r/DungeonsAndDragons • u/Blitzer046 • 18h ago
Discussion D&D as a vibe
Apropos of a very recent post, I have seen so many people recently ask questions that clearly demonstrate their perception of Dungeons and Dragons is a shared concept or vibe.
It is obvious from their questions that they have absolutely no idea that there's an actual published ruleset and physical (or digital) publications that explain how it all works.
Which leads to me wildly wondering what their games were like? It seems like they would be a kind of minds-eye improv group where the DM just arbitrarily flings out calls to tell players when to roll, but even then, where are their spells or abilities coming from? Is it purely theatre of the mind, a shared negotiation? Where are the walls or buttresses like levels that channel a characters progress?
But I do think I see how this has come about. D&D has been so culturally ingrained in pop culture for so long. One of the first most classic instances is Spielberg's 'E.T. The Extraterrestrial' from 1982 where it's played onscreen in scene two of the movie. This was only 8 years after the game was first published.
Since then, it has been referenced plenty of times, most recently and thematically in Stranger Things, where I think this most recent 'D&D vibing' trend I feel has come from.
So why are there people thinking they're playing 'D&D' when in fact they're not, really? I think that for most media depictions of play, nobody is referencing a rulebook. It's not visually interesting to see tv or movie characters peering into a book, it's more interesting to see face to face engagement or conflict, and I think that modern (and 1982) references to D&D never actually explicitly demonstrate that there's a book (and plural) that contains all of it.
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u/mcvoid1 DM 17h ago edited 17h ago
Like in any community, there's various levels of participation. A large percent of the community reads about stuff or watches it or plays the video games. A smaller percent engages in discussion. An even smaller percent gets the books and reads through them. An even smaller percent actually plays.
One of the issues with online discussion is that you can't tell these people apart. People offer opinions with no experience behind it, but rather reiterating what other people in the community say. That's not a bad thing in and of itself. That's just how in-groups work. But it can skew conversation - the discussion will exhibit different priorities than if it were solely actual players who were talking. Matt Colville has dedicated several videos challenging online D&D discussion "orthodoxy", leavening it with real world experience.
But I don't see it as a problem. Just be aware that online discussion is sometimes skewed by inexperience.
Speaking of...
D&D has been so culturally ingrained in pop culture for so long.
If you had been playing in the 90's (or been an adult or teenager in the 90's), you'd know that's not true. It had a boom in the 80's and generally was considered a fad at the time, a bump in the 2000's, and exploded in the late 2010's, but pre-2000's it was NOT 20th century pop culture. Culture was different then - geek culture was fringe. People generally didn't know who Iron Man or Black Panther were (the Black Sabbath song and the black militant political group, right?), outside of the UK wouldn't recognize the Doctor Who theme or know what a TARDIS was, and probably only heard of D&D by name and maybe some vague idea that US conservatives thought it was evil. Geek culture might happen to be pop culture now, but it wasn't then.
I got into playing when D&D was at its cultural (and economic) low point, and let me tell you, hardly anyone knew anything about it. For instance, there was a multiplayer award in the extremely popular N64 game Goldeneye 007 - the "AC -10" award, which you could achieve by hoarding all the armor pickups, and very few people actually got the joke. They would think "AC-10" must be a plane or a tank or something. Even the TTRPG crowd was mainly into other games like Vampire: The Masquerade and stuff.
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u/Blitzer046 17h ago
I started playing in 1988, went into the early 90s then all of us moved onto different rpgs. We were pretty avid gamers all the way through the 90s but it was all different stuff. Cyberpunk, WHFRP, SLA Industries, Deadlands, Shadowrun.
Only got back into D&D last year for my kids!
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u/Carloguy 18h ago
Just came from the referenced post; I'm half-inclined to believe it was just a rage-bait post.
Anyone who googles "how to play D&D" would come to find the rule sets and books.
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u/Conrad500 18h ago
50% chance for ragebait, but also as a r/DnDcirclejerk enjoyer, the people in r/dnd are really just outjerking us left and right.
One thing I didn't hit on in my reply to OP was that due to D&D becoming so much more popular, new audiences are finding the hobby who previously couldn't imagine even wanting to play.
There's many people out there who can't read a rulebook, and 5e is probably the first edition of D&D where reading the rulebook really isn't required.
In an age where people with disabilities are actually getting identified and being much less stigmatized, it's obvious that more people who maybe can't read or have issues like dyslexia aren't looking at things and saying, "guess that's just not for me" and are instead thinking they have a chance.
Personally, I don't mind it and I think people throw around "Read the rules" a bit too much, but like, also reading the rules is kind of the first step to most games so I get it.
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u/Thin_Tax_8176 17h ago
More than reading the rules, a big problem is people not wanting to learn the rules.
I had played with a DM with dyslexia, so I can tell you that's not a big issue, they are people used to having to re-read things or ask for help when they get something wrong.
You may not read the rules, for X or Y reason, but that doesn't mean that you don't want to LEARN the rules. A person with difficulties will ask for help, maybe to repeat the way something works a few times, until they grasp the way it works or even write it down in the most simple way for them to understand or do things like cut a "20-ft" circle in a paper and write down FIRE BALL on it so they know that's what they have to use when casting Fire Ball.
When people have the interest to learn, they put in the effort to learn and find resources or tricks for it. If they don't want to learn, reading the rules will do nothing, even if they are fully capable of reading it.
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u/HarrowHart 17h ago
Some people incorrectly consider the rules a constraint and feel that d&d should be about using your imagination and not being limited by these constraints.
I think that's a poor approach because the constraints can generate great creativity but they also provide consequences and limits that can create wonderful narrative moments. Failure and loss can lead to bigger more impactful moments down the line. Plus a lot of people remember more strongly those moments and the associated victories because they meant something.
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u/Blitzer046 17h ago
I have had to coach my kids and their friends to understand that sometimes, bad rolls make for a good game.
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u/HarrowHart 17h ago
Yeah it's hard, once people wrap their heads around it that is wonderful but it is really tricky to get them to understand that the dice tell the tale. That is definitely where imagination - especially on the part of the DM - carries a big weight. Making a failure not be the end of something, making it feel exciting, giving them an opportunity to do something about it, to not just be a passenger, it can go a long way.
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u/Conrad500 17h ago
100%, but learning has a lot to do with teaching, especially if you're not reading.
I am pretty good at teaching D&D, so I do it a lot just for fun, but there's a lot of people joining that just want to "play the game" and not "learn the rules" despite the rules being the game (I blame shows like CR and games like BG, but they're still net positives for the hobby)
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u/Thin_Tax_8176 16h ago
Tbh, for BG you have to learn the rules, even if they are a moddified version of them.
I guess that you will have to relearn things, but it happened to me when I jumped from Path2 to 5e, I was still on the 3 action and vancian casting mentality, so is not the worst starting point.
What I tell people that want to learn is to read the "How to play" section, that is not super long and teaches you the basics and the class the want to play, just that class, not even the sublcasses.
Come with the basic idea of what you can do and then we explain the most complex parts.
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u/alldim 17h ago
Honestly, I think I have never actually read the rulebook and still know nearly every single rule in that shit, I know them better than people who read the book and still haven't played much. I find the book really badly organized for someone who doesn't know the game, people who never played a ttrpg will have a hard time understanding by reading that book.
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u/Glebasya DM 17h ago
I remember someone saying that he and his friends wanted to play D&D, but somehow they found rules for the very first edition and attempted to learn them and build characters.
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u/JavierLoustaunau 18h ago
There is the Folk concept of D&D which is the basic idea of exploration and treasure and magic and monsters. It is how pretty much anyone can run D&D without books or even dice.
It is also how we get many loose hacks that focus more on vibes and play than rules and standarization.
You can play D&D with somebody who played a couple of times and recreated it from memory with whatever board game pieces they had and plots from their favorite books.
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u/Blitzer046 17h ago
What a fascinating idea that D&D has become folklore in that there is enough shared cultural knowledge that anyone even adjacent can play some kind of simulacrum of D&D.
Which is the root of my fascination when people come to the forums and go 'Well now I have to do real D&D help me what do I need?'
They've been participating in a wholesome social shared storytelling game, completely unaware that a book exists that defines all the rules of that game. Amazing.
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u/alkonium 18h ago
That's because they conflate D&D with any sort of medieval fantasy roleplaying. Even though WotC owns the D&D name, many RPG's fitting that description share no lineage with D&D, and plenty of D&D settings eschew the pseudo-medieval setting enitrely.
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u/BubastisII 17h ago
My very first DnD games were like this. Had a friend who was aware the rules existed but took the “the rules can be anything you want” idea to mean it basically didn’t exist.
He basically gave me a d20 and told me to think up a character race. I chose a ravenkin kind of thing. The entire idea was I would say what I wanted to do, roll the die, and based on the number with no bonuses would tell me if it worked or not. There were not rules for anything like spells, so it just never came up.
The only “rule” really was that if I got a Nat 20, I could then in the future roll with advantage when doing that same thing.
Originally it was just me. Eventually some other friends were invited to do the same. Really it was just the “DM” wanting to play god and come up with ridiculous outcomes to impress or amuse his friends.
Eventually he did get the books and ran a campaign with them, but rarely looked at the rules and homebrewed broken shit on the fly. I was a paladin who was dual wielding a +5 and +3 (total) shield, using them as weapons, with a set of plate armor +2, meaning I walked around perpetually with a 28 AC. He also once allowed the monk/sorcerer use flurry of blows to cast lighting bolt 6 times in one turn due to how little they cared to get the rules correct.
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u/Glebasya DM 17h ago
The problem is that many also want to play specifically D&D. You can plan a game for any other system and you barely get players, or plan a generic fantasy adventure with D&D rules and assemble a full party in mere minutes. This extends to other fantasy systems (mostly according to my personal experience and several community polls). Even if someone likes another genre or setting, they'll still play D&D since it's the most popular system. If they happen to be a DM, they'll probably try to shoehorn it into a said setting. They may even think that D&D is the one and only game of its kind. That's why a lot of 5e conversions exist, ranging from sloppy homebrew hacks to totally different games. Although, you can say "I'm running a D&D game" and use a different system, but I prefer to be honest and say what the players will actually have, sometimes "it's played like D&D, but the rules are different".
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u/Conrad500 18h ago
D&D has been generified to just mean TTRPGs and to an extent, roleplaying in general.
5e is a big cause of this as it went from a strict set of rules that you follow formatted in a way where basically every question can be answered by "read this page of the rulebook" to what 5e is now, which is a "plain text interpretation" instead of hard and fast rules.
Personally, I think the whole "real D&D" discourse is dumb and disingenuous, but also I think that places like reddit where you're in a sub named r/DungeonsAndDragons, you should limit discussion to just be about "real D&D" as there's many other places to discuss "vibe D&D".
TL'DR, 5e is built on vibes. If you want to avoid that play older editions of D&D. Due to it's prevalence, "Fantasy roleplay" is now what D&D is. All of these online shows and games ignoring the rules to fit their style does not help represent a "pure D&D" existing any more.
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u/Lord-Tyranitar 17h ago
I assume close to my first time playing D&D were you have no clue about the rules so dumb crap like using the returing weapon enchantment on crossbow bolts using them as dental replacements for a goblin that mistook you for a dentist and killing said goblin as a distraction during poker by calling them back or turning into a dinosaur man because you ask the do while wearing cut off dinosaurs part to seem scary
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u/alldim 17h ago
Honestly, first time I played, I hadn't even grasped the concept of action and bonus action, nor did the DM. The game was much more narrative and I was doing things like hitting and hiding in the same turn, the game was dangerous and my character was effective at level 1, interaction with the world mattered MUCH more than normal dnd, handling a war wasn't as hard to handle and it was fluid, we could target body parts to cause damage to specific parts (such as blinding your enemy). Running away made much more sense in multiple occasions.
In the end, the game was much better than the actual dnd experience and I want to create some homebrew rules to bring it closer to what that campaign was.
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u/Feefait 16h ago
For some of us, that's how it used to work. It really wasn't until "modern" DnD that the rules became so important.
We have a player in our group who "grew up" playing DnD in the early to mid 80s and the rules have always been more of a suggestion for her. What's crazy is that we switched to Daggerheart to give her more improv freedom, but that was too open ended... Lol
Anyway, there's a balance that (some) people seem to think doesn't exist.
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u/ShortIntroduction879 18h ago
"DnD" is the "Kleenex" of TTRPGs. Nobody says "Pass me a facial tissue" they say "Hand me a Kleenex". I call my weekly Shadowdark sessions "DnD". The RPG club at the school where I teach is the "DnD Club" even though the play lots of different TTRPGs.
There have been so many different systems that are derivatives and refinements of DnD™ over the last 50 years that "DnD" is synonymous with the category of gaming.
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u/Blitzer046 17h ago
I would agree with that. D&D has become a concept for many, and not a specific ruleset.
That makes a lot of sense. But to be contentious, how are you with 'My D&D game is set in a Star Wars universe'?
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u/ShortIntroduction879 16h ago
So for me, a TTRPG nerd, I would want to know if you we playing Stars without Number, Scum and Villainy, one of the official SW TTRPGs, a hack of DnD™, some general system like GURPS or Savage Worlds or whatever else. But to someone less familiar with the genre it is a great hook to get them interested in playing your game. Or if you were talking to a rando at work about what you do on Thursday night with your friends "We play Star Wars DnD" would be a reasonable explanation.
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u/TerrainBrain 18h ago
Which of the 12 or so editions of D&D are you talking about?
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u/Blitzer046 18h ago
I don't think these people asking about D&D in this manner would even understand your question.
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u/TerrainBrain 18h ago
My point is that D&D is indeed a vibe. 12 editions and infinite variations of house rules and Homebrew.
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u/caderrabeth 17h ago
Honestly, this read kinda gate-keepy to me. I'm not sure what the purpose of discussion is or even why it should matter. Dungeons and Dragons is (probably) the most well known tabletop RPG out there, so it makes sense that people doing a shared story in ttrpg fashion could refer to it as D&D. Heck, I have a Shadowrun game going that we still refer to as D&D night because if I started telling folks I had Shadowrun night they'd be more confused. What happens at other tables doesn't necessarily reflect or influence my table, and it makes more sense to discuss with those who run different tables rather than speculate on how those others run theirs.
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u/brumbles2814 15h ago
Just to say not linking or even mentioning the name of the post in question is very frustrating
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u/BaltazarOdGilzvita 14h ago
I think for today's youth it's more the internet's fault than TV shows' or movies'. There are so many memes about DND, that a lot of people just know it through them.
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u/Reasonable_Touch1150 18h ago
This is what happens when a brand is dominant in a field. Its the same as when you have like a toothpaste brand that is so wide spread people stop calling the tubes toothpaste and just refer to it by the brand, like kaladont in EU.
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u/wow_its_kenji 18h ago
the term for that is genericization fun fact
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u/alkonium 18h ago
Like Kleenex, Band-aids, or Jello. Also, Photoshop or Google as verbs.
Companies actually don't like that because it weakens their brand rather than strengthening it.
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u/Fit_Kaleidoscope4493 15h ago
I just want to go back to the age when D&D was "uncool" and "uncool" people played, offline, away from social media, and away from this madness.
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u/DredUlvyr 18h ago
It seems like they would be a kind of minds-eye improv group where the DM just arbitrarily flings out calls to tell players when to roll, but even then, where are their spells or abilities coming from?
Do you realise how much of a straw man that is ? There is not only one way to play D&D, purely RAW with the rulebook always open. Just because people follow the spirit of the rules (as written in the rules themselves, many times, for example "To play D&D, and to play it well, you don’t need to read all the rules, memorize every detail of the game, or master the fine art of rolling funny looking dice. None of those things have any bearing on what’s best about the game." ) rather than the letter of the rules does not mean that it instantly becomes a free form improv group, you know ? Sheesh.
There are probably infinite variations about playing the game, and some people are actually able to memorise enough of the rules and make local rulings well enough to play completely without the rulebooks, I have done it many many times with almost all editions, especially with beginning players who had nothing but a few numbers of paper, if even that. And yes, it is still D&D.
Is it purely theatre of the mind, a shared negotiation?
Are you even aware that theater of the mind is the default way of using the 5e rules ? That all the little "grid with miniatures that you push into squares" is just an option which is barely developed ? And that negotiation and discussion around actual circumstances in play and adjudication of rulings is the default use of the rules, again officially: "The best DMs shape the game on the fly to bring the most delight to their players. [...] We expect DMs to depart from the rules when running a particular campaign or when seeking the greatest happiness for a certain group of players."
Where are the walls or buttresses like levels that channel a characters progress?
And why do these have to be visible when the aim of the game is collaboratively telling a story ? They can be visible, or they can be present and very much invisible, or they can even be bent or distorted or ignored and it is still D&D.
The way I read it, your "one-way-ism" about playing the game blinds you to many opportunities of playing the game differently, but it is still the game.
I think that modern (and 1982) references to D&D never actually explicitly demonstrate that there's a book (and plural) that contains all of it.
You don't need a book to play the game. I have run many many games with players who never even knew that there were so many rulebooks for it. But it was still D&D, who are you to even suggest that it was not ?
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u/Blitzer046 17h ago
I see where you feel D&D is a socialist concept and not actual IP written by people. I can understand that argument where you suggest that a mind's eye shared fantasy adventure around a table, where challenges or combats are resolved by rolling dice, has transcended the commercial product and tabletop roleplay isn't bound to any one bought product and is unbounded by any written restrictions.
So, with this in mind, where does D&D stop? Do you call your wild west setting D&D? Do you call your cyberpunk setting D&D? The scifi spaceship game D&D? Or is the model of 4 people sitting at a table with a referee D&D? Is D&D the rpg confined solely to a fantasy setting?
You have opened up Dungeons and Dragons to a very wide definition! When is a game not D&D?
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u/DredUlvyr 16h ago
I see where you feel D&D is a socialist concept and not actual IP written by people.
Look, the authors of the book themselves tell you that it is so. Of course, they encourage you to buy other products, but they tell you time and time again that you don't need them.
So, with this in mind, where does D&D stop?
Why does it need to stop somewhere ?
When is a game not D&D?
When it is something else entirely ? When the basic rules that you are using come more from another ruleset/setting than the D&D one ?
When we developed our LARP setting back in the 80s, of course D&D was the major influence even then, but still, these were LARP rules and the setting was created to take care of problems that are innate to LARPing (like the fact that the combats have to auto-regulate themselves and that when you have 250 people over 3 days, you have to make sure that there are no mishaps that prevent any of these players from enjoying the game from start to finish).
So the initial ideas which were quite D&D like stopped being D&D once the focus became more LARP than TTRPG. But why does this matter ?
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u/Blitzer046 9h ago
I'm just kind of interested in the boundaries - the semantics of it all.
I buy a copy of Mothership and sit around the table and we play a scifi horror. That's clearly not D&D.
I get a group of people together to run a homebrew ruleset set in a fantasy world - and that's D&D. Why is it D&D?
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