A River Is A Liminal Landscape

D&D5e’s flexibility is a marketing lie. The only people who think D&D5e is relatively flexible are people who have little to no experience with any other TTRPGs besides D&D5e (and sometimes Pathfinder). It is in fact a very specific game (as the vast majority of TTRPGs are). Its rules adjudicate high fantasy heroic warriors and wizards with swords and spells engaging in tactical battles with monsters in a high fantasy world of some kind and becoming stronger and better at battling by doing so. That’s the only kind of game D&D5e can support. This premise is of course somewhat flexible in that it can support high fantasy battles in a variety of contexts with a variety of different types of warriors and wizards and for a variety of different reasons, but as soon as the occupations of the characters in your campaign do not primarily consist of high fantasy battles and preparation for more high fantasy battles, D&D5e is no-longer supporting it. In fact, D&D5e will quickly start to hinder it, at great strain to the GM.

As you can see, D&D5e is actually quite narrow in what campaigns and/or “stories” it supports. This narrowness/specificness is not, however, what makes D&D5e a bad game. Tons of very good TTRPGs are just as narrow or even more narrow. The people who force D&D5e to “flex” despite its relative inflexibility are doing so with a great deal of unnecessary effort, particularly on the GM side of things. This effort is unnecessary because for any given campaign/adventure premise, there are likely dozens of other TTRPGs which are either laserfocused on supporting that exact premise, or something much closer to it such that it takes less effort to “flex” them into it.

Despite it being difficult and unnecessary, they keep straining themselves to bend D&D5e into shapes it was never meant to be (and holds badly) because they don’t know any better. This is where the WotC/Hasbro marketing comes in. There is this marketing tactic called a “walled garden” that basically only monopolies with money to burn can pull off. Rather than competing with your competitors to have the better product, or even just hype up your product, to attract more customers, you build an enclosed ecosystem for your customers by obscuring their view of your competitors’ products entirely. With no frame of reference for what your competitors’ products are actually like, customers will have no reason to be skeptical of anything you say or imply about your product or your competitors’.

D&D5e is actually very narrow, very poorly designed (but again, narrowness is not an element of this poor design), not simple, and not beginner-friendly at all. But WotC’s marketing machine says it is extremely flexible, well-designed, simple, and beginner-friendly. In conjunction with the walled garden, WotC’s customers hear that and think “if a ‘simple,’ ‘beginner-friendly’ TTRPG is this complicated and hard to learn (not to mention expensive), I don’t even wanna know what a complex and advanced TTRPG looks like!” This makes them scared of other TTRPGs without ever having seen them, and makes them very unwilling to step foot outside the walled garden and see for themselves. (This is also somewhat relatable to how the US government keeps US citizens perpetually afraid of foreign nations and alternative economic frameworks, and how cults and abusers keep their victims from just walking out on them.)

“D&D5e/TTRPGs can be whatever you want them to be” is a marketing slogan for WotC and Hasbro, meant to tell you that the TTRPG you pick for your campaign doesn’t matter at all, so why not just settle for the one you’ve seen marketed the most? This is how WotC and Hasbro keep D&D5e players perpetually overpaying for undercooked products or, at the very least even if they pirate all their D&D5e books, not supporting any of the competitors. This facade is propped up by the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands of overworked GMs, who are the ones tasked by the wretched and insidious “Rule 0” with painstakingly bending D&D5e into all these different crude shapes (that another game would hold better) for the convenience of players.

That last part especially is where the cult comparison comes in. Those who do want to explore the world outside the cult and/or have seen through the lies are often trapped there still by their only relationships being within the cult. If they leave the cult, they can only do so by cutting all of their relationships and support networks off and entering the wider world with nothing. It’s a little less dramatic than that in the context of D&D5e of course, they aren’t literally losing their friends entirely, but they often are losing their gaming group, A.K.A. the big social activity they do with their friends. It is beyond count how many times I have heard someone say “I want to try out other TTRPGs, but my group only wants to do D&D5e because they think learning another game is too hard and also pointless because they think ‘TTRPGs can be whatever you want them to be’.” They try and try, but are eventually worn down until they go “Alright fine we can do a cozy farming game about reconciling with your past trauma in D&D5e. Roll Strength to pull up the carrots, I guess..” Dozens, possibly hundreds, reading this very post will be able to testify to being in this exact situation (and I urge you to do so in the tags or reblog comments).

(Also much like abuse victims and people who grew up in insular cults, many who do leave have great difficulty adjusting to the normal world, because they only know how to behave in the context of the bad situation they just left. This often manifests in TTRPGs as GMs reflexively trying to “fix” the rules of games that are actually well designed and don’t need to be fixed - or, topically, trying to squeeze “collaborative storytelling” out of games that were not meant to support such a thing, because WotC/Hasbro marketing taught them that when D&D5e doesn’t natively give you what you and your group want, it’s your fault because “a good GM could make it work.” The difficulties these maladapted behaviors result in even often lead them to giving up and returning to their bad situations.)

To summarize thus far, WotC/Hasbro marketing obscures other TTRPGs from the vast majority of TTRPG players, which allows them to imply those TTRPGs are not worth exploring by projecting the flaws of their own product onto the imagined conception of the competitors’ products. WotC/Hasbro tells players “TTRPGs are whatever you want them to be” to make their product, the design of which only supports one thing, appeal to customers who want many different things. They keep these customers they’ve lied to by encouraging GMs to do free labor contorting and rebuilding D&D5e on the fly to keep up the illusion as long as possible. People within these spaces who don’t buy into this illusion are shunned and only given the choice between continuing to prop up the lie or abandoning their social activities. People within these spaces who do buy into the illusion are liable to get very defensive-aggressive when the walls of the garden are shaken.

Part 2: “Collaborative Storytelling”

I described way up at the top of this comment that D&D5e has rules that basically only support fantasy warriors and wizards doing battles and getting stronger so they can do more battles. This is not inherently a bad thing, there are many good TTRPGs that support nothing but this same thing. (What makes D&D5e bad as a game is that it does its core premise very poorly. What makes it bad as a cultural force is how its dishonest marketing is choking and killing the industry and culture of TTRPGs.)

The other thing about D&D5e’s design that are important about this discussion is that it is s very “traditional” TTRPG, and thus very much built by the way its rules interact with each other to be a “challenge game.” A “challenge game” in this context is a game that challenges the cleverness and skill of both player and PC alike. The PC must overcome obstacles in their path through their cleverness and skill, and the player must use their cleverness and in-depth understanding of the rules to build a PC who can overcome those challenges and play them accordingly. If either is not up to the challenge, they fail, often with severe consequences to the PC. In video game terms, it is possible to get a “game over” when playing this type of game.

Where this becomes a "problem" is that challenge games are typically very, very bad at producing conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs through the default gameplay that their rules support, which is one of the main points of the original post. When people say they want/like “collaborative storytelling,” they are almost always referring to a desire for conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs.

And if this structure of game is bad at “collaborative storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story, and the point of TTRPGs as an artform is “collaborative storytelling,” then “challenge games” must be bad TTRPGs, right? Well, wrong; but that attitude is what the original post is criticizing.

They are calling a game bad because it fails to do something its rules were never written to support in the first place. D&D5e is lazily designed, but by calling it bad for failure to accomplish something that it was never built to do in the first place, they are completely writing off hundreds of much more effortfully and intentionally designed games which also fail at “collaboratively storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story because they were never meant to. This, indirectly, also only helps WotC and hurts smaller studios and designers, as well as closing the players off to experiences they might end up actually really enjoying.

The reality is “collaborative storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story with a plot and character arcs is not the only reason to play TTRPGs. Like many other artistic mediums, different TTRPGs have different experiences they are trying to present to the audience, and if the audience goes in expecting one and gets another, they will typically not enjoy the experience. It is only in TTRPGs however (due largely to the deceptive marketing described in Part 1) that there is such a pervasive acceptance of going to works within the artform expecting something they were never meant to be, and, instead of going and finding another one that actually is what you want, pushing forward stubbornly, as if trying to squeeze a novel full of twists and turns out of a math textbook.

Playing a challenge game expecting a conventionally satisfying narrative and character arcs will leave you frustrated and disappointed (unless of course the insidious “Rule 0” puts a gun to your GM’s head or brainwashes them and makes them take on the work of pulling thousands of strings behind the scenes to contort the game in real time so that that frustration never touches the players, only them). Likewise, if you play “story games” or similarly structured TTRPGs expecting a challenge, you will be frustrated and disappointed. Even if you put in the effort to "make it work," your experience with the result is significantly worsened and hindered compared to what the experience would be if you had just played a TTRPG that was built from the ground up to give that experience rather than trying to mod the game into something it's not. And here is a link to a post you (general "you," not specifically the person I am replying to, I mean anyone reading this) can click if you interpret the above passages as me saying "nothing should ever be homebrewed ever."

Part 3: I'm Kinda Just Rambling Now

I love “challenge games,” and many others do to, both for the in-the-moment thrill of them and for the unique (not usually conventionally satisfying) stories they produce as a secondary byproduct.

All TTRPGs (that I can think of) produce some kind of story as a byproduct of gameplay. Hell, most games in general do. However, just because it may produce it doesn’t mean the story is the primary purpose. It is the primary purpose of some games, but not others.

Actually I was going to go on, but I remembered I already said what I was about to say much better in a previous thread on this same post, so I am just going to link that here instead. This will explain different purposes I’m talking about.