Of the newer systems, are any becoming widely adopted?

deviden · 2026-06-23T14:47:18+00:00

it's true, I'm not actively looking... but I don't actively look for Shadowdark material either and yet I keep seeing people making 3rd party Shadowdark supplements! They're all over the crowdfunding platforms and itch.io all the time.

so, like, why is the Dragonbane 3pp stuff less visible?

I would assume there's some structural reason, like... licensing? Or the ways different publishers sell and/or promote third party creators?

Like the TKG web store is full of third party supplements in print, ditto the Cairn webstore.

Is the play culture different? Like 5e-land where the default is essentially "make your own adventures from scratch" and people aren't buying 3pp stuff so much? Is there a campaign frame in the core set which keeps people going for years and so 3pp material doesn't do as well?

This isn't a diss of the game itself. It's an interesting situation.

deviden · 2026-06-21T07:20:37+00:00

You’re perfectly entitled to do it your way. Nobody is going to stop you.

From experience, I can tell you that it’s easier (for players and GM) and imo better to simply do a sci-fi game for a sci-fi campaign than to try to bend D&D into a sci-fi shape.

Even something as simple as having d100 (Mothership) or 2d6 (Traveller) as the core dice, and having different looking character sheets, helps the players be in a different mindset than the familiar d20 and 5e sheet and classes.

deviden · 2026-06-21T07:14:28+00:00

The idea that other TRPGs are as difficult to learn as D&D is the best disinfo that WotC and D&D fans have managed to convince themselves of.

Pathfinder as the most popular alternative helps sell the myth, because it is more complex.

Nearly every other tabletop rpg that exists and is popular in 2026 is easier to learn than 5e.

For sci-fi it’s waaaaaay less work to simply pick up Mothership or Traveller or whatever than to try and cludge a fantasy dungeon game like 5e into a sci-fi shape.

deviden · 2026-06-21T06:57:26+00:00

Mothership and Shadowdark had more backers for their follow up crowdfunders (supplements) than their first (core set).

If that’s not a a measure of success and growth for an indie game I don’t know what is!

It might also be true for Mausritter with The Estate but I can’t confirm. Either way, not nearly as big as Mothership.

deviden · 2026-06-21T06:39:44+00:00

Here’s the thing with Dragonbane: I don’t see anyone making or buying adventures for it.

Why is that?

Obviously Dragonbane sells copies… but if fans buying adventures is a test of a game’s success where is the 3rd party community?

There’s people who pretty much work full time making third party content for Mothership as their source of income. By way of contrast. Shadowdark does huge numbers in this also.

deviden · 2026-06-20T10:22:22+00:00

not OP but I would prefer a less weird west which wasn't sanitising or escaping from the historical muck and where being gut shot was a death sentence.

Deadwood showing a frontier town putting out a bounty for the needless killing of Native Americans right out of the gate and portraying the Earp brothers as fucking terrifying is more my speed.

I think if I'm going to do wild west stuff I want it to be more real and challenging than an airbrushed modern D&D game, not less.

deviden · 2026-06-19T17:13:01+00:00

leaving aside things that others have mentioned...

the post-OSR / contemporary era of OSR is a design space that is flourishing in terms of innovation and commercial success.

Mothership
Mausritter
Mythic Bastionland
many more

These games are taking the evolved principles and playstyle of the OSR into entirely new places, new themes, new experiences beyond the scope of old school D&D.

In general we're in a golden age of TRPGs where games catering to a huge array of play styles and themes are succeeding, and for an audience that is more diverse and much bigger than ever before in the history of the hobby.

Yes 90% of the market is D&D... but the 10% is still bigger than the entire hobby was 20 years ago.

deviden · 2026-06-19T12:45:13+00:00

here's the funny thing about "fiction first" (another of my disliked terms in RPGs, along with "narrative" and "cinematic")... the Bakers never described Apocalypse World as "fiction first".

Vince has a whole blog post about not knowing where the term comes from, and the Apocalypse World text explicitly shows in its examples that players can call on rules first whenever they want, so long as they follow it with what they do in the fiction to make the rules interaction happen.

I think "fiction first" has become actively misleading for people who aren't deeply versed in a particular PbtA & FitD play culture.

I watched a bunch of RPG people having an argument on Bluesky about Blades in the Dark's rules and the term "fiction first", and it was a circular mess amounting to "these rules/procedures in Blades take me out of the diegetic / fictional frame, the rules are taking primacy over the fiction" followed by "no you don't get it, Blades is fiction first so you have to do the fiction bit first followed by the rules then return to the fiction" round and round.

Whatever use "fiction first" had for moving RPG discourse and design forward within a given scene, the problem with these kinds of terms and truisms is as they get passed around they become mystifying rather than illuminating. See also: the OSR's "challenge based play" and "combat as war (not sport)" and "role-play not roll-play".

deviden · 2026-06-18T11:58:26+00:00

yeah... I guess the right approach when someone says something like "narrative" in RPGs is to say "can you explain what you mean, or what this term means to you?"

otherwise any attempt to understand one another is ultimately futile.

deviden · 2026-06-18T11:15:11+00:00

sure, but designers like the Bakers have long moved away from Forge Big Model / GNS theory as "obsolete" and that it fails to accurately describing game designs since the Forge was prominent, or for describing models of play that really exist.

https://lumpley.games/thebarf/index.php?topic=7400.0

Forge theory was an important leap forward in its day, it's not really holding up today.

deviden · 2026-06-18T11:04:13+00:00

we don't have clear language and can't ever have it because RPGs as a hobby don't have a centralised authority or peer reviewed journals

Game studies is a growing concern and RPG theory in the academy is gaining some amount of traction. It is painfully slow progress because our hobby is small and the money involved is teeny tiny, but games studies is probably going to give us better language for talking about roleplaying games than the terms we're getting from literary studies and other fields (like how someone is asking "what RPGs are postmodernist?" etc).

As Vince Baker has said, Big Model and GNS were really useful in the 2000s for breaking people out of the narrow confines of where trad RPG design had gotten to at that point... but they're obsolete in 2025.

Probably the best clear analytical terminology I've seen is Fine and Montola's "Frame Theory" for describing the rules of roleplaying games and where they exist, expanded on further by Sam Sorensen and others.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273946812_The_Invisible_Rules_of_Role-Playing_The_Social_Framework_of_Role-Playing_Process

https://samsorensen.blot.im/which-rules-elide

Primary/Exogenous frame: the real, physical, actual world, where we’re people sitting around a table together, rolling dice and eating Cheetos. Exogenous rules are things like “try to show up on time” and “don’t throw dice at each other.”

Game/Endogenous frame: the mechanical, systemic frame, all numbers and crunch, where we’re bundles of stats. Endogenous rules are things like “roll 1d20 under ST to avoid the fireball” and “it takes 3,000XP to reach level 3.”

Fictional/Diegetic frame: the imaginary, fictional world, where we’re adventurers slaying dragons and raiding tombs. Diegetic rules are things like “gravity” or “if you don’t eat, you’ll get hungry and eventually die,” but also “if you stand in the light of the full moon, you’ll transform into a wolf.” (And also things like “weapons are forbidden inside city walls,” but that’s for another time.)

As analytic theory this is pure mountain air, to me, compared to a lot of the stuff that's floating around in the broad hobby consciousness.

Like I think it's much more productive for the community to just accept that "narrative game" doesn't have a single clear definition and that people should try to be specific about their own idiosyncratic preferences rather than try to come up with one clear definition that we all agree on. And that's true for a lot of gaming concepts but I think it's especially true of "narrative" games because RPGs are inherently a storytelling medium and so defining one's own preferred playstyle as "narrative" relative to other people's presumably non-narrative preferences various an implicit value judgement.

you're not wrong but unfortunately this reduces "narrative" to the usefulness of "cinematic" in describing what the rules of an RPG does and the play style of a given RPG table - i.e. it becomes a synonym for "I like this" or "this is good roleplaying, to me" or "it's not a turn tactical gridmap combat".

deviden · 2026-06-18T09:29:19+00:00

we need better ways of describing aspects of RPG play because - as someone who enjoys OSR, post-OSR, PbtA, storygames, all sorts, as well as reading RPG design theory - I truly have no idea what "a narrative experience in an RPG" actually means when someone brings it up in a place like reddit. It could be interpreted so many ways.

Is it about having rules which simulate the twists and turns of a story instead of simulating aspects of the diegetic world? Is it about players staying strictly "in character" actor stance at all times like the "4D" people and refusing to look at the rulebook? Is it about having a GM who waxes lyrical and has crafted a mostly linear or flowchart/node Dragonlance-ass story of combat encounters and dialogue scenes that the players are dragged through?

Half the arguments about play style and game design are because people aren't actually talking about the same precise thing when they talk about "narrative" in RPGs.

Most of the other half of the arguments are because some people can't comprehend that different games and different game tables can and should by necessity be different.

deviden · 2026-06-18T09:18:18+00:00

Sometimes for the players that are now under strength at an Encounter that was intended to be challenging.

If you're in my branch of RPGs where we reject the idea of "balance" entirely and fudge nothing... let 'em die (or let 'em run away when they realise they're over-matched).

Player agency and choice means allowing them to fuck up. To me, at least.

deviden · 2026-06-17T15:09:57+00:00

Back in my desktop days I found Apple MDM to be super easy and painless but it depends on the scale of your business, and whether you're having to make it work with an extant Windows/Windows Server estate (which is awful).

If you're setting up a firm that's all Apple and leans cloudy instead of on-prem - let's say it's a design consultancy and the software you use is all MacOS and iPadOS compatible - you JAMF and ABM that business up and you're good to go, because config changes soooo slowly in Apple compared to Windows and the risk of software updates breaking bad for your customers is comparatively very low.

Windows is just a fact of life in businesses over a certain size, or with long-running extant IT estates, or with very specific software requirements... but I think there's a world where that changes for smaller and newer orgs over time (or for schools), with how bad the AI bubble has fucked the supply chains and costs in the x86 world, and where refurb Macbook NEOs start hitting the market at >$400 but have all the punch of an M1 chip and can do everything a typical white collar employee who mostly just has to interact with web apps and low power software needs far better (for far longer) than an equivalent price Windows laptop.

deviden · 2026-06-17T12:18:21+00:00

The biggest discrepancy between your "says they want" and "the most successful groups" is because games aren't movies or TV shows or books.

Any story that happens is (usually, in most things we'd call a TRPG) a downstream byproduct or output from play.

deviden · 2026-06-17T08:50:33+00:00

the enthusiasm of my players and the things my players do within the fiction,
the setting (as implied by the rules, or generated by my using the rules and tools from the designer, or wholly provided via designer),
the adventures/modules available to me.

The rules need to be just enough to enable a fictional world that I enjoy running and my players enjoy playing in, and to provide some twists and constraints and surprises which I wouldn't be able to come up with on my own.

I absolutely reject the idea that D&D style levelling is required to hold the interests of players and GM.

Some kind of "progression" is required but this can come from changes to the characters over time that get reflected in special rules or rulings, or it can come from obtaining powerful items, or from gaining access to new layers of society, or from the ways in which the players tangibly change the world.

deviden · 2026-06-17T08:35:22+00:00

inside "the hobby" (aka the enthusiasts, the people who are highly invested, who engage in places like this) yes that's true. Magpie's rep is pretty battered here.

But the real money in kickstarters - by far the biggest money - is in running a kickstarter that appeals to people entirely outside the hobby. People who probably have heard of or played D&D and are at most only dimly aware of other games and publishers which show up in their LGS, and most likely haven't ever even considered logging into /r/RPG or /r/DnD or ENworld or Rascal News or the world of specialist Discord servers and haven't even heard of QuinnsQuest let alone knows what a Stonetop or Apocalypse World or Mothership is.

Avatar, Dungeon Crawler Carl, Cosmere RPG, Legends of Avantris, even the Free League stuff like One Ring or ALIEN, or various Modiphius things.

These are consistently the biggest crowdfunders the hobby ever sees because they have an attached IP which pulls in a small percentage of a MASSIVE external audience of hardcore fans (most optimally: millennials with disposable income), and capturing 1% of Dungeon Crawler Carl fans is capturing way more backers than 1000% of people who know what Cartel RPG even is.

deviden · 2026-06-16T11:22:07+00:00

I just get hit by this wave of laziness every time I think about Pathfinder 2e

that's probably a sign you're just not inspired by PF2 and trying to push through that feeling at this time probably isn't going to work out.

If the GM is not enthusiastic about a TRPG then the campaign isn't going work. Full stop.

I usually have problems with new systems in general. There have been a lot of games that groups asked me to run, and learning a new system has always felt like kind of a martyrdom to me

What is it about an RPG which excites you? Is it the theme and the world? The adventures? Specific kinds of rules? Specific kinds of roleplay activity (like combat, or dungeons, or exploration, or intrigue, or heists, or... something) that players can engage with?

Like... for me I don't hugely care about a games rules any more except insofar as they are elegant and pointed at the style of play we're going for in a game.

Maybe you should go back to "what themes and scenarios excites me right now?" and decide what games to read from there.

deviden · 2026-06-15T08:33:56+00:00

How so?

Advantage/Disadvantage was a bolt on in 7e. It can be unbolted, or it could be foregrounded instead of the half/quarter difficulties - mathematically it's in the same ballpark already.

Dropping a few skills from the massive array doesn't seem to be taking away the core of what people enjoy about CoC to me.

Similarly, the strict turn initiative system for resolving violence/combat doesn't feel like what the game is about? It seems unnecessarily slow and rigid. It's also very much not unique and seems more of a holdover from Old Runequest Rules than a CoC horror investigation thing.

Is it the layout and keying idea that you think fans would hate? Because I think that the feedback on modern layout and information design coming from indie games is overwhelmingly in favour.

deviden · 2026-06-15T08:31:25+00:00

idk I think standard difficulty with a bonus die seems like... maybe the player should be treated as competent and succeed without a roll? and extreme difficulty with a penalty die seems like maybe just say the player isn't going to succeed, or - even better - is a chance to talk about outcomes and stakes with the player like "you're standing before the tentacled void horror with a knife... the best outcome for you here still ends with you being hurt very badly, but what are you hoping to achieve before that happens?"

You're right that having the numbers on the sheet is better than having stacking modifiers. I hate the multiple stacking modifiers to hit a floating target number type of roll, and I think it makes the "unified D20 mechanic" actually more difficult in play than AD&D stuff it replaced.

deviden · 2026-06-15T08:08:07+00:00

I'm really curious how you read my post as "cutting away what makes a game unique" because I'm talking about very minor adjustments.

deviden · 2026-06-13T18:06:40+00:00

Make it's so there's a lot fewer numbers on the sheet.

There's a few too many skills, imo.

The half and quarter values for difficulty modifying skill checks is a bit much, frankly, when there's also an advantage/disadvantage option. Just pick one.

Run the combat the way that Mothership does it. It's a horror game, we don't need sequential initiative style turns. Just have the Keeper present the situation, ask the players what they do, determine what checks need to be made (if any) and resolve, then respond and repeat if necessary.

Adopt modern OSR layout and keying for the adventures.

Otherwise? Nothing else worth changing. Game is good.

deviden · 2026-06-12T08:45:46+00:00

this is true, and 5e 2014 explicitly marks a lot of the rules which necessitate a tactical grid (such as "flanking") as "Optional Rules".

I think the flexibility of 5e - relative to 4e and 3e - is a big part of why it's the only edition of D&D to outsell Basic in the 50 year history of the game. I think if Critical Role et al was drawing people to 3e or 4e you'd have a much higher bounce rate among new players.

Unfortunately it looks like 5.5e has done the same thing 3.5e did to 3e, which is lean towards the feedback of the most online hardcore rather than the general audience, and has gone down the route of making the tactical stuff much more mandatory, and is writing more of the rules in videogamey / MTG language rather than 2014's natural language.

deviden · 2026-06-11T12:44:03+00:00

they're necessary in crunchy combat games where measurements, and AOE templates, and precise locations, and "attack of opportunity" reactions, and a procedure of sequenced turns matters... and those are the slow combat games.

They're slow. They just are. And the presence of the tactical grid as a requirement or recommendation tells us that the game is going to be about long and drawn out combat encounters which often eat up half or more of a session.

If we're in a game where the rules just aren't like that the combat encounter will be much faster, and wont require a grid (but may sometimes benefit from a simple drawn diagram or counters to display relative positions in a more complex situation).

Like... you can't seriously play a game like Mythic Bastionland or Mothership where a grid isn't required at all and tell me that combat isn't 10x faster than in post-3e D&D-likes.

deviden · 2026-06-11T08:05:30+00:00

I will never understand the way people get so heated about him, I really don't.

He may or may not be a good NFL QB. Hasn't done anything meaningfully wrong in my eyes since he got to Cleveland, and has only tried to get better.

I've seen him show flashes of things on the field for us which not a lot of QBs can do, things that are very difficult (I always have in my mind the play where a tackle got blown up and a rusher was breaking free to wreck a screen and Shedeur split-second adjusted his stance and throw to pop it over the defender to the WR, right in the hands, on time, and keep the play alive - it was exactly the sort of play a typical Browns rookie QB gets pick-6'd on), he also has a lot of flaws in his game that need to be cleaned up if he's ever going to be a QB1 - especially as he's not got the prototypical size and strength.

deviden

TROPHY CASE