Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

It&#x27;s discombobulating to read an article about DND being &quot;killed&quot; while we&#x27;re in the middle of what is surely its golden age. There are people making real money running games, creating maps and assets and 3rd party software, there&#x27;s new an interesting _optional_ official content published regularly, and a vibrant homebrew community.<p>To pick a particular point:<p>&gt; Users pay nearly as much for digital versions of the core game books as they do hard copies<p>This comes up a lot, but as someone who&#x27;s bought both physical copies _and_ the DNDB versions, _you&#x27;re not paying for the content_. You&#x27;re paying to have to tightly integrated into the live character sheets, with all of the complexity of the vast rulesets implemented in code in multiple apps. Rulesets that I can then sync into (3rd party) tools like FoundryVTT via (3rd party) tools that talk to the APIs. It&#x27;s kinda magical and certainly _this_ community could understand why that is a significant task.<p>And content sharing means that not everyone actually has to buy this stuff. A group can pool, or a tooled up DM can run games using whatever content (including the in-app build your own homebrew content) they have to hand. Its a pretty good balance.<p>Maybe Hasbro will run it into the ground, that would hardly be surprising, but it seems like we&#x27;re a long way from that happening. In the meantime there are plenty of other TTRPGS out there if you don&#x27;t like this one – DND is a gateway into TTRPGs, not a monopoly.

I&#x27;ve been playing DnD since the 90s and it feels like Wizards of the Coast is slowly wringing out all that I enjoy about the game with each edition that is released.<p>It&#x27;s been a long time since I&#x27;ve had a steady group to play with even though there are more people playing it now than probably ever before.<p>There was a huge marketing push to make the game more attractive to a broader market along with the release of fifth edition. This grew the game enormously because fifth edition is a lot more &quot;streamlined&quot; than previous versions.<p>Fifth edition has a lot lower emphasis on mechanics. Character builds are like selecting a cable package, and at some point you realize that every package is showing the same shows.<p>There is a lot higher emphasis on character backstory building and roleplaying, which has also been hyped massively by the success of Celebrity podcast games such as Critical Role.<p>I find it all so dull. I like the numbers and crunch, theorycrafting crazy builds, I like games that reward a deep knowledge of the ruleset. 5E is none of this<p>And it seems 5e is all most people want to play anymore.

&gt; But Dungeons &amp; Dragons is also a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends and deforms any artistic endeavors to its own ends, and how, whatever the specific details of the situation or the intentions of the people involved, the demand for profit will always subsume the desire for aesthetic value or artistic integrity.<p>What a wonderful instance of missing the forest for... a tree. I was avid tabletop gamer around five years ago, and the only complaint I heard from the real aficionados was that truly great games were coming out faster than they could play them. In other words, the problem was that there was <i>too much high quality art</i> for someone to get to experience it all (and when you want to play the good ones many times...BAH!). Gone are the days when a game like Twilight Struggle could dominate the BGG &#x27;top game&#x27; charts for nearly a decade.<p>So the claim that &quot;Capitalism Kills Art&quot; might make more sense if we weren&#x27;t living through an undisputed golden age in tabletop gaming--the very artform from which the author drew this case study!

I spent my adolescence playing games similar to Dungeons and Dragons. One common sentiment that seems to pervade amongst its older devotees is an inability to see the game for what it was, which is to say largely a trifle and diversion for adolescents. There are those that think the game has outlived its origination because these companies make big pushes to diversify an audience that has always been compromised of uncouth suburban teenage dudes. There are those that place an undue stake in the game’s proliferation because it validates their difficult youths. At the end of the day, it is not worth analyzing too deeply. Thinking of games like this as art is a categorical error in my opinion.

Others in the thread have already mentioned how truly ridiculous and histrionic this Jacobin article is, so I&#x27;ll skip to the plainly false part of their conclusion: <i>that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&amp;D</i>.<p>That&#x27;s probably largely true of 5th Edition. It&#x27;s a focus group led, neutered, milquetoast version of Dungeons &amp; Dragons. All of it&#x27;s official product releases are whittled down to the least possibly offensive common denominator. And the D&amp;D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.<p>But the auteur creators aren&#x27;t gone and creativity hasn&#x27;t been killed. From Patrick Stuart&#x27;s (the writer, not the actor) projects like <i>Silent Titans</i>[1] to the bizarrely delightful <i>Mörk Borg</i>[2] to Luka Rejec&#x27;s <i>Ultraviolet Grasslands</i>[3] to the space horror game <i>Mothership</i>[4]...<p>There&#x27;s an insane amount of creativity in the design of tabletop roleplaying games today, and I haven&#x27;t even moved that far from D&amp;D-alike gameplay.<p>What&#x27;s more, <i>these auteurs are making good money without optimizing for maximum money as if they were MBAs with a drug habit to support or SV startups with &quot;angel&quot; investors demanding an insane return</i>. Look up the Kickstarters for any of those projects in the paragraph above.<p>Even for a Jacobin piece, this article is extremely myopic, poorly researched, and comically fatalistic.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.swordfishislands.com&#x2F;silent-titans&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.swordfishislands.com&#x2F;silent-titans&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;morkborg.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;morkborg.com</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exaltedfuneral.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;the-ultra-violet-grasslands-and-the-black-city" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exaltedfuneral.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;the-ultra-violet-gra...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mothershiprpg.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mothershiprpg.com&#x2F;</a>

I think the author needed to DuckDuckGo &quot;old-school renaissance&quot; and &quot;indy RPG.&quot; There is a vast cottage industry of hobbyists with their own RPGs, some based on the D&amp;D engine (the Open Game License is definitely not &quot;just another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro&quot;) and others on better-designed engines. Or you can buy $100 worth of books from any edition and do what you like with them. If you don&#x27;t like the Paizo and Hasbro takes on D&amp;D, there are more published alternatives than you could ever play.

I wanted to read an article about how capitalism kills art, but it took 7 paragraphs for the article to kind of sort of start talking about how capitalism killed D&amp;D, and then it wasn&#x27;t about capitalism, but about mismanagement.

&gt; He wasn’t initially interested in selling the slick, glossy product line we see in bookstores today; he wanted to sell a set of rules, essentially guidelines for play that could easily be adopted and adapted to whatever scenario other hobbyists cared to cook up.<p>Goodness, &quot;slick&quot; and &quot;glossy&quot;! I curse capitalism and its running dog, nice paper. Much purer to only sell xeroxed copies at GenCon.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the author has read the rules for Chainmail, but they were clearly not designed to be universal. Gygax sold a very specific system. D&amp;D and AD&amp;D were the same. Much later, the OGL provided a way to sell derivative products based on that system, but in any case the key word is <i>sell</i>. 5th edition D&amp;D is no less adaptable than 1st edition — if that&#x27;s your metric — and probably more so.

This is just &quot;The thing I loved is now ruined because the new thing is not the same as the old thing&quot;, except seen through the lens of the author who also looks at the world in terms of class struggles and interacts with the world through anti-capitalist agitation. If you ask 100 old nerds about modern day DnD, you&#x27;d probably get about 75 different answers for what ruined it.

D&amp;D always has been a commercial product of the west.<p>What did they play in the Soviet Union that was killed by becoming a sold product?

Have you ever heard about The Window? 42 pages PDF of rules for DnD like gameplay. Simple, effective, much more enjoyable...<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mimgames.com&#x2F;window&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mimgames.com&#x2F;window&#x2F;</a>

D&amp;D has plenty of competition, quite a bit of which is free. They do have some IP, but it&#x27;s not like they own the idea of adventuring or magic.<p>If you want an example of capitalism killing art, the mention of Marvel and DC toward the end might work better. They ended up a duopoly, with control over the industry&#x27;s IP.

someone roast White Wolf (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, exalted, more) next please.<p>gawd there&#x27;s such good podcasts for this multiverse though. like, not a lot of people, but hearing the couple real smart know it alls chat up these multiverses is so so so good.

Take a look at DrivethruRPG and tell me how capitalism killed art...

If you want to see how capitalism kills art, just watch one of the latest Marvel movies.

As opposed to socialist art, which is so pure. Jacobin: fuck YOU mom and dad! I hate this college!

I played sometimes as DnD as a kid growing up, and remember it was pretty straight forward to plunk down with friends in and afternoon and just have fun with it. I tried playing with my kids last year during lockdown and OMG...it took me 2 hrs to read the basic rules, 4 hrs to set up the characters, and then another 2 hrs to find where my kids had run of to because they got so bored with it!!! In the end, one loves it but it takes so much effort to set up and play that it can be overwhelming.