Spoiler: Kneon closes by saying D&D is too complicated.

It is complicated for complication’s sake–like complaining to complain–but it was always like that to bar outsiders. If D&D’s present-day handlers were honest, they would admit that their cloying attempts at promoting diversity and new modern audiences must (but does not) include a user-friendly approach that amends D&D’s nervous tic of writing every guide in pretentious legalese.

The character sheet is just brutal. It creates the illusion that whatever is explicit must stand and that anything that isn’t mentioned must also not even exist. Writing out a new character is like doing your taxes. If D&D dropped the excessive verbiage and let pictures describe things, we wouldn’t be so averse to everything D&D.

The bulk of text remains here just so we can shit our pants in laughter. When did it ever fit, or work for that matter?

Truth be told, layers of sophistry are designed to check pretenders at the gates so the big boys and girls can have their cozy little corner free of the distractions of curious onlookers. Both the classic legalese and the changes made by former onlookers (made resentful by past treatment, mind you) are made to satisfy the inverse outcome. The inverse is not the opposite, but that’s a different issue. The process is essentially the same.

I solidified this “nowhere-near-different” notion in my head after a memorable episode of MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch. In the nineties, we had no dearth of famous faces to fucking despise, but there was the schlubbish Jeanene Garofalo and the ridiculously prolific Cindy Crawford. What made me laugh out loud was how correspondent interviewer Stacy Cornbread found out firsthand the utter hypocrisy of upholding an image.

While image matters, methods used to attain a certain look can make you even worse than the intended result. Cindy acts in a most unwomanly manner, while Jeanene obsesses over which accessory to get the most “unwomanly” impact. It’s from the first season and got me hooked onto the show for a while, until the disastrous video game adaptation on PS2, and it stuck with me since.

Sophistry to block people out of a gaming hobby is sophistry no matter who does it. So, what keeps D&D alive in my mind? It boils down to a love of intricate, tactical play-by-play combat. The social element is beyond overrated, but the moment you say, “everything has a meaningful function,” is the moment I’m at the table. Those who think likewise are switching over to Pathfinder for reasons besides Hasbro’s repeated bungling of Wizards, who might have bungled D&D long ago but are nowhere near as incompetent as in this decade.

Third edition used granular point-by-point combat, which informed its design philosophy of how complicated and intricate warfare really is. It didn’t bake everything to perfection, but a few mechanical tweaks and we would have a convection oven primed to cook anything. Even so, the 2000’s Wizards figured its audience were more into Iced Earth’s Glorious Burden than the 2021 Tweets of its bandmembers savaging John Schaffer for having the nerve to protest an election.

In essence, these guys understood the general audience, attempted to pull many others in for the ride, and eventually wound up with a hipster dystopia that a cadre of Midwestern players find contemptible without any hint of sympathy or humor. The first iteration of 3.X was ridiculous enough, but the net’s surly response blows its successors out of the water in terms of complexity.

And that response was an attempt to dial back the complexity.

I remember some homebrew by two guys named Frank & Keith back in the 2,000’s, a response to third edition in particular–they’re called the Tomes of Necromancy, Fiends, the Dungeonomicon, and Races of War, to name a few. The Tomes were well-reasoned and made me reconsider my stance against the game and even the hobby on a whole, as that soured after some poor experiences with a playing group.

Races of War sought to amend the issue with Fighters being underpowered despite the edition’s emphasis on personal heroism and equality/balance among classes. One proposed variant rule was a “Background” system, a means of tailoring the character before play for a salient if minor perk–like Racial Traits but existing in tandem and dependent on personal choice, not explicit text.

The approach is simple: write a 500-character limit paragraph delineating the character’s essentials: parentage, environment, significant events, and the responses to the headiest ones. Then, the ref reasons out a handful of little perks that a player may accept.

In 3.X, that pertained to skills being class skills regardless of class, or a mutated anatomy with 5′ more reach (but does not “threaten” said panels). War Orphan, Born in Shadowlands, Street Rat, and Raised by Owlbears are notable examples. They can be configured preemptively or over play David Lynch style; your character has amnesia and the ref inserts random fluff that a player must live with–the price of laziness.

Beats having to play a snotty Half-Elf drama queen every time you pick the Half-Elf/Half-Human Race.

Before you OSR types bleat, “oh, we’d improvise this during play!”, think: if your player’s Background could net Race-like Traits, then improvising David Lynch style worked in a munchkin or power gamer’s advantage, thus to massive disadvantage for newcomers. Claiming the new “Background” system proposed by the recently revised 6th Edition D&D is some massive affront is disingenuous.

You see, the only reason the new system sucks is because they’re removing Race as a massively valuable mechanic thanks to worrying about a handful of vocal posers. At least a “Rule Zero” version lets you create, say, a fighting character that has the potential to be memorable. The Tome, Races of War, proposed the Background System because Fighters are rarely memorable, rather always gratuitously expendable. Certain Races also seem very expendable. If we got rid of Fighters and Races, would that make everything else feel OK?

No. It would still suck as much as before things were removed. We need more options, not less.

Also, the Background system exists alongside and complements an existent Race system. Elves are known for heightened senses and sharpened ears, unto the point where they even have sleeping issues and can only “Trance” four hours at a time. That reminds me of manic depression and not in a good way. Yet, I do not want people to remove Elves as a race simply because they’re snobbish.

I do not want Orcs as a race removed or altered just to avoid the implications that never crossed the minds of Blizzard Entertainment. They made StarCraft and WarCraft’s Orcs as these beefy, green-skinned interplanetary marauders. I do not want people to equate Orcs as Mexicans. That’s just stupid. I do not want Mexicans equated with anything other than someone who occasionally asks me where the bathrooms are. While that doesn’t seem all that great, remember my words: EVERYONE ASKS ME ABOUT THE BATHROOMS!

It’s even stupider than the case with black people, though understandable when seen through the lens of the unschooled. I get the rush to charge in to their aid like they’re Princess Fucking Daphne, but the net abhors White-Knighting, even when it’s genuine and necessary. For the record, Orcs from Lord of the Rings were originally ELVES that had been corrupted into slavery through black magics. That could be true for what was happening to bearers of the One Ring and those in close proximity, as per the tales’ theme.

That’s right: even the borderline racial stereotypes of the half-orcs are not without the caveat that the evil influence is merely given the word ‘black’ and is nowhere near addressing racial make-up. If anything, it has more to do with the concept of rednecks as espoused by Thomas Sowell (i.e. universal as a phenomenon). The gig with that One Ring is that it makes you power-hungry and forfeit your decorum–as in, you become less and less acculturated.

Of course, let’s not go nuts. In the same essay about Black Rednecks, Thomas points out how being excessively acculturated like New Englanders inspired the 1692 Witch Trials in Salem–repression for repression’s sake. If we reasoned out in D&D that everything rides on Race, then its complementary material can never surpass Humans, Gray Elves, Dwarfs, and Halflings. Frank and Keith draw many sobering conclusions and assumptions about D&D’s world that must be read.

Twice.

It’s okay, though: a lot of people make some disturbing, even alarming guesses as to the origins of certain things. I make it something of a pastime: devise the nastiest, most conspiratorial explanation for just about anything that is otherwise wholesome and innocuous. If you have listened to Vaush describe any conservative’s intentions or anything surrounding law enforcement, you know what I’m talking about.

For the longest time growing up, I had a grotesque vendetta against bottled water. It made sense for a cross-country trip or maybe a sporting event, but even then, you had big coolers and little cups. Give me a break–you shouldn’t be going out to the store and buying a bunch of bottles daily. That Saturday Night Live skit with Dan Ackroyd talking about Swill? Pure gold. And this hatred persisted before and after my twenties and lingers even today, for different reasons.

It became a lot more rational and informed: I’m keen for construction work and sports, but not casual general public consumption. Convenience stores with fountain functionality will sell you a refill for a 32oz decanter. It’s somewhat goofy and entirely wasteful to pay for a small bottle of water after the Nestle corporation got shamed for hoarding and reselling whole riverbends.

So, less the water, more the storage and shipping. But look no further than Evian, a brand from the French Alps of all places. Spelled backwards, it’s “Naïve” (using similar inflection to pronounce either word) for people to purchase it. The branding is like a “psy-op” before the term was tied to the US federal government and fifty times more soul-crushingly effective.

But then, I learned the details later in college. My English professor caught it and remarked how, to him, it was a bit of a reach. It’s a case of filling in the blanks where the information is, in fact, out there–you just didn’t look it up. For a more unflattering term, “ig’nant”. Hence, the people who equated Orcs with Blacks or Hispanics because they skipped LORD OF THE RINGS!

To be cheeky, claiming to have worked in a barista and getting odd perks like beard-tattoos or always having your hair in a bun and thus away from the eyes, was on the menu even before Frank and Keith piped up. 3.5 includes a Skill category called Profession, which did not provide enough functionality out of the box for players. So, we gravitated to the Race system–at least it had numbers and concrete rules.

The Background system helps to sidestep the unfortunate implications of the Race mechanic. Without divergent Backgrounds, we wouldn’t have Drizzt D’urden pop out among the Dark Elves, or “Drow”. It can be made subtle or it can also transform role-playing. It is not a “MARY SUE FANFIC GENERATOR”, because what Frank and Keith propose includes concrete limits and human interaction.

Take the War Profiteer, someone who can enter the game with their initial, eligible equipment being Masterwork in quality without additional cost. The caveat is how such a character is stereotyped and henpecked into being or at least treated like the token evil teammate. This happens to be the Background story of Tony Stark, whose father is pretty much Walt Disney in the arms biz.

Backgrounds provide players a reason behind stereotypes of even blank-slate Classes as Fighters and Wizards. The Dread Necromancer Class from the “Heroes of Horror” 3.5 expansion could only aspire to be Neutral at best with a Charnel Touch of Death laid on top. It sucked to play that character precisely because A) I do not believe that negative energy is inherently evil, B) neither did the character, who operated on a modicum of solid ethics, but also C) nobody else at the table shared any of my beliefs.

Evil is Evil. Negative aura is just negative aura. Maybe the person is terminally red-pilled, or someone who browsed the entirety of AlltheTropes.org or its bastard father site BEFORE ever picking up a singular piece of fiction or advertising and then making assumptions and pointing fingers and trying to predict the weather while watching a South Park episode. Utterly cold. Not inherently evil.

I mention Frank & Keith’s Tomes because there was the report about Dungeons & Dragons abandoning Race and people getting ticked off at that. They proposed their own Background system, so as to suggest “what happened to you?” is somehow more important than “what are you and where are you from and what’s wrong with you?” They’re all equally important, but also pale in comparison to “what do you do?”, of course.

Possibly, the other reason to mention the Tomes and homebrew is to remind you that Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t inherently suck (it’s rights holders might, but I’ll never understand the hatred). Dungeons & Dragons is what you make of it, not the other way around–this isn’t Soviet Russia, far from it–but you might not consider something unless it’s been done before and also presented as a possibility.

So, while Backgrounds might give the player and ref more discretion over starting packages compared to the set-in-stone racial makeup, it would have been nice to acknowledge both and have each option available. The Hasbro overseers dropped the ball when they thought to replace features with other features, and Kneon’s other video dropped it further by insinuating that a Background perk mechanic would devolve D&D into a fanfic generator.

That’s why I proposed the 500-character limit. Nobody else did, mind you. If you can’t phrase anything directly enough within that small a window or write freehand one paragraph that pins your intentions down, then we’re not using the same language. D&D has a modicum of creative freedom attached, like any tabletop setup. I’ll check out the Clownfish take on tabletop, just to be fair. You should, too–far cheaper than the modules they’re dispensing at the extreme discount stores. At any rate, I know you’re skilled, so I trust your judgment.

Good hunting.