Celebrating 50 Years of Fantasy Burnout
This is a repost from the Story at the Table Substack.
Two topics, interwoven, because they’re the same thing in the end. First, my new series of articles, which is actually me serializing a future book on Substack, is called Nothing Left to Add. The premise is that Dungeons & Dragons has taken things as far down its developmental line as they can go. The potential of wargame-derived, combat-focused tabletop roleplaying has no space to innovate because it’s firmly locked into being what it is, and everything to say on the topic has already been said. You can come up with new spells and classes to murder things with, creatures to murder, and magic items to reward players for clever and strategic acts of murder, but that’s a closed loop. Well, okay, there are the same arguments to be had about alignment, and the worldbuilding techniques to help you design a setting to commit murder in that looks like 99% of other fantasy settings, but it’s still a finite set to work with.
No offense.
Second, I’m trying to write roleplaying material that avoids the same repetitive tropes. I’m not calling it fantasy. I’m just calling it roleplaying. There’s a whole upcoming article about how fiction doesn’t have to have a genre, it just has to be fiction, movies don’t need a genre label, they’re movies, but roleplaying has to fit into a big box labelled FANTASY or one of the three smaller boxes marked HORROR, SCIENCE FICTION, or SUPERHEROES. There are exceptions; only the Sith deal in absolutes, but hopefully my point is clear.
Right now, on my Patreon, I have scenarios that I’m using as canaries for the coal mine of the marketplace. You can roleplaying stories about being an artist under a fascist regime. There are ideas inspired by the Iranian Revolution and the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. A setting where crops are failing, because the land hates agribusiness. One where you play journalists trying to investigate corporate corruption and coverups. Things that are interesting and exciting and reflect a wider band of the media most of us consume through novels, television series, and film.
Some of those, based on feedback, will get expanded into actual settings and full-fledged games.
There’s nothing wrong with fantasy or other genres. But that stuff already exists, to the point of oversaturation, in the roleplaying world. I want to explore things that haven’t been flogged to death. Things that, maybe, could draw in new audiences who find the idea of creative collaboration and interactive storytelling, but for whom magic wands, spaceships, and vampires aren’t their thing.
I acknowledge that there’s an edge of contempt in my tone here; I’m burned out from writing this stuff for decades. I go to the forums and see new people relitigating the same things we were arguing about decades ago. All I can think of is Ron Edwards, back in 2005, talking about all of the games that were one degree away from D&D, because the only thing that changed was the writer’s pet peeve issue, as all of the other assumptions stayed in place.
There’s a lot of room for roleplaying to grow. I’m dead certain that I’m onto something, and I’m saying things that are worth listening to. Hopefully, as I build the body of work, other people will start to see it, too, and join me.
