![]() ![]() When looking at characters gaining levels in D&D, they also gain hit points, which is a curious decision. Something like Fate, where Aspects could change to reflect the relationship John has with both his abilities and his peers, might be a better starting point. A character like John Wick, whose abilities are cemented at the beginning of his story and change little over the course of three movies, would be poorly served by this mechanic. Of course, stacking abilities gained level by level is nearly the only expansion of character power written into D&D, so rewriting the advancement system would require disassembling the game. Significant changes in personal power brought about by personal accomplishments and experiences makes perfect sense in the fantasy genre writ large, but doesn’t really work anywhere else. Leaving the number of levels the game covers to the side, level-by-level advancement produces fairly large step changes in character power as the primary mode of advancement. How about levels? The ascent from level 1 to level 20 in D&D represents a broad, sweeping power curve, so much so that many derivatives of D&D like 13 th Age and Dungeon World cut it in half. Once you begin removing the elements of D&D that make it D&D, it begs the question of why you didn’t pick another game in the first place. Second, there are deliberate design choices in D&D which are genre-reinforcing, and homebrew that ventures outside the conventions of the swords and sorcery genre requires the removal or alteration of these choices to work well. I’d also bet, thanks to the funny way computer RPGs developed, that most exceptions to this were themselves based on D&D at some point in their design history, or at least came from the same genre on which D&D was based (i.e. I am of the strong belief that for virtually every fictional property out there you’d want to homebrew into D&D somehow, I can name at least one if not two or three other games that all work better than D&D, will play better than D&D for your given property, and require less work (sometimes no work at all) to adapt. This is an argument that rests on two basic pillars: First, it is a fact that there are hundreds of RPGs out there which do different things than D&D. ![]() I’m not saying you can’t, I’m saying you shouldn’t. Joking aside, while D&D has broadened out over the years it is still only good at a few things and not good at most others.īefore going into specifics about design elements, let me address the elephant in the article: I am aware that it is possible to homebrew D&D into anything, given enough work. Sure, there has been expansion of the rules over the years going outside was an optional set of mechanics in the original edition (where it actually required you to purchase a game made by a different company), and at some point skill rolls were added to classes other than the thief. ![]() While the Fifth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons features some conscious design choices to make it appealing to a broader range of players, the game is ultimately about entering dungeons, killing monsters, reaping the rewards of killing said monsters, and then using your new powers to return to the dungeon and kill more monsters. There is a logical fallacy whereby people believe that if Dungeons and Dragons is the most popular role-playing game, it must have some amount of breadth to explain its popularity. “It would be really cool if I could run Harry Potter in D&D!”įortunately, these all have easy answers: Don’t, please don’t, and I don’t think it would. “What can you do to run Star Trek in D&D?” Well, something’s getting lost in translation for some, and in the #dnd world on Twitter you’ve likely seen questions like this: This is great news for everyone, right? We all know there’s a whole world of RPGs out there, from the big glossy traditional games to indie zines and everything in between. Now that this growth has been going on for a few years, there is burgeoning realization that role-playing games as a medium are capable of a lot more than dungeon crawls and Tolkien derivatives. The strong increase in popularity of Dungeons and Dragons brought about both by the increased accessibility of D&D’s Fifth Edition as well as the growth of the nascent streaming and actual play communities has meant that there are a whole lot of people getting introduced to D&D. ![]()
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