Listen: I am a fan of popular thing.
I know, crazy. Any time you hear somebody talk about a popular thing, it’s because they’re saying how it’s “not that good” or “overrated” or “can we talk about how the popular thing is bad, actually?” To which the answer is usually, yes, just acknowledge that it’s not necessarily bad, you just probably don’t like it.
Which brings me to my main point: I don’t really like Dungeons and Dragons, at least not in the current fifth edition or 5e form. I don’t think it’s some sort of calamity that killed my grandma or something, I just think it has fundamental issues as a storytelling and roleplaying game.
I’m going to choose to start out with the positives, because there are a lot. For example: the combat. Wow. DnD, with no homebrewing, and without even any of the auxiliary content, focusing just on the player’s handbook, allows for extremely deep combat encounters, intricate layers of character customization, and just so many different options for how to approach fighting. It reminds me of one of my favorite video games, Metal Gear Solid 5, except instead of needing to code the game to say “That way to approach combat sounds cool, sure, it works,” the players and dungeon masters can use this immense toolbox of mechanics to craft such an entertaining experience, my god. I had to change character specs so many times last time I played DnD, because I just kept seeing something else in the mechanics and thought, “wait, that’d be so cool for combat. Just imagine that.” And, honestly, the desire to respec like that is probably one of the most fun feeling a game can give me.
Okay, I know I’m supposed to be levying criticisms and scathing remarks at this game. But. Can I talk about how it also makes for a pretty fun world and set of creatures? I know, it’s just a generic high fantasy world, same as any good snoozefest in a post-Tolkien world. But wow. The settings and creatures and magic systems and everything else laid out in DnD are just so fun to play around with. Especially when thinking about how I can just play as basically anything my heart desires. At my last session 0, a friend far more experienced with DnD talked about wanting their player character to be a tortle monk wielding a quarterstaff. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because he just made Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda. So we basically made a game out of creating preexisting character but in DnD. The character customization system let us get so far in that regard.
But, this is still a DnD hate post (not really), so I have to talk about the system’s biggest flaw: actual roleplaying and storytelling. Good god, trying to make DnD 5e feel compelling is truly miserable sometimes. It’s a system where the best interactions, half the time… are just people standing around and talking. As a DM, you have to struggle and strain against the game itself, because you have to actively search for places where you can just say “okay… let’s roll this stat here.” Because the stats can, quite honestly, just feel like nonsense in terms of trying to relate them to roleplaying. What good are my combat stats as a martial character, if all they’re good for is combat? Martial and spellcasting builds are balanced out in combat by how well they scale throughout the game. Cool! But if I’m interested in roleplaying, and passing all those skill checks like those nerds in that one Futurama episode, why don’t I just play a spellcaster so I can build intelligence, or charisma, or wisdom, instead of having to split them?
Oh wait, that’s right. Because, when the game has that kind of imbalance, it leaves the DM caught between a rock and a very, very, very hard place. How do you keep the rest of the party interested, when half of them got to dump all their stat points into social skills, and the other half is stuck in big stick city? It’s not a problem when the DM and players are good at coming up with situations to keep things interesting, but that shouldn’t be a necessity for the game to be fun. If this whole rant sounds like it comes from personal experience, that’s because it does. These issues were all heavy the first time I played DnD. I thought it was just an inherent part of the experience, until I played with a different, more experienced DM, who managed to make non-combat encounters, like a riddle sphinx guarding a great library, or an entire session where we literally just chilled at a lake, talking with a life goddess and a giant duck, and weaved in organic ways to keep the martial characters involved. It’s not impossible, and not something that makes DnD bad, but I think the game could be designed a bit more around dungeons, and a lot less around dragons
