I’ve been working on putting together a modern fantasy setting for a new game I’m going to start in a couple weeks. We’re planning to play Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition since I’ve already got a ton of books for that and I’ve yet to find another system that feels as comfortable and malleable as D&D 5e does (most other things I’ve looked at feel a little too rules-light for the game my players and I want to play). Sure, there’s a lot of other much more open games where the only limitation is your imagination, but I’ve learned from trying to get people to play those games that a lot of people will freeze up if they’re presented with tasks or choices that seem too open-ended. Not everyone has the improvisational experience required to enjoy those kinds of games and a lot of people just want to play a game they already know so they can relax and enjoy themselves. Plus, I kind of miss it. D&D 5e, I mean. I’m still not planning to give Wizards anymore money, though I’ll admit that I’m running into a few problems with having all of my digital access to the 5e books I bought prior to last year’s debacle locked into one website since, unless I pay them money every year, I can’t share that access with anyone else. If I’d bought PDFs instead of digital access, I’d be able to share those with my players easily, but I honestly never thought I’d end my subscription to DnDBeyond and yet, here I am, subscription-less and trying to figure out how to make sure all my players have access to the same information I do.

Part of this is complicated by the impending update to D&D’s core ruleset that will be coming sometime this year (according to the little bit of information I’ve seen because, after leaving Twitter, I’ve lost my connections to the tabletop gaming spaces where I used to get my info). I don’t care to spend money to keep up with everything Wizards releases (though I still feel tempted to do so every time I scan through DnDBeyond for a rules reference), but I’m really not sure what else is out there in the same vein. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff out there, but a lot of it is either a rules-light Swords and Sorcerery game or an incredibly crunchy reaction to D&D 5e being less crunchy than the old favorite, 3.5e. Neither of those is what I want. I want the pleasantly middle-of-the-road war-game that is D&D 5e (especially the looser way I tend to run it) and there’s nothing else in that category right now, even a year later. I bet there’s some stuff coming down the pipelines (one of which actually got crowdfunded in a huge way, which gives me hope for the future), but it isn’t here yet and I can’t wait forever for something that might never materialize since, even after everything that happened last year, there’s still a huge number of people playing Dungeons and Dragons. How can anyone compete with the market domination that D&D has?

All of this might be a moot point, anyway. I still haven’t met with my players and while I’ve pitched the idea to most of them, I haven’t gotten the group together to talk through the kind of story we want to tell and the kind of world we want to inhabit. While I know 5e enough to comfortably adapt that to any genre, there are a few games that are specifically made for some of the sub-categories covered within “modern fantasy” that might fit our ideas better than D&D would. Kids on Brooms is one example. I don’t think we’ll wind up playing that since I don’t think everyone wants to be a spellcaster and that game is very much about being a kid in a magic school. The story we tell might involve being a kid and being in school (magic or mundane has yet to be decided), but the conversations I’ve had with the crew make it clear that that isn’t necessarily the focus they want. Then there’s Blades in the Dark and while I’d love to run a game of that, I don’t know if my players are interested in being so theft-focused and working through the layers of grime inherent to that system. I definitely am, but maybe not for the type of story we wind up wanting to tell. I’ll absolutely put the game forth if we wind up talking about a world that is compatible and a story that would mesh well with the grime of Blades, but since I pitched this as a brighter, more modern fantasy setting, I don’t think that’s the idea most people have been putting together.

I would love to focus on the more fun parts (the worldbuilding, character creation, and story plotting), but I’ve got this “to D&D or not to D&D” dilemma to solve first. I could probably set up the discord server and run a poll or see if people are free for a shorter session to meet up and talk through my initial thoughts and questions, but the reason I’m waiting until February is because most people have said they’re not available until then anyway [a fact that prove true after I set up the discord and poll to try to get the ball rolling more quickly]. So I’ve got another few weeks of spinning my wheels before I can actually get traction, which sucks because I could really use something fun and constructive to think about thanks to my on-going wave of depression and lack of any other fun plans coming up. This is all I’ve got to be excited about right now since my every-other-Sunday game of Heart: The City Beneath was skipped last weekend due to people being out or unwell. I already chewed through all the planning and excitement I had for that and there’s nothing even to rehash, after where we left things last time. Maybe I’ll just get the discord server put together, add people, and start the conversation so I’ve got something to let my idle thoughts mull over other than my life and the events of the last couple weeks.