D&D General Ch-Ch-Changes

[CleverNickName]

define sufficiently clever?

My nickname?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

any idea what is in the zeitgeist now that is not quite do able or would need a whole setting being built to do?

That's an interesting question.

No current D&D setting feels particularly fresh or modern, in my opinion. I know some will disagree, but some people say the most trite and aged possible settings are "fresh", when what they actually mean is they still like them. A setting not feeling "fresh" is not necessarily a bad thing at all. But it does mean it's unlikely to excite people, unlikely to cause people to think "I want to dump my old setting and play this new one!".

I think there are a couple of reasons for this - 5E is a really solid and extremely accessible RPG, but part of what's rolling on is safety and nostalgia (sometimes even for a time never experienced, as discussed before) - and the only settings to even approach fresh and relevant so far are the MtG-based ones (y'all know how much I hate to say that, but it is true).

There's also a general move in RPGs outside D&D, which is a bit zeitgeist-y, away from combat and killing as a focus of the game, and D&D makes that so central, and offers such limited support for other stuff (the entire high-randomness d20 mechanic with a binary pass/fail state is somewhat antithetical to other modes of play), that's hard to see how D&D could produce something particularly modern.

Then again, I didn't expect Planescape (or Dark Sun, which wasn't as shocking as PS, but was pretty shocking) in the 1990s. That was a big move, a daring one, and it seemed to pay off in terms of popularity, at least initially, but I think AD&D in general was in such trouble that it could only do so much. I know, for my group, PS got us playing D&D again - if not for it, we likely would have dropped D&D until 3E (and been more skeptical of 3E), when there were a multitude of other excellent RPGs competing for our attention. But as good as PS was (and this is an even bigger issue in the video game of it, I note), it still used the AD&D 2E rules, which seemed creaky and ancient by, say, 1995.

I think re: the current zeitgeist, right now, we're in an interstitial era, culturally, in the West, especially in English-speaking countries. There's been a lot of trauma over the last few years, and obviously the last year has been unprecedented in the modern age. How culture/media will react to that remains to be seen. What the zeitgeist might have been had 2020 been a more typical year, it's going to be different now. Very different. How will that manifest? I have absolutely no idea. But someone probably does, or if they don't, accidentally has ideas that happen to line up with that zeitgeist. I kind of think PS is sort of that. The heavy philosophical bent and heavy whimsy just happened to match up with a lot of what was going on culturally (esp. with under-30s) in the 1990s, and Tony D was only 2 years out of college, so he was absolute the sort of young, hungry and with it artist to reflect that too. Take him and maybe the visual designers of the books out of the equation and just have the writing of PS with more standard art, and I think it'd be less remembered, and have had less influence and impact.

So there's always a degree of accident here.

I do wonder if WotC are too corporate to capture any zeitgeist though. That might sound like a cheap burn. It's not intended to be. I work a large, well-run business which is pretty "corporate" in that sense. The sense of not taking risks, of not employing people in significant positions who don't have a good body of work behind them (we have learned to care less about degrees and more about experience at least). That leads to a reliable level of quality, barring a serious failure of leadership.

But would WotC hire a new Tony DiTerlizzi now? Doubt it. Would they let a designer "risk it" on a new setting which was kind of antithetical to D&D, and heavily concerned with philosophy and various out-there takes on stuff? Very much doubt it. People at the time complained that PS wasn't sufficiently playable - I disagree but I see where they're coming from - I suspect a similarly risky-but-potentially-brilliant setting now would likely be shot down pretty early on, in favour of a high-quality, fairly safe setting that's either a reboot/mash-up/update of an old setting(s) (i.e. Planejammer could happen) or an MtG setting.

So all that said how does that reflect on my predictions? I think it will probably still be Faerun or slightly lower chance, Exandria, that's the de facto or actual "default" setting of D&D (if it has one) in 2041. I think the chances of a new setting that's exciting enough to flip that cart coming out of WotC are extremely low, and I say that with love, because they're also not going to put on a half or more dozen other pretty dubious settings over the same period and bankrupt themselves!