The Stewardship of Dungeons & Dragons Part II: The Steward’s Hand

The above quote was made in response to criticism of The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970–1977. For a series about stewardship, it raises an unusually direct question: Whose voice does a steward have an obligation to hear?

In Part I, The Deck Is Full⁠, I asked how much sovereignty a modern designer should have to reinterpret story or items, something inherited from fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons. The Deck of Many Things gave us a useful case study because we could watch modern designers take something mysterious and old, construct a new mythology around it, and inevitably bring some of their own concerns into the process. Jason Tondro takes the stewardship question to the next level. He is not simply another freelance writer contributing several thousand words to a sourcebook. He is a Senior Designer on the Dungeons & Dragons team and has served as project lead on multiple books.

Before looking closely at Tondro, however, it is worth understanding why his remark landed as hard as it did. Many old-school players did not encounter “not worth listening to” as a one-off zinger from a designer on the internet. They encountered it after years of confrontations over the OGL and revisions to established settings and lore. They experienced it in the way Wizards discusses the game’s history. Add all that to an ever-growing bitter cultural divide over what Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be. Tondro was also not speaking from the sidelines. He had served as project lead on The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, would exercise substantial authority over other D&D projects, and has publicly spoken favorably about progressive values and greater representation in tabletop gaming.

From the grognard side of the divide, those facts can be assembled into a fairly damning story. Their concern is not simply that the current stewards of Dungeons & Dragons are changing rules or updating settings. Many believe the people currently entrusted with D&D are more interested in using the game as a vehicle for social change than in giving the inheritance the respect it deserves. Through that lens, changes to old lore, contemporary judgments placed around historical material, an increased emphasis on representation, and Tondro’s dismissal of grognard criticisms do not look like unrelated decisions. They look like evidence of a design culture in which changing Dungeons & Dragons to advance contemporary values takes precedence over preserving what made Dungeons & Dragons worth inheriting in the first place.

That is a serious accusation, and if we are going to ask old-school players to consider Jason Tondro’s perspective, we should not soften their argument until it becomes easy to answer. We should state the strongest version of it and then test it against the evidence. Is Tondro actually a designer who sees Dungeons & Dragons primarily as a vehicle for advancing a contemporary social vision, with the game’s inheritance taking second place? Or has a bitter cultural divide encouraged his critics to assemble individual decisions and statements into a picture that is less complete than the man himself? There is only one useful way to answer that question: look at what Tondro has actually said and done.

Nor am I arguing that designers should be forbidden from having political, cultural, religious, or social convictions. Of course they have them. Every writer does. This is America, and artists, writers, and game designers are free to advocate for whatever vision of the world they believe in through work that is their own. Their audiences are equally free to embrace that message, reject it, criticize it, or spend their money elsewhere.

But stewardship changes the equation. Dungeons & Dragons is not a blank sheet of paper handed to each new design team so that they can use it to advance whatever personal values they happen to hold. It is an inherited game, setting, history, and cultural institution temporarily placed in their care. If a designer wants to create a new game expressly intended to advance a political or social vision, that is his prerogative. When he accepts stewardship over Dungeons & Dragons, however, his first obligation should be to Dungeons & Dragons. The question is therefore not merely how much of his personal worldview a steward may bring into the inheritance. We should be willing to ask the harder question of whether deliberately reshaping that inheritance to advance his personal social or political values is an appropriate exercise of stewardship at all.

That does not mean Dungeons & Dragons can never change. It has changed constantly for more than fifty years, and some changes have unquestionably made it better. Nor does it mean every effort at greater representation or inclusion is somehow foreign to the game. The distinction is one of purpose. Is a change being made because the steward believes it makes Dungeons & Dragons a better game for the broad community that inherited and sustains it, or is Dungeons & Dragons being used because its enormous cultural reach makes it a useful vehicle for advancing goals that originate outside the game? Those two things can sometimes produce the same decision, but they are not the same philosophy of stewardship.

Denethor is easier to condemn if we reduce him to the mad old man eating tomatoes at the end of the story. Fortunately, Tolkien gives us more than that. In his youth, Denethor watched the mysterious Captain Thorongil, win renown in the service of his own father. Denethor appears to have suspected who this enigmatic stranger really was. By the time we see Denethor again, he has spent thirty-five years governing Gondor beneath the shadow of Mordor. He secretly uses the palantír, and Sauron has made sure that the Steward sees just enough truth from his own perspective to despair.

None of that excuses what Denethor does, but it helps explain him. His pride and suspicion of Aragorn have a history. Even his despair grows from circumstances that are real. Gondor really is in terrible danger. Sauron’s armies really are enormous. Denethor is not a fool imagining threats that do not exist. His failure is that he allows those truths, and his certainty that he understands the situation​, to destroy his ability to imagine an outcome of hope.

Tondro’s “not worth listening to” remark is his tomato scene. It is ugly, dismissive, and difficult to watch without forming an immediate opinion of the man delivering it. Taken by itself, it makes the judgment easy. Here is a steward looking at part of the inheritance entrusted to him and deciding that some of the people attached to it are beneath his consideration. But if we are going to demand better stewardship from Tondro, we should practice better judgment ourselves. Denethor is more than the old man eating tomatoes, and Tondro is more than one nasty remark about grognards. Understanding the larger man does not make the remark less ugly. It gives us the context necessary to decide whether that moment represents the whole of his stewardship or one particularly bad expression of a much more complicated record.

On his own professional website⁠, Tondro describes the remarkable amount of authority that comes with his position. A project lead outlines the project, assigns material to writers, develops and rewrites the manuscript, participates in art orders and bookbuilding, reviews the finished work, and helps guide the product through publication. Tondro summarizes the position plainly when he says that he has “tremendous influence over a project.”

That influence is backed by a strong résumé. Tondro earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside, after studying literature as an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno. His academic interests included medieval and Renaissance literature and comics, and he taught English before moving fully into professional tabletop game design. He worked at Paizo, eventually becoming a Senior Developer on Starfinder, before joining Wizards of the Coast. None of those credentials make his conclusions automatically correct, but they make lazy criticism of him useless. If we are going to examine Tondro as a steward of Dungeons & Dragons, we should examine the actual steward rather than inventing a caricature of him.

If we are going to judge Tondro’s stewardship fairly, then the case should not be built from what his critics say about him. It should be built from what Tondro says about himself, the authority he acknowledges possessing, and the work produced under his leadership. That gives us three questions to answer. What values does Jason Tondro say he brings to tabletop gaming? How much influence does he actually exercise over Dungeons & Dragons? And when those values and that authority meet the inheritance, what do the books themselves show us?

That is where we should build the case.

Tondro has been unusually open about the values he brings to tabletop gaming. In a 2021 WIRED⁠ examination of working conditions inside the tabletop RPG industry⁠, while he was still working at Paizo, Tondro described the company as “very outspoken about progressive issues and progressive values.” His comments came in a discussion that included Paizo’s efforts to create more inclusive characters and settings and his belief that the diversity visible in the company’s products was not adequately reflected within the workplace itself.

That statement does not require interpretation from his critics. Neither does the description of his authority on his own professional website. Tondro has publicly identified progressive values as important within tabletop gaming, and he tells us that the position he later assumed at Wizards gives him “tremendous influence over a project.” Neither fact is disqualifying. Together, however, they make it reasonable to examine whether those values remain personal convictions or become part of the way an inherited property is reshaped under his stewardship.

The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons provides an excellent place to begin. Wizards reproduced foundational documents from the earliest years of the hobby, including material whose language and assumptions can be jarring to readers half a century later. Wizards brought in inclusivity consultants to identify historical material the company believed deserved additional context. Tondro nevertheless defended leaving the primary documents themselves untouched, explaining, “We couldn’t change it, because it’s history.”

I agree with him. Whatever disagreements we may have about the commentary surrounding those documents, that is a defensible principle of stewardship. Preserve the historical artifact. Explain it when necessary. Let readers confront what was actually written rather than silently rewriting the past until it conforms to the present.

But the decision also reveals something important about the philosophy surrounding the project. Wizards deliberately sought additional perspectives to consider how historical Dungeons & Dragons might be received by constituencies the company believed had previously been marginalized or poorly represented. There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking those perspectives. In fact, listening broadly is precisely the principle this article argues for. The problem becomes apparent when we compare that deliberate consultation with Tondro’s reaction when criticism arrived from another constituency.

The team had prepared itself to hear objections from progressive readers and underrepresented communities. When longtime players objected instead to the way the historical material and its creators were being characterized, Tondro said he had not anticipated that he would “rouse the ire of the grognards.” More importantly, he did not merely reject their arguments. He considered those people “not worth listening to.”

That contrast deserves more attention than any label a critic could attach to Jason Tondro. One constituency was important enough to anticipate, consult about, and contextualize historical material around. Another constituency, containing people who had purchased, played, taught, preserved, and financially supported Dungeons & Dragons across much of its fifty-year history, could be dismissed as people not worth hearing. The question is not whether either constituency is automatically right. The question is why stewardship should extend the courtesy of careful consideration to one while withholding even the presumption of relevance from the other.

The record does not prove that Tondro treats Dungeons & Dragons primarily as a vehicle for a contemporary social vision. It does prove a steward who will preserve the artifacts and still decide, in advance, that one historic constituency is not worth listening to.

You can reject the strongest accusation against him and still say the remaining charge is enough. A steward may bring his convictions to the work. What he may not do is accept tremendous influence over an inherited game and then declare that a living part of its constituency no longer merits a hearing.

The dispute eventually became much larger after Elon Musk entered the fray, but Tondro’s own account of the controversy⁠ is more useful than another round of social-media he-said she-said. He explains what he wrote, what critics accused him of doing, and how he regarded the reaction. The important thing for our purposes is not Musk. It is that Tondro’s own account allows us to judge his position without relying solely on the people criticizing him.

The word grognard deserves some context because it has become one of those hobby terms whose meaning changes according to who is saying it and how much contempt they can squeeze into two syllables. In tabletop gaming, it generally refers to longtime, old-school players, often people whose experience reaches back into early editions of Dungeons & Dragons and traditional wargaming culture. The term can be affectionate or dismissive, but either way, these are not outsiders wandering into somebody else’s backyard. They are the constituency that carried Dungeons & Dragons through its history. By that definition, I am a grognard too. I started playing in 1982, when I was six years old, with the Erol Otus-covered Moldvay Basic set, its fighter and magic-user facing that magnificent green dragon. I have been carrying some version of this game around with me ever since.

It would be easy at this point to turn the grognards into martyrs. That would also be dishonest. I have spent enough time watching arguments between the old-school and contemporary sides of this hobby to understand why someone like Tondro might eventually become exasperated with them. There is a strain of grognard culture that seems constitutionally incapable of conceding that anything worthwhile has happened in tabletop roleplaying games for decades. Exactly when Dungeons & Dragons stopped being Dungeons & Dragons depends upon which grognard you ask. For some, the break comes with Lorraine Williams. For others, it came with Wizards of the Coast, Third Edition, or Fourth Edition. For a considerable number, the split came with Fifth Edition. And for some, the line seems to fall after whichever version of the game they personally regard as authentic.

That position is no more historically serious than pretending everything old was backward and waiting for modern designers to repair it. TSR was not Camelot. Gary Gygax and the people around him were enormously creative human beings, which means they were also human beings. They made mistakes. TSR made bad business decisions. Money was wasted. Personal relationships collapsed. Corporate struggles helped drive one of the game’s creators out of the company bearing his creation, and the company itself eventually failed badly enough to be purchased by Wizards of the Coast.

That is why Tondro’s defenders deserve more consideration than a caricature would give them. From their side of the table, they are not watching a heroic generation of harmless old gamers being silenced. They see a frequently hostile old guard that has spent years declaring newer players, newer designers, and newer forms of Dungeons & Dragons illegitimate. From that perspective, Tondro can look less like an arrogant steward and more like somebody willing to stand up to a faction perceived as perpetually angry, resistant to inclusion, and determined to drag the game backward. When he says he does not take certain criticism seriously, some of his supporters hear a professional finally refusing to allow the most immovable portion of the audience to veto every attempt at change.

There are times when I understand that reaction. Sometimes the grognards are wrong, and sometimes they are spectacularly wrong. Sometimes the answer really is that the game has learned something since 1974. Tondro was under no obligation to accept every criticism directed at him, and certainly no obligation to redesign Dungeons & Dragons according to the preferences of its oldest players.

But there is a difference between deciding that an argument is wrong and deciding that the people making it are not worth listening to. That distinction matters enormously when the speaker is one of the people temporarily entrusted with Dungeons & Dragons. The grognards Tondro dismissed include people who bought these books for decades, kept campaigns alive between editions, supported game stores and conventions, introduced children and grandchildren to the hobby, built communities around the game, and continued putting money into Dungeons & Dragons long before anyone currently holding a senior design position at Wizards arrived there. They do not deserve a veto because of that history. They do deserve to be regarded as part of the constituency being served.

After giving Tondro every reasonable benefit of context, I cannot find a version of “those people are not worth listening to” that represents good stewardship. Frustration can explain it. Abuse directed at designers can explain some of that frustration. The worst tendencies of grognard culture can help explain it. None of those things transforms dismissal into stewardship. If anything, the authority of Tondro’s position demands a higher standard precisely because he has the power to make decisions about an inheritance those people helped sustain.

A steward is allowed to tell part of his constituency that they are wrong. Sometimes he must. What he should never become comfortable saying is that they no longer matter.

The interesting thing is that Tondro himself has articulated a philosophy that comes surprisingly close to this. In his essay on the reasons for Fifth Edition’s remarkable popularity⁠, he points to Wizards’ surveys and public playtests as one of the game’s strengths. When a sufficiently large majority of players rejects a mechanic, the designers reconsider it. His larger conclusion is even more relevant: the success of Dungeons & Dragons comes from the larger community, not simply from one company. Actual-play performers, online creators, third-party publishers, players, Dungeon Masters, and popular culture all participate in making D&D what it is.

That is an important observation because Wizards of the Coast owns Dungeons & Dragons as intellectual property, but Wizards did not manufacture fifty years of cultural significance by itself. Generations of players produced that alongside generations of designers. Gygax and Arneson, and the guys at TSR created the game, but millions of tables transformed it into something larger than either man could have controlled. The company therefore owns the trademark and the copyrights it has acquired, while the cultural inheritance surrounding those properties is considerably more complicated.

This creates the tension at the center of The Steward’s Hand. When faced with historical documents containing ideas modern readers might find objectionable, Tondro’s position was that the documents could not simply be changed because they were history. Yet when some people deeply invested in that history objected to the framework surrounding those documents, he could describe them as people not worth listening to. I can agree completely with Tondro’s decision to preserve the documents and still believe that dismissing a segment of the audience associated with that history is a failure of the same stewardship principle.

The distinction is between disagreement and dismissal. A steward does not have an obligation to agree with every constituency, nor could he. Millions of players will inevitably want mutually contradictory things. Listening means hearing the criticism, deciding whether it has merit, and then making the decision you believe produces the better game. Sometimes the answer will still be no. What a steward should resist is deciding beforehand that an entire constituency does not merit consideration.

That principle has to operate in every direction. Tondro has spoken positively about progressive values and greater representation in tabletop games. Those players who have historically felt excluded deserve to be heard. Women deserve to be heard. Gay players deserve to be heard. Black players and disabled players deserve to be heard. So do twenty-year-olds who arrived through actual-play shows, people who discovered Dungeons & Dragons through Baldur’s Gate 3, and the sixty-five-year-old guy with battered AD&D books. None of them deserves to be heard simply because of what they are. What they say must then stand or fall on its own merits.

And once again, asking that question does not make the grognards correct. It makes their question legitimate. That is precisely why “not worth listening to” matters. Tondro does not have to agree with a player who believes Euryale, Asteria, or any other modern addition represents a departure from the Deck’s inheritance. He can conclude that the criticism is wrong and publish the material anyway. What becomes difficult to defend is exercising tremendous influence over inherited material, consciously allowing contemporary values to participate in its reinterpretation, and then declaring that some of the people questioning those choices are beneath consideration.

That mistrust did not begin with Jason Tondro, and blaming him for the entire fracture would be both unfair and historically absurd. Dungeons & Dragons has survived edition wars, corporate upheaval, fights over settings, the OGL controversy, arguments about representation, endless battles over rules philosophy, and fifty years of people announcing that whichever version they dislike is no longer really D&D. The current divide is institutional and cultural, not the creation of one designer.

This is why I keep returning to stewardship rather than ownership. The steward’s job is not to freeze the house exactly as he found it, nor is it to knock the house down because the wallpaper embarrasses him. He maintains it. He repairs what genuinely needs repair. He adds rooms when the family grows. He remembers why the foundation was laid where it was. Most importantly, he understands that the house existed before his tenure and is supposed to exist after it.

Perhaps the most encouraging development is that Wizards itself now appears to recognize some portion of this problem. At Gen Con 2026, the company unveiled D&D Icons, with Joe Manganiello serving as its Chief Creative Officer. The initiative deliberately reconnects contemporary Dungeons & Dragons with creators carrying direct relationships to some of its most important worlds and characters. Luke Gygax is involved with Greyhawk. Tracy Hickman is returning to Dragonlance. R.A. Salvatore is involved through Drizzt. Rather than treating those people merely as names belonging to the game’s past, Icons proposes putting them back into the creative conversation.

Manganiello provided even more reason for optimism in his recent Table & Talk⁠ interview with NERDCORE⁠. In discussing the effort to reconnect Dungeons & Dragons with its creative history, Joe also talked about Ed Greenwood being brought back into the fold. Greenwood is not simply another veteran Forgotten Realms writer. He created the Forgotten Realms. Bringing Greenwood, Gygax, Weis, Hickman, and Salvatore into conversation with people currently building Dungeons & Dragons suggests that someone inside Wizards recognizes that continuity has value.

That does not mean respected names alone can restore trust, nor does it mean the solution is handing Dungeons & Dragons back to the old guard and pretending the last twenty-five years never happened. The old players do not own Dungeons & Dragons forever, and the current designers do not possess a blank canvas simply because the books temporarily pass through their hands. The opportunity is to reconnect the people carrying different pieces of this inheritance rather than asking which faction gets to defeat the other.

That may be where the current moment becomes genuinely hopeful. Manganiello has spoken positively about the people now running Dungeons & Dragons and about their willingness to reconnect with the game’s history. If that effort is sincere, then perhaps Wizards has already begun recognizing that the fracture cannot continue indefinitely. The people who built these worlds, the people currently designing them, the people who have played for fifty years, and the people who rolled their first twenty-sided die last Tuesday do not have to agree about everything. They do have to recognize that Dungeons & Dragons has become large enough to contain all of them.

Part I asked what a steward has the right to change. Part II has asked whose voice that steward has an obligation to hear. Neither question can be answered by choosing a tribe and declaring victory. The progressive designer who believes the game can help build something better has a place at the table. The grognard who believes something precious is being lost has a place there too. Neither gets an automatic veto or automatic moral authority, and neither should be dismissed simply because the other finds him inconvenient.

The harder question is what happens when those people have spent so long fighting that they no longer trust one another enough to sit down. Joe Manganiello and Luke Gygax may have arrived at exactly the right moment.

Stewardship will be tested by the books, not the keynote.

Coming Soon

The Stewardship of Dungeons & Dragons

Part III: Unite the Clans