The Last Decade of Living Inside the Bubble

Most full-stack 5E games promise that greater character complexity will produce richer play. In practice, the heavy inward-focused sheet enhances neither the dungeon crawl nor the social and exploration pillars. Shadowdark and GURPS sit at opposite poles that actually deliver on their investments: one by keeping characters simple, the other by making complexity external and relational. The middle is mostly wasted effort.

Does the six-page character sheet actually improve the core dungeon-crawling experience? In most 5E implementations, the answer is no. The design is painfully inward: a dense collection of personal powers, tricks, and options that mostly resolve inside the character or, at best, inside the tiny party bubble. Very little of that complexity reaches outward into the environment, the dungeon’s pressure, or the decisions that actually matter in a crawl. Even less of the internal character design reaches out into the world and matters in terms of social or exploration play. Shadowdark (and the broader OSR) demonstrates the opposite approach: keep the characters simple so the procedures, scarcity, and danger can stay in the foreground. The long 5E-style sheet does not enhance the crawl; it often functions as sand in the gears, adding extra cognitive load and decision friction that slow down the very experience the table showed up for.

GURPS sits at the other pole. You can build an almost purely external character (150 points of social advantages and disadvantages, minimal skills, no attribute increases) and the design still works. The character may be mechanically fragile, but the sheet is packed with hooks that force interaction with the world: Reputation, Duty, Enemy, Ally, Code of Honor, Social Stigma, Dependents. Those traits generate ongoing narrative pressure and shape what the character can and cannot do in the setting. GURPS is every bit as complex as modern 5E, yet the complexity (in this case) is pointed outward, and it can be as balanced as I want it to be. It is not trapped inside the character or the party bubble. That is the difference: 5E mostly sells internal options, while GURPS can sell external consequences.

Level Up A5E is the main attempt inside the 5E family to escape the inward trap. Character creation is even heavier than in standard 5E or Tales of the Valiant, yet more of that complexity is pointed outward. Heritage, culture, background, and destiny options are designed to situate the character in the world rather than simply stacking more personal powers. The system also gives real mechanical support to the social and exploration pillars instead of treating them as afterthoughts. It is still built on the 5E chassis, so the sheet remains long and the cognitive load is high, but at least the extra investment is trying to buy external pressure and world interaction rather than more internal options. In that sense, A5E is the closest the 5E ecosystem comes to the GURPS approach, even if it never fully reaches it.

I play full-stack 5E games, and they make a clear promise: a deeply complex mechanical character will reward you with better story and a better dungeon-crawling experience. They do not. Shadowdark proves you can strip almost everything off the chassis and still end up with the best dungeon-crawling 5E-derived game written. With D&D and Tales of the Valiant, I often feel I am wasting a great deal of time just to arrive at the same place. My interest and excitement do not live inside the character- and party-centric bubble. Level Up A5E steps outside that bubble to a meaningful degree by giving real support to all three pillars of play and pulling more of the surrounding world into the design. In that sense, it does some of the same work GURPS does: the focus shifts toward a worldview instead of remaining trapped inside the party.

In the end it comes down to return on investment. If the table wants a pure dungeon crawl, the extra pages of inward-facing powers buy very little and often get in the way. If the table wants genuine narrative pressure and world interaction, that complexity needs to point outward the way GURPS (and to a lesser extent A5E) allows. Most full-stack 5E games ask for the cost of complexity without delivering either benefit. Once you see the two poles clearly, the middle starts to look like a lot of work for not much gain.

How much internal design work is actually needed for a satisfying dungeon crawl? The OSR answered that question decades ago. After ten years of hyper-focus on the party and on character-internal dynamics, it is worth asking whether that investment still delivers the core promise and the entertainment people show up for. The market is already moving. Shadowdark and the broader OSR are defining the pure dungeon-crawling experience with far less internal complexity, while games like Daggerheart pull narrative-focused players in the opposite direction. Staying inside the party-focused bubble makes it harder to see what comes next.

The Hydra and the Quiet Walking Away

Combat should be fun and not a failure state. We don't want magic forcing a 15-minute adventuring day. Supporting a game should not feel like a job. The table's attention should stay focused on the adventure rather than books and character sheets. We are the huge middle-ground audience, the gamers who care more about fun than worldview, ideological noise, or orthodoxy.

What is the Hydra? It is the eleven shelves I have devoted to D&D (three shelves), Tales of the Valiant (three shelves), generic 5e (three shelves), and Level Up A5E hardcovers (two shelves). You have these games that start out as three core books, already too big a game at nearly a thousand pages just for the core rules, and you start piling on option after option and book after book. You can play with "just the core books," but that creates a social problem when someone comes in with their favorite design, and a logistical one sorting through the chaff.

Session zero is now required and a barrier to entry. For most tables, it involves a website signup and learning how an online character creator works. I go to social events with the Society for Creative Anachronism and ask myself a simple question: if people are taking a break and want to get involved with a game right there in the park, could I do that with D&D 5.5E? No. With an OSR game or Shadowdark? Yes.

That portability is real. But it is not the whole answer. Some players do not want to play a one-shot caster. Others want combat that still feels fun rather than like a failure state. Most of the middle-ground audience comes from games like Diablo 4, World of Warcraft, and console RPGs. They do not care much about tradition. They care about having fun.

So we are in a world where many will reject the system advocates and quietly walk away from the game, either moving on to easier games or other hobbies entirely. Few people want to fight the Hydra or its adherent disciples, deal with the coded language, purity tests, the enforcement of aesthetic conformity, or other social glue that is meant more for loyalty and cohesion than gameplay and fun.

And the Hydra will push back against the mainstream alternatives. Players fear losing their investments as other games become popular, and those loyal to the old ways criticize modern alternatives that are more about gameplay improvements than social conformity. Many don’t even choose to throw in with a side, leaving the opposing camps to argue while the mainstream grows tired of watching. They join the multitude of those quietly walking away for better alternatives, positive, creative spaces, and communities more focused on fun than advocacy.

They don’t have time for the shelves full of rules, nor do they have the interest in watching the conflict anymore.

Flowcharts, Nostalgia, and the Cost of Unexamined Tradition

When my brother and I were kids, we mapped the entire Car Wars turn structure onto a 2' × 3' sheet of paper. We began with the basic sequence and then expanded every box. Movement, firing, damage allocation, handling checks, vehicle-specific exceptions, optional rules: each one opened into further branches, nested conditions, and special cases. By the time we finished, the sheet was a dense thicket of decision trees.

We ran large games, often sixty cars or more. Once the full flowchart existed, the repeated patterns became impossible to ignore. The same low-value checks, the same special-case loops, the same mental overhead occurred for every vehicle on every turn. What had felt like normal complexity at the table revealed itself as structural waste under sustained load. The exercise changed how we saw the game. It also taught a lasting lesson: systems look cleaner until someone is willing to draw the whole decision path.

That practice remains underused in tabletop design.

In semiconductor engineering, flowcharting and cycle analysis are standard because every wasted step compounds across millions of operations. Tabletop games rarely face equivalent pressure. A ruleset that feels “good enough” in ordinary play can persist for decades even when its highest-frequency loops contain repeated, low-value branches. Players adapt. The friction becomes habitual and therefore invisible. Only when the process is externalized does the cost become countable.

Two prominent design cultures illustrate the problem from opposite directions.

In mainstream 5E, the skill system has been elevated from an occasional specialist tool into the primary interface for interacting with the world. Almost every attempted action is expected to pass through a named skill, then through feats, subclass features, buffs, and possible re-rolls. The checklist is short in isolation. Under the repeated load of a full session, it becomes a constant tax on attention. The character sheet turns into the default lens, and the fiction waits its turn. Mapping the decision path makes the cumulative cost obvious.

In much of the OSR, a different failure mode appears. Procedures that were present in early editions are frequently preserved less because they still produce the best current play experience and more because they were present in the original experience. Awkward resolution methods, high bookkeeping, and nested special cases are defended as authentic texture. Critiquing them is often treated as a failure to understand the tradition rather than an examination of whether the procedure still earns its complexity. Nostalgia becomes a preservative for inefficiency.

Both positions share a common weakness. They substitute identity or memory for structural analysis. One side treats expanded interface complexity as sophistication. The other treats inherited friction as heritage. In neither case is the highest-frequency loop forced to justify every branch under realistic session load.

A common reply is that games are not about optimization. They are about memories, feelings, and shared experience. The objection has force. No one sits down at a table primarily to maximize throughput. The goal is the chandelier swing, the desperate rescue, the moment the plan collapses into something better.

Yet repeated inefficiency is a poor substitute for those experiences. When a system demands constant returns to the character sheet, repeated inventory of modifiers, and nested special cases simply to resolve ordinary actions, it consumes the very attention and energy that should be available for the fiction. The mental effort spent sifting through rules and sheet references is effort no longer spent imagining the chandelier, reading the room, or deciding how to save the princess.

The point is not to turn play into an engineering exercise. It is to notice when the interface has begun to compete with the experience it is supposed to deliver. A procedure that once felt like part of the charm can, under sustained load, become an obstacle to the very memories and feelings the game exists to create.

The healthier approach is selective and diagnostic. Externalize the decision trees for the actions that occur most often. Count the low-value steps. Distinguish friction that creates meaningful decisions from friction that mainly survives on familiarity or scene loyalty. Keep what still serves the intended play experience. Be willing to retire what does not.

Flowcharting will not resolve every design disagreement. It does, however, make certain kinds of disagreement harder to sustain. Once the full path is visible, arguments that rest primarily on “this is how it was done” or “this is our style” lose some of their protective cover. The conversation is pulled back toward evidence: does this procedure still earn the mental effort it demands when it is repeated dozens of times in a single session?

Most published games still ship without anyone having drawn those trees for their core loops. The result is predictable. Inefficiencies remain invisible until someone finally maps them, at which point the patterns (whether industrial skill interfaces or nostalgic special cases) look remarkably similar. They are simply the shape of unexamined tradition under load.

The Mental Load of the D&D Skill System

You don’t notice the cognitive load 5E places on you until you play something that removes it. In standard play, almost every action routes through the character sheet. The game text says “only roll when there’s a consequence,” but the actual mental process runs far deeper:

• Do I have the relevant skill?
• Is it trained, or am I rolling untrained?
• Any subclass features, feats, or racial traits that apply?
• Inspiration?
• Guidance, Enhance Ability, or other party buffs?
• Roll. Then possible re-rolls or reactions.

Every situation triggers this checklist. The character sheet becomes the primary interface with the game world, and the fiction has to wait its turn.

Contrast this with Shadowdark. For most situations, if the character has time and competence, no roll is required at all. This includes searching for traps or secret doors (Shadowdark, p. 81). Even specialized actions like disarming a trap become automatic when there is no time pressure, and failure carries no immediate consequence.

When a roll is needed, it is almost always a straight ability check. Six ability scores are easy to keep in mind. The only remaining question is usually whether the situation grants advantage or disadvantage. That is the entire decision path.

There is no repeated return to the character sheet, no scan for feats or subclass features, and no need to cross-reference rules. The interface stays short and close to the fiction.

The Cumulative Cost

A single skill check is not expensive. The cost appears in volume.

Over a typical session, the checklist runs dozens of times. Each instance is brief; sometimes only a second or two; but the interruptions are constant. Attention keeps flicking from the situation to the sheet and back again. The table’s shared focus fractures in small, repeated ways.

Players begin to treat the character sheet as the primary way they touch the game world. Instead of asking “What does this situation demand of me?” the first internal question becomes “What bonuses do I have for this?” The fiction is still present, but it is mediated through a mechanical filter that never fully turns off.

The effect is subtle because it is continuous. Most groups adapt and stop noticing the friction. Only when the same players sit down with a system that removes most of the checklist does the difference become obvious. Suddenly more of the session’s mental energy stays available for the actual play; reading the room, making decisions, reacting to consequences; rather than managing the interface.

Skills as Interface, not Exception

The deeper issue is not simply that 5E has a skill list. It is that the system elevates that list into the default interface for interacting with the world.

In many older games, skills functioned as special-case exceptions. A character might possess Mechanical Engineering, Law, or Surgery; narrow, uncommon training that modified the baseline assumption that a competent person could attempt most ordinary actions. Skills were additions to the fiction, not the primary lens through which the fiction was viewed.

5E industrializes the opposite approach. The skill list is broad enough that most common actions map onto a named entry, and table culture treats the presence of that entry as the normal path to resolution. Searching, persuading, climbing, recalling lore, and noticing details are all expected to pass through the sheet first. The result is that the character sheet becomes the set of glasses players are trained to wear, rather than a reference for occasional specialist knowledge.

When skills shift from occasional exceptions to the default interface, the cognitive loop described earlier stops being incidental. It becomes structural.

Different Games Entirely

Shadowdark delivers the dungeon-crawling game that D&D 5.5E promises. It feels like the classic TSR Dungeon! board game brought to the table: map, tokens, light radii, a torch timer counting down in real time. Every turn matters. Movement is concrete. Inventory is tight. And sooner or later you find yourself calculating whether you can squeeze one more room out of the light before the darkness closes in and the monsters come looking.

Classic OSR hits differently for me. Shadowdark turns the dungeon crawl into something closer to a mechanical board game; every inventory slot matters, deciding to drop a piece of gear so you can haul out a bag of coins is an agonizing choice, the torch is burning down in real time, resources are dwindling, and death is always one bad roll away. Most classic OSR play, even when it tracks time carefully, keeps that time on a record sheet. Movement and exploration can be heavily abstracted. The tension is real, but it lives more in the referee’s description and the campaign’s long arc than in a live timer and a physical map. Shadowdark feels far more like a board game than most OSR games do, and it benefits from rules that are tightly defined yet still flexible.

I see a lot of Shadowdark tables on YouTube being played with the same rules-intensity I associate with 5E: players carefully dissecting each turn, managing every action, treating the game almost competitively. A “professional Shadowdark” style seems to be emerging; tightly ruled, closely refereed, and closer in spirit to Battletech or Warhammer 40K than to loose theater-of-the-mind play. Shadowdark can absolutely be run light and freeform, but many of the players coming from 5E are bringing their high-precision habits with them, and the game’s clear procedures and constant resource pressure reward that approach.

This tighter, more exacting style is part of what has made Shadowdark so visible—and part of why some in the OSR treat it as competition.

Those who treat Shadowdark as a threat to the OSR are missing the forest for the trees. In terms of attention and shelf space, sure. In terms of what the games are becoming? They are not the same. The OSR is not changing; it remains the classic, referee-driven, campaign-oriented style many of us love.

Shadowdark, meanwhile, is being shaped by something else: the professional, high-precision habits of 5E play and the tightly ruled tension of games like Battletech and Warhammer 40K. There will always be tables running Shadowdark in a looser, more OSR-like mode. But the style that is rising, and that helps explain the game’s popularity, is a more exacting, convention-ready, almost competitive form of co-op dungeon crawling.

That is not the OSR evolving. It is a different game culture forming around a different set of priorities.

Video: ShadowSun Revision with Chubby Funster

This one is from three months ago, with the EruditeDM interviewing Greg Christopher for his Shadowsun Revised project, launching in mid-September. This is Shadowdark meets Dark Sun.

ShadowSun Campaign Setting by Chubby Funster — Kickstarter

This project needs to go big, like Deathbringer, and send a message.

This is what we want, and this is how you do justice to the spiritual successor to the classic setting. We don't want fantasy superhero splatterpunk with nudity and gore, where 20th-level characters can't die. We want the raw, gritty, tough, savage Robert E. Howard-inspired setting that we fell in love with back in the 1990s.

We want the fear of the desert and death. We want to live the lives of slaves in the pits who break their bonds, escape the gladiatorial arenas, and overthrow their masters. We want to free the overlord's city-state and start a revolution, or die trying. Or just find our way in the sands as we search for our path, uncovering the secrets of the past, and trying to change the world for the better.

Shadowdark is one of the best pick-up-and-play games ever created, perfect for conventions. This does not require giant hardcovers, a website subscription, or digital purchases to create characters. Shadowsun is instant immersion plus hardcore gladiator desert survival in a savage world.

Want to get new players immersed in this world? The Shadowdark model is the perfect way to do this. Just hand them a character card, or fill one out in the first five minutes of play. No D&D Beyond or (age-verified?) digital purchase needed. And this is the 5E they are used to.

Dark Sun and Shadowdark are a perfect match.

The Setting of the Dark Sun

I played Dark Sun when the setting first came out. I was the DM, running the brutality and oppressive heat of the slave pens, the players' dread of their characters being sent into the arena and not knowing if they would come out alive, and the stark hopelessness of the entire world. Very little metal existed, so the savage world fought with bone, wood, and stone. Bashing a monster's head in with a rock was a valid tactic and saved your weapons from wear and tear. The armor sucked and was whatever you found.

This was a mix of Mad Max, Gladiator, and Robert E. Howard's "savage fantasy" tropes turned up to eleven. The arenas were filled with savage monsters, and worst of all, other gladiators trying to kill you for the favor of the crowd and the dragon king's elites. If you managed to escape, where would you go? You would be hunted as an escaped slave, and fleeing into the desert to die was a terrible death.

Wizards announced Dark Sun for 5E with a mature content label, claiming it recaptures the original setting. What I saw was not Dark Sun. This felt like 5E's fantasy superheroes engaging in unhinged splatterpunk slasher violence. The original Dark Sun was a mature setting in theme and story, showing how the pursuit of power could devastate the world, not gratuitous over-the-top violence and nudity.

Shadowsun for Shadowdark is the spiritual successor to Dark Sun. We have the same savage setting with all the Dark Sun hallmarks, but laid on top of the brutal old-school experience of Shadowdark. Shadowsun does the pulp-adventure feeling of Dark Sun far better, in an easier rules chassis to grasp, without the power-gaming and superheroic power levels of D&D 5E. I don't need tables telling me someone ripped someone else's spine out; the fear and hopelessness are real in Shadowsun. The characters are not semi-godlike beings of power who can never die; they live close to the jagged edge of a sharpened bone blade that could shatter at any moment.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chubbyfunster/shadowsun-campaign-setting

Shadowsun’s revised edition is scheduled for a mid-September Kickstarter. The books (both Player and GM) will be finished on launch day. The original edition is already one of DriveThruRPG’s long-running bestsellers, and the new version expands the setting into a more dynamic campaign world that changes with each playthrough.

This is a version of the game that does not need violence, nudity, or gore to communicate the brutality of the setting. It stays closer to the original foundation of Dark Sun: the slave pens, the arena, the empty desert, and the long chance of one day walking back through the gates. For anyone who watched the Gen Con trailer and felt it missed the point, the Revised Shadowsun is worth a look.