The More I Play 5E...

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

...the more I like GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy.

I see these preset class designs going from level one to twenty, and I constantly tell myself, "I can do better than this!"  The Wizards team has been trying design after 20+ years, over six or seven versions (3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4 Essentials, 5, Tasha's, and One D&D) - plus two Pathfinder editions - and neither company can get it right. And here we are, consumers, waiting for the 2024 books (which they said will last until 2027 anyway). It comes out in a new or 'stealth edition' every three years.

My second thought is, "Every story of every character is different and special; why is everything so predetermined?" Why are our games so strictly railroaded in an age of uniqueness and individuality? The only way people break the mold is to multiclass, and then again, the few exploits and one-level-dips there are well-known and not different from the preset build paths we already have.

GURPS 4 will be 20 years old in 2024. GURPS itself will be 40 years old in 2025. GURPS does not need a new edition anytime soon; it is as close to a perfect game as possible. Is it perfect without exploits? Not really, and no game will ever be. The exploits and cheese are known in GURPS; use if you want, forbid if balance is enforced. No game will ever be without them, but in GURPS, you can choose not to use them (or limit how much X you can buy). In 5E, they happen due to class combos, and you can't escape them.

5E has a problem with 'not supporting the pillars of play' that only versions like Level Up Advanced 5E or Shadowdark are written to support. To get the classic D&D experience, you must play a game other than D&D or an OSR game. Level Up supports social and exploration play - and the game needs to write even more rules to support these activities. Many 5E games feel like they were written with blinders on; they support X, Y, and Z activities in the rules, but not A, B, and C, which this other version of 5E does better.

The number of rules they need to write just to 'support something in the rules' bloats the game to thousands of pages across dozens of books. Look at Pathfinder 1e for an example of a complete D&D game in the Wizards' design theory. Two shelves worth of books just to play a fantasy game. Granted, you can play with a fraction of those, but it is typically a thousand-page minimum for the core three books.

GURPS and pillars of play?

There are a million of them, all built into the skill system.

The pillars can be as broad or as focused as you would like and hone in on specific styles of play and roleplaying. Want to just focus on a traveling theater troupe? You can have stagehands, costume creators, make-up people, actors, singers, musicians, singers, playwriters, comedians, directors, band conductors, lighting people, security, concessions, money people, set designers, magicians, barkers and buskers, leading men and ladies, animal trainers, freight crew, shippers, painters, bards, and so many other specialty skilled people with great character builds the mind spins.

5E's skills and nonsensical 'tool proficiencies' can't even hope to cover that one activity in the depth it would take to make it enjoyable. And if 5E ever did, it would be a sixty to eighty-dollar book of more rules if it ever gets made on Kickstarter.

I can do that entire theater campaign out of the box with Dungeon Fantasy, with hundreds of fewer pages of rules, no level system, characters who organically progress, and character builds that I have complete control over.

A wilderness survival campaign? It's the same story: a new book is needed 5E, whereas GURPS does it out of the box. A political and social diplomacy and spy-intrigue game? I need to buy a 5E book for that (linked to one version of the game), and GURPS handles it with the basic set. A pirate-themed game? Same again. Steve Jackson Games sells PDFs covering these topics in-depth, but you could create any game without them and still have fun.

5E is a consumerist game designed to sell many books with filler. As a 'green game,' 5E fails horribly. Even one-book OSR games are far less wasteful, doing more with less. Many games for a lot with a little, and GURPS is one. But the 'green argument' highlights one thing: inefficient design requires much more 'brain work' and 'page count' to do the same thing a universal system was designed to do quickly and simply.

System lock-in is 5E's fatal flaw, which is the source of their design bloat. They must keep the best 'one to twenty builds' and 'subclasses' locked up in paid-for books and give one or two out per expansion or adventure. You end up with shelves full of filler-packed books, each taking energy to ship, toxic inks to print, and forests to cut down for the paper. Environmental concerns aside, that consumerist model sucks in the amount of rules and books you need to do the simplest things.

And not many of those classes, subclasses, and builds are fun - 10% at best. I am a better 'professional game designer' than the writers that Wizards hires, and everyone can be. This is how the hobby works; everyone is a game designer and should be.

My most recent 5E experience started strong; I was interested in the characters, the builds seemed like what I wanted, and then when I started to progress...

...and the builds were not what I wanted or expected. So what this power and that, I really wanted my bard to get a power that matched the story and did this other thing. This character is stuck doing this one thing. This other one is forever a tank. This one, the class doesn't fit, but it was the best I had.

The whole party seemed like a collection of compromises and lost potential, and the more I leveled, the worse it got. One character was on a 'quest to discover powers', and I constantly had to shoehorn in 'this next class power is actually a part of their story' - instead of giving them the power they invented in the story. The character came up with very cool and imaginative stuff, and the book said, 'No, you don't."

Why am I wasting my time with 5E when I have a game where I can give people the powers and abilities the story says they should have?

That game is GURPS.

At least for me.