I have been working on a setting for a future campaign for a few months now. It’s perhaps not that far outside of existing conceits, but it’s still different; enough so that I’ve been puzzling about what and how much information to give my players. Luckily I have a few touchstones; the idea that got me writing was a Dying Earth setting, but one that was kind of an unholy mashup of Electric Bastionland and Mutant Crawl Classics, with Caves of Qud providing additional inspiration. Having those four references, two TTRPGs, one video game, and a fantasy subgenre typified by Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, means that when it comes time to pitch my group I will have things to point to, and ideas about what sort of characters to play and story to create. While every setting is going to have its own difficulty level, there’s almost always going to be something that you can point to; after all, where did your ideas come from?

There is something larger going on, though. The hobby is strongly focused on fantasy, but more specifically a certain fantasy lens which has been ground into shape by Dungeons and Dragons itself over the last fifty years. Other games exist, but a large swathe of them orbit around D&D. Other genres exist, but with precious few exceptions they simply don’t get to be included in the mass market conversation that happens in Actual Play streaming and D&D Youtube. The broader hobby, especially second order products like Actual Play and other tie-ins (both media and not), does not seem to know what to do with games and stories other than the D&D monomyth.

Within a gaming group

D&D treats the progression of a campaign in a specific way, and frankly it doesn’t align with how people play the game. That said, the contrast between the implied campaign of D&D (levels 1-20) and what people actually do is a strong indicator of revealed preferences. Using those revealed preferences, you can make sure that you’re able to frame a new setting or new campaign idea in a way that will feel appealing to those who are more used to the typical fantasy arc. A lot of settings and campaign types can fit this campaign arc, but regardless of specific setting it is still arguably aligned with a D&D monomyth, even if the game and setting aren’t themselves D&D. We’ll come back to that.

Every gaming table is different. That said, there are some data points which do point towards tendencies of how home games are organized. D&D Beyond has released aggregate data at a few points in the past, usually indicating that people like playing humans and like playing fighters, among other factoids. Back in 2019, though, D&D Beyond released level data, which while not presented cumulatively, ended up pointing to the fact that well over 90% of characters made on the service were level ten or below. The modal level in this data is level 3, though looking at the graph in the link it’s clearer that there’s a broader maximum in the level 3-5 range. This perfectly aligns with anecdotes I’ve heard over the years that for most modern D&D low-mid level play is both what most groups actually do and, for at least a chunk of those groups, is considered ideal. There are even rules variants intended to keep players around that first ‘power level quartile’ (to butcher an idea from Ryan Dancey), like Justin Alexander’s E6.

The reason this is important is that we aren’t critiquing how D&D does advancement or how D&D does power creep, we’re looking at how players actually use those tools. If our determination is that most D&D campaigns will cover between 5-10 levels, we’re making a very different comparison than if the baseline is that most groups go through all 20.

Each level in D&D represents a notable change in how you play the character, especially at these lower levels. If you look at the advancement tables for each main D&D class, the only classes that don’t get at least one distinct class ability each level for the first eight are spellcasters (who are getting bundles of new powers in the form of spells). It is not a coincidence that popular PbtA games are tuned to provide between six and eight advances before a major character transition (switch to a new playbook, retire the character, etc). It’s also a sort of pacing that is widely observed across the trad world: Half a dozen or so character changes that culminate in the resolution of a major conflict. Going longer is usually stringing those nodes together, and several D&D editions have codified this with character tiers (4e being the most clear about it). This works for a lot of genres, and the fact that many, many RPG campaigns across genres are reskinned versions of this power-escalation monomyth is one of the reasons RPGs are often in conflict with other works in their respective genre (I’m thinking mostly about cyberpunk here, but it’s equally valid for horror, post-apocalypse, and supers). That said, there’s nothing wrong with the “heroic” games in these genres, even if they’re non-representative of the other works of that genre.

It should go without saying that I haven’t spent all that much time on what one traditionally considers “setting” elements, or even much about genre. Honestly that’s never the hardest part of the pitch. As maddening as it is, the fact that we hear so much about GMs and designers converting properties and genres into 5e tells me that there’s no broad difficulty with getting most groups to actually change genres and settings. Once you move past a rigid definition of what “playing D&D” means, I think most gamers are pretty flexible about the set and setting going on behind their plot archetype. That plot archetype, though, is a big blocker to actually using roleplaying games for exploring more settings, more genres, and (perhaps most obviously) more story structures. And that means truly exploring other settings and genres implies playing games other than D&D. You can start with baby steps. Cyberpunk and Traveller introduce very different relationships between characters and advancement than D&D does, with Traveller somewhat deemphasizing advancement and Cyberpunk both taking those big ‘level” chunks away but also making every improvement point spend a difficult decision (characters must opt not to invest in high-utility skill upgrades if they want to be able to afford to advance their character role ability). Even though both of these games are quite trad, quite mainstream, they immediately change a character’s story arc with regards to their own abilities and progression. They also pose different challenges to GMs because players aren’t expected to ‘unlock’ new abilities which change the way that their characters are able to solve problems.

And this gets to the most important pitch that you can make at your table: Sure, your players want to understand the setting and what their characters are going to look like, but they really want to understand what’s going to happen to them and how they’re going to change. D&D has a familiar fantasy setting, yes, but it also has a ruleset that makes and delivers on the promise that if you engage with the game in the way the game is asking (the “three pillars” but honestly mostly combat), your character will grow in capability, versatility, and renown. If in your setting that growth isn’t assured, that must be clear. If the mode of engagement is in any way different, that must be clear. And while you can’t make someone want to play your game, campaign, or setting, if you’re clear about what the game is about you’ll generally get more buy-in.

To the hobby at large

I think resistance of many players to try different things can somewhat be blamed on the hobby at large; mass market roleplaying orbits around a single set of genre and story conventions in a way that you simply don’t see in other media. It can come close: video games are incredibly top heavy with big action RPGs and first-person shooters, but at the very least a top-sellers chart can include both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Cyberpunk 2077 and even have their sales in the same rough magnitude of each other. D&D in contrast outsells everyone, but when you add the adjacent games that are variations on a theme (Pathfinder, Daggerheart, Shadowdark, Draw Steel, a hundred others) then the genre dynamics are even more top-heavy, and significantly more so than video games or movies.

We may see the same issues with story structure, though. While other forms of media are more diversified than roleplaying games, they also reveal the inherent weakness of trying to pitch a new story archetype. In film the top-sellers list from this decade is starting to resemble RPGs, with every one of the top 15 grossing movies either a kids movie or a heroic action movie of some flavor (the flavors are Avatar, Marvel, and Mario). The one interesting exception is Barbie, but it was part of a truly strange cultural moment that may not be exactly repeatable. The point, though, is that movies seem to illustrate the same clustering that RPGs do, with the strong difference in time commitment making RPGs that much more concentrated.

Weirdly, I think the two media are seeing similar trends because they’re both contending with small audiences. These aren’t small audiences at the same magnitude or for the same reason, mind you. Tabletop RPGs, though they’re more popular than ever, have a natural limit built into their adoption. Playing a tabletop RPG (especially a trad RPG like D&D) requires a notable time investment both to learn and to play a game, and many would-be gamers leave the hobby due to scheduling or not being able to commit enough free time to learn the rules and then find a group. This has been true forever, and the continual growth of low-commitment media puts more and more pressure on this high-commitment, unapologetically analog hobby. For movies we’re dealing with a completely different set of phenomena. The movie theater is, if not dying, undergoing a demographic transition where the role it plays as a shared space is changing. Streaming hobbled cinemas, COVID could have killed them, and multiple mass shootings at cinemas in the 2010s didn’t exactly encourage would-be moviegoers either. Massive home-theater TVs are cheaper than ever, movie tickets are more expensive than ever, and if a movie is going to see theatrical release, it needs to come with a built-in reason to see it in the cinema instead of at home. So, every major theatrical release it seems must be a) full of enough spectacle to really sell the IMAX screens and Dolby sound cannons, and b) aiming for the bestselling movie of the year to ensure it’s profitable.

Similar to movies, most RPGs with high production budgets need to attract a large core audience to be sustainable. The largest core audience is in the orbit of D&D, so a large majority of mainstream trad games are D&D-adjacent. If we’re saying we want the hobby at large to open up to new storytelling experiences, it’s likely not going to be a new game that does it (at least not on its own). What we need is to leverage a different game, a non-fantasy game, into the cultural conversation. I’ve said it before, but I honestly think the game that has come closest was Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk 2077 sold incredibly well, with its 35 million sales being somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times the estimated historical sales of the D&D 5e Player’s Handbook. Then came Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which has been renewed for a second season. There’s clearly an appetite for exploring the setting further, which made Talsorian’s choice to set Cyberpunk Red in an intermediate era between Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk 2077 a curious one to say the least. Now, the 2077 rulebook is coming down the pike, and successfully pulling off the linkage back to the game at a robust level would shift Cyberpunk from ‘a very successful non-D&D RPG’ to ‘one of the RPGs’. It is certainly possible I’m being too optimistic; transmedia tie-ins haven’t necessarily shaken the RPG world before, though it’s rare that we have a tie-in do so disproportionately well compared to the RPG it’s based off of.

The other open question is if an Actual Play, a really popular and well-established one, could do the work of ‘pitching’ a new mode of gameplay. I think the short answer is yes, an AP could do this, but whether they would and whether it would be successful are two additional questions we need to ask. There’s nowhere better to look for the inherent anxiety around audience in Actual Play than Critical Role right now. Through Darrington Press, Critical Role literally made Daggerheart. It’s their game and they even self-financed it, not relying on Crowdfunding to release their beta or the finished book. Despite that, they’re soft-walking the rollout of Daggerheart in their shows. I’m not saying it’s a bad choice, merely that it reflects the roiling cauldron of toxicity that mainstream APs could boil over if they tread more firmly into systems other than D&D.

Beyond that, there’s the real question that exists as much on the Actual Play side as it does on the home table side: Do viewers of shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20 want to watch a story that departs from the trad RPG monomyth? I am willing to boil down the D&D/Daggerheart divide to intransigence because, barring some mechanical nuance, they’re basically the same game. If Critical Role switches to Daggerheart it may change how some of their stories play out but it will not fundamentally alter how the team preps and runs their games. A Cyberpunk AP would look and feel a lot different. As I’m thinking about it, a Cyberpunk AP could be truly great because Cyberpunk is well-positioned to subvert rather than ignore a lot of the heroic character tropes that D&D is built on. But the fact that I’d enjoy it doesn’t answer the underlying question: Would it be successful, the sort of overwhelming success of a Critical Role or a Dimension 20 that would actually move the cultural needle in RPG spaces? I don’t know. That said, if either J Gray or Rob Barefoot at Talsorian happen to read this, consider: working with an AP crew, a very good AP crew, to help hype the release of a 2077 or Edgerunners sourcebook could be a game changer…even if it doesn’t get to ‘change the culture’ levels.

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I wouldn’t call myself “pleased” that media consolidation has come for so many of us, but it does blunt some of my consternation about the dominance of D&D and all the other dungeon games. There is something to be said about alignment to a broad, popular story archetype; while I am invoking Joseph Campbell by using the term ‘monomyth’, D&D is really only aligning to the Hero’s Journey close enough to provide structure and momentum to its mechanics. Even so, the play that D&D creates is able to tickle a broadly appealing power fantasy, whether you’re playing the game yourself, watching Actual Play, or engaging with tie-ins like video games. Exploring other story structures while maintaining that interest and momentum is challenging, though games have certainly succeeded in the past. At your home table, those successes of the past (and indies of the present) give you access to all sorts of stories that D&D couldn’t possibly tell; all you need to do is be clear with your players about what your campaign is going to look like. In the hobby at large, the stakes are higher. There are more games now than ever, but the sort of cultural shift that is truly going to make this hobby be about more than dungeons at a mass market level will have to be a huge one, and one that can’t be forced. The fantasy monomyth is going to be even harder to topple than the Hasbro monopoly; that’s why we need to speak clearly and loudly about all the other stories we want to tell.

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