Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
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Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#2I've never been a part of any of those fandoms, but it was always curious to me how open-source alternatives didn't obliterate things like Warhammer, Magic cards, or things like that.
I guess it being a proprietary IP makes it easier to keep a "standard" version of the game, but there should be some way to agree to a certain rules and avoid paying most of the price.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#3D & D was always money grubbing. Fun games, such as Toon, Paranoia and Call of Cthulu come as a single book that has everything you need to run the game including a sample campaign.
With D & D you need a whole bookshelf. It has been somewhat reformed but those polyhedral dice are not as fun as they look because people are always looking for the 5th d4 that rolled under the rug.
D & D is the one game I absolutely won’t run because people get attached to the characters and will argue with you. In Paranoia I will play without a campaign and kill them 4 or 5 times before they ever get to the briefing room and they will come back for more.
Gygax liked the improvisational acting aspect of the game but the rules were so Byzantine that all that got lost. The next generation games boasted simplified rules and directional bias built into the structure of the game that forces people out of the ‘accumulate stuff’ mindset they spend the rest of the week in.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#4> While it eventually became just another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro, the OGL pointed out a direction that could have freed the entire TTRPG hobby from capital’s clutches.
So it obviously didn’t point out a very good direction, hence hasbro’s commercial exploitation of it…
Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#5Please. Art is as dead as it wants to be.
There will always be a spectrum in the market.
A D&D will always taget the gourmand, no the gourmet.
The gourmets require education.
Be the educator, not the curmudgeon.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#6The thesis in the title makes no sense. There really isn't anything so special about the D&D systems that mean one person working from home couldn't come up with an artistic competitor. You don't need to spend any money on TSR books to run a campaign if there is an imaginative DM handy.
The only reason D&D is so big is that the profit lets it advertise and have a presence, so more people know about it. That is a benifit to the genre and encourages creativity.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#7D & D was always money grubbing. Fun games, such as Toon , Paranoia and Call of Cthulu come as a single book that has everything you need to run the game including a sample campaign. With D & D you need a whole bookshelf. It has been somewhat reformed but those polyhedral dice are not as fun as they look because people are always looking for the 5th d4 that rolled under the rug. D & D is the one game I absolutely won…
That seems like just a difference in campaign styles. Paranoia is designed for that sort of play, isn't it?
My RPG group that has played for 15+ years has only played D&D a couple times, and only in the past 5 years, but the style in terms of attachment to long-lived and growing characters isn't any different from our previous campaigns (Shadowrun, Starfinder, homebrew Fallout, probably some others I'm forgetting).
Just an odd criticism to hang on D&D specifically.
Half-agreed with the bookshelf argument, though you can certainly get by with just the open SRD rules - most of the book content is just adding more and more options you can pilfer without having to homebrew it all.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#8I've never been a part of any of those fandoms, but it was always curious to me how open-source alternatives didn't obliterate things like Warhammer, Magic cards, or things like that. I guess it being a proprietary IP makes it easier to keep a "standard" version of the game, but there should be some way to agree to a certain rules and avoid paying most of the price.
I guess a large reason why is because, especially with miniatures, it doesn't require any equipment to actually make the thing. Bear in mind 3d printers (or at least the ones the average person can buy) are still quite new, they were unheard of when I was into warhammer as a kid. If you wanted a miniature, you had to buy it from the people that made it. Even now, its easier, if more expensive long term, to go to a shop and just buy the things than to print one out.
As for magic cards, I remember as a kid printing off yu-gi-oh cards, but they never ended up being very good, even with access to a laminater (we had to go to the library to do that). It was a short lived idea sadly
Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#9Please. Art is as dead as it wants to be. There will always be a spectrum in the market. A D&D will always taget the gourmand, no the gourmet. The gourmets require education. Be the educator, not the curmudgeon.
> Be the educator, not the curmudgeon.
That's no way to sell subscriptions.
Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art
#10Okay, so while Westerners were playing D&D, socialists on the other side of the iron curtain were playing Zarnitsa and Orlyonok, where you attack your opponents, capture spies and interrogate them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarnitsa_game
I mean, horses for courses, but you could argue that there would be no D&D were it not for capitalism in the first place.