As a Forever DM, I will fully allow and support the decision of anyone who wants to come to my table and play a wheelchair character. That said, you are treated as any other player at that same table. The DM has enough to do without modifying multiple aspects of the campaign environment for a single PC. If you've chosen to play such a character, you can live with the consequences of that choice. Because the castle ruins definitely has stairs, rubble to climb over, and collapsed sections of the upper hallways, and that isn't about to change.
There you go. Nobody needs actual rules to allow a certain kind of character, but some things still break the immersion too much. That's why the picture I put in this post stood out to me as I was flipping through the book. It was so incongruous with a fantasy setting. It's like it was placed there so prominently to elicit a reaction.
Now, I tried to write a reasoned post here instead of reacting emotionally, and it's up to the reader to determine if I succeeded, but this is anti-verisimilitude. If the game took place in a world where limbs couldn't be regrown or any other sort of physical issue healed, it'd make perfect sense. In other words, to put a finer point on it, the issue isn't people in wheelchairs, the issue is that it's people in wheelchairs in D&D, which makes little to no sense.
I get you, but as a practical matter I just don't allow character concepts that are going to be massively disruptive, especially when they're obviously designed to give the player permanent center-of-attention mode.
Sorry, but no, your character cannot be in a wheelchair. That's just not going to work. You'll never get out of the tavern. The wizard cannot spend all of his spell slots making your character work for you. You are not the special, and you don't get to disrupt everyone else's enjoyment of the game.
Save the concept for a cyberpunk genre game, where you can be a hacker, or a rigger, or a fixer, or just a solo with cyberlegs that he resents and refuses to wear when he's not on the job. There, it would be very cool. But no, not in the fantasy game. Not gonna happen.
See I'm in exactly the same boat. I make it very clear in session zero that I: A) expect people to work as a team but no one is the main character, and B) if you get left behind, you get left behind. I'm not interested in running two games at once.
If the offending character cannot make it out of the tavern... That's where their adventure ends. Hope they had fun, but we're going to the haunted crypt 🤷🏻♂️
A part of the adventure could be getting a crippled or otherwise incapacitated/handicapped character OUT of a dungeon. That's what Tenser's Floating Disk is for, after all.
I'm presently playtesting a homebrew fantasy system where injuries like that are tracked, not terribly easy to magic away, and have significant gameplay impacts. Not sure if it's going to work or not, but that's the kind of scenario I hope it will create.
Yeah, many systems do. The problem in my estimation is that there are so many ready-made solutions for any given status effect that they blur together into simple mechanical numbers that go up and down from round to round. Pathfinder has the same problem. This round I am concussed and thus have 1 fewer AP. Next round it wears off but now I'm entangled and my movement is reduced to zero.
At worst I may have a disease, which applies a status condition for an extended period *in theory*, but in practice is removed by a skill check, potion, or spell and rarely lasts more than 24 hours.
The thing that matters in these games is resources: hit points, spell slots, actions, encumbrance, and those all come down to economic calculations: does the cleric have enough spell slots to offset the expected hit point losses in the next encounter; do the martials sustain sufficient DPR to keep combat down to 4 or fewer rounds, which reduces resource expenditures; is it better to carry 6 weak potions or one strong one; etc. etc.
So... the theory is, eliminate most of these resource gauges and see what a game looks like when getting hurt *matters*, isn't easy to reverse, and avoiding getting hurt is the object of your defensive strategy rather than offsetting HP loss with HP gain. But you'll get hurt anyway, so your plan Bs have to revolve around dealing with injury and knowing when to call it quits. Leaving the dungeon, and surviving the attempt, is an interesting adventure on its own.
But like I said, no idea if this is going to work. It's a radical departure from most TTRPGs (or video games).
I'm going to cast a bet before reading: it's for the ever elusive Modern Audience.
Which is to say, it's for a mythical subset of the population that doesn't actually exist, and is the natural result of stuffing a company full of people living squarely within their Seattle-based echo chamber, then placing former tech execs who know nothing of hobby spaces in charge of a hobby company.
I will absolutely be reading this, given that I've played D&D for many, many years and am always curious to gather the thoughts of others who are watching its rapid decline in real time, but this is the answer I predict will be reached here. Now to see if that bet pans out!
The D&D audience has, unfortunately, turned hard-left, and this is just playing to the player base that spends all the money. The days of kids playing D&D and having heroic adventures is over in favor of strange adults with lots of money wanting to play a Harry Potter lite.
My son just turned 12. He's had a gaming group with some of his school friends for about two years, and he started a D&D club at his new school last year which was so popular that (a) the teacher who supervised the club ended up playing, and is playing again this year, and (b) the club has more kids this year than last year. So normal kids are still playing D&D. He's in that sweet spot I was when I discovered RPGs. In fact, he found the old D&D books I hand and wanted to play when he was about seven or eight, which is a little after he'd seen my old HeroQuest game and wanted to play that. So there is still hope.
There's some truth to this, but it's an incomplete truth. WotC/Hasbro do see this particular base as spenders, and as such they've pursued them. However, it's also true that the company has been consistently losing money on both the D&D and MtG brands since the big surge that happened during the lockdowns, and not just a little bit of money either. New 5e supplements have largely languished on shelves, because players simply aren't interested in them.
This new left-leaning crowd are, ultimately, invaders who've stepped in more with a purpose to sling mud and shit and trash everywhere than to actually buy the products. We see this reflected in the patterns of purchase; the shrill harpies who cry the loudest don't buy, and a large portion of the most dedicated of older players don't buy anymore, either, particularly since many of them are aware of the independent scene and the OSR.
That leaves mostly the fair weather fans for WotC, the "normies" if you will. The people who got interested because of Critical Role, Adventure Zone, Legends of Avantris, and other live play shows. (Or those who played Baldur's Gate 3.) That audience is decidedly temporary. Some of them will stay for the long haul, but most are going to move on in time, either due to boredom or the simple shifts in priorities life likes to foist on us.
You're right that the days of kids playing the game to have heroic adventures is largely over, but it's not because the greater audience turned hard left. Most of them haven't, most sit somewhere in the middle. But those in WotC's local echo chamber have, and as we're all likely aware of by now, perception is greater than reality.
I disagree that the days of kids having heroic adventures is over, but you're right that kids aren't a lucrative enough audience.
The thing about RPGs is that, if a system is good, YOU DON'T NEED continual expansions and additional sourcebooks. And that, in our capitalist society (not a Marxist, but call it for what it is) is business death, because if you make something people only need to buy once, then you'll soon be out of business.
I don't think this is entirely top-down. I think there's a lot of this that is grassroots. And it's not just WOTC. Younger people that play RPGs or have nerd hobbies are much harder left than they used to be, compared to the old crew that was more libertarian and technophile and mostly didn't care about social issues. The hard-leftists are the ones that fill the conventions and so on.
Even if we're talking about sections of the tabletop space that are inherently more testosterone-fueled than D&D, there's, by default, this off-putting hard-left vibe now. That's the part I don't get. I get why that there are people in this world, many of them female, who want to play "fantasy Seattle coffee shop simulator", and those people naturally choose D&D. Because it's the default choice, and the Ren Faire vibe suits them better than a grittier setting would.
But for example this guy -- https://www.mygurps.com/pmwiki.php?n=Main.SavageRifts -- has some good house rules etc. for Savage Rifts. A lot of good material actually. And yet there are those banners on the side of his fan page: Trans Lives Matter, Queer Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter. It's hard for me to grok a guy who likes to arrange tactical battles between super-soldiers and mechs and cyborg-demons but also thinks that those three banners are the most important messages in the world.
There are several paths forward that should be undertaken simultaneously:
1) Refuse to leave the current space to the weirdos and entryists.
2) Discuss, play, and promote older editions of D&D played the proper way, as well as other older games, as promoted by Jeffro Johnson and those in his circles.
3) Maintain the clubhouse aspect, as discussed in excellent detail by Bradford C. Walker.
4) Encourage the playing of new games made by people who know what they're doing, like Alexander Macris's ACKS system.
I think the ACKS recommendation is great. I discovered it randomly when I was looking to make a 5e campaign grittier and more grounded about 10 years ago, and as someone with a real interest in economic history who disagreed with those that said RPGs and basic economic logic can't mix.
I bought the main PDF and incorporated the ACKS rules to manage a lot of the world, and it worked great. I didn't tell people where all my new rules came from until the end. Blending it with D&D is probably an easier sell for most groups than trying to get people to play ACKS exclusively. I'd never heard anyone else mention ACKS until now.
The problem with recommending old games is I do think that RPG rules design has objectively gotten better, even as the worldbuilding has gotten worse. If you have any familiarity with Rifts, then Savage Rifts is the perfect model of this. The old Palladium rules might have been the worst ever conceived, we had a 15-page document of house rules just to make the game playable, and even then our rules weren't great. But the world-building made up for it.
Now in Savage Rifts, the rules actually work! They're actually fun! The original promise of the game is finally realized. But you also have little things like the archetypal Crazy (berserk ninja super-soldier), instead of being a guy who looks like a berserk ninja super-soldier, is now skinny blond girl in pigtails. At least there aren't any drawings of cyborgs in wheelchairs, yet.
I'm amazed WotC is losing money. I figured D&D was a money printing machine because of the huge back-catalog. I guess it explains the subscription model they are persuing that is completely insane.
Part of the problem is the business model itself. TTRPGs aren't something which is going to bring in a lot of money naturally. Realistically, you only need one person to own the source books, and that's typically going to be the DM. On average, for D&D that means you're likely only selling 2-3 books for every 4-5 players, possibly less if you've got experienced people running the game who are practiced in homebrewing and hacking their own material. MtG has always been the bigger moneymaker because of its nature as a TCG.
That's not the only reason the slice-n-dice-n-resell-in-bits digital sales strategy was taken up, though. The current execs are a big part of that equation, since most of them are former tech execs, with Hasbro CEO herself previously being part of Microsoft's board of directors before she moved into Hasbro. In short, it's being run by people who have no understanding of the hobby market or hobby customers, so it's only natural that their decisions are drawing ire and starting to backfire on them in big ways.
I liked the old thing where magazines or short pamphlets had adventures that weren't contained in $50.00 books but were much cheaper and quicker ways to both provide players with some new stuff and new ideas, and make a few shekels for the companies on the side.
Dragon Magazine and similar publications, yes. Those were awesome resources to have. The step-dad of one of my oldest friends, the guy who got me into TTRPGs to begin with, used to have a collection of old Dragon Magazine editions tucked away in a clear Rubbermaid container along with old AD&D modules which he’d reference and modify for when he was running the first ever 3.0 campaign he played. Since he had friends (and an ex wife) who owned comic and hobby shops, we actually managed to get hold of an early release of the PHB, DM’s Guide, and the Monster Manual, along with the 3.0 rerelease of the low level adventure, The Sunless Citadel. I can safely say joining in on that game changed the course of my life.
This is one of the tragedies of modernity. Sometimes you just have to accept being small, and trying to scale will ruin everything. WotC probably is only capable of being a relatively small staffed operation by its very nature. Execs don't like that though.
Do any of these people actually *play* the game though? Yes, I know, a lot of them watch other people play the game on famous twitch/youtube channels.
Apparently they do a lot of LFG posts for online games on Reddit. I have this info secondhand, as I would never, ever visit what has become of reddit.
But, from the same source, it is nearly impossible to actually form a gaming group with these people. Most of them, apparently, will post a huge list of accommodation requirements that are functionally impossible to meet, or a list of the sorts of people they refuse to play with (christians, trump supporters, cishetwhitemales, ukraine war skeptics, etc., the usual suspects). If you hold your nose and make contact anyway, they ghost you (this friend of mine... has way more faith in humanity than I do to even get to that step).
So I ask again, do any of them actually play? Do they even pay for the paraphernalia? Sales figures suggest: no.
What they do is talk as if they're customers on the internet, while excluding everyone who actually plays from the conversation. Modern marketing departments apparently get all their information from Twitter/Reddit, where all the actual players have been purged for various sorts of wrongthink (not to mention the goodthink hellhole that is RPG.net and several other old-school fora).
Anyway, if that sounds like an angry rant, it isn't. I find this all hilarious. Meanwhile the people I play these sorts of games with carry on playing the old stuff and homebrew campaigns and systems. Could not possibly care less if WotC et al want to burn down their brands.
"[O]ld stuff and homebrew campaigns and systems." Yes, they cannot take that away from us. There are also some good new games. I keep mentioning ACKS, but that's because it's a very good D&D alternative.
The entire role-playing community has stage 4 cancer. Even if you ignore all the forced political agendas, the design community now hates writing rulebooks with...rules. I wish I was making this up. Every mechanic is GM fiat, handwaving essentially, which turns the game into a meta game where players have to appeal to the person running it for every action.
Well that's a "community" for you. The word is synonymous with cancer.
Meanwhile out here in real life, plenty of us still playing and thankful that the publishers are no longer interested in our money, because frankly our shelves are already full and we've already got more "we'll get around to that one someday" games than we'll get around to in this lifetime.
Pathfinder, DnD and ilk all invite goofiness. They are all more or less rules oriented and as such are ripe for rules shenanigans. I find them too influenced by video games.
I gave up on all these systems. But FATE still has my heart. It truly is a STORY oriented system.
We were discussing that elsewhere about story vs math games (how i’ll distinguish them). The cortex system by margaret weiss always hit my sweet spot between the two extremes.
That is something I agree with wholeheartedly Ulysses: the videogamification of TTRPGs, and of everything. If I wanted to play Diablo, I'll play Diablo, not pen-and-paper Diablo. TTRPGs are there to give you something computer games cannot, not imitate computer games.
DM: “Darryl, roll for your Social Anxiety Disorder check.”
*rolls*
DM: “Okay, you’ve crumbled to the floor thinking about how this wolf spider is probably judging your elf outfit negatively.”
Though in jest, that seems more reasonable for an adventure with a universe that is true to its own mechanics and challenges. Many characters in literature and film suffer from various anxieties and doubts, but they could traverse broken terrain and stairs throughout a dungeon lair while beset by giant beasts. If there were some magic that made the wheelchair levetate and soar around then that would be fine (and could be Professor X Tier cool while consistent with expectations of the challenges). At this point, it seems as though publishers are set on creating rage bait and purity tests for “modern audiences” to defend in increasingly silly ways.
"At this point, it seems as though publishers are set on creating rage bait and purity tests for 'modern audiences' to defend in increasingly silly ways."
Good points all, but this is the crux. It seems I fell for it, didn't I? And I wasn't trying to be rageful in the least.
The funny thing is that you didn’t even rage about it. The piece was more analytical and reflective. I find it more depressing than rage-inducing. It’s as if they had a money making machine that actually created a lot of good and they just broke it so it creates garbage. Sad.
Do you think they’re spiteful mutants raging against a reality that robbed them of status and/or just utterly incompetent. I see it in the comic book industry all the time. Some artists are utterly untalented, and they just make unappealing garbage with unaesthetic models. Some though seem talented but mindbroken to the point of delusion, drawing and writing lousy series. Probably a combination. Any field not run with careful gatekeepers will ultimately be swamped with these Machiavellian types.
The point is that while they may have various anxieties and doubts, they overcome (or totally disregard) them in order to accomplish the mission. That's what is so heroic about them. I recently watched Lawrence of Arabia for the first time. He was a flawed man who had lots of reasons to NOT succeed. But he overcame those flaws, amd in some cases even made those flaws work for him, so that he could accomplish legitimately incredible feats of heroism.
If the world ever gets right again (ie: We once again find the strength to laugh at ourselves), this style of goofiness is beyond ripe for parody and deserving of a good skewering.
Making everything into parody is part of what made the world go insane.
A huge amount of racial tensions come from white people expecting everyone else to tolerate the same level of “laughing at yourself” that white people do. Which is actually insane, and not at all living in reality.
Most things that are heavily parodied never actually recover. And it's always been that way.
Humility is certainly important. But just allowing bullies to say whatever they want about you is not actually humility.
Seems I was partly right in my guess. The obsession with forcing people to accept the absurdities of the "combat wheelchair" does play into that mythical Modern Audience that so many companies continue to vainly search for.
I don't really have much to add to all of this, save that I share your suspicions that there's likely more to this push from the banshees who keep wailing about it than simple representation. Not a hard suspicion to have, considering the amount of times that ulterior motives have been found in the mud they sling over the years. As far as your guess about it possibly being a sexual drive is concerned, I personally do think there's something to that. It's been a few years since I last played not just 5e D&D, but any tabletop game in a more public setting, and part of the reason for that is because I quickly started to notice patterns of unsettlingly pushy sexualization among certain portions of this tourist player base. (And among some older creeps, too, in all fairness.)
Truthfully, I don't have a problem with sex and sexuality being in TTRPGs, provided it's handled properly. That is to say, I have unbending caveats which I put into place for that: It must make reasonable sense within the campaign/scenario. It must be handled maturely, and not tossed around cheaply. It won't permit explicitness, fade to blacks exist for a reason and most of us don't need or want the sordid details. If you're there to get your jollies off to a fetish or engage in some wretched fantasizing, I'll kick you the fuck out of my group without question. If you're going to be disruptive with it, same thing. But above all else, I absolutely will not ever tolerate emotional bleed of any kind when it comes to anything related to sex. If you can't differentiate fantasy from reality, there is no seat for you at my table. Don't go catching feels over make believe.
Clearly, there's some troublesome shit that can happen when you include sexuality as a part of games like this. For that reason, while I am okay with it when it's handled properly, I almost never permit its use. The sole exception are the people with whom I've played for years, those whom I know well enough to be certain can be trusted.
The types to demand this kind of pandering representation are *not* to be trusted.
Glad you enjoyed the article anyway. You're spot-on that things should be reasonable and make sense even though D&D is a fantasy game. That doesn't mean rules can go entirely out the window, or that goofiness should reign totally supreme. I'm all for some gonzo stuff, but personally it can get too out of hand.
"If you can't differentiate fantasy from reality, there is no seat for you at my table." Yes!
The reason this is going to be appearing more often is because the digital (read: social media) age has destroyed the individual's sense of self. An individual who does not see themselves as strong, capable, a part of a community, valuable, etc will project themselves into a fantasy world where they are those things. Fantasy is no longer escaping the humdrum of the real world for a fantastical foray into fun, it is an escape from the self as a limited being.
To answer your question: yes, blacks will only play blacks, the disabled will only play disabled people, etc. They cannot grasp an identity in the real that they find admirable or good, so they will project themselves into fantasy where that is possible.
This is all to the detriment of the game, and the genre as a whole. Escapism doesn't require 1:1 self-insert. However, luckily, WotC or anyone else has no way of policing their version of wrongthink at any gaming table.
"Fantasy is no longer escaping the humdrum of the real world for a fantastical foray into fun, it is an escape from the self as a limited being."
This is unbelievably insightful and articulates the point so well.
I have seen that, and an early draft of this piece included a discussion of the phenomenon along with that very link. But it didn’t quite fit with the point I was trying to make here. I probably should have kept it in as a footnote.
I actually have a funny story about wheelchairs in DND. I was running a "grimdark" campaign where I had homebrewed a number of rules to make the world more low-fantasy and deadly. One of the rules I had was if a character reached 0 hp, they had to roll on a "Permanent Injuries" table. Some of the injuries were less impactful, like a hideous scar that gives you Disadvantage on Charisma saves, but some were worse, like losing a limb. I had a player roll real unlucky and lose both his legs. Regenerate is a 7th level spell, and this was a 2nd level party at the time, so they were not able to cast it.
I told them that if they went to the Monastery in the Big City, there would be a Cleric there who would be willing to cast Regenerate on their friend, as long as the proper "donation" was provided. So that became their new quest, travel to the Monastery, and accumulate enough gold along the way to pay for the regeneration.
In the meantime, however, the player asked if he could commission a local blacksmith to build him a wheelchair. Of course I said yes, because that is hilarious. Apparently WoTC has actually published rules for wheelchairs in DND, but I haven't purchased any WoTC products in years, because I don't support corporations that hate me. It's also not that hard to homebrew rules for a wheelchair: "Your movement speed is 50ft when going downhill, but only 15ft when going uphill. You cant climb stairs".
Anyway, it was pretty amusing to watch this character attempt to perform what would otherwise be mundane adventuring tasks, like climbing up a rope, or battling an enemy at the top of a staircase. Then he died. They never did get his legs Regenerated.
But yes, "inclusive" wheelchair adventurers is retarded and gay.
Thanks for the comment. Great story! That's how I envision things happening in real life with players who aren't out to score virtue points or anything like that. It all comes back to my point of, in a world with spells like Regenerate and all of the other healing magic, why would anybody in such a world choose to remain wheelchair-bound?
Looking at a schedule of events for an upcoming convention, I was surprised to see a number of 1st edition games. There are many other game systems now, and I sort of welcome the silliness of recent D&D, because I hope that it will draw the annoying people to it, instead of games I like. Some gardeners will plant-not sure what the name is-but essentially distraction plants. For example, if you plant nasturtiums next to cucumbers, the aphids are more attracted to the nasturtiums, and hopefully leave the cucumbers alone.
I only got 5e so my son could play with his friends, and I actually don't dislike the ruleset. It's the company that makes it and the people around it I differ with.
Yeah, structurally, it’s fine. I know a lot of old D&D modules or other games have been converted to use it. But if I’m playing with strangers, I think 5E may draw a different crowd. At least, if there are 5E and OSR games, I think kids and people with whom I won’t gel are more likely to be drawn to 5E. Honestly, I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to historical miniature wargames lately.
I was thinking of the wheelchair topic. As ill-fitting as it is for D&D, stuff like that can make some RPGs interesting (eg, Call of Cthulhu) that use more or less real world settings.
Man, I am glad those people don’t bother around in traditional hex and counter wargames or stuff like COIN and L&C which are simulations of actual history. God knows what they would do.
I'm no D&D expert but I've always assumed the medieval setting. Therefore, a modern wheelchair that is self-propelled doesn't make sense. A chariot, handcart, anything else and then I could see it.
As a child of the '80s this only makes me want to reread The Sleeping Dragon (Guardians of the Flame). There was a pivotal moment in it that I still think of sometimes when I am frustrated.
As a Forever DM, I will fully allow and support the decision of anyone who wants to come to my table and play a wheelchair character. That said, you are treated as any other player at that same table. The DM has enough to do without modifying multiple aspects of the campaign environment for a single PC. If you've chosen to play such a character, you can live with the consequences of that choice. Because the castle ruins definitely has stairs, rubble to climb over, and collapsed sections of the upper hallways, and that isn't about to change.
There you go. Nobody needs actual rules to allow a certain kind of character, but some things still break the immersion too much. That's why the picture I put in this post stood out to me as I was flipping through the book. It was so incongruous with a fantasy setting. It's like it was placed there so prominently to elicit a reaction.
Now, I tried to write a reasoned post here instead of reacting emotionally, and it's up to the reader to determine if I succeeded, but this is anti-verisimilitude. If the game took place in a world where limbs couldn't be regrown or any other sort of physical issue healed, it'd make perfect sense. In other words, to put a finer point on it, the issue isn't people in wheelchairs, the issue is that it's people in wheelchairs in D&D, which makes little to no sense.
I get you, but as a practical matter I just don't allow character concepts that are going to be massively disruptive, especially when they're obviously designed to give the player permanent center-of-attention mode.
Sorry, but no, your character cannot be in a wheelchair. That's just not going to work. You'll never get out of the tavern. The wizard cannot spend all of his spell slots making your character work for you. You are not the special, and you don't get to disrupt everyone else's enjoyment of the game.
Save the concept for a cyberpunk genre game, where you can be a hacker, or a rigger, or a fixer, or just a solo with cyberlegs that he resents and refuses to wear when he's not on the job. There, it would be very cool. But no, not in the fantasy game. Not gonna happen.
Again, fair enough. Your table, your rules.
See I'm in exactly the same boat. I make it very clear in session zero that I: A) expect people to work as a team but no one is the main character, and B) if you get left behind, you get left behind. I'm not interested in running two games at once.
If the offending character cannot make it out of the tavern... That's where their adventure ends. Hope they had fun, but we're going to the haunted crypt 🤷🏻♂️
A part of the adventure could be getting a crippled or otherwise incapacitated/handicapped character OUT of a dungeon. That's what Tenser's Floating Disk is for, after all.
I'm presently playtesting a homebrew fantasy system where injuries like that are tracked, not terribly easy to magic away, and have significant gameplay impacts. Not sure if it's going to work or not, but that's the kind of scenario I hope it will create.
I'd love to run a D&D campaign like that. 5e actually has those rules, but it's easy to homebrew your own in any system. I'd like to hear how it goes!
Yeah, many systems do. The problem in my estimation is that there are so many ready-made solutions for any given status effect that they blur together into simple mechanical numbers that go up and down from round to round. Pathfinder has the same problem. This round I am concussed and thus have 1 fewer AP. Next round it wears off but now I'm entangled and my movement is reduced to zero.
At worst I may have a disease, which applies a status condition for an extended period *in theory*, but in practice is removed by a skill check, potion, or spell and rarely lasts more than 24 hours.
The thing that matters in these games is resources: hit points, spell slots, actions, encumbrance, and those all come down to economic calculations: does the cleric have enough spell slots to offset the expected hit point losses in the next encounter; do the martials sustain sufficient DPR to keep combat down to 4 or fewer rounds, which reduces resource expenditures; is it better to carry 6 weak potions or one strong one; etc. etc.
So... the theory is, eliminate most of these resource gauges and see what a game looks like when getting hurt *matters*, isn't easy to reverse, and avoiding getting hurt is the object of your defensive strategy rather than offsetting HP loss with HP gain. But you'll get hurt anyway, so your plan Bs have to revolve around dealing with injury and knowing when to call it quits. Leaving the dungeon, and surviving the attempt, is an interesting adventure on its own.
But like I said, no idea if this is going to work. It's a radical departure from most TTRPGs (or video games).
I'm going to cast a bet before reading: it's for the ever elusive Modern Audience.
Which is to say, it's for a mythical subset of the population that doesn't actually exist, and is the natural result of stuffing a company full of people living squarely within their Seattle-based echo chamber, then placing former tech execs who know nothing of hobby spaces in charge of a hobby company.
I will absolutely be reading this, given that I've played D&D for many, many years and am always curious to gather the thoughts of others who are watching its rapid decline in real time, but this is the answer I predict will be reached here. Now to see if that bet pans out!
The D&D audience has, unfortunately, turned hard-left, and this is just playing to the player base that spends all the money. The days of kids playing D&D and having heroic adventures is over in favor of strange adults with lots of money wanting to play a Harry Potter lite.
My son just turned 12. He's had a gaming group with some of his school friends for about two years, and he started a D&D club at his new school last year which was so popular that (a) the teacher who supervised the club ended up playing, and is playing again this year, and (b) the club has more kids this year than last year. So normal kids are still playing D&D. He's in that sweet spot I was when I discovered RPGs. In fact, he found the old D&D books I hand and wanted to play when he was about seven or eight, which is a little after he'd seen my old HeroQuest game and wanted to play that. So there is still hope.
There's some truth to this, but it's an incomplete truth. WotC/Hasbro do see this particular base as spenders, and as such they've pursued them. However, it's also true that the company has been consistently losing money on both the D&D and MtG brands since the big surge that happened during the lockdowns, and not just a little bit of money either. New 5e supplements have largely languished on shelves, because players simply aren't interested in them.
This new left-leaning crowd are, ultimately, invaders who've stepped in more with a purpose to sling mud and shit and trash everywhere than to actually buy the products. We see this reflected in the patterns of purchase; the shrill harpies who cry the loudest don't buy, and a large portion of the most dedicated of older players don't buy anymore, either, particularly since many of them are aware of the independent scene and the OSR.
That leaves mostly the fair weather fans for WotC, the "normies" if you will. The people who got interested because of Critical Role, Adventure Zone, Legends of Avantris, and other live play shows. (Or those who played Baldur's Gate 3.) That audience is decidedly temporary. Some of them will stay for the long haul, but most are going to move on in time, either due to boredom or the simple shifts in priorities life likes to foist on us.
You're right that the days of kids playing the game to have heroic adventures is largely over, but it's not because the greater audience turned hard left. Most of them haven't, most sit somewhere in the middle. But those in WotC's local echo chamber have, and as we're all likely aware of by now, perception is greater than reality.
I disagree that the days of kids having heroic adventures is over, but you're right that kids aren't a lucrative enough audience.
The thing about RPGs is that, if a system is good, YOU DON'T NEED continual expansions and additional sourcebooks. And that, in our capitalist society (not a Marxist, but call it for what it is) is business death, because if you make something people only need to buy once, then you'll soon be out of business.
I don't think this is entirely top-down. I think there's a lot of this that is grassroots. And it's not just WOTC. Younger people that play RPGs or have nerd hobbies are much harder left than they used to be, compared to the old crew that was more libertarian and technophile and mostly didn't care about social issues. The hard-leftists are the ones that fill the conventions and so on.
Even if we're talking about sections of the tabletop space that are inherently more testosterone-fueled than D&D, there's, by default, this off-putting hard-left vibe now. That's the part I don't get. I get why that there are people in this world, many of them female, who want to play "fantasy Seattle coffee shop simulator", and those people naturally choose D&D. Because it's the default choice, and the Ren Faire vibe suits them better than a grittier setting would.
But for example this guy -- https://www.mygurps.com/pmwiki.php?n=Main.SavageRifts -- has some good house rules etc. for Savage Rifts. A lot of good material actually. And yet there are those banners on the side of his fan page: Trans Lives Matter, Queer Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter. It's hard for me to grok a guy who likes to arrange tactical battles between super-soldiers and mechs and cyborg-demons but also thinks that those three banners are the most important messages in the world.
There are several paths forward that should be undertaken simultaneously:
1) Refuse to leave the current space to the weirdos and entryists.
2) Discuss, play, and promote older editions of D&D played the proper way, as well as other older games, as promoted by Jeffro Johnson and those in his circles.
3) Maintain the clubhouse aspect, as discussed in excellent detail by Bradford C. Walker.
4) Encourage the playing of new games made by people who know what they're doing, like Alexander Macris's ACKS system.
I think the ACKS recommendation is great. I discovered it randomly when I was looking to make a 5e campaign grittier and more grounded about 10 years ago, and as someone with a real interest in economic history who disagreed with those that said RPGs and basic economic logic can't mix.
I bought the main PDF and incorporated the ACKS rules to manage a lot of the world, and it worked great. I didn't tell people where all my new rules came from until the end. Blending it with D&D is probably an easier sell for most groups than trying to get people to play ACKS exclusively. I'd never heard anyone else mention ACKS until now.
The problem with recommending old games is I do think that RPG rules design has objectively gotten better, even as the worldbuilding has gotten worse. If you have any familiarity with Rifts, then Savage Rifts is the perfect model of this. The old Palladium rules might have been the worst ever conceived, we had a 15-page document of house rules just to make the game playable, and even then our rules weren't great. But the world-building made up for it.
Now in Savage Rifts, the rules actually work! They're actually fun! The original promise of the game is finally realized. But you also have little things like the archetypal Crazy (berserk ninja super-soldier), instead of being a guy who looks like a berserk ninja super-soldier, is now skinny blond girl in pigtails. At least there aren't any drawings of cyborgs in wheelchairs, yet.
I'm amazed WotC is losing money. I figured D&D was a money printing machine because of the huge back-catalog. I guess it explains the subscription model they are persuing that is completely insane.
RPGs as a service. I hate modernity so much.
Part of the problem is the business model itself. TTRPGs aren't something which is going to bring in a lot of money naturally. Realistically, you only need one person to own the source books, and that's typically going to be the DM. On average, for D&D that means you're likely only selling 2-3 books for every 4-5 players, possibly less if you've got experienced people running the game who are practiced in homebrewing and hacking their own material. MtG has always been the bigger moneymaker because of its nature as a TCG.
That's not the only reason the slice-n-dice-n-resell-in-bits digital sales strategy was taken up, though. The current execs are a big part of that equation, since most of them are former tech execs, with Hasbro CEO herself previously being part of Microsoft's board of directors before she moved into Hasbro. In short, it's being run by people who have no understanding of the hobby market or hobby customers, so it's only natural that their decisions are drawing ire and starting to backfire on them in big ways.
Excellent points!
I liked the old thing where magazines or short pamphlets had adventures that weren't contained in $50.00 books but were much cheaper and quicker ways to both provide players with some new stuff and new ideas, and make a few shekels for the companies on the side.
Dragon Magazine and similar publications, yes. Those were awesome resources to have. The step-dad of one of my oldest friends, the guy who got me into TTRPGs to begin with, used to have a collection of old Dragon Magazine editions tucked away in a clear Rubbermaid container along with old AD&D modules which he’d reference and modify for when he was running the first ever 3.0 campaign he played. Since he had friends (and an ex wife) who owned comic and hobby shops, we actually managed to get hold of an early release of the PHB, DM’s Guide, and the Monster Manual, along with the 3.0 rerelease of the low level adventure, The Sunless Citadel. I can safely say joining in on that game changed the course of my life.
This is one of the tragedies of modernity. Sometimes you just have to accept being small, and trying to scale will ruin everything. WotC probably is only capable of being a relatively small staffed operation by its very nature. Execs don't like that though.
Absolutely. There comes a point in every business where expansion is the death knell. Success can breed failure. Very sad.
Do any of these people actually *play* the game though? Yes, I know, a lot of them watch other people play the game on famous twitch/youtube channels.
Apparently they do a lot of LFG posts for online games on Reddit. I have this info secondhand, as I would never, ever visit what has become of reddit.
But, from the same source, it is nearly impossible to actually form a gaming group with these people. Most of them, apparently, will post a huge list of accommodation requirements that are functionally impossible to meet, or a list of the sorts of people they refuse to play with (christians, trump supporters, cishetwhitemales, ukraine war skeptics, etc., the usual suspects). If you hold your nose and make contact anyway, they ghost you (this friend of mine... has way more faith in humanity than I do to even get to that step).
So I ask again, do any of them actually play? Do they even pay for the paraphernalia? Sales figures suggest: no.
What they do is talk as if they're customers on the internet, while excluding everyone who actually plays from the conversation. Modern marketing departments apparently get all their information from Twitter/Reddit, where all the actual players have been purged for various sorts of wrongthink (not to mention the goodthink hellhole that is RPG.net and several other old-school fora).
Anyway, if that sounds like an angry rant, it isn't. I find this all hilarious. Meanwhile the people I play these sorts of games with carry on playing the old stuff and homebrew campaigns and systems. Could not possibly care less if WotC et al want to burn down their brands.
"[O]ld stuff and homebrew campaigns and systems." Yes, they cannot take that away from us. There are also some good new games. I keep mentioning ACKS, but that's because it's a very good D&D alternative.
Very, very close!
I'm going to write a campaign where every PC is a severed head
So Zombie Nation for NES?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_Nation_(video_game)
Yeah!
Make it sci-fi, like Futurama.
I actually think this could work if you modified the mechanics for a Flameskull
The entire role-playing community has stage 4 cancer. Even if you ignore all the forced political agendas, the design community now hates writing rulebooks with...rules. I wish I was making this up. Every mechanic is GM fiat, handwaving essentially, which turns the game into a meta game where players have to appeal to the person running it for every action.
Cute girl: "I shoot a kamehameha at the goblin"
Virgin GM: "I'll allow it."
Well that's a "community" for you. The word is synonymous with cancer.
Meanwhile out here in real life, plenty of us still playing and thankful that the publishers are no longer interested in our money, because frankly our shelves are already full and we've already got more "we'll get around to that one someday" games than we'll get around to in this lifetime.
"Just have fun is the only rule."
No. It IS possible to play RPGs the right way and the wrong way. The operative word is GAME.
To be fair, regenerate is a 7th level spell and no one manages to keep a game together past level 5.
It does make you wonder darkly about a game situation like...
"Heal him!"
"I don't have the spell!"
"But you have resurrection?"
"Yes."
STAB STAB STAB STAB STAB....
"Revive him!"
I would pay good money to see that in a book or movie.
Pathfinder, DnD and ilk all invite goofiness. They are all more or less rules oriented and as such are ripe for rules shenanigans. I find them too influenced by video games.
I gave up on all these systems. But FATE still has my heart. It truly is a STORY oriented system.
We were discussing that elsewhere about story vs math games (how i’ll distinguish them). The cortex system by margaret weiss always hit my sweet spot between the two extremes.
THE Margaret Weiss designed a TTRPG system? Very cool!
They did.
https://www.cortexrpg.com/
It was built off their efforts to RPG Firefly/Serenity and Supernatural. I've written some about it.
That is something I agree with wholeheartedly Ulysses: the videogamification of TTRPGs, and of everything. If I wanted to play Diablo, I'll play Diablo, not pen-and-paper Diablo. TTRPGs are there to give you something computer games cannot, not imitate computer games.
But still: it's an odd demographic to be hitting so hard.
DM: “Darryl, roll for your Social Anxiety Disorder check.”
*rolls*
DM: “Okay, you’ve crumbled to the floor thinking about how this wolf spider is probably judging your elf outfit negatively.”
Though in jest, that seems more reasonable for an adventure with a universe that is true to its own mechanics and challenges. Many characters in literature and film suffer from various anxieties and doubts, but they could traverse broken terrain and stairs throughout a dungeon lair while beset by giant beasts. If there were some magic that made the wheelchair levetate and soar around then that would be fine (and could be Professor X Tier cool while consistent with expectations of the challenges). At this point, it seems as though publishers are set on creating rage bait and purity tests for “modern audiences” to defend in increasingly silly ways.
"At this point, it seems as though publishers are set on creating rage bait and purity tests for 'modern audiences' to defend in increasingly silly ways."
Good points all, but this is the crux. It seems I fell for it, didn't I? And I wasn't trying to be rageful in the least.
The funny thing is that you didn’t even rage about it. The piece was more analytical and reflective. I find it more depressing than rage-inducing. It’s as if they had a money making machine that actually created a lot of good and they just broke it so it creates garbage. Sad.
That's the worst part: the inheritors of these great things foul them up, seemingly beyond repair. VERY sad.
Do you think they’re spiteful mutants raging against a reality that robbed them of status and/or just utterly incompetent. I see it in the comic book industry all the time. Some artists are utterly untalented, and they just make unappealing garbage with unaesthetic models. Some though seem talented but mindbroken to the point of delusion, drawing and writing lousy series. Probably a combination. Any field not run with careful gatekeepers will ultimately be swamped with these Machiavellian types.
I see it as both.
The point is that while they may have various anxieties and doubts, they overcome (or totally disregard) them in order to accomplish the mission. That's what is so heroic about them. I recently watched Lawrence of Arabia for the first time. He was a flawed man who had lots of reasons to NOT succeed. But he overcame those flaws, amd in some cases even made those flaws work for him, so that he could accomplish legitimately incredible feats of heroism.
*slow clap*
Yes. Flaws are to be overcome in fiction, not celebrated.
If the world ever gets right again (ie: We once again find the strength to laugh at ourselves), this style of goofiness is beyond ripe for parody and deserving of a good skewering.
Making everything into parody is part of what made the world go insane.
A huge amount of racial tensions come from white people expecting everyone else to tolerate the same level of “laughing at yourself” that white people do. Which is actually insane, and not at all living in reality.
Most things that are heavily parodied never actually recover. And it's always been that way.
Humility is certainly important. But just allowing bullies to say whatever they want about you is not actually humility.
Incredibly astute comment
That's really interesting and true.
Seems I was partly right in my guess. The obsession with forcing people to accept the absurdities of the "combat wheelchair" does play into that mythical Modern Audience that so many companies continue to vainly search for.
I don't really have much to add to all of this, save that I share your suspicions that there's likely more to this push from the banshees who keep wailing about it than simple representation. Not a hard suspicion to have, considering the amount of times that ulterior motives have been found in the mud they sling over the years. As far as your guess about it possibly being a sexual drive is concerned, I personally do think there's something to that. It's been a few years since I last played not just 5e D&D, but any tabletop game in a more public setting, and part of the reason for that is because I quickly started to notice patterns of unsettlingly pushy sexualization among certain portions of this tourist player base. (And among some older creeps, too, in all fairness.)
Truthfully, I don't have a problem with sex and sexuality being in TTRPGs, provided it's handled properly. That is to say, I have unbending caveats which I put into place for that: It must make reasonable sense within the campaign/scenario. It must be handled maturely, and not tossed around cheaply. It won't permit explicitness, fade to blacks exist for a reason and most of us don't need or want the sordid details. If you're there to get your jollies off to a fetish or engage in some wretched fantasizing, I'll kick you the fuck out of my group without question. If you're going to be disruptive with it, same thing. But above all else, I absolutely will not ever tolerate emotional bleed of any kind when it comes to anything related to sex. If you can't differentiate fantasy from reality, there is no seat for you at my table. Don't go catching feels over make believe.
Clearly, there's some troublesome shit that can happen when you include sexuality as a part of games like this. For that reason, while I am okay with it when it's handled properly, I almost never permit its use. The sole exception are the people with whom I've played for years, those whom I know well enough to be certain can be trusted.
The types to demand this kind of pandering representation are *not* to be trusted.
Glad you enjoyed the article anyway. You're spot-on that things should be reasonable and make sense even though D&D is a fantasy game. That doesn't mean rules can go entirely out the window, or that goofiness should reign totally supreme. I'm all for some gonzo stuff, but personally it can get too out of hand.
"If you can't differentiate fantasy from reality, there is no seat for you at my table." Yes!
The reason this is going to be appearing more often is because the digital (read: social media) age has destroyed the individual's sense of self. An individual who does not see themselves as strong, capable, a part of a community, valuable, etc will project themselves into a fantasy world where they are those things. Fantasy is no longer escaping the humdrum of the real world for a fantastical foray into fun, it is an escape from the self as a limited being.
To answer your question: yes, blacks will only play blacks, the disabled will only play disabled people, etc. They cannot grasp an identity in the real that they find admirable or good, so they will project themselves into fantasy where that is possible.
Thanks for the comment man.
This is all to the detriment of the game, and the genre as a whole. Escapism doesn't require 1:1 self-insert. However, luckily, WotC or anyone else has no way of policing their version of wrongthink at any gaming table.
"Fantasy is no longer escaping the humdrum of the real world for a fantastical foray into fun, it is an escape from the self as a limited being."
This is unbelievably insightful and articulates the point so well.
If you haven't already seen it, I think this is a very interesting insight into the phenomena:
https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3s-most-picked-character-editor-options-created-the-most-generic-dude-possible/
I have seen that, and an early draft of this piece included a discussion of the phenomenon along with that very link. But it didn’t quite fit with the point I was trying to make here. I probably should have kept it in as a footnote.
I hate modern American culture so much. It's like the lamest, weakest, most pathetic people have somehow taken over and are running the show.
I tried to come up with a rebuttal but I can't.
I actually have a funny story about wheelchairs in DND. I was running a "grimdark" campaign where I had homebrewed a number of rules to make the world more low-fantasy and deadly. One of the rules I had was if a character reached 0 hp, they had to roll on a "Permanent Injuries" table. Some of the injuries were less impactful, like a hideous scar that gives you Disadvantage on Charisma saves, but some were worse, like losing a limb. I had a player roll real unlucky and lose both his legs. Regenerate is a 7th level spell, and this was a 2nd level party at the time, so they were not able to cast it.
I told them that if they went to the Monastery in the Big City, there would be a Cleric there who would be willing to cast Regenerate on their friend, as long as the proper "donation" was provided. So that became their new quest, travel to the Monastery, and accumulate enough gold along the way to pay for the regeneration.
In the meantime, however, the player asked if he could commission a local blacksmith to build him a wheelchair. Of course I said yes, because that is hilarious. Apparently WoTC has actually published rules for wheelchairs in DND, but I haven't purchased any WoTC products in years, because I don't support corporations that hate me. It's also not that hard to homebrew rules for a wheelchair: "Your movement speed is 50ft when going downhill, but only 15ft when going uphill. You cant climb stairs".
Anyway, it was pretty amusing to watch this character attempt to perform what would otherwise be mundane adventuring tasks, like climbing up a rope, or battling an enemy at the top of a staircase. Then he died. They never did get his legs Regenerated.
But yes, "inclusive" wheelchair adventurers is retarded and gay.
Thanks for the comment. Great story! That's how I envision things happening in real life with players who aren't out to score virtue points or anything like that. It all comes back to my point of, in a world with spells like Regenerate and all of the other healing magic, why would anybody in such a world choose to remain wheelchair-bound?
The rejection of diagetic story logic is the rejection of the fantasy genre's foundations, escapism.
Tolkien (surprise) said it best in "On Fairy Stories" when describing this. Its the idea that much of our modern world is in fact contingent.
Many authors/creators have no sense of this, and so you get completely alien concepts forced into settings, like wheel chair accessible dungeons....
Great point. And I'm so shocked, shocked I say, that the great Professor had written on this very point.
Looking at a schedule of events for an upcoming convention, I was surprised to see a number of 1st edition games. There are many other game systems now, and I sort of welcome the silliness of recent D&D, because I hope that it will draw the annoying people to it, instead of games I like. Some gardeners will plant-not sure what the name is-but essentially distraction plants. For example, if you plant nasturtiums next to cucumbers, the aphids are more attracted to the nasturtiums, and hopefully leave the cucumbers alone.
5e as a distraction plant . . . I like that.
I only got 5e so my son could play with his friends, and I actually don't dislike the ruleset. It's the company that makes it and the people around it I differ with.
Yeah, structurally, it’s fine. I know a lot of old D&D modules or other games have been converted to use it. But if I’m playing with strangers, I think 5E may draw a different crowd. At least, if there are 5E and OSR games, I think kids and people with whom I won’t gel are more likely to be drawn to 5E. Honestly, I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to historical miniature wargames lately.
I was thinking of the wheelchair topic. As ill-fitting as it is for D&D, stuff like that can make some RPGs interesting (eg, Call of Cthulhu) that use more or less real world settings.
The wheelchair-bound PC would absolutely fit better in more realistic settings, or at least ones without healing magic.
Good point about the crowd a 5e game might attract.
Man, I am glad those people don’t bother around in traditional hex and counter wargames or stuff like COIN and L&C which are simulations of actual history. God knows what they would do.
"How DARE there be no black disabled trans Vikings, you FASCIST!"
I'm no D&D expert but I've always assumed the medieval setting. Therefore, a modern wheelchair that is self-propelled doesn't make sense. A chariot, handcart, anything else and then I could see it.
Yes. Or a Tenser's Floating Disk.
As a child of the '80s this only makes me want to reread The Sleeping Dragon (Guardians of the Flame). There was a pivotal moment in it that I still think of sometimes when I am frustrated.
I'd never heard of those books, so I looked them up. Great concept!