I just finished reading the Atlantic hit piece that treats Dungeons & Dragons as ideology first and imagination second. That framing error drives everything that follows.
Dungeons & Dragons is not ideology.
It is not sociology.
It is not a racial theory in disguise.
It is imagination.
Nothing in D&D is obligated to map onto the real world. Elves, dwarves, orcs, alignment, monsters, magic, limits, and rules are not metaphors waiting to be decoded. They are tools for make believe. Anyone who has actually played the game understands this instinctively.
Fantasy works by exaggeration and contrast. Good and evil are clearer. Differences are sharper. Rules are stricter. That is not oppression. That is how tension is created at the table. If you have ever run a session that fell flat, you already know why this matters.
Limits are not moral claims. They are mechanics. Restrictions exist so that choice matters. When everything is allowed, nothing is interesting. I have watched more than one campaign die because characters became interchangeable and failure stopped being possible.
Alignment was never destiny. It was a story hook. Players ignored it. Dungeon Masters bent it. Entire campaigns were built around breaking it. The game always assumed people could think for themselves.
What makes this worse is that Wizards of the Coast now seems to agree with the Atlantic’s framing. Instead of defending the game as imagination, WotC treats it as a liability that must be managed. Not because play demanded it, but because criticism did.
The idea that Dungeons & Dragons needed to be corrected so people could tell better stories is absurd. Players have been rewriting the game at the table for fifty years. That is the point of tabletop role playing. No corporation taught us how to do that.
Corporate attempts to sanitize D&D do not expand imagination. They narrow it and strip it down for monetization. What remains is blander make believe engineered to chase trends and extract value from the brand.
You do not need permission to pretend.
Dungeons & Dragons is a game.
Stop treating it like a manifesto.