Avoiding the Slop: My 2025 TTRPG Resolutions, To Be Continued

Let's start this blog off strong, shall we?

For the first time in my life, I did some research on fair use copyright law. It's something I should probably be well-briefed on, considering I'm a person (pay no attention to the man behind the Asiatic wild dog curtain) who makes content and sometimes even posts it online. But I wasn't looking it up because I have some new intellectual property that I wanted to share with you all, I looked it up because I wanted to start this post, and this blog, with complaining and critique.

I accidentally chose a poignant time to get back into running, playing and writing content for TTRPGs, because recently they've gone so far as to be included in the United States 24-hour-news cycle in the form of NYT's D&D Rule Changes Involving Race and Identity Divide Players - The New York Times, what seems to be the end result of a long-protracted shouting match starting with the release of D&D's Player's Handbook 2024 (rules update? 5E 2024? 5.5E? who knows what to call it) and The Making of the Original Dungeons & Dragons... and then culminating in the cesspool of X / Twitter when Elon Musk chimed in with some choice words against Wizards of the Coast. 

Of course, opinions are like assholes, and I'd like to share my own on the whole debacle, fervently whistling from my corner of the internet to the masses (what, like, five of my friends?) in a concise enough manner, and then answer the question: where do we move forward from here?

Let's start with, mechanically, what got everyone all up in arms in the first place: the changes D&D writers made in their 2024 rules update to 5th Edition, and their language surrounding the makers and content of early editions of Dungeons & Dragons. It was a double whammy; Firstly, the 2024 rules update intentionally removed (and called notice to the removal of) ability score bonuses or penalties to certain ability scores based on a character's "race," changed the terminology of "race" to "species," and removed any conjunctions between a species and an ontological alignment. The tired example is that Orcs are no longer inherently inclined to "evil," brutish, or belligerent behavior-- something they were for the most part assumed to be in earlier editions. As the above NYT article states, these changes were specifically made with removing tired tropes and opening D&D to a larger, more socially conscious audience, an audience also full of people who may have been historically disenfranchised by the sort of real life societal tropes that some claim (and I agree) form the background of the tropes of ontologically evil species and peoples in fantasy as a whole. 

The second hammer to fall was the popularization of passages in the introduction of The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, which called to notice the historical issues of concepts and language in the earliest editions of D&D (concepts and language that I would argue probably remained in some form at least until AD&D 2nd), including exclusion or mocking of non-white-middle-class-males.

So, according to certain loud voices on different spaces on the internet, WoTC, and D&D, as with all other aspects of society, "went woke." Insert comedic fart noise to make fun of the fools who espouse this stuff, Musk included.

When Musk posts, the world listens (which is exactly what he wants, but it's not the time to complain about brand manipulation through shock value); we now have our NYT article, published in the aftermath of this issue, on the second-to-last-day of the year. On a second reading, it's actually a pretty good article. But as the 495-comments-and-growing show, it has already (and will likely continue to) light a fire under the collective ass of D&D and larger TTRPG community fans who want to complain about Wizard's "Woke D&D," which may or may not light the fire under the ass of people who want to complain about those complainers. My ass, it seems, is currently ablaze.

But I don't want it to be. Maybe it's the spirt of the end of the year and the renewal of 2025, maybe it's just being plain tired of it, or maybe it's wanting to pretend like I don't care about this sort of slop, but I do really want to move on. Surely, there must be greener pastures somewhere out there then having to post a reactionary paragraph in discord So, I ask myself: where do we move forward from here? 

Well, I can't tell anyone else where to move forward from here. But I can certainly try to write out what I'm going to do for myself. Call it my 2025 TTRPG resolutions, because that's catchy, and now it's the title of this post. And all you have to do, my loyal reader, is let me know what you think down in that comments section below (Ho ho, I really am a content creator now!)  What are your 2025 TTRPG resolutions? Are mine full of shit? Let me know. 

Dhole's 2025 TTRPG Resolutions

 1. Don't click on the bait-- clickbait, as it were. In the landscape of YouTube, my top social media platform, some larger content creators in the TTRPG sphere report on this sort of stuff because it's poignant, it's topical, it has value, and most importantly, it gets views from chronically online reactionaries like me. So, my first resolution: let's stay away from that. I'm going to try to stick to content creators who are smart enough to stay away from those sorts of topics, which also seem to be the smaller creators, so "YIPEE!" for supporting smaller content creators. 

2. Don't use "Dungeons & Dragons" as a universal term. Dungeons & Dragons, especially in the YouTube space, seems to me to have become the universal term for the larger world of fantasy TTRPGs, whether they're talking Shadowdark, Old School Essentials, or anything that isn't Pathfinder (Pathfinder is Pathfinder). This kinda ticks me off, because in a community where the modern trend is to disparage THE GAME WITH THE TITLE DUNGEONS & DRAGONS PRODUCED BY WIZARDS OF THE COAST, (especially 5th edition), and recommend TTRPGs which bring something newer, or more fresh, or more accessible, to the modern landscape, some folks continue to use the moniker D&D for all Fantasy TTRPGs. I hypothesize they do this because it gets the clicks, which is all fine and dandy, but I really want to find a way to introduce different Fantasy TTRPGs to new players without calling it "Dungeons & Dragons," or saying it's "like Dungeons & Dragons." My first inclination-- how does "tabletop fantasy adventure game" sound? I bet you all can come up with something better.

3. Separate the art from the megacorporation, when it comes to 5E 2014 / 2024 Dungeons and Dragons. Woe is me, because some days, it feels hard to be what my friend magnificienttophat calls a "D&D Enjoyer," crucially separated from a "D&D fan." Indeed, despite the fact that I, too, want to play other games sometimes, I actually really do enjoy modern Dungeons & Dragons, and not just because I've never played anything else! It's difficult to be an enjoyer when you know that Wizards, as well as its parent Hasbro, are working their asses off to make D&D into a product with the most appeal to the greatest number of buyers possible, and not for what I'd consider the right reasons-- not even to mention their series of corporate power abuses, whether it be laying off 1,000 workers before the holiday season, or the OGL debacle, or the Pinkerton incident. But I believe despite this, the writers of 2025 D&D have done a good job making a system that's understandable (to the initiated) AND brings what I'm looking for to the table in terms of fun. As such, I won't stop myself from playing the game, beyond trying to limit my support of the megacorporation that surrounds the current WoTC D&D team. 

3.5 (heh heh) Don't be afraid to try to introduce people to 5E 2024. To add to my above statement-- I do want to play D&D 2024, because I think the rules update is, in my opinion, a strict upgrade from 2014, even with the limitations that come with the lack of expansions. So, despite the controversy of Wizards and 5E 2024, I won't balk at trying to introduce it to others who are willing to give it a shot. 

4. Get into homebrewing rules-- even in more complicated systems. I've never been a huge homebrew guy when it comes to rules and mechanics in TTRPGs. I like making characters, monster stat blocks, scenarios, settings, stories-- but new mechanics? You're telling me I have to make them and then introduce MORE rules to my players that are already having trouble with the monotony of the core rules? Yes, you say, this is a D&D 5th edition problem. But I think I want to challenge myself to bend the rules a little more, and suit them better to my liking-- it starts with accepting that 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons is not a game for new players-- if I'm going to introduce someone to D&D 2024 from now on, I'm already going to be placing a fair level of rules complexity on them-- I already had been, I'd just been kidding myself about it. Why not add something a little different on there, if done with careful consideration?

5. Experiment with lethality in fantasy TTRPGs. I'm new to the dungeon crawl sort of lethality implicit in lots of OSR games, which I've played a fair amount of recently. I want to experiment with that, both mechanically and philosophically-- how can death in a dungeon crawl remain impactful, while also not feeling cheap and overly common? Something to think about (and post about) in the future. 

6. Think about trying Pathfinder. Yes, this is an open invitation for someone to run it for me-- because I don't want to buy more books (and you will soon learn, dear blog reader, that I fucking hate PDFs). 

7. Focus on setting cohesion. Fortunately for you, blog reader, not all the content I plan to post on this blog or write in full is focused on RPG philosophy. I want to continue to expand on the fantasy TTRPG setting I've been workshopping in my head since my highschooler days-- the Fading Kingdom, as I'm calling it now, which is just beginning to come to a sort of fruition. I want to continue to write for that setting, and I want to really focus on creating a setting that is not a kitchen sink of so many elements, because if it was, I might as well just write all my content for the Forgotten Realms. So, I'm going to work on that this year, and hopefully you'll get to join me for the journey. 

Gee, I sure hope I can edit this post later, because I am tired of writing and ready to post, but I am sure I will add more resolutions to this list in time. Until then, kudos folks! 

- Dhole