Moving On

5E books are certainly not worth much on the secondary market. I'm trying to sell mine, and I'll be lucky to get a few dollars for each one. Wow, either these are so commonplace that everyone, even third-party sellers, has a literal ton of them, or everyone is dumping them right now and getting out of D&D. They aren't great "investments," let me tell you that.

Part of the reason for the drawdown of this part of my library is to save Tales of the Valiant. My 5E library is so bloated and obese that no edition of the game will survive against a more focused and fun game, and Dungeon Crawl Classics is breathing down its neck, along with GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. I'm not sure a generic 5E can compete with either, given my limited playtime, but I like ToV a lot. Things will be better when Player's Guide 2 arrives, but the hardcover for that is due in January 2026.

The specific will always beat the generic, and that is my case with ToV. If my "fantasy interest" lies in the gonzo fantasy genre,  the game that caters to that as its specialty will win over a generic role-playing game every time. Compared to ToV, DCC will consistently outperform it in terms of playtime and interest levels. The game gives me more "fun per minute" invested than 5E, by far.

The only generic fantasy game that could compete with ToV and DCC is Old School Essentials. This game is so simple that it takes nothing to support, so it does not take a considerable amount of "mind space" or "reading time" to enjoy. OSE is like clicking on YouTube and finding something interesting to watch, and the convenience factor is even higher than DCC. 5E takes a lot of support from online character creators, rules reference, subclass options, character builds, spells, and other "hard support" that it wants to take over all your hobby time and budget. 

That high built-in support requirement is a problem that will haunt 5E until people abandon the system. This was the same story in 4E and D&D 3.5E, and frankly, any game that Wizards designed.

If OSE does half of what 5E does, it still wins by default.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy falls in the same place, but the genre is "realistic fantasy." This one outshines a similar genre of games, such as Warhammer, Zweihander, Rolemaster, and numerous others. GURPS does all that easily, without requiring tons of chart support, and it can handle any genre within realistic fantasy. I can create anything from a realistic Warhammer to a realistic Conan with the same system, and achieve great results with minimal effort. Granted, GURPS is not a lightweight game, but in terms of its capabilities, it is very high, so the time invested is a multiplier to my enjoyment at the table.

GURPS gives me a high amount of fun per minute invested. OSE gives me a high amount of fun per zero time invested. Both of them are high-reward games. DCC is also close to OSE, but with a little more time needed for chart support. Still, DCC plays off the character sheet quickly, so once you get rolling, the amount of time required to support the game is very low.

With 5E, I am paying monthly fees to support character design software and constantly reading pages of fluff text that describe character abilities in the most page-filling format possible. Even ToV is horribly overwritten, just like 5E, where a power should have been described in a bullet point and one-line explanation, they will take a long paragraph or two to explain what a cleave does.

Just like in my library, the bloat will kill 5E for me. I'm trying to fight it as best I can.