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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 9217585" data-attributes="member: 11760">I was dissatisfied with 3E by the time 4E was announced, for all the reasons discussed. While it was -- and is -- a homebrewer's dream, it also demanded a ton of system mastery from the DM and the idea that both NPCs and PCs used the same rules made me feel like I had to build custom spells and magic items for every NPC when I wanted to have them do something cool and new, and it had to be street legal. It was just too much extra work for me by the end.4E went in a direction I didn't like, so I swapped to Castles & Crusades, which tonally matched my earliest days of roleplaying. While it too has some neat rules (class and a half multiclassing is genius, and in a just world, we'd see that idea show up in a bunch of other fantasy games), it has its own issues and when I finally picked up the 5E Starter Set in winter 2018 and discovered that 5E had, ahem, parallel evolution of many of the best elements of C&C (other than the aforementioned class and a half), it was relatively easy to get my players to switch mid-campaign to a new system for a second time.I had previously switched from from 2E to 3E, but I didn't have strong enough feelings about the system or enough players for it to matter. Our short term all-halfling Five Shires game had already run its course by the time Eric Noah was hanging up his shingle.At this point, I'm more likely to pick specific games for specific modes rather than to "abandon" 5E in its entirety. For dungeoncrawling and horror-adjacent fantasy roleplaying, I've found Shadowdark is a vastly better game for me than 5E and it scratches the homebrewing itch even better than 3E did. Pirate Borg provides its own sort of madcap adventure better than running Freeport under 3E and C&C could do. And there's oodles of other games out there, like Deathmatch Island, Eat the Reich and The Job that I want to run, all of which would require a lot of elbow grease to get 5E to do, but which I can run immediately and in a purer form with dedicated games. Thankfully, I have a large stable of players who are up for trying such things.I'll still run 5E for heroic fantasy and have two games scheduled for it in the next six weeks. But it's unlikely to be my one and only ever again.</blockquote>

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