Dungeons and dragons, podcasts and original content
Well, I had been meaning to do this for a while now, so I'll share my thoughts on the matter. It's a bit venty (specially towards podcasts and such), so please, feel free to skip if you'd rather not read it.
Anyways, hello! I'm Sygdom. I have been dwelling around the Dungeons and Dragons "fandom" for about 6 years now, even if I started playing in a game around 2 years ago. Before that I had been RPing in forums that used some DnD content (specially the races) to a degree, but strayed a lot from the canon and relied mostly in homebrew stuff.
The Dungeons and dragons tag (and adjacents) have been always really helpful for me to show my content. The grand majority of my art is regarding my own characters (and those of the people I RP with), and currently it's mostly all related to the dnd campaign I run. And I had always found the tag and fandom to be a nice and welcoming place for these: It was a great way to share my art with people with similar interests (specially those who like drow and tieflings, the two races I draw and use the most). One of the most freeing things was to be able to produce original content that still could appeal to people due to dnd serving as a base everyone knows, and I have enjoyed plenty seeing how other people use and draw their own characters within this common imaginary.
One of the biggest appeals was to avoid needing to do fanart to hopefully get noticed. Most artists have struggled with this: You either do fanart of popular things or get a hard time getting noticed, unless your art is great, or you have plenty of luck. Once you get popular it's easier to do original content that still may get noticed, but getting there is incredibly hard. And DnD was very helpful to avoid that: While it still has some bases, it's really just a common blank canvas a lot of artists have used to create their own world and characters.
And then, podcasts happened.
I think everyone knows about CR by now. It's very much an ideal scenario for a campign: It has a DM with over 20 years of experience in the field, Voice Actors playing their characters masterfully, and plenty of following and resources to be able to make an incredibly detailed and fleshed out game. It did get incredibly popular, and... Somehow, I feel like it added that whole fanart-dependency on the dnd fandom. As much as art shouldn't be competitive, you can expect most of the dnd tags and race tags (specially for tieflings and firbolgs) to be pretty much filled with fanart of CR. And it's of course much easier to reach bigger audiences if you draw something that's more widely known than your own character.
I guess it's somewhat stressing for original authors to have to compete against widely known characters, and for the dnd fandom to get mixed in with fans of the podcasts, who do end up taking a lot of the space that was previously filled with original content. Even muting those tags can't really help much by now, and I guess it makes me sad to a degree. Some authors that previously produced mostly original content do end up doing fanart, as it's much easier to grow that way, and it ends up impacting how much original content is produced.
I don't want to get on the Mercer Effect, since that's another topic (and my players are pretty nice and not prone to compare me to professional DMs), although it is one of the most obvious consequences. There is also the whole influence the big podcasts may have to official publications, to the point some lore is getting tweaked to better suit podcasts, and I guess I'm fearful drow are retconned to be very much inspired by podcasts. There's certain expectations, and of course, as it has brought a lot of new people to play dnd, some have taken it as their basis of what dnd is like or how should a DM be, or even how certain races should be and act.
And I guess the biggest downside is discourse and fandom drama. It's not something that would happen often in dnd, since there wasn't really much of a common basis for it to stir, but now I've found my Twitter timeline (which has worse filtering than Tumblr’s) filled to the brim with drama stirring from podcasts that ends up spreading everywhere. There's also people willing to police or critique your original content on the basis of the podcasts, which- It's just sad. I mean. One of the biggest appeals of DnD is building your own stories and own characters, working on your campaigns, making something for you and your players. People shouldn't really be compared to existing campaigns, but it happens awfully often.
To sum it up, I just wanted to vent somewhat on how it feels to be someone who enjoyed the original part of dnd in a world filled with podcasts and fanart of them taking over. It was one of the few spaces that allowed for people to do their own thing, and I feel it's slowly losing itself. I want to encourage artists and authors to -of course- keep doing their own thing, and try to remember people that original content -while it may reach less audiences- is still very much appreciated and loved.
