cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3992477
Elon Musk, the owner of the app formerly known as Twitter, is calling on Wizards of the Coast and its parent company Hasbro to “burn in hell” for the publication of Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons. On November 21st, former gaming executive turned culture warrior Mark Hern posted several passages from Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons on Twitter, criticizing the book for providing context about some of the misogyny and cultural insensitivity found in early rulebooks. These passages were pulled from the foreword written by Jason Tondro, a senior designer for the D&D team who also worked extensively on the book. Hern stated that these passages, along with the release of the new 2024 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide for D&D’s “40th anniversary” (it is actually D&D’s 50th anniversary) both “erased and slandered” Gary Gygax and other creators of Dungeons & Dragons.
In response, Musk wrote “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash E. Gary Gygax and the geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons. What the [naughty word] is wrong with Hasbro and WoTC?? May they burn in hell.” Musk had played Dungeons & Dragons at some point in his youth, but it’s unclear when the last time he ever played the game.
Notably, Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons contains countless correspondences and letters written by both Gygax and Dave Arneson, including annotated copies of early D&D rulesets. Most early D&D rules supplements as well as early Dragon magazines are also found in the book. It seems odd to contain one of the most extensive compliations of Gygax’s work an “erasure,” but it’s unclear whether Hern or Musk actually read the book given the incorrect information about the anniversary.
Additionally, Gygax and Arneson are both credited in the 2024 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. The exact credit reads: “Building on the original game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and then developed by many others over the past 50 years.” Wizards of the Coast also regularly collaborates with Gygax’s youngest son Luke and is a participant at Gary Con, a convention held in Gygax’s honor. The opening paragraph of the 2024 Player’s Handbook is written by Jeremy Crawford and specifically lauds both Gygax and Arneson for making Dungeons & Dragons and contains an anecdote about Crawford meeting Gygax.
Musk has increasingly leaned into culture war controversies in recent years, usually amplifying misinformation to suit his own political agenda.
Elon Musk hints at buying Hasbro for D&D after announcing AI game studio
A week later, on November 27, X user Ian Miles Cheong posted a screenshot showing Tondro’s response to Musk’s prior concerns.
When addressing Musk’s criticism of the book, Tondro explained that he and others agreed that backlash would come from “progressives and people from underrepresented groups who justly took offense at the language of OD&D.”
“How much is Hasbro?” Musk asked.
Although the X owner didn’t elaborate on a potential purchase, if Musk does end up acquiring Hasbro, he would also secure the rights to Transformers, Axis & Allies, Monopoly, Magic The Gathering, and even My Little Pony.
We’ll have to wait and see how this unfolds and if Musk is serious about potentially acquiring the entertainment juggernaut.
I haven’t regularly played TTRPGs since 2016. Most players didn’t read then. Has it gotten worse?
When I was in middle school (forever ago in the 90s), I remember getting into these games because a bunch of us were all pouring through the rulebooks for the lore and then turning around looking for someone to run a game.
Now, I see my friend’s kids asking the parents to run games based on whatever cartoon or Let’s Play they were introduced to. But it’s rare to see them actually reading the books as books. So much of what they ingest is video or audio.
I think RPG audiences have branched out into people who don’t read rulebooks for fun. I voraciously consumed and memorised 40k 3rd Ed over the course of a week after school, but most people do not do this, and didn’t in the 90s either.
Modern RPGs tend to be better designed so that the rules can be shorter and flow with how people play, but older RPGs with decades of baggage tend to be a slog for all but a few people.
(Not saying that there isn’t a literacy crisis, but requiring people to study for their social leisure time is a great way to kneecap a niche hobby. D&D5 is probably bad, by virtue of D&D bring bad)
I do agree more non-readers are embracing TTRPGs as a hobby. And some of this is improved straightforward accessibility. But I would not automatically concede simplicity as an improvement in the game.
I’d argue it’s half the fun of the game. Learning all the intricacies of different factions and obscure locations and gadgets makes the game more of a piece of prose. Reading the little journal entries that merely allude to facets of a game that hobbyists then argue over incessantly is what juices the brain to write the next campaign.
The fuzzy sprawling nature of these games is what gives a lot of them their character. A big part of the game play is the mystery. Things the DM knows that the players are wholely unfamiliar with.
When too much is nailed down or easily grssped, you’re not playing an RPG, you’re playing a board game.
You and I probably have fun doing similar things, but a decent number of people just want to vibe with their friends. Some want to practice improv. Some want to write fuck fics.
I wound up being part of a group that has a rather hipster-ish approach to games. We haven’t touched D&D since around 2008, and mostly spend our mutual time playing a friend’s system. Rarely two systems in a row, rarely the same system twice unless its a substantial update and there’s no other game running. Even when we did play D&D, I don’t think anyone actually ran in the official D&D setting, though things like spell names and magic items carried through. We’d invent our own kingdoms and characters etc. I have my own critiques of how many of these systems were just “other system, but slightly different”, and the stories were generally pretty derivative as well, but I wouldn’t say that we leant into the sprawling nature of these settings.
I guess I’d compare, say… D&D and Shadowrun as these old games with vast sprawling splat book collections, different editions you can pull “lore” from, to like…
Blades in the Dark, where most of the rules content is on the characters sheets, the dice rolls are pretty simple to build up and down, and going further down the chain
Hillfolk, where there’s only nominal gameplay and settings are a single page with some character archetypes to get you started in a sort of free form theater activity.
There’s also games like GURPS or Hero System that nominally have a setting and rules for those settings, but actively encourage you to use the rules to make your own. These also tend to be older.
It is kind of in the name that role playing games involve some level of role playing, but that isn’t the history of these games. They largely evolved out of war games that are at least partially competitive, which requires large sprawling systems to cover all the edge cases.
I also don’t think “simplicity” per se is better, but consistency of rules generally is. If you have spent the entire rulebook talking about certain sorts of tests, and then you have a splat book later that offers very powerful rewards if you successfully play the drums (instead of rolling dice), you’re going to have a contingent of power gaming nerds annoying everyone with the drums constantly.
But having the “more powerful stuff” hidden in a sprawling array of splat books is… Well, it’s profitable, but its also annoying game design. The number of times I came across something in Shadowrun 5e where something was technically playable in the core rules but you had to have the Street Grimoire book was extremely annoying and made it inaccessible for someone that wasn’t scraping the internet to “play better” or voraciously reading every sourcebook for a thing.
Not that there isn’t enjoyment to be had in voraciously consuming every splat book and rule and comparing that with friends. Just not everyone enjoys doing that. I’d even say most people don’t enjoy that. And also a portion of the people that do enjoy that do it to have power over their friends in a leisure activity, reifying the hierarchy and so on (you can tell because they’re the sort of person who immediately loses interest if they can’t do it, and they have zero suggestions on how balance could be improved)
No. But it’s a thing you can do without a full table of players. While actually running a game requires much more time and coordination with other people.
The thinner and less detailed games - your Big Eyes Small Mouth and your FATE Core Game and your Kids on Bikes - can work as a system. But they don’t give you a lot to inspire a DM or excite a table of players.
If you’ve already got a group excited to play, that’s great. But the old setting dense books got me looking for people to play with in a way the very simple and rules agnostic books never could.