My gaming group is about to wrap up a campaign, our fourth and final in this setting. The homebrew setting I came up with three years ago is about to be retired for good. It’s been added onto as the setting changed hands. It started out with a group of level 1 characters working to save a small group of towns. Then escalated to saving an island, then the region, and finally – assuming we don’t all snuff it in the next couple of sessions – the world. I think it’s time to hang it up and begin a new tale.
But now the question comes: What do we play next? D&D 3.5 is all this particular group has ever played, although a couple of the members have played other games elsewhere. I’m not actually huge on the standard D&D fantasy setting. In fact, among the eight people in the group, only one of us prefers fantasy. The problem is, the rest of us all want something different. Star Wars. Pirates. Cyberpunk. Superheroes. The giant robot stuff. Vampires. Werewolves. Everyone has a different “favorite” that is despised by the rest of the group. We play in our homebrew fantasy world because it’s our only common ground.
If I had my choice I’d play some sort of space opera. It could be Star Wars, but it wouldn’t have to be. (Although if I ran a Star Wars game, I’d set it on my own made up worlds rather than dragging the party through the locales we keep visiting in the movies. Too often Lucas’ universe feels like a galaxy of a hundred million stars and eight planets. Sigh. I’d want to go somewhere new where we wouldn’t have Star Was canon dragging behind us like so much baggage.) Although for me, the game system itself is more important than setting. Great stories can take place in any genre. Great stories can’t take place if you spend all your time deciphering and fighting about The Rules.
So what should we play? What setting? What game system? It’s a tough call. We all have different goals and reasons for playing the game, so the challenge is to find some middle ground where we can all be content.
I’m at least as eccentric as the next guy, so I’m not going to pretend that this list is in any way reasonable. Having said that, in a perfect world my gaming system would have:
* Bell curve. I dislike the chaos encouraged by the flat d20 system. The bell curve formed by rolling two or more dice together appeals to me a great deal. It makes “special” events more special.
* Fun dice. I don’t like systems which rely on huge handfuls of boring old d6’s. The seven piece dice set is amusing and fun. There is a tactile appeal to using them. Yes, I realize that this conflicts with the previous item, as most bell-curve systems use two or three d6’s.
* Roleplaying over Strategy. Mechwarrior is not a bad thing, but it’s not for me. Any game where combat takes more than twenty minutes is a game where I’m going to get bored. I’m there to play a character and weave a story. If you want to play Risk, just say so and we can play Risk. But don’t ask me to develop a deep character and then funnel me through a series of long fights where the only use for my backstory is as a dice-rolling surface. Some players see the story as an excuse to chain a bunch of battles together, because that’s why they’re there. I see combat as a natural, emergent result of the goals of the player conflicting with the goals of NPC’s in the game. I can handle “arbitrary” fights in moderation, but if the fight isn’t directly related to the overall goal, I’m not going to be excited about it.
* Easy to learn rules. See also the Great Debate on Attacks of Opportunity. I can see why people write rules for grapple, overrun, AOO, etc. If you don’t have those rules, then the game will have lots of exploitable holes. A fighter will be able to run past a hedge of guards and attack the King in a single turn without risking harm, which doesn’t make sense. The problem is that plugging these holes requires twenty pages of rules, rolls, guidelines, and exceptions, which is just more crap to memorize and argue about. The whole system becomes an anchor around the neck of people who want to finish with the combat and get back to the game itself. I’d rather encourage players to respect the limits through in-game thinking rather than beating them into line with a bunch of pedantic regulations.
* Simple combat system. I can enjoy a system where I roll 1d20, and add my related skill modifier, then compare it to target number X. A system where I roll a die, add a modifier, then subtract some other modifiers, then divide by something and round up or down to hit a target number determined by the GM rolling the dice and doing similar calculations? This is not a game for me. It harkens back to the Mechwarrior players. Some people live for that number-crunching strategy. Nothing wrong with that, but I prefer to play that sort of thing on the computer and let the software handle the details for me. If I’m at the table with other human beings, I’m there to roleplay, dangit.
One player wants deep stratetgy. (Mechwarrior.) Another plays to amass loot and power, and prefers epic-level gaming. A couple of us really just want to play interesting characters in a compelling, believeable setting. Another one wants to be the strongest character in the group, and would really like to have PvP.
It’s amazing things go as smoothly as they do, considering our cross-purposes. The group is too big for my taste. It’s hard to roleplay in an eight-man gang. I’d suggest we split the group, but I don’t have time for two games at once, and since we meet at my house “splitting” the group would feel too much like “kicking some people out in favor of others”.
As tired as I am of D&D, it looks like it’s the only system that can be all things to all people. The other systems mostly specialize in ways that would alienate one or more players.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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