Left Behind

As I feel as though I've had an inordinate amount of fiction recently (most of it not even medieval!) so I've thought long and hard about something gaming related to talk about. What I've hit upon today is that very thing which drove me to write this blog in the first place. I feel like there is a certain sector of the pen and paper population that's being driven away by Wizards and their marketing strategies, of which game design plays a large part.

I first articulated this feeling in a letter to Wizards nearly a year ago now. The purpose of the letter was to ask for permission to use the trademark AD&D freely within the now-defunct Grognard magazine to which, of course, Wizards refused. The efforts of people like Mearls to "unite" the apparently warring factions of D&D players now sheds some light on their refusal; they themselves are trying to draw people back to the fold who have long since been left behind. I fear they will never draw me back, though, and that is what I want to talk about.

What exactly is it that drove me from the loving arms of the corporate world of D&D? Steve Winter has discussed the poisonous release cycle espoused by Wizards, but that's not the core of the issue. It has exacerbated my problems with the alterations that have been made to Dungeons and Dragons over the past several editions, but the problems themselves come not from the dangerous re-iteration and reshaping of core ideas simply to wring a buck out of the D&D crowd, but rather from the exact direction they have taken.

That direction is simply this: Dungeons and Dragons has become less like the fantasy I want to run and experience. The baseline of D&D has shifted from my fondest days (AD&D 2e, of course) away from the grim fantasy I love and towards flashy action-fantasy. We are told in the most modern iterations of D&D that things like monster ecologies are a waste of valuable ink; they never become relevant, so we do not need to trouble ourselves with them. This is the very attitude that wrongheadedly informs the new iterations of D&D over and over. But why?