why do people not like dnd? is it just because it's so ubiquitous at the expense of other ttrpgs or is it like actually Bad somehow? (idk much about this sorry)
it's a combination of a few factors. a big one is that dnd is all-encompassing and ubiquitous to the point where it's synonymous with 'ttrpg' for the general public, and this really fucking sucks because it's a really bad first RPG. it's full of convoluted self-referential design decisions, it expects you to buy and read three long, expensive rulebooks, it's an entirely combat-focused game, and it puts massive onus on the DM to do huge amounts of what is essentialy on-the-spot game design to make it playable at all.
some people say 'as long as it gets people into the hobby!' but it's kind of designed not to. it has a huge barrier to entry and a walled garden content ecosystem where you can experience nothing but dnd-as-a-lifestyle-brand across all forms of media and product. dnd gets people into dnd, and then actively discourages them from getting into the broader hobby of TTRPGs. you can see this happening all the time when somebody tries to brutally mangle DND, a high-fantasy grid combat game, to work for a murder mystery or a gritty dark fantasy or a swashbuckling space adventure--and it never fucking works--instead of just playing a fucking game that's been designed from the ground up to tell that kind of story.
on top of that, the game itself really nasty ideological roots--some of which it inherits from the fantasy genre, tolkein, and conan, some of which are straight from gary gygax's own vile fucking brain--biological determinism and race science are baked into its rules ('racial stat bonuses') and so is a violent, extractive view of the world. you can play dnd however you want, but as written, it is a game where you 'advance' by killing things and your reward for this is getting better at killing things. the very concept of a 'dungeon' in the fantasy RPG parlance is 'a place where it's morally sanctioned to murder the inhabitants for their possessions'.
then there's the monk and barbarian classes, which have orientalist and racist thinking at the core of their thinking. the dnd monk is an Asian Mystic while the archetypal barbarian is anywhere on the 'noble savage' to 'bloodthirsty native' spectrum of nasty stereotypes. the ranger class is also built from the ground up on settler-colonial terra nullius fantasies. or at least it would be if anyone played it (rimshot)
finally, and this is the most subjective/least important of my criticisms, i think 5e is quite poorly designed just on a basic design level. there's no coherency to it, just random systems haphazardly slapped together with no genuine artistic vision other than 'make it Feel Like DnD'. totally reduntant numerical boondoggles like 1-20 statlines, tool proficiencies, and spell levels cling to everything, the gulf between spellcasters and everyone else in terms of being allowed to play the damn game is fucking Comical, the completely fucking deranged decision was made to balance classes around having Seven Combat Encounters A Day, something absolutely no one does--and perhaps most frustratingly of all, there's absolutely no fucking useful guidance for the DM at all. if you have ever had a fun, narratively satisfying, well-balanced combat encoutner in DnD, i guarantee you that your DM and the tiny matt colville who lives in their head made that happen on their own merits despite what wizards of the coast wrote down, not because of it.
oh also and the way people get defensive when you criticize it by saying 'well WE dont play it that way' well then why do you have the big fuckin fifty dollar book innit. its like if you said you dont like steven universe and a bunch of people said 'well you dont have to like whats happening on the screen you can just close your eyes and make up a different show in your head'. like okay you can but you fuckin realize that's not a defense, right.
oh and also dnd play culture is fucking awful and encourages/embraces/memeifies some of the most obnoxious antagonistic behaviour of all time where the Evil DM Punishes Naughty Players and the Epic Horny Meme Bard Derails Campaigns. and this is not a dnd-exclusive problem (old man henderson was a coc character) but dnd is the biggest standard-bearer by far for this inane passive-aggressive uncommunicative play culture that is so terrified of ‘meta-gaming’ that it’s accepted practice to vent your interpersonal frustrations through elaborate in-game gotchas.
that + the fact that its total lack of GM tools means that being a dnd DM is a fucking mentally and creatively exhausting endeavour, therefore making anyone who’s started with dnd permanently afraid to take GM roles in systems that actually support the GM and treat them like a player rather than unpaid game design intern, mean that the average dnd player is a worse person to have at your ttrpg tabel than somebody who’s never touched a roleplaying game in their life. its like nursing an injured crow back to health
