Prescriptive vs. Descriptive D&D

The book Art & Arcana is probably the first of its kind: a history of the art of Dungeons & Dragons. Interlaced in the text is the history of D&D itself: its creation, rise to popularity, controversy, business changes, edition changes, fall in popularity, and apparent renaissance. The first generation to grow up in an age where D&D was popular have become the first elders of a tribe, transmitting for the first time the culture of playing D&D to a generation of players that is larger than any that came before it.

But what is D&D? Defining D&D has proven difficult for a long time, because the game is played slightly differently at every table, creating a broad spectrum of experiences that each claim, with basically equal authority, to be D&D.

Some are theatrical, with improvised acting, accents, or even props/costumes, where a disagreement between the dice and the drama should be resolved in the latter’s favor. Others are tactical challenges that dare the players to plan and execute character builds and combat tactics that will keep them alive in a meat-grinder of a dungeon with little grand design behind the function of presenting the challenge. Still other games are downright goofy, where characters are named after pop culture icons and the NPCs are there to be punchlines. Most games have a mixture of these. Some are even more esoteric.

This is still the most accurate statement of “What is D&D?”

On the other side of that experience, the books those groups are using might be different editions: there have been 5 official editions, but there were certainly more forms before 1st edition, 2nd edition had optional rulebooks that vastly changed the game, there was both a 3.0 and a 3.5 edition, a 4e and a 4e Essentials, etc. Depending on the mix of books at the table, the game worked very differently. Even if two tables used the same books, house rules can change the experience extensively.

Beyond that, there are a number of games built using the same building blocks as D&D: the six attributes, armor class, hit points, d20, etc., but which have never been called Dungeons & Dragons. Some of these used the material released under the Open Game License from 3rd edition days (and renewed to some extent in 5e), like the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, while others took the mechanical inspiration of later editions but reached back to the simpler, grittier gameplay of editions that predate the OGL, like Castles & Crusades, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and other OSR games.

One thorny issue in defining D&D is deciding what is not D&D. Is the use of the D&D logo the dividing line? The use of the OGL?

I want to explore the proposition that, at least for some purposes, all of them are D&D, from TSR, WotC, Paizo, or Troll Lord Games.

The Ash Wood (Campaign Diary #1)

In the far north of Tyr Alona, on the banks of the Silverrun River which flows out of the Mountains of Madness, lies the city of Greywatch. A continent-spanning mercenary guild called the Sapphire Legion operates a franchise of adventurers there. Recently, the unfortunate adventurers–known as the Sapphire Hares–met their demise in the depths of an abandoned dungeon outside the city.

Occupational hazard, you see.

Five new recruits from Ebonholde have been hired to fill their shoes. They hired a cart driven by an older gentleman named Berny to take them to Greywatch, where they would meet their Sapphire Legion liaison and manager, someone by the name of Exard Shaley.

These five recruits are:

• Thia, the Wood Elf Ranger
• Winnie, the Firbolg Druid
• Jewel of the Mountain, the Tabaxi Rogue
• Hyperion, the Aasimar Paladin
• Cora, the Halfling Rogue

As they entered the last day of their journey, the cart entered the Ash Wood, a cursed wood full of menacing fairies and terrifying monsters, according to rumors. The mist seemed to thicken, obscuring what little the adventurers could see through the dense foliage. The air grew chill, and the din of nature was seemingly silenced.

An hour into the Wood, a scream erupted from around the next bend. Berny knew better than to stop on this road, so the cart rounded the corner to find an ornate carriage surrounded by four guards on horseback focused on the eastern side of the road, crossbows drawn. Arrows streaked out from the foliage, hitting the carriage and one of the horses, which reared up, throwing its rider to the ground with a crash.

Power, Politics & Intrigue in D&D

Dungeons & Dragons-like games are carried by their combat systems, which have a very distinct way of creating tension and presenting constrained choices within a system to try to resolve that tension in your favor. In the 1970s, D&D built on decades of wargame experience, and today’s games have built on decades more of experience fine-tuning the mechanical apparatus of combat. Where D&D and TTRPGs in general have struggled is everything outside of combat, which lacks that focus and tangibility: players are usually left to either talk or roll dice at things until it resolves itself or turns into a combat scenario. Today, I want to talk about politics & intrigue.

Oh, yeah. We’re going there.

One of the event-based adventure types listed in the 5e DMG is Intrigue, and it describes a couple of options for the premise of an intrigue and whether there may be no villain or multiple villains, and suggests tracking influence with each faction or even each individual somehow. That’s a start, but it’s quite far from enough to understand the apparatus that supports an engaging intrigue. Just as a battle has well-defined parameters of what is possible and how likely things are to work (even if there is a significant amount of room for creative choices and rulings), a grander intrigue needs those same structures. Instead of jumping immediately to abstract game structures like faction points and tension levels and so on, I find this is one area where thinking of the in-universe mechanisms at work is the best starting point.

While “intrigue” refers to the fascinating or mysterious quality of the scenario, the actual substance of the intrigue is usually politics: the contest for power within a social system of some kind. When you want to go full Game of Thrones with the greatest power in the local world up for grabs and want to create the tension and present constrained choices within a system to try to resolve it in one side’s favor, you need to flesh out the full context significantly, so that players can at least somewhat accurately predict the consequences of their actions and be agents in the political world.

The political intrigue plots that are the spine of e.g. GoT hinge on manipulation and power plays, whether those are in personal relationships, political affairs, or war. The tropes here are the naked accumulation, manipulation, and exercise of power, which tends to overshadow the exploration of other themes.

So, for a game to feel like that, you have to 1) have individuals that run factions with certain power, circumstances or relationships, and goals, and then 2) have them go about growing, manipulating, and exercising their power. So let’s talk about power real fast.