One D&D

[TJS]

Hmmm

I see Free League offering 13 games, only 4 of which are based on a license, and one of the licenses is for an older RPG (T2000). These games cover fantasy, horror, sci-fi, post apocalypse etc.

The Design Mechanism has many settings for Mythras, 2 original fantasy settings, 5 mythic earth settings, one original urban fantasy, and two licensed settings. Additionally they have Casting the Runes based on the Gumshoe system.

Pinnacle / Savage Worlds has a slew of settings, some licensed some original, not even going to bother counting.

Steve Jackson Games - GURPS, The Fantasy Trip again I lack the fingers to tally these up.

Chaosium continues to offer Runequest and Call of Cthulhu and lately has begun to offer some other tid bits like Pendragon, Upwind and 7th Sea. Call of Cthulhu now covers a pretty wide range from Ancient Rome to modern times.

Cubicle 7 and Modiphius offer a slew of licensed settings.

Paizo has their "not D&D" in both fantasy and sci-fi flavors

Mongoose has the Traveller and Paranoia licenses as well as a pirate game Sea of Thieves (video game license).

Below these any of which I think can legitimately be consider the second tier there are hundreds of little guys, and below them thousands of tiny guys. Go to DTRPG, pick a genre and there is probably a game for it, and likely several even in the most obscure of genres.



The bigger problem really seems to be nobody wants to play the games I like.

Yeah. I realised after I posted that I left out a lot of companies that are still around, but I think that's because an awful lot of them are basically publishing legacy games. Cthulhu, Runequest, Traveller etc may be great games but they're not new games.

I guess what I'm referring to is companies with enough presence to make new games and produce a following for alternative games. There's a lot of games now for individual groups if they're willing to try anything and don't need the wider network, but for say, players who aren't in fixed groups, there's not really much presence of other specific games.

I'm comparing now to when we had all the White Wolf Games, Cyberpunk, Seventh Sea, Legends of the Five Rings, Deadlands, etc as well as smaller companies like Dreampod 9 with Tribe 8 (who I think are probably about where Free League are now).

I'm not complaining too much in regard to my own games as I can run what I like, but in terms of forward momentum for tabletop gaming as a whole, I'm not seeing a lot.

(I'm aware of course that this is a much wider cultural issue than just gaming).

If we look at the 90s for example, gaming influenced the wider culture. - a whole raft of movies were influenced by White Wolf games, Cyberpunk was memorable enough that it inspired a computer game a generation later. Licensed games are the inverse of that trend, and most of them don't seem to stick around all that long beyond the kickstarter.

 

[Toadmaster]

Yeah. I realised after I posted that I left out a lot of companies that are still around, but I think that's because an awful lot of them are basically publishing legacy games. Cthulhu, Runequest, Traveller etc may be great games but they're not new games.

I guess what I'm referring to is companies with enough presence to make new games and produce a following for alternative games. There's a lot of games now for individual groups if they're willing to try anything and don't need the wider network, but for say, players who aren't in fixed groups, there's not really much presence of other specific games.

I'm comparing now to when we had all the White Wolf Games, Cyberpunk, Seventh Sea, Legends of the Five Rings, Deadlands, etc as well as smaller companies like Dreampod 9 with Tribe 8 (who I think are probably about where Free League are now).

I'm not complaining too much in regard to my own games as I can run what I like, but in terms of forward momentum for tabletop gaming as a whole, I'm not seeing a lot.

(I'm aware of course that this is a much wider cultural issue than just gaming).

If we look at the 90s for example, gaming influenced the wider culture. - a whole raft of movies were influenced by White Wolf games, Cyberpunk was memorable enough that it inspired a computer game a generation later. Licensed games are the inverse of that trend, and most of them don't seem to stick around all that long beyond the kickstarter.

Kind of ironically, it seems like what causes many to lament the lack of creativity, is actually the result of an amazing amount of creativity and ease of access to it which has fractured the player base into hundreds of little bands.

In the 90s there were really only a handful of "big" games, and the smaller companies were quite a bit more obscure since publishing a game was tough.

Just sticking with D&D which had been one of the more homogenous and loyal game communities (AD&D + B/X) there are now dozens of micro-factions.

Go to one of the biggest non-D&D games, Call of Cthulhu which seems like a pretty tight genre and there are a 1/2 dozen or so major flavors with Gumshoe, Achtung Cthulhu, Delta Green, Fate of Cthulhu etc, and that is before factoring in the many CoC settings and the 6E / 7E rift.


As chronicled by Devo; Freedom of Choice is what we've got, Freedom from Choice is what we want.




I have no shame, I will never pass on an opportunity to slip in a Devo reference.

 

[TJS]

I sometimes think people know too well now what tends to work in rpgs and that tends to lessen people's ambitions.

It takes a certain naivete perhaps to think that producing a product line along the lines of say Skyrealms of Jorune could ever actually work.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think part of my frustration about it all is that after the OGL mishap, so many creators said they’d create their own games. So many gamers said they’d look for games other than D&D.

And now it seems like all the creators were just looking for ways to remake D&D with the number filed off. And so many gamers were just looking for an alternate to D&D that really isn’t all that much different.

It seemed like a pivotal moment for the hobby… and whatever possibility there was just seems so much lesser now, only a couple months later.

 

[Voros]

I can't for the life of me figure out exactly why and I guess we can't really discuss it here (although as far as I can see it's based on a logic of association rather than...well logic), but it really doesn't need to be a seperate race/lineage/ancestry/species/flavour of tomato chutney.

The sort of thing that could easily be covered by a feat really.

The half-races always sucked to me. Go full Elf or Orc or GTFO.

 

[VisionStorm]

The half-races always sucked to me. Go full Elf or Orc or GTFO.

I've almost always gone for full Elves and would rather have full Orcs as a standard race than allow only half-orcs, as it's handled in the game. But there's a lot of interesting background stuff you could come up with for mixed race characters, plus fey-blooded humans are a thing in real life folklore, and Orcs are supposed to be exceptionally cross-fertile according to the game's lore. So I'd never get rid of them, specially not for the ridiculous unmentionable reason they're giving for this change.

 

[CRKrueger]

I've almost always gone for full Elves and would rather have full Orcs as a standard race than allow only half-orcs, as it's handled in the game. But there's a lot of interesting background stuff you could come up with for mixed race characters, plus fey-blooded humans are a thing in real life folklore, and Orcs are supposed to be exceptionally cross-fertile according to the game's lore. So I'd never get rid of them, specially not for the ridiculous unmentionable reason they're giving for this change.

Half-orc, Full Orc, I want a DoublePlusGood Orc.

 

[CRKrueger]

Oh and lest we think the well of WotC creativity has dried up, the BBEG of the Edition will be…drumroll please…

Spoiler

Vecna, again.

 

[AsenRG]

Oh and lest we think the well of WotC creativity has dried up, the BBEG of the Edition will be…drumroll please…

Spoiler

Vecna, again.

So creative!

 

[Vile Traveller]

I'm still waiting for YouTube to discover Broo.

 

[Lychee of the Exchequer]

The more I read about One D&D, the less I care about it.

Which is a rather liberating feeling, truth be told.

I used to think the RPG hobby needed a flagship product like D&D, but I became convinced lately that the D&D torch could be grasped from the clammy hand of Wizards of The Coast/Hasbro, and instead be carried into the future by its freak stepchild - the Old School Renaissance - or some other iteration of creative impulse.

The bottom of my feeling is that I find big corporations nauseating*, and should Hasbro die a painful commercial death I will dance a merry go-round around the coffin.

But I still want to go see D&D the Movie .

* or more precisely I felt that the latest OGL shenanigans embodies what is most loathsome about big corporations. Okay, I may be a tad hyperbolic there...
But then we're living in 2023.

 

[Necrozius]

Agreed, Lychee of the Exchequer , I feel the same way.

Disappointed by WotC, but still eager to see the movie.

I've decided to fully switch over to Old School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics now.

 

[Toadmaster]

The more I read about One D&D, the less I care about it.

Which is a rather liberating feeling, truth be told.

I used to think the RPG hobby needed a flagship product like D&D, but I became convinced lately that the D&D torch could be grasped from the clammy hand of Wizards of The Coast/Hasbro, and instead be carried into the future by its freak stepchild - the Old School Renaissance - or some other iteration of creative impulse.

The bottom of my feeling is that I find big corporations nauseating*, and should Hasbro die a painful commercial death I will dance a merry go-round around the coffin.

But I still want to go see D&D the Movie .

* or more precisely I felt that the latest OGL shenanigans embodies what is most loathsome about big corporations. Okay, I may be a tad hyperbolic there...
But then we're living in 2023.

People need to evaluate their concept of success.


Which is a better book, War & Peace or Fifty Shades of Grey?

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

Dungeons and Dragons Creator Summit Turned Into a Roast of Wizards of the Coast

Dungeons and Dragons influencers and third-party publishers grill Wizards of the Coast on its business model during the recent Creator Summit.

gamerant.com

Probably not the kind of coverage Hasbro was hoping for.

"We hear everyone's criticisms and we pride ourselves on being the kind of company that listens to our fans"

 

[Baulderstone]

Game design? I think the designers would be better served by making a game they thought worked well rather than trying to appease a fanbase that’s far from unified. 5e was already a rules system designed around compromises… taking that further seems like a bad idea to me.

This is a very good point. I think most of the problems from 3E came from WotC doing it's survey, creating a checklist of things people wanted, then creating a game with all those things even when they didn't gel together properly. To give an obvious example, people voted to have more detailed character sheets. They also voted to have monsters work exactly like PCs. Individually, both of those requests are fine, but if you carry them both out, you end up with enormous monster stat blocks that are impossible for the GM to digest at the table.

Working as an editor on games, I've often noticed that designers often find rules they were excited about can fall flat at the table. You need to kill your darlings, as the expression goes. Game design involved hard decisions, and you can't just put those to a popular vote.

 

[Lychee of the Exchequer]

I heard on some youtube RPG channel (yeah, I know: it's hard to be more vague. It was a bearded guy commenting on the OGL kerfuflle... Surely, you see whom I mean ) that those type of playtest surveys are purely PR exercises, and that Wotc never reads them. The bearded one claimed to have learnt this from some "Wotc insiders".

I find it credible, but I don't really know.

For what it's worth, I agree that trying to cater to your fans "en masse", pooling their inchoate wants into an opinionated goo, will lead to baaaad results (whether or not it's the path Wotc chose re-3e).

On the other hand, when in the creative side of things, you really need an outside view at some point, lest you become enamored with your unborn child, and birth it all misshapen (metaphor slipping from my pen here ). To some-quote the plebeian bard of of our time (one Stephen King*): "You need to show your work to readers and listen to their inputs - but then you better have chosen those readers carefully."

*one of the great ones, in my opinion.

 

[TristramEvans]

Is a half-halfling a quarterling?

only if he hates women playing Magic: The Gathering

 

[Baulderstone]

I heard on some youtube RPG channel (yeah, I know: it's hard to be more vague. It was a bearded guy commenting on the OGL kerfuflle... Surely, you see whom I mean ) that those type of playtest surveys are purely PR exercises, and that Wotc never reads them. The bearded one claimed to have learnt this from some "Wotc insiders".

That's often the case with surveys. I studied journalism, so I am fully educated in how to write a survey to get an answer you want. However, I think in the case of 3E, they really did use it to box themselves into bad design decisions.

 

[Fritz]

I heard on some youtube RPG channel (yeah, I know: it's hard to be more vague. It was a bearded guy commenting on the OGL kerfuflle... Surely, you see whom I mean ) that those type of playtest surveys are purely PR exercises, and that Wotc never reads them. The bearded one claimed to have learnt this from some "Wotc insiders".

DnD Shorts. Best beard in the hobby.

 

[Chris Brady]

DnD Shorts. Best beard in the hobby.

He's got some weird takes, and doesn't fully understand the 5e rules... But I cannot deny that is one GLORIOUS beard.

 

[VisionStorm]

I trust the D&D Shorts guy to handle the game's rules better than WotC's current design team, TBH.

Just sayin'

 

[Telok]

I trust that beard to write better stuff than WotC's current design team

 

[Endless Flight]

He's got some weird takes, and doesn't fully understand the 5e rules... But I cannot deny that is one GLORIOUS beard.

I think my wife would kick me out if I had a beard like that.

 

[UnplayedRanger]

I heard on some youtube RPG channel (yeah, I know: it's hard to be more vague. It was a bearded guy commenting on the OGL kerfuflle... Surely, you see whom I mean ) that those type of playtest surveys are purely PR exercises, and that Wotc never reads them. The bearded one claimed to have learnt this from some "Wotc insiders".

I find it credible, but I don't really know.

That was immediately disproven by Wizards and other commentators with “inside” information. The beaded guy immediately walked it back on Twitter, but left the video up because views and misinformation are fun I guess.

also, if you actually look at the playtests it’s very obvious that they do read and listen to feedback.

 

[SmallbutVicious]

I've almost always gone for full Elves and would rather have full Orcs as a standard race than allow only half-orcs, as it's handled in the game. But there's a lot of interesting background stuff you could come up with for mixed race characters, plus fey-blooded humans are a thing in real life folklore, and Orcs are supposed to be exceptionally cross-fertile according to the game's lore. So I'd never get rid of them, specially not for the ridiculous unmentionable reason they're giving for this change.

I don't think you can maintain the idea of a half-race unless you're also willing to maintain the idea of a clear separation. If the elves live in the forest and humans live in the city and they rarely interact, then you can have a distinct option made out of the occasional, rare couplings. However, if you want some kind of cosmopolitan setting where all the races intermingle and there is no prejudice, the concept of a half race quickly breaks down.

If elves and humans can interbreed, and every city has a mix of elves and humans with no big social barriers between them, then you should rapidly end up with no meaningful distinction between human and elf.

 

[Voros]

DnD Shorts. Best beard in the hobby.

Tastes differ as I'd hardly call that the 'best' beard of anything.

 

[Voros]

I trust the D&D Shorts guy to handle the game's rules better than WotC's current design team, TBH.

Just sayin'

I have no idea why'd you say that as his videos before the OGL controversy are all based on obessively min/maxing builds in 5e, which barely makes any sense and seems to be an attitude to design carried over from 3e and 4e that I don't care for and is largely unsuited to 5e unless you allow the blight that is multi-classing into the ruleset.

 

[Fritz]

I think my wife would kick me out if I had a beard like that.

I'm sure she'd take you back in after noticing all the attention you'd immediately receive from the other ladies in the neighborhood.

 

[VisionStorm]

That was immediately disproven by Wizards

Yeah, I always trust WotC to be upfront about things.

The beaded guy immediately walked it back on Twitter, but left the video up because views and misinformation are fun I guess.

Or to own up to his mistakes rather than try to cover them up, as he mentioned in the video addressing the issue.

I don't think you can maintain the idea of a half-race unless you're also willing to maintain the idea of a clear separation. If the elves live in the forest and humans live in the city and they rarely interact, then you can have a distinct option made out of the occasional, rare couplings. However, if you want some kind of cosmopolitan setting where all the races intermingle and there is no prejudice, the concept of a half race quickly breaks down.

If elves and humans can interbreed, and every city has a mix of elves and humans with no big social barriers between them, then you should rapidly end up with no meaningful distinction between human and elf.

There's still different races IRL despite there being massive cosmopolitan cities with larger populations than anything in a D&D world. But to the degree that the claim above is true (though, highly overstated), I don't really dispute it. Though, that depends a lot on the setting.

I have no idea why'd you say that as his videos before the OGL controversy are all based on obessively min/maxing builds in 5e, which barely makes any sense and seems to be an attitude to design carried over from 3e and 4e that I don't care for and is largely unsuited to 5e unless you allow the blight that is multi-classing into the ruleset.

Solid game design is about knowing the rules inside out, not about having a particular attitude. And from what I understand WotC doesn't even have the people who made 5e what it is still around. Which is precisely why I'd trust him to do better than anyone on WotC's current design team.

 

[Voros]

I think my wife would kick me out if I had a beard like that.

I found the Return of the Beard in the last, what has it been? At least a decade, not to my taste as I prefer to rock things clean shaven myself.

Too much time and fuss to maintain a beard. Same reason I gave up longer hair a long time ago.

I wonder what made it fashionable. Not that I have an issue with it, how can you about something as inconsquential as fashion. Just out of curiousity.

Coming more from a punk background as a young guy there were pretty rare, more popular in the metal scene as I recall by only by a hair (haha).

I suspect it was tied to the popularity of a revival of psychedelic folk rock in the early 2000s like Devendra Banhart, Akron/Family, Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, etc. Mumford and Sons were the slightly more conventional take that brought it mainstream (and Bon Iver of course). A lot of them I think were important in reviving the shaggy hippy look.



I remember telling a music writer friend of mine at the time 'the hippies are the new punk rockers.' But later, as always happens with fashion, it was kinda tamed into the Tidy Lumberjack Clone look personified by Brooklyn hipsters.

Anyway, my picks for some best beards.

Paul's beard during the Get Back sessions and rooftop concert is legendary, never have I seen someone so unexpectedly suited to a beard.


Dennis Wilson (from the Pacific Ocean Blue album cover)


One of the OGs.


Oh and of course.

 

[Baulderstone]

I don't think you can maintain the idea of a half-race unless you're also willing to maintain the idea of a clear separation. If the elves live in the forest and humans live in the city and they rarely interact, then you can have a distinct option made out of the occasional, rare couplings. However, if you want some kind of cosmopolitan setting where all the races intermingle and there is no prejudice, the concept of a half race quickly breaks down.

If elves and humans can interbreed, and every city has a mix of elves and humans with no big social barriers between them, then you should rapidly end up with no meaningful distinction between human and elf.

That's a really good point. The half-races do make less sense in what seems to be the 5E default setting, as opposed to something like Warhammer, where even when non-humans live in cities, they tend to stick to their own neighborhoods (not that Warhammer has half-races anyway, but as I run it, it was the first thing to come to mind).

 

[Baulderstone]

I found the Return of the Beard in the last, what has it been? At least a decade, not to my taste as I prefer to rock things clean shaven myself.

Too much time and fuss to maintain a beard. Same reason I gave up longer hair a long time ago.

I often had a beard when I was younger, but I came to the same conclusion. In the short term, not shaving seemed the lazy path, but once you have to start performing beard maintenance, shaving begins to look better.

 

[Voros]

Yeah, I always trust WotC to be upfront about things.



Or to own up to his mistakes rather than try to cover them up, as he mentioned in the video addressing the issue.



There's still different races IRL despite there being massive cosmopolitan cities with larger populations than anything in a D&D world. But to the degree that the claim above is true (though, highly overstated), I don't really dispute it. Though, that depends a lot on the setting.



Solid game design is about knowing the rules inside out, not about having a particular attitude. And from what I understand WotC doesn't even have the people who made 5e what it is still around. Which is precisely why I'd trust him to do better than anyone on WotC's current design team.

Min/maxers don't know the rule system 'inside out' because they obsess over the supposedly 'broken' maces over quarterstaffs and approach all rule design and play forgetting one of the fundamental reasons most people play ttrpgs. They consistently miss the forest for the trees. To approach a ttrpg and act like only the 'game' part is what matters misses a huge element in actual game design. That kind of thinking led to the overcomplicated rulesets of the 80s and today.

Jeremy Crawford was Lead Rules Designer for 5e. Mearls was his boss but Crawford was the Lead Designer for the 5e DMG.

I know Crawford drives some people nuts, just as Mearls drove other people nuts, but if someone liked 5e as a ruleset, and I think it was a big improvement over 3e and 4e and fixed a number of issues I had with 1e and 2e, they can't keep pretending that the guy who was responsible for the ruleset doesn't get any of credit.

I think Crawford's mistake has been indulging in after-publication rules advice.

The very idea of Sage Advice is a blight on rpgs.

At first Crawford refused to answer the numerous, pointless questions he would get on Twitter and just say 'that's for your GM to decide, your table may vary' but eventually gave in and starting to respond which just feeds the rule lawyers that have always drained the fun from the game.

 

[Voros]

Yeah, I always trust WotC to be upfront about things.

I trust Ray Winninger, who was no longer working for WotC when he said this guy was full of shit, over some random asshole with a YT channel, any day of the week.

 

[SmallbutVicious]

There's still different races IRL despite there being massive cosmopolitan cities with larger populations than anything in a D&D world. But to the degree that the claim above is true (though, highly overstated), I don't really dispute it. Though, that depends a lot on the setting.

But, in the real world, those cities formed quite recently, and the ones in which you can point to someone as mixed tend to have histories of racial prejudice and segragation. Did elves and humans only come in to regular contact in the last couple of centuries? Were orcs a slave race that it was shameful to marry until a few decades ago? If so, then fine, but this kind of structure is necessary for such a clear distinction to make sense.

 

[Voros]

That's a really good point. The half-races do make less sense in what seems to be the 5E default setting, as opposed to something like Warhammer, where even when non-humans live in cities, they tend to stick to their own neighborhoods (not that Warhammer has half-races anyway, but as I run it, it was the first thing to come to mind).

To me another issue is that if there can be half-Elves and half-Orcs why not half-Hobbits and half-Dwarves and half-Gnomes and half-Ogres and half-whatever. It just dilutes the archetypes or more accurately the tropes that these character types are supposed to serve.

Once you follow that line of 'logic' (as logic has very little to do with fantasy) then you just end up with another overcomplicated mess that so many rpgs tie themselves up over for a misplaced idea of what is important in 'world building.'

Someone mentioned having optional rules for building your own half-races. That seems like a good option, give those who want them it as an option without gumming up the core ruleset.

 

[Endless Flight]

I found the Return of the Beard in the last, what has it been? At least a decade, not to my taste as I prefer to rock things clean shaven myself.

Too much time and fuss to maintain a beard. Same reason I gave up longer hair a long time ago.

I wonder what made it fashionable. Not that I have an issue with it, how can you about something as inconsquential as fashion. Just out of curiousity.

Coming more from a punk background as a young guy there were pretty rare, more popular in the metal scene as I recall by only by a hair (haha).

I suspect it was tied to the popularity of a revival of psychedelic folk rock in the early 2000s like Devendra Banhart, Akron/Family, Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, etc. Mumford and Sons were the slightly more conventional take that brought it mainstream (and Bon Iver of course). A lot of them I think were important in reviving the shaggy hippy look.

View attachment 58808

I remember telling a music writer friend of mine at the time 'the hippies are the new punk rockers.' But later, as always happens with fashion, it was kinda tamed into the Tidy Lumberjack Clone look personified by Brooklyn hipsters.

Anyway, my picks for some best beards.

Paul's beard during the Get Back sessions and rooftop concert is legendary, never have I seen someone so unexpectedly suited to a beard.
View attachment 58809

Dennis Wilson (from the Pacific Ocean Blue album cover)
View attachment 58810

One of the OGs.
View attachment 58811

Oh and of course.
View attachment 58812

Cat Stevens looked good in a beard too.

 

[Voros]

But, in the real world, those cities formed quite recently, and the ones in which you can point to someone as mixed tend to have histories of racial prejudice and segragation. Did elves and humans only come in to regular contact in the last couple of centuries? Were orcs a slave race that it was shameful to marry until a few decades ago? If so, then fine, but this kind of structure is necessary for such a clear distinction to make sense.

No historical expert in these matters but my limited understanding (haven't done any deep reading to confirm it) is that cities like ancient Rome and Constantinople were quite diverse. Also modern notions of race were very different in ancient times but to get too much into that discussion may take us into nominally political waters we've agreed to avoid here.

 

[Voros]

Cat Stevens looked good in a beard too.

 

[Baulderstone]

To me another issue is that if there can be half-Elves and half-Orcs why not half-Hobbits and half-Dwarves and half-Gnomes and half-Ogres and half-whatever. It just dilutes the archetypes or more accurately the tropes that these character types are supposed to serve.

Mechanically, I agree. On paper, half-races just don't seem interesting to me. On the other hand, BedrockBrendan made a good point earlier that the appeal of half-elves is roleplaying the character who is caught between worlds, not the mechanics. Of course, that takes us back to 5E's presumed setting where everyone is inter-mixed. If elves and humans all live among each other, that archetype doesn't work anymore,.