Over the years, I have realised that TTRPG theory doesn't tickle me the way playing, running and writing TTRPGs does, and so I have considered myself a practitioner rather than a theoretician (I fully understand you can be both.) As a consequence, I had until recently not consumed much youtube TTRPG content assuming that me listening to people talking about games was less interesting than me playing games.
Lately though I have watched some really interesting channels, including but not limited to Bob World Builder, Questing Beast and Dungeon Craft. There is actually a lot of interesting content on youtube, and it allowed me to discover new and off the beaten path games or think about gaming aspects that I hadn't necessarily thought about. I'm less interested in rules minutae or GMing advice, but it's easy enough to skip those particular videos.
One thing I've noticed though, and that has prompted me to write this short rant (a polite one, rest assured) is the common use in most of these videos of the name D&D (or Dungeons & Dragons in full) as a generic term for tabletop fantasy roleplaying games. This really rubs me the wrong way, and I thought I'd try to unpack why that is.
The first reason I find that irritating is that D&D is not just a generic fantasy roleplaying experience (although that may well be what non-roleplayers have taken away from watching actual plays.) It's actually a very specific experience — driven by its mechanics — that carries with it a particular feel. The heavy emphasis on combat, the importance of experience, loot, character progression, and much, much more.
While the DNA of D&D in its various iterations may have carried accross to many other TTRPGs, the primary reason someone publishes a new game these days is (it seems to me) to deliver a different experience. So, by encapsulating the entire OSR and NSR movements, and more generally the entirety of fantasy RPG experience under the generic moniker of D&D, I worry that the experience associated with this one game becomes associated with the entire RPG landscape. I think that's wrong.
Furthermore, in the current context where the company that owns the D&D brand seems to be working hard to radically transform that experience into something more digital, more driven by commercial products and less driven by imagination, I really think the salvation of TTRPGs as a whole will be in not identifying with D&D.
I honestly couldn't care less what happens to Hasbro's D&D. I haven't purchased a 5E book past the original tryptich in 2015, and two of these three I have given away (I kept the Monster Manual because my three years old my daughter used to spend hours rifling through it, so it's become a childhood memory for her.) Sometimes I actually think that D&D going out in a blaze of corporate flames could be the best thing that happens to the industry as a whole. Not that I wish that, there's always people actually working on these things (instead of playing the corporate game) whose livelihoods would be affected by something like this.
There is a term for when a brand becomes a generic name for the type of product that brand sells, it's called genericide. It sounds really ominous, and I think we should all do what we can to ensure that D&D remains a specific implementation of the TTRPG experience rather than a generic term for a gaming experience so very different from what you get out of D&D...
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