My Life As A Gamer: Metzen Proves That Neither Age Nor Experience Produces Wisdom On Their Own

Speaking of product mistakes, especially for tabletop RPGs, here--sadly--is an all too common one.

That's Chris Metzen, one of the co-founders of Blizzard and one of the minds behind the entire Warcraft franchise. He retired from the company several years ago, only coming back now and again to do Voice Over work for one of the characters his created (Thrall, Varian Wrynn, Jim Raynor).

He created a wargaming club that also produces tabletop products: Warchief Gaming. This announcement is the first actual product to come forth from the publishing arm of the company, and it's a third-party campaign setting for D&D 5th Edition.

Okay, so far nothing spectacular to see here. Old timer doing a thing to monetize his hobby.

No, the first and worst mistake is saying "I want to tell a story" and "I'm making a RPG thing" in the same sentance.

RPGs are not a storytelling medium. Jeffro Johnson's investigations, as well as that of Jon Peterson's, prove that conclusively: Tabletop RPGs are a wargaming medium, not a narrative medium, and every single attempt to deviate from that ends up AT BEST with a weird niche cult classic of very limited appeal (e.g. Pendragon, Runequest) and most of the time exposes the fact that the product should be redesigned for a superior medium for its expression (e.g. all mecha games should be card, board, or videogame wargame products as the appeal is the robots smashing each other and not the pilots- yes, even for Super Robots).

No, what someone--Jeffro, looking at you--needs to do is grab Chris by that greying beard and hammer through his think skull that if he wants to tell a story then he ought to write the goddamn book and be done with it already. He's not only too old to be this naive, but he ran and developed World of Warcraft up through Warlords of Draenor; he knows FIRST HAND that most gamers give no fucks about anything they are not personally and directly invested AND have no ability to change whatsoever.

That's right, he ought to know better and he's still making this massive fundamental fuckup.

It doesn't matter how pretty you make the product if the actual use of it is no better than what a stoner could cook up while higher than a kite, and that's exactly what Metzen's offering here, especially at the table where all that pretty artwork and all that narrative bullshit means sweet fuck-all because it doesn't aide actual play. Rather, too often, it's a massive boat anchor instead and leads to all sorts of terrible play experiences that plague other published settings that are far more popular such as the Forgotten Realms.

Metzen, like far too many others, labor under a wholly false conception of what a RPG is and how they actually work. Unless and until he gets that error corrected, he will fail and he will continue to fail- and so will everyone else, and all of them will deserve all the shit that's heaped upon them for being fuckups.