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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 7729648" data-attributes="member: 6777454">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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> 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.</blockquote>

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