Worlds Beyond Number is teaching me things that no D&D book can

polygon.com:

Folks seem pretty down on Dungeons & Dragons lately, and not for no reason. The company that owns it, Hasbro, continues to stick its foot in it — first with the whole OGL fiasco this time last year, and most recently with some conflicting comments from the company’s CEO regarding its stance on AI. But the gang at Worlds Beyond Number, the wildly popular Patreon-funded actual-play podcast, is still all-in on the seminal role-playing game. In fact, their most recent behind-the-scenes episode is serving to remind me why 5th edition D&D remains so popular — both with at-home players and with performers at Dimension 20, Critical Role, and elsewhere.

Worlds Beyond Number’s current storyline, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, tells the tale of three childhood friends that find themselves on the precipice of world-changing events. Ame the witch, played by Erika Ishii, is coming into her own as a pillar of the spirit realm’s relationship with the mortal world. Meanwhile the witch Suvi, played by Aabria Iyengar, is working things from the other side, using her hard-won magical abilities in service to the world’s more secular power structures. And then there’s Ursulon, a nonhuman spirit just trying to protect his best friends while he searches for a way home. It’s a complex web of personal relationships, high political drama, and careful world-building all bundled up into a delicious audio package by producer Taylor Moore.

Thing is, there’s hardly any combat in this show. That’s prompted critics, armchair and otherwise, to wonder out loud why they’re using D&D, which has a preponderance of rules for adjudicating combat, in the first place.

Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan recently dealt with that part of the larger TTRPG discourse head-on in a behind-the-scenes conversation from March 12. D&D is no more combat-oriented than some other system, he argues, and the murder hobos of the world that are convinced otherwise simply aren’t playing the same way that he and his