It is time for me to resume building an open-source roleplaying game.
I have enjoyed playing D&D5e since 2018. I was thrilled with the emergence of Critical Role, Dimension 20, and the increasing popularity of D&D. I was very pleased when Wizards of the Coast (WotC) took a different approach to simplifying 3rd Edition: not the boardgame-redux of 4e, but rather a stripping down of 3e that increased flexibility and facilitated storytelling. I feel like the simplification could have gone farther, but as it is, 5e is less ‘rules-crunchy’ and therefore more accessible to a general public. I loved the creative ecosystem fostered by the Open Game License (OGL), first issued by WotC in 2000 after they bought TSR. I even published a detailed set of maps of the city of Sharn (Eberron campaign setting) on the Dungeon Master’s Guild.
However, WotC is seeking to monetize D&D much more as a controlled corporate product. Nerd Immersion posted a detailed analysis of WotC’s shift away from–and possible total abandonment of–the OGL. WotC has already purchased D&D Beyond. They could revoke the right of creators to use the DM’s Guild, and revoke the right of Roll20 to support D&D copyrighted material. This would collapse the creative ecosystem we have enjoyed since the release of 5e in 2014. Questing Beast points out that we don’t need to use the OGL for many roleplaying game creations. I would further argue that if you want people to use your stuff, but give you credit for your creative contributions, there are multiple options for ‘copylefting‘ your work: the Creative Commons license and the GNU Free Documentation License, or even your own stipulations added to a standard Copyright. Plenty of options, but WotC and their parent company, Hasbro, seem most concerned that this wildly popular game is ‘under-monetized.’ Rather than reduce it to a board-game (the 4e approach), it now seems WotC wants to convert it to an online game with microtransactions, modeled on video-games like Fortnite.
More reasons to move on
While WotC goes in the video-game direction, I want to resume simplifying the game as an actual dice-and-paper, face-to-face (or simple video chat) tabletop roleplaying game: a TTRPG.
- I want the rules to be simple enough that very casual gamers can learn it and use it quickly.
- I want complexity to be emergent from simple rules. Both Chess and Go have simple rules that enable tremendous emergent diversity in play.
- I want to push group storytelling and story-creation further. After stripping the d20 system down to its bare bones, any new rules should support story-building and actual role-playing of the Players.
- I want both the rules and the campaign-settings to be decolonized. Internal to the game there can be coercion, inequality, and injustices that characterize the setting. However the game & setting should not implicitly condone nor normalize that. For example: the D&D Paladin Class emulates the real, historical Crusaders. The game implies that European Christians who slaughter non-Europeans and non-Christians, indiscriminately, are somehow the good guys. Even Pope John Paul II rejected that legacy in his Apology for the Crusades (2000). If the Roman Catholic Church can do it, gamers can do it too.
- Likewise, a setting can include (and even highlight) bigotry; but it should not be tacitly endorsed by the rules or setting. None of J.R.R. Tolkein’s very-thinly-veiled racist characterizations of orcs as East Asians and dwarves as Jews. Heritage and even species-variation can make great storytelling without being an implicit affirmation of prejudice. WotC has taken encouraging steps in this direction, but I think we need to go further.
- I would like to use the “What if?” of the TTRPG format to speculate about radically different possible futures. I will resume developing the Jehan campaign setting for this purpose.
- I might even want to design the system to be used by urban planners and emergency-response planners to model out complex “What if?” situations.
- I want to actually return to the physical tabletop and develop a social game. COVID and future pandemics will always be with us. We need to take reasonable precautions, and we should also be able to socialize over the internet. But even in video-calls, the focus can be on the people as players, or on a snazzy and distracting virtual environment.
For all of these reasons I want to go in a fundamentally different direction from the way D&D is headed in 2023. If there is one thing I might copyright about this evolved game, it is a name: Dice-Paper-Story (DPS). Gamers generally know understand this acronym to represent damage-per-second. That is okay; it means that even if I am using it to mean tabletop story-creation through play, there is the potential for disastrous and violent failure which is part of the fun.