Wondrous Variety!

I’m reading the new 5^th edition Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook, let’s call it D&D 5.5 for convenience. This post is not a proper review. If you follow me on social media, you might have read some of these thoughts. It’s a beautifully put-together book. It focuses on ease of play, referencing it during play, and helping new players understand the game. I like the layout and the use of art to illustrate the rules and concepts of the game, the fact that the illustrations have captions on what they represent, and credit the artist directly with the art. It is focused on the larger demographic currently playing the game, and to me, that is a strength; it seeks to grow the hobby, be inclusive, and be easier to understand. A far cry from the complex, often hard-to-grasp rulebooks I learned to play tabletop role-playing games with.

Except for the D&D Mentzer Red Box, an excellent book to learn the game, the AD&D 1e rule books were written in a style amicable to a much more niche audience, but I digress.

Reading the new &D 5.5 rulebook and looking at the illustrations and esthetics has brought to the fore a topic I’ve been thinking about for months now, certainly since watching the D&D Honor Among Thieves movie (which I very much enjoyed, BTW!), watching the Vox Machina animated series on Prime, and watching the awesome, made in Puerto Rico and highly recommended actual-play Juego La Mesa.

When you watch the D&D movie, the Vox Machina series, or the La Mesa actual-play videos, you see a fantasy world quite different from the one I grew up playing and reading about. Cards on the table, I’m a 50-year-old gamer who’s been playing one ttrpg or another for 38 years. When I first picked up D&D, my references for creating a fantasy world were the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table, the movie Excalibur,  reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, seeing the animated films about those stories, Conan movies and comics, Beastmaster and other myriad fantasy b-movies the flooded the video stores in the mid-80s. The Elfquest comics also greatly influenced my storytelling. Dragonlance was formative for my development as a Game Master and world builder, but I discovered those after starting to play D&D.

These stories and the game presented a very different fantasy world from the one we see today in games with more modern sensibilities. The division between the various peoples, what used to be called races in the game, and I understand the connotations involved in this concept, now called species in D&D 5.5, ancestries in Pathfinder, was marked and rigid. Orcs and goblins were painted with a broad stroke and cast as evil antagonists.

I grew up playing a game where, for example, the animosity between elves and dwarves was baked into the game; see the Racial Preferences Table from the AD&D 1e PHB, page 18.

In these worlds, the species lived separately and distrusted each other. The otherness of, for example, the half-orc was codified and made explicit in the rules. The good races were good and civilized, and the evil races were bad and barbarous.

With some reflection and introspection, we can now see that while some of these might be attributed to some literary sources, which does not excuse them and requires careful consideration of those works themselves, they also came from a mindset of biological determinism, colonialism, discrimination,  and projecting outdated, often racist, and downright hurtful beliefs into a game. It is not good enough to say these were products of the time or the author’s outdated views. These games were written merely half a century ago, within my lifetime! Many creators were alive until recently, and since we still pay them, it is valid and essential that we analyze, question, and try to address these problematic ideas.

No one is telling anyone else how to play your home campaign. If you enjoy a more simplistic black-and-white morality in your game, have at it. But don’t expect other people not to question, analyze, and discuss these issues because that is important in the larger social context where these games take place. This discussion and analysis is about making the hobby accessible and respectful and addressing the problems in the games we enjoy. If you think this is an attack on you and how you play, then that may require introspection on your part.

Let me get off my soapbox now and continue with this post. So, what does the rant of the last four paragraphs have to do with what I started writing about? As much as I recognize that the above-discussed analysis of our hobby’s origins and problematic elements is important, I am not immune to the effects of growing up playing with a different fantasy paradigm and suffering culture shock with newer fantasy worlds.

I was taken aback when I first watched the Honor Among Thieves movie, with aarakocra and tabaxi living among the humans. The campaign worlds seen in the Legend of Vox Machina and the Juego La Mesa are cosmopolitan, where many of the game’s species live together in multiethnic societies. Not without conflict or challenges, but a far cry from the xenophobic worlds of racial distrust of early D&D.

Funny enough, I was also incredibly thrilled when I saw the movie. The aarakocra are one of my favorite species from the original Fiend Folio, especially after reading an article in Dragon Magazine #124, from August 1987, detailing their ecology and stats, The Wings of Eagles. The fact that aarakocra are among the player characters in Juego LA mesa also delighted me.

D&D has always been about adding new options and species as player characters. Since the beginning of the game, people have looked for ways to play other fantastic beings. D&D 4^th edition expanded the classical roster of human, dwarf, elf, gnome, half-elf, half-orc, and halfling. The dragongborn, the eladrin, and the tiefling were now options in the core book, but no gnome or half-orc in the PHB when 4e came out. Those three new species added in the D&D 4e PHB existed in previous editions in one form or another, but they were now even more integrated into the world of D&D, even in the classic campaigns published by WotC.

I included those new options when I created my points-of-light campaign to play D&D 4^th edition. They eventually entered my long-running campaign and many other options from Eberron and other campaigns. More character creation options for players is always a benefit from my perspective.

Despite recognizing the value of this variety in the rules and wanting a world that embraces and respects diversity in the world around me, I  did not create fantasy worlds that reflected that. My long-running homebrew campaign was developed based on the old paradigms of fantasy I grew up with.

In a way, D&D is no longer a reflection of the fantasy worlds it was trying to emulate at its inception; instead, D&D shapes the expectation of what fantasy is. I must consciously deal with my reaction to fantasy worlds where all the races live together, where the party composition includes rabbit folk, fairy folk, and dragon people. The people playing the hobby now come to the game with different influences, from video games to anime, manga, and literature, which are often more varied and inclusive than what I enjoyed while growing up.

I can recognize that some of these options are not for me. I sometimes enjoy a different campaign, but that’s ok. The game is not created or marketed solely for me. It’s sold and should be aimed at another audience, a younger generation discovering the game for the first time.

The younger generation always overjoys me, and I refuse to dismiss them because I genuinely see in them a more compassionate, tolerant, and open generation than we ever were. Whenever I have my knee-jerk reaction that says, “That’s not my fantasy,” I rein myself in and think, yes, it is not my instinctual concept of fantasy; it’s a broader, more varied view, which is a good thing.

It may be time to put on my world-building hat and try to create a world more like modern D&D and fantasy. Make it a personal challenge. If the World of Greyhawk is the default setting in the upcoming D&D 5.5 Dungeon Masters Guide, I wonder how they will mesh this with one of the original fantasy campaigns.

I am looking forward to that.  

To paraphrase Morgan Freeman as Azeem in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, a movie that certainly has issues with representation, but humor me in this instance… I am thankful for the wondrous variety of games we play.