I also think an important part of all of this, which if I am ungenerous I could take as disingenuous but even if I am being generous is at best ignorant, is the fun police accusation. I'm going to be real, learning to actually play a game, even if you continue to add in homebrew and additional rules, a thing which has always been a part of ttrpgs since the get go. Even with the white book you were expected to just go find rules somewhere to handle whatever issues you needed handled.
Even if I don't bring up that you can have funny doing basically anything with your friends, the entire discussion hinges on that fact that, actually, quite a lot of people aren't having fun. At least half of this entire discourse arises from the fact that D&D is an analog Omelas that burns down GMs for everyone else's fun. That if you need to basically remake the game from scratch or pretend it doesn't exist as a text than clearly you're not having fun with it. That you are advised to treat the asymmetric player as the devil and the asymmetric player is advised to treat the others as petty pain constructs there to make things harder and worse. That effort must be put in to create story arcs, to manage character arcs, to not kill, to this, to that all to the satisfaction of the potential agency of the players to play out the story they came to the conclusion should, if not perhaps must, happen or the game was bad.
Even if one accepts the kayfabe paradigm as engaging in good faith, it is very clear that an enormous amount of the friction created in the play space if from wanting to play checkers, not knowing checkers exists, and modifying chess on your way to recreating it. This isn't a "misunderstanding of the rules", a thing which would require you to have done something other than pass the buck off to your DM until they burn out, but an at-best contemptuous disengagement from the text in a manner that makes all of the folkloric "misunderstandings of the rules" of, say, Monopoly, look like nothing.
The effort that goes into making D&D as it is under its own culture of play is enormous. You generally don't create what amounts to an effectively different game on top of the bones of the game you're claiming to play if you're having fun with the rules of the game and so the question, at its kindest, arises to ask "why are you playing it in the first place? Why put all this effort in?"
I imagine if someone claimed to love a certain kind of cake but then told you that first you had to remove all the frosting, swap out two of the layers for different flavors, hollowed it out to fill with jam, and then reassemble it, refrost it, and then create fondant decorations on top and it was the baker's fault because they should have known that's what you just do with that recipe to make it good, others would probably not be in the wrong to say you don't actually enjoy that kind of cake.
And I would honestly call "the text is not the game" one of the most absolutely disingenuous statements to ever be made. Though I suppose given D&D's evangelical background is fully in line with the sorts of beliefs the author may have had about the interpretation of texts.
The cherry-pick and embrace the cultural folklore approach is what creates the confusion. Especially since the approach creates so much strife. It burns out GMs, it causes people to quit the game over the expectations they have been told they should have not being met, it causes enormous amounts of efforts to be put in in order to force it to meet those expectations, and if it didn't create an enormous amount of friction, both between the large number of people who do read the text (even amongst the people whom I engage with who are not deep in the reeds like this, maybe half of them are locked in the 5e culture of play) but also with each other.
And on the anti-capitalism, the only people this benefits, for the same reason that copyright does, that remaking the same works over and over does, that walling the garden and putting all the inmates in the same asylum does, is that it only benefits the people who keep restarting the attempts to make every other ttrpg be D&D whether it's Gygax before his ousting, the WotC board with the original OGL, or now with the movement of D&D from being a game at all to being a lifestyle brand in the fashion of Disney (and that brand, worth more than everything else Hasbro controls combined, is the real reason) so that anyone and everyone can be included under the umbrella of what D&D is without question and with a minimum of options.
In a manner of speaking, I'm here to play chess but half the people I run into are using the chess pieces to play quarters and are unhappy that the pieces aren't well sized or aerodynamic enough to land in a shot glass.
ellievsbear
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
