Hellbent on Small Ball

     

    Decklist

All Kitchen Table Decks 

I’ve had more access to Magic: The Gathering cards than most players could hope to see in their lives. My coworkers and I were responsible for the integrity of probably the largest single collection of Magic cards on the west coast, and possibly the world. Something like 250,000+ individual SKUs spread across four graded conditions with another thousand released every three weeks. You’d be surprised how quickly you memorize the names, art and locations of 250,000 Magic cards. 

Four years of unfettered access and an employee discount did a number on me, on a large scale altering who I am and what I want out of a career, but that’s not what I wanna talk about. On a much smaller scale, working at CK so completely altered the way I enjoy Magic that I doubt I’ll ever be the same. 

A 10% discount on singles would be enough to get any competitive player salivating at the possibilities. I had more than a few coworkers who loved to grind the comp scene, and they did very well generally at events, due to the ease with which they could swap out decks to match the meta. 

While never a real competitive player, my first purchase when I was hired was the dominating Standard deck of the era, the infamous Risen Reef landfall deck. I never took it to an FNM, and instead just punished my roommates with it for a few months before taking it apart. 

Slithering Shade - Daren Bader

Then it was March 2020, and the competitive scene for Magic was effectively dead in the water. A recent Reddit post generated some discussion on the topic, but mostly it was the inability to play in physical spaces and the nightmare meta of the time that found many players disenchanted with the game as WotC was selling it. Folks became more invested in their private pods and play groups and turned towards casual, kitchen table Magic, as one redditor puts it. 

 I’m of a mind to agree, mostly. While my disenchantment with the game came from a different source (“seeing how the sausage gets made,” as it were), I also found myself experiencing a nostalgic longing for the Magic that originally enticed me as a child. 

2012 saw the release of Innistrad into Standard and also the release of Jeff into high school. Though I’d been collecting cards for as long as I could remember, it wasn’t until then that I started to really grasp the intricacies of advantage and threat assessment and optimal mulligans and all that. I had picked up the 2012 vampire themed Event Deck as well as the Zombies one from later that year (from Avacyn Restored). With no money for valuable singles we played exciting best-of-three matches in class, at lunch, before and after school; basically whenever we could find a flat surface large enough to encompass the field. Our decks were cobbled-together Frankensteins built from the remains of the one or two drafts we could attend, whatever intro/theme/event decks we could get our hands on at Target, and the singles we could trade for. This meant decks with only one or two copies of what would be considered their “key cards” and a lot of on-theme chaff. This, to me, was the perfect Magic. A constructed format with a pseudo-limited access to cards. Deck’s power levels were insanely swingy, and almost entirely depended on who could draw their rares. Games were won and lost on the merit of your wits, usually. 

There’s a concept in baseball called “small ball,” which sits in opposition to “big ball” (I know, crazy). Small ball is an offensive strategy that calls for putting runners on base, moving them into scoring position, and then advancing them home in a slow, methodical way. It’s the opposite of “big ball,” where flashy home runs make up the majority of runs scored. We were playing small ball Magic. 

Maybe this is all a misguided attempt to recapture the nostalgia I feel for younger days, and maybe that’s fruitless, but that didn’t stop me from purchasing the cards I needed for something like two dozen battle decks for my Kitchen Table League. I’m not sure if I’m looking to write primers on these decks, or just discuss their play style in the environment I’m creating. The former seems a bit out of place, since the goal of these decks is ostensibly that you’ll be able to pick them up and play without much pregame planning, so maybe I’ll stick to the latter. Who cares, it’s my blog. 

I think it was the release of Modern Horizons 2 that initially sent me over the edge. By then I had mostly divorced myself from constructed Magic, keeping my EDH decks together in sleeves because it was the only format I could play reliably, casually. Limited formats were scratching my itch, but I needed to more (or, less, I guess). 

A 10% discount on singles can get you a lot of cards. Especially if you aren’t purchasing anything expensive. Especially if those inexpensive cards are playsets of every card with hellbent, the worst mechanic from Dissension. Well, not true, forecast was in that set as well. 

The reintroduction of the Hellbent mechanic in that set got me thinking about one of the favorite MTG products: the Dissension theme deck “Rakdos Bloodsport.” I got this back in 2005/6 and played it religiously in casual games between class. Feeling the nostalgia poison that many of us have acquired here in the early 2020s, I purchased the deck list singles for less than $10 and got to work on expanding it and living out my teenage dreams.

Hellbent was never a great mechanic since its design is counterintuitive to how you want to play Magic. Typically, it’s always beneficial to have more cards in your hand. Hellbent cards have small to medium buffs when you’re top decking, which is usually not a position you want to put yourself in. As soon as this mechanic rotated out of Standard (or type 2?) it was quickly forgotten. Modern Horizons 2 printed a small spattering of new hellbent cards, so I wanted to see if you could make a playable deck from them. I knew it would never stand against anything at an FNM, but it looked like the deck would top out at about $20, so I hit send. 

This deck was the first of the Kitchen Table League and it remains one of my favorites. It’s an aggro deck that gets advantage in an untraditional way (going hellbent) and plays against the disadvantage of not having cards in hand by using newer draw/discard mechanics that weren’t present in hellbent’s original environment. 

The current decklist and maybeboard are in playtest mode still, since I’ve had more trouble than I expected trying to convince people to play bad, slow Magic with my cards and even more trouble trying to convince them to build something out of their own draft chaff. That said, it’s still a fun deck to play, even with all these one-ofs and two-ofs. 

Rakdos Headliner is the best new card to compliment hellbent decks. A 3/3 with haste is a ton of damage on turn two, and its echo cost is more of an upside in this deck than downside. The original Rakdos Bloodsport deck used Drekavacs to pitch the lands and extra spells from your hand to the graveyard, but that was always a sub-optimal choice (we’re keeping the Sadistic Augermage from the original deck because while it fulfills the same role, its symmetrical effect is a funny way to lock our opponent’s draw down). Anything we can’t cast, we want to get value out of as we pitch it. That means using Terminal Agony and other madness cards to cast spells while we don’t cast spells. 

Also helping us clear our hand are a couple big early threats. Avatar of Discord, Rotting Regisaur and  Bloodrage Brawler will dump your hand way quicker than you’d expect. However, they run the risk of kneecapping you early if you can’t hang onto any spell in your hand.

That’s where Bottled Cloister comes in. This unique artifact from the original Ravnica block seems like its intended use is protection from sorcery-speed discard on your opponents turn, but here it’s our hellbent-enabler and extra draw. Think of it as the KTL environment’s The One Ring in terms of advantage generation (this is a huge stretch). 

The issue with hellbent at the time was draw was a lot weaker in red in 2006, but the new ways red can loot and impulse draw (is that really what we’re landing on for that?) lets you filter through a hellbent deck without filling up your hand needlessly, or splashing into blue. Faithless Salvaging and Reckless Impulse are the two I bounce between, eventually one or the other will go to 4 copies. 

That’s about it. Anthem of Rakdos, Nihilistic Glee, Gibbering Descent and Taste for Mayhem are just there for fun and flavor. Anthem, Glee, and Descent are just heavy investments in a deck that’s trying to be aggressive, but they can save you in games that go long. They also make great cards to discard to The Underworld Cookbook or Viashino Lashclaw. 

I realize the maybeboard is 86 cards long. I've really gotta clean that up.

Notably I've maybeboard'd Infernal Tutor (for possibly being too good for this format), Slaughterhouse Bouncer, Tragic Fall, and a few others for fearing of ruining the deck's curve. These cards make good side-ins against decks that'll force a long game (I'll write up some of those later). Cutthroat il-Dal always excites me but ends up being too fragile in this meta.

For the record, purchasing the deck didn't wipe away the embarrassing nostalgia I have for simpler times. But it did start me along this deck building project that I could use to distract myself from the nostalgia. So that's something. 

Decklist

All Kitchen Table Decks

Title and Registration and Earl

     Two things happened this weekend that affected me. The first was Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie turning 20 years old, and the other was the release of Earl Sweatshirt’s VOIR DIRE. Both made me think about my life in a retrospective way that feels kind of cringe but is still something we should all turn and face at some point or another. 

    Twenty years ago, I was eight. A little too young to listen to Transatlanticism, I wouldn’t discover it until I was twelve or thirteen, probably. I remember the moment exactly: riding in the middle seat in my mom’s minivan, on the way to pick up something she’d left at her office by accident some Saturday morning (purse, cell phone, something), in-ear SkullCandy headphones playing the album off of a Sony CD walkman I’d had since time immemorial. I think my aunt gave me the CD sometime that year; I remember her getting a PC that could burn mp3s to disk and asking me all the time what sort of music I was into. Tiny Vessels came on and I had such a visceral emotional reaction I started to cry in the back seat. I think a lot of young boys, especially those raised in upper-middle white homes that go to church every week with both parents and have next to no problems, don’t frequently reckon with sad emotions such as the ones Ben Gibbard’s hopelessly sigh-ing out all over that record. Suffice to say, I had never before felt emotions the likes of which Gibbard describes in Tiny Vessels or Passenger Seat - understandably, because I was barely out of middle school. It still shocked something into me, and it felt like I grew up ten years during that 45-minute runtime. I’d call it a fond memory, or something adjacent to a fond memory.

    Twelve years ago, I was 16, and so was Earl Sweatshirt. I had recently crested the upper-middle white kid music taste hill and was coming around to rap, and like many suburban white boys, I got really into Odd Future after the release of Yonkers. I spent a lot of time listening to that first hyper-violent EARL mixtape, and then even more time with Doris when it was out a few years later. It’s a uniquely 2011 16-year-old experience to have. I was really into those albums for their violent imagery; sort of the direct opposite why I loved Transatlanticism so much. It felt like a similar outlet to the metal and hardcore I was just getting into, as well. An undiagnosed mental illness will do that to you. I, too, was disenchanted with the monoculture and radio pop-rap. I imagine it's how a lot of kids feel when they find their local punk scenes, something I wouldn’t really start leaning into until I was in college and had a band of my own.

    Nine years ago, I was starting college. Pacific Lutheran University was the in-state private college I ended up at in scenic Parkland, Washington. Parkland had one venue for live music, and it was a really, honestly poorly-run coffee shop on the constructed main street just outside the campus boundaries that was carefully fabricated to give the illusion that you weren’t attending college in unincorporated Pierce county. The cafe did open mics every wednesday and I made a genuine attempt to attend and perform whenever I could. The place was packed every week, mostly because there was nothing else to do in Parkland and this was the only off-campus hangout that didn’t card. I had just started writing originals with my first band, but we never ended up finishing anything that’d resemble a setlist. Instead, we picked a handful of songs we could cover on two acoustic guitars and I made my guitarist drive out to Parkland every week to sing Title and Registration with me. Title isn’t a great karaoke-style song, so it must’ve been fairly punishing watching us squawk our way through Death Cab’s masterpiece of a down-tempo acoustic ballad. I didn’t care. I was so enamored by the simple fact that I could write my name down on the list and go up there and sing Title and Registration to fifty-odd people and no one would stop us until we were done. This was a new Title and Registration, a rediscovery of the joy for the song that I hadn’t yet felt. Playing it live was like hearing it for the first time again.

    Two days ago, I read this interview with Earl from the Guardian. Earl reflects on being 29 and being so separated from the slur-slinging sixteen year old of his youth. It's not often we get to watch an artist progress so publicly from such a young age, and even less common when they happen to be the same age as you. I won’t pretend to say I can draw any direct parallels between my life and Earl’s besides the general feeling of maturity that happens across his career. EARL and Doris are albums made by a young guy, mad at the world and mad at his depression and mad at his dad. It won’t be until Some Rap Songs that we start to see a “joyful” Earl album. That transition from angry young man to a calmer, wiser tone isn’t unique to Earl’s experience, either. You can see it in lots of artists’ discographies; compare the first Mountain Goats albums to the dad-rock Darnielle puts out now. That’s not who Earl is anymore.  “I had to make myself inhabitable,” he says in the interview. 

    It’s not who I am anymore, either, but not to the extent of necessity that Earl talks about. I don’t listen to the EARL mixtape anymore, but I do still love Doris. But it’s different now; I’m only reconnecting to that 16-19 year old Jeff rather than creating a completely new bond with the music. If I hadn’t listened to some of this so much when I was young, I don’t know that I’d like it now, honestly. That scares me a bit; that you can change so much over time. Parts of me that I thought were intrinsic to my sense of self are barely perceptible anymore. Let me be clear: I’m not lamenting the loss of my Odd Future fan aesthetic, but rather the passion I could feel for a group like Odd Future.

    On the other hand, I’ll never stop listening to Transatlanticism. Don’t ask me why its easy to fall in love with that song over and over again. 

    I’ve lost the plot here, though. I guess what I’m saying is the double whammy of two musical moments coalescing so clearly in my hindsight at the same time did something to me. In a move both retro- and introspective, I’ve spent some time recalling the music I listened to at 12, and at 16, and at 19, and at 23, and at 28. A lot of it is the same as it was back then, just matured a little. This musical maturing is something I’ve felt very closely these past few months. 

    I’ve recently come into a time of funemployment in my life, which has given me an unprecedented opportunity to sit around and overthink things to drive myself mad with worry. First and foremost of these worries (even before the “damn, I should find another job” one) is how I can get more music finished. With one band playing shows with a soon-to-be stale setlist, and two more on the cusp of getting off the ground, I've been playing and writing more music in the past two months since any time before in my life, including when I was a full-time music student. I look back on the band I started when I was a freshman, and I look back at the Save Bandit album from five years ago with a mix of embarrassment, pride, and contempt. There’s always gonna be nitpicking you’ll do about how we recorded this part, or the riff on that part, and I’m over that initial wave of self-criticism. Where I’m at now is a complicated mix between desires for dissociation and preservation. Dissociative because I would prefer if people heard new music when they search up Save Bandit after a show, and preservation because I have an anthropological and ethical necessity to preserve relics of culture forever for future generations. Like a blogspot from 2008 with niche screamo releases in media zips. 

    I don’t think this feeling ever goes away. Earl struggles throughout his seven album career, and probably won’t ever escape. Despite Title and Registration’s two-decade presence in my head, I’ll never be able to stop singing it. The best I can do with it is dissect the parts of me that resonated with it originally.

    Anyways, Save Bandit’s playing the Bayside Cafe in Everett on October 13th and we’ll be doing a Title and Registration cover. 

Stop Making Sense

 I’m gonna talk about how I saw Stop Making Sense in theaters last night and it changed my life. 

I'm not a film critic, but I wouldn’t say I’m unfamiliar with concert docs. One of the first DVDs I personally owned was AC/DC Live in Donington, which became a formative memory in my personal history of rock music. I’m not unfamiliar with documentaries about the personal lives of bands, either; I make a point to watch Some Kind of Monster once a year. Stop Making Sense blew everything out of the water, and it’s not even close.

We used to host gigs in the basement of our four bedroom rental with a broken PA and mixer like all good, god-fearing punks do at one point or another. Locals and touring acts would play sets without any hard and fast end time, mostly just going until they were too drunk or too tired to continue (we always put out free beer to make sure they didn’t go longer than 30 or 40 minutes). These artists are always playing to a room of like, 20 people max. I think the biggest show we had was a New Year’s Eve gig and we might’ve pushed 60 people into our basement and backyard. Cover was pay-what-you-want always, and we never offered a guarantee. We hosted these gigs because we believed live music needed a place to thrive outside of the capitalist hellscape of the music industry and we wanted artists to have access to an intimate space where they could perform directly to an audience that had no choice but to give them their rapt attention. Turns out, if you play the music loud enough in a room small enough, this’ll work. 

In our basement shows, I watched emo bands spill their guts and indie-pop artists dance their hearts out. Kids lost their minds trying to mosh in a ten-by-ten space while precariously avoiding the sharp edges on the fireplace mantle. Hardcore bands threw themselves against the walls so much I was afraid we’d lose our deposit (we did). Every time we did a show, people couldn’t tear their eyes away, except to cut loose. 

On the other hand, I’ve seen big bands on reunion tours go on stage and deliver the saddest “I’m-out-of-money-and-nobody-likes-my-solo-records” performances on earth. American Football’s first tour back, Duster’s reunion tour, Algernon Cadawallader’s sputtering start-and-stop show at Neumos; I’m generally stoked to see these bands but had a hard time focusing on the music, and I like to think the crowds at these shows agreed with me. None of them had the charisma to command an audience the way you could when the only thing between you and the crowd was a microphone and five feet of space. There’s just too much space between you - we can’t see your face or hear the hurt or recoil from your beer-stained breath. 

What Demme and Byrne accomplish in Stop Making Sense is the reconnection of the performer to the audience, and most importantly, they make it last far into the future. Byrne’s presence on stage is as a ritual casting shaman leading a congregation of pagan worshippers in cult sacrifice. It’s a knife cutting through the curtain of monotony of my life revealing a world so bright and saturated I can’t look away. Close cuts to Byrne during Psycho Killer create a direct route from his lips straight to my brain, and they’ll continue to take this road for the entire 88 minutes. It’s like every time he cuts to that gaunt man Byrne’s body is beamed directly into my cortex.

Byrne’s dance moves are the real encapsulation, though. Wide shots of him flopping across the stage set against the rest of the band who mostly keep to their blocking make him the centerpiece of the show. The rest of the band has moments where they match his moves, but these are always sloppy enough that it feels like a spontaneous explosion rather than a planned break in their stand still. 

Let’s talk about the lamp. When Byrne started dancing with the lamp, I wanted to cry. It was so beautiful. Here we see a man broken down and reconstituted by love and energy and pure dancing. He throws the lamp back and forth, teasing the audience with the possibility that it might land on stage and shatter. It never does. Byrne manages to toss the thing to himself four times before collapsing on it like he’s falling into a lover’s arms for the first time in a long time. And I felt it. 

40 years on from the Talking Heads iconic performance I still felt the energy and pure unadulterated joy bursting off of that stage in 1984. 40 years on from that performance and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band put out that specific flavor of on-stage elation. Byrne’s like 30 feet from the closest audience member and I know for certain they can’t pull their eyes off him. And Demme was able to capture it exactly how it felt. 

From the close ups of Byrne and the other band members cast in shadow from under-lighting to the “gymnasium light” Byrne absolutely needed for the opening number, the performance of the band is caught tenderly in the camera’s lens. Demme pioneers live concert filmography by lighting the stage entirely from the left on one night, and then from the right on the second night so they can cut the pieces together. What emerges is a performance in pseudo-perfection: everyone is lit at just the right moment, everyone gets a spotlight, and the band had four tries to get their on-stage energy to match exactly.

Somewhere out there, there exist a handful of videos of my band playing various house basements in the Pacific Northwest. Most of these are unlistenable blown-out recordings taken on a straight-to-tape camcorder or a conglomeration of iPhone camera shots stitched together in an attempt to leave a record of our existence at that space, at that time, doing what we did. None of these videos have multiple camera angles, nor am I wearing a big suit or dancing nearly as much or as well as Byrne does. Our most interesting production involved projecting images from Skate 3 playthroughs and episodes of The Office behind us while we played. Still, there are some special moments there, when the band gets in sync, and I’m not worrying about forgetting lyrics, and I can look across to my homies playing the songs we wrote in front of some 20-odd 20-somethings in a basement who are completely and utterly enraptured by us, and I get it. I get why Byrne sprints laps around the stage during Life During Wartime; it’s because he physically has to. His body will erupt if he doesn’t. I’ve had those moments where you’re dancing during the instrumental break and you run over to your bandmates to try to make them laugh at your moves. It feels amazing, and Byrne feels it more than most other humans could ever hope to. Demme captures that energy, bottles it, and loads it into a plasma gun that he fires point-blank at my head, killing me instantly. 

D&D Engagement Bait

The engagement bait posts have finally landed in the D&D circles on Twitter. At least this time, the post is going around without that stupid Kevin James image attached. At the risk of diving into a realm where I invite the worst dorks you know to come in and tell me I’m wrong, I’ve got some thoughts that’ve been buzzing around in my head for years now that I’m gonna try to parse through here.

When I saw the post going around, I had two gut responses immediately for my controversial D&D opinions. The first, and probably least controversial, is that the game does not lend itself as well to roleplaying as CR and its fans want to believe. There’s been tons and tons of moaning and humbugging about Critical Role and I’m not here to shit on those actors or their production company. They’re just trying to get their bag and they managed to do it by playing a goofy game online for ten years. That’s good. What’s bad is the expectation their legions of fresh D&D players have put on the game. They expect rich storytelling and deep characters with trauma-filled backstories and a novel’s worth of dialogue their DM can pull out of their ass. This has been largely bad for the game, but not for the reason “gatekeepers” (a useless term) want you to think.

Here’s the other problem: CR is a company. They exist to make money. Because of this, they have to tone their show to appeal to the widest possible audience. This means turning off any of the (to use the McElroys’ word for it) “bad vibes” that could arise in the natural flow of storytelling. They have to do this to keep the show on Twitch/Youtube; they can’t play out a plotline about tiefling genocide when it’ll make those viewers  uncomfortable, right? What follows is a generation of conflict-adverse D&D zoomers and zillennials who become distraught whenever something akin to violence occurs.

    There’s no shortage of the people coming out in droves to chide Wizards over whatever perceived or projected injustice they printed in a supplement about literally enslaved monkey-men. Or the weird hubbub that emerged after the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 around the tieflings/druids conflict. People claimed the way the druids treated the tieflings (racistly) made them uncomfortable. That’s good, though. Racism should make you uncomfortable. Those feelings you have when you engage with a fictional story with real-world parallels are supposed to be introspective moments where you consider how you might improve yourself and the world around you, instead of decrying how bad it made you feel that they called someone a fantasy slur.

    I am begging you to stop imprinting on fantasy stories. I am begging you to read any book. Conflict arises in the real world based on perceived and invented boundaries and differences drummed up by racists, fascists, and worse. It should feel good to roleplay kicking those peoples’ teeth in. 

The second impulsive hot take I spat out was about how most modern D&D players have never opened a rulebook from any previous edition (there’s a non-zero chance a significant portion have never opened any rulebook, even). The game’s transition to a roleplaying-heavy experience (due in small part to the success of CR and other streamed shows) has made the combat and actual rolling mechanics feel secondary to the social pillar of the game. This ties into the previous gripe, but also has its own dire consequence: without an understanding of where D&D’s roots in wargaming, the player base has shifted away from what the game was originally intended to do - which is, replicate a wargame experience on a small, dungeon-crawling scale. 

    This goes deeper, though. It’s easy to say, “sure, but D&D isn’t a wargame like it was 50 years ago.” And you’d be right! But, the current incarnation of D&D is weighed down by its years and years of solidly wargaming mechanics and it’ll never be able to shake them while remaining as a recognizable D&D game. I mean, the 5e Player’s Handbook is 50% combat rules. 

    Take it this way: in 2008, WotC released 4th Edition and it was a huge flop. They tried to move away from the bloated D20 system that they had (in their eyes) erroneously granted everyone access to, thereby allowing a swathe of technically-official books and supplements that they really wished they hadn’t. Because of this we got weird products spawned from the dankest basements of the midwest like The Book of Erotic Darkness. 

    In an attempt to distance themselves from that sort of narrow-appeal products, they launched 4th with a completely new combat system. PCs maxed out at like four or five powers each; two at-wills and a combination of encounter and daily powers that would get swapped out at each level. Basically no abilities could be used outside of combat, and the ones that could had all the flavor and excitement of plain oatmeal. 

    This was D&D’s first major departure from the standard wargaming style and it was an abysmal failure. We knew the d20 system was fine, and the massive failure of 4th edition was what ultimately saw the meteoric rise of Pathfinder, which was effectively a 3.5 skin with some balancing at the time. 4th failed because it was trying to take the core pieces of the d20 system (roll a d20, add relevant modifier, compare to the DC) and append a digitally-inspired gameplay experience onto it. I mean, they even started designating classes as Tanks, Healers, or Damage.  The open-ended gameplay of a D&D campaign was suddenly siloed into Overwatch with extra steps.

    Now, WotC is again trying to move away from the wargame aspect of D&D. The entire system was “dumbed down” to remove rules bloat and make game management easier on DMs. The Advantage/Disadvantage system and a compression of the top-end of skill checks meant that player’s bonuses were, on average, lower per level. I’ll relent that 5th finally got skill checks right in a simple, if uncreative way. 

     5th Edition is split into three “pillars” of play, each ostensibly as important as the other. The pillars are combat, social, and exploration, and supposedly the game supports each the same. Here’s the issue, though: I’ve yet to play a D&D game where all three are touched on consistently. This isn’t to bash any of my previous DMs; they’ve all been great and we have amazing memories of our campaigns together. Where I take issue with the pillars is the false promise of mechanics to support each of them.

    Anyone who’s tried to run Tomb of Annihilation knows that the exploration mechanics are lacking, especially when the exploration is scaled up to a hex-crawl across many square miles of jungle. My group’s campaign was frequently mired for days in-game rolling survival checks to advance one hex, then rolling for encounters, then progressing on until something happened. The party knew their goal, they knew their objective, but then spent several sessions simply traveling there. I know many DMs would say to just omit the boring travel bits, but that would mean ignoring something like 40% of the written content in a book I just paid $50 for. 

    Social interaction, on the other hand, is almost entirely up to your DM to resolve. If they aren’t a trained actor/improviser/writer, they’re going to have trouble. Getting information to your characters is its own struggle, but what if they want to interact with those NPCs, rather than just listen to them? Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception pull the players into declaring mechanical rolls to achieve ends, and are frequently muddied by the actual things PCs say to NPCs. And I’m not just talking about the group of murder-hobos we’ve all been a part of; I’m talking about well-designed social encounters with stakes that won’t be mitigated by persuasions.

    For all its failings, 4th did try to address this by rolling out the “skill challenge,” where the party as a group has to pass X skill checks out of Y attempts to succeed. This could be as simple as climbing a rock wall; each player describes what they do to scale the wall (“I use a rope,” “I cast fly,” “I find handholds along the surface to climb,” etc) and the DM determines the type of check for each action. Players take it in turns resolving their actions, and then the cycle repeats. Turning skill checks or social interactions into pseudo-combat wasn’t the best solution, but it kept with the design philosophy of the time, which was to remove rules bloat and streamline games. 

    My point here is that D&D doesn’t work well when it deviates from the basic concepts that were set out for it in the first edition. For a game originally with such finely-tuned and math-heavy mechanics like THAC0, simplicity just doesn’t translate. And when your game is bloated with rules, you have less players willing to invest in the start-up to learn the game. And therefore less cash, which rules everything around me (WotC). Decisions get made to make the rules palatable to a wider audience, that wider audience demands more palatable settings and flavor than previous editions, and the company relents because this new fanbase eclipses the original. They ditch the weird settings like Dark Sun and Kalamar in favor of market research-backed Strixhaven and Ravnica. Ability scores are no longer tied to race, because that’s perceived as ethno-essentialism or something like that. Psionics were erased for being too complicated. Prestige classes are gone and instead a rigid subclass system locks PCs into one of three flavors for each class. Seriously, if we get another supplement that's just like “what if this martial class… but divine?” or a stapled-on wild magic ability I’m gonna scream. 

    What we’re left with is a game that doesn’t trust its current fanbase with complex story elements beyond such as “slavery bad” nor does it trust them with the mechanics to engage in complex wargaming and character-building.

    Really, what I’m saying is a lot of TTRPG fans could do with the smallest amount of class consciousness to realize that Wizards will always make decisions that make them the most money. The game will continue down the path WotC has set it upon, and you should probably invest in physical copies of your favorite previous editions before it becomes unplayable.