Ampersand Anniversary

Does the 50th Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons actually mean anything?

It was 50 years ago this past weekend that the original version of Dungeons & Dragons, the White Box with the three booklets, was released. In that time, D&D has grown from a small, independently produced wargaming supplement to a multinational pop culture monolith. So large is the shadow of D&D that I use the name interchangeably with “RPG” and “Roleplaying Game” when describing my interests to people who are outside of the gaming world. My gamer friends know that I primarily play Castles & Crusades and ACKS, but the people in my church group believe that I play D&D. Brand ubiquity is certainly an achievement, but whose achievement is it? To raise a point of comparison, the company that I work for in my day job just celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Our company’s founder has remained with the company through the present day and is still our semi-retired Chief Executive Officer. 50 years of continuous growth and business is certainly an accomplishment for him and all the people who have helped him reach that milestone. D&D does not share that same chain of ownership though. D&D is an intellectual property that has been through multiple owners’ hands. Today it bears little resemblance to what it was in the beginning. Today we’re going to unpack what exactly is being celebrated to see if there’s actually an accomplishment to celebrate here or if D&D 50 is just a marketing gimmick.

What do we celebrate when we celebrate an anniversary? We celebrate significant happenings and reflect upon the impact that a particular event has on our modern world. We also celebrate the success or longevity of a union, company or organization. In those cases, an anniversary is cause for reflection on successes and failures and how they led a company, a couple, a band, etc to where they are today. Rush, one of my favorite bands of all time, celebrated the anniversary of their founding all the way up to 40 years. This celebration was significant because the band never broke up and consistently released music throughout the majority of that time. By contrast, the anniversary of Van Halen is not celebrated the same way that Rush’s was celebrated because the band was inconsistent in its lineup, had long periods of inactivity and is no longer a cohesive entity. Likewise, Rush fans won’t be celebrating R50 this year because Rush no longer exists. Yes, it’s been 50 years since their first album but the anniversary doesn’t carry the same weight as its 30th and 40th anniversaries did primarily because R30 and R40 were celebrated by a unit that never broke up and included full-fledged tours by the band themselves. On the eve of Rush’s 50th anniversary, John Rutsey, the drummer who played on the album, is deceased as is the longest-tenured drummer Neil Peart. Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee have gone their separate ways professionally so the anniversary of Rush’s first album is no longer a celebration of longevity as it was for 40 years after it was released.

I say all of this to make the point that D&D’s 50th anniversary is not a celebration of longevity, even if its current owners and fanbase believe it to be one. This anniversary should be more of a reflection on the impact of D&D, but its overlords insist on parading around its increasingly shriveled corpse Weekend at Bernie’s style insisting that Dungeons & Dragons is still alive and kicking. To offer a counter-example, R Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk just celebrated its 35th anniversary last year. Cyberpunk has matured into a venerable franchise with several iterations of the RPG, an animated series, and a major video game under its belt. However, the IP has remained in the hands of R. Talsorian and its creator Mike Pondsmith throughout this period. There has been a continuity of control over this IP which has grown and will continue to grow. The changes made to it have been iterative and show a maturation process. Once can look at Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk Red and see how these are the same game with iterative changes. This is not the case with D&D.

The continuity with D&D’s creation was broken sometime around 1997 when TSR was swallowed up by gaming giant Wizards of the Coast. Without getting into the minutiae of rules changes which are irrelevant to the topic at hand, the chain that led back to Gary Gygax was broken with the development of 3rd Edition. Before 3E, every edition of the game was iterative, much like the Cyberpunk example. From the White Box through AD&D 1st Edition, iterations were made by Gygax himself with the help of other designers. Basic D&D was a stripped down version of Gygax’s rules by John Eric Holmes and then later by Tom Moldvay, Zeb Cook and Frank Mentzer. Even after Gygax was removed from the creative process, the next iterations of AD&D 2nd Edition and Rules Cyclopedia still resembled Gygax’s game in meaningful ways. The rules were largely compatible with each other and the things that required converting were relatively simple. When TSR collapsed though, the game became something entirely different. There have been a lot of arguments over whether or not you can count certain editions as real D&D with people like Jeffro Johnson saying the game was illegitimate as early as 1980. While I can’t quite agree with Jeffro on that, I do believe that everything post 2000 is D&D in name only.

WotC and now Hasbro get to claim the legitimacy of D&D through ownership of the name and IP associated with it. This leads to my problem not just with D&D’s anniversary but with the continual parading around of old intellectual properties. In the time since the White Box’s original release, we’ve seen the media landscape change drastically. Creatives in Gygax’s day aspired to create their own kingdoms, creatively combining IPs that captured their imaginations to create the next great film, comic book, TV show, novel, etc. Studios sought to recreate successes as they always had, but they didn’t demand that creatives endlessly resurrect the same characters and worlds. We live in a creative landscape dominated by IP now though, and many so-called creatives merely want to play in someone else’s sandbox. Our pop culture is stagnant right now with Baby Boomer and Gen X nostalgia being endlessly trotted out over and over again with only Millennial Nostalgia to look forward to as my generation enters its period of economic viability. We’re making copies of copies and puppeting skeletons of our childhood instead of creating new, vibrant projects that we can claim as our own. In roleplaying, this means that the dominant market force is a charlatan wearing the face of a long-deceased friend and a bunch of pretenders constantly trying to remind you of how similar they are to that long-deceased friend. Instead of letting things pass into cultural memory and carrying our fondness for them into new innovations, we continue shocking the corpses of our beloved IPs back to life to watch them shamble around in a weak imitation of their old dance.

Dungeons & Dragons’ 50th anniversary is nothing more than an anniversary for a set of initials. It’s another excuse for a faceless corporation to dawn the face of something you love and desperately try to convince you that it’s still alive. It’s a performance from a low-rent Elvis impersonator who cannot let go of the delusion that he’s the real Elvis while a new, sleazier Colonel Tom Parker collects money from poor fools who want to remember the Elvis they loved or have bought into the lie that this is the same Elvis their parents and grandparents knew. This is the state of pop culture now as we desperately wait for something new and full of life to forever shatter the illusions, expose the pretenders and lead a new generation of creators to build something new. Do I think it can happen? Well, let me put it this way, that’s what I’m trying to do. Will I be successful? Who knows. I approach my creative process in the way that people like Bill Finger, George Lucas, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby approached their process. I take things that I loved from my youth, take them apart and try to line up pieces with each other to see what fits. I’m far from the first person to try to replicate their success and I may fail. I have my ambitions though and I would rather take my shot and fail than continue pretending that Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Dungeons & Dragons still got it. Nothing lasts forever. At some point, things will pass away. Instead of clinging to something old and familiar as it rots beneath us, let go, remember the joy and comfort it once brought you and let its memory inspire you to build something even better for tomorrow.