Other fairly recent, high-quality, professionally-produced, original fantasy RPGs?

[mearls]

've just noticed the huge contrast between that, and D&D. The differences between 4E and 1st Edition AD&D are so massive, it's like one game isn't even recognizable as a version of the other. Interesting. I wonder why that is?

Two words: grognard capture.

It's really interesting to take some RPGs and look at their editions, from 1st to their current ones. Most RPGs follow a similar track:

1. They were introduced with relatively digestible, 64 to 128 page or so rulebooks.

2. Each successive edition incorporates more and more rules found in expansions into the core.

3. Eventually, the game grows into a bloated mass that only the hardest of the hard core play.

In essence, the game began its life in a state that allowed it to capture a ton of fans. Yet, the presence of that body of fans encourages the publisher to move away from a model that let it capture them in the first place. Instead, it now focuses on pleasing the group it captured. In so doing, it erects barriers to gaining new gamers.

It's hard to avoid that trap. The people playing your game have already consumed that original, 64 page game. They don't want it again. They want that game and all the cool expansions you released. After all, that's what they're playing with now. They don't want to go back to the basics.

D&D managed to avoid this. 2e actually cut back on options and sought to simplify the rules. 3e rebuilt the core mechanic. 4e refined 3e, simplifying the core and creating a more manageable series of options.

Rather than expand the core of the game, D&D has focused on improving its core. Now, other games do that too, but in general their developers placed a significantly higher premium on compatibility. After all, that's what their current fans asked for.

OTOH, the folks behind each new edition of D&D have had faith in their ability to overcome the fears of incompatibility with a promise of superior mechanics. So far, that gamble has paid off.

I think that D&D leans too heavily on sale in bookstores, and sales to new gamers, to every give them short shrift compared to existing players. Ideally, you keep both groups happy, but you can't sacrifice the D&D crowd of 5 to 10 years from now to keep the hardcore, extreme edge of today's crowd happy.

My personal belief is that publishers radically overrate compatibility. I think that while there are lots of loud complaints about it, a sufficiently interesting and improved design not only helps bring in new players but also re-energizes your existing fan base.

Publishers make the mistake, IMO, of trying to sell only to the people who are buying the current edition of their game. There are also lapsed players, people who moved on to other games or who just grew bored with the old one. A fresh new take not only keeps your game accessible, it also pulls in players who left your game for one reason or another.

I also think that, in many ways, D&D's position as the market's behemoth makes it easier for gamers to accept changes to it. It's pretty easy to find rants about how terrible D&D is. Gamers who are plugged into the culture around the hobby, regardless of how they feel about the game, can rattle off a litany of typical complaints about it. D&D is big enough that everyone talks about it.

For smaller games, only the people who like it are really engaged by it. You don't see consistent criticisms. I think that's actually a significant drawback for them. It's nice to have fans who love your game, but the people who seethe and rant can be pretty useful when it comes time to figure out what you need to fix. If all you hear is praise, you're stuck with guessing.

 

[justanobody]

It's hard to avoid that trap. The people playing your game have already consumed that original, 64 page game. They don't want it again. They want that game and all the cool expansions you released. After all, that's what they're playing with now. They don't want to go back to the basics.

D&D managed to avoid this. 2e actually cut back on options and sought to simplify the rules. 3e rebuilt the core mechanic. 4e refined 3e, simplifying the core and creating a more manageable series of options.

Rather than expand the core of the game, D&D has focused on improving its core. Now, other games do that too, but in general their developers placed a significantly higher premium on compatibility. After all, that's what their current fans asked for.

I stopped reading here and have nothing to comment on the part prior to this.

To the first thing, you are right. They don't want those 64 pages again, because they already own them. How often do you buy a new Monopoly board? Only when it wears out. These things like the 64-pages are re-uasble.

It is something in the gaming industry called replayability. The best game makers understand this and have gone great strides to make sure their games have replayability and that people will keep focusing on the line/series/etc that goes with their product. This is why the Final Fantasy, WarCraft, Sims, Sim City, etc games have done so well. They found what people liked and stuck to it and made sure there was replayability.

This brings to your last thing in the quote. Well since you have a stable foundation for the game and it has replayability, then where do you get money? Do you keep screwing with the "core" and your games foundation so that you risk fans and consumers (Final Fantasy X-2), or do you keep with what works and just keep going forward with that even if it still contains those same 64-pages? Seems you can add to those 64-pages, but when you remove a majority of them, then your foundation has crumbled and things fall apart. You might get lucky once as make changes that alter things completely, but still garner more fans and consumers (WarCraft=>StarCraft, SimCity=>Sims).

So where does the company money come from if not making a new game? Expansion packs! Ruins of Kunark, Shadows or Luclin, whatever this weeks Oblivion upgrade or WoW, or Warhammer MMO upgrade is.

So don't expand the core, and dont go poking it with a jack-hammer either else you might find yourself losing footing and end up in a pile of rubble.

So make the expansion material that gives new life to those first 64-pages and people will keep playing them and buying them for as long as they are good. When the expansions sour, then you have a problem.

You also have to know when to stop, like before making the Star Wars prequels. Because no matter how much you want to add to try to make it better or refine some core, you will reach a saturation point where there is nothing left people will want.

This brings back to the middle section of the quoted portion. D&D did manage to avoid a fast death by being put through a slow painful one. AD&D 2nd edition removed no options, but left out all the rulings like some circuit court judge was lording over you ready to sentence you the second you are found guilty of screwing up. Yes it had those things in the way of rules lawyers. The became even more prevalent because 3rd edition set out to rebuild the core mechanic, and anyone could play without fear of negative numbers and THAC0. Not to mention there were so many rules and "options" that it required rules lawyers to play. I will also give you 4th refined 3rd in that now these rules lawyers that were born strongly from 3rd edition have become a neccisity for 4th as that is all there is and the imagination of the system is left for the combat simulation game that the core is. Which isn't that where Gary moved away from to begin with and one of the reasons AD&D 1st edition was created to get a bit more away from the miniature wargames that THE creators of D&D were a bit tired of? But it has been 30 years so it must be "retro" to go back to D&D being a miniature wargame. The only reason the options are more manageable in 4th is because of how few and boring they are because the become so repetitive you don't even have to think just do the same routine of powers/actions/etc per encounter.

As for what firesnakearies was saying, form what I can tell, is that the game has changed so much it just doesn't look like the same and why did it happen in a PnP game unlike the changes for say Final Fantasy where 8-bit graphics and 64k memory gave way to now 3rd gen consoles that have more power than mainframe computers at the time of the first of the series could handle or ever dream to become.

So in the interest of the topic of this thread....

The only things I really se for RPGs out there these days are rip-offs of D&D in some form using the OGL, or GSL. I haven't really seen a new game that would spark my interest that isn't somehow founded on the core of D&D and what WotC allows of its IP to use.

I say looking backwards with the retro and return to combat intensive gaming of 4th may be the right thing, but not the way 4th tries to do it.

Look at older games if they can be found and give them a try. I don't think there is much life left in wholly new game system as everything has been tried and probably failed due to the OGL and 3rd in the big D&D-reskinned bubble that popped. It will take someone fighting against, the companies with large marketing departments and little to no sense; to try something new and get it out there to the right people and start like D&D did.

Ignore the existing games.
Grow and publish small.
Let word of mouth handle the rest.

When that game comes along to knock D&D off its ivory tower, then I will be watching for it as well and after the dust settles from the RPG war in its death throes, I will be there waiting to pick up that new game if it comes out within my lifetime.

But like you firesnakearies, I am stuck with D&D for now, and no one wants to even go back to things like Rifts and I never even got a chance to try Shadowrun.

So I wish you luck on your search for that new game that sets the world on fire, and please inform me when you find it so I can look in its direction.

 

[eyebeams]

For the first poster: Get HARP. It's and excellent, moderately complex (but less so than Rolemaster -- it;s kind of like RM without all of the things that make you want to punch somebody in the face when you try to make a character) FRPG. It's at HARP.

Yes, maintaining a profitable game line is a real pain. When I was consulting for a client a couple of years ago I explained it this way:

1) You need room to expand vertically (within the scope of long term play);

2) and you need room to expand horizontally (within any stage of play)

The classic vertical expansions in RPGs are D&D's box sets, each of which aded horizontal elements too, but in a way that was staged to allow gradual introduction (with some exceptions -- skills and weapon mastery). A more recent example is White Wolf's Scion, which was split into three hardbacks by "level:" specific stages of character power.

Horizontal expansion has been the hardback A/D&D tradition. You get new widgets for your character, new items, new things to fight. That kind of thing. But the books allow full advancement to the end of a single campaign, and lay out options at all stages.

In my opinion, staying horizontal has been a problem since 2e. All those campaign settings in 2e are examples of horizontal expansion. 3e didn't do much better, since it expected everybody else to support it for free by using a very stupid business model (at least in the long term) instead of capturing a niche with a d20 variant that would not support 3e much.

What people forget is that the red box they loved was a product meant for vertical expansion. That's why it was tiny. Mentzer D&D with every box is pretty much as complex as AD&D, but you didn't have to swallow it all in one bite.

I enjoy 4e -- play it once a week. But it should have been 96-104 pages, covered 5 levels and skipped half the rules -- and it shouldn't have been the "Basic Game" that feels like a ripoff once you buy the core books. It should have had pregens for every class and an adventure inside -- maybe a chunk of a ongoing campaign over several books. 4e suffers from being overly referential. To navigate my objectives and know what's going on at different career stages I find myself referring back to the boxed sets as a "map." This insight isn't available to newer gamers.

 

[firesnakearies]

Publishers make the mistake, IMO, of trying to sell only to the people who are buying the current edition of their game. There are also lapsed players, people who moved on to other games or who just grew bored with the old one. A fresh new take not only keeps your game accessible, it also pulls in players who left your game for one reason or another.

This was me, for sure. I've been playing D&D in its various forms since about 1985-1986 or so, and I've always been a big fan. But somewhere about three years ago, or so, I just plain got sick of it. 3.5 was gloriously wonderful when it came out, but after running a long-term, very high-level game, I just got so burnt out on it. The game's just silly at higher levels, and the amount of work I had to put in as a DM was completely absurd.

So I quit playing, and didn't so much as look at a D&D book for a few years. But then 4E came along, and just out of curiosity, I took a glance at it. And immediately I was like, "Whoa! This is really COOL!" And I've been pretty much wildly involved in it ever since. I'm definitely a convert. So the sweeping changes to the game absolutely brought me back in, where more subtle alterations would not have.

I think the 4E team has made a fantastic game. I don't hesitate at all to say that it's the best RPG I've played. But I still see all of these little areas, little holdovers and subjects of debate that don't make a lot of sense to me. I tend to think that a lot of that stuff is just left in the fridge from the last edition's party, and no one bothered to clear it out.


Mike Mearls is my game design hero, though.



$

 

[small pumpkin man]

Are there any games as crunchy and rules-heavy as 3e? (That aren’t a direct derivative of it. And I’m not sure even many of its derivatives count.)

As was mentioned in the the OP, Rolemaster is generally given as the example of a game that has too much crunch. Each weapon had it's own damage/crit chart which took up an entire page, as did each crit chart, as well as the several critical fumble charts. I can't remember how spells worked, but I'm sure they also involved large charts. This is before you get to charts about "how likely is inn food to poison you", and other such details. It also had lots of situational modifiers.

GURPS certainly has the capacity to be crunchier, even if most people seem to only use the simple version(s) of the rules. HERO is crunchier.

EDIT: In regards to the OP. One game which hasn't been mentioned, but would fit your criteria AFAICT. Artesia: Adventures in the Known World would fit everything except possibly 8. The setting isn't too dissimilar to your normal Hyboeria/early Black Company deal, although it's definitely it's own thing, but the system doesn't seem "reminiscent" of what I know of the Earthdawn/Shadowrun systems.

 

[justanobody]

What people forget is that the red box they loved was a product meant for vertical expansion. That's why it was tiny. Mentzer D&D with every box is pretty much as complex as AD&D, but you didn't have to swallow it all in one bite.

I think this is about the most profound and true thing I have ever read said about any edition D&D and AD&D.

I think that is the biggest thing that games should try to strive for.

Give you the whole game up front, and then just add stuff to it as you go. Not mountains of new rules, but the optional bits as it were. Give people time to swallow what they have before they choke on the overload of having too much to begin with.

:clap:

Mike Mearls is my game design hero, though.

Well he did put the blood back in bloodied with alternate damage rules somewhere.

 

[Khuxan]

I'm wondering if there are any good alternatives out there to D&D that I should be looking into.

I think Reign might be what you're looking for.

It's

1) Original

2) Crunchy

3) Has a very cool fantasy setting.

4) Gothic and baroque, not emo or funny.

6) Indie, but well produced.

7) New, because it uses the ORE system.

 

[(un)reason]

A different business model.

And a near complete turnover in the people writing and developing it. It's no co-incidence that the games that change least are also the ones still owned by their original creators.

 

[xechnao]

Two words: grognard capture.
....

So you agree that the D20 OGL was a strategic mistake in the sense of being used by publishers to explode the hardcore and damage the hobby as ASL managed to do for SL?

I think that D&D leans too heavily on sale in bookstores, and sales to new gamers, to every give them short shrift compared to existing players.

I am not sure I understand this. In a literal way.

 

[Aus_Snow]

I also think that, in many ways, D&D's position as the market's behemoth makes it easier for gamers to accept changes to it. It's pretty easy to find rants about how terrible D&D is. Gamers who are plugged into the culture around the hobby, regardless of how they feel about the game, can rattle off a litany of typical complaints about it. D&D is big enough that everyone talks about it.

For smaller games, only the people who like it are really engaged by it. You don't see consistent criticisms. I think that's actually a significant drawback for them. It's nice to have fans who love your game, but the people who seethe and rant can be pretty useful when it comes time to figure out what you need to fix. If all you hear is praise, you're stuck with guessing.

This is just not true, sorry. Maybe you're not aware of all the criticisms, ranting and so on, that other games (even very small-time RPGs) receive, consistently. But it is *definitely* there. Always.

And these games do change (OK, many of them, to be precise). But only as much as they *need* to, in many cases. They're not compelled to sell x (x being a 'uge number, or so) copies of however many books, and so have no need to totally and fundamentally alter the game, so that it's another game entirely, just for the sake of meeting bigger business expactations (including those of all the shareholders, etc.)

They can just listen to players and other critics - and many, if not all, people involved in these games do listen -and change things accordingly. That's a kind of freedom WotC - possibly along with one or two others (?) - just doesn't have.