D&D 5E Jeremy Crawford on the Expanding Mind podcast

[I'm A Banana]

I really like it when Crawford talks about what makes D&D awesome to its nearby satellite audience. He does so here, on the Expanding Mind podcast (a podcast that hits the intersection of philosophy, religion, and pop culture).

 

[I'm A Banana]

Some interesting highlights:

Storytelling vs. The Divine Chariot Driver
He distinguishes between "group storytelling" and playing a game of D&D by invoking the dice - having the dice decide the success or failure of a proposition seems to be core to his idea of what makes D&D not just a storytelling game, and would seem to imply that 5e's return to more dice rolling (random charts and the like) is highlighting this difference - "letting the divine be the chariot driver" is giving up control to the game system. A lack of total control is part of what makes D&D fun and different.

They return to this idea later, in terms of "sometimes, the dice create a farce," and how the challenge of dealing with that is part of the interesting gameplay that forces you to question assumptions and deal with unexpected events.

I think that's kind of interesting when seeing what powergamers and "player agency" advocates often push games to be - to be independent of the dice, to be receptive to players simply declaring things to be the case, to be more predictable and less fraught with random and unpredictable results. The dice aren't just a resolution mechanic, they are, in a design philosophy sense, a feature of D&D that is to be embraced.

Big Tent Philosophy
Also, he made explicit that a design goal for 5th was to expand beyond the "tactical" scope of the game (while keeping folks invested in the tactics along for the ride as much as possible). The high-heroic fantasy storytelling is the thing that the team sees as uniting these disparate individuals (with a DM adjusting the game to their group). He talks a bit about how character creation plays into issues of personal identity for players, and emphasizes how the diversity language in the PHB plays into this.

I really like it when he said "If you're outside the majority, you have a place here." ...and then the host enhanced that by noting that it's also something in the mythology of multiple cultures throughout history, resonating with the mythological storytelling that unites D&D players. The conversation about how human diversity has been an important part of ancient history, and that seeing such things as simple "modern political correctness" is ahistorical and inauthentic.

It's curious to see this spiral into the talk about subclasses ("sub-archetypes"), and how each one is meant to be a storytelling opportunity (and I can see clearly how subclasses like the fighter subclasses didn't do as well on that metric).

It's really interesting to me that both the perspective beyond tactical play AND the diversity language in the PHB come from the same root place: to make the game something that lots of different people can play in a way that delights them. They even fit alignments and DMing creative villains into this goal! (and reminds me that, in as much as gaming ever represents morality, alignment does a better job than many things casual observers might be familiar with) Empathy is something that is easy to presume for those of us who play this game a lot, but it's actually a very distinctive quality of tabletop RPG play that is very core to the experience.

D&D as Ritual Play
It's curious to see D&D described as doing something similar to what religion (and mysticism) does. A lot of energy has been spent distancing the two, so it's unexpected and delightful to see folks playing with the idea in a serious way. Role-playing as a way to experiment with belief and identity and motive and religious ideas is a fascinating avenue to look at this game from, and one that I really need to look at in more detail myself.

Sneaky Hints
He's working on 4 books right now..."some of them are not adventures."