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

jacobinmag.com

21–30 of 64 posts

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

#21

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…

There much more expensive RPG systems back then EPT for example.

Modern players don't realise this my first set of Run Quest Rules cost me back in the Late 70's about £80 in todays terms

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

#22
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.

Open-source still struggles with quality and consistency -- two things important in a medium where aesthetics are important.

That said, access to low-cost, high-resolution 3D printers (specifically resin-based printers) has enabled an explosion of the open-source Warhammer community (see https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedWarhammer/ for one example) -- and oddly, it's exactly the free market that is allowing this to flourish through services like Patreon, where artists are financially rewarded by supporters who receive a steady stream of fresh new .stl's on a regular basis.

Open-source Magic the Gathering has struggled a bit, but there are still a good number of fan projects that have done very well. In particular, open-source game clients such as XMage have been open-source competitors to MTGO, and open-source fan-project expansions such as Star Wars: The Gathering have managed to keep a high level of quality and consistency: https://www.starwarsthegathering.com/

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

#23
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.

Dota managed to do it though. There were hundreds of dota versions people made and played before the origin of the modern day dota (called DotA allstars since it was a mesh of the favourite things from the other versions) appeared and everyone settled on it.

Edit: And the reason new dota versions stopped appearing after that is that the mapmaking community learned how to prevent people from opening and looking at the map source code, so it was no longer easy to change them. Maybe modern day dota would never have happened if that exploit wasn't found. But also modern day dota would likely never have happened if people couldn't easily modify and reupload others maps easily in the first place, since dota allstars drew so much inspiration from all the other wacky versions people made.

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

#24
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read this and was very confused until I realized you weren't talking about a package manager, the statement almost work for package managers.

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

#25
post #18

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 peopl…

> 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?

Pretty sure he would have created D&D anyway, yes. But if not for capitalism he likely wouldn't have done the work to standardize and share D&D with the world and instead just kept it as his own homebrew campaign rules. Today it would be easier, but back then? No way.

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

#26
post #9
post #5

Please. 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.

You can sell education.

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

#27
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

D20 is released under the open game license, so anyone can use or modify it.

License here: https://www.d20srd.org/ogl.htm

Basic rules, classes, monsters etc are included: https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm

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

#28
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…

Couldn't agree with this more.

The idea that D&D has hoovered up so much of the world as to deny people of their own creative expression is absurd and I couldn't get past the first paragraph without thinking the author is off his rocker.

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

#29
Nothing in this article justifies the title. Broadly their primary complaints seem to be that Hasbro is selling anything aside from a core rule set (or really anything), and that the founders of TSR were slowly pushed out. These somehow means that art is killed.

The D&D founder weren't gods. If they wanted complete control, they could have not sold their company. Or once they were out of it, they could have filed off the serial numbers and made a new system (like Paizo did years later) having learned how to protect themselves from being pushed out.

The complaint that Hasbro sells things is asinine. Sure the digital dice on D&D Beyond are tacky, but you can just not buy them. The same goes for all the toys and trinkets that they sell on the side, like pins and minis.

I especially don't understand the complaints about the OGL because it seems like exactly what they want. That's what led to Pathfinder, a competing system that Hasbro doesn't control! (Unless they bought out Paizo when I wasn't looking.)

This article fundamentally doesn't demonstrate how capitalism had any marked impact on D&D as an art form. And there are some things they could have talked about that might have landed. For instance, the need to be pushing out new content all the time resulting in lower quality or the inability to fundamentally fix real problems. They could have brought up how 4.0 pulled the rug out from under people with the way more restrictive GSL. Or how in 5.0 the only option to make money off of more than just the SRD is to use a specific site and accept a 50% cut.

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

#30
post #25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 peopl…

> 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? Pretty sure he would have created D&D anyway, yes. But if not for capitalism he likely wouldn't have done the work to standardize and share D&D with the world and instead just kept it as his own homebrew campaign rules. Today it would be easier, but back then…

Why is that? Sure, the game wouldn't be as popular without marketing, but information traveled before we had people dedicating their lives to making you click links.

For proof of that, you just need to look at Tetris. It spread so quickly that it had to be banned from universities. Tetris' history does bring up other issues, but spread of information is not one of them.

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