The last time I talked about this topic, I may have danced around some of my thoughts on the matter, in part because it’s easy to take them out of context or misconstrue what I’m trying to say. The ‘nerd shift’ in TTRPGs is important because it implies that there is a fair expectation of what broader conversation about the hobby looks like. It also implies that the nerd shift did not start all of a sudden in 2014 (when 5e came out) or all of a sudden in 2015 (when Critical Role started) or all of a sudden in 2018 (when Critical Role left Geek and Sundry and went independent). The nerd shift in TTRPGs has been happening since 1981, but changes in both the hobby and the broader world mean that what’s happened since the pandemic has been especially acute.

First, let me explain nerd shift. This is where I get in trouble, though I think I explained the basic idea pretty well in the last post about this. In short, Wizards of the Coast has built their marketing strategy around D&D towards making it more accessible to mainstream audiences, i.e. not nerds. It’s not that TSR wasn’t doing this, and that’s where 1981 the date comes from; that’s when the ‘red box’ Basic D&D was released, and it was released far and wide, into bookstores, toy stores, and all sorts of not particularly nerdy retailers. Sales were pretty good, and the red box made it into the hands of players all over the country, including a lot of kids. This is where you hit the wall that made the nerd shift in 1981 fairly small: Playing the game was unintuitive (while B/X is better presented than the original from 1974 it’s still a lot), and ultimately everyone who read the rulebook came to a crossroads, often before they even had a chance to play. The choices were simple: You either went deeper, committed more time to understand how this game worked, or you gave up and went outside to play baseball (Remember, the target audience for the 1981 push, much like the target audience for D&D today, is young). Wizards of the Coast is trying to minimize the drop-off associated with reaching the point where you need to invest time to fully understand the rules. At the same time, they don’t actually want to make the rules more streamlined, because in addition to alienating much of their market by changing things (remember 4e?) they actually benefit from the perceived lock-in effects of their ruleset being (or looking) complicated. The way they do this is by implying that you don’t need to read the whole book to play the game. This is where Actual Play comes into the marketing strategy. Well and truly, Actual Play demonstrates what a TTRPG actually is better than anything short of sitting in on a game, so when it took off as entertainment, it showed thousands if not millions of people that roleplaying is easy and fun. And, well, it is. But what Actual Play doesn’t show you (especially well-produced Actual Play like Critical Role or Dimension 20) is how the games they’re “using” work. We already have plenty of slang terms about the shock new players experience when they sit down at a gaming table and realize to their horror that they didn’t think through the difference in social contract between a cadre of professional actors who are being paid for their time and, directly or indirectly, compensated for making their “game” entertaining, and five people who want to sit around, kill some orcs, maybe save a kingdom. This doesn’t make the storylines of an Actual Play “fake”, it simply means that Actual Play is a static entertainment medium, with the conventions of a ruleset being a piece of equipment just like the cameras and microphones. To beat a dead horse, Actual Play is to playing an RPG at home as pornography is to sex.

The point here is not to make a value judgment, but rather to say that there is now a large and (for any time dimension my commentary will stay relevant) permanent influx of gamers who do not come from a tradition that has anything to do with rules. There’s nothing wrong with this; if anything it means that as the D&D cultural wave finally breaks, there will be a number of puzzlemakers who will design games we’ve never seen before. Considering how close so many titles hew to very old ideas, considering it took 40 years after the RPG was designed to see any game that actually gave the design world a shake achieve something resembling success, this is not only good it’s incredibly needed. The problems inherent with the nerd shift are that these future designers are one side of a normal distribution, and we get the entire continuum.

This leads into comments that were made about the Reddit TTRPG “community” of r/RPG this week. r/RPG has a bad reputation because, well, it’s the lowest common denominator of RPG discussion on the internet. How could it not be? The subreddit has nearly 1.6 million subscribers, posting around 10,000 posts and comments weekly. There is no larger agglomeration of RPG hobbyists anywhere, and that means that when you comment, your upvotes could be coming from the likes of Yochai Gal (u/yochaigal) or Mike Pondsmith (u/therealmaxmike)…or from some guy in Madison who has played with the same four guys in his basement since he was banned from his game store 15 years ago…or someone terminally online who’s never successfully played a roleplaying game. You don’t know!

As is true on all of Reddit, nuance rarely gets an audience on r/RPG because the internet rewards dogma. Dogma has been a problem with RPGs forever; RPGnet famously had to quarantine their D&D subforum due to all the flame wars. When you combine, though, highly opinionated fans of a highly subjective medium with a constantly churning influx of new participants and a platform designed like a Skinner box…well, you get the reply I gave about r/RPG in Cannibal Halfling’s last Weekend Update. A large subreddit kind of sucks? No shit.

The situation on Reddit in particular is that mods are stuck dealing with two completely separate avalanches of low-quality content. One is, essentially, advertising, posts directing readers to a Kickstarter page or a storefront or anything for sale in an attempt to use the subreddit for free marketing. In this case, r/RPG bans self-promotion, but the amount of leeway for what promotion is ‘relevant’ is vast, and given that the entire hobby outside of Wizards of the Coast consists of variously sized self-publishers, the amount of ads coming through is vast also. The second avalanche is posts made asking inane, poorly worded, or poorly thought out queries, usually framed around recommendations, “hot takes”, or questions like ‘how can I design an RPG without levels’ that betray a fairly low level of reading comprehension. The problem with this second tranche is that Reddit rewards engagement, and it’s generally worth more internet points to dunk on the thread or get an early comment than it is to downvote and move on. As a result, there’s no discernable difference in low-quality and high-quality threads and comments based on votes alone. Everyone votes for their ‘team’, so whether that -13 point comment is truly noxious or just happened to like games other than the ones the people already in the thread like is, well, a crapshoot.

You can see how this flood relates to a ‘nerd shift’ by comparing it to communities that actually require some sort of skill to take part in. I am a subscriber to r/bikewrench, a subreddit for working on bicycles. There are a lot of entry-level questions here, no doubt. But, the subreddit has a mission: it’s about bike repair. In exchange for trying to be a safe spot for anyone to post bike repair questions, mods can basically auto-delete everything that isn’t a bike repair question. More importantly, though, is what happens in the comments. People who comment are bike mechanics, both professional and amateur. If you say something incorrect, you will get downvoted to the bottom of the thread. The only times I have had an outright negative voted comment on r/bikewrench are when I’ve been wrong. There are a couple sore spots among cyclists, like mechanical disc brakes (my most controversial opinion, apparently), but overall, if you have the experience to contribute in good faith, you will be recognized. On the other hand, r/RPG upvote/downvote cycles are like roulette, where the green house pocket is someone who reads and thoughtfully engages and all the red and black ones are just different flavors of opinionated asshole.

As I said above, this isn’t limited to r/RPG, either as a subreddit or an RPG discussion space. But this is an important consequence of the fact that, like I said before, TTRPGs aren’t inherently a nerd hobby. They may have been before, maybe from 1974-1999 or maybe from 1974-1981. They maybe have never been, but participating in pre-internet RPG discourse perhaps implied a nerdy demeanor, given its higher difficulty and limited reach. While TTRPGs have always appealed to nerds, the barrier to entry is low and accessibility is increasing every day. But, and this is where people get pissy, you cannot assume a gamer is smart. You have to assume that in this hobby you’re meeting the same normal distribution of geniuses and dumbasses you do in the rest of everyday life.

And this kind of extends to the entire idea of a nerd, doesn’t it? Enthusiasm and commitment can drive you deep into any sort of hobby, and that can make you a nerd. I meet nerds in many places and, when I can, I often become friends with them. But having a hobby doesn’t make you a nerd. Consuming media doesn’t make you a nerd. Buying things doesn’t make you a nerd. I know it sounds gatekeepery, but if you only play D&D 5e and don’t DM, or do DM and only run pre-written materials, I don’t have much to talk to you about. You aren’t engaging with the hobby in the same way that I am. That’s fine, mind you, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s the TTRPG equivalent of a Mr. Coffee and buying your beans at Costco. I’m glad you enjoy your morning cup, but why on earth would I care what you think about my hand grinder? And that’s kind of what we get in r/RPG, which no amount of moderating can ever fix: Voluminous, unqualified opinions.

The hobby is slowly and painfully building a professional class around the culture and craft of roleplaying games. We have academic journals, we have published texts, and there is a small body of expertise building around legitimizing the hobby as media and art and stopping the cycle of forgetting and relearning that has plagued game design and gameplay best practices for decades. We also have, around this small, nascent professional hub, a sphere of enthusiastic amateurs trying to help record, recount, and assess the state of the industry. You do need to have a degree of skill and craft with RPGs and an analytical mind to join this sphere, at least in a way that you’ll get recognized. You’ll need to play lots of games, read even more games, and likely read a lot of history too, be that online or elsewhere. It is not easy in this hobby (or any hobby) to craft a thought-provoking, valuable opinion, but given a few years of experience and maybe a hundred or so thousand words of writing under your belt, you would probably make valuable additions to the broader hobby discussion.

In contrast, playing a roleplaying game requires twelve dollars of dice. A Reddit account is free.