Having Trouble Letting Go

 About a month ago now I killed my entire D&D party. It felt like a moment of failure. I saw the moment when the group stopped having fun. Like literally I looked around the table and saw that everyone had a look of horror on their faces.  Evoking emotion is a good thing. Watching a train wreck unfold that wasn’t the result of a player saying yes in response to me asking,” Are you really sure that is what you want to do,” is a lot worse. 

I haven’t run a game since. I wasn’t emotionally up to it on my birthday weekend. Mother’s Day was two weeks later. I was glad of the excuse to not run. I am avoiding the table a bit. Part of that is that party wipe was a failure on my part. I should have pivoted the encounter. Yes, this is me ruminating on a failure. 

It is an interesting time to be a gamer who loves role play. Paizo is actually cutting officially away from the Dungeons and Dragons roots that birthed it with a remastered release of Pathfinder 2E. I am in for the change. I have been collecting (without playing) everything that has released since the inception of P2E as a fan of the very detailed world of Golarion. Could I adapt some of their content to 5E to run a system I feel more comfortable and familiar with? I mean they have released content for 5E so it clearly can be done. That feels a bit silly though. The P2E system is very cool. I suspect it will be an even greater experience after it removes the OGL and related content. I am ready for something different and less familiar. 

Then I ask myself if it makes sense to have my players learn P2E before the release of the updated content. We cannot get affordable Core Rulebooks at the moment. Paizo wisely stopped printing the OGL content. The hardcovers start dropping in November, and if I am not mistaken the pocket editions will be available a few months later. That seems a good reason to wait a half year to make a switch.

Then Wizards of the Coast keeps making ghoulish moves. The whole Pinkerton thing over Magic cards was obviously a media nightmare in the works. I am having a hard time feeling positive about spending my dollars of more 5E. None of the changes I have seen for “One D&D” have been exciting. I don’t even love the more balanced approach they are taking to “monstrous” player characters since it removes built in positives and negatives that comes with role playing a race that may not be welcome in all parts of society. 

Now, before we get into too woke a conversation, let me say that I don’t think it is wonderful to play racist games. By that I mean that players should not be encouraged to attack one another based on traits that emulate real world bigotry. I wouldn’t tolerate someone talking about the big lips on an orc or the dark skin of a Drow elf as an analog for real world racism. Then again, I don’t associate myself with bigoted people. 

I do think there is contextually appropriate racism in games. If your character’s back story is having lost both of their parents in a red dragon attack then it is very likely that character is going to feel some sort of way about unaliving red dragons. I cannot see To put it in terms of Skyrim, I personally hate both the Falmer and the Forsworn. They were designed to be difficult and annoying enemies that a player should enjoy slaying with prejudice. I don’t feel that slaying fictional underground elves as slightly taller halflings has impacted my real world bigotry at all. 

The whole thing about doing away with “half” orcs and “half” elves irritates my soul. I want to preface this by saying that I don’t believe in biracial humans. I don’t believe in them because I don’t believe that humans come in different races. Yes someone can have a parent that has a darker skin tone and a parent that has a lighter skin tone and that person will have some traits of each parent without necessarily being completely like one parent or the other genetically. The problem is in definition. If we stopped using the term race to define people with different mixtures of pigment in their skin and started relating to one another as a single race it would help improve our perspective. 

A half orc or a half elf are not analogs for biracial humans in the real world. In the fantasy worlds of dungeons and dragons orcs, elves, and humans do not have a common genetic ancestor. In most cases they are separate races that are created by some divine being intentionally different from other species. They aren’t one race that happen to have different skin colors or features. They are separate species just like goats, dogs, and monkeys. The fantastic difference is these imaginary races also happen to have fictional genitals that can intermingle and produce hybrid offspring. That means that the child of a orc and a human has elements of both races of creature while not being wholly one thing or another. 

The funny part of this is that people in the real world are finding a way to be upset about it. No table that I have ever sat played up half characters as outcast, lesser, or anything else. Honestly, we didn’t follow the cannon of tieflings not being welcome in society due to their infernal heritage. We didn’t normally have people distrust orcs, drow, or any other race. Why? Well, racism isn’t fun or something to play at. 

The closest we came to that line was the aforementioned character that had some race based tragedy and that was typically a type of monster not a humanoid race.  I mean, I once played a polyamorous bi-sexual non-binary goblin prostitute and had a blast every time we encountered a new NPC that I could make uncomfortable. I mean I also wore an un-cured Wolf Skin over my head and shoulders with nothing else but a loin cloth. Does that reflect anything of who I am in the real world? Well, maybe, but shut up. I also played a cowardly version of Conan the Barbarian who liked to earn coin by making performance checks to strip in highly inappropriate situations. The point is to have fun, be free, and spend time with friends. 

Great memories like that make letting go of 5E a little difficult. Nothing says I have to. I can pretty well do what I want. I have enough content on my shelves and computer right now to RP for the rest of my days without any real need to buy another thing… well except dice. There are never enough dice.  Just ask my TikTok.

I think I want to go my own way for a while. I think I want to reboot my old setting and design some things from scratch. I have a very different play group who will make totally different choices for the world. It wouldn’t take a whole lot of effort to revive aspects of the old world. I could spell out my own pantheon again. Share some lore. Create and redefine my own races and characters easily. 

Yep. That is what I want to do. While I am at it, I will revisit and formalize some house rules. That idea makes me excited to get back to the table. In fact, I don’t really want to write anymore here. Maybe I will share some of the D&D content as fiction. I don’t know if that will make it easier or harder to move away from 5E, but I also don’t know that I care.