Strawbeary Den

Why My Next Campaign is D&D

A little while ago, as some of you would know, we wrapped up a pretty cute game of Mausritter.

I'm moving to The Big City soon, and I'm certainly going to be playing RPGs, and since I'm currently in the midst of re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the ninth time or so, I want to run something fantasy.

So what to play?


There's Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, of course, but 5E s-t-i-n-k-s as we all know, or have collectively decided after years of fun. There's also my darling child, 1st Edition, which half of the hobby has declared to be a needlessly complex re-print of OSE or Into the Odd or whichever other OSR game is their particular favorite, and which half of the hobby has declared to be bad-wrong-fun (like 5E) because a wizard magic-user has only d4 hit points (unlike 5E).

So what to play?


When it comes down to medieval fantasy RPGs, we've got Daggerheart and Draw Steel on the trad end, and B/X (and everything that's totallyyy not B/X), Mythic Bastionland, Ruins & Rogues, and some other funky ones on the OSR end. Those are options, right? But then if I play one of these I'll feel as if I need to run it as-is, and I am not a perfect (!) fan of any of these games as-is.

So what to play?


Systems are better as frameworks

In Traverse Fantasy's Steps to Demonetize the TTRPG Hobby, she writes:

... This has sometimes led to an overemphasis of authorial authority among indie publishers, that if you are not playing the game how the author of its rulebook intended, then you are playing incorrectly. Players of D&D thus have a much more flexible relationship to the game they play, even if this is a calculated move by Wizards of the Coast [6]. Who cares what people do with rulebooks or adventures or other materials? Of course, we can read and interpret any text, but these so-called game designers have no reason to expect fidelity to their material in practice. Their emphasis of authorial intent serves mostly to assert the value of their products in the face of a monopoly that openly flaunts its promiscuous interpretability. The stronger answer to both parties is that we shall freely take and use whatever we wish, irrespective of stated intent, and we shall not buy anything if we don’t want to.

I agree! Mostly.

To me, indie RPGs can feel really limiting. You've got to play it as-is, and referee it as-is, because A) that's what the players expect and B) that's how you appreciate the indie designer. D&D on the other hand, you can hack to Star Wars and back, and it's fine. Players are happy, you're happy (mostly, even if monster prep can be tedious), the designer's happy. All's good.


As Chris McDowall writes in Bastionland:

[Home-brewing] is inevitable. When running the game, you’re also taking on the role of game designer.

He's talking specifically here about Electric Bastionland, but I think the point stands on every RPG you could play. The system isn't perfect for your table. It's a framework. System matters, in that the framework matters, but at the end of the day it cannot be your table.


Another Manifesto

If I want you to take one thing away from this blog, it's not my little tidbit on what I'm gonna be playing this Autumn/Winter. It is that:


That's five things but still, you get my point.


(unrelated, but this connects WELL with the whole indie-ttrpgs-are-a-collectors-hobby thing! what do people play? frameworks + some mix-and-match supplemental stuff + their own stuff, not systems)


So what to play?

There are a few kinds of RPGs that I really realy like:

  1. Dungeons & Dragons, which is just a framework and a brand

  2. Ashcan / in-development / playtest stuff like ICON

  3. Things that are explicitly made for community hacking, like the GLOG

  4. "Toolkits" like Maze Rats

This stuff is fun because they either are frameworks explicitly (re: GLOG, Maze Rats) or they're so casually consumed that they're very easy to treat as frameworkable (re: D&D, ICON).


So what am I playing next?

Probably D&D, or something along those lines. Some framework that supports hit points and spells and all that. Then I'll toss in a little bit of this and then a little bit of that, and we'll call it a day.


edit: found this thread i think is p perfectly related


(song of the post)

safely crushed by sweatcult

it's so gooddd