D&D as an oral tradition (D&D Accelerated #2) (Patreon)

I recently saw a short thread that started with this post:

https://twitter.com/aaronmfking/status/1113814434928050176

"D&D is a Midwestern folk art that accreted around a creative commons, its original curators were cheated of money or never legally acknowledged, and someday I'll be sued out of existence for printing the words "umber hulk," "carrion crawler," and "mind flayer."" by @aaronmfking

I have not done exhaustive research to validate the length of these claims, but it feeds into a bigger point, so I'm going to accept the premise for the sake of this post.

This makes the "creators" of D&D into a sort of tabletop Grimm Brothers - collecting and concretizing an oral tradition into a written form. And in doing so, they created a division between the "official" version and everything else - which would become defined by their relationship to this "official" version. 

TTRPGS were an oral tradition before the canonization into the first D&D books (this take on the argument I find even stronger, given the history of the role-playing elements in Chainmail and its contemporaries). D*D was largely spread through oral transmission (a new player learns to play from people that have already played, learns to GM by watching other GMs). Since the advent of actual play as an entertainment form for outside viewers (via podcasts, live-streams, etc.) we probably have a lot more people who learn D&D not from friends or acquaintances but from performers that the viewer knows only through that text - they have a parasocial rather than interpersonal or local subcultural connection to.

And even so, D&D in practice tends to vary so wildly and broadly from RAW. I think this is more and less the case with other ttrpgs (depending on the game and the people that play it) but for now I am mostly talking about D&D.

Here's my central argument (and it may be one you've already seen. But it's one I'm working through as part of my process in deciding what I'd want from D&D Accelerated):

Much like Disney/Marvel benefits massively from their IP's fans doing a massive amount of work to fill in the gaps in the storytelling of Star Wars and Marvel, etc., Hasbro benefits massively from the countless hours of work done by non-Hasbro staff on the project of D&D as an oral tradition and a subculture. Folk D&D exists around and in direct dialogue with Official D&D, but due to the way our IP law works, Hasbro wields a great deal of control over and benefits from the mostly unpaid work done by players and DMs in their own games. Folk D&D is made to serve Official D&D and WotC in turn.

And this largesse extends to covering some (IMO large) design failures in the current edition of D&D.


Fix-it-Fic with Dice (Failing Forward, Success at a Cost, and Mixed Results)

Players of D&D have been adapting, adjusting, drifting, and hacking D&D since it was first published. This shares some qualities with Fix-it-Fic in the fanfiction community, where creators address what they see as failings in the canonical text.

Failing Forward (the idea that the fiction, the story of the game, always moves forward even on a failed roll, the idea that failures that change the world state are more interesting than pure whiffs and dead air) is very common in modern tabletop design. The fact that a lot of DMs figure out how to/decide to make rolls fail forward even if it's not written/stressed in the book is a success of the folk practitioners to make up for a failing of the canonical text.

Designers outside Hasbro/WotC revisit and rework the skill challenges rules from 4e into 5e as a work of transformative repair, filling a gap in design put in the game *by the designers* who re-created a hole their predecessors had canonically filled.

The 5E DMG has optional rules for success at a cost. Why are these optional? Success at a cost/mixed results was popularized in indie ttrpg scenes by games like Apocalypse World, which was released years before the 5e DMG was released. Why did the WotC team hedge their bets and have the default version of their rules perpetuate the almost entirely binary result state system of their game? Especially when using a non-die-pool system creates very swingy results vs. the more reliable bell curve results sets seen in die pool systems?

The fact that I've seen success at a cost implemented *very sparingly if at all* in major 5e streams makes me think that WotC did themselves a great disservice in burying this *critical modification to their system* halfway into a book that will be read by a small % of their players (assuming that many players will never want to DM and won't buy or won't read the DMG).

Moving from a binary result state to include some form of success at a cost would be a foundational pillar of any modified version of D&D that I ran. And even more, I'd expand that success at a cost range, since the idea that on a 16 you hit the knight for normal damage but on 17 you hit but are disarmed is a pretty large consequence. You could have a minor consequence band of results (miss by 1-3 points) and larger consequences with bigger misses. Mixed results do exist in many spells, where a spell saves for half damage and reduced effects. I do greatly prefer this to "no effect on a save", because it is just like whiffing on a physical attack. It requires hacking for the fiction to move forward in a meaningful way, and in a tactical game like D&D, "Ah well, I feel useless" is a bad time. Especially if combat moves slowly and you won't get another turn for 30+ minutes.

I've seen some DMs create non-binary result states by turning the system around. They set a base DC for the partial/lesser result and then award greater effects to results 5 or 10 above the DC. But I haven't seen that practice used systemically across many games or systematized for easier use by DMs without every DM needing to re-create it for their game- maybe you have and I'm not seeing it. Again, a folk tradition!


Better Than Nothing?

The DMs Guild system allows folk creators to be paid for their work (though it also profits WotC not just directly per sale but in providing tools the WotC team doesn't have to create) through a form of digital sharecropping (this throws back to my framing of this term w/r/t textual poaching during my fan studies/subcultural studies day). D&D is broken, and the many overlapping and distinct D&D communities continue to do the work of un-breaking it. I'm glad that there are ways for creators, especially those that *were already doing the work* are now able to legally make money from their work. But even with more resources available, individual groups and players then have to do *even more work* in deciding what supplemental DMs Guild material to use. 


Takeaways
I can't fix international IP law and am not in a position to even start trying. So that part I can't change. Instead, I look to the way that communities navigate dominant systems and try to carve out space for themselves. How can I contend with the dominance of D&D and have fun the way I want to? Playing other games or even adjusting in order to enjoy D&D? I can explore DMs Guild projects and support folk creators, letting them do the core design work for me and then just adapt their work into my mental model of D&D. I can play with people that are similarly interested in pushing D&D in directions WotC will not or can not. I can study from the vast wealth of actual play material available, learning from D&D DMs like Aabria Iyengar (Exandria Unlimited), Brian Murphy (Not Another D&D Podcast), B. Dave Walters (Black Dice Society), and others.