The Noise and Drama Feels Like Too Much

With Wizards changing so much of the classic settings and systems, I'm starting to feel like enough is enough. Now they are changing classic fantasy art, too? Dark Sun? And these video game and pop-culture IPs moving into D&D have me feeling like all of 5E feels unsustainable.

It is a huge multiversal mess, a year after multiverses fell out of style and became corporate boondoggles for both Disney and WB. Even the word multiverse is being phased out of pop culture because nobody wants it anymore since it destroys customer investment. Who cares if Captain America from Earth 23824 dies? We have a billion other ones that can appear, the same old theme song plays, and nothing of value is lost. Who cares if we start on a carefully crafted D&D campaign homeworld when the planes, Star Wars, and World of Warcraft are a magical gate away?

Yes, don't allow that stuff into your campaigns, but as a game master, I don't want any of that stuff remotely near my precious campaign world that I spent months creating. Even the planes, and I saw how they minimize a campaign world quickly once a game floats into plane-hopping adventures.

I get it - don't punish Tales of the Valiant or Level Up A5E for the actions of Wizards, I know - but I just feel the need to wash my brain of 5E entirely to get as far away from the mess as possible. Even Shadowdark may get pulled into this mess.

I've had enough.

I would rather play Palladium Fantasy or an OSR game and forget that 5E exists.

Otherwise, I look at a shelf of 5E books, and my mind floats back into the "current bad news of the day" again, and I shake my head and sigh. There are moments when I only want games with "good memories only," and those are few and far between.

I have good memories of BX and AD&D.

I love playing Cypher System with my sister.

Aftermath and Space Opera are old favorites.

Dungeon Crawl Classics is my dream version of 3E.

I am still a huge Palladium fan.

The Star Wars RPG and FATE were favorites of me and my brother. We also played D&D 4E together, and to be honest, that memory keeps A5E on the shelf when all the others have been put away.

These games only stay on my shelves because of memories. Not system loyalty or investment. I am boxing up new games I never played and selling them off. I have had enough of collecting and hoarding. These new games mean nothing to me.

At some point, all the bad news of today reaches a tipping point, and I flee to games that give me better memories. And the bad news feels like it is attacking those same memories and trying to redefine them, and that feels personal to me. It is repainting the portrait of Jesus in a cathedral and making a mockery out of what was once loved and cherished.

Everyone has a point where they tip over the edge, and the little support they gave to these games out of curiosity and kindness ends. The feeling of "can I have fun with this?" stops completely, and we walk away, turn our backs on the modern mess, and head toward what we love.

A Sad Day

https://www.adventurousdadanddaughters.com/what-a-difference-38-years-makes/

If you are an artist, why do you knowingly destroy another artist's work? I would say no, just out of respect and principle for the man. And out of principle as an artist. We would not want this done to our work.

At that point, just commission a new cover. Wizards has good artists; they could have done something cool and original while still fitting the corporate zeitgeist. Instead, they chose Photoshop and generative fill, and disrespected a legendary artist.

The harder and more principled choice is to leave it as it was.

The easier choice is to let AI cover up art history.

What shocks me is that this isn't even a release for young readers, like a Scholastic reprint. This is for general and adult audiences. At this point, abandon all your digital books now before AI goes through and censors them all. Print or nothing. I am done with digital crap that can be auto-updated like the 1984 memory hole, only pushed directly to our devices.

The world is more like Fahrenheit 451, only the books people pass down are the uncensored editions, while the rest of the world reads censored and corporate-friendly tripe. The cloud will auto-scan books (they are all rentals, you know) for license violations, and those will be auto-updated, too.

Print is the only thing that is real.

Store your PDFs locally and burn them to physical media before it's too late.

Stop it with your corporate vandalism. You are now worse than the Satanic Panic crowd that flooded the megachurches and daytime talk shows in the 1980s. All you want is attention, same as then, true today.

At this point, is D&D truly dead?

It feels like when a musician I love passes away.

Only this time, we have the power to say no.

What Do the Numbers Mean?

Do the numbers in a pen-and-paper game mean anything? A character can get stabbed and take a shotgun blast to the face, sleep it off, and be fine the next morning. If that is the game you are selling me, I am better off in World of Warcraft. If injury math means nothing, the danger the DM can present is meaningless. Even death can be negotiated with.

A second point lies in games that forgot what the numbers mean. The Cypher System invented a wound track in the new edition because players could not tell the difference between spending 2 pool points to dodge a bullet and standing there getting shot. That is the difference between dropping from exhaustion and dying from blood loss when the pools empty. A GM Intrusion can be tied to a bullet wound. The original game’s narrative moment meant something. The revision flattened two kinds of loss into one bar to appeal to the video game audience.

Even Palladium saw the weakness of a single hit-point pool in the 1980s. It split the old bar in two. SDC is the free pool: luck, scratches, bruises, skin-of-the-teeth. It comes back fast. Hit points are what happens after that pool is gone - grave injury, slow to heal, the road to death. 5E copied the SDC half and forgot to include the hit-point part. Its whole bar is SDC. Morning resets it. Nothing on the sheet still has a hole in it after a sword impales your character. That is why 5E looks like a weak copy of Palladium Fantasy.

If a system is just a slower video game, or I need a half-video-game VTT to run it, I lose interest. If the game forgot what the numbers meant, I am not on board anymore. If the danger is minimized to dying in World of Warcraft and respawning in the graveyard, what am I doing? A monthly subscription already gives me that twenty-four hours a day. I do not need to beg for a weekly game.

When MMOs start shipping AI DMs and NPCs, the players who came to paper for the math-rush and a narrative railroad will walk. The number-gaming crowd will have a better client.

FATE Fixes the Caster-Martial Divide

Your class is an aspect. Want to shoot fireballs? Roll your Lore (or Magic) skill and invoke your "caster class" aspect for a reroll or a more powerful spell.

The martial vs. caster divide is fixed here since everything is mostly the same, and flavor is the only difference between character types. Are you a paladin who smites and casts heals? Use the Lore skill, announce the effect, and cast. Power is all relative and similar. Want to be a half-caster versus a full? Don't buy the Lore skill as high and specialize in other areas. Let true mages and priests buy it at +4, while half-caster classes need to buy it at a lower level.

Yes, I get it, "but it is all the same!" And, "There are no flavorful abilities!" And "There is no class identity!" These are generic "generic game" complaints, and valid. But take a step back. D&D has repeatedly proven it can't balance casters versus martial classes, and it often stumbles in the dark and throws caster subclasses at martial classes to fix the problem. By falling all the way back to "generic power sets," we can see what a completely balanced system looks like.

Yes, we don't have the fiddly powers and rules here, and everyone has infinite casting unless you define some limits. But again, D&D 4 is pretty much infinite-cast now with all the resting exploits, especially at higher levels. Again, this is a step back: my mage and paladin are relatively balanced against each other, and there are no complaints that "one is more powerful than the other" because the concepts are so basic and stripped down.

As a result, we can look inside a fantasy world with relative class balance and parity. The rogue is as powerful as the mage. The ranger is as powerful as the monk. The fighter is as powerful as the warlock. I am not picking bard because it has the most class cheese; I am picking bard because I want to play a bard. I will balance it against the cleric.

To be fair, Pathfinder 2 likely has the best class balance in gaming. I need to give all the testing and design this team did props. To get there, they needed a huge framework, and the game feels heavy. I never got into this, despite trying, so this remains one of my biggest misses. Not the game's fault, but it is personal and just me. There are still issues with caster DPS and a few other nitpicks I see brought up from time to time, but they all feel minor.

And, let's face it, I have played enough D&D to know what the "typical bard powers" are, and in FATE, the system lets me invent new ones on the fly, as long as they get GM approval. I am not limited by the spell list here, and even many of today's newer narrative games fall into this trap. To keep you on the recurring revenue stream, today's games carefully define what you can and can't do, then slowly drip-feed new must-have powers in the next book you are forced to buy.

Want a "wall of sound" power? Sure, tell me what it does and make a roll. We will work it out from there. And all of a sudden, magic feels special and unpredictable again. Oops. Take that, carefully designed, limited power set, narrative gaming. When they remove your imagination from the game, they will replace it with your wallet.

We get so lost in the weeds with 5E these days that we can't see the design box the game and its systems shove us into. If you change the game, you will start to see the system's weaknesses and the revenue streams they purposefully built into it. We don't know what a game with a balanced class model looks like because most companies can't design it, or refuse to give it to us since "caster-focused books sell better."

And it is far too easy to slip into the D&D YouTube trap of comparing new subclass designs and theory-crafting, getting lost in those weeds and not realizing what is really happening here: subclasses that feel like patches duct-taped onto the game, or new power-gaming gimmies to sell the book (and later to get banned from people's tables because they break the game).

Once a game is designed as a recurring-revenue model, it becomes inferior to the ones we already have.

The Flood, Glut, and Crash

It feels strange to be bombarded by this many crowdfunding projects, and every day over on Facebook, it feels like a new game, with hardcovers hundreds of pages long, is coming out and being announced. The game glut has started, and AI tools are accelerating us toward a tipping point for gaming.

I get the feeling a 1982-style Atari-level extinction-event crash is coming in gaming.

The market can't support all these narrative, cozy, specific niche, and boutique games. Especially with multiple versions of "5E something" coming out all at the same time. Universes Beyond doesn't help; it only piles on to the sea of mediocrity and glut of things to distract us from fantasy gaming and fracture the market worse than it did when TSR went bankrupt. They will most likely be one-shot games, with no product line or future. Another option, another universe, and we will all end up playing something different.

The glut will come, 5E will be oversaturated, and the only way out will be 6E.

It feels like planned obsolescence, the end of an era, the final last gasp of the 5E market.

I have had enough of the 5E rules, and I am battening down the hatches and supporting only one edition. Right now, the current leader is the D&D 4E-like Level Up A5E, which brings back memories of my 4E days and a better time in gaming, when things didn't suck. Mind you, 4E sucked, but gaming was still cool. Those days, 2008-2014, were good times.

The books I have will be it for 5E.

A5E and its smaller library feel supportable for me, and the design is solid.

I am circling the wagons, standardizing on my favorite version of 5E as my "long-term support" version, and going back to games that I loved before the 5E mess happened. Palladium. Rifts. FATE. Maybe Rolemaster. Aftermath. Space Opera. Cepheus Engine. GURPS. BX in some version or another, but not going back to the TSR books. I'm also trying a few other games I haven't paid much attention to, like Blades in the Dark. DCC still had a few shelves, and I love the vibe around that game. Shadowdark is still a good game: small and focused, with strong support.

I'm heading toward a flight to quality and memories.

These days, gaming is a cold and jaded place, where designers use games as a platform to exclude others and push tribalism. Burn it all down. There isn't much left anyway. Take it; I have my memories. The new stuff isn't worth the hassle, or trying to fight a system to get an old-school style out of a game that refuses the concept.

Going back to older games that I loved feels right for me. There is also a glut of these cozy, narrative heartbreakers coming out, and they typically come on strong and fade quickly. It is easy to get excited and spend money, but often that is all there is. What I seek is not new games, but older memories. I want games that take me back. I know that, for those coming into the market, these will be the days, and you can never really get back what you lost.

But there are games where I open the book, and it all comes back.

I open books to remember, smile, and enjoy the yellowed, hazy, faded memories of an autumn season of gaming.

Off the Shelf: Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a specific job. It hands you a tight B/X kit — characters, gear, magic, combat, the usual action rules — and then it gets out of the way. The adventures do the rest. They supply the rooms you should not have entered, the things that do not belong in a Monster Manual, and the treasures that might save you or end you. The adventures do the rest. There is no bestiary. Those belong to the adventure writer’s twisted imagination, and they stay there on purpose. If the players could study the opposition in advance, this would be a different game.

I keep that game on one shelf. Rules & Magic sits at the end. Everything else is a night or a place: Carcosa, the Virginia Disastrum books, A Red & Pleasant Land, Frostbitten & Mutilated, Broodmother Skyfortress, the anthologies, Blood in the Chocolate, World of the Lost, Earth Incubation Crisis. The Swords & Wizardry box on the same board is just storage. OSRIC is only there if something needs a number before it eats someone. The shelf's identity is the modules.

It is a stack of horror films that happen to use dice.

The 18+ contract is not a sticker on the wrap. This is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. You know what you sat down for. Taking the character sheet is pressing play on Terrifier, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, or Event Horizon. The film does not stop to ask if you are comfortable. Neither does this kit. If the game pre-defines the envelope of the horror, it sands down the thing you came for. It tempers the worst thing the module is willing to put in the room. If that is too much, get up and walk away. That is allowed. The game is not designed to run a comfort layer on top of the night. That runs counter to the horror this shelf is for.

What I love about this game is the default stage. Not generic medieval. Seventeenth-century Europe. The dawn of the colonization push: Pilgrim ships, trade empires stuffing holds and calling it God’s work. For a horror game with Puritan bones — all sinners shall be punished — that is ripe territory. The people writing ledgers and raising forts in the New World are the campers. The woods, the coast, the thing in the chapel, and the cargo that should not have been opened are the movie. The point is to inflict that on the expedition. You do not need orcs in a hole. You need a world that still believes in damnation and has just enough maps to walk into it. That is why the Virginia books on the shelf matter more than another dungeon pamphlet. 1633 is not flavor text. It is the year the contract is set.

How does a night run? The players sit there with character sheets and no frame of reference. No known bestiary. No magic-item list to drool over. No “fair encounter” math to hide behind. The referee puts a strange, unsettling situation on the table — a chapel that smells wrong, a hold that should not be that cold, a town that will not look at you — and the players react. There are no feat lists, subclass powers, death saves, or short rests to save you. What you see is what is there. Very little stands between you and a horrific fate except what you do, or what you fail to do.

The kit is small on purpose, and it does the job a B/X kit is supposed to do: it defines the niches and then protects them. The Fighter is the only one who gets better at hitting things. The Specialist is the skill kit. Magic is a loaded gun that might be pointed at the room. Nobody at the table is a toolbox of feats. You are your role, and the situation does not care.

As a referee, you have to love horror and be willing to let the night go where it goes. This is not a game for fudging dice so player narratives survive. Think Night of the Living Dead. They may fall one by one. They may all go in one ugly TPK. You can run the old tricks: peel one of them off, let the woods lie to them, make every sound a question. Like The Thing, they may stop trusting the person across the table because something in the room might already be wearing that face. You are Stephen King or John Carpenter. Part of the fun is the ride — the characters, and the terrible fates that may happen to them.

The still-unpublished Referee’s Guide puts a warning in front of all of this, and it is worth hearing in plain language. Enjoying a vicious movie is not the same as acting one out with other people in the room. LotFP art is flavor. It is there to tell you this is not the other fantasy game. It is not a shot list you are required to stage.

Know who sat down. Talk outside the game. Find the line before the night starts. The job is not to shock, scare, or scandalize the actual human across from you. If you truly offend them, they will not come back, and you will have earned that. Respect for the person comes before the idea you had for the scene. That is not a comfort layer bolted onto Friday the 13th. That is how you get a table that will press play at all.

The game has a reputation it really doesn't deserve, and the above could be considered one of the first "safety tools" printed in an OSR game. The game is an interactive horror movie. A lot of people cannot handle that. The people who can love this game like nothing else. But, as the game reminds you, talk to each other about it.

Depending on my mood, the first spine off the board is A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum 1633, Volume I. I love history, and I love horror, and this is the peanut-butter-and-chocolate moment. The punishment is not a speech. It is the colony. They have arrived in a land they do not understand, with ledgers, sermons, and a fence that will not help them. There is the settlement they think they are building. Something else is out there, too.

The fun is watching the characters take roles in that new place and then turning the screws the way Blair Witch turns them. A problem. A mystery. Someone who does not come back. Sounds in the woods that the colony's charter does not cover. Do not dump the truth on page one. Let the settlement invent explanations.

The beat I cannot resist: one or more of them are Magic-Users, locked in the stocks for witchcraft, while the colony manager has to stand in the mud and plead for their help. The sky is wrong. The woods are wrong. Everyone else is sure it is Satan. Nobody in charge understands it, and the only people who might are the ones they already chained up. That is the night. That is why this book comes off the shelf first.

Carcosa, Broodmother, the anthologies — those are not a punchline. They are the other situation. Virginia casts the player characters as colonists. The rest of the shelf casts them as stereotypical adventurers: swords, packs, a map, the old hunger for the next room. Same original sin. They opened the door. They unlocked the box. They walked into a place that was not theirs and expected the universe to grade on a curve. It does not. A pulp frame like Carcosa can still terrify an adventurer as badly as 1633 terrifies a colonist. The clothes change. The bill does not.

That is also when the OSRIC book on the end of the shelf earns its keep. In a night where “adventurer” is the default costume, you can let the table think they recognize the furniture. That looks like an owlbear. That looks like a +1 shield. No, it is not. The familiar stat line is bait. The module’s thing is what is actually in the room. OSRIC hands you the lie. LotFP is the punch that follows.

When I want the movie I actually described, I start in Virginia. The shelf stays because nothing else I own does this mix: 1633, Puritan panic, pulp nights that still punish the expedition, and a kit that will not let the Monster Manual save you.

D&D 4E and Level Up

 My brother and I collected 4E, and we loved it. That was a rough stretch, and the game got us out of the house and off the floor for the week. Most people hated the edition. It did not matter. We had figures, a battle map, and those tight dungeon fights that felt like chess you could bleed on. We were there for a tabletop-first game. We were not there to win an argument about whether it counted.

It held for the first ten levels. After that, the edges came apart. Monsters carried so many hit points that the fight became hours that dragged on forever. We started looking at each other like nobody had run this game at a table before they printed it.

It got so bad that our monsters wished out loud for it to be over, too.

I get why a 5E referee stops tracking the number. The game feels like it is coming apart in your hands. You can fake a fight that still feels like a night, or you can play it honest and watch people check out because high level is too easy. We did our version of that in 4E. Cut the monster’s hit points in half, doubled the damage- anything to make the mess end. By the end, we could not stand what that edition had turned into. With 5E, if a DM doesn't prep right or doesn't know their players' power, the end boss can turn into tissue paper and the whole night is ruined.

There was a D&D YouTube video recently about how lying to players like this and faking fights is terrible. But if the game is that broken, I don't blame DMs who cheat the system to make things feel more exciting. Especially if your players won't play anything else. What are you supposed to do? At that point, it is either lie to your players or quit a game you can't stand anymore.

At least if you lie, you are all playing together.

That is where we ended up with D&D 4E. In the end, it came down to lying to each other and rolling the dice.

But still, D&D 4E sits in a special place. The last good long campaign I played with my brother. At the start, it felt like it could go on forever. That part of my life still feels that way when I think about the maps, the minis, and the two of us at the table.

We walked to the bookstore to buy the books.

We spent those Saturdays together.

We would play with the new books all Sunday.

Leveling up to 10 in D&D 4E was fun. After that, it was a slow, long letdown.

That is why I hold A5E so tightly, even though Tales of the Valiant is the better-supported game and has more of everything. Level Up feels like a 5E that remembered 4E without asking me to play a broken game. A fighter with a tradition. A road that can go wrong. The commander class returns. Nerrath is still a place you can walk toward. The math is dry and scales well to level 20. It plays like a fixed 4E should feel, without being 4E.

Today’s 5E is at the end of the edition, casters having all the fun while the rest of the table watches. A5E is the last flicker of that 4E candle. I cannot put A5E away. It stays on the shelves I actually play from. I have better games. The memories are stronger than today’s promises.