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In Theory: Finding The Right D&D For My Group

September 27, 2026 5 Minutes 1 Comment

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.

The success of Baldur’s Gate 3 can be attributed to a lot of things, but if I were to paraphrase it, it’s because of its quintessential D&Dness. There is no denying how well the 5e mechanics translated into a video game, it was practically made for it.

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.

Deathbringer, the latest and greatest out of the OSR, is no doubt a great rendition and take on old-school D&D using modern mechanics. I have full faith in Professor DM, and I definitely think the OSR is starting to branch further and further away from its archaic legacy systems. It’s really only in the last couple of years though, that this started happening. Most games in the OSR have sort of re-affirmed the legacy stuff, and I don’t think my players have any interest in that sort of thing.

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.

Forbidden Lands is one of the unique early cases of the OSR producing something modern and unique without relying on legacy D&D rules, yet firmly hardwired as an old-school-style game. It’s kind of a horror survival game in a fantasy world with a bit of a post-apocalypse feel. It actually reminds me a lot of Dark Sun.

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.

I love 2nd edition AD&D mainly because I think it captures that D&D Sword and Sorcery feel. It does have quite a few chinks in the armor, especially when compared to modern RPG’s. It’s flawed perfection if there is such a thing.

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.

My group played Pathfinder 2nd Edition for a pretty extended period; we bought all the books, we did a full mental buy-in, and it was fun. In hindsight, though, I don’t think the system had anything to do at all with what we enjoyed about the campaign. In fact, I would argue it was despite the system, not because of it, that the campaign was successful. We liked our characters, the story, the world. The system itself was a constant nuisance.

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.

You see the issue between role-playing, story, and player-DM desires for outcome and what a system produces when watching Critical Role. It’s so crystal clear to me that D&D 5e is the absolutetly wrong mechanic for this group, the game itself is constantly getting under their feet. It also shows, however, that a good gaming group can make any system work. I honestly believe that if this gaming group wasn’t famous running a show on YouTube and they were just playing together for fun at home, they would have abandoned D&D 5e a long time ago.

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.

I think Dungeon Crawl Classics is a great system overall, but it does use these rather wierd and oddly shaped dice, an aspect of the game that really serves no logical purpose. It’s just wierd for wierdness sake, it doesn’t do anything at all to make the game better.

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.

Choosing Dolmenwood from the list I agonized over for the Top 10 Versions of Dungeons and Dragons was not the first thing I did to come to that conclusion. I have actually spent about 3-4 years painstakingly creating my own version of D&D for this very purpose. It was the release of Old School Essentials and games like Dolmenwood that really caused me to abandon those projects. I came to the realization that there are much better designers and writers out there, it was a much easier process to choose one of those systems.

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.

I love the approach to story Dolmenwood takes, not just in how the books for this campaign are written, but how the writer understands that the point of a campaign setting is to be a starting point for the creativity of a GM. It hands you a seed that you can plant and grow yourself. Dolmenwood doesn’t give you a whole story, it gives you just enough for you to create your own and as such, its not a complete work, it requires a GM to write the script.

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.

Many parts of Dolmenwood are really fleshed out, in particular some of the historical bad guys like The Cold Prince. To me, this is a critical part of a good setting, I want to know who the big bad guys are, what are they up to, what motivates them. Dolmenwood understands this and really gives you the tools to bring these bad guys to life.

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.

Dolmenwood is based on Old School Essentials, but where OSE was a generic system for sword and sorcery fantasy, effectively a re-edit of Basic/Expert rules, Dolmenwood is reworked with the specific setting and style that setting is trying to bring to the table. It’s so much more vivid and in focus and it’s precisely this focus that I think makes it stand out so far and beyond the game on which its based.

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.

The Dolmenwood Campaign Book is a massive tome, overflowing with story seeds, adventures, bad guys, awesome locations, factions, culture and so much more. Everything is written with usability in mind, you don’t have to read this book cover to cover to run a good Dolmenwood campaign. Turn to any page and it’s always a self contained, clearly defined thing you can use at the table. Gavin Norman, the creator of Dolmenwood is a master editor. The book is pitch perfect.

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.

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September 18, 2026 5 Minutes

–By Søren Kamper

Søren is a guest writer here at Gamersdungeon, and we are thrilled to have him. It’s been a well-established goal that I have wanted to achieve to have more voices speaking through the Gamersdungeon platform, so big thanks, Søren, for your contribution. You’re always welcome!
– Gamersdungeon

The best licensed games do not merely put familiar names on cards and miniatures. They ask a harder question: what should this universe force the player to do?

Star Wars is unusually easy to decorate a game with. Put Darth Vader on the box, scatter a few TIE fighters across the table, add a Wilhelm scream at a suitable moment and the licence is immediately doing visible work. The harder part begins when the box is open. A game can look exactly like Star Wars and still behave like something that could have been about medieval merchants, colonial railways or highly competitive turnip farmers. Theme is cheap when it only changes the nouns. The interesting licensed games are the ones where the verbs change too.

That is one reason Trials of Maya is such a useful recent example of the broader problem. A MOBA-inspired tabletop game cannot simply borrow colourful heroes and lanes as scenery; it has to translate a genre built around unique abilities, pressure, positioning and team roles into decisions that survive contact with cardboard. Star Wars tabletop design faces the same test. The galaxy already arrives with forty-nine years of expectations attached. The rules either turn those expectations into pressure, or they leave them sitting politely in the artwork.

The most interesting Star Wars games usually choose the former. Star Wars: Rebellion makes the Empire and the Rebel Alliance feel different before anybody quotes a film. Outer Rim turns the scoundrel fantasy into an economy of fame, jobs and people who are angry with you. Armada makes commanding a capital ship feel like issuing an order to something too large to change its mind quickly. The Clone Wars takes the relentless spread of a galactic conflict and turns it into cooperative triage. And, now, Zero Company shows that the same philosophy works when the table becomes a screen.

Rebellion: asymmetry does the storytelling

Rebellion works because its two sides are not simply different colours with slightly different unit values. The Empire has ships, troops, production and enough plastic to make the table look as though somebody has emptied a military warehouse onto it. The Rebels have a secret. Their base is hidden, the Empire has to find it, and almost every major decision follows from that imbalance. One side occupies space and gathers information. The other side survives by being difficult to locate, disrupting plans and making every Imperial deployment feel faintly suspicious.

Star Wars Rebellion is often described as “Star Wars In a Box”, a sentiment I fully agree with. It truly captures the sensation of watching A New Hope, with every mechanical and thematic detail perfectly captured. I fully agree with Soren here; it’s almost a magic trick what they manage to pull off with this game mechanically.

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That sounds obvious because it is exactly how the original trilogy works, but that is the achievement. The hidden base is not flavour text explaining why the Rebel player starts with fewer pieces. It is the central engine. Probe cards eliminate possibilities. Imperial fleets spread out because ignorance is expensive. Rebel missions create diversions because a weaker military force cannot afford to play the same game as its opponent. Even the victory conditions are telling different stories: the Empire needs to discover and crush the base, while the Rebels need to outlast the machine long enough for resistance and reputation to grow.

There is a useful comparison with War of the Ring, another licensed design where asymmetry is not a balance problem to be sanded down but the entire point. Sauron should have armies the Free Peoples cannot sensibly match. The Fellowship should have a different route to victory. In both games, the source material gives the designer permission to make the players uncomfortable in different ways. Balance does not require sameness. In fact, sameness would destroy the fiction.

Rebellion is not beyond criticism. Repeated play can expose its structure, and the hunt for the base can occasionally end with the strategic equivalent of opening the correct cupboard by accident. But even those weaknesses reveal how completely the theme and mechanism are fused. If the search loses tension, the game loses Star Wars with it. That is a far more interesting failure than a game whose theme could be replaced by changing the card art.

Outer Rim: Han Solo is a job description

Outer Rim operates at the opposite scale. There is no galactic command chair, no Death Star to position and no reason to care which government controls the Core. The fantasy is smaller and, in its own way, more recognisably Star Wars: get a ship, find work, improve the ship, hire somebody useful, annoy the wrong faction, and become famous enough that people eventually stop asking whether the hyperdrive was legally acquired.

Never had the pleasure, but it’s been on my radar for a long time. I have an affinity for Corey Konieczka’s work, in fact, looking at my gaming shelves, this designer takes up a lot of shelf space. I believe it’s his attention to detail when it comes to linking theme and mechanics together flawlessly that sets him apart as a designer.

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The goal is fame, but the important part is how many roads lead there. Bounties ask you to hunt people. Jobs turn the map into a chain of opportunities and complications. Cargo can be profitable until a patrol takes an interest. Reputation with the Empire, Rebels, Hutts and crime syndicates changes how safely you can move through the same space. The result is that being a scoundrel is not communicated by a portrait of Han Solo grinning from a card. It is communicated by the fact that your best plan is often profitable, questionable and likely to create a second problem before it solves the first.

That is what good thematic design does. It asks what behaviour the fiction should produce. Star Wars smugglers are not interesting because they own fast ships. They are interesting because they live inside networks of debts, favours, employers, rivals and authorities. Outer Rim turns those relationships into a playable economy. A patrol is not just an enemy token. It is a reminder that your previous decisions have a memory.

Armada: a Star Destroyer should not corner like a shopping trolley

Armada may be the purest example of a physical mechanism explaining fictional scale. Star Wars has always told us that capital ships are enormous, but film can cheat. A camera cuts, John Williams does the heavy lifting, and suddenly several kilometres of metal seem perfectly nimble. A tabletop game has to make mass something you can feel.

Soren is absolutetly correct here that Star Wars Armada captures the sensation of what we see on screen mechanically. The added magic trick is that Armada is a deep well of strategic possibilities. This is a war game in the purest sense, with a tremendous amount of Star Wars-based sci-fi realism assumptions that work as strategies. It remains one of my favorite miniature games of all time, a true masterpiece.

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The command stack does exactly that. Larger ships plan commands in advance, with orders buried in a queue before they are executed. A navigation command chosen now may be the thing that saves you later, assuming you guessed correctly about where the battle would be by then. That delay creates command friction without requiring a thirty-page subsystem about naval bureaucracy. The Star Destroyer feels large because your intentions take time to travel through it.

Movement reinforces the same idea. The manoeuvre tool does not merely measure distance; it gives large ships arcs, inertia and commitments. You are steering a capital vessel, not dragging a miniature to a convenient spot because the ruler says it fits. The contrast with the movement-first design of Star Wars: X-Wing is instructive. X-Wing uses hidden manoeuvre dials to create the uncertainty of a dogfight, where reading an opponent matters because fighters can change the geometry of a battle in seconds. Armada slows that thought process down. Both games are about Star Wars ships, but they are not asking the same question.

This is where a licence becomes useful rather than restrictive. The designer does not need one universal movement system for every spacecraft. A TIE fighter and an Imperial-class Star Destroyer should not feel related simply because both have engines. One is a knife fight. The other is urban planning with turbolasers.

The Clone Wars: Pandemic becomes a war

Star Wars: The Clone Wars takes a more visible shortcut because its foundation is the Pandemic System. That could easily have produced a reskin: replace disease cubes with battle droids, rename outbreaks, put a Jedi on the cover and go home early. Instead, the useful question is what the Pandemic structure already understands. Pressure spreads. Problems multiply while you are solving different problems. No player can be everywhere, and ignoring one region because another looks more dramatic is exactly how a manageable board becomes a disaster.

I’m going to have to take Soren’s word on this one; I have neither played Star Wars Clone Wars, nor am I a particularly big fan of the Pandemic series in general. For me, the issue that Soren suggests is not a problem in this variant of Pandemic games is that it suffers from “Alpha Gamer Syndrome,” where a single, experienced player is pretty much going to dictate the decisions for the less experienced players.

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That rhythm fits the Clone Wars remarkably well. Jedi move from planet to planet, droids accumulate, blockades obstruct routes, missions demand attention and villains push the game toward specific kinds of trouble. The system creates the feeling that the Republic is permanently short of time. Winning is not about clearing the map and admiring a clean galaxy. It is about deciding which crisis can be allowed to remain ugly for one more turn.

The best cooperative games understand that cooperation needs adversity rather than politeness. The appeal of designs built around genuine shared pressure is that the table has to negotiate priorities, not merely distribute chores. The Clone Wars inherits that strength from Pandemic and gives it a particularly suitable costume. Ahsoka, Obi-Wan and their allies are powerful, but the war is larger than any one of them. A Jedi can solve the problem in front of them. The rules make sure there is always another planet on fire.

Zero Company: the rules engine leaves the table

The interesting thing is that this design philosophy no longer stops at the edge of the table. Star Wars Zero Company is a single-player turn-based tactics game rather than a board game, but it is wrestling with the same question: how do you make the Clone Wars behave like more than a backdrop for blaster fire? Its answer is to make people, time and preparation into resources.

Everyone is talking about this game right now, it’s being hailed as one of the best Star Wars Games ever made by some reviewers, a claim I have heard many times said about many Star Wars Games. It does look awesome, and it’s definitely on the list!

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On the battlefield, operators spend action points to move, attack, assist, use abilities and hold positions with overwatch. That is the familiar tactical layer. The more interesting translation happens around it. At the Den, the company chooses between missions and non-combat operations, and it cannot do everything in a cycle. Injured operators may be poor choices for dangerous deployments. Relationships between squad members can strengthen or weaken, with bonds unlocking combat synergies. Optional permadeath means a bad decision can become a permanent absence rather than a quick reload-shaped inconvenience.

A complete Zero Company guide quickly becomes less about listing guns and more about explaining those interlocking systems: squad builds, bonds, recovery, resources, the Den and the consequences of deciding who goes where. That is precisely why the game belongs in this conversation. The Clone Wars are not only represented by clone armour, familiar planets and a Jedi in the squad. The fiction is asking the player to behave like the commander of a small organisation operating inside a conflict far larger than itself.

There is a faint tabletop logic to the whole thing. You look at a roster, weigh limited actions, accept that one objective may have to be sacrificed for another and then live with the state you created. The computer handles the arithmetic, animation and line-of-sight calculations, but the dramatic mechanism is familiar: scarcity turns lore into decisions. The player does not merely watch a squad become close. The rules pay out when those relationships become tactically useful, and punish you when people are injured, unavailable or dead.

The real question is what the licence makes you do

Licensed games are often judged first by recognition. Does Vader look right? Are the miniatures detailed? Is the terminology correct? Those things matter, especially with a universe as obsessively catalogued as Star Wars, but they are the easy part. A game can pass every visual inspection and still feel strangely hollow once the first turn begins.

The stronger test is mechanical. The Empire should make you feel powerful and blind at the same time. A smuggler should make money by creating future complications. A Star Destroyer should force you to think several minutes ahead because several kilometres of warship cannot simply perform a tidy little U-turn. A Jedi in the Clone Wars should be extraordinary and still unable to be on six planets at once. A mercenary squad should become more valuable, and more frightening to risk, as its people develop relationships and history.

One example I think could have been part of this list to make the point is Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit. Strangely, the game does such an amazing job of linking theme and mechanics that it’s gained cult status among board game and Star Wars fans alike, and this is despite the fact that it’s actually not a particularly good game. It just nails that connection so well that it becomes “good” despite its flaws. It nails the point home that when theme and mechanics are synced up, even a mediocre game becomes good.

This is also why thematic games can survive long after the pleasure of recognising the artwork has faded. Star Wars: Destiny and Star Wars: Unlimited approach the licence through another design tradition entirely, but the same tension remains: familiar characters can attract us to the table, while the system has to give them something meaningful to do once they arrive. Theme is not the presence of Luke Skywalker. Theme is the set of pressures that makes a player understand why Luke Skywalker matters here.

That is the difference between Star Wars as decoration and Star Wars as a rules engine. A TIE fighter is a miniature; uncertainty and speed make it a dogfighter. A bounty hunter is a portrait; fame, contracts and faction heat make it a career. The Clone Wars is a logo; cascading crises make it a war. When the design gets that translation right, the game stops asking us to admire the galaxy from outside. It makes us obey its logic for a few hours.

And that may be the finest trick a licensed game can pull. The box eventually closes, the miniatures go back into their trays, and somebody spends ten minutes looking for the one token that has somehow migrated under the sofa. But for the length of the game, the rules made the galaxy exist.

–About the author–

Søren Kamper is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, an independent site covering the history, design and present-day world of Star Wars video games. He has been writing about Star Wars games since 2009.

In Theory

In Theory: AI Art In Board Games

June 20, 2026 5 Minutes

While I generally try to avoid controversy on this site and stick to what I enjoy most, reviewing games, talking about games and, well… more games, now and then a subject comes along that is simply impossible to ignore.

This is one of those subjects.

As someone who reviews board games, I’m increasingly running into games that use AI-generated artwork, which means I have to make a decision about how I’m going to treat them. Do I ignore it? Mention it? Penalize it? Celebrate it? Pretend it isn’t there and hope nobody notices?

Sooner or later, I have to put my cards on the table, explain my position and live with the consequences. The internet being what it is, remaining silent makes you complicit, while saying anything at all guarantees that one tribe or the other will decide you’re the villain of the week. It’s a remarkable system we’ve built for ourselves in which you are always left with a lose-lose scenario.

I’ve touched on AI artwork in a few previous reviews, most recently Syncanite Foundation and Kingdom Legacy, and those conversations have helped me work out where I stand. But scattered comments buried inside reviews aren’t enough anymore. I need to make dealing with AI art work part of my rating system, so that I can respond to it in an objective and fair way.

So this article will be the official GamersDungeon position on AI artwork in board games, how I’m going to approach it as a reviewer and, most importantly, how it will impact the rating/scores that games receive going forward.

The Controversy

Unless you’ve been hiding under a particularly large and comfortable rock, you’re probably aware that AI is everywhere. In the tabletop hobby, and especially in board games, role playing games and miniature games, AI-generated artwork has become one of the most divisive subjects around.

Mention it in a comment section, and you’ll usually have enough material for a three-day flame war.

While there are dozens of individual arguments and plenty of grey areas, the debate generally revolves around three major points.

The first is that generative AI art is fundamentally a form of theft. The argument is that AI models are trained on existing artwork created by real artists and then produce derivative images without permission, attribution or compensation. In other words, the machine is standing on the shoulders of artists who never agreed to hold it up.

Adobe Firefly combats Generative AI theft by training it’s AI on public domain images and images willingly provided by artists. This is just one of many unique methods that put to question the argument that Generative AI images are theft. Hence the problem with this argument.

The second argument is economic. Every AI image used by a publisher is potentially one less commission for a human artist. If a company can generate an illustration in minutes instead of paying an illustrator, more profit stays with the publisher, while fewer opportunities exist for the people who built the artistic foundation AI relies upon. To critics, it isn’t just replacing jobs, it’s replacing them with something built from the work of those same artists.

Finally, there is the quality argument. Critics often describe AI art as soulless, repetitive, and creatively hollow, produced by systems that consume enormous amounts of computing power and energy simply to flood the internet with an endless stream of technically competent but artistically disposable images. The term AI slop didn’t appear out of nowhere.

There are plenty of smaller arguments, edge cases and philosophical rabbit holes that could fill an entire series of articles, but these three points are the heavy hitters. If I can explain where I stand on them, then I can also explain how AI artwork will be treated in reviews here on GamersDungeon going forward.

First, however, we have to talk about the elephant in the room.

Circumstances Matter

I’ve never had much patience for ivory tower thinking or the modern habit of treating every issue like it’s a football match where you have to pick a side and spend the next six months screaming at the other team.

The real world is a lot messier than that.

Real people have real jobs, real businesses, real families and real bills to pay. Artists, publishers, designers, consumers and even the people building AI tools all have different incentives and different circumstances. Any position that completely ignores one side in favour of ideological purity is, in my opinion, more interested in winning an argument than solving a problem.

Kingdom Legacy and Fryxelius Games is a great example of circumstances mattering. This is a family run business of creative people who are doing their best to bring great games to us. They however like all businesses have to make compromises. In the case of Kingdom Legacy, your talking about producing art for 140 quardruple sided cards requiring around 500 images for a game that can’t cost more than 10-15 bucks for it to be marketable. Had Fryxelius games hired an artist to create these images this game would never see the light of day and if it did it would cost more than anyone would be willing to pay for a game that is effectively a box with 140 cards in it.

That isn’t particularly useful to me.

So I’m not going to approach AI artwork from the perspective of absolute morality, nor am I going to pretend that technological progress can simply be wished away. My position has to account for the many people affected by it, which means it’s inevitably going to be a compromise.

To put it plainly, I’m not taking the easy route of saying “I refuse to review games with AI art” and I’m equally not going to shrug and say “I don’t care, embrace the future.”

Somewhere between those two extremes is a position that I think is both fair and practical. Whether you ultimately agree with it or not, I think it’s worth explaining how I arrived there before I tell you what the policy will be.

AI Art is Stealing

This is probably the biggest argument against AI-generated art, and it’s also the one I find the hardest to apply in practice.

Not because I know it isn’t true, but because I don’t know that it is.

I’m not an AI engineer, and I’m certainly not qualified to explain exactly what every image model is doing behind the scenes. More importantly, not every AI is trained the same way. Some models are trained on enormous collections of scraped images, while others are built from artwork that has been voluntarily submitted or properly licensed by the artists involved.

Those are very different situations.

A good example is Kingdom Legacy. After doing some research for that review, I discovered that the publisher uses an AI trained on artwork freely contributed by artists. If that’s the case, then the blanket statement that “AI art is theft” simply doesn’t apply.

The problem is that I can’t realistically investigate the AI training methods behind every game that uses AI-art I review, and even if I tried, publishers have no obligation to explain their workflow or be completely transparent about it.

So what am I supposed to do? Assume everyone is guilty until proven innocent? Or assume everyone is acting ethically until proven otherwise?

Neither approach seems particularly reasonable.

For that reason, I can’t base my review policy on the argument that AI art is inherently stealing. There are simply too many variables, too many different models and too many different ways of using the technology for me to conclude that every instance of generative AI is automatically unethical.

That’s not the same as saying the concern isn’t valid. It’s saying that, as a reviewer sitting behind a keyboard trying to decide whether a board game deserves a 3.5 or a 4, I don’t have enough information to make that judgment consistently or fairly.

So, for the most part, I set this argument aside. Not because I dismissed it, but because I don’t think it provides a practical foundation for a review policy.

They Took’ma’job!

I’m going to keep this one relatively short. Technology replaces people. It always has.

The printing press replaced scribes, photography replaced portrait painters, tractors replaced farm workers, digital distribution replaced video rental stores and the internet made life very uncomfortable for anyone who thought selling encyclopedias door to door was a long-term career plan.

We can resist it, protest it and argue about whether it’s a good thing, and sometimes those arguments are completely justified. History, however, has a habit of continuing anyway.

Dragonfoot Forums, one of the oldest D&D forums in existance has recently taken the decision to ban AI art from their forums and will moderate AI created material published through their site. This sort of reaction to AI art is common. Gamers everywhere are rejecting AI normalization and for good reason. Art is culture and AI is erasing it.

My personal philosophy has always been simple. Adapt and survive. Do I think it’s a good thing if artists lose work to AI? Absolutely not. But that isn’t actually what influences my reviews.

What influences my reviews is that I have yet to see AI-generated artwork that was worth replacing a human artist for in the first place.

That’s the important distinction.

I’m not making a moral judgment about technological progress. I’m making an artistic judgment about the end result.

And, quite frankly, I’m not impressed.

To me, AI artwork is shallow, repetitive and creatively uninteresting. I have no desire to sit here debating whether a particular image is “good AI” or “bad AI” any more than I want to debate whether instant coffee is “good coffee.” At best, it’s mediocre. At worst, it’s visual wallpaper that exists solely because someone needed a dragon by Tuesday afternoon.

Talent is something people develop over years of practice. Style is something people earn through experience, experimentation and failure. If the artwork in a game can be produced by me, my neighbour and a reasonably motivated golden retriever typing prompts into the same generator, then I struggle to assign much artistic value to it.

As a reviewer, that matters.

If I believe components contribute to the overall experience of a board game, then artwork is part of that equation, and artwork that I consider generic, uninspired or interchangeable should naturally be reflected in the score.

But even that isn’t really the heart of the issue.

The real reason AI art matters to me is something much more fundamental.

AI Art Has No Soul

This is the argument that ultimately matters to me.

I’ve already said that I’m unconvinced by the blanket claim that all AI art is theft and equally unconvinced that I can somehow stop technological progress by refusing to acknowledge it.

None of that changes the simple fact that I don’t like AI art. Not a little. Not “when it’s used badly.” I don’t like it at all.

The ecological cost, the enormous computing resources and the economic disruption only reinforce an opinion I already have, which is that the end result simply isn’t worth it. It’s an extraordinary amount of effort and energy being spent to produce something that, in my eyes, is artistically mediocre.

To me there is no masterpiece hiding inside AI-generated artwork, only different flavours of competent wallpaper. It can be technically impressive, visually striking and even useful, but I have yet to see anything that makes me stop and appreciate the person behind it.

Because there isn’t one.

Syncanite Foundation is one of those rare exceptions where I thought the AI art was well curated. It was the first review I ever did for a project with AI art however and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. In the end, I chose to just judge the art as I would any other, but it felt wrong. I don’t want to judge AI art, it felt empty, like I was speaking to a void rather than complimenting a persons hard work. This is what I want to avoid having to do in my reviews.

What makes art meaningful to me isn’t perfection. It’s the evidence that another human being sat down with a skill they spent years developing and created something that could only exist because they chose to make it. The mistakes, the style, the personality and even the imperfections are part of the experience.

That’s the soul.

AI removes the very thing I value most about art and replaces it with automation. It turns creativity into manufacturing, and while that may be efficient, efficiency has never been the quality that made me love board games, role playing games or miniature games in the first place.

So this is where I draw my line. Not because I think AI should be banned. Not because I think everyone who uses it is acting unethically. And not because I believe technology can be put back into the bottle.

But because, as a reviewer, I want to reward human creativity wherever I find it. Choosing a human artist over a prompt is, in my opinion, an investment in the very creative spirit that makes this hobby worth celebrating.

That’s my protest.

To me, replacing genuine artistic expression with AI artwork is like spray painting over a beautiful mural. The person holding the can may have perfectly reasonable motivations and the paint may even look neat from a distance, but something uniquely human has still been covered up in the process.

And that, more than any legal or economic argument, is why AI artwork will matter in my reviews.

Conclusion

I should probably end with a confession. I use AI art in my own projects.

When I wrote my D&D adventure The Lost Citadel, a project I’m genuinely proud of, I used AI-generated artwork for one very simple reason. I couldn’t afford to hire an artist, or perhaps more accurately, I didn’t want to afford hiring an artist. It was a hobby project, I did it for fun, not as a business venture.

That doesn’t suddenly make the artwork great.

If anything, I fully accept that the book is artistically less than it could have been. The illustrations do their job, but they don’t define the identity of the book the way a human artist could have. They lack personality, style and, for want of a better word, soul.

And if someone looked at The Lost Citadel, decided it was AI slop and chose not to buy it, I wouldn’t hold it against them for a second.

I understand the position because I understand the compromise I made.

As a reviewer, however, I don’t think the answer is to draw a line so extreme that any game containing AI artwork is immediately dismissed as worthless.

A board game is more than its illustrations.

It is mechanics, design, theme, writing, balance, playtesting, production and countless hours of work by real people who may have chosen AI art for reasons ranging from budget constraints to simple practicality. Just as I don’t want my own work dismissed solely because I couldn’t afford an illustrator, I’m not going to do that to someone else.

But I also think there should be a clear acknowledgement that AI artwork is not something I value as an artistic contribution.

So this is the new policy at GamersDungeon.

Any game that uses AI-generated artwork will receive a maximum of 1 star in the Theme category of my reviews.

That doesn’t mean the game is bad. It doesn’t mean I won’t recommend it. It doesn’t mean the designers are lazy or unethical.

It simply means that, in my view, AI-generated artwork does not meaningfully contribute to the artistic identity of a board game and therefore cannot receive a higher score in a category where artistic presentation is a major consideration.

Everything else will still be judged on its own merits. Great mechanics will still be great mechanics. Brilliant design will still be brilliant design. An exceptional game can still receive an exceptional overall score.

In fact, Kingdom Legacy: Exploration managed a respectable 3.15 out of 5 despite receiving only 1 star for Theme.

So this isn’t a boycott. It’s a statement of values.

If you choose AI artwork instead of human artistry, I’m not going to refuse to review your game, and I’m not going to pretend the rest of your work doesn’t matter.

Gamersdungeon.net rating system will be updated with the new AI based rule put into effect. For me, this is a compromise and the most appropriate way to handle AI. It may change in the future, but for now I feel like it’s good middle ground I can work with.

I’m simply going to score the art exactly as I see it. The absence of effort, the equivillant of copy/pasting it from some other source, a non-contributor.

And from this day forward, that’s how AI-generated artwork will be handled on GamersDungeon.net.

And that’s all, folks!

D&D, In Theory

In Theory: Why D&D 5th succeeded and 5.5 is failing

April 22, 2026 5 Minutes

Let’s get one thing straight before we wade into the swamp.

I don’t have a dog in this fight.

I play what I like, I ignore what I don’t, and I move on with my life. It’s a surprisingly effective strategy that I highly recommend to anyone currently drafting their 14th Reddit manifesto about “the death of the RPG hobby.” As far as I’m concerned, the best version of D&D already came out decades ago, 2nd Edition AD&D, and it’s been entertaining fans like me for decades, not asking for a rebrand, a rules refresh, or a marketing campaign with buzzwords like “evolution.” It just exists in its glorious awesomeness.

I think of all the games that embody the D&D Ethos, I think 2nd edition AD&D is it. It is the most D&Dish of D&D’s, and I think that is why it remains my absolute favorite.

So, whatever Wizards of the Coast decides to do with the modern game? Interesting, sure. Important? Not really. Their wins and losses don’t keep me up at night. I’m more of a curious observer than a concerned shareholder.

But I am interested in the trajectory of Dungeons & Dragons and RPG hobby as a whole. The way it changes, the way it stumbles, the way it occasionally trips over its own shoelaces while insisting it meant to do that. It’s fascinating. And more importantly, it makes for good writing opportunities. And if this blog is going to talk about anything relevant in tabletop gaming, it has to talk about D&D.

So here’s the situation.

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition wasn’t just successful; it was a phenomenon. It dragged the game out of niche obscurity and shoved it into the mainstream spotlight. Podcasts, streams, celebrity games, you couldn’t throw a d20 without hitting a new player. It has done nothing short of kick-starting a golden age of Dungeons and Dragons.

Then came its so-called successor: Dungeons & Dragons 2024 edition 5e Revised or 5.5, or whatever name it’s going by this week. A game that arrived wrapped in bold claims, corporate confidence, and just enough ambiguity to make you wonder if you were buying a new edition or a software patch.

I had my beefs with 5th edition D&D, there is no question about that, but no one could ever accuse 5e of not being a card-carrying member of Dungeons and Dragons. It was a game that adhered to the D&D ethos through and through.

And despite being labeled “the best-selling D&D ever” by Wizards of the Coast, a claim with little evidence that deserves its own investigation, it landed with all the impact of a damp fireball. No explosion. No spark. Just a quiet fizzle. The fanbase’s reaction has been cruel at best, outright hateful at its worst.

So the question is simple: What happened? Why did it happen?

And maybe most importantly, how do you follow up a golden goose by serving scrambled eggs?

Let’s get into it.

We have been here before

History doesn’t repeat, but in D&D, it definitely rerolls.

The whole 5.5 situation is not new. Not surprising. Not even particularly creative. We’ve watched this exact episode before, just with worse branding and fewer YouTube reactions.

Let’s rewind to the late 2000s.

Back then, Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition was riding high, arguably the biggest thing D&D had been in years. But like all editions, it eventually drifted into the Long Tail: that slow, inevitable phase where releases keep coming, but excitement quietly packs its bags and leaves. The shelves are full, the rules are bloated, and even the diehards stop buying new books.

So Wizards of the Coast did what they always do when the engine starts sputtering: They scrapped it and started over.

They assembled a top-tier design team, seriously, no sarcasm here, these were heavy hitters in RPG design, and told them to fix D&D. Modernize it. Streamline it. Give it structure. Give it teeth. Make it, you know… a proper game.

And out came Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. A game so divisive it made alignment debates look like polite dinner conversation.

It was a bit of a disaster, and Wizards of the Coast’s official D&D franchise would get knocked off its throne for the first time since it rose to it. But here’s the uncomfortable truth, brace yourself: 4th Edition wasn’t a bad game.

There, I said it. Take a moment. Breathe.

4th edition Dungeons and Dragons had a lot of problems when it came to the D&D ethos, but a far bigger offense of the game was how much it had in common with MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft. It was, in a way, a tabletop version of an MMO . I think fans found that particularly insulting.

If you examined it objectively, stripped of the logo, it was a tight, tactical, well-balanced game, frankly ahead of its time. A heroic tactical fantasy RPG that really defined a new sub-genre in RPG’s that would catch on and in the future (as in now) trigger inventions like 13th Age and Draw Steel, for example. Compared to the glorious chaos of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition (which reads like it was assembled during a wizard duel) or even 2nd Edition, my beloved, bloated masterpiece, it was smooth. Clean. Playable without needing a legal degree. It should have been a success, but it wasn’t.

So why did it crash? Why did a good game get rejected by the very audience it was built for?

Because the designers solved the wrong problem. And here’s where 5.5 walks straight into the same rake.

Both 4th Edition and this new “definitely-not-a-new-edition-we-swear” version suffer from the same fatal flaw: Once again, the designer forgot the D&D Ethos.

Not balance. Not mechanics. Not accessibility. Ethos.

That invisible, irrational, deeply ingrained identity that makes D&D feel like D&D and not just “generic fantasy system #27 with better UI.”

There are many games without the D&D logo, that adhere to the D&D ethos more than some versions of actual D&D. Castles and Crusades is a great example; it is, without question, a version of Dungeons and Dragons.

4e didn’t feel like D&D, that was the primary and unanimous complaint from fans.

And 5.5…Well… it feels like D&D after a corporate wellness seminar.

Same mistake. Same cause. And if history is any indication, same result, just with better marketing copy.

What is the D&D Ethos?

I think not everyone understands what the D&D Ethos is, in fact, it’s often confused with lore, but the two are not really the same thing.

This is where things get messy.

The idea of “Ethos” isn’t neat, it isn’t quantifiable, and it definitely isn’t something you can drop into a design document and explain. It’s slippery. It’s instinctual. It’s institutional. You know it when you see it, and more importantly, you really know when it’s missing.

The easiest way to explain it is through example.

Take ability scores: they are primary attributes of a character that range from 3–18. Why? Why, after 50 years, are we still clinging to this relic like it’s a sacred text? Why six abilities? Why generate a number that, in most cases, doesn’t even matter mechanically because the game only cares about the modifier?

From a pure design standpoint, it’s nonsense. You could streamline it tomorrow, clean it up, make it more intuitive, more modern, more elegant.

But we don’t. The secret is the reason we don’t is because you really can’t. It’s part of the D&D ethos.

That 3–18 range comes from rolling 3d6, a method for generating ability scores from the past that most D&D tables don’t even use anymore. We’ve got arrays, point buy, all sorts of cleaner systems, but the bones are still there in modern D&D. Not because they’re optimal, but because they’re D&D. It’s legacy code baked into the DNA of the game. It doesn’t need to make sense, it needs to feel right.

That’s Ethos.

The modern 5e D&D character sheet doesn’t really look all that different than a 1st edition AD&D character sheet. The more things change, the more they stay the same, and that is the way the fan base wants it.

And once you start looking, you see it everywhere. Spell slots and Vancian casting. Hit Points that somehow let you survive being stabbed repeatedly until you suddenly fall over at zero. Armor Class as an abstract number instead of, you know, actual armor doing anything logical. A shortsword doing 1d6 damage because… it always has. Wizards being squishy and allergic to armor. Fighters being walking meat grinders. None of this is sacred because it’s good design, it’s sacred because it’s D&D design, it’s part of the D&D ethos.

Could you improve these systems? Absolutely. If you were building a modern fantasy RPG from scratch, you probably would. But that’s the problem, D&D isn’t a modern game, not really. It’s a game held together by decades of expectation, tradition, culture, and a fanbase that knows exactly how it’s supposed to feel. You can update it, sure, but every change is a negotiation with history, and fan base expectations, and these two things are immovable forces of nature.

Sure, fair-weather fans and new arrivals might come in and demand modernization, but the core D&D community, the vast overwhelming majority fan base, is not vocal. Their world is at the table, it’s a place of practicality that is executed away from online spaces like Twitter and DnD beyond. The noise always comes from vocal minority groups who don’t understand or care for D&D’s legacy, but when it comes down to it, the cash cow that is Dungeons and Dragons answers to the core fan base, and as 4e discovered and as 5.5 is discovering now, these people vote with their wallets. You’re not going to get feedback on your new evolved edition of the game, you’re not going to hear about it until you see the needle drop on your spreadsheets.

The D&D Beyond Forums is a strange place where not only is it an echo chamber of a vocal minority, but the messaging is enforced by the moderators. The only thing you’re allowed to do on these forums is agree that Wizards of the Coast does everything right and whatever the latest thing they released is wonderful. Disagree with anything, and you will be moderated. The result is a place where no real D&D debates and discussions are allowed. If Wizards of the Coast uses this forum, presuming it represents the D&D community, things like 4e and 5.5 are going to continue to happen in the future.

This is because, just like me, every D&D fan already has the edition of the game they love, so if whatever is new doesn’t register with them, they (we) just go back to playing the game we already love. No reason to make a fuss about it.

This is exactly where Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition stumbled. The design was tight, the math worked, the systems were clean, but it drifted too far from that underlying D&D Ethos. It stopped feeling like D&D. What players got instead was a well-designed, highly functional fantasy system that just happened to be wearing a D&D nametag. And fans didn’t want “well-designed.” They wanted recognizable. They wanted D&D.

Because that’s the real trap. Designers can push the Ethos. It’s not frozen in amber. But it evolves slowly, cautiously, over time. From a business standpoint, every deviation is a gamble, and you never quite know which sacred cow is actually load-bearing. Push too far, too fast, and suddenly you’re not evolving the game, you’re replacing it, abandoning the very thing that made you famous to begin with, and perhaps most importantly, this disconnects you from the fan base.

4th Edition crossed that line and faceplanted.

And 5.5? It walked right up to the same line, took a confident step forward… and then acted surprised when the ground gave way underneath it.

But what specifically about the 5.5 design has departed so far from the core D&D Ethos that has fans abandoning the game like it’s the latest coronavirus? Understanding that, is the real magic trick here.

Where 5th edition succeeded and 5.5 failed

One thing you have to understand is that this is almost never about one catastrophic mistake. D&D doesn’t collapse because of a single bad decision, it erodes. Slowly. Quietly. Painfully. Breaking away from the Ethos isn’t a dramatic explosion; it’s death by a thousand very deliberate, very “well-intentioned” cuts.

It’s the little things that get under people’s skin. The tweaks. The “quality of life improvements.” The subtle reworks that, on paper, look harmless, but in practice feel like someone rearranging your house while insisting it’s for your benefit. That irritation builds. It spreads. It turns into a kind of collective Barbarian rage that starts at one table, then another, and before long it’s everywhere. Not all at once, but steadily, like a slow infection.

And this is why when Wizards of the Coast says 5.5 is the best-selling D&D of all time, I’m not even inclined to argue. That’s probably true. Of course it is. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition was massively popular, and those players were always going to buy the “next version,” whatever label it shipped under. New books are exciting. Updates are exciting. I bought in too. Most of us did.

But sales happen at launch. Opinions take time.

That Barbarian rage? That comes later.

So let’s talk about the cuts.

The Art

Art isn’t window dressing in D&D, it’s foundational. It’s part of the Ethos as much as dice and dragons. It sets tone, defines expectation, and tells you what kind of fantasy you’re stepping into before you’ve read a single rule. D&D fans are ruthless about it. There are unwritten rules here, no official guidebook, just decades of accumulated taste, and if you miss the mark, people notice immediately.

And somehow, 5.5 missed it.

The best word for the art direction is sanitized. Safe. Soft. Focus-grouped into submission. And that’s a problem, because D&D art has never been about playing it safe. It’s been heavy metal album covers, grimdark nightmares, heroic last stands, bizarre fever dreams, sometimes all on the same page. It’s supposed to have teeth.

Art like this is typical for the 5.5 books. I don’t know what this is, what game this belongs to or what setting it is meant for, but whatever it is, it does not belong in a D&D book. This is .. nonsense.

What we got instead feels like it was run through a corporate filter designed to remove anything remotely sharp. The edges are sanded down, the grit is gone, and what’s left feels less like fantasy and more like something that passed an internal brand compliance meeting.

It’s like Iron Maiden deciding their next album cover should feature Martha Stewart smiling politely over a cup of tea.

There are good pieces in there, credit where it’s due, but they’re buried in an overall direction that just doesn’t understand what D&D is supposed to look like. And when the first impression of your game is off, everything else starts uphill.

Fantasy Races (Species)

If you want to find a fault line in D&D’s Ethos, look no further than its fantasy races. This has always been contentious territory. Fans argue about it constantly, and have for decades. It’s also why you have to be especially cautious when making changes. The last thing you want to happen is for the fan base to suddenly become unanimous about what the ethos of D&D is regarding races.

What belongs? What doesn’t? What feels like D&D?

The addition of Dragonborn and Tieflings was controversial back in the day. Half-Orcs have been debated since the AD&D days. Drow as player characters? Still a lightning rod. Even ability score modifiers, those little nudges that push races toward certain classes, have sparked endless arguments about whether they reinforce fantasy or restrict it.

The key thing is this: these changes have always been gradual. Painful, sometimes, but gradual.

5.5 didn’t do gradual. It ripped the bandage off and called it progress, creating a domino effect that led to unanimous sanctions from the community. Wizards of the Coast managed to take something the community was divided about and led them to take a stand on the topic, one that opposed the decisions they made in 5.5. It was the worst possible outcome for them.

Renaming “races” to “species.” Removing half-races like Half-Elves and Half-Orcs as meaningful mechanical options. Stripping out ability score modifiers entirely. Flattening distinctions. Smoothing edges. And then, of course, the orc shift, moving them cleanly out of “monster” territory and into fully normalized player options, which for many players wasn’t just a tweak, but a fundamental redefinition of the setting’s logic.

This one change quite literally invalidates most of the official D&D settings and their lore.

Individually, you could argue for any of these changes. That’s not really the issue. The issue is all of them at once.

I know that removing Half-Races like Half-Elves from the game was politically motivated, which in its own right was egregious, but the problem you really run into is that in much of the D&D lore, half-race characters are some of the most memorable and beloved characters in D&D. Tanis Half-Elven from the Dragonlance series novels, for example is an absolute legend and it’s destructive to the game to erase that from the ethos of the game.

Because Ethos isn’t just about what you change, it’s about how much you change, and how fast. And 5.5 didn’t nudge the system forward; it shoved it. Hard. The result wasn’t clarity, it was confusion. Tables arguing. Players divided. A constant, low-level friction about what D&D is even supposed to be anymore.

And then there’s the presentation. In 5e, races got space, three, four pages to breathe, to define culture, identity, flavor. In 5.5, they’re condensed, abbreviated, reduced to something closer to a stat block with a portrait. Vague. Non-committal. Stripped of the texture that made them feel like part of a living world.

In the end, these changes broke the ethos in the eyes of the community and in some ways, helped to unify it, which will make it even more difficult to both keep the changes introduced in 5.5, they will have to backtrack if they want to recapture the D&D audiances buy-in but it also means they won’t be able to alter it in the future.

At this stage, this aspect of 5.5 was just outright rejected by the D&D fan base and while there are echo-chambers like the D&D Beyond forum where you will find support for it, it’s a misleading message for Wizards of the Coast. Again, you have to remember to think about the vocal minority; they might be loud, but it’s not their wallets you’re after. You need the core D&D community to buy into these changes, and they have very coldly rejected them.

Power Creep & Dungeon Masters

Power creep in D&D isn’t new. Even in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, you could feel it, slow, steady, almost polite. A subclass here, a spell there, a magic item that maybe pushed things a little too far. The community tolerated it because it moved in inches, not miles.

5.5 doesn’t move in inches. It lurches forward like an out-of-control steam train.

But here’s the thing, power creep isn’t really a player problem. Players love power creep. Of course they do. Winning is fun. Being strong is fun. Having a character sheet that reads like a loaded weapon is very fun. When players bulldoze encounters or make reckless decisions knowing they’ve got fifteen different ways to get out of trouble, their takeaway isn’t “this is broken,” it’s “this is awesome.”

The real cost lands squarely on the shoulders of the Dungeon Master.

Because the DM is the one trying to hold the whole thing together. They’re the ones responsible for making the game feel challenging, coherent, and, most importantly, meaningful. And when every character at the table is effectively a walking solution to every conceivable problem, that job stops being fun and starts feeling like unpaid overtime.

When players trivialize encounters, bypass obstacles with a spell checkbox, and shrug off danger like it’s a mild inconvenience, the DM is left trying to constantly escalate just to keep up. Bigger monsters. Harder fights. More convoluted scenarios. And all of it starts to feel artificial, like you’re inflating difficulty just to punch through an ever-growing layer of mechanical padding.

It’s exhausting.

If you look up D&D 5e on youtube, most videos are going to be about “how to DM”. The reason is that in modern D&D in general being a DM is exceedingly difficult, and the books really do very little to teach you. In 5.5, the situation has become progressively worse.

And this was already a problem in 5e. There’s a reason you see so many groups full of eager players desperately searching for someone, anyone, willing to run the game. The shortage of Dungeon Masters isn’t anecdotal anymore, it’s systemic. We’ve reached the point where people will literally pay hourly rates to complete strangers just to have someone sit behind the screen and manage the chaos.

5.5 didn’t fix that problem. It made it dramatically worse.

From personal experience, running 5.5 feels like trying to challenge a party of superheroes who showed up to a goblin fight out of sheer boredom. The characters are absurdly capable from the outset, stacked with options, layered with safety nets, and equipped to handle just about anything you throw at them without breaking a sweat. Fear? Gone. Tension? Optional. Consequences? Negotiable at best.

They’re not adventurers anymore, they’re demigods with a starter kit.

And from the DM’s side of the table, that’s not exciting. It’s tedious. It’s a constant uphill battle to create stakes in a system that seems actively opposed to having them. The adventure design doesn’t help either, balance is all over the place, and the claim of “backwards compatibility” feels more like a technicality than a reality. Sure, you can run old 5e adventures, but be prepared to gut them, rebuild encounters, and essentially do the designer’s job for them if you want anything resembling a challenge.

Which brings us back to Ethos.

D&D has always been about the climb. Zero to hero. That’s the fantasy. You start fragile, uncertain, maybe a little incompetent, and you earn your power over time. Levels matter because they represent that journey.

5.5 skips the journey. You don’t grow into power, you spawn with it.

And when you remove the climb, what you’re left with isn’t empowerment. It’s boredom with better stats. This community complaint about 5.5 I personally get from experience. Running 5.5 as a DM sucks balls.

Conclusion

The truth is, I could probably write three more articles like this, each one picking apart a different way 5.5 sidesteps the D&D Ethos, but at some point you stop adding evidence and start repeating yourself.

Because the core issue isn’t complicated.

D&D has an Ethos. A real one. Not something printed in a rulebook, not something you can bullet point in a design meeting, but something that exists all the same. You can argue over the details, sure. People have been doing that for decades. But when you move too far, too fast, and too often away from it, the result becomes obvious. Not academically obvious, viscerally obvious.

5.5 isn’t a bad game because of any single decision. In fact, taken on its own terms, it’s not even a bad game at all. Mechanically, there’s a lot to like. It’s clean, it’s accessible, it’s polished.

But it’s not a good version of Dungeons & Dragons.

It misses too many of the grounded, intangible pieces that make D&D feel like D&D. And when you sit down to play, that absence becomes impossible to ignore. Everything looks familiar at a glance, but the moment you interact with it, something feels… off. Slightly twisted. Like you’re reaching for something you recognize, only to find it’s been subtly reshaped into something else.

It’s the same problem Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition had. Familiar components, unfamiliar experience.

And that disconnect creates these strange, almost surreal moments at the table that don’t quite fit the fantasy the game is supposed to evoke. It’s hard to define until you see it happen in real time, like a Halfling Fighter casually swinging a massive two-handed battle axe with maxed-out Strength like it’s just another Tuesday. Is it “allowed”? Sure. Does it feel like D&D? Not even a little.

That’s the problem.

I can’t give you a perfect definition of what D&D is. Nobody can. But I know it when I see it, and more importantly, I know when I don’t.

And judging by the wider community, I’m not alone.

The energy around D&D right now feels… thin. The buzz is fading. The excitement that carried 5e into the mainstream spotlight is sputtering out. You can see it in the content space, you can feel it in conversations, there’s just not much to latch onto. For a game that once felt unstoppable, that’s a pretty telling shift.

And yeah, this edition kind of sucks, not as a game, but as a D&D game.

But here’s the good news: it doesn’t matter as much as it sounds like it does.

No one is coming to your house to confiscate your books. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition still exists. 3.5 still exists. And 2nd Edition, glorious, bloated, beautiful 2e, is still sitting right where you left it, waiting to be played.

D&D doesn’t disappear when a new edition misses the mark. It continues, just not under the banner of the new edition.

And if history tells us anything, it’s this: Wizards of the Coast has been here before. They stumbled with 4e, and they course-corrected.

They’ll do it again.

Probably right after they finish insisting this one is exactly what we wanted.

Gamers Dungeon

Category Archives: In Theory

In Theory: Finding The Right D&D For My Group

I have my favorites in principle, but not in practice

D&D sucks?

Picking The Right D&D Variant

Dolmenwood – The Great Hope

A Setting-Driven Game

A Grand Story With Freedom of Choice

Mechanically Familiar & Simple

A Foundational Campaign

Extreme Compatibility

Conclusion

In Theory: When Star Wars Lore Becomes a Rules Engine, Not Decoration

Rebellion: asymmetry does the storytelling

Outer Rim: Han Solo is a job description

Armada: a Star Destroyer should not corner like a shopping trolley

The Clone Wars: Pandemic becomes a war

Zero Company: the rules engine leaves the table

The real question is what the licence makes you do

–About the author–

In Theory: AI Art In Board Games

The Controversy

Circumstances Matter

AI Art is Stealing

They Took’ma’job!

AI Art Has No Soul

Conclusion

In Theory: Why D&D 5th succeeded and 5.5 is failing

We have been here before

What is the D&D Ethos?

Where 5th edition succeeded and 5.5 failed

The Art

Fantasy Races (Species)

Power Creep & Dungeon Masters

Conclusion

Dedicated To All Things Gaming

I have my favorites in principle, but not in practice

D&D sucks?

Picking The Right D&D Variant

Dolmenwood – The Great Hope

A Setting-Driven Game

A Grand Story With Freedom of Choice

Mechanically Familiar & Simple

A Foundational Campaign

Extreme Compatibility

Conclusion

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Rebellion: asymmetry does the storytelling

Outer Rim: Han Solo is a job description

Armada: a Star Destroyer should not corner like a shopping trolley

The Clone Wars: Pandemic becomes a war

Zero Company: the rules engine leaves the table

The real question is what the licence makes you do

–About the author–

Share this:

The Controversy

Circumstances Matter

AI Art is Stealing

They Took’ma’job!

AI Art Has No Soul

Conclusion

Share this:

We have been here before

What is the D&D Ethos?

Where 5th edition succeeded and 5.5 failed

The Art

Fantasy Races (Species)

Power Creep & Dungeon Masters

Conclusion

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Dedicated To All Things Gaming