The State of Dungeons & Dragons: Future

Fuentes:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/5th-edition-dungeons-and-dragons/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9294-The-State-of-Dungeons-Dragons-Future

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9294-The-State-of-Dungeons-Dragons-Future.2

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9294-The-State-of-Dungeons-Dragons-Future.3

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The State of Dungeons & Dragons: Future

GREG TITO | 30 DECEMBER 2011 3:00 PM

You've seen the Past and the Present, now the Future.

THE GHOST OF D&D FUTURE

Daunted by the release of the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2008, the future of the roleplaying game industry is unclear. The core books of 4th edition sold well, and the game is still popular among a large section of players, but detractors used memes like Hitler's speech from Downfall to illustrate their rage , while game designers like Justin Alexander carefully examined why the dissociated mechanics of 4th edition didn't work for him. The nerd rage has dulled a bit in the three years since 4th edition, was released, but the tabletop RPG industry is still reeling.

Mearls admits 4th edition might have gone too far in creating a perfectly balanced game.

"A divided D&D is a symptom," said Mike Mearls, the current head of Dungeons & Dragons development at WOTC. "I think the designers have lost faith in the core essence of the RPG."

Mearls came from the OGL [Open Gaming License] era of publishing, during which he was a highly prolific freelance designer. Critics and gamers alike regarded Mearls' Iron Heroes system (2005) as one of the highlights of creativity that the open system could produce. He was hired at WotC soon after, and delved deeply into designing 4th edition with the rest of the team under the direction of former head of development, Bill Slavicsek, and fellow designers Andy Collins and Rob Heinsoo. After their departure, Mearls took hold of the reins in 2011 to nudge 4th Edition a little closer to the D&D a lot of the older players wanted. Even though it was in development long before he took over, the 4th edition Red Box's homage to the art from TSR's original Red Box might be considered Mearls' olive branch. The purpose of the new Red Box was to remind the older generation that 4th edition may be a new direction, but it still shares a lineage with the game they fell in love with in the 80s.

"I have a theory about RPGs," Mearls said. "When 2nd edition really got focused on story [in 1989], we had what I call the first era of RPG decadence and it was based on story. The idea that the DM is going to tell you a story, and you go from point A to point B to point C. The narrative is linear and [the DM is a] storyteller going to tell you a static story, and you would just get to roll dice occasionally. 3rd edition came out and said 'To Hell with that,' it's all about players, we're going to give you some really cool options, it's all flexibility in the DM and for the players, there's this meaningful choice.

"I think we've hit the second era of RPG decadence, and it's gone the opposite way," he continued. "It's all about player power now - the DM is just the rules guy - and the DM can't contradict what the players say. [The game] is taking away from the DM, and that's where I worry because other types of games can do that better. I might as well play a board game, 'cause I'm just here enforcing the rules. Without the DM as the creative guy, what's the point?"

Mearls admits 4th edition might have gone too far in creating a perfectly balanced game. "We've lost faith of what makes an RPG an RPG," he said, admitting that in trying to please gamers with a limited imagination, 4th edition might have punished those with an active one. "There's this fear of the bad gaming group, where the game is so good that even playing with a bad gaming group, you'll still have fun."

The result of this philosophy is that, perhaps more than ever before, gamers are playing different games than the official D&D coming out of the Wizards of the Coast. "What D&D faces now with different editions and old school versus new school, and 3.5 versus 4th edition, it's like the comic book conundrum," Mearls said in reference to the differences between Silver Age Captain America versus the plot of the recent Captain Americafilm. "How do we get all these guys back together, so we actually have real communities, not just a bunch of separate smaller communities, that don't really interact in any way?"

Mearls believes that if he produces games that people want to play or written content on the online portal D&D Insider that people want to read, then he has done his job well, but the problem is that - more than ever - that is a difficult proposition.

In order to serve each customer well, WotC no longer jams one square-shaped edition or format into a round audience-sized hole but instead offers different games for each potential player.

"People have no time for bullshit," he said. "People have less time than ever to do stuff that engages them. You take roleplayers, who are by nature creative and engaged, they're not just passively watching something. They have standards of what they want, they're persnickety. They want what they want, and if you don't give it to them they'll tell you very loudly and clearly, 'Screw you buddy, I don't need this!'"

There is no lack of feedback on the web or at convention panels for what WotC is doing wrong, but Mearls said he is paying close attention. For example, statistics gathered internally show that more than two thirds of D&D players choose to play one of the four major races - human, elf, dwarf, halfling - so there's been a shift to focus on the core of what people expect from the game. Mearls intended the Essentials line - essentially a repackaging of 4E rules into easier-to-digest books - to get back to the shared language that unites all D&D players. "You don't want a situation where someone comes into a room and says 'Hey guys, I'm playing a Shardmind Seeker' and the response is 'What the hell is that?'" he said. "I know what it is because I worked on it, but it's not even in the Player's Handbook. If you [publish] too much, that shared language, it just evaporates."

WotC has also realized in the last few years is that not all D&D gamers are alike. There are some who love 4th edition's tactical gameplay, while others simply want to participate in epic stories with their friends every week. Some gamers don't have a lot of time to devote to game sessions, while others would gladly spend all their time playing and reading about D&D. In order to serve each customer well, WotC no longer jams one square-shaped edition or format into a round audience-sized hole but instead offers different games for each potential player.

"D&D isn't one game, it's a range of games," said Mearls.

The current strategy of WotC is diverse. For players who want a quick structured experience, WotC now offers three board games designed to be completed in an hour or two, using a simplified version of 4th edition rules. The Legend of Drizzt came out in late 2011 and uses R.A. Salvatore's iconic character to attempt to attract new players. D&D Encounters is a weekly program that brings players into game stores for newbie-friendly sessions designed to teach them the full role-playing game, and the recently launched beta of the Facebook game Heroes of Neverwinter aims to get friends playing D&D together as easy as possible.

The other side of Wizards is the cash cow of Magic: The Gathering, and it's hard for Mearls not to want to emulate the profitability of that game. Magic has seen a boost in popularity from the success of the Xbox Live game Duels of the Planeswalkers. A large percentage of players will get hooked on the digital game and then be inclined to purchase a booster deck of cards - or twenty. "One of the big questions facing the medium now is what is theDuels of the Planeswalkers for D&D?" said Mearls.

The problem with developing such a game was, until this year, Atari held an exclusive license to produce all digital representations of D&D, and Atari had no interest in making games other than what was already in the pipeline. As of August 2011, the two parties have settled that dispute, and D&D is now free to either develop games itself, or hire other videogame developers to make the game WotC hopes will be as successful as Duels is for Magic.

With all of these options, it seems that the biggest hole in WotC's catalogue would be a product for those players who grew up with the game. "Working on a game that's almost 40 years old now, we've seen the complex end. And what happened with each edition of D&D is it got more complex and we need to go back to the original D&D." Mearls isn't necessarily arguing for WotC to reprint the older editions and compete directly with the many retro-clones released by the Old School Renaissance - although there are rumblings - but he wants the company to go back to what drew people to the game in the first place.

"A lot is going to depend on whether D&D can rebound from its current state. The game has had a troubled few years and it'll help everyone if WotC can turn things around."

"Let's just play D&D," he said. "Just cut all the bullshit that can get in the way, and say 'Look, we have all these different ways you can express yourself in the game,' and let's just give people what they want. Don't trick people into things they want or just come up with something new for the sake of it. [Let's] get back in touch with what makes role-playing games great, what makes D&D great."

Only a little over three years since the last revision, it's probably too early to speak of a 5th Edition of D&D because such talk would only further enrage customers who just bought a whole set of books. Instead, Mearls is less dedicated to reuniting the fractured audience rather than catering to each new niche in turn. But with products like Paizo's Pathfinder, the many games of the Old School Renaissance, and Chris Pramas' RPG lines from Green Ronin already serving their communities well, it will take more than lip service from Wizard of the Coast employees to heal the loss of hit points that 4th edition caused.

"A lot is going to depend on whether D&D can rebound from its current state. The game has had a troubled few years and it'll help everyone if WotC can turn things around," said Pramas.

A healthy RPG industry depends on how the most recognizable brand fares, but Pramas remains optimistic that Green Ronin will still be publishing rulebooks. "I expect there will be least one and maybe more than one industry-changing innovation," he said. "We will be here one way or the other, making great games and promoting all that is awesome about pen and paper RPGs."

Paizo will continue to innovate as well, while still holding onto the principles that made Pathfinder successful. "The future is going to bring more integration of technology to tabletop games, to the point at which 'pen and paper tabletop games' won't, in many cases, use pens, paper, or tabletops," said Erik Mona, publisher at Paizo. "I hope Paizo is still at the vanguard of the tabletop hobby in 5 and 10 years, pushing forward with new ideas and new expressions of the game, but always focusing on story first."

Not all gamers are so optimistic. "I think the tabletop RPG market is enduring a kind of death. I think it is transforming into something that isn't a viable commercial business for more than a handful of people," said Ryan Dancey, former VP of RPGs at Wizards and marketing guru at White Wolf/CCP. Dancey was instrumental in developing the OGL before the 3rd edition era of D&D, but he foresees the RPG industry becoming a dead hobby like model trains. "Kids stopped playing with trains, and the businesses that remained dedicated to hobbyists who got more disposable income as they grew up, until the price of the hobby was out of reach of anyone except those older hobbyists. Eventually, it became a high-end hobby with very expensive products, sold to an ever-decreasing number of hobbyists. As those folks die, the hobby shrinks. That is what is happening to the tabletop RPG business."

No matter what edition or game you play, tabletop role-playing games are really just vehicles for getting together with your friends, rolling some dice, and having fun. The saddest part about the current state of the tabletop industry is that game designers, publishers and even regular gamers are now hyper-aware of how well each game sells and how these games are marketed or written instead of - as Mearls pointed out - just playing the games. The vitriol seen during the launch of 4th edition now just leaves a bad taste in gamers' mouths. Healthy competition is a good thing for any industry, and with digital distribution and cheaper print costs, it's easier than ever for startup gaming publishers with great ideas to compete with established brands likePathfinder and even Dungeons & Dragons. While the separate communities and aging of the audience as Dancey says could be perceived as unhealthy for the hobby, the many different tabletop options gamers now have might actually be a good thing. D&D, and by extension the whole role-playing industry, has been through a rough patch in the last few years, but there is a glint of great things ahead. Like the characters in any fantasy adventure story, passing through the dark times will only make us stronger. Despite the anger and resentment fostered by the release 4th edition, optimism on the future of RPGs has begun to bubble to the surface. We are on the verge of a golden age of tabletop gaming we haven't seen since fantasy roleplaying roared out of the minds of Gygax and Arneson and took over imaginations of gamers everywhere.

You've seen the Future, now check out the Past and the Present of RPGs.

The State of D&D: Present

Fuentes:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/5th-edition-dungeons-and-dragons/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9293-The-State-of-D-D-Present

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9293-The-State-of-D-D-Present.2

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9293-The-State-of-D-D-Present.3

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The State of D&D: Present

GREG TITO | 28 DECEMBER 2011 3:00 PM

Previously on The State of Dungeons & Dragons.

In the mid 2000s, tabletop roleplaying games enjoyed a resurgence in popularity not seen since the originalDungeons & Dragons rules were published by Gary Gygax in the 70s. The 3rd edition of those rules, and the Open Gaming License (OGL) that opened them up for public use, cemented D&D as the leader of the roleplaying game world, while simultaneously encouraging competitors to advance the design of roleplaying games. But as result of Hasbro's desire to turn D&D into a $100 million business, and the success of fantasy MMO videogames likeWorld of Warcraft, the release of the 4th edition in 2008 changed more of the game than many fans were comfortable with and despoiled the goodwill Wizards of the Coast had built over the last decade. The Ghost ofD&D Present still haunts the industry.

The young designers working at Wizards wanted to stretch their design muscles to make a new game - something that they could call their edition.

Andy Collins worked under 4E Lead Designer Rob Heinsoo at Wizards of the Coast and eventually became Design & Development Manager around the release of 4th edition. Collins told The Escapist back in 2010 that the changes he and Heinsoo implemented in D&D were meant to catch the game up with the way that people played modern games. Collins believed players have a short attention span, and were, perhaps, "less likely [to be] interested in reading the rules of the game before playing." "I'm not just talking about younger players now, but anybody. We've been working to adapt to that, the changing expectations of the new gamer."

The young designers working at Wizards wanted to stretch their design muscles to make a new game - something that they could call their edition. "Designing new editions is the work of younger, more energetic folks," said Collins. While 4th edition offered elegant tactical combat and an equanimity between classes never seen before in the game, many of the people who played Gygax'sDungeons & Dragons in the 70s and 80s didn't understand why concepts they held to be sacred were axed.

"I started playing D&D when I was 10 years old in 1979. I thought they made some curious choices [in 4E] regarding what was central to the property," said Chris Pramas, President of Green Ronin Publishing. "They added new core races and created a different cosmology, and that was totally fine for the new campaign setting they were releasing. It just seemed strange to me that that all the old settings had to have that stuff shoehorned into them."

"I don't know why you call an elf an eladrin and I don't know why tieflings are there when they haven't been there all along. I do have some problems with it as a writer," said R.A. Salvatore, who writes novels set in D&D's Forgotten Realms. Salvatore has written more than thirty novels starring the dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden, many of them NY Times Bestsellers, arguably giving Salvatore the distinction of creating the world's most valuable D&Dcharacter. "4th edition [D&D] is more like a card game. It's a strategy game and there are a lot of things in there for the reason of class balancing, so from a mechanical standpoint, it's a fabulous game. From a roleplaying standpoint, by that I mean a writing standpoint, it's much harder."

"I think, at least from my initial observations, that 4E put too much emphasis on the battle grid and not enough emphasis on the world outside of combat. That, in combination with the sacred cow-killing, made it feel like a whole different game to a lot of people, including me," added Erik Mona, publisher at Paizo, creators of Pathfinder.

Although work had already begun on the design, public talk of a new D&D edition from Wizards of the Coast began around 2007. The expectation was that WotC would support 4th edition the same way it had before with a new license and system reference document. It seemed unlikely that the OGL would survive the new edition unscathed, but fans and publishers had no reason to suspect just how thoroughly Wizards would abandon it.

"Like any aggressive proposal, the OGL never had universal support within Wizards of the Coast. Lots of folks questioned the wisdom of simply giving away the rights to the core system of the game that paid our salaries."

"[WotC] made all sorts of assurances to the community of third-party developers about how open the new game would be, how they planned to share the rules early with key publishers, and how we could all get on board with supporting the new edition," Mona said. "But something happened behind the scenes over there at about that time, and a licensing agreement that had been touted as a 'more open than ever' failed to materialize."

Not everyone at WotC believed that the OGL was a good thing for D&D. "Like any aggressive proposal, the OGL never had universal support within Wizards of the Coast. Lots of folks - myself included, at the time - questioned the wisdom of simply giving away the rights to the core system of the game that paid our salaries," said Collins recently.

"There were a lot of folks who thought [the idea of OGL] was a disaster, and that the result would be a failure of 3rd edition, but they kept their opinions to themselves and to the watercooler chat," remembers Ryan Dancey, the VP of RPGs at Wizards until 2001, and the guy who came up with the crazy OGL idea. "When 3rd edition didn't fail, but instead wildly succeeded, most of those folks came around to seeing it at least as a neutral, if not a net positive."

By the time that 4th edition was developed, even the people who begrudgingly accepted the OGL had left their positions at Wizards of the Coast. "Many of the key players were completely different at this point - different brand managers, different legal team, different executive team," said Collins. "And with new people come new opinions ... and this time around, the pro-OGL side was in the minority."

He still believed in the benefits of an open system, but he was fighting a losing battle. "I remember arguing pretty hard to retain something like what Wizards had done for 3rd edition; an open license that included the core rules and a few basic guidelines on how to use it. I argued that without some kind of OGL, Wizards risked leaving behind the body of customers and potential customers who saw the open license as an assumed part of the D&D experience," Collins said.

"In hindsight, I wonder if it might simply have been better to [let the OGL die] rather than guilting the company into crafting a Frankenstein's monster of an open license that ended up pleasing basically nobody," Collins continued. The Game System License [GSL] that WotC released in conjunction with 4th edition took away many of the freedoms that the industry had come to expect with the D&D rules, such as reprinting text for clarity in new products. "At the time, those of us arguing for the continuation of an OGL-like system truly believed that we'd be able to come up with something that protected Wizards and also helped the community," he admitted, but wrangling an agreement that achieved those goals proved a monumental task that took much longer than anyone anticipated.

If the licensing issue was the only black Eye of Vecna on its face, 4th edition might still have been a hit with fans and other publishers alike. In December 2007, WOTC released Wizards Presents: Races and Classes the first of several preview documents that outlined some of the radical changes to the rules, and initial feedback from fans was not encouraging. "All of a sudden our subscribers started begging us not to convert to the new game system," Mona said. "The fact that many members of our editorial staff shared some of these concerns underscored our uneasiness with the dragged out licensing situation. We finally made the decision that if we weren't able to support the game at launch, we might as well not bother supporting it at all. So we decided to stick with [D&D] 3.5."

The designers at Paizo rewrote the 3.5 rules a bit under the old OGL license and added the distinct setting of Golarion into a package called Pathfinder. Even Mona was surprised at how well the beta version of Pathfindersold, and how it has grown into a multi-million dollar enterprise. "We put together an impressive print run of the Beta Playtest version of the Pathfinder rules, and when that sold out in about a week, we knew we were onto something," he said. "Interest in the system far exceeded our expectations, and continues to do so. We sold more [Pathfinder] Core Rulebooks in 2011 than we did in 2010, and the final hardcover Core Rulebook is now in its fifth printing with no end in sight."

Paizo's success with Pathfinder was possible because the OGL was not abolished; it was still valid for the rules printed under the 3rd edition D&D banner, while the GSL governed everything published under 4th edition. This created a unique situation in the history of role-playing games- for the first time, it was legal for companies to reprint older versions of Dungeons & Dragons after its publisher had let the core rulebooks disappear from shelves.

"That allowed something we have never seen before: a company that emerges as the champion of the previous edition and rallies its fans," said Pramas of his competitor in the third party market. "That is what Paizo was able to do with Pathfinder. Similarly, many companies of the Old School Renaissance used the OGL to recreate older editions of D&D in various permutations. Now, no matter which version of D&D you prefer, there are many publishers supporting it with new material."

The Old School Renaissance is the name given to what can only be called a movement among gamers to return to an older style of play. "I think Gary Gygax's death [in 2008] had a profound impact on a lot of the old schoolers. Many of them were grudgingly going along with modern game design conventions simply because they had no other choice," said Erik Mona.

Games like Swords & Wizardry, Castles & Crusades, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess use the OGL to recreate the feel and simplicity of older editions while making tweaks to the presentation and playability. (Full disclosure: I'm publishing a game called the Adventurer Conqueror King System which similarly represents older rules with significant modifications.) Members of the Old School Renaissance play these so-called retro-clones, or keep on rolling dice with old copies of TSR's own editions and then dissect the experience online at websites like The Mule Abides and Grognardia.

Changes in how people buy RPGs and the freedom of the OGL combined to make the Old School Renaissance grow across the internet. The rise of digital distribution of PDFs through marketplaces like DriveThruRPG.com have allowed designers to make money selling their work with less overhead. The costs of printing books has also decreased, especially print-on-demand services that allow smaller print runs, so it's easier than ever for amateur designers to publish something gamers can bring to the table and use with any of D&D's older editions or retro-clones.

Pulling from so many different sources, especially videogames, may have worked against the reception of 4th edition D&D.

While most members of the Old School Renaissance are older people who began playing as kids during D&D's early-80s heyday, the current edition competes against a totally different medium among young people today - computer games. "Nerd momentum has moved away from RPGs and towards videogames in the last 30 years," said Pramas. "In the 70s, if you were a certain kind of geek, you'd have playedD&D. Now that same type of geek is much more likely to enter fantasy gaming through World of Warcraft."

Mona admits that tabletop games are vying for the attention of the audience but instead of a threat, he sees a challenge. "Gamers have more options to spend their money than ever before, and that could lead to an erosion of tabletop gamers across the board," he said. "A lot of the bleed-off can be counterbalanced by a new generation of gamers who come to the hobby through electronic games, but who are open to tabletop experiences, as well. Many of these gamers come to the table with a much greater understanding of RPG basics like hit points, character class, and armor class than any of us had in the 1970s. It's up to game publishers to make compelling content that these people will want to buy and experience as much or more than the latest computer or console game."

Coinciding with the release of 4th edition D&D in 2008, Wizards of the Coast launched an advertising campaign that reached out to MMO players. "If you're going to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, you should at least have some friends over to help," the text of one ad read over a shot of a bored young man in front of a computer. Paradoxically, one of the most frequent complaints with 4th edition was that the rules too closely mimicked World of Warcraft or EverQuest. The concept of certain classes described specifically to take or deal damage in 4th edition mirrors the role of tank or "DPS" in MMOs.

Collins admitted that 4th edition was influenced by MMOs but was quick to point out that the design took inspiration from many contemporary sources. "As professional game designers, we look at all games for lessons," he said last year. "Certainly, the lessons we learn from online games are going to be the most obvious ones because they have a lot of people familiar with the sources, but there's also lessons about turn management from European board games, interface ideas from card games."

Pulling from so many different sources, especially videogames, may have worked against the reception of 4th edition D&D. "I think the mistake people sometimes make is to think that we can attract more players if we ape the experience of videogames. I think a better approach is to emphasize what makes pen and paper RPGs unique and fun," said Pramas.

For all the machinations behind-the-scenes at Wizards and the grumblings of people in the industry, Collins and his designers clearly wrote a game that fans wanted to buy. Preorders for the core books of 4th edition of D&D in June 2008 were extremely strong and - without any hard sales numbers released by WoTC - anecdotal evidence from local game stores supported the claim that it sold much better than 3rd at launch. Moving its periodic content to a digital portal called D&D Insider on a monthly subscription model, while providing access to online tools like the handy Character Builder seems to be successful (Again, without any sales numbers it is hard to gauge, but anecdotally most people who play 4th Edition use D&D Insider in some capacity.) In addition, any gamer who wrote scathing critiques of the game on forums was met with an equivalent number of fervent supporters of 4th Edition. The new game has attracted a loyal audience, especially with younger players, but at the cost of alienating those who grew up with the game of Gygax and Arneson.

The negative response to 4th edition was not without consequences for the people who made it. Rob Heinsoo was laid off in late 2009, and Bill Slavicsek, Director of RPG R&D for more than ten years, left earlier this year. Wizards is notorious for laying off employees before Christmas, but restructuring can happen at any time. In May 2010, Andy Collins was asked to vacate his position at Wizards of the Coast as design and development manager of D&D. "To be blunt: They told me they were restructuring the department and I didn't have a job there anymore," he said. "As harsh as that moment was, it was a good thing for me, both personally and professionally. Despite working on an amazing game, surrounded by smart, talented folks whose mere presence made me a better designer, I was stagnating."

With the departure of Heinsoo, Slavicsek, Collins and most of the brand team who launched 4th edition, it seemed the company was moving in a new direction. The D&D Essentials line and the new Red Box starter set released in September 2010 were publicized as easy gateways for players to enter the hobby. WotC also released its first D&D-themed boardgame - the dungeon-crawl with 4E elements Castle Ravenloft - at the same time. Wizards of the Coast appeared to be moving away from a pure tabletop RPG publisher and people began speculating what the company would do next. Some assumed that a new 5th edition was inevitable, while the concentration on digital subscriptions and online tools suggested that Wizards could sustain the 4th edition lifecycle for a while. Old school gamers rejoiced when Collins' successor was named, but it remains to be seen whether one man can turn the tide.

A changing of the guard at Wizards may herald a sea change for the company, check back to see what the ghost of D&D future has to say about where tabletop RPGs will be like in ten years.

Previously on The State of Dungeons & Dragons.

The Ghosts of D&D: Past

Fuentes:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/5th-edition-dungeons-and-dragons/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9292-The-Ghosts-of-D-D-Past

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9292-The-Ghosts-of-D-D-Past.2

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9292-The-Ghosts-of-D-D-Past.3

Información:

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The Ghosts of D&D: Past

GREG TITO | 26 DECEMBER 2011 3:00 PM

Sitting around a table pretending to be human fighters and elven mages delving through dungeons in search of loot and fame hasn't been a favorite pastime for fantasy fans for all that long. The first tabletop RPG was released a mere 37 years ago, in 1974, but there are now more roleplaying games on store shelves than ever before, - covering every niche of geek culture from the superheroes of Mutants & Masterminds to character-based "story-games," to space exploration in Traveler, to games that meld all genres like Rifts. Through it all though, there was one game to rule them all - Dungeons & Dragons - and even though the rules were revised over the years, the majority of the fantasy-gaming audience have used whatever edition of D&D was currently available.

Confidence in the officialDungeons & Dragons is at an all-time low. Players are split into various camps, viciously defending what they believe is the "true" D&D.

That changed in 2008, with the release of the 4th edition ofDungeons & Dragons. Many tenets of the game like spell memorization and alignment were thrown away in the name of modernization and streamlining. Confidence in the officialDungeons & Dragons is at an all-time low; on forums, at conventions and at your local game store, players are split into various camps, viciously defending what they believe is the "true" D&D.

To understand the current landscape of the RPG industry, it's essential to comprehend the important events in D&D's past and present before we look to the future. Like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, lets visit with the ghosts of RPG history to get a better understanding of how the hobby got here, what is happening in the tabletop gaming industry today and what it faces in the future.

THE GHOST OF D&D PAST

In the beginning, there was only one set of rules. Dave Arneson adapted the rules of Gary Gygax's war gameChainmail in the early 70s to concentrate on a smaller group of characters fighting against monsters. Gygax finalized those changes into what would come in a white boxed set called Dungeons & Dragons. He later revised the rules and his company TSR published them as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1978. TSR published a new 2nd edition of AD&D in 1989 that significantly changed the core rules in order to unify much of the supplementary material that had been published for D&D - a move that pleased some players but disenchanted many others. A troubled run in the 1990s nearly bankrupted TSR, but, but the game survived when Wizards of the Coast stepped in and published another edition edition of D&D in 2000. This new edition not only spurred sales, but also fixed many of the previous edition's problems. Another slight improvement, called Edition 3.5, arrived in 2003, followed by yet another edition of the beloved roleplaying game in 2008. By this time, D&D had passed through so many hands and filtered through so many imaginations that playing 4th edition bore almost no resemblance to playing the game created by Gygax and Arneson some 35 years before.

Gygax had a troubled relationship with his own game because he was a much better game designer than a publishing company CEO. In the 80s, a lot of his attention turned to overseeing the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, and a faction within TSR wrested control of the company from him in 1985. Unfortunately, TSR fared no better without Gygax running the books, and Magic the Gathering-owner Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR in 1996 when the D&D publisher was on the brink of bankruptcy. Despite no longer owning the game he created, Gygax still remained active in the hobby, posting on forums and attending gaming conventions whenever possible until his death in 2008.

When Wizards of the Coast was acquired by toy-maker Hasbro in 1999, there were already plans to create a 3rd edition to unite the various disparate groups of tabletop RPG fans. "You had people playing 1st edition AD&D, 2nd edition AD&D, five or more flavors of Storyteller games, a couple of different games from FASA,GURPSs, Call of Cthulhu, Deadlands, Legend of the Five Rings5R," recounts Ryan Dancey, the VP of Tabletop Games at Wizards of the Coast at the time from 1997 to 2001. "By percentage, it was probably 2nd edition 30 percent, everything else 70 percent.

"When we were working on 3rd edition, it became clear that our biggest competitors were 1st and 2nd edition AD&D, not a third party game system."

"When we were working on 3rd edition, it became clear that our biggest competitors were 1st and 2nd edition AD&D, not a third party game system," Dancey continued. "2nd [edition] had clearly suffered because it had not managed to get enough 1st edition players to switch."

In order to group all of these camps under the same game umbrella, Dancey had a crazy idea that ultimately shaped the current roleplaying marketplace. "I remember Ryan Dancey walking into a meeting where all of RPG R&D was gathered," said Mike Selinker, one of the creative directors of the 3rd edition of D&D. "Ryan and his team came in all sheepish, as if they had something to say that could have gotten them lynched. Ryan starts talking about the open source computer movement and the future of paper-based publishing and so on, and eventually gets to the nugget. 'So,' he says, 'we're thinking about giving the system ofD&D away for free. Pretty much anybody can publish anything they want using our game and our text. They can even copy it and print it. Other game publishers can republish their own settings using our rules. What do you guys think?'

"The room was dead silent. Eventually, from the far corner of the room, I said, 'I think that's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard.'" Selinker remembered that there was an intense debate afterwards but eventually everyone "coalesced around this crazy idea." The Open Gaming License [OGL] was born in that room, a legal document with very loose copyright restrictions that allowed basically anyone to produce content using the coreD&D mechanics.

"We wanted to ensure [the division of 2nd edition vs. 1st] did not repeat, by trying for an (unobtainable) goal of 100% conversion," said Dancey. "The OGL was a big part of making that possible - because it let hundreds of developers fill in the niches that Wizards didn't have the time or the inclination to do itself, including a lot of content desired by 1st and 2nd edition players."

When it was published in 2000 along with the 3rd edition of the rules, the OGL sparked unprecedented growth in the RPG industry. The OGL made it so easy to use the rules conventions of D&D like hit points, spells and monsters that hundreds of products - the official signifier of D&D-compatible materials created using the OGL - emblazoned on them made their way to game store shelves.

"The core of the D&D property was released through the Open Game License. WotC held back a few monsters like beholders and mind flayers, but for the most part the guts of D&D were made available to everyone for legal re-use," said Chris Pramas, President of Green Ronin Publishing. Companies Green Ronin were able to use the OGL to create entire RPG lines like the superhero game Mutants & Masterminds and make a significant amount of money.

The OGL and the 3rd Edition of D&D were unarguably a success. "[3rd edition] was the most successful RPG published since the early years of 1st edition AD&D," Dancey said. "It outsold the core books of 2nd edition AD&D by a wide margin. I attribute some of that success to the OGL and to the massive amount of player network support the OGL engendered." According to a 2007 issue of Comics & Games Retailer , five out of the top ten bestselling RPGs were either published by Wizards of the Coast or utilized the OGL. More than that, the OGL allowed smaller companies and even individuals with big ideas to bring their products to the market. Because of the OGL, gamers could concentrate on imagining new adventures, dungeons, and characters instead of reinventing the nuts and bolts of the mechanics.

Of course, not every module or supplement created using the OGL had the same level of quality and polish. "Plenty of distributors and retailers assumed that all d20 stuff was of a similar quality," said Andy Collins, who was a design team lead for 4th edition under Bill Slavicsek and Rob Heinsoo before taking over as Design & Development Manager around the launch. "Which is a little like expecting that every new book with a vampire on the cover will automatically sell as well as Twilight, but hey, these were exciting times." The swell of new products with a somewhat "official" D&D stamp on it led to a boom period in the industry with hundreds of new products suddenly on hobby store shelves.

"Wizards has a $100 million brand - Magic: the Gathering. It tried to convince Hasbro that it could have two, by amping up D&D to that level."

With every boom, there is a bust. The glut of unsold d20 products from the early 2000s began to weigh down those same store shelves, as did the core D&D products that supported them, such as the Player's Handbook. Wizards of the Coast added to the 3rd edition rules with product lines like the Complete series, but, with only a few exceptions such asPsionics, it never again released its content as open source, nor took material others had developed using the OGL and incorporated it into official D&D products.

"D&D had to support itself through the sales of secondary books - such as the class books, or the setting books, or additional rules supplements. As more and more of these become available (over the life of any edition of the game), the audience gets closer and closer to a saturation point," said Ed Stark, a creative directors from the 3rd edition era of D&D. "Eventually, the individual consumers start buying every new book and become pickier about what they add to their collections. Sales drop off - not necessarily because of book quality - and a new edition becomes necessary to 'reset' the knowledge base and introduce a new influx of sales to the support products."

As much as fans of the game were impressed with 3rd edition and its modest revision of 3.5, market pressures began to build. Wizards of the Coast, at first emboldened by the corporate resources of Hasbro, suddenly felt the need to make D&D more profitable. In the mid-2000s, "Hasbro restructured itself internally to focus on its most successful brands," said Dancey. "Brands that did $50-$100 million a year in revenue were considered 'core,' and smaller brands were going to be marginalized. Marginalized businesses get downsized in headcount. They may also be mothballed, or sold."

The sad truth was that D&D was in danger. "Wizards has a $100 million brand - Magic: the Gathering. It tried to convince Hasbro that it could have two, by amping up D&D to that level," continued Dancey. "D&D was not a $50 million a year business, nor was it likely to ever become one on its then-current trajectory. So the reaction of the folks working on RPGs at Wizards is totally understandable - they felt their jobs were at risk."

The desire to grow roleplaying games and D&D into a bigger business is a noble goal, but the executives at Wizards were divided on how to make that happen. The obvious success of fantasy MMOs like World of Warcraft in 2004 suggested there was an as yet untapped audience for fantasy RPGs. A new edition of the beloved game that catered to these folks might push growth of D&D players to new levels. The OGL and its degree of success was also a hot topic of debate, and many of the people in charge when it was implemented - including Dancey and former Wizards CEO Peter Adkinson - were no longer employed at the company. Executives' confidence in giving away content for free began to wane as the company invested time and money in having young, eager game designers develop a new edition of the rules. Even to fans, an update to the D&Drules seemed like an exciting prospect, but unlike how the OGL and 3rd edition united audiences, Wizards' handling of the release of the 4th edition of D&D in 2008 splintered roleplaying gamers into violently opposing groups.

Find out what happened, and the current state of the RPG industry, in the next installment as we welcome a visit from the ghost of D&D Present.