D&D Fifth Edition: Death & Rebirth

Hashtag OSRisOverParty, Hashtag RIPBozo, etc etc. The initial… “edition” of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition tried to present itself as a reactionary return to some ideal past paradigm of D&D—be it Third Edition to win back territory lost prior to Paizo’s Pathfinder, or an even older Gygaxian edition to get in the pants of the sort-of nascent OSR. Practically, this resulted in a final product that was like a simple Third Edition with dogwhistle-like nods to OSR conventions (since the play-style’s influence in the end was tenuous at best and mostly abandoned after the public test phase). It’s maybe more succinctly described as a people-pleasing game, with the caveat that people-pleasers don’t please anyone.

So, how did it become popular? And how does the new 2024 not-edition reflect major differences between then and now, in terms of how D&D is perceived and played? This is my ramble. Sent from iPhone.

Fifth Edition: Born in 2014

Of course, nobody plays D&D as written. Whatever play-style the authors expected, it was certainly not how Fifth Edition was actually received. Popular podcasts like The Adventure Zone and Critical Role interpreted Fifth Edition through the lens of improvisational comedy, theater culture, and online fandom culture. These specific, visible “parties” brought their perspectives of the game to a broader audience, which in turn popularized D&D for a different and larger demographic of women and LGBT people (including Darren Criss types—it’s the girls and the gays and the inexplicably straight theater guys, who are an important part of the whole ecosystem, without whom we would probably perish).

People also attribute some popularization to the Netflix show Stranger Things that features D&D as a plot-point, being set in the eighties. However, I don’t buy that the show or its audience had a long-term, concrete influence on D&D’s culture even if it sold copies of the books. Likely, the people who were attracted to D&D by Stranger Things—and also stayed—shared cultural and demographic affinities with those who were attracted to D&D by online fandom culture.

Either way, over the last decade, a young play-culture became the primary audience of D&D: one spearheaded by geeky women and LGBT people, focused on players telling fantastic stories about characters whose thematic content is often a conscious reflection of their own individual experiences. Certain tabletop games like Vampire: The Masquerade occupied a similar niche for a similar demographic, but D&D itself had not before been associated with that demographic, and the scale of its audience massively outweighs that of Vampire by being derived from online fandom culture and having a legacy brand name (which Stranger Things can actually be credited for solidifying in the public eye).

Fifth Edition: Died in 2014

The shifting image of D&D was not well received by everyone. The new guard had a distinct culture not only aesthetically or priority-wise, but had a structurally novel relationship to the game (which may well be considered a new ‘game’ altogether, as much as all these are distinct ‘games’). The old guards are three, best exemplified by the three historical eras of D&D prior to Fifth Edition: the exploration and war-gamers of First Edition; the fantasy novel emulators of Second Edition; and the tactical combat gamers of Third and Fourth Edition, the latter of which alienated the other two groups and led directly to Fifth Edition’s inception as the People’s Edition. Sort of.

Although those three camps have often conflicted, and continue to do so, D&D Fifth Edition was written on the premise that it could accommodate all three play-styles and cultures. The new culture was perceived in contrast as a total intrusion on all three historical cultures. Hunting for treasure and killing monsters, per se, was not a particular interest of the new culture (except in as much as those activities are generic conventions of D&D that characterize its fiction). Even the “traditional” storytelling culture, closest in theory to the new character-driven culture, hinges on the game master as the central and authoritative storyteller, as opposed to the collaborative storytelling of the later culture which involves players as cowriters of their respective characters’ narrative and thematic arcs.

Not to mention, the demographic difference lent the perception of its culture seeming feminine or faggy compared to the more masculine subject matter of the earlier D&D cultures. It prioritizes emotional attachment and involvement with one’s character and their relationships, which is almost strictly orthogonal to old-school play (where one’s character is their play-piece) or traditional play (where one’s character is non-central or even incidental to the game master’s plot). Players inhabit their characters, imagine how they look or how they act or how they feel, and indulge in their character as a fantasy specific to them. Detractors have called it narcissistic, frivolous, or woke—so what, exactly? It’s not for them? Too bad! D&D after 2014 would see this culture explode and become predominant. Past a certain point, one can bet that Wizards of the Coast felt obliged to capitalize on their newfound market.

2024: Welcome Back, Fifth Edition!

Ten years later, Wizards of the Coast is about to publish a revised (not-)edition of D&D Fifth Edition. Most of the discourse surrounding the new version has been about what has changed on a mechanical level since 2014, and whether these are actually improvements on the game as a formal system. This is the wrong way of looking at the whole thing. The new 2024 version of Fifth Edition is less about the system per se than about D&D having a totally new target audience and culture of play than it used to have in 2014. It is an acknowledgment and endorsement of the game’s now-predominant play-style.

Wizards of the Coast was seemingly hesitant to describe the 2024 version as a new “edition” since, for the last three editions, version numbers have indicated a systematic overhaul of the game’s formal rules. Third Edition introduced the universal D20 resolution procedure, Fourth Edition standardized classes and monsters, and Fifth Edition rolled back the previous edition’s changes while simplifying its granddaddy into less of an accountant’s wet dream. What does that make the 2024 version? Edition 5.5? Or not even that? Definitely not Sixth Edition, Wizards of the Coast says.

Second Edition, however, was barely an evolution of its predecessor. Like the 2024 version, it was rewritten from the ground up to clarify and improve the rules but—more importantly—it codified the game’s culture shift from Gygaxian sword-and-sorcery to romantic fantasy (expressed in traditional campaigns like Dragonlance). Possibly the ‘biggest’ change, one that perfectly characterizes Second Edition in contrast to First Edition, is that players receive experience for good role-play and story participation rather than for hauling treasure out of dungeons. Besides that, the cultural shift was expressed through the new edition’s high fantasy illustrations of inspiring adventurers and epic monsters (less gritty and pseudo-naturalist than its predecessor). Despite formal compatibility with its predecessor, Second Edition was a total departure aesthetically, culturally, and thematically in ways that reflected the game’s dynamic player culture.

D&D 2024, for lack of a better name (maybe they should’ve stuck to their guts), can be read in precisely analogous terms as a reinterpretation of the Fifth Edition system through a culturally distinct lens. Rather than trying to win back historical audiences of D&D, it fully embraces the audience that D&D has found instead: those for whom the system is merely a mechanical framework to express and explore their characters through emotive, immersive role-play. The implied setting takes cues from the 2022 adventure anthology Radiant Citadel, a science-fantasy Obamacrat city where diverse civilizations across the D&D multiverse are connected by cosmic commerce and metropolitan mindedness. The sheer quantity of art of each background and subclass emphasizes the system’s aim to mechanically represent specific character archetypes and aesthetics. The most significant mechanical change, the shift from race (now species) to background as the prime determinant of a character’s pre-class abilities and skills, is akin to the experience rules for Second Edition. Despite not changing much mechanically, it embodies a totally different relationship that players have to the game and their characters.

Conclusion

I don’t think I'll buy this book because I probably won’t use it. I’ve liked doing my own thing for a while, and don’t like how “hard-coded” and systematic that name-brand D&D is, regardless of which play-style is at the helm. I also don’t care for certain aesthetic choices that Wizards of the Coast has made. On a pure vibes level, it feels insincere and non-compelling that the implied setting lacks any social friction, especially when such friction is a major source of conflict and catharsis for character-driven role-play. For example, society no longer despises tieflings but fully accepts them as normal members of society. No! That’s so boring! When it turns out that the gays relate to a character because of the oppression they catch from society, you defeat the point by saying that society is suddenly woke now! On that note, “species”? “Species”? Race definitely didn’t work anymore. But "species"?

TODO: mention the OGL thing because you basically have to even though everyone knows about it and it's truly not that big of a deal bc you pirate everything anyway and it's not like you're a publisher so whatever

Regardless, I think this development is so interesting. If we take D&D as the vanguard of the role-playing game industry—in that each edition embodies popular trends and solidifies them by introducing them to a general audience, for whom the trend then becomes paradigmatic of role-play in general—then we can surmise that character-driven role-playing has become so popular that it has also become the most profitable. However, another mission statement of D&D 2024 was backward compatibility with D&D 2014, so I'd almost be more interested in what a true 'sixth edition' of D&D would look like if they had no obligation to the game's past at all. You could say that Wizards of the Coast learned their lesson with Fourth Edition and wouldn't take that risk again, but that fiasco was more because they 'abandoned' two core audiences. Are they still core audiences now, though?

So, again: probably not buying it, but I like what it represents. Long live big capital!