T w e n t y S i d e d

When I wrote the first entry in my series explaining RPG systems to newbies, I wrote–and deleted–several paragraphs on why I recommended Dungeons and Dragons at all. The reason it got cut was that it felt like a needlessly confrontational introduction; this series is to educate new players, not carry a spear in the endless nerd faction blood war between old ones. But now that I’m underway, let me take a moment explain to any prospective gamers–if not imaginary grognards with opinions two degrees east of my own–why I’m pushing D&D for my first two posts of recommendations when I rarely choose to run it myself.

Sure–there’s things I don’t like about D&D. And as a full disclosure, that’s not exactly an unpopular opinion among people who’ve been gaming as long as I have. A common complaint is that it’s outdated, married to 1970s sacred cows that have since been replaced with newer, sexier cows with lower carbon footprints. I’ll be honest and say that several of the editions I’m recommending, I don’t like playing at all. At least, not anymore.

But when you get right down to it, D&D just isn’t like the games I replace it with. It’s not a schlocky parody riff/jazz solo on the tropes of standard roleplaying games like Sacred Barbecue. It’s not a re-examination of dungeon crawling storytelling using tightly reinvented mechanics like Dungeon World or Dungeon Crawl Classics. All of those are games made because somebody got sick of D&D, but they got sick of it because they’d played it–their work is derivative, and it only functions because it operates from the same recognizable and approachable foundation. What D&D is–what it needs to be–is a solid, earnest, classic game. It’s a firm base of objective rules with a straightforward, literal, and legible mechanic used to tell entry-level fantasy stories. It’s a medium-crust delivery pepperoni pizza. It’s a great start. You won’t hate it. Odds are you’ll have an excellent time, you’ll find one part you like more than the rest, you’ll branch out, and then four years later you’ll be writing forum posts about what’s wrong with D&D like the rest of us.

There’s another and simpler reason: Dungeons and Dragons is lavishly produced to be an introductory game. Almost every RPG allocates some space to teaching first-timers what they’re doing, but it’s so often a perfunctory and lazy effort: generally speaking the rulebook’s either a tight sixty-page .pdf that can’t dedicate more than a couple to tutorials or it assumes anyone who can find it by word of mouth and pick it up won’t need more than a refresher. Grab any edition of D&D, on the other hand, and you’ll find an entire chapter–often several chapters–dedicated to explaining how things work in the sort of exhaustive mind-numbing detail you only get when you’ve got interns to abuse.

Now, where were we? Oh, right.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rutskarn’s RPG System Hoedown, Part 2: The Latter Dragons”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.