D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[JConstantine]

I'm sorry, are you trying to all seriousness argue that a very much non-generic, heroic fantasy-specific RPG is "basically the same" as RPGs intentionally and consciously designed to be generic and genre-mutable?

Firstly, I'd point out that I didn't claim it was "basically the same", I said "no better or worse". Secondly, D&D can and has been adapted to various other genres as evidenced by the absolute glut of d20 products, even more so during the 3.X era. The core makes it adaptable.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I understand where you’re coming from better now, thanks for clarifying. I also realize I didn’t explain the core of my point well.

I think the real devil’s in the lists, not the core mechanics. That’s what often gets overlooked when people assume systems like GURPS or Savage Worlds are “easier” to adapt. Sure, they’re generic in theory, but in practice, you still have to wade through catalogs of traits, gear, abilities, and system-specific edge cases. Then you have to curate what actually fits your tone, genre, and setting. It sounds modular on paper, but the actual process can be just as involved as working from a non-generic chassis.

Some generic systems help by offering strong ready-to-play content, Savage Worlds and BRP do this well. GURPS choose poorly. Until products like Dungeon Fantasy or Monster Hunters came along, you were stuck deep in the catalog, building from scratch. So even in “generic” systems, you're often still doing heavy lifting unless you buy into a very specific supplement line.

D&D, even 5E (though not 4E), has fewer assumptions baked into the core than many people think. The base mechanics are straightforward; the genre flavor comes from the surrounding lists: classes, monsters, spell options, equipment. In that sense, it's structurally different from GURPS, but not inherently harder to adapt. Having rebuilt 5E for my Majestic Fantasy setting, I found the basic components very modular. Most classes/subclasses come down to five or six new features, and the mechanics slot together cleanly once you understand the internal logic.

That said, 5E does have its difficult points. The 20-level progression encourages far more development than most campaigns ever need, and the Warlock, while conceptually cool, feels like a dumping ground for kewl powers. But even so, the overall effort wasn’t significantly different from what I had to do when adapting GURPS 4e for a similar purpose back in the day.

Majestic Fantasy Rules for 5e

Also, I wouldn’t say Crawford’s approach is rare in the OSR anymore. He may have been an early standard-bearer, but over the last several years, more designers have embraced the same spirit, treating classic D&D mechanics as a toolkit rather than a script.

I feel like the issue here is that you appear to be comparing adapting a heroic fantasy game to do heroic fantasy to adapting GURPS 4E, a generic game primarily focused on supporting SF and historical/faux-historical settings to heroic fantasy.

I mean, I definitely agree GURPS 4E is both probably the worst generic system, and certainly the worst generic system I can easily think of when it comes to both fantasy and superheroes support, because GURPS' deal is fundamentally that it wants to be very much about these quite complicated and individual encounters, rather than splattering goblin brains on the wall all day and night. Also it's just really not well-designed to cope with supers and its supplements did not help it there.

D&D 5E has points of fundamental incompatibility with a lot of settings and genres most of which stem from the massive and RAW relatively rapid power growth (which you mention), and linear HP gain (which is a huge issue). It also a has a magic system which is just straightforwardly useless for most settings which aren't D&D specifically, including ones with magic. You'll need to make up your own from scratch - but that's less an incompatibility (whereas power growth and linear HP gain are) and more a lack of support.

I think if you adapted D&D 5E to do say, gritty WW2 French Resistance Fighter roleplaying (some GURPs does with ease, you barely even need supplements), first off, you'd basically have nothing left of D&D except maybe rolling a d20 against a target number, and second off, rather than it just being a huge amount of tedious effort (as the case can be made for going through GURPS supplements and so on) or costing you money, you'd need to actually be good at design! Most people aren't! It's a specific skill set!

Also, I wouldn’t say Crawford’s approach is rare in the OSR anymore.

Sure, but in most cases you're not using 5E are you? Which is the point of contention. You're frequently not using much of any specific older edition either - hell Crawford doesn't even keep the d20 resolution system for skills and so on! He swaps to a much better 2d6-based one!

 

[JConstantine]

I don't think it's "zero-sum", but I don't necessarily agree with ideas like "a rising tide lifts all boats" or "a strong D&D makes for a strong TTRPG market."

To be clear, I don't think "a strong D&D makes for a strong TTRPG market" inherently. I was relaying what a Paizo dev stated, that 5e specifically has been a case of that, but I also noted later it seems to have been a perfect storm, and no small part of that is geekdom being in zeitgeist right now.

But I'm anticipating a weakening 5e market and an inability to make a viable 6e will prove to be a test bed for this particular thesis in the near future (5-10 years).

Oh, I'm fully expecting the bubble to burst with 2024, but I'll guess we'll see.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Firstly, I'd point out that I didn't claim it was "basically the same", I said "no better or worse". Secondly, D&D can and has been adapted to various other genres as evidenced by the absolute glut of d20 products, even more so during the 3.X era. The core makes it adaptable.

I'm sorry but that's just not the evidence you think it is.

What that's evidence of is that people will absolutely spam out stuff to try and cash in on a craze and make a quick buck, especially in an industry where it's tricky to make money.

As @AbdulAlhazred correctly points out, it's very notable how much of a flash in the pan the d20 deal was (it didn't even really last three years), and how basically no d20 games have survived that era, with games based on BRP, OSR/NSR, PtbA/FitD, unique systems and so on simply replacing them, because again, they were terrible and didn't work well work at the genres and settings they were supposedly for.

The only exceptions I can think of went incredibly far in stripping out the rules of D&D so it was basically just "use a d20 to roll against a TN" as the only actual similarity, which if that makes a game "D&D", then lol.

I do personally have beef with the d20 boom too because it killed a good FLGS I knew. They stocked d20 boom stuff aggressively, because they believed the hype, and when that hype completely faded, they were left with tons of stock nobody wanted, because people had already gone back to non-generic RPGs or successful proper-generic RPGs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Firstly, I'd point out that I didn't claim it was "basically the same", I said "no better or worse". Secondly, D&D can and has been adapted to various other genres as evidenced by the absolute glut of d20 products, even more so during the 3.X era. The core makes it adaptable.

There were a glut of products, but AFAIK almost none of them were successful. Is there even one such product that got further development? I think the best one was Mearles' Iron Heroes, which is basically a variant D&D.

 

[JConstantine]

The Ai art thing isn't a deal breaker for me.

actual art is not inherently expensive - you just have to actually look around and find reasonably-priced artists (there's no shortage of them!).

I don’t use AI art at all, still happy to hire artists.

There's a gross pervasive attitude that art isn't worth much, it's just a pretty picture. But you're not just paying the piece, you're paying for the manhours spent on it, the years of practice developing the expertise, the materials/software used to make it. Artists are skilled workers deserving of adequate pay just as much as a doctor, engineer or labourer. Besides, AI art wouldn't exist without those original artists' work that got scraped.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

There were a glut of products, but AFAIK almost none of them were successful. Is there even one such product that got further development? I think the best one was Mearles' Iron Heroes, which is basically a variant D&D.

Quite - the only other good d20-era material, and stuff that kept selling even a little past the initial boom was Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Diamond Throne, which was also basically variant D&D.

Mutants and Masterminds also survived a bit longer but is the poster-child for "ripping out everything from D&D 3E except the d20 vs TN resolution mechanism".

 

[JConstantine]

But I must admit I like art as part of conveying the concept and setting.

On this note, I absolutely loved Kagan McLeod's art for RBRB. His blending of the classic East Asian style with a more Western comic style was gorgeous.

 

[Bedrockgames]

On this note, I absolutely loved Kagan McLeod's art for RBRB. His blending of the classic East Asian style with a more Western comic style was gorgeous.

He did a perfect job capturing the look of a Shaw Brothers film

 

[Lanefan]

By putting the goblin there, you have just broken the past context and rewritten things to include goblins, even though there objectively weren't any before and if the players could see your notes, they'd know that. Hence, by doing this, you have just proven that context and setting are not in any way a limitation. In trying to disprove a small claim, you have surrendered the greater. I don't think that's what you intended to do.

Ah. I wasn't thinking in this instance of this specifically being the forest with no Goblins, so probably a bad example.

Replace Goblin with Kobold, perhaps, and my point remains: there's no "menu" of possible player responses to a Kobold stepping into the firelight, no "railroad" to follow or not follow, just the open-ended question "What do you do?".

But that's what people have repeatedly told me is the case. They've repeatedly said that the GM cannot just act as they like, that there really IS something that limits them. This means either you're wrong, or they have been wrong this whole time. Which is it?

What limits a DM is, in the end, largely self-inflicted and self-enforced.

Some of those self-limits can be imposed by setting and-or genre conceits e.g. a DM narrating that some NPC is driving a 1974 Chevy Malibu down the main street in Waterdeep is (maybe intentionally) blowing genre conventions all to hell; 99.9% of DMs aren't going to do that and the remainder will almost certainly have a good reason for it e.g. they're introducing a modern-world crossover of some sort.

Some of those self-limits can be imposed by social contract, which varies widely from one table to the next.

Some of those self-limits can be imposed by what the DM is willing to run. Sometimes for example this means the PCs can't go beyond the prepped area as the DM isn't willing to (or hasn't the confidence to) wing it. Sometimes this means the DM won't run certain types of scenes or situations. Etc.

Some of those self-limits can be imposed by simple game-play concerns. Deciding not to throw ol' grandpappy Red Dragon at the 1st-level rookies is an example of such.

Some of those self-limits can be imposed by the DM's (and-or the table's) sense of realism or what-makes-sense. Having a colony of 185 full-grown Dragons in the mountains doesn't make sense the moment anyone thinks to ask "what do they all eat?"; sure we all bend real-world ecology into knots in our settings but there's still a limit.

And so on; I could list more, but you get the idea.

Not all of these limits are ironclad, nor do they all need to be followed perfectly. A true-sandbox DM, for example, might ignore any game-play concerns limits; if the PCs wander into grandpappy Dragon's territory then so be it: they're a nice light snack and out come the roll-up dice. Many DMs are quite happy to run scenes or situations that many others wouldn't touch with a barge pole. And so on. An individual DM's limits might also vary over time, or be intentionally somewhat malleable e.g. "Normally I wouldn't run a torture scene but this time it's worth the exception".

The point is that each DM has a different set of self-imposed limits...and sometimes might not even know what they are or how to express them. (side note: it's probably worth noting that many of the arguments and discussions here revolve around people questioning or disagreeing with the self-imposed limits (or lack thereof) of others)

Asking the game to impose (and enforce, but how?) external limits that will essentially never entirely agree with the self-limits of any one DM seems like an exercise in futility, and also a big step back from "make the game your own".