#idk a lot of ppl are really annoying about dnd on both sides of the argument

[coffee-at-annies]

Honestly idk. I’m not seeing any (new) discourse about gygax or dnd tbh. I’m in indie rpg spaces outside of tumblr (one of the other special interests)(tumblr I keep to myself cause actual play fandoms burnt me tf out in 2020) so like I’m aware of some of the common gripes, just not this specific one? A lot of the bullshit I see stems from a couple different places which I’m throwing under a cut.

1) wizards of the coast and the parent company, hasbro, are big corporations and are y’know evil in various ways. Hasbro literally hired the Pinkertons to go after a guy last year bc he accidentally received a magic the gathering set early.

2) wotc/hasbro wants you to keep giving them money forever. A lot of ppl in online rpg spaces don’t want to do that.

3) the table top role playing game (ttrpg) space is so saturated by dnd that it is most people’s first and only game. This is exacerbated by actual play podcasts, twitch streams, and youtube series that only play dnd. This has led to many many rounds of discourse about “playing other ttrpgs” and “play indie ttrpgs.”

4) building off that, a lot of casual players and gms resist learning other systems when they can instead “hack dnd to do things and genres it was never meant to do so they don’t have to learn another game.” (Something I’ve had an acquaintance say to my face about a homebrew campaign she wanted to run).

5) the refusal to explore outside a nebulous “comfort zone” negatively effects indie creators trying to eek out a living on the indie/self-pub side of it. Would they have made a sale anyway? I dunno. But it’s hard to reach/grow an audience when half the market only wants to do one thing. (This circles back to #3)

6) idk people like to hate things and decades old misogyny is an excuse to start cancel culture puriteen bullshit. There was some nonsense a couple years ago about phylactery being a Jewish word and omg is this secretly antisemitic?

7) this one is personal opinion, but dnd isn’t actually the best system out there for everything and i feel like a lot of the arguments are people trying to get others to acknowledge that. Dnd has severe limitations and a habit of putting everything on the gms shoulders to “make the game work.” Depending on what I’m trying to do or what type of game I want to play there are other rpgs that do it better. My first thought, no time spent thinking, example is if I was going to do a wrestling game, I would go crack open world wide wrestling, a system designed top to bottom to tell stories about wrestlers rather than trying to figure out how to do it with dnd’s combat or skill check system.

8) a lot of indie games will handle things for gms and players so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make a game work. Some things can be hacked easily enough but I love cracking open a playbook and having everything handed to me. One of the first indie games I ever read/played was called Sleepaway and had people play as camp counselors at a camp haunted by the lindworm. Sure I could make the sporty counselor, the arts and crafts counselor, the lifeguard, and the newbie in dnd classes but instead the rulebook did the heavy lifting for me, and kept it thematically relevant. Why not let the rulebook hand me character tropes rather than inventing it by myself?

9) something something queer players should give queer creators money instead of it going to a soulless corporation or misogynist creators.

10) idk I’m just adding bullet points at this point cause the adhd likes “and one more thing” and 10 feels like a nice even number

Anyway I feel like attacking the creators boils down to “you should hate this thing cause this guy sucks” and also a bad argument in favor of playing other games. I fully endorse checking out the extended ttrpg scene if you’re looking for something outside the fantasy genre that DnD has made its standard. There’s a ton of games out there worth playing. I am a better role player having played other games

okay but fr what is the goal of these "d&d creators bad" posts I keep seeing. yeah okay those guys sucked. now their games are played by women and queers and even - holy shit - queer women. so. we won! yay

"the game was made by bad people" ok?? so???? like is the end goal that everybody gotta make sure to prostrate themselves somehow before having fun because d&d is ontologically evil, since some dickheads touched it forty years ago??? this sounds suspiciously like bullshit