What I Would Do If I Owned D&D

Since in my previous post I raised the question, it is only fair that I deliver my own thoughts on the important matter of what I would do if I owned D&D.

I find myself genuinely split. On the one hand, I think D&D occupies an important role as a sort of universal language, and that its middle-of-the-roadness and basic banality, as a Tolkienesque fantasy RPG denuded of all the things that made Tolkien interesting and worthwhile, is in its own way useful. There is a reason why McDonald's, M&S, Next, Disney princesses, Bond films, etc., exist - it is to provide an easy solution to the question of 'What shall we eat/wear/watch tonight?' The more eccentric and distinctive something is, the harder it will be to get buy-in from those who do not share the eccentricity in question. 

Hence, 'blandified, bowdlerized Tolkien with some bits and pieces stolen from pulp fantasy' is much more likely to appeal to a group of five random gamers who want to put a campaign together than is 'Egyptian/meosamerican style megadungeon inside a crocodile's brain' - while one or even two of the group will love the latter idea, the rest will be put off by it, whereas there is a good chance that all five will at least tolerate the former. 

There is therefore a space for doing blandified, bowdlerized Tolkien well, and in this respect I suppose it's actually quite difficult to improve on what WotC are already doing. They serve up RPG Big Macs and they do it in such a way as to satisfy the widest range of potential gamers they possibly can. It is not to my taste, but even I eat Big Macs sometimes when it's the easiest and most readily available thing on offer. So the very shot answer to what I would do if I owned D&D could be very straightforward: do what WotC currently do but a bit better. (Chiefly, I would change the art direction so as to be much more John Howe-style understated grandeur, and much less modern-video-game-illustration blandness.) 

That's a boring answer, though, and also doesn't really reflect the basic setup of the thought experiment, which is that I am supposed to be imaginging myself as possessing vast wealth and not particularly having any interest in turning a profit. Once you put things that way, all the bets are off and you can start entirely from scratch.

So I am strongly tempted, then, to say that if I owned D&D I would go in the opposite direction - I would be a fantasy maximalist. I would have a set of relatively simple core mechanics and I would commission a range of writers and artists to produce a properly compelling mixture of genuinely novel and fresh settings, and I would foreground procedural generation through random tables throughout. I would put the emphasis entirely on dungeoneering and sandbox exploration, and would eschew 'character' as a central element of play. And while I would not by any means cut down on things like bestiaries and spell lists, I would emphasise the toolkit element of the rules - I would make it very plain that the rules are there to facilitate DMs doing their own imaginative things (inventing monsters, spells, etc.) easily and quickly. 

But now that I re-read that paragraph I increasingly wonder whether I am not simply saying in the end that I would cannibalise existing D&D with an OSR mentality (since the OSR basically did all of the things I suggest) and, indeed, perhaps just in the end institutionalise and mainstream what the OSR was all about. This might not be as popular as D&D is now, but it would I think be better, and that's what counts.