What would the tabletop RPG hobby be like today if D&D had never existed? It’s almost impossible to imagine it. I’m sure TTRPGs would have evolved to popularity with some other game as the catalyst, but I’ll leave hypothetical histories to the actual historians. I did recently have cause to wonder, though: is my entire perspective on roleplaying skewed by having started with Dungeons & Dragons? If that’s true of me, it’s true for many millions of others, and begs the question: what would things be like if D&D wasn’t almost everybody’s first step into roleplaying?
Some context on this thought experiment. My main, weekly RPG group – which has been running for seven years – recently debated how we’d rank all nine of our campaigns to help decide what to play next. Despite a spirited defense from me, sheer weight of votes placed our two full length Dungeons & Dragons capers near the bottom of the tier list, while the mighty Blades In The Dark took the S-Tier throne.
Cue a discussion that’ll be familiar to most long-term TTRPGers: the good old “D&D – hyuhh – what is it good for?” chat. My comrades – mostly negative on D&D, or simply disinterested after feeling they’ve got all they could from it – put up strong cases for the prosecution.
“It’s simultaneously too simple, and too convoluted,” said our forever GM, “a product of an archaic, overly complex game for nerds being stripped back to capture newbies and theater kids. The nerds have found games that much better scratch their mechanical itch, and the theater kids have found games with narrative mechanics”.
Leaping to D&D’s defense, I fell back on my own interpretation: it gives players simplicity first (Roll D20, add a number, do a thing), then adds convolution as the characters grow and players’ confidence increases, and this is part of what makes it so beginner friendly. My thinking was that nervous newbies (including DMs, to an extent) can just start playing, get the dopamine hit of rolling a dice, succeeding, making something happen, and then slowly build up the creative energy they put into injecting meaningful story to back it up.
Detractors (including me, in past Wargamer articles) tend to call D&D overly mechanistic, because almost any action has a pretty one-to-one designated skill to roll, and every roll works the same, with only as much variety as the DM is able or willing to bake in for things like partial successes. But that can be a boon too because, as a new player, you’re never stuck for what to do. You can just press the appropriate “do thing” button each time, and the game will work, even if you’re lacking most of the character motivations, interactions, emotions, specific narration of how things are done, and why, because no-one’s entirely comfortable ‘getting into character’ like that yet.
Story forward games with fewer, more flexible rules, I would have thought, require more skill and experience to make work, because a certain amount of creative engagement is required just to make anything happen in the first place.
Now, I stand by a lot of those points – but this is where the scales started to fall from my eyes. I’d assumed most of that D&D analysis to be pretty uncontroversial, impartial, and logical. In fact, I now believe it’s biased by an unproven assumption, born of Dungeons and Dragons’ ubiquitous position: that mechanics are more fundamental than storytelling.
Is D&D a perfect first RPG because it has you get to grips with all your numbers and dice rolls right away, letting you master all the basic interactions with the game world – and enjoy beheading a few skeletons – before requiring the storytelling and roleplay skills most newbies lack on entry? Or is it, as my GM says, “awful for beginners in the hobby because it’s one of the few games where you have to do a lot of math (proficiency modifiers); a lot of suspension of disbelief (what does 42/85HP even look like?); and then, a not-inconsiderable amount of the time, your chosen action results in ‘nothing happens’.”
Do new RPGers benefit most from getting the ‘game’ part first and learning to embrace the ‘role-playing’ part later? Or do newbies “tend to be MORE creative, and then that gets sapped out of them when they get told ‘no’ enough times, because D&D can’t handle anything outside of its list of skills”?
The answers, naturally, will vary from group to group. Merely raising these questions, though, made me realize many of my basic assumptions about TTRPGs – what they are, how they work, what they’re for – have been unconsciously molded by playing and writing about D&D for so long. I love rules-light narrative games, and these days I play them at least as much as D&D. But, without knowing it, I’ve come to think of them as ‘games people move onto after learning the ropes with D&D’, simply because that’s what happened to me and, it seems, most gamers. Somehow, I mentally filed them as variations, where Dungeons & Dragons is the baseline norm.
In fairness, that’s a natural enough categorization. D&D is the biggest, most popular, most played TTRPG in the world. It’s been so for decades; it’s still the only one most people on earth have ever heard of and, whether they like it or not, the creator of every other TTRPG has to somehow locate their game in relation to it, sooner or later. Its orbit is inescapable.
But I wonder how I’d view this whole question if my first proper RPG hadn’t been D&D, but rather a narrative-first game like Blades in the Dark. In that game, dice are still important in shaping what happens in the story, but – to quote the noble and misunderstood Captain Barbosa – “they’re more like guidelines”. You don’t pick a pre-packaged action from dozens on the shelf, roll a D20 plus bonuses to see if it does anything, update everyone’s HP counters, and pass the turn.
Instead, you:
- Think of what would be the best or coolest thing to do in the moment
- Discuss it with the group, and find out who might be able to do something equally cool to help, giving you extra dice to roll.
- Find out from the GM how risky it’s going to be (which can make your roll tougher, and the consequences rougher).
- Find out from the GM the rough range of possible outcomes (just because you want to jump to the moon and roll all sixes, doesn’t mean you can).
- Roll one, two, or three D6s, and the balance of 4-6s versus 1-3s tells you not just if you succeeded, but how well or badly.
That’s just one example, but it illustrates nicely the gulf between this style of play, and the general D&D approach: codifying every possible mechanical action, getting started, and then generating story separately, as needed. It’s rather eye opening to imagine what it’d be like as a theater kid who played Blades in the Dark first, then moved to D&D. The closest analogy I can muster is switching from life drawing to a filling in a vast library of slightly overwrought paint by numbers books.
I don’t want to be too unfair on D&D here. Blades, and games like it, all have their shortcomings too. Plus, outside of combat, where flexible skill checks and flowing narration can run free, skilful DMs can shape play to feel almost like the Blades process above – and in my opinion that generates some of the best moments in the game.
But the fact is, as every player learns in the first hour, D&D campaigns are almost always dominated by combat. You’re strongly motivated to plan, optimize, and systemize from the off, because you need to build your mechanical toolkit or be left behind. Without expert DM care and attention, the rest of your tale can all too easily fade into an unmemorable supporting act – not because that’s what the players want, but because it’s what the system naturally tends towards.
How might it change fans’ general expectations and priorities in games, if most people’s first roleplaying game constantly forced them to engage actively with the story and narrate their actions first, and apply rules to those actions second, rather than the other way around? How might it affect their ‘baseline’ of what TTRPGs are for, which ones they buy, and thus which get made, if the core question they learned to apply to new games wasn’t ‘how many specific cool things does it have purpose-built rules for?’, but rather ‘how much do I like the way these rules will let us create a satisfying story together?’
At the risk of robbing you of a payoff, I don’t know – but I think we might already be starting to find out. In this escalating golden age of TTRPGs, new releases are flowering everywhere, from D&D’s biggest rivals – Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and the like – right down to eye-wateringly gorgeous, high concept, art-house creations from solo designers. And, by my reckoning at least, this new wave of TTRPG creativity is weighted far more towards the rules-light, story-heavy end of the spectrum than D&D and Pathfinder territory, let alone the ultra-crunchy, full-simulation and wargame lands beyond.
I’ve been RPGing for nearly 20 years now – perhaps in another 20, people’s baseline will have shifted closer to the middle of that spectrum. In the meantime, I’ll keep hopping about as I like. My pals might be down on D&D, but I’ll always love it for the slightly misshapen nostalgia beast it is. Only up to about level 15 though – we don’t talk about what goes on after level 15.
What’s your take? Can D&D ever be all things to all gamers, as it dearly wishes to be? What was your very first ever TTRPG, and how has it affected your tastes in the hobby? Come join the free Wargamer Discord community and let us know; this is exactly the kind of rabbit hole we love jumping down!
Source: Wargamer
