I think you're introducing something entirely different from point buy based games that's certainly there but hasn't been touched on. D&D by design presumes the possibility of progression from 1-20 (though in practice as DungeonCraft says a lot of games do stick in that lvl 5-10 sweet spot before hitting the reset button or trying out a different game with a skill system or what have you). Champions in have a 50 point game and 250 point game sets parameters by design for the entirety of the game. IIRC without heavy GM intervention your 50 pt secret agent isn't going get to the same power level as the 250 pt build through any sort of natural play achievements..
A fantasy game that runs three points a session for a hundred sessions is certainly the type of thing I've seen (more when I was younger, 50 sessions is a pretty long campaign now), and while a 350 point fantasy character doesn't look that much like a 250 point superhero, it's still likely more powerful than a 20th level D&D character.
I think you're introducing something entirely different from point buy based games that's certainly there but hasn't been touched on. D&D by design presumes the possibility of progression from 1-20 (though in practice as DungeonCraft says a lot of games do stick in that lvl 5-10 sweet spot before hitting the reset button or trying out a different game with a skill system or what have you). Champions in have a 50 point game and 250 point game sets parameters by design for the entirety of the game. IIRC without heavy GM intervention your 50 pt secret agent isn't going get to the same power level as the 250 pt build through any sort of natural play achievements..
A fantasy game that runs three points a session for a hundred sessions is certainly the type of thing I've seen (more when I was younger, 50 sessions is a pretty long campaign now), and while a 350 point fantasy character doesn't look that much like a 250 point superhero, it's still likely more powerful than a 20th level D&D character.
I guess that asks the question whether the "powers" in Champions are on the same level as the much narrower bands of skills you get in games like Cyberpunk, Alien, CoC, etc. Further question would be if folks did do D&D in a point buy system like Champions, what would suffer? I still think there's something about character level and spell levels that matter in a way that CR and XP rewards are designed, and I guess something done within the scales Champions allows would require a wider array of challenges/monsters. And I supposed would mak the "what if my PC was a god, what stats would they have?" threads that much easier to settle.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I guess that asks the question whether the "powers" in Champions are on the same level as the much narrower bands of skills you get in games like Cyberpunk, Alien, CoC, etc.
By no means. There are some games (such as Ars Magica and Mage the Ascension) that have magical skills on the scale of Champions powers, but systems that only have mundane skills tend to operate on much lower scales.
Could you run a D&D game in a different engine? Could you build characters in GURPS, say, or whichever variation of Champions is still active, and then play a game that felt like a D&D game? Could you use a point-builder engine to create a game that a longtime D&D player would recognize as being Essentially D&D through use of setting materials, background materials, iconic monsters/NPCs, and the like. Could you, as an example, run Lost Mine of Phandelver in GURPS and have people, at the end, go "man, that D&D game was really cool!"
If you believe "yes", then the mechanical systems of D&D are not important to you, or at least not of primary importance. "The Essence of D&D" is in its trappings - the lore, the monsters, the mythos, the general attitude and play feel of the game.
Conversely - could you run a modern-world cyberpunky edgey thriller using D&D's rules? Say, run a Shadowrun game using D&D 5e rules (since Shadowrun's own rules are a tire fire). Homebrew rules for cybernetic augs, guns, computers and the Internet, vehicles, and everything else, play that game using D&D 5e's rules and systems of resolution, and still call that game a D&D game? Can you excise the trappings of D&D completely, change genres and tones and styles and everyshitz, run that game, and have people at the end go "man, that was a crazy D&D game!"
If you believe "yes", then the mechanical systems of D&D are all that's important to you. The trappings are nice, but they're not what makes the system. "The Essence of D&D" is in its mechanical framework and resolution system, with its trappings being of distinctly secondary importance.
For me? I could very easily see running "A D&D Game" in GURPS. Cull the skill list some (a lot), set up certain advantages as rough analogues of class abilities, figure out how GURPS' godawful magic system works (or more likely just resort to using the Sorcery supplement like I always do), then work on statting up some classic critters and either inventing my own plot or adapting a module. I see absolutely no issue with running Lost Mine of Phandelver in GURPS instead of using 5e's system, which tells me that the essence of the game in my head lies pretty much exclusively with its trappings. Its mechanical resolution system doesn't matter, the game could be run with an entirely different ruleset and still classify as D&D.
Curious how other people would see that breaking down.
Curious how other people would see that breaking down.
GURPS even has a "dungeon fantasy" sub-line in a couple different forms. Though, I think it spends a good deal of page count trying to emulate class- and level-based gaming, and (for obvious copyright reasons) doesn't strictly emulate the settings.
I think "D&D" the genre is, unfortunately, very closely tied to its mechanical trappings. Classes and levels and alignments and races and spell levels and the spells themselves are all tied to each other and incorporated into the world-building.
I have some 15-20 fantasy tabletop RPGs on my shelves. D&D (all editions) is just one of them. Making any of the others cosmetically similar to D&D by porting over a canon setting and monsters and famous characters wouldn't make it feel like D&D to me. D&D is a distinct fantasy RPG to me. The other way around, importing another fantasy RPG's setting and aesthetic into 5E's (or any D&D edition's) ruleset, would absolutely feel like D&D to me too. A sci-fi type RPG though? Anything not fantasy is never going to feel like D&D to me (and the conversion would be a ton of tiresome work to get right).
Could you run a D&D game in a different engine? Could you build characters in GURPS, say, or whichever variation of Champions is still active, and then play a game that felt like a D&D game?
Depends on your definition of 'feels like a D&D game'. There's no shortage of game systems that will permit hack and slash fantasy (I would probably recommend a more recent game system than either GURPS or Champions, both of which were revolutionary -- in the 1980s). There are some features of D&D (such as spell memorization and armor making you harder to hit) that are rare in game systems that aren't directly based on D&D, but are those essential to your concept of 'feels like D&D'?
The simple fact that D&D, despite old and clunky mechanics, hasn't been replaced by something more modern suggests that for the majority of gamers the old and clunky mechanics are core to feeling like D&D.
As stated before, Seth Skorkowsky and Dungeon Craft both released videos about the whole class-based games or levels thing, and so the videos might be showing up in case you watched either of those and other youtubers might be jumping on the train of thought of doing away with levels in dnd.
However, as someone who knows how youtube works, the algorithm shows you more of what you want to see. You likely either clicked on a video about this or watched a video from a creator who made a video on the subject. So youtube is showing you their most recent work, or showing you what others have watched from this creator or others. When you click on something, youtube shows you more of it, unless that content didn't keep your attention long enough. It's just the algorithm funneling this content to you rather than it being a trend most likely (seeing as at least half if not more of the folks responding to this thread didn't really know it was a thing), but it could (and might even be likely) to turn into a trend a little ways into the future, depending on how much the general DnDtube audience clicks on these videos.
I guess that asks the question whether the "powers" in Champions are on the same level as the much narrower bands of skills you get in games like Cyberpunk, Alien, CoC, etc. Further question would be if folks did do D&D in a point buy system like Champions, what would suffer?
It's called Fantasy HERO. Same company, same build rules, just with fantasy flair. I like it.
Nothing suffers except it is no longer D&D =)
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"real life is a super high CR."
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"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
I recall another thread where you seemed more on there being a synnergy between mechanics and genre than this more agnostic musing sits. I mean you're free to evolve you mind, but I'm going to push at some of the premises here. Mostly because a lot of this isn't hypothetical at all.
Could you run a D&D game in a different engine? Could you build characters in GURPS, say, or whichever variation of Champions is still active, and then play a game that felt like a D&D game? Could you use a point-builder engine to create a game that a longtime D&D player would recognize as being Essentially D&D through use of setting materials, background materials, iconic monsters/NPCs, and the like. Could you, as an example, run Lost Mine of Phandelver in GURPS and have people, at the end, go "man, that D&D game was really cool!"
So I'm assuming we're excluding D&D clones and derivatives and stuff sort of using the same sort of "engine" (d20 based, d6 also important but polyhedrals, etc.) so we're ruling out Pathfinder (though it's arguably close to a "point buy D&D" in a lot of ways) other D&D Clones from the 70s through today from Fantasy Trip and Palladium to Five Torches Deep. We'll discount them too, but that Dungeon Craft Guy has infected my feed and I do watch the White Hack Black Hack review and those have me curious from a lazy DM perspective.
But to get at what I think you're pointing at I'd say GURPS and other generic systems definitely aspire to be able to "capture D&D" as much as generic systems try to capture everything. I honestly don't know what's going on with GURPS these days, when I was into it they had a license deal with Traveller, were trying to put a flag on Cyberpunk and Shadowrun's turf, etc. but I also remember them making an effort at "high fantasy." So there are examples out there outside of the thought lab but in the wilds of play space where folks have tried to provide a "D&D like experience but with our rules." I mean, weren't we all worried Fandom was going to do precisely that with Genesys? ... whatever happened to Genesys?
So I think rather than contemplating I'd ask whether anyone's ever tried to do D&D in another system.
If you believe "yes", then the mechanical systems of D&D are not important to you, or at least not of primary importance. "The Essence of D&D" is in its trappings - the lore, the monsters, the mythos, the general attitude and play feel of the game.
But I don't think anyone would really split a binary like that into mechanics and genre/setting/trappings. Mechanics in many ways are trappings. AC, hit points, hit dice, those are trappings too.
Conversely - could you run a modern-world cyberpunky edgey thriller using D&D's rules? Say, run a Shadowrun game using D&D 5e rules (since Shadowrun's own rules are a tire fire). Homebrew rules for cybernetic augs, guns, computers and the Internet, vehicles, and everything else, play that game using D&D 5e's rules and systems of resolution, and still call that game a D&D game? Can you excise the trappings of D&D completely, change genres and tones and styles and everyshitz, run that game, and have people at the end go "man, that was a crazy D&D game!"
So this there's a lot more data on. 3 and 3.5e coincided with the effort of WotC and various open source allies and licensees to do the reverse and put everything into something directly or much more resembling a D&D. 3.0 whiffed at its shot but 3.5 produced a set of Star Wars rules players particularly those more into Knights of the Old Republic that the thrilogies and attendant animation and live action programs swear by over West End's original d6 and FFG/Edge's funky dice game. (Personally I don't care for it, though I can see how KOTOR fans dig it since leveled progression sort of fits the video game progression and I prefer the more wildly swingy anarchic d6 and still trying to figure out if I like FFG's beyond the gorgeous artwork. 3 and 3.5 saw a lot more ports into other genres as well. d20 modern (that I believe did away with leveled play or at least leveled hit dice probably trying to get back to the old Top Secret and Top Secret S.I. games) comes to mind in particular and that spawned a bunch of third party spinoffs, I think even a Star Trek game that may or may not have been licensed.
5e we got a rebel Star Wars game that's super popular (it gets a meh from me similar to the 3./3.5 games) apparently Anthem has 5e based game floating out there in the bootlegverse too. I haven't dived into them enough to really immerse myself in them, but I have trouble seeing the genre past the D&D ... like that other conversation I think it's still more D&D skinned, but like in those 70s apron constumes with rubber band affixed face mask costumes rather than real cosplay.
If you believe "yes", then the mechanical systems of D&D are all that's important to you. The trappings are nice, but they're not what makes the system. "The Essence of D&D" is in its mechanical framework and resolution system, with its trappings being of distinctly secondary importance.
For me? I could very easily see running "A D&D Game" in GURPS. Cull the skill list some (a lot), set up certain advantages as rough analogues of class abilities, figure out how GURPS' godawful magic system works (or more likely just resort to using the Sorcery supplement like I always do), then work on statting up some classic critters and either inventing my own plot or adapting a module. I see absolutely no issue with running Lost Mine of Phandelver in GURPS instead of using 5e's system, which tells me that the essence of the game in my head lies pretty much exclusively with its trappings. Its mechanical resolution system doesn't matter, the game could be run with an entirely different ruleset and still classify as D&D.
Curious how other people would see that breaking down.
I guess at the end of the day, and maybe I'm just too precious or really like variety, I think there's a marriage of mechanics and thematics. If you were to GURPS the Lost Mind of the Philanderer (forthcoming, Midnightplat) you're picking an interesting target as it's an adventure that's expressly written to introduce D&D and the thematic/plot/story progress is very much tied to the mechanical progress of the characters. I'd have to do a lot more thinking as to what specifically, but I feel GURPing that or any D&D specific module would leave both DM and players thinking "other things" should be happening that arent' because your pulling out the song and leaving behind the intended instrumentation if that analogy makes sense.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I am not attached to lore nor mechanics. D&D would still feel like D&D to me if Wizards published sci-fi slice-of-life module and made level and class irrelevant.
I am more attached to D&D's ideals, namely D&D can be whatever you want and the goal is to have fun.
As for the OP, I have not really noticed anything about removing levels from D&D. It is a really interesting idea though.
Could you run a D&D game in a different engine? Could you build characters in GURPS, say, or whichever variation of Champions is still active, and then play a game that felt like a D&D game? Could you use a point-builder engine to create a game that a longtime D&D player would recognize as being Essentially D&D through use of setting materials, background materials, iconic monsters/NPCs, and the like. Could you, as an example, run Lost Mine of Phandelver in GURPS and have people, at the end, go "man, that D&D game was really cool!"
If you believe "yes", then the mechanical systems of D&D are not important to you, or at least not of primary importance. "The Essence of D&D" is in its trappings - the lore, the monsters, the mythos, the general attitude and play feel of the game.
Conversely - could you run a modern-world cyberpunky edgey thriller using D&D's rules? Say, run a Shadowrun game using D&D 5e rules (since Shadowrun's own rules are a tire fire). Homebrew rules for cybernetic augs, guns, computers and the Internet, vehicles, and everything else, play that game using D&D 5e's rules and systems of resolution, and still call that game a D&D game? Can you excise the trappings of D&D completely, change genres and tones and styles and everyshitz, run that game, and have people at the end go "man, that was a crazy D&D game!"
If you believe "yes", then the mechanical systems of D&D are all that's important to you. The trappings are nice, but they're not what makes the system. "The Essence of D&D" is in its mechanical framework and resolution system, with its trappings being of distinctly secondary importance.
For me? I could very easily see running "A D&D Game" in GURPS. Cull the skill list some (a lot), set up certain advantages as rough analogues of class abilities, figure out how GURPS' godawful magic system works (or more likely just resort to using the Sorcery supplement like I always do), then work on statting up some classic critters and either inventing my own plot or adapting a module. I see absolutely no issue with running Lost Mine of Phandelver in GURPS instead of using 5e's system, which tells me that the essence of the game in my head lies pretty much exclusively with its trappings. Its mechanical resolution system doesn't matter, the game could be run with an entirely different ruleset and still classify as D&D.
Curious how other people would see that breaking down.
Honestly, I think you're creating a false dichotomy there. I think that what most people view as "being D&D" is, similar to my view, a synergy of the two, a mixture of the mechanics and the lore. Heck, I even get D&D vibes from playing Star Trek Adventures - despite the mechanics being quite different?it uses a 2d20 system) AND the lore being very different. D&D is all of it, the mechanics, the lore, game culture. The more another game is similar to D&D, the more it feels like D&D.
Now, it is true that people lean more to one aspect than another when it comes to what makes a game feel like D&D, but they aren't completely divorced from each other either. I don't think any one would feel that a D&D skin on a different mechanical system would feel nothing like D&D while a game that used the same mechanics but reskinned for Battlestar Galactica would be indistinguishable or vice versa.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Let me begin by saying that as much as I don't like any sort of level system, we all knew when we started D&D that it worked with levels so we shouldn't be shocked. I like 5e and I've played unleveled systems that I've enjoyed as well.
My question is why am I suddenly seeing videos from youtubers talking about taking D&D to a game without levels? Did someone lead a big panel about it somewhere that I missed out on or something? Did I click on one at random and now the Youtube RNG is steering all of these my way?
Inquiring minds want to know.
I guess we watch different feeds because I didn't know there was a groundswell or this was a "thing". The reason you see "all these...." is because a lot of content is reactionarily competitive. Someone does a video on classless D&D and others are compelled to do so hoping their video beats out the others in the algorhytms (I can never spell that) search results.
I know a couple of weeks ago, Seth Skorkowski did a video on "what are skill based games" where he explains the difference between level and skill games, because he kept being asked about it, and did his usual grounded nuanced view that pure levels and pure skill games are few but rather significant "leans" all games generally make. Cyberpunk, for example is a skill game, though every role has a "unique skill" to which you have to do the equivalent of multiclassing old school to acquire (and that wasn't even really allowed in the earliest editions).
It just would seem a waste of time to take class and levels out of D&D given that there are plenty of good to excellent systems out there where you can play D&D type fantasy in a system designed around skill development as opposed to class leveling. So basically you're looking at people consciously or zombie unconsciously trying to "game" social media by jumping on a trend and using the most recognizable TTRPG brand to do it.
I'm not convinced. I just Googled "levelless dnd" and "dnd without levels", and all the initial results (probably checked ten or so each) are years old, spreading back to 2002 at one point. I'm not sure that this is a new phase as opposed to just algorithms sensing that he clicked on on link (perhaps brought up randomly) and now swamping his searches with it.
Curiously, after putting my response down here, one of the "you may like" highlighted YouTube videos on their splash page for me was DungeonCraft "MATT MERCER KNOWS LEVELING UP IS CURSE"/aka "The Problem with Leveling Up in Dungeons and Dragons" apparently put out about 7 days ago. I can't say I'm a regular DungeonCraft watcher, and haven't watched the vid, but I'm guessing someone said something recently and the reaction is simply blooming till it goes away in a week or so.
I guess the discussion isn't really on here at all since we're talking about something you really can't do in any real way on DDB. Maybe it's got some legs on ENWORLD or Reddit or maybe Bell of Lost Souls is trying to get attention again.
You may have hit the nail on the head here. Right now Matt's name is synonymous with D&D and when he speaks, the RNG shifts. That was one of the videos I saw recently so that may have been the trigger for the youtube daemons to send me other videos.
I must apologize for starting this thread and then not responding to it for several days. My issues are having issues. That being said:
As far as I'm concerned, D&D is the mechanical system we use to bring structure to whatever fantasy realm we choose to put it in. You COULD use D&D in many different genres with very little tweaking but fantasy was where the system was born and so fantasy is where it fits best. However, 'fantasy' is a HUGE word and it encompasses lots of things that are not expressly designed for D&D. I have run D&D campaigns in Middle Earth using the sourcebooks from the MERP system. All of the lore and the maps and the descriptions were there, I just needed stat blocks for monsters.
I don't even mind the idea of a leveled system except for one thing: The Hit Point progression. If my 1st level Fighter with 12 HP gets hit by an arrow, he's HURT. After an adventure or two, he goes to bed, wakes up, and now he has nearly 20 HP, and that one arrow is much less threatening. Add another level and the same applies again. GURPS and the Hero System handle this by not using levels but a point system instead. Sure, you CAN get more HP but you have to spend a LOT of points to get relatively small gains while the rest of the party buys or improves skills, spells, or whatever. If D&D could modify the system so that the HP progression was less steep, it would approach being a perfect system IMHO.
I'm a storyteller by choice. Sure, I love a good battle because that's where some of the most dramatic moments in a campaign can occur, but I want the system I'm playing in to work WITH my storytelling, not against it. I have never been in a Vanilla D&D game using strictly RAW. The first game I ever sat down to in 1st Ed was already homebrewed because NOBODY wanted to play a Wizard who could only cast 1 spell a day. Many of us homebrew the rules to suit our playstyle and that's fine. But when I think back to the point-based systems I've played in I realize that we didn't have to homebrew as much. Those systems were far more flexible so it wasn't necessary. However, this brings up another point: Accessibility.
IMHO GURPS was very nearly perfect for beginners because for a point-based system it was relatively easy. You had 4 stats and then you had Skills. All of the Skill rolls were either derived from one of the four stats or (in some very rare occasions) they came down to pure chance. The more points you spent on a skill, the better your chances of success. Like D&D, you could try to do something you didn't have the skill for by rolling against the appropriate stat. The single biggest difference was that if three arrows would kill your brand new character on the first day of the campaign, those same three arrows might still kill you after months or years of play. Boromir's death in LotR? Yeah, my friends and I point and say 'GURPS death'. Look at a level 10 Fighter in D&D and figure out how many arrows it would take to bring him down. The answer is a lot.
But D&D tries to take a lot of the burden off of the DM IMHO. Players can look at the PHB or whatever source their race and class come from and see what they can do later on. It's all laid out for them. Sure, they can ask the DM if they want to homebrew something, but they have a roadmap to follow. In a classless or point-buy system, the players either have to know the system (which can be daunting) or they have to rely HEAVILY on the DM for help. That's lots of work for the DM and it can remove some of the player agency or at least the feeling of it. Both sides have their advantages and disadvantages.
Boromir's death in LotR? Yeah, my friends and I point and say 'GURPS death'. Look at a level 10 Fighter in D&D and figure out how many arrows it would take to bring him down. The answer is a lot.
The actual text of the book says Boromir was "pierced with many black-feathered arrows" after the orcs shot "a rain" of them at him, so Tolkien at least was thinking a lot rather than just three or so. Most of the pre-movie art I remember of his death depicted him as a human pincushion
Hit points in D&D aren't intended to represent simple physical fortitude. It's heroic fantasy; more powerful characters should be able to take a lot more hits, and shrug off a lot more damage, than beginning ones. It's a feature, not a bug. Certainly, an ever-increasing HP total isn't the only way to depict that, but it serves that purpose well enough
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Hot take: over-bloated HP totals are three quarters of the reason high-level D&D never gets any credit and everyone keeps complaining that "nobody can ever challenge high-level characters!"
If your HP didn't increase damn near exponentially from when you were lower level and the game was tuned such that it only took two or three solid hits to bring you into Critical Danger territory? Then challenging high-level characters would be perfectly straightforward. The same random footpad shivving you in the ribs at level 1 to spark a chase could do it at level 20 - the chase would just be shorter and the footpad would regret his life choices far more by the end of it. HP bloat kills games more than anything else in D&D does, and I include Greater Arcana spells in that.
Hot take: over-bloated HP totals are three quarters of the reason high-level D&D never gets any credit and everyone keeps complaining that "nobody can ever challenge high-level characters!"
If your HP didn't increase damn near exponentially from when you were lower level and the game was tuned such that it only took two or three solid hits to bring you into Critical Danger territory? Then challenging high-level characters would be perfectly straightforward. The same random footpad shivving you in the ribs at level 1 to spark a chase could do it at level 20 - the chase would just be shorter and the footpad would regret his life choices far more by the end of it. HP bloat kills games more than anything else in D&D does, and I include Greater Arcana spells in that.
I haven't played to high level yet, the highest being L8 so far, but I didn't find early levels [as] fun because of the low HP. A single hit could be enough to kill you or at least force you to withdraw from the fight. The game got much more fun when I could tank a few hits and things became more about my decisions rather than a single roll of the dice. Of course, that could swing the other way at higher levels and be more about my character's ability to tank hits than my decisions, but I really wouldn't want to be perpetually at 8HP throughout a game.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Hot take: over-bloated HP totals are three quarters of the reason high-level D&D never gets any credit and everyone keeps complaining that "nobody can ever challenge high-level characters!"
Hot take: high hit points has nothing to do with why high level D&D isn't popular. High level D&D is problematic because of the explosion in complexity as level increases, and because the more options you introduce, the more broken options make their way in (which means most of the brokenness is due to spells and magic items, as that's where most of the options are).
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A fantasy game that runs three points a session for a hundred sessions is certainly the type of thing I've seen (more when I was younger, 50 sessions is a pretty long campaign now), and while a 350 point fantasy character doesn't look that much like a 250 point superhero, it's still likely more powerful than a 20th level D&D character.
I guess that asks the question whether the "powers" in Champions are on the same level as the much narrower bands of skills you get in games like Cyberpunk, Alien, CoC, etc. Further question would be if folks did do D&D in a point buy system like Champions, what would suffer? I still think there's something about character level and spell levels that matter in a way that CR and XP rewards are designed, and I guess something done within the scales Champions allows would require a wider array of challenges/monsters. And I supposed would mak the "what if my PC was a god, what stats would they have?" threads that much easier to settle.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
By no means. There are some games (such as Ars Magica and Mage the Ascension) that have magical skills on the scale of Champions powers, but systems that only have mundane skills tend to operate on much lower scales.
Interesting hypothetical for folks.
Could you run a D&D game in a different engine? Could you build characters in GURPS, say, or whichever variation of Champions is still active, and then play a game that felt like a D&D game? Could you use a point-builder engine to create a game that a longtime D&D player would recognize as being Essentially D&D through use of setting materials, background materials, iconic monsters/NPCs, and the like. Could you, as an example, run Lost Mine of Phandelver in GURPS and have people, at the end, go "man, that D&D game was really cool!"
If you believe "yes", then the mechanical systems of D&D are not important to you, or at least not of primary importance. "The Essence of D&D" is in its trappings - the lore, the monsters, the mythos, the general attitude and play feel of the game.
Conversely - could you run a modern-world cyberpunky edgey thriller using D&D's rules? Say, run a Shadowrun game using D&D 5e rules (since Shadowrun's own rules are a tire fire). Homebrew rules for cybernetic augs, guns, computers and the Internet, vehicles, and everything else, play that game using D&D 5e's rules and systems of resolution, and still call that game a D&D game? Can you excise the trappings of D&D completely, change genres and tones and styles and everyshitz, run that game, and have people at the end go "man, that was a crazy D&D game!"
If you believe "yes", then the mechanical systems of D&D are all that's important to you. The trappings are nice, but they're not what makes the system. "The Essence of D&D" is in its mechanical framework and resolution system, with its trappings being of distinctly secondary importance.
For me? I could very easily see running "A D&D Game" in GURPS. Cull the skill list some (a lot), set up certain advantages as rough analogues of class abilities, figure out how GURPS' godawful magic system works (or more likely just resort to using the Sorcery supplement like I always do), then work on statting up some classic critters and either inventing my own plot or adapting a module. I see absolutely no issue with running Lost Mine of Phandelver in GURPS instead of using 5e's system, which tells me that the essence of the game in my head lies pretty much exclusively with its trappings. Its mechanical resolution system doesn't matter, the game could be run with an entirely different ruleset and still classify as D&D.
Curious how other people would see that breaking down.
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GURPS even has a "dungeon fantasy" sub-line in a couple different forms. Though, I think it spends a good deal of page count trying to emulate class- and level-based gaming, and (for obvious copyright reasons) doesn't strictly emulate the settings.
I think "D&D" the genre is, unfortunately, very closely tied to its mechanical trappings. Classes and levels and alignments and races and spell levels and the spells themselves are all tied to each other and incorporated into the world-building.
I have some 15-20 fantasy tabletop RPGs on my shelves. D&D (all editions) is just one of them. Making any of the others cosmetically similar to D&D by porting over a canon setting and monsters and famous characters wouldn't make it feel like D&D to me. D&D is a distinct fantasy RPG to me. The other way around, importing another fantasy RPG's setting and aesthetic into 5E's (or any D&D edition's) ruleset, would absolutely feel like D&D to me too. A sci-fi type RPG though? Anything not fantasy is never going to feel like D&D to me (and the conversion would be a ton of tiresome work to get right).
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What if the answer is yes to both-
Depends on your definition of 'feels like a D&D game'. There's no shortage of game systems that will permit hack and slash fantasy (I would probably recommend a more recent game system than either GURPS or Champions, both of which were revolutionary -- in the 1980s). There are some features of D&D (such as spell memorization and armor making you harder to hit) that are rare in game systems that aren't directly based on D&D, but are those essential to your concept of 'feels like D&D'?
The simple fact that D&D, despite old and clunky mechanics, hasn't been replaced by something more modern suggests that for the majority of gamers the old and clunky mechanics are core to feeling like D&D.
The algorithm is using you to test content.
As stated before, Seth Skorkowsky and Dungeon Craft both released videos about the whole class-based games or levels thing, and so the videos might be showing up in case you watched either of those and other youtubers might be jumping on the train of thought of doing away with levels in dnd.
However, as someone who knows how youtube works, the algorithm shows you more of what you want to see. You likely either clicked on a video about this or watched a video from a creator who made a video on the subject. So youtube is showing you their most recent work, or showing you what others have watched from this creator or others. When you click on something, youtube shows you more of it, unless that content didn't keep your attention long enough. It's just the algorithm funneling this content to you rather than it being a trend most likely (seeing as at least half if not more of the folks responding to this thread didn't really know it was a thing), but it could (and might even be likely) to turn into a trend a little ways into the future, depending on how much the general DnDtube audience clicks on these videos.
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It's called Fantasy HERO. Same company, same build rules, just with fantasy flair. I like it.
Nothing suffers except it is no longer D&D =)
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So I'm assuming we're excluding D&D clones and derivatives and stuff sort of using the same sort of "engine" (d20 based, d6 also important but polyhedrals, etc.) so we're ruling out Pathfinder (though it's arguably close to a "point buy D&D" in a lot of ways) other D&D Clones from the 70s through today from Fantasy Trip and Palladium to Five Torches Deep. We'll discount them too, but that Dungeon Craft Guy has infected my feed and I do watch the White Hack Black Hack review and those have me curious from a lazy DM perspective.
But to get at what I think you're pointing at I'd say GURPS and other generic systems definitely aspire to be able to "capture D&D" as much as generic systems try to capture everything. I honestly don't know what's going on with GURPS these days, when I was into it they had a license deal with Traveller, were trying to put a flag on Cyberpunk and Shadowrun's turf, etc. but I also remember them making an effort at "high fantasy." So there are examples out there outside of the thought lab but in the wilds of play space where folks have tried to provide a "D&D like experience but with our rules." I mean, weren't we all worried Fandom was going to do precisely that with Genesys? ... whatever happened to Genesys?
So I think rather than contemplating I'd ask whether anyone's ever tried to do D&D in another system.
But I don't think anyone would really split a binary like that into mechanics and genre/setting/trappings. Mechanics in many ways are trappings. AC, hit points, hit dice, those are trappings too.
So this there's a lot more data on. 3 and 3.5e coincided with the effort of WotC and various open source allies and licensees to do the reverse and put everything into something directly or much more resembling a D&D. 3.0 whiffed at its shot but 3.5 produced a set of Star Wars rules players particularly those more into Knights of the Old Republic that the thrilogies and attendant animation and live action programs swear by over West End's original d6 and FFG/Edge's funky dice game. (Personally I don't care for it, though I can see how KOTOR fans dig it since leveled progression sort of fits the video game progression and I prefer the more wildly swingy anarchic d6 and still trying to figure out if I like FFG's beyond the gorgeous artwork. 3 and 3.5 saw a lot more ports into other genres as well. d20 modern (that I believe did away with leveled play or at least leveled hit dice probably trying to get back to the old Top Secret and Top Secret S.I. games) comes to mind in particular and that spawned a bunch of third party spinoffs, I think even a Star Trek game that may or may not have been licensed.
5e we got a rebel Star Wars game that's super popular (it gets a meh from me similar to the 3./3.5 games) apparently Anthem has 5e based game floating out there in the bootlegverse too. I haven't dived into them enough to really immerse myself in them, but I have trouble seeing the genre past the D&D ... like that other conversation I think it's still more D&D skinned, but like in those 70s apron constumes with rubber band affixed face mask costumes rather than real cosplay.
I guess at the end of the day, and maybe I'm just too precious or really like variety, I think there's a marriage of mechanics and thematics. If you were to GURPS the Lost Mind of the Philanderer (forthcoming, Midnightplat) you're picking an interesting target as it's an adventure that's expressly written to introduce D&D and the thematic/plot/story progress is very much tied to the mechanical progress of the characters. I'd have to do a lot more thinking as to what specifically, but I feel GURPing that or any D&D specific module would leave both DM and players thinking "other things" should be happening that arent' because your pulling out the song and leaving behind the intended instrumentation if that analogy makes sense.
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Honestly, I think you're creating a false dichotomy there. I think that what most people view as "being D&D" is, similar to my view, a synergy of the two, a mixture of the mechanics and the lore. Heck, I even get D&D vibes from playing Star Trek Adventures - despite the mechanics being quite different?it uses a 2d20 system) AND the lore being very different. D&D is all of it, the mechanics, the lore, game culture. The more another game is similar to D&D, the more it feels like D&D.
Now, it is true that people lean more to one aspect than another when it comes to what makes a game feel like D&D, but they aren't completely divorced from each other either. I don't think any one would feel that a D&D skin on a different mechanical system would feel nothing like D&D while a game that used the same mechanics but reskinned for Battlestar Galactica would be indistinguishable or vice versa.
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You may have hit the nail on the head here. Right now Matt's name is synonymous with D&D and when he speaks, the RNG shifts. That was one of the videos I saw recently so that may have been the trigger for the youtube daemons to send me other videos.
I must apologize for starting this thread and then not responding to it for several days. My issues are having issues. That being said:
As far as I'm concerned, D&D is the mechanical system we use to bring structure to whatever fantasy realm we choose to put it in. You COULD use D&D in many different genres with very little tweaking but fantasy was where the system was born and so fantasy is where it fits best. However, 'fantasy' is a HUGE word and it encompasses lots of things that are not expressly designed for D&D. I have run D&D campaigns in Middle Earth using the sourcebooks from the MERP system. All of the lore and the maps and the descriptions were there, I just needed stat blocks for monsters.
I don't even mind the idea of a leveled system except for one thing: The Hit Point progression. If my 1st level Fighter with 12 HP gets hit by an arrow, he's HURT. After an adventure or two, he goes to bed, wakes up, and now he has nearly 20 HP, and that one arrow is much less threatening. Add another level and the same applies again. GURPS and the Hero System handle this by not using levels but a point system instead. Sure, you CAN get more HP but you have to spend a LOT of points to get relatively small gains while the rest of the party buys or improves skills, spells, or whatever. If D&D could modify the system so that the HP progression was less steep, it would approach being a perfect system IMHO.
I'm a storyteller by choice. Sure, I love a good battle because that's where some of the most dramatic moments in a campaign can occur, but I want the system I'm playing in to work WITH my storytelling, not against it. I have never been in a Vanilla D&D game using strictly RAW. The first game I ever sat down to in 1st Ed was already homebrewed because NOBODY wanted to play a Wizard who could only cast 1 spell a day. Many of us homebrew the rules to suit our playstyle and that's fine. But when I think back to the point-based systems I've played in I realize that we didn't have to homebrew as much. Those systems were far more flexible so it wasn't necessary. However, this brings up another point: Accessibility.
IMHO GURPS was very nearly perfect for beginners because for a point-based system it was relatively easy. You had 4 stats and then you had Skills. All of the Skill rolls were either derived from one of the four stats or (in some very rare occasions) they came down to pure chance. The more points you spent on a skill, the better your chances of success. Like D&D, you could try to do something you didn't have the skill for by rolling against the appropriate stat. The single biggest difference was that if three arrows would kill your brand new character on the first day of the campaign, those same three arrows might still kill you after months or years of play. Boromir's death in LotR? Yeah, my friends and I point and say 'GURPS death'. Look at a level 10 Fighter in D&D and figure out how many arrows it would take to bring him down. The answer is a lot.
But D&D tries to take a lot of the burden off of the DM IMHO. Players can look at the PHB or whatever source their race and class come from and see what they can do later on. It's all laid out for them. Sure, they can ask the DM if they want to homebrew something, but they have a roadmap to follow. In a classless or point-buy system, the players either have to know the system (which can be daunting) or they have to rely HEAVILY on the DM for help. That's lots of work for the DM and it can remove some of the player agency or at least the feeling of it. Both sides have their advantages and disadvantages.
The actual text of the book says Boromir was "pierced with many black-feathered arrows" after the orcs shot "a rain" of them at him, so Tolkien at least was thinking a lot rather than just three or so. Most of the pre-movie art I remember of his death depicted him as a human pincushion
Hit points in D&D aren't intended to represent simple physical fortitude. It's heroic fantasy; more powerful characters should be able to take a lot more hits, and shrug off a lot more damage, than beginning ones. It's a feature, not a bug. Certainly, an ever-increasing HP total isn't the only way to depict that, but it serves that purpose well enough
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Hot take: over-bloated HP totals are three quarters of the reason high-level D&D never gets any credit and everyone keeps complaining that "nobody can ever challenge high-level characters!"
If your HP didn't increase damn near exponentially from when you were lower level and the game was tuned such that it only took two or three solid hits to bring you into Critical Danger territory? Then challenging high-level characters would be perfectly straightforward. The same random footpad shivving you in the ribs at level 1 to spark a chase could do it at level 20 - the chase would just be shorter and the footpad would regret his life choices far more by the end of it. HP bloat kills games more than anything else in D&D does, and I include Greater Arcana spells in that.
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I haven't played to high level yet, the highest being L8 so far, but I didn't find early levels [as] fun because of the low HP. A single hit could be enough to kill you or at least force you to withdraw from the fight. The game got much more fun when I could tank a few hits and things became more about my decisions rather than a single roll of the dice. Of course, that could swing the other way at higher levels and be more about my character's ability to tank hits than my decisions, but I really wouldn't want to be perpetually at 8HP throughout a game.
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Hot take: high hit points has nothing to do with why high level D&D isn't popular. High level D&D is problematic because of the explosion in complexity as level increases, and because the more options you introduce, the more broken options make their way in (which means most of the brokenness is due to spells and magic items, as that's where most of the options are).