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’ll admit my experience with 5e is very cursory relative to a bunch of the 90s/00s systems, but Xander’s Guide definitely has crafting rules, including item cost and time to competition, based on the designated item rarity (ranging from 50gp / 1 week for Common to 100k / 50 weeks for Legendary).
5e also definitely has social skills, feats, and powers. And the 5e implementation of Kingmaker didn’t need to work any harder to incorporate exploration/kingdom building mechanics than they did with PF.
The primary reason people like 5e is just networking effect. People play it cause people play it. I’ve never had a problem finding people familiar with D&D. Meanwhile, good luck finding anyone who is familiar with Rollmaster or Rifts.
But secondly, the d20 system - particularly in the latest incarnation - is fairly easy to pick up and reasonably well balanced. Nobody feels like they screwed up halfway through the game because they decided to play a Conan style barbarian instead of a Merlin-esque wizard. Nobody has to learn an entire subset of rules to pay a Shadowrun Decker or Vampire Tremere.
Thirdly, there is a TON of content. I love Exalted to death, but good luck finding any modules to run for new players/STs. You’re really coming at it from scratch.
5e is drowning in them - both in updates to classics and new releases. I did a one shot of 5e set in MtG’s Dominiara and had a ton of fun playing straight out of the book.
A lot of that is just compounded returns. D&D has tons of money and manpower for development in a way Lancer and Fate don’t. Lots of old head players keep churning out derivative content in the setting.
But that’s the nut of it.
That’s exactly the issue I’m talking about - The price of an item of a specific rarity is given as a range, but individual items aren’t priced and there are no formula to calculate specific prices by. The DM still has to choose the specific price within the range for the rarity.
I never said it didn’t, I said it has no systems for them - think about what those skills actually do, and then what systems they interact with. When someone’s unfriendly towards you, how does influencing them actually work? When do you actually make the skill checks, how often can you make them, what happens when you succeed and fail? 5e has plenty of trailing threads, but if you look at what they connect to it’s left to the DM.
You know WotC didn’t make Kingmaker, right? Paizo made Kingmaker in order to release their own official Pathfinder exploration/kingdom building mechanics for their own system(s), then created a 3rd party conversion for 5e. They didn’t have to work any harder because they were already making rules up whole cloth themselves for their own systems. You are pointing at Paizo’s homebrew content for WotC’s system as evidence of official content.
It’s easy to start playing, creating a character and sitting down at the table, but there aren’t enough rules to pick up as a player. It’s not just that each DM has their own style, each DM is having to make their own decisions on how various things work mechanically, so players can only ever learn how their DM runs 5e. Rather than learn the rules you have to constantly refer to the DM for what you can and can’t do and how difficult it’ll be. The DM is an arbiter, dictating the rules, rather than a mediator, ensuring the rules are run correctly.
Only having levels 3-8 considered playable (if you ban certain subclasses) isn’t “reasonably well balanced”, and while the fighter/wizard problem is slightly less extreme than in 3.x, it is only marginally. Even within the “balanced” levels casters can be noticeably more powerful than martials, and once they get into the teens they’re gamebreaking. I understand 5.5 is fixing some of the worst subclasses, but there are still heavily abuseable combos like sorlocks and hexadins that create a wild difference between optimised and unoptimised characters. Meanwhile, CR is only tangentially related to the difficulty of a fight to an even worse degree than 3.x, with easy fights suddenly descending into chaos from a lucky crit or impossible odds turning out to be actually entirely possible as long as you’re not unlucky.
5e is barebones compared to its previous editions, and even moreso considering the amount of money and manpower Hasbro should be able to leverage for it - to compare it directly to Exalted, a fairly niche system, there’s roughly the same number of rules and settings books available for both D&D 5e and Exalted 3e without turning to third party publishers. Similar stories for VtM 5e, Trail of Cthulhu, and Delta Green. If you compare it to its most direct competitor, Paizo have put out twice as many rules and settings books for PF2e in half the time. Sure, 5e has lots of third party content, but that just loops back around to the inability to learn the rules - each individual DM is the arbiter of which 3rd party content they use to fill in the gaps.
Ultimately, there is only one reason to play D&D:
I heard
is threatening to buy Hasbro to get control of D&D. Really hope he does, and everyone realises what a terrible reason that is to play a TTRPG.