Public Domain Gaming

Why hasn't the community adopted public domain gaming?

I stare at the Without Number SRDs, and both are in the CC0 public domain. We have the Wizards SRDs, which are on a higher level Attribution license, but in all honesty, rules cannot be copyrighted. A lot of this is already public domain language and concepts. Goblins, orcs, and trolls are folklore - they can never be tied to one gaming license or another. Of course, over the years, plenty of companies have introduced lore into these concepts that should be avoided.

But for the section of the gaming community notoriously opposed to Wall Street shenanigans and business practices, most gamers crawl back to D&D Beyond and rules that are controlled tightly within corporate grasp. I get it; the platform will win every time, but where are your principles?

Why isn't the community converting everything into a public-domain rules framework and breaking free of all this corporate control of gaming? Free and open licenses (attribution) are great, but an even better level of openness is when things are put in the public domain.

But companies can steal what is in the public domain! This is Disney's entire business model, and to an extent, it is the Wizards' model. You can't stop them, but don't have to support them.

You have a choice.

The Worlds Without Number SRD is an excellent public domain fantasy set of rules, ready to be expanded and used for any fantasy game. This is 100% compatible with B/X spells, monsters, classes, and magic items - and public domain versions of these can be created, too. Any B/X compatible content works with the game. All that is needed are compatible public domain and historical source expansions. You could replace all OGL content with public-domain works, and everyone owns this to do as they please, create games, computer games, or any other derivative works.

If everything is put into CC0, we could be done worrying about licenses and "who can do what, how."

Why wait to convert my games and put my expansions into CC0? Here is my orc, my dragon, and my troll. Here is my Mana Shock spell. Here is my Fire Blast spell.

Other Creative Commons games are good, too, except for the ones that force you to buy the "paywall parts" of the game just to play. But a part of me feels the public domain is the best way to go.

Gaming, how we interact socially, should belong to the world. Nobody should own it.

The concept of ownership of rules and content in gaming needs to go away. The community must focus on contributing to the greater whole of humanity and future generations. Building a public-domain gaming library will free the hobby from corporate control forever. Derivative works will blossom and flourish, but that core will always belong to the people of Earth.

Why do people play games where the owning company could legally threaten them for sharing their creativity? Because it ensures I can always find a game? Convenience is not a good enough reason.

I get it—some of them are nice games. They have the art and adventures to back them up.

However, in the long term, gaming must be a freer and communal space for future generations.

Cepheus Engine SF-RPG

There are plenty of Cepheus games out there, including one I discounted as an earlier version of the game, a flawed market leader, and a new standard in generic sci-fi gaming.

Get the black-and-white version of Cepheus Deluxe Enhanced Edition (CDEE) since the color version is a massive misstep. The borders are distracting and garish, and even the B&W version suffers from being overly large and wasting space. Also, the deck plans in the back of the book are nice, but far too small to use.

I would love to see a version of this game with less flash, a clean B&W layout, and better presentation.

The previous version, Cepheus Deluxe (CD), is also a good choice. It does not have the layout issues of the newest book, though it lacks some of the newer improvements. I still like the Stellagama Publishing versions of this game since they focus on providing a solid, generic Traveller-like experience. The art and layout are not the best, but the game delivers on the concept.

There is another version of this book based on the SRD, so this previous version is not really needed unless you really like this edition. I like it, so I keep it on my shelves.

Cepheus Universal (CU) is better presented and laid out, and makes several good system improvements. CU is the game's more "generic sci-fi" version and is less Traveller-esque overall. Even though CU is the better-put-together game, CD and CDEE do better with the generic Traveller subsector sandbox experience. I like CU because it can simulate any sci-fi setting easily and out of the book with very little work.

This is my current favorite generic sci-fi game outside of Stars Without Number.

Another option is the Cepheus Engine SF-RPG (CE SF-RPG), a no-art version of the game from Moon Toad Publishing. This is a surprisingly solid, no-frills, SRD-based, constantly updated version of the original core rules. They have vehicle and spacecraft design add-on books. This is an excellent choice as a bare-bones printed version of the SRD, and the newest file is reportedly updated with links. If you find CDEE or CD hurt your eyes, and the CU game isn't Traveller enough for you, the CE SF-RPG gives you the rules with no fluff.

The SRD-based game does not have an XP system, so you can leave it as-is or hack in one like we did. Ours was a simple 1-3 XP per successful encounter, 10 XP for a level zero skill, 10 XP times the desired level for raising skills or ability scores. You can also track XP per skill and ability, and spread rewards only to the skills and abilities used during that session. Modify the reward rate as desired.

I still like this game. Limiting ships to 5,000 tons in the base game and creating a universe of smaller vessels creates a fun "small ship" universe where space battleships don't determine who controls the universe. Adventure ships still matter, and navies will comprise battlegroups of smaller-sized ships that characters can reasonably fight and flee from. Limit task-group size to 6-9 starships with various roles, and you will have a space navy game that still works on character ship levels.

Also, since you don't have large ships in a base-book game, one planet can't easily invade another with massive troop ships. War will be between smaller battle fleets, and supporting like-minded factions on a world with off-world weapons and monetary support is a better way to "invade" a world, and dramatically increases the faction and political wrangling that characters and factions must do to win a war of population and resources. Star Wars has gotten too "instant teleportation" and "massive fleet and troop battles" that individual characters don't matter anymore. As a result, massive-scale IP is less heroic and fun to play.

The Spacecraft Design Guide adds capital ships larger than 5,000 tons, if you want them in your game. They are kept as an option, which is how it should be. Even with capital ships, if you limit those, they won't affect planetary invasions as much as they do in other games.

I am less and less interested in art in role-playing games these days. It is either AI slop, AI-assisted slop, purple-haired happy tree friends garbage, groan-inducing message art, or poor-quality filler. The times we get great art, it is done by one artist. Having seen all the terrible art in RPGs these days, I do not mind a book with no art at all. If I want something, I will make my own AI-generated slop, show it to players, and pray they don't laugh. Or I will return to drawing and do it myself, since even a crappy game master sketch has more heart than a soulless rip-off AI-art machine.

All of them are excellent choices, with a few being better for some things than the others.

Warhammer FRP: Surprisingly Solid

Now that D&D 2024 is out, Warhammer FRP 4th Edition looks much better.

I used to be lukewarm about this edition, preferring the traditionalist 2nd Edition of the game and, by extension, Zweihänder. Now, Zweihänder does have a more open license (the product must require the use of the paid-for book), so it is the more community-friendly version of the rules.

But the 4th Edition Warhammer did not seem needed when it came out, and it felt a touch modernized for a game I played the original version of. I had Zweihänder, which was an OSR clone of 2nd Edition. I did not need much else.

In hindsight, the team at Crucible 7 did not turn the game into modern D&D 5E, as I had feared. The new edition is faithful to the original feeling, and they are not trying to modernize the game to the point where the Chaos factions are just misunderstood good-guys at heart.

If Wizards did it, I can see the game, happy Chaos cultists, alien Dark Elves, and goofy Skaven alongside Dwarves, Humans, and Elves, with brightly colored hair and visiting planar coffee shops all day. There are plenty of furry races, vampires, dragon people, skeleton races, ghosts, and half-demon tieflings in WotC Warhammer. Pathfinder adds the tired football-headed goblins, living puppets, and plant people. I swear, mass-market roleplaying is like eating at a horrible buffet where all the food is garbage and tastes the same.

By rejecting tradition, modern games have no foundation and look like AI art, bad anime, and Tumblr. A player has told me that 2024 D&D looks stupid now, and some have told me they don't know what the art is supposed to be.

Warhammer's tone has been kept.

4th Edition Warhammer is not a bad game.

The art is more melting-pot in tone and style, but if the tone is kept, I don't care since we can assume this is a later era when trade and travel have mixed the urban areas to an extent, with cross-cultural travel. It helps the game more since you can do stories of new people coming to the land, and those who have lived there are suspicious of them, with Chaos cults taking advantage of the strife. Players must solve these problems; that clash of cultures is good storytelling material.

And the slightly more diverse art, I don't really care. This is a horror game at its heart; all of them will be victims of some terrible fate, all the same. Heavy set or thin, dark skinned or light, male or female, no matter your personal preferences or culture you originate from, all are equally consumed by the Eye of Chaos.

There is an important message there.

And you can't escape it by pretending you are a cartoon.

Warhammer has leaned into the collector's market, which is a flaw. The game is playable with one book, though. Companies must stay in business, keep the books coming, and pay the license fees.

Zweihänder is still the better choice for historical games and my own world, along with a community where anyone can write expansions and adventures for the game. It has a defiant community with a chip on its shoulder. Zweihänder gets a bad rap, but it is a good game with a good community. Yes, I know you can buy the second edition of Warhammer, but can you publish books for it? Community options and gaming are good, and supporting them is worthy.

With Warhammer, you are playing in the Warhammer world, hands down. Why change the main attraction of the game? You are going to Disney World here. This is the premium experience, and it is easy to sell to others. "Hey! Want to play the Warhammer RPG?" My players said, "Warhammer? Yes!" These are more "normal people" players, not gamers who know the hobby inside and out. They know Warhammer. It sounds cool. They will jump at the chance of being in that world.

As a D&D 2024 alternative, or being stubborn with 2014, Warhammer 4th Edition is a worthy option to wash your hands of identity gaming and walk away.

Off the Shelf: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

I have always been partial to Zweihänder, but WRFP is back on my table now that a few of my current 5E players have shown interest. It is harder to sell Zweihänder to people who have no idea what it is other than "like Warhammer."

And everyone knows what Warhammer is.

Why not just play Warhammer?

When you play these other adjacent games, normal people ask, "What is the problem?" And that becomes, "What is your problem?" When introducing normal, outside gaming people to the hobby, most people need to be taken in using the familiar things first. I have even seen them resist Shadowdark, when D&D seems like "the game everyone plays." Even though I know Shadowdark is the game they would enjoy more.

Getting "I know D&D" players into Warhammer and possibly Call of Cthulhu or Cyberpunk is easier than any other game. Warhammer is easy since everyone knows what it is, and it is a "brand" that strongly sells its assumptions and world-building. Warhammer is the Applebee's to D&D's McDonald's.

I can easily bring people to eat at either, given their mood.

I still like Zweihänder. It is a better game if you homebrew your setting since it hits the generic setting tones. Overall, it is a solid system and well-supported. Getting a group into Warhammer is far easier for me, and I am not explaining the theme while trying to convince them to play something else just like it. If Zweihänder were a restaurant, it would be a regional chain that was very good, but few people outside the area know what it is, like Chunky Jones' Chuckwagon, a name I just pulled out of my hat. This place has a giant glass-enclosed pie counter, chicken-fired steak, hot cinnamon apple side dishes, baked potatoes, and comfort food up and down the menu. You know the place.

Some people deride it as a copycat game, but they have an open license, and as a creator who supports open and free games, that means something. We need to support those who help indie creators and open gaming.

It is nice that they did not modernize the Warhammer world for D&D players. While there is diversity in the human races, no furry animals, dragon people, angels with wings, half-demons, or other silly animal-shaped cookie-cutter fantasy races are running around happy land. The world does not look like it is on psychedelic mushrooms with pseudo dragons hanging off blacksmith signs and angels smiling at devil people while happy cloud half-giants float overhead.

D&D species have become the same dough, new shape, and nothing special. Even humanoid races in the 2024 Monster Manual have been erased out of fear and replaced with generic stat blocks, where it is, "Who cares if you say orc or goblin? We are fighting the fighter template again."

And someone, somewhere, down the line, will Kickstarter a patch for that with "ultimate humanoid monsters" and bring back the Monster Manual orcs, goblins, and others, what we had, minus sixty to hundred dollars for the hardcovers. I am sick of relying on the community to patch a broken game or being intentionally limited by a design team that did not care about the game's history.

The new 2024 D&D with its fake diversity sucks. It is "anything-ism" and a flavorless slop of fantasy gruel art that looks like the happy AI remix machine made it. And it seems so dumb that it turns off some of my new players. One said, "D&D looks stupid now."

D&D 2024 is filled with corporate blandification.

People sit there and take what they are given to be a part of a group. Being a fan of something these days sucks. It means there will be an expiration date for your love for something. Instead of accepting the death of something you love, the profit-squeezing necromancers of Wall Street will keep it alive and torture your memories of it in an abusive relationship with an undead franchise.

D&D 2014 was that expiration date, and even then, the later parts of that game are dead on the vine. Some of the Open 5E alternatives are the true heirs to the legacy.

Warhammer sticks to its lore and guns, slightly updating the look, but keeping its heart. Orcs and goblins are evil, and that will never change. Chaos will corrupt your soul and turn you into a monster. Goblins, skaven, orcs, dark elves, chaos cultists, trolls, chaos dwarves, and other evil kin will never be player options. Good. I want clarity. If something has demon blood and is growing horns, it isn't a happy coffee shop owner who makes your latte. I want players to see a band of plague skaven, see the terror in their eyes, and sense their hearts dropping to the floor as they know what comes next.

This is Call of Cthulhu mixed with D&D.

Kill or be killed, with everything you know and love being destroyed if you fail.

Chaos will take it all.

That is Warhammer, and it won't change. The 4th Edition may look a little more diverse, but the same heart is in there, and the same blood runs through its veins. I see it as a later world, after trade and commerce have opened new lands, and the cities have become melting pots of cultures and people. The hinterlands and rural areas will still remain more homogenized and monocultural, as history teaches us, but that is good since, from a story perspective, that sets up clashes in cultures and kin.

Is this a chaos cult, or is it people getting used to new people setting down roots? That is good stuff—the real meat that means a lot to people today. Do you want to be the good guys and help people live together, or do you play into the hands of chaos and blame the innocent for acts they did not commit?

The game company does not try to hide that fact or make it impossible for you to tell these stories. Players sit there and don't see orcs and dwarves fighting; they just see a bunch of generic fighter templates on each side rolling meaningless dice, propped up by a DM trying to do their best with rules that hate creativity. The game seems embarrassed by the simple facts of history to the point that the writers would have panic attacks and feel they were personally attacked if someone pointed this out, or included enough cultural diversity that telling these stories feels easy and natural.

Warhammer is still worthy.

Palladium SDC Games and Sandbox Play

Strangely, the concept of dungeon crawling took over the hobby. It is suitable for follow-on sales, but it feels strangely fake as the core of the hobby. Many games in the 1990s walked away from the dungeon concept, and a lot of creativity and imagination came into the hobby. We had the Palladium games, which were never really dungeon-crawling games, Vampire, GURPS, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, and a few others that did not put "the dungeon" as the peak of adventure gaming. By the 1990s, the dungeon had been done, and even AD&D 2nd Edition shifted more towards story-gaming and modules based on novels.

Which is why my Palladium SDC games are sticking around. They come from the post-D&D era and tried to do something new. We are in that post-D&D era again, where the "dungeon as adventure" has been done to death, and we are ready for more story-based adventures. Once you build your character in a Palladium game, that is your "playing piece" that you take through various situations and scenarios. That sounds precisely like D&D, but it differs from the 90s RPGs.

The first goal is to "assemble your team of experts," and characters in Palladium's games need each other since they are all specialists in certain areas, and below average in areas unrelated to their specialties. In Palladium games, if you pick the archer, you will be the best archer ever. If you choose the ninja, you will be the best ninja ever. You will excel in your area of specialization, but you need the healer, warrior, wizard, and all others in your group.

You are trying to solve a series of situations with your characters, where you will all have a chance to shine. A dungeon is not a dry grid of room descriptions; more than it is a list of situations you will all need to resolve, circumvent, or work your way through to achieve your objective.

The "SB" in SBRPG stands for situation-based. This is what our game was about.

The gameplay in situation-based gaming is dynamic and incompatible with set-in-stone keyed room descriptions. It is almost sandbox-based play, with factions in the world working "live" to achieve their own goals, and you running around trying to stop them. In a Keep on the Borderlands-style adventure, the Caves of Chaos would not be the focus. The area map would be better filled with hamlets and villages around the keep, interesting locations, a wizard's tower, a soaring ancient bridge, small farms, outposts, trading camps, and other spots. Then, the tribes would enter the map, set up camps, and begin to take down civilization as marauders.

Each group's force numbers and memorable NPCs would be tracked and killed, and the situation would evolve organically. Your group may choose to root out the goblins stealing food from farms and burning them down first, and that may slow down the other forces when they begin to suffer food shortages. You may choose to break the orc siege of a southern town first, and that would free up men to reinforce the outposts.

The concept works on a master "situation" and breaks down into lower levels of "sub-situations" each faction pursues to achieve a goal. Your goal, as heroes, is to be the monkey wrench thrown into the scene. The master situation will not end well. Left unchecked, these bands of humanoids will surround the keep, lay siege, kill everyone inside, and take over the fort as an evil, demon-worshipping humanoid stronghold and blight upon every surrounding kingdom as more evil flows in from the broken lands.

This is how we played these 90s games; they were never dungeon crawls but live, active, dynamic, and engaging meshes of cause-and-effect, live situations that required multiple play sessions to work out and play through. There are no 'passive skills' that play the game for you, so you can stay on your phone. The Palladium games are perfect for this 'live action' play since your "team of experts" is there to tackle these problems with the tools you have and in the best way you see fit.

Do you have a stealthy ranger and ninja pair that can wreak havoc on goblin warbands?

Are you more a heavy metal group with tanks and healers, meant to bloody the nose of an orc assault?

Do you work more with magic that manipulates the mind and can turn the humanoid factions against each other? Or are you a more arcane sorcerer who can summon elemental forces or twist the land to stop the invaders?

Are you more in tune with nature and turn the land and animals against the invaders, washing out roads, tangling vines to slow them down, and calling on woodland spirits to fight alongside you? Are there nature factions to align with for this character type?

In Palladium games, other characters need you, and you need them.

The story modules for D&D in the 1990s were all about railroads. They were a series of combat encounters strung together by a story. Again, the live sandbox style of play ends up being the same series of combat encounters, but again, there is a vast difference here. There was typically zero freedom in how you pursued your goals in the 1990s TSR story modules.

The structure of the D&D adventuring party did not change, and it felt like a poor fit for those scenarios. Even today, D&D struggles with skills, and characters don't feel like "they have the tools for the job."

Palladium?

I have the skills for many jobs, thank you.

D&D rarely does "big magic," and 90% of the powers in the game are meant to be used in a small room. In the old days, you had "big spells" mixed into the list, like 'illusionary terrain' spell, and the 'pass without trace' spell. By the time we got to D&D 4, the game's scope had shrunk to become an MMO with small powers, and 5E continues in that direction.

Does it matter that characters in Palladium games are complex and take a while to create? No. Character creation is 90% of the game, where the focus of the rules should be. The rest of any Palladium game is so simple it puts rules-light games to shame. Combat is simple. Turn actions are simple. Skill rolls are simple. The action economy is simple. Damage and healing are simple. Armor is simple. Resources burn down, requiring rest and breaks, so you need to be able to plan for downtime and replenishment.

Palladium still captures the classic resource management elements of the classic role-playing games.

With d20 games like D&D, the story is the same as in the 1990s. D&D's characters are too simple and lack the tools to deal with dynamic situations. Your powers are room-based and don't do anything big and cool. While characters are specialized, they are specialists. The overlap of spells and abilities makes some character types obsolete. Every class is set up to tackle dungeons and not live situations. With frequent rests restoring most resources, the game feels like an MMO where your powers are full in every encounter.

Yes, there is always the Rifts game, but I am not focused on Rifts right now. I do not want MDC. I want a lower-level game where hit points and SDC matter. That part of the Palladium system is excellent, and focusing on the SDC games in an SDC universe is a joy. MDC weapons and powers are a distraction and trivialize the combat math into all-or-nothing, alpha-attacks, and going first. Playing with weapons that can destroy city blocks is fun, but my heart lies in the lower-level, smaller-focused, personal games.

The Rifts game is another discussion entirely. It is a lot like Robotech at heart; that is where you need to begin understanding it all. For me, the SDC games capture the Palladium charm the best.

I like the SDC games. I wish they made more of them. I would love to have a Weird West game or a 'hard science fiction' game combining horror and psychic powers from them. These books would also be great to combine with Rifts, adding cowboys, shamans, astronauts, and space marines. I would love a gangster game, pulp adventure, or a take on the Cthulhu mythos. I can make all these myself with any of their modern-day games (Dead Reign, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited, or Beyond the Supernatural). Still, they have a way of making a single-book game compelling and exciting.

Gangbusters: B/X Edition

https://wizardtowergamesshop.com/products/gangbusters-core-game

Seeing the B/X version of Gangbusters get a new edition is nice. I loved the original, and the B/X version is worth it. They are having a special on a combo softcover deal until the end of May, and a limited amount of the hardcovers for the signed main rulebook.

Head on over if interested, this is a fun game, with a fun setting and a 1920s and 30s gangsters genre.

5E: Thrown Together, Not Designed

A lot of 5E D&D is a thrown-together mess. Simplifying and going back to basic options is a great thing, but the break in 2014 with Tasha's being the first "patch release" for 2014 D&D complicates things. The backward compatibility of 2024 confuses things even more.

You have two paths with D&D: play 2024 and ignore everything but the three core books, or play a patched version of 2014 and Tasha's, focusing on fixing the broken core classes in the 2014 PHB.

In a sense, patching the game in Tasha's was a huge mistake.

Tales of the Valiant and Level Up: A5E are better choices. Toss out your 2014 core D&D books, use these as the game's rules instead, and ignore most 3rd-party content. The broken class designs in 2014 are fixed in both these games, and you are not playing with "core plus Tasha's" and pulling in a book's worth of extra rules you don't want or need.

I don't want more; I want it fixed. Please make this 5E game work correctly. And 2024 isn't it, since there are classes they tried to fix in the book, but they messed up even more. The ones they did fix, they just made OP to make people happy, and the nerfs are likely already being written. This is the floating design style of MMOs, and the books are already losing value due to constant patching.

What was OP one week shall be nerfed the next, and the constant stream of buffs and nerfs causes just enough community outrage and discussion to keep people engaged and playing. It is all a lie, purposeful chaos meant to serve as marketing. World of Warcraft has been doing this for decades.

I want books that hold value.

I want a game that gets it mostly right at release.

That isn't hard to do if that is your design goal.

Oh, wait. I have a fixed edition of the game.

Adventures Dark and Deep (ADAD) better merges the first-edition aesthetic with the fifth-edition choices than most of the 5E clone games. It keeps the game on solid Gygaxian math and balance. ADAD is the way forward for first-edition games, with OSRIC being a strong second.

OSRIC 3 looks interesting, and I am interested in that.

ADAD and OSRIC are games worthy of the original Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk settings. If you play any version of D&D from Wizards, you are not getting the authentic experience of living and adventuring in these worlds. It was not how they were originally envisioned, nor when the original lore was established.

I fondly remember later editions in some of these worlds, but the experiences are different, colored by the character-building rules instead of the original legend-building games.

 Also, if you are cheating the rules and invincible, solve-every-problem GMNPCs are running around (like they were in AD&D 2nd Edition) - that is on you. Ignore rules, fudge dice rolls, and protect your darling NPCs; the game master is to blame, and the players should call this out. This sort of "cheat so everyone has fun and can tell their story" garbage is rampant in today's games. Do that, and you are not playing a game anymore. There is no point in designing and maintaining characters; the dice mean nothing, and those rulebooks are wasted. Sit at the table, imagine whoever you are, narrate your action, and roll the dice to pretend you are playing something.

I did that for years.

And this is the thing I most regret.

We never really played those games. We only pretended to.

Rules mean something. They should.

The day you can't play? You will look back at those days and say you cheated yourself and your players.

I should walk away from 5E entirely and return to first-edition gaming. If it weren't for my current D&D game, I would. One of the fundamental flaws of 5E is giving classes too many powers. This started in 4E, when characters became Christmas trees upon which to hang loads of powers and abilities. Going back to the first edition simplifies the entire structure of the game.

You can't balance and have a superhero game unless you deliver a superhero game. This modern era of shipping "broken superhero games" as fantasy RPGs sucks. They give everyone "cantrip superpowers" as class-defining abilities, and they get overused, trite, boring, one-note, and repetitive.

Eldritch blast. Eldritch blast. Eldritch blast. Eldritch blast. Eldritch blast.

Magic missile. Magic missile. Magic missile. Magic missile. Magic missile.

5E is really not that fundamentally different than 4E.

You may get a few leveled spells, but this is 70-90% of the game. Expansion books and 3rd party content just change the names of what you repeat every turn. And worse, because these are broken superhero games, the broken multiclassing system breaks the game even harder, as limited options that were never supposed to be stacked get stacked and combined into freakishly overpowered rule-breaking attacks.

Breaking the game becomes the only fun in the game.

We played our Mystara game back in the day using Champions rules. This was a fun game. If a warlock wanted darkness and entangled power that affected every hex around them, but not them, and it used a focus item and a limited pool of resources, we could design that. Only this warlock had this incredible, thematic power, and people could create whatever they wanted. Cleric with an extraordinary smite power? Done. Want that single-target or an area-of-effect power centered on a hex? Done.

It took forever to design powers, and there was no list to choose from. We had to establish power frameworks for "divine powers" and "wizard spells" and create standard option sets.

But every choice worked and was balanced. They could have a " magic bolt " power if a class wanted a "magic bolt" power. Design, flavor, and justify it in lore, and you can have it. I don't need Seattle game designers to tell me what a class can and cannot have. They rarely get it right anyway.

You did your homework, designed the next power you wanted, tweaked it, saved character points, and waited for the moment you could buy it. You could focus on ability scores for a while. Every player was a game designer, creating extraordinary powers for their characters. Everyone got the powers they wanted and worked how they wanted.

We were doing "5E" back in the 1980s with Champions, and it was a fun game. We did not have broken multiclassing, rangers that sucked, monks that sucked, people using action surge to double-cast fireball, or freakish warlock-paladin builds that created an entirely new fantasy class trope because of a broken set of rules interactions.

If we wanted "the game with fantasy classes" without superpowers, we played AD&D. These days, it is ADAD.

If we wanted fantasy superheroes, we played a superhero game that gave us all the options and was free of headaches.