Comment by sfRattan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfRattan | Hacker News Reader

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Others in the thread have already mentioned how truly ridiculous and histrionic this Jacobin article is, so I'll skip to the plainly false part of their conclusion: that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&D.

That's probably largely true of 5th Edition. It's a focus group led, neutered, milquetoast version of Dungeons & Dragons. All of it's official product releases are whittled down to the least possibly offensive common denominator. And the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.

But the auteur creators aren't gone and creativity hasn't been killed. From Patrick Stuart's (the writer, not the actor) projects like Silent Titans[1] to the bizarrely delightful Mörk Borg[2] to Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands[3] to the space horror game Mothership[4]...

There's an insane amount of creativity in the design of tabletop roleplaying games today, and I haven't even moved that far from D&D-alike gameplay.

What's more, 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 "angel" investors demanding an insane return. Look up the Kickstarters for any of those projects in the paragraph above.

Even for a Jacobin piece, this article is extremely myopic, poorly researched, and comically fatalistic.

[1] https://shop.swordfishislands.com/silent-titans/

[2] https://morkborg.com

[3] https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/the-ultra-violet-gra...

[4] https://www.mothershiprpg.com/

> And the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.

Second attempt, actually. WOTC had a monthly-subscription webapp offering in the 4th Edition era, with (digital) subscriptions to the magazines, a character builder, and promises of a virtual tabletop that AFAIK never shipped.

While I have my issues with Jacobin, the article isn't about "RPG culture", it's specifically about Dungeons & Dragons. You say their conclusion "that capitalism has killed the artistic and creative part of D&D" is false, yet then go on to say

> That's probably largely true of 5th Edition […] and the D&D Beyond software is clearly a first attempt at an Apple App Store style walled garden from which to extract rent forever and ever.

…which is absolutely supporting their argument, isn't it? "Hasbro's steadily killing the artistic and creative part of D&D" and "there is an insane amount of creativity in RPG culture" aren't mutually exclusive! One doesn't disprove the other. They can both be true.

No one company has owned D&D this century. Most of it is in the public domain (Open Game Content), with some fiddly details restricted. For a while Hasbro's latest D&D was selling less than Paizo's, although I think Hasbro regained the lead. And even in the 1990s, you could share your own house rules, monsters, spells, etc. as much as you liked as long as you did not try to make money from them. RPG designers have very little control over what people do when they sit down at the table.

If the author thinks that the latest version of D&D published by the biggest corporation is the 'real' one, that just shows that he has adopted the corporate ideas he claims to reject.

The author is very clearly making histrionic statements about the state of the entire hobby, so my use of broader terms is entirely appropriate. I'm using the term "D&D" in the same way every RPG gamer I know has ever used it: as the genericized trademark that it is, often synonymous in everyday use with some broader sense of tabletop RPGs.

In some places, the author focuses narrowly in on TSR and Hasbro and D&D as a specific property. In other places, the author makes broad, sweeping, silly statements about the hobby as a whole, and implies equally silly despairing nonsense about other hobbies (which is beyond the scope of this thread to even look into).

> Without the market’s demands and the accompanying dictates that stifle creativity in favor of profitability, TTRPGs could have been part of the public domain, with gamers free to build and expand on whatever ideas they wanted, either their own or ones drawn from other sources.

> Game Wizards is not just a captivating story about how one man lost control of his dream. It’s also an object lesson in the way capitalism invariably strips even our leisure activities of their communal joy.

The author is playing a semantic game and moving the goalposts in order to commiserate where there is no imposed misery. Just consumers who sometimes make choices that lead them into boring walled gardens, while still having the choice to walk out of those walled gardens and find the rest of the forest.

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