D&D General What is Good for D&D ... is Good for the RPG Hobby- Thoughts?

[Ruin Explorer]

See, I've tried, and also had others try and get me to pick up other systems (Table Top games mostly), to varying levels of failure. The issue has always boiled down to "my time is limited, why play X, when I could play Y, and if I only have time for Y, I'm certainly not going to invest into learning X at all".

Just my experience though.

Hmmm. Maybe Public School Boys Are Magic lol, I guess Boris Johnson managed to get elected PM despite being an manifest idiot whose main concerns were dosh and his love life, and perhaps I can use my own magic to persuade people to play RPGs other than D&D. I mean sheesh I got my main group to switch to Spire less than a year ago, and I also got them to try out my Cortex Prime-built Mass Effect RPG - the only reason we didn't keep going with that was we did indeed have a refusenik, the first I've ever come across - but not because of me or the rules, because that player has a personal and bizarre beef with Mass Effect (and it's a normal one either lol, I'm not sure I can even explain it - it's like, he's personally offended by pretty much most of Shepard's companions - like what the hell man?).

 

[Scribe]

Hmmm. Maybe Public School Boys Are Magic lol, I guess Boris Johnson managed to get elected PM despite being an manifest idiot whose main concerns were dosh and his love life, and perhaps I can use my own magic to persuade people to play RPGs other than D&D. I mean sheesh I got my main group to switch to Spire less than a year ago, and I also got them to try out my Cortex Prime-built Mass Effect RPG - the only reason we didn't keep going with that was we did indeed have a refusenik, the first I've ever come across - but not because of me or the rules, because that player has a personal and bizarre beef with Mass Effect (and it's a normal one either lol, I'm not sure I can even explain it - it's like, he's personally offended by pretty much most of Shepard's companions - like what the hell man?).

I mean I dont know what to tell you. Its just about that time management, and my group just didnt have the will or desire to change. Not that there was any personal beef, just a 'but we could do this instead so why..' kind of thing. A general satisfaction with the status quo, I suppose.

 

[JAMUMU]

that player has a personal and bizarre beef with Mass Effect (and it's a normal one either lol, I'm not sure I can even explain it - it's like, he's personally offended by pretty much most of Shepard's companions - like what the hell man?).

IME there's just no accounting for players. Always getting in the way, messing up the good gaming.

 

[Aldarc]

View attachment 275064

Don't you know? PF2 = FKR.

 

[overgeeked]

I think we misunderstand each other at a fundamental level.

(I'm not saying you are in favour of PF1, its my system of choice.)

I'm not suggesting we support Wizards,

Any version of "keep playing 5E" supports Wizards. Yes, even non-Wizards 5E clones. Because, importantly, Wizards also produces content for 5E. So if you play Black Flag, a 5E variant, someone is going to eventually want to play an artificer or a species not covered by Black Flag and the artificer is right there in D&D...the other races are right there in D&D. So people will still buy Wizards books because they will still be compatible with Black Flag. Or A5E, or C7d20, or...or...or.

I'm not wanting to solve the problem of 5e being too dominant.

If you care about the hobby you should.

The point of the thread and the open question(s) are I guess

1. Can it even be solved.

Yes, easily. Stop playing and supporting 5E.

2. If not, how can it (5e dominance) be leveraged for good?

It can't. All 5E roads lead to WotC. That was literally the point of the OGL and now the CC-BY release of the 5.1 SRD. Supporting any of them will either directly or indirectly support WotC.

If your answer to the premise of the thread

The premise of the thread is: What's good for D&D is good for the RPG hobby. I fundamentally disagree with that premise. Quite the opposite. What's good for D&D is actively harmful to the RPG hobby.

'D&D is out there, and folk D&D is the answer' in the form of whatever version you like, thats a perfectly valid answer.

D&D is out there...and so are thousands and thousands of other games. Go play some. That's my answer.

Does it look like DCC? Maybe? I love the flavour of the free rules.

Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. DCC rocks. You should try it. But it's not just about D&D-adjacent games. It's about the industry as a whole. Traveller, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu, Bushido, Fabula Ultima, Fate, Apocalypse World, Masks, Cartel, L5R, Mouse Guard, Mutant Year Zero, Wushu, Risus, Index Card RPG, Night's Black Agents, Outbreak, Cortex Prime, Cypher, WFRP, Broken Compass, on and on and on. Those games and so many more barely exist because D&D has a stranglehold on the industry. I'd love to be able to play all of them and more. I've offered to run most of those on that list. There just aren't players...because D&D has a stranglehold on the industry.

The issue is one of 3PP keeping the lights on, as you noted, and how that is done, within the realm of 5e being the overwhelmingly dominant space.

Right. And that very dominance is the problem.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I mean I dont know what to tell you. Its just about that time management, and my group just didnt have the will or desire to change. Not that there was any personal beef, just a 'but we could do this instead so why..' kind of thing. A general satisfaction with the status quo, I suppose.

Unfortunate.

I mean, what I've found is important, as an adult, is two things:

1) You have to be genuinely excited about the system you want people to try out, and you have to express that excitement, and think about the individual players and what they like/don't like about D&D. If they like everything about it, you may be in trouble lol.

2) It needs to have character generation at least as simple/straightforward as D&D. This bar can go a bit higher if the system is kind of famous, I've found, like people will risk more complex chargen to try Exalted or whatever, but not this game "Spire" they'd never heard of - fortunately it has far more straightforward chargen.

Then you just convince them to do a one-shot, and make sure it's an evening where they actually have time to make their PCs and play the game, or make the PCs outside the game.

You can also be subversive and get a smaller part of the group to try it out with you first - the more adventurous ones - and then they can convince the others.

 

[overgeeked]

Don't you know? PF2 = FKR.

My brain hurts.

mp_gumby.gif

 

[Scribe]

Any version of "keep playing 5E" supports Wizards. Yes, even non-Wizards 5E clones. Because, importantly, Wizards also produces content for 5E. So if you play Black Flag, a 5E variant, someone is going to eventually want to play an artificer or a species not covered by Black Flag and the artificer is right there in D&D...the other races are right there in D&D. So people will still buy Wizards books because they will still be compatible with Black Flag. Or A5E, or C7d20, or...or...or.

We agree.

If you care about the hobby you should.

We agree, but I believe it to be outside my personal control. I'm not a publisher, of any appreciable size or influence.

Yes, easily. Stop playing and supporting 5E.

Depending on where you are, the size of your player pool, or your own network. This amounts to 'Play 5e or Play Nothing'.

The premise of the thread is: What's good for D&D is good for the RPG hobby. I fundamentally disagree with that premise. Quite the opposite. What's good for D&D is actively harmful to the RPG hobby.

And thats 100% fine, the point was to have discussion generated.

D&D is out there...and so are thousands and thousands of other games. Go play some. That's my answer.

As noted in the dialogue with Ruin Explorer, its not that simple.

Right. And that very dominance is the problem.

Understood, the point (to me) is is there room to get a benefit out of this.

 

[Yora]

Metaphorically, what is the tide? Tabletop roleplaying in general?

Because then, in a sense, D&D is the tide. It was the game that invented TTRPG (and yes, I know about the various influences and antecedents, but D&D was where it all came together). And though the genre almost immediately grew beyond D&D, that early identification means it is the one game that is treated as a kind of synonym for the entire hobby. That is why it will be so hard to unseat.

I also agree with Snarf that a lot of games sold under different names and by different companies, more or less are D&D. Just with different skins on. When you get past the superficialities of what dice they use or how they distribute skill checks, abilities and so on, the tabletop experience is not particularly distinct. So this limits the incentive to switch games, because really, you are just having to learn new rules to play more D&D, except maybe with a space setting or a cosmic horror theme or whatever. That can be fun, and I love me a good game of Call of Cthulhu myself. But I don't think it's enough to drive a big D&D exodus.

WotC's games have nothing in common with the early RPG that started it all, other than the branding.

 

[dave2008]

Me too. I just don't get to enjoy my game because people aren't interested in playing it because it's not 5E. So cool for you, sucks for me. I guess I can either shuffle off out of the hobby or get on the bland train. No gaming is better than bad gaming, I suppose.

Well I only game with friends so I don't have that problem and our brand of 5e is anything but bland!

 

[Clint_L]

WotC's games have nothing in common with the early RPG that started it all, other than the branding.

Dungeon masters
Turns/rounds
Ability scores based on 3d6
Spell lists
Magic items
Hit Points
Saving throws
Classes
Monsters
Dungeons
Dragons

Getting bored listing things in common. I feel like maybe you were being hyperbolic or snarky rather than making a good faith attempt to further the conversation.

 

[MGibster]

That is 5e for me, it is fine that it is not for you. Sorry the market leader doesn't suit your taste. However, if your preferred game was the market leader, other people would be in your boat now. Not everyone can "win." It sucks for you - sorry!

It's not the fact that D&D is the market leader that's the problem, it's that the entire table top RPG hobby revolves around D&D. I started a thread a few weeks ago arguing the overwhelming dominance of D&D was bad for the RPG industry. Insomuch as we can call it an industry given the niche status of RPGs as a whole. When WotC announced a change to their OGL it caused several companies and players to what we Americans commonly refer to as "$%#^ a brick." I would expect the largest company in any industry to cause ripples when they make a major announcement, but I don't expect them to be able to call down the apocalypse. This must be how Mexico and Canada feel all the time living next to the United States.

 

[Hussar]

Meh. The hobby fandom has repeatedly demonstrated that it has zero interest in innovation. Why would WotC try when it will get nothing but endless grief any time they colour even slightly outside the lines.

 

[dave2008]

WotC's games have nothing in common with the early RPG that started it all, other than the branding.

Oh I disagree immensely. 4e brought me back to D&D because it felt like I was going home again (I started with 1e/BECMI hybrid) and 5e has only continued that tradition. And that is beyond all the obvious commonalties listed by @Clint_L

 

[Saracenus]

A tale of two RPG heartbreakers...

I. Harnmaster and the Harn Campaign Books (Colombia Games).
This is quite possibly the most beautiful game world ever produced (lore, maps, internal consistency of a real Medieval Europe that happens to have Magic), unfortunately the rule system that supports it is, well, overly complex and encourages a very conservative playstyle. It does not help that it is primarily a skill based d100 % system (yes, you have attributes/ability scores, but they are not super useful). Combat? Hahahahahahahahaha. If the combat doesn't kill you, the infection rules and the limited healing available to the players will (Note: This was the case with 1e Harnmaster, this may have changed with 2e and now 3e were created after the original creator Robin Crosby passed away). It was just plain better to avoid combat if you could, unless you had the jump on your foes with overwhelming force. This game molders in a box in my basement. This campaign world became my go to "lonely fun" reading because I could not find anyone who would play it and at the time AD&D 2e was just to fiddley to make it work with the campaign assumptions. I occasionally pull the local maps (city and site) to use for D&D (whatever edition I happen to be using) but those are game mechanics neutral.

II. GENESYS (Fantasy Flight Games).
FFG (Asmodee) have interesting licensed and house IP that could be exploited for an RPG. Enter Genesys. FFG thought that their Android: Netrunner Living Card Game, X-Wing starship minis combat game, and (at the time) unreleased tactical Fantasy minis game (a Warhammer contender) user bases could be converted into a house RPG system that would allow you to play in a lot of different genres. Genesys not only required you to learn a new system but also by custom dice that were only usable by the game. They were not numbers but abstract symbols that you had to memorize the meaning of to play the game. Who wouldn't want to play in the Cyberpunk future of the Android universe or Star Wars license? Unfortunately, the user bases of the existing games did not cross pollinate like they thought it would and in the case of Star Wars the new system was a barrier for entry for those that played previous system under West End Games (d6s?) and WotC's d20 system. I don't think it lasted a year before development was cancelled.

In both cases, complexity + different mechanics = death. There were not enough players, that pesky network externality, to sustain either as a viable system. Even the lure of Star Wars was not enough.

These both happened before the power of actual play and livestreaming made the onboarding process for new players and GMs all that much easier. Even so, the keepers of D&D recognized the value of this to explode the hobby (even if it surprised them at first) and the rules lighter base game of D&D (in comparison to Pathfinder) and made it the dominate force for TTRPGs on YouTube and Twitch. I don't think Harnmaster or Genesys would have fared well against D&D even in this new environment as they both made Pathfinder seem simple.

With all this said, without D&D none of these games would have been possible even if their survival as a viable TTRPG had the odds stacked against them.

For those wishing WotC and D&D to crash and burn so that something else would pop up in its place, if such a thing were possible, would find the likely successor would be some variant of d20 D&D (Paizo comes to mind) and the whole process would begin anew as that game converted D&D's externalities into it's own. Something as innovative as Fate, Blades In The Dark, or even Call of Cthulhu would have a hard time converting a bulk of those folks over to them. Sure you would see a brief rise as people cast about for something else but most would gravitate to what is known.

One last thought, indy games have a perfectly viable niche in the TTRPG market. They do not need to have the scale of success that WotC or FFG require for a game to continue. However, anything that they innovate making them stand out and has people taking notice, D&D, can and will, quietly incorporate it into their system (sometimes with good effect). For example, the concept of Fronts from the Powered By The Apocalypse game engine is easily transported into D&D. I actually was introduced to that game system by a designer blog that Mike Mearls wrote about incorporating them in your D&D game.

 

[EthanSental]

I strongly disagree here. I have talked about this before on other threads, but a fair number of indie designers have said that 4e rather than 5e was the best thing that happened to them. Lo and behold! There are a lot of creative, innovate games out there that sprung forth during the time of around 2008-2015, or roughly the time of 4e and before 5e became the overgrown gorilla of the hobby.

Not a snarky question but it will come off that way, but for the designers referenced was it cause they were using 4e related game ideas/structures and enjoyed the freedom of the system or since the game was locked out by the GSL, they had to create something new to sell during at time so they were creative for that reason? Just curious and it might be answered as I’m at this post reading the discussion.

 

[EthanSental]

Me too. I just don't get to enjoy my game because people aren't interested in playing it because it's not 5E. So cool for you, sucks for me. I guess I can either shuffle off out of the hobby or get on the bland train. No gaming is better than bad gaming, I suppose.

I understand this…a group of friends I enjoy playing tend to enjoy old retro clones of basic dnd, Labyrinth Lord. I enjoy the roleplaying aspect but the game just is a bore to me…why? Cause I don’t enjoy playing a fighter for 10 sessions that only action in combat is 1 attack. For 12 or 15 levels, all I can do it attack once. I enjoyed when we started cause that’s all we knew. Now I’ve played various editions of dnd (and other games sprinkled through out) and enjoy the changes since then. I’ll do a one shot of any game but like others have said, dnd is what I enjoy and 5e currently still scratches that itch. So I can play a bland game of labyrinth lord or play a 5e game, just gotta get more people playing to expand the group…which I did 3 weekends ago with 2 new players.

 

[overgeeked]

I understand this…a group of friends I enjoy playing tend to enjoy old retro clones of basic dnd, Labyrinth Lord. I enjoy the roleplaying aspect but the game just is a bore to me…why? Cause I don’t enjoy playing a fighter for 10 sessions that only action in combat is 1 attack. For 12 or 15 levels, all I can do it attack once. I enjoyed when we started cause that’s all we knew. Now I’ve played various editions of dnd (and other games sprinkled through out) and enjoy the changes since then. I’ll do a one shot of any game but like others have said, dnd is what I enjoy and 5e currently still scratches that itch. So I can play a bland game of labyrinth lord or play a 5e game, just gotta get more people playing to expand the group…which I did 3 weekends ago with 2 new players.

Try Dungeon Crawl Classics. The warrior and mighty deeds mechanic are about the best implementation of a martial character I’ve seen.

 

[EthanSental]

Try Dungeon Crawl Classics. The warrior and mighty deeds mechanic are about the best implementation of a martial character I’ve seen.

Now that is one I do like. We played about 3 sessions of it but the DM at the time got pulled away. I had the book and still have the dice. Need to find the book and read it again. The friend playing the magic user was always having bad rolls on the spell rolls but it had some fantastically funny role playing as a result. Heck I’m smiling just thinking of those sessions…I’ll have to run it by the group and see if we can work it in…thanks for the inspiration!

 

[overgeeked]

Now that is one I do like. We played about 3 sessions of it but the DM at the time got pulled away. I had the book and still have the dice. Need to find the book and read it again. The friend playing the magic user was always having bad rolls on the spell rolls but it had some fantastically funny role playing as a result. Heck I’m smiling just thinking of those sessions…I’ll have to run it by the group and see if we can work it in…thanks for the inspiration!

Nice. I absolutely love DCC‘s magic system. Corruption, patron taint, deity displeasure, ritual magic, spellburn…so tasty.