How can we sleep while our game is burning? Or, how many problems?

[GMMichael]

I was happy to house-rule D&D (3rd) back in the day. It was kind of fun, actually - a little tweak here, another there, until I had the game that ran like I wanted it to run. I didn't (that I recall) complain about how broken polymorph was, or how grossly overpowered the cleric was, or how warlocks would be the downfall of the edition. Okay, I probably complained about warlocks, but anyway, I rode the 3e train until WotC ran it off the cliff.

That allowed me to take a step back and ask: should I be playing a different game? Why would I? And then my problems with 3e became clear: Op Attacks, action type bloat, grappling, prestige classes, stacking modifiers, and more. I realized that I had so many issues with the game that it was time for a new one.

Have you abandoned a favorite game? How many issues did it take to seal the deal? What are they? If you're still playing your favorite game, what would be the turning point for you to go to a new one?

"It belongs to them. Let's give it back."

EDIT: sorry, choice 1 is supposed to read "1 (and partial problems)." For the small things, I guess, that don't amount to full problems but irritate you nonetheless.

 

[Blue Orange]

Upvoted for old-school Midnight Oil reference.

I'm more likely to stick with D&D because it's the easiest thing to find players for by far, and that's a major consideration.

 

[payn]

I usually abandon well before favorite status. If I stick with it for whatever reason, I'll make it work. A lot has to do with theme and what I get out of it. That said, after 20 years of experience with 3E/PF1, its still my go to fantasy RPG. If it came out today, however, im not sure it would make favorite status. It was a lot of work figuring it out. I was a younger man then.

 

[el-remmen]

3E was definitely a favorite when it came out. Despite the fact that I hacked the hell out of it from day one to match with my expectation of D&D and my ongoing (at the time) homebrew setting, it still had more in it I liked than didn't like (or was tired of) over 2E which I had been playing for the decade before it.

That said, by 2016, when I last played 3E/3.5E (we played a mish-mash, taking what we liked from the latter and sticking it in the former) I was exhausted by 3E's granularity. I was never one to complain about all the combos and things that others complained about because my group just never played that "build/level dip" style of play, but just the number of rules and the time needed to build PCs or monsters started to feel like it wasn't worth it. I took a break from D&D, dabbled with Pathfinder/Starfinder (and didn't find it different enough) and then adopted 5E in late 2019 and thought it hit the spot I was looking for with the option to add things if I wanted.

So to answer the question, it is not about the number of "problems" because defining what is actually a problem ranges widely from person to person and from group to group - but do I feel like I can play around with the ruleset to get what I want out of it? I am going to have to do with any fantasy adventure RPG I play and to me that is part of the fun.

 

[Pedantic]

This is far more control than I feel like I have. I'm beholden to a group, and their collective tolerance for the game is ultimately more important than my opinions.

That being said, I think I would have happily played 3.5/PF1 forever, complaining about all the little things and slowly tweaking things with assorted houserules, had I not moved on to different groups who were more aligned with the modern market. Maybe that first group would have gotten deeper into Fantasy Craft if Spellbound had ever been released.

 

[Umbran]

Have you abandoned a favorite game?

Not in the way you seem to mean it. I have never been playing a game, looked at it, and said, "I don't like it any more, I'm going to drop it for something else."

On the other hand, I've never really been a single-game player. When I was very young, I played what my eldest brother ran for us (Tunnels & Trolls). When he came back from college with AD&D as Xmas presents, we played that. When TSR's FASERIP Marvel came out, we played that. When Shadowrun came out, I played that at home during the college summers with older friends, and 2E D&D and D6 Star Wars at college.

None of those changes were abandoning games due to "problems" with the system we were playing, it was that something in an entirely different genre had come out.

Today, when I play, system is not generally the central question to me as to whether I'll accept an invite to a game - Care about who is running the game, who is playing the game, and what genre it is in before i care about system. When I run a game, I choose genre/setting first, and then pick a system that supports that well.

 

[Yora]

If I stopped using a game system because it has 3 things I don't like, I never would be running anything.

It's not a matter of how many flaws a game has, but of how well the game as a whole is suited for the kinds of campaigns I want to run. If the game is a great fit in general, I can endure one big weird quirk, or a whole lot of little nuisances.
But if all the mechanics individually are fine and unobtrusive, but the game as a whole just doesn't produce the structures I want, then I have no intentions to deal with it.

 

[Tonguez]

DnD has so many problems, but its just a game. Im not particularly enamored of 5e but others want to play it so fair's fair, I'll pay my rent and I'll play my share

its not I have to sleep in it

 

[Celebrim]

I have never met a well-designed RPG rules set. Every single one of them, even the ones I admire, always ends up with hundreds of pages of house rules. I can't imagine what a system would be like if it only had like 3 minor flaws rather than 300 or 3000.

The only system I have ever abandoned is GURPS, and that's because the fix of GURPS would ultimately look so little like GURPS that there would be no point in calling it GURPS. That was the first rule set that I admired that upon running realized the rules problems were so daunting that I couldn't save it and make it a functional game. There are plenty of rules sets I've looked at, shook my head in disbelief, and just decided not to run the system, but that's the only one I've started and thought, "What a horrible mistake I have made."

UPDATE: OK, on reflection it may be more than one. I abandoned Mouse Guard which like GURPS read very well after one experimental session playing it with my daughter where it was obvious that the game could not work as written and you'd be better off with a completely different system.

Also, you could say I abandoned 1e as I spent a lot of time trying to make that ruleset work and did move on to other rules sets and game systems. But it wasn't so much that I gave up on D&D as I also burned out on it. And my attempts to find an alternative such as GURPS only led to increasing my admiration for the system. When 3e D&D came out I treated it like the house rules for 1e AD&D that I'd always wanted but hadn't had the skill at the time to actually create.

 

[MGibster]

As far as games I've liked, I've only abandoned two. The first was AD&D 2nd edition, and I abandoned it because I was simply tired of playing AD&D. The second game I abandoned was D&D 3rd edition when it switched over to 3.5. While I was initially excited to hear about 3.5, the changes were's substantial enough for me to purchse new core books, so I simply walked away.