Off the Shelf: D&D 3.5E

I think one of the biggest fabrications in gaming in the last 20 years was that Pathfinder 1e was D&D 3.75. Yes, the games are practically the same, but in a few, key, important ways they are not.

D&D 3.5 is still its own game.

And Pathfinder 1e is not an upgrade, is it a side-grade. It is not D&D 3.75.

Pathfinder 1e is essentially a story game, designed to sell adventure paths. When they released, the company knew what to do, turn up the mature content, sex up the art, and target the game at older players. Rise of the Runelords has a "sin system" and got into all sorts of edgy and mature topics, far beyond anything Wizards would publish (as a mainstream book, with one exception). All this was removed for Pathfinder 2E, since their market is the nebulous audience on social media. They used a lot of mature topics and sex to sell Pathfinder 1e to an older audience, and it worked.

Pathfinder 1e is still one of my iconic, greatest of all time games. But D&D 3.5E is not a prequel, nor is it inferior - it is a different game entirely, even though it was cloned. Both games have huge flaws, yes, but the goals of a game design matter greatly here.

Pathfinder enhances character power, and you see the beginnings of modern gaming in here, such as the "force missiles" that evocation wizards get, the "free magic attack per turn" that you see in 5E and most all modern games with the cantrips. Back in 3.5E, if a caster runs out of spells, you are learning how to use a ranged weapon, quick. The game is more old-school and sticks to those sensibilities.

Also, in Pathfinder, you see a simplification of skills, and they combined 3.5E's jump, tumble, and balance skills into "acrobat" - which you see in every modern game. I do not like acrobat, since the name implies working in a circus, and I would rather have balance be a skill, in case a wizard wants to buy a few cross-class skill levels in it just to be able to shimmy along a cave ledge. The skills in D&D 3,5E were far more oriented to "dungeon map play" than Pathfinder 1e's skills, which felt more like a generic game's skill list meant for story play.

And D&D 3.5E is dungeon-crawl and miniatures oriented. Yes, Pathfinder 1e has the same map and combat rules, but everything in 3.5E feels tightly tied to the map-based play. Pathfinder is full of "story feats" and a bunch of other softer character systems, where D&D 3.5E always felt more like a "dungeon battle" game, much like what they wanted to do with D&D 4E but failed spectacularly at. The jump skill is there to jump chasms placed on the battle mat. The balance skill is meant to be rolled in squares that require a balance check. Tumble is for character who want to use that as a special combat move, otherwise you don't need it.

Use rope is for using ropes, and has a skill synergy with climbing. Skill synergies were big, and added depth to the skills that we don't see in modern gaming.

There were more prestige classes in D&D 3.5E, and they were worth building towards. Pathfinder 1e seemed to follow the single or multi-classing model and avoided prestige classing for the most part, and you rarely see prestige classes in modern gaming. Prestige classes are cool! They are often overpowered, but since you had to work towards them, they were worth it and felt like a special achievement. Even roleplaying-wise, you got treated differently, in new social circles, and you felt like a "somebody."

D&D 3.5E also felt far more world-agnostic than Pathfinder 1e. The game is not linked to a single "take it or leave it" campaign setting, the art isn't trying to sell you football-headed goblin plushies, and the iconic characters aren't overused to the point of feeling like the only characters in the world. The 3.5E Deities and Demigods book was mostly classical pantheons, with over twice the page count going towards "non D&D" gods and demigods. 3.5E felt more like a "generic fantasy game" than Pathfinder 1e did, by far, and you get a 3.5E SRD these days, and it practically feels like a setting-neutral game.

With modern games, I can't say any of them outside of the OSR feel setting neutral.

Pathfinder 1e also has a huge problem with subsystems and rules bloat. You buy a book, and they give you a corruption system or kingdom score to track. In D&D 3.5E, you get your character, and you play. The design of the game stuck to the dungeon-crawling, and anything outside of that was a referee ruling. You are not tracking a corruption score in 3.5E, you commit an evil act or fall victim to a dark curse, and the DM says what happens as a result.

You don't need all these silly subsystems that Pathfinder drops in! you are better off without them.

Make a ruling.

Play.

Pathfinder 1e amps up the number of feats everyone gets. There is a huge amount of power creep going on here, and this leads to more balance issues, record keeping, and power gaming.

In modern games, the lines between good and evil start to become blurred, and orcs and goblins are our friends! People with demon-blood are not fighting against the blood of pure evil, but just different and cosplay-friendly character options. Half vampires are just really pale and have special abilities. Anybody can have any ability score modifier.

In D&D 3.5E, alignment was a thing. The DM controlled alignment changes, and they weren't done by earning points in some add-on system. You did good acts, and your alignment gradually shifted from evil to good, but you needed to prove yourself. You did evil, and you started to drift towards the darkness. New games do away with alignment completely, and the games suffer as a result. Nothing means anything. There is no evil in the world. Characters do whatever they want. Nobody judges anybody. The world becomes cosmopolitan, small, peaceful, and boring.

Pathfinder 1e started us down the road of this same-ism. It kicked off the modern design and multitudes of different shaped character races. It blurred good and evil. There were some banger good and evil books in the series, but by the end, the iconic (and every evil) Hellknights of the setting were presented as sometimes heroes and figures worth of respect. The setting ended up confusing the rules and muddling the absolutes that fantasy needs to be compelling. They wrote entire triggering concepts out of the setting out of fear of social media outrage.

The game ceased being a tool to tell stories, and a means to create an alternate identity for social media. Pathfinder became too much "about itself" than "about my story." D&D 3.5E? It is a dungeon game, first, not a story game or something to see yourself in. The lines between good and evil are clear.

And yes, D&D 3.5E is a West Coast design, and feels like deck-building in MtG. This is designed by some noted designers, and some pretty iconic ones. I feel this game is the only West Coast design that I like, the original is the best here before social media came along and the game started to pander to outside forces. Yes, the hit-points and damage are scaled, but this started in AD&D 2e. D&D 3.5E still has that design purity, and it feels like it cares more about old-school sensibilities than any other modern game - even Pathfinder 1e, which is its clone.

Where Pathfinder 1e wants to be a story game, D&D 3.5E knows what it is - a dungeon crawler.

The world is left up to you.

And the story is yours to write.

Fear of Making a Ruling

Many modern games instill this "fear of making a ruling" in referees, and some games I read give referees no room to even make one. D&D 4 felt like this to me. We came away from that game with the feeling that all the referee did was read the text in the highlighted box, set up the monsters, play the monsters, and lay out the map for the next room.

The referee was a "play" button on a DVD player or a streaming service movie remote.

Also, the more rules a game has, the less the referee has to do. Some games barely need a referee, and many have solo-play modes, which are the game. The more "referee advice" a game pushes, the less free a referee feels to make a ruling. There are good general guidelines, but I don't see a few hundred pages of referee advice being needed.

In the first version of D&D we played, there was barely a page or two describing who the DM was and what they did. Since then, referee advice has grown, and now we need 500 pages explaining how to do something that was supposed to be simple and straightforward. Somewhere along the way, the art of refereeing a game becomes one thing, and today, it feels more like a training manual for managers instead of enabling creativity. Please play the game however the company requires you to, or the game will be unfun, and you will disappoint your players. Thank you.

These thoughts came up when I read about the corruption and sanity systems for the new Amazing Adventures game. Many games have these systems, basically "referee tracking systems" about various aspects of the character. They are also intended to "soften the blow" of a mechanic like a "save or die" sort of "save versus insanity" monster attack. Back in the old days, monsters did all kinds of nasty things to characters, save or die, turn to stone, level drain, rust away gear, burrow their way into the brain or heart for instant death in a few turns, and so many terrible effects pulled from horror movies.

We never needed "soft" tracking systems. While I appreciate them in the game, and they support the Cthulhu-genre play, things were much more harsh and absolute back then. They are here to help the Cthulhu genre; things were much harsher and more brutal, and they relied more on referee judgment. In AA, the corruption mechanic relies on the total mental damage taken. The system feels like a slow progression over 20+ levels, more than a system intended for a faster play experience. If used as-is, I would speed this up a little and tweak it to be a little more like the ones in horror games.

In Shadows of the Demon Lord, corruption is tracked per act and bumped up by one for each committed. The effects get progressively worse and can be reversed by repentance. There is a random chance for a "corruption manifestation" to appear. This system feels better to me, and in the old days, we would just "borrow it" for our AD&D game and keep playing. If the Rolemaster "Arms Law" felt like a better combat system, we would use that for AD&D, too.

In older games, "making a ruling" included "borrowing systems from other games." In today's games, you almost feel forbidden to do anything like that. It is a good thing Amazing Adventures and Castles & Crusades are built to be "hacker games" like the ones in the old days; if you find a system you want to drop in and use or mod the rules in any way, you are free to go ahead and do it.

Soft tracking systems also sometimes break. I have had things I should have known happen, but they did not occur because the game's internal soft-tracking system prevented them. You must be brave enough to override what the game tells you to do and just say, "It happens."

If you feel it should happen, it happens.

And then you move on.

Never revisit, try to hack the soft-tracker, make the game work the way you should feel it should, or try to change the rules. You should trust yourself 100% of the time, make the ruling, and move on. This is true for every internal tracking system a game gives you for sanity, corruption, reputation, fame, renown, kingdom score, distrust, diplomatic factor, or any other numeric system the game provides to track some soft factor often hidden from the players.

There are times I feel a simple journal works better than all of these systems, and you can look back through the events of the campaign and say, "This event made the party more famous," and "That event corrupted these farmlands." You don't need soft-trackers since your journal lists things that happened, and you can make rulings on "what logically happens next" for each of them. You can also notice patterns and increase the effects of repeated actions, like a thief who always gets caught stealing from shopkeepers in an area (or a thief who never gets caught, and the shopkeepers start to take notice of things missing).

Most of the time, keeping a simple journal will beat any numeric soft-tracking system games try to introduce and produce much better (and varied) results that create a dynamic sandbox and game history.

Mail Room: XCrawl Classics

This is an odd game; a Running Man meets Mad Max meets Auto Duel-style "death sports dungeons" game. It transforms the DCC rules into a parody game of the genre, where teams of dungeon crawlers take on dungeons for audiences in this corporate death sports league world of madness and magic. It feels a little like "DCC meets Shadowrun," in a way.

The characters feel like street gang members. The selection of classes is very narrow and specific, with the specialist class being overloaded into several roles. There are guns in this game, though they are just a handful of "street-style" weapons.

I would have liked to see more non-human classes, options for elves and dwarves, and a few more fantasy races, such as trolls, demons, goblins, kobolds, mimics, and other classics. Elves can only be a trickster class. XCrawl emphasizes that you are a professional athlete in an XCrawl League, a celebrity, and working your way up the ladder of fortune and fame.

The game needs a class expansion, though any DCC class could be dropped in just fine.

This is the same ground covered by Umerica, though this game is more Max Max, Fallout, and Gamma World and less magic and fantasy. The guns and gear in Umerica are superior, along with the tech and world design. I love all the atlases and details on this world's political factions and societies. The world feels like a real place and a step above the parody; though each faction is a pretty obvious parody, it all holds together well.

The guns in Umerica are excellent, and there is a vehicle combat system. The armor system differs entirely from DCC and XCrawl but can be converted. Umerica relies on its expansions to be a complete game, whereas XCrawl gives you much to play with.

In Unemrica, you are survivors and faction members, and the tone is less tongue-in-cheek than XCrawl. XCrawl feels more like the one-shot, convention parody game where you can play as a movie star and laugh it up. Umerica has parody elements, but it is darker in tone and feeling.

XCrawl is a strange game, but I am looking forward to it.

Off the Shelf: Shadow of the Demon Lord

With Shadow of the Weird Wizard out, I found my Shadow of the Demon Lord books on a storage shelf tucked away and safe. I pulled them out to join their sister's game, and together, they sat on the shelf as polar opposites. The underlying game system, minus the gore and horror, is quite sound and expressive, pulling more than its weight with the game's dice and stats.

The system is a very streamlined version of 5E, boiled down to the minimum needed to provide adventure and combat. The d20 systems work well, with a traditional d20 vs. defense roll for combat and a simple 10+ roll for all ability score checks and saves. The ability scores also serve as target numbers for attacks made against them, and the system really puts the ability scores to good use and makes every point matter since the modifier is a flat score minus ten value. There is no dividing by two to calculate a modifier.

Every point matters. The system handles everything with a stripped-down set of abilities. Boons and banes are genius mechanics. The entire system feels tuned like a Swiss watch.

Combining classes at the character levels is also genius, and there are no prerequisites. You can pick a caster class and blend magic and combat when you have that choice. Abilities, health, and stats increase as a result of class choices. The progression system is clean and seamless and produces far more customization and flexibility than 5E could with multiclassing. I can see why they turned this into a generic fantasy game; it puts D&D 2024 to shame and makes 5E look like a 10-year-old game meant to patch D&D 4E.

Instead of patching a few things and selling the same game for two hundred dollars, the system in both SotDL and SotWW are evolutions of class-based games with some of the best parts of JRPG class combination mechanics, like the ones in the original Final Fantasy Tactics. The progression system is one of the best parts of this game.

And SotDL gets dark. Some of the spells and dark magics are disgusting. The door is open to Terrifier-style adventures and mayhem. Characters can die often and often in the most grisly ways. The benefit of the progression system is creating a new high-level character is very fast, with no computer program needed, and it is just a few choices, and you are playing again. This is critical for a horror game, and many games fail the "ease of creating a replacement character" test.

And you get a little of the Mork Borg thing going on here. I loved Mork Borg since it was a wake-up call to the OSR and gaming. The world is ending. You are in the final days. The world can end in many ways, and the portents of doom change the campaign world and progress further. Characters suffer permanent changes, go insane, become corrupted, or fall to the dark one's powers. Things constantly get worse. Even monsters you may have thought of as enemies join the cause. Against all odds, your heroes fight - or fall.

But you have a chance of saving the world here.

If the world ends or you save it, you start a new one. There is a setting, and there is none. The next world experiences the horror.

Terror and the universe are infinite.

You can start the game with a blank-slate innocent world and watch the corruption slowly creep in, or you can start your game ten seconds to midnight when all hell is breaking loose. It is your choice. Something is perversely appealing about taking one of today's "safe space" fantasy settings and feeding it to demons. Turn the "we all get along" people in on each other. Watch the utopian cities fall. Let the seven deadly sins be at the front door, and watch greed, jealousy, hatred, and distrust tear the place apart.

Too many "save the world" 5E adventures boil down to a group of mustache-twirling bad guys, a few set-piece action sequences, and a series of dungeons. With the bad guys in this game, the world, reality, and society are tearing apart. When times go bad, everyone's true colors are revealed. That "Good Queen of the North" everyone loved as a benevolent GMNPC may just strike a deal with the Demon Lord to spare her people, and the party is sitting there with their jaws on the floor.

It was a foolish bargain (this is horror), but now the party is hunted by the army they thought they could count on. This game features epic betrayals as the world turns upside down, which is Game of Thrones-quality storytelling. You are playing the game right if players quit the game screaming, "That character would never do that in the novels!"

Oh, yes, they would.

But the heroes can save the world or what is left. And bring that queen to justice. It is a grim task, but hard times call for hard choices.

That is a call to action that inspires me.

5E is in Storage (Again)

Here we go again. I gave 5E three chances, and I am putting my books in storage again. Why? The game takes too much effort, the characters are stacks of special abilities, the character sheets are huge, and it takes too long to create a character.

For me, the character sheets kill this game. I can have a character with more depth and detail in a 2-page GURPS character sheet than a 5 to 6-page 5E sheet, with unique abilities described in paragraphs printed on the character sheet. This has always been a problem with any Wizards-designed or derivative game; I remember Pathfinder 1e character sheets that started at 12 pages from Hero Lab. Some reached 24 pages of printed paper for one character (with spells), almost book-length.

These games start simple and add ability after ability. The "choice every level" designs attract power gamers and focus too much on ARPG character builds. I like games where choices are made every few levels or not at all (skill system games); the focus is more on role-playing and the world. Also, by forcing "choices at every level," many choices become meaningless and are balanced out by the designers, so many of these choices become false.

They are meaningless make-work and take the game's focus off the story. If I am playing an ARPG, I will do that in a video game.

The best part about Tales of the Valiant is its open license, extensive supporting library, and Midgard's campaign world. I look forward to seeing what they do in the future, but the game needs time to cook. There needs to be more subclass and character options. I still have the pocket books out on my shelves, and I hope this game does well.

I had the most fun with Level Up Advanced 5E. This is the best version of 5E, and it has an old-school feeling. This game gives you double the unique abilities of Tales of the Valiant, but both games share the same fundamental flaw: "taped-on abilities." I am writing down note after note of unique this and particular that and looking up the rules for each.

After four characters, I am sick of it.

5E characters are stuck full of notes of how they have a special action that can break a rule that, or in this specific situation, they get a bonus. You are writing down paragraphs of game rules on your freaking character sheet. GURPS? Ability scores and skills. The rules are in the rules. 5E relies on the West Coast design of forcing players to keep a virtual "card deck" on their character sheets of all the extraordinary things they can pull. At least in D&D 4E, these abilities were actual cards that could be easily tracked and flipped over when used. Instead of keeping it accessible like D&D 4E did, 5E hides the design and puts all the work on the players.

Level Up is still the best version of 5E. ToV is very compatible, and a drop-in replacement for D&D, but LU A5E was rebuilt from the ground up for fun. Still, the characters end up vast and complicated, but if you are going to go all out, go all out and sticky note the heck out of those character sheets.

But if I am playing A5E for the old-school feel, why not just go back to Swords & Wizardry or OSRIC? I don't need the 5E framework for old-school, and in many ways, it gets in the way and has to be patched heavily to support that style of play. This means more rules are needed for an already rules-heavy system. I pulled out OSRIC and was won over instantly; this is gaming how I remembered it. This is the original "Lake Geneva" design, sensible, rules-based, that Midwest sensibility, and it doesn't play like a mobile game from a tech-company wannabe.

Old School Essentials is impressive. This is still a gold-standard game. And we have others on the way, including ACKS II, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, the Castles & Crusades remaster, and many others.

GURPS lets all characters do all "special attack" combat actions and some skills will default to a value. You get penalized heavily for trying, and you fail. You have high combat skills and a better chance of success, and your character looks like a complete ninja master. GURPS characters are more accessible than 5E, and the complexity stays flat. It is more complicated than 5E at the start but does not ramp up in complexity like 5E does when you get all the interrupts and particular action types involved.

5E characters feel like B/X characters, with many sticky notes attached to the character sheet for special abilities. It is a West Coast "sticky note" design, and it comes from Magic: The Gathering, where a card will change the game's rules or affect another card with an override of this or that. It puts too much focus on rules overriding other game rules, and the system gets too complicated and breaks down after a while. And now weapons have tacked-on rules, and it goes on and on...

5E pretends it is B/X at level one. Then, by the time you get to level 5, you are a frog in a boiling pot of water and never realize how much complexity snuck up on you, and you have not even started taping those sticky notes on for even more special rules for the levels you have coming. GURPS? Basic Roleplaying? Traveller? B/X, zero-edition, first-edition, and BECMI? And almost every other game typically starts at "complexity X" and, for high-level play, stays at "complexity X."

I don't have time for 5E's overly complex character and rules. If I put time into a heavy game, it will be GURPS, and I will get much more out of it. With GURPS, every choice in the design system is valid. With 5E, whatever the designers give you, the next level is valid.

Look only as far as Shadowdark, a 5E game that avoids the sticky-note designs, and any special rules to classes are done at the class level, not buried in subclass options. You will never get an ability that gives you a "bonus action" or hugely change the rules. Characters can be written on index cards; that is all the paper you need. Shadowdark is the "real 5E" since it plays more like original D&D than D&D does these days. This game is not going into storage, and it is sort of my "final game" in the 5E lineage. It will take more work to make a better 5E game than this.

With a few house rules, I can get the "look and feel" of 5E and the power level into Castles & Crusades. A 5E-style feat, every even level, plus 5E-style races, easily take this into the high-fantasy super-heroic fantasy realm. C&C is what did in 5E this time, just like Runequest did in Pathfinder 1e. The game requires near-zero book reference to play, and all the silly charts you need to reference during play are gone. One 4x6" index card character sheet is all you need to play.

Other than that? OGL-free fantasy gaming and a few other gems are my go-to games. Swords & Wizardry went OGL free, Castles & Crusades is moving free of the OGL, ACKS II is already there, and many other games are tossing the West Coast license overboard. A few big names remain, such as Dungeon Crawl Classics, but I suspect they will follow soon behind. The upsides of tossing out the license are too significant, and it is a happy thing to see the transformation of the OSR into a dynamic and creative place that will never be "compared to D&D" ever again.

No, none of my OSR games have the flexibility of GURPS, and 5E beats OSR games in choices as you level. But 5E is too heavy for far too limited options, and GURPS wins this war. The OSR games win in simplicity and compatibility with each other, and some of them, such as Dungeon Crawl Classics, have a fantastic "fun factor" when you play them that outstrips 5E. DCC is still very 3.5E in its heart, and I would love to see them ditch Fort/Ref/Will saves, go back to a clean zero-edition design, and toss the accursed OGL and SRD into Mount Doom where they belong.

Oh, and Wizards, please release earlier rules into the Creative Commons. I give you a lot of flak, but holding onto those old rules holds you back. If you want D&D Beyond to be what you want it to be, a massive social media and gaming platform, then you have no use for the older rules, and clinging onto them holds back your business agility.

Indie 5E is a fantastic place if you are playing 5E. D&D, as it is, holds more promise in D&D Beyond than it does as a tabletop game. The books and older editions hold them back. Even Apple makes some ports, keyboard keys, and longtime "PC standards" obsolete and depreciates them. It forces their internal units to innovate and lead.

However, 5.5E is not the best version of D&D, which hopefully comes next, but I doubt whether the company can transform itself. The 2024 version is a stop-gap patch, and 5E as a game is too much work to play for the time I have. The 2014 to 2024 rules of 5E are the old, legacy USB-A ports, and they need to be eliminated from the design of D&D. The previous games, zero-edition through D&D 4, should be handed over to the community, like the old LPT serial printer ports. The problem with Wizards is that they brought in Microsoft employees, not Apple employees.

As for 5E?

I have too many other games that give me more fun and less work.

5E, with its complexity and structure, is the Blackberry keyboard of smartphones. Everyone says a phone (or fantasy gaming) needs it, but when it is gone, everyone agrees it was for the better.

Kickstarter: Ashes Without Number

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sinenomineinc/ashes-without-number/description

We finally see the Kickstarter for the next Kevin Crawford game, Ashes Without Number. This is a post-apocalyptic game like Gamma World, Mad Max, zombie apocalypse, near future, far future, and any "as long as it is destroyed" future you want. The game will have tables galore, so it is worth the money for generation systems.

This is compatible with all the other games, so the juggernaut of the ...Without Number games continues. This is an instant backing for me, and the link is in the sidebar.

Mail Room: Shadow of the Weird Wizard

The hardcovers from the Shadow of the Weird Wizard game Kickstarter came on Halloween, which is a strange twist. This is the "not-horror" version of the Shadow of the Demon Lord game, sort of the same system and adapted for generic fantasy games, with a slightly "strange" twist, like a Dungeon Crawl Classics sort of feeling with mysterious magic and a world in danger and needing heroes.

Part of me feels Demon Lord is the more compelling game since the horror genre is woefully thin and underserved in gaming, while the generic fantasy genre is oversaturated to the point of "why bother?" Call of Cthulhu, Alien, and a few others are the big names right now, with Demon Lord nicely covering fantasy horror and delivering on the source material with some disturbing content. Demon Lord is the most "R Rated" of the bunch, and while it appeals to a niche horror audience, it does that very well.

The question arises, do I need another generic fantasy game? Whenever I put 5E in storage, I get this explosion of options that "do fantasy better." Castles & Crusades, Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, Dungeon Fantasy, and Dungeon Crawl Classics are my amazing games that do the genre well. One of those is a GURPS game! C&C does a 5E-feeling game exceptionally well, with 90% less work. OSRIC is the best first-edition game out there. S&W is zero-edition awesomeness. DCC is emergent play through tables of chaos.

5E tries to do all of the above genres, but it does them terribly. I have "evil campaign" 5E books, but they are still overpowered 5E with a cheap Halloween mask on. I have unpredictable magic systems for 5E, but they rarely go far enough to be fun. I have books that mod 5E to be old-school, but they are patches to games that emulate the originals and do it far better.

Demon Lord survives because few games do horror and darkness as well as this game. The game does not need a fear mechanic since the players are the ones who feel it.

I like that the only dice used (in both games) are a d20 and a few d6 dice, which feel like white box gaming. Also, the game does not use "DC" - all tasks are attacks that roll against a monster's defense or challenge rolls against a straight target number of 10. Ability score modifiers are 10 minus the ability and added to the roll. Attacks against an attribute use the attribute as the target number. Attributes can be attacked to produce stunts.

The rules are dirt simple. They are more accessible than 5E by far and much more expressive and dynamic once stunts are used. You don't need D&D's weapon masteries and extra rules for weapon properties and what they do; you just stunt and roll against a creature's attribute. Who needs all those extra rules and unique weapon properties? Who cares? If I want to trip someone with a longsword, let me try, and throw a bane on the roll if the weapon wasn't "made for it" if that is the ruling at the table.

In the 2024 edition, D&D adopted the "more rules for everything" policy, which is a mistake. 5E, in general, follows this policy, too. An expressive rules system does a lot of the work for you, and all you need to do is pick up a copy of Savage Worlds to know this.

Expressive game systems beat ones that rely on rules for everything every time. The more a game allows you to freeform and try things, the more fun you will have.

Demon Lord starts you as a "level zero" character with an ancestry, profession, and wealth level, which can all be determined randomly. You pick a novice path (character class) when you complete your first adventure. So, a "funnel" game is going on here, and the characters are quick and straightforward to create. SotWW has this option, too, in the Sage's rulebook.

From the SotWW rulebook, page 8:

Shadow of the Weird Wizard is based on Shadow of the Demon Lord but sheds much of the bleakness and foulness of that game. Here, you play heroes who struggle to help those in need against sickness, despair, and corruption. You can make the campaign more gruesome if you wish, but the intent of this setting is for you and your friends to do good deeds and feel great about doing them.

Interesting. If you want, you can play this like the sister game, and the door is open for using it for horror. The characters are tougher and more heroic, so the deadliness likely isn't there for that fear factor.

Weird Wizard needs a niche, but my generic fantasy space is crowded. But that stunting mechanic and how simple the rules are grab my interest. The combinable classes and unlocking new ones as you level is a brilliant piece of game design. It feels like the classic game Final Fantasy Tactics, where you could have heroes who combined the classes' abilities as they leveled. You could have unique heroes with synergistic abilities.

The base game only has a human ancestry; all others are in a PDF supplement. This is an exciting choice and makes the game feel like Runequest. I like this choice since it allows groups to customize their worlds without including everything. This also keeps the core rulebook streamlined.

Survivability from Demon Lord has improved dramatically. The fonts are smaller, which could be better, but it is still readable. Also, the combat system has been tweaked to be more dynamic and tactical. In some ways, it feels like a 2.0 SotDL revision.

SotWW is a generic fantasy game for those who want a more traditional experience without all the gore and darkness of SotDL. It is a viable 5E alterative for high fantasy, and in many ways, offers greater customization and flexibility for characters than a shelf full of 5E books.