D&D 5E If you've ever left D&D, what made you come back?

[Ath-kethin]

I stopped playing about a decade ago due to annoyance with the volume of nitpicky rules in 3.x and the propensity for my players to whine about how their characters' bankrolls weren't keeping pace with that idiot Wealth By Level chart.

I came back during the Next/5e playtest to check it out, and found a rules set I could work with and - baked right into the rulebooks (again at last) - the authority to disregard and/or fiddle with anything I wanted. I played in an AL game for a bit, then took my three favorite fellow players and started up a new campaign. I love it.

 

[Nagol]

I first left D&D in 1981 maybe '82. I leave it all the time in fact. I run games whose experience best fits what I want to run at the moment.

I come back to D&D when I want an exploration-heavy sandbox-style sword-and-sorcery zero-to-hero game.

 

[ccs]

Friends.

To be honest, I've never completely left D&D....
'94-'99 - I took a long tour though the World of Darkness, alot of minis gaming, Magic, & other RPG systems. My D&D was limited to a pair of relitively short 2e campaigns and playing at GenCon.

2k-late '06 - I'd left the group I'd been playing Magic, WoD, & other RPGS with. Book wise I completely skipped 3.0
My gaming was miniture wargamingv & board games. D&D (mostly 1e) was only played at GenCon.

Fall 2006:
1) A friend from my 90s college days was looking to get back into D&D. He called me up & recruited me for the group he was forming.
The guy that was to DM wanted to use 3.5
So I had to invest in some new books.
2) Oct - a couple of friends opened a hobby/game shop. Soon I was running a Dragonlance game. And playing in other games.
Eventually a core of us formed a regular group & I've been gaming (mostly D&D) weekly+ ever since.

 

[MostlyDm]

I'm nearing my thousandth post on EnWorld now, and in the eight years I've been here, I've seen nearly all of the arguments (and participated in most of them ) around how D&D is constructed.

But for the last 5 years my participation in these arguments has been purely as a bystander, as I've not run or played anything bearing a familial lineage, superficial or otherwise, to the actual D&D product. When I engage in discussions about "D&D", it's completely in the abstract these days.

And truthfully, the longer I'm away from the "D&D" family, more and more I find I don't miss it.

• I don't miss the entire hit points/cure light wounds/short rest paradigm at all.
• I don't miss classes. I don't miss having to figure out exactly how to "build" my character so I'm at least competent in the four things I care about without having to find some convoluted set of rules loopholes. I would really have a hard time going back to a class-based system now after the freedom of a pure attribute/skill-based system.
• I don't miss the spell system. I never really liked "Vancian" casting to begin with, and by the end of my run with Pathfinder had basically swapped Psionics Unleashed for the entire "base" magic system (including clerics).
• I don't miss the "lore" at all. Since I'm running a system that so thoroughly encourages homebrewing and makes it supremely easy to do, I don't feel compelled to follow ANYTHING related to anything about cosmology, cultures, races, etc. If I don't like something or want to change it, a simple "Hey players, I'm going to change this or get rid of it, you good with that?" is pretty much all that's required.
• I don't miss alignments. It's a breath of fresh air just to play a character and let the character's consistencies (and inconsistencies) just arise naturally.
• I don't miss the "gonzo" aspect of D&D once you hit level 9 or 10, when your character goes from supremely-heroic-but-still-plausibly-based-in-reality to straight-up Marvel superhero.

About the only thing I DO miss is actually using the d20s in my dice bag (Savage Worlds only uses the d20 for random tables). And at some point, if I felt the "lore" was compelling enough, I might consider using D&D to get the "best" expression of a particular setting like FR or DL. But other than that, all in all I just don't see myself ever really embracing "D&D" again, and simply sticking to any number of excellent alternatives.

So I guess I'm wondering for those who left D&D for a time and came back, what was the impetus? What was it about D&D specifically that made you come back to it?

I've always enjoyed alternate systems, and Savage Worlds is one of my favorites. I still run a heavily modded version of it, and play in a far less modded version.

I largely left D&D after about 2 years of 4e. In addition to Savage Worlds and my homebrew versions of it, I started running an E6 D20 game, so I don't know if that counts as quitting D&D or not. It lacked all of the items on your list though... no traditional HP/Rest paradigm, no classes, no D&D spells, no D&D lore, no alignments, and no gonzo. E6 stands for Epic 6, where Level 6 is the maximum level and all advancement after that is horizontal (in feats, or as my group calls them, "tiers," which give new abilities but don't increase your baseline bonuses much or at all.)

I stole a few bits from 4e for this game. And a lot of B/X and 1e. When I saw the Next playtest, we stole Advantage/Disadvantage. And I made up a ton of stuff from whole cloth, like the way armor works.

I thought this was the closest I would ever get to playing D&D again, and that worked for me. Then a friend bought me the core books for 5e when the DMG came out, and I was floored.

5e basically feels like it was made for me. I have minor issues with it, easily house-ruled, and it lets me have a framework in which I can run games for new players without having to explain the cobbled together system to them.

I still run and play SW. And I still run my kludged together D&D Frankenstein, and play in a version of it tweaked by a friend to support Superheroes. And they are glorious.

But I'm also running four 5e games, and playing in one. And I'm having a blast.

 

[JeffB]

I left not long after 3.5

Came back for 4th.

played other D&D type games since 2011 or so. PFBB, OSR variants, 13A. Playtested NEXT.

5th has pretty much driven me away like 3.5 did, but for different reasons. We generally play Dungeon World or an OSR game for fantasy.

I hroughly enjoy Dungeon World and find most modern D&D games very tedious to run these days. When I'm feeling like I want "real" D&D, it's an TSR/OSR variant. The two extremes. Modern indy or Gygax era. That said, I run the same type of adventures and settings for either.

 

[Ezequielramone]

Friends and Adventures.

 

[cbwjm]

From 3e, my dnd gaming has been sporadic due to friends moving and not having the time to play. We did have a few games of 4e but that didn't last long. With 5e, I felt this was an edition that I could get back into playing, i contacted friends and they wanted to join in, we also ended up with a few others joining us. We only get together once a month but we are consistently playing.

To be honest, if I pushed for it, we probably could have got together for 2e or basic which is what we first started with, but since I'd just purchased the 5e books...

 

[Prakriti]

5E.

3E had too much bloat, and I didn't like the direction the design took (I saw the early play-tests and concept art and didn't like what I saw). Later on, it seemed like there was a $1,000 barrier to entry, with all the supplements and stuff. Also, I'm a purist at heart. I like Fighters and Wizards, whereas 3E was all about building cyborg kobold druid-sorcerer-cavalier-monk-gunslingers.

4E, meanwhile, looked like table-top World of Warcraft, and I was too busy with the actual World of Warcraft to have any interest in playing it with dice.

 

[BrockBallingdark]

My group was with D&D all our lives until a couple of months into 4e. We left and went to Pathfinder so we technically didn't leave D&D. Then Pathfinder's bloat was getting to us and 5e was what we the group wanted and we are in it now.

Like some others, I'm burned out with levels, classes and hit points, during our down time between 4e and Pathfinder, I tried other systems for my friends. I got my group into Savage Worlds and Cortex Plus for a short term, to shake things up.

TOR and Conan 2D20 are all I think about now, so once I run my campaign of 5e for my group, I will want to GM Conan 2d20 or TOR for them. If someone in my group wants to run 5e instead, I will gladly be a player but GM wise I'm done with Classes and HP.

Even with that said, 5e had my group cheering again for D&D, we all think it's the best version of D&D ever.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm nearing my thousandth post on EnWorld now, and in the eight years I've been here, I've seen nearly all of the arguments (and participated in most of them ) around how D&D is constructed.

But for the last 5 years my participation in these arguments has been purely as a bystander, as I've not run or played anything bearing a familial lineage, superficial or otherwise, to the actual D&D product. When I engage in discussions about "D&D", it's completely in the abstract these days.

And truthfully, the longer I'm away from the "D&D" family, more and more I find I don't miss it.

• I don't miss the entire hit points/cure light wounds/short rest paradigm at all.
• I don't miss classes. I don't miss having to figure out exactly how to "build" my character so I'm at least competent in the four things I care about without having to find some convoluted set of rules loopholes. I would really have a hard time going back to a class-based system now after the freedom of a pure attribute/skill-based system.
• I don't miss the spell system. I never really liked "Vancian" casting to begin with, and by the end of my run with Pathfinder had basically swapped Psionics Unleashed for the entire "base" magic system (including clerics).
• I don't miss the "lore" at all. Since I'm running a system that so thoroughly encourages homebrewing and makes it supremely easy to do, I don't feel compelled to follow ANYTHING related to anything about cosmology, cultures, races, etc. If I don't like something or want to change it, a simple "Hey players, I'm going to change this or get rid of it, you good with that?" is pretty much all that's required.
• I don't miss alignments. It's a breath of fresh air just to play a character and let the character's consistencies (and inconsistencies) just arise naturally.
• I don't miss the "gonzo" aspect of D&D once you hit level 9 or 10, when your character goes from supremely-heroic-but-still-plausibly-based-in-reality to straight-up Marvel superhero.

About the only thing I DO miss is actually using the d20s in my dice bag (Savage Worlds only uses the d20 for random tables). And at some point, if I felt the "lore" was compelling enough, I might consider using D&D to get the "best" expression of a particular setting like FR or DL. But other than that, all in all I just don't see myself ever really embracing "D&D" again, and simply sticking to any number of excellent alternatives.

So I guess I'm wondering for those who left D&D for a time and came back, what was the impetus? What was it about D&D specifically that made you come back to it?

A combination of factors.

(1) I liked the way combat worked in GURPS 4E, but I never got a magic system that felt quite right to me. Everything was always very small-scale and surgical, but I wanted Fireballs and had no good way to model them.

(2) My interest in GURPS died down as the edition changed towards more of system composed of orthogonal effects (instead of psychokinesis, you pay for an attack power and get a discount for making pyschokinesis the "source"--I find that style ineffably boring), and my Shadowrun group turned out to have an incompatible style to my own.

(3) I had some free time, and my karate sensei invited me to play 5E with him. He hadn't played D&D since 2nd edition days, but had recently discovered 5E (mid-2014, 5E had just come out) and was excited about it.

(4) I gave it a shot and found that 5E didn't have the things I hated most about D&D 4E and D&D 3E. Because it's D&D, it obviously had a class system instead of the boring effects-based character construction system that bored me with later GURPS 4E.

(5) One day I was bored at a church game night and I offered to run a D&D session for the guys who were there. I'd been playing 5E recently, and I had my 5E books with me, so I ran a 5E game. They took me up on it, made some characters, survived a massacre, and killed some goblins--and that started my first 5E campaign as a DM.

So basically, 5E was "good enough" that I didn't hate it, and it was there when I had some free time.

I really like the HP paradigm and the idea of a completely fantasy physics/biology (e.g. Aristotelian elements), and I like the AD&D magic system and found 5E's magic system close enough to be tolerable, and I like monsters like beholders and mind flayers, and I find class-based systems interestingly discretized. So when I came back to the D&D family, it had things to offer me.

From what you describe of your preferences it sounds like you probably have no reason to ever come back. All the things that were pros for me are cons for you.