How Far We Have Fallen

Never did I ever imagine we would have Bugs Bunny put in a game where kids use high-power military assault weapons to kill each other. If this were the 1980s, this would have been enough to get a CEO and the entire board of directors fired and run out of the entertainment business for life.

But here we are.

No wonder D&D sucks. This is the corporate thinking these days. This is the Wall Street zeitgeist. This is where "you can't die in a role-playing game" comes from. You can take a shotgun blast to the face and sleep it off in D&D 5E. This whole notion that stabbing someone or shooting them "doesn't do anything" makes me want to vomit. This is why roleplaying sucks. There are zero consequences for actions; the game has safety tools to prevent the referee from using them, death is impossible, and avatars are goofy animals in silly costumes. The entire game is a fantasy fulfillment simulator with self-identity coding and sexual overtones.

D&D owners and shareholders, this is where you went wrong. You don't need a survey to tell you what is right in front of your own eyes.

Foxy the cute fox man can't have his head blown off by a 5.56mm NATO assault rifle! You will scar me for life! It's "damage"; this is a "game." I am throwing up an X now! I identify as him! Sorry, that is a real weapon, and we treat real weapons with respect. We are too far down this road in real life to ignore this now. The world is at war. This may come home at any time. Shootings are on the news nearly every day. Foxy was cute, but he is dead. There are fox brains all over the wall behind him. Roll a new character.

There is a quote in this video:

"I don't think he understands that weapons don't do anything here..."

As the players get on a school bus.

God, I miss the 1980s. Do you know the outrage this would cause? Multiple state attorneys general would be on their ass about this. Donahue would be running this for two weeks. The nightly news would lead with this for days, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and the rest, all with grave undertones of what this is doing to our children's impressionable minds. Front page news around the country. Time and Newsweek would be doing stories on how corporations are militarizing our children and how gun manufacturers are profiting.

Are all you 1980s liberals dead, or did you just never believe the things you were saying back then? Where are you, people? We need you. This is your last chance to make a stand and say what is right. I know I am. But I am just one Gen-X'er with a stupid blog.

And here we are.

Now they got to Bugs Bunny, and that part of me will forever see this.

Classic Car Wars

I love classic Car Wars.

The new game is cool, and more miniature and card-based. Nothing beats the original for me, as I remember long summers of my brother and me playing days-long battles like a massive wargame on card tables covered with quarter-inch ruled maps.

And the game lets you design the vehicle your mind could imagine, from sports cars to buses to 18-wheelers. Motorcycles, too! Tanks, helicopters, boats, and planes joined the fight later. The game had both electric and gas engines for the cars, though, really, you could just say whatever you wanted the engines to be, and it did not really matter when we started playing. The gas engines were cool, along with the metal armor rules and the low-tech "Mad Max" style of play, where the battles were more "chassis and crossbow."

The game was slow. You were simulating a vehicle battle with real physics, one-tenth of a second at a time, though later that was increased to one-fifth of a second, and that sped up play by double. That level of accuracy was needed, since the battles were these chaotic dances of death where everything was in motion, and those "planned random moments" where a damaged side of armor appeared for a fraction of a second were often the difference between life and death.

If you don't have the patience to play a battle one second at a time without a computer, this game is not for you. And we designed these vehicles by hand, using an LCD scientific calculator. I still have this TI calculator, 50 years old at this point, and it is still working (and on its second battery).

Seriously, this country used to make stuff that lasted back in the 1970s and 80s.

Car Wars is a lot like simulating World War 2 dogfights: motion, fire angles, momentum, control rolls, lucky shots, and planning movement in slow motion were the keys to victory. Though on the ground, tire management became an issue. You are only as good as your contact with the road, and mines and spikes took their toll. Oil, paint, smoke, and other defensive weapons were highly effective.

Predicting your opponent's movement hours ahead of "real world time" and figuring out where you wanted to move, for 15-second slices of "game time," helped you gain foresight into where your opponents were likely to move. A car moving 40mph moves 4 inches per second, which gives you an idea of where it was going and could be in the next 10 seconds of play.

If you don't have the patience for this, stay far away.

But if you ever wanted to simulate a car-versus-car battle where every heartbeat of time matters, this is car nirvana. This hits the classic American "car culture" vibe perfectly, mixing it with Western and post-apoc genres in a tasty blend of nostalgia and muscle-car madness. The game slaps hard and is the meat and potatoes of simulation wargaming.

Fighting on foot is a death sentence, as cars were like ogre main battle tanks. You can mount an effective pedestrian defense against a vehicle assault, but you need urban terrain and a lot of coordinated fire and ambushes to do so. Pedestrians are slow compared to vehicles!

The game works for post-apocalyptic play, flashy autoduel arena battle play, low-tech car battles, battle cars versus superheroes, and every place in between.

Gaming is Adult Daycare

I had this huge rant on the topic, but I deleted it since it was way too negative. Big corporations are turning the games we love into adult daycare, aiming to extract live-service revenue from us all.

Season models, battle passes, micro-transactions, digital DLC, paid cosmetics, and all the things we hate about gaming are coming to every game.

This is happening in every game, from video games to tabletop role-playing games. The games are being written as "kid-friendly games touching on adult topics," and toxic fandoms are cultivated in order to create an online army to destroy and discourage competition.

And it is all-digital, all the time, and paid for by every hyped and released part.

I removed all the bile and negativity.

But the point still stands.

Gaming is being ruined.

They get us to sign up for these services, lock us into online systems, and they never let their hooks out of us. They foster this "adult daycare" vibe, the cartoony characters with the adult undertones, sexual preferences, and who sleeps with whom. Yet they keep the art sanitized. They tell us to "see ourselves in the game" and express our identity through our characters. It is insidious and toxic.

This is why I play older games and indie releases. They are mostly immune.

But I won't play any of these games that expect me to "buy in" and "keep buying in" over and over again.

Nor will I play a game that asks me to see myself inside its world.

Back in the day, we were warned against that since it was bad for mental health.

The Strange Post-D&D World

D&D can be dead, over, gone, finished, post-prime, yet people will still play it. "D&D is dead" is just a statement, and it means nothing, because people will still find a way. There are still people praising and playing D&D 4E, an untested, broken, copy-and-paste corporate disaster we had fun with and enjoyed for its run. In the end, it let us down, and that was a terrible moment.

We never started playing 5E because there was always something that felt "wrong" about the game. My brother loved the Ranger class, and that entire class was a ball of suck in D&D 2014, and it still is today. D&D's ranger is Charlie Brown and his infamous "bag of rocks" every time they put out a new edition. The rogue is close behind, and many games don't even know what to do with a rogue other than throw skill points at them and pray the game's skill system gives them something to do.

The real truth is "D&D is many things," and it covers the OSR, adjacent games like Dragonbane, any version of D&D since Chainmail, games like EZD6, and anything else you can "D&D at." When I say "D&D is dead," it really means "feeling you have to play the latest, supported, official Wall Street-endorsed version to have fun is dead."

That type of D&D is dead, and it has been since the OGL. Half the audience walked away in disgust, and they are still out here enjoying games like Pathfinder 2, Castles & Crusades, and Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Games like Shadowdark and Nimble have stepped in as better alternatives. You want hardcore dungeoning with a classic feeling? Shadowdark should be your D&D. You want that classic, pulp-adventure, D&D feeling? Nimble 5e should be your D&D.

D&D? They over-designed it with one of the worst action economies in any version of the game, and it is even worse than D&D 3.5E. They blew it with the bonus actions, free actions, what-is-this-action, and all the confusing, obscure, not straightforward, and frankly stupid action-economy rules that led them to write more rules about how not to break the system than about how to use it effectively. If you are writing special rules to ban double-casting Fireball on a turn, you have failed at game design and should be laughed out of the industry. It's embarrassing.

Something that should be obvious, "you can't do" has been discovered by D&D YouTube, celebrated and enshrined as a legitimate tactic and "rules as written" allowable player action, and as a DM, I am now fighting with PNG YouTube videos meant for clicks and humor, and my game goes in the garbage.

Sure thing, we can double-cast Fireball!

And then the next version specifically writes rules to disallow it, and the mess of special cases, patches, and fixes makes the game unbearable to play. The action system was broken at launch; you can't patch it by adding a point-five to the edition.

Even GURPS is far easier than this with its one-second turns. Do one thing if it can be done in one second. I draw my sword. Turn over. Next! My player argues (for 500 seconds or more) that they can do more things in that one second, and I sit there and count to one. Then I point to the very clear rules. One second, one action, unless you have or do X, Y, or Z. The special cases are very limited, since this "turn stuffing" is a major exploit in pen-and-paper gaming, along with "turn denial" against enemies.

I count to one.

Your turn is over.

GURPS seems like a breath of fresh air compared to D&D 5E, where I am sitting there, flipping through a dozen printed pages of a character sheet, trying to tax-form together a string of allowed actions my character can make during a turn, and then having another player argue with me about how I can't do that because this action combination is banned in this book or that.

Pretty soon, the entire table is flipping through books or on their phones, looking up rules. Half of them will get distracted by TikTok by the end of this, and there goes the entire game's focus and flow.

I have Tales of the Valiant, and that is my "last full 5E" game. The game still has enough sense not to go out of its way to anger the old-timers; orcs are still in the Monster Manual, and the game still feels like it respects the classic ways. It is not a classic game, and it is still 5E. If I want the real deal, I will play Adventures Dark & Deep and live in my childhood. That is a seriously great version of 1E, and it is the king, even with Castles & Crusades out here being the best 2.5E we have ever seen.

Castles & Crusades should have been D&D 3E. It streamlined the game while keeping depth and that classic feeling. C&C is the best modern D&D ever written.

Adventures Dark & Deep is "full Gygax" with the charts, factoring weapon speed into combat, and all the fiddly bits we used to love about the game that modern players can't understand or even stand to comprehend by taking five seconds away from their phones. If you ever seek to go "full Gygax," start with ADAD.

If you want zany, gonzo, over-the-top D&D with plenty of random death and emergent play, play Dungeon Crawl Classics. This is also another version of D&D that I remember fondly, recreating those "felt posters in a van" moments of the original game and its counter-culture.

And I think that is where I can sit here and clearly state that "D&D is dead" is because it became the culture. When "Ted the talking teddy bear" is your "D&D ambassador" because two Wall Street companies "thought this was the hip, cool thing to do," then you have just oversold Bart Simpson and made him, and whatever he is attached to, uncool. I have no idea why they did that; it was cringe.

You Icarused too close to the sun, D&D.

The game is now uncool.

Thus, it is dead.

D&D was always about the counter-culture. The fact that the original game had nudity and college-level reading in it was a clear sign that the game was counter-culture, High Times, post-hippie, nonconformist, and cool, "not in the mainstream" gaming meant for the fringe hobbiests. The sanitized, violence-free D&D Cartoon was a betrayal to us all, not a wholesome, fondly remembered artifact of the times. Putting the D&D Cartoon on a pedestal is an insult to those of us who were alive at the time. This was the moment D&D sold out to Hollywood, became mainstream, and went uncool. The dagger was further stuck in the heart with the Satanic Panic reaction and AD&D 2E, no-demons edition, safe for Waldenbooks in the heartland malls.

D&D was never supposed to be the culture.

D&D was counter-culture.

Is High Fantasy Just a Lack of Consequences?

You take any classic game system, such as RoleMaster, GURPS, or any OSR system, and put it up against 5E or any of these other modern "high fantasy" systems, and you will hear people say, "The newer games are more high fantasy."

Well, what is that?

High magic? Lots of fantasy races? Pulp action?

Not the "actual definition" but the "today's definition."

I get the feeling the meaning of high fantasy is being lost with D&D being so consequence-free, no deaths, superpowered characters, slap giants in the face, toss a dragon by their tail, planar characters, and godlike abilities. High fantasy is starting to mean something entirely different from the definition I grew up with.

The traditional definition of high fantasy was a world of plentiful magic with epic storylines. That hasn't really changed. I get the feeling that death is so hard (or even short-circuited with an X safety tool), combined with a "everybody wins" attitude, has shifted the meaning of high fantasy to a zero-consequence model and expectation. Safety tools being used to override referee judgments (you kill the guards, okay, you are caught and thrown in jail, X, we are triggered, take that back, no, we aren't) again reduce logical consequences and change the definition of the genre to a very cartoonish and zero-cost style of play.

You can't die.

There are near-zero consequences for your actions.

You have planar power.

You have a safe space to fall back on with your bastion.

No one can kill your followers there. Trip the safety tool, and your pets and followers won't die in the real world either.

Trip the tool again, and any consequences of your actions in the world won't be held against you.

Granted, this is an extreme example, but rules-as-written, this is allowed. No one in their right mind would allow safety tools to be used like this, right? Twenty years ago, if you had told me dying would be impossible in D&D, I would have laughed. This new breed of safety tools will change the game; we just don't know how yet.

With all these mobile game-like additions to the core rules, I really don't know what D&D "is" anymore.

The relative immunity of characters is a feature of epic fantasy, but it is not generally required. I could do high fantasy all the way back in AD&D, with lots of magic, plentiful magic items, and epic plots. Granted, you can do low fantasy with relative immunity, but that really isn't low fantasy anymore.

I can do high fantasy with GURPS or RoleMaster just fine, and the game is still deadly with high consequences to any possible action. In D&D, I feel my hands are tied by the designers to adhere to their style of play.

"Everybody wins" is not high fantasy.

I get the feeling that this high-character-power, zero-consequences, constant-winning, and immune-to-death aspect of D&D is becoming part of "high fantasy" to some, and even the genre as a whole. We lost the historical aspect of the game, too, with modern writers coming in and making everything too cosmopolitan and modern, and traditional high fantasy was one of the staples of the genre, and that seems like it is slipping away into D&D, essentially becoming an adult babysitting game, where there aren't consequences for any action.

Nimble 5e: They Broke a Million

There is something so fun about watching a Kickstarter campaign inch toward a million-dollar goal, especially in the face of all the naysayers and those on the bandwagon of billion-dollar corporations, and watching true gems like Shadowdark and Nimble 5e rise and find an audience.

This is the little guy winning.

This is cool.

I still play "full 5E," but this is just so much easier. Like a 2d6 game, it packs a lot into a small book that does so much; that feeling of infinite adventure in a small package has to be felt to be described. The original Traveller Little Black Books captured that spirit, and many of today's Cepheus games keep it alive and carry on its legacy.

Shadowdark captures that "magic in a small book" feeling and brings endless enjoyment to millions, being the OSR gateway game of choice for many 5E players.

Nimble is this generation's "Savage Worlds meets Traveller" in a clean, fun 5E package for fantasy gaming. It does everything D&D does, but without the whiffs, mystery action types that can and can't do various things, and general endless rules referencing and page-flipping that we have all come to loathe over the last 12 years because VTTs are too good at hiding the true complexity of D&D from us all.

If you want superheroic fantasy gaming, Nimble is the clear winner. It plays fast, satisfies the character builder itch, captures the essence of 5E, all without getting dragged down into the weeds. It is a game more about adventure, less about references to rules, pointless monster stat blocks, and rules interactions that bog the game down. You have all the same character power that you do in 5E, without needing a 16-page character sheet at level 14.

It feels like D&D, without all the problems of D&D.

Nimble joining the "Shadowdark club" is a great thing for gaming and the industry, opening up doors for competition and innovation, and allowing more people to play and expanding the hobby. This is the death of the "network effect" on which the OGL was based; the success of D&D does not foretell the success of other games, and the success of other games does not automatically "feed into D&D" anymore. The death of the OGL was also the death of the "D&D Network Effect."

All we need is the concept of fantasy adventure, and the indies can take it from here.

We have eight more hours, and I hope they can break the million-dollar mark.

Go, go, Nimble.

We are opening the book on a new chapter of the hobby.

...

UPDATE: They broke a million with four hours to go. Congrats, guys.

Nimble is Pushing 1 Million

Get ready for the new Shadowdark, because Nimble 5e is pushing one million dollars in its Kickstarter.

Congratulations to the team.

This is now one of the post-crash 5E Kickstarters to approach this level of success. This is actually huge news. I am happy for them. We need these sorts of small 5E book versions on the market, and I hope they achieve Shadowdark levels of success in the future.

Well done, and I am in on this one and looking forward to this in the mail!