Okay, so for what is practically one of my first blogs here I wanted to talk about something that’s been on my mind for a little while: Tabletop Games Specifically, which tabletop games are good for newcomers and which ones are not.
While in pop culture the most known tabletop game is Dungeons & Dragons, there’s a vast myriad of reasons why it’s not actually a good introduction to the medium. Those are as follows:
- The first and second editions are more so intended as war games not unlike 40k, and are generally agreed to be unpolished. The first two are unrepresentative of the TTRPG medium as a whole, as they’re games made to facilitate strategy instead of storytelling
- The third edition, while closer to the typical TTRPG, is ludicrously unbalanced, has a severe learning curve that makes it less user friendly, and lacks the customization often associated with TTRPGs. Some of these issues improve with 3.5 edition, but that update makes it even LESS user friendly.
- Fourth edition is considered a bad example of a D&D game, much less of a TTRPG. Character creation is easy, but also uniform and lacking in customization. The combat system is bloated, confusing, and completely unpolished. The character classes are indistinct, making gameplay between each one feel the exact same. The game is more user friendly and balanced, but that only really matters if it’s worth playing.
- Fifth edition is by far the best of the editions, but it’s also unbalanced, has a lot of redundant rules and concepts and character abilities that become useless over time, not to mention it’s practically impossible to scale threats, stakes, or rewards to the players, as the challenge rating system is completely misleading and changing with every newly released book. The combat system is still overly complicated, though in different ways than previous ones, but still contributing to combat times lasting several hours even on small encounters.
- For almost every edition, the books are too expensive, and one often is supposed to buy the game’s multiple angles of content in separate books in order to attain the best experience.
Overall, D&D fails in many crucial elements of TTRPGs in every edition, and one can actually reverse engineer criteria judging other tabletop games by looking at the many sins of Dungeons and Dragons:
- TTRPGs should be TTRPGs, or, tabletop games made to tell stories
- TTRPGs should be well balanced
- TTRPGs should have rules made for human beings to read and understand
- TTRPGs should have systems and procedures that are functional and constructed in order to assist the players in having fun, even if it breaks from how realistic procedures such as combat are, realistically, siege combat is not a recreational activity, that doesn’t mean all of the fun must be wrung from it with counterolls, counterules, cover calculation, and conditional modifiers
- Not a requirement, but affordability of rulebooks needed to play is obviously a plus
Now keep in mind, if you enjoy these editions for any reason, that’s okay too! I also play D&D occasionally, I just wanted to acknowledge it’s flaws which are often overlooked because of it’s status as the genre’s flagship. The game isn’t horrible, but it is flawed, and I wanted to present some games that are strong where it is weak.
With these criteria in consideration, which TTRPGs are good alternatives to Dungeons and Dragons? In my opinion, two champions outclass Dungeons and Dragons: Monster of the Week and City of Mist.
These two TTRPGs, monster of the week coming out in 2015, and City of Mist coming out in 2017, succeed distinctly in ways that Dungeons and Dragons has failed. Because both are unique and creative games, following blog posts will discuss them each individually.
