Need an alternative to D&D.

So, my group recently expressed interest in doing a fantasy campaign so given D&D is the big name in the genre I bought it - naively it appears. The PCs are still low-level but I'm already finding the system a little hinky with things like Perception and AC feeling very loose with balance and result. But more especially I'm learning things like the system really doesn't support well anything other than, well, "dungeons". I'm participating in several threads on topics like encounter balance and balancing ranged and melee combat on the 5e forums but constructive discussion is just being bombed by people insisting that people are "playing it wrong". For example, it seems to break if you have one encounter a day. In my games, you could go weeks without an encounter and when you do have one it's a big dramatic finalé. I don't see the point of combats that don't advance the story. I've been told by other posters on the forums that "D&D isn't for you." There's a thread on ranged combat and tweaking that and it's just getting buried by aggressive posters who insist that encounters should start at X range, etc. Ignoring the fact that my GM'ing style is very player driven and I don't want to deny them the strategic ideas they have that control how encounters emerge. Honestly, certain posters here, the issues I'm seeing with the system and that people are telling me that those issues are baked into it by design, have put me off 5e.

But that leaves me stuck with a load of campaign background I've written out, a group that have developed PC backgrounds, etc. There's a lot of work and investment. So I'm looking for suggestions for an alternative fantasy system that I can drop in, in place of D&D 5e. That could be a different edition or a different system entirely. I know there are a lot of games out there. My requirements are moderately crunchy combat but capable of handling other things well, a magic system that allows similar things to D&D (i.e. needs to be fireballs not subtle curses) and ideally a similar range of power - i.e. you can scale up from goblins to ancient dragons.

I know there are a lot of D&D clones of various flavours out there. Anyone know any that fit the bill? Thanks for any responses.

I would look at Mutants & Masterminds 2Ed (I don't know 3rd), HERO (any) or GURPS (any).

The last 2 are true generic systems, capable of modeling a wide variety of different genres, and can even do so simultaneously, and have fantasy genre supplements to facilitate that kind of campaign. Mutants & Masterminds is a superhero game that is essentially a D20 take on a system like HERO (which started off as a superhero game, Champions), and has its own fantasy rules supplement, Warriors & Warlocks.

knasser said:

In my games, you could go weeks without an encounter and when you do have one it's a big dramatic finalé.

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What are the main activities that the player characters engage in, in these weeks without a (combat) encounter?
Is it exploration, investigation, research, engaging in politics, trade or just social encounters?
Or is it simply downtime, i.e. your campaign just has a slower pace than a typical D&D campaign?

If it's the latter, I'd recommend to continue using D&D but to tweak the (encounter) system. If it's the former, you're likely better off migrating to a different RPG system that focuses on the kind of activities that are at the core of your campaign.

knasser said:

My requirements are moderately crunchy combat but capable of handling other things well, a magic system that allows similar things to D&D (i.e. needs to be fireballs not subtle curses) and ideally a similar range of power - i.e. you can scale up from goblins to ancient dragons.

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Do you have any requirements on how 'fantastic' your setting needs to be? There's plenty of high-magic settings covering the range from low-fantasy (e.g. Ars Magica) to high-fantasy (e.g. Earthdawn).
Most systems have 'moderately' crunchy combat systems. D&D is actually quite high on the spectrum of 'crunchiness'.

Thanks. I would never have thought of looking at Mutants and Masterminds. I actually have the 3rd edition. Well, kind of - I have the DC edition because of my players was interested in a comic book game and I think it was cheap. I read through it and was impressed by how flexible it was. Also that it seemed to scale well to different power levels. The supplement seems interesting. It locks things down to Power Level 6. I'll have to refresh my memory on how it all works and see how they approach magic.

GURPS is so obvious I could kick myself. I've heard of it, never played it. Again, I'll take a look.

Hero is the one with the 4 million page rule-book, yes?

Jhaelen said:

What are the main activities that the player characters engage in, in these weeks without a (combat) encounter?
Is it exploration, investigation, research, engaging in politics, trade or just social encounters?
Or is it simply downtime, i.e. your campaign just has a slower pace than a typical D&D campaign?

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All of the things you listed except downtime. There can be downtime but that's easily handled in any system. You just say "Three weeks later..." Yes, a story I run can have a lot of politicking, role-playing, social maneouvering and investigation. Very often the players will try to manipulate people into being where they want or doing what they want, they will seek out allies to help them defeat particular threats. When a combat happens, it's often semi-planned out by the players. If they know that the baron is their enemy, they're not going to march up to his castle and barge in the front door - my players would think that the height of stupidity. They're going to try and lure him to a ball or find out when he's riding out in his carriage, etc. So you see whilst I can do a lot to tweak how an encounter will play out, the game leans substantially towards low numbers of encounters and I'm also expecting it to lean towards solos more than I'm starting to get the impression some people's games do as well. Not saying dungeon crawls wont or don't happen - my players are currently tolerantly following an obvious rail-road, but I got their buy in with that because it's a new campaign in a new system and they know I need time to build up the setting and a roster of NPCs and guide them into the world I'm building. However, long term I expect them to revert to seeing combat as a means to an end rather than an end itself. I.e. if it can be side-stepped or circumstances tweaked to shift the odds wildly in their favour, they're going to do it. And why wouldn't they?

Jhaelen said:

If it's the latter, I'd recommend to continue using D&D but to tweak the (encounter) system. If it's the former, you're likely better off migrating to a different RPG system that focuses on the kind of activities that are at the core of your campaign.
Do you have any requirements on how 'fantastic' your setting needs to be? There's plenty of high-magic settings covering the range from low-fantasy (e.g. Ars Magica) to high-fantasy (e.g. Earthdawn).
Most systems have 'moderately' crunchy combat systems. D&D is actually quite high on the spectrum of 'crunchiness'.

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I want something that roughly equates to D&D default in terms of magic prevalence and power. My setting is North European Medieval for the most part, with magic being known, practiced but not routine. Earthdawn might be interesting. Ars Magica I like but it's not good for mundanes.

There was a game I got a long time back which I never ran called Iron Heroes. I don't know how well it plays but it had interesting ideas and classes. It was a very low magic setting, though.

knasser said:

But more especially I'm learning things like the system really doesn't support well anything other than, well, "dungeons".

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Good thing the developers of Dark Sun, Spelljammer etc didn't know this.

knasser said:

on the 5e forums

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I suddenly have a vague guess at what the problem is.

knasser said:

but constructive discussion is just being bombed by people insisting that people are "playing it wrong". For example, it seems to break if you have one encounter a day. In my games, you could go weeks without an encounter and when you do have one it's a big dramatic finalé.

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For most settings, "weeks without an encounter" is sane, unless you are on a war. Or, yes, in a dungeon.

knasser said:

I don't see the point of combats that don't advance the story. I've been told by other posters on the forums that "D&D isn't for you."

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Maybe. The root of your problem seems to be that in *D&D character level is all-important, and most or all (depending on the version) XP is "defeat" XP. No combat - no XP.
In the end, a party have to level up somehow to deal with tougher problems. AD&D2 has decent amount of Individual Awards (and more of them e.g. in Dark Sun), and before that there was XP for loot. It works nicely as a diet supplement, but is not so great as the main source. And warriors have Individual Awards, obviously, for fighting.
Levelling up is not really necessary for the game, but it is necessary if PCs are to handle a tough fight later. So if there's not enough of legitimate XP, DM have a choice:
A. not using showy tough challenges that low-level PCs cannot beat (no dragons, no problem),
B. some form of deus ex machina (which makes the tough part unsatisfactory) or
C. toughen PCs up by throwing in arbitrary "quest awards", etc - sometimes it can be justified, sometimes it's but another paper-thin disguise for deus ex machina.
In some old modules authors had to cheat to make sure PCs are up to it at some later point by using XP steroids:

Celebrim said:

A good example of this is the GDQ adventure path, which is just stuffed to the gills with mounds and mountains of treasure to ensure that by the time you finish a module the party has been power leveled up to deal with the next one.

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Kind of like this.

knasser said:

I know there are a lot of D&D clones of various flavours out there. Anyone know any that fit the bill? Thanks for any responses.

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Retroclones like Castles & Crusades? The problem is, most D&D retroclones were, obviously, made specifically to play much like old D&D. So why would this change much?
If you want non-D&D relatives, Dragonlance: Fifth Age was an adaptation of SAGA system, IIRC. Warhammer Fantasy RP. Alternity (there's a remake in the workshop currently), though its magic system (FX skills) is rather sketchy.
Either way, it would be easier to find if you formulated requirements - what exactly result do you want.

It's hard to give suggestions without more specification as to what you are looking for the game to do. There are thousands of game systems. Many do at least one thing well. None are a perfect match for every possible game.

Like Dannyalcatraz, I'm a big fan of Hero; it is my go-to system when I don't find a pre-existing game that is already a close match to what I want to run. Other games with a strong fantasy feel that may be better suited to your needs include Ars Magica, Pendragon, 13th Age, Castles and Crusades, Dungeonworld, or maybe Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.

I recommend sitting down and thinking through what you want to run in terms of genre, power level, trappings, what level unpredictability is tolerable, what PC interaction with the world is encouraged (delving, homesteading, trading, mass combat, frontier exploration, research/development to name a few), how much input the players have outside their character actions, and how much PCs are expected to react to the situations around them versus having the environment react to player action.

I think basically you are dealing with the fact that 5e was designed to be a more barebones version of D&D, and its fans tend to prefer a certain sort of experience. It's certainly not as inflexible as they are claiming, and there is no such thing as doing it wrong if by doing it wrong someone means "Your setting isn't right". D20 is a very flexible system capable of handling almost anything with just a few tweaks, and if you are doing a fantasy game with normal fantasy expectations the system shouldn't break so easily that very simple patches won't be available.

As for switching to another system, let me assure you that you won't find a system that won't have to be patched a least a little to meet your specific needs rather than the default assumptions of the game. By switching, all you'll be doing is putting off finding those little annoying problems with the new system that you'll need to figure out how to deal with.

Someone mentioned GURPS. I learned a lot from running GURPS, and every GM should read the GURPS rules. But one of the things I learned from playing GURPS is that you shouldn't play GURPS. GURPS is like the 3rd best suited system to any game you would want to play. It's got a lot of amazing ideas, but you should pretty much always be looking for a system better suited to your game. And at this point, I feel the D20 family of games that were inspired by various incarnations of D&D will beat GURPS straight up at pretty much any genera.

I also mention GURPS because it has the rules solution to what I'm going to guess is the biggest problem you are having - stock D20 is lousy at dealing with distance. And while I'm not familiar with the 5e rules, I'm guessing that 5e in simplifying made the problem even worse.

The basic problem D20 has is that it's built with the assumption of dungeons, as you might have noticed, and so it assumes that most things that are important happen in small areas - 30 feet away, 50 feet away, maybe 100 feet away at most. And to keep things simple, D20 prefers to have simple easy to remember linear modifiers. For example, 3e had a -1 penalty to perception for each 10 feet further away something was. That works not too badly if you have fairly small environments and you constrain the action to those small environments, but you very quickly realize that if you take the rules literally the game breaks hard in large environments.

The problem here is that the math is wrong. The difficulty of perception doesn't increase linearly with distance. The actual math is that when something gets twice as far away, it gets four times harder to see. It's true that it's much harder to see something that is 20' away than something 10' away, but it's not true that the same increase in difficult occurs between 20' and 30'. The next interval with the same increase in difficulty is 20', not 10'. And the one after that is 40', not 10'. GURPS has a table that handles scale rather elegantly, but 3e tried to avoid tables. To handle scale elegantly in D20 (whether 3e or 5e or whatever), you'll need to invent a table for it showing how the linear increase in difficult requires an exponential increase in distance. (As a suggestion, each -1 penalty involves roughly 50% further out than the prior one. If you'd like a table, I can post the one I use for 3e, and you can tweak to inform your 5e Perception rolls.)

The other issue of scale you seem to be having is ranged weapons. In every edition of D&D, all things being equal, the party is best advised to specialize in ranged combat. It's not surprising you are having problems of balance between ranged and melee weapons. Let me explain the basic problem:

In reality, ranged weapons are vastly superior to melee weapons.

Most RPG systems have to cheat considerably to make melee weapons relevant. Ranged weapons have so much more theoretical combat power than melee weapons it's not even close. The ability to kill things from a distance, at a range at which the enemy may not have an effective reply is so much better than melee, that of course ranged weapons are superior. Even systems that don't try to simulate this end up simulating this. Consider the fundamental asymmetry involved in fight most monsters. Most monsters are vastly stronger and more deadly up close than a human is, even one armed with a piece of sharpened steal. Yet relatively few monsters are skilled ranged opponents. Consider the tactical asymmetry. Tactics are determined by terrain. All the tactical problems as GM might present to a player come down to, "How will you deal with moving across this terrain?" Ranged weapons render all those problems basically trivial. The most effective strategy a party can have is blast everything they see before it can reply. That's system independent.

I suspect 3e handles the ranged combat better than 5e because 3e has the concept of 'range increments', which meant that it got ludicrously hard to hit anything with a ranged weapon out at the limits of its range. But even so, 3e tried to evade the problem by making the range increments so ludicrously large that most of the time, a ranged attacker would have little or no range penalty to hit. In my game, to keep melee relevant, I had to make several small tweaks - one of which was halving the range increment of most weapons. (I also introduce a dodge bonus against missile fire based on speed, got rid of certain ranged weapon empowering feats, and I more or less inverted the 5' step rule to keep archers from being able to consistently step out of threat zones. You probably won't need to go that far unless you are as finicky as I am.)

Stop talking to system purists. Find some theory crafters and hammer in the tweaks you need. It's going to be a whole lot easier than switching systems mid-campaign, and more likely to solve your problems. Changing systems will just give you a new set of problems to solve.

Small illustration of why linear perception penalties are bad:

Suppose that there is something very far away, but which has such a tremendous penalty to stealth that no one could possibly avoid missing seeing it. Consider for example your world's Sun. In our game, let's suppose that the Sun has a stealth penalty such that at even at the vast distance it is from your fantasy world, the difficulty of perceiving the sun is 0. Anyone that isn't completely blind notices the sun anytime it's present, even without really thinking about it. Now, let's apply a simple linear penalty to perception. For every 10' further away the object is, the difficulty of perceiving the option increases by 1. Move the sun 210' feet further out, and now suddenly only the keen eyed will notice the sun (and presumably, the Earth gets plunged into darkness.). If we on the other hand adopt a table, and an exponential scale, how much further out must the Sun be to become noticeable only to the keen eyed observer? Roughly 5000 times its original distance.

knasser said:

Thanks. I would never have thought of looking at Mutants and Masterminds. I actually have the 3rd edition. Well, kind of - I have the DC edition because of my players was interested in a comic book game and I think it was cheap. I read through it and was impressed by how flexible it was. Also that it seemed to scale well to different power levels. The supplement seems interesting. It locks things down to Power Level 6. I'll have to refresh my memory on how it all works and see how they approach magic.

GURPS is so obvious I could kick myself. I've heard of it, never played it. Again, I'll take a look.

Hero is the one with the 4 million page rule-book, yes?

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HERO does have a big rulebook...because damn near everything you need to run a game is in it. There are rules supplements, but they mainly contain info on how to run campaigns, plus some time-saving tips (see below).

The system's strength is that it does a reasonable job of modeling a huge variety of options because of its Lego-like approach to character design. There may be literally a half dozen ways or more to design a particular power like a fireball, depending on how you want it to work. I've personally run fantasy campaigns in HERO where characters had D&D style character mechanics from 1st, 2nd & 3Ed...for the same class.

Also, despite the large rulebook, you don't actually use it much in game. Once characters are designed and everyone is playing, 90+% of everything needed to play is actually on the character sheet. The time is mainly used during initial PC design and when expending character build points earned in play.

The weaknesses:

1) daunting LOOKING math. It's really all basic, but there's lots of it, sometimes presented in odd-looking formats, like tables.

2) LONG character generation process. All those options make deciding how to do something a lengthy process. The few supplements out there can help, though, by doing some of the math for you. That is, instead of everyone figuring out how to make their own laser blaster & other tech gear, a sci-if supplement will provide a table of predesigned items. Relevant to your situation, Fantasy HERO contains a lot of predesigned spells.