Days of High Adventure

Changing the Game: D&D and Mods

At this point D&D, the progenitor of modern video games, had finally caught up with its offspring - and much like modern game companies, some fans felt it had started to focus more on the bottom line than consumer loyalty. The recent controversy over Modern Warfare 2's lack of dedicated servers - and more relevant lack of mod-tool support - is still fresh in a lot of gamers' minds, and a similar debate followed the Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, released June 2008, and its successor to the OGL, the Game System License. Some fans, former Wizards employees and OGL game publishers see the GSL as being needlessly restrictive. Of particular note is Sean Reynolds, a former Wizards employee who wrote that the GSL appeared to be engineered to stop people from making any third-party supplements and competing with Wizards.

Perhaps in this manner digital add-ons have surpassed Gygax's creation. Video and computer game modding is a constantly growing field and unlike Bledsaw's early efforts, today's modding teams are sometimes as professional as the studios whose games they're expanding. Epic Games is currently wrapping up its "Make Something Unreal" contest, which had mod teams from across the world creating new maps, weapons and stand-alone games using the Unreal Development Kit. Mods created included third-person zombie shooters, portal guns and even a snowboarding game. The best mod teams took home up to $10,000 in prize money.

Now we have games where the entire purpose is built with user-generated content in mind. Titles like Little Big Planet and Mod Nation Racers are constructed around the idea of players having access to the same set of tools as the designers and dreaming up their own uses for them. Campaign and level editors have been commonplace in PC games for a long time now, from Doom to Dragon Age, and even a lot of old games still see fresh content from their dedicated fans. D&D players should know best of all. They've been churning out content for their game of choice for the past thirty-plus years, and despite what anybody else tells them, they'll keep doing it for years to come.

Robert Stoneback is a freelance writer who currently lives on a field in Pennsylvania surrounded by stray cats, game dice and broken video game controllers. He can be reached at rstoneback@gmail.com or through his community blog at 1up.com.

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