I don’t know what it’s like for everyone else out there, but in my local gaming group, we don’t really play D&D anymore and its a bit of a bummer. I’m going to vent and contemplate out loud today about the core issues of trying to get D&D to the table, perhaps some can relate.
First, its important to note that It’s not because my group doesn’t like fantasy RPGs. Quite the opposite. It’s because my gaming crew occupies a rather awkward little patch of RPG no-man’s-land: they don’t particularly like modern D&D, but they aren’t especially interested in Old School D&D either.
They’re too young to have nostalgia for the old stuff, but too experienced to be satisfied by modern D&D’s strange, dissociative dissonance.
In short, neither of the two schools of D&D available today to us scratches that itch.
On one side, you have Wizards of the Coast’s latest rendition of the game, 2024 5e, with all of its modern assumptions about balance, character building, and what a D&D adventure is supposed to look like. Essentially a game of levers to pull on, something very system-driven and, if I can use a strange word here, very programmatic. There is a reason why modern D&D translates so well to video games.
On the other, you have the OSR, which, despite producing some genuinely fantastic material, often seems determined to solve the problem by digging up rulesets from 80’s and 90’s, changing the saving throws, commissioning some wonderfully grotesque artwork and releasing it again. Most of the OSR really is a rehash of the awkward rules of a mostly fractioned base system. The systems produced by the OSR are getting better and better, but they still rely on nostalgia to pave the way and old rules are still considered sacred cows; it’s rarely based on modern game design.
My gaming crew wants neither.
Thankfully, they’re also an adventurous bunch. They’ll try just about any RPG you put in front of them. We don’t suffer from that peculiar condition I’ve encountered in so many gaming groups where everyone agrees that D&D isn’t quite giving them what they want, but nevertheless insists that the solution must obviously be to play more D&D, be it old school or modern.
So we wander. And, for the most part, I’m perfectly happy wandering with them. Except…
I really want to play D&D.
The strange thing is that whenever I say that out loud, I find myself wondering what the hell I actually mean. Because unlike the rest of my crew, I do suffer from nostalgia, yet I do get their point.
I’ve played pretty much every edition of D&D as it was released, going all the way back to 1st Edition AD&D. Not 0 Edition, mind you. I’m old, but I’m not carbon-dated old.
And because of that, I’ve developed a general affection for the whole ridiculous thing.
I love the settings. I love the lore. I love the mechanics, even the weird ones that require a flowchart, three tables and a brief consultation with Gary Gygax’s ghost. And I have a particular soft spot for that older style of play: dungeon crawls, hex crawls, wilderness survival, resource management, and that wonderful zero-to-hero journey where a character begins their adventuring career armed with a rusty sword, six hit points, and wildly misplaced confidence.
It’s a love affair that has lasted nearly forty years. I’m not ready to give it up.
And it’s not that I have a problem with other systems. My group is currently playing Forbidden Lands, and we’re having a blast. In many ways, that game is a love letter to old-school D&D. It captures the danger, exploration, survival, and unpredictability I love.
But…It’s not D&D.
And that’s where things get complicated. Because systems do matter.
There’s something buried inside the perpetual motion machine that is Dungeons & Dragons, something that has somehow survived editions, designers, companies, rules revisions, forgotten settings, THAC0, feats, healing surges, advantage, subclasses, and approximately seven billion arguments about alignment.
It still is, something unmistakably unique, something very D&D.
Other games have captured pieces of it. Some have improved upon individual parts of it. There are RPGs with better combat systems, better exploration rules, better character development, better settings, and unquestionably better-organized rulebooks.
And yet none of them quite manage to reproduce the magic of the whole thing.
I suspect that’s part of the unspoken reason D&D remains, in the eyes of so much of the RPG community, the roleplaying game.
There’s some strange alchemy hidden between those pages. A little bit of true sorcery that designers have been trying to bottle for fifty years.
And perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe what I’m looking for isn’t old D&D. Maybe it isn’t modern D&D either.
Maybe what I actually want is the version of D&D that exists somewhere in between the editions, in the accumulated memories, ideas, mechanics, and traditions of forty years spent rolling dice around a table. I really believe that the OSR will be or perhaps already is the answer to my quest, pun intended!
I have my favorites in principle, but not in practice
I recently did a Top 10 list of the best versions of Dungeons & Dragons, and sitting comfortably at number one was 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I still consider it the best version of D&D ever produced, and not by a small margin.
That said, if you put me on the spot and said, “You can run any version of D&D you want. Pick one,” I don’t think I’d actually choose 2nd Edition AD&D.
Contradictory? Maybe. But there is a difference between the version of D&D I admire most and the version I actually want to put in front of my current group.
I love the core concepts of 2nd Edition. I love its style, its atmosphere, its assumptions about what an RPG should be, and the general approach it takes to running a fantasy adventure. But it also does a lot of awkward things mechanically, things I know would draw the ire of my players and, admittedly, irritate me as well.
There are plenty of little problems you can fix. THAC0, for example, can be turned into ascending AC with some very simple math. But the deeper you dig, the more strange little subsystems you find, and not all of them mesh particularly well with the atmosphere I’m trying to create at the table.
That’s the catch with 2nd Edition AD&D.
For me, it may be the best version of D&D, but it’s the best version when everyone sitting at the table already wants to play 2nd Edition AD&D.
Get a group of enthusiastic players who understand its quirks, accept its rough edges, and are excited about what the game is trying to do, and I think you’ve hit the perfect storm. In the hands of that kind of group, AD&D 2nd Edition is almost impossible to beat.
But I don’t have that group.
And trying to push 2nd Edition onto the group I do have wouldn’t magically recreate the D&D experience I’m nostalgic for. More likely, I’d spend half my time explaining, defending, ignoring, or house-ruling the very things they don’t like as I field complaints.
At that point, what exactly am I preserving, the game, or just the name on the cover?
D&D sucks?
Strategically, I know that playing the wrong D&D with my group is probably a bad idea. It’s just not going to go anywhere good and will ultimately reinforce the idea that “D&D sucks”, a common phrase uttered in my gaming circles. Worse yet, a failed attempt might spoil the potential of the many D&D-like games out there that reinvent its architecture in more modern and interesting ways, some of which I might actually have a chance of getting to the table.
In fact, I have dedicated a considerable amount of time over the last few years trying to find, even create, that perfect D&D variant that might actually work for my gaming crew. Past attempts have had mixed, mostly bad results, but seeing everyone genuinely enjoying Forbidden Lands, a very distant cousin to D&D, but a cousin nonetheless, has given me some new hope.
I think the trick to succeeding is first understanding what my players actually mean when they say “D&D sucks.” Perhaps not just my players but all players out there, as this reflex accusation levied at D&D is quite common no matter where you look.
After all, D&D isn’t one game. It’s not even one system. Hell, I’m not convinced it’s even one style or theme. That is both the problem and, potentially, the thing that gives me some hope.
In a strange way, I think my players actually do like D&D. They just like D&D as a concept more than they like any of the specific versions of it they have actually played.
I know, for example, that they don’t like Bonus Actions, Healing Surges, THAC0 or percentile dice rolling. They don’t want tactical combat or slow gameplay progression. They are very story-focused and generally prefer quick, sensible resolutions and abstractions over gamified lever pulling. None of this is theoretical either. These are conclusions I have drawn from games we have actually played together.
There is something else worth considering here, however, and that is execution.
One thing I have noticed about my gaming group is that even a weak system can work if the story is good and the atmosphere at the table is right. A game can mechanically be completely not our bag of chips, and we can still have a great time with it, there can still be a considerable buy-in from everyone.
Our experience with Pathfinder 2nd Edition is probably the best example.
For all its praise as a competitor to D&D, I think Pathfinder 2nd Edition is a wildly overcooked system. It takes the “rules of the game” concept so literally that at times it feels like it has attempted to codify the entire concept of roleplaying.
We appreciated it as a rules system in the sense that we could admire the complexity and intricacy of the design, but as a practical system at the table it constantly interfered with the thing we were actually there to do.
Roleplay.
I mean, the only thing in Pathfinder 2nd Edition you don’t roll for is talking, and that’s only true some of the time.
Yet we had a great story, great characters and some amazing GMing, which produced a genuinely fun campaign despite the system being rather exhausting.
I remember leveling up in particular being one of the biggest chores. Pathfinder 2nd Edition may be the first and only RPG I have ever played where gaining a level felt more like a punishment than a reward.
Part of the problem was that the game scales so aggressively alongside the characters. Your bonuses go up, but so do the DCs, monsters and obstacles you are expected to face. The numbers get bigger, your character sheet gets more complicated and you gain more mechanical levers to pull, but in actual play it often felt like I was running just to stay in the same place.
At 1st level I might need a 15 on the die to accomplish the sort of difficult task appropriate for a 1st level character. Many levels later, after adding an impressive pile of numbers to my character sheet, I might still need roughly that same 15 to accomplish the sort of difficult task the game now considers appropriate for me.
Obviously there is considerably more mechanical nuance to Pathfinder 2nd Edition than that, but from the player’s side of the screen that was often what progression felt like.
More numbers. More abilities. More rules. More things to remember.
Not necessarily more capable, and nothing that was added improved the experience in any meaningful way, quite to the contrary, all the rules kind of spoiled the fun.
The point of this little Pathfinder detour is that I already know one important thing about whatever version of D&D I eventually put in front of this group.
It needs to get out of the way, it needs to be consumable and approachable; in a sense, it needs to be simple.
It needs quick resolutions, sensible abstractions and enough empty space for us to roleplay without constantly consulting the machinery of the game.
Because that is where my group lives. You could say we are closer to the theatre kids version of D&D than we are to the kick down the doors and murder everything that moves sort of players.
Picking The Right D&D Variant
Now I know what defenders of X or Y edition are going to say.
Don’t use mechanics to replace roleplaying. Just wing it. Change this rule. Ignore that rule. Adapt the game to your playstyle. The rules are just guidelines. Etc… etc…
The internet is full of this kind of advice, but at the end of the day the reality at the table is that whatever a system does mechanically is generally how people are going to use it mechanically.
If there is an Insight skill, people are going to use the Insight skill.
It’s just how it is.
Of course, as the GM I can change rules, ignore mechanics, make rulings on the fly and generally beat the system into whatever shape I want. I’ve been running RPGs long enough to know how to do that.
But that isn’t what I want.
I want to be able to hand my players a rule system and let them use it. I want them to engage with the mechanics without those mechanics derailing either their vision or mine for the campaign, the story and, most importantly, the space they need to roleplay.
When I wrote my Top 10 Versions of Dungeons & Dragons article, one of the goals beyond simply coming up with the list was to dissect the different variants in the hope of finding one I might actually be able to put in front of my players.
Going back through that list with everything I know about my group, the process of elimination produces a surprisingly clear result.
We are currently playing Forbidden Lands, number 10 on my list, and despite its low ranking, it was a serious contender. The fact that one of my buddies independently picked it up and is currently running a campaign with it, which everyone is enjoying, suggests that I must be onto something.
Forbidden Lands gets a lot right for this group. Unfortunately, as I already pointed out, it isn’t D&D. It’s not even particularly close mechanically. It’s more like a distant cousin that occasionally shows up at the family reunion wearing a suit of armor. I love playing it, but it’s not the one I want to run.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition, number 9, has already been tried and executed for crimes against free time. It’s simply too heavy and too mechanically involved for what my group wants out of an RPG.
Castles & Crusades, number 8, has considerably more potential. In fact, this might be my second attempt if the first one doesn’t work out. It’s core sword and sorcery, relatively clean and, to me, feels a bit like an alternate history version of 3rd Edition D&D. The version we might have gotten if Gygax had remained at the helm, made his peace with some modernization, and didn’t insist on maintaining backwards compatibility with 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D.
Modern 5e, number 7, is certainly more direct than Pathfinder 2nd Edition, but for my purposes it suffers from much the same problem. Too much rules weight. Too many mechanics. Too many levers. The same basic criticism applies to 3rd Edition and Pathfinder 1st Edition at number 6.
Dungeon Crawl Classics, number 5, is an interesting one because we actually tried it.
Unfortunately, we played it online during the pandemic.
It went fine. We had fun with it. Nobody hated it, but nobody exactly fell in love with it either. Its reception was mostly just… meh.
In fairness to Dungeon Crawl Classics, I suspect that had as much to do with our general dislike of playing RPGs online as it did with the system itself. I actually think DCC is a really fun game and, on paper at least, it fits much of what I’m looking for here.
Unfortunately, those memories muddy the waters a bit. If I’m trying to sell my group on D&D again, starting with “remember that game we played online that none of us were particularly excited about” isn’t exactly putting my best foot forward.
So DCC is out.
AD&D 1st Edition at number 4 and AD&D 2nd Edition at number 1 both run into the same problem.
Legacy.
My group is simply the wrong generation for nostalgia to smooth over the rough edges. When I look at some strange subsystem in AD&D, I see history, charm and a particular philosophy about how D&D should work.
They just see a strange subsystem.
Their nostalgia lives elsewhere. 3rd Edition D&D and the Swedish classic Drakar och Demoner, known today in English-speaking markets as Dragonbane, are much closer to the games of their youth. Even those games, however, hold little interest for them as something to revisit today. They are not nostalgia gamers, to put it plainly.
Which brings me to B/X and BECMI at number 3.
I think these games come considerably closer. They are simpler than AD&D, cleaner in many places, and represent what I consider to be some of the best versions of classic D&D ever produced. There is a reason so much of the OSR traces its DNA back to Basic and Expert D&D.
But I think they would ultimately suffer the same fate.
Descending Armor Class, race as class, and all the other little artifacts of early D&D design would immediately identify the game as old to my players. I could convert things, house-rule things, and modernize things, but once again I’m back to trying to convince my players to look past the system rather than simply giving them a system they actually want to use.
And that defeats the entire purpose of this exercise.
So after eliminating the games that are too complicated, too modern, too old, too nostalgic, not nostalgic enough, already tried, mechanically unsuitable or simply not actually D&D, I am left with one game from my list.
Number 2. Dolmenwood.
And the more I look at it, the more I think Dolmenwood might be the version of D&D my group doesn’t know they want.
Dolmenwood – The Great Hope
There are actually five unique things about Dolmenwood that I think will register with my group and, perhaps, might do the same for a lot of modern gamers.
A Setting-Driven Game
While Dolmenwood is a D&D variant, a sort of modernized version of what 1st Edition D&D might look like if you designed it today, one of the key elements of that design is that it’s made for a specific setting.
I believe, for my group and probably a lot of groups for that matter, that a system designed specifically for its setting creates a much stronger connection between mechanics, lore, and story. The rules aren’t simply dropped on top of the world; they are part of the world.
This works much better than “generic” systems adapted to settings. In fact, I consider this to be one of D&D’s most prolific flaws as a system, despite it being responsible for the creation of some of my favorite fantasy settings.
It always happens that the system just doesn’t quite match the story.
In Dolmenwood, everything from race and class selection to spells, abilities, skills, and even the aesthetic of the equipment has a story behind it. More importantly, these aren’t just bits of flavor text. They have connections to the game world that players can discover as they explore it.
Dolmenwood is also sword-and-sorcery medieval fantasy in tone, yet it departs heavily from the traditional Tolkien aesthetic and themes. This gives the game a darker, meaner, and sometimes much stranger edge, while still keeping you firmly in recognizable fantasy territory.
More importantly, it stays quite distant from the superhero fantasy of modern D&D. You are mortal creatures. You are vulnerable. You are very often outmatched by the fantastical things inhabiting this world, and that vulnerability gives those things weight.
One potential complaint I expect to field from my group is the setting’s heavy inspiration from folklore and fairy tales, which includes anthropomorphic creatures like the Grimalkin, shapeshifting cat-like people.
Yeah… I can already hear the grumbling.
I don’t think it’s going to be game-breaking, however. There are plenty of other cool choices, including naturally humans and elves, and given Dolmenwood’s old-school D&D DNA, expanding the options with compatible material isn’t exactly difficult.
Suffice it to say, I think the setting, and in particular the story behind the setting and its deep, inspired writing, is a fantastic foundation for a lot of very cool adventures.
Which brings me to the big picture.
A Grand Story With Freedom of Choice
One big thing I always look for in a role-playing game is a well-defined, structured, and organized story built into the world I’m going to run.
This is probably why games like Vampire: The Masquerade and Alternity’s Star*Drive campaign setting remain among my favorites. I’m a sucker for a great backdrop: a deep, expansive story built into the setting that occupies the imaginations of the players regardless of what goals they ultimately decide to pursue.
Dolmenwood has that in spades.
Grand history. Ancient enemies. Cultural dilemmas. Wars. Geopolitical maneuvering. Old grudges. Weird mysteries. All of that good stuff that gives players something to attach themselves to a cause, an identity, a belief and, most importantly, a sense of direction and purpose.
Dolmenwood is a story filled with secrets and forgotten, dangerous places, but these aren’t simply “adventuring locations” waiting around for the players to clear them out. Everything is a set piece in a larger story.
More importantly, the history of Dolmenwood isn’t just a bunch of stuff that happened centuries ago and now sits in the campaign book as background reading for the GM. Its history is alive. The grudges, conflicts, mysteries and consequences of the past are specifically designed to matter right now.
That is the magic trick.
As soon as the players start exploring the world, they start discovering these things and inevitably become involved in the grand story hidden between the many pages of the campaign setting.
Because the mechanics themselves are also tied to that story, the players have an immediate sense of relevance in the game world. They aren’t tourists visiting Dolmenwood. They belong there.
Inevitably, they are going to become an important part of its history.
For me, that’s the perfect setup for a great D&D campaign: give the players a world already in motion, then let them choose sides and write their own script for how the story unfolds.
Mechanically Familiar & Simple
When I say I want to run D&D, I mean something fairly specific, and Dolmenwood is unmistakably D&D.
Anyone who has played D&D before is going to understand what is going on almost immediately, yet there are aspects of Dolmenwood that I think lean into the best parts of classic D&D while quietly cutting away some of the worst.
Gone are archaic concepts like THAC0, descending Armor Class and some of the stranger old-school subsystems. In their place are quick, standardized and easy-to-remember mechanics, with some mathematical footwork done behind the scenes to simplify elements like skill checks and combat sequencing.
In fact, many of the “new” things in Dolmenwood are really just improved versions of old things, which helps cement the idea that this is still D&D, simply designed with an eye toward modernization.
One of my favorite aspects of the game is the attention paid to areas of adventuring that traditionally become routine bookkeeping.
Dolmenwood absolutely caters to the survival aspect of old-school D&D, but it simplifies much of the resource management in a way that reminds me of Forbidden Lands. Food, water, arrows, torches and other supplies still matter because they are critical to maintaining that survival experience, but you aren’t constantly buried in microscopic bookkeeping just to preserve it.
The combat routine in particular is something I like a lot.
D&D combat has a tendency to get bogged down. It’s often slow, highly mechanical, and intensely tactical, which I have always found strangely contradictory to the fast-moving pulp fantasy heroics the game is supposedly trying to portray.
Dolmenwood goes in the other direction.
Combat is gritty, fast, furious and dangerous. Rounds are still sufficiently structured to ensure combat is tactically more interesting than a simple roll-off, but the sequence is logical and intuitive enough that the storytelling remains at the forefront.
You’re not just pulling mechanical levers off a character sheet. You’re describing actions in a role-playing rhythm, while the tactical layer quietly supports what is happening in the fiction.
Players still have roles to fill. Jobs to perform. Things they excel at. Vulnerabilities that matter.
It feels like a fight rather than a board game interrupting the role-playing session.
A Foundational Campaign
One thing about my players, and I suspect this may register with a lot of groups out there, is that they don’t really want one-shots, short adventures or to walk into a game knowing their stay is limited to X number of sessions before the story is over.
They want broad, long-term campaigns. They just don’t want to commit to one.
Welcome to adult role-playing.
A weekly campaign spanning several years is absolutely in their wheelhouse conceptually; they simply can’t reliably afford the time. So they’re resistant to short-term games while simultaneously being unable to commit to long-term ones.
It’s a wonderfully stupid problem.
I think the best answer is what I would call a foundational campaign: a setting where you can have adventures and build characters without committing to some enormous predetermined campaign arc.
The story isn’t the commitment. The place is.
It’s somewhere the group can continually return to, building a shared history together, building familiarity with its denizens, and picking things up wherever they left off even if the real-world time span between sessions is months apart.
Dolmenwood is written almost perfectly for that style of play.
There are countless plots, adventure locations, strange people, mysteries and individual stories. While the whole setting is connected through a handful of larger narratives, you don’t have to embark on some epic multi-year quest to get satisfaction out of it.
There is simply a ton to do.
It’s a little bit like Diablo in that sense. You can do everything from a single-session delve to a multi-part adventure, to a grand epic quest, and none of it feels wasted because everything exists within the same lore, history and milieu.
Every adventure adds another little piece to the group’s history with the place.
Dolmenwood is good for a visit of almost any length.
Extreme Compatibility
The final piece is Dolmenwood’s compatibility with the enormous ecosystem of D&D and OSR material, and this is where the real magic happens for a GM like me.
Because underneath everything, Dolmenwood is delightfully, recognizably D&D, adapting material from across the game’s history is generally pretty painless.
Classic monsters, adventures, magic items, dungeons, and ideas can all be pulled into Dolmenwood without having to rebuild the entire game around them. Old-school and OSR material in particular is practically begging to be raided for parts, while material from newer editions can usually be converted with a little common sense.
And that matters.
After fifty years, D&D has accumulated a ludicrous amount of material. Adventures, settings, monsters, classes, spells, magic items, house rules, weird subsystems, and thousands upon thousands of ideas created by professionals, hobbyists, and lunatics with access to a word processor.
Dolmenwood gives me access to that library without forcing me to inherit all of D&D’s baggage along with it.
That’s the sweet spot.
It feels a little like a vanilla version of D&D, except one that has been remastered with modern sensibilities. It avoids much of the mechanical weirdness of old-school D&D while simultaneously sidestepping the overcooked “lever systems” of modern D&D.
The result is one of the more flexible D&D architectures I’ve encountered. And for a GM, flexibility is freedom.
It means that when I find a great monster, adventure, mechanic, dungeon or idea buried somewhere in fifty years of D&D history, my first thought doesn’t have to be:
“Can I make this work?” It’s usually: “Where can I put it?”
That swings the door wide open for creativity.
And perhaps that’s ultimately the strongest argument I can make for Dolmenwood.
It’s a version of D&D that rarely has to say no.
Conclusion
This turned out to be a much bigger article than I expected, and I’m not even sure how many people out there will relate to my very specific local gaming dilemma. But if this blog is anything, it’s an ongoing dialogue about my gaming experiences, and figuring out what RPGs I actually want to run and play has always been a never-ending challenge for me.
In fact, it’s been a while since I’ve actually run anything, in part because I’m picky about what I run. I don’t want to start a campaign simply for the sake of having a game on the calendar. I want to be excited about it, and I want to believe that what I’m putting in front of my players has a real chance of working for us.
Whether or not Dolmenwood actually makes it to the table remains to be seen.
What I do have, however, is the strange satisfaction of finally having made a decision. After digging through editions, variants, old-school games, modern games and all the different ideas about what D&D is supposed to be, I’ve landed somewhere.
If I’m going to run D&D again, Dolmenwood is the game I’m going to run.
A decision contemplated, dissected, and finally made.
Now I just need to get the bastards to show up.
