GURPS is Beating 5E for Me Now

While I love 5E and Tales of the Valiant is a strong implementation of the system, for the types of stories I tell, GURPS wins hands down. The 5E character sheets get too long, they are too much, and I find myself flipping through over a dozen pages of information (every turn) just to run a character effectively.

With GURPS, my character sheet is a single, double-sided character sheet. If I am going onto a third page, that is a complicated character. Rarely do I need four sides of a sheet of paper. And 90% of the information I need is on the first page of that sheet.

No wonder 5E player turns are 30 minutes long for some; they are reading a short story just to process their turn. Shadowdark shines in comparison. Why does 5E have such huge character sheets? Do a PDF printout from the Shard Tabletop of your sheet and count the pages, especially for characters above 10th level. Multiclass characters are worse. Subclass features can have special rules that are found nowhere else in the book.

With GURPS, all of the rules are in the books. Your character sheet only contains choices and the numeric values that affect them.

I used to feel GURPS characters were the complicated ones. Now I am not so sure.

With 5E, all of the rules are on your character sheets, and it reads like a rulebook. I own games with shorter page counts than some 5E character sheets.

The multiclass problem hits me hard in 5E, especially when a character changes their lifepath mid-arc. A scout (ranger), who later becomes a knight (paladin)? I am leveling up as a ranger, then need to swap, and I am overall weaker than a paladin who started at first level, but has some ranger utility? I have overlapping choices? I will never get my 20th-level ability?

With GURPS, it is no problem, just start training in the new areas and organically grow. Whatever you spend your character points on is what you get. Want an "ultimate paladin ability?" Go design it with a superpower, and be the only one in the world with it.

It is near-impossible to fit my ideas into a rigid class-and-level system. Multiclassing makes things worse.

Digital Only and Partnered Releases

The trend of "digital only" DLC for D&D sucks. Now, we are expected to buy our games from only one storefront and never have a physical copy? Not even a PDF that will last beyond the life of D&D Beyond? When the website shuts down, is it over? Like D&D 4's errata and online character creation tools, gone forever?

The partnered content, too, does not feel great. Are we getting no hardcovers from now on? Have we moved into a "no announcements, DLC only" model of releases? Are these D&D Beyond-only releases, too, without PDFs?

The game has taken a turn for the worse. Even if I were still giving them a chance, I would be very unhappy about the state of affairs. Yet D&D YouTube pretends "this is fine," and there isn't much alarm there as they pray the golden goose doesn't die anytime soon. It is a tough position to be put in, and you pray another game takes off in popularity and sustains your viewership.

Even criticizing the current state of affairs will breed negativity and force viewers away.

If I want to play 5E, I have Tales of the Valiant or Level Up A5E. I have books, PDFs, crowdfunding campaigns, and everything the "market leader" isn't giving me. Ten-year-old books still work with the Open 5E version of the system, and newer stuff works, too. ToV offers greater compatibility, seamlessly working with existing classes and subclasses.

Since I adopted ToV as my "long-term support" 5E, I have been happy with the system and support.

All my Wizards D&D books are in the garage. Even the monster manuals and campaign books.

I am just happier where I am.

FTL Nomad Thoughts

What a cool game.

FTL Nomad is sort of an evolution of the "2d6 space game," but rules-light, built for speed, and licensed under CC BY 4.0. The entire system forgoes ability scores in favor of a skill-plus-talent system. You also get a character archetype, which is like a class that gives you a special bonus.

The game uses a single target number of 8, and a unique XD6 dicing system, where advantage and disadvantage dice cancel each other out, and if you are in the negative, you roll whatever is left and take the two lowest, and if you are in the positive, you roll whatever is left and take the two highest. Skill level is added to the end result.

For example, a net -2D difficulty on a 2d6 skill roll means you roll 4d6 and take the two lowest dice. A net +3D difficulty means you roll 5d6 dice and take the two highest dice.

Damage can also gain advantage or disadvantage, and while it is capped by the number of damage dice, taking the highest or lowest still counts.

The system is fast, elegant, stays out of the way, and preserves a single target number. Many 2d6 games have a target number for each difficulty level, but here it always stays 8. Difficulty adds or subtracts dice. Some report this is an excellent storytelling and roleplaying system that stays out of the way.

The game has seven skills (but optional rules in the first expansion can expand that list to 14 or 20), but the basic game stays simple and focused.

The game features starship combat, aliens, robots, world creation, encounters, creatures, vehicle combat, and everything else you need in a science-fiction game. The rules for each are simple and straightforward, built for speedy, consistent, rules-light fun.

Where traditional 2d6 games follow the attributes plus skills system, this dares to do something different, and it works incredibly well. It does not get bogged down in attributes that mean little in play or exist only to modify rolls when very high or very low.

Do You Have the Skill for That?

One of the defining differences between Castles & Crusades and most other games is the lack of a skill system, though an optional one is available. The game eliminates the referee question, “Do you have a skill for that?”

This streamlines play to a degree I don’t think many designers appreciate. The system works on assumed knowledge. If the roll is skill-like and “something your class should know or do,” then add your level to the roll. If not, don’t. You could disallow the roll or penalize it. The system is elegant and simple.

Skill-based games have this “do you have the skill for that” question on almost every roll, inserting an extra referee question and player character sheet check in every die roll in the game. It gets cumbersome and tiring, and some games go to a pedantic level of depth for every action, requiring skill rolls for searching, spotting, and bifurcating every sense and type of searching into a separate skill.

How do you get “trained in seeing something” anyway? While yes, there is honing your perceptual abilities, it goes way too far into levels of depth that should just be covered by a simple ability score roll, if needed at all, and the game should move on. If a player guesses the correct place and thing to search, no roll is even needed.

Some games force unnecessary dice rolls, and they suffer for it.

Some games go to such a deep level of simulation detail that they suffer for it.

Castles & Crusades does a beautiful job of erasing the need for skills. Is this a skill check that your class should know something about? Great, add your level to the check, and you may get a bonus. Is it outside your character’s realm of knowledge? No level is added, and there could be a penalty on it if the roll is even allowed.

Add Conan: The Hyborian Age to the Hot List

Wow, interest in Castles & Crusades and the new Conan game from Monolith is super-hot right now. Hits on all my C&C and Conan articles are exploding.

They are great games, I am not really surprised, but wow, we are at six times the average traffic right now.

Like DCC, C&C has a cult following hungry for news and content, and the Conan game does as well.

Castles & Crusades is Hot Now

My hits are way up for Castles & Crusades articles. I suppose this game is not "really" in the OSR, and many are using it as a replacement for 5E. I can see why, it is quick, simple, does the "D&D thing" and does not require much in the way of computerized support.

I am beginning to feel that if your game requires an application to design characters, then you are no longer a pen-and-paper role-playing game. You are a wannabe computer game that lacks application code and a GUI. If you had the budget to make a computer game, that is where you would be; instead, you load the complexity of designing software onto other companies or the community.

Sunk costs can do amazing things, like get the community to write application software for you for free.

Castles & Crusades needs none of that. I can create a character in 5 minutes on a piece of notebook paper. My group does not need a "session zero" since we are playing in about 15 minutes. Any game that needs a "session zero" where it takes 8 hours to design characters has a serious design flaw; it is offloading unneeded work onto the players.

Imagine Monopoly taking 8 hours of session prep.

You would get a subset of players who love to go into autistic detail, trying to justify why setting your firm's "bank interest rate" and "subprime mortgage exposure" are needed details for Advanced Monopoly, along with 200 other financial factors you need to calculate for your firm. Not to mention the need for a collection of character cards for your firm's personnel and their salaries, along with going through several hiring phases.

You need three hours to set up the city's economic status indicators and the city government, since that affects housing and building, too. Along with the country's broader economic context, the optional Wall Street expansion gives you an add-on board that lets you play the market, the Federal Reserve expansion board simulates the economy, and the Futures Market board simulates another part of the economy. By the time we get to the Big Oil and Auto Industry boards, we are left wondering why the focus on building houses on Baltic Avenue has been lost in the shuffle.

That reminds me of a certain game....

D&D has gotten too detailed and complicated. It rivals GURPS in complexity. With C&C, dungeon crawling is a game again that you can pick up and play. Without all that detail, subclass options, action types, and magical attacks, my characters feel more focused on "character and story" and less on "rules and builds."

No wonder hits are up for C&C.

You can play a dungeon game in a few hours, start to stop, and you don't need to be constantly sifting through rules. This is almost exactly like a 2d6 science fiction game, like Cepheus Engine. You can get started in 15 minutes, have characters good to go, and start playing in a future universe quickly and without endless rules reference.

These massive games have a shelf life of 7-10 years, and then they collapse and die under their own weight when people no longer have time for them. While they are hot, they are fun. When the bubble bursts, we are left with piles of books and cardboard pieces that people no longer have the time to play with. I still love my books and pieces, but a part of me knows the magic is gone and the era is over.

C&C has lasted so long because it is, at heart, a simple game.

Simple games endure much longer than these games designed to be an all-encompassing lifestyle.

Castles & Crusades: Speed of Play

I could play Old School Essentials, Shadowdark, Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, and even Adventures Dark & Deep. I could play other swords & sorcery games such as Rolemaster, Palladium Fantasy, Dungeon Fantasy, Dragonbane, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Pathfinder 2, and many others.  I could play 5E with Level Up A5E or Tales of the Valiant.

None of them "get out of my way" and have the speed of play as Castles & Crusades. No saving throw charts, no tables of thief abilities, no pages-long class descriptions, no spell charts (though those are fun in DCC), and the game plays from a character sheet the size of an index card, and it is a pure "get in and go" game. Where DCC brings a lot of fun to the table, the emergent play and imagination of that game are a close second to C&C's speed and ease-of-play.

If you have an issue with the SIEGE Engine, just use the primary, secondary, and tertiary ability score system in the Castle Keeper's Guide. This way, you get a nice, smoothly stepped feel to your ability score target numbers (12, 15, and 18; instead of 12 and 18) and you have better chances of success in a few more areas, giving you more choice and rounding out your characters better.

For the longest time, I had this feeling my "pulp-adventure cleric" build in C&C, with primaries of WIS, CHR, and CON (target number 12), had to sacrifice DEX, INT, and STR to the terrible target number of 18, and they could not creep along edges or kick down a door. She felt helpless in ways I did not expect, and in a point-buy system like GURPS, these are the areas you would buy 2 or 4-point skills in "just to cover" and not be helpless.

With the tertiary system, I can set STR and DEX to a target of 15 as my secondaries, and leave INT at the worst tertiary target of 18. Now, she feels more capable, and while every target number is not a "best in class" 12, those times she has to jump a pit, balance, or force open a door feel better, and I have a chance of making it happen with those 15's, especially when level and ability score modifiers are factored in.

If you are doing pulp games, think about that three-tier ability score system seriously.

Yes, I could just throw a positive modifier on there, but I hate having to modify every roll. The unmodified rolls should feel achievable at level one, and as she levels up, the challenges can increase. It helps that C&C is such a moddable game, and the CK's Guide has so many excellent suggestions for turning the game into whatever you want.

I still like the build options in 5E, but it is a typical modern design. With today's game designers, they need to specifically lay out every choice clearly, like they were programming a computer game, and the machine expects clear rules on exactly what the option does, when it can be triggered, what happens when you have it activated, and every special effect and game change it produces. This leads to a horrendous overdesign of the entire system, where the game reads like a pen-and-paper computer game.

There are times when I am in the mood for that, and other times when I am not.

C&C is a 5E-like design with leveled unlock class powers, but it does not go into subclasses or choices within the class. For that level of customization, use the multiclass system. Also, if you need to "invent" a class power or ability, such as a bard's "ability to identify music," you would simply make a SIEGE engine roll. In 5E, you bet some designer would make a subclass around identifying music, and then all of a sudden, every other bard can't identify a song once that subclass is added to the game. The more you add to 5E, the worse it gets for everyone else.

The same thing happened in Pathfinder 1e when they introduced social feats, and you needed a special feat to negotiate the end of a war. That is "story stuff," and it does not belong in the rules, nor should it ever be in a character design. Before that feat was added, negotiation could be handled by anyone. After that, only those with the feat could negotiate the end of a conflict. It is an exaggeration, but the net effect was this absurd, rules-induced paradox.

It also shows the dangers of trusting modern game designers too much when they rely on the MMO model of balance and design. MMO designs never last and must constantly be refreshed and rebalanced. D&D will probably be refreshed every few years just because of this design model; it has to be, since all MMOs break and need constant rebalancing. It is not an evergreen game since modern MMO designs are tied to iterative rebalancing and refresh releases.

We are stuck with D&D [YEAR] forever now.

They will sell through 7 years of books and reboot the rules forever.

C&C has not changed since its original release more than 20 years ago. Classes have been added and optional rules released, but it hasn't changed all that much. The design is a solid compromise between D&D 2.0 and 3.0. It does not use MMO mechanics. It just works as a solid design.

Good things last the test of time.