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The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

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Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#241

Post by SaulOfTheJungle »

mcv wrote: post #188
hellepardo wrote: post #61

My friends and I play D&D because we have no real other option. We used to play Minecraft and other collaborative building games as a group, but then one in our group went fully blind. There is a complete lack of good multiplayer computer games for entirely blind players (admittedly that is quite a challenge), but D&D requires only imagination, which all of us still have. Highly recommend if you have friends with vis…

No real other option? There are dozens of other excellent RPGs available that rely more on imagination than sight. D&D is merely the gateway game. There are of course D&D spin-offs and clones like Pathfinder and 13th Age, old school (OSR) "retro-clones" like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and many, many others. Then there are the classic non-D&D games like Shadowrun (in its 5th edition now…

What non-D&D game would you suggest to someone who enjoys D&D but would like to explore other systems?

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#242

Post by dragonwriter »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #203
weavejester wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree that 4e was far from D&D's roots. D&D evolved from miniture-based wargames, and it remains a combat-focused P&P system. In my view 4e had two primary problems: combat was complex took a long time to resolve, even by D&D's standards, and it was different to what people were used to.

Technically Correct - but once the Three brown Books where published in 75/76 DnD diverged from "proper" wargaming 100%

Well, not 100%; AD&D Battlesystem was a thing.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#243

Post by LoSboccacc »

ajross wrote: post #33
JoshTriplett wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that. 4e greatly simplified the rules, which made it far more accessible and playable, but it made many classes feel very much the same; every class had daily powers, encounter powers, and at-will powers. 5e managed to make every class feel unique again, and brought many of the classic D&D players back.

That's the enthusiast perspective. I think closer to the truth of the article (which is talking about broad market share among non-geeks) is the fact that 5e made D&D accessible to kids again. I've been suckered into running a weekly game for a gaggle of 10 year olds. They seem to love the game, but have absolutely zero interest in rules crunch. They're very happy having to be reminded about which die to roll and whi…

> They seem to love the game, but have absolutely zero interest in rules crunch.

I ran a campaign for my brothers when they were more or less at the same age.

They picked up interest in bionichles and kid being kid their way to play them was screaming "I hit you" in a growing brawl at each other until mom intervened.

of course I did not use dnd or any other crunch system, just contested rolls on every action and some rules based on range, and I did it so it could be used both for storytelling and wargaming, and they had a blast.

it's a GREAT way to start channeling their ruffle play into something more structured, rules be damned. just pick whatever some group of kid likes, throw some game rules and they'll figure out a way to make it work. it took less than six month for my brother to start playing at school with the rule given and then grew up into dnd.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#244

Post by mcv »

jsjohnst wrote: post #223
mcv wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely a great game too. But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of games I have omitted. There's a lot out there.

I’d probably say thousands of games we both omitted, but it wasn’t my intent to list them all and very likely not yours either.

Yeah, I have no intent to try to list them all. It's better to point to RPGgeek.com[0], which lists nearly 10,000 RPGs. (Though that's counting different editions of the same game as separate games.)

[0] https://rpggeek.com/browse/rpg

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#245

Post by floren »

nihil75 wrote: post #22
floren wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two of the photos in the article are of kids playing D&D, and there's mention of it in the text itself. Kids like D&D.

The kids are playing with their parents: "it didn't take too much convincing to get the whole family to play, including his 73-year-old grandmother." The surge in Twitch and podcasting is adults: "One of the most popular live-play Dungeons & Dragons web series is Critical Role, featuring a core group of eight professional voice actors adventuring through custom campaigns written and led by dungeon master Matthew Merc…

What the hell are you talking about? Look for the ones captioned "Irvin Reynolds, top left, leads weekly D&D sessions for kids at Uncle's Games." and "RPG Research Vice President John Welker leads Dungeons & Dragons sessions for kids twice a month at Spark Central in Kendall Yards."

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#246

Post by dpatriarche »

SaulOfTheJungle wrote: post #241
mcv wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No real other option? There are dozens of other excellent RPGs available that rely more on imagination than sight. D&D is merely the gateway game. There are of course D&D spin-offs and clones like Pathfinder and 13th Age, old school (OSR) "retro-clones" like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and many, many others. Then there are the classic non-D&D games like Shadowrun (in its 5th edition now…

What non-D&D game would you suggest to someone who enjoys D&D but would like to explore other systems?

I’d like to recommend checking out Numenera, from Monte Cook Games. It’s kind of a sci-if/fantasy mashup. It takes place on Earth one billion years in the future. Eight great civilizations have appeared and disappeared in that time, leaving the world full of ruins and starnge technology, all of which is inscrutable to the people who live there now. The game materials have high production values, on the same level as the D&D books, and about the same level of complexity of game mechanics. The thing I particularly like about Numenera is its emphasis on exploration and discovery rather than killing things. There is still fighting, if you want there to be, but the focus of the game is on going out into the strange world and uncovering it’s weirdness.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#247

Post by plopz »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #67

5e made great progrsss by stripping down rules and making things more accessible. I think they should do it even further. The core game is fun, but combat is quite slow, tedious, and, in my opinion, not much of a good role play experience. Nix weapon stats, health, spell slots, etc. Differentiate more heavily on specialties. Ward off fear of death with a system of injuries and what not. Fighting can still be a huge p…

It sounds like you might like Dungeon World a lot more than D&D.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#248

Post by projectramo »

There are two reasons to pick other game systems over D&D:

1. You don't want the medieval + magic world and want to explore other timelines. Maybe futuristic, Star Wars etc.

2. You don't like the mechanics. Maybe the game system complexity slows you down or else there is some weird arbitrage opportunity that messes up the incentives. (Let's spend the whole game killing orc babies to build up XP instead of solving the clues and then just beat up the bad guy at the end).

Do people have good recommendations for substitutes that solves #2?

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#249

Post by JoshTriplett »

lmm wrote: post #182
JoshTriplett wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree with that entirely. Our 4e group threw out half the explicit rules and did a lot of improvising. One of 5e's greatest strengths was explicitly telling the DM how and when to wing it and improvise, rather than giving a rule for everything. The 5e DM's guide tells you that you can skip the encumbrance rules, that you can just give a level after every session or two rather than counting XP, that you don't nee…

The only decent D&D games I've played threw out at least half the rules. But at that point wouldn't you be better off starting from a more rules-light system? On the whole I've had better experience with games in the World of Darkness family, and even better with those at a FATE-like simplicity level.

The rules most commonly thrown out around my table are things like "carefully track how much all your equipment weighs to make sure that picking up that loot won't make you encumbered", or "track the exact number of experience points you need to level up". Those aren't the most interesting bits of D&D, those are just the "if you really need a rule for it, here's one" bits.

I enjoy rules-light systems as well, for certain types of games that don't fit at all into a D&D-ish framework. But for anything that roughly fits the parameters of 5e, our group tends to gravitate towards 5e and enjoy the majority of its structure.

Re: The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons

#250

Post by mcv »

SaulOfTheJungle wrote: post #241
mcv wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No real other option? There are dozens of other excellent RPGs available that rely more on imagination than sight. D&D is merely the gateway game. There are of course D&D spin-offs and clones like Pathfinder and 13th Age, old school (OSR) "retro-clones" like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and many, many others. Then there are the classic non-D&D games like Shadowrun (in its 5th edition now…

What non-D&D game would you suggest to someone who enjoys D&D but would like to explore other systems?

There are way too many options to give a simple answer to that question.

If you want to stick close to D&D, Pathfinder and 13th Age are obvious choices. If you prefer something a bit more raw, less polished maybe, deadlier, where survival is a goal in itself and combat may be better avoided, try one of the OSR systems, like DCC, LotFP, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, etc. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is weird horror and explicitly 18+. If you want the feeling of D&D but with a system that focuses more on the story and the experience than on all the numbers in D&D, then try Dungeon World. A lot of people lauded Dungeon World for recreating the feeling they had when they first played D&D.

If you want to get further away from D&D, well, what direction do you want? Fantasy? SF? Cyberpunk? Historical? Martial arts? Horror? Steam punk? Espionage? Military? Old West? TV shows?

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