My old irl group had a lot of diversity in the games we ran. My personal favorite was Trail of Cthulhu
How much trouble is it to keep learning different systems?
it looks harder than it actually is.
my friends and i played Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and it fucking rocked and i didn’t even have to DM it we all just Roleplayed
“If you’d rather play D&D, are you willing to DM while I recharge?”
In my group, yes. :| We actually have plenty of players willing to run games.
That said, they’re also willing to try out new games, so it all works out just fine. :)
In my experience those two usually go hand-in-hand
I think it’s an error to treat “I play DND” the same as “I play RPGs”. It’s like “I play baseball” vs “I play sports”.
There are too many reasons to succinctly list why people might be sticking to DND.
In my experience, you’ll have better luck finding players who want to play something else rather than trying to convert DND players.
It’s like “I play baseball” vs “I play sports”.
I think more like “I play baseball” Vs “I play softball/rounders/cricket”.
It’s not that difficult to convince people who enjoy little league to try standard baseball.
D&D and Pathfinder are like Baseball and Softball, maybe. But going from D&D to Fate or PbtA is like changing to football or fencing. It’s very different. Trying to get someone who’s playing Baseball to take up soccer is tricky. D&D is baseball. Pathfinder is softball. Easier transition.
People just don’t like homework. (Which is perfectly understandable) And for most people most of the time, learning a new system is homework.
On the other hand, DMing also involves a lot of homework, so it’s completely understandable that someone might want to switch to doing homework for a different subject on occasion.
Some people never really learned DND either, but kind of get carried along by the group. I feel like you could switch out systems on those people and they wouldn’t do any worse.
But I get it. Some people are more casual. Some people have executive dysfunction. My current strategy is to find people who want to play what I want to play, and it’s working okay. Still makes me a little sad that DND is so mega popular, but okay.
I’m imagining someone switching to Pathfinder 2e, not telling anyone, and whenever it comes up they say it’s house rules.
I also feel like D&D is kinda hard to learn and has decades of terminology and baggage that contribute to that. Ah well
I was once explaining a rules lite system I wanted to try to someone, and he kept complaining about how difficult it would be for him to learn a new system. I had to point out that I had already fully explained the rules while we were talking, and we weren’t even talking long.
I think some people just think every system is as complex as D&D.
This is very often a thing people believe! Especially if the other system they’re looking at is like Pathfinder (similarly complex) or some close D&D relatives that have a different set of arbitrary numbers. Like, in this game a 15 strength is +3! We have 50 feats with similar names but different behaviors! They might not even realize that not every game has six stats, or long lists of “feats”, or anything even like “feats”. And a lot of games (most of them?) don’t have weird tables and mappings.
Like if you’re playing Fate Core, and you want to burgle, you just your burgle score. One number.
But I think a lot of the time when people present that kind of resistance, it’s coming from an emotional place. Telling them facts isn’t going to do much. They might feel embarrassed about not being good at the new game. They might feel bad about spending $80 on the D&D books and unusual dice when the new game has a free book and just uses d6. That kind of stuff. Unfortunately, most people aren’t really introspective enough to surface those feelings quickly and accurately. (I include myself in “most people” there, sadly.)
I had a guy in an old group that once with full sincerity said “The best thing about D&D is we can just try out different house rules, and if we don’t like them we can change something out.” Like, my guy, that’s not a unique property of D&D. If anything, D&D is harder to homebrew because it has oddly specific rules and assumptions.
Pathfinder is close enough to D&D that I’ve had success converting people to it because fuck Wizards of the Coast and their recurring attempts to gouge everyone with mandatory subscriptions and predatory licensing rackets.
Also Pathfinder’s setting is downright more creative because they don’t keep digging deeper into that boring old “what if underdark and illithids… AGAIN?” well.
I haven’t played Pathfinder 2e but my understanding is it had a lot more choices at the turn level and character build level. that’s good if you want that, but I think for a lot of people the shallowness of 5e is a plus. There are other games that would also be a good fit if you’re not looking for deep tactics or builds, though.
It’s unfortunate, because I do find D&D creatively dry and stale especially now. WOTC focuses heavily on its “original monsters do not steal” and tends to rehash and rehash them for settings and stories a lot.
I run two groups right now - one for d&d and one for Blades in the Dark. Blades group are people with whom we tried D&D before but they found it too combat-focused and “like someone put his gross math fetish into a game”. First group I may one day run Pathfinder 2e for ew camapign. Second one I don’t even suggest this option.
People complain about it a lot, but I’ve never actually ran into a system that uses any maths beyond what a five-year-old should be capable of. Closest I think might be Mutants and Masterminds with stacking multipliers, but still just some extra steps. Nothing that knowing your times tables wouldn’t prepare you for.
me slowly putting away my logarithmic power curve and orbital mechanics RPG that no one will ever play
Fuck I love Mutants and Masterminds, but only one of my partners and none of my friends are as into original capeshit as I am; so… [sob]
I said I wanted to take a break from DMing. Group vanished.
F
After running some Dungeon World I have little interest in every playing or running d&d again. It’s so much better for organic storytelling, and combat is much less of a slog.
If you’re having fun with friends who cares about the system?
Well, I wasn’t having much fun with DND.
There are degrees of fun.
When you’re a forever GM and have been running the same system for a decade, you start to care about the system.
10 years? , on average, I change game yearly
My campaigns tend to last 2-3 years.
The spirit of my comment being “if you’re having fun with friends, who cares if you switch systems?”
Conversely,if you’re not having fun with friends, then who doesn’t care about the system? If it’s getting in the way, then ofc switch.
Really, the core point is don’t let the system get in the way of fun social time
Because certain systems have different focuses.
The core game focus of DnD is pretty heavily directed toward combat. Most of the spells and skills your character has are for combat or for getting into combat or for between combat encounters. It’s a combat centric game, with some RP rules added on top for in-between combat encounters.
Compare that to World of Darkness’s Storyteller system, which is much more heavily focused on the social interactiom and narrative drama. Combat in that game is quick and usually quite lethal, and even in the 5th Edition games Paradox is releasing, calls for combat to be 3 turns before resolving the interaction.
It takes a lot of time and effort to add on your own rules to make these systems handle what they weren’t really designed for.
I wouldn’t really want to run a game of complex political intrigue in DnD just as I wouldn’t want to run a monster slaying dungeon crawl in World of Darkness.
Put the “Master” in “Game Master!” ~Professor DM, Dungeon Craft
My current group of players has only played Starfinder, Stars without Number, Cities without Number, Vampire the Masquerade (V5), and some one-shot games like Quiet Year.
I don’t want to run or play D&D, so I don’t. If needed, we could always hang out without playing a game.
quiet year is sweet af, i highly recommend playing it with a 6 year old sometimes
Once you try Runequest, you’ll know you’ve been blessed.
If they don’t want to play it, running it isn’t gonna be that fun. That’s why I haven’t ran the Shadowrun campaign I made for my group. Nobody other than my sister wants to play SR. :/
I like SR way more than D&D, personally.
SR lore is so good and the system has so much potential.
We’ve switched from D&D to SR4 and BOY does that rulebook have a lot of holes. So many contradictions and omissions, so often things are very unclear. Top that with the insane decision to have the group play basically three separate space-time lines with the real world, the spirit world and the matrix. Let’s all wait around the table for an hour while our decker does matrix that takes a second of in-game time and then our shaman projects into the astral plane and that’s not as fast as the matrix but still a lot faster and takes another hour but it’s only a minute in-game.
We stopped after like 6 months. And it’s a shame because the world is so fun.
SR6 is way better now. There’s also another system (Anarchy) is you want.
And.since a year or two, there are metaplans.
Is SR6 easier to make characters for/doesn’t need a whole-ass paid-for program to do the job?
We shopped around for a bit, read reviews and talked to some SR veteran players and most pointed to SR4 being the one to go with.
But Anarchy sounds like a thing I should look into, thanks!
Anarchy in its original version is unperfect. Consult it before trying to sell it to your players (except if you can read the French version which is kind of a version 1.5)
I gave my 8 players a Condorcet poll for which game I should run next. Their main gripe was a Condorcet poll sounded complicated (it wasn’t).
Kevin Crawford’s “Without Number” games swept the podium (Stars, Cities, Worlds) knocking D&D to fourth place.
The real big table might be a factor. Combat is just so much faster.
The last group I was with ran mostly DND 5e. However, our DM needed a break, and another player took up the reigns for a Star Wars Table Top.
It was not serious. Homebrew and the rule of cool made it a blast - Think Guardians of the Galaxy comedy in a Star Wars wrapper.
The DM for that set goal posts. Like around a certain level, force sensitive classes would get their first light saber.
My character was a bounty hunter who finally got his Mandalorian armor where I could customize “components” like a hand mounted flame thrower, or a shoulder cannon, or what the fuck ever. We spent more time dissecting statistics to get it balanced than anything thematic.
Totally home brewed in that system.
I think that was my best table top experience, and I’m an old school DND nerd. I feel like some days I can barely do my job, but I can quote how THAC0 works on a whim.
I don’t understand statistics unless dice are involved, and no that does not extend to gambling dice games. Utterly useless, but I can go into an ADHD hyper focus on anything that is not actually beneficial to my life in a tangible way, lol.
Whenever my GM says I get to play I know it’s gonna be fire.
I’ll play fucking uno if that’s what he’s running.
My players love Pathfinder, but after running a 1-20 campaign for years I needed a break from it. So far this year we’ve played Apocalypse Frame, Delta Green, and Troika. It’s been a blast trying out different systems and settings, had a few surprises about how much we liked or didn’t like different mechanics.
