The Myth of D&D is Dead

Not the game.

Not the books. 

Not the streams, the VTT, or the fifty million people who have touched it. The myth - the specific story the hobby told itself about what it meant to sit down, light a torch, and go into the dark.

The myth is dead.

That myth was never “we make a story together.” Every RPG does that. The D&D myth was a crossing. You stepped through a threshold into a place that did not care about your character’s tragic backstory or the campaign’s planned ending. The dungeon (or the wilderness, or the mythic underworld) was indifferent and slightly hostile. Doors slammed. Light ran out. Time cost wandering monsters. A rust monster, a save-or-die, or a 4 hp magic-user meeting the wrong corridor could end the expedition. You came back changed because you might not come back. The gold, the levels, and the stories felt taken from the other side, not awarded. That was the alchemy: heat, pressure, and the chance the vessel cracks.

The official game no longer performs that procedure.

Characters can’t die in the way the myth required.

Fifth Edition and the 2024 revision built a machine that treats death as an exception. Death saves, short rests that refill hit points, abundant healing, cheap resurrection, and encounter math tuned so the party is expected to win turn failure into a narrative beat the table can choose to allow. People still lose characters. That is not the point. The system no longer generates death - or even lasting loss - as a structural feature of play. It is optional, often socially costly, and frequently walked back because the story “needs” these protagonists. When the vessel almost never cracks, the alchemy does not fire. You are no longer crossing into Wonderland. You are looking at yourself in the glass.

Every expansion then adds power creep on top of that safety.

New subclasses, origin feats, revised class features, background bonuses, and later-book options keep raising the floor and the ceiling. The company has never kept the classes in a single book in a stable power band. Later material routinely outshines earlier material. The 2024 books continued the pattern: weaker classes got real buffs, the overall power level rose, and the monster and adventure math was not rebuilt to match. This is not “more interesting choices.” It is inflation. The constraints that once made the otherworld feel real - scarcity, time, the risk of permanent loss - are replaced by more buttons and more ways to succeed. When even the publisher cannot keep its own classes balanced, the last pretense of an indifferent, dangerous place is gone.

Play shifts from adventure to consuming content.

Official adventures become products to be completed rather than places that push back. The dungeon is no longer a threshold. It is a series of balanced encounters and set-piece moments designed to make the party feel like protagonists. You move through a theme-park queue with better merch and a guaranteed exit. The brand sells the memory of danger while delivering reliability and escalation. That is the opposite of the old myth. The old myth needed the possibility that you would not get the treasure, would not get the level, would not get the story you wanted. Content consumption assumes you will.

That is why the original myth is dead inside the official product. The design no longer generates the conditions the myth required: real danger, real scarcity, and an otherworld that can reject you. What remains is a well-marketed power-fantasy loop.

The myth did not vanish. It left the books. It lives in tables that house-rule the inflation and the safety nets away, in OSR and adjacent games that never accepted the “you are the destined heroes” premise, and in the memory of people who remember when a first-level wizard had 1–4 hit points, and the dungeon itself was the antagonist.

The question is no longer whether D&D is popular. It is whether we still want the crossing over into the unknown, or whether we are content to consume the souvenir from the gift shop.

What I Will Carry

The last game-as-a-library I owned was Pathfinder 1e. A library-game is a line you add to for years without changing religions. New books become rooms in the same house. I tried to rebuild that house with Pathfinder 2e, and it never took. I tried again with 5E — 2014, 2024, Tales of the Valiant, Level Up A5E — and got four partial collections instead of one living shelf. The only libraries I still feed are GURPS and Palladium, and half the Palladium books are in a closet because 5E is standing where they used to stand.

Buying D&D 2024 was a mistake. I get the feeling two or three years from now, all of 5.5E will be replaced in the 6E announcement. This version will be a gaming history footnote at the end of the chapter titled D&D 2014.

But my shelves will change. I may give Palladium the shelf Tales of the Valiant is using. Of the 5E-shaped games, I will keep only one. Level Up stays because it is the pile I can run without flipping through a wall. The thinner support is not a drawback. There is already enough in that stack for a decade of play, and if I need a monster, a spell, or a whole adventure, I can pull it from the other 5E libraries and bring it over. This is not a console that refuses other discs. Everything still ports. I am just choosing to live in the smaller house first, the one I will actually open.

I am happier in the older games. They were written before a handful of design theories started getting repeated as law in a hobby that does not have one. D&D and Candyland are both games. They are not the same kind of game. Candyland does not need a thousand pages or 48 subclasses, and nobody calls it incomplete. The tent is that big. A lot of those early books were not trying to win a modern market, so they leave more room to invent. Fantasy RPGs have spent a decade trying to move on from 5E and then shipping 5E again, like another superhero movie the studio expects to open at a billion.

The official D&D shelf is already in storage. That part is finished. What is left in the room is two shelves of Kobold Press and Tales of the Valiant, one shelf of Level Up, and a closet full of Palladium that got evicted so 5E could keep trying to become a library. It never did. I went around that fact a few times — keep the cousins, rank the cousins, donate the cousins — before the job got simple.

Tales of the Valiant comes off the shelf. I still have the PDFs. The game is playable. It just is not on display anymore as something core to how I game. That folder is not free. Cloud storage and the devices I read it on are a bill, same as wood and dust. Nothing in this hobby stays around at zero cost.

Palladium comes out of the closet and takes that space. Level Up stays as the one 5E I will actually run. Everything else in that family can sit in a box until I need to port a monster or an adventure over. GURPS does not move. It is already a library. I am not building a fourth 5E.

The room is simpler than the last ten years of buying tried to make it. Two libraries I still believe in — GURPS and Palladium — get to take up space because I will open them. One small 5E stack stays so I have a dialect I can run, and a box I can raid, without keeping four versions of the same game warm. Pathfinder 1e remains the last time a library game felt like a house I lived in. I am not going to rebuild that house out of every hardcover that looks like 5E.

I am going to play what I will carry.

A Universe from One Page

The last article I published on this idea was about the original Traveller Little Black Books. Three digest booklets, forty-eight pages each, 1977. Characters and Combat. Starships. Worlds and Adventures. No official empire in the box. You rolled a sector because that was the game. Tiny rules. Infinite map.

Kevin Crawford’s Without Number games are the best living version of that same concept. Stars Without Number. Worlds Without Number. Cities Without Number. Ashes Without Number. One small engine, reused. The rules you actually need at the table fit on a single printed sheet. The rest of the book generates a whole universe.

The engine is plain on purpose. Six attributes, 3 to 18. A short skill list. Foci instead of a phone book of feats. Combat any old-school player already knows. Skills on 2d6 plus attribute plus skill—that Traveller curve, sitting next to B/X fighting. Hand someone a pregen and that sheet, and they can play. The books are fat because Crawford spent the pages on the part a lot of modern design skips: tools that spit out places, jobs, factions, and trouble without a week of prep.

Where the pages go

Look at the 2024 Dungeons & Dragons player book—the one people call 5.5E. About 384 pages, and that is only the player half. Twelve classes. Forty-eight subclasses. Feats stacked on feats. Almost all of that complexity lives on your sheet. New level, new button. “Me, me, me,” written as rules.

There is joy in that. Builds are fun. I am not going to pretend they aren’t.

It is also a different product. The universe becomes the hallway you walk down between ability uses. The LBB idea, and Crawford’s idea, flips it. The character stays small. Marine, psychic, thief, operator. Enough person to have a job and a wound. The infinite sits outside the sheet: a world with two tags that will not sit still, a corp that has heat on you, a court that wants a favor, factions that move because you ignored them for three sessions.

You do not need forty-eight subclasses to matter at the table. You need a place that answers when you engage it. This hobby would rather catalog the world—and have that world still be there after the selves get killed and you roll up the next one.

Traveller Grows Up

The 1977 set gave you a Universal World Profile and trusted the referee to turn digits into Saturday night. Those books were not free. They were small, cheap, and enough to start. Later Traveller grew a huge official setting, and the current line is still a paid game. If you want the open-rules cousin, that is Cepheus Engine, from an old Mongoose SRD. Different family tree. When people say “the LBBs,” they mean Books 1–3 as a machine. Not a novel. Not a free PDF.

Stars Without Number delivers on the dream of the LBBs. It takes a few hundred more pages, but it delivers. Tags are the world-gen tables after they grew up. You do not get a blob of flavor and a hope. You get two tags, then enemies, friends, complications, things, and places that fall out of the mix. Collide the tags and the world already has work for the party. You have not even named the bartender.

Then there is the faction turn. Between sessions, the GM runs a short, mean little game with the groups already on the map. They grab resources. They fight. They fall apart. They send trouble whether anyone asked for it. The sector keeps moving while the table is off doing laundry. The sandbox has instructions now.

The books talk to each other. A spike-drive wreck can land in the Latter Earth. An operator out of Cities can bleed in Ashes. Same verbs. Different generator: worlds, courts and ruins, city heat, the wreck after the wreck.

The "universes" these games create are directly relevant to the settings they encapsulate.

Show the machine

This is the part a feat list cannot do.

You roll a world. Air you can breathe. Enough people for politics. Tech high enough to hurt and low enough to be hungry. Two tags: heavy industry, tomb world. So the colony is mining the bones of something older than the charter. The enemy is easy—a combine that will bury a worker to hold a claim. The friend is a surveyor who saw the wrong mural in a shaft and cannot let it go. Complication: a union, a sickness in the lower galleries, a pretech vault the company swears is empty. The thing worth stealing is a crate of sealed cans, or a name on a work order. The place is a canteen under a rusted gantry where everyone drinks with their back to the door.

That is not a setting guide. That is next session, in less time than it takes to pick a subclass. Do it twenty times, and you have a sector. At the end of the night, ask where they want to go next, and only prep that. The infinite is not more words. It is a small rule that keeps making situations.

These four books are what I would keep if I were forced to throw everything else out, and I would feel I did not lose a thing. Maybe I would keep a BX game like Basic Fantasy for a few more monsters and treasures, maybe a couple thematic spells, but that is it. A lifetime of gaming could fit in a single backpack, and I am good to go.

The free game

What Without Number adds—and what the 1977 box did not—is a real free game. Most of the rules and most of the generators are in the PDF you can send around tonight. Deluxe is more toys: extra classes, weirder tech, thicker toolkits. Not a locked door in front of play. That is his publishing choice, not a Traveller tradition. Still a good one.

“Download this, and we can start” should not be rare.

This should be the way the industry operates.

Why the small framework still feels like magic

There is a clean joy in a core that stays small and still applies to everything you point it at. One page of verbs. A universe that talks back. The sheet is a cheap, sharp tool. The map is the thing you came for.

The other school is not broken. It is buying a different feeling: a self that levels into more self. Popular for a reason. Also expensive. Every new button on the sheet is a page that did not go to the world, and one more rule to remember before anyone looks up and sees the gantry, the canteen, the mural in the shaft.

The old bet still holds true. Keep the rules in your head. Point them at whatever is in front of you. Let the tables force a collision so you are not staring at a blank hex. Same promise as the Little Black Books, with better notes on how to run it. Tiny framework. Infinite application.

If you want to feel the difference, skip the build. Roll two tags and a reaction. The universe is already bigger than the sheet.

The Tiny Producing the Infinite

I play classic games the way some people read classical literature: not because the new stuff is bad, but because I want to get back to the basics.

If we want to understand literature more deeply, we go back to Shakespeare or Homer. If we want to understand poetry, we return to the classics. In religion, we read the source texts. In philosophy, we read the greats. The same impulse applies here. In this hobby there’s a quiet pressure to stay current. New systems drop constantly. Even “new editions” of old games often arrive loaded with ideas borrowed from everywhere else. Cross-pollination is real, and after a while it starts to feel like the hobby is eating its own dog food. Designers pull from the same pool of proven techniques, the same assumptions about what a session should feel like, the same standards and practices that have calcified over decades. The result is a lot of games that deliver very similar experiences with slightly different dice, slightly different procedure names, and slightly different branding.

I get why that happens. Modern design is highly tuned. It knows how to produce a specific kind of fun with remarkable efficiency. But when too many games are tuned toward the same frequencies, the original signals get harder to hear.

Going back to the early games cuts through that. You’re not dealing with a carefully refined product that has already absorbed thirty years of other people’s solutions. You’re dealing with the unfiltered source ideas as they first appeared: the weird assumptions, the gaps, the strange procedures that later designers smoothed over or abandoned. Those rough edges are valuable. They force you to confront the original inspirations on their own terms instead of through layers of later interpretation.

That confrontation is where new ideas start to germinate for me. Once you’ve sat with the original text and felt how it actually plays—not the modern reconstruction, not the OSR distillation, not the “this is how we fixed it” version—you have a cleaner foundation. From there you can decide what still works, what was always awkward, and what possibilities got left on the table when the hobby moved on.

I’m not interested in purity for its own sake. I’m interested in having the original materials available as living tools again, not as historical artifacts that only exist inside someone else’s revision.

Even the OSR, for all its stated fidelity, still adds an interpretive layer. An implementation such as Swords & Wizardry or Old School Essentials may stay completely true to the original rules text, yet it is always flavored by the designer’s own experience with the game. That experience shapes the method of play, the tone, and the implicit assumptions about how the game is “supposed” to feel at the table. The result is a version of the original, already filtered through one person’s (or one design team’s) long history with it.

Consider a simple historical possibility. Suppose one group’s way of playing D&D in the late 1970s was to draw a map of points and lines: each point a town, dungeon, or other location, each line a measured travel time. Play consisted of traversing that point map. Nothing in the original booklets forbids it. The rules are open enough that such a method could arise naturally from the text and the table’s own habits. Yet that style of play does not sound like any modern OSR presentation. Modern OSR materials, however carefully they reproduce the rules, tend to carry forward a set of shared assumptions about how the game was “always” played by the majority of groups—hex crawls of a certain density, dungeon procedures of a certain rhythm, wilderness travel of a certain texture. Those assumptions are useful, and they produce excellent games. They are still assumptions.

When you play someone else’s interpretation, even a scrupulously faithful one, you inherit those common assumptions. You lose the quirky, local, possibly hobby-altering ideas that could only have emerged from a particular table working directly with the sparse original text. The original games left room for those divergences. Later presentations, including many OSR ones, quietly close some of that room by folding in the methods that became standard.

The same pattern appears in Traveller. The original Little Black Books were small enough to fit in a coat pocket. In those books, the Imperium was not a finished setting. Players generated it at the table through random tables and dice rolls. Every group’s stars, worlds, and trade routes were different because every group’s dice told a different story. A few thin volumes could produce an infinite, personal universe. That is the part that still moves me: the tiny producing the infinite. Modern Traveller offers a fully realized, multi-shelf catalog—rich, supported, and highly playable. It is a different and valuable proposition. But once every star and planet has been mapped and filled out, the galaxy becomes a known commodity. The sense that this particular group is still discovering the universe fades.

With the original, the generative toolkit becomes a finished product.

Both the OSR reconstructions and the modern lines of classic games are achievements. They make the material accessible and often improve the experience in practical ways. Yet each adds a layer of interpretation that the original text did not contain. If the goal is to hear the source signal before those layers settled into place, the early booklets remain the place to go. They are still the only versions that leave the most possibilities open—including the strange, local, and potentially transformative ones that never became the majority practice.

The point is not to reject the modern lines or the OSR reconstructions. Both have made these games more accessible and, in many ways, more playable. The point is simply that the original texts still offer something those later versions cannot fully replace: the largest open space.

When you sit down with the early booklets, you are not inheriting a finished method of play, a settled tone, or a pre-mapped universe. You are inheriting a sparse set of procedures and the permission to fill the rest yourself. That permission is what allowed the quirky, local solutions—the point maps, the personal Imperiums, the odd procedures that never became standard—to appear in the first place. Those solutions are still available. They just require returning to the source before the interpretive layers settled into place.

I keep going back to the classics for the same reason people keep going back to Homer, to the early philosophical texts, to the original scriptures. Not because later commentary is worthless, but because the source still has the power to surprise. In the gaps and the rough edges, new ideas can still take root. The tiny books can still produce the infinite. All they need is a table willing to roll the dice and find out what kind of universe appears this time.

And the Truck Keeps Rolling

But we will get new toys! But I have already spent so much money! Who cares? The caster-martial divide is a mile wide at this point, and who plays martials? I want more power gaming!

There comes a point in the hobby when the rolling ball of junk is so heavy and loud that it sustains itself just on momentum and greed. Official D&D no longer has to be good, coherent, or even honest about its own settings. It only has to keep moving. New subclasses, new feats, another limited-edition PHB - that’s enough to keep the people who have already spent the money from walking away. Momentum and sunk cost do the rest.

The state of 5.5E is sad. It feels like a late-stage game. The designers know the next edition is coming, so they stopped caring how much power creep they throw in and decided to ride this one out for as much money as possible. The whole thing is an out-of-control garbage truck, filled to the brim, rolling downhill.

I like 5E. The rules were never the problem. D&D and its settings are beginning to become nauseating to me, and I don’t even recognize them anymore. Greyhawk, the Realms, Planescape, Spelljammer, and every other one? They deserve better than they got today. Just go away.

I’ll pick up a discarded 3.5-era setting book and just play that. Scarred Lands. Kingdoms of Kalamar. Freeport. Something like Savage Thule. The kind of book that still assumes the world is allowed to be ugly, specific, and a little embarrassing. A setting that didn’t need a committee to decide whether the city could be rotten, whether the elves could be treacherous, or whether the map was allowed to have a wound in it. Those books still have an identity. They still have an edge. They still sound like someone actually wanted to say something about the world instead of just selling the next subclass.

Why is everything so censored in a hobby built to simulate difficult topics? Death. Loss. The unknown. The myth of the monster. The acquisition of wealth by going outside the system and into the dungeon. Taking risks. Becoming a hero and fighting evil.

That is the version of the hobby I miss. Not the rules. The voice. The stretch when you could still open a setting and recognize it, before every classic world got sanded down and sold back as an update. I would rather run one of those old books at my table than keep paying for the official version of a place I no longer recognize.

These days alignment and evil itself are gone. The game has become a “me me me” story simulator—hollow, empty, lifeless, an introspective ego-masturbation identity simulator. Good and evil mean nothing. Wealth means nothing. Heaven and Hell mean nothing. Do what you want and get away with it all. Power and identity are everything. And now the worlds are being built around the same stupid “nothing is important except you” ego-stroking mentality.

The problem is what the name is now attached to: updates that no longer sound like themselves, books that exist to keep the truck moving, the smell of a company that would rather sand a world down than risk saying what it used to say. I would rather take the 5E chassis and get away from that entirely. Tales of the Valiant will do it. Level Up Advanced 5E does it better. Same math, same table, none of the official voice I no longer want in the room.

Here’s the rub. If I am already giving up the official books, the official settings, and the official smell, why stop halfway? Why not go the rest of the way and play Shadowdark, or something out of the OSR, or Castles & Crusades? Dungeon Crawl Classics will do the whole job with more fun per hour and a lot less complexity. Once you start giving things up, giving it all up becomes a real option. The only reason to stay is the rules you actually want to keep.

If I am still in that neighborhood, I will go to the best version I can find. Shadowdark when I want speed and ease of play - it is not a 5E clone, but it is close enough to the same instincts that it belongs in the conversation. Level Up Advanced 5E when I want depth. Depth can be deceptive, though. A thicker book is not always a better game. Sometimes it is just more weight to carry down the same hill.

Level Up A5E gets close to the point where the complexity stops paying you back. You are already carrying a heavy book, already making more decisions at the table, already spending the kind of prep time that used to belong to a different kind of game. Once you are that far down the big-and-heavy path, GURPS is only a few steps farther, and it gives you more for the same investment. It is an acquired taste. Most people bounce off it. When you can make it sing, though, it is better than another thick 5E variant trying to be everything at once. If I am going to accept that much weight, I would rather accept the game that was built for it.

I am not going to keep buying the official thing just to protect the money I already spent, or because the next book has another toy in it. The truck can keep rolling. I don’t have to be on it.

Aftermath Archives: Dice Before the Chain

Aftermath Archives: Dice Before the Chain

A fun little observation on my Aftermath! blog, the DCC dice are directly compatible with the Saving Throw system in the Aftermath! game. The concept of dice chains started 32 years before DCC's release, but, to be honest, some of the DCC dice never formally existed back in 1980.

Using the d30 (and other dice) was mentioned for Saving Throws in Aftermath!, instead of modifying the target number. This technically extends to any dice, including DCC's d14, d16, and d24 - and others.

The two systems are dice-compatible. Goodman Games needs to reach out to FGU, work on a new edition, and write the Zochi dice into the game. This is a classic system that theoretically uses the same dice and was written 46 years ago. It would be amazing to have another game that uses the super-fun Zochi dice to collect and play with.

DOA Sun

https://www.ttrpginsider.news/p/fighting-oppression-in-new-ways-d-d-s-designers-on-adapting-dark-sun-to-modern-times

Forget it.

Cooked.

It's done.

There Is No Ethical Brain Donation

https://www.polygon.com/dnd-baldurs-gate-3-mind-flayer-tabletop-transformation/

I hate to be the spoilsport, but there is no way around it.

Vampires can live on animal blood or willing donors. You can write a tragic, even sympathetic vampire if you want. The hunger is a problem you can negotiate.

Mind flayers do not have that option. Their food is the entire mind of an intelligent creature. Their colonies do not function without a steady supply of thinking beings kept as livestock. That is not flavor you can file off. That is the creature.

Wizards has spent years scrubbing slavery and “people-owning” out of every other culture they print. Then they release a feat path that lets a player become one of the few monsters whose entire society is built on exactly that. They will give you the tentacles and the Mind Blast. They will not give you an honest accounting of dinner.

As a story option that mimics the BG3 struggle, it is fine. The tadpole, the slow loss of self, the choice to stop or go further - that can be a good character arc. But if the transformation ever completes, you should lose the character. What remains is an evil NPC. That is the traditional take, and it is the honest one. Ceremorphosis is not a prestige class. It should not end up as a power-gaming feat chain you take because Mind Blast looks fun.

D&D has spent years making sure you never lose control of your character. So of course they won’t take the sheet away when the transformation finishes. They’ll just let you keep playing the thing whose society they refuse to describe.

They want to sell you the squid. They just don’t want to talk about the farm.

Games as Media

Getting five people together for a game night is a lot harder than sitting on the couch and consuming games as media. Look at the D&D YouTube audience, the actual-play shows, Critical Role, the $13 million Dungeon Crawler Carl crowdfunding campaign, and the trailer-driven announcements that now drop like video-game reveals. That is a real market. It is just not the same market as a weekly table.

There is a parallel collector market, games as objects, limited editions, shelf pieces that may never hit the table. Set that aside for now. The bigger money and the louder noise are in media.

I like fiddly games. The ones meant to live on a table: math, lore, numbers, figures, dungeon tiles, rulers, a calculator, dried paint on the wood, dice hitting the tray. That is one way the hobby-as-game still looks. It is not the only way. A rules-light story game that a group actually runs every Thursday is still the game layer. The point is not complexity. The point is that the product is built to be used.

Games-as-media can be played on a tabletop. Plenty will be. The difference is what the launch is optimized for. A big IP campaign, a cinematic trailer, an actual-play flagship, those succeed if they are watched, shared, backed, and argued about. Table time is a hoped-for aftereffect, not the thing the machine is built to measure. Attention is the product. Play is a possible use.

You can see it in the artifacts. A game built for the table expects worn books and missing minis. A game built for media expects a clean unboxing, a clip, and a discourse cycle.

Every publisher wants hype. That is just the social-media world we live in. The question is whether the game can bank cash without a table.

A store-level game that nobody plays dies. The books sit. The next order does not come. The FLGS cannot sell atmosphere. Something built for the games-as-media market can live in the licensed-IP sphere instead: a Netflix-pilot energy, a comic-book drop, a pretty coffee-table book meant for casual flipping more than for a campaign. Plastic miniatures. A trailer. The sale happens when the object is desired, not when the session starts.

That is the split. Hype is common. Getting paid before play is not.

Is the Dark Sun trailer selling a physical game, or is it shopping a look? In a games-as-media market, that is a fair question. The footage has to work as a clip, a vibe, a possible Fallout-style show. The books can still be real, and the trailer can still be doing Hollywood work.

In the FLGS and OSR world, this barely comes up. Those games are not built to be pitched. They are built to be run. In the hybrid market, one foot is on the table, and the other is in the pitch room.

Not every launch is like this. Plenty of games still arrive as a book, a PDF, and a hope that a store or a Discord will pick them up. The ones that dominate the feed are different. They land like trailers for the next franchise installment. That layer is loud, and it is easy to mistake the volume for the whole hobby.

The hobby can feel like noise because hype is what travels. A session does not.

I can’t play a trailer.

I can play a game.

Anti-Energy and the Hobby

Anti-energy can be a dangerous thing. Let me define it.

This happened to me. My disappointment with Star Wars built up over years and finally peaked with this year’s lackluster movie release. So I dove in, collecting Star Wars RPG books and telling myself, “I can do better than them.” My goal was to tell classic Star Wars stories at the table the way they were supposed to feel.

The concept of “proving them wrong” is the crux of anti-energy. When that moment fades, the anti-energy fades with it, and you are left holding empty feelings and piles of useless books. Anti-energy is best redirected: create your own sci-fi universe and stories instead. Refuse to “fix theirs” out of spite.

Whatever actually appeals to you about science fiction—low-level free traders scraping by on payroll runs, explorers in barely spaceworthy junk craft, space mercenaries on the fringe, or the classic hard sci-fi stories you love—do those things. Do them instead of channeling anti-energy into fixing someone else’s pile of broken junk that no longer even knows what it is supposed to be.

Then the anti-energy starts to wane. You feel the riptide pulling your creative urges into the abyss. That is when you realize what this feeling actually is.

Anti-energy is a destructive force. It feeds on schadenfreude and the false-positive rush of “I can fix this.” You move on to the next thing. I can fix Dark Sun. I can fix D&D. I can fix Star Trek. You buy more books. You fall into the next trap. The anti-energy fades again, and you are left more drained and empty than before. Time wasted when new stories could have been told.

Look at where the official material is going. Dark Sun is turning into Splatterpunk meets WWE for the new D&D 5.5E version. Star Trek’s shows are crashing and burning—no longer exploring strange new worlds, but turning inward into Gen Z feelings and emotions, the kind of show better suited for the CW on those fringe syndicated budget networks. D&D itself is becoming a fantasy superhero game, and everyone by default accepts it like D&D is the new fantasy MCU. The original had those deep-rooted feelings of myth, heroism, savage survival, crawling into the unknown, crossing into the mirror, the dungeon funhouse of death, and personal struggles where you were not invincible and immortal.

Parts of the OSR are based on anti-energy for D&D. I feel that if D&D were ever to disappear, a good portion of that scene would retract and recede into a much smaller niche audience.

I’m not saying the OSR is artificial. But why you love it may be.

If you are in the OSR primarily to “correct D&D,” you are setting yourself up for disappointment the day modern D&D dies or stops mattering. That corrective drive is still anti-energy. It needs the thing it’s pushing against in order to keep its heat.

If you are in the OSR out of genuine love for the old ways—the resource tension, the real danger, the mythic grit, the dungeon as a place that does not care about your story—and you refuse the toxic anti-energy, you are in a far more creative and better place. That version does not need modern D&D to exist as a foil. It can keep generating new material and new tables even if the official line vanished tomorrow.

The same distinction applies to everything else. Star Wars, Dark Sun, Trek, whatever. When the urge is “I will fix their broken thing,” the energy is finite and extractive. When the urge is “this is the specific feeling and structure I actually want at my table,” the energy becomes self-sustaining. That is the difference between ending up with another stack of unused books and ending up with campaigns that actually happened.

Anti-energy is finite and extractive. Positive love of the play experience itself is generative.

The practical move is simple. Notice when the urge to collect, redesign, or “restore” is coming from opposition rather than appetite. Isolate the actual texture you want—mythic vulnerability, desperate scarcity, outward exploration, low-level free-trader grind, whatever it is—and feed that directly. Build the stories that only exist at your table. Refuse the invitation to fix someone else’s pile of broken junk that no longer even knows what it is supposed to be.

When the spite runs out, that is what remains: the campaigns that actually happened, instead of the books that never got used.

The Age of Distillation

We are entering the Age of Distillation.

The “big iron” systems of the last two decades- multi-book, thousand-page engines like Pathfinder 1E and the various iterations of D&D are no longer the only way to deliver their own fantasies. A growing body of design work is taking those dense rule sets and re-expressing them as lean, fast, highly accessible games. The goal is the same: keep the fantasy, dump the friction.

Just as the iPhone was initially mocked for stripping away the complexity of earlier smartphones, these distilled games deliberately remove the mechanical overhead that once felt necessary. Shadowdark took the core appeal of modern D&D-style play and condensed it into a tight, elegant, torch-lit framework. Shadowfinder does the same for the 3.5E/Pathfinder 1E tradition: it is a Shadowdark-adjacent reimplementation that preserves the class fantasy, the option density, and the sense of a complete campaign toolkit while running on a far lighter chassis.

Old-School Essentials performed a similar act of clarification for B/X.

OSE took the complete rules of the 1981 Basic and Expert sets and re-presented them in a ruthlessly clear, modular, and quickly referenceable format. Strictly speaking, it is more of a definitive rules reference than a mechanical redesign. The underlying procedures stayed very close to the original. What changed was the presentation: ambiguous wording was resolved, scattered rules were gathered, and the entire system became instantly legible.

The practical result, however, was the same as distillation. Players and referees could find any rule in seconds instead of flipping between books, interpreting unclear language, or simply missing procedures that had been poorly organized in the originals. A game that had been written as a teaching text for a new hobby was transformed into a fast, reliable reference that removed most of the friction of actually using it at the table.

Shadowfinder takes the next step. Where OSE primarily clarified and organized an existing ruleset, Shadowfinder actively rewrites the 3.5E/Pathfinder 1E tradition into an entirely different chassis, Shadowdark’s lean, lethal, real-time framework, while deliberately preserving the fantasy, option density, and campaign-scale toolkit that made the original appealing.

Distillation is not replacing the big systems. It is not coming for OSR, D&D 5.5E, or either edition of Pathfinder.

What it offers is a parallel path for players and GMs who no longer have the time, focus, or bandwidth that denser games demand. In an attention-scarce world, many people still want the fantasy those systems deliver; they simply cannot (or will not) invest the cognitive and temporal overhead the original rules require. Distilled games give them a way to stay at the table.

You will hear people say they “moved from D&D to Shadowdark.” Some of them prefer the leaner rules on pure design grounds. Many others made the shift because they no longer have the sustained attention that 5E (or Pathfinder) asks for. Keeping those players inside the hobby through a distilled experience is better than watching them drift toward video games or other entertainments.

This is additive, not zero-sum. The existence of Shadowdark and Shadowfinder does not diminish anyone’s preferred ruleset. It simply widens the door so more people can keep playing.

One of the clearest “missing the mark” moments in the current industry is that neither Wizards of the Coast nor Paizo appears to recognize this movement.

Both companies still treat their dense, multi-book systems as the primary (and essentially only) way to experience their respective fantasy brands. They have no serious product answer for the growing audience that wants the D&D or Pathfinder feeling but no longer has the time, focus, or bandwidth those systems demand.

Just as TikTok distilled the time and attention required to consume video, a significant portion of the tabletop audience is looking for a distilled version of the big fantasy RPGs. The major publishers have so far offered none. Instead, they continue chasing live-service and subscription models for their digital platforms. This approach increasingly resembles the same failed live-service strategies currently damaging many AAA video game publishers.

While third-party designers are busy creating lean, playable expressions of the very fantasies WotC and Paizo own, the companies themselves remain focused on heavier systems and ongoing monetization layers. The gap is real, and the distilled games are filling it.

Yet the absence of an official response does not mean the demand is going unanswered.

Shadowfinder currently stands as one of the clearest and most successful examples of what distillation can achieve. It takes the broad fantasy, character options, and campaign-scale ambition of Pathfinder 1E and re-expresses them inside Shadowdark’s fast, lethal, and highly usable framework. The result is not a stripped-down novelty. It is a complete game that can support the kind of sprawling, multi-region campaigns many Pathfinder fans originally fell in love with, without the mechanical weight that made those campaigns increasingly difficult to sustain.

For players who still want the class fantasy of the magus, the alchemist, the gunslinger, the specialized wizard, or the unusual ancestry, Shadowfinder delivers those options in a form that actually reaches the table. The same is true of the wider toolkit: meaningful gear and materials, alchemy, travel and mounts, downtime systems, richer character advancement, and a bestiary drawn from the full span of the Pathfinder 1E monster books. Where core Shadowdark intentionally focuses on the dungeon crawl, Shadowfinder expands the same engine into something that can carry a full campaign without feeling incomplete.

In doing so, it elevates the Shadowdark experience for a specific and underserved audience. Pathfinder 1E fans who bounced off the denser rules of later editions (or simply no longer have the bandwidth for them) are given a way to reclaim the open, slightly savage, high-option fantasy they enjoyed, now running on a system that respects their time and attention. The fantasy remains. The friction is largely gone.

This is distillation working as it should: not as a lesser substitute, but as a parallel avenue that keeps more people playing the kind of games they actually want.

When some OSR and 5E fans dismiss Shadowdark as “nothing new,” they are missing the actual point.

A growing number of modern OSR systems have themselves become mechanically deep, especially once high-level play enters the picture. In practice, they can demand as much rules mastery and table time as contemporary D&D. The people turning to distillation are often not looking for novelty for its own sake. They are looking for a way back into the fantasy after real life stripped them of the time and attention the heavier systems require.

I have been that player. Games I once loved now sit in crates in the garage, unused and unloved, because I no longer have the bandwidth to support a multi-shelf library of books and the cognitive load that comes with them. The disappointment is real. The promise of those systems eventually collides with the limits of available time and focus.

A distilled version of the same fantasy changes the equation. It lets me return to the world I cared about without the same drain on my days. The campaign can exist again. The characters can exist again. The sense of possibility returns, but it no longer requires the same costly monopoly on attention.

Whether the density of the “big iron” games is intentional or simply the result of decades of accretion, the practical effect is the same for many of us: the system becomes too expensive in time to sustain. Distillation offers a way to keep the dream without accepting that cost.

The Age of Distillation is not a rejection of the games that came before. It is a recognition that the fantasy itself is more important than the particular weight of the rules that once delivered it. For those of us who still want to live in those worlds but can no longer carry the full library, these leaner expressions are not lesser. They are what allow the dream to continue.

Go Big or Go Home

What did Gen Con 2026 reveal about sustained RPG interest?

Looking at the announced play sessions and how the tables actually filled (based on available seats, player-hours, and final sell-out patterns), a clear hierarchy emerged: 

• D&D: Still the clear top tier by a healthy margin, but the 90% leader narrative no longer applies
• Pathfinder + Starfinder: The institutional alternative
• Daggerheart / Pirate Borg / Call of Cthulhu: Mid-tier systems that convert attention into filled tables
• DCC + Shadowdark: The strong fantasy alternatives
• Shadowrun + Marvel Multiverse: Established but lower relative heat

The ranking is not random. It tracks closely with publishing scale, cadence, and independence.

The Core Pattern

Systems backed by operations built for volume and continuous output tend to hold or climb. Paizo maintains Tier 2 through institutional infrastructure and steady product flow. Chaosium keeps Call of Cthulhu in the mid-tier with a large, expanding catalog.

Goodman Games runs the most aggressive mid-scale version of the same model: near-constant crowdfunding, megadungeons, crawl collections, and special editions. Dungeon Crawl Classics is no longer a critical darling or the hot newness; it is an older game, yet it ranked in the same statistical band last year and this year. Sustained support and a deep indie community are what keep it alive and filling tables, more than media attention or novelty. That relentless catalog growth is why DCC continues to place consistently highly despite its age.

DCC being its own system with its own dice also creates a stickiness factor that is hard to escape. We have seen this with a few other special-dice systems (Genesys, the Fantasy Flight Star Wars line, and a handful of others). They either fail to find an audience at launch or, once they do, the proprietary dice keep people engaged simply because “they already have some.”

The high-heat test cases Shadowdark and Daggerheart currently occupy the opposite position. Both have strong design and cultural momentum. Shadowdark remains the most visible pure-OSR-style system that cracked the fourth tier; Daggerheart sits in the mid-tier as this year’s critical darling. Yet both operate with thinner, slower release pipelines. The data pattern from previous breakout systems suggests their long-term Gen Con footprint will depend on whether the support infrastructure scales — or whether they settle into the “excellent but constrained” category.

Necessary Qualifications

Volume alone is not enough. Kobold Press maintains a massive professional catalog, yet remains largely invisible in system-level rankings because so much of that output lives inside the 5E ecosystem. It supports the dominant game rather than competing with it for independent tables and identity. Tales of the Valiant has not yet broken that gravity.

Traveller offers the genre counter-example. Mongoose has one of the deepest catalogs in the hobby, but pure science fiction consistently underperforms fantasy at Gen Con. Even large-scale support hits a lower ceiling when the genre itself draws a smaller share of attention. Starfinder only performs as well as it does because it combines Paizo’s infrastructure with science-fantasy positioning.

What Drives Interest?

Sustained high engagement at Gen Con scale tends to require volume + independence + favorable genre positioning (especially fantasy).

Volume without independence gets absorbed by the larger ecosystem.

Volume in a smaller genre hits a structural ceiling.

Independence + high-cadence support inside the big fantasy lane is what converts popularity into durable table presence.

Old School Essentials sits as the cautionary case on the other side: real reach and critical respect (especially via Dolmenwood’s awards), yet a publishing approach that left the core line feeling under-supported and statistically quiet.

In a crowded field, design quality and early heat still matter. But the systems that keep filling seats year after year are the ones whose publishers treat catalog growth and delivery cadence as non-negotiable. The rest, even the breakouts, tend to peak and then settle.

Gen Con 2026 RPG Observations: Five Tiers of Interest

Looking at the announced play sessions and how the tables actually filled (based on available seats, player-hours, and final sell-out patterns), a clear hierarchy emerged:

• D&D – still the clear top tier by a healthy margin, but the 90% leader narrative no longer applies
• Pathfinder + Starfinder – the institutional alternative
• Daggerheart / Pirate Borg / Call of Cthulhu – the mid-tier systems that convert attention into filled tables
• DCC + Shadowdark – the strong fantasy alternatives
• Shadowrun + Marvel Multiverse – established but lower relative heat

D&D remains the biggest single block of seats and player-hours, but the gap is no longer the old “everything else is a rounding error” picture. The second and third tiers are visible, active, and drawing real demand. That’s the story the 2026 schedule told.

DCC, Change, and BYOB Imagery

Dungeon Crawl Classics still has a spot at my table. While Shadowdark is a stripped-down acoustic guitar performance, clean and melodic, DCC brings the Heavy Metal vibe and lets you turn the dials to your liking. You can have as much body horror, the bizarre and strange, personal corruption, slasher horror, and chainmail bikinis as you want. Goodman Games is smart enough to let you BYOB on the controversial elements. They imply rather than declare, walking what looks like a more conservative line, and the net effect is that the company pays almost no online discourse tax when the game is discussed.

Contrast this with Deathbringer. It feels more like a statement game, a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag planted squarely for the chainmail bikini and the full Heavy Metal vibe. There is real value in that kind of open declaration, but for my table the combination of DCC plus a stack of SQP Art fantasy books does the same job better. I already have one of the best-supported gonzo fantasy games available, complete with the mechanical depth the genre actually needs to stay relevant at the table. The SQP books simply supply the visual frosting: the exact Del Rey, Tor, and classic pulp paperback energy I’m after when I want the unhinged version of the game.

Goodman Games is a very smart company. They walk a fine line, paying real tribute to the past while carefully avoiding the online discourse rakes that leave wooden handles smacked across a publisher’s face. They have stepped on a few over the years, but they have always managed to course-correct and come back stronger. In a hobby that regularly kills its own, Goodman Games is a survivor. The way DCC stays BYOB on the touchier subjects does not feel like censorship so much as shrewd business navigating the messy times we live in.

For me, DCC has the strongest campaign support for the Appendix N vibe of any game in the space, stronger than other OSR titles, 5E clones, tactical fantasy battle games, or narrative story games. Shadowdark is stripped down, tight, and instant fun. DCC goes further. It excels at delivering the essential story of change that fiction actually needs. Weak movies and stories refuse to show real change at all. The characters feel stuck in a syndicated television show, delivering a new adventure every week while remaining exactly the same. On the other side, if the change is all positive, the way a typical 5E character develops, it becomes an ever-increasing rise to power that eventually turns boring.

Permanent consequences create meaningful change.

That statement is true, and many story-driven and level-progression games fail this basic test. If there are no real consequences, no negative progression, no new disadvantages, and no lasting drawbacks on the quest for power, the entire exercise cannot answer the simple question: so what? So what if you gain twenty levels of druid power and become a master of nature? What did you give up? Did you sacrifice part of your humanity, your ability to speak with ordinary people, your place in civilization, or even your mortal form? What cost does any of it carry, or is the power simply a game-designer gimme with no price attached?

DCC is a smart game because it actually delivers on those stories of personal change. The cheesecake art we are free to bring to the table is icing on the cake, decoration rather than delivery. Shadowdark is too bare-bones to support the deeper stories of change that longer campaigns lean on. Many OSR games still mirror the same power onramp found in modern 5E; the biggest difference is tradition versus modernity. Deathbringer feels like a statement, and we will have to wait and judge how well it delivers on the concept. To build on Appendix N, DCC goes a few hundred pages deep. Because many players have never read those original books, or simply do not have the time, the size of the DCC rulebook functions as teaching material. It guides the table into the proper genre headspace.

But the art and vibe we bring to the table are our own, and we remain free to define them. There is a personal space in the game that the books do not dictate. The rules allow us to bring our own interpretations and refuse to spell out the obvious. DCC lets us decide the amount of gore, sex, violence, mature themes, and body horror that will appear in our games. They will not tell us, because they cannot, yet the system still gives us a wide lane to interpret those areas for ourselves. If a full-plate bikini (or loincloth and shoulder pads for the men) grants a +8 AC bonus, that is our choice, and it is our game. That is how it worked in the 1980s, and that is how it works here. If we prefer the OSR grognard view of full plate and closed visors, that is equally our choice.

The real game happens in the space the books leave open. DCC gives you the tools and the headspace, then steps aside so you can decide how far the unhinged elements go. That is the design, and that is why it still works.

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.