How can we sleep while our game is burning? Or, how many problems?

[delericho]

The only game I ever abandoned was due to a singularly bad experience. In all other cases, I've gradually drifted away, generally due to a switch to a newer version.

So... dunno, really.

 

[Celebrim]

That's more pages than the actually crunchy rules portions of even a fairly heavy-rules system's core book.

Yes, and no. Most successful systems extend their rules system fairly extensively. If they don't, it's a pretty good sign they aren't that successful.

I mean consider popular rules sets like D20, D6, BRP, etc. Each book that gets published tends to extend the rule set. How long were the rules of 3.5e D&D for example? Maybe 8000 pages? A rules set like D6 before it went defunct had rules in the region of two or three thousand pages. BRP is a bit smaller, but once you fold in the Grimoire and the Pulp Rules and so forth you are still getting close to the 1000 page mark.

I maintain that most tables playing crunchy systems actually have over 100 pages of house rules they just don't take the time to document them. The are generally of the form of "this section is included in the rules" and "this section is excluded", so that if you wrote them down in the most compact form they'd look like the legalese of a typical Federal law passed by Congress. If you tried to create a house rules document for all the Dragon articles, rulings, third party content, and expansions that you allowed at the table, you'd quickly need a very long document.

Beyond that, I'm a big believer in subsystems. Can your game system cover mass combat? Can your game system do good chase scenes? Can your game system handle underwater combat? Crafting? Disease? Sanity? Naval combat? Aerial combat? Dynasties? Economics? What happens with your game if your players try to make the focus of the game something other than the game's core envisioned gameplay? What happens if you start playing Space Truckers in a Star Wars game? Well, you get out your Traveller rulebook and you start looking for inspiration. What happens if in your D&D game you start doing mass combat and dynastic play? Well, you get out your Pendragon or you start making things up. Can you handle it if your PCs in D&D start playing "Pirates of the Carribean" and you have mass naval combat inspired by the great age of sail? Or you want firearms rules in your game.

At this point your are basically making your own game, which is cool. But if you are writing 100s of pages of rules for a system to make it work for you, it seems you've abandoned it in all but name.

Definitely not. If I played CoC or D&D 3.Xe or Star Wars D6 you'd definitely recognize the game and it might actually take a good bit of watching it before you realized that there were even house rules in play.

 

[The Soloist]

I abandoned all editions of D&D after some years because I didn't want to fix them. I hated doing house rules. I'm not buying D&D 5.5. I often drop other RPGs because too many things annoy me.

In complete contradiction to what I just wrote, last year, I went back to Basic D&D Moldvay (+OSE advanced) and created several house rules to make it work the way I wanted. It worked for a while but the D&D bagage is too heavy.

Today, I created my own light RPG system (2 pages) and will use that for my solitary games from now on. No idea how long that will last.

 

[Cruentus]

I abandoned 5e DnD after two years of playing and DM'ing - this after 40 or so years of playing DnD from Ad&d onward (skipping 4e and 3.5e). It was too much work to change up to fit our play style, and was distinctly unfun for many of us.

I went back to B/X and OSE Advanced/Beyond the Wall, and tinkered with those (wow, looks like I'm just retyping @The Soloist 's post - ), and am running in several pbem games in the same setting.

We're now going to try out things like Aliens, Shadowdark, Symbaroum, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (2e), Pendragon, etc., to get to those games that do what we're looking for. We might check back in to OSE again and again, but I'm off the treadmill.

 

[innerdude]

I utterly abandoned D&D and everything even remotely resembling the D20 system, including Pathfinder, somewhere around 2012.

I haven't owned a D20-based rule system in hard cover since 2016 or 2017. (Obviously no reason to get rid of PDFs, even if I'll never run the system.) I'll play anything that someone is willing to run. I've played 5e and PF2 in the past year (albeit very short stints).

I even backed Level Up at the PDF level, just to have something to use if I wanted to play 5e or adjacent.

But I'll never GM a D20 game again in my lifetime, barring some radically unforeseen circumstance.

I've seen too much. I've experienced so much richer fruit than D&D ever offered or provided. Going back to D&D is now literally just that, going backward. It's "old tech." It's Geocities, circa 1996.

I've also sort of let Savage Worlds cool off to the side for a bit. Had an amazing 9-year run with it, but was ready for something different. I'm certain I'll play and GM it again, though, just maybe not for a couple more years.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't know if I've ever seen an RPG with less than 3 problems!

I mean, maybe Dungeon World only had like 1-2 problems? I guess that's the least problems I've seen.

I'm very confused by this 1-2-3 phrasing though. I would have thought something like:

1) Mechanical problems don't cause me to stop running a game, ever.

2) It takes multiple major mechanical issues to stop me running a game.

3) A couple of notable and frequently-occuring major mechanical issues cause me to stop.

4) Even relatively minor/rare mechanical issues make me want to stop running a game.

Generally we've made decision as a group on this, and they're usually more holistic. For example:

A) Champion: The Next Millennium - Everyone was pretty excited about this until we actually ran it, and a single combat, which would have a been about a comic's worth of punching (I mean, a solid fight with multiple real villains but not an epic smackdown) took 5+ hours to run. So we were done.

B) 3.XE slooooooooowly drove us away, just by being so un-fun, and so focused on design that didn't support playing D&D in a fun way, rather just a ridiculously mechanically complex way. The fact that it was "D&D" kept us playing years longer than we otherwise would have.

C) Lore rather than rules changes and a changed tone kind of stopped us playing V:tM after Revised. It wasn't even an angry decision or anything, just "I guess they don't want us playing it, guys".

D) 4E, when combat length got so long it was like we were playing 3.XE, we started looking at other RPGs instead.

Hmmmm interesting, in 3 out of 4 there combat length was a major factor for us. Seems like we really don't like combat that drags on, even though we do like tactical combat.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I abandoned 5e DnD after two years of playing and DM'ing - this after 40 or so years of playing DnD from Ad&d onward (skipping 4e and 3.5e). It was too much work to change up to fit our play style, and was distinctly unfun for many of us.

I went back to B/X and OSE Advanced/Beyond the Wall, and tinkered with those (wow, looks like I'm just retyping @The Soloist 's post - ), and am running in several pbem games in the same setting.

We're now going to try out things like Aliens, Shadowdark, Symbaroum, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (2e), Pendragon, etc., to get to those games that do what we're looking for. We might check back in to OSE again and again, but I'm off the treadmill.

Beyond the Wall is so good. Still waiting on them to release their dungeon book for Grizzled Adventurers, although I'll likely just use it for Shadowdark now.

Still, Flatland Games' setting and adventure creation tools are top notch. If they made them system neutral or for 5E, they'd be super-popular, I suspect.

 

[MNblockhead]

@Celebrim Good point about undocumented house rules.

I guess it depends on the system. I do find that with my D&D game I tend to bring in a lot of third-party material and house rules that either chance or add subsystems to it.

But I can happily play a game like InSPECTREs that only has a few page of rules and never feel the need to add to or alter it.

In the Warhammer Fantasy 4e game I'm starting up, I plan to run it RAW, perhaps using some of the variant rules in the core or supplements. But I find that I don't have much need for as many subsystems as I am really liking its rules-as-written way to handle downtime / between adventures. It abstracts them in a way that is still fun and uses up PC loot.

But this is "starting a new campaign" MN Blockhead.

A year from now, my things could look very different.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I think more people should abadon games they don't like and write their own games that match their exact taste. That's how the Dungeon Crawl Classics TTRPG came to be born!

 

[Clint_L]

Upvoted for old-school Midnight Oil reference.

I'm more likely to stick with D&D because it's the easiest thing to find players for by far, and that's a major consideration.

Yeah, I adapt every game to my preferences anyway, and D&D is the most common touchstone so that makes it easier.

I do not get the Midnight Oil reference. That song is about returning stolen lands to indigenous folks so...yeah, not seeing the connection to giving up on a D&D game that isn't working. Are we giving up and returning it to its rightful owners? "Here you go, Dave and Gary, have your game back." Confused.