D&D General On making 5E versions of other games

[Morrus]

I don't fault someone who feels a need to use the engine of the world's most popular RPG to up their accessibility.

But the other side of that is, system matters. There's not much that can be described as "based on" 5e that I'd find particularly attractive, either.

I mean, yeah, we don't know what that'll mean, but you have to find at least some elements of the based game attractive for that to be a good thing. Those elements are pretty much either things I'm really luke warm about (D20 based resolution) on the whole, dislike (classes, levels, elevating hit points) or actively consider a design mistake (Advantage/Disadvantage).

That doesn't mean I think actively hating on the people doing it is appropriate, but I do kind of reserve the right to roll my eyes about it.

I guess the target audience is people who like D&D, not people who don’t like D&D.

 

[TheSword]

What is C7 supposed to do? Keep getting smaller every year as people ignore them? Deal with a literal storm of hate on Twitter everytime they try to make a smart business decision? And keep in mind, they haven't even talked about their new game at all. We don't know what mechanics it does and does not have. But everyone, literally everyone, assumes that this book will be for people to play in as if it were the Forgotten Realms and uses this assumption to attack them.

Its insane, and it really highlights the absolute pitiful state the industry is in underneath the glamorous, D&D-glazed surface.

The Twitter storm will die down in days. It’s Twitter, what do people expect, reasoned discussion?

Cubicle 7 will be just fine. They have a history of great IP based games and did a bang up job modifying 5e enough for great games in Middle Earth.

I suspect this game will take some inspiration from that one!

 

[Thunderfoot]

It's more of 'outrage outrage outrage' oh look a butterfly. It's something to do until the next controversy. Frankly these folks were either:
1) Not around for the d20 3.X everybody on board system. or
2) They weren't paying attention if they were.

Crying that it's not fair that a company has to compete with WotC because they are smaller is like saying Germany's bobsled teams have an unfair advantage over Jamaica.... Duuuh? Who said life was fair?

 

[humble minion]

In the 3rd Ed age There were some companies creating a d20 version of their franchises, for example Monte Cook's World of Darkness, Fading Suns d20, Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea or Deadlands, and I don't remember any controversy.

I remember the early 2000s very differently to you then. The conversation was very different somewhere like rpg.net than it was here, of course, because ENWorld was originally a 3e rumours site and posters here at the time could safely be assumed to be 3e enthusiasts. And of course there was no twitter then. But yeah, plenty of people hated the ubiquity of d20 back then.

I was not one of them, but i slowly came around to having more sympathy for their position after running a long campaign in d20 Star Wars, a game that was barely functional because it carried far too much D&D mechanical baggage into a fundamentally non-D&D genre. And then i got turned back a bit the other way by Mutants and Masterminds, which made an excellent superhero ruleset out of the very non-superhero-y d20 system by being bolder about what D&D impedimentia it threw out.

It's not something i'm going to get worked up about one way or another, but one thing that today's RPG market has going for it ahead of (say) 2001 is the whole kickstarter/crowdfunding scene. The hurdles seem lower now, you don't have to gamble piles of your own cash on writing, producing, illustrating, and printing an indie system only to find no gameshop cares enough to stock it, you can instead crowdfund it and if it fails, at least it's failed early and relatively cheap. I've been almost exclusively a D&D player for years now simply because that's where my group is, but even so, I've backed/bought small-press things like Good Society, Flying Circus, Briar and Bramble which it's really hard to imagine would have gotten made in 2003, let alone in sumptuous colour hardback.

It's also worth remembering that a couple of real godzilla-sized media properties are releasing RPGs in the next year or two - and neither Last Airbender nor Marvel went with any variation of 5e. I suspect these games will be first RPG for more than a few people. Maybe those people will eventually want to adapt D&D to fit the system THEY'RE familiar with...

 

[Thunderfoot]

<SNIP>
It's also worth remembering that a couple of real godzilla-sized media properties are releasing RPGs in the next year or two - and neither Last Airbender nor Marvel went with any variation of 5e. I suspect these games will be first RPG for more than a few people. Maybe those people will eventually want to adapt D&D to fit the system THEY'RE familiar with...

While I enjoyed your post immensely.... I really seriously doubt it. Marvel has tried to drop rules several times before (Even using Mutants & Masterminds and a failed attempt at d20 Modern) Marvel doesn't have the patience to support any gaming system for long.

Air Bender might have a shot at moving into the coveted number 3 position behind Pathfinder and ahead of Savage Worlds....IF they come up with a system that plays like the world it's written for and doesn't require a ton of exposition. And while the Last Air Bender was very successful, it was still very much a niche market, even amongst geeks. Star Trek and Star Wars are both much larger franchises and due to licensing neither can keep an RPG audience for long. WotC owns D&D, therefore when they produce a product, they own it, seriously doubt the cartoon production company that owns the TM to The Last Airbender is going to produce their own game. (though if they do, good on them)

 

[Mind of tempest]

While I enjoyed your post immensely.... I really seriously doubt it. Marvel has tried to drop rules several times before (Even using Mutants & Masterminds and a failed attempt at d20 Modern) Marvel doesn't have the patience to support any gaming system for long.

Air Bender might have a shot at moving into the coveted number 3 position behind Pathfinder and ahead of Savage Worlds....IF they come up with a system that plays like the world it's written for and doesn't require a ton of exposition. And while the Last Air Bender was very successful, it was still very much a niche market, even amongst geeks. Star Trek and Star Wars are both much larger franchises and due to licensing neither can keep an RPG audience for long. WotC owns D&D, therefore when they produce a product, they own it, seriously doubt the cartoon production company that owns the TM to The Last Airbender is going to produce their own game. (though if they do, good on them)

then it is a question of what system they end up picking that already exists?

 

[humble minion]

While I enjoyed your post immensely.... I really seriously doubt it. Marvel has tried to drop rules several times before (Even using Mutants & Masterminds and a failed attempt at d20 Modern) Marvel doesn't have the patience to support any gaming system for long.

Marvel never touched M&M did they? I know Green Ronin released a line of DC books, but not Marvel.
And of course this was way back around 2010. Even the first Captain America film hadn't been released at that stage. The media (and superhero popculture) landscape has changed just a tad since then!

Still, i suspect you're mostly right. I have no expectations of the Marvel or Airbender RPGs overtaking D&D any time soon. And that's ok. But top 5 is a reasonable thing to aim for. There's a real chance these games, if handled well and supported, could become a legit alternate entry point into the hobby, like Vampire was in the late 90s - if Marvel and the Airbender people are smart enough to make the games newbie-friendly and commercially-savvy enough to get them stocked in places other than specialised game stores.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

And Marvel is going to publish a playtest of their version of d20, with the name 616 system. We know nothing, but a superhero TTRPG with leveling up is a serious challengue for game designers to find the right power balance. Some enemies could be too easy, or dangerous for the PCs.

Other point is what number of franchises are homebred adapted into d20 or others, for example Storyteller system. I guess this is a good example about that systems are most popular. How many monsters from videogames or movies have been adapted for the Chaosium's basic roleplaying system for "Call of Chulthu" or "Runequest"?

And the open licence has opened the doors for lots of 3PPs, allowing the creation of many new settings, and some of these very interesting or with a great potential. (for example Disney would be willing to get the licence of "the batle of the bards" to produce a Broadway musical).

A lot of new players would rather simple dungeon raids, because there are the simplest option. If they are young, the DMs are too busy with the studies of the first years in the job to get ready for games with complexer plots.

 

[Jer]

With all the people telling “there are better systems for it!” the answer is they know, but you won’t play that. People talk about how they don’t want to learn another game, and the fact that people aren’t even aware of the 10-year old and running existing non-5E game is kind of ironic.

One problem that the market has as a whole is that there's only one company that focuses on growing the market towards non-gamers. Realistically there's only one company that can really afford to do it and that has the size to do it and that company is the one that makes Dungeons and Dragons. The D&D boxed sets on the shelves at stores are some of the best "intro to roleplaying" games that I've seen in my entire 4 decades in the hobby - and they're widely available at big box stores for the first time since the 80s.

There's also the issue that 5e is, for all its faults, actually a really good game for introducing new players to roleplaying as a game even outside of the Starter Sets. I don't know how much of it was intentional and how much just emerged from the final design goals for 5e, but they really leveraged their level based approach to create a game where the first few levels really do act like tutorial levels while you play the game and allow you to get used to the various mechanics of play at a decent pace and then dole out new abilities on a schedule that makes it easy to master them before you get the next one. Add to that the Essentials Kit - which is probably the best new DM tutorial I've seen to show DMs how the game is actually played - and you get a platform that is actually really good for introducing brand new people to roleplaying.

Most RPGs are just not good at this - their target audience is "people who already play RPGs" and they're trying to draw off people who have already learned how to roleplay in general. They aren't sold at places where new players can pick them up - they tend to be sold only at hobby shops or, more recently, exclusively online because the hobby stores don't carry them. They aren't built to train new players - they usually drop all of the capabilities onto the players right from the start - and thus implicitly require the GM to teach the mechanics to the players or for the players to be immediately interested in the game enough to teach themselves the mechanics.

So it's tough. And if you're already in the market and trying to convert people who already play RPGs to your game, these days the largest pool of potential converts are 5e D&D players. Giving them familiar mechanics means you can leverage the work that Wizards has already done to grow the player base through the big box stores, which means that you don't rely on the players to boostrap themselves into the game or having a GM teach the game to them. It makes perfect sense even as those of us who would like to see different games supported (and are GMs who thereforce invest time in teaching their players mechanics of different games ) can be disappointed by it.

 

[Thunderfoot]

Marvel never touched M&M did they? I know Green Ronin released a line of DC books, but not Marvel.
And of course this was way back around 2010. Even the first Captain America film hadn't been released at that stage. The media (and superhero popculture) landscape has changed just a tad since then!

Still, i suspect you're mostly right. I have no expectations of the Marvel or Airbender RPGs overtaking D&D any time soon. And that's ok. But top 5 is a reasonable thing to aim for. There's a real chance these games, if handled well and supported, could become a legit alternate entry point into the hobby, like Vampire was in the late 90s - if Marvel and the Airbender people are smart enough to make the games newbie-friendly and commercially-savvy enough to get them stocked in places other than specialised game stores.

I don't think it ever got past talks with M&M, I know they both did Hero Clix for a time and Topps contacted True Dungeon for a tie in before (the short lived True Heroes) Marvel pulled the license from Topps. That was about 5 years total (I think, I've slept since then. lol) and that seems to be their magic number, 5 years and then something else. Speaking of which, who owns Topps now? Lmao...