A Love Letter to Dungeons and Dragons
I love Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, and I have a debt to it I can scarcely repay. I also really hate 5th Edition and all the trouble it put me and my fellow fledgling DM's through.
I love table top role playing games as a whole, D&D 5E invited me to the party then tried to charge me for being at the party so I left the party and indie TTRPG’s invited me over to their place and said “hey buddy watch this” and did a backflip. I've never seen D&D do a backflip so here I stay, steeping myself in the fresh game design by people making cool shit and sharing it with the world, often for way too little in return.
So this is a very roundabout and personal way of saying thank you, to this tradition of iteration calling anyone to contribute to a wealth of games and adventures that seems inexhaustible.
Hasbro Has my Money and I Can't Get it Back
I grew up a socially deficient and depressed teenager, too afraid to engage with the wider social world but with just enough courage to participate in structured magic the gathering games at the lunch table. The gateway drug to gaming, the ultimate child-legal gambling machine and the game that led me to the place where all mtg nerds go to shuffle cards: Friday Night Magic. It was in between getting my starter black reanimator deck handed to me that I saw it, a glorious purple tome with the powerful-looking undead lich on the cover, The Dungeon Masters Guide to 5th Edition. The tome's cover art did it’s job catching my eye and before I knew it I was walking out of the shop with that book in my backpack, burning it’s brand into my mind.
I’m going to take a brief aside to say that the 5th edition DMG is one of the worst core books of any TTRPG I have ever read. You'd think the first chapter would be about running the game, rather you begin reading about starting a pantheon... A hell of a lot of pressure for a newbie starting out. And the actually helpful DMing instruction are in the back of the book!
I had heard of D&D, but could never understand what on earth it was or why it was such an mysterious hobby despite it’s cultural footprint. So I was determined to find out what on earth dungeons have to do with dragons and dug into the 5E DMG.
When I started reading the guide for the first time I thought “Where are all the rules, I thought this was a game but this reads like a poorly organized build your own fantasy setting book”.
Even so if I have to take something away from this top down approach it's that it leaves a lot open for the mind to explore while flipping through.
I was, for reasons aforementioned, extremely confused by the lack of play rules so I took to asking the wizard Google for guidance. Upon realizing that this was in fact one part of three books I of course did the only logical thing and immediately ordered the other two from the courier of the Amazon guild and eagerly awaited their arrival.
I devoured every inch of the monster manual and made characters while fantasizing about magic swords and debating with myself what the best 9th level spell was. The world these books asked me to imagine was already fantastical and rife with potential, it felt like anything could happen within the bounds of these rules and my imagination.
Spellbound by the vision these rulebooks cast on me, the one thing left for me to do: invite 4 friends to hang out every week. Being the one thing I had been avoiding doing for the past decade and a half of my life, and to group hallucinate with paper, pencils and odd dice no less! It was lunacy. But I was determined to see the vision that these well-illustrated rulebooks had instilled me with through.
I invited my closest friends, I helped them make characters and we had the most epic gaming of our lives. Fucking around in a tavern before burning it to the ground for 3 and a half hours because I didn't know how to run the game...
Built on the Backs of Many
So thanks D&D, for encouraging me to practice my social skills and for telling me that I could write and design games too.
But really I have to give that credit to the OSR and DIY TTRPG community online, as unfortunately Wizards of the Coast is indeed run like a money machine by its corporate overlords.
Seeing all of the indie writers and designers make truly beautiful and accessible games is truly inspiring.
The Open Games License scandal demystified D&D for me, quickly identified where WotC's business model was changing and caused me to look upon the hobby for what it is: a community built upon by thousands of players & DMs turned thankless writers and designers. So thank you Hasbro for making me realize that D&D is not the only game out there and that in fact it’s not even the best TTRPG out there, just the best marketed.
To this hobby that made me want to give back what it gave to me all of these years and what it will give in the future. Keep on playing, keep on creating, be kind to one another and never forget where you came from.
