Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art | Hacker News Reader

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

jacobinmag.com

52 pointsairza61 comments

The thesis in the title makes no sense. There really isn't anything so special about the D&D systems that mean one person working from home couldn't come up with an artistic competitor. You don't need to spend any money on TSR books to run a campaign if there is an imaginative DM handy.

The only reason D&D is so big is that the profit lets it advertise and have a presence, so more people know about it. That is a benifit to the genre and encourages creativity.

Aren’t some of the game systems like D20 patented/copy written

D20 is released under the open game license, so anyone can use or modify it.

License here: https://www.d20srd.org/ogl.htm

Basic rules, classes, monsters etc are included: https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm

I don't actually believe you can patent game mechanics. Specifically for D&D, there's nothing novel about rolling a polyhedron and adding the resulting value with some other static value on a piece of paper.

* copyrighted

Couldn't agree with this more.

The idea that D&D has hoovered up so much of the world as to deny people of their own creative expression is absurd and I couldn't get past the first paragraph without thinking the author is off his rocker.

That thesis is over-reaching. What I would say, though, is that D&D has such market penetration, it's become like kleenex: the uninitiated cannot think of the concept of a TTRPG without thinking of D&D.

While other TTRPG's are still free to exist, it is much harder to convince a new player to hop on board with anything else (or to even explain to them how there are games very similar to Dungeons and Dragons that aren't Dungeons and Dragons).

It doesn't help that things like the term "DM" are patented by WotC, too.

As someone who has played for years, this is a struggle for me too. My group actually put a ban on D&D and PF as systems, and we cycle through 3-4 completely new and unique systems per year trying out everything that's out there. When people ask what I'm doing, my response is always, "We play Tabl-- We're playing D&D"

The thesis _almost_ makes sense. Then the article does nothing to support it.

The history of D&D is an example of capitalism commoditizing creativity.

Initially, there were some very thin rules about character stuff to accompany miniature wargaming. This was not terribly interesting to most people. Wargamers or otherwise.

That grew into some still thin and permissive rules and more of a focus on playing a role and storytelling. The onus was on the players to do most of this. There wasn't much in the way of example or instruction. This attracted the crowd we think of today as makers - self-directed problem solvers who like to greenfield.

That all seemed sort of interesting but not approachable enough, so, in typical capitalist fashion, there were more and more manuals and rule sets and published scenarios. There was a lot more hand-holding for the creatively needy.

Meanwhile, simple algorithmic dungeon crawlers were created on computers. There was only a thin whiff of role playing as theme in combat-mechanic- and metric-heavy CRPGs.

Then we bounce back to TTRPGs who've learned from CRPGs and they become something a bit like CRPGs with slightly heavier theme. Almost all the creativity is sucked out of it. What we used to call "munchkining" prevails. The only meaningful decisions are in character creation, itself a strictly bounded system.

How did this happen? At every step along the way decisions were driven by profitability, economies of scale, and the general commoditization of creativity, turning every game into the same pleasant McAdventure.

Oringally, D&D didn't even have a system for melee. Readers were referred to the rules of Chainmail. And for adventuring, to Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival.

Play was all DIY and the saddle bound Guides were ambiguous suggestions and a gateway into the world of more-than-six-sided dice.

Advanced D&D was a different game sold at the Dalton's in your local mall. Each of the ever expanding line of hardcover rule books - that game had rules not guides - cost about double the ten bucks of the old three guide boxed set (Chanmail was another ten bucks).

My understanding from the article is that the book covers that transition or succession or whatever from guidelines to rules. From a stapled 'zine to manufactured product lines.

Is that the death of art? As such reports tend to be greatly exaggerated, probably not. But there was a change. The game got canon.

And cannon canon https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Cannon

D & D was always money grubbing. Fun games, such as Toon, Paranoia and Call of Cthulu come as a single book that has everything you need to run the game including a sample campaign.

With D & D you need a whole bookshelf. It has been somewhat reformed but those polyhedral dice are not as fun as they look because people are always looking for the 5th d4 that rolled under the rug.

D & D is the one game I absolutely won’t run because people get attached to the characters and will argue with you. In Paranoia I will play without a campaign and kill them 4 or 5 times before they ever get to the briefing room and they will come back for more.

Gygax liked the improvisational acting aspect of the game but the rules were so Byzantine that all that got lost. The next generation games boasted simplified rules and directional bias built into the structure of the game that forces people out of the ‘accumulate stuff’ mindset they spend the rest of the week in.

That seems like just a difference in campaign styles. Paranoia is designed for that sort of play, isn't it?

My RPG group that has played for 15+ years has only played D&D a couple times, and only in the past 5 years, but the style in terms of attachment to long-lived and growing characters isn't any different from our previous campaigns (Shadowrun, Starfinder, homebrew Fallout, probably some others I'm forgetting).

Just an odd criticism to hang on D&D specifically.

Half-agreed with the bookshelf argument, though you can certainly get by with just the open SRD rules - most of the book content is just adding more and more options you can pilfer without having to homebrew it all.

There's also the sad fact that the more source books you add, the les distinguishable it is from homebrew -- they just can't play test the interactions between 72 different additions well enough to weed out the absurdities and balance everything well.

I read this and was very confused until I realized you weren't talking about a package manager, the statement almost work for package managers.

Perhaps I'm pedantic here but, no, you don't need "a bookshelf". The PHB/DMG split is obvious; you don't need the DMG (or MM) if you're a player. You don't need any of the supplements.

Also, you can run D&D games with or without TPK, you know. You can do troupe play. You can do all sorts of game modes. Rules are a framework for your game, that you build, not natural law.

There much more expensive RPG systems back then EPT for example.

Modern players don't realise this my first set of Run Quest Rules cost me back in the Late 70's about £80 in todays terms

My group started a new campaign and I’ve been killed at least 5 times, rolled 5 new toons. It really depends on how the DM runs the game and how adaptable the PCs are. It’s actually more fun not getting so attached and playing a diverse range of characters, of which you can have links between.

We’re playing Old School Essentials (BX) btw and it rocks.

Some friends and I dove into D & D during the pandemic. I have some improv and writing background (I’m an English teacher), so I took on the DM role. I honestly was not prepared for the depth of complexity and time investment to faithfully play the game. In the end, we stripped away entire parts of the rule book and made the game more role play focused; it’s not fun to be constantly referencing the rule book, but there was also a sense that we weren’t really playing D&D.

I'm not an expert in D&D per se, but looking at my shelf I have bought and read a ton of different P&P systems.

So I can't say you're right or wrong about the money grab, but I think you're missing the point that some people like world building (maybe more than the stories) and some people like storytelling (and couldn't care less for the world).

Some quick examples, a lot of the World of Darkness systems like Vampire, Hunter, Werewolf: You don't need to describe the world like in D&D because it's Earth, with a few differences. All background material is mostly social, political, some tech and "made up" stuff. Contrast this to D&D where you can sell books for every region: the geography, the lifeforms, the history, etc.pp

And I think you can't simply say one is better than the other. Some people want to play in a completely made up world and some people like the setting of Earth (with or without extras, there are also systems who don't have any magic or monsters). And this is a huge part of how many source material there is.

I stopped reading here:

> Their conclusion guaranteed him a lifelong income but left him bitter at the feeling he was underappreciated for the creative work that made D&D a reality.

If any of my endeavors gets me a lifelong income, it frees me to pursue other endeavors in financial peace. Recognition is overrated.

Yeah possibly this is oversimplifying but you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to be Bill Watterson, be Bill Watterson. But you have to accept he's financially worth 1/10 of what his comic-creating peers of similar stature are.

I stopped reading here:

> (jacobinmag.com)

Nothing in this article justifies the title. Broadly their primary complaints seem to be that Hasbro is selling anything aside from a core rule set (or really anything), and that the founders of TSR were slowly pushed out. These somehow means that art is killed.

The D&D founder weren't gods. If they wanted complete control, they could have not sold their company. Or once they were out of it, they could have filed off the serial numbers and made a new system (like Paizo did years later) having learned how to protect themselves from being pushed out.

The complaint that Hasbro sells things is asinine. Sure the digital dice on D&D Beyond are tacky, but you can just not buy them. The same goes for all the toys and trinkets that they sell on the side, like pins and minis.

I especially don't understand the complaints about the OGL because it seems like exactly what they want. That's what led to Pathfinder, a competing system that Hasbro doesn't control! (Unless they bought out Paizo when I wasn't looking.)

This article fundamentally doesn't demonstrate how capitalism had any marked impact on D&D as an art form. And there are some things they could have talked about that might have landed. For instance, the need to be pushing out new content all the time resulting in lower quality or the inability to fundamentally fix real problems. They could have brought up how 4.0 pulled the rug out from under people with the way more restrictive GSL. Or how in 5.0 the only option to make money off of more than just the SRD is to use a specific site and accept a 50% cut.

The article is just a mess and contradicts itself. The “main game itself remains largely moribund” even though it’s more popular than it’s ever been. What definition of “moribund” are they using? If it’s “moribund” because of lack of updates, that is first of all not true, but also would just be criticized by the author as “extracting as much money from consumers as possible through… constant upselling”. A comment the author made literally the sentence before the “moribund” comment.

The whole article smacks of gatekeeping on the part of the author, like they miss how it used to be a niche hobby.

Please. Art is as dead as it wants to be.

There will always be a spectrum in the market.

A D&D will always taget the gourmand, no the gourmet.

The gourmets require education.

Be the educator, not the curmudgeon.

> Be the educator, not the curmudgeon.

That's no way to sell subscriptions.

You can sell education.

That would be an advertising problem.

I've never been a part of any of those fandoms, but it was always curious to me how open-source alternatives didn't obliterate things like Warhammer, Magic cards, or things like that.

I guess it being a proprietary IP makes it easier to keep a "standard" version of the game, but there should be some way to agree to a certain rules and avoid paying most of the price.

I guess a large reason why is because, especially with miniatures, it doesn't require any equipment to actually make the thing. Bear in mind 3d printers (or at least the ones the average person can buy) are still quite new, they were unheard of when I was into warhammer as a kid. If you wanted a miniature, you had to buy it from the people that made it. Even now, its easier, if more expensive long term, to go to a shop and just buy the things than to print one out.

As for magic cards, I remember as a kid printing off yu-gi-oh cards, but they never ended up being very good, even with access to a laminater (we had to go to the library to do that). It was a short lived idea sadly

It takes a great deal of energy to create good content. It seems most people are willing to spend money to reduce that burden for their own games or at a minimum willing to spend money to create an elevated starting point for their own efforts.

One big problem with things like Warhammer and Magic (Magic being a more serious example) is there you really need a "dictator" who decides how "powerful" everything is, and can ban / weaken things which turn out to be broken. That type of thing seems consistently hard to do in open-source.

Dota managed to do it though. There were hundreds of dota versions people made and played before the origin of the modern day dota (called DotA allstars since it was a mesh of the favourite things from the other versions) appeared and everyone settled on it.

Edit: And the reason new dota versions stopped appearing after that is that the mapmaking community learned how to prevent people from opening and looking at the map source code, so it was no longer easy to change them. Maybe modern day dota would never have happened if that exploit wasn't found. But also modern day dota would likely never have happened if people couldn't easily modify and reupload others maps easily in the first place, since dota allstars drew so much inspiration from all the other wacky versions people made.

It was however only after DotA was handed[0] to the design/balancing BDFL IceFrog where it became the competitive game that we think of today. Before that, it was really just another yet popular "fun-map". He took advice from the best players and a trusted circle, but was known to have the last word on things.

There is something to say about the quality of a competitive game that is balanced around hardcore play versus a game that is balanced around a profit motive.

[0] I don't remember how the transition came to be.

5.54b was the last version before Icefrog, and then Icefrog took over development and the game slowly became the clean and interesting e-sport it is today. Was still just hobbyists doing it for fun though. People still don't know who Icefrog is, even after being hired by Valve he remains anonymous.

How many successful open source projects aren't substantially supported by people getting paid to do that work as their job? One of the big challenges for most open source projects is getting enough time to make substantial progress.

I think one of the challenges here is that the rules are meant to support a theme and the open nature means there's a lot of scut work building a viable system, testing, and balancing it. As we've seen with other ares like video games which combine the creativity of story telling with relatively high expectations for completeness, that's a pretty challenging combination to get volunteers to support. Companies which do invest the time and resources are going to have a natural conflict about sharing that with potential competitors since they need to make pay and it seems pretty easy to imagine a lot of the outcomes ending up like Elastic/Amazon disputes.

Open-source still struggles with quality and consistency -- two things important in a medium where aesthetics are important.

That said, access to low-cost, high-resolution 3D printers (specifically resin-based printers) has enabled an explosion of the open-source Warhammer community (see https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedWarhammer/ for one example) -- and oddly, it's exactly the free market that is allowing this to flourish through services like Patreon, where artists are financially rewarded by supporters who receive a steady stream of fresh new .stl's on a regular basis.

Open-source Magic the Gathering has struggled a bit, but there are still a good number of fan projects that have done very well. In particular, open-source game clients such as XMage have been open-source competitors to MTGO, and open-source fan-project expansions such as Star Wars: The Gathering have managed to keep a high level of quality and consistency: https://www.starwarsthegathering.com/

https://www.thingiverse.com/devonjones/collections/openforge

This is interesting -- quickly browsing through this list, I note that some of these .stls are literal alternatives to "sold" "products", like these legally distinct siege bunnies. [0][1] On the one hand, it's surely problematic for the original modeller, but on the other it's "just" similar (not identical!) instructions to the printer. Has this modeller "stolen" from the paid guy? How about from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

We all know and laugh at "illegal primes", but my intuitions, about how this applies to (what will eventually be, at its final stage) a physical object, are confusing me.

[0] https://haylandterrain.com/products/trojan-bunny

[1] https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3916454

When Warhammer and open-source collide, I'm always fascinated to see which aspect the discussion assumes deserving of attention: the miniatures, or the rules. The minis were historically protected by the rarity of injection moulding hobbyists, but in the era of 3d printing all bets are off. It's made easier by the casual Warhammer scene having long ago grown accustomed to "counts-as" models. Assuming it's around the same size and profile, you can use that WWII tabletop tank and call it a Leman Russ, so a Leman Russ with sliiiiiightly off dimensions or print quality is a shoe-in.

The rules, though, are a different matter. Warhammer 40k (the sci-fi variant) is a confusing blur of simultaneous, competing standards, controlled by an edition rulebook (which handles general gameplay rules and discussing physical aspects of the hobby like collecting and painting) and Codex books for each army, which aren't necessarily updated when a new edition comes out. The interactions of the army rules in each Codex and each edition's ruleset is chaotic at best, and often results in insane-looking letter-of-the-law strategies that exploit that interaction (early Tau firefish, anyone?), until it's fixed by a new Codex or edition.

The problem is, IMO, theorycrafting. The nerds that wind up playing your game have a lot more time, in aggregate, to break it than you do, and once one 'sploit has been found, disseminating it through the internet is trivial. Now everybody's doing it, and it's called "the current meta". If you don't want that, you've got to change something. You can add ever more and more complex pieces to the system, like they did with D&D3.5, or you can keep it moving forward and correct newly discovered imbalances live, as they do with WH40k (or, if you're a conspiracy theorist, correct some and intentionally introduce others).

I stopped trying to climb the endless mountain of 40k a long, long time ago. While I idly dream of a drop-in replacement ruleset that does away with the push-and-pull of edition-and-Codex rules-leapfrogging, I don't think something as complex as 40k can really be distilled into a timeless, unproblematic ruleset like chess or Icehouse or Homeworlds, especially if the intent is to continue releasing new models with new rules... especially if they're Space Marines, the Mary Sues of the 40k universe and the best-selling model line by far.

Anyway, I find it interesting that the parent comment took the approach it did. Note how Warhammer-as-open-source is about the free market providing new models, rather than the reverse-engineers "pirating" the entirety of Magic for XMage or creating new rules for the Star Wars variant. Warhammer has an "alternative client" too, in the form of the Vassal engine [0] (an LGPL 2d tabletop simulation system). Unlike XMage, it doesn't automagically enforce all rules, but then, neither does IRL live-action Warhammer. One could do something similar in Tabletop Simulator, of course.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassal_Engine

Magic is actually really enhanced by capitalism, imo. Trading cards is a really enticing aspect of it (which you can skip entirely if you want), each one having different cards is really interesting (you start with a novice set and can get better by acquiring the right cards). There is always that mystery of someone with really powerful cards, it creates an interesting atmosphere (and makes good cards really remarkable). Teaching children about economics is a good thing for me as well.

Games like Dominion (deck-building Magic) are really good, but you don't get this aspect of the game.

Now, maybe if everyone were given a random set of cards which you had to trade your way to glory that could be interesting as well. Maybe a victory allows you points or permits trading one of your cards for the opponent. In that case, Magic gets more meritocratic. However, this is essentially a parallel, magic-exclusive economy. And the glaring issue would be preventing the bleeding/interference of the real economy into this lateral economy.

This sounds more like a problem with taking a company public than it does with capitalism in general.

When your company isn't beholden to shareholders, you're generally more welcome to do anything you want with it, including focusing on "artistic integrity" for as long as you like. However, you also don't have access to the monopoly money that seems to get generated when taking your company public.

I suspect the sirens call of "infinite wealth" eventually wears down even the most principled, and the artist themselves chooses to let their art take a backseat. An unfortunately part of the human experience that I think most people don't want to acknowledge.

>This sounds more like a problem with taking a company public than it does with capitalism in general

I don't disagree, but it's sort of difficult to disentangle the incentives to take a company public from "capitalism in general", at least as it's practiced in the world today.

I'd point to Valve as the paradigmatic example of "not-evil corporation", precisely because it's GabeN's private hat empire and he can do things like fund the big unwieldy rocket of Steam Machines, which can then jettison the much more capable craft of Proton -- neither of which The Shareholders would have been comfortable with.

Would there have been pressure to go public and become normal if Valve didn't have access to Steam's money-printer? How about if Valve's charismatic hat-emperor was no longer at the helm? Maybe so, but I think that suggesting that "the sirens call of "infinite wealth"" can corrupt anyone is capitalist apologism when there are strong counterexamples in similar forms of expression. Moreover, suggesting the mere act of going public generates "monopoly money" and "infinite wealth", suitable to corrupt even the most principled, strikes me as parroting a just-so story about vulture capitalism's obvious unstoppable dominion.

I don't mean to suggest that the process is inevitable, just frequent.

> While it eventually became just another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro, the OGL pointed out a direction that could have freed the entire TTRPG hobby from capital’s clutches.

So it obviously didn’t point out a very good direction, hence hasbro’s commercial exploitation of it…

Dnd the ruleset can't make much money IMO. But world's,like the forgotten realms or the rival Pathfinder's inner sea make plenty of money.

These story settings make more than enough to expand upon rules (psyonics, epic games, etc) in a kinda-sorta story related reason.

Okay, so while Westerners were playing D&D, socialists on the other side of the iron curtain were playing Zarnitsa and Orlyonok, where you attack your opponents, capture spies and interrogate them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarnitsa_game

I mean, horses for courses, but you could argue that there would be no D&D were it not for capitalism in the first place.

This might be of interest as well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

> you could argue that there would be no D&D were it not for capitalism in the first place.

This is a fascinating thing for me to read because it is brought up every single time someone points out how capitalism encouraging the profit motive over anything else negatively impacts something.

It's also incredibly sad though, as the concept of creating things out of pure joy seems like such an alien concept to some people. What's so special about D&D that makes it so it could only be created in an economic system where the person who created it would face poverty if they didn't?

Conversely, it could be argued that in a system where people don't have to be coerced to do things they despise out of fear they won't have a place to live, they would have the time and mental energy to spend creating things they enjoy, actively including the billions of people who are too busy doing meaningless jobs to create anything in the equation.

> What's so special about D&D that makes it so it could only be created in an economic system where the person who created it would face poverty if they didn't?

Pretty sure he would have created D&D anyway, yes. But if not for capitalism he likely wouldn't have done the work to standardize and share D&D with the world and instead just kept it as his own homebrew campaign rules. Today it would be easier, but back then? No way.

Why is that? Sure, the game wouldn't be as popular without marketing, but information traveled before we had people dedicating their lives to making you click links.

For proof of that, you just need to look at Tetris. It spread so quickly that it had to be banned from universities. Tetris' history does bring up other issues, but spread of information is not one of them.

Tetris came a decade later so computers were more common and floppy disks were a thing making it easy to copy and share information.

Not to mention all the reasons why a book of roleplaying rules has less memetic potential than a small quick to play single player game. Today with good screens and internet it is plausible, pretty sure there already are such systems out there, but it couldn't have happened in the 70's and I'm pretty sure it would never happen in the 80's either.

I know you're not arguing this, but for the sake of expanding into the following point:

There have been plenty of games and other creative projects that became successful ignoring or even despite the economic system.

In fact I would argue that many of the most artistic games that had the most positive impact on me personally were made because they simply had to be made.

I'm not a fan of table top games (haven't tried them seriously enough) but I could give you a long list of computer games that are just oozing of passion, artistry, profound insights and deep respect for both their craft and their players. A good portion were successful financially, but certainly not all of them.

Right, today is very different from the 70's, and computer games are very different from table top games.

Anyway, I do think that the gaming industry would be much worse if not for capitalism. As you say you can find plenty of good passion projects to play, and even though most of them don't blow up some of them do, giving tons of money to people who have a passion for making games. If not for capitalism, the moment the person starts to add more workers to his project he no longer owns the IP since the concept of owning means of production is a core part of capitalism and IP is a means of production. Now I'm all for worker rights etc, but democratizing the decisions of how an IP should be handled and what should happen with game design etc isn't a good thing, I don't think the people he hires should have any say in that, I bought his products since I liked his vision and don't want new people to ruin it.

> since the concept of owning means of production is a core part of capitalism and IP is a means of production

Means of production are scarce property which is used (and consumed—even if only for a time) in the production of other goods. "IP" is not a means of production because it is not scarce. This also implies that it is not property, despite the misleading name. It's a social engineering project instituted by governments and not a core element of capitalism.

> system where people don't have to be coerced to do things

Was there ever a working system without some form of coercion? The common forms of coercion are either withholding resources (usually money), or restricting freedom (prison / labor camp).

The vast majority of conflicts were won with pre-modern weapons, but despite that overwhelming statistic, if I had to fight I'd prefer a rifle and modern armour.

Maybe historical data alone without other context isn't the best way to predict the future -- unless you're trying to make it look like the past. IMO much of the open-source world appears to function entirely without "some form of coercion"...

> Maybe historical data alone without other context isn't the best way to predict the future

So how can you get people do unpleasant but necessary work without direct benefit for them?

> much of the open-source world appears to function entirely without "some form of coercion"...

Does it? My impression is that the tedious and unpleasant work in large projects like Linux is often done by those who are paid for it.

>So how can you get people do unpleasant but necessary work without direct benefit for them?

I don't think we're going to be able to discuss this. Our priors are too different. This question sneaks the premise that people won't and don't "do unpleasant but necessary work without direct benefit for them", despite counterexamples littering the (impressively capitalist) world. Engaging with the question on its face is accepting the premise. It'd be like if I asked the parent "by ensuring that nearly everyone has to do often-meaningless and sometimes actively harmful things in order to avoid succumbing to exposure, what are the powerful people (who can, and do, choose not to debase themselves thusly) trying to prevent?"

For that matter, I might recommend David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, in answer to implication that all work is necessary.

>My impression is that the tedious and unpleasant work in large projects like Linux is often done by those who are paid for it

Linux itself didn't spring from a salaried worker, and large open-source projects having paid maintainers wasn't a requirement for their inception. AFAICT, paid maintainers exist precisely because their open-source projects have grown too large, unwieldy, and important to be allowed to be someone's pet project that's only worked on in spare moments.

And it's not that nobody's interested in large open-source projects, it's that the current system doesn't allow one to focus oneself entirely on something that doesn't make money, because without money, one dies of exposure. I can say this with confidence, because all those open-source projects that now support paid workers evolved from smaller ones whose contributors worked for free-as-in-starving-artist.

There would not be DnD without the Fantasy /SF literature and wargaming in general.

Little Wars was written by HG Wells ( Socialist and a member the Fabian Society

He may have been a socialist, but he was not living in a socialist country when he did it.

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