SableWyvern
Cruel Despot
I want to preface this by stating that everything I'm about to say is a matter of subjective, personal preference. This is why I play different games, not why you should.
In the mid-80s, I played Fighting Fantasy as it was the first game I was able to get my hands on, dabbled a little in basic D&D but settled on MERP as the game of choice because it seemed more interesting and advanced. Later on, after I had moved on to Rolemaster, I found a comment in our quarterly MilSims mail order catelogue that Rolemaster was gaining popularity with "the D&D-bashing crowd". This lead me to decide I like that crowd, and they must be justified and RM was clearly the better game, with D&D a game of simplistic hack-and-slash for roll players. Thus, I was an anti-D&D snob through most of my teen years. We tried plenty of different games (with MERP/RM as the staple) but no one in my circle who was interested in D&D was interested in running it, so it didn't get played. Also, AD&D had dumb things like illusionists who cast weird, silly spells like colour spray, and their most powerful spell made a coloured ball or light or somthing? Dumb.
When 3e came out, I saw that it had been changed to take on a lot of things that seemed very familiar to RM. I gave it shot and felt it was much better than the game I had imagined AD&D to be. I played a reasonable amount of 3e, Mongoose Conan and Mongoose Lonewolf. In the end though, I found the NPC and monster builds to be too cumbersome for too little payoff and after a few years, I'd had enough. There is nothing there for me enticing me to go back.
I tried 4e and ran a campaign for about 18 months. Far and away the worst system I've actually run for any extended period of time. It has no redeeming features, IMO.
After 4e, though, the OSR was getting into full swing, and I was intrigued. It got me to go back and take a look at AD&D with a open mind and became enamoured of the idea of player-skill dungeon crawl with factions and a lot more than combat. I discovered that AD&D was actually amazing for this sort of thing. Since then, I've realised that early iterations of D&D are really, really good at certain things -- dungeon crawls, exploration-heavy hexcrawls, operating with large parties including henchmen and troops and segueing into domain play. Over time, I've decided that B/X does this better than AD&D and that, ultimately, my ideal D&D is mix of B/X and ACKS, especially all the campaign tools in ACKS. However, the only sort of game I'm likely to run with this mix of rules is a dungeon-crawler, so if I'm not running a dungeon crawl, it's no use to me.
I looked at some of the playtest material that was released for 5e and it didn't take too long for me to recognise that 5e was never going to do anything for me that I couldn't do better with a different system. If I want dungeon-crawling, I have B/X/ACKS. For other styles of games, I have different rulesets entirely.
If I want to run Dark Sun, Al Qadim or Planescape, I'll do it with Mythras. If I want to run Forgotten Realms, I'll do it with Rolemaster. To me, these are vastly better systems than 3, 4 or 5e. I find that Mythras does a much better job of bringing the settings I mentioned to life than the various hacks of the D&D system that were used in their official versions. Defiling magic, summoning and binding djinn, factions and brotherhoods, piecemeal armour -- all these things, adn more, work much better in Mythras.
For the more vanilla Forgotten Realms, the Rolemaster system allows me to emulate most of the traditional D&Disms, but with a more interesting combat system, the fun of crits, and a lot more versatility for players in designing characters, where the professions are much less constrictive than D&D classes.
And, of course, if I want to run space pirates, X-files, X-com, completely unrestricted build fantasy, supers or any number of other things D&D doesn't even attempt to specialise in, of course I'm going to use a game that isn't D&D.
So, in summary, I play games other than D&D because I've arrived at the conclusion that the only thing D&D ever did really well was dungeon crawling, exploration heavy games with big parties and the potential for domain play. The earliest versions did this best, so I'll potentially use them for that sort of game. However, I like to play a wide variety of different types of game and when I'm choosing the best game for anything else I'm interested in running, it's never going to be D&D.
And, I want to finish by reiterating that these are my subjective preferences. People are welcome to love and play any version of D&D they want, as much as they want, for any reason they want, and I have no interest in trying to convince them they shouldn't.
In the mid-80s, I played Fighting Fantasy as it was the first game I was able to get my hands on, dabbled a little in basic D&D but settled on MERP as the game of choice because it seemed more interesting and advanced. Later on, after I had moved on to Rolemaster, I found a comment in our quarterly MilSims mail order catelogue that Rolemaster was gaining popularity with "the D&D-bashing crowd". This lead me to decide I like that crowd, and they must be justified and RM was clearly the better game, with D&D a game of simplistic hack-and-slash for roll players. Thus, I was an anti-D&D snob through most of my teen years. We tried plenty of different games (with MERP/RM as the staple) but no one in my circle who was interested in D&D was interested in running it, so it didn't get played. Also, AD&D had dumb things like illusionists who cast weird, silly spells like colour spray, and their most powerful spell made a coloured ball or light or somthing? Dumb.
When 3e came out, I saw that it had been changed to take on a lot of things that seemed very familiar to RM. I gave it shot and felt it was much better than the game I had imagined AD&D to be. I played a reasonable amount of 3e, Mongoose Conan and Mongoose Lonewolf. In the end though, I found the NPC and monster builds to be too cumbersome for too little payoff and after a few years, I'd had enough. There is nothing there for me enticing me to go back.
I tried 4e and ran a campaign for about 18 months. Far and away the worst system I've actually run for any extended period of time. It has no redeeming features, IMO.
After 4e, though, the OSR was getting into full swing, and I was intrigued. It got me to go back and take a look at AD&D with a open mind and became enamoured of the idea of player-skill dungeon crawl with factions and a lot more than combat. I discovered that AD&D was actually amazing for this sort of thing. Since then, I've realised that early iterations of D&D are really, really good at certain things -- dungeon crawls, exploration-heavy hexcrawls, operating with large parties including henchmen and troops and segueing into domain play. Over time, I've decided that B/X does this better than AD&D and that, ultimately, my ideal D&D is mix of B/X and ACKS, especially all the campaign tools in ACKS. However, the only sort of game I'm likely to run with this mix of rules is a dungeon-crawler, so if I'm not running a dungeon crawl, it's no use to me.
I looked at some of the playtest material that was released for 5e and it didn't take too long for me to recognise that 5e was never going to do anything for me that I couldn't do better with a different system. If I want dungeon-crawling, I have B/X/ACKS. For other styles of games, I have different rulesets entirely.
If I want to run Dark Sun, Al Qadim or Planescape, I'll do it with Mythras. If I want to run Forgotten Realms, I'll do it with Rolemaster. To me, these are vastly better systems than 3, 4 or 5e. I find that Mythras does a much better job of bringing the settings I mentioned to life than the various hacks of the D&D system that were used in their official versions. Defiling magic, summoning and binding djinn, factions and brotherhoods, piecemeal armour -- all these things, adn more, work much better in Mythras.
For the more vanilla Forgotten Realms, the Rolemaster system allows me to emulate most of the traditional D&Disms, but with a more interesting combat system, the fun of crits, and a lot more versatility for players in designing characters, where the professions are much less constrictive than D&D classes.
And, of course, if I want to run space pirates, X-files, X-com, completely unrestricted build fantasy, supers or any number of other things D&D doesn't even attempt to specialise in, of course I'm going to use a game that isn't D&D.
So, in summary, I play games other than D&D because I've arrived at the conclusion that the only thing D&D ever did really well was dungeon crawling, exploration heavy games with big parties and the potential for domain play. The earliest versions did this best, so I'll potentially use them for that sort of game. However, I like to play a wide variety of different types of game and when I'm choosing the best game for anything else I'm interested in running, it's never going to be D&D.
And, I want to finish by reiterating that these are my subjective preferences. People are welcome to love and play any version of D&D they want, as much as they want, for any reason they want, and I have no interest in trying to convince them they shouldn't.
