I often have discussions with other gamers, many of them close to my age (40), about the exact state of how Dungeons and Dragons is being handled by Hasbro and WotC. While I have a lot of opinions about this, I understand that they are just opinions, and I do not feel that the foundation of the game is really being attacked or threatened by a "woke mob." What I do think, is that there are four major generations of players who are all active in the hobby, and it ranges from people who got into the game at its advent in the 70s and 80s, people like myself who got into the game in the late 80s/early 90s, early 2000s, and more recently. Of course, the game changes mechanically with each edition, and you could argue that there are 10 or so versions of the game around. There is plenty of discussion about mechanical differences in the game, so I do not want to dive into that here, because I personally do not think it is that important. I have long been in favor of house rules, and I believe that while important, rules are sometimes optional.
Much of the criticism I hear from the game, is about the "direction" of the game. You would be living under a rock to have missed some of statements WotC made about certain game topics--particularly race-- over the summer, and there are plenty of Facebook arguments, Twitter meltdowns, and toxic YouTube shit out there to catch you up, so I do not want to really dive too deep into that here either. What I do want to talk about is the idea of Appendix N and it's influence on the game.
If you don't know, Appendix N was a list of fiction that essentially influenced the early game. A good Game Master should milk as many ideas as possible, it is advice I almost always hear on panels at cons, and it is what I do when I think up a session. I do not think that a good GM needs to reinvent the wheel, there is tons of stuff from fiction, movies, history, et al to weave into a session. Of course, everyone does this, because everyone has some kind of expectation they bring to a game, and I would say that very nature of RPGs makes you use your imagination to picture things, which is almost always referenced by something.
Many, many players who have come to the game in the last five years got to the game through Critical Role. This is their Appendix N. I want to be crystal clear that I do not have a problem with CR, I just don't really follow it because it is hard enough for me to find time to play my own games, much less four hours a week set aside to watch someone else's. If anything, I like that now I have access to so many players, that most games have too many Player Characters, and most games have a waiting list (at least in my experience). To say that this isn't because of the popularity of CR would be an outright lie. Ten years ago or so, a lot of people were getting into the game through MMO games, so much so that we ended up with an edition that will almost always be remembered as the biggest flop of the game. In a lot of ways, World of Warcraft was Appendix N for some players, I remember those days.
I just wanted to put this out to the universe, because I don't know if a week has gone by in the last three years that I have talked about the state of the game at least several times with someone. As you can imagine, I hear mostly negative garbage, or wild assumptions, depending on who I am talking to. It is somewhat exhausting. I do not feel like the game is in itself inherently racist because of ideas of monstrous races, and I do hear what people are saying, I just disagree. Mainly, because the early game was modeled on fiction written between the late 19th Century until the 1970s, and you would be a fool to think that offensive ideas would not have found their way into some of that literature. I personally think that committing the Historian's Fallacy is equally as foolish.
Saying all of that, I want to dig into my personal Appendix N. I think being aware of it makes you a better player and GM, and outside of the folks at Goodman Games, Appendix N is seriously overlooked these days.
I don't want to start with obvious influences for me, but a great one is the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George RR Martin. The series is sort of like the Beatles of grim dark, and it also has great descriptions of what is happening through the eyes of characters, often after the fact. Seeing the aftermath of the war as certain characters travel, is something I use often in travel during RPGs, and the early books of the series do it well. Sometimes it even feels like a campaign to me. Also, political intrigue is something hard to pull off in games, and there are thousands of pages of it here. It would be hard to find players who aren't familiar with the show or the series these days, so it is definitely a great place to look.
Mark Lawrence's The Broken Empire series is another fairly recent series that is great for ideas. I do not want spoil any of it here, but if you have read it, there is plenty of grim stuff, and great ideas for gonzo games. Yes gonzo RPG stuff is something I am rather fond of, but that is a post for another day.
I would like to keep this as an on going thing here, hopefully others will contribute in the comments at some point. If you have any ideas about music, fiction, comics, other games, whatever--I want to hear them. Some of these posts have gotten more views that I was anticipating, so don't be shy.
Finally, nothing I said here was official content for Dungeons and Dragons, and as always, none of this is for sale. All typos were unintentional, and consider them gifts from me to you.
