Edgedullers: Why A "D&D" Article Caused Such Uproar

You might remember, back in mid-April, I wrote about how Dungeons & Dragons was not the best roleplaying game around despite it being the most "popular." How its outsized impact on the TTRPG industry was not a good thing. It seems my concern was well founded, though the method of confirmation was not what I'd expected.

A little while ago, Netflix put out a ten episode anime series called Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. It was produced by CD Projekt RED and Studio Trigger (Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia), and based off CDPR's video game Cyberpunk 2077. It's an excellent series, garnering rave reviews and curiously spurring an upsurge of activity on Steam (and presumably other platforms). Last week, a tabletop RPG news website called Bell of Lost Souls published an article where they tried to stat out the main character from Edgerunners, David Martinez. And, perhaps to the shock of the site and the author, it was not well received.

Fans of Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk RED (and its predecessor Cyberpunk 2020) are livid that the writer didn't even think to try and use RED for this little effort. More surprisingly, D&D fans aren't thrilled about it because it's trying to use fantasy game character archetypes for a technic near-future setting. It's much like trying to filet a trout with a meat tenderizer: it ruins the fish and leaves an awful mess. The discontent was bad enough, or looked to be getting that way, that Pondsmith himself put out a tweet reminding RED fans not harass the writer of the article just because they disagreed with it.

As an editor myself, I'm seriously disappointed by the BoLS article. Generally, their content is pretty decent, which makes this one especially dissatisfying. Poorly written, facts either not checked or obfuscated by the low quality of writing, it's really not representative of their standard work in the worst way. What's more concerning is why the editor didn't make the obvious call when this particular piece was pitched: "Why don't you just use Cyberpunk RED?" As a player and GM, I can tell you even RED would have required some tweaking and adjustment to be done, but considering that R. Talsorian Games recently put out Cyberpunk RED: Easy Mode as a freebie, there's no good reason for the effort not being made. It absolutely would not have required the weird gyrations that the BoLS article indulged in for their effort. And it's particularly damning that BoLS put out a news piece about Easy Mode a couple days after this ill-fated article, despite the product being out well before all of this occurred.

There have been, in certain quarters, the muttered charge of "erasure," of trying to diminish or ignore an artistic work because its creator (Mike Pondsmith, if you hadn't figured it out) is black. The piece has apparently been re-edited since its original release, when it made a comparison between Edgerunners and the TTRPG Shadownrun. It currently mentions Cyberpunk RED, but erroneously conflates it with the earlier 2020 edition as well as saying it's a direct sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, when in fact RED is a prequel of sorts to the video game. My personal thought is that Hanlon's Razor can safely be applied in this instance. It's still not a good look for BoLS, but unless some Discord or Skype screenshot turns up with inflammatory comments to the contrary, I'm going to operate on the premise that the writer and editor just weren't using their heads.

But this whole affair underscores the larger issue that I'd observed back in April. Dungeons & Dragons is warping the TTRPG space, and doing so in ways that are surprising even to me. I wouldn't have thought a media outlet would allow such a piece like the BoLS article to come out in the first place. "Homebrewing" new content for an existing system is one thing, but there comes a point in every homebrewer's life where they realize that they're using the wrong tool for the project they have in mind. Or they have that pointed out to them, sometimes with more vigor than tact. And given the lack of official rules for modern, near-future, or far-future settings for the d20 system out of Wizards of The Coast, it's entirely likely that gaffes like this will continue to happen. And that will almost certainly start to impact the perception of d20 as a useful system outside of certain parameters.

At a time when WoTC is trying to get buy-in on their "One D&D" concept, the restriction to heroic fantasy settings cannot be seen as anything other than a self-inflicted wound. Me, I'm all for trying out new systems and new settings, because it's something that helps keep me sharp as a player and a GM. WoTC is deliberately dulling their edge, and outlets like Bell of Lost Souls are showing what happens when you try to use such a fatally flawed tool.