The Great D&D Schism: The End of an age and the scattering of gamers

I've been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about the last decade and a half or so of D&D and what has happened to the gaming community.

When I started playing D&D in 1998, the various groups I knew that played D&D each played heavily house-ruled versions of AD&D 2e, modified almost beyond recognition. No two groups used the same modifications, you basically had to re-learn the game just to go from one group to another. Even one group that tried to be by-the-book and didn't want to change things ended up changing certain rules that were just too constricting. Many groups had jumped to homebrewed fantasy RPG's, or had just given up on fantasy RPG's and were playing Star Wars or CoC or Shadowrun.

Then 3e came out in August of 2000. It was like a breath of fresh air. D&D remade with a modern rules system, consistent rules, balanced and flexible rules. Rules existed which filled many/most of the function of the various house rules I'd seen over the years. We joked that WotC must have been spying on our sessions for ideas.

Over the next few years, I saw virtually every D&D gaming group I know convert to 3.x. I saw a group that had been playing 1e since 1980 go to 3.5e. I saw groups that had given up D&D for GURPS or other games return to D&D, at least to playing it sometimes. By 2005, the substantial majority of all gaming groups I knew played D&D 3.5e, at least sometimes. Most of those that didn't played a related d20 game like Blue Rose, Arcana Evolved, Iron Heroes or d20 Modern and still played 3.x occasionally or were at least familiar with it. Even players who would rather play another edition at least learned 3.5 and owned the PHB.

In retrospect, the early to mid 2000's were a Golden Age of D&D.

Then 4e came. The controversy was immediate, since it took what people liked about D&D 3e and threw it out in favor of something new and completely different. Incendiary marketing from WotC that outright insulted D&D 3.5 and its players didn't help. Volatile language on both sides of the edition wars escalated. Both sides saw the other as a tiny minority and their preferred edition as the only one people played. 3.5 players didn't buy 4e books, and the two camps began to grow apart.

Then Pathfinder showed a new way, now people who wanted D&D the way they liked it could get it. . .but not under the D&D name. A lot of people just walked away from D&D pretty much forever to their own fork of gaming over this schism.

I saw the Edition Wars break into real life like no other gaming debate ever did. When I was on Active Duty in the Army, I would meet fellow soldiers who wanted to game, but every time there was that cautious "whose side are you on" question when they would ask which edition you played. In my experience, most played 3.5, but some did play 4e. . .and the players of one never played the other. These were people I'd never seen before, from all around the country. . .the Edition Wars had become a Cold War among D&D gamers, as everybody was too tired of arguing to want to keep fighting, but the underlying cause was far from settled. Years of yelling, but to no effect.

I saw a gaming club I love slowly break apart as each faction didn't want to play the other games. The people who play 4e refused to play 3.5 or Pathfinder, the 3.5 players wouldn't touch 4e with a 10 foot pole and didn't see a need for Pathfinder since they were happy with their 3.5, and the Pathfinder players didn't like go back to 3.5 and had an "over my dead body" attitude about 4e. Whereas there was a general consensus on which game to play several years prior, now it was small camps that didn't want to game with each other.

Now, years later we have "D&D Next", 5e that is, on the horizon. . .and it doesn't look to be mending any fences. Too dissimilar to either camp to draw the majority in, right now it looks like at most it will create a 3rd faction (or 4th if you count Pathfinder as an edition) to the Edition Wars.

I miss when we were all on the same page, more or less. I miss when I could talk D&D online or in meatspace and not have to ignore half the conversations because I genuinely dislike the edition they are talking about, or when I could walk into my FLGS and actually see books I wanted to buy. I haven't bought a D&D book in about 6 years, because they stopped making anything I'd want to buy.

The sad thing is, I've got no idea what could fix this gaming schism. D&D Next (I still want to call it 5e) was meant to bring the factions together, but it's not seeming like it will do that. Personally I'll probably buy the PHB for it, but I've got faint hope that it will do anything other than break D&D gaming apart further.

Those anecdotes are sad, particularly in the military. I think your picture is pretty typical to what happened. There was a vibrant D&D community, and now there isn't to the same extent. We'll probably never get that golden age back. I think the best that can happen is that some time passes, some of those competing camps die out and others diversify, the community gets back to something like it was before the 3e release, and something new and brilliant comes out that grabs everyone again. But we're a long way from that, and 5e ain't it.

The best we can do is enjoy our own games.

To an extent, you're completely right, @wingsandsword. 3.x was fairly groundbreaking in its unification of the D&D fanbase, even from the beginning--considering how TSR knowingly fractured their own fanbase with "basic" D&D and "advanced" D&D.

About a year ago I posted a thread describing, however, that "unification" itself is a bit of a fallacy, in that we've never really been united in our choice to play Dungeons and Dragons.

There's been massive tensions and "drift" for D&D in actual play for a long, long time. People have wanted very different things from their RPG experience, but a lot of us stuck with D&D because it was popular enough that everyone at least had some experience with it, and if it wasn't exactly what we wanted from an RPG, it was close enough, and there was enough "traction" in the gaming community at large that we just went along with it. Getting groups / players to branch out was generally a difficult task, and required great amounts of effort from a GM to go out of his or her way to specifically recruit for it.

Even now, how much easier would it be to recruit a group at your local FLGS to play a Pathfinder campaign versus say, GURPS or Runequest?

The 4e / 3.x schism just happened at a time where the dissenting love / hate opinions with the 4e system were codified into a public space -- the Internet. The rift became that much more real because we were in front of it, many of us participating in it, every day, all around us.

We had opportunities to explore the why of that rift, to explore the dimensions behind the theory and game designs of each system, and to better understand our own preferences in gaming. To me, this is a massive positive of the "Edition Wars," which makes me a little bit hesitant to label anything an "edition war," or to even discount someone else's opinion, even if it's couched somewhat in vitriol.

Ahnehnois said:

I think the best that can happen is that some time passes, some of those competing camps die out and others diversify, the community gets back to something like it was before the 3e release, and something new and brilliant comes out that grabs everyone again. But we're a long way from that, and 5e ain't it.

The best we can do is enjoy our own games.

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Sadly, I'm fairly certain you're right, @Ahnehnois. Based on the playtest feedback I've seen here and elsewhere, 5e doesn't appear to be pushing the right buttons for enough people to become the "grand unification" edition. From the feedback I've seen, the very FIRST playtest packet seemed to be the most popular, because it specifically touched the "OSR" nerve in a lot of people. Everything from the first packet onward seemed to produce an increasingly smaller return on investment, in terms of fan appreciation.

Truly, the best we can do is enjoy our own games---but the trick now is to go out and find the game you'll most enjoy! The available gaming options for any given group are staggering. There's virtually no reason to play a game / system you're not really enjoying.

The biggest danger to D&D as a whole is a group of fans like me, who break away from D&D by trying other stuff, and then suddenly realize that they don't miss D&D at all, because they've found a game or games that radically suit their needs better. I'm definitely in that camp.

Pretty much any variety of D&D / d20 is easily now fourth or fifth on my list of systems I'd like to play / run, even the ones I actually LIKE such as Fantasy Craft and Radiance.

D&D Next's problem isn't just that it's fighting against Pathfinder, and 4e inertia. It's also in a very real fight against Fate, Savage Worlds, and the ever-growing OSR movement for mind share.

WotC is just now coming to realize that as Malcolm Gladwell described in a famous TED talk, we don't want "the one perfect D&D spaghetti sauce." We want fifteen different "D&D spaghetti sauces." 5e is obviously an attempt to do this, but I don't think it's going to be modular enough to achieve "unification."

If the 5e framework is solid, and future modularity can be built piece by piece into it, then I think 10 years from now, 5.5e or 6e may have a shot at it. But the current landscape makes "unification" pretty much a pipe dream.

Don't be so quick to assume Next has failed before its out the gate. Everyone has an opinion or 2 about the playtest to date, however we haven't seen the final product yet. While I can't say for any certainty that the next edition will do any good or push things further apart, no one can say for sure what the end result will look like.

innerdude said:

The biggest danger to D&D as a whole is a group of fans like me, who break away from D&D by trying other stuff, and then suddenly realize that they don't miss D&D at all, because they've found a game or games that radically suit their needs better. I'm definitely in that camp.

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I do miss it, but not enough to buy something that isn't better than what I already have.

I think their danger is that by breaking up their own monopoly and forcing people out of the chain of buying their books, they've created a much pickier group of customers, ones who are now more educated about the variety out there. It used to be that d20 was the lowest common denominator, but now I think it's too low.

You see a schism, I see a healthy diversity.

Looked at through another prism, in the past people who wanted to play a fantasy RPG had one real choice. Now they have many. They can pick a game that caters best to their tables' preferred play style. They can try out Pathfinder or Dungeon World or Fate or GURPS or Savage World or 13th Age. I'm sure I've left some important ones off that list. Seems like lately there's more cool, professional games out that there than ever before. This can only be good for the hobby.

I suspect that the only people the 'schism' is really bad for is Wizards of the Coast.

Going forward there may not be One Game To Rule Them All. And that's fine. As long as you are open to new gaming experiences I doubt you'll have trouble finding a table to play at.

Feeroper said:

Don't be so quick to assume Next has failed before its out the gate. Everyone has an opinion or 2 about the playtest to date, however we haven't seen the final product yet. While I can't say for any certainty that the next edition will do any good or push things further apart, no one can say for sure what the end result will look like.

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I don't think 5e will "fail," certainly not from a commercial standpoint. And certainly it will "win over" some fans as their preferred edition.

The original subtext of this thread is that 5e doesn't appear to be a vehicle for player base unification. If you're defining 5e's success or failure based on its ability to unite the fan base, then yes, in my opinion 5e will "fail."

But 5e can fail at that aim, and still find success in other ways.

[MENTION=91777]Dungeoneer[/MENTION]
I mostly kind with that (i.e. that diversity is good), but I do think that for when you don't have a trusted established group, a common language and set of experiences is awfully useful. I have the group I want now, but the thing that concerns me is if I'm ever in the market again, will I have to teach players from scratch or even get them to unlearn other things they've learned just so we can get on the same page.

It's also helpful for the quality of that one dominant system if everyone's playing it and they're getting feedback and using it.

And lastly, it's always a problem when you're talking to someone who isn't in the hobby and you have to explain to them what is and isn't D&D, or why if they want to join they have to buy some old out of print book, etc. That goes above and beyond variety because you have to explain a value judgment to someone who doesn't understand it, and it doesn't cast our hobby in the best light.

But there are definitely some good things about the increased variety. I wish we could have had that without all the other stuff.

wingsandsword said:

I miss when we were all on the same page, more or less.

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I agree with Ahnehnois that your anecdotes are sad, but I don't think D&Ders have ever lived in a golden age of communal understanding. Except maybe at the very beginning, when Gygax and Arneson were DMing the very first campaigns and making things up as they went. Actually, scratch that, considering the differences that developed between the two, I doubt even they were ever on the same page.

So frankly, all this talk of golden ages and great schisms sounds very melodramatic to me. I think that we are in a transition between Ages; but it's not from a golden age of communal bliss to a dark age of schisms. It's the transition between the first age of our hobby, when the first of our hobbyists are still alive and gaming, to an age when most of us have seen and played multiple incarnations of the game, and nobody can claim comprehensive knowledge of the hobby. And those of us who've played multiple editions have generally realized that there was never a possibility of D&Ders 'being on the same page,' and that no edition will ever achieve that utopian state.

Because the simple fact is that tastes vary too widely to achieve anything resembling mutual game values, even within D&D, and the only reason that the hobby may have once resembled a collective soul is because it was a small hobby, with a very few DMs making the calls.

Dungeoneer said:

You see a schism, I see a healthy diversity.

Looked at through another prism, in the past people who wanted to play a fantasy RPG had one real choice. Now they have many. They can pick a game that caters best to their tables' preferred play style. They can try out Pathfinder or Dungeon World or Fate or GURPS or Savage World or 13th Age. I'm sure I've left some important ones off that list. Seems like lately there's more cool, professional games out that there than ever before. This can only be good for the hobby.

I suspect that the only people the 'schism' is really bad for is Wizards of the Coast.

Going forward there may not be One Game To Rule Them All. And that's fine. As long as you are open to new gaming experiences I doubt you'll have trouble finding a table to play at.

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Well said, Dungeoneer!

I've certainly run across a couple of the real-life edition warriors that wingsandsword mentioned, but more that are willing to at least try games and editions outside of their comfort zone. Generally, a GM can find a group to play edition A even if this player'd rather play edition B and that player'd rather play game Q.

I myself played and loved 3.x for eight years before becoming a 4e fan, and occasionally play PF with a local Paizo group. I, like most gamers I know, are somewhere in between "It's about the group, not the rules" and "It's my edition or the highway."