D&D General Has the OGL/WotC debacle motivated you to create your own Fantasy Heartbreaker or homebrew?
Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
Not prompted to create it, only to use what I've already made. WotC management cannot and MUST NOT be trusted. Any and all ideas I had about doing anything with 5E I have given up. I will touch no new edition material. I will buy NOTHING they publish under an OGL modified by THEM. I will support the ORC license and the publishers who use it, as well as those who produce their own specific OGL and those who will use no OGL at all. But at present, and for the FAR forseeable future, I will buy no Wizards game materials. If invited into a 5E game I will use no WotC VTT, will not use D&D Beyond, will buy no new materials and if OTHERS in the game give them money for any of those things I will decline further participation. This will, sadly, be maintained for me until WotC have established/RE-established a PROVEN track record that can be trusted, and they have abandoned all further attempts to use modifications to the original OGL for their selfish purposes and embrace it as the SELFLESS document it was originally created to be.
Not really. But it has caused me to think about dusting off some ideas I had for a mystery game that I'd gotten up to playtesting and found needs some serious revision (need to spend some time on it that I don't have). And about tweaking the same rules for a modern horror game.
Honestly fantasy rpg replacements for D&D are the one thing I don't think I'll ever have to write for myself.
Honestly fantasy rpg replacements for D&D are the one thing I don't think I'll ever have to write for myself.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Aldarc
Legend
Or Vaesen?
So first of all I love both Gumshoe and Brindlewood Bay for mystery games. So this is a game that is trying to fill a different niche from either of these.
Gumshoe is great for the kind of setting it's trying to work with, which is one where finding the clues is part of the trail to get to the "action" of the game. In a D&D analogy inn Gumshoe I see the clues as the corridors that are being explored but the "action" of the game is still in the confrontations that you face along the way. Gathering the clues is as assumed in the game as traversing corridors is in D&D (including the fact that you can take actions and spend points to get bonus clues that you don't really need to complete the game but make you feel cooler or give you an extra reward - like detecting traps and secret doors in the D&D analogy). This works great for giving you the feel of a police procedural, but IME makes for a boring game if you don't get that action scene somewhere in the scenario.
Brindlewood is great for creating a collaborative mystery, but it doesn't scratch the itch of the player who wants to have a challenge with a solution presented to them and then they work to solve it like a puzzle.
So it started as a thought experiment about what a game for a Poirot or Murder She Wrote or Scooby Doo or Columbo style game would look like if the process of finding clues were as central to the game as combat is in D&D and the "action" of the game doesn't involve actual "action". There's no combat or even having the suspect run off or pull a gun at the end assumed. Just like in the books and TV shows where there's that kind of mystery - the bulk of the book is about finding clues and putting the pieces together, not athletics and combat. So a game that comes from an alternate world where Gygax and Arneson didn't invent D&D but some guys who were really into Agatha Christie did instead.
As I worked on it it turns out the game's dice action mostly involves back-and-forth interaction with suspects and witnesses and the mechanics are about getting around their defenses or improving their attitude towards you to get clues out of them (including red herring clues from the actual guilty parties to try to frame other suspects). There are also physical clues, but it turns out that the mechanics for searching for clues in an in depth way cannot really be made "dramatic" enough for players to care (or if they can I'm not the person to do it). Much like in a mystery novel or Gumshoe, finding clues when you decide to look for them so you can just move on to the action or trying to figure out the mystery is more interesting than trying to come up with some kind of dice game to find clues.
The initial playtests were really positively received by my player who is really into that kind of idea, but it's also a lot of work to develop scenarios for the game because of the number of NPCs I need to create and the clues I need to come up with. To a large degree I need to create a "Monster Manual" of generic types of NPCs to be able to throw into a scenario and I don't have that. So I need to do that, keep tweaking the rules more, and see if it works with a bigger group, or if I just happen to have one player who is a freak in synch with me and nobody else would be interested
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
That's a really good explanation, @Jer, thanks. And yeah, Brindlewood Bay is sort of a fake-out as far as the mysteries go. But traditional mysteries aren't where they really are focusing anyway.
I think you're right about building a collection of spare parts the GM can pull in as needed will make a lot of this work better.
I think you're right about building a collection of spare parts the GM can pull in as needed will make a lot of this work better.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I don’t think I’m going to not make OGL things, regardless of what wotc tries to say about OGL 1.0a. At most I’ll keep it non-commercial. But tbh I’m not worried about wotc, and I also don’t think there is any benefit to abandoning D&D in general or 5e specifically, especially while wotc is still letting our feedback push them back away from what they had planned.
Benjamin Olson
Hero
Alright, well now that the core rules are creative commons I'm 100% making my own 5e clone.
Sure most of what was made freely useable was probably not really copyrightable, but the clone or quasi-clone creator can now adopt whatever they want of it wholesale with no worries about a cease and desist letter from WotC making them revise the entire core of their game. And the path to making games whose content is broadly intercompatible with 5e/OneD&D and each other got much clearer.
Whether anything will come of the project, I don't know, but it feels much more achievable now.
Sure most of what was made freely useable was probably not really copyrightable, but the clone or quasi-clone creator can now adopt whatever they want of it wholesale with no worries about a cease and desist letter from WotC making them revise the entire core of their game. And the path to making games whose content is broadly intercompatible with 5e/OneD&D and each other got much clearer.
Whether anything will come of the project, I don't know, but it feels much more achievable now.
