“What RPG would you still be playing twenty years from now,” asks #RPGaDAY today.
Well, twenty years ago, I was playing Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowrun. The two most recent games I’ve played were Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowrun. In twenty years from now, it would probably be one of those two games.
Nah. It’s not Shadowrun.
Both games are on their fifth edition now, and looking back over them, Shadowrun has been enamored with complexity in an attempt at realistically simulating how grenades and bullets would work in a world where there are cybernetic elves casting magic spells at six-foot-tall wasps that primarily aren’t physical creatures. The complexity of running any sort of combat in Shadowrun 5th Edition is as thick as any of the earlier versions. Over the last twenty years, I’ve been favoring games that are lighter, faster, and allow for more time for story. Two decades from now, I’ll want something even more like that – Shadowrun isn’t that game and shows no change in that direction.
Aside: If we’re talking games with heists, Leverage does it so much better. The part about Shadowrun I absolutely hate is the planning phase, where I sit around doing nothing for an hour or two while the players discuss exactly how they are going to break into the location, despite the shit hitting the fan two dice rolls later and everyone is improvising. I also want to run Will Hindmarch’s Dark when that comes out, but I’m afraid that I’m getting burnt out on the infiltration/heist game mode. We’ll see.
There’s also another thing that I strongly dislike in the current (and most past) versions of Shadowrun: doing nearly everything seems to require a bazillion dice rolls. Oh, if the summoning action was like Apocalypse World!
When you summon a spirit, roll+Magic. A spirit appears and owes you one service. On a major hit, choose two from the following list. On a minor hit, choose one. On a miss, you take massive drain.
- It owes you two more services.
- It owes you two more services.
- You take no drain.
Bam, over and done.
D&D 5 is a pretty neat game. Unlike the massive rules bloat of 3rd and 3.5, where the DMG has about eight hundred words devoted to rules about door hinges, the more recent editions had taken a step backwards to an easier game. 4th Edition tried to play faster than 3.5 (until you got to high-enough levels where the players at the table had too many game-move options that analysis paralysis set in to bog things down). 5th Edition’s combat rules are about ten pages long. Let me restate that:
The rules for fighting creatures, the primary thing characters do in Dungeons & Dragons, is contained in less than ten pages.
That’s amazing. Combat is about as quick as it was back in AD&D 2nd edition. You can go and fight and have more story in a game session. In twenty years, I expect that my styles would continue to go more towards rules-light games ((I never thought I’d say that about Dungeons & Dragons.)) that can let the narrative shine through.
And if I’m not playing that in twenty years, I’m probably playing Fate.
And now, Thomas? What would you be playing in nineteen years from now?
I’m really impressed with how simple D&D 5 is to run. If Dungeons & Dragons continues on the trajectory away from the bloat of 3.5, all the better — I’ll probably be playing Dungeons & Dragons 8 or whatever rules-light system is around then. Maybe Primetime Adventures.