Moving On From D&D
“It is a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You Step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Its ironic, well—not really—to be posting about moving on from D&D a few days after Valentine’s Day. A friend and I were talking and I almost wrote a love letter to the game we have been playing for over 40 years. But like many relationships, its been too long, and its becoming too much.
Sorry WotC, its not you, its me.
This space was always meant to be sort of system agnostic, be a general resource for fantasy roleplaying. But then I got caught up in the OGL and SRD stuff and thought I could make stuff specific to the “world’s greatest RPG”, or at least the world’s biggest? Because all nostalgia aside, to me that is what it has become: Too Much. Sure its the most popular, and the biggest company: but its also become the biggest in bloat.
While its been interesting and challenging making things that work with all that bloat, at this stage in my life, in our playing careers, and in this space its become too much. (you might read that phrase a lot in this post).
First things first. I am not and probably will never fully give up on D&D. It was my first RPG and while I have played many others, its been the consistent one. Nostalgically, its hard to leave it as other than Tolkien’s works, its my main tether to fantasy. We’ve played all the editions from BECMI or B/X (the red box+), through Advanced, 2e, 3e, dreaded 4e, and both releases of 5e. And while I do like many things 5e24 has done, from a playing standpoint, its too big now. Sure that means supplements and so on, but to me it really stems from character creation and advancement: primarily subclasses. The subclass format is seemingly meant to give you options, but it does the opposite. It’s the illusion of choice. Though there are lots of choices, once chosen you are locked in. And the choices are too many within a class. Whether using an electronic character sheet or a physical paper one, its hard to keep track of everything characters can do even at tier 2 of play. Sure, there are cheats or help aids like flash cards for combos, but a game system shouldn’t need players to know that many different abilities. Plus, Feats aside, you just end up being like every other character of that subclass.
Then there is the power level. To me its not so much about hit points, or even to hit bonuses, but magic and even class features. Once you get past 5th level, the characters start becoming superheroes. Literally, they are equal to comic book superheroes. Its no secret that a lot of groups, probably a majority, don’t play into the teens or max level play. Characters move past affecting opponents to affecting the environment, even the world and eventually reality itself. For some this may be fun or interesting, but to most players and DMs it just become exhausting and too hard to make things challenging.
I could go on for longer, but if you search the interwebs its not hard to find YT videos, reddits, or other places to find complaints about 5e, mostly starting from and continuing from 4e. Yes, they cleaned a lot up but the roots of the complexity of the game now started there.
Anyway, recently my friends and I started to look at other options. Initially as an alternative in addition to, not necessarily to replace, D&D. I certainly did not think I would be swayed to use this space for anything else. We looked at OSRs and other fantasy games. Like I said, D&D is not the only game I have played: we have done one-shots and campaigns in other genres like Call of Cthulhu, Battletech, Heavy Gear, Twilight 2000, Bushido, and more and we have played countless games at cons and game shops: so we already have experience with other rules systems. We are currently playing The One Ring, and Delta Green. I’ve also been dabbling for years with my own game system. So its not like we have just played D&D and had no outside perspective on the rules.
As I was helping a friend look at OSRs for him to run us in—he had become disillusioned with running 5e before me-I had looked at many games, but I myself was still devoted to D&D. Again, its such a big part of my life as really the rpg and my inspiration for CQ and the setting of Taluma which integrates many old characters in past adventures into its history. There was one game that caught my own eye, and I picked it up on sale partly to let my friend use it if he wanted to. I hadn’t planned to use it myself really, and definitely not to even think about moving onto it here.
But then something happened… I stepped on that road and let it sweep me off to a new place.
When I received Free League Publishing’s Dragonbane core set in the mail and took a few days to familiarize myself with it, it ticked nearly every box of the things we didn’t like about 5e and what we wanted out of a different system. For me it let me know some things I wasn’t even thinking might be issues in 5e. It inspired me to see a less is more approach where simplicity will make me even more creative.
What this means is that, moving forward, any rules system related posts will focus on Dragonbane. There will still be a large amount, maybe a majority, that can be and is relative to any game and many posts will specifically be meant that way. The recent Class Features still work for any character that has a similar background and build, the feats posts can work for Heroic Abilities in Dragonbane, and the bestiary posts are still my way of classifying beasts—in Taluma or in any setting. And all the information about the different people of Taluma (kin in Dragonbane) are more about background and flavor and applicable anywhere. So all the existing posts will remain for everyone to read, including the 5e-specific ones (who knows, maybe I’ll return one day to that system).
We are just getting started playing so it might take me a bit to get into the flow of what I want to support it with. But, I will for sure go back and adapt some previous work for 5e to new resources for Dragonbane, allowing me to refresh and update the information. I need to make Urchins as a kin for the rules with their Ability. I will make my dwarf and elf background and feats into something: Professions and Heroic Abilities most likely. I may come up with some rules enhancement ideas (house rules).
I hope you join me on the ride, whether a hard-core D&D or a general fantasy TTRPG player as in most cases, what you will find here can apply to any fantasy game or setting.
