How I Fell Out of Love with D&D

I started into the whole Tabletop RPG hobby right around the Height of AD&D 2nd Edition's existence. At the very impressionable age of 12, I was reading every DragonLance book I could get my hands on, and buying Every single Player's Handbook "Complete" guide I could find. And at that age, I could afford all of it, because there wasn't anything else that I needed to buy or worry about. So very quickly, I amassed hundreds of dollars in TSR's finest Roleplaying materials, most of which coming from the only major source for books and gaming supplies in town: Waldenbooks. Since there wasn't much in the name of RPG competition coming out of Waldenbooks (Primarily I remember Shadowrun, and StarWars), my Impressionable mind told me that TSR was the top dog, and that idea stuck in my head for nearly a decade.

Even after I tried a couple different game systems, (namely Shadowrun and a strange superhero game called Villains and Vigilantes), I still considered AD&D the game to be. I kept buying the books and boxed sets clear through the days of Planescape and RedSteele. But around that time, (maybe 1996 or so), I noticed things were changing at TSR. The novels were being rereleased without the "good" covers by Easley and Elmore, and the new setting being pushed out, Birthright, seemed to lack the sort of oomph that I had been used to. The rereleased core books had a kind of shaky (this isn't a 3rd edition, but we know we need to do something else) feel to them, and the Players Option books seemed to really show that TSR was reaching for some hook to keep its fanbase. I bought the Birthright box, and after reading through it a couple of times, all I could think of was, "My campaign world is way better than this, and it's still in its infancy." Then the book sales started dropping off. Then the whole Waldenbooks fiasco happened, TSR was bought by WotC, and my heart sunk.

I was one of the kids, who hated Magic: the Gathering when it came out. Not that I didn't eventually get sucked into the game, but I saw it as an evil force coming into the RPG world, and WotC as an evil company looking to scarf up all the surrounding competition. Not that there's any real proof of that, or that sort of thing actually happened, but as for as this podunk town goes, that's the kind of vibe I got. I've never seen much of a gaming community here, so when MtG exploded, I kinda felt like all us Tabletop PnP players were getting pushed back to the "old timey" room. Anyway, I kept on playing D&D all along through the MtG heydays (all my friends quit Magic about the time the Homelands set came out, because the cards started getting rediculus), and to this day, I'm grudgingly still using a core of AD&D 2nd edition rules, but I'm definetly not happy about that constrainment. But as the nineties drew to a close, I began to wonder and worry what would happen to the tabletop RPG niche. I love game, and will never quit, but I was worried that this sort of thing wouldn't exist for future generations. I knew that WotC needed to do something to the gaming scene to bring tabletop back; they needed to launch a third edition of D&D.

I was pumped when I first heard that a third edition was in the works, but then I saw that the "A" had been dropped. They were making a 3rd edition of classic D&D, not an improvement of the classic 2nd Edition rules I had come to love (albeit feelings of growing constrainment and age). I started out on classic D&D, and found it to be terribly boring. I never liked the dungeon crawl, and really, D&D isn't much more than that--fights, dungeons, treasure. My hype-level on the new edition dropped to the minimal level, even though the media was buzzing about all the "fantastic" additions to the new system, like Assassins, Monks, and prestige classes. All I could think about while folks raved about being able to be an assassin was, "they already have that in 2nd edition--it's a character class kit from the complete thieves' handbook."

Fortunately, my standard gaming group was about as excited for 3rd edition as I was. Sure, we were all planning on looking at the books, and I knew that I'd eventually buy them for the inspiration aspect gained from the art and maybe a few weird interesting facets, but none of us were planning on making a conversion.

Then I transferred to another college, and moved down to a new town for a few years. While I was down there, I was happy to find a thriving gamer/anime community, which I became a part of very quickly. However, I was shocked to see that everyone down there had completly fallen for the new 3rd edition rules, which had just been released. Granted, this was my first real experience with gamers outside the microcosm that I lived in my hometown. All my friends became gamers because of my influence, and I taught myself how to play, so our play style evolved into something weird and nonstandard. For the first time, I found myself in a group of standard gamers; a place where the fabled min-maxers, petty GMs, dungeon crawls, and lack of roleplaying existed and were more part of the norm than the fringe (until this point, I had only 1 min-max player).

Once I had gotten to know some people enough to want to run a game for them, they were shocked and appalled that I was against 3rd edition. "It's so much smoother," they decried, "it's not as cumbersome as 2nd edition," "there's more options." Well I wasn't conviced, but I let them make 3rd ed. style characters and tried to run the game on 3rd rules. The storylines I ran made the players really happy, but all of us hated the rules for different reasons (though the players liked them more than I did). Battles took forever, and I felt like all the dynamic description and cinematic style action that I was used to was lost in constant checks and dice rolls. I hated making arbitrary DC numbers for skill checks, and I didn't even begin to unravel the mess of mob creation with the difficulty ratings and checks and balances. But we clunked along until summer vacation. Over the summer, I switched everyone's characters to 2nd ed versions, retaining all gained skills. When play picked up the next year, things went a lot more smoothly for me, and the players quickly got into the more streamlined style of play that 2nd ed allows for. Dice rolls dropped, and roleplaying increased. The only problem: 2nd edition has a very inconsistant rule set; there are way too many different rolls, and all the players had a hard time remembering if they needed to roll high or low.

By this point, I had been running on the same rule set for more or less 10+ years. Sure, I knew just about everything inside out, and if I didn't, I generally knew page numbers off the top of my head. But as I encouraged my players to new levels of roleplaying, and as the plots continued to build and twist, I started to see the stress marks and holes that plagued the 2nd edition set. I've been struggling since this realization to modify the rules somehow to open up for more roleplaying, less dice rolling, and more unique character design.

In the last couple of years, I've struggled with this once magestic system, turned haggard crone. I've explored options of creating a classless character creation system, percentile based rolls in order to unify the high/low difficulties, new rules such as Channeling (as in drawing essences from one source and tranferring them), alternate magic rules, and various limited combat modifications. While I've had some very good ideas, I'm not particularly good at rule writing by myself. And currently I don't have any players with the time to vest into creating a wholly new system with me. So after spending a good chunk of this past summer wrestling with attempting some sort of facelift on the rules I know, I've decided that I should be doing something that I probably should have done long ago: look to other game systems.

My search for other game systems, has opened me to a nice little microcosm of Gamers and gaming blogs such as Treasure Tables, Roleplaying Tips, and others that have fueled my ideas and led me to picking up GURPS and thinking about lots of new things like conflict resolution and paying closer attention to my own GMing habits.

Granted, I haven't severed my link to D&D, but the love and respect I once held for "the one" system has diminished greatly; I feel as if the mask of obscurity has been lifted, and hopefully in time, my gaming sessions will feel a lot more like I want them to feel, and they'll play with a lot less hassle, headache and rules-checking.