As I sat down to run what I was ninety-five percent certain was going to be the Session 0 of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I had to take a few minutes to put aside the misgivings and constant internal debate about whether or not I was making the right choice. I had spent most of the day already, and a lot of idle time in the weeks leading up to said day, trying to figure out how I felt about returning to a hobby I had so firmly turned my back on just over a year prior. It was a difficult time, back then, as the company that owned my most-played tabletop game tried to destroy the hobby in order to make a little more money, and it wasn’t a decision I’d made lightly. I’d been running some form of D&D game ostensibly weekly (up to four times a week, during the first year and a half of the pandemic), except for a year off after I moved away from my college town to the city in which I still live, since the summer of 2010. There were other gaps in there, but no more than a few months at most. My entire tabletop history had been built around the game and I still felt compelled to turn away, to withhold my money from the company that seemed to be actively trying to drive it into the dirt. I was the sort of person who bought every book as they came out, who owned physical copies and digital copies online, through DNDBeyond, who ran tons of games and could not only run a game reference free, but quickly homebrew up something custom for my players that almost always hit my desired balance of “overpowered but in a way that’s fun for everyone.” And I still cut all ties.

I spent a year trying to get people to play other games and only succeeded once. I played in tons of other games, trying to find something I could enjoy as much as D&D, that fit the same genre space, and bounced off of everything I tried. I backed kickstarters, bought books, and did my best to keep my finger on the pulse of the fantasy tabletop spaces right up until I couldn’t stand to be on twitter any longer. Despite finding lots of games to love (none of which I’ve had the opportunity to play), I still couldn’t find anything that fit in the genre space that Dungeons and Dragons occupies. Sure, there are a lot of cool ideas that might one day take up space in that genre, but they don’t do me any good today. I can’t get run a game that isn’t released yet and while I’d love to run any number of different games, the fact remains that most of the tabletop gamers I know have played Dungeons and Dragons, remember the steep learning curve involved in their introduction to the game, and would rather stick with something they already know than take a chance on something new. This isn’t really a criticism, mind you, since learning new games is difficult and there are plenty out there that seem almost hostile to easy comprehension (I’m looking at you, Pathfinder 2e). It’s just unfortunately true that I can’t get most of the people for whom I’d love to run a game to be interested in most of the games I’d love to run.

So I spent more time doing research. I carefully considered all the ways I could run a game of D&D for my players without giving Wizards of the Coast any money. I thought about sharing logins, about helping my players build their characters every step of the way by sharing my screen as I let them look at the information I had. I even though about buying new PDFs to share via google drive or investing all over again by buying them all in a Virtual TableTop. The only way I could manage it all, without sacrificing huge quantities of my already sparse time, was to just reinvest in DNDBeyond again since even moving to a VTT’s internal compendium would involve giving way more money to WotC than just getting a yearly subscription to share what I’d already bought. I put off this action, though. I looked through the website and even figured out what, exactly, I’d buy if I did, but I still held off on actually making the purchase. After all, there was still what I figured was a five percent chance that my players would wind up pushing into a genre space more easily handled by a different game. A chance that disappeared pretty much the instant the group got together and started introductions. Our icebreaker involved telling each other what our favorite or least favorite D&D classes were, before we’ve even confirmed that we were going to play Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t begrudge my players their enthusiasm, but I’d just spent ten minutes centering myself so I wouldn’t be distracted by my own internal turmoil and it was difficult to get my heart into it.

So now we have a campaign set up, I’ve got my DNDBeyond account once again subscribed so I can share my digital sourcebooks with my players, and we’ve built an incredible world to play in. I don’t regret what I’ve done, even if it does set me on edge a little bit, but it’s difficult to let go of the arguments I’ve been having with myself for over a month at this point. I know WotC did a lot of work to walk back the mistakes they made. I know the company actually producing Dungeons and Dragons can’t help being owned by the IP Strip Mine that is Hasbro. I also know that a lot of people at WotC got laid off last winter and that Hasbro is likely gearing up for more shady shit, just like every other megacorp in this capitalistic hellscape we call the United States of America. It should be easy to simply make an exception for something I’ve loved for years, for a game I’ve hacked enough that it doesn’t really compare to the base game that a lot of people are right to criticize. Instead, all I can think about are all the other things I did not make an exception for. Or how leaving D&D behind got tied up in all the broken and faded friendships that broke or began to fade in the first two months of 2023. Or how I can’t “simply” anything these days since life seems to only ever grow more complicated. I have a lot of work to do, to sort through all these feelings so I can relax and run a fun game for my friends (and myself, of course), and while I don’t expected myself to work through it all before the next session with this group, I hope I can work through it enough that I can just focus on the fun I’m having playing make-believe and telling a story with my friends. That’s all I really want, anyway.