Part of the reason why I think the many heroic fantasy RPGs are going to struggle to build as big of an audience as D&D is that, on a fundamental level, these games are about telling stories. To be sure, there are players who prefer the crunchier, optimization-focused elements of the game. But these games are all trying to give players the same broad possibility: to immerse yourself in a story of fantastical adventure, and to identify with and embody a character invented for such a story.
D&D has a big advantage in that the game is practically synonymous with the medium of tabletop RPGs. Only when they significantly rocked the boat with 4th Edition did another game start to rival it as the most popular fantasy RPG - but Pathfinder was hit with the 5E broadside, and while there are certainly people playing it, I think the number of people playing D&D is likely to remain higher than all the players of Tales of the Valiant, Draw Steel, Pathfinder, and Daggerheart combined.
There's a bit of inertia here, of course. Learning these games takes a long time, and while some players (generally the more fiddly, optimizer kinds) will enjoy learning a new system, for those who just want the game to serve as a tool to allow for them to get together with friends and improvise fantasy adventures, it's easiest to stick with the rules you know.
While we had to cancel my latest Ravnica game because so many people were going to have to miss it, I talked with the two players who were able to come about the prospect of converting characters to the new system. One of these players has been playing with me for a good six years now, but expressed some surprise, or at least a minority opinion, that she was not terribly excited about converting her character to the new version - she didn't want to have to re-learn how her character worked.
And while I'm confident that people will have a reasonably easy time figuring the changes out, her character - a Sorcerer - will be functioning a bit differently. And of course, there will also be things like Origin Feats and the like that will probably only be buffs in most cases, but it did strike me that, as someone who spends a lot of time poring over all the changes coming with the new PHB, I might be inclined to minimize the changes, which do add up.
What I think will simultaneously be helpful but also possible disappointing is that the kind of story we can tell won't really be that different. Now, perhaps that's all well and good - D&D is celebrating its 50th year, and it should be able to work when running a scary dungeon designed in the 1980s.
I think I've made little secret on this blog about how I really like genre-bending fantasy. This blog began as a World of Warcraft-specific one, and one of the things that always endeared me to that setting was the way in which technology was always incorporated into it. I started playing a few months before its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out, and in that, we went to a shattered remnant of a planet that contained, among other things, futuristic technology. The massive demonic army that served as the ultimate big bad for much of the game's early years was not just demonic, but also employed technology out of some far-future science fiction story. Knights in shining armor fight robots, and the dwarf hunters use muskets by default.
I think that on a certain level, D&D's d20 system is a really broadly-applicable one. Dimension 20, for example, has really shown off the versatility of the system, between its vaguely John Hughes-style teen comedy-meets-fantasy adventure with Fantasy High, to its real-world set Urban Fantasy of the Unsleeping City, and then Regency Romance in the Feywild of A Court of Fey and Flowers to an almost Sandman-like fairy-tale-horror with Neverafter, the system can do a lot of things.
But I'll also note that in pretty much all of these, there's a lot of work that the DM has to do to make it all functional.
Personally, I've been somewhat passively on the lookout for a TTRPG that matches the tone and aesthetics of Remedy's Alan Wake and Control games (which are admittedly somewhat different in feel, but both draw a lot from, among other sources, Stephen King). Essentially, after finishing Alan Wake II, I found myself wishing I could play a game like that - but there sort of aren't any, the price you pay for being that original.
Elements of those stories do work their way into my D&D campaigns - part of the upcoming House Dimir chapter of the Ravnica game is going to see Duskmantle in a state not entire dissimilar to the Oldest House under the Hiss invasion in Control.
I guess what I'm curious about in this post is how the stories we tell using the 2024 revisions will really differ from those we tell with the 2014 rules.
And to be clear, I'm guessing they won't be all that different.
Still, I think there can be subtle changes that might lead to different kinds of stories. For example, Draw Steel is being built from the ground up to try to encourage players to push on and continue adventuring, with player power increasing the longer they keep adventuring without taking rests, rather than D&D's attrition-style resource management (I do think there will be a little of that in Draw Steel, given how Recoveries are limited, but everything else is pushing players to keep going).
In a sense, I'm not really expecting the rules themselves to change things that much - except perhaps in very subtle ways.
One change that I'm eager to play with is how Exhaustion has been redesigned. In the new system, each point of Exhaustion reduces the result of any d20 test (the new collective name for attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws) by 2. Each point also reduces your speed by 5 feet. This is still pretty bad, but notably you're still going to be somewhat functional.
The 2014 version of Exhaustion is so punishing that I think most players would choose to essentially skip days of adventuring if it was required to clear their exhaustion levels. Naturally, a DM can force their hand by having unavoidable threats that can't be delayed, but the old version was just so nasty that that felt kind of unfair to the players.
If we find Exhaustion can be a more commonly used mechanic, I could actually see this allowing a new kind of story-telling. I'd love to see, for example, monsters that impose Exhaustion with various abilities (never more than one level at a time, of course, and probably making them limited-per-day or recharge abilities) to create a kind of desperate survival situation. Indeed, I feel like a kind of zombie-like undead that imposes this with their bites would be a really cool thing to use in a Ravenloft-like horror scenario.
I actually think Weapon Mastery, along with various changes to the Monk, might also really change the dynamics of combat in a way that could really change the kinds of stories being told when fighting monsters. With masteries like Push and Topple, I feel as a DM I'm going to want to put more hazards on battle maps to really encourage using the environment as part of the fight. This might give us some more dynamic, swashbuckling encounters.
Outside of combat, though, I don't really know that anything huge is shifting. I had hoped for a robust crafting system, but at least so far, it doesn't seem like what has been presented is all too different from what we had before. While I'm a little skeptical about Draw Steel's Negotiation system - which I worry might feel overdesigned - I still appreciate that they're trying to give players something to feel they can master that isn't just fighting monsters. MCDM is clearly trying to create those epic moments in fantasy novels in which the heroes must plead their case - like Merry and Pippin at the Entmoot. The question is whether you can make as compelling of a gameplay system that focuses on that kind of thing.
Ultimately, it's in the players and the DMs' hands as to what kind of stories we choose to tell. I'm eager to see what comes of this.
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