Patterns in Revealed Preference: The Tabletop RPG Pattern

Dungeons & Dragons created an entire category of game by taking skirmish-scale wargames and focusing upon the hero figure. By the 1980s and the publishing of the classic Mentzer Red Box, the medium (and game) had taken on its mature form as a thing separate and distinct from the wargames it forked from.

The original form of the game, the version that hit big and went on to have influence far out-sized for its presence, focused upon the exploration of unknown lands and mysterious locations and looting the treasures therein. It was Sword & Sorcery, not Tolkien, and it was glorious.

But the totes-Tolkien crowd took over and reshaped the game over the years, and that opening came with Lorraine Williams winning the office political war over the company; in her desire to consolidate her hold over TSR, she opened the door for those willing and able to do away with Gary's vision of the game to do so. They did, and the successive cohorts of players coming in with that conception went along with the changes (more or less) in the game and its official settings.

The results over the years accelerated with D&D's third edition. More and more people, dissatified with the medium, went to alternative media that does what they wanted out of an RPG better. Rather than check to see if the changes made had anything to do with this trend, most in the medium doubled-down and accelerated it. The result? Collapse, starting in 2003 and only worsening from there; as of this post the only significant tabletop RPG companies are Wizards of the Coast (where it's second-fiddle to Magic), Paizo Publishing (weak), and Palladium Books (barely). Every other notable publisher is dead, not really into the scene anymore (which is where Wizards is heading), or reduced to a garage operation.

Meanwhile, the audience originally satisfied by D&D and not served by videogames or boardgames finally has a clear legal avenue to do something about it thanks to the Open Gaming License. This is the legal mechanism that lead to the Old School Renaisance, and its success as a sub-category shows that the real spirit remains in the original edition and its variants. This is true of D&D, and it's also true of other genres.

So what happened?

While the malevolent influence of Williams is hardly insignificant, and the presence SJW infestation is a big problem, neither is sufficient to explain what happened. The change came because of the severing of the connection between the material that inspired the game's original form and the audience that played it, coupled with the failure of Gygax et. al. to communicate how to play the game to an audience that did not share (and thus did not possess) the wargaming norms that informed the Lake Geneva and Minneapolis campaigns that served as test beds for D&D.

The game did away with the domain-based endgame because the succeeding cohorts did not want to play it. They did not want to play it because being a lord in a castle was Game Over to them, and it was Game Over to them because they came from Tolkien and the vast army of imitators (which would soon include TSR's own novel publications) where lords in castles were not the epic heroes they wanted to pretend to be. The wargame aspect fell away for the exact same reason.

As the game became dominated by the rules, the focus narrowed from The Hero and his warband to The Hero alone. (Yes, even in a group of players; teamwork outside of rules-specific interactions became depreciated.) The feedback loop begun in the 1980s only accelerated as the years elapsed and TSR overcommitted into collapse and bankrupcy in the 1990s. The WOTC takeover did not change this. It only cut away the sure losers and refocused on the winning IP amongst its settings.

The dominance of The Hero naturally lead to the takeover of storygaming influences as more and more frustrated novelist types took their frustrations out via running D&D campaigns. As went D&D, so went the tabletop RPG category at-large; some of this bled off into the LARP scene, but not enough to purge the influence, especially as more ties to the videogame industry arose via licenses as well as personnel changes and the networking going on in the Seattle-Tacoma era; PAX only accelerated this trend.

When the OSR arose, it blew up as it did because it found similar conditions to D&D's original success: an underserved audience hungry for the authentic (if virtual) experience of adventure into the unknown, an experience fundamentally favoring adaptation of wargaming as a medium due to the competitive elements to the scenario and the necessity of both logistics and diplomacy in long-term success. The original form was a challenge to players. The current form is wish-fulfillment on an interrupted Pavlovian distribution scheme.

A note on tabletop RPGs going forward is necessary: the failure of D&D's original form to sustain itself was a self-inflicted wound. Apart from the deliberate memory-holing of the fantastic fiction that inspired the game, this iteration of the pattern could have been averted before it started had TSR taken the effort to clearly and consistently communicate what the game is and how to go about playing it- something that did not happen, despite appearances to the contrary.

The reason for the failure is two-fold; lack of awareness that this is necessary, and lack of understanding of what the thing Gary and Dave created actually is. You can't fix what you don't know is broken, and you can't fix a problem that you don't comprehend. Both of these are now solved problems.

Other expressions of the pattern, happening in this one's wake, seem to have picked up on these necessities.