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.

 

[wicked cool]

Thoughts of making it an e sport

The baldurs gate mansion of madness-the twist of having a player turn against another. make it an elimination type game

a tomb type quest with a timer-best times move on

not sure why a team vs another team vs dungeon wouldn't work. points based on treasure, time, monsters fought, etc. restrictions on teleport etc.

 

[talien]

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

Oops, sorry about that, fixed. Thank you!

 

[talien]

This seems like some barrel-bottom scratching desperation.

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

...

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.

You seem oddly hostile about this topic. Are you all right?

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I think it would have been interesting to see recordings of the first time a classic tourney adventure like Tomb of Horrors was run. How players approached it and how they solved or died in it.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

For as long as I’ve been gaming, yeah, the most competitive players have been the worst to play beside and DM for. These are the people that cheat at dice rolls, have ridiculous stat “rolls,” try to bully and browbeat everyone else at the table, and when something bad happens to their character, throw a tantrum.

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.

 

[Muad'dib Pendragon]

IMO, "competitive" role playing would be more akin to "American Idol," "X Factor" and other shows like that. Largely subjective...

 

[MarkB]

If the question had been phrased as "Could D&D ever be an eSport?" my answer would be a simple no. D&D is not a sport, it's a system to support co-operative narrative.

However, "could D&D ever have an eSport?" That might be possible.

With sufficient mainstream popularity, especially if it were accompanied by an increased degree of regulated play such as Adventurers' League, I could easily see some form of arena challenge as a potential spin-off product.

Take a verified AL-legal character, enter them into a ranked tournament, and then run that tournament via a streamlined rule system designed to strip out as much of the human judgement element as possible from the competition, perhaps supported by a virtual tabletop system with a highly polished visual interface that resolves all die rolls and can simulate most tournament-legal spells and effects.

Honestly, D&D isn't the best system for such a tournament and the tournament itself would play very differently from any typical D&D session, but as a spin-off that became its own separate thing, it could certainly work.

 

[bedir than]

Back in the early 90s playing AD&D/2e we would sometimes run an arena/gladiator session. Each of two players ran 4 PCs of the same level in a large arena doing a capture the flag type thing.

It worked for us, but only as a distraction because 2-4 players didn't show on a planned night.

 

[jmucchiello]

IMO, "competitive" role playing would be more akin to "American Idol," "X Factor" and other shows like that. Largely subjective...

That might be something. In the early rounds of an old AD&D tournaments, the players at the table would vote for who at the table was "best" and that person would advance. They would also rate the DM and the DM's would compete to advance.

If the audience voted for best player, it would eliminate most of the need for balanced PCs. Of course, it would then turning into a popularity contest, much like AI or XF. But at least it wouldn't require a specialized game system with referees judging the DMs.

 

[Spookykid]

Dungeons and dragons online does have some tournys. Not a full blown esports setup but I could see them making a few adjustments for it. PvP isn't group vs group but shouldn't be hard to do. The one I had fun in was the 1st level waterworks challenge, run that dungeon and you get points for hitting objectives along they way and best time wins ties. Then the next round the difficulty of the dungeon increases.