 Long ago, in the before times of 1971, a soft, squishy man named Ernest Gygax created a small battle simulation game based off of rules created by his local wargaming club, the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, with the intent of creating a medieval battle system similar to one's founded convention created by him and his pals, the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention, which would later be shortened to just GenCon, because people don't have time for that many words anymore. The rules of this battle system were borrowed from a friend of Ernest's named Jeff Perrin and expanded upon to explore the aspects of medieval warfare, and it would go on to become one of the most important works of Ernest's life. Its name was Chainmail. This is the story of a different game entirely, Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons was created in 1974 by one E. Gary Gygax, and a man that he met at another GenCon meeting, Dave Arnson. For those of you sharp-eyed viewers, you may have caught on by now that E. Gary Gygax is, in actuality, Ernest Gygax, the very same man who made Chainmail just three years before. And while Ernie was developing his medieval war game, he also created a weird one-off supplement that added elements of fantasy literature into an otherwise strictly realistic game. The idea was just to pay homage to the likes of Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, because Ernest was a huge nerd and he had the strange idea of playing games set in a world like those, but he wasn't sure about whether it would go over well with his crowd of historically-minded friends, so he included it in the back of the main rulebook for Chainmail as what were essentially optional, hey, look at this fun thing I made, rules. Despite his expectation that the joke rules wouldn't be taken seriously, the first edition of Chainmail was a huge success, and a large subsection of the game's new audience really resonated with the more jovial tone of the silly fantasy rules. One man in particular, the aforementioned Dave Arnson, got really hooked on the idea that you could play around with individual miniatures and act like you're going through fantasy stories like Dark Shadows. This would leave Davey Arnie to develop a game called Blackmore, where players would take on the role of medieval characters within the barony of Blackmore and go on quest for gold, battle monsters, and fight dragons within the dungeons of Castle Blackmore. Arnson took the fantasy rules from Chainmail and added heavy roleplay elements to what had until that point been a totally accurate battle simulator, creating what we would probably consider today to be just a module, but at the time, that was the whole game. Blackmore was the beginning of what we can recognize as the modern, tabletop roleplaying genre. Dave brought this new idea to GenCon, and it caught the eye of Ernest, which gave the two of them an idea. What would happen if they took the basic structure of Chainmail's one-on-one combat system, played into the fantasy gimmick, and then changed the focus from simulated scrimches to a long-form campaign that tracked the progress of individual heroes Fellowship of the Ring style? Thus, after many hours of playtesting and a naming process heavily vetted by Ernest's two-year-old daughter, Dungeons and Dragons was born, filling a niche that was hiding under the tabletop of wargaming, and expanding out from that community into the broader community of over-imaginative geeks trying to find escapism in the judgmental world of the mid-70s. In order to produce the new game, Ernest created tactical studies rules incorporated, along with Ernest's childhood friend, Don Kay, a man ultimately unimportant to the story who died two years after the company was founded. But while he was alive, he and Ernest realized that their business skills weren't business-y enough, and more importantly, that they didn't have the money needed to pass out D&D books like they were sheep cigars. Dave Arneson, who also didn't have the money to fund production, wasn't really driving with the whole business of business, so he agreed to take a cut of the royalties from sales for his contribution to the game, and then he sort of just fades into the background from here on out. Ernest and Don decided that in order to get the gold necessary to pass their loot out, they would have to bring in somebody new, and so they hired a man named Brian Bloom, represented here as Mr. Burns from the Simpsons because this action will have consequences. But we'll get to that later. For now, Brian had the money, and production for the world's greatest role-playing game could start. The overall presentation of the inaugural copy of the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons was really bad, to say the least. Bloom only gave Ernest $2,000 to produce 1,000 copies of the game, and while 2,000 was more back then than it is now, only 100 of that was put aside for R, so the Big E was only shelling out $2-3 per illustration, and he conscripted anyone that he could find to make him a doodle, up to and including his own wife's sister. So the tradition of treating commissioned artists like shit within the TTRPG community goes all the way back to the source, and the end result was, well, it's good b-roll for my videos. That wasn't the only issue plaguing the double-Ds when it first came out, either. Ernest G. Gygax was a wargamer at heart, and his rules stemmed from an understanding that you knew what wargaming was all about. If you were one of those people who saw a table full of metal soldier men and did not know what the hell was going on, D&D wasn't going to make a lot of sense to you at first. Also, the very fact that this was the first game of its kind, besides Blackmore, which wasn't as popular, led to a lot of growing pains outside of the nerd bubble, such as that people weren't used to taking four hours out of their day to sit around and hallucinate about magic men, only to be told that the game wasn't over at the end of that day, and that they would have to routinely come back and play the game over and over again to eventually get the resolution after about 20 total hours of game time. In a world that was just meeting D&D for the first time, that was kind of bonkers. That said, the fact that this was a game where you could do anything was a huge deal, and before you ask, the Satanic Panic wasn't in full swing back then, so Christian Mothers didn't really care about this weird paper game where you could play such exciting classes as magic user, elf, or fighting man, at least not yet. Eventually, the success of the game would lead to new releases of rules that expanded on the core premise, but were mostly just Ernest going, hey, look at this cool thing I had made, just like how he did with Chainmail. Unlike Chainmail, though, he didn't stop making rules, and by 1977, there was a bit of an issue. Ernest had made so many rule clarifications and updates and new options for players that the game was starting to get bloated, and the lack of high-speed internet meant that somebody could hear about a clarification for a rule in a supplement that they didn't even know about, but apparently came out a year ago. Thus, Ernie had two options. Create a uniform collection of D&D rules and present that as the true addition of Dungeons & Dragons, or continue to sell the current Basic Rules version of the game that could be more easily marketed towards Toy Store owners and filthy casuals. Instead of choosing one option, he chose both, and thus was created Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. One of the things people ask me a lot is the placement of AD&D within the numerical editions. A lot of people assume that AD&D is considered the second edition because Advanced implies that it comes after the normal one, and this really isn't the case. When AD&D came out, it wasn't considered a new edition of D&D as much as it was considered its own game that spawned off of D&D. Both Double D and Advanced D were given their own updates and expansions, and their rules often contradicted one another because they weren't meant to be compatible anymore. One was the casual experience, and one was the rules-heavy nerd jock experience, and they built themselves around their new identities. Both had their place in the nerd ecosystem, but the creation of AD&D did cause a big rift between Ernest and Dave Arneson. See, Dave agreed to take royalties on his co-creation, Dungeons & Dragons, and leave the business of tactical studies rules to Ernest. But now, TSR was selling a new thing that was still sort of called Dungeons & Dragons and still sort of used the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, but TSR considered it so creatively removed from the original version of the game that they thought Arneson didn't deserve any of the money from it. This spawned a huge legal debate that ended in Dave getting 2.5% of the revenue from AD&D, which was a good amount of money, sure, but the rift between Ernest and Dave never healed. Aside from that legal snafu, the next decade was full of happiness, profit, and good vibes with D&D's popularity soaring into the sun until the year of 1989 when Ernest's wax wings began to melt. What happens next in the D&D timeline is undoubtedly the most influential thing to happen to the game, and for all the wrong reasons. But to talk about that, we have to talk business. As you know, D&D was owned by a company called Tactical Studies Rules Incorporated, or TSR for short. A company created and owned by Ernie, the mostly superfluous Don K, and eventually Brian Bloom, the man who had ultimately financed the game. Bebe Gun may have been a businessman, but it was his father who had the real money, and if I may paraphrase in an effort to condense multiple years of TSR politics and very dense business business into a single paragraph, Brian Bloom's father, Melvin, eventually took partial ownership of the company by way of absorbing Don K's shares when he died. Then gave his partial ownership to Brian's brother, Kevin Bloom. At this point, Brian and Kevin combined, owned a larger percentage of the company than Ernest did on his own, and it naturally caused some tension. Ernest was just a guy who wanted to make games and also have very unsettling views on women, and it was actually Don's idea to make a company in the first place, so now Ernest had to juggle his love for games and his newfound status of being what is effectively a figurehead for his own multi-million dollar company. To make matters worse, copycat games and unofficial bootleg expansions created by unlicensed publishers started growing in the shadow of D&D's popularity, and while Ernest saw it as a sign of a growing community and only wanted to slap down literal counterfeit copies, the Bloom brothers held the same opinion of Homebrew as I did two years ago, so they started trying to throw the legal book at people. It wasn't very effective. But despite that, D&D carried on with both its popularity and its ability to bring in the gold pieces to the point where Ernest had a chance to get away from the internal politics and focus on doing creative projects in the form of both D&D movies and cartoons, the latter of which is the greatest shit in the world, while Ernest was expanding on the brand, Bebe and KB were expanding on their brandy, which is to say that they were spending crazy amounts of company money on nonsense that didn't matter, including overstaffing, buying a shitload of company cars, and for some reason, uncovering a 19th century wreckage of a ship from the ocean. I don't know why they did this. No one knows why they did this. And it got to the point where one day, Ernest had to halt production of the D&D movie completely because one of his employees came to him and said, Mr. Gygax, our sales' quarter are better than ever. Why? That's fantastic. Now I can keep working on my movie and... Also, the Bloom Brothers just put us $1.5 million in debt and they're trying to sell the company. Ernest responded to this news with the reasonable response of firing them, to which they responded with the reasonable response of combining their percentage shares in the company into one large Franken share and then handing that share to the worst person they could think of in a clear act of retaliation, the then general manager of TSR, Lorraine Williams. A little bit about Lorraine, she's a savvy businesswoman. She's a devout Christian and the satanic panic is finally starting to roll in. She hates gamers and thinks that they're all basement dwelling troglodytes who worship Satan and get the AIDS. And due to the combined percentage shares of the Bloom Brothers being transferred to her, she now had complete control over the most profitable gaming company in the world. So, yeah, big oof. Ernest tried to fight things in legal court by telling the judge, hey, the Bloom Brothers totally told me that they would give me their shares if I were ever to fire them for being crushingly stupid. So, can I please have my business back? But the judge was not moved by this deception and seeing the natural one on the wall, Ernest sold his ownership of the company and sailed off into the sunset as a mirage in the greater history of D&D, just like its other creator, Dave Arnson. Thus ends the tale of the men who created Dungeons and Dragons and begins the tale of the woman who nearly destroyed it. Lorraine Williams, the manager of TSR, had just been made majority shareholder and the share mass of bad vibes that she gave off caused the old guy to do a backflip right out of the company. Funnily enough, he was actually the one who hired her in the first place because the Bloom Brothers were business savants. If by savant, you mean idiot savant and if by idiot savant, you mean idiot. They were business idiots. And their business idiocy allowed Lorraine Williams to rise up to the top of the company where she now ruled with an iron fist. Her first order of business, get money. The Bloom Brothers may have gotten her into her seat but they still left the company $1.5 million in debt and that needed to be taken care of first. Luckily, she'd been the general manager of the company before her knee jerk promotions so she was less business idiot and more straight business. Under her leadership, TSR expanded from just selling board games and to selling comic books and magazines. Similar to the ones that featured beloved and culturally relevant character, Buck Rogers, whom Lorraine personally owned and gained a rudimentary understanding of pop culture from. The ultimate goal of expansion also led to the creation of dozens of new settings such as Darksun, Alkdeem, Ravenloft and 5E's future favorite fantasy land, the Forgotten Realms. The basic business model looked like this. Release the setting. All the fans will lose their shit and buy it. Make a bunch of additional material for that setting. Get more money and then drop it and make a different setting that all the fans will lose their shit over. In the short term, this worked as the sheer overload of settings meant that if fans liked something, it could be capitalized on. But if it sucked, then they could just sweep it onto the rug and pretend it never happened. Through these tactics, TSR managed to recoup its losses and stay at the table top of the industry through the rest of the 80s. The second prong of her strategy could affectionately be referred to as fuck guy gags with a cactus, preferably. It started with the fact that as long as Ernest was considered the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, TSR would never be able to get rid of him so Lorraine decided to create her own Dungeons and Dragons with Blackjack and Hookers as a way of divorcing Ernest from his legacy. This is how AD&D's second edition came along and you'll find that new editions of D&D usually coincide with somebody getting fucked over. So don't expect fifth edition to end until Hasbro gets eaten by the big mouse. But I'm getting ahead of myself. TSR released second edition as a complete overhaul of the original game and suddenly Ernest got the same treatment that he had given Dave years earlier. But without the backing of hyper-aggressive lawyers like Lorraine had, Ernest didn't get any percentage of the royalties. But he didn't take this defeat lying down and after sailing off into the sunset when he left TSR, he came sailing right back with a new company, Games Designers Workshop, and a new fantasy role-playing game called Dangerous Journeys, which Lorraine immediately recognized as a threat both because of Ernest's reputation as the creator of D&D and because she didn't actually know how these games worked. So maybe this was going to be better than what she had and that couldn't be allowed. So she sacked her lawyers on Ernest once again and destroyed his new game before it could start, cutting the legs off of GDW and finally removing Ernest as a threat for good. Despite these good developments, Lorraine was still having a problem that couldn't be fixed with bureaucracy. Making a million supplements and settings meant that quality control was of no consequence except that it was a consequence to the players of the game. Crazy broken shit came out and fans just had to roll with it, which is where our cultural acceptance of lopsided power differences comes from. It didn't help that in addition to the short and strict schedules, Lorraine was unwilling to let the developers of her own game playtest the material that they were putting out because she saw it as an excuse to, quote, sit around and play games. And if there's one thing a games distribution company wants to avoid more than anything, it's people playing games. Also, since she was a Christian in the late 80s, she outright banned any material that would be seen as anti-God, including demons and devils, letting players play as evil people, anything involving the sex and a bunch of other nebulous concepts. It's commonly accepted that the image of TSR profited in spite of her, thriving off of the goodwill that the brand had built up, as well as the actually talented people working under her who created massively popular settings that are still being reprinted today in novels. Of course, no amount of luck could save her forever, and as the 1990s rolled around, Lorraine was met with the bane of all bad business owners, competition. While TSR cornered the role-playing game market, two new challengers entered the ring and started taking pieces of the gaming pie for themselves. Game's workshop showed up with two fistfuls of war games, Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Rogue Trader, which would soon be retitled as Warhammer 40K, a badass macho spaceman romp that was meant to lampoon the ridiculous and overly edgy mindset of the 80s attitude era, but would eventually go on to slam face first and oppose law and become the very thing it swore to destroy. Meanwhile, a completely new and innovative game was sweeping the nerd scene named Magic the Gathering. The intensely rewarding and rules-heavy magic battle card game created and owned by none other than Wizards of the Coast. Between these two rising titans, Lorraine felt the pressure and knew that TSR would have to innovate if it wanted to stay in the ring. She knew that she was basically already competing directly with GW in the miniatures game, but thought that the power of TSR could crush Wizards of the Coast if they rolled out their own version of the world's first collectible card game. So she took a look at what D&D had to offer and honed in on the most iconic parts, dragons and dice. The resulting product was a collectible dice game where players would buy packs of colored math rocks that corresponded to different elements and had symbols on them that allowed for various powers to be used, with the ultimate goal of taking terrain from the other player or otherwise killing all their units. You could buy a pack of dragon dice with a random assortment of colors and symbols and whoever had the best collection would win as long as the dice gods allowed it. The game was actually pretty good in that sort of novelty way, and as an avid board game junkie, if I saw a dragon dice sitting on a shelf somewhere, I'd consider buying it if I could get enough of the pieces together. Financially, it sold well too, with TSR shelling out more money to exponentially increase the amount of dragon dice packs in game stores, as well as releasing new types of dice that actually represented dragons. Unfortunately, what Lorraine expected to be a knockout punch against Wizards turned into an Uno reverse card. As where she saw immense staying power, the reality was a passing if quirky fad, and once that fad was over, Toy Store owners were left with racks of useless dice that they didn't want. So they exercised their right to return products to the manufacturer, and soon enough, TSR was choking on the plastic that was meant to save them. Full trucks of dragon dice costing millions of dollars would just roll back into the company warehouses with a sticky note that said return to sender. This miscalculation spelled financial disaster for TSR, and in 1997 Wizards of the Coast, the very company that they were trying to compete with bought out TSR and all of its products, including the much beloved Dungeons and Dragons. TSR would officially be dissolved three years later, and over the years the brand name would be picked up by a new team, since at the time that Wizards got it, its reputation was so beaten down that they decided it wasn't even worth keeping. Currently, TSR is owned by a crusty old transphobe named Ernie Gygax, the son of our late hero, Ernest, and at the time of this writing, his current business model seems to be destroying his father's legacy so hard that people won't stop talking about it, and then coasting on the small but consistent revenue of edgy reactionaries whose parents never hugged them because that would be gay. As for Lorraine Williams, she left the nerd scene completely, because she never wanted to be there in the first place, and she spent her last few years trying to get people to care about Buck Rogers again, to a resounding who? Moving back to the present day of 1997, Wizards of the Coast had just acquired TSR, and in a show of good faith, offered to relocate all the TSR employees so that they could keep their jobs. At this point, Wizards of the Coast was still owned by its original founder, Peter Adzksen, who was a pretty nice dude that put stock in the value of human life. In fact, the name Wizards of the Coast came from a cabal of mages that he had in his own personal D&D setting, so it's safe to say that he was a fan, and he intended on treating the D&D IP with care and respect. He even spent three years fixing D&D's public image by making reparations with people like Ernest, David Arnson, third-party creators like R.A. Salvatore, and especially the homebrew community, to elation and applause from the greater D&D fan base. Truly, P.D. was the man that the game desperately needed. It is such a shame, then, that at the turn of the millennium, Wizards got noticed by a bigger fish and the long shadow of the oligarchy swooped in and devoured it, sending Peter Packing, although he bought GenCon two years later, so he sure landed on his feet, and leaving D&D in the hands of the soulless one. In the same way that Ernie had screwed over David and Lorraine had screwed over Ernie in turn, the soulless one could not stand idly by as someone else made money off of Dungeons & Dragons, so a new product quickly became the main priority, with Wizards of the Coast combining the minds of TSR veterans Ralph Williams and Monty Cook, as well as WOTC TTRPG designer Jonathan Tweet, in order to brainstorm what would become the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Johnny Johnny had been making smaller RPGs for years, and he wrote the Player's Handbook. Cookie Monster wrote the Dungeon Master's Guide, and then later would work on the 2002 edition of Call of Cthulhu. Ralph Williams, on the other hand, had been the most involved with D&D up until now, because he went to high school with Ernest's future transfer above the sun, Ernie, which granted him access to the Gygaxian estate, where in his youth he play-tested advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules given to him by Ernest himself. He wrote the Monster Manual. With their powers combined, they managed to create a game system that most modern D&D fans would actually be able to recognize as D&D. Unlike the older editions, whose rules compared to now were like trying to speak Old English while only knowing Nihongo. While the rules overhaul simplified the game from the abstract mathematics of second edition, it was still seen as the tabletop equivalent of Spaghetti Code, due in part to their adoption of Lorraine's throw everything out there and see what happens style of content creation. Although actually being allowed to play their game, tighten the quality from, let's hope that this isn't that bad, to, it probably won't be that bad. The unwieldy mess of new rules was handled in part by embracing the mindset of, DMs will ban whatever is overpowered. And so it spawned a renaissance of min-maxing, munchkinizing, home brewing, power gaming, number crunching, mind-numbing fun. For seven years, the game thrived by releasing crazy shit and letting the community decide its fate. For fans, there was wide elation, but this design philosophy was obviously not without its flaws. Despite attempting to curb second editions wildly inconsistent quality, 3E was still a fuster cluck and every year came dozens of new supplements that only further fostered its cluck. They tried releasing amended versions of the player's handbook and Ralph even authored the Sage device column to help clarify rules and keep the crunchy ship from sinking. Jackson Hayne, a writer for the unbiased and trustworthy tabloid screen rant, made note of the problem as he wrote that Wizard of the Coast printed 12 different core D&D rule books between 2000 and 2007. This quote was so important that it made it into the Wikipedia article. So it has to be true. The first big attempt at getting over the hump of eroding mechanics was in the form of D&D 3.5 edition released in 2003. Three years after 3E came out and it combined all of the then current rules changes and updates in much the same way that AD&D was formed. However, the decision to brand this as a direct update to the current edition and not a spin-off like AD&D made it understood that future releases would all be in reference to 3.5 and not base 3E, officially removing the advanced from Dungeons & Dragons and ending the concept of having two D&D brands running at the same time. From now on, the only way was forward, baby. And forward it went. For the seven years that third edition was alive, Wizard of the Coast kept pumping out update after update, spurned on by a fan base happy to spend their money, which put happy dollar signs in the soulless one's eyes. However, the reality of each release putting the game on shakier and shakier ground mechanics wise was making the fan base uneasy and an uneasy fan base was making the soulless one sweat. So it imposed upon Wizard of the Coast an idea to rejuvenate the money magnet of D&D. An idea that would lead the game down a polarizing path that had never been before C.E.N. Get it? Cause that's a word based pun on 4E. The third edition of Dungeons and Dragons was doing well, but expansion after expansion had broken the game beyond repair and Wizard of the Coast wanted to start on clear level ground with a more simplistic game that was more rigid in its rules, thereby making it harder to break accidentally. Bill Slavisek, the director of role-playing, knew that changing editions was always risky play. So he called on the big guns of Rob Heinzew, a man who had been playing D&D since he was 10 and had been making Forgotten Realms content for wizards from the moment that they got the IP. Rob, in turn, summoned both Andy Collins and James Wyatt and together they formed the 4E Force, a superhero team dedicated to making the new edition not suck. And when they lit the beacons of Gondor, they called forth a bevy of designers from across the land, including David Noonan, Mike Murrells, and Jesse Decker, who all acted as Rob's flywheel design team, meaning he would chuck rules at them and they'd give their immediate feedback. In the future, this role would be taken over by 14-year-olds on Reddit, but for now, this was the squad. The first order of business, get people hyped for the new game. In 2007, they released two compendium books known as Wizards Presents Classes and Races and Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters, which, as they sound, gave fans a first taste at how the game was going to play out. First in terms of character creation, then regarding world building. They also talked about the design philosophy of their new game. And as they were released at a time when the internet was first figuring out how to enslave people, this generated a lot of buzz. Such a large amount of keyboard warrior energy raised the eyebrows of Wizards of the Coast, who saw an additional path to victory in the World Wide Web. They soon announced Dungeons and Dragons Insider, which some may recognize as the precursor to today's D&D Beyond. DDI granted access to 4E books on a subscription-based model, and it also provided the catalog of D&D magazines, as well as a barebones tabletop simulator and a character creator, which didn't come out right away so the fanbase got angry. The attempt at a concise community system was there, but Insider was a lackluster service. And if anybody tried to make custom API tools to help improve the experience, Wizards Code Monkeys would get offended and start flinging feces filled with cease and desist orders. Still, DDI would survive for the lifetime of 4E, which, back in the present day of 2008, was finally ready for launch. Rob Hynesu hit the big red button, and 4E happened. Oh boy, did it happen. The point of a new edition was meant to appease fans who had found the third edition to be bloated and oversaturated, so Wizards expected a standing ovation for their efforts. But what they got instead were cries of terror from players and hobby store owners alike. The first and most glaring issue actually had nothing to do with the game itself, but it had everything to do with timing. See, us modern D&D fans look at the release schedules between third to fourth and fifth edition, and we see that they're only six to seven years apart, which makes us think that it's normal for a single edition of the game to only last less than a decade. But as you've hopefully learned through watching the series, games don't just go up in edition because the time feels right. They usually only change because something important is making them change. OG D&D lasted for 15 years, or 12 years if you're going off of the advanced D&D. Second edition lasted for 11 years, but third edition had only been out for seven, or if you consider 3.5 to be its own version, the game had only been out for three and a half years. If you were someone who was getting into D&D in 2007, it would be a slap in the face to buy up all the books for a relatively new game, only to hear that the company making it is dropping support and working on this other thing now. And if you were a hobby store owner who had loaded up on D&D material, you didn't just get slapped in the face, you got slapped in the face with the soulless one's ass cheek and then offered the other cheek in the form of buying more books for the next edition. This is honestly where a lot of the ire for fourth edition comes from. Yeah, the game has changed heavily for the 3.5. Things were oversimplified to the point where the classes were indistinguishable mechanically, half of the expected classes didn't even come out in the core rulebook, and the game played more like an epic battle simulator than the world's greatest role-playing game, but that was just the icing on the ass cheeks. Even worse, one of the biggest draws for 3.5 was the open gaming license that it was built on, which allowed for third-party creators to just go ham on whatever homebrew material they wanted to make, and they could take from pretty much every part of the main game if they wanted to expand on something. 4E, however, was looking to tighten that leash on the developing community, and that only further fueled the rank core that the community had for the game. One particular group of people got so offended, in fact, they decided to fight back the only way they knew how. They'd make their own D&D edition with Blackjack and Hookers. Enter Pathfinder. So this isn't a history of Pathfinder video, but it's impossible to talk about the 4E era of D&D without bringing up Pathfinder. Pathfinder was a TT RPG just like D&D, created by Paizo, a company that had once worked for Wizards of the Coast writing dragon magazines, but Wizards chose to stop working with them, and because of that, along with the changing of the open game license, Paizo retaliated by using their intimate knowledge of D&D's design process to create their own game, which did fantastically at launch and almost immediately overtook 4E in popularity, becoming the top-selling tabletop game from 2011 to 2014, and even then, it only dropped down to second place afterwards. This continued the long-standing D&D curse of screwing over friends and creating enemies from within, and it was perhaps the biggest example since Lorraine Williams. Pathfinder only exists because the open gaming license of 3.5 was so open that Pathfinder was able to copy almost wholesale what Wizards of the Coast was doing, and this isn't an insult, it was a design philosophy. Paizo intentionally wanted to create a game that was incredibly similar to D&D so that they could capitalize on the Hindenburg explosion that was 4E. They wanted to create a game that would get in on all the buzz of a new D&D edition without making something so different that it would spook the core fanbase, and with a lot of people feeling betrayed that they had invested their time into the mechanics of 3E, they were more than happy to jump ship onto a game that was just like 3E, but was still getting support from the company. Pathfinder was even nicknamed 3.75 by the design team because it felt so much like a tightened rules update, and with the power of hindsight giving it all of the advantages over D&D, Paizo spent the next half decade rocking Wizards of the Coast right out of their seat to become the new premier TTRPG company of the early 2000s. Fourth edition would spend its lifetime not only competing with Pathfinder, but also competing with its past lives because people who didn't wanna make a switch just didn't. And even when 4E was in its heyday, little 14-year-old me ended up getting introduced to D&D via 3.5, and I was told not to touch a 4E book lest it steal my crops and run off with my children. It seemed like nothing could stop the brand assassination that 4E was tainted with, and the soulless one was becoming frustrated with all the money it was burning away. So in 2012, just four years after 4E was launched, Wizards of the Coast began scrambling to work on a new edition to save the company from obscurity. The soulless one had known that tampering with the affairs of mortals often leads to disaster, so it pulled its black tendrils away from the production of 5E, but gave Wizards of the Coast an ultimatum. Make money, and we will leave you alone. Stop making money, and you will spend all eternity in the pits of Shior. With this bargain understood, Wizards put together its two best men, Mike Morales, who had been heavily involved in 4E's rise to fame and definitely hadn't been secretly assisting an abuser in tracking down their victims behind closed doors. And Jeremy Crawford, the first openly gay D&D designer and king of the deep ocean. Together, they got to work on what they hoped would be a more popular edition of Dungeons and Dragons. And holy shit, was it ever. In 2014, Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, codenamed D&D Next, was released to an unsuspecting audience, and the world lost its shit. Not all at once. At first, D&D Next was faced with apprehension from a fan base that had seen what could happen when editions change, but the rules of this new system seemed to bode better for the future. The mechanics were simple, yet deep enough that they didn't become boring, and most importantly, they made the character creation process so easy to understand that people who were originally put off by the number crunching min-maxing fun of 3.5 now had a new chance to try out this dice thing that everybody's been talking about. And because it came out at a time where everyone was trying to pretend that 4E didn't exist, the normally polarizing nature of having a radically different rule system didn't hurt 5E as much as it did 4E. Players who wanted simplicity were elated, but those who wanted a more mechanically minded game already had one in the form of either Pathfinder, which was still being updated, or 3.5, which still had a dedicated community that no longer gave a shit about what edition D&D was on anyway. For one full year, 5E took baby steps into the fandom's heart and tried not to rock the boat. Then, in 2015, everybody actually lost their shit. It started with a man named Vin Diesel. You may know him for his increasingly surreal action series about what was originally street racing, but is now about battling supervillains with cars that can only be fueled by family members. Mr. Diesel went on the YouTube podcast Geek and Sundry, wherein he played a quick one-shot with an obscure voice actor named Matt Miller as a means of drawing publicity onto their channel. In this video, Vin Diesel played the mighty witch hunter and showed to the world that it was possible for a musclebound jock, a straight himbo of a man, to also be a fucking nerd. This was a big revelation. Vin Diesel is a powerhouse whose reputation is so untouchable that even I am too scared to use his real name like I do with everybody else in these videos. And his status as a role model for meatheads that wanted to roleplay as an elf wizard made the message loud and clear. D&D is for cool people. Troves of people flock to 5E and seeing the barrier of entry so low created an entirely new community of normies that now wanted to get in on the action economy. Not only that, but Matt Miller gained notoriety for being the dungeon master of that game. And his own podcast, which he had just started with his friends, got hit by a wave of newcomers that boosted it to new heights until it became a household show. Its name was Critical Role. Between the lightning rods of Vin Diesel and CR, celebrity D&D bringing more famous faces for fans to gawk at, D&D was in a renaissance. The core books seemed to be flying off the shelves and normies would invite other normie friends until it seemed like D&D, a niche game that was only spoken of in whispers, was becoming mainstream. In fact, with the advent of the internet, geeks and gunks were finding solidarity in hundreds of things that they once thought were only for outcasts. In the greater cultural zeitgeist of the mid-2000s, it was becoming normal to like weird things. And against all of the boomer cries of, no, you have to stop liking things that my parents forced me to stop liking, a lot of those weird things were nerdy childhood nostalgia. And there's nothing more nerdy and childlike than pretending to be a wizard. Especially the wizard. 5e had caught the perfect wave of publicity from podcasts, celebrities, and the entire culture of the internet shifting to embrace the game. But there was still a problem. The core books were selling like hotcakes, but all of the adventure books, as well as the source book for Feyru, known as the Sword Coast Adventures Guide, seemed to be getting noticed less and less. The reason for this drop in sales was immediately obvious. Everything after the core rule books was being released through Green Ronin Publishing, a third-party company not unlike the type that had pumped up mountains of content for previous editions. However, with a new mainstream fan base came a new mainstream perspective. They couldn't just release content and hope that things worked out anymore. Not only was that the mindset that nuked 3e, it would also shock and alienate their new audience, and they'd lose this crazy wave that they were in. So they reigned in the quality control and started doing every book in-house under the direct supervision of the project leads. The first book released like this was Curse of Strahd, which, as of this video, is still considered to be the best 5e adventure. Over the next few years, Wizards of the Coast has been mindful of its place in the world. Jeremy Crawford has tried to use his Perennaprop powers to appease a growing neurodivergent community to very lukewarm results. Mike Murrell's, on the other hand, has since been outed for that whole knowingly aiding and abuser thing. And after quietly being shuffled onto other positions within Wizards of the Coast instead of being fired, he finally left the company in 2019 and awaits the day that the internet forgets about him. Overall, Dungeons and Dragons has been down a long road. It started as a tiny idea created as a joke supplement by a guy in his basement, then evolved into a tiny game made by two friends. Then it became the smash hit of the 70s and practically invented its own genre. And then it passed into the hands of so many people and companies that it took one man weeks to come up with all of the history because people in the 20th century did not record game very well. Surely there will come a time in the future where more history must be orated to you in a tongue-in-cheek fashion and narrated by the eloquent Spard himself. But for now, that'll about do it. Thank you all so much for watching. Be sure to share this video with all your friends, hit that bell so that you get the proper notifications and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can be the next Herodotus. But yeah, Davy out.