I just finished playing through a short Runequest campaign, and it’s certainly an interesting system and setting. It’s extremely “oldschool” in feel (probably stemming from the fact that it’s been around for forever.)

The big struggle with Runequest and Glorantha is that there’s just so MUCH of it, and a lot of the setting is rather dry. It’s a little like reading a history book, except you have to learn what everything means, because it’s a self-contained setting. I feel it appeals quite strongly to people who want a lot of “lore” and history in their game, and who want to really get into the weeds of what a political marrage between these two clan leaders means for future trade agreements and military alliances. People who like their fantasy stories to have an index in the back of character names with a pronunciation guide, and their family trees and stuff.

Like… the first hour of character creation was rolling through d20 tables that randomized the eventual fates of each PC’s grandparents through various wars and major historical events, so we could determine stuff like “is your family famous?” and “how much do you hate wolf pirates?”

Anyway, here’s my girl Tikaret, she’s a priestess of Issaries, and she discovered one of his lost aspects on a heroquest once.

I would say that the main thing that “sucks” about DnD is that DnD has often been portrayed as appealing to the kind of nerdy rules-lawyers that like to argue “hey, the rules say (x) so I can do (ridiculous thing)” and end up in a big argument with their DM about what the rules do and do not say. A lot of my groups have been like this, and it’s okay for a game to cater towards that specific playstyle.

I’m not trying to make a value judgement whether this is a good or a bad way to play a game. It’s also just one of many ways to play the game. You can (and given the stuff I talk about below, perhaps you should!) play it differently, but regardless it is quite a common table-style that the various holders of the DnD IP have encouraged throughout its history.

What is a problem is that this kind of playstyle can often be quite acrimonious, especially when combined with adversarial DM styles, and arguments can get rather heated and angry. I’ve heard many a tale of a group that split up over a rules argument that left everyone at the table too angry and frustrated to stick together as a group.

DnD 4e made huge strides to mitigating these problems by having a whole lot of very tightly defined keywords and language which could almost always be resolved into a solid, consistent, official ruling. You had to do a lot of work to learn exactly how the language was being used, but it was possible to get a table of six rules lawyers to sit down and develop a shared understanding of what the rules meant - and know there was a right answer to any specific question.

DnD 5e has taken huge strides to re-introducing the uncertainty in the system, by very loosely defining how things work, or not providing official answers at all, preferring to go with a “the DM will make a ruling” approach. This can be a nightmare for groups that like to have a defined, correct, answer to things.

Now of course, many alternate systems take this stance as a given “The rules are a set of loose guidelines, the GM will run the game and just make up a lot of the rules on the spot.” - and this has a lot of advantages. It makes it easier to write systems because you don’t have to be completely rigorous, and it leaves the GM with the freedom to run the game they want, and it encourages players to not get hung up on the details - all healthy…

But DnD is in the unique position of already having proven with 4e that it can nail down a rigorous set of principles and a style guide that leaves ambiguity behind, courting a whole section of RPG players who desire that, and then retreating from that position with a new, fuzzier, system document.

Why is this a “problem” for DnD specifically? Well… I find it’s extremely common on internet forums like this one for a person to say “I was in a game and (x) happened” and then immediately three different arguments spawn, running in separate directions, all founded on the premise that the poster is playing the game wrong or doesn’t understand the rules. It’s exhausting.

I’m not seeing any mention of it, but I think a lot of people might be interested in Break! - it’s specifically aiming to make a game that has the vibes of an “adventure of the week” system, where you learn of an ancient ruin, gear up, venture through the wilderness, explore a crumbling tomb for loot, then get back in time for dinner and an ale. - Basically I’m saying that the game is specifically designed to try and tell the kind of stories that DnD is designed for.

Where break differs from DnD is in it’s approach to mechanics. Downtime, journeying, exploring an adventure site, and fighting are all their own small, light subsystems of rules, so there’s clear guidelines for how to run each of them, and they’re largely aimed at highlighting the cruical and interesting moments for each of those activities, while quickly glossing past the faff and monotony of what lies between.

I’ve lost track of the number of DnD campaigns I’ve played where the DM didn’t really have a clear framework for what to do on a long journey, and resorted to just tossing a couple of random encounter fights in because it “felt necessary”, but they never felt like they advanced the story or contributed anything interesting to the game.

It’s also a game you can recruit random NPCs and the like to join you and follow you around, and when they run out of HP you check to see if you remembered to give them a name. The world knows that characters who have their own names are important to the story, and characters who are just “that random bandit mook who surrendered and we brought them along” are not. If the character doesn’t have a name when they hit 0hp, they die on the spot.

Oh, and fights take 10 minutes, rather than 2 hours - so you can have one in the middle of a session without it becoming the whole session. Yum.

Those are all just

Like

Your opinion

Man

(Whereas wotc being a terrible company that mistreats its players is straight up fact)

DnD has often been portrayed as appealing to the kind of nerdy rules-lawyers that like to argue

Not a totally unfair critique, but also not unique to D&D.

I’d say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules. So, for instance, “If I can’t move the big rock with a Strength check alone, can I get some ropes and set up a pulley system?” <throws a bunch of math at the table> “See? This should give me a 3x multiplier to my Strength, so I should be able to move it easily?” And the DM just looks at that, shakes his head, and replies “All that’ll do is give you Advantage (and if you move the rock you’ll derail my plot)”.

But more broadly, I’d say the problem with D&D is that it’s inevitably the same Medieval High Fantasy setting in one way or another. The format of the game is geared towards the classic Journey to Mordor, with challenges and story beats and pacing to match. It doesn’t play well with modern settings, because modern and futuristic technology tends to trivialize magic (especially under the Vancian system). It doesn’t play well with the Horror genre, because the game rewards “winning” rather than “survival”. It doesn’t play well with PC antagonists/betrayers as the class system puts you at a huge disadvantage when you’re not working as a team, so heel-turns and dramatic reveals can leave players with a sour taste in their mouths in a way a game more explicitly geared towards Finding The Traitor does not.

But DnD is in the unique position of already having proven with 4e that it can nail down a rigorous set of principles and a style guide that leaves ambiguity behind, courting a whole section of RPG players who desire that, and then retreating from that position with a new, fuzzier, system document.

As I understood it, 4e was an attempt to bridge the gap between the strategic tabletop genre and the D&D style of play. It was a kind-of Return To Chainmail, with this whole vision of the game really going back to these very grandious geographical set-pieces and large army combats, with the heroes playing as champions of great armies rather than rag-tag murder hobos. Very much inspired by Warhammer and Warcraft.

5e was more of a back-to-basics dungeon crawling game, keeping the streamlining of 4e but reintroducing a lot of the customization and flavor of 3e/2e/1e.

But they were still ultimately board games in practice. Positioning your models to flank or ambush or avoid a fireball remained a pivotal part of the game. Hell, the very act of flinging a fireball or swinging a sword to resolve a conflict was a fundamental cornerstone of the game.

Compare that to a game of Vampire or Call of Cthulhu, where a lot of the story is about investigating a conspiracy and surviving when you are surrounded by people who want to kill (and very likely eat) you, who you cannot trivially club to death in response. That’s the real bridge that you have to get people over. This idea that you’re not going into the spooky old house to simply loot it and bludgeon to death everything you find inside. The idea that you’re not playing in a world where Good Guys and Bad Guys are these equal-but-opposite forces clashing together along a territorial border. The idea that magic isn’t natural and meddling with these kinds of arcane forces comes at a terrible price.

Nevermind how the character sheets are all topsy turvy and new players - especially players coming from D&D - simply do not know how to build/play a character that isn’t geared to punch every problem directly in the face.

Why is this a “problem” for DnD specifically?

It’s a problem with any game that abstracts away reality in favor of dice and event tables, but still expects the players to Theater of the Mind their way through the abstractions.

A combat system is all that a TTRPG really is. There may be rules for travel, crafting, and skill checks … but the games only real purpose is to set guidelines.

All of the things you have mentioned are campaign issues, not system issues. Mystery, social encounters, interesting traveling… that is ALL the responsibility of the person running the game. No one should need a random set of tables to roll on to tell them that “Colonel Mustard killed someone in the library with a candlestick”.

I have one that’s supposed to walk you through it. I don’t know how user-friendly that is in practice though.

I forgot to add, it needs to be free. It looks like that one isn’t.

I forgot to add, it needs to be free. I did download GURPS Lite a while ago. I can’t remember exactly why I didn’t like it, but one problem I see is that it has a specific list of weapons. You can’t just make your own with whatever set of attributes you want. And there’s going to be statistically better and worse ones, so you have to choose between the weapon you think is cool and the one that deals more damage. In contrast, Mutants & Masterminds has weapons with a point buy system same as the characters. Though it’s extremely bad at explaining that. It just has a list of Devices and their costs, and you have to notice that the example characters have weapons that aren’t in the list, and that they cost the same as if you just build them into a player but with Equipment Points instead of Power Points.

Also, Lite at least doesn’t seem to have any way to build characters with interesting powers. I don’t really care if it’s superhero-themed in particular, but I just think M&M’s system of design your own spells is better than D&D or Pathfinder where you just have to pick one out of a list or or make your own and eyeball it.

Ah yeah, totally understand. In that case I’d recommend the ORE Toolkit (same system, but written by fans and slightly more designed around homebrewing and tweaking the underlying system for tone and lethality).

https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1401/25/1401252784488.pdf

If they play a system, they probably like that system and find its shortcomings acceptable. You can’t convince someone that a system isn’t enjoyable when they have first-hand evidence to the contrary.

Asking people to stop being comfortable doing something they like, so that they can be uncomfortable doing something you like, isn’t a good value proposition.

Lol, what?

You’ve either never left the DnD bubble, or you’re just blatantly ignorant towards 90% of what tabletop roleplaying games are! Seriously, that’s the shittiest shittake I’ve ever heard when it comes to TTRPGs. I seriously hope you’re joking, but I’m afraid you’re not.

At least a third of the TTRPG systems I play don’t even have combat rules because it’s just so irrelevant in these systems. And then there’s the vast majority of systems like Vampires: The Masquerade, Call of Cuthulu, fate, etc. where conbat exists, but is almost completely irrelevant. I’ve played in several groups that go multiple sessions without a single combat encounter and it never felt lile combat was important or missing.

TLDR: Lol

If they play a system, they probably like that system

I don’t think you’ve ever actually gamed before.

It’s not about identity as much as it’s a very poor way to try to convince someone.

Don’t base your line of argument on a statement you know the other person will likely disagree with.

For example “You should play Pathfinder because DnD sucks”, holds no weight to people who don’t think that DnD sucks. In fact if they happen to like DnD, it undermines your argument, because if you disagree about DnD, aren’t you also likely to disagree about Pathfinder?

This is all fine. I’m not arguing that this is a problem for ONLY DnD… It’s just that was the subject at hand, and it’s a problem with DnD.

I’d say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules.

This is an interesting point, but I would not say that the problem is with “certain players.”

DnD is heavily marketed and promoted as THE ttrpg. The default. The one for everyone. WotC talk about the game as being designed for an extremely broad pool of players, of many different styles. Players who want a more narrative experience, with less of a focus on rules are also a the target market for the system. If WotC say the game is for them, and the game doesn’t handle what they want from it, then the problem is either with the game design, or with the game’s promotion, marketing and reputation.

It’s interesting that my post was largely about how DnD 5e fails to cater towards people who want a strict set of rules for simulations, and your argument is about how DnD fails to cater towards people who want a loose set of rules that can be bent. I’m a firm believer that when you try to please everyone, you please nobody, and this is DnD’s biggest weakness as a system: If you have a strongly cohesive group of players who want a specific style, DnD will do an okay job at it, but there will always be a better system out there. It’s the ready meal you put in the microwave because it’s easy, not the specific gourmet restaurant that does that one dish you love perfectly.

DnD’s not really trying to cater towards any specific niche though - the design wants to appeal to the widest audience possible. By trying to cater to every style, it means you can pull together a group of players with a range of preferences, and put them in the same game. That’s a big part of why it’s got so much ubiquity after all. The logistics of setting up a group to play are rough for a lot of people, and just being able to put a game together is easier when your system promises fun to a wider range of players.

Did someone make alternate dice rules? Those are insane. Nine pages of rules, and it’s effectively impossible to figure out your odds of success.

Some people will argue on the internet about anything.

Player 1 posts “this system sucks, it’s nothing but combat, there are no travel events or mysteries”

Player 2 responds “That’s not the system’s issue, it is the Gamemaster’s. A system does not create a murder mystery storyline, the gamemaster does. The system is just a ruleset”

Player 1 basically responds “I play sessions all the time with no conbat, a third of the ttrpg systems I play dont even have conbat … here I will name three systems that I dont think conbat is important in: one has a massively detailed conbat system with limitless power combinations where vampires literally fight werewolves, fae, and wizards, one has a conbat system so brutal that it can drive players insane, and one has an amazingly cinematic conbat system. lol u dumb and only know D&D, the GM can’'t control the narrative … it’s the system that has to do it.”

Player 2 Responds “Sure man, whatever”

There are loads of ways to tinker. If you want to run it for kids, use d6s and suddenly it feels like a light-hearted and easy game (significantly easier to get successes with smaller dice pools).

The math is hardly impossible, but at least for d10, someone else has done the math. https://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/nemesis/probability.html

I used to have a better link where someone had a graph that gave a better sense of width likelihoods. Long story short, the curve is highly centered on twos and threes, and anything bigger is laughably unlikely unless you have special “master” dice.

EDIT: I FOUND IT!!!

Chance of Reign

Based on an opinion voiced in an Exalted forum, I picked up the hardback of Reign, a game self-published by Greg Stolze. Stolze is the co-author of the incredibly good Unknown Armies and wrote the best “how to run a game” chapter that I’ve ever read (published in the …

Asteroid (asteroid.divnull.com)

Good grief. I made the system by instinct and the “poke it with a stick until it hollers” method. Maybe I shouldn’t have admitted that. Ah well. I’ma hit “submit reply” anyway.

Greg Stolze, upon reading this analysis

That’s a lot of non-trivial math. Do I understand it, I hear you ask? Nice weather we’re having today…

I don’t hate 5e, in fact I’d join in as a player very happily, but I wouldn’t run it. 5e is geared towards a very specific kind of campaign that I’m not very interested in running.

I’m more of a social campaign with big action sequences kind of DM and Savage Worlds does that perfectly. It is:

• Classless
• 3 actions per turn, going over 1 heightens the chance you’ll fail on all actions. Players tend to spend less time thinking.
• Step die instead of d20, easy math.
• Extremely easy to make homebrew for.
• Generic, which means it can do any genre (I’ve done dark fantasy western and high fantasy medieval, next up I’ll do dark fantasy cyberpunk hopefully).

I tried to turn 5e into something that fit a cyberpunk setting for about 3 months, before just buying SWADE and being able to run every genre I could imagine from the go.

Because to some people, liking a thing that they do not like is the equivalent of slapping them in the face.