# The Eurogame D&D Longs To Be tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/dnd #game/wargame/chainmail ![[DND Rules Cyclopedia (cover).jpg]] I have come to a terrible realization about the source of the problems with Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro and **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]**. This is not something I wanted; this is something forced on me by the patronage of whatever force I am sworn to as a warlock. Who knows? The problem is not the invasion of the _Wokies_. Well, that's part of the problem—an issue with the thematic presentation, the organization, and the world-building. But that's not the core problem, weird as it is to say. The core problem predates their arrival. No, the problem is that **D&D** used to be an American-style tabletop board game, and now it's a Eurogame. Think about it: it had lots of intricate bits, including miniatures. It was about exhibiting system mastery by understanding how to make individual elements fight one another effectively. It was about playing out campaigns of carefully selected and curated scenarios that had an externally validated and expected end (i.e., history). If one little dude died, it wasn't a big deal—you just rolled some dice, pulled another one out, and threw it on the table. It was an expected part of the process. A Eurogame, by comparison, is not about going out in the field and killing the hell out of another guy; it's about moving your little, largely undifferentiated block elements from place to place and allocating resources. If there is conflict, it is carefully compartmentalized into something entirely bloodless. In fact, conflict is more often indirect and lacks critical commitment. Instead, it's about setting up a process and then leaning back to see if it pays off. There's competition, but only through an abstract, intermediary token economy. Emotions can come into play, but they are largely dealt with as tokens to be exchanged. It's all tightly scripted, but the script plays out whether or not there are players in the room. When you look at **D&D** this way, it makes a lot more sense. As you get away from _Chainmail_, you move along the spectrum toward a Eurogame, like a Knizia board game. Yes, that includes 0th edition and on for you hardcore grognards out there. The shift started slowly, with a focus narrowing from the management of large groups to a focus on individuals, but it still stayed tight on what those individuals could do and how they could interact on the battlefield. Roleplay existed, but only insofar as it forwarded the connection from one conflict to another on a greater scale. Ultimately, it was intended that those individuals would amass greater forces and come together to almost return to the scale of _Chainmail_, but now with a manifest personal investment from the players. 3rd Edition wandered on eventually, and we got further toward a Eurogame, but still acceptably for most of the original players. Mass battle was largely a thing of the past. Instead, gameplay campaigns focused on a much smaller board but were still placed within larger national and international concerns. Aspirations were still high for a character's ultimate position in the fictional space, but mechanically, things got smoothed out. Simultaneously, layers of complication of roughly equal smoothness got piled on, making the mechanics a little more three-dimensional and more complicated than they were. This complexity fit with the smaller scale of the zoom. Then, forces within the management and marketing departments realized they had gotten away from what was important to the community of players earlier in the game's evolution, and they wanted to recapture some of that. In the age of growing MMO popularity—most of which were fantasy-oriented and all of which were strongly focused on moving from combat to combat more than any sort of emotional or interpersonal story—it must have seemed like a great idea. They decided to take the property and return it to its roots in a real sense. While keeping some of the more abstract mechanical direction, and even taking another step, they returned the thematic and narrative focus to something earlier in the path. This led them to 4th Edition. 4th Edition was largely panned, a critical failure, and generally unliked, according to the internet. It stopped moving toward being a Eurogame and started becoming a very clearly American tabletop board game once again. It was the board game elements, some of the original parts that went into playing what became **D&D**, that the current community didn't go for. The truly old grognards looked at it askance because it smelled of a video game. But when they gave it a chance, they seemed to be all right with it. This is where Wizards made a critical fumble. Instead of saying, "This is the next D&D," for 4th Edition, they should have said, "This is _Chainmail 2.0_." They should have had a conscious and very self-aware divide between RPG play and detailed militaristic play. They could have returned to having a very specific game context for those kinds of experiences and then kept evolving mainline **D&D** along the increasingly Eurogame path, without having to worry about not having something for the grognards to play and, more importantly, spend their money on. This could have been a winning strategy, but it's not the one they pursued. Nor did they decide to commit to the return to their roots, for a variety of reasons. But it's at this point, I think, that the social pressure, along with the people who had fallen into and out of management and development, took its toll. 4th Edition was so aggressively lambasted that the people who wanted that kind of grounded, gritty, militarist play decided to go elsewhere, where their services would be better appreciated. Without them in the management chain, the results were sadly predictable. 5th Edition was supposed to be a return to what made 3rd and 3.5 great. That's not what happened, as we all pretty much know at this point. The movement toward being a Eurogame rather than an American board game had accelerated among the developers because they misinterpreted the 4th Edition backlash. They thought it was a wholesale rejection of the idea, rather than a recognition that what they were doing before was out of step with what they introduced all at once. So, they dropped more elements of the board game. They decided that "Theater of the Mind" was the best and only course forward. They picked through the bones of what lay before them, making sure not to pick up anything too firm or too threatening, and started assembling a squishier framework to hang some meat on. This isn't where the "woke" influence started to take root, but it's certainly where it started to be obvious in comparison to what came before. So that's 5th Edition. It's almost to where it wants to be. People are telling cozy little stories with it. People want to run little inns by the side of the road and play out how that works in **D&D**, ignoring the fact that the game was never designed to deal with conflicts with such low stakes and on such a small scale. It doesn't really work _mechanically_ for that. But they had all the furniture and affordances of the previous versions and had to at least pay some obeisance to them. It would have been a far better method to spin this off as the gentler, cozier, more family-friendly game of **D&D** that you can play with your family and kids to introduce them to your hobby. All the conflict could be sucked out, the scale taken off the table, and miniatures used only insofar as playing house is useful, allowing them to sell you more components for your house. They probably would have wanted to avoid an outright "kids" label, just because that's not a great selling point in our marketplace. Instead, they catered to those who find thinking about orc invasions, severed supply lines, and what that may portend to be absolutely and utterly unconscionable, plus all that nasty racism and other sources of conflict. It must be neutered for their safety, for their comfort, for their pleasure. **D&D 2024** brought us an almost perfect example of a game where everything that could be has been sucked out of it as an IP and as a game. It remains roughly the same skinsuit shape, but without any of the soul, bones, or things that might push it forward with any speed. It has chosen instead the slow, shambling, rotting-as-it-goes death that it manifested. Finally, **D&D 2024** achieved its aim of becoming a Eurogame. The blocks it's playing with may not be as elegant as the physical blocks in most Eurogames, but everything has been reduced to just one more little component that can be put, Lego-like, wherever it seems to patch a hole. Nothing is particularly exciting because getting excited is bad for you. You might start caring about something, and then what could you do? You might destroy the fragile balance at the table between the people who can't self-regulate their emotions and the people who want utter focus on their emotions and nothing else. The environment for the game has been made as soft, non-challenging, and child-protected as possible—to the point where it is no longer possible to tell adult stories. So, any of those adult characters will have to go. It's a world of their own making, interestingly. The grognards never stood up for what they really wanted and took the opportunity to tear down 4th Edition—the one thing that could have given them part of what they wanted, but which couldn't be allowed to live because it might give someone else part of what they wanted. The Wokies were the only ones who came out ahead because they didn't really care about the rules per se; they were like rotting vines on the ground. They cared about what remained of the bones, the hooks where you could drop something and manipulate the whole thing from inside. That's what they cared about, and the community that was left was happy to give that up. Why not? It was all so easy. What's the outlook for this year? I presume a lot more low-stress, low-context, low-T, low-effort scenarios are going to come out. People are going to look at them and be deeply confused because while they do require multiple players, they don't require those players to make specific dice rolls, for instance, or to passionately pursue a problem unless they really, really want to. The world certainly won't push you for it; they would punish the guy that made that the case. Imagine a bunch of the AARP Satanic-panic folks wearing their outfits and shouting encouragement as the current crowd turns toward them, spreads their arms, and says, "You want a coffeehouse? Seattle wants a coffeehouse! You're gonna get a coffeehouse! And you're gonna get a coffeehouse! And you're gonna get a little place in the middle of Maine because we've decided that that part of our world is really connected to the real world. Yeah!" No more will you have to pretend so hard to be somewhere else. We'll just bring the fantasy to you. And thus does whatever is good in the world die. Not with a whimper, but with an all-consuming clap. I'm sad to have written this, but moreover, I'm sad to have felt like I needed to write it. Would that it were different. I don't think the current state of affairs is stable. They are going to want or, more accurately, need to get you back on the reservation if you are still a true believer. They're going to want to harvest your brain for hype. And they're going to do it. This is my black pill for the RPG hobby in a lot of ways. Sure, positive things could come out of it. The vast central belief in external authority could break down in a magnificent way, and we'd finally see groups going back to running things in a hundred different ways, at a hundred different rates, and having a hundred different kinds of good fun. But I'm not counting on it. Luckily, I don't have to really care about **D&D**. I mean, some of you are okay, but most of you, eh, whatever. Someone will find a way to archive and have access to every little bit of every little thing that Wizards does going forward, long before it comes out. That's a great advantage for us. Is it worth all this Sturm und Drang, all this tempest in a teapot, just to keep a line that would rather commit seppuku than represent any classic masculine traits in its management or characters? Maybe. I don't think it is, really. The world has moved on. Games have moved on. There are 30,000 different RPGs that have nothing to do with those named characters in those named places. A whole new book, a whole new world is right there. See, there's one other thing the grognards and the old-school tabletop board game grognards have in common: they are more interested in holding on to things than they are in playing them. Very few people playing around with the systems as they stand, at whatever level, are looking to do art with them. Art is just a distraction, like cooking or paying the bills. When they finally get to play, they play in the predefined, pre-accepted, pre-tested ways, and it simply leaves things in a place where everything is subjective but can be objectively observed. At this moment, what would fix the situation? Perhaps an honest internal reconsideration of past ills and a resolution to make up for them. That would be a good first start, right? We need official _Chainmail II_. There need to be clear lines of transition between the two games, but this definitely needs to happen. The hardcore, world-spanning _Chainmail_, maybe with some sleeked-down modern mechanics—it could certainly use them on a couple of points, but that's easy. They've had years to figure out what those are. Make sure the players know that this is an alternative to "**Disney D&D**" and focuses on some pretty heavy adult issues by definition. Then take them at their word and give it a rip. It'll either succeed or it won't. With _Chainmail II_ on the board and being supported with minis, terrain, and the usual goodies, we could sit down with the **D&D** crew and talk about what they really want to do at this point. The question is, do we let them go on their own to make something? Or do we keep them there to work as indentured slaves, which rarely goes well? Once the user base is split between two different game scales and mechanics, you have to wait. Waiting is the hard part because word of mouth needs to travel, and it needs to travel naturally. So, you play your games and you take your chances. War Reports, Game Reports—a huge pile of documentation ought to be falling out of Hasbro. Start with this. Oh yes, and bring back 4th Edition as part of _Chainmail II_, along with _Dark Sun_. I'm not going to ask for anything easy, so much as I'm asking for what would make the best show. Western board game vs. European Eurogame. Round 1: Fight! I suspect it's going to be a tough one.