Playing vs. Not Playing

The battle these days is between playing and not playing.

I will be a huge fan of a complicated game, such as 5E, Rolemaster, Palladium, GURPS, or any of the other, pore over and worship the books on my gaming shelf shrines, and never play the games. GURPS, I still manage to play among them all, but some are clearly shelf-worship.

So in walks Castles & Crusades. I put this game in a closet for a reason. It will kill the playtime of other games, most notably 5E, Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, and OSE. I like to read and cover those games, but C&C will just subsume and absorb all the playtime and attention that would have gone to them, and take it for itself. C&C is that good a game.

But I can play this. It only takes a 4x6" index card for a character sheet. A short list of spells and equipment, and I am good to go. I don't open the book when I play. There are no charts to reference, so special rules to look up; everything is handled nicely by the SIEGE Engine, and the game plays very smoothly while remaining expressive and maintaining detail and crunch.

The game plays any adventure, and is mostly math-compatible with any OSR, BX, 1E, 2E, or White Box game's adventures. For 3E and later adventures? Simply use C&C monsters and keep the adventure structure. For traps and challenges, use SIEGE Engine and best-guess damages, and the rest of the dangers. It isn't hard.

C&C has the same "pick up and play" factor as OSE or Shadowdark. Grab a character sheet and go. It is so easy to start, pick up, play, and put away again. Getting started again is near-zero effort. It is easy. Picking games that I can maintain and play is the difference between playing and not.

In contrast, logging into a character sheet program, fiddling with the build, printing out pages of character information, making sure all the points and choices are legal, sorting through options, programming in options that don't exist in the book, and doing that for each character in the group is so much work that it kills games for me. I have to stop and ask myself, "What am I doing?"

I will never be able to manage this for more than three characters. It will kill my game. At this point, I am better off developing my own game than wasting my time with someone's character sheet program, online or not. I will get as much done, even if I never finish programming a game.

And the game is highly hackable and moddable, even more than OSE. The structure of the game can be changed, the awards, the ability score modifiers, magic, spell points versus Vancian, the SIEGE Engine itself - everything can be modded. The CK Guide is a hacker's guide to the entire game, giving us the freedom to tweak and modify the game's engine to play exactly how we want.

Don't like the huge difference between Primary (12) and Secondary (18) target numbers? Introduce the approved option to create three levels for Primary (12), Secondary (15), and Tertiary (18) levels and smooth out the curve, while still keeping balance, but enhancing choice. It is slightly more in-depth, but it fixes a few "all or nothing" problems some feel the game has at lower levels.

Want to fix the game even more? Use the optional rules for secondary skills and feat-like advantages to further customize your character. Want a cleric with wilderness survival? Choose a survival skill as a skill, and all checks with that will be at a Primary level, modified by ability score and level, as usual.

Want a system of advantages and disadvantages? Use the game's existing "advantage" system for feat-like picks, and create penalizing "disadvantages" to buy off equally powerful "advantages," and you are done.

You can create a demonic corruption system with this, with a "must be evil" disadvantage (with self-control rolls based on WIS saves), balancing off a "demonic wings" advantage that grants flight. Pace these pairs out as corruption increases, and you are done with this system. In extreme cases, force them to dual-class with a caster and give them evil spells as "rewards." You can even dual-class later on, and if they are behind, force them to catch up before levelling begins as normal again. Just figure the current XP total versus the old, subtract the difference, and force them to level up the deficient caster class until it catches up.

A few small hacks save us hours of designing characters in other games, pages of printouts, custom code hacking into program data files (if it is even possible), and endless wrangling of points and build options. The time and energy saved by a hackable game like C&C mean more playtime and an easier return to the game.

And C&C does Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, Mystara, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Birthright, and all the classic settings equally well. There is no need to convert; all the classes and spells fit perfectly, and the monsters are there and fully ready to go. Just make a story and go. The red dragon attacks with the Orc mercenaries. You find a +2 warhammer and a fireball scroll. I have it all. All the boxes are checked. I am not converting a thing.

I am just picking up my character sheets and getting ready to play.

Part of the beauty of Castles & Crusades is forgetting all these other games exist. It sounds like a bad thing, but it isn't. You don't need any of them, their overly complicated systems, the endless crunch, the strict rules, the pedantic charts and tables, and the fragile structured builds. The differing interpretations of BX, White Box, 1E, and 2E are gone. The language of fantasy is standardized on one system. Nothing else is needed to play a fantasy game.

Just this game.

Mail Room: Player's Guide 2 (ToV)

The Player's Guide 2 was released today for backers, and I am enjoying this. More soon.

Off the Shelf: Castles & Crusades (Reforged)

There is a class of games where many players tire of all the rules, bloat, books, website character sheets, and drama, and just want a simple game that works.

Old School Essentials and Shadowdark are two of those games.

Castles & Crusades is another.

Even games like Dungeon Crawl Classics, while simple in theory, are a mess to play since it is a huge, disorganized, chaotic book with numerous tables to reference during play. OSRIC? It is not ideal, unless you are such a mega-fan of 1E that every little percentage modifier matters to you. Adventures Dark & Deep? Wonderful 1E clone, but again, why do we need all these rules and charts? Swords & Wizardry comes close to C&C, but C&C is the more modern game with leveled class abilities and unlocks.

Those modern-style classes with the leveled abilities and unlocks that go all the way to 24th level are the secret weapon of C&C. The SIEGE Engine throws away every chart, ability score check, and special saving throw for a rules-light, simplified system. You can play from a character sheet on a 4x6" index card without opening a book.

If you want more than what a traditional BX or 1E game will give you, and you want "new stuff every few levels" where the OSR refuses to unlock powers and abilities, then C&C is the game for you. This makes the game easier than BX, as expressive in character builds as 5E, and with the original 1E math. The game is a hybrid 3.5E without damage scaling, and, in play, feels exactly like AD&D.

C&C is a step-up game from OSE and Shadowdark, if you want more character detail, lower complexity, and higher-level campaign play.

And the game is OGL-free. Honestly, you can play with the pre-Reforged books and see very few differences; just a few names have changed, but everything else is exactly the same. Anyone with a Castles & Crusades book, of any edition, can play and CK a game.

Any OSR, BX, or 1E adventure can be used easily. The math, damage, and AC values are identical. If you like the OSE adventures and their "easy peasy" bulleted formatting, you can use those. You can play the crazy DCC adventures. You can play the classic AD&D adventures. You can play adventures written for Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry. All of it is usable.

And the game has built-in modding support. The CK guide is mostly a "hacking guide" for the game. Don't like the primary and secondary ability score system being so harsh with target numbers of 12 and 18? Introduce a tertiary attribute level for 18 and have a secondary target number of 15.

This way, if I want my human cleric to have primaries of CHR, CON, and WIS (12), I can set DEX and STR as secondaries (15) and INT as my tertiary (18). If I want to force open doors or balance along a ledge, that middling target number solves a lot of problems people have with the system. My cleric is not so helpless with physical feats, and another reason to not play is gone.

Want feat-like "advantages"? There is a system for that, and you can set the rate of gaining them, or ignore the system entirely. You can create custom advantages, port in 5E feats, or do anything you want.

Porting in 5E races? This is super simple if you use the advantage system to cover the feat choices, and you can use the 2014-style ability score modifiers as-is. I can have any 5E race I want in my game instantly.

Pulp adventures? We got a SIEGE Engine game for that, too, with Amazing Adventures. This covers modern and science fiction gaming nicely. BYO starship combat system, though, or just use another game's starship combat system to handle it all.

And the multi-class system in this game lets you build anything you can imagine. It is a bit advanced, but the flexibility of combining any of the classes to build something new gives me near infinite options, and it beats 5E's system handily.

C&C will kill 5E anytime I get it out, so I am trying to give ToV a chance; it's currently in one of my closets. However, ToV is 5E, and it requires character designers and all sorts of technical hacking to get it to do what I want. Do I want a special character race? I need to enter it into Shard, set the values to match, perhaps create custom feat entries in the software, and do all this work for just one choice.

C&C will just "do what I want" with zero effort. I just write it down on my character sheet, make a few adjustments to the feats I want ported in, and it all works easily.

With the time I have for games dwindling as I get older, and my patience for systems that just take "too much effort to play," having games like C&C and OSE handy is the difference between "playing a game" and "playing nothing." I would rather be playing than flipping through books to find the rules for every little thing.

I can pick up a 4x6" character sheet on an index card and play without needing a book open.

Very few other games can do that.

Games, Not Worldviews

One troubling trend in many hobbies is the adoption of a game, movie, cartoon, or other media property as a worldview. You get feelings like, "If this is okay in D&D, then it is fine in real life." If the media is well known, the fandom around it mutates and becomes justification for real-world worldviews and potentially actions outside the game.

None of us carries around longswords, but you get this self-justification of real-world violence through justification carried over from games and movies. Well, if Captain America would do this, then I should...

I swear, we are back to the Superman thing in the 1950s, where kids are jumping off roofs with pillowcases tied around their shoulders. Only today is it seen as perfectly fine for adults to adopt superhero justifications for their real-world actions.

This is the danger of "identity gaming," where the lines get blurred between fantasy and reality, and some cannot handle this, and fantasy becomes reality. You even see this careless corporate "you in the game" marketing through art in many of today's games that "looks like us" and pushes the idea that the people in the game are modern people thrust into a fantasy world.

Any time I see these "modern people" in "fantasy worlds" in game art, it is a red flag to me. This is the most toxic form of marketing in gaming, and it needs to be called out.

I prefer games that show dwarves as dwarves, elves as elves, and that have an internal logic to the world, and an attempt to make the world the game shows as different from our own. It takes a lot of creative control and discipline to maintain an internal logic and consistency in a game world.

Some of the newer cozy games do this well, and should be commended for maintaining that consistent worldbuilding and careful crafting of an experience.

If a game takes special care to craft an entire Elven (or rabbit, hedgehog, or other cozy backgrounds) culture and world, and gives us that to explore and uncover, that is remarkable. If another game tells us, "Elven culture is actually a parallel for this real-world culture," that is so low-effort and dumb that it's another red flag.

Plopping modern people, hairstyles, clothing, and cultures into a fantasy setting is lazy, and it tells me the designers do not care. It is a clear sign of the grift that sales and marketing are more important than telling a story through worldbuilding and creating a place other than our own.

Why do I need to build a world and tell a story of another place in time?

I can just plop the real world into a fantasy setting and paint people in Steampunk clothing with magic coming out of their hands. Let's throw costplay face paint, Tiefling horns, or other comic convention props on them for good measure. Look! Fantasy makeup equals worldbuilding!

Harry Potter lies at the root of this "identity gaming" movement, setting up a generation of kids who feel entitled to "live in a mixed world of fantasy and reality." They never give up their childhood, and they live lives in which youth escapes them, leaving them angry and unsatisfied with life.

Harry Potter was a net negative for childhood psychology and adult development. The books and story are fine, but how this was turned into a corporate franchise trapped a generation in eternal childhood forever.

When I enter a fantasy world, I want the world to mean more than the modern day. I want to make mistakes in the world's internal logical consistency, to be called out for not knowing the local culture, and to have that "fish out of water" feeling. I never want to enter a fantasy world, adopt modern attitudes, and have those attitudes affirmed and reinforced by that world's culture and belief system.

I want to escape from this world when I play fantasy.

I want a world that makes me feel like I am "somewhere else."

Not "here and now."

My Games for 2026

I have my most-played shelves set for 2026, and they could use a few more passes and minor improvements, but they are primarily set up for fun. These are the games on my shelves to start the year.

GURPS. No game does characters right like GURPS. The realistic combat is excellent. There are no classes; you improve your character however you want. The game works for any genre or world, and it is one of the best to play in settings where "you have no game for it."

It does more than that; it can make worlds you dismissed or feel are lacking take on an entirely new feeling once you use GURPS as the rules to run the world. Traveller, the Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, Star Trek, Conan, Star Frontiers, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire, and many other universes can be transformed into a fantastic layer of detailed, gritty, incredible realism with outstanding gameplay once you convert them to GURPS.

So, even if you do "own the game," GURPS will do the setting better. Feel a "step removed" from the setting, like in a 2d6, BX, d100, or other rules-light game? Want to see Traveller in an entirely new light? Switch to GURPS and be instantly immersed in the setting. At times, switching to GURPS feels like putting on a VR headset and becoming immersed in the world.

GURPS does all of my heavy lifting and replaces so many games. If I am not looking for a specific throwback class-and-level experience, I will use GURPS instead and save myself a lot of time and effort by supporting only one game. The character builds make this game worth investing time in, and there are two excellent character designers, one of whom has a Linux-native option.

And GURPS, once you are fluent, is fantastic fun, and a simple game at heart.

Tales of the Valiant is the best version of 2014 D&D you can get your hands on, and by what I see the community playing, the 2014 edition of D&D 5E is the one to stick with. ToV is fixed, patched, easy to learn, clean, and a straightforward version of the game without the OGL. It is 100% compatible with all of my 2014-2024 third-party books, subclasses, classes, adventures, and expansion content. That era is the most important, since the 2014 version was the best supported version of the game by far.

Better off, ToV has incredible support through Kobold Press, and the library you can build with just this one source is fantastic. You can build a library of thousands of spells and monsters, and have dozens of full-length adventures and campaigns to embark upon. Kobold Press supports 5E better than Wizards of the Coast supports D&D.

And Tales of the Valiant does not go out of its way to anger old-school players. Humanoid monsters are still in the monster vault, and all the classics are here. If you need the few "product identity" monsters of 2014 D&D, pull them in if you want, but my worlds are fine without them.

As an added bonus, the publishing licensing is much better here, and I don't have to deal with Wizards of the Coast or support them if I have objections to their direction or business model, or feel like dealing with their censorship in the 2024 edition. A "clean room" 5E is all I want to play the game, mod, and use the books I bought during the 5E heyday.

Also, Shard Tabletop is my character creation tool, and it's very moddable for custom content. If D&D is Windows and Microsoft, ToV is like Linux for 5E.

I am following this game's crowdfunding campaigns. If I want a class-and-level system in a modern 5E implementation, Tales of the Valiant is the best choice for 2026.

Forget most of your OSR games, play Adventures Dark and Deep for the best first edition experience out there today. You get it all, the kitchen sink, the backyard, the den, the basement addition, and the RV in the driveway with this game. We get new classes, classic monsters, old-school gameplay, and it is written by an old-school Greyhawk historian.

If you want to wade through the arcane tables, modifiers, and all the fiddly bits of classic first edition gameplay, this is your game. If you wish to play rules-light? Look elsewhere, like Swords & Wizardry. Weapon speed finally matters! The parts of 1E that Gary wanted to matter are all here, improved, and recreated with a loving amount of grognard attention and care.

All the classic monsters are here, the demons and devils, classic alignment, descending AC, encumbrance mattering, and anything you would ever want in a game that plays exactly like the classic 1E books played. Combat is significantly improved. The Monster book is massive, the size of a phone book! I love this game in many ways, and like GURPS, it immerses me in the first edition. Not the world (like GURPS would), but the rules and the feeling of the original game of the 1980s.

We are getting an expansion book on Kickstarter this month, so the future for this game is bright. Every first edition and OSR adventure is compatible, so you will have no shortage of things to do. This is the other game I am following crowdfunding for.

We also have a fantastic resource on Cthulhu mythos in 1E games by the same publisher, along with an excellent Wuxia expansion. Of all the "mega games" in the OSR, there are three: Adventures Dark & Deep, Castles & Crusades, and ACKS II. Of those, this game offers the best first-edition experience and expands upon everything.

Many are swearing by this game as the 1E to play in 2026, and I would agree. If you feel OSE is drifting away from its original inspirations, feel the OSR is diverging and going off in a thousand directions, this is an excellent home for you. This is a fantastic game, immersing you into a complete first edition experience, and it has everything I remember plus more. 

There is so much to explore and experience here.

My Palladium games are on my most-played shelves, just for nostalgia. I still love these books, and they bring back memories of the 1990s and some of my best games ever. If just for the memories, these games are good times for me.

Rifts and all my SDC Palladium games have a charm to them I can't escape. Are they perfect? No. Do they bring back memories? Yes. Does GURPS do a better job with the genres it covers? In most cases, yes, but I still love them as much as I do any of my 1990s games.

Other games nearby include Dungeon Crawl Classics, my Without Number games, Rolemaster, and Mutant Epoch. Old School Essentials and Swords & Wizardry are also on my shelves. I am keeping my Cepheus games out and putting Traveller away for a while. Traveller is epic, but a bit big for me to play. I would rather drill down on characters with GURPS for hard science fiction, or keep it lighter with Stars Without Number.

The big games last year? Draw Steel, Daggerheart, and Nimble? All lost in the shuffle. They did not grab me, or they felt endlessly derivative of that "too many cooks" fantasy genre. I don't have any of them out currently, and I have seen some critique the "everything and the kitchen sink" fantasy genre these games stumble into. Nimble, I still keep close, but the others are in storage. Still, there is no reason for 5E alternatives when I have so many 5E books and ToV to enjoy them with. I have 10 years of books, why play something else?

SBRPG is also on the table for this year, but not in the form people may be familiar with.

Kickstarter: Book of Fell Wisdom (Adventures Dark & Deep)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brwgames/adventures-dark-and-deep-book-of-fell-wisdom

I like Adventures Dark & Deep a lot. As an expanded, reimagined first-edition game, it is one of the best we have outside of OSRIC. We are getting a new book this year: basically, everything that didn't make it into the ADAD tomes we have, plus some of the PDF-exclusive evil classes the creator put out. And here is a list from the notification pager:

• Clerical servants of demon lords
• Necromancers
• Witches
• Alchemy
• Ley Lines
• Demiplanes
• New spells
• Followers for high-level characters
• Courtly intrigue
• Generational play

I am looking forward to this one a lot, since ADAD is the de facto new standard of first-edition gaming, expanded and beautifully presented in two massive tomes of first-edition goodness. Outside of Old School Essentials, this is one of the best OSR games out there, well worth your attention, and it captures the 1E vibe perfectly.

The Kickstarter should be happening in the next week, sometime from what I hear, so put this one on your radar, and if you haven't checked this out, please do so!

The Encrapification of the Forgotten Realms

https://www.enworld.org/threads/forgotten-realms-geographic-changes.702914/page-2#post-9279257

This thread came up on Facebook, and a thread linked to this EN World post, where the designers of D&D around the jump to 3.5E, sliced the Forgotten Realms up with scissors and shrunk the map.

Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, 3E, Page 29

The new map feels more inspired by video games, and shrinking the map to make it more accessible and closely connected. The old world was massive, with plenty of room to "fill in the blanks" where I could drop in my own kingdoms, cities, characters, history, dungeons, bad guys, and stories.

This was a world where most of the chaos and evil flowed from the lands of the dead, the wastes, and the dragons and demons, or this hellish scar cutting through the center of the civilized world. Everyone needed to be on guard, or else the fragile lattice of civilization could be crushed by the forces of darkness. Nothing was close by, so the heroes needed to answer the call.

But the best part of the old world was that room to fill in the blanks. I had room to make my own Underdark, drop it into an area, and create surface kingdoms to deal with the threat in a sandboxed story area that was Realms-like, wholly inspired by it, yet my own creation.

The NPCs and books never interfered with my games, since I had the room to create my own setting anywhere within the existing one. The new world? Forget making my own cities and stories, I was forced to use the published ones. I could not put a dungeon on the map without checking what was already there, so as not to accidentally connect them.

Grand History of the Realms, 3.5E, Page 44

The most notable loss was the massive wasteland (The Anauroch Desert), where most of the chaos and monsters originated, which divided east from west and was lost forever. I knew there was a change here, but I never realized it was this dramatic. Frankly, the new map is crap, and it is not even the same world I remembered from AD&D 2E. Everything is so close, covered in a book or video game, and adjacent that help is just a short trip away.

No wonder my memories of campaigning in this world feel so different than the games and books of today. The world became a shrunken-down World of Warcraft map, smaller than a US state map, where a massive capital city is just a 10-minute walk from the furthest borderlands. Orc invasion at the border fort? Somebody, please, walk over to the capital and tell the king.

Our world was a fully realized AD&D 2E game, immense and everywhere was explorable and full of mysteries and my own history. The world was as massive as the stories we told inside it. A demon king could have an empire in that desert, and it could sow chaos everywhere it touched.

I have no room in the new world. No wonder the GMNPC problem got worse as time went on; the vast area of chaos was cut out of the world, and every Harper and good guy lives in the neighborhood. Need help? Someone from the next town over will be by shortly; you can all sit in the inn while Elminster and the Harpers ride in to save the day again.

They are just down the road.

Did players complain that the map was too big, and thus "not adventurable?" Did DMs lose their imagination and complain about all the "blank space" on the map with "nothing in it?" Did we all collectively lose our minds and ability to create new stuff? Were we only meant to "recreate the events of the video games" with the D&D rules?

This new 3.5E version of Faerun is some mutant demiplane created by the video games, and it is not the real Forgotten Realms at all. This is the moment the Forgotten Realms died and became a corporate tool, meant to push book and adventure sales. The world told us, "We have no room for your ideas anymore." By the time we reached 4E, the massive changes continued, and the Underdark collapsed, leaving enormous holes in the world, figuratively, mentally, and physically. It is a fantasy setting wearing a skinsuit, calling itself something it is not.

The old world was a literate place, huge and filled with my own ideas. It feels more like The Lord of the Rings than it does an "8-bit console RPG."

The old world was a real fantasy world.

The new world isn't.

Just a Small Suggestion....

I watched the Stranger Things finale last night, and a few thoughts....

The final battle played out like most any 5E fight: the party runs around spamming attacks, no one dies, and the big bad boss goes down in seven minutes flat with someone's mom delivering repeated final blows that never get the job done each time.

Keep making attacks, mom, and rolling that d20, and stop rolling low damage!

I rolled another one. Is that bad?

No minions in that fight? That was a terrible DM. No wonder the boss got rolled.

More characters should have died. There was minimal sacrifice for what they did, and it makes it all seem meaningless. Also, the epilogue was far, far, far too long. By the time I was satisfied with the ending and felt the series should end, I had another 25 minutes of the show to get through, which is longer than some Star Wars streaming shows' episodes.

If this were 1989, they should have been playing GURPS by now. Or WHRFP. Or Cyberpunk 2013. Or the Star Wars d6 system. Or Shadowrun. Or Robotech. Or Paranoia. Or Rolemaster. Or even Battletech.

And AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989; the new kids should have gotten the latest books as a gift.

They should have gone to the party with those girls after graduation. Stop playing those games, grow up, and live your life. Find a girl and start a family. That hit me the wrong way, since I wish I had. Playing D&D after you are 20 does not set you up for a fulfilling life. That moment hit me like a bad toothache.

Where was the original Nintendo NES? And the Genesis? Come on, this was 1989! SMB3 was released this year. The Game Boy, too. Sim City. The C64 was still around, too, and one of the most popular home computers. It is a sin not to highlight how video gaming started to push D&D out of the mainstream.

Did the final episode do anything for D&D? Not really. It leaned too hard into the game at the end, and it felt like the series put the game metaphorically on the shelf for good. This wasn't a D&D show, but in the end, that is what it turned into. It is weaker for not being itself first, and turning into a D&D nostalgia throwback show.

Some of the characters disappeared.

No more of this "hugging the bad guy" stuff, please. Every superhero movie in 2025 had a misunderstood villain in there that just needed a hug. One of the bad guys ended up like that, and then he was gone, never to be seen again. What? Did I miss something?

The military should have been the Terminator, and if they caught a character, it should have been the end of that character. The military was used for too much cheap suspense that never amounted to anything. We only had one military-related character elimination, and I saw that one coming. The assassins in the first season were far more tonally terrifying and threatening.

It wasn't a terrible final episode, but films like Super 8 did this concept better and in a tighter timeline.

After this was finished, I watched a few Blake Edwards films to reset my palette.

It wasn't bad, but it didn't live up to the moment for me.