I’ve been thinking on this topic in one way or another for a long time, but have been reluctant to write on it. Gatekeeping is very real in most hobbies, and for the most part it’s toxic. What value does it have to tell someone going on 12mph rides trying to get in shape that they’re ‘not a real cyclist’? Being inclusive is how all hobbies grow and become friendlier, not fitting people to bullshit standards. With that preamble out of the way, the ineffable status of ‘nerd’ has been changing the TTRPG hobby and I want to talk about it.

The word ‘nerd’ doesn’t really have a consistent definition, so even if I wanted to claim that a person or class of people ‘weren’t real nerds’ I don’t think I could with any credibility. That said, ‘being a nerd’ has a relationship to certain hobbies, and those hobbies are shaped by how many people within them are nerds. And at this point I need to be clear about how I define a ‘nerd’: A nerd, in the context of a hobby or an interest, is someone who fixates, analyzes, optimizes, and otherwise goes as deep as they possibly can, because they enjoy it. That last part is key, because once something is a career it no longer maps the same way. So let’s take a very normal and easily understandable example, coffee. Drinking coffee does not make you a coffee nerd. Making coffee at home doesn’t make you a coffee nerd. Hell, buying a pourover and using it with a recipe you saw online because you saw it recommended in a Reddit thread may not make you a coffee nerd, though you are definitely starting to care about coffee at this point. It’s very hard to tell where the border is, but if you go from using a pourover to a) dialing in custom recipes for sixteen different roasts, b) arguing about pourover recipes on Reddit, or c) deciding that the success of the pourover means you should buy 16 other coffee brewers and compare/contrast them, maybe even making a spreadsheet, then you’re definitely a coffee nerd. In case you’re interested, I’m c, though I haven’t made a spreadsheet yet.

The thing that makes coffee as a beverage (or pastime?) “normal” is that the nerds can go do their own thing and, for the most part, nobody has to care. Nerds have probably made your coffee life better in some small way, like putting up on the internet the correct way to use your Italian grandpa’s moka pot or making excellent easy brewers like the Aeropress available. But, even with those things, most coffee drinkers can just drink their coffee. The fact that some people get really into it either doesn’t affect them at all or affects them very little.

The relationship between the ‘mainstream’ market and ‘nerd’ market causes tension. In coffee this is minimized because the things that nerdy coffee drinkers find good and the things most coffee drinkers find good are, largely, the same. A large swathe of coffee drinkers like light roast coffees regardless of what the nerds say, and whole bean coffee is popular because it stays fresher longer, which you don’t need to be a nerd to taste. When we get away from objective measures to subjective ones, though, it gets tougher, and sometimes the nerds just need to face the fact that they’re the minority customers. Take beer. Possibly the most common complaint among beer nerds is that there are ‘too many IPAs’, but when you look at the average craft beer consumer who isn’t a total nerd about it, an IPA is, overwhelmingly, what they want to drink. The cross-section of beer drinkers who a) want something more developed than a Bud or Coors and b) aren’t total nerds about it are, essentially, IPA drinkers. It is what it is.

This is where the discussion starts to become about TTRPGs. When we get into TTRPGs we’re now talking about ‘nerd culture’, which is a nod to media and hobbies that the broader public thinks you basically have to be a nerd to enjoy. The irony, of course, is that the adoption of the phrase ‘nerd culture’ indicates the exact point in time where that was no longer true. Comics went from mainstream to niche between the 50s and 80s, but thanks to the massive transmedia push of the MCU, superhero properties returned to the mainstream and became accessible like never before. Being a Star Wars fan in 1988 probably made you a nerd, five years after the last movie and only having novels, RPGs, and Star Wars Insider to sate your interest, but now? There’s still plenty to make the series your special interest, but you can also just Netflix (or Disney Plus) and chill about it. TTRPGs, more so than comics or movie series, started as a hobby that virtually required you to be a nerd about it. Starting in 2000, and definitely by 2019, that was no longer true. You don’t need to be a nerd to play D&D, and some of the nerds are salty about that.

There’s two different phenomena at play, one long-standing and one much more recent. What’s been true forever is that you can enter the TTRPG hobby and, instead of becoming a ‘TTRPG nerd’ writ large, become a [system x] nerd. The World of Darkness is a great example, because White Wolf’s publication style and strategy made it easy to dive deep into the lore, collect dozens of books, and really, really get into a specific setting, specific game, or even the specific system, Storyteller. And it may be that you decide you’re not really interested in TTRPGs writ large, just the World of Darkness, and therefore you don’t have any interest in talking about dice pool mechanics or fictional positioning or any of that weird RPG crap, you just want to play your game and be a Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/etc.. The same has been true with Dungeons and Dragons for a long time, and obviously now being a ‘D&D nerd’ is way more common than being a ‘TTRPG nerd’. The issue, and the second phenomenon, is that playing D&D doesn’t necessarily make you a nerd anymore, and the hobby as a whole is having a hard time dealing with that.

Hasbro aims to make D&D a cultural phenomenon, and they’re doing that not only with traditional marketing but also by positioning ‘learning how to play D&D’ in the same category as ‘learning to ski’, namely something you do relatively early in life to see if you like it, regardless of whether you’ll get into skiing or playing D&D as a hobby. They’re pushing to put D&D in media, in theme parks, in bookstores (of course), and make it as accessible as possible. This push strongly diminishes the ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ aspect of increasing RPG popularity; while there may be a couple other TTRPGs in a Barnes and Noble, they’re there for the same reason a coffee shop may have a Chemex or Aeropress on a shelf: Gifts and impulse buys.

The Fifth Edition of D&D is the TTRPG that has been most systematically successful at opening up to a broader, non-nerd audience. There have been others that have come close, like the abovementioned World of Darkness, but the infrastructure wasn’t there to make it stick. That’s arguably why it didn’t quite stick the first time D&D tried it, which was with Basic in 1981. First the red box showed up in toy stores and then the tie-in products showed up everywhere; there was even a Satanic Panic (among other things) to make it seem even cooler to kids and teenagers. However, the love lavished on the (significantly poorer selling) AD&D as well as TSR’s mismanagement eventually extinguished the flame, leaving World of Darkness the more popular game in the early 90s. Wizards came in with the intent to make D&D explode the same way Magic: The Gathering did, but they fumbled the ball a couple times. 3e they came close, but a combination of brand mismanagement and handling the 3.5 update like a typical nerd property prevented the explosion from occurring. 4e was a complete misstep from a mass market perspective, and abandoned key requirements for the mass market (familiarity, consistency) for key requirements for the nerd market (design focus, mathematical engagement, long tail gameplay). 4e was the most significant indicator that D&D’s continued growth meant it couldn’t be just for nerds.

Although D&D has been pushed as a mainstream brand for 45 years, with 5e Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro finally succeeded, and the rest of the hobby is still figuring out what that means a bit. The fact that there are now people learning how to play D&D casually and having game nights like it’s poker isn’t really a problem, although there’s plenty of sour grapes among the nerds of the hobby (even if D&D isn’t as bad as some make it out to be, it is still the Settlers of Catan of RPGs). However, it means the next generation of D&D player that becomes a D&D nerd is not nearly as likely to be a TTRPG nerd at all, or care about the actual game as an object in the same way a TTRPG nerd would. It’s the reason improving D&D sales only affects the rest of the hobby in a superficial way: D&D makes TTRPG nerds at the same rate that Starbucks makes coffee nerds, and that rate is very low.

One thing I realized when recently discussing the OSR is that one of the reasons the OSR is tied to D&D play specifically instead of simulationist play broadly is that the OSR came about not only as a specific clade of TTRPG nerddom, but as a refuge for D&D nerds who felt like their special interest was abandoning them. When you consider the rhetoric around Dragonlance, it all begins to make sense: Dragonlance began the shift of D&D as dungeon game to D&D as hero game, as I mentioned last week. It was also a release that enabled the market discovery that heroic fantasy was popular, and that popularity rather than any particular design affectation was what caused D&D to start shifting that way, a shift that was basically complete with 3e. Where does that leave the hardcore dungeon game nerds? They’re the ones at the beer bar complaining that there’s 15 IPAs and not a single bock or kolsch. So, they start breweries (or write Whitehack, as the case may be).

The point of this is not to say that somebody is ‘not a nerd’, even if there’s occasionally a bit of stolen valor with incredibly mainstream objects like the Dungeons and Dragons movie or Baldur’s Gate 3 (yup, video games are mainstream now). Rather, what has really sunk in to me is that being into D&D, the mainstream as-published D&D, doesn’t mean you’re into TTRPGs. You don’t need to understand what makes a TTRPG interesting, accessible, or workable to play D&D, in the same way you don’t need to know what all the parts of a bicycle are in order to learn how to ride one. I am a bicycle nerd in that I enjoy tinkering, taking them apart, and using them for pleasure and exploration. A road bike dude who knows his functional threshold power, gets deep into fueling strategies and waxes his chain for marginal wattage gains is also a bicycle nerd, but we don’t really have anything to say to each other. And so it is with D&D. And just like with cycling, the much larger amount of money and attention that goes into road biking than vintage bikes or bike touring means that one section of nerds has a harder time and needs to work harder than the other.

I do think because D&D’s mainstream entree was so recent, D&D nerds don’t necessarily understand they aren’t TTRPG nerds. To go back to the cycling analogy, most roadies understand at least superficially that going into a discussion on bike touring and luggage and mentioning that a carbon frame would be lighter is somewhere between a complete misunderstanding and a really stupid thing to say. At the same time, someone complaining that their gravel bike is having a really tough time on wooded trails that they ride should be able to comprehend that ‘a mountain bike would make that easier’ is valid advice, though perhaps irrelevant to them specifically. In RPG terms, advice around D&D Fifth Edition is often shot across the nerd circles, making it useless. A TTRPG nerd is not going to homebrew 5e, it’s a waste of time when so many other systems are out there and either ‘do the thing’ out of the box or are easier to hack. At the same time, a 5e nerd isn’t going to try another game because that’s not their hobby and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

And this is where the accusations of gatekeeping come in, exacerbated by the fact that this is all rather new and there is a legitimate lack of understanding caused more by the category being new than by any sort of hierarchy. As it is, we’re all just hyperfocusing in different ways and there’s no value judgment in that. Even so, people hate being told that they’re ‘not’ something, it’s just human nature that being excluded feels shitty. At the same time, though, seeing the divergent nerd paths is going to make everyone’s lives easier. If a road biker doesn’t like being told they aren’t a mountain biker, they buy a mountain bike, not bring their road bike to a bike park. Or, they take comfort in the fact that their hobby brings them joy and that mountain biking is not their hobby. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with just being a D&D nerd, whether that means going deep into the Forgotten Realms and Baldur’s Gate, going deep into Critical Role and Exandria, or even looking systemically at D&D-aligned games like Shadowdark, Draw Steel, and Daggerheart. It’s a fun part of nerddom with a lot of likeminded people. And if you still feel some kind of way about not being a TTRPG nerd in the same way I am, you can always become one! It will, however, require you to play games that aren’t D&D.