If You’ve Only Ever Played D&D, You’re Missing Out

Let’s say you’ve never played a video game before, but you hear about them from a friend or see the characters of a supernatural 80s nostalgia drama series playing one around an old TV in their basement. You ask a friend who plays them which to get started with, or you walk into a Gamestop and ask the same. And you’re told, “Just get Hades.” Which sounds great, because that’s the game you know your friend plays, or the game you saw those kids on TV enjoying. And it looks pretty fun.

Now, it’s years later and you play video games regularly. If asked if you’re “a gamer,” you’ll say, “Absolutely.” But the only video game you’ve ever played, in those years of playing, has been Hades. And maybe Hades 2. And maybe some other roguelikes. But only ever roguelikes. You like roguelikes, they’re a ton of fun, and popular for a reason. Nothing wrong with playing them. Yet, if you enjoy video games, like really enjoy your time with them, most gamers who have played genres outside of roguelikes will tell you you’re missing out. That video games can do a lot more than what roguelikes do, even if roguelikes are great at what they do, and you’d probably like those other approaches too. You might even find you like fighting games, or JPGS, or Soulslikes, or walking simulators more than roguelikes. Who knows? The point is, you won’t until you try them.

Fortunately, video games don’t tend to work this way. Yes, there are players out there who stick to one kind of game forever. But they’re a vanishingly small minority. Even if you have a favorite video game genre, you’ve probably played video games outside it.

But tabletop RPGs do work like that. Dungeons & Dragons dominates the industry to a frankly unfathomable degree. It’s the first game most everyone getting into TTRPGs plays, and it’s the only game most everyone into TTRPGs ever plays. If you go to your local gaming shop with your kid, who has expressed an interest in roleplaying games, even if she hasn’t expressed an interest specifically in D&D, chances are she’s going to walk out with a D&D starter set or a Player’s Handbook. It’s what the guy behind the counter will recommend.

And it makes sense. Unlike video games, which are either played solo or online with a baked-in matchmaking service, TTRPGs require you to have a group to play them with. (Let’s bracket solo RPGs, which, while gaining in popularity, are still quite fringe.) And that group probably needs to be at least three people, and ideally four or five. That, in turn, means you either need to get a game people around you already play or talk people around you into trying something new. The former is, typically, easier.

Further, TTRPGs are weird. They don’t work like most other games. In fact, they’re closer to, as John Tynes described them in Unknown Armies, “improvisational radio theatre.” Which means seeing people play them is helpful (even if primarily watching professional actors do it, like Critical Role, can set unrealistic expectations for your own games, and lead new GMs to feel like they’re not doing it right), and having access to tutorials and discussions is helpful. But the incentives of content creators in the algorithmic age create a kind of conceptual feedback loop. We are so surrounded by D&D content—the builds, the lore, the meta-commentary—that the game stops being a choice and starts being the very atmosphere of TTRPGs. It becomes a self-proliferating reality that makes the existence of other systems feel not just distant, but unnecessary.

Which means you start with D&D, and for reasons that aren’t nonsense. But then most people just stay with it forever. Forever. We know this from industry stats and reports from gaming shops. The number of TTRPG players who got into these games through D&D is “almost all of them,” and the number who only ever play D&D is “almost all of those.”

And this is, I submit, a problem. Not because D&D itself is a bad game. It’s fine. Good, even. But D&D, as a setting, is a very specific one aimed at telling a specific kind of story. And that story isn’t “fantasy,” it’s “high-fantasy superhero” tales. Wanna run The Lord of the Rings type games? It’s not the best. Want to run Warhammer Fantasy? It’s not the best. Want to run low-fantasy style exploration and dungeon crawling? There’s an entire, thriving TTRPG design community called the “Old School Revival” which puts out games intended to capture the feel of first edition Dungeons & Dragons because fifth edition doesn’t do it as well.

What I mean by “doesn’t do it as well” is that D&D isn’t just a set of narrative and setting tropes. It’s a rules engine. And a rules engine, for any RPG, is opinionated. It might say on the tin, “Run any kind of game you imagine!” but the mechanical choices the designers make are going to push games in one direction versus another. The stats your character has, for example, tell you a lot about what the game expects you to do with those characters. A character sheet is more than a user interface, it is a mental framework. If 90% of that sheet is dedicated to violence, your mind begins to construct every interaction as a potential combat encounter. The tool doesn’t just help us play, it conditions how we perceive the narrative possibilities before the story even begins.

To use the 5E rules to run Bridgerton is possible, but you’ll be ignoring most of what 5E’s designers created, and hand-waving ways to handle a lot of dramatic situations they didn’t build for. Again, you can do this. Lots of people have used 5E (or d20 during the OGL boom) to power all kinds of games outside D&D’s narrow genre, but they were rarely as good, from a gameplay experience, as systems designed instead to tell those stories. If you want to play Bridgerton, you’ll likely enjoy a game where the mechanics facilitate that, instead of where you have to ignore most of the mechanics to pull it off.

Which, again, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with D&D. But it does mean D&D pushes groups into telling D&D stories. If D&D stories are the only kind of stories you or your group enjoy, that’s awesome. But most all of us like lots of kinds of stories. And for every story we might enjoy, there’s a TTRPG out there with mechanics laser-focused on telling it brilliantly.

You’re a Star Trek fan? There’s a game for that, , and it mechanically emphasizes the way Star Trek handles narrative role protection and the distinction between bridge crew and red shirts. Love the MCU? There’s a game for that , designed to make you feel like a demigod smashing through buildings. Think it would be fun to play Mulder and Scully investigating Lovecraftian cults? There’s a game for that, , and its mechanics highlight not just the feeling of powerlessness in the face of cosmic horror, but also the way these investigations will destroy the normal relationships your character has. Think Coen brothers movies are the bee’s knees? Let me introduce you to maybe the most elegantly designed TTRPG ever, , one that produces extraordinary stories of “powerful ambition and poor impulse control” with zero prep, close to zero mechanics to learn, and no need for even a GM. (If you haven’t played it, you’ve no idea what you’re missing.)

Yes, you could tell these sorts of stories with D&D, but why would you? You’ll have a better time, and get a better session or campaign, playing with a game designed for them. Just like all of them would be poor fits for telling stories of wizards combating dragons. And a bet a lot of D&D-exclusive players, as much as they like wizards combating dragons, might also enjoy getting to take the Enterprise for a spin, or dream up their favorite costumed hero, or crack a government conspiracy to subvert democracy to the will of Nyarlathotep, or just be a bunch of dumb crooks in way over their heads.

Playing those games does mean learning a new system, and it means convincing your group to learn a new system, and all while they probably already know D&D. But here’s the thing: This isn’t difficult. Really. You already learned D&D and D&D is actually a very complex game. It has hundreds of spells, specific movement rules, and complex action economies. If you can learn D&D, you have already done the hard work. Games like Fiasco or Monster of the Week can be learned in 15 minutes. You aren’t climbing a new mountain, you’re stepping off a mountain onto a gentle hill. That’s still effort, sure, but no more effort than getting your friends to try a new board game. And most people who play board games don’t spend their entire board gaming lives playing only Catan.

The hardest part isn’t the rules. It’s the weight of habit. We return to D&D not always because it’s the best fit for the night, but because it’s the path of least resistance—a groove worn deep into our gaming group’s routine. Breaking that cycle isn’t about a grand conversion but about a small, conscious moment of choosing a different path to see where it leads.You don’t need to convert them. Just ask for a one-shot. Ask for one single night to try a different flavor. Most people will try anything once, especially if you offer to run it.

D&D is the king of TTRPGs, and it’s a great game. But if you’ve only ever played D&D, you’re basically a gamer who has only ever played Hades. Put down the d20 for a night, pick up a new system, and see what else the medium has to offer. You might find you like it.