08/24/10
Dungeons and Dragons is undergoing another rules revision. that makes D&D 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.0-plus-more-Players-Handbooks, and now D&D Essentials all in the span of a decade.
I’m sympathetic to the plight of paper-and-dice roleplaying game industry. Videogames have very much stolen their fire, often presenting fantasy adventures more interesting and vivid than the mind’s eye of paper-and-dice gaming’s median player. when there are lots of players to sell to, you can make plenty of money selling supplementary materials such as adventures and the like. But when the customer pool is smaller, the only road to financial viability is to republish the core rules every two or three years.
Unless you move to an online subscriber-based system, which is what WotC plans to do.
My gaming friends and I have had many interesting (No, really!) debates on the merits of the various editions of D&D rules. I subscribe to what I call the Geometry Theory: basically, the dice rules game mechanics have a “shape” and flavor the game. AD&D 2nd Edition, my favorite version of the game, has all kinds of oddities and extremities. there were so many supplements and sub-classes, each with their own rules, that you could explore the mechanics just as you explored fantasy worlds while playing the game. D&D 3.0 was much too “round” and every dice roll, whether you were healing a sick person or slaying a dragon, was essentially the same.
D&D 4th Ed was scarcely better. at low levels, the rules system was terrific. The basic rules mechanics were still boring and limiting, but each classes abilities were truly unique. But the game was flooded with new classes and races that made everything, again, taste the same. and every time you leveled, you got one to three new powers — all operating on the same formula (“Attack with one of your skills + bonus vs. the target’s relevant skill + bonus”). My current 4th ed. character has something like 25 note cards of powers with rules and conditions; the game feels less like D&D and more like using a card catalog at the library. (This is what happens when you try to make World of Warcraft into a paper-and-dice game.)
D&D Essentials (I guess we call it D&DE?) is allegedly a simpler version of those 4th ed. rules… except not… because D&DE doesn’t directly contradict D&D 4.0. there is now a “4th ed. fighter” and an “Essentials fighter” and both, allegedly, will be compatible with the same game. The idea behind the “Essentials” classes, it seems, is to return to diversity in the game mechanics of the individual classess, which I like.
Of course, all of this mixing-and-matching and rejiggering means that D&D Essentials will be online subscription service, where you pay a monthly fee in order to be privy to the rules updates, moving the game even closer to replicating the MMORPGs that are taking away from D&D’s market share.
At this point, I don’t see why anyone would want to buy new D&D rules. If you want paper-and-dice gaming for its strengths — cooperative storytelling, roleplaying, and puzzle solving — then all the classic 1st and 2nd edition rules are available for free in the form of a giant torrent that has hundreds of PDFs. those systems serve Dungeons and Dragons, as I know and love it to be, best.
And if you want “character builds” and all that other crap, why not just play World of Warcraft?
The current state of Dungeons and Dragons accentuates what I hate most about gamers: that they are, at the end of the day, perverse in their consumerism. Unable to form social bonds, successfully create commercially, or achieve meaning in life otherwise, they find their identity in the purchase of meaningless shit. Critical failure.