How Nerds Have Ruined D&D
The Pathology of Tabletop RPGs Part 2
In my last piece, I laid out the two cultures of play which dominate Dungeons and Dragons, and, by extension, tabletop role-playing. I argued that the old-school revival playstyle was objectively superior to the modern style, for three big reasons:
The OSR emphasizes player choice and is therefore a better fit for the tabletop RPG medium
Modern D&D is quite rude as a social interaction
Old-school play imposes significantly less cognitive load on Dungeon Masters and is easier to run
Despite these disadvantages, for the last 40 years the modern style of D&D has firmly outcompeted the old school in the struggle for market share and control of the zeitgeist.
In this essay, I’m going to lay out a thumbnail sketch of the “nerd” personality type, the pathological type of person for whom modern RPG systems have been constructed. I’ll first give an overview of the type “in its own terms”, and then I’ll elaborate the myriad ways in which the type corrupts the structure of D&D, and how this interaction distorts the public perceptions of the TTRPG hobby.
But first, a note on terminology and what we’re actually “doing” here.
Personality Types and Epistemology
Explaining social phenomena is difficult, because human beings are too complicated to perform controlled experiments on. I write about this at length in my blogbook, and it’s the bedrock upon which all of my cultural commentary is constructed.
The standard means by which people go about explaining human behavior is to construct an argument about what other people are doing on the basis of their own intuitions and empathy, and then to furnish “evidence” that their theory is correct. They might, for instance, conduct a study in which they ask people a series of multiple-choice questions and compare their answers, or consult econometric or sales data relating to the subjects they’re attempting to understand.
This approach is problematic, because unlike in a true application of the scientific method— hypothesis, experimentation, and revision of hypothesis— it’s impossible to narrow human behavior down to a series of “fracture points” which experiments and data can definitively prove.
For instance, if you wanted to assess the relative quality of OSR and Modern D&D, how would you go about it?
You could have the same players play both systems, and rate their enjoyment of each. But tests like that could be skewed in any number of ways- the quality of the players they interacted with, their own familiarity with the systems, their natural aptitude for one or the other, the facility of the test’s organizers in explaining the games, the skill with which the rulebooks are written, the list is basically endless.
Even if you did manage, through the kind of statistical astrology that universities hold up as scientific, to control for all of these factors, you’d still be unable to control for the confounding variables latent in your sample of players— “Are the people liable to sign up for a D&D study also liable to be a certain type of person?”— and the epistemic errors in your construction of the question— “What does “relative quality” mean? Can it be accurately self-reported?”
In reality, most “scientific” approaches to questions of human behavior serve simply to launder an author’s intuitions by burying them under a pile of data that the average reader won’t care enough to litigate.
In my own cultural commentary, I strive to employ a method which sidesteps these issues. Rather than attempting to “prove” the existence of any of the phenomena I allege, I simply lay them out in as much mechanical detail as I feel equipped to. What I ask of you is not that you “believe” that these phenomena— in this article’s case, the existence of these specific nerds— are true, but rather that you accept them provisionally for the sake of fully understanding them. Once you understand them, you can measure them against your own experience going forward.
So as you continue reading, please keep this in mind— it’s not a question of whether I’ve proved what I’m saying; it’s a question of whether it makes sense. If you find that it does make sense, then if it becomes relevant to you in the future, you’ll naturally find yourself measuring it against the phenomena you encounter; that is to say, you’ll furnish the proof for yourself.
What a Nerd is
“Nerd” is a pretty loose term. Most people would call me a nerd— after all, I’m writing a series of esoteric blog posts about Dungeons and Dragons!
I’ve chosen the term “nerd” to get your attention, but the personality type I’m referring to with the term is significantly more specific, for all that it’s a common one. “Nerd”, for the purposes of this essay, is identical to “type 2n3o” in my Framework of Personalities; but you don’t need to read my book to understand what I’m talking about here.
In this part, I’ll lay out the nerd personality type across three sections: what causes people to develop the disposition, the pathological bargain which animates it, and the signs and symbols by which it can be recognized in another person.
The Cause of Nerdiness
Nerdiness is caused by the absence of external reward structures in adolescence, generally due to parental neglect. A person becomes a nerd if they are left too much to their own devices from the ages of ~10 to ~18, and are thereby inculcated with a pathological bargain which disposes them to aggregate social authority onto themselves and ignore the enforcement of social norms by others.
You may notice that the cause of nerdiness, in this schema, is far upstream of “outsider” status. This is important. The picture of nerdiness which we’ve received from pop culture is the nerd as he is perceived by conformists, who by dint of numerical majority control the entertainment industry. The conformist— the “normie”— is subjected to the opposite depredation of the nerd. They spent their adolescence under too much scrutiny, and, as a result, are obsessively bent on adhering to social norms. The highest good of the conformist is to fit in, and he empathetically assumes that the nerd shares this value. He sees the nerd as someone who tries and fails to fit in, and concocts the elaborate fantasy of spite, frustration, and low self-esteem which our media has incarnated into the archetype of the nerd.
In truth, nerds don’t care to fit in; in fact, they see standing out as a significant duty, to cover the spaces and investigate the opportunities neglected by the consensus. The resentment which the conformist perceives in the nerd is the product in part of this misapplication of the Golden Rule, and in part of the fact that true misfits, down-and-outers who couldn’t make it in normie society, are better accommodated by nerd culture than by normie culture. These latter types often exhibit significant antipathy towards the majority which has rejected them; but they’re guests in nerd spaces, not residents.
You should also note that nerdiness is purely adolescent in origin. It persists into adulthood, but it has no roots in childhood trauma. Childhood trauma doesn’t preclude one from developing the nerd pathology, but nerd culture is dominated by individuals without any significant childhood trauma.
On a more granular level, the causes of parental neglect are multifarious. Sometimes it’s the result of divorce, sometimes of illness, sometimes merely of inherited trauma. In America, at least, there is no extant ethnicity or culture producing nerds.
The Nerd’s Pathological Bargain
At the center of the nerd’s psyche is a pathological bargain. It’s a bargain between the conscious and subconscious mind which forms in order to fill the vacuum of authority left by neglectful parents, and which subsequently calcifies into a worldview and is buried beneath conscious awareness.
The nerd desires to belong to a network of support which will care for him as a matter of course. He fears being so unhelpful that he is abandoned by the groups to which he belongs. To pursue his desire while avoiding his fear, he feels a deep-seated duty to be devoted to the care of those around him. He hopes that by fulfilling his duty he can achieve the privilege of creating a community to which he can belong no matter what. However, he is constrained from asserting that right to belong by asking people to help him.
This formula— drawn from the universal formula for pathological bargains in my book— is sufficient to explain any facet of nerd culture, but, taken on its own, isn’t very illustrative. To flesh it out a little, I’ll provide you with an illustration of another archetype, one which results from identical conditioning to that of the nerd.
The homemaker is an extinct archetype which was the product of the collision of adolescent neglect with the firm gender-roles of the Industrialized West. The differences between the nerd and the homemaker are the result of this gendered nature, but the operation of the pathology is the same. Where the nerd applies his pathological bargain to a substrate composed of science fiction and fantasy, the homemaker applies hers to the traditional occupations and pursuits of the housewife.
The network of support to which the homemaker desires to belong is the nuclear family; she fears being neglectful— being a bad mother— which would lead her to be cast aside once her children grow old enough to move away. She forestalls this possibility by pursuing every opportunity to be devoted to her children— cooking elaborate meals, keeping the house conspicuously clean, and generally constructed a style of home life which is conducive towards displays of devotion. She hopes that by being a good housewife her family will stay close enough together to constitute a supportive community into her old age, but she can’t express these fears and needs to her children directly and, frequently, fails to receive the emotional and social support she desires once her children have left home.
As we explore the interaction of the nerd’s pathological bargain with Dungeons and Dragons in more detail, we’ll return to this metaphor of the homemaker to illustrate the extent to which recognizable neuroses lead to behaviors that undermine the game.
Signs and Symbols by Wich Ye Nerd Maye Bae Perfeiv’d
Pedantry
The nerd’s personality traits are greatly influenced by their pathological bargain. Most people operate on the typical mind fallacy, or if you’d rather, the Golden Rule, and the nerd is no different. His desire is to belong to networks of support— rather than networks of competition, like the “in-group” of the conformist— and he projects this desire onto everyone he interacts with. This gives him a conversational style which is intrusive, argumentative, and pedantic. He wants to litigate the positives and negatives of any given behavior or decision, because he sees his role as keeping an eye out for others and hopes that they do the same for him.
Distinguishing Nerdiness from Autism
The nerd affect is not necessarily autistic. Autism is highly comorbid with nerdiness, because the complexity of middle- and high-school conditioning causes many parents to throw up their hands in frustration and allow their autistic child to dictate their own affairs1. However, the two conditions are distinct, and there are plenty of non-autistic nerds and non-nerdy autistics.
You can distinguish autism from nerdiness by asking whether the flouting of social norms is self-conscious. This is another area where conformists have difficulty understanding true nerds; conformists can’t imagine genuinely not caring about social norms, and therefore find ignorance a comforting explanation for the nerd’s independence. But a nerd breaks rules because he feels that it is his responsibility to question the unquestioned, both to exploit unrecognized opportunities and to safeguard himself and his friends from unrecognized dangers.
Fashion
A pure nerd will dress unfashionably, because the esteem which dressing well yields him is next to worthless in achieving his social aims:
By contrast, a non-nerdy autistic will dress in what he thinks is a fashionable manner, but will fail to understand what the fashion actually is:
A nerdy autistic will dress in a deliberately unfashionable manner, and use his manner of dress as a means of communicating his independence from polite society:
Contrarianism
Nerd contrarianism is contained to a certain band of social complexity, something I refer to as a “sublimation layer”.
The details are complex, but the over-under is that a pure nerd will grill you about the types of decisions which play out on scales of dozens of people and over months— fashion choices, job choices, ethical expressions like veganism or religion— but less so over more personal issues like petty interpersonal dramas, questions of finance, or romantic situations.
Solicitude for Outcasts
Nerds are inclined to view social norms as a waste of time, and are therefore protective of those who try and fail to fit in elsewhere. More darkly, the fewer social options a person has, the easier it is to enmesh them in networks of unconditional mutual assistance.
Loyalty to Friends
The Geek Social Fallacies blog post, an Internet classic, addresses the exact same type of person I’m examining here, albeit through Michael Suileabhain-Wilson’s somewhat misanthropic lens2.
All five of the supposed fallacies hinge on the same underlying formation, the relationship of the nerd to his friends. Fallacies 1, 2, and 4 are the mis-reasoned product of the author’s own crotchety conformist pathology, but I’ll lay out my brief thoughts on each anyway, since it’s the most significant work of the tradition in which I am writing here.
Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil
The author, being a normie, locates the center of the nerd’s distaste for ostracism in their own supposed traumatic experiences living on the outside looking in. In truth, the core-nerds who make up the bulk of geek spaces never minded being in that position; they dislike ostracizers not because they view the behavior as triggering, but because the purpose of their social activities is always to create as large and durable a community as possible, even if it gets in the way of doing the actual activity the community is premised on. For instance, nerds won’t kick their smelly friend out of their MtG tournament, but will instead attempt to argue him into wearing deodorant.
The author is conflating peripheral nerd associates who do bear that sort of trauma with core nerds who do not. The difference can be sensed in that a gathering of traumatized nerd-associates sans nerds isn’t a nerd gathering— it’s probably some sort of anarchist, furry, or polyamorous meetup.
Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am
This is another case of the author conflating core-nerds and peripheral nerd-associates. Nerds are very deeply confrontational, and will harangue each other endlessly about flaws in their reasoning as a form of looking-out for one another. However, the kind of Mean Girls “nonacceptance” which the GSF author feels should be permissible interferes directly with the community formation nerds hold as their highest good, so petitions from sensitive losers on the periphery will always gain a lot of traction with the nerds at the core.
Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All
This is a very direct consequence of the nerd pathological bargain. The networks of support which nerds seek to create are worthless unless they’ve been tested, and nerds will find ways to test the security of their positions without ever actually asking people if they care about them. They do this by creating conflicts with outsiders and forcing members of their core group to pick sides, as is described in the post.
Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive
This mentality is a direct outgrowth of the nerd desire to create maximally large networks of support to which they can belong, but the normie-conformist author of the GSF post takes his objection to it way, way too far in the atomistic opposite direction.
GSF4 can also lead carriers to make inappropriate requests of people they barely know — asking a friend’s roommate’s ex if they can crash on their couch, asking a college acquaintance from eight years ago for a letter of recommendation at their workplace, and so on. If something is appropriate to ask of a friend, it’s appropriate to ask of a friend of a friend.— None of these are inappropriate to ask of a friend of a friend, and the world dominated by people like Michael Suileabhain-Wilson is a cold and lonely place.
Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together
Nerds do experience not being included as heartrending abandonment, as to be excluded because they are insufficiently devoted is their greatest fear. If they’ve been expressing their devotion through acts of service in the manner which nerds always do, then not being invited to something feels like a hideous invalidation of their efforts, a violation of their internal bargain which sends them into personal crisis.
How Nerdiness Interacts With Dungeons and Dragons
Each of the flaws of Modern D&D is either ameliorated or turned into a significant advantage when viewed through the constraints of nerd pathology. This is no surprise; nerdiness, as the combination of adolescent neglect with science fiction and fantasy, pre-dated D&D. D&D was drawn into the whirling gears of nerd culture as soon as it broke out of its wargame niche in the early 80s, and decades of refinement have molded it to the purposes of that culture.
This is an essential point. Durable, dramatic changes in the behavior of large groups of people have to be accounted for by similarly durable and dramatic factors. To describe the evolution of D&D from old school to modern in terms of mimesis or dialectic— “people got this idea and spread it, and it displaced that other idea”— stops analysis at the level of the “what” and never accounts for the “why”. Both the displacement of the old school by the new school and the failure of the OSR counterrevolution need to be accounted for in terms of some consistent cause. Given the objective superiority of the OSR, our explanation of the “why” needs to meet a few standards:
It needs to relate to a condition present from 1983 to at least the 2010s (when the OSR lost steam).
Therefore the Internet and anything related to it is right out, as are the various mainstreaming efforts of D&D’s 5th edition.
It needs to account for each of the major flaws of modern D&D convincingly
Therefore anything relying on the flaws of old school D&D (like the complexity of THAC0) won’t work, because the OSR fixed them.
It needs to be constructed in terms of why people play D&D, rather than relying on theoretical knowledge which individual DMs and players may not have
This disqualifies theories that involve dialectics and “meta-discussions” which most players and DMs never participate in.
It needs to affect the many millions of D&D players simultaneously, in large enough numbers to explain modern D&D in terms of active appeal
This disqualifies theories based on “laziness”, “apathy”, or any other “black box”, as these fail to comprehend that the choice between modern and old D&D has been made again and again by many DMs, not one time by the DMs of the early 80s.
As I hope you can see, my theory of nerd pathology hits all of these notes, where common refrains among the OSR community tend to miss a few, if they address the question of nu-D&D’s popularity at all. In this section, I’ll lay out in greater specificity how nerd pathology interacts with the 3 major flaws of D&D, thereby explaining how it has warped the game and stymied its potential.
Cognitive Load as an Act of Devotion
In the last post, I laid out the idea of cognitive load— that holding a lot of ideas in your head at one time is stressful, and that doing so for prolonged periods is unpleasant. I held the relative lack of this sort of strain in more procedurally-focused old school systems to be the core of their advantage over modern games.
However, when we combine our understanding of cognitive load with our understanding of a nerd’s priorities, it’s easy to grasp why this substantial disadvantage of nu-D&D would appear to them like an upside. The core of the nerd’s bargain is that he hopes to earn the privilege of belonging to a group by demonstrating his devotion to them. What better means of demonstrating your devotion to your friends than by straining to provide them with hours of bespoke entertainment?
A modern Dungeon Master’s role is a limitless effort-sink which yields proportional results no matter how much time and energy is poured into it.
Simply to get a modern-style game up and running requires mastering complicated systems of interlocking rules, shelling out money for gamebooks and stationary, and learning the fundamentals of the game’s lore and premise. Once this floor has been established, a “good” DM engages in regular “session prep”. This takes a few fundamental forms:
Adventure Design
Usually this would be better termed “railroad construction”, and consists of shadowboxing the events of the next game session in order to design encounters and arrange plot hooks to be as seamless (insulated from player meddling) as possible
Sometimes this instead involves purchasing a premade adventure and poring over it in detail, memorizing large enough tracts of it to execute its railroading mechanisms flawlessly and customizing it to “suit” your players’ style and composition.
System mastery
D&D proper is a series of procedures— I do this, you do that— which can be picked up intuitively by anyone that plays the game for more than a couple of hours. Beyond the procedures, in later editions of the game, sit pages and pages and pages of rules precisely dictating the interaction of various game mechanics. “System mastery” in modern D&D parlance refers to memorization and application of these rules, rather than the procedures underlying them. Substantial time and effort can be sunk into answering questions like whether it’s “fair” for a grappled mage to be unable to cast spells with verbal components when he’s got a hand over his mouth. That the actual outcome of combat is intended to be a foregone conclusion renders these investigations pointless, but the perennial threat of an uppity player finding an obscure rule which derails your session necessitates a certain degree of research.
Props and accoutrement
Miniature figurines, ale mugs, handmade journals, custom music playlists, special dice rollers, touch-screen enabled gaming tables; every dollar or drop of sweat sunk into D&D marginalia grants a Dungeon Master another gizmo with which to wow his players. Forums are filled with distressed DM’s bemoaning the high expectations set by professional YouTube productions like Critical Role. The ceiling on expenditure is limitless.
Homebrewing
Playing modules is all well and good, but an experienced DM is expected to apply the system mastery he accrues to the creation of new content— custom adventures, custom classes, entire bespoke game systems. Everyone is tempted to try their hand at it sooner or later.
All of these avenues of limitless effort really do make a pronounced difference in the quality of a given session of modern D&D from a player’s perspective; thus an enterprising nerd-DM can easily heap 10 or 20 hours a week— outside of actual play!— onto the altar of this single social interaction without hitting the point of diminishing returns.
Then, when the game actually starts, all of these resources are bent on the true demonstration of devotion— the actual Dungeon Mastering. The more prep the Dungeon Master does, the more impressive his storytelling will be. The gaps in the prep, however, must be shored up with quick thinking; hours and hours of quick thinking! Rooms will be conjured on the fly, NPCs will be given creative mannerisms and acted out in compelling voices, combat encounters will be adjusted so invisibly that players can hardly tell that the DM is behind the scenes manipulating the numbers. By the end of the session the Dungeon Master is an drained, satisfied husk of himself, secure in the knowledge that he has earned his keep among his friends for another week. That his friends haven’t asked for any of this, and would be alarmed to know that he’s expended all of this effort for their benefit, are ideas he isn’t equipped to consider.
Rudeness as a Nerd Virtue
Up above, I mentioned that nerds dress unfashionably on purpose. This isn’t a coincidence, isn’t merely a comorbidity with their central damage.
Fashion, in the sense of what clothes you wear, is the demonstration of regard for the aesthetic preferences of other people in social contexts. To demonstrate this sort of regard for other people’s preferences strikes nerds as a moral failing.
The nerd is the inverse of the normie, the yin to his yang. Neglect in adolescence breeds an inflated sense of one’s own competence; an adolescent with absent parents continually meets with and must solve problems which outstrip the capacities of their youth. They have to “grow up fast”, for a certain sense of the phrase. With this competence— or at least, self-perceived competence— comes a sense of responsibility. Such a youth has to stay alert for problems which have gone unperceived by those around them; when they try following the cues of others, they run into disaster after disaster (for instance, unpaid power bills, heaps of dirty laundry, nothing for dinner).
When independence of thought is a virtue, catering to the expectations of others is a sin. The practice of taking someone else’s word about what is best rather than investigating matters for yourself is precisely what the nerd has been conditioned against.
In my last piece, I compared the rudeness of modern D&D to being hoodwinked by a friend into listening to endless drafts of their upcoming fantasy novel, while they let you beat them at Monopoly and pretended to listen to your suggestions for the story.
The rudeness of that setup was contained in three elements:
The tedium of listening to an amateur’s composition on HIS time, rather than at your own leisure
The dishonesty of being assured you were a partner in authoring the story when you were in fact an audience
The poor sportsmanship of his cheating at the board game element of proceedings
Each of these rudenesses is the same mode of transgression as the nerd’s unwillingness to dress fashionably: an unwillingness to let other people have a say in how they think things should be conducted.
When the tedium is held up as a transgression, the nerd-DM will point to the huge amount of effort he sinks into prepping for each session— never mind the fact that he has to strain so hard to keep the players entertained precisely because they find his story uncompelling.
When the dishonesty is held up, the nerd-DM will insist that he always tries very hard to integrate his players’ ideas and intentions into the course of the game— never mind the fact that the multifarious tools for hoodwinking players into “following the script”, from quantum ogres to the combat mechanics themselves, are designed to prevent players from having any input.
When the poor sportsmanship is held up, the nerd-DM will insist that he designs his encounters so carefully that he never has to break the rules to get the outcome that he wants— never mind the fact that rigging a game from the start is just as much cheating as opportunistically bending the rules.
The common disconnect is that the nerd-DM feels not entitled but duty-bound to violate other people’s preferences. The transgression is the point, because transgression is a means of expressing your willingness to play the devil’s advocate, to spot the hidden danger and the hidden opportunity that herd-followers miss.
A sensible attitude when your alcoholic mother assures you that going to the movies is more important than paying the electric bill; less so when your friends are telling you they’re bored by your elaborate make-believe game, and you desperately scramble to trick them into having fun.
Player Choice as Beneath a Nerd’s Dignity
Nerds have a reputation for inflexibility. The science fiction and fantasy stories onto which they project their fascination are held to scrupulous standards of self-consistency, and woe betide the errant director who stumbles into a franchise hoping to “try something new”.
What’s essential to understand is that this inflexibility is of an essentially idiosyncratic character. Compare two examples:
Obama wears a tan suit
A bourgeois conformist reporter for Fox News wants his Boomer audience to understand that this is a hideous transgression of societal mores— simply not how things are done, and no greater reason is needed than that.
A bourgeois conformist reporter for the New York Times wants his Boomer audience to know that tan suits are absolutely how things are done, in fact he has prepared a 15 page slideshow of presidents wearing tan suits just to reassure his readers that Republican journalists are a bunch of lying bastards.
George Lucas decides that the Clone Wars involve twenty quintillion copies of Boba Fett duking it out with a bunch of robots
RPG.net forum poster Dragnar’sFieryJockstrap writes a 17 page post about this in 2019 letting us know that he thinks it’s a great idea, because Boba Fett is the best character from the Original Trilogy so twenty quintillion Boba Fetts can only be awesome
Redditor u/furryfemboysatanist writes a 10k word essay in 2022 letting us all know that George Lucas is an inbred moron, because when he saw the Original Trilogy as a kid he assumed that the clones were clones of Jedis, which is a way cooler idea3
The normie reporters are timely, and justify their arguments in terms of received wisdom— what other people have done is how it must be done. The nerds are not timely, and they justify their positions by argumentation that wraps at length back to their own preferences.
Do any of these people care about what they’re writing about commensurately with the effort they expend on writing about it? Hell no! The normie reporters are lying their asses off to score points with the fantasy Midwestern rubes against which they litigate all of their positions, and the nerds have vomited out giant walls of text because they fear “I just think it’s cool” isn’t going to convince anyone of anything.
But hopefully, in this example, you can see that this is how the nerd handles disagreement— my gut instinct is right, and yours is wrong, and I will lavish as much effort as I can into laundering my gut instinct into an argument rather than a preference.
Disagreement is at the heart of D&D. That’s what all the dice rolls and numbers are for— groups of people tell a story, they sometimes disagree on what happens, and they use random results to decide the issue (“I want to uproot this tree and use it to cross the chasm!” “Seems cartoony, but OK. That’s a DC 22 strength check, hope you brought your potion of Cloud Giant Strength.”)
Nerds have a problem with disagreement— they can’t budge from their first impressions a single micrometer. As we established earlier, when their drunken mothers got too toasty to drive and told them that missing the occasional day of school wasn’t that big of a deal, they ended up getting three days of detention. They’ve been honed to an epitome of disagreeableness.
This disagreeableness is at the heart of what draws a person to DMing. This is something a lot of players don’t understand, and a lot of DMs won’t admit. The point of all the effort isn’t just to please one’s friends— it also gives the DM cover to exercise dictatorial control over what happens during a session. When the rest of the guys drop in to play for 4 hours a week, and the other sinks 15+ into session prep, it’s a lot harder to politely overrule him.
As I established in the last post, railroading is at the heart of modern D&D. The combat mechanics dangle in front of whiny players like an infant’s mobile, while the toolkit of plot hooks and quantum ogres lays out the tracks in front of them.
This is most evident in the two archetypes of player which the train conductor DM most dreads— the Munchkin and the Muderhobo.
The Munchkin is a player who has so much mastery over the rules of the game that he’s able to craft a character “more powerful than he’s supposed to be”. This forces the DM into positions of implausibility if he wants to preserve the course of events he has laid out for the session’s encounters. The proverbial Count Stradh stands on a high ridge taunting the players with an evil laugh; the Munchkin’s Monk with a Sorcerer dip casts haste on himself, windwalks up behind him, and hits the vampire lord with four attacks, any one of which would credibly kill him. Suddenly it’s going to take a lot of lying for the DM to keep the adventure’s plot on track, or it’s 10 hours of prep down the drain.
The Murderhobo is a player who doesn’t care to respect the niceties of the DM’s story; he’s heard D&D is a game about fighting and killing, so he intends to fight and kill everything he runs into. The damsel in distress comes running from the dark forest, screaming about the kobolds which have captured her brother; “I run up and chop of her head!” Dave the Barbarian shouts, while the DM groans and tells him that that’s simply not how the game works.
The shared component of both of these player archetypes is that they have a good excuse for taking control from the DM. The Munchkin is a problem for them DM’s planning because he’s actually bothered to get good at the game; that’s what players are supposed to do! The Murderhobo is a problem because he thinks that D&D is all about doing whatever the hell you want and living out your fantasies in a magical world; that’s what the pitch has been for 40 years!
The Holiday Dinner Party
The strength of the randomness-mediated collaborative storytelling medium is that it allows multiple people to share authority for a single story, live and in person. The nerd, by twisting the activity into an elaborate display of devotion over which he exercises dictatorial control regardless of what any of his players want, completely shithouses all of the potential of the medium.
This state of affairs is not without precedent. Up above, I compared the nerd to the homemaker: The woman of the mid 20th century, neglected in adolescence as an economic non-entity, forced to care for her younger siblings and grow up before her time, bound tightly to a gendered field of expression which was both her daily preoccupation and her economic vehicle.
What was her indulgence? What days, of all the days in the year, were for her?
The holidays!
D&D is to nerds what holiday parties were to midcentury housewives. It’s a bottomless pit of effort into which she pours her devotion to her family— more food, better food, more decor, better decor, more people, better people. It’s a field over which they exercise dictatorial control— “No, don’t touch that turkey, you’ll burn it!” “Where are the special napkins? We can’t use these napkins!” “Don’t put your elbows on the table!” It’s a social activity which everyone is bound to engage in on her terms whether they think it’s reasonable or not— after all, she put in all this effort for you!
The same anxieties play out in the exact same way over a wildly different body of material. The DM/Mother stretches themselves to the utter breaking point creating the “best” experience possible for everyone, everyone plays their role as demanded of them, and the host is rewarded with everyone’s effusive reassurance; they feel loved, and, for a moment, a little more secure in their bonds to the people around them.
The potential which is left on the table— the riotous festival in which everyone has a good time and doesn’t worry too much about who is using what napkin, the freeform storytelling experience where everyone gets to have the kind of adventure they’ve always longed for— is lost in the shuffle. After all, it’s her big day! She’s been working on this party for three months now, and doing it all for you!
Why All of This is a Problem
“So what?” I hear millions of voices cry out in indifference (and wish they’d be suddenly silenced), “What does it matter if people are using D&D to scratch a pathological itch?”
Well, I’m not trying to take anybody’s crutch away from them. I’m certainly of the opinion that more self-knowledge is always a good thing, but the nexus of proclivities which gave rise to the modern form of nerd-dominated D&D are deeply rooted and would be extremely difficult to dislodge. The same tendencies which lead one to be a modern-school DM creep into every other element of a nerd’s life, and usually they’re interfering with issues that are a lot more serious than how he treats his hobby. It would be unreasonable to ask these people to give up such an important outlet for such serious pain just for the sake of improving the average experience at the D&D table.4
However, a confluence of factors renders the nerd-culture element of D&D problematic for someone who wants to do what I want to do, which is push the culture of D&D play more towards the diverging poles of the simulationist OSR and pure storygames:
Nerd culture is extremely performative and takes up a lot of space
Conventions, fan zines, cosplay, merchandise— the nerd-pathology juggernaut sticks to anything that gratifies it and warps it in a manner perceived by outsiders as “not their bag”
Disproportionate expenditure of effort is better suited to online discussion than a style of DM prep which actually yields enjoyable play.
This is a common problem for OSR content creators to have— once you’ve nailed down the specifics of how you like to play D&D, you don’t really have a running narrative of “How can I solve this hyper-specific session prep problem?” to make tutorial videos about.
Modern style DMs also frequently generate more content than they are capable of using, which creates a natural impulse to share this content online so that someone sees it, creating a sizable body of enthusiasts who talk about D&D way more than they play it
A “DIY Ethos” drives away casual players
Since the basic deal of D&D for most DMs is “I put in a shitload of work and my friends treat me nice in return”, people who don’t want that sort of burden but who WOULD like a less time-intensive form of collaborative storytelling get put off by the idea of trying tabletop RPGs.
The essential problem is that, in the zeitgeist, the enormous expenditure of effort on this version of D&D eats up everyone’s cognitive real estate. People try D&D, realize it’s more like cooking a holiday meal than playing a game, and bounce right off of it. Or they never even try it!
This is a type of problem which most people don’t like thinking about— an issue of wasted potential, rather than of harm done. The nerd DMs using D&D as a platform for gratifying their adolescent trauma are doing the best they can with the hand they’ve been dealt. The players who put up with it must be getting something out of it that makes it worthwhile, otherwise they wouldn’t do it.
But, as I said at the beginning of this series, storytelling is a fundamental human tendency. I remained convinced that there are many millions of people— hundreds of millions!— who would deeply enjoy randomness-mediated collaborative storytelling if it were presented to them in the right way, and the nerd ghettoization of D&D has boxed them out of the activity altogether. So long as TTRPGs remain a hobby for obsessives scratching at a wound in their psyche rather than a game for people to enjoy in a lighthearted manner, the medium will not reach its full artistic potential, and the human experience will be left less rich than it could have been.
In the next and final post in this discussion, I’m going to explore the evidence for this untapped vein of RPG enthusiasm, as it has been revealed in the popularity of D&D’s 5th edition. I’ll then conclude by laying out some potential means of releasing this pressure valve with two hypothetical products— one which tightens the OSR’s value proposition, and another which lunges as hard in the opposite direction of the OSR as possible.
I hope to see you there!
You can often tell when an adult nerd is autistic because they will have a speech impediment. Speech impediments can be reliably excised with therapy, but the therapy is unpleasant. A child only makes it through adolescence with a speech impediment if their parents are sufficiently apathetic to let them off without therapy, while the child simultaneously doesn’t notice or care how negatively it effects others’ impression of them.
That “Geek” there means the same thing as “Nerd” here should help to illustrate how arbitrary terminology can be.
He’s right, but that’s beside the point
My Framework Blogbook contains a self-applied transcendental psychological process that can cure the underlying anxieties that make a person this sort of nerd, for what it’s worth. I wouldn’t write this post at all if I didn’t have an actual solution somewhere in my bag of tricks; adolescent neglect, Disposition 3o, is one of the 8 pathologies my book is designed to cure.