Why is 5E Like That?

Some musings on the history of Dungeons and Dragons

So, people love to dunk on modern D&D, for various different reasons.

It’s useful for OSR fans, especially those who like to houserule or produce OSR content, to understand just how in the hell we got here.

The Failure Mode

The problem is that modern D&D is essentially a huge collection of marketable character options. And this is because, ultimately, the purpose of modern D&D is to sell sourcebooks. So in order to produce a steady revenue stream, D&D (or any D&D-like game such as Pathfinder) must continue to output new sourcebooks, with new character options, which players will want to choose.

If all a game does is produce new adventures, they can sell a steady trickle of them to DMs, but they are effectively ignoring the player base as a market to extract cash from.

Historical Origins

Dungeons and Dragons started out as a blend of ideas from Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, with inspiration from various other wargamers that they both had worked with. Without both of their input, I think D&D simply wouldn’t have caught the lightning-in-a-bottle that made it what it is. Once it became clear that D&D was going to be a Big Deal, the personality differences between Arneson and Gygax started heavily influencing the shape and fate of the company.

As several documentaries and histories of the game have written, Gygax was the better businessman, while Arneson was the more “improvisational” of the two. As conventions and “tournament play” became a thing, Gygax dove headfirst into it, while Arneson preferred to build “creativity aids” for more sandbox-style play. The split of D&D into AD&D and B/X D&D may have been designed by Gygax to edge Arneson out of profits, but it also gave Arneson’s vision a small “walled garden” to grow in, mostly free from Gygax’s growing tournament rule system.

A tournament rule system has a vastly different set of rule requirements than a sandbox system. For tournament play, rules must be codified and made consistent, so that a player built in one campaign for one DM can be dropped into another campaign run by another DM without any surprises. This means that just about everything that a player can think of, needs to be ruled on, codified, packaged, and presented to players-in-general as a chooseable option with consistent prerequisites.

A lot of OSR philosophy seems to assert that this is a failure mode of game design. Unless I’m building a “tactical wargame with RPG-like elements”, I agree. (There’s a fun irony here, which I’ll get to in a minute if you haven’t spotted it yet.)

This failure mode started as a minor trend in late 1E AD&D, then bloomed into fruition towards the end of Second Edition. This produced a whole generation of gamers for whom that style of game design simply was Dungeons and Dragons. Then those gamers went on to become employees of Wizards of the Coast, and helped create Third Edition - which effectively “locked in” this style as What D&D Was For.

Hasbro Enters The Picture

D&D is no stranger to corporate meddling from CEOs that don’t really understand the product. But getting bought by Wizards of the Coast, and then WotC getting bought by Hasbro, took it to a whole new level. Modern investment capitalism simply can’t help but “enshittify” everything. Enshittification is simply how shareholder value is produced in the late-stage capitalist economy.

That irony I mentioned earlier? Here it is: there was actually a way for D&D to survive Hasbro. It was called Fourth Edition.

Fourth Edition did something brilliant. It said “hey wait a minute, D&D isn’t actually an RPG with tactical wargame-like elements; it’s a tactical wargame with RPG-like elements!” And then it committed to the bit.

And everyone hated it.

They hated it because it forced them to admit that they were playing a tactical wargame and pretending it was an RPG. They hated it so much that Paizo took the entirety of third edition, which did a much better job of hiding the tactical wargame under an RPG mask, and repackaged it as “not 4E”, aka Pathfinder.

So, since 4E was rejected by the Pharisees and crucified by the market, 5E was born - and the enshittification process entered full swing.

The Solution

If you want a genuine tactical wargame, try 4E. Or better yet, try Draw Steel, which is trying to be 4E by committing even harder to the bit.

If you want what D&D was originally supposed to be, though, try a B/X-based OSR clone.

Putting it as pithily as I can: 4E made no bones about being a tactical wargame with RPG-like elements. While B/X, on the other hand, is an RPG with tactical wargame-like elements. Which, I assert, is the promise originally made by Gygax and Arneson, which D&D has failed to deliver on (with a few shining exceptions) for three decades.