Sure, for most everyone else the OGL fiasco is fading from memory, but for me it has made an indelible mark. At first I felt a little traumatized, then I realized: as much as this feels like a place I've never been before, it is also a place I've very much been before.
Dungeons & Dragons has died many deaths for me, or at least lived many lives.
Welcome to the roleplaying multiverse.
It all started, of course, by trying to horn into my brother's games. I was much younger, you see, and this New Game that he and his friends were playing seemed very interesting. There was dice and math and storytelling and tiny lead figures to paint. My first few minutes of D&D, tho, was very much pencil and paper. One sheet of lined paper to document my stats and one sheet of graph paper where we started the adventure.
"You can see about thirty feet with your torchlight. Each square here is five feet." Brother draws a five by thirty foot hallway on the graph paper. "The stone hallway is dirty and cold. Your footsteps sound loud to your own ears as the sound bounces off the walls. What do you do?"
"I move forward slowly."
"You see more hallway," keeps drawing, "more hallway... You see orcs!"
Now, why were orcs just waiting for me to stumble my way up the hallway? I don't know. That's just how those first edition adventures seemed to go, at least in our house. I don't remember how that first confrontation went, I was about ten at the time, but something about that combination of dice, math, and storytelling hooked me. As much as I love to paint, for me the lead figures were optional. (That's doesn't mean I don't own a horde of them, I do, but I possess them like an angry dragon.)
I particularly became enamored of an elven figure that I dubbed "Sir Flame." All my brothers friends assumed it was a gay joke, but it wasn't. I just knew that was his title. I also pulled his name Trazelle out of the ether, which it turns out is a real name (I wouldn't know that for 30 years). I played characters before him (all female), and have played many characters since (of all varieties), but Trazelle was the first character to completely captivate me. He was funny and otherworldly and so very, very deadly when he needed to be. His weapon of choice for battlefields? Fire, of course. He's the reason I love purple (his favorite color) and lavender (his favorite scent). Anyone who has played with him has at least one Trazelle story. "Remember that time you forgot to pack any rations, so after we killed that dragon you poked at it and asked, 'Is it tender?'" The action was funny enough, but the tentative, hopeful little tone in his voice is what put it over the top. The only actor I can think of who could play him would be Leslie Howard.
Once I had my first real taste of an ongoing character in a larger world with conflict, politics, enemies, and allies, well, the hook was sunk deep. The next logical step, for me, was creating my OWN world. So in 1985 I sat down and did just that. Maps. Notebooks full of places and people. Ancient items.
I particularly focused in one region, Land East, that was formerly a human empire and had fractured into uneasy alliances of powerful leaders who had dominion over a small country. Magic was strictly forbidden throughout most of the area, even though the ruins of one of the most significant magic schools of any era sat directly in the middle of it. My favorite part of running players through it was starting them in one area that 'hated' another area, then having them start characters on the other side of the conflict. It removed the 'good and evil' paradigm that is so often at the heart of basic roleplaying.
In 1989 our group all made the transition to Second Edition. We were young and feisty with A Lot of Opinions about the changes. That loose leaf Monster Manual is one of the best/worst ideas I've ever seen. Or maybe it was a good idea with poor execution, because heavy or laminated paper would have worked. The paper they used? Omigod, you could tear it by breathing on it. By then we were also playing a lot of other roleplaying games, so D&D had a lot of competition, but our regular Sunday night game was usually reserved for the classic. For months, maybe years?, our adventuring party slogged from first to twelfth level in a campaign my husband ran. We were deep into regional politics, the effects of dark magics, and how in the heck we were supposed to save our people.
Man, we loved second edition like a dragon loves gold. Sure, we bought the books for 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0, but did we play them? Heck no. I kept an old laptop with a CD rom specifically to run Core Rules 2.0 on gaming nights. Yes, I still have it. So you could say that 2.0 never really died for me, it is a zombie that lives in my house, sort of like Nick Frost at the end of Shaun of the Dead.
"we loved second edition like a dragon loves gold"
However, the type of D&D we played with 2.0 seems to have died at least a little death. The original AD&D was very combat oriented, but 2.0 - at least for my group - was very roleplaying oriented. We already knew phrases like 'rules lawyers' and 'min-maxing', but they were used with derision rather than as something to aspire to. Choices needed to make sense for the character, not in some sort of meta-gaming way. "That's what my character would do" was a phrase that meant something to us, and that thing was not 'this is how I'm going to justify my chaotic, murder-hobo, shit-stupid idea'.
For us game night was mostly a night of improv, sort of improv for the mathematically inclined, if you will. One of my very favorite sessions was when a humorous friend played a Sprite with an orc henchman that he named Robin. I don't remember the Sprite's name anymore, but I remember Robin very clearly because the poor, put upon servant was called upon almost every minute of the day while the Sprite would go into a swoon and demand to be carried around.
In early 2019, invited to a game on a VTT (Virtual Table Top), we finally broke down and tried 5.0. We've been playing it ever since, if somewhat begrudgingly. Because we don't have the time we used to in order to build what is now called "Homebrew" content, we run modules that we enhance with, ya know, logic and good maps. Using VTTs we are running more consistent, longer-term games than we have in decades, and also getting a chance to try one-offs and other content with friends all over the place. 5e sort of feels like the price of entry to playing with more people.
The roleplaying world, however, seems to have been irrevocably affected by a video game mentality. 5e has a sense of character optimization and quest streamlining to it that although possible in 2e was not as emphasized. Or maybe it is just that the players have played so many video games that their brains are altered. It drives me more than a little crazy because it's hard to play a character instead of the game these days. Players literally talk in terms of 'collecting all the quests in town' before heading out to slay the dragon. My eyes roll back in my head every time that happens.
So here we are again. A new version of an old game is on the way. The multi-layered bureaucratic corporation that owns it has fumbled the roll-out in so many times in so many ways that it's a miracle they are carrying the ball across the finish line. But D&D, like a giant bank, is basically too big to fail. It doesn't matter to them that I won't ever buy another product from them because they have plenty of people who will.
As for me, I figure I already own enough 2.0 and 5e stuff that I can play eternally. Furthermore, there are also a ton of rpgs to try, with new ones coming out every day. The Hasbros don't need me and I don't need them, but whether I want it to be true or not, it means that the current version of the game I've become accustomed to is dying. All of the resources and focus will move on to another version. 5e will join 2.0 on the zombie couch.
D&D is Dead, Long Live D&D.
In case you've missed it, instead of homebrewing new roleplaying content I've spent the last ten years as a romance author. You can check out my books on my author website bysuelondon.com. Sure, it's historical romance, but along with the historical nerdity you also get a suspicious number of geek references. You might think you're not a romance reader, but I've made a few converts in my time.
