Dungeons & Dragons Looks Back on Past While Preparing for Future

As Wizards of the Coast celebrates the first 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons, it also looks to build the game and ensure the storied tabletop RPG continues for another 50 years. Earlier this year, Dungeons & Dragons celebrated its 50th anniversary, marking the formal day when the first version of the oldest tabletop RPG was first sold. The game has changed hands several times and experienced several sweeping edition changes, but it has endured not only as a game but as a brand synonymous with "deep nerd" culture.

However, like any game or institution that has endured for a half-century, the game and its stewards has also faced significant challenges. Just last year, Wizards of the Coast faced a potentially fanbase-breaking controversy when it attempted to make changes to the Open Gaming License (or OGL for short), a 20-year-old legal framework that allowed for other publishers and content creators to make their own material using Dungeons & Dragons rules. Other controversies involving the use of AI (which both the D&D design team and Wizards of the Coast have publicly spoken out against), and more recently, layoffs have kept a dark cloud hanging over Dungeons & Dragons during what should have been a celebratory year. 

Sitting down with D&D game architect Chris Perkins and D&D senior designer Justice Arman at Gary Con, a convention named after D&D's co-founder and held just minutes away from the house where the first draft of Dungeons & Dragons was written, my first question was what the D&D team and brand had learned from the controversy surrounding the OGL and if it had recovered.

"I think that there was certainly the hiccup in 2023, but I think it ended well, and I think that the fans are ready to move on," Perkins said, referencing Wizards' move to place the System Reference Document for the game's current ruleset under a Creative Commons license, thus enshrining it for public use in perpetuity. 

"And we have a very exciting year. It's all about the celebration of the game, and the game has been what has united us all for the past 50 years and helped us build the friendships that have lasted lifetimes." 

Perkins pointed to two new products releasing in the coming months, Vecna: Eve of Ruin and Quests From the Infinite Staircase, both of which are steeped in the history of D&D.

"This year's array of products are really designed to show how much we care and respond to D&D's past and present, as well as its future," Perkins said. "The Vecna: Eve of Ruin product is very much a celebration of the whole D&D multiverse and all the characters in it, and it's just a romp to all these places that people love – Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, Krynn, Greyhawk. And Quests from the Infinite Staircase is this love letter to a set of past adventures that have never gone out of style. People still play them today."

Perkins also noted that the re-release of the adventures in updated form also helped continue one of D&D's strongest elements, keeping them as shared experiences and teaching new players who haven't experienced these adventures about some of the lore and elements that have been foundational to D&D over the years. 

Another major part of D&D's plans for 2024 is the release of Revised Core Rulebooks which updates the current 5th Edition rules instead of switching over to a new edition. The rulebooks follow a two-year open playtest process and months of scrutiny by both designers and fans. Perkins has high hopes for the new Core Rulebooks and believes that they will usher in the future of the game.

"We hope that the fans, when they see the books, will go, 'Oh, these are the best D&D books I've ever seen. These are the best D&D books Wizards has ever produced, and they will carry us into the next 10 or 20 years of gaming going forward,'" Perkins said.

Perkins also acknowledged a strong truth about Dungeons & Dragons, the passion that surrounds the game and the wider brand.

"To circle around and close off this point, our fans love our game, and we want to be good stewards of that game, so we're trying," Perkins said, referencing his earlier comments about the OGL.

D&D: The 8,000 Pound Gorilla in the Tabletop Space

Dungeons & Dragons is the first tabletop RPG and easily its biggest, but the tabletop RPG space has grown steadily over the last 50 years. No game has ever consistently topped D&D for any length of time, but even in 2024, there are plenty of innovative games that are looking to exist in the same space as Dungeons & Dragons. With games like Daggerheart and the unnamed MCDM RPG both on the horizon (both of which were created by companies that originally made their name off of D&D 5E), I asked how Dungeons & Dragons stands out among its peers and if it does need to stand out as, in Chris Perkins' words, the "the 8,000 pound gorilla" in the tabletop RPG. 

Arman, who joined Wizards of the Coast a few years ago after several years as an amateur designer, pointed to the 2023 Dungeons & Dragons movie as really capturing the unique spirit of the game.

"As we celebrate D&D's history, we can embrace all the things that are truly D&D," Arman said. "We've talked before about the idea of this legacy that we carry forward as stewards, and I think that we have D&D movie this year, and so much of that movie was recognizable to fans who had played the game. We can see the Bard's performance check and the illusion going wrong, and so many of those movie moments spoke to moments in our game and, I think, are unique to D&D." 

Arman also noted that the upcoming rules update provided a new opportunity to further showcase the unique spirit of D&D.

"As we go through this rules update, we can continue to showcase the parts of D&D that make it what it truly is," Arman said. 

However, neither Perkins nor Arman believed that other tabletop RPGs were a detriment to Dungeons & Dragons, and noted that other games presented more opportunities for play and different kinds of storytelling. Perkins said that Wizards wanted to support the tabletop RPG industry, and pointed to the recent additions of third-party content to D&D Beyond as an example of that.

"People are always going to want to explore other types of gaming, and everybody's got their own tastes, and D&D can't appeal to all tastes of course, nor would we even try," Perkins said. "But we can be good partners and reach out to some of these other studios and bring their content into our tools. So in [D&D Beyond], you can actually access content from Ghostfire Games, from Kobold Press, from Critical Role, and a number of other partners because there is great value in showing that we are all gamers. We're all in this together. The industry can't survive without the variety that exists."

Why D&D's 50th Anniversary is a Thank You to Fans

Continuing with the discussion about the 50th anniversary, I asked the two designers what the goal was for the milestone year and how the 50th anniversary sets up the future of the game. "The goal with the 50th was just to say thank you," Perkins said. "Thank you, everybody, for keeping this game alive. Fifty years is a huge achievement for a role playing game, and it has meant so much to so many people." He noted that the 2024 releases were set up specifically with celebrating the past, present, and future of the game, with some products focusing on the game's rich history (including Quests From the Infinite Staircase and a history book detailing the origins of the D&D), while the Revised Core Rulebooks set up the future of the game and ensured continued accessibility. 

However, while Dungeons & Dragons has a rich history of products, that history is also filled with out-of-touch material, missteps, and things considered offensive by many to the modern day. So I asked how Wizards decided what to pull forward and celebrate and what to leave behind, especially in their role as stewards of the game. "We're lucky to have a robust inclusion review process that helps us," Arman said. "We're not making some of these decisions alone. We have outside consultants that we work with to make sure that anything that would be sensitive with our fans, that we approach it with care and thoughtfully when looking at what things to pull." 

Arman noted that for Quests From the Infinite Staircase (a product that he served as lead designer of), it served as an opportunity to showcase older adventures and give newer fans a chance to see them shine.

"For Quests, we took some of the most exciting adventures and the hope is that these are things that not only fans who recognize or remember the original material can celebrate them, but that these can be opportunities too for new fans of D&D, or ones who have never played these, to truly recognize what makes them special and to keep the fire of these adventures alive essentially, going forward," Arman said. 

Perkins also noted that one key to D&D's continued growth and longevity was learning from the past. "I think a misstep is a learning opportunity," Perkins said. "And I don't fear them, and I don't shun them. I don't like making missteps. But when they happen, the important thing is that you learn from them, and you improve and you grow and that people can see that growth and improvement. And yeah, there are certainly moments in D&D's past, and sometimes not too distant past, where it's like, 'Ugh, we did not hit that one out of the park. We did not land that one properly.' But we can always go back and analyze it, do our postmortems, get people on board to help us make sure we don't make those mistakes in the future."

When asked about their favorite part of the current 5E era, neither Perkins nor Arman pointed to a specific product, but rather the community that has built up around the game.

"For me, it's been going to conventions, sometimes performing at conventions, and just seeing the excitement around the game and looking at the players and seeing that it is truly mainstream now," Perkins said. "There's very few barriers left in the game for people to come in and feel like this is a game where they feel like they belong, that they can make friends, that they can have a really good time. And I've loved watching the audience grow and change, and I love the fact that we've got processes now where we can talk to them directly through [Unearthed Arcana] articles, through meeting them face to face. It shows. That's the part that interests me the most, is hearing the stories of their adventures, hearing the stories of their characters. That's the juice that keeps me going.

"I was still working in healthcare not that many years ago, and Fifth Edition stands out to me as, and maybe it's my personal experience, but the liveliness of the community, the excitement and creation that was always buzzing," Arman added."I remember those early days on Twitter, where the next release would be announced...we'd start to speculate on it. And friends on the DMs Guild, we try to anticipate something, come up with our own ideas, and bounce off of what Wizards was doing." 

Arman and Perkins both noted the opportunity to continue growing the world of Dungeons & Dragons as well, with Perkins pointed to the mysterious obelisks that were seeded in various adventures for years before paying off in last year's Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk adventure and Arman noting that the recently released Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel book continued to receive references in the Planescape campaign setting book later that year.

"Over time, you strengthen these bonds between adventures, products, stories," Arman said. "And 10 years from now when D&D is celebrating its 60th anniversary, somebody looks back and says, 'Radiant Citadel is so important to me. I've loved seeing it on all these books. It's my favorite place.' And that's the thing that made an impact on them. And there are many things in D&D, in this edition, that made an impact on me that I think fondly on."

Dungeons & Dragons and Actual Play

Critical to Dungeons & Dragons' recent growth is the rise of Actual Play series and performances, which has served as a way to showcase how D&D (and other tabletop RPGs) are played. During a tour of Lake Geneva that took place during Gary Con, D&D historian and writer Mike Witwer mentioned that Actual Plays "cracked the code" for making D&D accessible that generations of designers and game publishers had failed to do for decade. With that in mind, I asked whether the upcoming Revised Core Rulebooks were written with Actual Play in mind and if the game's rules had shifted because of the prevalence of the relatively recent art form. While the rules themselves weren't changed to focus on performance, Perkins said that the advice in rulebooks were presented with a focus on how the game is really played, including online play and Actual Play.

"One of the folks that we brought on as a consultant on the [Dungeon Master's Guide], Matthew Mercer, you may have heard of him, is a very gifted DM who has run campaigns for years on Critical Role, Perkins said." And part of inviting him to participate in this process was to see what experiences he's had running that game live that would be worth including so that DMs who are trying to do the same thing can do so more successfully."

To wrap up our conversation on Dungeons & Dragons, I asked a more general question, one focused on the imbalance between the average player and their Dungeon Master. It's often said that a Dungeon Master has one hour of preparation for every hour they plan to run a game, and I asked both Perkins and Arman about how to prevent "burnout" as a DM. "My players actually help me prevent DM burnout because they're always feeding me fuel during the game," Perkins said. "So there's often a point, maybe it's halfway through or three quarters of the way through, where they'll get into an argument about something, or they'll muse about something, and I'm like, 'Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.' And I'm taking secret notes off to the side and already plotting the next three or four adventures, based on them just riffing off each other. So they're the ones who keep me going. And I think that if you have a really good group, and there's a real alchemy there, that is a perpetual energy machine." 

Perkins said he couldn't remember the last time he suffered DM burnout, but he provided a few tips for how to improve as a DM. "One of the things I often tell DMs, there's often great power in just listening, that some of the best DMs I know just are very good listeners, and they take good notes, and they let the players tire themselves out," Perkins said. "And the other thing I've learned, doing things like Acquisitions Inc (a popular Actual Play series), is not to over prepare, that a DM can burn out on preparation, and they can feel burned out later if the stuff they're preparing isn't getting used."

"For me, I think of DMs a lot of the time like a magician," Arman added. "You keep some things behind the curtain. I use a DM screen. Not every DM does, but I live for the reveal, the foreshadow, the little hints that you build up 10 sessions, and then just living for the look on the players' faces. But I think sometimes it's healthy for DMs who have a lot of creative weight, and I think a lot of the time the things that cause DM burnout are life burnout, and DM-ing becomes another responsibility that they have on their plate, that they treat it very highly. And I think it's healthy to remember that as wonderful and amazing as D&D is, it is a game, and the stakes for a game are what you make of them." 

Arman ended the interview by pointing out the true goal of Dungeons & Dragons, a core ethos that needs to be at the forefront of every DM's mind.

"At the end of the day your goal is just make sure your players have a good time," Arman said of the beating heart of Dungeons & Dragons, the players who actually run the game for their friends. "I think every DM can do that every week."

Arman's comments really captured the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons, which is the importance of having fun at the table. D&D's game engine is not the rules that define play but rather the imagination of the players sitting around the table. For fifty years, the makers of D&D has found success not by offering one kind of fantasy story or setting, but by being something that everyone can use for an experience that makes their friends laugh and shout and look fondly back on for years.

"Dungeons & Dragons is remarkably elastic," Perkins said earlier in our conversation. "And I think one of the secrets to its success is you can run the game that you want inside the rule set that D&D has offered."

That elasticity will need to continue for D&D to thrive as it enters its second half-century, finding a balance between providing rules and encouraging players to ignore them when needed, and by facilitating fun through shared storytelling and the occasional dice roll.