In my experience, most roleplayers seem to dislike D&D and consider it a poor RPG. I've been a member of three different RPG clubs each with dozens of members, and been to the UK nationals, so I've met a fair few roleplayers.
Personally I'm on the fence. I like D&D, particularly Forgotten Realms, and one of my all time favourite RPG campaigns is one I ran 8 years ago in 3.5 edition. Which to this day remains one of the best experiences I've ha appvalleyd GMing. Still whentutuapp I compare it to World Of Darkness, Shadowrun, GURPS, WHFRP, and more; D20 games just seem to come across as poorly balanced hack-n-slash games that push combat whilst heavily limiting any social aspect of the game. I also find the frankly cartoon like healing breaks immersion, and some of the abstract systems like "class" and "weapon proficiencies" irritating and anachronistic. I still enjoy D&D, and I'm running a game in 5e now which has me more invested than anything else, but it's flaws are still apparent to me.
My issue is, amongst RL gamers I find I'm the one defending D&D saying, "it doesn't have to be just a dungeon crawl where you just kill shit and take their stuff, a decent GM can craft really great stories with D&D, just give me a chance and I swear you'll enjoy it". Online however I'm being pegged as the D&D hater who only goes to D&D forums because he wants to tell people why it sucks...
D&D is a great RPG even though it has many imperfections but no game is perfect. but i would never say D&D is heavily limiting any social aspect of the game. On the contrary roleplaying has no need for rules and the ammount of social , combat, and exploration pillars that comes into play is up to each group, players and DM. But the game itself is not limiting RP, it even encourage it.
D&D stands as the industry behemoth and for many will be the first RPG they will play. Personally, I started with some limited experience of 3.5e and now have had a fair amount of experience with 5e; returning to RPGs since its release.
I think that D&D, by-and-large, does a good job of being the 'main' RPG out there; the fact that it still occupies the position as the biggest is testament to this. However, the pitfalls are still there - in my view 5e stresses accessibility over depth. I've had a number of quite length discussions with many Pathfinder 2e GMs and players; P2e in my view being a lot heftier a ruleset to the point of being restrictive, unless you pick and choose the rules you adhere to and which you do not. On the other hand, 5e has to oftentimes use 3rd party resources to plug gaps in its rules; it is clear that more emphasis has been placed on campaigns based around PCs of lower level (probably the reason why most of the official adventures rarely go into the high teens).
Personally, I am really interested in exploring the world of OSR; really want to run a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign! There was a really interesting interview recently which delved into the idea of reducing the amount of rules further and having a more fluid / narrative driven rule-set; which may well be the future of a segment of the RPG community.
D&D remains a good base, it has positioned itself as a simple and highly accessible game - a gateway RPG if you will. Allowing for players that get 'bored' with the rule-set to either change systems or incorporate more homebrew / 3rd party rules into their system.
D&D stands as the industry behemoth and for many will be the first RPG they will play. Personally, I started with some limited experience of 3.5e and now have had a fair amount of experience with 5e; returning to RPGs since its release.
I think that D&D, by-and-large, does a good job of being the 'main' RPG out there; the fact that it still occupies the position as the biggest is testament to this. However, the pitfalls are still there - in my view 5e stresses accessibility over depth. I've had a number of quite length discussions with many Pathfinder 2e GMs and players; P2e in my view being a lot heftier a ruleset to the point of being restrictive, unless you pick and choose the rules you adhere to and which you do not. On the other hand, 5e has to oftentimes use 3rd party resources to plug gaps in its rules; it is clear that more emphasis has been placed on campaigns based around PCs of lower level (probably the reason why most of the official adventures rarely go into the high teens).
Personally, I am really interested in exploring the world of OSR; really want to run a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign! There was a really interesting interview recently which delved into the idea of reducing the amount of rules further and having a more fluid / narrative driven rule-set; which may well be the future of a segment of the RPG community.
D&D remains a good base, it has positioned itself as a simple and highly accessible game - a gateway RPG if you will. Allowing for players that get 'bored' with the rule-set to either change systems or incorporate more homebrew / 3rd party rules into their system.
OSR is awesome from my experience. My roommate runs DCC funnels every now and then and they're always a blast. I run Mork Borg and I just got the Old School Essentials book.
I think D&D is a fine game and I'm too heavily invested to back out entirely, but I find that so many character options really make it hard to build a cohesive world that I'm interested in running. I got into D&D for the classic tropes, but with 5e I feel late to the party and everyone else is already past that. People say there aren't enough options in comparison to something like Pathfinder, but I go the other direction. I feel like Human Fighters are awesome because the depth comes from the RP and the personality of the character more than having a bajillion combat options. In this same regard, PHB Rangers are fine as well.
I just feel like when everything is special, nothing is special. Sure, you can take the game and do whatever you want with it at your own table, but the product line definitely has taken on a certain bent that lends itself to a certain style of play. Even the horror stuff in the new Ravenloft book comes off as more cartoony and "spooky" than actually grim and dreadful.
And I'm not saying D&D should be those things. Hasbro makes toys for children, so of course they don't want to put their name on anything too gruesome or dark. And as stated above, there are other games that do what I'm looking for. But D&D still serves as a better jumping on point. If I invite friends over to play Mork Borg, they're not gonna know what to expect. But my parents know what D&D is. It's a household name and the rules are now at a point to where I can teach someone totally new enough to get them playing in about 15 minutes.
In my experience, most roleplayers seem to dislike D&D and consider it a poor RPG. I've been a member of three different RPG clubs each with dozens of members, and been to the UK nationals, so I've met a fair few roleplayers.
Personally I'm on the fence. I like D&D, particularly Forgotten Realms, and one of my all time favourite RPG campaigns is one I ran 8 years ago in 3.5 edition. Which to this day remains one of the best experiences I've had GMing. Still when I compare it to World Of Darkness, Shadowrun, GURPS, WHFRP, and more; D20 games just seem to come across as poorly balanced hack-n-slash games that push combat whilst heavily limiting any social aspect of the game. I also find the frankly cartoon like healing breaks immersion, and some of the abstract systems like "class" and "weapon proficiencies" irritating and anachronistic. I still enjoy D&D, and I'm running a game in 5e now which has me more invested than anything else, but it's flaws are still apparent to me.
My issue is, amongst RL gamers I find I'm the one defending D&D saying, "it doesn't have to be just a dungeon crawl where you just kill shit and take their stuff, a decent GM can craft really great stories with D&D, just give me a chance and I swear you'll enjoy it". Online however I'm being pegged as the D&D hater who only goes to D&D forums because he wants to tell people why it sucks...
It sounds like what you want out of a roleplaying game is quite different from most people. Most people just want to have a laugh with their friends and fight challenging bad guys.
Sounds like you want an elite gaming system where its all about the mechanics. Maybe try more modern systems like world of dungeons.
One thing D&D does well* that other, more modern systems often struggle with is allowing characters to grow in power. A high-level spellcaster in D&D can do things with Greater Arcana spell slots that would have any other RPG developer's teeth turning blue. I've toyed with a number of other systems, and many of them call out many of the things D&D accepts as just a thing spellcasters can do as horrifying story-breaking superpowers the DM should never allow at the table. A thirteenth-level D&D character can simply teleport their party to wherever on the globe they feel like being once a day without (much) muss or fuss, and while many DMs hate that it's still a thing the system simply expects will happen. Other games have significant trouble with a measly thirty-foot blink and advise DMs against allowing players to possess such abilities.
That growth in power is restricted, of course, and it's mostly exclusive to spellcasters, but it's still a thing D&D does that no other modern system I've worked with accounts for.
Other more modern games often veer towards the Rules-Lite Narrative Experience(TM) mode, wherein they strip the game down far more than even 5e does and eliminate so many rules and mechanical structures in the name of simplification, accessibility, and "not getting in the way of a player's imagination!" that there's very little reason left to buy the book. There's no gameplay left in many such RPGs; you simply sit around spinning a yarn with your buddies and occasionally throw a dice maybe once or twice a session if you feel like it. Again - that's just a book that takes way more effort to read than it should. D&D, for all its warts - and there are many, many warts indeed - is still a role-playing game. There's still some meaty mechanical crunch in there, still some game systems to master, and still some satisfaction in overcoming challenge.
Combat-heavy games do not have to be mindless dungeon crawls, and a game that doesn't rely on/feature combat isn't automatically better than a game that does - that is entirely down on whether the GM can offer better options and the players can follow through on them. A terrible GM running a shallow, pretentious poser game of World of Darkness alongside a bunch of hipster twerks more interested in Tweeting about their bucking of trends, maaaaan....is not better than an excellent GM running a tightly crafted and deeply engaging Heroic Fantasy game in D&D for a group of close-knit friends invested in the story and in elevating what the GM gives them just because the WoD wonks used a different system.
Heh...and besides. Given how often people still yell at D&D for being overly rules-heavy, mechanically fiddly, and restrictive, I often find myself wondering why they want a bunch of heavy, mechanically fiddly and restrictive rules clamps in place on social gameplay. Social gameplay consists of having a conversation with the DM; you tell the DM what your character is saying and how they're saying it, the GM tells you how the NPC reacts and what the NPC is saying. Rolling an occasional Charisma (or Intelligence or Wisdom, if the GM is any damn good) check to see if you stick the delivery or bollix it up is all you need to run a perfectly respectable 'social encounter'. You don't get to push for a Rules-Lite Narrative Experience(TM) and then still yell at D&D for not having a bunch of excessive rules for social gameplay just because you're socially awkward and don't like talking to people.
EDIT: And put it this way - I own the Shadowrun Sixth World ruleboook, their Latest Edition. I've read it. I'd rather run Shadowrun in GURPS, or even in frickin' D&D 5e, than use that godawful abortion of a ruleset. Bought the book on a lark because I'd always been curious about Shadowrun; it's useful as hell for lore and setting knowledge and getting a sense of the game, but even though D&D is bloody terrible at running Futuretech Sci-Fi I could build a better Shadowrun game in 5e than I could with those terrible rules. "New Hotness" ain't always hot.
Well this is a D&D forum, so... yeah most of us like D&D? Not sure why we'd be here otherwise.
In my experience, most roleplayers seem to dislike D&D and consider it a poor RPG. I've been a member of three different RPG clubs each with dozens of members, and been to the UK nationals, so I've met a fair few roleplayers.
One thing to consider is that D&D is typically popular enough to have its own groups/clubs/meetups. As such, most "RPG clubs" are made up of people who are fans of RPGs that are specifically there to play "not D&D." Unless sales numbers are totally divorced from actual play, the circles you've been in are not a true representation of the hobby.
I think it comes down to personal preference. I have a friend that prefers White Wolf games like Mage, Changeling, etc. and our group has run those games before. I've also played the original Star Wars RPG and a couple other systems here and there. They were ok, but I prefer D&D and that's what my group always gravitates back to.
In my experience, most roleplayers seem to dislike D&D and consider it a poor RPG.
Curious, are what you're calling "roleplayers" distinct from a broader category of TTRPG players? I'm not sure whether your experience is speaking to a subset of gamers who consider themselves "role playing" (and are therefore likely adverse to rules systems who spend the bulk of their page count providing rules for what are largely combat resolution (including the bulk of magic) or are you talking about players of TTRPGs in general being down on D&D.
What do they think of Pathfinder?
That last question aside, D&D, especially it's present rule set, is not the most sophisticated system out there. I often quip "D&D combat is done in broad strokes," but frankly everything else outside of combat is done even more broadly. This is not a bad a thing. That said, D&D is good at being D&D. My take is both Pathfinder and the OSR and contemporary clone systems are all "narrow" D&Ds or better yet "niche" D&Ds that capitalize on select aspects of D&D the designers and players of their niche feel is neglected by their origin game.
Outside of D&D there are lots of great systems, while I play D&D most frequently that's largely for "friends and family reasons" (and I guess D&D haters can say all those folks are caught up in the D&D hegemony or what have you) I also presently play four other systems (well, learning one, through playing) and have played at least ten other systems over the years. Presently, no one in my "other systems" tables (ok, playbyposts and video meets) is of the "D&D sucks" or even "The problem with D&D ..." mindset. I think it might be where we are in life chronologically. When I was younger there was always "that guy" (almost always a guy, sidenote the) or even "those guys" who were D&D haters with a ready to go soapbox speech denouncing everything that made the game bad. Those folks were given their space and not asked to play D&D. I think when it comes down to it while they're all TTRPGs D&D is more about "playing D&D" while other games, even the so called universal ones, are trying to capture a particular genre or trope. Players of TTRPGs tend to focus and not take broad views so when they "find their game" it's inherently superior to the "lowest common denominator" game (see similar phenomenon with alt music in the 80s/90s and indie rock at the start of the 21s century vs. pop music; "independent" comics vs Mavel/DC, independent cinema vs. Hollywood, craft beer vs. miller/coors, artisanal bratwurst vs. ballpark hot dogs ... etc.). I mean in _some_ cases the more "boutique" games can be construed as "better quality", but not all. I think there's also a sort of envy bordering on Oedipal father-killing of D&D by partisans for other games ... they'd love to have their game be supported for decades - I think the only games that can claim a similar longevity, but never anything close to a market share, are Call of Cthulhu and maybe Champions Traveler and GURPS ... is GURPS even really thing anymore or just a reprint market?
People like to feel they've made the right choice. Any game requires a substantial investment of time and a not insubstantial investment in money. I think "my preferences are superior" stances may also have some background in that psychology too. Gamers can be fragile, and it's easier to join up and guzzle haterade than acknowledge that some folks just aren't into what you're playing and prefer to play the more available and popular alternative. Like a kid who was really into the Cure and thinks that why he was dumped by his girlfriend for some dude who could copy New Kids on the Block moves, ahem.
Anyway, D&D is a fun game ... I think the difference between it and other games that are trying to capture something more specific, that gives it its own unique fun is that it's probably the most "forgiving" in terms of trying to push past a rule, realize the group shouldn't do that, and return to its basics.
I've been playing roleplaying games since I was 8 years old with the redboxed basic DnD set in the late 70's. I played Advanced DnD and then when I got to college played all kinds of things. Star Wars d6, Cyberpunk 2020, GURPS 3rd edition, Shadowrun, World of Darkness Marvel Heroes, Palladium products of various sorts, Earthdawn, Toon, Paranoia and probably a smattering of games that have just slipped my mind. Mostly I play GURPS 4th edition now though I'm a supporter of DnD 5th edition. DnD 3rd edition actually chased me away from the system for almost 10 years due to the requirement that the players had to plan every level carefully to be an affective character made it almost impossible to get an effective character if you played based on character and not based on it as a collection of traits. 4th edition did not impress me and I never even thought about trying a game.
5th edition is really good at what it does which is be an opening game for people. 5th ed is probably the best game I've ever seen in the reward to effort ratio and gradually ramping up the complication of the game. Its a wonderful game to bring people to the hobby and continues to provide an enjoyable experience for players who have been playing for a while. In short its a good game and probably one of the best iterations of DnD and gives a good solid positive view of the hobby as a whole.
With that I HATE the way people consider DnD the only game out there or try to staple painfully different genre's onto DnD. DnD runs DnD games incredibly well. High fantasy is its bread and butter. Wonderful fun and pretty flexible adventures can be had but if I wanted a real gritty campaign I wouldn't pick up DnD. I wouldn't try to run Star Trek in DnD or Cyberpunk or MCU game. I wouldn't run a caveman daily survival campaign. There are better systems for all of those things.
I've seen two primary schools of thought regarding the D20-focused 5e system.
Some people see it as a challenge of strategy with stats and dice.
Some people see it as an opportunity to have a social game with stats and dice.
People want what they want, and as far as I can tell, 5e has the ability to provide two primary experiences. That's just two out of oodles of possibilities, some of which can be managed by D20 and some cannot (but often someone else has managed to capture the desired experiences that 5e cannot give).
I see D&D like I see Unreal Engine: You use what you want for what you need to give certain experiences, you can build your own stuff or modify what's already there, and you're not forced to use the entire thing all the time (unlike Frostbite, Lumberyard, and CryEngine which all 3 are often like trying to fit a Detroit DD16 into a sports car if your project's not a 16-wheel lorry).
We seem to run into the most issues when we think D&D is not providing us the experience we expected. Occasionally, that can be a shortcoming of the system, but I think more often it is a miscommunication between players. Strategy or social, D&D is still a group effort either way.
That's, like, just my opinion - a rambling train of thought at that. Nothing here is fact. Wrong answers only, and all that.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Where to begin? I've been playing D&D since 1979, so I must like it.
I've played a lot of different games in the last 40 years, the last 35 with mainly the same group of people. The games all had some interesting ideas. It was mostly fun playing them.
But none of them, including D&D, was the right system for everybody at the table. I'm the only player in our group to really enjoy both the complexity of Champions (1st to 4th editions) and the narrative-driven simplicity of Dungeon World. Yet the only joy I ever got out of Rolemaster was laughing at the critical hit tables.
D&D 5e is the same. It's too complex for some of our players, yet too simple for others. And at times, it's too complex for everybody. I'm looking at you, Barkskin with a shield.
But 5e is a good compromise for our group. The same players who find D&D complex found Dungeon World too uncertain. And we all find the heft of the Pathfinder 2 books a bit daunting. We're old now and our memories aren't as good as they used to be, plus we frequently have to stop and question if we're remembering the 5e rules or the AD&D rules.
So D&D 5e: good enough. We can still kick down doors and loot tombs, but we can also woo serving girls who are secretly werewolves and have the kind of horror romances we remember from our youth.
In my experience, most roleplayers seem to dislike D&D and consider it a poor RPG. I've been a member of three different RPG clubs each with dozens of members, and been to the UK nationals, so I've met a fair few roleplayers.
I believe you are in a special niche group of people that want to get together and roleplay. I'm not sure what the other roleplay games are although I hear about many of them here. I am particular struck by your comment that you've "been to UK nationals", because that sounds like a competition like the US Open (chess tournament) or something. Just out of curiosity, what are the UK nationals?
I think the D&D ruleset allows you to be almost anything outside of combat, and the combat rules are spelled out so that combat is not trivial. To get some reward from the game, you need some sort of challenge and in D&D the challenge is overcoming the monsters you face from time to time. And even there, if the DM chooses to make it a mystery, then there can be negligible combat because you have a different challenge to overcome.
D&D is set up to be a game set in an era of swords and armor. If that is an era you don't want to RP in, then you would need to be in something else.
I just feel that it is all about the group. If the group fits together well and the DM has the time to come prepared and the players stay engaged, you can have all the fun in the world.
And as someone already shared, you should expect a very pro-5e group here. But we are a small niche group of the 5e community that is more focused on what the rules allow than your typical group.
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Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
There are two kinds of people that probably make up 90% of all TTRPG players:
Have only played D&D
Didn't like D&D, so tried a different system
Obviously there are some people who have tried multiple systems and D&D is still their favorite, but they are in the minority. So that's why when you sample from people who have tried multiple systems, there's a good chance you'll find people who prefer those other systems. Or you might find people who prefer D&D, but they aren't as vocal about it, because the "The vastly most popular XYZ is overrated," people tend to be quite loud.
It's not a flawless game, but I like it a lot. That said I don't have experience with other TTRPgs. I technically started with 4E but after a few sessions of that our Dm swapped us to 5E when the online tool they were using for 4E stuff shut down.
I really like 5E's class and subclass system, though I wish everyone started with their subclass archetype at level 1. Even if they needed to redistribute some of the abilites a bit. But I think it's a great way to have a limited number of classes but allow more variety within those classes.
I think more classes could use a system similar to warlock invocations and boons, choices that really change up your character customization beyond just what spells you pick.
I only really have experience with 5E. It's not that I think it's the best system ever, but rather I don't really have the time or reason to branch out. I like 5E a lot, so I don't feel pressured into other systems on that front. And I don't really have the time to pick up a new game in a new system on top of the games I'ma lready playing. Maybe I'll branch out one day when things have cleared up more on my end. But for now I"m content with 5E.
Having played many games since the boxed sets I got in 1983, I have played extensively in D&D campaigns, CWoD (and a little New), Pathfinder, GURPs, Star Wars, Shadowrun, etc (most across multiple version over that same time span... I'm an info junkie and have too many books). Our longest running campaign was over 8 years in Mage. Every system has strengths and weaknesses and I don't want to spend a lengthy time listing them out. Mostly, I have found that this comes down to the group. My current group is much more heavily focused on combat and the DM does an excellent job presenting the fights. There are several of us that would like a lot more roleplaying opportunities for character development, but understand how that plays out at this table, so we talk to each other about character development outside of game and go from there. The Storyteller in Mage was a master of story, on the other hand, he had a way of bringing things together and describing venues and getting into the holy guts of the characters we were interacting with. I have loved and hated his characters, and been betrayed by the one I thought was closest. Combat was interesting and had good details, but it was the story we came back for. And then he didn't wake up one morning and there has been a loss in our gaming community for many many years now. Personally, I think I fall somewhere between. I want to mix combat in pretty heavily but take time for character development without allowing the players to just devolve into silly randomness.
Would I take a table full of roleplayers that know how to not turn it into High Drama and pursue an intricate story? You betcha. That's not the table I have before me. To be honest... I got to sit at that table for a lot of years... and it made me a better roleplayer, I just wish I could go back and use what I know now and begin playing back then. But that's ok too. Without one, we don't get the other. As it stands, I'll take playing a game with players that want to play and enjoy the moments. Most of the players now are over 20 years younger than I am and for half of them this is their first game. So I try to take opportunities to do things in game that show them about roleplaying without telling them how to roleplay. Over time they are getting better at it and we have fun week after week.
So to me, does it matter what system? Nah. The system is the rules I'm playing by at the table I happen to be at. The roleplaying is the story that I have built in my mind and show to the other players around me. D&D is at a great time where lots of people are playing it and finding out how the system works and seeing how they can look beyond the veil into the land of story. If I get a chance at some of the other systems will I play? Sure. Will I keep playing D&D? Most likely... no signs of that stopping any time soon. Will I roleplay? Yes, I'll build in story for my characters and use world knowledge to portray them in an appropriate context so they can grow and live and breathe.
The only "roleplaying" I want nothing to do with is the kind you find so often in MMOs and fanfiction where the characters are all nobility and every. single. thing. they do is something that affects the entire world and the whole world has to revolve around them. I don't find that roleplaying and I don't find it enjoyable. Be a baker's son who made a pact so he could more easily light the kitchen fires early in the morning. Be the stablemaster's son who knows his way around a rake and can muck a stall out who finds a magic sword in the forest. Be a soldier who stood on walls for so long he finally became a caravan guard and found out he wasn't very good at fighting, but is determined to get better. Sometimes it's better to just play with people that want to play the game... (regardless of the titles or pictures on the covers)
Eh, everything moves in cycles. Cultures, traditions, movements, hobbies, literature, music, doesn't matter, there is a constant treadmill that people move through as the old gets 'stale' and the new is 'shiny'. And eventually it all comes full circle and starts again. The cycles aren't necessarily set in stone and there's a lot of variety and crossover as a niches branch and rise and fall in popularity but there are always people challenging the status quo, looking elsewhere for renewed interest, rejecting what they had before or building atop it. It's all happened before in D&D's history, several times over, and will probably happen again short of an apocalypse.
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"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
D&D has rules for combat, which are quite abstracted compared to some of the super detailed systems going for "realistism" (which are specifically not very popular because of all the crunch), because players want to have some action in their story. Some want just the action, and those are the ones playing straight up hack and slash dungeon crawls.
Newsflash to the OP's "roleplayers:" There is absolutely nothing in D&D that restricts roleplaying. That's provided by the players, as facilitated by the DM, just like in any other RPG. Those who complain about D&D somehow being non-conducive to roleplaying and storytelling are probably mainly interested in Yurei's "Rules-Lite Narrative Experience(TM) mode" where they buy a sourcebook that is ninety percent or more setting material to help them tell a story that frequently amounts to a collective fanfic set in a fully fleshed out world with pre-provided characters and plots. I'm not saying you can't have wonderfully engaging games featuring original plots, drama, and action with those narrative-heavy games. I'm saying that people who assert that you can't have a story/character driven roleplaying experience without those settings (and they're mostly really marketed as settings with a few rules tossed in case you feel like rolling some dice once in a while) are creatively stunted fools who rely on the crutch of somebody else writing a large portion of the story that they "play" for them.
Every game of D&D has exactly as much roleplaying as the DM and players collectively decide to put into it. The rules are there as a way of determining just how things turn out when the heroes fight the bad guys, or whatever else they're doing that involves chance or conflict with characters or creatures that would rather have the story go differently.
There are two kinds of people that probably make up 90% of all TTRPG players:
Have only played D&D
Didn't like D&D, so tried a different system
Obviously there are some people who have tried multiple systems and D&D is still their favorite, but they are in the minority. So that's why when you sample from people who have tried multiple systems, there's a good chance you'll find people who prefer those other systems. Or you might find people who prefer D&D, but they aren't as vocal about it, because the "The vastly most popular XYZ is overrated," people tend to be quite loud.
I have tried multiple systems (dabbled in Call of Cthulhu 7e, Pathfinder 2e (A tiny bit), Year Zero Engine, Monster of the Week (also a tiny bit), Star wars (there was a span of time in which I would skim over several RPGs to get a quick gist of the rules), and Star Trek Adventures (a tiny bit))
Been playing D&D since 1976, prior to 1st ed. AD&D, and many classic RPGs such as Runequest, Traveler, GURPS, Tunnels and Trolls, even Bunnies and Burrows. The issue with all those games is where are they now? Most RPGs only last a short period, while D&D goes on forever and is the common thread amongst gamers. Even if you personally love Vampire-whatever, the chance to find many people who will also play it year after year is low.
I agree with Flushmaster and others above that the amount of RP in D&D is up to the players and the DM - there is no limit to that in the rules. Look at Witchlight which can reportedly be played without any combat to resolve the adventures. I will say that most D&D players I have played with in 46 years (whoa, now I feel old) do like hacking things, casting spells and rolling D20s more than talking their way through a session. Those people will always be mainstream players, but it doesn't mean you cannot find a group that loves RP more than hacking.
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In my experience, most roleplayers seem to dislike D&D and consider it a poor RPG. I've been a member of three different RPG clubs each with dozens of members, and been to the UK nationals, so I've met a fair few roleplayers.
Personally I'm on the fence. I like D&D, particularly Forgotten Realms, and one of my all time favourite RPG campaigns is one I ran 8 years ago in 3.5 edition. Which to this day remains one of the best experiences I've ha appvalleyd GMing. Still whentutuapp I compare it to World Of Darkness, Shadowrun, GURPS, WHFRP, and more; D20 games just seem to come across as poorly balanced hack-n-slash games that push combat whilst heavily limiting any social aspect of the game. I also find the frankly cartoon like healing breaks immersion, and some of the abstract systems like "class" and "weapon proficiencies" irritating and anachronistic. I still enjoy D&D, and I'm running a game in 5e now which has me more invested than anything else, but it's flaws are still apparent to me.
My issue is, amongst RL gamers I find I'm the one defending D&D saying, "it doesn't have to be just a dungeon crawl where you just kill shit and take their stuff, a decent GM can craft really great stories with D&D, just give me a chance and I swear you'll enjoy it". Online however I'm being pegged as the D&D hater who only goes to D&D forums because he wants to tell people why it sucks...
D&D is a great RPG even though it has many imperfections but no game is perfect. but i would never say D&D is heavily limiting any social aspect of the game. On the contrary roleplaying has no need for rules and the ammount of social , combat, and exploration pillars that comes into play is up to each group, players and DM. But the game itself is not limiting RP, it even encourage it.
D&D stands as the industry behemoth and for many will be the first RPG they will play. Personally, I started with some limited experience of 3.5e and now have had a fair amount of experience with 5e; returning to RPGs since its release.
I think that D&D, by-and-large, does a good job of being the 'main' RPG out there; the fact that it still occupies the position as the biggest is testament to this. However, the pitfalls are still there - in my view 5e stresses accessibility over depth. I've had a number of quite length discussions with many Pathfinder 2e GMs and players; P2e in my view being a lot heftier a ruleset to the point of being restrictive, unless you pick and choose the rules you adhere to and which you do not. On the other hand, 5e has to oftentimes use 3rd party resources to plug gaps in its rules; it is clear that more emphasis has been placed on campaigns based around PCs of lower level (probably the reason why most of the official adventures rarely go into the high teens).
Personally, I am really interested in exploring the world of OSR; really want to run a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign! There was a really interesting interview recently which delved into the idea of reducing the amount of rules further and having a more fluid / narrative driven rule-set; which may well be the future of a segment of the RPG community.
D&D remains a good base, it has positioned itself as a simple and highly accessible game - a gateway RPG if you will. Allowing for players that get 'bored' with the rule-set to either change systems or incorporate more homebrew / 3rd party rules into their system.
DM - The Call of Strahd (CoS); Feyrealm Campaign, Chapter 0 - Bleak Prospect (BP), Chapter 1 - Destination Unknown (DU)
OSR is awesome from my experience. My roommate runs DCC funnels every now and then and they're always a blast. I run Mork Borg and I just got the Old School Essentials book.
I think D&D is a fine game and I'm too heavily invested to back out entirely, but I find that so many character options really make it hard to build a cohesive world that I'm interested in running. I got into D&D for the classic tropes, but with 5e I feel late to the party and everyone else is already past that. People say there aren't enough options in comparison to something like Pathfinder, but I go the other direction. I feel like Human Fighters are awesome because the depth comes from the RP and the personality of the character more than having a bajillion combat options. In this same regard, PHB Rangers are fine as well.
I just feel like when everything is special, nothing is special. Sure, you can take the game and do whatever you want with it at your own table, but the product line definitely has taken on a certain bent that lends itself to a certain style of play. Even the horror stuff in the new Ravenloft book comes off as more cartoony and "spooky" than actually grim and dreadful.
And I'm not saying D&D should be those things. Hasbro makes toys for children, so of course they don't want to put their name on anything too gruesome or dark. And as stated above, there are other games that do what I'm looking for. But D&D still serves as a better jumping on point. If I invite friends over to play Mork Borg, they're not gonna know what to expect. But my parents know what D&D is. It's a household name and the rules are now at a point to where I can teach someone totally new enough to get them playing in about 15 minutes.
It sounds like what you want out of a roleplaying game is quite different from most people. Most people just want to have a laugh with their friends and fight challenging bad guys.
Sounds like you want an elite gaming system where its all about the mechanics. Maybe try more modern systems like world of dungeons.
One thing D&D does well* that other, more modern systems often struggle with is allowing characters to grow in power. A high-level spellcaster in D&D can do things with Greater Arcana spell slots that would have any other RPG developer's teeth turning blue. I've toyed with a number of other systems, and many of them call out many of the things D&D accepts as just a thing spellcasters can do as horrifying story-breaking superpowers the DM should never allow at the table. A thirteenth-level D&D character can simply teleport their party to wherever on the globe they feel like being once a day without (much) muss or fuss, and while many DMs hate that it's still a thing the system simply expects will happen. Other games have significant trouble with a measly thirty-foot blink and advise DMs against allowing players to possess such abilities.
That growth in power is restricted, of course, and it's mostly exclusive to spellcasters, but it's still a thing D&D does that no other modern system I've worked with accounts for.
Other more modern games often veer towards the Rules-Lite Narrative Experience(TM) mode, wherein they strip the game down far more than even 5e does and eliminate so many rules and mechanical structures in the name of simplification, accessibility, and "not getting in the way of a player's imagination!" that there's very little reason left to buy the book. There's no gameplay left in many such RPGs; you simply sit around spinning a yarn with your buddies and occasionally throw a dice maybe once or twice a session if you feel like it. Again - that's just a book that takes way more effort to read than it should. D&D, for all its warts - and there are many, many warts indeed - is still a role-playing game. There's still some meaty mechanical crunch in there, still some game systems to master, and still some satisfaction in overcoming challenge.
Combat-heavy games do not have to be mindless dungeon crawls, and a game that doesn't rely on/feature combat isn't automatically better than a game that does - that is entirely down on whether the GM can offer better options and the players can follow through on them. A terrible GM running a shallow, pretentious poser game of World of Darkness alongside a bunch of hipster twerks more interested in Tweeting about their bucking of trends, maaaaan....is not better than an excellent GM running a tightly crafted and deeply engaging Heroic Fantasy game in D&D for a group of close-knit friends invested in the story and in elevating what the GM gives them just because the WoD wonks used a different system.
Heh...and besides. Given how often people still yell at D&D for being overly rules-heavy, mechanically fiddly, and restrictive, I often find myself wondering why they want a bunch of heavy, mechanically fiddly and restrictive rules clamps in place on social gameplay. Social gameplay consists of having a conversation with the DM; you tell the DM what your character is saying and how they're saying it, the GM tells you how the NPC reacts and what the NPC is saying. Rolling an occasional Charisma (or Intelligence or Wisdom, if the GM is any damn good) check to see if you stick the delivery or bollix it up is all you need to run a perfectly respectable 'social encounter'. You don't get to push for a Rules-Lite Narrative Experience(TM) and then still yell at D&D for not having a bunch of excessive rules for social gameplay just because you're socially awkward and don't like talking to people.
EDIT: And put it this way - I own the Shadowrun Sixth World ruleboook, their Latest Edition. I've read it. I'd rather run Shadowrun in GURPS, or even in frickin' D&D 5e, than use that godawful abortion of a ruleset. Bought the book on a lark because I'd always been curious about Shadowrun; it's useful as hell for lore and setting knowledge and getting a sense of the game, but even though D&D is bloody terrible at running Futuretech Sci-Fi I could build a better Shadowrun game in 5e than I could with those terrible rules. "New Hotness" ain't always hot.
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In my honest opinion D&D is great, but the combat takes so freaking long unless you're fighting kobolds. I find it so tedious..
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For every user who writes 5 paragraph essays as each of their posts: Remember to touch grass occasionally
Well this is a D&D forum, so... yeah most of us like D&D? Not sure why we'd be here otherwise.
One thing to consider is that D&D is typically popular enough to have its own groups/clubs/meetups. As such, most "RPG clubs" are made up of people who are fans of RPGs that are specifically there to play "not D&D." Unless sales numbers are totally divorced from actual play, the circles you've been in are not a true representation of the hobby.
I think it comes down to personal preference. I have a friend that prefers White Wolf games like Mage, Changeling, etc. and our group has run those games before. I've also played the original Star Wars RPG and a couple other systems here and there. They were ok, but I prefer D&D and that's what my group always gravitates back to.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Curious, are what you're calling "roleplayers" distinct from a broader category of TTRPG players? I'm not sure whether your experience is speaking to a subset of gamers who consider themselves "role playing" (and are therefore likely adverse to rules systems who spend the bulk of their page count providing rules for what are largely combat resolution (including the bulk of magic) or are you talking about players of TTRPGs in general being down on D&D.
What do they think of Pathfinder?
That last question aside, D&D, especially it's present rule set, is not the most sophisticated system out there. I often quip "D&D combat is done in broad strokes," but frankly everything else outside of combat is done even more broadly. This is not a bad a thing. That said, D&D is good at being D&D. My take is both Pathfinder and the OSR and contemporary clone systems are all "narrow" D&Ds or better yet "niche" D&Ds that capitalize on select aspects of D&D the designers and players of their niche feel is neglected by their origin game.
Outside of D&D there are lots of great systems, while I play D&D most frequently that's largely for "friends and family reasons" (and I guess D&D haters can say all those folks are caught up in the D&D hegemony or what have you) I also presently play four other systems (well, learning one, through playing) and have played at least ten other systems over the years. Presently, no one in my "other systems" tables (ok, playbyposts and video meets) is of the "D&D sucks" or even "The problem with D&D ..." mindset. I think it might be where we are in life chronologically. When I was younger there was always "that guy" (almost always a guy, sidenote the) or even "those guys" who were D&D haters with a ready to go soapbox speech denouncing everything that made the game bad. Those folks were given their space and not asked to play D&D. I think when it comes down to it while they're all TTRPGs D&D is more about "playing D&D" while other games, even the so called universal ones, are trying to capture a particular genre or trope. Players of TTRPGs tend to focus and not take broad views so when they "find their game" it's inherently superior to the "lowest common denominator" game (see similar phenomenon with alt music in the 80s/90s and indie rock at the start of the 21s century vs. pop music; "independent" comics vs Mavel/DC, independent cinema vs. Hollywood, craft beer vs. miller/coors, artisanal bratwurst vs. ballpark hot dogs ... etc.). I mean in _some_ cases the more "boutique" games can be construed as "better quality", but not all. I think there's also a sort of envy bordering on Oedipal father-killing of D&D by partisans for other games ... they'd love to have their game be supported for decades - I think the only games that can claim a similar longevity, but never anything close to a market share, are Call of Cthulhu and maybe Champions Traveler and GURPS ... is GURPS even really thing anymore or just a reprint market?
People like to feel they've made the right choice. Any game requires a substantial investment of time and a not insubstantial investment in money. I think "my preferences are superior" stances may also have some background in that psychology too. Gamers can be fragile, and it's easier to join up and guzzle haterade than acknowledge that some folks just aren't into what you're playing and prefer to play the more available and popular alternative. Like a kid who was really into the Cure and thinks that why he was dumped by his girlfriend for some dude who could copy New Kids on the Block moves, ahem.
Anyway, D&D is a fun game ... I think the difference between it and other games that are trying to capture something more specific, that gives it its own unique fun is that it's probably the most "forgiving" in terms of trying to push past a rule, realize the group shouldn't do that, and return to its basics.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I've been playing roleplaying games since I was 8 years old with the redboxed basic DnD set in the late 70's. I played Advanced DnD and then when I got to college played all kinds of things. Star Wars d6, Cyberpunk 2020, GURPS 3rd edition, Shadowrun, World of Darkness Marvel Heroes, Palladium products of various sorts, Earthdawn, Toon, Paranoia and probably a smattering of games that have just slipped my mind. Mostly I play GURPS 4th edition now though I'm a supporter of DnD 5th edition. DnD 3rd edition actually chased me away from the system for almost 10 years due to the requirement that the players had to plan every level carefully to be an affective character made it almost impossible to get an effective character if you played based on character and not based on it as a collection of traits. 4th edition did not impress me and I never even thought about trying a game.
5th edition is really good at what it does which is be an opening game for people. 5th ed is probably the best game I've ever seen in the reward to effort ratio and gradually ramping up the complication of the game. Its a wonderful game to bring people to the hobby and continues to provide an enjoyable experience for players who have been playing for a while. In short its a good game and probably one of the best iterations of DnD and gives a good solid positive view of the hobby as a whole.
With that I HATE the way people consider DnD the only game out there or try to staple painfully different genre's onto DnD. DnD runs DnD games incredibly well. High fantasy is its bread and butter. Wonderful fun and pretty flexible adventures can be had but if I wanted a real gritty campaign I wouldn't pick up DnD. I wouldn't try to run Star Trek in DnD or Cyberpunk or MCU game. I wouldn't run a caveman daily survival campaign. There are better systems for all of those things.
I've seen two primary schools of thought regarding the D20-focused 5e system.
Some people see it as a challenge of strategy with stats and dice.
Some people see it as an opportunity to have a social game with stats and dice.
People want what they want, and as far as I can tell, 5e has the ability to provide two primary experiences. That's just two out of oodles of possibilities, some of which can be managed by D20 and some cannot (but often someone else has managed to capture the desired experiences that 5e cannot give).
I see D&D like I see Unreal Engine: You use what you want for what you need to give certain experiences, you can build your own stuff or modify what's already there, and you're not forced to use the entire thing all the time (unlike Frostbite, Lumberyard, and CryEngine which all 3 are often like trying to fit a Detroit DD16 into a sports car if your project's not a 16-wheel lorry).
We seem to run into the most issues when we think D&D is not providing us the experience we expected. Occasionally, that can be a shortcoming of the system, but I think more often it is a miscommunication between players. Strategy or social, D&D is still a group effort either way.
That's, like, just my opinion - a rambling train of thought at that. Nothing here is fact. Wrong answers only, and all that.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
Where to begin? I've been playing D&D since 1979, so I must like it.
I've played a lot of different games in the last 40 years, the last 35 with mainly the same group of people. The games all had some interesting ideas. It was mostly fun playing them.
But none of them, including D&D, was the right system for everybody at the table. I'm the only player in our group to really enjoy both the complexity of Champions (1st to 4th editions) and the narrative-driven simplicity of Dungeon World. Yet the only joy I ever got out of Rolemaster was laughing at the critical hit tables.
D&D 5e is the same. It's too complex for some of our players, yet too simple for others. And at times, it's too complex for everybody. I'm looking at you, Barkskin with a shield.
But 5e is a good compromise for our group. The same players who find D&D complex found Dungeon World too uncertain. And we all find the heft of the Pathfinder 2 books a bit daunting. We're old now and our memories aren't as good as they used to be, plus we frequently have to stop and question if we're remembering the 5e rules or the AD&D rules.
So D&D 5e: good enough. We can still kick down doors and loot tombs, but we can also woo serving girls who are secretly werewolves and have the kind of horror romances we remember from our youth.
I believe you are in a special niche group of people that want to get together and roleplay. I'm not sure what the other roleplay games are although I hear about many of them here. I am particular struck by your comment that you've "been to UK nationals", because that sounds like a competition like the US Open (chess tournament) or something. Just out of curiosity, what are the UK nationals?
I think the D&D ruleset allows you to be almost anything outside of combat, and the combat rules are spelled out so that combat is not trivial. To get some reward from the game, you need some sort of challenge and in D&D the challenge is overcoming the monsters you face from time to time. And even there, if the DM chooses to make it a mystery, then there can be negligible combat because you have a different challenge to overcome.
D&D is set up to be a game set in an era of swords and armor. If that is an era you don't want to RP in, then you would need to be in something else.
I just feel that it is all about the group. If the group fits together well and the DM has the time to come prepared and the players stay engaged, you can have all the fun in the world.
And as someone already shared, you should expect a very pro-5e group here. But we are a small niche group of the 5e community that is more focused on what the rules allow than your typical group.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
There are two kinds of people that probably make up 90% of all TTRPG players:
Obviously there are some people who have tried multiple systems and D&D is still their favorite, but they are in the minority. So that's why when you sample from people who have tried multiple systems, there's a good chance you'll find people who prefer those other systems. Or you might find people who prefer D&D, but they aren't as vocal about it, because the "The vastly most popular XYZ is overrated," people tend to be quite loud.
It's not a flawless game, but I like it a lot. That said I don't have experience with other TTRPgs. I technically started with 4E but after a few sessions of that our Dm swapped us to 5E when the online tool they were using for 4E stuff shut down.
I really like 5E's class and subclass system, though I wish everyone started with their subclass archetype at level 1. Even if they needed to redistribute some of the abilites a bit. But I think it's a great way to have a limited number of classes but allow more variety within those classes.
I think more classes could use a system similar to warlock invocations and boons, choices that really change up your character customization beyond just what spells you pick.
I only really have experience with 5E. It's not that I think it's the best system ever, but rather I don't really have the time or reason to branch out. I like 5E a lot, so I don't feel pressured into other systems on that front. And I don't really have the time to pick up a new game in a new system on top of the games I'ma lready playing. Maybe I'll branch out one day when things have cleared up more on my end. But for now I"m content with 5E.
Having played many games since the boxed sets I got in 1983, I have played extensively in D&D campaigns, CWoD (and a little New), Pathfinder, GURPs, Star Wars, Shadowrun, etc (most across multiple version over that same time span... I'm an info junkie and have too many books). Our longest running campaign was over 8 years in Mage. Every system has strengths and weaknesses and I don't want to spend a lengthy time listing them out. Mostly, I have found that this comes down to the group. My current group is much more heavily focused on combat and the DM does an excellent job presenting the fights. There are several of us that would like a lot more roleplaying opportunities for character development, but understand how that plays out at this table, so we talk to each other about character development outside of game and go from there. The Storyteller in Mage was a master of story, on the other hand, he had a way of bringing things together and describing venues and getting into the holy guts of the characters we were interacting with. I have loved and hated his characters, and been betrayed by the one I thought was closest. Combat was interesting and had good details, but it was the story we came back for. And then he didn't wake up one morning and there has been a loss in our gaming community for many many years now. Personally, I think I fall somewhere between. I want to mix combat in pretty heavily but take time for character development without allowing the players to just devolve into silly randomness.
Would I take a table full of roleplayers that know how to not turn it into High Drama and pursue an intricate story? You betcha. That's not the table I have before me. To be honest... I got to sit at that table for a lot of years... and it made me a better roleplayer, I just wish I could go back and use what I know now and begin playing back then. But that's ok too. Without one, we don't get the other. As it stands, I'll take playing a game with players that want to play and enjoy the moments. Most of the players now are over 20 years younger than I am and for half of them this is their first game. So I try to take opportunities to do things in game that show them about roleplaying without telling them how to roleplay. Over time they are getting better at it and we have fun week after week.
So to me, does it matter what system? Nah. The system is the rules I'm playing by at the table I happen to be at. The roleplaying is the story that I have built in my mind and show to the other players around me. D&D is at a great time where lots of people are playing it and finding out how the system works and seeing how they can look beyond the veil into the land of story. If I get a chance at some of the other systems will I play? Sure. Will I keep playing D&D? Most likely... no signs of that stopping any time soon. Will I roleplay? Yes, I'll build in story for my characters and use world knowledge to portray them in an appropriate context so they can grow and live and breathe.
The only "roleplaying" I want nothing to do with is the kind you find so often in MMOs and fanfiction where the characters are all nobility and every. single. thing. they do is something that affects the entire world and the whole world has to revolve around them. I don't find that roleplaying and I don't find it enjoyable. Be a baker's son who made a pact so he could more easily light the kitchen fires early in the morning. Be the stablemaster's son who knows his way around a rake and can muck a stall out who finds a magic sword in the forest. Be a soldier who stood on walls for so long he finally became a caravan guard and found out he wasn't very good at fighting, but is determined to get better. Sometimes it's better to just play with people that want to play the game... (regardless of the titles or pictures on the covers)
Eh, everything moves in cycles. Cultures, traditions, movements, hobbies, literature, music, doesn't matter, there is a constant treadmill that people move through as the old gets 'stale' and the new is 'shiny'. And eventually it all comes full circle and starts again. The cycles aren't necessarily set in stone and there's a lot of variety and crossover as a niches branch and rise and fall in popularity but there are always people challenging the status quo, looking elsewhere for renewed interest, rejecting what they had before or building atop it. It's all happened before in D&D's history, several times over, and will probably happen again short of an apocalypse.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
― Oscar Wilde.
D&D has rules for combat, which are quite abstracted compared to some of the super detailed systems going for "realistism" (which are specifically not very popular because of all the crunch), because players want to have some action in their story. Some want just the action, and those are the ones playing straight up hack and slash dungeon crawls.
Newsflash to the OP's "roleplayers:" There is absolutely nothing in D&D that restricts roleplaying. That's provided by the players, as facilitated by the DM, just like in any other RPG. Those who complain about D&D somehow being non-conducive to roleplaying and storytelling are probably mainly interested in Yurei's "Rules-Lite Narrative Experience(TM) mode" where they buy a sourcebook that is ninety percent or more setting material to help them tell a story that frequently amounts to a collective fanfic set in a fully fleshed out world with pre-provided characters and plots. I'm not saying you can't have wonderfully engaging games featuring original plots, drama, and action with those narrative-heavy games. I'm saying that people who assert that you can't have a story/character driven roleplaying experience without those settings (and they're mostly really marketed as settings with a few rules tossed in case you feel like rolling some dice once in a while) are creatively stunted fools who rely on the crutch of somebody else writing a large portion of the story that they "play" for them.
Every game of D&D has exactly as much roleplaying as the DM and players collectively decide to put into it. The rules are there as a way of determining just how things turn out when the heroes fight the bad guys, or whatever else they're doing that involves chance or conflict with characters or creatures that would rather have the story go differently.
I have tried multiple systems (dabbled in Call of Cthulhu 7e, Pathfinder 2e (A tiny bit), Year Zero Engine, Monster of the Week (also a tiny bit), Star wars (there was a span of time in which I would skim over several RPGs to get a quick gist of the rules), and Star Trek Adventures (a tiny bit))
I still prefer D&D 5e.
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Been playing D&D since 1976, prior to 1st ed. AD&D, and many classic RPGs such as Runequest, Traveler, GURPS, Tunnels and Trolls, even Bunnies and Burrows. The issue with all those games is where are they now? Most RPGs only last a short period, while D&D goes on forever and is the common thread amongst gamers. Even if you personally love Vampire-whatever, the chance to find many people who will also play it year after year is low.
I agree with Flushmaster and others above that the amount of RP in D&D is up to the players and the DM - there is no limit to that in the rules. Look at Witchlight which can reportedly be played without any combat to resolve the adventures. I will say that most D&D players I have played with in 46 years (whoa, now I feel old) do like hacking things, casting spells and rolling D20s more than talking their way through a session. Those people will always be mainstream players, but it doesn't mean you cannot find a group that loves RP more than hacking.