I don't like the word "tourist" since it has a new definition: "Anyone I feel that doesn't belong in my hobby." I am going by the classic definition here: "People from out of town here to see the sights, take all the parking spaces, clog the roads, throw their trash all over, and then leave."
I grew up on the coast of New England, so I have the right to complain about them.
The video I saw the other day got me thinking about modern adventure recreations, and how 5E can never recreate the situations that made those classic adventures what they were. The end product is reminiscent of those AI-generated movies; it appears goofy, with people having a drugged look, the camera moves erratically, and while things look cool, it lacks soul.
Some modern Wizards adventure remakes of classic adventures are just terrible, and they seem like "saying you went through the module" rather than "I actually played this the way it was designed." This is what I mean by "tourist" - in that you aren't getting the real thing, and due to modern convenience, someone accepts whatever they are given and then falsely adopts that as authenticity.
Modern D&D hands out short rests like juice boxes to kindergartners. The entire resource replenishment system of 5E is a holdover from trying to fix D&D 3.5E's "15-minute adventuring day," where module designers gave up balancing encounters and threw full fights at the party every time. Wizards never delivered a version of D&D with decent resource management, and they failed every time they tried. They scaled hit points and damage with levels, and they broke the game.
In classic D&D and AD&D, that 1d8+2 longsword does that same damage at level twenty as it did at level one. You hit far easier with it, so your damage does increase, but you are still fighting monsters with 60-80 hit points maximum. Your job is to take hits for the casters, who are pathetically defended and have near-zero hit points, and allow them to drop the massive hits.
D&D 3.0 and later scaled damage like a video game. This broke the resource management game. Breaking that system means every classic adventure breaks.
Passive perception is D&D's "training wheels," allowing players to focus on their own actions without needing to pay attention to the DM, and thus they can sit on their phones, zone out, and not even participate. Why even have traps in a dungeon? Someone will specialize in finding them with their "trap radar," so what are you going to do? Set the DCs so high that you can't even see them, and then metagame and purposely invalidate the "trap radar" build?
This type of game design essentially forces the rogue character to be the "trap radar" and nothing else. You have one build to help a party; you'd better pick it. My OSR thief can do many fun things, and "trap detection" is an active ability, so I don't need to build my character around it.
Choice? Character builds?
What choice?
If the designers played MMOs, they would know how quickly these trap builds get fixed, since an entire player base of a class hates being forced to all pick the same thing.
"You got trap finding? No? Find another group, or re-spec."
So, the entire concept of traps is thrown on the DM's lap as "extra work" instead of being an action players take to be careful? Why do I include them as a DM, again? And they wonder why 5E has a DM shortage; most of the workload of playing a game, including things players should be thinking about, is tossed over the referee's screen at the person trying to run the game.
So many things about 5E the designers got completely wrong. A lot of these things have become so ingrained into the hobby that they seem like blights upon gaming.
Where original D&D got a lot of things right, and left a lot of garbage out, 5E is designed by committee and throws it all back in. Gary Gygax would have never put half the things they put in 5E, and he would have tossed them all in the bin as bad game design.
The lack of permanent character death is akin to entering a video game's options and setting it to "easy mode." The entire concept of "death saves" is flawed, reminiscent of a slot machine or mobile game. If the Wizards VTT ever took off, I bet you would have been able to buy "automatic heroic saves" as a paid token you could spend "in-game."
Even Bastions seemed like a mobile game mechanic that slipped into the game, but not the SRD, so now they are an orphaned design mechanic that third parties can't support. Are we sure that D&D isn't transitioning into a mobile game with features locked behind paywalls?
The character sheet support alone in both D&D and Open 5E is a nightmare, and an expensive one to solve. You could pay a lot of money per month to other companies just to have character sheets for whatever version of 5E you play. Shard is excellent, but it is expensive.
The game is fine; it is just the ecosystem around it that is rotten to the core. Again, you attract tourists, you take advantage of them by jacking up prices, and make them pay through the nose for every little thing. This is what the locals did all summer in those small New England towns back then. Hey, we all had to survive the long off-season and do this again next year, so don't complain.
The out-of-control high-level power, lack of save-or-die, and the general "handrailing" of the entire game in every area feel like the core design of the rules is to protect the players from the adventures the company creates, that every experience will be a "safe one," and this is not even D&D. It is saying you played the game when all you watched was someone finish the game on YouTube.
5E is a good game, but it requires a heavy framework of support. In other games, I can run character sheets by hand, but in 5E, I need to pay for VTTs or online character creation services just to use my books in a game. I own my PDFs from other games as well, and D&D is still stuck in the past.
If you can't own PDFs, it is not a real game.
D&D 5E, and I need to be fair and include Tales of the Valiant and Level Up A5E in this one, is simply a tourist game that lets you "experience" classic adventures as if you were on a theme park ride, being rolled through the scenes in a motorized cart. There is no chance for character death; you do not need to pay attention or be invested. There are few consequences for any action, no matter how insightful or utterly stupid. There are fatal flaws built into 5E's core design.
If I ever lose faith in 5E, it will be because of this design choice.
It would be a loss to give up on ToV, since that would mean my entire investment in 5E was a waste. Is it a fun game? Yes, it works. But don't fool yourself that modern D&D is anything like classic D&D, and any of the classic adventures have been stripped of their soul and anything that made them what they were. And the effort required to create a new adventure in that spirit, or hope that something new comes along that captures the feeling, but everything about 5E makes "simulating the past" nearly impossible.
This feels like a "looking in the mirror and realizing you are living a lie" moment.
5E needs to be saved from itself for it to survive.
Shadowdark gets it right. This is a smaller-scale game where you are not "delving" (I hate that word, it is so touristy) through classic dungeons, as even a three-room hole in the ground can turn into a Tomb of Horrors-style nightmare. It is not a classic D&D experience since it lacks the scope and grandeur of adventure, including building expeditions, hiring retainers, and eventually establishing strongholds and claiming hexes on the campaign map for your domain.
If you want that gameplay, stick to Old School Essentials. This is the best, most stripped-down, easiest to play, classic dungeon game out there with all the options you would ever want. This faithfully recreates most of the classic modules exactly as they were intended to be played. Adventures Dark and Deep and Swords & Wizardry deserve special mention here, too.
Shadowdark is more like D&D mixed with Monopoly, and somewhat similar to the old Dungeon! board game by TSR. This is played in initiative order; you never break out of that. Players take turns, and you creep around the board, praying that your supplies hold out and you survive. You may defeat the end boss and die trying to escape the dungeon afterward.
The timer is always ticking. The players around the board need to work together and make the best of the time. Quick play means more is done. Being efficient in combat matters. Being a good referee means mastering the skills of presenting information quickly and clearly. Shadowdark is like our hobby's first "competitive sport" that can be played at a high level.
It is not very heroic or "simulating the original classic modules safely," but Shadowdark does reflect the classic game and how it was played at its most basic level. Shadowdark is the best interpretation of 5E as the classic "Dungeon!" board game ever written.
If I want 5E, I have Tales of the Valiant. I hope Kobold Press breaks the touristy nature of the game. With Player's Guide 2, we have the options and player roles we were missing. I hope they focus on a Game Master's Guide 2 and provide all types of play modifications, including a hardcore mode. The only way out of this mess is to change the game's fundamentals to accommodate the play styles and games that OSR players enjoy, and integrate them into the 5E framework.
Give us the tools to recreate old-school experiences. We need a "Shadowdark mode" for ToV. We need classic rules. We need rule mods that utilize the base game but offer new ways to play.
Start deconstructing 5E, Kobold Press.
If I want gritty realism, I always have GURPS. I don't need Warhammer or other low-magic 5E-style games; this one is the best right here, and it does it all. I get gritty combat, the best character design in any game in history, and a solid set of rules based on a simple mechanic. As a bonus, I no longer need modern, historical, science fiction, or licensed games either. GURPS is my forever game.
If I want gonzo high fantasy and a 3.5E replacement, I have Dungeon Crawl Classics. This is my Pathfinder 1e successor, and it captures that mixture of "anything goes" and "death at every turn" that I loved about those old-school adventures. What is fantastic about DCC is that every adventure they write plays like an old-school experience. Character death is real. There is no trap radar. You need to approach this game with an old-school mindset. I own my PDFs. I don't need to pay for monthly computer programs to track characters.
The adventures they write are like rereading the classic AD&D modules. Why would I not want to be on board for this? This is fun, and it takes me back to a time when... DCC is like the ultimate 1980s tribute band. Yes, they are paying homage to the classics we remember, but wow, are they good. Some old-school types will look down on this game, but we all know the truth. DCC rocks.
Rounding out this list are Old School Adventures, Adventures Dark & Deep, and Swords & Wizardry. Cypher System is in here, too, as my ultimate narrative game that blows away even Daggerheart in storytelling power.
5E does have that troubling "touristy" feeling to it. This is more the direction the game took after the original 2014 books, but there are parts of D&D 2014 that laid the groundwork for this. These made the game "too easy" and "too forgiving" for me. With Open 5E, we have a chance to break the cycle, as the 2024 D&D books appear to be doubling down on the nostalgia and tourism we already knew we were heading in.
I want 5E to be saved from itself. I don't want to have that tourist feeling of being a spectator, wandering through classic adventures with no threat or danger. If the story is "we are out of food and water," what does it matter if the druid can just good-berry us forever? I can see why referees are leaving 5E; the game takes away all your tools, leaving you as just the person reading the shaded boxes of text and paying attention to passive skills, while your players can be on their phones.
There are too many other games that would easily win a fight against a touristy 5E.
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