A New "anti-D&D" Era

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

How old was that?
For board/card games, we were doing Munchkin, Dungeon, Ascension and Smash-up when he was 7 1/2, but didn't start D&D (Moldvay) until around 9 1/2.

I think she was six at the time.

Oh, and good point about Dungeon. I had already been running games of that for her and her brother for about a year at that point. Dungeon was honestly the gateway drug for me and my brother back in the day and I think it still works great as one today. (It's the original rogue-like!)

 

[nevin]

Pathfinder 2E is much more enjoyable to run with its crunchy foundation to lean on rather than my imagination.

I think you just nailed why I never liked Pathfinder 2e. I'd rather lean on my imagination that hobble around on the crunch.

 

[TheSword]

So, this thread is intended to be about whether we will see another explosion of innovation and experimentation in design and aesthetic like we saw in the 90s, and what that might look like. All speculation, I know,but probably less acrimonious than arguing about -- weirdly -- 4E in yet another unrelated thread.

I know some folks have suggested there may be less innovation rather than more as publishers throw themselves into 5E-alikes. Do I ever hope those folks are wrong! I want to see the next Deadlands or Earthdawn or Ars Magika or Fading Suns -- new ideas with new systems.

Can I ask what the signs are you think that there will be that explosion in non D&D games.

Or to put it another way, is there anyone you see now coming through that wasn’t in the business doing largely the same thing 5 years ago?

I look at companies like Free League, Cubicle 7, Edge, Paizo etc. but they have done more 5e stuff not less.

 

[nevin]

I do feel like 5E is burning out D&D. A lot of people love how "easy and simple" 5E is.....at first. But it does not have the staying power of a long term game. The big hole is that it simply does not have the rules. I, myself, add a ton of house rules to 5E to make it more like 2E. But that is a lot of work for most people.

I do see gamers, playing 5E for a couple years, start to feel 5E is going nowhere. They just have the same action and same fights over and over again. Everyone in their group uses the same couple "cool" races, classes, and such....and nothing else.

And this is on top of the low imagination: I see a lot of DMs struggle with this. They describe a caste as "just a square of stone". A city is just "some streets and shops". And worst of all when they have to describe an Abyssal city......it's just "some streets and towers, oh with demons".

I really think 6E will bump D&D down and out too....

I like 5e as a quick stress free game. The rules are simple and easy to understand. But It does feel like bowling with the rails up.

 

[dirtypool]

I look at companies like Free League, Cubicle 7, Edge, Paizo etc. but they have done more 5e stuff not less.

The point those hoping for a new non D&D renaissance are making is that the output we can see is all stuff that was in the pipeline before the OGL controversy. Their expectation is that larger companies will not divest themselves of 5e content as much as possible.

In the case of Free League and Cubicle 7 that woldn't be hard, we're mainly discussing CRB's for translations of their game lines to the 5e ecosystem. Not doing that moving forward isn't much skin off their nose. Paizo's 5e adaptation of Abomination Vault is in limbo with it being at best delayed until 2024 or simply not coming out at all now.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I like 5e as a quick stress free game. The rules are simple and easy to understand. But It does feel like bowling with the rails up.

A game like that should not, IMO, have nearly the outsized influence on the industry that it has. No product should be so powerful that most people haven't even heard of any others.

 

[Aldarc]

Up next for us to try is Worlds Without Number, which looks attractive as another D&D adjacent game, but I don't really like some of the OSR elements. It's what always turned me off Stars Without Number, too, which is stellar in design and presentation but just not what I'm looking for. I'm interested in cinematic, heroic fantasy. I don't want gritty realism or grim darkness. Or table gen the setting. I guess we'll see if it feels right or not.

If you have the deluxe version (i.e., the paid one), then there are rules in the back for adjusting the game to more heroic fantasy (pp. 356-357).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Can I ask what the signs are you think that there will be that explosion in non D&D games.

Or to put it another way, is there anyone you see now coming through that wasn’t in the business doing largely the same thing 5 years ago?

Just searching for "roleplaying" on Kickstarter turns up a bunch of small companies getting into the market. ZineQuest is obviously skewing the results a bit, but very few of them mention 5E, Pathfinder or OSR. (Obviously, if you search for any of those keywords, you can find a ton of projects as well.)

Some examples:

• https://www.kickstarter.com/project...war-adventures?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• Fear Within: A Vessel Roleplaying System Zine - [Zinequest]
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/soncka/rootsystem-in-print?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• AMPERSAND RPG – Tabletop Games for Kids & Parents
• Titans' Story - Embers in the Wind.
• FEVER DREAM NEXUS
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jesseross/rlyehwatch-rpg?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• https://www.kickstarter.com/project...e-playing-game?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/korvidae-games/kill-him-faster?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• https://www.kickstarter.com/project...leplaying-game?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• https://www.kickstarter.com/project...leplaying-game?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shadowlandsgames/raven?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vaultrpg/vault-0?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• https://www.kickstarter.com/project...or-1-6-players?ref=discovery&term=roleplaying
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fral/children-of-amur?ref=discovery

Not all of those campaigns look good to me necessarily, and I suspect one or two of those campaigns are too ambitious to succeed, but they appear to all be new systems, or based on a previous recent campaign introducing a new system, and they represent a wide range of new ideas, unless there are more "tropical fantasy by Brazilian RPG designers" or "speed-run killing Hitler" games out there that I'm unaware of.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I like 5e as a quick stress free game. The rules are simple and easy to understand. But It does feel like bowling with the rails up.

I strongly recommend Flatland Games RPGs as a way to take a half-step away from 5E and toward OSR, but with modern innovations mixed in. You can go from character creation to completed adventure, with characters, groups and adventure all generated on the fly, in under three hours.

I've run two games of Grizzled Adventurers in the last month, and for a game that's explicitly straddling both the d20 era and AD&D, it felt surprisingly fresh with new threats that feel classic and a refreshingly fast but successful adventure generation system. I'll likely be running games of Beyond the Wall and Through Sunken Lands this year as well, to kick the tires on those versions of their systems.

 

[dirtypool]

A game like that should not, IMO, have nearly the outsized influence on the industry that it has. No product should be so powerful that most people haven't even heard of any others.

Kleenex, Band-Aid, Post-It's, Wite-Out, Dumpster, Popsicle, Tupperware

This is a pretty common thing.