Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

jacobinmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 64 posts

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#11

Post by mgreenly »

Ambolia wrote: post #2

I'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.

It takes a great deal of energy to create good content. It seems most people are willing to spend money to reduce that burden for their own games or at a minimum willing to spend money to create an elevated starting point for their own efforts.

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#12

Post by CJefferson »

Ambolia wrote: post #2

I'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.

One big problem with things like Warhammer and Magic (Magic being a more serious example) is there you really need a "dictator" who decides how "powerful" everything is, and can ban / weaken things which turn out to be broken. That type of thing seems consistently hard to do in open-source.

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#13

Post by acdha »

Ambolia wrote: post #2

I'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.

How many successful open source projects aren't substantially supported by people getting paid to do that work as their job? One of the big challenges for most open source projects is getting enough time to make substantial progress.

I think one of the challenges here is that the rules are meant to support a theme and the open nature means there's a lot of scut work building a viable system, testing, and balancing it. As we've seen with other ares like video games which combine the creativity of story telling with relatively high expectations for completeness, that's a pretty challenging combination to get volunteers to support. Companies which do invest the time and resources are going to have a natural conflict about sharing that with potential competitors since they need to make pay and it seems pretty easy to imagine a lot of the outcomes ending up like Elastic/Amazon disputes.

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#14

Post by dogma1138 »

roenxi wrote: post #6

The 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 beni…

Aren’t some of the game systems like D20 patented/copy written

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#15

Post by itronitron »

bencollier49 wrote: post #10

Okay, 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.

This might be of interest as well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#16

Post by neurobashing »

PaulHoule wrote: post #3

D & 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…

Perhaps I'm pedantic here but, no, you don't need "a bookshelf". The PHB/DMG split is obvious; you don't need the DMG (or MM) if you're a player. You don't need any of the supplements.

Also, you can run D&D games with or without TPK, you know. You can do troupe play. You can do all sorts of game modes. Rules are a framework for your game, that you build, not natural law.

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#17

Post by saalweachter »

vollmond wrote: post #7
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

D & 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). J…

There's also the sad fact that the more source books you add, the les distinguishable it is from homebrew -- they just can't play test the interactions between 72 different additions well enough to weed out the absurdities and balance everything well.

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#18

Post by Kaze404 »

bencollier49 wrote: post #10

Okay, 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.

> you could argue that there would be no D&D were it not for capitalism in the first place.

This is a fascinating thing for me to read because it is brought up every single time someone points out how capitalism encouraging the profit motive over anything else negatively impacts something.

It's also incredibly sad though, as the concept of creating things out of pure joy seems like such an alien concept to some people. What's so special about D&D that makes it so it could only be created in an economic system where the person who created it would face poverty if they didn't?

Conversely, it could be argued that in a system where people don't have to be coerced to do things they despise out of fear they won't have a place to live, they would have the time and mental energy to spend creating things they enjoy, actively including the billions of people who are too busy doing meaningless jobs to create anything in the equation.

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#19

Post by DnDGrognard »

bencollier49 wrote: post #10

Okay, 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.

There would not be DnD without the Fantasy /SF literature and wargaming in general.

Little Wars was written by HG Wells ( Socialist and a member the Fabian Society

Re: Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

#20

Post by spicyusername »

This sounds more like a problem with taking a company public than it does with capitalism in general.

When your company isn't beholden to shareholders, you're generally more welcome to do anything you want with it, including focusing on "artistic integrity" for as long as you like. However, you also don't have access to the monopoly money that seems to get generated when taking your company public.

I suspect the sirens call of "infinite wealth" eventually wears down even the most principled, and the artist themselves chooses to let their art take a backseat. An unfortunately part of the human experience that I think most people don't want to acknowledge.

Post reply on HN