The Point of No Return

We knew this moment when D&D 4 Essentials came out.

"It's dead, Jim."

At this point, with YouTubers beginning to take notice, D&D 2024 is a failed revision. Nothing will save this version of the game now. We are approaching critical mass, with people leaving for new hobbies, video games, and other entertainment. A small fraction will stick around and switch to a new tabletop role-playing game, but many of those are already on board and bought into their alternative of choice, Pathfinder 2E, Shadowdark, and others.

And the products in the pipeline are confused. We have a starter set that feels like a cozy game —and... Dragonlance? Again? Didn't I just see that at the dollar store? With that hundred-dollar board game? Murmurs of Dark Sun? Leaning on Baldur's Gate 3 yet another time and riding a good horse until dead? I don't get the feeling the left side of Wizards knows what the right side is doing.

Even if they announce a 6E, who will trust them? They canceled their VTT, pulled the OGL thing, and messed up every classic setting with off-model rewrites and compilation adventures. I wouldn't trust them with classic 1E re-releases, since they can't fix the PDF errors and PoD issues that the community has known about for years.

The worst place you can be is a lack of interest, a lack of trust, and the appearance of a lack of care from the company.

People are even walking away from complaint articles like this. They don't care that 2024 is failing; they already know it.

So tell me something new.

Dead Levels

"If a game has dead levels, then it is a flawed design."

The number of times I hear that statement repeated on D&D YouTube is starting to sound like the annoying yapping of tiny dogs. It sounds entitled, almost spoiled, and it assumes players are only playing these games to accumulate power. I recently heard this tossed at Worlds Without Number, and it is just a really lame argument in the context of a larger game and experience.

These people have not played a BX fighter to level 14, have they?

You, Sir, get NOTHING!

The point of dead levels is to force the referee to think about alternate rewards players can get, without giving them too much, without making players feel they "already got something this level," and without holding back an external, social, or other intangible award or power. Magic items, weapons, or armor? A social rank allowing the character to request help or get special resources? Favors? Contacts? Even a supernatural ability, the referee "just gives" the character —like danger sense, an ability score modification, an innate spell, or some other special bonus — that could have a limit per day.

Dead levels are breathing room and opportunities for the referee to introduce alternate rewards.

They are not design flaws.

I swear the 5E and Pathfinder 2E generations are being indoctrinated with "rules as written" being god. You get nothing unless the book says you get it, or else you are breaking the game, upsetting the designers, embarrassing yourselves on YouTube, and ruining the experience for everyone. I have seen people like this argue against homebrew because "it ruins the game for everyone, and we are not playing by a standardized set of rules anymore."

What are they talking about? These people have not played old-school games, and I fear that if they did, they would slavishly adhere to the books and rules-as-written and still fail to understand how the game is supposed to be played.

"But I expect to get something every level!"

Games are spoiling us; we feel entitled to "get something every level," and the game slowly drifts away from being about story, character, exploration, and the world—and becomes more about the build, rules, exploits, power gaming, and what is allowed within the book. If you give characters too much power, the game breaks, and play drags to a crawl since higher levels need to scale hit points.

I don't want the book or a level chart to be the master of my destiny.

I want my choices to be.

Dead levels are a design feature, not a flaw. They let the level chart relax and deemphasize the constant need to be "fed something" at every level. Stop treating level systems as a Skinnerian approach that requires rewards at every milestone. It is a lame design, and advancement can mean something much more profound than just "what the books give you."

Many make Worlds Without Number their core fantasy system, playing only this game after game, and it is a great book. There is a trivial difference between a 1d6 skill system in BX and the 2d6 skill system in the WN games, except that we have a bell curve and can have a more meaningful skill level and modifier system. I prefer 2d6 skills, since it makes them fundamentally different than "just another d20 roll" and highlights we are doing something other than "rolling to kill." Putting the entire system "on one die" can make every roll feel the same.

The Kevin Crawford WN games are classics, easily masterpieces, and outstanding solo experiences.

One book can generate an entire world.

Video: Ignoring D&D24

"This would have been so much easier had I just started this in something like Shadowdark or another game."

A fantastic video today, please watch all the way through, like, and subscribe.

This covers so many of the problems with D&D 2024: the cozy comfy-core vibe, the silly starter-set quests, how kids play the game, the complexity and crunch, the tired culture content, and the lack of motivation and danger in the game as a whole.

D&D 2024 is Gilette 2019

I agree with all his points, and I see this in other games too. It feels like a moment when a big corporation "fires" all its customers in hopes of attracting a future audience that will adopt its product. This is the 2019 Gilette thing all over again, but the people being "fired" from D&D are those who love high-action adventure fantasy, danger, and classic dungeon crawling. You have been replaced by the identity marketing, cozy-core, comfy adventures, and Richard Scarry children's book vibe.

And the executives who fire customers will say losing half or more of their market share was "worth it" in the end. Logic does not apply here.

This has nothing to do with woke either, as a considerable part of the woke audience has been fired too if they enjoy traditional dungeon crawling. This cuts across the cultural lines, and it is not about that! While Gilette 2019 was about that, D&D 2024 is about something else entirely. But the firing customers part remains the same.

For the Starter Set to derail by having players collect sheep on fetch quests feels like the design team wants to make a comfy mobile game rather than D&D, and piled on top of that, taking a whole session to design characters, fighting D&D Beyond, and wrestling with books and character sheets to create characters who aren't ideal for dungeon crawling.

D&D no longer knows what it is.

Players no longer know what roles to take in the game.

I get why some dislike bards, monks, rangers, and other soft non-core classes. They end up being default choices, distractions, and do not support the core experience with strong roles central to the game's needs. If everyone plays bard classes, then everyone will die, and the players will walk away to other games.

And then you get to hear, "The game doesn't support my choices!"

Shadowdark is the Better Game

Meanwhile, over in Shadowdark, hand out pregen characters, "You start in a dungeon and..." Bang. You are playing. The motivation is clear. What you are doing is right in front of your face. And Shadowdark doesn't ship with a whole lot of soft classes that are more about identity than function.

Plenty of woke and traditional OSR people play Shadowdark, and they all love it. So this is not woke versus non-woke. Shadowdark proves it. This battle is cozy, comfy-core versus hardcore OSR dungeon crawling. Don't be distracted or let others shift the argument to defend their investments.

The limited choices in Shadowdark support the function of the game's core intended activities. This results in a better game. This is also likely true in the Vagabond game, since the designer understands that core motivation facilitates gameplay, and that is baked in through design. If I agree with a designer's theory of motivation and design, I am a fan of their work. Vagabond sounds like a fun game, and I urge people to check it out.

Things Will Never Get Better

You will get a group with D&D telling us to "stick it out" and "things will get better," but it will never improve. Sorry, those sunk costs are now at the bottom of the ocean and worth nothing right now, because the company abandoned you.

Almost all of you have been fired as customers, and you will realize this later, rather than sooner.

Welcome to D&D in 2025.

2024 just handed you a pink slip.

A New BX Game Coming?

Based on the rumors, we will get another game to replace the loss of Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy. I get why people like this game. At times, Advanced Fantasy can feel like "too much" with too many divergent options for races and classes, and the game becomes muddled with "too much stuff."

Did we really need the Svirfneblin, Drow, Half-Orc, and the Duergar in Advanced? I get it —Advanced sold far better due to "more stuff" — but at some point, I want a more focused core set, with the rest supported in option books. Classic Fantasy lets you do that. If they do add rules and options to OSE Advanced 2026, I hope they fold in all the options found in the Carcass Crawler Zines, which would make it a very compelling game. It is sort of a "go big or go home" theory, and I would like to see a lot of those options in the base game if it is not going to be streamlined.

Even an excellent BX game like Dragonslayer adds the Cyclopsman, a variant race not part of the core experience. A lot of games come close to the idea experience, but many diverge in places and don't provide that simple set of options. DS is still a good version of the game, just a little different.

Classic Fantasy also kept it simple, with the classic options. Only Labyrinth Lord (Classic Edition) remains as the purist BX game, with a few White Box options around, but those are all d20/d6 games. Another great option is Basic Fantasy, a game many swear by as the true heir to BX gaming's legacy.

It will still be possible to play a "Classic Game" with the 2026 OSE rules, since they include an appendix that lays it out. However, it still means cutting most of the book and sorting through it to say "yes and no" to different parts, which is a terrible experience for new users and those who just want a simple base game.

Shadowdark should have taught us to keep our core book game experience focused and straightforward. And a lot of these Shadowdark expansion books, I just want to forget now, since they clutter up the game with too many options.

Do we need another edition of BX? With all the variants of classic games out there, why do we need another game? Is this something the community tells itself we need? There are so many versions of White Box, 1E, BXA, and 0E out there. Do we have everything covered with Labyrinth Lord Classic and Basic Fantasy still in PoD? Or do we need another game because we feel we don't have a standard-bearer now? The community will step up and give us another option, and then invariably re-create what we had in OSE Advanced.

I get the feeling mixing "race plus class" with "race-based classes" in OSE was a mistake. If I want a 2026 version of OSE Advanced Fantasy, get rid of race-based classes and standardize the game on "race plus class," and streamline the game around that. Let a pure "Classic BX Game" do the race-based classes, and pare your game down to the best "race plus class" options that only work one way.

Similarly, if someone does do a new version of BX, please keep it to race-based classes only. Don't confuse things or try to make a game that copies OSE Advanced. Also, any expansion material for this new theoretical BX game should stick with only race-based classes.

I am all for letting OSE be more of the BXA, race-plus-class game, and for any new version of BX to stick to race-as-class.

A great option to OSE Advanced is Swords & Wizardry Revised. This is 98% compatible with any OSE material and offers an AD&D Lite experience with greater clarity and focus, while keeping ability score modifiers under tight control. It is a strict race-plus-class game, but it gives me the perfect blend of 0E and 1E material, plus a wealth of expansion content in add-on books.

S&W can completely replace OSE Advanced race-plus-class and port in its best options, plus it gives me more in terms of supporting the classic bestiary monsters, demons & devils, illusionists & druids, and even two types of bards in the Options book (bard and troubador). We also get necromancers and warlocks in the S&W Options book as purely evil character classes. All of these are far better than their OSE counterparts, many with dedicated spell lists.

And we get a monster expansion book for S&W, with even more monsters and plenty of 1E favorites making a return. With the core book, Options, and the monster expansion, you get a game that clearly rivals OSE Advanced, provides far more options, and does so with a straightforward, easily understood set of rules that feels superior to the limited BX.

0E predates BX, and comes before 1E, when everything got overly complicated. 0E also supports the best options and provides forward-looking 1E options. BX feels pared down and simplified compared to a full-featured 0E game like S&W, and by the time you expand BX into a BXA game, S&W will still have more and unify the classes and system far better, while still keeping the core rules in one book and far more straightforward.

Also, S&W handles fighters far better than OSE Advanced, and it does not need all the fighter mods from the Carcass Crawler books to make them viable character classes and interesting.

A cut-down BX is like Shadowdark, a simple, core, focused dungeon game.

A full 0E game like S&W is more like AD&D to me, a full-featured roleplaying game that does a better job than an expanded BXA-style game with a mix of race-plus-class and race-as-class options, and it provides me with superior options when selecting races and customizing my world.

Where 0E crosses over is into 1E territory, and it becomes the easier version of a full AD&D, Adventures Dark and Deep, or OSRIC. For those games, though, they typically use the one-size larger hit dice for classes (d10 for fighters, d8 for clerics, d6 for thieves, etc.) and things like segments and weapon speeds. As a result, combats are more protracted and play is slower than a BX, BXA, WB, or 0E game. Play 1E if you like this level of detail. Play other games if you don't want to bother with all the minutiae. S&W keeps the BX hit points and speed of play, while still feeling like AD&D.

I am looking forward to this new "pure BX" game and the revised 2026 OSE Advanced.

Pinball Crawl Classics

https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/891f2362-d05c-43a2-857f-417bb038207d/landing

Okay, this restores my faith in DCC and Goodman Games. A series of licensed pinball-machine-inspired adventures for DCC and MCC. What a cool idea, and this fits the game and brand better than a series of converted 5E adventures.

For a moment, I felt DCC had no direction and was a little lost compared to BX, BXA, and 1E. Now we are back in nostalgia-land again, but on some very amazing and fresh ground that has never been done before.

Thank you.

This is the sort of creativity, inspiration, and fun the hobby needs.

High Traffic: Mutant Epoch?

Of all the articles that get a lot of hits here, one that keeps making me wonder why is my Mutant Epoch coverage. I did not know this game was that popular, and I covered it because it has been around forever. I liked the completely random world and character creation. If any game throws you for a loop out of the gate, destroying any notion of "my 20-page character background and history," then this game is it.

You have no idea what you are getting when you leave character creation. You could be a dung farming servant of a mutant lord with a spear and a rock, or a terminator cyborg from the far future with a fusion rifle. Or a mutated cucumber plant. Or a human-like superhero, like from the X-Men. Or an Android. Or a cleaning robot. Or a mutant freak like the Toxic Avenger. Or a holographic AI.

You do not know.

And you probably won't live long, but who cares?

Let's make another character and see who we get.

The game isn't Fallout, Gamma World, Aftermath, Terminator, TNMT, Borderlands, Wastelands, Tank Girl, or Mad Max; it is all of that. This is a post-apocalyptic mega game, wrapping up every genre trope in a world big enough to hold them all, like D&D did with fantasy, ME does it with everything after the bombs fall.

Best of all, ME does it convincingly, and in a better way than even Rifts does (minus the MDC). Where Rifts uses magic to explain it all, this uses a blender attached to someone's arm to mix things all up and does not really care about the why. You only need to worry about everything trying to kill you, take your food and water, and rob you blind. Like Aftermath, trust is a currency you cannot put a value on, and it will be how you survive the ruins.

This isn't like modern fantasy, which assumes a socialist central fantasy government pushes egalitarian equality and opportunity. Everyone hates each other here; people fight over resources constantly, and marauders come along and kill the survivors and take what's left. You battle to build trust with a mutated head on a snake tail and a Commodore 64 on a wheeled tripod, with a text-to-speech module that sounds like it is coming out of a tin can. This game teaches you to respect others who are different from you, and since everyone else is as flawed and imperfect as you are, it comes down to who you are inside that matters.

The biggest choice you have in this game is who you are as a character after the tables spit out something random. Your choices will define you, not your race, class, or background. If that dung farmer rises up to be a Thundarr-like wasteland Conan and finds an artifact energy sword, so be it. You made something of that character and accomplished what 99% of players would roll their eyes at and beg the referee to allow them to roll a new "more perfect" character.

And you most likely got there since you built trust with others.

The starter set is fantastic; it is most of what you need to start playing, and it only misses an equipment list. Not that you need it on this first adventure, you will be finding and scavenging most of what you need in the ruins. And this book is under $20 on Amazon.

The game is a steal and well worth supporting. I never put this one in storage; it continues to sit alongside my SDC Palladium games on workout room shelves.

This is still a classic game I still love, and it retains a very loyal and hungry audience. Thank you for all the hits, and more coverage is coming soon!

Inversion

There exists a mythical audience for every product, with infinite size, longevity, depth, and mass-market appeal.

If only we could find it.

The trend of desperation marketing is hitting the tabletop hobby hard, and you can see this in inversion marketing in almost every game. The producers of the games start putting "the audience they want to see playing it" into the game's art and marketing, trying to seed the alternate universe and get it started with a little push.

There is nothing wrong with finding new audiences.

It is just that when you do this, you are screaming that your game is dying and that the numbers are not where you want them to be.

If things were working out, there would not be such a drastic change. This is Wall Street we are talking about here, and those who pretend to be like them in the smaller shops. You can hear the mom-and-pop game producers thinking, "Let's do what the market leaders are doing; that must be the way!" So the inversion marketing becomes a fad, failing games desperately searching for a new audience, which, in reality, is as common as finding a herd of unicorns. Nine times out of ten, all inversion marketing does is alienate the existing audience who liked horses.

And we are now in the "firing phase" where all those plans have failed. You see this across big tech now, and the tabletop hobby is typically 1-2 years behind that, where mass amounts of workers and creatives who promised Amazon, Microsoft, and other huge companies new audiences never found them. Billions of dollars were wasted chasing rainbows, and entire IPs and creative properties were destroyed due to audience rejection.

Those workers inevitably end up in the tabletop gaming space and try to sell those ideas here as the secret sauce to get paying unicorns in the door.

This isn't an anti-woke diatribe; it is just the people selling woke as an audience magnet oversold it way, way too hard, promised the moon, but delivered a pebble on the beach. I feel sorry for them. Wall Street will do as Wall Street does: fire everyone, forget they existed, hire a new batch of bright-eyed "rock-star" workers to ruin the dreams and healths of, and tell us to "forget all of that unicorn chasing just happened."

This is wish fulfillment by the product development team with no plan, money, or support to back it up. You can't just "wish for a new audience" by changing the art in the books; it requires ground-game level stuff like supporting reading programs, getting D&D starter fiction into schools through Scholastic, and supporting K-5 reading programs. If the next generation can't read, good luck selling your game to them.

We will get a few years of the old stuff still releasing before the new stuff, and the new workers will begin delivering, so there will be a 2-year glut of pipeline products to work through.

We will see the new direction here in a few years, and maybe the entire industry will "go back to basics," leading to an AD&D First Edition re-release, this time with nostalgia marketing, no new-age character options, chainmail bikinis, evil orcs, racial ability score modifiers, and traditional art and themes. "We always loved what this was!" will be the line from Wall Street.

They will sell you out for a dollar.

It should be well-known at this point.

Don't be delusional.

And we will get more retreads, like Dragonlance again being sold to us as something "new and exciting" when the last relaunch just a few years ago flopped so hard that hundred-dollar board games based on the setting ended up in dollar stores. Sorry, D&D, you will always be beholden to and ridden around by video-game and entertainment companies, and those BG3 characters will be on the front of so many books they will begin to look like cereal mascots. Hollywood is interested in Dragonlance (again), and this will be our next BG3, if the deals go through (most of which fail).

You live in a hit-driven space in media and entertainment.

This is not a nice place. Mostly, you fail, and only the 1% make enough money to survive.

Even if you do have a hit, unless you sell out hard and begin the follow-up on day one, you will ride that hit into the ground, and people will get as sick of it as they did hair metal in the 1990s. BG4 should have been released by now, and that is such a massive failure that heads should roll. Again, this is Wall Street we are talking about, the place in New York that resembles a crazy world where nothing makes sense except for the color green and the smell of money.

Even if BG4 made half as much as BG3, a half-billion dollars is still better than zero.

It would still be seen as a massive failure, since the #1 rule on Wall Street is, "You are only a success as long as you top the last thing." So, BG3 killed D&D, in a way, by setting expectations so high that it killed the entire IP, and no one could ever follow it up. Hasbro should have "sold Wizards up the financial pipe" at that point, given the billion-dollar hit, and flipped it for cash to a large investment group. Instead, they held on, and hubris killed the valuation. The iron is no longer hot. The moment is over.

D&D YouTube likes to point to the next D&D book and say, "D&D is back!" or "D&D is doomed!" Other culture YouTubers like to point to the art and content and scream about it as the reason it's failing.

It is not like that. Blind men and an elephant.

We are in a deeper, structural, cyclical problem with the entire hobby.

The problem is rooted in the cyclical nature of the entertainment market and the money it generates.

How I get through it is by going back to the classic games and remembering the good times, as any new investments in anything 5E or "new games" will just end up in drama, heartbreak, and disappointment. Even 3.5E is a fantasy heartbreaker at this point, since it is a dead game and unsupported. I hear about a new revision of GURPS, and I hope for the best, but I know the revision will be used as a wedge, as people will attack it for changing things too much. I hope it does well, but I do have a horrible feeling it will further divide the hobby. It is a great idea at a terrible time.

Why would I invite drama in the door when all I want is fun?

GURPS is still fun. First Edition, BX, and BXA are still amazing throwback games.

Many new games and games released in the last 10 years are failing me right now. I struggle to see a future for many of them, and their compatibility issues are rampant. Even inside 5E, compatibility with many 3rd-party books is terrible. I love Shadowdark, but I can get the same thing in any BX, BXA, or 1E game, with better cross-compatibility for third-party and community adventures.

I don't see the value in spending money on games.

More money spent does not equal more fun.