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

[MatthewJHanson]

So this is a complete opposite mindset of what I have.

First of all our group is pretty much always game to run whatever the GM wants to run, because we like our group more than we care about the system.

Second, we rotate GMs, I for one, and I think other GMs switch games not because we say "Oh this systems has problems," but instead we say, "Look there's this other cool system that I really want to try."

In short it's not that we have a problem with what we've got, we just enjoy trying new things.

 

[Willie the Duck]

As usual with polls, I can't find one that fits.

I don't think number of problems is really the metric for me, so much as how much of an issue are the problems (whatever number there is) and how readily can they be fixed with house rules.

 

[GMMichael]

As usual with polls, I can't find one that fits.

I don't think number of problems is really the metric for me, so much as how much of an issue are the problems (whatever number there is) and how readily can they be fixed with house rules.

That's fair. It's hard to draw a box around a "problem." But if it helps, think of "whack-a-mole combat" or "martial/caster imbalance" as problems. You know, something that can be labeled.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

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.

That is my experience as well. I've gotten mini-campaigns of other games going, but a permanent switch from D&D for D&D players has yet to happen for me. When it came out, I desperately didn't want to run 4e, and suggested Castles & Crusades instead, but got zero takers. So I ended up running 4e after all.

I voted 3+. In order for me to abandon a beloved game, the problems need to be systemic in nature, not just a handful.

 

[MNblockhead]

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.

That's more pages than the actually crunchy rules portions of even a fairly heavy-rules system's core book. At this point your are basically making your own game, which is cool. But if you are writing 100s of pages of rules for a system to make it work for you, it seems you've abandoned it in all but name.

 

[Retreater]

I have enough trouble finding a book that doesn't have 3 (or more) problems per page. If I was looking for something that didn't require work, I wouldn't be playing TTRPGs with human beings.

 

[MNblockhead]

At this stage in my life, I find I don't really get to the point of building a relationship with any entertainment that I have to abandon. I generally figure out that I'm not into something and just drop it before I get too deep into it. I'll start reading a book and just drop it if it doesn't grab me. Same with movies and TV series. Especially true with games.

I've stopped running D&D but that was not because of problems, it is just after years of running 5e as my main game, I wanted to play something else for a while. I may try out the 2024 version late next year, or go back to 5e. I don't feel like I've abandoned D&D, we're just taking a break.

The only TTRPG that I made much of an investment in that I dropped in the past decade was Mage: The Ascension. My players liked that game and convinced me to run a campaign for it. My initial impression of the magic system was good, and I bought the rule books and some expansions and third party aids. I started building up my campaign and stories and ran a couple of sessions. But I found the system to be a confusing, poorly organized, mess. The more I tried to make it work, the more I hated trying to run it and I just told my players, sorry, but I don't enjoy this and do not have luxury of lots of free time to invest into trying to make this work for me.

 

[aco175]

Out where the river broke
The bloodwood and the desert oak
Holden wrecks and boilin' diesels
Steam in forty-five degrees

I just noticed that the 45 degrees lyric is 45 Celsius, not Fahrenheit. Silly Americans growing up in the 80s. I was thinking 45F is a bit chilly where you need a bit more than a sweatshirt.

 

[Lanefan]

As a GM I don't abandon games due to problems. Instead I kitbash and rework the existing game in order to fix those problems as they arise, and carry on. And while @MNblockhead might see this as a slow abandonment of the root system, I disagree with that view.

As a player I'll think long and hard about abandoning a game if it has problems that the GM either won't or can't fix.

Edit to add: and now of course I'm all set to use the thread title as the root of a full Beds Are Burning rewording...

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I was dissatisfied with 3E by the time 4E was announced, for all the reasons discussed. While it was -- and is -- a homebrewer's dream, it also demanded a ton of system mastery from the DM and the idea that both NPCs and PCs used the same rules made me feel like I had to build custom spells and magic items for every NPC when I wanted to have them do something cool and new, and it had to be street legal. It was just too much extra work for me by the end.

4E went in a direction I didn't like, so I swapped to Castles & Crusades, which tonally matched my earliest days of roleplaying. While it too has some neat rules (class and a half multiclassing is genius, and in a just world, we'd see that idea show up in a bunch of other fantasy games), it has its own issues and when I finally picked up the 5E Starter Set in winter 2018 and discovered that 5E had, ahem, parallel evolution of many of the best elements of C&C (other than the aforementioned class and a half), it was relatively easy to get my players to switch mid-campaign to a new system for a second time.

I had previously switched from from 2E to 3E, but I didn't have strong enough feelings about the system or enough players for it to matter. Our short term all-halfling Five Shires game had already run its course by the time Eric Noah was hanging up his shingle.

At this point, I'm more likely to pick specific games for specific modes rather than to "abandon" 5E in its entirety. For dungeoncrawling and horror-adjacent fantasy roleplaying, I've found Shadowdark is a vastly better game for me than 5E and it scratches the homebrewing itch even better than 3E did. Pirate Borg provides its own sort of madcap adventure better than running Freeport under 3E and C&C could do. And there's oodles of other games out there, like Deathmatch Island, Eat the Reich and The Job that I want to run, all of which would require a lot of elbow grease to get 5E to do, but which I can run immediately and in a purer form with dedicated games. Thankfully, I have a large stable of players who are up for trying such things.

I'll still run 5E for heroic fantasy and have two games scheduled for it in the next six weeks. But it's unlikely to be my one and only ever again.