The news that John Hight, formerly of Blizzard, has joined WotC as the new company President has reignited the speculation that WizBro is moving into an online, subscription, micro-transaction model for D&D, and the hand wringing and finger pointing has been interesting, to say the least. Evidently, this is something D&D has wanted to do since 4th edition, but the technology wasn’t quite right yet.
I don’t know if the fuss is coming from Gen-X gamers who don’t want to play a game without firs shelling out $150 or more for hardcover books to have on the table, or from Millennial gamers who resent being nickeled and dimed to death online in-game, but either way, I think it’s doomed to failure, and here’s why:
As good as video games are, and continue to become, they will never be able to do in their coding and programming what I do in a split second in my head. Boom. Done.
That’s not to say that computer games are inferior; go play Red Dead Redemption 2 and tell me that you didn’t have a jaw-dropping time. At their best, large “role-playing” video games (I absolutely loathe that the video game industry has co-opted that term) are like a lengthy series of YA novels with subplots, short stories and a wiki fan page all rolled into one package. Video games can deliver a thrilling and sometimes emotional story, so long as it’s a story you personally want to experience.
Compare this to any role-playing game I’ve run in the last 39 years. Back in the day, when we were playing more frequently, my sandbox campaign was predicated on the players telling me what they wanted to do, and it being incumbent on me to provide them with something cool, on the fly, and make it fun. If my group decided, on a lark, to charter passage to the continent on the other side of the ocean, who was I to deny them the chance to travel? Only, now I’m responsible for coming up with a city on a coastline they can dock at, and fast. If they wanted to get off the ship, go into a tavern, eat lunch, then get back on the ship and go home, they can do that. I will, as a matter of course, ensure that the passage home is fraught with peril, and no, Brock, that’s not a punishment, okay? It’s not my fault you rolled a random giant squid for your wandering monster.
That’s the difference in a nutshell, and it’s universal for any rpg setting out there. When you play Skyrim, you are locked into being “the dragon born” (eye roll) and sure, you can go bang out that thieves guild quest, but the second you leave town, some dragon is going to land right next to you because you’ve been ignoring the main story, but the main story isn’t ignoring you.
That experience, that sensation of being able to do virtually anything (with consequences, of course, you can’t just go around in my game and start murdering people. What do you think this is, Grand Theft Auto?) is what initially attracted us to role-playing games in the first place. There wasn’t a good computer option; Atari’s Adventure was anything but.
Now WizBro is working diligently on this new online D&D platform, complete with a robust character creator, the ability to build dungeon settings, and the interactive play environment similar to all of the other ones in the market. Build a character, put him on the map, and the DM, who lives in Bakersfield, talks into the mic and reads the flavor text aloud while you stare at a screen.
That may be fun. And it will certainly be novel. But what happens when I want to build a unique dungeon that is outside of the pre-loaded elements in the game itself? Are they going to let the community make the assets that would create a floating city? Or an underwater kingdom? I don’t know, but this is a fact: they only have so much digital storage space, and we only have so much computing power at our disposal. Maybe that’s part of the appeal; after all, the 5e default setting is one of the most generic, uninspired and lackluster environments out there. This isn’t a grimdark complaint; it’s a complaint about how they have aimed for the center of their demographic, hoping to cast the widest possible market share. In this new digital platform, I’ll be able to subtract (by mere omission) from the base assets, but I won’t be able to add anything, will I? Or won’t I? I have no idea.
But I do know that I won’t be able to create things on the fly, nor adjust things on the fly, nor pivot when the group decides to do something else that session. If I’m playing D&D online, I’m the game’s operating software, nothing more. On their app, I’m merely a not-as-cool version of Skyrim.
My prediction is this: the game, when launched, will pull a percentage of people out of tabletop gaming and we’ll never see them again. It’s not the percentage D&D thinks it is, not at first. I think most people my age or thereabouts will give it one chance and then give up, if they do even that. The very young demographic will embrace the technology, and they will love it, until they get bored with looking at the same dungeon walls, the same black dragon, the same orc chieftain miniature in the digital space, and they will drop it and get a proper video game. What they won’t do is dial back to analog gaming. These two playing experiences are going to be the new “edition wars.”
I don’t know how long it will last. My guess is it’ll be mothballed by 2028. Role-playing games, on the other hand, will continue to build on this Second Renaissance that started when WotC blew up their own brand and decimated two decades of goodwill back in 2021. I’m mildly curious to see if the digital app will bring anyone into tabletop gaming. It would be an ideal gateway to other things if the players decide they want more out of their games.