Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Do We Need New D&D?

Bear with me here. As a guy that plays D&D like an Irish drunk being dragged into church on Easter, I am not the most impartial observer on this matter.  I mean I say this as a guy that spent thirty years of my life absolutely loving the first rip-off of the brand called Tunnels and Trolls, but really is there not enough pseudomedieval to medieval accurate source material among the official brand and the offshoot, schools of thought, err Open Game License advocates to last a bit? Between five different editions of the strict game and dozens, possibly hundreds, of homebrew variations, can adventure gamers not find dungeon delving material that particular way to role-play out  scenario/campaign with or without steampunk gnomes or Tolkien's elves with crowd-funding yet another FRPG system?
Hanging out and meeting the guys from G Plus back in the halcyon days of almost five years ago, it's become more than obvious that are about twenty FRPG systems per single player. Even for nostalgia's sake why doesn't one find a copy of a favorite rip-off of D&D and just run that. Say that you want to play Warhammer why not play it instead of needing to create FleiSwatter Zee Schwanger Vit Minutia ScheisseSpeil. At least since DCC, the field is so broad one does not have to develop a whole game system to work Mad-Libs instead of crunch details into their cavern crawling sessions, why create yet another take on White Wolf's storytelling system but this time for D&D by being about the narrative? You need rules for narrative role-playing? 

Yes I am being a hypocrite as I use my own systems for my horror and science fictions games. For the S-F that's because I like a certain style of game mechanic, the 2D6 and DARO system, but it's not open licensed so a different rules system is required. For the horror, it's because my system is godsbedamned revolutionary, or more accurately, the TACK system lends itself for both LARP and tabletop roleplaying which is helpful for the crowd that plays and runs Crawlspace. Even given my ham-handed double standards, am I wrong? Is there just not enough choice already for yet another fake European Dark Ages tabletop product for anybody?

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