Op-Ed: This Game Was Better When it Wasn’t Fun
“There used to be a time when the only way you learned Dungeons and Dragons was by finding an old Player’s Handbook in the woods and a mystical fae would curse you to being a dungeon master”
There is a specter haunting Dungeons and Dragons, one much more deadly than any you will find in the Basic Rules. This specter: Fun. It is already eroding the core of the game I have loved for over 60 years (yes, I started playing it before it was even released, not like those losers who developed the game.) This creeping cloud of fun has already drastically changed the game, the culture, and must be stopped if we want to preserve the true spirit of Dungeons and Dragons: seeing people new to the game become frustrated and quit.
The first and perhaps biggest problem is that not enough characters die in fifth edition. Some will say this is a good thing, it allows players to develop a personality for the character and get attached to it. It allows them to become a writer for their character, and perhaps tell a story they have in their hearts. But what those people forget is that both lower mortality rates and the ability to develop depth of character will directly lead to suboptimal character builds. Oh, you want to take Linguist because you feel your scholarly character would know more languages? Well I guess you can if you don’t need every last resource to go towards surviving an unforgiving dungeon with unbalanced encounters. But good luck impressing the other players with who don’t really care about how much damage you can do anyway. Keep telling yourself that they would rather have more interesting party members to interact with instead of a badass who has no flaws that need to be realized and overcome on the journey.
On the other end of the spectrum, players who do decide to optimize and then cobble together a personality as an afterthought, will find their characters are too powerful. I really can’t imagine anything worse than a game that allows you the ability to easily overcome obstacles that you aren’t able to in real life. Why would anyone want to play a game where you can live out the fantasy of being skilled and powerful and well-liked? You could just do that in real life.
Being too easy isn’t the only problem, though. The game also offers too many options for character creation. It used to be you had to either play a tired trope of a character, like human wizard, or a human thief, and struggle to make that character unique. You’d have to make them relatable, and give them struggles, to make them engaging. But now, characters can just decide to be a noble dragonborn paladin/sorcerer and that can be their entire personality. If you can just make fun and silly characters, then why would any player go through the trouble of taking hours upon hours of screenwriting courses? Do they want us to play the game without an expert understanding of the hero’s journey? What would I do with all my story circle notes?
The entire game has become too accessible if we’re honest. There used to be a time when the only way you learned Dungeons and Dragons was by finding an old Player’s Handbook in the woods and a mystical fae would curse you to being a dungeon master for all eternity. It sounds harsh, but you had the ability to limit the game to only what you wanted it to be (dungeon crawling). But now people are seeing the potential in the rules set. They are adapting the game to meet their own wants, when it should be a game where you keep track of arrows and rations and try to survive to level 5.
The fact that there are so many podcasts and web series available doesn’t help the matter either. It’s causing people to try to be actors and improvisers when they play, they are trying to immerse themselves into a fantasy as an escape from the real world. Most players are not good actors, and I believe that people should only do things they are good at. Also, immersion into a fantasy world is not healthy: we should always be aware that we’re playing a game and keep that in perspective. Otherwise, we run the risk of falling too deep like Tom Hanks’ character in the movie Mazes and Monsters.
We’re already seeing the results of these changes, and they can only get worse: People who aren’t me are enjoying Dungeons and Dragons.
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