Let me level with ya
Tul, the fearsome barbarian, pursues the duke down one of the castle’s corridors. Elsie, his gnomish wizard companion trails behind, holding her velvet hat in place with one hand and a crumpled scrollbook with the other. Slam! The duke locks the door behind him, and his footsteps disappear up the tower. Roaring, Tul crashes his shoulder into the door, but he rolled a 2, so the door doesn’t budge. When Elsie catches up, she rolls a 20, and the door bursts open. The duke can’t have gotten far!
This is an especially unflattering example of a kind of thing that can happen in D&D.1 The character who should be able to do the thing, can’t, and the character who shouldn’t, can. Ideally you come up with a narratively satisfying reason for this (Elsie actually noticed the door’s hinges were exposed, and unscrewed them) but in the moment, Tul fails at the thing he’s meant to be good at.
The duo sprint to the top of the tower, but it’s empty save for a clouded mirror with runes etched around its frame. Elsie scrutinizes them. She rolls a 7 and so recognizes that they’re written in an infernal script, but doesn’t know what it says. Tul gives it a go, and rolls an 18. He reckons it’s a portal device which the duke has used to escape from their clutches again.
How’d you figure that out, Tul? Oh, you saw an artifact like this when you were young? Okay, sure.
It’s not implausible, but it sucks for Elsie. She has this whole backstory about how she studied for years at the Gnomish Academy, but because she’s only level 3, the rules say that she’ll only succeed at trying to investigate things 11/20ths of the time.
It's in this way that D&D is a highly structured fantasy roleplaying game. It gives its players rules to follow and a way to establish the probabilities of risky outcomes that make the story suspenseful.
These rules are simulationist. The Player’s Handbook tells you how things work in the same way that the laws of physics and biology do: here’s how fast you can run; here’s how far a fireball can fly; here’s the number you need to roll higher than on a twenty-sided die to hit a far away target. If you don’t run to be within range of the goblin, you can’t hit them with your fireball, which means they’ll be able to get away. Just like real life.
In this magical physics sandbox, memorable & amazing adventures happen, purely through the power of your collective imaginations. It truly is amazing, and good D&D rules.
But bad D&D can happen. Everyone has different views on what it constitutes, but mine are converging on the idea that a lot of it is baked into the fundamental design of the game.
Level 1
The first tabletop roleplaying game I ever played was Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. I was fourteen, playing over the internet with some guys from Texas that I knew through video games.
Like all of our influences, Fourth Edition itself was very video gamey, but I fell in love with the agentic freedom it granted. Yes, we were spending most of the time fighting monsters and using our special abilities that did area-of-effect damage in tactically optimal ways, but I loved that I could interact with my fellow players in-character, and choose to pursue any way forward that I wanted. It was a dramatically blindered version of the game, but still kaleidoscopic compared to the 2-colour palette of any video game RPG I’d played till then.
Level 2
Skip forward some years. That campaign had ended, a new version of D&D had come out, and new genre of Entertainment Product had risen: Actual Play podcasts. These shows - Critical Role, Harmonquest, Dimension 20 - brought Los Angeles creative talent to my nerdy hobby, and completely revolutionized what I understood the game to be. D&D wasn’t just a way to play fractal Skyrim, but an actually-good vehicle for improvised comedy and story-telling.
They did accents and voices. Their characters made choices that were self-sabotaging. Their instincts were informed by screenwriting, and they paced the game by cutting between scenes like a TV show script.2
I began to realize that there was more to the game than the video game-mechanical success of finishing the quest and acquiring the loot. There was also a narrative success in discovering your character; having fun in the downtime scenes; Really Caring about your peers and the NPCs.
The extent to which that had been happening to me before was incidental. A neat side effect of playing the real game. I’ve since realized it’s actuallly the principle reason I want to play, and the trouble is that a lot of D&D’s design pulls in the opposite direction.
As it’s commonly played, D&D requires the Dungeon Master to prepare a lot in advance. You want to have a lot of things ready for all the contingencies of your players’ actions. If you have a village, who’s in it? Your players should be free to talk to any of them, so what are they like? What are their motives? If you have roads leading out of your village, where do they go? If there’s danger, how can it be construed to the form of an exciting combat encounter that the players have fair odds of surviving?
For people who aren’t good at improvising, figuring out all of this in advance feels like a good way to make sure you won’t get flustered in the moment, or fail to come up with anything interesting for your players to do. For years, I actually really enjoyed doing this. Every week, I’d spend a couple of hours worldbuilding, or designing dungeons, or creating puzzles. It was a great creative outlet.
But I think it also had a pacifying effect on the players, especially the new ones. The complexity of the D&D’s rules already put them in a position of recipiency, and from there, it wasn’t a large leap to infer that the story of this game was also to be recieved, to be experienced.
This can work okay if they’re liking that experience, but when I started my last group that didn’t jibe with my ideas as much, it started to feel wasteful and unsatisfying. They didn’t like my locations or NPCs. They didn’t bite the plot hooks I set. I don’t think they felt like the game’s calls to action spoke to their characters. The group lost its momentum and I lost my spark.
Now, this was first and foremost a communication problem. If we’d have some so-called Session Zeroes to talk about what kind of game we wanted to play, before any dice were rolled, a lot of this disappointment could have been avoided. If only I’d spent half as much time working with the players to develop their characters and prepare things that directly tied into their motives as I did thinking about the political factions of my made-up city state!
Alas.
D&D doesn’t have to be this way, but its design and luminaries encourage it, and I think that’s why I made that mistake. As popularly performed, the Dungeon Master is the god-referee of the game. They know everything that isn’t the character’s thoughts, and they reveal it to the players with authoritative power. The reason those Actual Play shows were so compelling was because of all the work their DMs did. They had so many ideas. Their characters were so thought-through. The world felt so alive.
I still think that’s true (Brennan Lee-Mulligan, you’re a genius), but not the whole truth. The reason those Actual Play shows were so compelling was because everyone was actually compelled to enthusiastically engage with the game, and in the case of Dimension 20, this happened because of a lot of good, effective, and cooperative preparation.
So imagine my surprise when I started listening to a non-D&D Actual Play podcast that was just as compelling without any of that.
[DUNGEON WORLD ENTERS]
Where D&D uses dice to determine whether or not characters succeed in their attempts to do things, Dungeon World (and all games of its pedigree, based on a system called Powered by the Apocalypse,) use dice to determine what the narrative outcome of an action should be. It’s not “here’s the number you need to do this thing.” It’s “here’s the number you need to do this thing without anything else happening”. If you roll low, you can still succeed at whatever you were trying to do, but some complicating stuff will happen too.
Let’s imagine the scene from the beginning with this new system:
Tul, the fearsome barbarian, pursues the duke down one of the castle’s corridors. Elsie, his gnomish wizard companion trails behind, holding her velvet hat in place with one hand and a crumpled scrollbook with the other. Slam! The duke locks the door behind him, and his footsteps disappear up the tower. Roaring, Tul crashes his shoulder into the door, rolling a 2, bursting through the door in an explosion of oak splinters. With a horrible crash, the stone frame collapses behind him, separating him from Elsie and alerting the whole castle’s guard to their location
Tul gets to be the big tough barbarian, and yet they’ve still got problems!
“Go on without me!” Elsie yells. She turns to face the advancing captain of the guard, a ball of violet magic forming in her hand. Tul races up the tower, but all he finds is a mirror, clouded as if by a sulfuric smoke. “Go away!” Elsie incants in the language of old magic, releasing the lightning from her hands. She rolls a 4. The blast flies towards the guard, slows, reverses, and rushes back into Elsie. A brilliant flash surges up the tower and she feels her presence get transported. Tul opens his eyes. He sees Elsie in the mirror, but she’s not in the room. Her reflection mouths something: “Get me out of here!”
Isn’t that cooler? Yeah, I took more creative liberties with how magic works in these second examples, but that’s because I can! There’s no rigid 100-page chapter that spells out the mechanics of magic in Dungeon World. Magic works in service of the fiction, in the way you want it to, and the way I wanted it to work is that it can sometimes activiate powerful magical artifacts if used in their presence.
The way Powered by the Apocalypse games center “narrative advancement” as the unitary output of players’ actions means that the rules of the game are more abstract, and (as written) a lot simpler3. There’s more hand-waving, trusting the whole group to use their own judgement to decide whether or not the goblin’s in range for fireballing. This blurs the dichotomy of authority:non-authority prevalent in D&D and empowers new players to collaborate in adjudication from the beginning. Moreover, the game explicitly encourages all players to add details to the lore of the world that they want. The DM isn’t the sole expert of the universe from whom its details are revealed. They’re just the person who plays the NPCs and adds fuel when the fire begins to dwindle, the fire that doesn’t even need to be roaring from the get go, because the players all build it up together.
I really like this system. I really want to play it (specifically a more recent game called Chasing Adventure which further refines the rules).
Will it go well? I hope so! But I can also imagine some ways it might not. Improvising is a skill, and I don’t have much practice at it. If all my players are similar, maybe we’ll have some really tepid scenes where not much happens. They might also not like the untethered floatiness of it. One of my friends likes the crunchy combat and meta-layer of D&D where the players are trying to beat the DM through technically legal tactics that test the limits of D&D’s rules. Many players enjoy min-maxing the rules and finding ways to be powerful, regardless of the narrative implications or consequences.
On the other side, in the Spout Lore podcast, sometimes a character will ad lib a world detail that I don’t like. It might be kinda boorish, or in contradiction with some previously established lore. Presumably this happens even more often than the podcast implies, because they can edit out the parts they regret in hindsight. Nevertheless, I think this tension is a necessary part of the success of the game. The democratic ownership of the story means that concessions will be made, in service of a story that everyone cares about and feels a part of.
I’m looking forward to running a one-shot with Chasing Adventure, and will possibly report back in the future.
I’m not trying to make a persuasion check with this essay, despite its framing of my development as some sort of ascension towards truth. Narrative RPG systems are the devil I don’t know, and all the things I’ve kvetched are intrinsic to D&D are a) part of the fun for many players, and b) completely solvable with homebrew rules.
But I, personally, just want to fight mental and physical (and slime) demons, not a rules system or stock price4
So uhhh, yeah. It's... time to... roll the dice.