk down with friends in and afternoon and just have fun with it. I tried playing with my kids last year during lockdown and OMG...it took me 2 hrs to read the basic rules, 4 hrs to set up the characters, and then another 2 hrs to find where my kids had run of to because they got so bored with it!!! In the end, one loves it but it takes so much effort to set up and play that it can be overwhelming.

com2kid 5y ago
You already knew how to play 2nd ed, so it seamed simple to you. Any RPG system, if the DM knows the rules really well, is easy to sit down at a table and play. Back when I DM'd a lot I'd run one shots for people all the time, so long as I knew the rules (or subset of rules for what we'd be encountering that session), everything was smooth.
ygjb 5y ago
I think you are probably misremembering the ease of play with older editions. I have been playing D&D in various iterations, and have older books going back to the original AD&D 1st edition and BECMI box sets and 5e was far easier to pick up and play, and is way more accessible to young children than previous editions.
lupire 5y ago
This you forgetting how much free time and few distractions kids had before Internet.

polemic 5y ago

It's discombobulating to read an article about DND being "killed" while we're in the middle of what is surely its golden age. There are people making real money running games, creating maps and assets and 3rd party software, there's new an interesting _optional_ official content published regularly, and a vibrant homebrew community. To pick a particular point: > Users pay nearly as much for digital versions of the core game books as they do hard copies This comes up a lot, but as someone who's bought both physical copies _and_ the DNDB versions, _you're not paying for the content_. You're paying to have to tightly integrated into the live character sheets, with all of the complexity of the vast rulesets implemented in code in multiple apps. Rulesets that I can then sync into (3rd party) tools like FoundryVTT via (3rd party) tools that talk to the APIs. It's kinda magical and certainly _this_ community could understand why that is a significant task. And content sharing means that not everyone actually has to buy this stuff. A group can pool, or a tooled up DM can run games using whatever content (including the in-app build your own homebrew content) they have to hand. Its a pretty good balance. Maybe Hasbro will run it into the ground, that would hardly be surprising, but it seems like we're a long way from that happening. In the meantime there are plenty of other TTRPGS out there if you don't like this one – DND is a gateway into TTRPGs, not a monopoly.

ygjb 5y ago
As a D&D player i don't mind paying for physical media, and I don't mind paying for electronic versions of the media that are integrated with D&D Beyond or Roll20. What I find galling is that I have to buy the same content on different platforms instead of buying my digital content from WotC, and logging into Roll20 or D&D Beyond with a WotC account with my entitlements. Both D&D Beyond and Roll20 can negotiate with WotC on how payments would be split up, or whatever. The current model is hostile to me as a consumer, and I don't like it :P
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Check out FoundryVTT and the d&dbeyond importers module[1]. It's not a solution to the entire problem but if you own the content on DNDB you can import it into Foundry. Also Foundry is much better than roll20 IMO as a long time player and GM on both. 1. https://foundryvtt.com/packages/ddb-importer/ https://foundryvtt.com/packages/ddb-importer/

amelius 5y ago

If you want to see how capitalism kills art, just watch one of the latest Marvel movies.

xupybd 5y ago
Wasn't Marvel always a money making machine?
krapp 5y ago
In many ways the Marvel movies are high art compared to the comics. And that includes comparing them as visual media. They improved upon and streamlined many elements from the comics. For instance, Thanos' motivations in the movies created an actual cultural conversation, whereas in the comics he just wanted to impress the female personification of Death. I'll take "dialogue on Malthusian catastrophe theory" versus "purple space incel wants to get his dick wet" any day of the week.

karaterobot 5y ago

> He wasn’t initially interested in selling the slick, glossy product line we see in bookstores today; he wanted to sell a set of rules, essentially guidelines for play that could easily be adopted and adapted to whatever scenario other hobbyists cared to cook up. Goodness, "slick" and "glossy"! I curse capitalism and its running dog, nice paper. Much purer to only sell xeroxed copies at GenCon. I don't know if the author has read the rules for Chainmail, but they were clearly not designed to be universal. Gygax sold a very specific system. D&D and AD&D were the same. Much later, the OGL provided a way to sell derivative products based on that system, but in any case the key word is sell. 5th edition D&D is no less adaptable than 1st edition — if that's your metric — and probably more so.

sfRattan 5y ago

Others in the thread have already mentioned how truly ridiculous and histrionic this Jacobin article is, so I'll skip to the plainly false part of their conclusion: that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&D. That's probably largely true of 5th Edition. It's a focus group led, neutered, milquetoast version of Dungeons & Dragons. All of it's official product releases are whittled down to the least possibly offensive common denominator. And the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever. But the auteur creators aren't gone and creativity hasn't been killed. From Patrick Stuart's (the writer, not the actor) projects like Silent Titans[1] to the bizarrely delightful Mörk Borg[2] to Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands[3] to the space horror game Mothership[4]... There's an insane amount of creativity in the design of tabletop roleplaying games today, and I haven't even moved that far from D&D-alike gameplay. What's more, these auteurs are making good money without optimizing for maximum money as if they were MBAs with a drug habit to support or SV startups with "angel" investors demanding an insane return. Look up the Kickstarters for any of those projects in the paragraph above. Even for a Jacobin piece, this article is extremely myopic, poorly researched, and comically fatalistic. [1] https://shop.swordfishislands.com/silent-titans/ https://shop.swordfishislands.com/silent-titans/ [2] https://morkborg.com https://morkborg.com [3] https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/the-ultra-violet-grasslands-and-the-black-city https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/the-ultra-violet-gra... [4] https://www.mothershiprpg.com/ https://www.mothershiprpg.com/

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
While I have my issues with Jacobin, the article isn't about "RPG culture", it's specifically about Dungeons & Dragons. You say their conclusion "that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&D" is false, yet then go on to say > That's probably largely true of 5th Edition […] and the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever. …which is absolutely supporting their argument, isn't it? "Hasbro's steadily killing the artistic and creative part of D&D" and "there is an insane amount of creativity in RPG culture" aren't mutually exclusive! One doesn't disprove the other. They can both be true.

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scruffyherder 5y ago

D&D always has been a commercial product of the west. What did they play in the Soviet Union that was killed by becoming a sold product?

nitwit005 5y ago

D&D has plenty of competition, quite a bit of which is free. They do have some IP, but it's not like they own the idea of adventuring or magic. If you want an example of capitalism killing art, the mention of Marvel and DC toward the end might work better. They ended up a duopoly, with control over the industry's IP.

lupire 5y ago

previous rebuttal of the poor argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29117738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29117738

deleted 5y ago

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pixodaros 5y ago

I think the author needed to DuckDuckGo "old-school renaissance" and "indy RPG." There is a vast cottage industry of hobbyists with their own RPGs, some based on the D&D engine (the Open Game License is definitely not "just another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro") and others on better-designed engines. Or you can buy $100 worth of books from any edition and do what you like with them. If you don't like the Paizo and Hasbro takes on D&D, there are more published alternatives than you could ever play.

garbagecoder 5y ago

As opposed to socialist art, which is so pure. Jacobin: fuck YOU mom and dad! I hate this college!

t0bia_s 5y ago

Have you ever heard about The Window? 42 pages PDF of rules for DnD like gameplay. Simple, effective, much more enjoyable... http://www.mimgames.com/window/ http://www.mimgames.com/window/