Could D&D Ever Have an eSport?

eSports -- game competitions facilitated by electronic systems -- are largely known for their multiplayer video game competitions. But with the rise of Dungeons & Dragons' presence on Twitch and the D&D Adventurer's League, an eSport for D&D isn't that far-fetched.

By Denny Sung (CEO) - GLOBAL MULTIMEDIA SCHOOL, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=108140853 ​

eSports On the Rise​

The rise of eSports, particularly in the video game arena, is accelerating rapidly. According to Newzoo, eSports had $660M in revenues, $485M in brand investment, and 191M global enthusiasts in 2017. The ingredients for a successful eSport are outlined by Kat Bailey on USGamer.net: a game that's easy to grasp but deeper than it looks, a balanced game, freely accessible, capable of building tension and punctuating it with dramatic moments, a strong community, and a big prize pool.

With a rules iteration history of several decades, D&D has most of these points covered. Thanks to the release of the Basic rules, the Fifth Edition is free. Any player can attest to D&D's ability to build tension and create dramatic moments. It's also accessible to a broad audience, and due to Hasbro's renewed focus on Twitch, that's now a reality. In fact, Hasbro's CEO recently claimed there are "millions of views on Twitch around Dungeons & Dragons."

D&D and Competitive Play​

D&D has always had a competitive streak. Many of co-creator Gary Gygax's published adventures were adapted from tournaments that were played competitively at conventions, like Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and Tomb of Horrors.

Thanks to its wargaming roots, tournament play was well-established by the time D&D came along. Tournaments were associated with wargaming conventions. The first large-scale D&D tournament took place at Origins in Baltimore, MD on July 25-27. An estimated 1,500 attended, with 120 participating in the D&D tournament. But how to judge the winner of a game where "anything can be attempted?" The success condition was defined as a revenue target, according to Jon Peterson in Playing at the World. Mark Swanson, who attended that first tournament, wrote a detailed account in Alarums & Excursions #4 of his game (refereed by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax's son, Ernie):

All fifteen of the characters were nameless, pre-generated, and assigned to players in alphabetical order: to ensure that the trips to begin on equal footing, Gygax needed to mandate an identical party composition across them all. The luck of the draw landed Swanson a feeble Magic-user. In Swanson’s group, only four of fifteen had any prior experience with the game, which means that those other eleven Origins attendees had pre-registered for a baptism by fire— and furthermore suggests the Gygax family’s personal tutelage introduced many wargamers to Dungeons & Dragons that weekend. Any ardent fan of early Dungeons & Dragons would find the scenario of the tournament immediately recognizable. From the moment Swanson reports, “We were to loot a tomb, hidden under a hill,” one suspects that Swanson faced an early incarnation of the classic deathtrap module the Tomb of Horrors (1978).

The proto-Tomb of Horrors did not impress Swanson:

From the whole experience, I deduce a couple of lessons. 1) Don’t run D& D as a tournament. 2) Always shatter plaster unless you are in the dungeon of nasty-minded people such as I who might put poison gas behind it. 3) Play a Gygax game if you like pits, secret doors and Dungeon Roulette. Play a game such as in A& E if you prefer monsters, talking/ arguing/ fighting with chance met characters and a more exciting game. Of course, the game may not have been typical, but Gygax can defend himself. I felt no real desire for a second, similar game.

This experience would set the tone for a "Gygaxian" style of play in which the DM's job was to thwart players. Gygax's tomb was likely so antagonistic to accommodate a tournament environment. As Peterson puts it:

For the eleven newbies who accompanied Swanson’s party into that funhouse, however, this session calibrated them to the play of Dungeons & Dragons, and it carried the authority of the game’s inventor: many later dungeon masters followed this deathtrap precedent.

It didn't help that some of the first published adventures were designed for tournaments, further cementing a DM vs. player-style of gaming. These scenarios were offered to large tournaments and multiple DMs for a fee, which helped blaze a trail for later scenarios published for the mass market:

Owing to the need for several tournament referees to administer dungeon explorations simultaneously and impartially, each referee worked from a common set of written instructions crafted by Gygax, copied and distributed to all dungeon masters. Following the precedent of Bob Blake’s post-game sales of his GenCon IX tournament dungeon, TSR later allowed the Metro Detroit Gamers group to package Gygax’s maps, encounter charts, character sheets and related instructions to tournament referees as a sixteen-page loose leaf product in a zip-lock bag to offer for sale. They called it the Lost Caverns of Tsojconth, and advised buyers to “use this dungeon for your own tournament or for a new exciting dungeon for one Dungeonmaster and six players.”

D&D's tradition of competitive play has continued to this day.

The Rules of the Sport​

The National Society of Crazed Gamers (NASCRAG) ran D&D tournaments from 1980 through 2011, and has sinced moved to Pathfinder. There was also a D&D Championship Series, which ran from 1977 through 2013. In 2016, Wizards of the Coast brought the Series back, using the D&D Adventurers League rules.

D&D has the rules, has the community, and has a long history of competitive play. It just needs a platform to make eSports feasible. The rise of online play platforms like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds makes this more feasible than ever, and actual play podcasts and YouTube videos can capture the action in a wide variety of media. In fact, Roll20 took over an eSports team (Team8):

It’s a mildly unorthodox thing for a company like Roll20 to up and jump into esports, but there’s a lot about it that just made sense. We don’t do much advertising (‘cause you all do such a fantastic job of telling your friends about us!) and we feel like the friendly Heroes community might occasionally enjoy taking a break from winning and losing to make more friends on Roll20 in the same way we’ve enjoyed exorcising our competitive Diablo’s in “HotS.”

Of all the existing gaming platforms that might launch an eSport, Roll20's experience makes them a likely candidate. For a glimpse at what a transmedia competitive game might look like, Open Game Master offers a tantalizing possibility.

Will D&D ever become an eSport? Perhaps the answer is that D&D was the original eSport before there were video game tournaments. It's just taking a while for technology to catch up.

 

[Bigsta]

"Player 3 has thrown the challenge flag. Let's watch as the referee reviews the video replay to see if the DM blew the call on that last fireball spell."

"Ouch, yet another low score from the Soviet judge."

 

[werecorpse]

"I always win at D&D. I beat all my friends. Even when I play at conventions I beat the other players and the GM."
- Waldorf
; )

I think that the combat side of tabletop RPGs to the extent that there are strict rules as required in an e-competitive game is adequately copied by things like DOTA or overwatch so competitive D&D of this sort is unlikely to succeed.

I agree with the posters who see broadcast D&D as more akin to broadcast storytelling than broadcast sport. It's closer to a soap opera than a sport season. The added elements of collaborative storytelling and periodically dice determining events is the thing it has over a more normal soap, but doesn't make it a sport IMO.

 

[GreenTengu]

This seems like some barrel-bottom scratching desperation.

"Hey! That thing seems big at the moment! Let's jump on that bandwagon!!"

No, D&D as an eSport could not work because D&D lacks a number of aspects that a decent video game would have. To have competitive D&D you would need a few things.

a) Actually balanced rules that didn't play favorites with races and classes or allow the big semi-truck sized holes for abuse by min/maxers that are created by sacred cow things like the attribute system. And you couldn't do expansions with blatantly intentionally unbalanced garbage like well... pretty much every splat book in this edition, but Volo's stands out as an example and I am sure Xanathar's is going to be similarly crap in the balance department. In the very least, the game would need a way to frequently "patch" the rules to fix these issues.

b) You would need to ensure that all players face the same challenge or at least some way for that challenge to be measured and scaled accordingly. When you have a player against player situation, this isn't an issue as the players who are better advance. But whenever you have players tackling a challenge and comparing results, they need to be going up against the same challenge or any differences being a result of their own inputs or it isn't a fair competition. Each DM is going to be making different choices and handling things differently, resulting in different challenges for different players.

c) RNG is the bane of eSports. The more RNG affects a game, the less valid it is in terms of eSports. The amount of RNG in the things that are popular in eSports already is a major known issue and often talked about. But D&D is literally nothing but RNG. Everything is determined with the role of the die and player input can only have the most minor of effects. In fact, every example of D&D being "tough" or "challenging" has really always just amounted to living through the adventure being a total slot machine/lottery gamble result that is determined entirely by getting good rolls on several saving throws-- or, occasionally, the DM rolling poor numbers on attack and damage rolls of powerful creatures that would kill the player on a single turn of average rolls. I know there are some in this community who utterly fool themselves into thinking they have accomplished something by surviving through such situations-- but, no, you rolling high numbers and the DM rolling low numbers consistently enough for you to have won the proverbial lottery is no particular great accomplishment.

d) The spirit of eSports is competition, and competitiveness in D&D is virtually always toxic. The whole concept of D&D only works when people at the table, DM included, are cooperating to make an enjoyable experience for everyone there. When you have people being hyper competitive, it just makes the game entirely unenjoyable to play and equally awkward and unenjoyable to watch. Nothing could be learned from it and there could be no moments of greatness... it would just be a bunch of people acting to one another and arguing like bitter children.

Just out and out, D&D would not and could not make for any sort of "eSport" and one has to be pretty disconnected from the reality of the situation to have decided that writing up this post and putting it on the front page was a worth-while exercise. You may as well have asked "Could the moon really be made of green cheese?" Except... no... even that could have had better, more creative responses.


What works for D&D is not being an eSport, but rather to be a performance... a system through which people can do improvisational performances. And there are already many popular groups doing that very thing! Critical Roll and Harmon Quest (technically that one uses Pathfinder, but... oh well) and countless other groups far more amateur have put up recordings of their game sessions and found that many people find them quite entertaining and enjoy them.

 

[trancejeremy]

Well, as the article mentions, there were competitive tournaments for like the first 10 years of D&D/AD&D. Team goes through module, scores X amount of points. Top teams move on to the next module. Repeat 3 more times and finally you have a winning team. Balance doesn't matter because everyone has the same pregenerated characters.

In a way, it's more like Ninja Warrior than the PvP in most e-sports

Would anyone watch it? I dunno. But it's obviously feasible since D&D competitions have been done

 

[Shasarak]

Will D&D ever become an eSport? Perhaps the answer is that D&D was the original eSport before there were video game tournaments. It's just taking a while for technology to catch up.

Being a Gold Medal winning DnD player will teach the people who say you can not win at DnD.

"I won at DnD and it was Advanced!"

 

[Jhaelen]

I'm definitely with Mark Swanson, here: "Don’t run D&D as a tournament."

The very idea runs counter to what I consider the hallmark of a roleplaying game: trying to portrait characters with personal goals and motivations, working as a team to overcome challenges while creating an interesting narrative. It's _not_ about trying to compete with other players, the GM, and most decidedly not 'playing to win'.

It's why I don't consider most computer RPGs actual roleplaying games and why I advise boardgamers not to play games like FFG's Descent or Imperial Assault and expect to experience something similar to an actual RPG. These games are inherently adversarial: Both sides are trying their best to win, resulting in a decidedly non-fun atmosphere. I.e. unless you're looking for an extremely competitive game that doesn't have anything in common with an actual RPG, avoid them at all cost.

And regarding watching a group playing an RPG: I enjoy seeing the interaction between players and the GM. I'm definitely not watching it to see them push minis across a grid and roll dice.

 

[Lylandra]

I also don't see how D&D could or should become an eSports thing. Unless you changed the rating system to a jury who places scores on interaction, creativity, character play etc. in addition to the team's combat, puzzle and exploration success you'd miss very crucial parts of what it means to play a TTRPG. Simply "defeating a dungeon" by using mechanics and being lucky with the dice isn't too much of a challenge.

And yes, D&D has way too much linear RNG for any kind of sport. You cannot, even if you wanted, create a fair, competitive, balanced sports environment when your success is determined by that much luck. It might work if the game used only martial characters, but add binary save-or-suck/die effects that can be applied or avoided with a d20 roll and the system gets too messy.

Plus, many of the 5e spells (and skills) are subject to the DM's judgement. So you'd either need to cut down a lot of the DM's freedom or success would also depend on how well Referee (I suppose the DM wouldn't be part of the team) and team get along.

 

[wcpfish]

point of correction: Baltimore, MD not Baltimore, MA. That Origins was a little farther south than Massachusetts

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Well, as the article mentions, there were competitive tournaments for like the first 10 years of D&D/AD&D. Team goes through module, scores X amount of points. Top teams move on to the next module. Repeat 3 more times and finally you have a winning team. Balance doesn't matter because everyone has the same pregenerated characters.

In a way, it's more like Ninja Warrior than the PvP in most e-sports

Would anyone watch it? I dunno. But it's obviously feasible since D&D competitions have been done

When I used to go to the local con here back in the late 80's early 90's that was how all the D&D tourney games went, which was all the D&D games really. And it was fun, you got some often crazy Pre-Gen PC and an over the top scenario that was designed to weed out parties. I had a blast though my groups never advanced.