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.

Mail Room: Shadowfinder

I loved Pathfinder 1e, and its remix of D&D 3.5E, the original world, the almost brutal Conan-meets-D&D flavor, and the entire “do anything” 3.5E rules. The backgrounds, classes, and savage world just worked so well together, and it was one of the near-perfect fantasy settings.

I bounced off Pathfinder 2E hard, and while I have many of the books, the new system doesn’t appeal to me. The books are huge, the system is voluminous, and there is too much for one person to fully grasp and appreciate.

So I find myself returning to simple games like Old School Essentials and Shadowdark for easier play, faster pacing, and rules I can keep in my head instead of needing to reach for a book to look up. But what if there was a compromise between Pathfinder 1e, D&D 3.5E, and old-school gaming? What if there was a game to fill the 3.5E hole missing in my life?

Part of that hole is tonal. D&D 5E often feels like high-fantasy superheroes; magic is abundant, characters grow into larger-than-life figures, and the system leans into power fantasy. Old School Essentials and core Shadowdark sit at the other end: low-fantasy survival, where resources are scarce, magic is dangerous or rare, and the world feels harsh and unforgiving. D&D 3.5E and Pathfinder 1e (and therefore Shadowfinder) hit a middle-magic sweet spot that still feels right to me. Magic is present, potent, and flavorful, but it doesn’t take over the entire system or turn every character into a walking special-effects show. The world stays dangerous and grounded while still allowing for the wonder and variety that made those earlier editions sing.

That middle register is exactly what a lot of us who loved 3.5e and PF1e are looking for when pure OSR games feel too stripped-down and modern 5E feels too inflated. For those players, the jump all the way back to four classes and extreme minimalism can feel like losing the texture that made the game feel like home.

You don’t have to go all the way back.

Shadowfinder is a third-party conversion that takes the best of Pathfinder 1e’s player options and its entire six-book Bestiary line and rebuilds them on the Shadowdark engine. It keeps the content density and character-option richness that made 3.5e and PF1e feel like “your edition,” while delivering the speed, lethality, and modern table feel of Shadowdark. You get alchemists, bloodragers, gunslingers, magi, skalds, slayers, specialist wizards, alignment-flavored clerics, dozens of ancestries, firearms with mishap tables, and a monster catalog that still feels like classic Golarion, or a close cousin you can file the serial numbers off of for a custom world.

The project is still expanding. Menagerie Press has already released the Complete Bestiary and the Player Guide as the first two core books. A full GM’s Guide has now completed crowdfunding as the third volume in the set, with the books and PDFs coming soon. Once those arrive, Shadowfinder will have a complete core trio that covers player options, monsters, and referee tools in one coherent package.

What changes is the chassis underneath. Real-time torch timers still tick. Darkness is still deadly. Magic is still risky (roll-to-cast instead of pure Vancian). Hit points stay low. Combat stays fast. The incremental bonus stacking and long character-optimization loops of Pathfinder 1e are gone. The game still favors player decisions over character builds, but it no longer starves you of the toys that made the older system feel rich.

In practice, this means you can recapture a lot of the classic pre-PF2e Golarion flavor, or run a custom world in that same high-fantasy-but-still-grounded register, without the system weight that made Pathfinder 1e start to drag, and without the more radical minimalism of pure OSE or core Shadowdark. The conversion work for adventure paths and homebrew is lighter than it would be in either of those systems, because the content is already speaking a familiar language.

This isn’t a claim that Shadowfinder is “better” than Old School Essentials or core Shadowdark. Those games remain excellent for the tables that want pure procedures or the most focused possible dungeon-crawling experience. It is simply a recognition that not every 3.5e or PF1e veteran wants to make the full cultural and mechanical leap those games require. For the players who still love the option depth and the classic middle-magic tone but no longer want the bloat, Shadowfinder currently sits in a useful middle space that didn’t really exist before.

You don’t have to choose between keeping all the complexity or stripping everything down to four classes and a torch timer. There is now a more gradual off-ramp that still gets you into faster, more dangerous play while letting you keep more of what made the edition feel like home.

If the pure OSR versions have always felt like too big a step backward from the game that defined your table for years, this might be the compromise worth looking at.

The Gen Con Announcements

From what I hear, EDGE Studios is not losing the Star Wars license, but Wizards will still produce 5E Star Wars books. Wizards is also releasing a handful of D&D and World of Warcraft books.

I do not yet know how deep these two product lines will be, or whether they will be one-off books with little follow-up support. These two IPs alone deserve libraries of material: bestiaries, race and culture books, era sourcebooks (not just a couple of quick releases). If they turn out to be limited, self-contained products, I am far less interested. What I want is a full, complete game experience that can sustain years of play.

The announced World of Warcraft book includes 50+ monsters. That does not even begin to cover the depth of WoW’s creatures, which could easily fill multiple bestiaries. Every major race deserves its own lore, history, and background treatment.

At the same time, Dark Sun is returning, along with Dragonlance and Greyhawk. In some ways it feels like the 1990s again, when too many settings helped push TSR toward bankruptcy. We will also see the D&D engine power G.I. Joe, Transformers, Power Rangers, and other licensed games in the coming years, further splitting attention. Traveller 5E is on the way. Many other publishers are announcing 5E-compatible versions of their own games.

We are watching partners brought on board to share financial risk, and other companies spending time and resources on D&D books when that energy could go into their own systems and releases.

Does flooding the channel with 5E-compatible versions of every popular IP, and every classic D&D setting, risk the same kind of consumer fatigue that hit the video-game industry in 1983 and TSR in the 1990s?

This is not a question of popularity. It is a question of volume without focus.

Is D&D Only Good for D&D Stories?

When the first version of AD&D 2nd Edition came out, it looked more like a generic game than D&D. The art was all over the place, but it included historical imagery that felt more like a simulation of Greek myths and stories. It still had plenty of generic fantasy art and pieces from noted TSR artists, but the entire game felt more setting-neutral than many editions. The revised edition shifted back into the D&D norms, but it still had that generic feeling, and that game could be used as a generic fantasy game.

TSR felt pressure from GURPS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so it is understandable they shifted away from the "D&D lore" and more into generic fantasy tropes and imagery. AD&D 2E is peak D&D for the kind of flexible fantasy play I’m talking about; it does not have the Gygaxian prose, but it does have the modern tropes, including the bard. The best Open 2E version is For Gold & Glory, and one of the best alternatives to Wizards' D&D out there; it is a better game for generic fantasy than AD&D 2E since it removes the D&D tropes, and the art is fantastic and deeply thematic. If you go in expecting D&D tropes or demons and devils, note those have been removed, but the game itself is very strong.

When D&D 4E came around, Wizards went full "World of Warcraft," and we now had the official D&D setting, planes, and worlds firmly set in stone as the default setting. We never left this model of world delivery, and D&D 5E still feels like it is set in the "official" D&D universe.

The subclass design does not help things; they are designed for a specific world model and idea. These drag in a lot of D&D-isms, mixed with the high-and-flashy magic spells, and you are doing more work to remove things than enjoy a game with a neutral base. The cosmology, planar travel, and monsters all feel like a "World of Warcraft world, but D&D" and far out of the realm of generic fantasy. They drag their assumptions with them. Even the “simple” Fighter and Rogue have gotten more layered with subclass features that often feel anachronistic or tonally off for a grounded historical-fantasy game.

The Open 5E clones still feel like "different flavor D&D worlds" rather than generic fantasy, with Level Up A5E feeling the most generic of the three, compared to the heavily Midgard-ized Tales of the Valiant. Even then, Level Up A5E makes specific assumptions about races like Orcs, and still crafts its own setting in the rules.

Treasure, magic items, and gear round out the assumed pseudo-Victorian post-Renaissance setting, and once you introduce guns, all bets are off. Modern D&D is all over the place in terms of technology levels. Even the manner of dress has morphed into "trenchcoats and pauldrons" steampunk fantasy. In many modern games, the equipment lists help define the world.

Granted, with enough work, D&D can be used for historical fantasy, but I get the feeling it is a lot more work to do it, or you need a "5E compatible" game specifically designed for that setting and time period, usually a crowdfunding buy-in whenever it rolls around. The costs for supporting 5E are typically higher than other games.

The game has spent the last decade doubling down on its own identity rather than staying a neutral chassis. The D&D identity is popular and commercially successful, but it does make the system less transparent when you try to use it for something outside its preferred aesthetic.

While I play GURPS for these types of games, there are drawbacks. The rules weight and character creation times of GURPS prevent quick adoption, and many groups bounce off the system in the first 20 minutes, never to return. There is also a lot more referee work up front.

GURPS is better at supporting any setting without fighting you. Whether it is the better game for a given group depends on how much they value setting fidelity versus ease of play, speed of character creation, and built-in high-fantasy energy. GURPS is not low-prep or fast-starting; I would play Shadowdark for that type of "pick up fantasy game."

Shadowdark is a legitimate middle option, and it sits in an interesting spot between modern 5E and something like GURPS. It is deliberately lighter on baked-in setting and cosmology than current D&D. The core game gives you four classes (Fighter, Priest, Thief, Wizard), a short spell list, a focus on torch-and-resource pressure, and a tone that leans classic pulp fantasy rather than the high-magic, multiplanar, subclass-heavy world of 5E. Because so much of the “D&D-ness” has been stripped out or made optional, it is easier to tilt toward other flavors without constant subtraction.

I can do a classic Greek or Roman game in Shadowdark easily. But Shadowdark is not a blank slate. It is still a class-and-level, hit-point, armor-class, dungeon-crawling fantasy game at its core. Shadowdark wants to be dangerous, resource-aware, and slightly pulp. That is a feature if you like that feel. It is a mild constraint if you want something closer to pure historical drama or very low-fantasy mythic storytelling.

Shadowdark will not hand you a perfect classical or Norse game out of the box, but the amount of material you have to remove or rewrite is noticeably smaller than in current D&D. You are also not having to create everything yourself or leverage sourcebooks like you are in GURPS, though the GURPS sourcebooks are excellent. On the plus side, Shadowdark is far easier for new players to get used to, and the "flavor" of the campaign is "classic Greek" or "classic Roman," and the existing classes work as-is.

How much setting and tone does the system assume?

With 5E, you have a strictly defined world.

With GURPS, you have everything and nothing, and it is all DIY.

Shadowdark sits in the perfect center of this discussion: light, fast, and familiar - it hits the D&D notes. It is also far easier to mod and flavor than full D&D. It is far easier to start new players with than GURPS. Magic is already constrained and dangerous. The system can be modded into any setting with minimal effort.