D&D is best when its corporate owner isn’t paying attention. When I asked who deserved credit for that observation, it proved too widespread and too old to name a source. The D&D team started sharing the notion soon after 1985, when D&D’s co-creator Gary Gygax lost control of publisher TSR and non-gamers started managing the game. Since then, when the suits steered D&D’s creative direction, the game suffered, but when they ignored it, it thrived. Corporate attention has risen and fallen over the game’s 50-year history, leading to a cycle of highs and lows.

Many gamers fell in love with D&D with its second edition, but the release stands as a creative low. Sure, the second edition designers loved the game and fought to make the release as good as possible, but TSR’s management stifled their ability to improve on the rules. Lead designer David “Zeb” Cook recalled, “We had to convince management that [second edition] was a good idea because they’re going, “That’s our Core Business right there and you’re talking about rewriting it.’ Fear starts to appear in their eyes. “We have a whole warehouse full of product. If you do this, what’s going to happen to all that product?’”

“There were all kinds of changes that we would have made if we had been given a free hand to make them—an awful lot of what ultimately happened in the third edition,” said second-edition designer Steve Winter said. “We heard so many times, ‘Why did you keep armor classes going down instead of going up?’ People somehow thought that that idea had never occurred to us. We had tons of ideas that we would have loved to do, but we still had a fairly narrow mandate that whatever was in print should still be largely compatible with the second edition.”

A game outside of management’s scrutiny, the 1992 edition of Gamma World, benefited from the design team’s innovations. “We basically said, take all these ideas that we couldn’t do and incorporate them into Gamma World and make it as streamlined as possible,” explained Steve Winter. Gamma World featured many innovations that corporate blocked from reaching the second edition.

• Ascending armor class
• Skills called skills
• Attribute checks
• Attribute modifiers similar to those that would appear in 3rd edition
• Health and Mental Defense saves that resemble 3rd edition’s Fortitude and Will saves

(See The Dungeons & Dragons Books that Secretly Previewed Each New Edition.)

Management also made the decision to remove demons and devils. “That didn’t work because, oh my goodness, they’re the best monsters ever” Designer Wolfgang Baur said, only slightly in jest. “Every hero wants to take on and defeat them.” The game steered away from anything that might alarm concerned parents. See D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—1. D&D Becomes a Target of the Satanic Panic.

During D&D’s second edition era, parts of the D&D product line also gained freedom and creative energy from management’s inattention. The Planescape campaign setting makes a perfect example. The setting met widespread critical acclaim. For example, in Pyramid issue 8, Scott Haring wrote, “Normally, I start a review off slowly…forget that noise. I’ll cut to the chase—Planescape is the finest game world ever produced for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Period.” He concluded, “Planescape is a revolutionary product, a breakthrough for TSR. If you think you’ve ‘graduated’ from AD&D, that you’ve evolved past it, go back and take a look at Planescape. This is the game world that will get you playing AD&D again.”

Planescape’s lead designer, Zeb Cook, started the setting from minimal instructions summarized in Slaying the Dragon by D&D historian Ben Riggs. “Do the planes. Have a base location as a setting. And do factions.” The idea for factions came from the bestselling Vampire: The Masquerade game. “The vagueness gave [Zeb Cook] license. He could do almost anything and play anywhere in the D&D cosmos.”

Soon after the setting’s release, Cook left TSR, but follow-up products continued to gain from a lack of oversight. “Fortunately for the Planescape team, upper management was very hands-off with Planescape, even after it won the Origins Award, and we could get as weird as we wanted,” recalled designer Colin McComb. “Now that I think about it, it’s possible Creative Director Andria Hayday and David Wise (who would be promoted to the manager for the whole department) managed to shield us from the Eye of Sauron—getting us the resources we needed while keeping management from paying too much attention to us.”

Despite Planescape’s creative success, the line failed to make money for TSR. None of TSR’s products made enough money, so by 1997 the company neared bankruptcy. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) purchased TSR and saved D&D from being auctioned piecemeal by the courts. Peter Adkison, WotC’s CEO and a D&D fan, led D&D to a new high.

Adkison became deeply involved in D&D, attending third edition design meetings and earning a designer credit in the rule books. But Adkison approached the game as a fan and game designer. “Coming into 1990…I was spending so much time on D&D that I decided, along with many of my friends, to start a gaming company—Wizards of the Coast.” When the third-edition design team struggled to agree on a direction for the new edition, Adkison set one from a gamer’s perspective. “I was filled with trepidation. I was assuming responsibility for something very important to, literally, millions of fans around the world. If I made the wrong decisions, a lot of gamers would be very disappointed.” He feared disappointing gamers rather than stockholders.

Adkison set a good direction for the game, and the designers released an edition that delighted existing players and won new enthusiasts. “Fan response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive,” wrote Adkison.

The 2003 release of a 3.5 rules update brought D&D to another low. By then, Peter Adkison had left Wizards of the Coast. Most D&D players now owned third-edition books, so sales slowed. Corporate management looked for a way to boost D&D revenue. Based on his insider knowledge, game designer Monte Cook concludes that management sped the release of D&D 3.5 to just three years after third edition’s debut and that “the amount of change in the books was artificially increased beyond what was needed to force the player base to buy all new rule books.”

The update’s designers succeeded at making improvements, so when Paizo developed their Pathfinder game, they built on 3.5. Still, the sudden release hurt D&D overall. “The changes in 3.5 are so pervasive, and some of them so subtle, that any mastery people had achieved is gone. ‘Oh come on, Monte,’ one might reply, ‘the changes aren’t that bad.’ I’m not even talking about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ here. The problem is that there are just enough changes that a player has to question everything. Even if fireball didn’t really change, after you’ve had to re-learn how wall of force, flame arrow, and polymorph work, how can you be sure? Welcome to the game sessions where you’ve got to look everything up again.”

At the time, D&D players enjoyed a surging number of third-party, D&D-compatible products that filled game store shelves. The release of 3.5 instantly made those books incompatible. Game stores suffered from stocks of nearly worthless products. Most of the publishers went out of business. Everyone lost.

While the D&D team developed the game‘s fourth edition for a 2008 release, Harbro management brought big ideas for an edition could increase the game’s profitability. “Some of the people who ran WotC were really jealous of World of Warcraft’s subscription model and so a whole bunch of the things that happened at Wizards of the Coast at that time were based on trying to get people to pay money every month,” lead designer Rob Heinsoo said. Management also hoped a new edition would break ties to the Open Gaming License, stopping other publishers from profiting from D&D compatibility without paying for a license.

The millions of people playing World of Warcraft seemed to far outnumber those playing D&D. “When we made the fourth edition, one of the earliest design goals given to us by the management was that it should be more familiar to people who were coming in having played World of Warcraft and other digital games. We were supposed to be more approachable.” So the new edition focused on the elements that made the D&D fun and especially appealing to fans of online fantasy games.

Designer Mike Mearls recalled that the team felt that “building a player character was the real thing that drove people to play the games. You wanted to choose your feats, your prestige classes and whatnot.” Rob Heinsoo focused on adding an irresistible hook. “The solution James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and I were excited about was to give every PC an ongoing series of choices of interesting powers. Every combat round you have an interesting choice of which power or powers to use.”

While the ultimate design offered many virtues, it failed to interest enough D&D fans. Mike Mearls later wrote, “No one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said, ‘Let’s get rid of all our fans and replace them.’ That was never the intent. With fourth edition, there were good intentions. The game is very solid, there are a lot of people who play it and enjoy it, but you do get those people that say ‘hey, this feels like an MMO, this feels like a board game.’” (For the full story of fourth edition, see The Threat that Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons—Twice.)

By the time the D&D team started on a fifth edition, corporate no longer gave the tabletop game as much scrutiny. After all, the fourth edition had become a financial disappointment and the tabletop RPG market had declined since 2005. Years of annual layoffs had eliminated most of the fourth-edition team. “While we didn’t talk about it in public, the business goal was to make a game that could keep people happy so that D&D could grow via video games and licensing,” fifth-edition lead Mike Mearls wrote later. “We ended up laying off or re-assigning several of the designers and editors after the game launched.”

The focus on video games and licensing brought freedom to the fifth-edition team. Instead of taking orders from upper management, the design team relied on feedback from the fans. Between the edition’s announcement in 2012 and its release in 2014, the D&D team offered a series of open playtest packets, collected feedback from 170,000 players, and then let the fans help guide the design.

Fifth edition became a hit. While every other edition of the game brought a surge of sales that quickly fell after existing players bought in, fifth edition sales climbed year after year. During Hasbro’s investor calls, the company now routinely boasted of D&D’s growth and profitability. Before the fifth edition, D&D only rated a mention once.

But over eight years, sales inevitably cooled, and in the corporate world, a steady profit is a disappointment. In 2022, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams appeared in a presentation for investors. Williams touted D&D’s popularity but described the game as “under monetized.” Wizards aimed to do a better job of gaining income from the game, bringing more earnings to stockholders. Corporate scrutiny returned.

WotC’s lawyers found a way to potentially invalidate the OGL that allowed publishers to profit from D&D-comparable products without giving WotC a cut. Incensed D&D fans forced the company to kill the plan. (See D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—3. Wizards of the Coast Attempts To Revoke the Current Open Gaming License.)

Unlike D&D 3.5, I suspect something more noble than a cash grab led to the release of D&D’s 2024 update. In a 2020 article on diversity, the team wrote that in the six years since fifth edition’s release “making D&D as welcoming and inclusive as possible has moved to the forefront of our priorities.” D&D needed a new Player’s Handbook that dropped racial ability score modifiers and reflected the priority. As a bonus, the team could also make refinements based on years of play. (For my prediction of an upcoming update, see D&D‘s Ongoing Updates and How a Priority Could Lead to New Core Books.) The 2024 books include many improvements that I love.

Despite the good intentions, the 2024 update suggests Hasbro’s corporate influence, and I think the meddling left us with a weaker game than the D&D team might have created if left alone.

Watch the videos promoting the update to fans. The designers rarely mention all the welcome refinements and corrections to the existing rules. Instead, they boast of additions that never appeared on anyone’s wish list of essential updates.

• They show new benefits player characters gain. The scale of these boosts goes beyond shoring up weaker classes, adding new candy like features that will “frustrate” DMs and a new weapon mastery system certain to slow play.
• They showcase the bastion system—a game within a game that lets players farm more boons for their characters. Since 1974, D&D has sporadically included stronghold rules, but players rarely use them.
• They tout the new crafting system that lets characters manufacture their own loot. When Chris Perkins pitched the crafting system, he cautioned that it appears in the Dungeon Master’s Guide because “this is unlocked by the dungeon master. The dungeon master determines whether or not the materials are available, whether or not the characters can build these items.” Perkins knows if characters with nowhere else to spend their gold can manufacture items like wands and enspelled gear, they will derail any campaign. The book offers no advice to DMs on managing crafting, so this system feels like a trap rushed into the book.

Because few gamers asked for many of the advertised changes, I suspect the push to make them came from corporate. The most unnecessary and weakest additions to the 2024 version of the game seem like they came from a meeting where a marketing executive stood at a white board with a marker, turned to face the D&D design team, and then demanded that they pitch new goodies that would sell the 2024 books to players who already have the 2014 books. Years from now, I may write a post that includes quotes from those designers talking about just such a meeting.