Everything people are scared Tencent might do to D&D has already been done by Hasbro: the MMORPG conversion (4th edition), canning all the staff (happens every few years, and to Magic too), adding DLC (just take a look at the current official app), walling off the garden (three tries on that one: once with 4th, once recently with the OGL stuff, and once with the limitations on animations in map applications), even the movie.
D&D the rules system has been a corpse for years, that the designers managed to make 5th into a passable game is a miracle. Play Pathfinder, Blades in the Dark, Call of Cthulhu, Savage Worlds, Fate, Vampire, GURPS, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Dread, Worlds Without Number, Mothership, Numenera, Mork Borg, Everyone is John, any of the dozen variations on those games, or one of the hundreds of other options not yet listed. They pretty much all run as well if not better than D&D.
That’s a ton of names dropped. I wonder what is the best way to have a brief understanding of each one.
Yeah, to be honest my point is there are many good games out there. That said…
- Pathfinder: Fantasy in the classic D&D style, branched off after 3.5ed. Three action economy is gooooood once you’re used to it. Lots of dice.
- Blades in the Dark: Steampunk horror fantasy. The most beautifully designed system I’ve played. Dice pool game that’s easy to pick up and master, flavor for days, fantastic narrative control for the players and GM, easy to run. Even people who will never play Blades need to read the book, it has several concepts that can change how any GM or DM runs their games.
- Call of Cthulhu: d100 horror game about staring into the face of a cold, uncaring universe. The cashmere scarf of tabletop RPGs, just oozes luxury. The way the math on skills works is so perfectly suited to CoC’s style of horror it’s uncanny. Delta Green is a great variant if you want to an SCP or X-Files game.
- Savage Worlds: Action Movie! The Game. Universal system, can be used for most any genre. When it was written it was considered pretty fast to play, now it’s about average. Swingy combat. I use it when I run a system not covered by other games, for me mostly 1920-1950s era detective stories. The surface level rules are intuitive, but the GM needs better system knowledge.
- Fate: Very high concept storytelling game. Players and GMs both have the ability to influence the narrative of the scene. The game I had the hardest time learning, not because of the game itself is hard but because I had to change the way I think about TTRPGs.
- Vampire: Vampires in the modern world. Dice pool system. I like the newest edition a lot, I think it’s pretty elegant. Can get weird.
- GURPS: The ultimate multipurpose game. Build any character in any setting. ANY setting. Building characters is a horrible slog, but the rules are… surprisingly simple in practice, at the discretion of the GM. A lot of work in prep, but when it’s right, it’s very right. The Film Reroll podcast plays through movies using it, highly recommend listening to a movie run by Paulo (Home Alone, maybe) to get an idea of the system.
- Shadow of the Demon Lord: Grimdark or horror fantasy. d20 system, very easy for D&D players to learn.
- Dread: Extreme rules light horror game. Tasks are resolved with a Jenga tower. The GM creates a horror scenario. Anytime the GM wants to increase the tension or the players are in danger trying to do something, a player pulls a block (or two, or three). When the tower falls the player who knocked it over dies. Players can sacrifice their life to accomplish a heroic action by knocking over the tower intentionally. That’s all the rules.
- Worlds Without Number: Fantasy. Sort of another branch off AD&D. A nicely designed mix of Old School Renaissance and some modern conveniences. Very, very good worldbuilding tools. Free, to some extent.
- Mothership: d100 sci-fi horror system, more barebones than CoC. Very easy to pick up and build characters fast, which is good, 'cause they’re going to die.
- Numenera: Weird sort of futuristic/fantasy setting. One of the easiest systems I’ve ever run, super easy to adjust on the fly. Maybe a little too complicated to explain in a few sentences.
- Mork Borg: Old school, original D&D turned emo. Can be played straight or as satire.
- Everyone is John: A comedy game, very rules light, where the players take turns controlling the same character, John. They try to accomplish hilarious tasks. Gets weird. My John flew the USS Enterprise-D into a sun once. Free.
For people who want high fantasy but not D&D, I’d recommend Pathfinder 2e. For people who want something a little more dangerous and stripped down and are coming from D&D, Worlds Without Number. For anyone I recommend Call of Cthulhu and Dread. Everyone should read Blades in the Dark, even if they don’t want to play in the setting.
Also, from the other comments below: Traveller: Space Adventures! The Game. The rumor is Firefly was based on Joss Whedon’s Traveller game, and that’s how Traveller plays. Amazing character creation system that lets players control some of their background, but mirrors real life in that not everything goes as planned. The setting is very, very deep. I admit I would probably play Scum and Villainy (Blades in the Dark in Space) or Stars Without Number (the predecessor to WWN) instead, but it’s up there. The One Ring Roleplaying Game: Very much a system to play stories not just in Middle Earth but in the style of LotR. I have not played this and have no intent to do so, but it’s clever in its own little hobbit hole way. I have read it. Cool dice.
I haven’t read Shadowdark or Pugmire. Shadowdark looks, for my purposes, similar to Worlds Without Number or Shadow of the Demon Lord. As for Pugmire I use Mouseguard for my Redwall adjacent stuff, but I would sit in a few sessions for sure.
Woah! Thanks for the detailed intro. I have checked out some of them right after seeing your original comments.
I have tried some of the listed myself. Pathfinder, CoC, Everyone is John, inSANE, Cypher System, and Ten Candles.
Cypher System’s premise is that character creation is just 3 sentences. You pick a class, a descriptor, and a purpose and you are done. Each of them might offer some skills, advantages or disadvantages for your characters. Another key feature is their character arcs, you get to pick your short term goals and you earn experience by attempting to achieve the goals, and you need to explain to the GM what you have done to achieve them at the end of each session. Experience will only be granted if the GM agrees.
I am looking into some systems that are easy to create characters. As it is often the first blocker for new players. No way someone new is gonna read through every possible class, subclass and feats. I am looking for a system that could drag my friends into the trpg world.
Goblin Quest and the Quest RPG are what I would try next.
Goblin Quest is about stupid goblins who die trying to accomplish silly goals. Chaotic, fun and maybe gruesome. Players will be creating five similar goblins at once and will be switching between (after each of them dies). Dying/failure is inevitable in this game and and should be fun. The quests will be silly and small in scale (like trying to make a cake, host a party, or steal a pumpkin).
Quest RPG is similar to Cypher in terms of character creation and skill picking, whilst having a little more depth in it. Its major perks are having Skill Trees that requires players to learn the skills in defined order, locking powerful skills at later levels without level systems. Characters will always have 10 max HP, at all times. When 6-10 are rolled from a D20, tough choices will be laid out to players, instead of the GM deciding exactly what happens, two equally bad situations are presented for the players. Let’s say Jon is trying to attack this red dragon with a dagger, he is rashing in and attempting a cut. He rolled a 7, so he needs to choose between dealing less damage or suffering some damage himself.
Headline was so confusing because I never see it stylized like that. It’s always D&D or DnD, never DND - that’s ‘Do Not Disturb’.
I just wish that Larian Studios would buy it. They could save their licensing fees for BG3 and could keep DnD community driven. Would also make it much easier for them to introduce new game mechanics into future games and pull those changes back into DnD.
Edit: I just read that tencent owns 30% shares of Larian which is kind of a bummer. Still would be much better with Larian directly, because tencent doesnt have a majority say then.
Larian isn’t especially big though, even with the success of BG3, a purchase like this is likely would be well outside what they could hope to afford.
They have over 450 employees and operate in six different countries. I don’t know what DnD would be worth but it’s not like Larian is small.
Logically I think it makes more sense for Larian to want to buy the video game rights specifically as anything beyond that would be outside their scope.
Imagine how much staff works for Hasbro or Tencent, because that’s the league we are playing in here - after a quick Google, Hasbro has 6480, Tencent has 108,436. Larian is a dust mite to Tencent and DND has been around for half a century, had a film based on it recently, just had a game of the year based on it and a two decade old dnd IP. DND made $100-150 million in 2022.
D&d price roughly 2 billion. Ten cent has 100 times that.0 larion has only millions to spend
Those would be mad expensive too - think about all the awesome D&D video games that have ever been made. Yes they’ve been less so in the last decade, but any company would know the power of the name and want the game rights as well as the printed media and other rights. It’s a whole deal. Larian could almost never hope to have the kind of money that would convince Hasbro to sell the game rights separately, much as we’d basically all prefer that.
I just learned about that as well. I hope Larian dilutes or buys back Tencent’s shares.
Why would they do that, though? They’re a private company. They didn’t have to let Tencent buy in in the first place, which means it was purposeful.
And the reason companies give Tencent a cut of themselves is to have better access to the Chinese market. You need a Chinese publisher or partner to operate there, and Tencent offers that to software companies in exchange for letting them buy in. They always buy minority stakes, and they don’t take over editorial control of anything.
They’re actually a good business partner for anyone wanting to have their games distributed in China.
They’re just also a really aggressive F2P developer.
Everything about that is absolute cancer.
Everyone’s favorite TTRPG going world stage corporate. Fucking yay…
How is that different than now? DnD fell apart because Hasbro is a world stage corporation, they’re just trading it to another world stage corporation which will kill it further until they pass it on too.
Whatever you remember liking is long long dead.
Nobody was trying to make this about race except you my man. That was the very first place your mind went. Which probably isn’t a coincidence because, in my experience, the people screaming look at me look at me I’m not racist usually turn out to be the most racist motherfuckers you will ever deal with.
I get the spirit of the comment, but among people who often play multiple TTRPGs almost no one would call D&D their favorite. I would be worried if Tencent (or Hasbro) bought Arc Dream or Evil Hat, but in practice the John Harpers of the world leave and start another company using their corporate lucre. In fact that’s where Paizo started, from people peeling off of D&D after Hasbro acquired it.
Tabletop games are such a functionally cheap product to create and sell it’s impossible to truly stomp out competition. Tencent would have to buy Twitch and YouTube and disallow any other game, and even then every nerd convention in the world would have some guy selling stapled together zines that rips D&D a new asshole.
Tl;dr: I don’t give a shit if Tencent buys D&D.
We should petition the government to invalidate the copyright on D&D and send it to the public domain.
