John Zeitler

Essay Week 2010 runs from Sunday, July 25th to Saturday, July 31st. Every year I take a week and write about some topics of interest to me that run slightly more serious than the usual fare on the blog. That’s not to say that games and anime won’t enter into it, but the predominant theme is that this week skews a bit more literary than epistolary. Today we take a look back at the very first Essay Week topic three years ago, and see if I was rolling 20′s that day.

It’s not that Dungeons and Dragons has become less nerdy in the two years since its fourth edition was released. Quite the contrary, in point of fact, as the game now has an emphasis on miniature modeling in addition to die-based roleplaying. The books are more numerous, the gameplay more dogmatically defined, and the characters hewn more closely to standard fantasy and gaming archetypes. But, even within that strictly nerdy framework, the players involved are becoming ever so more diverse.

In retrospect, I think maybe Wizards of the Coast made a bad call in describing 4th edition as ‘evolutionary, not revolutionary’. A huge amount changed between 3.5 and 4.0, and with it came a pretty bad backlash against WOTC. This retaliation came in no small part due to two specific things, both of them very dogmatic and very dear to many players’ and supporters’ hearts.

The first, and probably the least obvious one, is the dropping of the Open Gaming License system. Introduced alongside 3rd Edition in 1999, the OGL was intended to make creating content for Dungeons and Dragons “safer” for players after the (and I hesitate to use this word, even though it’s both thematically and literally appropriate) draconian measures that TSR had employed during editions prior to 3rd. TSR had seen the Internet as a threat to their ability to maintain a profit on D&D in the 1990s, and as a result cracked down HARD on discussion of the game. Even when the discussion was purely positive. It was so bad that even the official discussion boards for the smash-hit computer game Baldur’s Gate, which was itself based on D&D rules and officially licensed by TSR, could not talk about the rules that the game employed. By taking an open-source approach to the creation of D&D supplements, it was hoped that interest in D&D would surge.

It certainly did, but with that came the attendant increase in really crappy modules and rule splatbooks. Sturgeon’s Law was in full force, and Hasbro (at the time the owners of the D&D property) could do little about them. The core rules for the game were freely available except for a few key elements such as character creation and class listings. Think of it like the rules for poker: you can go to any website in the world and download the rules for poker for free, but you still need to buy a deck of cards to actually play. While OGL and the D20 System were very good ideas in theory– and the D20 System rules are still among the clearest and most straightforward of any RPG systems available– it was still, in Hasbro/WOTC’s eyes, a wash.

So, when 4th Edition rolled around, both the OGL and D20 System were quietly taken out behind the shed. This presented a legal problem for WOTC. They could not revoke the OGL license and fully kill off 3.0/3.5, and in truth they didn’t want to, as that would undo a lot of the goodwill they’d regained from players. On the other hand, they wanted to push 4th Edition as the proverbial “new hotness”, and owing to this they needed to wash their hands of the game system. Enter Paizo Publishing, a child company of WOTC that had been set up to handle the magazines Dungeon and Dragon (two different magazines at first, later rolled into one). An agreement was set up: Paizo would split off from WOTC, and become its own entity. They would then trade licenses: Paizo would gain control of the OGL and D20 System, and WOTC would gain the Dungeon and Dragon names for… we’ll get to that in a bit. This worked for gamers, but it was bad for WOTC as the ‘new’ game on the block– Pathfinder– was now in direct competition for the hearts and minds of players. Ultimately, though, it worked out for everyone’s benefit, again as we’ll discuss momentarily.

The second issue that stuck in gamers’ craws was the complete revamp of the way the game was played. Whereas in 3.0/3.5 miniatures representing players and monsters were a strong recommendation, in 4.0 they became all but a requirement as the game took a more tactical emphasis on combat. Adding to this the fact that the character classes were completely redesigned to provide a better focus on the combat role each character would play in a functional party (thus preventing a party from having not enough offense or defense to withstand a challenge), the fact that characters of all classes now gained abilities in exactly the same ways and were all more “wizard-y” (thus preventing the problem of magic users far outstripping straight fighters at high levels), and the fact that, for the first time in the game’s history, a complete and fully-supported computer application suite was being offered for a monthly fee to assist in session development and character creation/maintenance (thus preventing the problem of players complaining that creating such game resources was too time-consuming and difficult), and the conclusion was leapt to almost immediately that D&D had become pen-and-paper World of Warcraft.

The truth is, that’s an unfair and knee-jerk reaction to the benefits these advances provided. Yeah, so you can’t play a wizard because the party needs a physical fighter; now you have all these really cool fighter-type classes to choose from that don’t have just “hit things with sword” as their only course of action, and you can preview anything in the game– literally every officially published class, splatbook, and magical geegaw– up to level 3 for free. You don’t need to spend a ton of money on miniatures if you have a bunch of pawns or spare dice and some imagination. Games can be organized more quickly and played much faster. And while there’s still an emphasis on combat, if you have a good DM, you can sometimes go entire weeks of playtime without having to resort to violence.

Since the game’s debut in June of 2008, I’ve played in a few different runs here and there and even run a couple of sessions myself. Another friend of mine has fallen completely in love with the game, and spends a lot of his spare time trying to shoehorn interesting mechanics into the 4th Edition ruleset (and is making a pretty good name for himself by posting his successes for others to work with). What I’ve noticed, though, is that the game is quickly becoming more universal and more accepted in mainstream society. The crowd of gamers who join in the monthly sessions at GASP is skewing slightly older, and the younger ones joining in are from incredibly diverse backgrounds and are not at all what could be considered Geek Classic. It’s becoming a universal thing, and I love it.

I’m not saying we’re going to see Congress resolve its issues with rolls of 20-sided dice, or that the UN will replace its Secretary-General with a Maitre de Jeux Internationale. But as time wears on, and as the geeks get older, we’re seeing Poker Nights and D&D Nights go neck and neck for get-together activities. What the geeks of yesterday played, the world of today is discovering, and will become the commonplace of tomorrow. Revolutionizing the game has prompted the evolution of the society surrounding it.

For my part, I really enjoy the game, and making it easier to play has been probably the best thing to happen to it. I have more 4th Edition books than any other game system, and I’m seriously considering starting up a campaign to run using pre-made modules (I don’t have time to build a campaign from scratch right now, even though I’d love to). But really, what it’s done that’s most telling is that I have what I call the “+2 Case of Gaming”, fully stocked and ready at a moment’s notice to roll, something I’ve never done for any other pen-and-paper game. If the game’s ready for me at any time, then I ought to be ready for the game at any time.