The Sources
It’s pretty easy to see that D&D, and roleplaying games in general, where more successful at one point. There isn’t a D&D TV show on the air now, for a start. D&D isn’t as much a part of pop culture. It’s regarded as retro, a throwback.
There are probably many reasons why that is. The audience has changed, competition from other media has evolved, the internet has allowed the fracturing of pop culture in general. But I wonder if one of the main reasons isn’t that D&D has ceased to be a product of pop culture and started being a product of itself.
For those first early editions the primary sources for what D&D was to be came from other media around it. Wizards had memorized spells at least in part because Jack Vance wrote the Dying Earth books. (Of course the flow of ideas isn’t 100% clear: was Vance an inspiration or a justification?) Paladins were heavily inspired by Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions. The Cleric couldn’t draw blood because of the (possibly apocryphal) dictum governing priests in the Crusades.
This list can go on and on, a project for another time. The point is: D&D was this evolving thing that reflected the world around it. The key unchanging aspect was adventurers going on adventures, the rest was dredged from the sledgepool of pop culture and crafted into clear archetypes.
Over time that’s changed. Now D&D is based on D&D. If you look at the sources for 4th edition you’d probably find 3.5 at the top of the heap. The obvious source for 3.5 was 3rd, and for 3rd it was 2nd, and so on. It’s D&D all the way down.
This makes D&D an insular thing. Clerics are clerics because they’re clerics. The definition of Cleric is passed down from edition to edition, no longer evolving to reflect the culture around it. It’s a daunting task to new players.
Of course even the early sets, Moldvay and the like, didn’t wear these influences on their sleeves. There’s no reference to Vance when explaining how spells work. But it’s still there, all the same, and I would guess that many early readers would pick up on that. They had at least a passing familiarity with Vance, so this wasn’t a crazy left-field idea.
So I’m left to wonder if D&D, or roleplaying games in general, wouldn’t be better served by coming back into conversation with the greater pop culture. Some smart indie game authors are already doing this, like Vincent Baker (Apocalypse World), Jason Morningstar and Steve Segedy (Fiasco). Those games play off pop culture, things ‘everyone’ already knows, to make the game more approachable and less of an odd outlier in the media landscape. The base archetypes for AW are heavily based on Firefly and some of the name lists reference other media. Fiasco plays on the types of movies you already know, sometimes directly citing influences like the Cohen Brothers.
Maybe the cleric would benefit from reflecting Shepard Book. Maybe the wizard could learn something from Harry Potter. It’s not that they have to imitate those works of media, but the popular concept of a wizard has shifted. The ur-wizard of D&D was crafted from the cultural landscape of its time, why shouldn’t the current wizard reflect its place as well?
The D&D Next design crew have talked about the pillars of D&D: exploration, combat, and roleplaying.1 1. I take slight issues with “roleplaying” being a pillar, as that’s something that happens throughout all aspects of the game. I think of that last pillar as interaction, or maybe more specifically social interaction. Those are the things that need to stay the same to make it D&D. One of the often cited causes for 4E’s failure (I’m not sure this was a cause or that 4E was a failure) is that it changed too much, but that’s not quite the change I’m talking about. A lot of people hated the 4E move to fighters with powers per encounter/day, which is nothing like making the fighter reflect the pop culture. It’s not that the concept of the fighter changed, it’s that the mechanics of the fighter changed. Hopefully people would put up with an evolution of the concept. Keep those pillars, but make D&D a part of the dialogue of pop culture again.
Wouldn’t contemporary video games be good candidates for source material, especially for 4e? The 4e art, and conceivably a lot of 3e, seems very heavily influenced by WoW and other MMORPGs. Even the “roles” as defined in 4e speak to video game design.
Sure, that’s a possibility, but I think it sets up an unfavorable comparison: “Isn’t this just WoW, but with a lot more work?”
The trouble with videogames as a source is that I think it frames RPGs the wrong way. Unless the GM has really good tools, the GM’s content isn’t going to be as refined as a game’s, since the game had dozens of people ensuring each encounter is well thought-out. A tabletop game is to leverage the differentiator (the GM) to really stand out, and I don’t think enough games really do that.
There’s also the issue that so many MMOs are in turn based back on D&D anyway. Expanding the cultural exchange means going beyond the D&D family tree.