The State of Dungeons & Dragons: Past, Present, and Future

A thorough analysis of the past, present, and future of Dungeons & Dragons and its Open Game License spin-off is the objective of a new three-part features on The Escapist. All told, it’s a nine-page history of the tabletop system that’s packed with a lot of information and commentary from industry types and team members over at Wizards of the Coast:

In the beginning, there was only one set of rules. Dave Arneson adapted the rules of Gary Gygax’s war game Chainmail in the early 70s to concentrate on a smaller group of characters fighting against monsters. Gygax finalized those changes into what would come in a white boxed set called Dungeons & Dragons. He later revised the rules and his company TSR published them as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1978. TSR published a new 2nd edition of AD&D in 1989 that significantly changed the core rules in order to unify much of the supplementary material that had been published for D&D – a move that pleased some players but disenchanted many others. A troubled run in the 1990s nearly bankrupted TSR, but, but the game survived when Wizards of the Coast stepped in and published another edition edition of D&D in 2000. This new edition not only spurred sales, but also fixed many of the previous edition’s problems. Another slight improvement, called Edition 3.5, arrived in 2003, followed by yet another edition of the beloved roleplaying game in 2008. By this time, D&D had passed through so many hands and filtered through so many imaginations that playing 4th edition bore almost no resemblance to playing the game created by Gygax and Arneson some 35 years before.

Gygax had a troubled relationship with his own game because he was a much better game designer than a publishing company CEO. In the 80s, a lot of his attention turned to overseeing the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, and a faction within TSR wrested control of the company from him in 1985. Unfortunately, TSR fared no better without Gygax running the books, and Magic the Gathering-owner Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR in 1996 when the D&D publisher was on the brink of bankruptcy. Despite no longer owning the game he created, Gygax still remained active in the hobby, posting on forums and attending gaming conventions whenever possible until his death in 2008.

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“The core of the D&D property was released through the Open Game License. WotC held back a few monsters like beholders and mind flayers, but for the most part the guts of D&D were made available to everyone for legal re-use,” said Chris Pramas, President of Green Ronin Publishing. Companies Green Ronin were able to use the OGL to create entire RPG lines like the superhero game Mutants & Masterminds and make a significant amount of money.

The OGL and the 3rd Edition of D&D were unarguably a success. “[3rd edition] was the most successful RPG published since the early years of 1st edition AD&D,” Dancey said. “It outsold the core books of 2nd edition AD&D by a wide margin. I attribute some of that success to the OGL and to the massive amount of player network support the OGL engendered.” According to a 2007 issue of Comics & Games Retailer , five out of the top ten bestselling RPGs were either published by Wizards of the Coast or utilized the OGL. More than that, the OGL allowed smaller companies and even individuals with big ideas to bring their products to the market. Because of the OGL, gamers could concentrate on imagining new adventures, dungeons, and characters instead of reinventing the nuts and bolts of the mechanics.

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“There were a lot of folks who thought [the idea of OGL] was a disaster, and that the result would be a failure of 3rd edition, but they kept their opinions to themselves and to the watercooler chat,” remembers Ryan Dancey, the VP of RPGs at Wizards until 2001, and the guy who came up with the crazy OGL idea. “When 3rd edition didn’t fail, but instead wildly succeeded, most of those folks came around to seeing it at least as a neutral, if not a net positive.”

By the time that 4th edition was developed, even the people who begrudgingly accepted the OGL had left their positions at Wizards of the Coast. “Many of the key players were completely different at this point – different brand managers, different legal team, different executive team,” said Collins. “And with new people come new opinions … and this time around, the pro-OGL side was in the minority.”

He still believed in the benefits of an open system, but he was fighting a losing battle. “I remember arguing pretty hard to retain something like what Wizards had done for 3rd edition; an open license that included the core rules and a few basic guidelines on how to use it. I argued that without some kind of OGL, Wizards risked leaving behind the body of customers and potential customers who saw the open license as an assumed part of the D&D experience,” Collins said.

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The other side of Wizards is the cash cow of Magic: The Gathering, and it’s hard for Mearls not to want to emulate the profitability of that game. Magic has seen a boost in popularity from the success of the Xbox Live game Duels of the Planeswalkers. A large percentage of players will get hooked on the digital game and then be inclined to purchase a booster deck of cards – or twenty. “One of the big questions facing the medium now is what is the Duels of the Planeswalkers for D&D?” said Mearls.

The problem with developing such a game was, until this year, Atari held an exclusive license to produce all digital representations of D&D, and Atari had no interest in making games other than what was already in the pipeline. As of August 2011, the two parties have settled that dispute, and D&D is now free to either develop games itself, or hire other videogame developers to make the game WotC hopes will be as successful as Duels is for Magic.