Episode 1: The Case Against D&D

Every other week, entertainment journalist Sean Weeks picks the brain of multi-ENNie award winning game designer Steve Dee about games as an art form, and how they change us, and how games can rise to that calling and we can improve our literacy around games.

This episode Sean asks Steve Dee about the "Lord Fang Problem", which is a topic that reveals the origins of Dungeons and Dragons. Appearing on the market in 1976, the game has come to define the gaming world, the nature of what became roleplaying games and even the whole nature of modern fantasy fiction, having as big an effect on our culture as Star Trek and Star Wars. But D&D was - like most things - not born fully formed from Zeus' head. Instead it was an accretion of random ideas and game mechanics designed primarily for skirmish miniature warfare in holes in the ground.  The subcreation was a chaotic muddling of every subcreation around and the mechanics were built on antagonism.

Which is fine but when D&D is increasingly lauded as the great storytelling engine of our age, we need to actually ask: is it good at that? Is it even average at that? Or is it like using a fridge as a screwdriver, something so poorly designed for the job that it inevitably fails, and leaves its players confused and unmoored - and inevitably driven to make something better fitting for the advertised purpose.

It's time to ask better questions of our games to make games be better.