INHERENT DICE

Why Aren't More People Playing TTRPGs? (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Move On From D&D) - Perspectives From a Beginner

Foreword - Ruminations and Recollections of a Personal History

I can never remember when I first got interested in the concept of a tabletop roleplaying game, but it probably had to do with reading this Foxtrot comic strip somewhere between 2012 and 2014--so probably when I would have been around nine years old, give or take a year or two. Alas, the tides and time of young me's life did not permit for much of a social life or friends to pull me into mainlining D&D as a child--but man, did that comic strip spark my interest! A fantasy setting where you could play as whatever you wanted with your friends? A game mixing math (randomness) and imagination, two of my favorite things?? Over 31 volumes of content??? Sacrebleu! Good heavens! Was I dreaming?

It's interesting that, now, at the ripe old age of twenty and the grand total experience of having three DM'd one-shots, I look back and see a childhood of always being interested in being a DM, rather than a player. As a child, I wrote books and stories set in my own fantasy worlds, I came up with my own stories with family lineages and trees to roleplay in in my quiet inner world, and most of all I was always entranced and possessed by a desire to create not for myself but for other people. As an adult, I can look in retrospect and understand this desire in relation with and connection to my own inherent personality traits.

In Which I Complain For Too Long About Dungeons & Dragons

Since I had my first experience finally playing Dungeons & Dragons roughly three years ago, I've DM'd a few D&D one-shots for different groups, hopped in (and out) of a (tragically inconsistently-meeting) Curse of Strahd campaign over the course of two years, played a campaign in a non-D&D setting (Night's Black Agents, run by my friend Dom), and taught myself a few settings of my own, in addition to recently writing my first one-shot for the Mothership RPG system. All in all, that doesn't add up to a lot of hours or a lot of experience for three years of a hobby, but it has put me in a significant amount of situations where I find myself talking about D&D or other roleplaying games, frequently with people I've never met before and never met again, and time and time again I find myself hearing the same statement that I had to reckon with earlier in my life:

I've always really wanted to play D&D, but I just never had anyone to teach me.

Ah--there are many potential nicknames for this problem, but for now I'll call it the Older Sibling Syndrome, or OSS. In addition to a severe lack of friends, I suffered young from not having any kind of older mentor or anyone who could even usher me into the world of roleplaying games. This gets at what I see as one of the biggest myths among TTRPG beginners--that you have to be ushered in through the gates of roleplaying by an experienced mentor with keys to the entrance of the exceedingly large and labyrinthian DUNGEONS & DRAGONS BUILDING, rather than simply trutting and waltzing in at your own pace and picking any one of the hundreds of varyingly-sized huts and headquarters located in this city that we call TTRPG gaming.

This gets at a commonly-held opinion within the community that frequently emerges when one starts to venture into the world of TTRPGs outside of D&D--namely, that D&D's role as the primary gatekeeper or and many players' first encounter with tabletop roleplaying is actively bad for the medium. Why is this? How could such a historically important, culturally ubiquitous, and beloved game be actively hostile towards the state of the medium it helped build up? I'm going to list a few reasons--it's worth mentioning that none of these are strict facts, just some of my opinions and most notably my observations on what many beginners I talk to think about D&D. It's worth mentioning that all of the following statements are specifically about the fifth edition of D&D, which is the only edition I have experience with.

  1. It is complex and difficult to pick up as a beginner player. The rules of D&D are vast, contradictory, and most significantly, the game relies on a large number of core system pillars---skill checks, perks, tactical combat, survival mechanics, experience, spellbooks, etc. As a new player, this is really overwhelming! Let's say you want to pick up a core campaign book or one-shot that doesn't start at Level 1, and you want to play some kind of wizard. Well, this means you have to understand, in addition to the core rules of the game, how spell acquisition works, how the wizard class works on a level-by-level progression basis, how many actions you get in combat and what actions you can take during combat, what kind of proficiencies to take that will let you roleplay the way you want without being punished, and so forth. This, in my mind, is not just a ridiculous expectation for someone who has never played a TTRPG before, but is also completely unsustainable for the culture of the medium and gives the impression that other roleplaying systems are equally as complex.
  2. It is complex and difficult to pick up as a DM to teach players. A fundamental obstacle to teaching yourself any roleplaying system is the inevitable situation of having to teach your friends that same system. Two of the three times I ran D&D one-shots, I had audiences of entirely beginners with no familiarity of the system. They were given choices of pre-generated character sheets to cut the fat of character creation, but it was still a herculean effort to explain the minutiae of how saves worked versus skill checks, what kind of actions they could or could not roll for, and what "reasonable" roleplaying is for a new player. Much of my recent excitement for the Mothership system has to do with its simplicity and easibility in teaching new players, and I look forward to learning other systems to DM that are similarly easy to teach.
  3. A lot of D&D's visibility and culture is based on the concept of long-term, years-spanning campaigns. This is not necessarily a bad thing--years-long campaigns can be a blast and a great bonding exercise between a group of friends, but they also, in my experience, lead to burnout, scheduling issues, and slow, disappointing campaign decay. Players can also get frustrated by the snowballing issues of, say, picking a class that they don't vibe with, when their DM won't let them roll a new character or spec into a new class. My favorite tabletop experience as a player to date was a five-month GUMSHOE campaign that consistently met almost every week regardless of player availability and ended just as the story reached its peak point of action and intrigue. Much of my current scenario-writing focuses around one-shots or serial adventures, with the goal of working towards setting up a procedural campaign that consists of a non-linear chain of much smaller adventures. In my experience, players tend to feel more rewarded by and enjoy these types of adventures much more, because they don't feel as pressured to perform over a long period of time. It's also much less stressful to set up a campaign or pitch players on joining you in one when they don't have to commit to a year-plus adventure. I've had great success in simply hitting up some of my friends (beginners and experienced players alike) and saying, "hey, would you like to play a one-shot this or next weekend?"
  4. What we can call "Dark Souls Syndrome"--namely, a "get good" attitude response within the community to any complaints, frustrations, or challenges that new players encounter. As a player of D&D, I've developed a lot of irritation by how heavily-experienced D&D players who lack experience in other systems tend to respond to any criticism of the system. For me, this included complaints as vague and general as "" or even as specific as "I don't enjoy combat having picked [x] class and subclass." This gets at another problem that I think many RPG players tend to misunderstand--that there is no fundamentally wrong way to play a roleplaying game. There are definitely ways to play a roleplaying game that are perhaps actively hostile towards the DM or fellow players (which I'll get to in the next section). However, the type of play that is deemed "right" or "optimal" is ultimately up to the player's individual goals and should be a collaboration with the other players and the DM. Brushing aside meaningful complaints from new players is not just discouraging--it's actively hostile and has the potential to scare them away.
  5. D&D does not teach intelligent, appropriate, or sociable roleplaying. Roleplaying in a group setting is a series of social contracts. For many, the most obvious way this comes forward is through things like house rules or content warnings--that is, responsibilities that are placed on the shoulders of the DM. However, it is also up to players to have awareness of how their actions inside the game affect the players around them. D&D fails to teach players socially appropriate roleplaying, and even moreso, the system itself does not encourage intelligent roleplaying, because decisions and actions are always gatekept by a dice roll. Compare this to a system like Mothership, which has no social rolls and generally allows its players to perform any action they can reasonably do unless the situation is of extraordinary challenge or they are placed under a situation of duress. Players are often punished for trying to think creatively about situations, and the system also doesn't do much to teach DMs how to deal with such situations. This also gets at D&D's marketing as a power fantasy. Certainly, a power fantasy can be a fundamentally interesting hook for any RPG, but I think that promising a fantasy of character and role rather than a fantasy of power and accomplishment is a much healthier marketing hook for an RPG. Many players waltz into D&D with a severe case of Main Character Syndrome (think dangerhobos!) and since the game markets itself significantly on this promise it's difficult to extinguish their desires and rein them in without killing their enthusiasm. This also makes learning new systems challenging because they can often rely on players actually thinking intelligently rather than thinking "well this is a fuck-ass crazy idea but my [x] stat is high enough to make it probably work!"
  6. Lastly, D&D does not give new DMs the resources to succeed. This is a serious problem. Every D&D campaign book I've read and own (with the somewhat, really heavily-asterisked exception of Wild Beyond the Witchlight) is confusing, overly long, and poorly-structured. On top of that, the core resources are split across three books and the Dungeon Master's Guide does not give clear advice on how to actually prep for a session or a campaign. WotC has admittedly done an excellent job on giving players the resources to create their own worlds and stories based on the books they've put out, but little advice on how to modify the system, structure a campaign in a way that allows for player agency, or even prep for the most simple one-shot. I tried for the longest time to set up a D&D campaign using an official corebook and I even had two interested groups, but I always struggled with the fact that reading the books taught me little about how to actually run the games. In comparison, I found the Mothership Warden's Operations Manual an incredibly effective tool at teaching an aspiring DM not just how to run someone else's story but easily set up their own, starting with hooks, narrative journeys and plot archetypes, maps, intriguing puzzle design, and so forth.

Whew. That's a whole lot of negativity, but I feel that the six notes above get pretty at the core problem of why people don't just pick up D&D without prior experience, get together a few friends, and run a campaign.

Now that we've settled that D&D is ultimately a beginner-unfriendly game, what kind of solutions do I have for moving forward?

Solutions and Moving Forward (tl;dr, Play Mothership)

To be honest, I wish I had better answers, but as someone who's still really new to roleplaying and more particularly to DMing, I don't have a lot of clean answers other than "try this system I really like!" (hence, why this article is subtitled "Perspectives From a Beginner"). That being said, I do really heavily recommend picking up a system like Mothership or another rules-light, roleplaying-heavy RPG like an OSR-type system. I found GUMSHOE really approachable to new players and a great way to learn intelligent and personable roleplaying, but I do think that it takes a lot of creativity on behalf of the DM and the whole web-of-clues shenanigans can be overwhelming and disinteresting to players who don't have an affinity for mystery.

A lot of the problems I listed with D&D have to do with the challenges of teaching yourself a system, rather than having someone teach it to you. I'm also not going to suggest social solutions like going to a game store that hosts one-shots, because I'm aware that many people don't have the privilege of having such an option. If I can give any advice for picking a system to use to get into roleplaying and hook some interested friends, I'd give these three pieces of advice:

  1. Pick something rules-light---only a few stats, maybe a few systems, the less dice the better, the less progression mechanics (like experience levels) the better. I can't vouch for all of these, but I've heard good things about Mork Borg if you like dark fantasy, Cairn if you're looking for something rather ascetic, Monster of the Week, Heart, and Mothership.
  2. Pick something that has a lot of one-shots or miniature campaigns easily available to you--the aforementioned Monster of the Week and Mothership have tons of these. I wouldn't suggest jumping into the deep end with making your own story from the get go, especially if you've never DM'd or even played before. Playing other people's adventures tells you a lot about what you like to see in your own games, and it also gives you a lot of guidance on what makes good vs bad prep work for an adventure.
  3. Lastly, I'd avoid any system that excessively uses skill checks to perform tasks or do social roleplaying. New players will feel discouraged when their character doesn't perform in a certain way that seems logical to them because of the outcome of a dice roll. Again, I'll rep Mothership one last time--the very-excellent Warden Educational System (WES) that Tuesday Knight Games provides does a great job of specifying when and why skill checks and saves should be made. The less restrictions you make on a player's social agency in a game, the better their roleplaying skills will be built for in the future.

I very purposefully put "Perspectives From a Beginner" in the article title in hopes that I'm able to come back to this article in a few years and follow up with more experience and tangible knowledge of how to help new players get into roleplaying. That being said, for now, I hope to explore more new systems and work more with new players to get them interested. Toodle-oo!