what other major news organization would run a story called "Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons?" It's a good article about the phenomenon of D&D in the 70's and 80's and the respective fates of its original creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, but it's strangely silent about the game's latter-day fortunes. Re-released by Wizards of the Coast as the "d20 System", Dungeons and Dragons has gone from its sleepy and doddering 90's to once again dominating the roleplaying market. The trick was to make the D&D rules open source, allowing players to tinker with the rules, design their own adventuring materials, and even sell the fruit of their labors under the d20 moniker, so long as they agreed to the terms of the "Open Game License".
The result has been a cottage industry of quality amateur publications that D&D hadn't enjoyed since the mid-80's, as well as a systematic expansion of the d20 System - which could be stripped of its fantasy elements into a more universal set of rules - into other genres of roleplaying games. Soon virtually every game already out there felt the need to offer a "d20 variant" so as not to miss out on the action, while new games didn't even bother writing their own rules systems and simply started with the d20 System.
While this is terribly good news for Dungeons and Dragons and the d20 System, is this "Microsoftification" of the RPG world a positive development overall? Sure, the existence of an open source rules base makes it much easier for would-be game designers to get their products out (rather than spending year after year in playtesting and rewrites), but the drawback of using someone else's system - no matter how bare-boned it may be - is that you are subscribing to that game creator's biases about how the universe operates.
While this is usually no big deal to the standard "Sword and Sorcery" fare that the d20 System was reengineered to facilitate, applying such a generic base to a more peculiar genre can undermine its look and feel. The best roleplaying games are ones whose rules are a direct reflection of the world the players are trying to inhabit. For example, Call of Cthulhu, based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and considered one of the best RPG's ever dares to stack the deck overwhelmingly against the players. Not only is physical combat designed to be deadly, but those characters that do survive their confrontations with the horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos often end up going mad for the efforts. The cosmic pessimism that permeates Lovecraft's short stories is built right into Call of Cthulhu, but is somehow lost in translation to its more heroic d20 version.
All of the above having been said, I'm happy nonetheless that my childhood obsession is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. In this age of massively multiplayer online hack-'n-slash games masquerading as roleplaying, it's nice to see that there's still a market for the genuine article, where all of the action goes on in one's imagination, settled by the occasional roll of the dice.
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