D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Pedantic]

Probably! And certainly I agree with the sentiment. For an easy recent example Outgunned and its relatives are absolutely both gamist and narrativist (as well as genre-simulating).

I don't think negotiation and iterated gambling are enough to hang a game (in the strong sense) on. You can do risk management well, but only if you settle it in a web of other supporting systems that provide a lot of agency to manipulate outcomes. There's more than "having the appearance of a board game mechanic" that goes into making a game mechanically compelling.

 

[Bedrockgames]

On this note, I absolutely loved Kagan McLeod's art for RBRB. His blending of the classic East Asian style with a more Western comic style was gorgeous.

Incidentally I am just about to open up a copy of the French edition

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think negotiation and iterated gambling are enough to hang a game (in the strong sense) on. You can do risk management well, but only if you settle it in a web of other supporting systems that provide a lot of agency to manipulate outcomes. There's more than "having the appearance of a board game mechanic" that goes into making a game mechanically compelling.

What are you talking about? I ask because it's completely and entirely unclear what the subject of your concern is here. I can't even tell if you're here to praise Caesar or bury him!

 

[Micah Sweet]

What if, instead of being a black box, the GM in this case just explicated the risks and rewards? Instead what I see is that typically tad play involves the players having no idea whatsoever as to the implications of an action. This is a great strength of good Narrativist play. I mean, at least tell me that my henchmen are idiots! I'd have gone out and hired a castellan or something.

Did you have reason to know your henchmen were idiots?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Did you have reason to know your henchmen were idiots?

Realistically, it's pretty rare that you can't rapidly tell that people you're working with are idiots.

Even assuming no interviews and just hiring people who turn up, just hanging around with them tends very rapidly show you who is a moron and who is lazy and who cannot possibly be trusted and so on.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I understand where you’re coming from better now, thanks for clarifying. I also realize I didn’t explain the core of my point well.

I think the real devil’s in the lists, not the core mechanics. That’s what often gets overlooked when people assume systems like GURPS or Savage Worlds are “easier” to adapt. Sure, they’re generic in theory, but in practice, you still have to wade through catalogs of traits, gear, abilities, and system-specific edge cases. Then you have to curate what actually fits your tone, genre, and setting. It sounds modular on paper, but the actual process can be just as involved as working from a non-generic chassis.

Some generic systems help by offering strong ready-to-play content, Savage Worlds and BRP do this well. GURPS choose poorly. Until products like Dungeon Fantasy or Monster Hunters came along, you were stuck deep in the catalog, building from scratch. So even in “generic” systems, you're often still doing heavy lifting unless you buy into a very specific supplement line.

D&D, even 5E (though not 4E), has fewer assumptions baked into the core than many people think. The base mechanics are straightforward; the genre flavor comes from the surrounding lists: classes, monsters, spell options, equipment. In that sense, it's structurally different from GURPS, but not inherently harder to adapt. Having rebuilt 5E for my Majestic Fantasy setting, I found the basic components very modular. Most classes/subclasses come down to five or six new features, and the mechanics slot together cleanly once you understand the internal logic.

That said, 5E does have its difficult points. The 20-level progression encourages far more development than most campaigns ever need, and the Warlock, while conceptually cool, feels like a dumping ground for kewl powers. But even so, the overall effort wasn’t significantly different from what I had to do when adapting GURPS 4e for a similar purpose back in the day.

Majestic Fantasy Rules for 5e

Also, I wouldn’t say Crawford’s approach is rare in the OSR anymore. He may have been an early standard-bearer, but over the last several years, more designers have embraced the same spirit, treating classic D&D mechanics as a toolkit rather than a script.

If there's a game designer I admire more than any other for their produced work, it's Kevin Crawford. His sandbox work is very impressive, and I love rulesets that work across genres.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm sorry but that's just not the evidence you think it is.

What that's evidence of is that people will absolutely spam out stuff to try and cash in on a craze and make a quick buck, especially in an industry where it's tricky to make money.

As @AbdulAlhazred correctly points out, it's very notable how much of a flash in the pan the d20 deal was (it didn't even really last three years), and how basically no d20 games have survived that era, with games based on BRP, OSR/NSR, PtbA/FitD, unique systems and so on simply replacing them, because again, they were terrible and didn't work well work at the genres and settings they were supposedly for.

The only exceptions I can think of went incredibly far in stripping out the rules of D&D so it was basically just "use a d20 to roll against a TN" as the only actual similarity, which if that makes a game "D&D", then lol.

I do personally have beef with the d20 boom too because it killed a good FLGS I knew. They stocked d20 boom stuff aggressively, because they believed the hype, and when that hype completely faded, they were left with tons of stock nobody wanted, because people had already gone back to non-generic RPGs or successful proper-generic RPGs.

Mutants & Masterminds is still chugging along, and it's definitely still a d20 game.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If there's a game designer I admire more than any other for their produced work, it's Kevin Crawford. His sandbox work is very impressive, and I love rulesets that work across genres.

One other thing I liked with his work that I have is that he does recognise that sometimes you need different rules to change the genre and tone, and he tends to offer them as optional rules - you can really significantly nuance the deadliness, power level and heroism up and down in Worlds Without Number for example, with various optional rules (which all work together very nicely).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Quite - the only other good d20-era material, and stuff that kept selling even a little past the initial boom was Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Diamond Throne, which was also basically variant D&D.

Mutants and Masterminds also survived a bit longer but is the poster-child for "ripping out everything from D&D 3E except the d20 vs TN resolution mechanism".

Isn't that resolution system what makes it a d20 game? And as far as I know M&M is still being released. Present tense.

 

[Lanefan]

Theater kids like me, who approach the hobby, as a sort of extension of our experience in theater, can often feel like the stuff, we consider fundamental to our engagement is treated like its intrusive.

Question: is your theatre experience mostly onstage as an actor or backstage as crew?

I ask because what little theatre experience I have was all on-stage, and as an actor I never even thought to try to have any say in what the set looked like or how to paint the backdrops; that's what the crew was for. By the same token, the crew members didn't tell the actors how to play their parts.

To me that's almost directly analagous to RPGs - the players are the actors, and the DM is the crew who creates the stage. The main and obvious difference is that RPGs don't come with a script or "director".