Red Box Dawn - The Ballad of Bargle - Memories of Dungeons & Dragons Red Box

My first rpg experience was with Gamma World, 1st edition. But most people were playing D&D, so I got into that less than a year later.

Although I never had the red box Basic edition, I did end up picking up some of the sourcebooks for the wonderful Mystara setting. The elves were okay, and the dwarves had some great maps. The orcs one included the Orc Wars board game, which was moderately fun. But my favorite was the City of Glantri, which was a fantasy version of Venice ruled by an aristocracy of mages.

I'm not sure how WOTC markets to new young players. I think they feel that RPG are so ingrained at this point through media and video games that it doesn't need much explanation.

I also think they want to get away from mechanic based dungeon crawl "murder hobo" adventures to more personality driven acting workshops that stream really well. Their published adventures are a bewildering array of characters, conflicting motives, overarching plots, and layered bad guys. A far stretch from the 'go from A to B to C killing and looting' modules of old. I think they yielded that terrain to DCC.

The news that orcs, drow, and the like will become "nuanced" just confirms this to me.

^I think that's right. I think they've seen where the zeitgeist of DnD is going (Critical Role) and they're following it. Makes sense. Barnes pushes back hard against this all the time but from a market perspective it makes sense.

Gary Sax wrote: . . . but from a market perspective it makes sense.

That's the heart of it. There's not a lot of money in a small self-standing product. You need something that generates follow-on sales unless you're a small privately-owned publisher.

Gary Sax wrote: ^I think that's right. I think they've seen where the zeitgeist of DnD is going (Critical Role) and they're following it. Makes sense. Barnes pushes back hard against this all the time but from a market perspective it makes sense.

Yeah, I think it's easy to ascribe too much credit to WotC for the game's current resurgence when in fact it probably comes from a confluence of factors like a generation raised on video games, the huge amount of community content and the accessibility that online streaming, hosting and distribution services enable. They're just busy riding that wave and making hay while the sun is shining. I must admit I've never watched Critical Role. There's something about that dude that just gives me the creeps. He looks like the singer in a Christian rock band or a guy who hangs out at university parties with a pocket full of rohypnol :/

I'm all for more variety and nuance in adventures and settings but I just wish they'd retain some more of the cryptic wyrdness and esoteric overtones. (Which to be fair were already fading by the time they got to the featured red box). However, yeah DCC and the indie scene are doing a fantastic job of mining that particular vein. I've actually not played any of the official 5e modules (apart from the aforementioned Lost Mines of Vanilla) but it's telling how many of them are reprints and reimaginings of old fare such as Saltmarsh and Ravenloft.

The only area where I will ascribe some foresight to Wizards is that they always kept at it with dungeons and dragons, doing their absolute best to keep it in mainstream bookstores, etc. I think it woul dhave been easy to abandon the core cultural artifact, the RPG, to mainly trade on the intellectual property. So they had nothing to do with RPG streaming and actual play podcasts becoming big, but they did keep the option open by sticking with the product.

Yeah there's been acres of licensed tat over the years. TSR were all over that too. Shrinkie Dinks! Jeremy Irons! But yeah you're right, they definitely kept the lights on so-to-speak. On the other hand, they would have been crucified otherwise. It's a legacy they're entrusted with. It has serious weight and cultural, historical significance. It's arguably the most influential game ever created. And that includes Chess.

Andi Lennon wrote: It's arguably the most influential game ever created. And that includes Chess.

I don’t see anything that comes within 100 miles of it. Its effect on Hollywood alone is measured in the billions.

Yeah not to mention video games which dwarf even Hollywood. Even golf simulations have stat blocks and levelling systems now. It also probably took the mantle from Tolkien for informing our cultural shorthand for fantasy tropes and archetypes. For better or worse. It's the Big Kahuna.

D&D is one of those brands like Star Wars where it can be very difficult to do much different with it without people losing their heads. There is just so much nostalgia and attachment to adolescent memories that if you inch out of the wheelhouse much, you alienate a huge number of people. However, unlike Star Wars, until 5e D&D hadn't been a mainstream hit since the early 1980s. It really couldn't afford to tell people to suck it up and deal with it, because until like 2015 those hardcore fans were pretty much the whole market.

Considering that I feel like 5e has threaded the needle about as well as could be expected. It's a fairly versatile system really. But in trying to be all things to all people it also isn't really one thing to such an extent that it's awesome at either extreme. It doesn't have the mechanical framework to really support the old school dungeon crawl simulation aspect, but it also doesn't really support the sort of mechanics focused "build" culture that a lot of people on say /r/dndnext seem to want from it. It also has too many mechanics to support the more free-form narrative style to satisfy a lot of TTRPG hobbyists. The key is that you can hack it in any of those directions (though perhaps not build culture as much) without too much trouble.

So all that considered, I think WotC is making the right move in making D&D the lingua franca of the community. I feel like that's a pretty clear strategy. The Youtube culture is a real boon for D&D, because it sort of defies verbal description. That's one reason it was so easy for bad-faith arguments about demons and satanic rituals to take hold, because when you explain D&D it sounds weird and arcane. Youtube has been able to demonstrate it, and all of the sudden the mystique is gone. It's just make-believe with lots of rules.

It really isn't the same kind of game anymore, to what it was in the 1980s. It's a lot more focused on broad-strokes storytelling than it is on simulationist gameplay. I've read a lot of takes on how bad this is, but I think a lot of those takes come off as kids-these-days scolding. It's like those people who think CRPGs have gotten too easy because people aren't forced to reload old saves or mess with ugly inventory systems, to me.

One thing WotC has done really well is embrace the hackable nature of D&D. You can pull at it in a lot of different directions and come away with basically the same game. Things like the DM's Guild or the Unearthed Arcana really promote this, as does the general attitude of the design team. They've done a good job of promoting blogger and Youtube culture, and if you don't like something about the way the game is written, it's super easy to find someone who can give you some advice. Is this lazy on the part of WotC, in that they let other people do their development work for them? Maybe, but it also prevents them from constantly releasing splatbooks and errata, which was an issue with 3e, 3.5, and 4e. The product line is way more manageable, the community is far more varied and expansive, and their cultural profile is as broad as its ever been. It's not always done very cleanly, but the overall result has been hard to argue with.

Oh absolutely but I don't think there's ever been a session of any RPG that hasn't been hacked and homebrewed in some form or other. A dogged adherence to 'rules as written' is the enemy of cool emergent storytelling in most cases. I'm so far from being a purist that I'm not fussed about what direction they take it in as long as its cool y'know? Although that's a very subjective thing haha. I'm also not a participant in the edition wars as I was MIA for all of three and four. I think the OSR is as much about 'rules light' immersion in story and worlds as it is some misty eyed nostalgia for a more purist era

It's odd that D&D is the system being used when talking of a shift to more narrative heavy interpersonal stories though. D&D as a system has never really been well built for that. Its texts are largely based on conflict and combat heavy resolutions with lots of emphasis on gaining strength, power and dominion over your surroundings. It offers precious little in terms of framework for telling stories that stray too far from a tolkienesque heroic journey. Even the shorthand parlance (BBEG etc) reinforces that.

Ultimately I only really still play at all due to the door opening qualities that are calcified and baked into the sheer recognition factor the name supplies. I'd much rather get my fantasy fix from the likes of Mork Borg, DCC et al and get my narrative heavy stuff from indie one shots, Call of Cthulhu or the like. I just invested in Invisible Sun which although daunting, looks fascinating (if not a little pretentious). But again it all stands in the shadow of D&D. A case could be made that it's probably as much a burden as a boon to the adoption of the wider hobby in a lot of ways at this point. But it will always have given me Bargle...