I love tabletop roleplaying games. I love designing them, playing them (on both sides of the GM screen), reading about them, writing about them, and thinking about them.

And Dungeons & Dragons is where it all began.

(Note: This article will assume you have some familiarity with the different editions of D&D along with related movements like the OSR. Here’s a good video by Justin Alexander of thealexandrian.net to get you up to speed if you need that.)

So in a lot of ways, I also love D&D. I love its history and design lineage, and I love what it gave to the world. The Blackmoor game created by Dave Arneson, which was iterated on by Gary Gygax into D&D, is one of the most recent examples I can think of of an entirely new type of thing being created, and for having been considered such a niche hobby for most of its existence, its influence on the media we produce and consume is staggering. From concepts like Hit Points and character stats to the codification of monster taxonomy (“Undead”), if you love any kind of pop culture released since around 1980, there is a practically 100% chance that you love something that was influenced directly or indirectly by D&D.

But I don’t play it.

And I don’t think I ever would join a D&D game unless it was literally my only option for playing a ttrpg.

Now, let’s be very specific here–I do play D&Dlike games. Particularly Shadowdark and Dolmenwood, both of which are basically forks (to borrow programming terminology) of D&D that share a lot of its core mechanics and DNA.

And, I suppose, I might be willing to try a game of OD&D (original D&D, the 1974 rules) purely for the experience. To say that I have actually played the world’s first roleplaying game.

But if I was going to play a ttrpg, either as a one-shot or joining a campaign, I would pick almost anything else.

It’s not even about editions (D&D famously has lots of different editions, all of which people still play to varying degrees). I started with 3.5 but didn’t play it very much, and if I had to pick an edition of D&D to play with a gun to my head, I’d still go for 3.5.

But if I want to play something like 3.5…I’d just play Pathfinder.

And that’s the crux of the issue…for every reason I could think of to play D&D, there’s invariably a different system that is more appealing to me.

If I want a crunchy D&D-like system with a large playerbase, I’d play Pathfinder.

If I want to run some old-school adventures (either short modules I pick up at my FLGS or from the old issues of Dragon Magazine I collect), I’d play a retroclone like Old School Essentials.

If I want a versatile, condensed system that offers things I love about both the OSR and more modern mechanics and forms of play, I’d play Shadowdark (I’ll probably write another article in the future about why I love Shadowdark).

And if I wanted to GM a long-term fantasy campaign, I’d run my own homebrew system (which I’ll eventually get around to publishing).

Some people might quibble–all the games I just mentioned (except my homebrew system) are basically variants or offshoots of D&D, right? So how meaningful is it to say that I don’t play D&D?

Now, if I were reading this article instead of writing it, this is where I’d expect the author to start talking about how I don’t play D&D because Wizards of the Coast and its parent company Hasbro, the owners of D&D, are evil, unethical corporations who don’t give a flying fuck about gamers or anything else other than profit.

And that’s absolutely true. It’s true of every corporation, actually, even the ones you think are exceptions.

And no, I won’t be busting out the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” canard–you shouldn’t support Wizards or Hasbro. They suck. (And it’s trivial to play any edition of D&D you want without giving them money.)

But that’s not really why I don’t play D&D. Even if Wizards was the wokest of the woke companies, and had a strong, unionized labor force, and was firmly anti-AI, and staffed by passionate gamers who put the interests of the hobby first…

…I still probably wouldn’t play D&D.

I want to talk about why here, and not because I think anyone should care what games I do or don’t play.

I like analyzing game design and mechanics. When I write about RPGs, that’s almost always going to be my focus area.

And despite loving (or at least enjoying) many other systems that are explicitly based on D&D, every edition of D&D still has numerous little (and a few not-so-little) things that get in the way of my enjoyment. And that’s very interesting to me–how can small rule or design changes radically affect my ability to enjoy a game? How do those design choices flow downstream into things like play culture and scenario design? Why do I think a system like Shadowdark can do certain things so much better than 5e when the mechanical differences can be so minor that many players wouldn’t even notice them?

That’s going to be the focus of this article. But I need to mention–I am not hating on you if you play 5e, or any other edition of D&D. This is about me, and my tastes. I am one type of player. I do think that criticism like this can play a small role in shaping how people think about different RPGs, and if I can convince someone to maybe take a break from D&D or seek out other games, I’ll be happy. But I am not writing this article as a moral or intellectual judgment.

(I do actually have some strong opinions on certain editions and the people who play them that I’ll drop in for funsies. For example, the cycle of “critical reassessment” we’re seeing about 4e right now is as annoying and reactionary as all critical reassessment cycles started by nostalgia-blinded people who come of age and then start pretending the shit they loved when they were 12 was High Art, Actually (see also the Star Wars prequels) are. 4e is simply bad in a lot of ways that you can’t handwave away and most takes otherwise are simply contrarianism.

On another note, while I don’t think 5e is actively offensive on the design side, the play culture around it often is, to the extent that 5e feels actively detrimental to the hobby sometimes. The phenomenon of people who refuse to play any game other than 5e, to the point where they will try to hack 5e to run vastly different kinds of games than what it is made for, is a plague. So is the pressure for designers to make 5e-compatible versions of everything, because it’s one of the only ways to make money in an industry where Wizards sucks up the vast majority of the money.

Okay, ranting over.)

Drowning in Magic

Magic items are awesome, right? The One Ring, Excalibur, Stormbringer, Dagda’s Cauldron of Plenty, Strega Nona’s magical pasta pot–these and dozens of other iconic magic weapons and items from fiction and mythology almost define the fantasy genre. (I said almost.)

And D&D ruins it by having them practically grow on trees.

Now hold on, I hear you saying: if you don’t like too many magic items, then just pick a setting that doesn’t have them. Or invent one. Or just remove them from whatever setting you’re playing.

And I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.

D&D is balanced from a game design perspective around the use of magic items. You can remove them, sure–but then get ready to do a bunch of work re-balancing all sorts of encounters because they assume the PCs will have magic swords and gloves and arrows and scrolls and wands and rings, bafangool!

This is actually my biggest pet peeve about the mostly-superb Baldur’s Gate 3, which is by far the most I’ve played 5e. You can’t go anywhere in that game without finding 10 different magic items, most of which are utterly useless and boring. I won’t complain too much on how immersion-breaking this is, because I want to keep the focus on mechanics; suffice to say that it doesn’t just strain credulity, it fucks credulity’s mom and then ghosts her.

This isn’t just a Forgotten Realms problem; it’s been baked into D&D‘s DNA since at least AD&D. Starting with 5e and working backward, you’ll immediately notice that in the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) the sections on “Magic Items” and “Sentient Magic Items” are a whopping 85 pages, more than double the rest of the sections in the “Treasure” chapter combined.

Most of the section lists various magic items, and here you see the crux of the problem. Magic items have a “rarity” value ranging from “common” to “legendary.”

By the very design of the game, magic items are common.

Now look, if you like or don’t mind this, that’s fine. You are entitled to your tastes. But this is my blog and I’m talking about my tastes.

My point is not “magic items should never be common in any setting and it’s inherently bad if they are.” My point is that when you make magic items (or magic in general) common in a setting, they do not feel wondrous or powerful or awe-inspiring or mysterious or arcane.

Y’know. They don’t feel like magic.

Magic was rare in Lord of the Rings, and in the pulp sword and sorcery fiction that influenced D&D it was almost always also terrifying and sinister. We have moved so far away from that that it feels very difficult for me to recreate the very things that make magic so cool in the fantasy fiction I love.

(Note: Pathfinder also has this issue, inherited from its 3.X roots.)

You don’t feel like Gandalf if there’s wizards or sorcerers in every encounter. You don’t feel like you just found Excalibur if every third monster encounter has some sort of +1 Codpiece associated with it.

What does it mean for a setting when potions of healing are “common,” as they are in the 5e DMG? In real life, if people had ready access to drinks that could literally close wounds instantaneously, it would have dramatic effects on how we view life and death and injury and danger. Most D&D settings, whether official or homebrewed, simply handwave this away.

And it really isn’t as simple as just “use less magic items.” The 3.5 DMG, for example, notes that “…if the PCs don’t get enough magic items, they won’t be powerful enough to deal with the challenges that have been balanced for characters of their level” (3.5 DMG p. 212). 5e doesn’t explicitly say this, but the same design philosophy is there; consider that both “Common” and “Uncommon” magic items are expected to be available to 1st-level characters.

(Note: I don’t have access to, nor do I feel like consulting, the updated rules for OneD&D or 5.5e or whatever they’re calling it these days. I’m using the base 5e DMG.)

Again, take my distaste for what this does to fantasy settings or immersion away. It’s a design philosophy that I don’t like. It makes monsters and encounters have to be designed to be more challenging. The less a PC’s capability comes from their own attributes and skills, the less opportunity there is to roleplay under my preferred roll to roleplay philosophy.

Yes, this is a problem that can be fixed with some work on the DM’s part. But I could also just play Shadowdark.

Power Creep

D&D characters are too damn strong.

A 1st-level character is already orders of magnitude stronger than like, your average peasant. This isn’t inherently a problem by itself; they are trained warriors or adventurers after all.

But if you want to play a zero-to-hero? The stableboy who becomes a legend? Ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation who can only survive with incredible cleverness and a little luck? Forget it.

(Yes, there are ways to make 0-level characters, but they’re not official rules unless 5.5 has added them, and for a variety of reasons they rarely feel good. Even Shadowdark, which I’ve been dickriding this whole article, has problems with this concept.)

Again, personal taste, but the worlds created using D&D rules tend to simply be extremely dangerous, necessitating player characters who start off heroic and, by 8th level or so, are downright superheroic.

And the worst part is that this shift happens in the most boring way possible.

In 5e, the primary way most characters become stronger on a level-to-level basis is by getting increased Hit Points.

See, in 5e your proficiency bonus only increases every few levels, going from a +2 at 1st level to +6 at 20th, a difference so marginal and stretched out over so many levels as to be basically imperceptible over the course of a campaign. And it doesn’t exist to make you feel more awesome–the game is balanced so that it basically exists for you to keep up with increased monster AC.

So the reason that the goblin horde that gave you a tough time at 1st level becomes trivial at 5th is mostly down to having a lot more Hit Points. Yes, a balanced party will also have more spells and magic items (ugh) and a few passive or active abilities available to it, but in general, it’s the Hit Points.

But having more Hit Points doesn’t do anything. And as a mechanic they are so abstract as to basically be impossible to roleplay off of.

You’re just abstractly harder to kill. Is it because you’re better at dodging? But your Dexterity is the same as it always was. Better at resisting pain? Well, not according to your static Strength and/or Constitution scores. Armor increases your AC, which is fine, but doesn’t have anything to do with HP.

Your character is just harder to kill because they’re higher-level. This isn’t the worst mechanic ever, but it’s inherently dissociated. You can re-associate it, but only on a per-character basis.

To be clear, I’m not saying I hate inflationary hit point systems. They work okay, for the most part. But the sheer range of possible hit points illustrates perfectly the hilarious difference in power between 1st-level and 20th-level characters.

3.X was different–it has its Base Attack Bonus (BAB) mechanic, which was in some ways better because it increased more regularly, allowing all characters but especially martial characters to feel tangibly stronger at almost every level increase, and because it was specifically tied to physical attacks it functioned as an associated stat that represented “how good you are at physically fighting.” Its problem was that it was too free; numbers got so high (and once you got to multiple attacks they became more complex and fiddly) that the power-scaling overwhelmed any sense of realism or pacing or grittiness. (Not to mention the ridiculous gaps in power between different classes.) We’ll see this again when we talk about skill systems in a moment, but for now it’s important to recognize that while 3.X’s power creep was more mechanically interesting (at least at low levels), it’s still a fundamental design choice that leads to the game having a scope that I find unfun.

If you like high-level play, or just don’t mind the power scaling, then play away. It’s a valid style of play that lots of people like. I just prefer my fantasy a little more gritty, a little more deadly, a little more pegged to real-world physics and realism.

Who needs skills, anyway?

D&D has never really nailed down how to handle skills.

From the early days when certain classes would have simple X-in-6 chances of succeeding at particular actions to the runaway train of 3.X’s ceiling-less skill system, to 5e’s big fat pile of nothing, D&D has always tried to model different characters being better or worse at different things based on their training, natural abilities, or the circumstances of the campaign.

And this is a good thing. Skill systems are good and cool, despite what OSR purists think. It’s just that D&D has never done them particularly well.

And on one level, that’s understandable. It’s a class-based game, not a skill-based game (a distinction that’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy, but I digress). It’s not unreasonable to think that if you want to do “thief” things like pick locks and pockets, you should play a Thief/Rogue. If you want to do things like handle animals or have nature lore, play a Ranger. Et cetera.

3e/3.5 is the fulcrum of this whole mess. See, 3.5e combined 2nd edition’s trend towards simulationism with a commitment to unified, symmetrical mechanics. Since anyone, not just a trained thief, can stick a lockpick in a lock and try to pick it, the system tries to model this. Everyone has access to the Open Lock skill. Some classes will be better than others, but fuck it, if you want to play a wizard who was a rapscallion as a youngster and learned their way around a tumbler, you can do it.

And honestly? That rocks. The skill system is relatively simple to understand and allows for enormous variety in character creation and development. And 3.X largely succeeds at simulating the high-magic, high-fantasy worlds that D&D has become associated with…

…as long as you don’t plan on leveling up very much.

While I admire what they were trying to do with 3.X, the system starts to sputter at medium levels, and utterly collapses when you get to high-level play. Skill bonuses become completely unwieldy (just like Base Attack Bonuses, mentioned above). The gap between low-level and even medium-level characters becomes absurd if you care at all about realism.

And I know some players don’t. Please don’t act like that’s a gotcha. I care about that, and it’s a valid thing to care about. No game will ever satisfy everybody.

5e overcorrected this problem so hard that it also sucks. Skill bonuses and Base Attack Bonus were folded together into a a flat “proficiency bonus” that goes from +2 to +6 (so from 10% to 30% of the maximum 1d20 roll). Your proficiency bonus increases by 1 every few levels, no matter what your class is. If you are trained in a certain skill, you get to add that bonus to those skill checks. If you aren’t, you don’t.

And that’s basically it.

(There’s more to it, like the Reliable Talent feat and the Expertise class feature that Rogues get, but those just create more problems. For now I’m going to focus on the base system.)

First off–what the fuck does the “proficiency bonus” mean in real-world terms? It’s an abstraction of being generally “good at stuff.” But it means that my character will be exactly as good at swinging a sword as she will at, like, arcane lore or animal handling. She’ll get better at all of them at the exact same pace. And, barring a few exceptions, she’ll generally only ever be 30% better at them than she will at tasks she’s totally untrained at.

Boo. Hiss.

(I try not to talk about 4e here because I don’t have anything nice to say, but for completion’s sake, it had a bizarre skill system where you added half your level to all skill checks, and you got a flat +5 bonus if you were “trained” in a skill. This is somehow more inscrutable than 5e’s system, and when you add in its utterly broken Skill Challenge mechanic, made this one of the worst “skill systems” in published RPG history.)

The 3.X system definitely needed to be reined in, as did (does) the overall power creep of pretty much all editions of D&D. But going this far in the other direction makes it a waste of time to even have a skill system.

For what it’s worth, I would’ve fixed the 3.X skill system by capping skill bonuses at your level, limiting the amount you could raise a certain skill per level, and reducing the overall number of skill points characters got (as well as DCs). You could play with this, maybe take certain feats or be able to break this limit for class skills only, but the point is that you could’ve constrained the numbers without abstracting both skills and Base Attack Bonus together into a nonsense “proficiency bonus” and handicapping your system with bounded accuracy.

I also would’ve instituted guidelines for scenario and adventure design to discourage the “you can only attempt an action if your character sheet says you have skill points in the corresponding skill” attitudes that cropped up around this time and led to the overcorrection of the OSR’s reactionary hatred of skill systems.

See, OSR games like Shadowdark and Dolmenwood and Knave, and retroclones like OSRIC and OSE, simply don’t have skill systems, and it’s fine. Personally I like skill systems, but I’d rather not have one at all than have a broken or boring one. It’s trivial to just have characters roll ability checks and give them a circumstantial bonus if you think they should be extra good at something. These games aren’t trying to simulate a real world to the extent that 3.X was, and they’re built for fast character creation and gameplay, and skill systems would slow them down. I can accept that tradeoff.

5e’s vestigial skill system is just unnecessary bloat; not interesting or meaningful enough to justify its page count and not simple or intuitive enough to justify its tediousness. It’s the worst of both worlds.

D&D Play Culture (is annoying)

There’s a lot I could say about the general “play culture” of D&D, but I’m going to try to keep it constrained to those aspects that I feel are downstream of the mechanics. This is the “bring it all home” section, so to speak.

Also, when talking about play culture, all of this overwhelmingly applies to 5e more than other editions.

D&D overwhelmingly has a play culture revolving around dedicated campaigns full of people who are there to do what they call “roleplay” (really play-acting) of their precious OCs that in many cases were dreamed up independently of any actual campaign setting or story. Character death is extremely rare, and usually reversible, because you spent all that time developing that character, and it’s bad form if your DM lets them die (or kills them, as some people put it).

We could talk about how Actual Play culture reinforces this trend, but that wouldn’t be getting to the root cause. D&D‘s mechanics and long-term trends in scenario design incentivize this approach to character-building.

And this isn’t a newfangled problem–it arguably began with Dragonlance in the 80’s, in the halcyon days of AD&D. For those unfamiliar, Dragonlance was an official campaign setting that became very popular as a novel series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. (To be clear, it was created as a D&D setting; the novels simply overshadowed the campaign modules and other play material.) The Dragonlance play materials are infamous for how railroaded they are (meaning they expect the story to play out in a specific way and are designed to force the PCs to stay within the bounds of that story) and how much they encourage players to play as the pregenerated characters rather than create their own.

I’ve seen it argued that Dragonlance is really the progenitor of the modern idea of high or heroic fantasy, and believe it or not it’s a compelling argument. It’s certainly had an enormous influence on how we think about “standard” D&D-esque settings, even moreso than Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms.

Regardless of that, from then on you started to see trends towards long-term campaigns that are heavily plotted and reliant on a stable of powerful characters wearing heavy suits of plot armor. And in true dialectical fashion, this exacerbated and was shaped by D&D‘s long-term trend of flattening its own game structures, which led to the power creep at high levels of play that I mentioned above.

See, OD&D had several distinct tiers or structures of play. Low-level characters raided dungeons in search of treasure and experience points. Mid-level characters explored the wilderness, crawling and clearing hexes and getting involved in politics. And high-level characters, while strong, weren’t gods or superheroes–they were rulers. See, when you got to a certain point, depending on your class you’d get a barony with a castle (for fighting-men) or a wizard’s tower (for magic-users) or become the head of your own church (clerics). OD&D‘s rules for commanding armies, naval combat, and the like were intended to smoothly transition the game into a politics-and-wargame at higher levels. You were not really intended to be dungeoncrawling with 20th-level characters.

But dungeoncrawling was the part everybody liked, and so it’s the part that stuck around, to the detriment of other forms of play. Sure, rules for strongholds and hirelings and other trappings of those kinds of characters still exist, but they’re vestigial (and less and less prominent with each new edition).

Which brings us to the era of dedicated OCs that were meticulously designed and draped in plot armor, heralded by Dragonlance. These characters can’t “retire!” You don’t “win” the game and have your PC settle down as a nice king or archmage and then roll up a new character–you spent all that time making this character!

I get it. I really do. I am not hating on the idea of making a really cool character and wanting to roleplay them for a long time. I am not a partisan of rolling up disposable characters and treating the game like a Roguelike. That’s fun, but so is having a dedicated OC.

My point is that D&D was not designed for that.

On the one hand, yeah, having ridiculously powerful characters helps them live a long time, so if you want to keep playing them for a years-long campaign, it works. But it also makes them boring, and leads to nonsense where your godlike character is getting involved with things that logically should be far beneath them. 20th-level characters are basically demigods, and that does not mesh well with either the classic style of play built around dungeoncrawls, nor the more modern types of stories full of intrigue, adventure, and character development.

It’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg thing, this issue. People’s desire to play characters for a long time makes them tolerate and defend the system’s power creep, but at the same time, the power creep shapes our understanding of how often characters should die and how deadly the game should be.

The other way the game’s play culture results from its mechanics is in the class/species system. Now, I like fantasy races, and I don’t mind class systems. I also don’t mind putting them together. But D&D has too many, and the ways they are differentiated does not work.

In researching for this post I learned that 5.5e has finally, after 50 goddamn years, gotten rid of the ridiculous “half-elves” and “half-orcs” and finally allowed me to play a goddamn orc in the main rulebook. So, that’s good.

But the proliferation of ancestries/species and the lazy differentiation leads to settings and stories that are absolutely crawling with all sorts of sentient fantasy creatures, and it almost never amounts to anything other than aesthetics.

A recent video by the Youtuber JBat put this into words recently; it’s a sort of inversion of the “Planet of Hats” trope.

“Sometimes out of ‘fearing the hat,’ people will just take it away rather than add to it.” -JBat

As I discussed in my post about fantasy races, I’m in favor of fantasy races because I think they allow for interesting stories and characters. I’d love to roleplay an elf because I want to try to explore what it would actually be like to live for hundreds or thousands of years and not need to sleep.

But D&D doesn’t mechanically encourage this kind of play. Elves get darkvision (big deal, so does basically everybody) and are racially superior at magic (and wielding certain kinds of weapons???) and other than that, they’re just sexy humans with sexy pointed ears who live forever but unless you commit to roleplaying that in some way it doesn’t really matter.

Yes, I as the player should have to put some effort into roleplaying my character, but is it too much to ask that a game with tons of fiddly mechanics for character development also try to incentivize it? Or model it?

I don’t want to belabor the point because at a certain point I’m just bitching, but my point is that I find the kinds of worlds that result from “standard” D&D play interminably boring. They’re overstuffed, not only with magic and magic items but also with dozens of varieties of elves and gnomes and tieflings and dragonborn and goliaths and assimar (sic), and that’s not even getting into the homebrews and supplements and setting-specific ones. And, of course, the hundreds of different monster species that inhabit not only the dungeons but practically every nook and cranny. It’s difficult to really sink your teeth into anything, because as soon as you get your bearings it’s throwing something else at you.

There are other reasons I don’t play D&D, but I wanted to focus on the mechanical reasons here as opposed to criticizing certain settings or adventure paths or whatever. I want to reiterate that none of this (okay, very little of this) is a judgment on people with different tastes from me. There are ways to fix these issues, and they aren’t issues for everyone.

But I think it’s important to continually criticize not just all RPGs, but D&D specifically. It’s the first and biggest, and the majority of people’s introduction to the entire hobby of ttrpgs. And while it’s arguably a good thing that the hobby has an “entry product” with household-name status, it ends up having a determining influence on the shape of the hobby and the expectations of new players.

If anyone wants to comment, in addition to telling me why I’m a dumbass and 4e Rocks, Actually, I’d love to hear how people deal with the flaws in D&D that bother them the most.