Step One

I am still sorting through decades of old games and getting rid of the ones that no longer appeal to me. I tried getting on the 5E train, but the entire market is filled with grift, zero care for play balance, and so many divergent ideas and ways of doing the same thing. It feels like end-stage Windows XP when companies started hacking the operating system to improve it. There was no concept like file, operating system, or driver integrity. People hacked new window managers and system services on the thing, and the company lost control of its platform.

GURPS will likely be my game, but all of 5E lost hard this round of sorting. The system can't do one simple thing without needing a hardcover to support it. The 5E game is as bloated as a set of encyclopedias, and none of the books were written to work with each other well.

The Dungeon Fantasy box set covers more than six shelves of 5E books. Once you add the GURPS core books, you can double that to twelve shelves of 5E books replaced with a few GURPS books that don't even take up a quarter of one shelf. The bloat in 5E books, especially with AI art and text, is approaching a level of obscenity and ridiculousness that feels like creators tossing everything and anything out on Kickstarter and praying for the next payday to strike gold.

Pick up a 5E book and read the text. They take one whole column of bloviating to express one class feature or power. None of the writers appreciates conciseness and brevity. They don't care about your time or ability to understand what they wrote, and it feels like a game written and "paid by the word."

The more you buy for 5E, the worse it gets. Even if you stick with official D&D books, the bloat is still a problem. By the time Wizards "redoes" all the 2014 books, the system will be 15 years old, and talk of the next edition will be coming around soon once the current design team is fired.

The Open 5E implementations, such as Tales of the Valiant and Level Up, are a little better, but they still inherit the same library of bloat and grift. Sticking with ToV and only Kobold Press books is a sound strategy, but this has weak software support, so prepare for a lot of hand-done characters.

There is only one 5E left worth playing, and its name is Shadowdark. This game captures that old-school purist, imagination-capturing, one-book-system design in a wonderfully crafted book. This game has a magic to it that very few games replicate. This is "the 5E" for 2025 and beyond.

For old school gaming? ACKS II does the entire genre better than AD&D, streamlines the system, and makes the entire adventure to domain management game easy. This also goes beyond the OSR and presses the reset button on the genre. The OGL is gone, and everything is new again. This is also highly compatible with GURPS, and is more of a "fantasy sourcebook" for GURPS than many other books in the hobby. This is great by itself or with GURPS.

Pathfinder 2 Remastered is also my jam. This game is more complex than GURPS, but the remastered books have a freshness to them, and the design team went out of their way to reinvent monsters and spells rather than just reskin them. There is a great deal of imagination and design work here, and even if you play GURPS, you can appreciate the design and creativity the team put into this.

There is one thing about all the fantasy games left on my shelf, and this applies to Pathfinder 2, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Swords & Wizardry, ACKS II, and Shadowdark. These are games where the designer tells you what to do. What a fighter is. What a wizard does. Everything is laid out for you, there are very few options, and each class "tells you  how to think."

GURPS is so different.

In GURPS, my bard can specialize up into a full fighter. My thief can morph into a wizard. They retain the abilities they had, and can improve a few more they want. Each character is unique and different. Each story is "designed into" each character.

With any of the "leveled fantasy games" you do not get this freedom. Some, like Pathfinder 2, give you ways to mix and match powers and "cross spec" but it isn't the truth and freedom GURPS gives us.

Sometimes it is nice to have "things done for you."

But most of the time, I find my imagination to be much greater than the imaginations of any of the designers of these games, or the games they are trying to emulate. When I want my character to be mine, it is GURPS, and only GURPS.