So you're done with D&D but still want to play D&Dish fantasy...

[BigZebra]

@Celebrim If Legendary Games ever finish their Corefinder heartbreaker, it might be just what you're looking for. A tightened rebuild of PF1.

Interesting. These @LegendaryGames ? Is it still an on-going project?

 

[Staffan]

I don't think anyone's mentioned Savage Worlds yet. It's byline is Fast. Furious. Fun. It's a generic system, with your abilities rated by die type - d4, d6, d8, d10, d12. To succeed in an action, you have to beat a target number of 4. There's certainly a lot more to it, but that's the core of the system.

It's got add-ons for all kinds of play, and even has an official Pathfinder set of supplements as well as a more generic "fantasy" supplement, and several interesting pre-made worlds (50 fanthoms, Frost & Fur, Hellfrost, Beasts & Barbarians) including sci-fi, superheroes and weird/horror (such as Deadlands and Realms of Cthulhu). Even has a few official pulp adaptions - John Carter of Mars and Flash Gordon.

It was built out of an expansion called Rail Wars for Deadlands, which is a Weird Wild West world.

I'm on a Savage Worlds kick myself at the moment, running an East Texas University campaign. I've been looking at the Savage Pathfinder stuff, and particularly the campaigns, and found them unsatisfying, likely due to the limitations of the license. The license lets PEG do conversions of Pathfinder adventure paths, and so far they've done Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne. The issue is that these are basically direct conversions – same plots, same maps/dungeons, same creatures in those dungeons, only using Savage Worlds stats instead of Pathfinder stats. But Savage Worlds is built differently than Pathfinder/D&D. PF is based around attrition, where you have multiple smaller encounters in relatively rapid succession in order to wear PCs down, costing them hit points, spell slots, and whatever other resources they have. But Savage Worlds doesn't want that sort of thing. It wants fewer but more impressive fights.

I do wish Pinnacle would do a "normal" fantasy setting with an associated plot point campaign, but I feel that that's unlikely as long as they have the Savage Pathfinder license. While it's not quite what I, at least, want, it's close enough that they probably don't want to do anything similar. On the plus side, that opens the door for Ace licensees to do their takes, like Vermilium which at first glance seems kind of cool (fantasy with post-apocalyptic and Western elements).

 

[Gorgon Zee]

This suggests to me that you kind of really lean into a more D20-adjacent desire in fantasy at least (though I acknowledge the BESM note); I'd call SW plenty gamist in a lot of its orientation.

(That said, I haven't seen it used in fantasy at all; all the games I've seen it used for were modern or SF).

I’d agree that SW leans to being gamist. For me, though, the mechanics it uses have an archaic sort of feel to them, and they quite often lead to surprising results that feel a bit odd. So, for me, I often feel irritated at the rules. I think that’s why I prefer PF2 to it generally. But I did have a ton of fun running a Flash Gordon SW campaign over the pandemic, it’s not a system I dislike so much as one I feel little need for as others fill the niche — for fantasy.

You are right that I do like the d20 based systems though. Dice pool systems are very swingy in results and so it often feels that you are failing or being lucky when you shouldn’t. I’m playing in TALES FROM THE LOOP campaign and the randomness is fine there, but it is very common for one person to roll 8 dice and another to roll 2 and the latter succeeds when the former doesn’t. D20 also has a nice level of granularity. I’ve played a lot of Rolemaster, and am playing a ton of BRP games, and have no objections to d100, but players cannot tell if you round everything to 5%. D100 is better for unusual levels of success - I really like the BRP system of roll under ½ or 1/5 the value to get higher levels of success; much nicer than the d20 “20 is a critical success regardless of how good you are at the skill”, but it is a bit more finicky. I like GUMSHOE quite a bit also, but d6 to resolve combat is not quite enough for me if the game is mostly about combat.

TLDR; yeah, I think you are right.

 

[Desdichado]

You are right that I do like the d20 based systems though. Dice pool systems are very swingy in results and so it often feels that you are failing or being lucky when you shouldn’t. I’m playing in TALES FROM THE LOOP campaign and the randomness is fine there, but it is very common for one person to roll 8 dice and another to roll 2 and the latter succeeds when the former doesn’t. D20 also has a nice level of granularity. I’ve played a lot of Rolemaster, and am playing a ton of BRP games, and have no objections to d100, but players cannot tell if you round everything to 5%. D100 is better for unusual levels of success - I really like the BRP system of roll under ½ or 1/5 the value to get higher levels of success; much nicer than the d20 “20 is a critical success regardless of how good you are at the skill”, but it is a bit more finicky. I like GUMSHOE quite a bit also, but d6 to resolve combat is not quite enough for me if the game is mostly about combat.

As much as there are problems that I've always had with the core mechanics of D&D (I don't mean details, like how the magic system works, etc., but the whole core concept of rolling a d20 to solve most things, the six ability scores, stuff like hp and ac, etc.) after many years of experimentation, I decided that I don't like anything else any better, and I still prefer roughly D&D-like mechanics to any alternative.

 

[Alkalithe]

If you're into X, then play Dragonbane.

If you're into Y, then play Shadowdark.

If you're into Z, then play Pathfinder.

And so on.

"X, Y, Z" can be any specific or gestalt of qualities you feel like assembling, and of course include as many games as you like. I'd even suggest being vague as to what "D&Dish" means...I mean, if you need me to define it, I'd suggest something simple like "adventure-based fantasy."

I'm mainly just curious how people would characterize the plentiful "D&D alternatives" that are out there now, many of which have stable fan bases - and specifically, how they might be characterized in reference to D&D.

And of course the reasons a person is "done with D&D" might vary - be it WotC corporatism, their recent artistic direction, tonal qualities, complexity fatigue, or just wanting a change, etc -- I don't think that part really matters, except as it relates to the alternatives and what they offer.

Have at it....

I realise I'm quite late to this but recently I had the notion of a category referred to as "5E spin-off." I would define this as a system that has the basic skeleton of 5E but the muscles around it are different.
Off the top of my head, some games I would put in this category are:

• Nimble
• Shadowdark
• Index Card RPG
• 5 Torches Deep

They have their nuances and differences, but all four can trace their DNA to 5E in particular.

 

[darjr]

And just to add, I’m def doing other games, but I’m not “done” with D&D.

I’m thinking of doing some things with it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I’d agree that SW leans to being gamist. For me, though, the mechanics it uses have an archaic sort of feel to them, and they quite often lead to surprising results that feel a bit odd. So, for me, I often feel irritated at the rules. I think that’s why I prefer PF2 to it generally. But I did have a ton of fun running a Flash Gordon SW campaign over the pandemic, it’s not a system I dislike so much as one I feel little need for as others fill the niche — for fantasy.

You are right that I do like the d20 based systems though. Dice pool systems are very swingy in results and so it often feels that you are failing or being lucky when you shouldn’t. I’m playing in TALES FROM THE LOOP campaign and the randomness is fine there, but it is very common for one person to roll 8 dice and another to roll 2 and the latter succeeds when the former doesn’t. D20 also has a nice level of granularity. I’ve played a lot of Rolemaster, and am playing a ton of BRP games, and have no objections to d100, but players cannot tell if you round everything to 5%. D100 is better for unusual levels of success - I really like the BRP system of roll under ½ or 1/5 the value to get higher levels of success; much nicer than the d20 “20 is a critical success regardless of how good you are at the skill”, but it is a bit more finicky. I like GUMSHOE quite a bit also, but d6 to resolve combat is not quite enough for me if the game is mostly about combat.

TLDR; yeah, I think you are right.

Just a side comment, but to me most dice pool systems feel far less swingy than D20 or D100 systems; I see massive swings in my 13th Age game all the time that would be extremely uncommon in most dice pool systems I know of.

As a second aside, like you say, the point in D100 systems is to be able to bake in secondary mechanics in the roll that you couldn't do with a D20 without making the frequency too high or otherwise connecting it with the D20 result in a way that's undesirable. In and of itself its not significantly different from the D20.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Just a side comment, but to me most dice pool systems feel far less swingy than D20 or D100 systems; I see massive swings in my 13th Age game all the time that would be extremely uncommon in most dice pool systems I know of.

Compare two characters attempting the same skill. One has a 90% chance of a basic success, another a 10% chance. If they compete against each other, who is more likely to win?

In d20, lets assume a DC of 20, so character 1 has +17 and character 2 has +1. In a head to head, the first player wins 98.5% of the time.

In a dice pool system (say we need 6s to succeed), character 1 is rolling 12 dice and character 2 is rolling 1 dice. Character 1 wins if they roll 2 or more 6s (60% of the time), or one 6 and the other player rolls none (30% x 5/6), so only 85% of the time.

So in the dice pool system, a character with a basic success rate of 90% fails to beat one with a basic success rate of 10% 15% of the time, which is ten times as often as in a d20 system.

"What does it mean to say a result is swingy?" has a number of possible responses, and game systems have other factors that contribute to a swingy feeling, but the chances of failing contested rolls in dice pool games when you are much, much better than the opponent are pretty high, and it can be very irritating.

Every session we played of ALIENS saw at least one time that a player was rolling 16+ dice (after re-rolls) to counter a lucky 2-3 dice roll by an opponent and failing to beat it. In 13th Age, lucky rolls can have huge consequences, absolutely, but the swinginess seems more in the consequences of the unusual result rather than the probability of it.

 

[Staffan]

Dice pool systems are very swingy in results and so it often feels that you are failing or being lucky when you shouldn’t. I’m playing in TALES FROM THE LOOP campaign and the randomness is fine there, but it is very common for one person to roll 8 dice and another to roll 2 and the latter succeeds when the former doesn’t.

Just a side comment, but to me most dice pool systems feel far less swingy than D20 or D100 systems; I see massive swings in my 13th Age game all the time that would be extremely uncommon in most dice pool systems I know of.

IME, Mutant: Year Zero and games based on that engine are more swingy than most dice pool systems because you only succeed on a 6 on a d6. This compresses the results a lot. To use Gorgon Zee's example with 8 dice vs 2, that gives you about a 27% chance of a tie and about 8% of a win for the 2 dice (barring rerolls). If you instead had successes on 5-6 (like Shadowrun), that would instead be 12% and 4%.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Compare two characters attempting the same skill. One has a 90% chance of a basic success, another a 10% chance. If they compete against each other, who is more likely to win?

In d20, lets assume a DC of 20, so character 1 has +17 and character 2 has +1. In a head to head, the first player wins 98.5% of the time.

In a dice pool system (say we need 6s to succeed), character 1 is rolling 12 dice and character 2 is rolling 1 dice. Character 1 wins if they roll 2 or more 6s (60% of the time), or one 6 and the other player rolls none (30% x 5/6), so only 85% of the time.

So in the dice pool system, a character with a basic success rate of 90% fails to beat one with a basic success rate of 10% 15% of the time, which is ten times as often as in a d20 system.

But that's an artifact of that system that deciding one character shouldn't win quite as often as 90%. Its not hard to set the probabilities so that's not true. Look at the difference if you set the target numbers in that system at 5. At that point it limits how small you can make the chance of succeeding, but it doesn't make it less likely that the higher chance will.

"What does it mean to say a result is swingy?" has a number of possible responses, and game systems have other factors that contribute to a swingy feeling, but the chances of failing contested rolls in dice pool games when you are much, much better than the opponent are pretty high, and it can be very irritating.

I'd argue its more than the minimum chances are high. As I note above, it doesn't have to be set up so that the actual ones are. That's an artifact of a combination of the probability of individual dice, and how many you roll. A Prowlers and Paragons character who needs 1 success and is rolling 12D6, where a 4 is a success approaches, but does not reach, certainty.

Every session we played of ALIENS saw at least one time that a player was rolling 16+ dice (after re-rolls) to counter a lucky 2-3 dice roll by an opponent and failing to beat it. In 13th Age, lucky rolls can have huge consequences, absolutely, but the swinginess seems more in the consequences of the unusual result rather than the probability of it.

That's a fair argument, but few games are going to provide you with a consistent experience of having extremely high success on rolls that are actually made; the normal play space is going to be at least somewhat in the margins at most.

Opposed rolls are going to be an odd case because they have a relatively high chance of multiple successes with small numbers (using your targets above, D10s where you need 6s will get three successes an 8th of the time) so at that point the opponent is dealing with his own probability already being comparatively low (you expect 8 successes on 16 dice in that situation, but getting less than four is not so far down the probability line that with the number of die rolls you make in a typical RPG is not going to have some risk of one coming up at some point in the game).

On the other hand, if you have a linear die system with opposed rolls, its not like aren't going to see those too; its just that most linear die systems with large dice ranges (like D20s and D100s) don't do that. Or if they do, they bake in elements so the higher roll still has some probability to win that's greater than simply the opposed roll numbers will tell.

Edit: Also, now that I see his comment, see my response to Staffan below. If you've mostly been dealing with die pools with very small chances of success per die, I can see how you'd feel this way. Far as I can tell, that's pretty abnormal for die pool systems as a whole.