5 ms·

> It is mildly snarky about D&D. Truly one of the most obnoxious aspects of online RPG discourse.

by Karrot_Kream 3y ago

protocolture 3y ago
DND existing, and being referred to as a default system for everything? Yes its very obnoxious.
dallas 3y ago
Indeed. "Why won't more people play the games I like after I've been snarky about the games most people enjoy?"
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Do people most enjoy D&D these days? On one hand, it’s iconic enough to be the Kleenex or Xerox of tabletop fantasy. On the other, recent behavior from Wizards of the Coast have put the brand in an ambiguous space, receiving ample competition from the likes of Pathfinder. Though that’s somewhat inside baseball consumer-corporate drama.
  - smegger001 3y ago
    Is it inside base ball drama when it make headlines in newspapers of note?
  - dallas 3y ago
    To be honest I don't like WOTC-era D&D all that much and prefer early TSR-era stuff and modern OSR games. However, I am surrounded by young people in my circles of real world friends who continue to play and post/YouTube about 5th edition - the game they got started in.
    - ultimafan 3y ago
      You're not alone, and really the one thing I will give WOTC credit for amidst all the bad they've done is bringing back the 1e/2e books as POD reprints, it felt great to buy brand new hardcover copies so I could shelve my original ones, and not have to worry so much about wearing them out at the table.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    Yes, D&D is very popular and most people who play it enjoy it (or they would stop). I would be willing to bet that most players would not be able to name the publisher if asked and have probably never heard of Wizards of the Coast.
  - Marazan 3y ago
    It is massive. It is the Hydrogen of RPG elements. If I show you a random group of gamers playing an RPG and you guess they are playing DnD then you'll be correct more often than not.
  - 0xEF 3y ago
    As a long-time play-by-poster of D&D, yes, it still dominates the TTRPG crowd. I branch out to other game systems myself, but always have at least two or three D&D games going. The game itself is not hated, just the company, and there are enough free resources available online that anyone can play the game without giving WotC a single dime. As far as we're concerned, the game belongs to the players and WotC are nothing more than Interlopers. Check out https://5e.tools/ https://5e.tools/ for an example of a good free, self-hostable resource.
cthalupa 3y ago
Having been engaged in the online TTRPG/D&D discourse for many years - the general zeitgeist didn't start out as being snarky about D&D, even when they were proponents of alternative systems. But the explosive success of 5E has brought that out, and it's not entirely the fault of the people being snarky about D&D. Some of it is 'eternal september' quasi-nostalgia, some of it is people pushing about against something being popular, but a lot of it is that D&D discussion has invaded all sorts of other places that were either specifically about alternative systems, or were intended to be balanced in what was being discussed. The relative newness for a lot people in the overall hobby, along with Wizards very much pushing it as a lifestyle/identity choice has also resulted in a lot of people discussing D&D on the internet being some mixture of hostile/dismissive/etc. of any discourse that isn't about 5E. I've lost count of the number of conversations I've witnessed where people are talking about something they dislike in D&D or asking how to homebrew a system on top of it to do a certain thing, and someone will politely say "Hey this is pretty core to how 5E functions and is part of the primary gameplay loop, you might want to look into X system because it handles Y thing in Z way, which seems to align with your needs here," and they get a rather rude dismissal. With the release of the One D&D rules, I saw lots of conversations where criticism of them, even from 5E players, were taken as some sort of personal attack on a core values of people who were fans. There are plenty of assholes in the OSR, storygaming, etc. scenes. Toxicity sure isn't limited to the 5E players. But the sheer number of them, coupled with the previously mentioned Wizards marketing strategy, has resulted in a lot of the rest of the TTRPG community stuck with their hackles raised and feeling like they always have to be on the defensive. And that leads to the snark.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  I haven't been engaged in the discourse as long but I figured as such. That doesn't excuse the current state of the discourse as good however. There are lots of media fandoms out there where certain parts of the fandom get much, much more fan interest than others. There have always been popular blockbuster movies, books are dominated by bestsellers, anime and manga have always been dominated by shounen works which have fandoms much larger than all the other anime and manga debuting in the year combined. Those fandoms don't seem to have their hackles raised permanently when discussing the popular properties. Instead fans of the broader medium recognize that they are a fan of the medium as a whole instead of the most popular properties. The TTRPG space seems uniquely bitter. Even aside from the silly 5E spat, the loudest TTRPG voices tend to strongly prefer story games and the old Forge forum had a legacy of using hyperbolic language to criticize adjacent styles that were mostly a matter of taste. In my experience, TTRPG discourse is quite bad and mostly involves talking up your preferences and criticizing others'. I enjoy the hobby but really hate the childish, camp-obsessed discourse. I tend to stick to the spaces of systems I like because there's less us-vs-them going on. The anti-D&D snark at the NASA adventure is a great example. I can think of 4 non-D&D-lineage (so non-OSR) systems that the adventure is trivial to convert to. But instead of producing translations of the adventure or thanking the NASA folks for releasing a free adventure, the TTRPG world seems to be yet again trying to find the smallest thing they can to get angry over.

> It is mildly snarky about D&D. Truly one of the most obnoxious aspects of online RPG discourse.

protocolture 3y ago

DND existing, and being referred to as a default system for everything? Yes its very obnoxious.

dallas 3y ago

Indeed. "Why won't more people play the games I like after I've been snarky about the games most people enjoy?"

Apocryphon 3y ago
Do people most enjoy D&D these days? On one hand, it’s iconic enough to be the Kleenex or Xerox of tabletop fantasy. On the other, recent behavior from Wizards of the Coast have put the brand in an ambiguous space, receiving ample competition from the likes of Pathfinder. Though that’s somewhat inside baseball consumer-corporate drama.
- smegger001 3y ago
  Is it inside base ball drama when it make headlines in newspapers of note?
- dallas 3y ago
  To be honest I don't like WOTC-era D&D all that much and prefer early TSR-era stuff and modern OSR games. However, I am surrounded by young people in my circles of real world friends who continue to play and post/YouTube about 5th edition - the game they got started in.
  - ultimafan 3y ago
    You're not alone, and really the one thing I will give WOTC credit for amidst all the bad they've done is bringing back the 1e/2e books as POD reprints, it felt great to buy brand new hardcover copies so I could shelve my original ones, and not have to worry so much about wearing them out at the table.
- burkaman 3y ago
  Yes, D&D is very popular and most people who play it enjoy it (or they would stop). I would be willing to bet that most players would not be able to name the publisher if asked and have probably never heard of Wizards of the Coast.
- Marazan 3y ago
  It is massive. It is the Hydrogen of RPG elements. If I show you a random group of gamers playing an RPG and you guess they are playing DnD then you'll be correct more often than not.
- 0xEF 3y ago
  As a long-time play-by-poster of D&D, yes, it still dominates the TTRPG crowd. I branch out to other game systems myself, but always have at least two or three D&D games going. The game itself is not hated, just the company, and there are enough free resources available online that anyone can play the game without giving WotC a single dime. As far as we're concerned, the game belongs to the players and WotC are nothing more than Interlopers. Check out https://5e.tools/ https://5e.tools/ for an example of a good free, self-hostable resource.

cthalupa 3y ago

Having been engaged in the online TTRPG/D&D discourse for many years - the general zeitgeist didn't start out as being snarky about D&D, even when they were proponents of alternative systems. But the explosive success of 5E has brought that out, and it's not entirely the fault of the people being snarky about D&D. Some of it is 'eternal september' quasi-nostalgia, some of it is people pushing about against something being popular, but a lot of it is that D&D discussion has invaded all sorts of other places that were either specifically about alternative systems, or were intended to be balanced in what was being discussed. The relative newness for a lot people in the overall hobby, along with Wizards very much pushing it as a lifestyle/identity choice has also resulted in a lot of people discussing D&D on the internet being some mixture of hostile/dismissive/etc. of any discourse that isn't about 5E. I've lost count of the number of conversations I've witnessed where people are talking about something they dislike in D&D or asking how to homebrew a system on top of it to do a certain thing, and someone will politely say "Hey this is pretty core to how 5E functions and is part of the primary gameplay loop, you might want to look into X system because it handles Y thing in Z way, which seems to align with your needs here," and they get a rather rude dismissal. With the release of the One D&D rules, I saw lots of conversations where criticism of them, even from 5E players, were taken as some sort of personal attack on a core values of people who were fans. There are plenty of assholes in the OSR, storygaming, etc. scenes. Toxicity sure isn't limited to the 5E players. But the sheer number of them, coupled with the previously mentioned Wizards marketing strategy, has resulted in a lot of the rest of the TTRPG community stuck with their hackles raised and feeling like they always have to be on the defensive. And that leads to the snark.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago
I haven't been engaged in the discourse as long but I figured as such. That doesn't excuse the current state of the discourse as good however. There are lots of media fandoms out there where certain parts of the fandom get much, much more fan interest than others. There have always been popular blockbuster movies, books are dominated by bestsellers, anime and manga have always been dominated by shounen works which have fandoms much larger than all the other anime and manga debuting in the year combined. Those fandoms don't seem to have their hackles raised permanently when discussing the popular properties. Instead fans of the broader medium recognize that they are a fan of the medium as a whole instead of the most popular properties. The TTRPG space seems uniquely bitter. Even aside from the silly 5E spat, the loudest TTRPG voices tend to strongly prefer story games and the old Forge forum had a legacy of using hyperbolic language to criticize adjacent styles that were mostly a matter of taste. In my experience, TTRPG discourse is quite bad and mostly involves talking up your preferences and criticizing others'. I enjoy the hobby but really hate the childish, camp-obsessed discourse. I tend to stick to the spaces of systems I like because there's less us-vs-them going on. The anti-D&D snark at the NASA adventure is a great example. I can think of 4 non-D&D-lineage (so non-OSR) systems that the adventure is trivial to convert to. But instead of producing translations of the adventure or thanking the NASA folks for releasing a free adventure, the TTRPG world seems to be yet again trying to find the smallest thing they can to get angry over.