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 wizard 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 teams are used to:
[Calling D&D a combat-oriented game] would sort of be like looking at a stove and being like, This has nothing to do with food. You can’t eat metal. Clearly this contraption is for moving gas around and having a clock on it. If it was about food, there would be some food here. […] What you should get is a machine that is either made of food, or has food in it. […]
I’m going to bring the food. The food is my favorite part. [People say that] because D&D has so many combat mechanics, you are destined to tell combat stories. I fundamentally disagree. Combat is the part I’m the least interested in simulating through improvisational storytelling. So I need a game to do that for me, while I take care of emotions, relationships, character progression, because that shit is intuitive and I understand it well. I don’t intuitively understand how an arrow moves through a fictional airspace.
That line of reasoning resonates powerfully with me. While the many D&D materials published by Wizards of the Coast are heavy on the combat — including major campaigns and some anthologized adventures — there’s nothing in the rules that stops players from working together to tell stories and build the kinds of interconnected narratives on display in Worlds Beyond Number. That part of the ruleset is intentionally left open for players to find their own way — by using things like Insight rolls, Perception checks, and other aspects of the game that aren’t combat. In fact, the non-combat interactions in Worlds Beyond Number are some of the best I’ve experienced in any actual play.
[Ed. note: What follows contains minor spoilers for The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One #22: Bring Them to Me.]
A case in point comes early on in episode 22 of The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One. A favorite non-player character in the show is named Mr. Callum, and he’s a tamori. In the fiction of this world, that means he’s a sentient spell that takes on an anthropomorphic form that persists indefinitely to perform a given task. As a sentient embodiment of the minor utility spell Mage Hand, Mr. Callum is an incredibly skilled restaurant proprietor who is dedicated to his craft, but he exists without a lot of other aspects to his personality. That does not, as you might imagine, leave a lot of room for personal introspection. And yet that’s just what Ishii’s character, Ame, demanded of this tamori over a beautifully rendered lemon tart. (You can listen in at the 4:20 mark.)
“Do you have any taboos as a spirit that you must abide by?” she asked. Meaning, are there supernatural restrictions on your behavior — like crossing a threshold or eating mortal food — such as those that apply to spirits like Ursulon, who are similarly magical in essence.
Mr. Callum paused. “Am I a spirit?” he asked, while I imagined a puzzled look locked suddenly into place on his ghostly face. Realizing that she had transgressed with Mr. Callum, potentially planting the seeds of existential dread inside the humble baker/spell, she backpedaled. First came the heartfelt apology, and then the Insight check to see if there’s another way out of this corner she’s talked herself into. Ishii rolls a 24, and Mulligan takes that as his excuse to crack off a doozy.
“Talking to Mr. Callum in this way,” he continued, “you realize you’re a creature of the deep end of the pool and you are constantly starting deep conversations in a way that, to lots of people, will be really distressing. Your glib invitation for this tamori to have a panic attack/existential crisis is because there is no part of the universe you don’t feel interested in looking at. And that, suddenly, you realize is an immense gift. It’s a superpower. You’re tough, and your heart is strong, and there’s lots and lots of people who will never want to join you there.”
The encounter, such as it is, leaves Ishii the player breathless. “That [Insight check] was for my character,” she mumbled, clearly feeling the blow personally (though with good humor). Returning to her character, Ame, it’s clear that she too was wounded by that dose of Insight, wounded more deeply than if she’d taken a blow from a goblin’s sword. Just as Mr. Callum began to reflect on his own reason for being, so did Ame. The way that she is emotionally damaged in this moment seems to extend into the rest of the episode, which finds her uneasy, on edge, and downright reckless from start to finish. In the truest sense, that singular roll colors every one of the momentous actions that follow — actions that literally change the course of the entire campaign.
Rarely in the pages of a D&D book do you find the kind of guidance that becomes a fulcrum around which the entire storyline revolves. That’s because the folks that write D&D books can’t ever know who will be showing up to play. It’s up to the humans at the table to bring that kind of sustenance along with them on game nights if they want to, and it’s only through the continuous and careful interaction between the players and the DM that these sorts of narrative meals can get served up. That means engaging with the other players’ characters on a very personal level, but it also means using all the tools you have at your disposal in the wider D&D toolbox — tools like insight, arcana, and all the other less well-documented aspects of the game.
Everyone that sits down to a game of D&D is given a weapon. But often the most powerful tools we have are our words — soft skills that embolden creativity and reward improvisation. While dexterity and strength often play a big role when swinging those weapons around, often it’s from the much more intimate interactions that the heart of a story truly emerges.
The third arc of Worlds Beyond Number’s first series, The Wizard, the Witch, and the Wild One, premieres on April 9.
