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 Noimble 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. You 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 yet kept 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!

Nimble, Shadowdark, and That's It...

Digest-sized 5E really is the way to go.

I love my Shadowdark books, and Nimble 5E is joining that collection as my "heroic fantasy" version of the game. The books do not eat up shelves of space, nor do they require subscriptions and double purchases to function properly and be playable. They do not take up a huge part of my life and sit on a shelf. They are small things, packed with potential, like all games should be.

The books are small, filled with fun, and every page is filled with imagination and inspiration. As much as I love Tales of the Valiant and Level Up A5E, they are huge games that require digital tools. With these books, I can have 5E, be free of subscriptions, and they play either grimdark or high fantasy, and I have it all in a very small space.

I am done with embarrassing myself with huge shelves full of books I never use, and games that exist in my house solely as bloatware. Honestly, the last "shelf games" I will ever support are GURPS, Castles & Crusades, and Dungeon Crawl Classics. The latter shines particularly well thanks to its special editions, size, and over-the-top attitude. GURPS is a blue-collar game; every book I own works hard. C&C is perfect in every way.

But for my "5E games?"

Give me the small, digest-sized, compact, and fun games I can throw in a suitcase and travel with. I am done with these massive, bloated, wordy 5E implementations, full of confusing action types and 30-minute player turns, character sheets that are dozens of pages long, and just want a game that is small and that works.

I am done with "big book" 5E.

That era is over.

Video: Dead Internet Theory Is Real: Resident Evil Requiem Exposed It

This is very important.

You know I am real since I am often wrong, I have silly opinions, and I have strange opinions, often based on a unique life experience. If you frequently disagree with me, I am a real person. I play GURPS and games no one has heard of. This is why you come back. You know you are reading someone with a soul.

I am not an AI.

Gambling companies are buying up gaming media sites, faking a staff with AI, and directing people to online gambling sites through embedded ads.

Now, do you know why "the officially licensed D&D slot machine" is so bad? They are selling our trust to casinos. They are creating a path from childhood to a life of gambling for children through our games. This is not "just for fun" and "harmless."

It is a complete betrayal.

D&D's "Digital First" Strategy

I heard today that Wizards is embracing a "digital first" strategy for D&D.

I am not interested. This is something that drives me away from the game, since it forces customers to D&D Beyond for exclusive releases, digital-only DLC, and other money-making schemes that remove the game from the tabletop and turn it into an "online only" game.

D&D 5E already has a massive "digital problem": you need to buy the physical books, then a digital version elsewhere just to play the game, and you are locked into a VTT platform. I have even seen this with games like Tales of the Valiant, where I am locked into the Shard VTT for that game.

Forget playing on a tabletop with your friends, maps, and miniatures.

I can still play Nimble and Shadowdark around a table with friends, and these are the 5E versions I support. Other than that, it is either an OSR game or Castles & Crusades that fits the fantasy tabletop gameplay style the best.

Digital first means players last, and heralds the death of the game.

You will never compete with mobile gaming in the digital market.