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.

BackerKit: OSRIC 3

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/mythmere-games/osric-3

A new, non-OGL, easier-to-learn, cleaner, laid-out version of OSRIC? Closer to AD&D than 2.0? Ascending AC options? No AI art?

Made and printed in the USA?

Done by the Swords & Wizardry team?

Sign me up!

...Without Number SRDs

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/473939/worlds-without-number-system-reference-document

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/452790/cities-without-number-system-reference-document

So we have CC0 public-domain SRDs for Worlds Without Number (fantasy) and Cities Without Number (cyberpunk)? And I hear we have one coming for Ashes Without Number (post-apocalyptic)?

What a fantastic creator and gift to the community.

Thank you.

Mutant Epoch vs. Mutant Crawl Classics

Mutant Epoch (ME) is a spoiler game for me. While I love Mutant Crawl Classics (MCC) and the whole Zocchi-dice post-apocalyptic vibe, ME does a level of detail in characters, gear, and loot that satisfies me in a way only the classic Aftermath game did, but with a more straightforward core system.

MCC does a lot right, and it is an excellent game. Is it the king of post-apocalyptic play?

For me, I have two systems that I played back in the 1980s, Gamma World and Aftermath. Gamma World was the first, and we only started playing this in the 2nd edition. We owned the first for a while, but the 2nd caught our imagination. The characters we had carried the setting for us, but the rules were okay, and the fight to survive never really grabbed us in this world.

The 2nd Edition captivated us with its fantasy themes. It was sort of a mistake, since while they were fun at first, the fantasy elements struck us as "imitation future D&D" after a while, and the novelty wore off. They had dragons, fairies, orcs, gnolls, and all the standard fantasy trope approximations. The characters in this edition were interesting, but they still lacked something.

MCC feels closest in spirit to Gamma World 2nd Edition.

Classic Aftermath elevates the difficulty of the world, layering on the inhabitants, where even small things like a lack of food and water, temperature extremes, disease, booby traps, and collapsing structures can be just as deadly as a random wandering mutant or bandit gang. ME does the same thing, plus a whole lot more. The entire environment is a fun sandbox, a dangerous place waiting to be explored to find relics, loot, weapons, supplies, and lost technology.

How do you mitigate the danger? Skills, mutations, gear, and imaginative play. Classic "sandbox-style" 2D post-apocalyptic survival games, such as Fallout 1 and 2, Wasteland, and other games, come to mind. The later Fallout games were less about survival and the world, and more about collecting weapons and armor for 3d fights. Part of the fun is surviving in a deadly sandbox world, and dealing with factions and monsters comes on top of all that.

MCC is a softer game, where the characters are more prominent, and the environment serves as a backdrop for stories and tales of adventure. You are not using skills and gear as much to mitigate world danger, and that shifts into the background. Story and combat are more crucial to the overall gameplay experience. Like the assumed fantasy world in Dungeon Crawl Classics, the setting is not as important as the characters. Some of the tropes, such as vehicle combat, are not well handled by the rules.

Any of Goodman Games' products share a similar theme, where character and power advancement are primary, and world and gear advancement are secondary, a characteristic also found in 5E.

This is one trait of modern games that I dislike. They deemphasize gear and wealth, dismissing the world as a dangerous, living sandbox. They are "power collection and character advancement" games, intended for use in "any generic world," which are half a game at best. These generic "any worlds" are boring, your typical D&D generic kingdom, with zero weight and nowhere worlds offering no low-level game or distinction from anywhere else.

ME's collection of characters, races, gear, hazards, monsters, and dangers creates its own world. It is a lot like the psychotic, insane, crazy world we played in our Aftermath game, where laser-armed killer ATM machines and bears with hand grenades tried to kill players constantly. It was almost a Looney Tunes level of violence where feral plague-zombie tigers and intelligent gorillas roamed a destroyed office building looking for the last can of beans, and the entire building teetered on the verge of collapse as killer robots patrolled the streets with M-60 machineguns while riding on M-48 tanks.

Intelligent rats wearing saucepans as helmets built disease-tipped crossbows in the sewers. The rivers were filled with rad-piranhas and electric eels. Bandits would randomly fire mortars at you. Cockroaches the size of dogs would try to jump on your face from 10 meters away. Thinking computers with 64K of RAM wanted to kill all living beings. If it was good loot, it was booby trapped with enough explosives to wipe out the city block.

Why?

We were kids. The game had those things. Therefore, those things went into the game.

Turn off your brain. This is fun stuff.

And ME is that game, but with even more stuff. Give people stuff, mutations, monsters, factions, high-powered weapons, bandoleers filled with cans of beans, and scarce resources, and you have yourself a game. Weak characters? Let them find good weapons. And ME is more straightforward than Aftermath, and gives you a crazier, more insane hit.

ME is also a game that works on a lower level. Where Aftermath had mass battle rules that required a character to find 5,000 rounds of 7.62mm NATO, ME is more personal, with armies and settlements fighting with primitive, easy-to-craft, archaic weapons and armor. Crossbows and volleyed archery fire are the norm. If a community had primitive gunsmithing, it would be black powder weapons or  cowboy guns

ME does the setting so much better, and the characters are much more detailed and interesting. Archaic combat remains critically important, and bullets serve as a form of currency. Finding a semi-safe haven to trade and rest is just as much of a challenge as trying to find salvage in dangerous, monster-infested ruins. This is the same hit that Aftermath gave me, where characters must survive in the deadly sandbox the game creates.

ME digs in deep, and even a box of paperclips can be bartered or used as scrap for item fabrication. ME also goes expansive, like dimensional travel in the expansion book. ME also goes wide, with characters that can be created from the least powerful to mutant combat gods. ME also does surface, with simple, straight human characters being some of the easiest to play. The game is similar to the first or second edition of Gamma World, with all the components included, and features greater depth and detail in character development and creation.

MCC is a solid game that complements DCC content well. At times, MCC feels like a DCC expansion book.

Mutant Epoch is everything classic Gamma World was, but it does it much better. Given how much I love classic Gamma World, the amount of fun and new content in ME eclipses that game and makes everything so much easier. The game appears complicated, but it actually has only two core mechanics.

The SV/DV combat system, a d100, roll-low, dirt-simple to-hit system.

The Hazard/Difficulty Chart, a d100 ability score versus difficulty rating system, is equally straightforward.

In play, the game is easier than a B/X system.

Character creation takes a little longer than most d20 systems, but it is far easier than those found in Rolemaster, GURPS, or other games with extensive customization options. Some characters, like straightforward humans, are on par with B/X in terms of complexity. The rest of the books are lists of stuff to use in character creation, gear, or referee guidelines. The game has more charts than actual rules.

MCC is more family-friendly than ME, as ME delves into mature subjects. If I were playing this in a game store or with my family, I would choose MCC. With a private group that does not care if they offend each other, and the safety sheets are tossed into the recycling bin? I would go all the way with ME. Why not? I am an adult, and I am allowed to choose what I want to see in entertainment. The same people who gush over Terrifier are getting upset at what happens to their D&D characters.

The post-apocalyptic world is neither clean, happy, nor friendly. If you look at some of the places in our world that are currently ravaged by war, famine, or hopeless corruption and under the heel of dictators, ME seems tame compared to these places in our world right now. Live in a TikTok and social media bubble of fakeness, and the real world will come along and shock you. No amount of supporting an emoji or responding to engagement farming will change this world or make it go away. That same terrible, destroyed, war-ravaged world of ours will be there tomorrow, and you will be seeking dopamine hits to try to ignore it for another day.

There is a moral argument against escapism. Real people are suffering.

There is a survival need for the same. Escapism is how we deal with our fears in a safe environment.

The truth lies in an equilibrium.

Mutant Epoch is the modern-day Aftermath.

Mutant Crawl Classics is the new Gamma World.

Both are fantastic games, but I grew up under the shadow of a mushroom cloud in the 1980s. And a fear of grenade-throwing bears, ice-covered lakes filled with piranhas, and killer ATMs with laser beams.  We had a to-scale paper cut-out of an M-48 tank, scaled to one meter to the inch, with a fully rotatable turret, that we moved on a one-meter hexagonal grid. Aftermath was our game.

And back in those days, we hoarded cans of beans and bricks of government cheese and butter. We were ready.

And Mutant Epoch is ready, too.

Mutant Epoch: Die Roll Modifiers?

Mutant Epoch has a few rules regarding combat, ability, and skill checks that threw me off balance when I read them. I assumed this was a standard 1d100 game, attributes are directly rolled against with a +10 per skill level modifier, a normal -80 to +80 difficulty modifier, and all that.

The game is nothing like your average 1d100 game.

First up, I could never find Strike Value in the game, and I thought the statement:

Most humans have a base value of 01-50.

This meant (to my confused brain) that the value was somehow calculated, resulting in a number between 1 and 50. How do I calculate it, then? This value is listed on the Rank Advancement Table (Table TME-1-21, page 34) and in the Strike Value column. A value of 01-50 indicates that any roll of 1 to 50 hits, modified by skill, ability, and other factors.

It isn't, a value of 01-50 means a 50% to-hit base. It is that simple.

Next up, skills. Skills are not ability plus 10 per level as a base chance of success. Many skills have custom rules, derived scores, and tables that are rolled on the Hazard Checks chart (Table TME-3-1, page 118). Difficulties are rated on a letter value, from A to M, with A being the easiest difficulty.

Skill levels never give a bonus to succeed, such as a +10 modifier. 

Skill levels only lower the rated difficulty. If a padlock is a C to pick and an E to smash off, that is the padlock's rated difficulty. The skill Pick Lock, for every level, reduces the difficulty. To smash off, that is just a STR roll on the hazard chart versus an E. Do you have special tools, such as a sledgehammer or a pry bar, that could help? Lower the difficulty by one or two levels. Are you under stress, facing challenging circumstances, working under a tight deadline, or operating in the dark? Don't apply a negative modifier after the fact; let the chart do the work and raise difficulty by one or more levels.

Setting a difficulty letter protects you as the referee. You won't be accused of "massaging the difficulty" artificially, as in Star Frontiers or Basic Roleplaying, if players have a 90% chance to open a lock. You, as the referee, want a little more drama in the roll and slap a -20% modifier on it to make it spicy and give them a chance to fail. This occurs frequently in percentage systems.

Nope, that lock was a C difficulty 900 years ago; it remains a C today, and it will continue to be a C in the future before the latch rusts and the lock falls off the door. Are you working under challenging circumstances? Okay, now it is a D.

The referee's job is made incredibly easy by this.

This is also supported many times in the Quick Start Rules' adventure, which supports difficulty A through E, and the A-E range becomes our "beginning adventurer" difficulty range:

Whoever is operating the rudder must make a perception-based type B hazard check.

...who must make a type B agility-based hazard check to side-step the block...

...anyone bitten by this dog must make a type C endurance-based hazard check or succumb to paralysis...

Perception, resistance rolls, and ability checks? They are all rated on the A through M scale and rolled on the chart, with no exceptions when utilizing a characteristic for a roll. If something is a flat chance, such as "the guard has a 10% chance of being in this room," then it is indeed 10%. If it has anything to do with a skill or ability score? Use the chart.

You are not rolling against your scores or modifying the d100 roll based on arbitrary difficulty. The referee says, "Give me a B strength check," and you roll on the chart. If a skill could apply to the situation, or something makes the check more challenging, lower or raise the letter; do not modify the roll. Do you have excellent lockpicks that lower the difficulty by one level? Fine, knock difficulty down one.

I am not poring over a skill difficulty chart and going, average +0%, in low light -10%, under stress -10%, wounded -20%, double the time taken +20%, and so on.

Does a character with the Pick Locks skill have a terrible Accuracy score? The chance will be lower, but the difficulty is still the same. However, as the referee, you have an easy job since you are simply rating tasks, barriers, actions, and outcomes on a difficulty level from A to M, and the charts in each skill give a lot of guidance and suggestions on how to set this.

In 99% of gameplay, a referee can set a difficulty level and lower it by one for every skill level a character can apply to the task, while raising it for negative factors.

The game really is that simple.

What I like about it is that the challenge ratings exist not only within the characters but also in the world. That D strength check to force open the grate is D for anyone in the world. In a game like Basic Roleplaying, characters with a 90% skill level can walk around, and it's assumed that they can handle 90% of the problems in the world. Yes, you can simply assign that sewer grate a "tough" rating and apply a -40% modifier for everyone, but there is a more elegant and straightforward solution: rating the rate a D and moving on.

I no longer care about the 20% or 90% skill level characters and what modifier to put on the task. I am not massaging the numbers to make it easier or harder. The sewer grate is a D.

The character's ability scores, skill level, and chart will determine the rest.

It is a "D."

The only time you manually adjust a number up or down, such as in a percentage-based game, is with Strike Value, which is based on special combat modifiers and the target's defensive value. Running combat and calculating SV is the only time you need to do math, and 90% of the dice rolls will result in an easy SV minus DV. The DVs in the sample adventure are typically kept on the 5s or 10s, so the math is trivially simple.

One might think that Mutant Epoch is an incredibly complex game, but it isn't.

However, there are only two core systems to understand. The 1d100 SV versus DV combat system and the A-M difficulty versus ability score system. Damage and injury are like any other game, as damage reduces endurance. Armor reduces the chance of being hit. The game is no more complicated than B/X D&D, just using a 1d100 instead of a 1d20.

The only complexity lies in random character generation, but the charts are designed to provide a unique, unpredictable, and enjoyable experience each time. Some character types use more rules, such as mutations and special abilities, making them suitable for more advanced players. The game is aware of this and weights the charts according to different player experience levels.

If you want a straightforward character, play a generic human to learn the rules.

When you start wanting more depth, play a mutant, cyborg, or characters with a bit more rule complexity. And character types exist beyond those with even more depth. Any ARPG player knows that certain character types require a deeper understanding of special rules and play styles, while others are simpler to play.

Even AI chatbots, when I asked them how the game plays, outright lied to me, saying "attribute plus ten per skill level" as the default skill and characteristic check method. I had to challenge the AI on it, and it groveled and acted confused when I did. When I confronted the AI with the actual rule and the actual page, it backpedaled and apologized.

This is the danger of AI.

The system is so enthusiastic and positive when selling an outright lie or fabrication that you take it as the truth. Companies want to "sell" their system as an "information authority" when all they are selling is a repackaged search engine that relies on munged data, rather than someone sitting there with a book in hand, pointing to what was written on a page. And the system will "sell" you so hard on a wrong answer, using positive wording and "hey, buddy" language, that you won't question the result. Additionally, if you pay for the service, there is even less likelihood that you will question it.

The AI was so optimistic and excited that it could provide me with the wrong answer.

It almost convinced me this was the way the game was played.

To many, 1d100 + 10/skill level will be the way they play this game.

And they will be wrong.

But they won't care.

Because "AI is always right."

Mutant Epoch: Comparison

I can see why Mutant Epoch (ME) has a cult-like following; the game has a unique look and style, a "freak" art style that reminds me of 1970s underground comics. It is not slick, and the proportions are oddly off-kilter, but that leads to a style that gives you an impression of a "world that isn't like ours." Too slick art, a few notable, hyper-realistic fantasy artists, would break the immersion. The game looks like "the best artist in high school's notebook." Not the most realistic, but the coolest.

One hardcover is a 200-page solo adventure. What? Nobody does this.

Some hardcovers are the size of phone books. They are packed with ideas; this isn't filler, paragraphs of fluff-text, or art-filled borders. We have world books, expansions, adventures, character options, and a game that feels infinite in a relatively small campaign space and library.

Where classic D&D subsumes and turns fantasy tropes, this does for pop culture, 90s comic books, and post-apocalyptic genres. Modern D&D no longer does that; it has abandoned Appendix N and exists only as commentary on the last 10 years of pop-culture fantasy and wannabe anime dressed in comic-convention cosplay.

Mutant Epoch picks up where 1990s comic books and Heavy Metal left off.

There is no default assumption of how a character looks. Some games go cartoony and round-faced, almost like Disney art. Others stick to standard fantasy tropes. Some are one artist's style, and this one falls into that category, too. Some are old-school blends. Mutant Epoch has no "standard look." You can be attractive or a complete freak with two arms off one side of your body, and horns growing off the other. You can be a soldier or a superhero. You can be a monster. You can be a robot, cyborg, or android.

Different character types have various levels of play complexity.

The game this compares to is Mutant Crawl Classics. But where MCC feels like transposing a post-apocalyptic world into the Dungeon Crawl Classic rules, and assuming you can fill in that gonzo post-ruin flavor, ME forces your hand, and you get the gonzo world written into every character option and rule. Both games rely on the adventures to fill in the flavor. MCC relies more on spectacle and the "wow" of what the adventure writers can imagine, and like DCC, it deemphasizes things like gear lists and survival for extraordinary mutant powers and godlike AIs.

MCC also does not feel like it has a default world, other than a tribal existence with lost knowledge and neon-colored skies. The game leaves the world up to you, and like DCC, it foregoes an equipment list and leaves that all to you. I like using Mutant Future to fill in the gaps with this game.

Eliminating shopping and the collection of gold is a hallmark of DCC and MCC, and in that regard, it is like 5E.

ME is an actual post-apocalyptic game, with survival rules, scarce gear, and a variety of systems all colliding to create a world. It feels heavily inspired by classic games such as Aftermath. There is a core system, a host of optional options, divergent systems that work together, and a collision of character types that create a unique, visually unappealing but entirely compelling world. ME is very close to Aftermath's world and feeling.

But Aftermath is a very technical game, almost a post-apocalyptic survival guide rewritten into a role-playing game. It lacks the fun and style of Mutant Epoch. You don't get diverse character types, a merging of technology and human life, or a complete evolution through mutations.

The low-level world in Aftermath is solid and something I keep coming back to. Its barter-based economy, which relies on seasonal farming for populations to survive, is exactly like the one in ME.

Mutant Epoch delivers a modern post-apocalyptic game that destroys other games in the genre. Even the classic Gamma World, closest to ME in tone, fails to measure up to ME. Gamma World feels too clean and written for kids, sanitizing the post-ruin world to turn it into "alternate D&D with laser pistols." Gamma World never really had a society for us; it was more a fantasy plus survival game, with the rules laid out.

The later editions of Gamma World began to embrace the mutant and freakish side of the game, but the original was very human-centric and tame, as evidenced by the cover art of the first edition. Gamma World became a poster child of TSR's mismanagement, never really finding itself. The game died on the vine and has never been as popular as the fantasy options since.

Another game Mutant Epoch feels close to is classic Rifts, minus the magic and MDC systems. I hate comparing the game to Rifts, but ME feels like it delivers better on what the average "world" is like, more than Rifts. Despite the flavored location books, I have no idea what the average "life in the ruins" life is like in Rifts; I still have no clue what "average life" looks like in the Rifts world.

With ME, what the world looks and feels like is baked into every picture, and I instantly get transported there when I open a book.

Another game that gets the low-level world is Mutant Future. This world is a typical medieval fantasy world of mutants and different species. Guards have crossbows, and carts may use salvaged modern tires. People farm the land, and the "lost places" are dangerous "no-go" zones. The world is feudal with kingdoms, fiefdoms, and lands. Mutant Future has the game world that Gamma World lost, and that MCC needs.

I want the prices for mutated pack animals and carts, bits of salvaged technology, crossbows, and suits of plate armor. I need the statistics for boats and fortifications. I want the price of rations and medical supplies. Mutant Future is a big part of almost every other game here, since it fills in many missing pieces.

Mutant Epoch owns them all. The library is vast, but the expansions are not filled with collectors' pap and fluff. The Quick Start rules are the heart of the game (minus the equipment list, found in the full rules), and the book is still helpful as a quick reference guide and simple set of starting options for new players. The books are split 50-50 on rules and bestiaries versus adventures and gazetteers. Only the core rulebook is needed, and the quick-start rules are nice.

Mutant Epoch is turning into my go-to post-apocalyptic game.

Freak & D: The Mutant Game

D&D isn't one game anymore.

It is a mutant mix of everything.

You get groups that will base their play on a stable version of the game, most likely 2014, and they will take the best from everything else, including 2024, ToV, A5E, and various third-party books.

Since 2024 has not set the world on fire, the community collectively shrugged its shoulders, took the 2024 books, and used them as "patch notes" for their 2014 games. Sure, they may pick up a book, but so many are deeply bought into 2014 that they will not leave unless a new edition with a radical design shift comes along and changes everything.

You can do most of 2024, the best changes, while staying in 2014 with a page of errata. 2014 is arguably better and closer to classic D&D, with alignment, humanoid monsters, and races still in the older game. The whole background, ancestry, species, etc., character creation complicates character creation. It isn't D&D. I don't mind in other games, but we don't need this many "false choices" in D&D when the "do whatever you want" system in Tasha's was much better for classic D&D, or sticking with the racial ability score bonuses.

Only a dozen or so spells are broken. A few multiclass combos are broken, and this can be fixed with the limitations on action surge and the "one leveled spell" per turn limit. Most issues are fixed by limiting multiclassing to a roleplaying context instead of letting people build characters like an ARPG.

With a page of fixes, 2014 is the superior game.

Even Roll20's D&D with extra DM Guild content vastly differs from 2014 or 2024. The game is bizarre, built out of a Frankenstein patchwork of books and Roll20 supplements. While it is based on D&D 2014, the game is more like this strange, generic 5E unique to Roll20.

Roll20 D&D is nothing like D&D Beyond D&D once you fully kit the game. It is a freakish game, with almost a random assortment of spells, races, and subclass choices.

Add a page of community-sourced house rules to the game, and you have something superior to D&D 2024. These house rules can pull in the best D&D 2024 patches, but ignore all the problematic changes.  Monks from 2024 and rangers from ToV are in the same party. Modded 2014 D&D with house rules is a better game.

Orcs and humanoids are still monsters, alignment is still here, half-orcs and half-elves have not been erased, and the game feels classic, yet wholly random and freakish.

It is Freak & D.

It is even different from A5E, which feels more like B/X D&D than mutant Roll20 D&D. Some of the best rules from this version are must-haves for F&D, and there is a lot from this game that will get pulled in, such as counter spell rules, exploration challenges, and much more.

ToV also feels vastly different, like another version of the basic game, like the D&D Rules Compendium. We have excellent class designs here; you are free to use them. I saw a game with the ToV ranger, the 2024 monk, and a few other classes from other books and publishers in one party.

However, the D&D game inside Roll20, fully modded with third-party content, is one of the closest things you can get to experiencing a version of F&D you can look at and play in the wild. Without VTTs, people have stopped caring and are mixing every game with every game and calling it 5E.

D&D feels like it died, and we are left picking through the game's ruins and modding it to be whatever we like. 2024 isn't a new version; it is the patch notes that people choose the best parts from and mostly ignore. D&D is a boneyard system these days, where we pick and choose parts to cobble together a game. This is the OGL fallout. Wizards lost that fight.

I wonder if D&D even has one set of defined rules anymore.

Everything is this generic "5E roleplaying," and the base version of that is "whatever 5E rulebook you happen to own." SRD included.

Even the base version does not matter anymore. What is your base game? 2014? ToV? A5E? 2024? The 5.1 SRD? Do you stick to one VTT's character designer, and that is your game?

That is the exception if you are a purist and want to play in one system, like a ToV or A5E table. It is nice since you have one "source of truth." I like the fixes that both the ToV and A5E teams made. I can play Roll20 D&D, which is a different version of 2014. I wish Roll20 supported both A5E and ToV (I know about the ToV announcement and it sucks).