Most of today's role-playing hobbyists are consumed with characters who aim to gather personal power. This reflects an age where everyone feels powerless and helpless, and popular entertainment feeds the beast of insecurity.
The internet and social media have destroyed traditional consciousness.
It used to be back in the day, you could grow up, find someone you liked, and have a family. You could buy a house. You could have a career that lasts most of your life. Your power was more local, within a small place and time, but the fact that "you made it" means you "won at life" and your name carried on to the next generation.
The false god of the corporation pushes the lie that we can be young forever.
They keep selling kids' things to adults.
D&D 5E is a prime example. Classes only exist as "intravenous power delivery" paths. At times, the different character classes are slightly different photocopies of each other. There is no real difference between a warlock and a cleric besides marketing. I don't care about your eldritch blast or your pacts; you are still a cleric, and only one set of rules makes you feel more special than the other.
Pandering is a symptom of games that market false power to their players.
I have my 5E books out for my game with others, and they contain piles of buffs, snowflake class options, power builds, and more of the same thing, just reworded and resold to us as the same thing, only different.
Could a bard just be a rogue with a musical background skill? Do we need all this silly, magical music? Would a bard feel more powerful without all these "song of X" and "ballad of Y" false powers driven only by marketing that this class is somehow now needing to be different, and complicating our games with another version of something similar, again?
If a referee said, "Because you are a high-level hero and have this special background skill, just play a song and tell me what you want it to do."
That same thing works all the time for blacksmith skill, or bowyer. A level 20 character with smithing should be able to forge an epic weapon. If Bard was a background skill for roleplaying-based powers, would that not work just as well?
Why do we need yet another class and set of subclass options?
I could give every one of the four base classes in Basic Fantasy a "background skill pick" that mirrors a D&D class, and just let people make up powers with that, and I would get the same feeling and in-game effects without a few thousand more pages of rules. Warlock? Pick that as a magic user or cleric, and have the player tell me what it does, make up powers, and change their spells. Druid? Bard? Barbarian? Ranger?
Let's make any special abilities for those work like an ability score check. Have the player tell you what they want to do, and what in-game effect they want it to have.
Does the fighter with the ranger skill want to make a shelter?
Does the thief with the bard skill wish to sway a hostile crowd?
Does the cleric with the druid skill wish to calm the grizzly bear?
Does the thief, using acrobatic skill, want to tightrope walk?
Does the cleric with the warlock skill want to summon a demon to ask a lore question?
I don't need spells or chapters full of rules for those things. I will make it an ability score check, apply a modifier, and make a ruling. I will consider the character level to determine how much power they have. We are done, put down your phones, and we don't need all those books to waste our time and money.
Most of these powers don't even need die rolls either, and that is another secret today's overdesigned consumer service games don't want to tell you. The level 8 thief walks the tightrope. The level 11 cleric summons the demon and gets the answer.
Don't let the dice control your game or ruin the story.
There, now I don't need to carry around a few thousand pages of rules, nobody needs to use D&D Beyond, and we avoid hours of rules reference on our phones every game session. Plus, people get distracted by notifications and do something else at the table when they should be participating.
With one small change, Basic Fantasy is doing more than D&D 5E does, with far fewer rules.
And the power levels are still under control.
Four classes with a simple skill choice for each can do far more than one or two thousand pages of overwrought rules that were written using a pay-by-the-word payment contract. And in my modded Basic Fantasy, I can have a cleric with the bard skill, or a fighter-acrobat.
Want even more power? Give characters a second skill at 10th level.
What?
Is game design hard?
Can only people in Seattle do this?
Filling a book with words is entirely different than creating a game.
In games where I have less power, such as classic D&D and others where you play a mostly normal "skilled person," I end up feeling more powerful because I need to effect change outside of my character, make relationships, achieve achievements, and change the world outside my character. Even in a classic AD&D style game, I must clear land and build a stronghold. Those gold pieces are my XP. Those demon-worshipping orcs in the next valley? They must be destroyed or they will cause pain for everyone around them. No "getting along" or modern sensibilities and diplomacy exists in a fantasy world.
Defeating them feels like actual power. I have changed the world for the better.
In modern D&D, playing a game is about "me and what I get out of it."
I have never seen a comic book survive the "more power" period, a late-stage affliction of most fiction and media. This is the final run of most stories, where the writers give the characters all the power they could ever want and blow out what they took so long to build.
When a game or story goes "power first," it is late-stage media.
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