D&D 5E If you've ever left D&D, what made you come back?

I'm nearing my thousandth post on EnWorld now, and in the eight years I've been here, I've seen nearly all of the arguments (and participated in most of them ) around how D&D is constructed.

But for the last 5 years my participation in these arguments has been purely as a bystander, as I've not run or played anything bearing a familial lineage, superficial or otherwise, to the actual D&D product. When I engage in discussions about "D&D", it's completely in the abstract these days.

And truthfully, the longer I'm away from the "D&D" family, more and more I find I don't miss it.

• I don't miss the entire hit points/cure light wounds/short rest paradigm at all.
• I don't miss classes. I don't miss having to figure out exactly how to "build" my character so I'm at least competent in the four things I care about without having to find some convoluted set of rules loopholes. I would really have a hard time going back to a class-based system now after the freedom of a pure attribute/skill-based system.
• I don't miss the spell system. I never really liked "Vancian" casting to begin with, and by the end of my run with Pathfinder had basically swapped Psionics Unleashed for the entire "base" magic system (including clerics).
• I don't miss the "lore" at all. Since I'm running a system that so thoroughly encourages homebrewing and makes it supremely easy to do, I don't feel compelled to follow ANYTHING related to anything about cosmology, cultures, races, etc. If I don't like something or want to change it, a simple "Hey players, I'm going to change this or get rid of it, you good with that?" is pretty much all that's required.
• I don't miss alignments. It's a breath of fresh air just to play a character and let the character's consistencies (and inconsistencies) just arise naturally.
• I don't miss the "gonzo" aspect of D&D once you hit level 9 or 10, when your character goes from supremely-heroic-but-still-plausibly-based-in-reality to straight-up Marvel superhero.

About the only thing I DO miss is actually using the d20s in my dice bag (Savage Worlds only uses the d20 for random tables). And at some point, if I felt the "lore" was compelling enough, I might consider using D&D to get the "best" expression of a particular setting like FR or DL. But other than that, all in all I just don't see myself ever really embracing "D&D" again, and simply sticking to any number of excellent alternatives.

So I guess I'm wondering for those who left D&D for a time and came back, what was the impetus? What was it about D&D specifically that made you come back to it?

5e.


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I've left D&D twice.

The first time was the early 80's. My group had played OD&D, then AD&D for years, but when we started playing Champions, we fell in love with the flexibility. So we moved onto Fantasy Hero, dropping D&D completely. Yes, in Hero System it's a lot of work to design a character, but playing them was easy. And we could design pretty much any character we wanted, without having to worry about classes, multi-classing, racial limitations, and so on. Basically, we just wanted something more flexible.

Due to real world stuff, I lost touch with that group and stopped roleplaying for about 10 years. Then 3E came along. I found another group and we played 3.x for years. But 3.x is just too darn much work for the payoff. Yes, it's much more flexible than white box and AD&D, but it seemed like it had a rule for everything. I could streamline some parts, but everything was so inter-related it was not easy. So we started playing other games - Hero System, Savage Worlds, and so on. None of them really grabbed my new group, so we stopped playing RPGs for a while.

Then 5E came out. It has more flexibility than the earlier versions, but far less crunch and complexity than 3E. It's a breeze to house-rule a few elements, and the rules don't generally get in the way during sessions. It's simple enough we've added two new players, both children of adults in our group. 5E's not perfect, but it's been working for my group since the Starter Set came out and I expect we'll continue to play it for years to come.

Many times I have drifted away from it, but in 3.x we made a pretty conscious effort to get out. We returned for 4e and tried and tried (not really sure why in retrospect) but just couldn't get as much fun out of it as other systems.

5e made me return because it is one of the best games I have ever played. Basic still holds more great memories, but 5e just keeps giving me great game after great game, is amazing for introducing new players (especially completely new-to-ttrpg players), flexible, easy to run, I could go on and on.

After 3.x and 4e, the Wotc D&D brand was pretty much a strike against the game, but 5e changed that quickly and I also like almost everything I have heard from Mearls et al. regarding the game in general.

I stopped playing for a while because work and life took over for a bit.

Sounds naff, but the LOTR movies brought me back.

*Deleted by user*

innerdude said:

So I guess I'm wondering for those who left D&D for a time and came back, what was the impetus?

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I suppose there were a mix of things that drove me away from D&D, but the proximate cause, at the time was getting fed up with the quantity (and, I suppose, quality) of material coming out for 2e. 1e, it seemed like, maybe squeezed out a significant book per year - lot of modules and other junk either by TSR or nominally compatible, but serious, hard-bound rulebook maybe 1 a year or so - of course, I was really young, so a years seemed like a long time, too. 2e there was stuff coming out constantly, and it rapidly added up to a pretty darn broken pile of something. I mostly ignore settings, but they started pushing them a little harder in The Dragon, and Planescape really felt like it had jumped a shark of some kind.

I probably stuck with D&D longer than I would have because I was still running a campaign that had started in 1e (and I was staunchly ignoring just about everything coming out after the first year or so for it, sticking to heavily modded house rules), and because the BS of the roll vs role debate made me want to defend it. Ultimately, though, that campaign wound down (c1995) and D&D became something I read about more than I played, and finally, what I was reading was not worth it, TSR went under and WotC (whom I kinda resented for M:tG) took over. That was it. I stopped buying books, my subscription lapsed, D&D was over for me.

I had found a group willing to play things other than D&D in 1984, and while that group lasted I was playing a lot of Champions, then Storyteller in college and with a group that held together for a while after graduation. By the turn of the millennium, though those were both gone, too (Silicon Valley is a wonderful place in some ways, but I've spent my life saying goodbye to friends moving to somewhere with a lower cost of living).

What was it about D&D specifically that made you come back to it?

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So, c1999 the only gaming I was getting was one convention a year and a weekly boardgaming group. They'd all played RPGs at some point, but none were quite into it enough to get something started. 3.0 comes out and it generates just enough excitement to try it. It was just nicely nostalgic, at first, but the addition of feats, skills, and the brilliant/elegant/revolutionary (by D&D standards) new take on multi-classing & classes (particularly the simple/elegant/customizable design of the fighter, a class I'd formerly had some contempt for), sold me on it. Since then my biggest complaint has been the way WotC seems to compulsively roll rev too early. If each ed had gotten a 10 year run, I think we'd all've been happier.
Hopefully 5e finally gets back to that, it sure seems paced to hold up that long.


Edit: It occurs to me that the short answer of why I left D&D at the height of 2e was 'bloat' and that might seem inconsistent with staying through 3e & 4e, which were notoriously bloated. Thing is, in 3e, as long as I didn't try to run, I could just ignore the bloat. I just played from a smaller menu - mostly elaborate non-caster builds and the occasional Sorcerer (the fighter & sorcerer class designs really grabbed me, they were so customizeable on the player side). It also helped that the group I played the most with wasn't exactly powergaming to the hilt, either. In 4e, run or play, I could ignore the bloat because it was, overall, balanced enough you didn't need that sort of system-mastery-in-self-defense either to get a viable character or to keep your campaign from crashing & burning. 5e of course, not so bloated, and it's both familiar and amenable to the DMing style I mastered running AD&D.

I stopped playing around 3/3.5. The D&D Next Playtest pulled me back in. It reminded me of the D&D of yore.

I left D&D once for 5 or 6 years. Mostly because I was frustrated with what I felt was the 'unrealities' of the system - the usual complaints, hit points, clsses, Vancian spellcasting, and every other rock that fantasy heartbreakers dash themselves upon.

And I came back through a combination of two things.

First, I figured out that when you drop hit points, classes, Vancian spellcasting, and various things of that sort, it's not pure win. You gain some things but you lose some things as well. And the things you lose were more important to me as a DM than the things that are gained.

a) Vancian Spellcasting: First of all, I've always had a strong tight in world explanation for how Vancian spellcasting worked that made sense to me. So the problem was less that I couldn't associate the mechanic with the setting in a potent manner, than I thought that Vancian had poor verisimilitude to magic as it appeared in typical fantasy narratives. What I discovered was that spell point systems had even less verisimilitude to magic as it appears in typical fantasy narratives. Besides compartmentalizing magic, Vancian does something very powerful - it explains why the character just doesn't do the same thing over and over again.

b) Classes: I've played and admire a great many point buy systems. But point buy systems typically depend on poor system mastery and are broken by high system mastery. It just ends up turning out that some set of builds are more interesting than other ones. Point buy systems are never well balanced because they are impossible to play test. There is almost no good way to measure character ability based on points alone. They are also almost impossible to work with was a DM, because chargen is so much more complex and short hand is so much more difficult. I'm used to doing everything from scratch. Try running a fantasy homebrew from scratch in a highly granular point by system. Moreover, as with Vancian spellcasting, classes do something really interesting - they force players to be both broad and narrow. Typically if you build a class based character, it's both almost impossible to avoid the core focus of the game (say combat) but at the same time almost impossible put all your resources into that narrow focus. By contrast, if you are the GM in a point buy based system, you have no idea what the player's are going to show up with. You could end up with players that are avoiding the core focus of the intended game, or you could end up with Johnny One Tricks that put all of their points into a hammer that they intend to bash every single problem regardless of what it looks like with.

c) Hit points: For a mechanic that receives so much hate, I find it interesting virtually no video game has ever dispensed with them. Dwarf Fortress is one of the few I can think of, and would be a case in point for why game designers usually don't. The great thing about hit points is it makes encounter design so much easier. It's pretty easy to work out the math of 'party can probably do about this much damage per round, killing the X in about this many rounds, and receiving about this much damage. Is that a fair fight? Is that going to be interesting?' Without hit points, it's just a really a crap shoot what will happen, and really the luck starts vastly exceeding any other component of the system. It's frustrating as a GM to design for that.

Secondly, I came back because 3e D&D looked a lot like a cleaner version of the house rules I was trying to write for 1e AD&D when I gave it up as a bad cause. It was like someone custom designed a platform just for me that was very close to my needs. I understood what the designer's were thinking, because they were addressing problems that had actually come up in my play rather than theoretical problems I didn't have.

I can't help but notice you wrote from a player's perspective, and I wrote from a GM's perspective.

As a player, I don't really care what rules we use. As a GM, I do.

UPDATE: I'll add a third take on this. As a GM, there are a lot of systems I admire. I'm not hidebound to a particular system. I've homebrewed my own for particular purposes and it looks NOTHING like D&D and NOTHING like a fantasy heartbreaker either. But I would assess that for most of those systems it takes a pretty particular group of players to make it work as a game. Many of those systems implicitly depend on player attitudes or player skills that aren't particularly common even in RPing groups. By contrast, I think I could make D&D work for just about anyone that wanted to RP, just by twisting a few dials. There aren't a lot of games like that, and those that exist (WEG Star Wars, for one) I don't have as much experience with so its a lot harder for me to wing it.

New Editions always make me come back and give them a try.