Why D&D is a Stepping Stone to Tabletop Games

D&D is generally most folks' first tabletop games. It's not true of every tabletop player, but it is true for most of us. The easy explanation is that D&D is the most popular of tabletop games--therefore, it is necessarily the game that most people will encounter first. But I'm not interested in that idea. Yes, it is clear that D&D is the sort of name brand experience for tabletops, but why does it serve as a bridge for other games? Put another way, why is that D&D hooks players and prepares them for other games? 

Answering these questions will require us to step away from what we know about tabletop games. We will need to be able to see the these games from an outside perspective. In order to do that, let's begin by tracing the elements of what makes D&D accessible (and inaccessible) to new players. 

I'll begin by traveling back in time to my beginning with tabletop games. I was in high school. I had a classmate in an elective class--Academic Decathlon, where I was bound to meet other nerds--who turned out to live only a few houses away from me. She invited me to join her D&D group, whose DM was her dad. I was kindly welcomed into their home and added to a game that was already in progress. 

My initial impressions of the game were marked by wonder. I'd been raised on video games, where choosing what you do is the key aspect of the game experience. But video games can only do what the programmers considered. In D&D, I could decide to ask an NPC about their favorite local restaurant if I wanted to, which I couldn't do in a video game. This seemed like a new order of freedom that I hadn't considered before. 

There was also the matter of generating in-character fiction. Over my first few weeks as a player, I began to grasp the idea of roleplaying. My character, an elven monk named Algar, started out as a simple and quiet person, but he gradually came to embrace a kind of humility and focus that made him feel like more than a nebulous idea. I started to realize that I could make my character into someone who I had designed to be complete. This idea was very much fueled by my fellow players' focus on roleplaying. 

The final thing that I picked up on was how the art of DMing affected the story. My DM back then used modules as the backbone of his game with a healthy dose of improvisation when we decided to get creative. It took months of observing to really develop my sense of this, but as I experimented more and more with what Algar could decide to do, I began to understand the extent to which the DM really drives the game. I was transfixed, and the moment I left for college, I began DMing games myself. (In fact, I taught between 30 and 40 people to play D&D in my freshman year at college.)

It was these ideas that formed my perception of what D&D--and by extension, tabletop games--really are. They are open and free for experimentation; they allow you to meaningfully control an in-game avatar; they are driven by collaboration between players and DM. These are the things which many new D&D players realize as they become familiar with the system. 

But D&D is not the tabletop game which would serve as the best introduction to tabletop games. D&D was not deliberately designed with roleplaying in mind. There are hundreds of rules to learn and consider when playing. And modules actively prevent DMs from being able to respond directly to players in-game. So why is it that D&D teaches new players these things so well anyway? 

The simplest answer is that essentially any tabletop can teach a new player these things. It's just that the market for tabletop games has always existed in response to D&D. D&D was the first tabletop game, and so it has that kind of primacy. But it's more than that. Most any tabletop game designer (myself included) assumes that their players have at least some familiarity with tabletop games at large, and almost certainly D&D in particular. It's the nature of the market--games will try to be in the same league as the most wildly successful game in the field. 

So new D&D players end up learning that tabletop games are open and creative and collaborative in nearly any case, and that primes the players for recognizing these traits in other games. Allow me to reflect on a few of the other tabletop games I have played in the past:

• Call of Cthulhu - This game utilizes a system of rules and skills that make gameplay more challenging as players fight eldritch horrors for survival. The idea here is to make the players less likely to survive and to add a mechanic for insanity, which plays into the setting of the game. Its openness is similar to D&D's in that it allows adventure and investigation; in my experience, this game is more narratively closed than the average, but that could just have been the GMs I've played with. The game certainly allows creativity, especially in terms of problem solving, as direct solutions are usually dangerous. And the game is just as collaborative as any other tabletop game; there's no special emphasis on it, however--in fact, the GM holds more power here than in most tabletop games. As a result, Call of Cthulhu is a game experience that focuses on the narrative the GM is spinning and the frightful fight for survival. 
• Exalted - This game in the White Wolf system has a fabulously detailed world of lore and pits various supernatural beings against one another. The dice system calls for rolling a pool of dice and counting successes, which simplifies the dice systems of most tabletop games that use multiple dice. The game is quite open, though this also depends on the GM. There's lots of room for creativity--I remember that as I played this game, I developed dozens of pages of description about my character's assets, relationships, and job. And as far as collaboration goes, the high power level of the characters makes it easy for players to have significant agency when they play. The end result of all this is that Exalted is a game that allows players to meddle in massive universal matters with considerable powers, which empowers the players to really make the story their own. 
• Don't Rest Your Head - This game is an independent production which has little to no actual rules. A simplified dice pool system similar to Exalted's makes interacting with the world simple, and since the player character only had two abilities which the develop intends the player to stretch, most of the game is centered around creative use of what you can do. The game is very open--it has the least restrictive rule book of any I've seen. (More than half of the very brief manual is suggested worldbuilding, and even those are suggestions.) It obviously lends itself to creativity, as the player must be very clever to get by with their two powers. And the unstated goal of the game is a narrative tool; it is meant to be a vehicle for collaborative storytelling. Because of all this, the experience of playing Don't Rest Your Head characterized by narrative and player agency. 

You can see how each of these games differs from the D&D model. But one element of this has remained unsaid: these games would almost certainly be worse introductions to tabletop games than D&D. You may be thinking, "But you said that D&D wasn't the best introduction to tabletop games." This is true, but neither are these. One of the reasons that D&D serves so well as the introduction to tabletop games is that it isn't a specialized game. 

Consider this: if a player's first game were Call of Cthulhu, they would believe that tabletop games are about fighting against impossible odds and being on edge. If a player's first game were Exalted, they would be flummoxed by other games' more complicated rules and the lack of structured worldbuilding. If a player's first game were Don't Rest Your Head, they would believe that tabletop games only exist for creative thinking and storytelling, and they'd really be put off by complicated dice systems. None of these would really represent the genre as a whole. This is in part because their specialized systems step away from the middle ground of the form. 

D&D, however, is more or less a system of rules with a loosely-defined world. The rules account for physical reality--what can player characters do?--and for enough worldbuilding to explain the races and classes. Modules can provide stories, but these vary in scope and topic. The actual tone of the story is up to the DM. 

And here's our big idea: D&D is the entry point to tabletop games because it's the most popular one, because it's more a tool than a written experience, and because it leaves so much room for interpretation. It is more or less the average of what's available. But this is only the first element of my point. The second is that D&D prepares players to move on to other tabletop games. 

When I look back on my career in tabletop games, I see that I would not have necessarily been ready for a game like Don't Rest Your Head. I think that if that had been my first tabletop game, I wouldn't have been able to figure out my place at the table as easily since my task would be much bigger. I wouldn't have known how to roleplay, either. In D&D, I could ignore the fantasy setting (which we largely did anyway in favor of more character-based stories) and focus on the story, but in DRYH, I would have been grappling with the nightmare city setting and the very stark failure conditions. 

I acknowledge that I am drawing on personal experience here, and that not everyone will be able to completely agree. But I really do feel that for most players, D&D ends up being not the destination, but the first step. As I have grown as a DM over the years, I have come to rely less and less on what the official books say and more on how I think my gameworld should function. This kind of comfort with that process requires confidence and practice, both of which are gained by spending time in the world of tabletop games long enough to settle in. And that probably means playing on the playground that is D&D long enough to develop the taste and skills and perspective required to enjoy tabletop games at large. 

So, to review: D&D serves as a stepping stone to other tabletop games because it is the most popular tabletop game, because it is more or less the average tabletop game experience, and because it allows DMs and players to customize their game with minimal changes to the intended experience. D&D ends up teaching players the skills and perspectives necessary to appreciate and succeed at other tabletop games. And in the end, D&D is the training grounds for the art that has been inspired by it. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: tips for creating likeable NPCs, a profile on sports and games in my homebrew setting, and a list of ideas for character backstories. Until next time, happy gaming!

Back to the homepage (where you can find everything!)