shadow of the demon lord

Alternatives to Dungeons and Dragons for the Hasbro-Alienated

/ geotrickster / Leave a comment

Annoyed by changes in Dungeons and Dragons corporate policy and the Open Gaming License? Need ideas for alternative systems? This is a post for you.

Inspired by Neckbeardia’s James going on an impassioned and dare I say moving plea (go to the 36 minute mark here) for the relevancy of the tabletop roleplaying hobby in an increasingly socially alienating and extremist era, plus the seemingly contradictory need to gatekeep hobbies to prevent them from going the same way as DnD currently is, I am going to continue my now three year annual trend of writing about roleplaying games in January. Specifically, I wish to lay out the opportunities for alternative (non-DnD) systems to soak up defecting players from the increasingly corporatized and monocultural direction of the largest and oldest of the hobbies. I have never liked DnD as much as some other games-especially since the rise of Wizards of the Coast and the modern 3, 4, and 5 editions- and the near monopoly that the game holds on the hobby is not a good thing. Especially when it seems media organizations are parroting the narrative of these companies that anyone who defects might be some kind of reactionary or racist for preferring a different mechanical system. This is an attempt to weaponize trendy (amongst the professional managerial class) politics in order to quash creative diversity. It will fail, but it is part of a trend where tabletop roleplaying is blamed on societal ills which it actually combats. In the 1980s the shoe was on the other cultural foot and it was a Satanic Panic. These days the language has changed but not the invasive and media driven hysteria. This type of culture is directly related to the corporatization of the most popular franchise in the hobby-and it is used to make itself look cutting edge and cast doubt on the legitimacy of its competitors while assimilating itself to the world view of a human resources department. Following in the footsteps of Marvel, Disney, etc, an awkward attempt is made by a franchise to look superficially diverse without changing any of the suburb-safe Anglo-Protestantism that fuels increasingly stale intellectual properties. The true purpose of this turn to progressive marketing for corporate is to be able to imply any criticism of their product is not about the product’s quality but rather the moral foibles of a misguided and pRoBlEmAtIc fanbase.

 You do not have to be stuck with DnD, Wizards of the Coast, or Hasbro, however. Especially when its best attribute, the open gaming license, might be about to be heavily curtailed or revoked. This may even include the company revoking the rights to already existing spin off properties made by third party creators and then seizing them and selling them themselves.

But now the alternative games can grow their numbers and the hobby can remain strong as it lets a thousand games go their own way from a stifling shared origin. Like the worlds of Jack Vance’s Gaian Reach, there are now enough of tabletop gaming alternatives with their own distinctive culture that they can diverge and hopefully avoid the gray sludge effect of post-TSR DnD’s trying to appeal to everyone and therefore not really appealing to any particular core group. The point is that there should be no hegemonic replacement because there shouldn’t be a catch all game in the first place. There should be different tones, systems, and playstyles. This encourages creative production and small business while also discouraging the missionary drive for mass assimilation and formulaic and predictable experiences or a company trying to please too many people at once and robbing its products of their original appeal.

With all that in mind I would now like to list some alternatives I either have experience running myself or have heard enough about from people I trust to at least talk about. It is my hope that at least a handful of people who might never have tried an RPG other than DnD (Or never tried one at all) might come across this via keyword search and find out about something new that could interest them and keep them away from getting sucked into the unfolding nightmare of OneDnD by default.

First, let us start with the biggest gap being left at one’s table if they are defecting from the worlds biggest roleplaying game. That of a modern system with a strong action emphasis and the potential to play in high fantasy settings with a large degree of customization. The clear winner on this front is my new favorite game which came out in 2015 but I only discovered about a year ago: Shadow of the Demon Lord. The world is ending due to supernatural cataclysm and the very fabric of reality tears itself apart, so what better thing to do than to try to survive long enough to be as terrifying as the world around you? SotDL is its own game, but in effect it basically operates as a Berserk-style of TTRPG. Nightmare monsters roam and societies become corrupted so your only real choice is to band together into the kind of people who can meet such monsters toe-to-toe. This translates mechanically a fast and brutal combat system with the deadly and simple sensibilities of an old school game and the slick modern mechanics of a new game. Of all games I have played, it has the best advantage/disadvantage mechanic (called boons and banes) which enables a degree of variation and nuance few others do. This game also comes with a post-apocalyptic expansion to add Road Warrior style themes (which I am currently using for my campaign) and a closely related but technically separate game called Punkapocalyptic to flesh out such themes even more. Since it is my personal view that post-apocalyptic settings are the best campaigns for open world and random generation, all of these materials are useful to harvest in my current game master phase of embracing the random, the hexgrid, and the dice generated dungeon. Additionally, the creator’s greater library of related systems will expand later this year with his more family friendly (most settings really like gore and body horror) and general audience Shadow of the Weird Wizard-something that should come out at just the right time to soak up some disaffected DnD players.

If, unlike me, you prefer crunchier more rules-intensive systems but with a similar flow to that described above, consider Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, which tries to model the pace of its gameplay off of the highs and lows of 1930s sword and sorcery pulps and has a strong dedication to its source material being accurately portrayed.

Now let us turn to a different type of game. The one that has dominated most of my life. That of the investigatory and skills-based game. First are foremost of these is Call of Cthulhu. While not my first game as a player, it was the first I ever ran as a game master-and to this day the one I run the most. My love for this game could be an entire blog entry in its own right, but if you know anything about Lovecraft and how learning about the eldritch cosmos takes a massive toll on human sanity you can probably guess how this game works. Players literally drive themselves mad trying to solve mysteries (or running away from things they couldn’t possibly handle). CoC is a game of percentile dice where the most useful skill could be Library Use and the least useful the combat related options. The best game masters run in the 1920s and 1930s over the modern day, of course. Having a party that wants to play normies in an un-normie world running away from things constantly lest they die and losing their minds is basically peak weird fiction good time.

I have heard good things about Mothership, which has a similar system but in space science fiction setting and is more open ended about what you do with it, but not having yet played it these are things I cannot vouch for myself. Same with Traveler which eschews horror themes for pure exploration. Another thing I have yet to run but have read is the post-apocalyptic Degenesis which you can download here for free.

The third and final game I am going to mention as being worth to get the full bolded font treatment in The Dying Earth RPG. This, and games like it, are a third type of option where the players are often pitted as much against each other as antagonists outside of the party. Additionally, the core dynamic is one of multiple countering forms of pettifoggery (yes, including pettifoggery itself as a skill) to emulate the style of Jack Vance’s pompous self-serving characters. DE rewards players for wit and cunning, be it against their own allies or mutual foes. It strives to play very rules light while also asking much from its participants in a collaborative farce. Mechanically this is the easiest game I have ever played, but in terms of quick wits and player input it remains unmatched.

While it is a mechanical system I am not a huge fan of, I would also like to shout out the first ttrpg I ever played back in middle school (that wasn’t Second Edition DnD anyway), Werewolf the Apocalypse. White Wolf as a company really seemed to be the big thing in the very goth-fused mid and late 90s before burning out rapidly and seeming to mostly live through (pc) gaming franchises since. Its World of Darkness setting, of which Werewolf is a (the best) part, is highly evocative to many and serves as a good modern-action setting for those who like urban supernaturalism.

Because I have banged on about the Old School Renaissance (OSR) scene before, and also because it might fall under this new Hasbro-inspired weirdness with the open gaming license, I won’t talk about it much here. I will simply state that if you want to check out the real old school but still very much DnD derived small press scene, Old School Essentials has the authentic Boomer experience down perfectly and Mork Borg shows how experimental the genre can become.

The options are out there and they are waiting. We as a society need collaborative imaginative games to help us escape from late-stage neoliberalism and think outside the confines of corporate fiat while practicing the cooperative skills that help us respond to random events. The decline of the DnD franchise should not be seen as the end, but rather a challenge to explore new options. I hope in my own small way I have helped you do just that here.

For additional reference I will now list just a few youtube channels and podcasts I believe may be of service to game masters and players alike as they look for alternatives and/or inspiration:

Seth Skorkowsky– Excellent GM advice, small press game reviews, and a strong focus on Call of Cthulhu. This is my favorite one.
Dave Thaumavore RPG Reviews-Small press and indie reviews, extremely thorough. His multi-episode run down of Degenesis is especially good.

Questing Beast– OSR reviews, covers a lot in a famously diverse and expansive subset.

Vintage RPG Podcast– Often hilarious coverage of forgotten about supplements, spin offs, and questionable decisions (Dallas, the RPG anyone?) by older game editions.

Dungeons and Discourse– Already linked to in the post text, I only discovered this channel today but it seems great at analyzing everything that’s going on with DnD at the moment.

Captcorajus– Strong 1E DnD history focus but with plenty of indie/OSR reviews and occasional other content.

Dm Nel– Shadow of the Demon Lord focused channel with some episodes explaining the rules and mechanics but most on lore.

Geotrickster’s Official Ranking of D&D Editions

/ geotrickster / 7 Comments

No matter how tenuous the justification for putting it here is, having written about the importance of table top role playing games in understanding macro-scale events exactly one year ago, I feel it is perfectly fine in light of the announcement of a new or upgraded edition coming in 2024 to have a post ranking Dungeons and Dragons editions. I promise, given the order I plan on ranking them in, that nobody but myself and a few others I personally know will be happy with it.

Before starting, I want to point out that DnD is not my first, second, or even necessarily third favorite game. This is specifically a ranking only of official DnD editions lest we get bogged down in Old School Renaissance discussions (my preferred way of playing the game). We will start with the best and decline to the worst as if heading from the safety of town into perpetually gloomier bowels of peril much like that of a dungeon. Now, with that out of the way…

1. First Edition

This is no grognard nostalgia at work here on my part. The one edition that predates my very birth into the real world is actually the last edition I ever got to start playing. I am recent convert to its simplicity, deadly peril, and extremely evocative amateur art, having only begun to experience it about three years ago. (Something worth noting is how much of the art has a party quaking in fear, dying or running away rather than looking like confident superheroes like they would in the art of all subsequent editions, more on this later). Coming in both advanced and basic versions, and easy to house rules (a necessity for anything DnD), it is the first official rendition of the game that gives the best play experience all these years later. Characters do not start out as superheroes. A lot of them will die embarrassing and miserable deaths. Loot gets you experience points, not monsters slain. This coupled with the greater emphasis on player (rather than character sheet) agency and cleverness really brings forth what a tabletop game should be-and shows how much more fun it is when not structured around the limitations of what computer game-influenced expectations have imposed on the genre. Creative and unconventional problem solving rule when rules are tough but not omnipresent. What you get is a game whose rules play like how Sun Tzu conceptualized warfare; something to be avoided whenever possible but, if unavoidable, need to be gamed with clever and unexpected thinking. This worked well considering the game’s culture was all about constructing the strangest most mind-bending adventures possible.

This is real tabletop gaming from a time of non-Euclidean interior décor, hideous jellied party food, and ‘fancy’ overcooked dinners at the Steak and Ale®. Jimmy Carter might have made it famous as the ‘Malaise Era’, but there was nothing but the bounce of a vibrant disco subculture in those deadly dungeons. It is a style of play that, outside the old school modern spin off scene in TTRPGs, is best encapsulated by PC games like Darkest Dungeon-or it would if that example had zany roleplaying and psychedelic funhouse settings.

The Basic versions are to be preferred over Advanced, for what it is worth.

2. Fifth Edition

Having 1rst and 5th both at the top end is enough by itself to make this list controversial. The oldest and the newest editions fans tend to view each as the polar opposite. How fast things change. When 5th first dropped it was often hailed as a welcome return to old school sensibilities for its simplicity and cutting away of the endless amounts of math fat that had grown in the intermediary editions. And rightly so. The game is popular for a reason. In fact, its only real mechanical flaw compared to the first is both a greater amount of mechanical bloat (gotta sell those splat books!) and the lack of danger. Without house-rulesing its almost impossible to kill a player character without breaking the game’s balance, ruining the dramatic tension of encounters. This ties into a questionable design philosophy of starting out the PCs as de facto superheroes that began back in 3rd and was never stopped up through the present day.

The real drawback of 5e is really in its generic nature. Trying to be everything for everyone means it is kind of for no one whose tastes expect more than the generic. Though no fault of the game itself, this does mean it has the (second) worst fan base of any edition. Being a Zoomer-hugbox-friendly game, it tends to attract a fandumb very much integrated into the present Postmodern-Protestant monoculture and its ever-shifting labyrinth of zeitgiesty-yet-sterile human resources department derived ideologies. Most annoyingly, this tends to manifest as people caring more for lame podcasts about playing the game than, you know, actually playing the game themselves.

A Carelord Paladin character about to advance from level one intern to level 3 lanyard at daddy’s NGO.

That and the game system being built for cornball high fantasy over the sword and sorcery weirdness of 1rst Edition is what keeps this perfectly fine game at second place. But is still perfectly playable and has brought many people into the hobby so credit goes where credit is due.

3. Second Edition

The middle position usually delineates ‘average’, but there’s nothing really average about 2. It’s a grab bag of terrible and awesome. Mostly, the actual system is an overly complicated hot mess version of 1 but at least maintains its sense of perilous play and player agency. However, you need more types of dice than there are kinds of legos for it to work at all. Unrelated to the system but worth mentioning, this was the system that had the best PC game adaptations (Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, etc) and the best pre-made settings in general like Dark Sun and (regular) Planescape. But since I always make my own campaign settings myself this doesn’t really affect me. Sadly, it was also the first to come after the 1980s Satanic Panic that had really attached itself to 1, and thus came with this weird squeaky-clean veneer that robbed the game of much of its edge. A loss it has yet to really fully recover from even today. NEXT!

4. Fourth Edition

How many times could Deep Blue, being a hostile dungeon master and running DnD 4E, defeat a party of Gary Kasparovs?

This is a weird one. A noble experiment in some ways but just an utter failure in execution. They wanted a very tactical and well balanced game…and they got that! Its just…it came in 2008. Long after PC games could deliver exactly that far better than a tabletop game could. So…you could effectively play a computer game on the table and have to do all the math yourself. Really just misreading what makes tabletops still so good even in the era of advanced electronic gaming. This is most people’s least favorite edition and for good reason…but the fact that it was so combat focused ironically meant the non-combat portions of the game could be played old school style since they weren’t rules’d out to death. Its just a shame it took half an hour for a party to fight one small band of goblins. To add an ultimate level of irony, this system, that would have worked great in PC adaptations, never got a major PC game adaptation! But hey, it was still better than…

5. Third Edition

Do you like mass market monoculture superhero movies? Do you like character creation that feels like doing your taxes? Do you love rules-layering and meta-gaming? How about reading novels worth of ‘feats’ that ‘give you so many options’ but in so doing show how little player agency exists off of the confines of the character sheet? Than OH BOY DO I HAVE THE EDITION FOR YOU!

An average third edition player showing off simplified 3e character creation.

3E, and its different company pseudosequel Pathfinder, [more like Mathfinder, amirite?] have got to be not just my least favorite edition of DnD, but among my least favorite mechanical systems in all of TTRPG-dom. Feats? Ugh. In an action oriented game with stats and classes rather than skills as focus you should never have to read paragraphs to tweak numbers off your core stats. Do you want to be skills based 3? Then get a better system for it! Do you want to be class based? Then keep it simple! The bloat becomes offensively bad the longer you play, with both friends and foes spiraling up like a bad shonen anime power up sequence that never stops but without the entertainment value of them screaming each other’s names (though I suppose you could roleplay this if you wanted). High level characters don’t even have much in the way of random elements from the dice as modifiers make the tossing of the D20 a mere formality of turn taking. Spellcasters (that class of nerds) are even more ridiculously overpowered than usual, turning all late game encounters into WWI artillery duels between them with everyone else getting to be the obsolete and sidelined horse cavalry.

Couple that with the fact that the people who still like this system like to loudly proclaim its nonexistent virtues with a healthy side of ‘you’re just not smart enough to play my High Fantashire Turbotax Simulator’ and its just beyond me how anyone could ever enjoy this game. This game I once had to run an entire campaign in for a bunch of players despite my objections to using such a terrible system.

But I suppose it will get its second wind when future President Incel_Sniper1488 sets up a game of it in the Oval Office in order to DM for the First Waifu Pillow and the hapless members of the Secret Service who haven’t resigned yet.

The Crossroads

By both being very modern and somewhat old school, the future and whether 5.5 or 6 or what have you will be better or worse remains open to question. It won’t really matter to me, since I have already decided my ideal monster-bashing table top system is Shadow of the Demon Lord, but I do like to wonder. Will the exploding OSR scene cause the largest role playing property to take another hard look at learning from its avocado colored furniture on orange shag carpet disco original core? Or will the next iteration be in all pastel colors, replace deadly damage in entirely with ‘literal trauma’ and conduct character advancement via ‘lived experience points?’

Only time will tell.