D&D off-Ramps (from Rob Donaghue)

[Gundark]

I think Savage Worlds is more of an "Off Ramp" than what is likely to result from even the seemingly most popular of the three he mentions. .

Back around 2005-2008 Savage Worlds was totally an off ramp for D&D a lot of people who were tired or sick of 3e were looking for other games and the answer seemed to be "Savage Worlds"

[MENTION=26651]amerigoV[/MENTION] There was a "de-programming" that had to happen after all the d20 my group played, interestingly enough Savage Worlds seems to be the rules we default to for a lot of genres...except D&Dish fantasy. It feels weird to play fantasy and not use some kind of D&D ish game

I'm curious why Rob Donoghue stated that FATE and Savage Worlds were "wrong answers" when it came to off ramps

 

[Radiating Gnome]

I'm curious why Rob Donoghue stated that FATE and Savage Worlds were "wrong answers" when it came to off ramps

Just guessing, but I think he's not just looking for other RPGs, but RPGs that one way or another capture something essential about D&D -- and the examples he cites are three different takes on what's essential about D&D.

He picked those three, and might have picked other games with slightly different ways of defining his terms -- but I think the essential difference is that neither SW nor FATE is a descendant of D&D. They're also both generic systems that don't necessarily have a setting the way the three he selected do.

One of his criteria was timeliness -- these three games all came out in this past year, falling into this flux period when people are theoretically looking for off ramps. SW has been around for quite some time. So has Fate. So have Song of Ice and Fire and Dragon Age, which he also discards for the sake of his discussion (but does not criticize as games).

SW isn't trying to be D&D. It's not about attrition and resource management the same way D&D is. Unless you count Bennies, which are a different enough resource from hit points and spells as to not bear much comparison.

FATE isn't trying to be D&D. Interestingly, FATE has been around for quite a while (and has it's FUDGE roots that go back decades) but the recent excitement and interest surrounding the FATE Core kickstarter gives it some novelty.

But Numenara is trading on it's D&D roots, because it's Monte Cook. He's got a built in D&D-based audience for anything he does. 13th Age has a similar, if not quite so high powered personality based fan base -- but it's also the version that bears the closest connection to the 3rd and 4th edition rules. And Dungeon World lacks personality and crunch ties to D&D, but unlike a universal system that tries to fit all needs (like SW and FATE), it's about capturing the feel of one sort of play -- the old school dungeon crawl -- without the weight of rules and crunch.

SO... calling FATE and Savage Worlds "wrong answers" to the off-ramp question makes sense to me, so long as you understand that it's not about saying any of these games are good or bad, fun or not fun, worth playing or not worth playing -- just that they're not obvious next steps for folks who are looking for a break from 3.x/D&D.

-rg

 

[amerigoV]

[MENTION=26651]amerigoV[/MENTION] There was a "de-programming" that had to happen after all the d20 my group played, interestingly enough Savage Worlds seems to be the rules we default to for a lot of genres...except D&Dish fantasy. It feels weird to play fantasy and not use some kind of D&D ish game

SW does 3.x D&D very poorly out of the box. But I find for most general aspects of fantasy SW does an excellent job. D&D took its inspiration from a variety of fantasy sources and made its own stew. But D&D always had a hard problem running the source inspirations ("Gandalf is a 5th level MU" and "I'll play in Hyborea so long as I can still run my Gnome Illusionist"). SW runs the source fantasy extremely well and does a fair job on D&Desque things, but not all things.

 

[Mark CMG]

You meant to quote Gundark.

 

[amerigoV]

You meant to quote Gundark.

Instead of admitting a mistake, it clearly means that means you are now responsible for whatever Gundarks says.

 

[Mark CMG]

Instead of admitting a mistake, it clearly means that means you are now responsible for whatever Gundarks says.

It's a fair cop . . .

 

[Gorgon Zee]

If you take my gaming group(s), there are probably about 20 people I play with regularly. Of those about a third have never played much D&D and a third played D&D almost exclusively for a long while -- like 5+ years.

I don't think there is more than one or two people left in the group who would look for D&D as their primary game. It may even be none. They absolutely feel 3.5 / Pathfinder have an old-fashioned feel. Some prefer that to 4e ("bland and combat intensive") but I don't think anyone is excited about it.

I just started a 13th Age campaign and people ARE excited about it -- the pro-4e people like the base mechanics, the pro-3.5 like the fact that each class feels very different, the AD&D fan (just one!) likes the looser structure and room for RP. It seriously feels like it's doing exactly what DDNext is supposed to be doing. I expect that most of the players who play 13th Age will off-ramp from D&D.

I have told people I will get a Numenera game going, and have had a serious issue that way more people want to play than I can handle as a GM. Just a couple of hours ago I got an email from a friend 100 miles away, with whom I haven't gamed in a decade, reminding me I mentioned it and asking when it's starting.

The third group I have is very interesting from an evolutionary gaming POV. We started out with a mixed group, mostly D&D focused. We played Rippers (Savage Worlds) for 2 years along with D&D, then Supernatural (Cortex system, but so badly edited it might as well be freeform ...) for three years, still while playing WotC livign campaigns (Living Force, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms). Our enthusiasm for the latter has defintiely been eclipsed by the other systems and when we finished up the Supernatural campaign, we switched to a variety of Indie games, now culminating in a FATE CORE mini-campaign.

Several of our group still play 4e and Pathfinder. But it increasingly feels like it's being played because nothing better was being offered, or because we're playing with infrequent gamers to whom 4e is new!

For me, I think I have pretty much headed off the ramp. 3.5/Pathfinder lost their allure when 4e came out, as I have always liked D&D for tactical fantasy combat, and 4e does that better than 3.5. But now, like the article says, I prefer simpler game systems that have interesting mechanics that are easy to use and do not require systems mastery to play with.

Numenera and 13th Age fill that need. The campaigns I remember with most fondness are Rolemaster ones from 20+ years ago. But that level of complexity seems no longer necessary. When I run 4e nowadays, I find myself wondering if I rewrote the monsters in the same simple style as Numenera (this is a level 3 creature that acts as level 5 when using trickery and has the special attack X) where a level determines attack, defenses and hit points, would anyone notice the difference? And if not, then why the heck do we need all this complexity? And why aren't I playing something simpler?

 

[pemerton]

Rob makes an interesting point in an earlier post that the most distinctive piece of tech within D&D is the spell list concept, and that the reason so many D&D style games fail is because they don't have anything with the breadth or depth to replace it.

I read something online years ago - I can't remember where - that said that the strength of D&D is its lists. Lists of monsters, lists of spells, and lists of magic items.

4e preserves the list of monsters, but - in the interests of balance and consistency in PC build - radically changes the spell and item lists. This wasn't an issue for me when I moved from Rolemaster to 4e, because Rolemaster also has a degree of austerity in its item and spell lists in the interests of balance and consistency. But it is certainly a difference from AD&D, and I imagine 3E.

13th Age strikes me as closer to 4e than AD&D on the spell side (I haven't read the item chapter yet).