Need an alternative to D&D.

[Caliban]

If you want something similar to D&D, try Palladium Fantasy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_Fantasy_Role-Playing_Game). It also has the option of transporting the PC's in to the future sci-fi fantasy setting of RIFTS if you want to get really wacky.

 

[steenan]

Probably the simplest thing you can do is keeping D&D5, but changing rest and XP rules. Remove combat XP entirely, give XP for achieving story goals; make a short rest take a whole night and a long rest a week in a friendly location, including at least one party.
That's not a perfect solution, but it's something that may be done smoothly without interrupting your current campaign.

If you want to switch systems while keeping your setting, I suggest using Dungeon World or Fate Core.

Dungeon World is a game that uses D&D-like general play style and a system based on Apocalypse World. It's fast and intuitive in play (very simple rules, nearly no modifiers), very light on GM prep and contains great advice for both players and GMs.

Fate Core may be used as-is, customized to fit your setting or used with rules from one of numerous Fate-based fantasy games that currently exist (many are available as pay-what-you-want, so you may easily review them before deciding). Keep in mind that Fate is based very strongly on story-logic and focuses on expressing the characters, not on tactics. If you saw Inspiration as a great addition in D&D5 and wished they made it more important, Fate is probably for you.

 

[chaochou]

So I'm looking for suggestions for an alternative fantasy system that I can drop in, in place of D&D 5e.

Take a look at Burning Wheel. It'll handle all your power levels from guttersnipe to dragonslayer (dragons in BW, like in the original Runequest, are epic foes.) Combats only happen to advance the story - and that story is player driven as it revolves around the GM challenging the player's beliefs and goals. It's designed for campaign play over many sessions.

The most obvious place it doesn't fit what you're asking for is magic. Magic is subtle, hard, comes at a cost and can be very dangerous to cast. Like magic should, but doesn't in D&D.

It might not be the game for you. But equally, it might be exactly what you're looking for.

 

[Tony Vargas]

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.

4e D&D really does sound very close to requirements, especially for D&D (really, it's been accused of 'not being D&D' for that reason), and, since this isn't the 5e forum, I don't feel obliged to try to talk you out of it so much.

One thing to consider: I understand you have limited experience with D&D and haven't bought into it's expectations, but is that true of your whole group? If you have a happy D&Der or two in your group, they may well be able to bring everyone around to the 5e/classic D&D paradigm.

Otherwise, sure, consider 4e. You could also try 13th Age, which is sometimes described as a 'clone' of 4e (it's not, it's every bit as much classic D&D as 4e, that's just a whole lot more 4e-like than 5e is). The way 13th Age addresses your issue with pacing (and the related issue of class balance), for instance, is to have a DM-declared 'Full Heal Up' after every 4th encounter - whether they're minutes or days apart. It doesn't always have to be every 4th encounter, but that's what the classes are balanced around (instead of all being on one resource schedule like 4e 'AEDU' classes). Also, players can declare 'resting' for a full heal up, too, but must accept a 'campaign loss' imposed by the DM for doing so. It's a fair, storytelling-style-supportive way of handling the issue, that still allows classes to be differentiated by whether they cast a few, powerful spells per day or hack away with a weapon every round (or a lot of things in-between, you can't accuse Heinsoo & Tweet of a lack of creativity).

Hero System (the original fantasy game they put out was called Fantasy Hero, but it's all generic now) is a great system, extremely flexible 'universal' point-buy, but very crunchy. It's not as intimidating as it seems. There are, ultimately, fewer rules and 'powers' than in an edition of D&D for instance, it's just that they're all right there in the one book (maybe two in the 6th ed, which I haven't followed so much). The reason being that Hero powers are effects-based mechanics. If a power is all about killing the target, it's (a little on the nose) a 'Killing Attack' - sword, arrow, firebolt, firearm, LASER, maser, bananafanna-pho-phaser, doesn't matter. All Killing Attacks with various advantages/limitations and different 'special effects' (fluff).

 

[Celebrim]

On the recommendations (to the OP):

Dresden Files/FATE: Almost certainly doesn't do what you want. 'Spirit of the Century' is a great system for what it is, but I don't think it's what you want. If you were complaining mostly about pacing, tension, player empowerment, and other drama concerns, I'd probably point you in this direction, but from what you've said your concerns are mostly about verisimilitude, balance, and 'realism'. If so, don't go for systems that don't care about those things.

Palladium: Just nope. No, you'll be trading some problems for a basket full.

D6: It's an awesome durable system, but you'll need to tweak it just like 5e. Main reason for switching to D6 would be if you prefer a more classless game system with less dependency on archetypal characters. Power curve is a bit different than D&D, and if you aren't careful it's easy to scale right out of the sweet spot.

Burning Wheel: I'm not a fan of BW, and I consider it a somewhat predictable fantasy heartbreaker (ei, games were the writer said, "I like D&D, but if I made just a few changes it would be a PERFECT SYSTEM!"), but honestly it might be your thing based on what you've said so far if you want relatively few but meaningful combats and you prefer a system to hold your hand during RP. You'd probably need to make magic more accessible.

4e/13th Age/Dungeon World: I'm guessing that these systems go in the opposite direction of what you seem to want, and you'd be less happy with them than 5e.

 

[chaochou]

If you want to switch systems while keeping your setting, I suggest using Dungeon World or Fate Core.

Dungeon World is a game that uses D&D-like general play style and a system based on Apocalypse World. It's fast and intuitive in play (very simple rules, nearly no modifiers), very light on GM prep and contains great advice for both players and GMs.

Fate Core may be used as-is, customized to fit your setting or used with rules from one of numerous Fate-based fantasy games that currently exist (many are available as pay-what-you-want, so you may easily review them before deciding).

I can see the logic behind recommending Dungeon World - it offers something very different, but still which might suit the OPs requirements.

But I can't see any version of FATE really hitting the mark... not because it's a bad game, far from it, but i've yet to see a version do zero to hero arcs, or goblins to dragons as the OP puts it. It usually has a skill pyramid that stays a skill pyramid... hero to, erm, hero...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I was a player in a Dresden Files RPG campaign and it was a lot of fun. Except for one part…anyone playing a wizard very quickly becomes overpowered. To the point that I started to feel like I was playing the sidekick. I get that it matches the source material, but man, was it a bummer, and a glaring design flaw.

Agreed. I'm not really sure how a total "normie" can stand next to an experienced wizard in that setting, but it does seem like they could have worked a little harder to make that happen.

The most obvious place it doesn't fit what you're asking for is magic. Magic is subtle, hard, comes at a cost and can be very dangerous to cast. Like magic should, but doesn't in D&D.

It's one way to do magic, but hardly the way it "should be".


OP, maybe some further clarification of what you want out of a system?

There seem to be a few incompatible perceptions of what you want out of the game in this thread.

For instance, I can't find anything in this thread that points to you needing more realism than 5e provides.

You call out heroic scaling (goblins to dragons), big flashy boom magic, crunchy combat, and actual solid rules for things other than combat, with the last one being the thing that 5e is most missing for you and your group.
Thus, the recommendation of looking at games like Dresden and The One Ring (Adventures In Middle Earth) to take bits from and add them to 5e. Because 5e is mostly just missing that stuff. Pretty easy to convert a part of one system into another, when it deals with a part of the game that the target system doesn't really do much for.

I'd also consider checking out 4e, as [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] suggested. It has much clearer rules for skill use, and as long as you use the latest version (Rules Compendium, IIRC) of Skill Challenges, 4e does non combat encounters really really well, while remaining within the same basic framework as the rest of the system.

Ultimately, I think your best bet is to stick with DnD, because of the amount of system elements that you want to "keep" from DnD, and add/convert system elements from other games into DnD.

I assure you, plenty of folks here, on RPG.net, and elsewhere, will be eager to give you advice on converting or adding specific things, and 5e is really malleable. WHile I prefer 4e overall, IMO the best thing about 5e is how much you can tinker optional rules and homebrew without tanking the whole system.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I would say that in and of itself, a long character generation process is not a big problem as it doesn't interfere with play and is just a sunk cost. It renders the game less accessible to new players, but it doesn't impact play much.

The real problem I have with HERO is that the GM must be absolutely fully comfortable with winging and improvising almost everything, because any burden you put on a player, impacts a GM twenty-fold. If deciding how to do something is a lengthy process, it takes the GM 20 times longer because the GM has a much larger and ongoing preparation burden. The massive amount of preparation time in HERO limits the sort of preparation a GM can do, and Celebrim's First Law of RPGs is that how you prepare to play a game and how you think about playing the game is as important as the rules. HERO's massive preparation burden forces the sort of game you can play much more severely than rules light systems do simply by making it all but impossible to do certain styles of preparation.

Time saving in a system like HERO is just about everything from a GM's perspective. Compare with 1e AD&D were the crunch presents almost no burden to the GM for the presumed style of play, or a more crunchy system like 3e D&D where many GMs became frustrated with feeling that they couldn't treat monster generation with the granularity provided for and seemingly expected by the rules. Both 4e and 5e have tended to back away from that expectation that the rest of the world is as granular as the PCs.

HERO is my favorite system, so I do understand the prep-time pitfall. I'm glad you made clear what I only implied. Cutting GM prep time is one of the reasons why HERO supplements exist, after all.

In them, a lot of NPC types get statted out, as do powers & gear. In some supplements- mainly fantasy or sci-fi- races/species get the same treatment. Want to have an orc warrior, and it is probably statted up. For a group of them with identical gear, copy/paste. Want a group of orc brigands with variations in gear, find gear with comperable costs.

...or don't, and just wing it using the gear stats but ignoring the differences in build costs because they're not going to be that big a deal in most combats.

Want an orc wizard of the blaster orcatype...errr...archetype? Sub the warrior's gear for a magic item. Or use a similarly priced "blaster rifle" from a sci-if supplement renamed "wizard's staff".

The big prep time comes when stating up more important combatants with more unique abilities. But again, the same time savers lighten the load. A villainous caster's "Fire seeds" spell might be modeled well by a grenade launcher, with a couple of tweaks.

And after a while, doing that on the fly becomes much easier. You'll just know a 60pt power with 1/2 level worth of disads costs 40pts.* So if the above grenade launcher has a 1/2 level worth of disads not available in your campaign for your Fire seeds spell, all you need do is sub 1/2 levels of more appropriate ones.







* doing that from memory, and having not played HERO in a decade due to my current group. Feel free to check.

 

[Argyle King]

You don't seem to mind crunch.

As such, I'd say to check out GURPS.

If you want something that still employs D&D/rpg tropes, check out Dungeon Fantasy. Currently, the pdfs are available. Next year, SJ Games is releasing a Dungeon Fantasy boxed set which is a completely independent (though still compatible) game. The differences between stock GURPS and what DF Boxed set will be is that the boxed set is essentially a game built specifically for a particular style of fantasy.

If you're open to something entirely different, Banestorm is alright. It's a setting book.

In either case, I'd recommend trying GURPS Lite first. It is a free pdf and would give you a general feel for how the game works. If you don't like it, you haven't spent anything, so no loss. If you do like it, the move from Lite to the full game will be easier.

My advice for the full game? Despite being a point buy system, don't worry about doing the math for everything on the DM side of things. Also, chat with folks on the SJ Games forum. The community tends to be friendly and offers experienced insight into how things work.

 

[innerdude]

If you haven't at least considered giving Savage Worlds a chance, you're doing yourself a disservice. Savage Worlds is generic in the mold of GURPS and HERO, but infinitely less complex. In play it feels very much like "classic" BECMI D&D / D&D Rules Cyclopedia, only it's using a vastly more elegant, consistent, and easy to GM system.

Out of anything I've heard suggested in this thread so far, Savage Worlds would be by far the easiest in terms of GM preparation time.