[This isn't really an article about Dungeons & Dragons, though that game is its surface subject. I'm pleased with this, but too unsettled to be proud, yet. Which is to say I'm satisfied and not fulfilled, which brings us - neatly enough, I hope/think - to the actual subject of this article.]
The biggest barrier to entry into fantasy gaming, fiction, film, and fandom, is...'fantasy' as currently understood by publishers, readers, gamers, and filmgoers, i.e. 'Tolkien repackaged.' It's strange to think that a grand genre of storytelling is 'incorrectly' labeled - what's a genre label if not a collectively agreed-upon circumscription, an emergent set of shared cultural markers? - but in this particular case, at this moment and within our commercial matrix, 'fantasy' isn't what fantasy is.
What is Dungeons & Dragons about? It's not about monsters, demons, barbarians, dungeons, magic, adventures - it's definitely not about dragons. Indeed the 'fantasy' element of D&D is only incidentally about commercial fantasy as broadly understood today (a mix of Conan the Barbarian and Lord of the Rings with a wing set aside for Neil Gaiman's goth-Victorian delicacies).
When you say that D&D is a 'fantasy' roleplaying game, you're describing not its generic trappings but the imaginative activity it intends to provoke. D&D is a dicerolling framework for fantasizing and then acting out one's fantasies. It differs from 'live-action roleplaying' (LARPs) only in that it happens around a table, rather than around the neighbourhood. And crucially, it differs from what 'adults' think of as fantasy play or roleplay - dressing up in the bedroom or at the bar to act out naughty fantasies - only in it ends in fighting rather than fucking.
Let me say this again in slightly different terms: the purpose of fantasy roleplay in its 'adult' form - sexual fantasy, acted out - is not essentially sexual. You don't dress up like a schoolgirl or a naughty stable boy because you want to have an orgasm; the vast majority of people can do that anyhow. You dress up, you engage in the fantasy, because you want to explore the content of the fantasy - you want to be this other thing. The erection, the exchange of fluids, is a byproduct (quite literally in the latter case) of the excitement caused by fantasy itself.
We make a distinction between these activities not because we want to set aside special space for nominal adults, not because imaginative activities of this sort are 'childish,' but rather because this imaginative play isn't inherently tied to age or maturity at all, except to the extent that we think of 'maturity' - getting a job, buying a house, settling down - as the socially-productive foreclosure of imaginative possibility. Within this framework it's easy to imagine, for instance, why there was a 'Satanism' scare surrounding D&D in the 80's: not because D&D books have monstrous demons on their covers, but because the image of Satan and related images are about forbidden knowledge as such, content-agnostic and made sacred by its very forbiddenness. And from that idea of 'forbidden knowledge' it's easy to get to a new, consistent attitude toward pornography: let it be, and teach our kids that representation of sex and sexuality is part of an imaginative continuum rather than a reproductive one. Permit the knowledge and then assign it a value within a new moral framework. Make more world to wrap it in - which is to say, a rich moral code is glad to accept and incorporate new, unexpected forms of behaviour. As is a rich game system.
There are games (and lives) in which whatever isn't expressly permitted is forbidden; there are games in which whatever isn't expressly forbidden is permitted. The two types of games place implicit (or even explicit!) moral weight on game actions, and are related to two opposed moral codes. Poker is of the first sort of game, and there are probably more unhappy poker players than happy ones. (All happy bank accounts are the same; all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own ways.) Dungeons & Dragons is of the latter sort - it's a framework for story development, cravenly marketed even now as a combat game with storytelling elements. D&D labours under a lot of deadweight. The worst of it is the need to be a 'fantasy' game - when everyone knows, before the ritual day of their forgetting, that fantasy has no shape and no genre, that its power comes from its shapelessness, its individuality, the rough and dangerous work of sharing it.
Let's come back to a small concern then, in the middle of these big ones: Why is Dungeons & Dragons marketed as a combat game?
D&D started at a level of abstraction at which dicerolling combat results were reasonable - tabletop miniatures wargaming, in which a single figure might represent twenty real-life soldiers - and moved to a 1-to-1 model, binding D&D to a particular mode of abstraction and simulation. As the game evolved and storytelling became more important - as complex plots requiring 'social' dicerolls (diplomacy, bluffing, 'knowledge checks,' etc.) became standard roleplaying fare - the game's combat mechanics were extended to the gameworld/storyworld at large.
This was fine as far as it went. but in the middle of D&D's evolution something big happened to the generation of gamers who would have grown up on complex tabletop simulations - something big known as video games - and suddenly a new mode of abstraction achieved imaginative ascendancy among the target D&D/wargaming demographic, as did new modes of storytelling. I suspect that the open-endedness of great homebrew roleplaying campaigns is opposed by video games' evolutionary tendency toward the cinematic - as well as by the advent of home videos, which make it possible to dwell continuously in the mere circumstances of a story rather than its implications (which, if it costs money and time to get to a movie theatre to watch a first-run flick, are all you're left with when the movie's done). Indeed, D&D has always been a self-consciously literary game, even if the literary forebears are largely abject rubbish, and the function of literature is itself changing in the video game era.
So why is D&D marketed - cynically, I say - as a combat game? Because tactical combat is something that most kids know nothing about; it presents well onscreen; it tends to be morally cut-and-dried (not politically, but in its staging) with a clear win condition (you're still standing or the other guy is); because young children, who'll be far less measured in their financial expenditures than adults given the opportunity, can relate to the urge to fight more than the urge to, say, research spells. And let's face it - it's a hell of a lot easier to create a thing-to-kill than a thing-to-live-with, especially for a little boy (do most boys have imaginary friends, or imaginary oppressors? I had the latter). Atop which, because combat is of all simulated activities the furthest from players' daily experiences, it's the activity they're least like to be able to recreate realistically in other forms (whereas one could roleplay a debate by actually debating - which would make adjudication harder, etc.). It needs dice to make any sense.
But most importantly, D&D is marketed as a combat game because that's what its rules were initially created to cover, and they're not that good at simulating anything else.
Combat in Dungeons & Dragons is like sex in pornography - it's not the point of the exercise, which is the fantasy of power/control/submission/exploration/etc. that surrounds the combat/sex. But the central representation has become, over time, the (largely commercial) meaning of the activity. You look at sexy things to get excited, and you satisfy that excitement. You play D&D to imagine other lives and circumstances - to bring your circumstances and your aspirations/imaginings into proportion - and you stage a fight because the monsters are heroes in a story at odds in yours.
Or you can come to these forms of representation - porn, an RPG - because you wish to achieve the effects they promise. And the people who sell these things to you have a much easier time imagining that kind of desire, that interaction, than the more complex fantasy-investment originally offered by the form (and its narrative antecedents: novels of the fantastic, erotica). The bosses want to sell you the effect, so you learn to shop for the effect instead of the ongoing, fluid experience.
Hence a generation of guys who don't care if you have an orgasm as long as they get theirs.
Hence a generation of gamers who assume they need to min/max their characters in order to enjoy themselves in play.
The bosses do not care about faith in means, they care about ends. They sell ends.
The most diabolical slogan in American history is 'Satisfaction Is Job #1.'
Related anticlimactic topic: 'power creep.' By the time D&D 3rd edition was retired, it had expanded to include hundreds of sourcebooks, adventures, and supplements, from D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast and various third-party publishers. I learned only recently that expansions like The Quintessential Drow and The Complete Fighter and the Power Gamer's 3.5 Wizard Strategy Guide are known among D&D fans as splatbooks - 'splat' being the sound a basic character makes when hit by a souped-up creature, ha ha. [Update: No! The truth about 'splatbook' is much geekier, charmingly so. Thanks to Mark Argent for the call.] Typically, Dungeon Masters don't allow new features and mechanics into their games unless they're (1) homebrew or (2) from a book that one of the players owns, which is an interesting economic model - same thing with costly, high-powered Magic: The Gathering cards, unsurprisingly (WotC publishes both M:TG and D&D).
The problem with these expansion books is their inflationary effect - while good designers aim to balance their work with existing resources, there's an overarching feeling that 'more is better' - that after the core classes (fighter, rogue, cleric, etc.), the only thing a player will be interested in playing is an even more powerful class (Dragonrider Mage! Master of Time and Space! Raging Spellcaster Paladin Thief Potionmaker Demigod!!!!), balance be damned.
Call it the Anime Inflationary Effect if you'd like.
When this effect sets in, the first thing to go is imaginative daring. Splatbooks put a premium not on wild creativity, not on the embrace of human possibility past known limits, but on the mechanical advantage such creativity might offer.
Splatbooks regulate and monetize exploration; they place value on expansion rather than consideration. Maintaining speed rather than depth.
The 'civilization' that gave us The Quintessential Barbarian and Sword and Fist: A Guidebook to Fighters and Monks also gave us Brooke Ashley in The World's Biggest Anal Gangbang. At heart, the impulse behind each is more or less the same: more is better. Bigger is better. Balance is for Frenchmen. The problem is power creep, and it is the American Dream.
