Is 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Tragic?

My previous post looked at how a certain approach to roleplaying games, that typical of the OSR, has seemed to align itself with a philosophical position known as materialism. The “Old School” (OSR) style of gaming is often contrasted with the approach characteristic of mainstream 5e D&D. It is not surprising then that 5e D&D itself shows an alignment with a different and contrasting position, one which I am going to refer to as idealist poetics.

My aim is to keep the philosophy light. A lot of the ideas I talk about here actually come from dramatic theory. This may not be their natural ground, but I think they help explain certain trends within RPGs surprisingly well.

While this blog comes from an OSR perspective, I’m not necessarily setting out to cast 5e D&D in a bad light. I’m actually going to try and place 5e in a tradition held in very high esteem. I’m putting it in the same box as the work of Greek tragedians like Sophocles. The issue is more whether this approach is really a good fit for RPGs.



Poetics in D&D

The term poetics refers to the principles of drama, which originates from Aristotle’s famous work The Poetics. Aristotle was mainly talking about Greek tragedy, but many of the work’s principles are still relevant to drama today, under the wider catch-all of idealist poetics.

Idealist poetics work on the assumption that “thought determines being”. This just means that outcomes in the world originate from the character, from “thought” treated as something separate from the material world.

In Greek tragedy, this worked by the tragic outcome of the story always being traced back to a fatal flaw of the character. In Oedipus, the main character does some very bad stuff to their royal parents because they were arrogant in not listening to advice from the gods. Pride leads the heroic warrior Ajax to humiliate himself by massacring some sheep, then kill himself from embarrassment.

Modern dramas often work on a similar principle, even if they tend to modify the outcome (as everyone dying can be bad for box office). The hero in a superhero film will typically have a flaw too. Sometimes overcoming the flaw will be crucial in saving the day, like Batman overcoming his moroseness in The Dark Knight Rises. Sometimes what seemed like a flaw will actually be a good thing, like Stephen Strange’s arrogance and ambition in Dr Strange leading him to crucially bend the rules and save the world. Either way, it is a trait of the character that determines the outcome in the world.



Bane helpfully sticks Batman in his flaw therapy pit

The above examples are of course from structured dramas, not RPGs. Even a heavily railroaded game would find it hard to engineer such outcomes. Players get to pick their character traits and can’t be relied on the enact them at the perfect moment. But in many 5e campaigns we still seem to get a simplified version of the same principle.

Let’s take a stereotypical 5e case. There is the good paladin, who upholds justice and defends the weak, which drives them to overthrow a tyrannical ruler. Here a feature of the paladin’s character, their being just, leads to the world becoming a more just place. On the flip side, it was the tyrant being cruel and evil that had led to the world to being an evil place.

Of course, not all characters will be paladins, but many campaigns run on the assumption that the party overall will follow the path of goodness. That they will take the hook to rescue the kidnapped child, rather than just scavenge for gold as in an OSR game.

There will of course be many counter examples to this cliche of a 5e campaign. The Critcrab channel on Youtube has countless cases of players undermining the DM’s careful campaign design. RPGs give players the freedom to do this. But such counter examples can just as well illustrate idealist poetics.

Consider the “Edgelord” character, who a player roleplays as moody and uncooperative with their party members. Perhaps this leads them to sulk in the corner during the climactic battle with the tyrant, resulting in a total party kill. Here, the fate of the kingdom rests on the whim of an “edgy” character trait – another illustration of thought determining being.

How Rules Contribute to Idealist Poetics

The most obviously relevant item in 5e would be the d6 flaw table in the Player’s Handbook. Players are encouraged to pick and roleplay a flaw, for which they can be rewarded with “Inspiration” bonus rolls. I’m not going pretend this is a massively adhered to rule for casual players, but its inclusion and the literary examples used are at least a nudge in the direction of idealist poetics.

Far more important to this discussion is the level of power the 5e rules make available to players. All the examples of idealist poetics above rely on the assumption that the characters hold a high level of either power or status. The protagonists in Greek tragedy are typically ruling elites or demigods. In a superhero film, the hero might start off ordinary but then acquires godlike status through their powers.

There is a reason for this. For thought to determine being, a character needs to have power within the world to effect change. 5e is a rule system which quickly elevates characters to the equivalent of superheroes, through mechanics such as feats, inflated hit points and pathway abilities. There is little or no dependency on the game world in acquiring this power. A paladin who doesn’t keep to their oaths can just become an “oath breaker paladin”, with access to a different set of powers.

Working in conjunction with the above is the 5e D&D challenge rating system. This system allows the dungeon master to design combat encounters that are always defeatable by the characters at their current power level. Challenge ratings might be the ultimate idealist rules mechanism. When working as designed, their purpose is to ensure characters will be able to determine outcomes in every scenario. The game world conforms to their ambitions and rolls out the red carpet.

So far, I've focused on 5e rules. There are also some long-standing rules within D&D which have always leant into idealist poetics. I intend to cover these later in a specific review of earlier D&D editions. But my next post will continue the discussion of idealist poetics in 5e campaigns, with specific attention on how the Dungeon Master can sometime be in the business of tailoring the game world to the characters.