Of course I'm gonna talk about ttrpgs

My Wednesday gaming group is concluding its campaign soon, and the time has come to start discussing what our next game will look like. This means it is time for me to do one of my favorite things: beg people to please, pretty please, play literally any game that isn't Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. Or 2025. or whatever the fuck the latest monetized chimera from WOTC calls itself.

I have a lot of reasons for disliking D&D/WOTC. There are obvious ethical concerns--Hasbro's continued attempts to strip the game of its creativity and joy; leaning on well-worn tropes couched in colonialism, imperialism, racism, and all kinds of other ugly stuff; Union-busting and other shady business tactics that make me feel gross any time my money goes even remotely in their direction, etc. For me, there is also a massive lack of nostalgia. D&D was not my first ttrpg, like it was for so many other people. My parents baptized me into ttrpgs in the fire of Champions and Harnmaster, games that are way crunchier than they should be and approach basically every facet of gameplay from an entirely different perspective than Gygax's special lad.

I understand that I'm not normal in this way--especially when playing with people who started the game in the 2010s, 5e and D&D is the thing almost everybody knows and loves. It also has a decently high learning curve, so most people who play it believe that game systems are intensely complex things to learn and do not want to transition to another one. Most people in the hobby also do not have their ears to the ground regarding the various problematic decisions made by companies, and they just want to do the thing that is familiar and fun.

I also don't care. 5e has a ton of problems, but chief on the list for me is that it's fucking boring.

There is nothing in 5e that I think can't be done better in another system. Magic. Combat. Social interactions. Big, epic encounters. Perilous dungeons. Fantastic worlds on a variety of planes. None of these are unique to D&D and all of them can be accomplished better in other ways. I just don't like it very much. You could strip away every single problematic layer of the game's background, current publishers, and higher-than-deserved market share, and I still wouldn't want to play it.

Our last game, we were essentially three archaeologists. We had D&D classes and skills and spells, but they were so incidental to the actual interests of the party that we barely rolled dice at all. Most of the time, when I wanted to do something interesting with my class features, it was house-ruled because it had nothing to do with the general way characters are designed to interact with the game world in 5e. None of our characters were combat-optimized in a game that is geared towards extremely combat-forward play. We did everything we could to avoid the actual mechanics of 5e encounters, because if we had interacted with the game how it is intended to be played, we would have just fucking died.

I mentioned this to the party and the GM a few times. They are kind and wonderful people who listen, and they are also people who have, by and large, only played D&D. It is their comfort zone. So while they agreed with my overall assessments, the verdict was "maybe we can try something else for the next game."

Well guess what bitches, it's next game time. So I'm about to be the most annoying person in the discord server as I offer up Onedrive links and strident advocacy for a variety of games that can do the fantasy elfgame thing, but in a different way.

I am absolutely not looking for recommendations, do not give them to me. I'm actually pretty good at offering up suggestions based on a table's interests, skill level, and play style. This is not a group that is going to stray far from the themes and genres present in Dungeons and Dragons, and that's okay. There are other tables for that. I just want the game to actually suit the way that we play. So I've said my piece and I'm just hoping that my friends will take it to heart.

Being a ridiculous ttrpg nerd is lonely sometimes because a lot of people are exhausted by the prospect of thinking about rules and systems and lore. They just want to sit down at a table with their dice, roll them, and have somebody tell them that they did something fucking cool to that monster. They may want to optimize strategy bc they're big video game nerds, and they know the math in this game, so they like playing in it because they can bend that math to their will. I'm sure that I am dreaded in many scenarios with my friends, as I come barreling in with my overstuffed cloud drive and my autistic rants about playstyle.

I guess I'm used to that. I generally assume, as I suppose many traumatized neurodivergents do, that people do not want to hear more minutiae about the hyper specific things that I love. But something that I promised myself a while ago is that I would stop making myself smaller for people. I'm not going to steamroll over the desires of others, but you bet your boots I'm going to say the things about the stuff that I like and want. I will then resign myself to whatever the group decides, and be a team player, and do my darndest to have fun regardless of the dice shape or the character sheet laid before me.

It would just be nice if more people would listen more than just begrudgingly, more tables would be willing to launch themselves into new ventures and try things and maybe hate them or maybe love them and then try again if things don't work out. It would feel less lonely if I didn't get the sense that I'm being indulged every time people agree to try a new game.

Games are neat and I like reading about them, learning about them, playing them. I hope I get to play another cool game soon.