On no longer running D&D 5e

Note: this translates and expands upon a clarification I made for a post on a Hebrew role-playing game Facebook group, where I asked about people's experiences with converting a campaign to a different system.

Let me explain why, if I do decide to add new arcs to the campaign which I finished in February, I would want to do so in a system that is not Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

On the one hand, I don't feel that the things that are dominant in D&D 5E were meaningful for the campaign developments which interested me, and hopefully, the players as well. The character journey from slightly superhuman to very superhuman, which is apparent even in the range that we played, levels 1 to 5, simply wasn't very connected to them.

On the other hand, I felt the absence of tools that I have seen in other systems:

• The existence of multiple groups using different, mutually unintelligible languages, was very important, and D&D has very facile support for this aspect of play - as opposed to, say, RuneQuest Classic, which has a dedicated and yet seemingly well-integrated system for languages as skills, including acquisition, graded levels of proficiency, distinctions between speech and literacy, and tools for addressing communication between characters with different levels of fluency. I've previously written my early impressions of RQC, and a more detailed discussion of using languages in RPGs.
• Especially towards the end of the campaign, there was a lot of mass combat. While I was eventually able to run an experience that was reasonably engaging using the rules of D&D 5E, it would have been much nicer to work with a system that had better support for it. For example, I had an excellent time playtesting Ahadi, Basheer Ghouse's upcoming role-playing wargame, where you play officers of a certain rank in the Mughal Empire. It blends role-playing political power plays, managing interesting and sometimes risky travel and logistics, and conducting tactical mass warfare in a very entertaining and cohesive fashion. Such a breath of fresh air after attempting to do similar things in D&D.
• D&D 5E's method for handling social and diplomatic challenges is basically unusable, and I would much prefer to have a system with better social mechanisms, which also tie in better to character progression.
• This feeds into a bigger issue: the lack of ways of measuring character advancement by level of influence or political power, or by increase in knowledge, without them becoming superheroic in more personal, direct ways. The main numerical measure of progress in D&D 5E is the proficiency bonus, which gets added to the mundane and magical attack modifiers, to the target numbers when forcing enemies to roll saving throws, and to the use of skills and tools. It ends up flattening out progression into combat prowess, with everything else being subsidiary.

I was able to use a combination of reinterpretation, homebrew, and dungeon master fiat to work around these issues in the campaign to its conclusion. Furthermore, I am aware that there are homebrew rules, frequently cheap or even free, which address a few of them. But they would turn the game into something entirely different, and I would be spending more time fitting them all together than running and enjoying the campaign itself. And since I don't really like the core of this system anyway, I would much rather start somewhere else.

Mid-March 2021 Updates and work in progress

I've been working on a couple of potential articles for the blog. Unfortunately, none of them is ready to be posted yet. So I figured I'd give you all a rough idea of what's on my mind, and some general updates that you might be interested in. Can't promise all of these will be published, although if you find any of them interesting, do let me know - maybe that'll motivate me to finish them faster!

My first campaign is over

I concluded my first campaign last month. It started in spring 2019, so it ran for about a year and a half. The system was Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. I created my own setting, although the premise was to build it around several adventures from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It was definitely a trip. I learned a lot about my proclivities, I experimented with a lot of methods and structures, and came to some interesting conclusions. There are several posts related to it in various states of writing:

Campaign summary

This being my first campaign, I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do, and I made significant changes to the material I adapted, some of which I am happy with, some not so much. It may well be useful to provide a summary as a record and a set of tips for people who might be interested in doing something similar in future. I also have at least one original campaign concept I might be able to extract from it into its own product, so I'll have to see how much exactly to share.

Why I don't want to continue it in D&D 5E

The campaign ended with the main pressing issue concluded, which made it a good stopping point. Nevertheless, we all feel like there's a lot more potential to this world and to the conflicts we established within it. Unfortunately, one of the things I learned while running it was that I don't want to run D&D 5E anymore. I have a post on the subject I formulated when asking an Israeli forum about the feasibility of moving a campaign to a different system, which I can translate to English. I think it'll be more than mere D&D-bashing. (Update: here's the post!)

The D&D 5E character sheet game

I've done a bit of analytical, theoretical, even design work with the character sheet game framework. However, one glaring gap is that I have yet to apply it at length to an existing role-playing game system. Since I've played 5E and have run a whole campaign in it, and since it's very well-known, it makes for a good candidate. Reading and taking notes is a bit of a slog so far, but I hope to finish it at some point. My conclusions will probably tie into why I don't want to continue running it.

Other works in progress

In addition to items related to my recently concluded campaign, here are other things in various stages of completion:

Diceless constructive alienation

I've been active in playtesting and examining an upcoming diceless RPG, Guy Sclanders` Bounty Hunter. This has gotten me thinking about how and whether it's possible to use constructive alienation when you don't have an outside source of randomness. How do you position yourself with the players to enjoy the structure you've built, when there are no points in which the decision depends on a result that none of you can predict? How do you, as a gamemaster, work against your own biases, when there is no way to replace your arbitrary decisions with samples from a predesigned distribution? I don't have an answer yet, so this remains a draft. I've consequently gotten in touch with a group that plays a more established diceless RPG, Amber Diceless, and have started reading its rulebook, so maybe that will lead me to some insights.

More virtual reality in media

I've previously discussed my talks about virtual reality as exists in our world and in fiction. Since those talks, I've had the opportunity to watch two TV series which have featured virtual reality as a central premise: The Prisoner and The Good Place. Without spoiling too much, the former involves an artificial world built and peopled around the protagonist to get him to divulge some information, while the latter has a world constructed to provide the very best people their perfectly tailored afterlife. I have fragments of thoughts about them both, but neither have crystalized into something publishable here, yet.

Historical immersion

I've been watching Peaky Blinders as a way of getting some genre concepts for Blades in the Dark. One thing I noticed is the use of a modern soundtrack for themes and leitmotif, to immerse the audience emotionally in what's going on, even though the tracks are anachronistic to early 20th Century Birmingham. There's something to be said about a contrast between realism and immersion, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.

And that's it! Hopefully I'll have a fully-fledge post for you soon.

Fooled by alignment

Let's talk about alignment charts. Not just that of characters in Dungeons & Dragons -  with evil vs. good on one axis, chaos vs. law on the other - but also the types of role-playing games according to Blacow - role-playing vs. wargaming over power-gaming vs. story-telling - and the political compass in politics - authoritarian vs. libertarian over left vs. right.

There's a sense of descriptive power to them, isn't there? You're free, even more free than you would have been had you been trying to line things up on a spectrum. You can fit a lot of personalities, games, and political positions on a flat piece of paper, and maybe even capture the relations between them. But that's not all that happens. Once people accept these alignment charts, they start becoming normative. People want to stand out, so they start defining themselves based on limited combinations of the extremes, and instead of having a whole flat surface, you end up with a discrete set of possibilities. For character alignment, there are at most nine; when the Blacow typology for role-playing games came out, people soon pigeonholed themselves, as well as the games they enjoyed or wanted to design, by the extremes on the two axes - so four types of games and gamers were born. The political compass, at least when it originally came out in the 1990s, was presented online by American libertarians, as a way of explaining and justifying their singular position. What happened to the freedom, the explanatory power of two whole space dimensions? Gone. Who is going to take the time to explain that their character is actually 60% Chaotic 40% Lawful, and 80% Bad 20% Good? What do those details even signify? The original breadth of ethics or games or politics is gone, and we're left with caricatures.

And that's before we start criticizing the frameworks themselves. Are role-playing and wargaming actually at odds, or, as I argued in a previous post (where roll-playing can easily be a stand-in for wargaming), independent player interests, that can be brought together with the proper design? What if a game is decidedly detrimental to both power-gaming and story-telling, say by enforcing strict inter-character balance using mechanics that deny the possibility of creating a consistent story? It could either fail to do these things out of bad design, or it could benefit a different agenda.

With D&D character alignments, we run into different problems: who is good to everyone, or bad to everyone? Is lying to protect a friend good or bad? It's probably a difficult moral question, not easily resolved by the alignment chart. Is a loyal underling of a crime syndicate lawful for keeping their word, or chaotic for undermining the rule of law? Is an informer who keeps ratting out members of their corrupt organization lawful for upholding the rule of law, or chaotic for undermining this organization? Why are these interesting questions? We already have the drama, the tension, the focus of difficult decision-making, in the description of the person's connections to the people and society around them, the conflict between the various values they hold. Since we're already going to be pushed into the extremes, let's just accept the combinatorial explosion and revel in it. 

Many games dispense with alignment. Fate has its aspect system; most Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games describe bonds and character weaknesses explicitly, rather than trying to throw them on a two-dimensional chart; even old-school RuneQuest has you align yourself with or against several cults and guilds, groups in the world that have complicated and dynamic relations with each other, and that are not always mutually exclusive.

Alignment in its many forms is very compelling - too compelling. It becomes the subject instead of helping understand it. I think it's long past time to let it go.