that is one way of making people try out other gamea

I don't need to buy a set of books to give me permission to use my imagination, and I don't need it's permission to disregard rules that don't serve my campaign, or homebrew my own. Every ruleset of every tabletop game is optional. Sure, ignoring some rules can unravel the system, but every table is free to make that choice. I buy a set of books because I want an exhaustive set of balanced and play tested rules. I am under no obligation to use every rule, but I want to have them so I know if I choose to use them, or isn't going to break the balance. For instance, I've fully moved to GURPS. It has a reputation for being complicated because there are *lots* of mechanics available. I ignore the vast majority of them most of the time, but when a player wants to do something out of the ordinary, I can count on having a balanced mechanic available for guidance. I didn't have to worry about being too strict, or too lenient, or inconsistent the next time the same situation arises. 5e isn't "permissive", it's lazy game design. I quit after buying the Spelljammer set, which provided basically zero guidance for any of the actual spell jamming stuff. When the answer to every question is "The DM can decide to do it however they want :)”, you're not actually releasing a game system. Again, I don't need to buy a book to have permission to use my imagination however I want. I buy a book to give me balanced and playtested mechanics. WotC doesn't seem particularly interested in that.

How long did that take you?? The highest we’ve ever gone is level 11, and that took a couple of years.

The difference is pretty minor either way. I’ve never had more issues balancing this than I have with sorcerer burst damage or creation bards collapsing economies.

About a year and a half. It was a game explicitly intended to just be full of difficult combat encounters all of the time, so it was pretty much the ideal circumstances for levelling quicky. Her last encounter had about 60,000 xp worth of enemies in it per player, without using the multipliers for multiple enemies

I'll always love a paladin rouge multi even if it's not the "best". there's just so many interesting story possibilities there.

Oh, wargaming dnd? How’d you like it? Did 5e stand up well or did it need a lot of homebrewing?

I enjoyed it enough to play it for all that time, at least! I'm not particularly keen on D&D as a system (regardless of edition) and don't care for the Forgotten Realms as a setting, I just enjoy playing TTRPGs with people I like and D&D is the easy one to get people together for. Since I had a good crowd, I was having fun. There were usually plenty of interesting tactical decisions to make, and all of us know the game well enough to get through complicated turns smoothly. Everyone involved would still RP in combat so it wasn't just dice rolling. Gotta talk some shit to the hideous aberration that just deleted half your hp, right? It was _mostly_ RAW, but with some exceptions. For the sake of everyone being able to tailor their builds to combat, magic items could be purchased at will with prices agreed upon out of character

Multiclassing because it's fun even if it doesn't work that well will always have a place in my heart. I'm currently playing a barely-functional monk/druid. I think I can get him to work, but right now his tiger wildshape is more of the paper variety

I suppose I'm lucky enough to have enough friends into ttrpgs to build a group of players open to the system I like. I lost some who *were* emotionally invested in D&D, but frankly they were the least fun ones to play with (min-max munchkins and rules lawyers undercut by an unfamiliar system), so I'm not too upset about it. Plus I've been empowered with many more options for creative play, and blessed with players *interested* in creative play.

> I mean, last I checked you have the option to be proficient with various sets of craft tools, but the system doesn't actually explain what that actually does mechanically. Chapter 8, "Between Adventures," "Downtime," "Crafting." Page 187 in the 2014 version of the Player's Handbook. It tells you exactly how long it takes and how much it costs to create items using artisans' tools. I concede that it's pretty generic, but it does explain what you can do, mechanically, with your proficiency in artisans' tools. (If the 2024 version of the Player's Handbook removed this guidance then I'm not sure what to say, except that I don't personally consider that version to be "5e.") Xanathar's Guide to Everything also has an extensive section in Chapter 2, beginning on page 78, that does a great job fleshing out each type of tool proficiency and providing novel ways to use them.

Ahh, an Elder Scrolls protagonist

I ran a campaign that lasted several years and everyone went to 20. Technically past 20, though we never did any of the epic stuff. It was 3.5 though

Your fighter is gonna be very disappointed when they find out which level they get action surge at

For war gaming, which system do you personally prefer, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m looking to molest some people with *something fresh* and pathfinder doesn’t always work out. I used to ask people on Reddit, but I’d rather not use that site again.

I'm not gonna pretend that I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of what's available, but my limited experience with Mythras 6E has been very positive and I really like how Lancer plays. Mythras has Runequest as its high fantasy counterpart, so if you want a D&D-ish experience that's probably where to look. I've not played Runequest though, I had been doing a worldbuilding project and grabbed Mythras as something that looked suitable for there being no magic involved. Lancer comes with a really cool setting, but it's obviously way off in a different direction to D&D and the like. It does at least have the benefit of outstanding art to get people interested, and it's very good at making players feel cool even at low levels

I've never touched anything beyond level 20. I thought that's what the epic stuff was? Are there regular class features and such published for those levels too, or were you homebrewing by then?

>I concede that it's pretty generic and would benefit from some refinement That's my point. A couple paragraphs on one page, and an addendum in another book to *consider* giving the player advantage and maybe an "added benefit", again left entirely up to the DM. The Xanathar's content is nice, if again a bit vague, assuming your DM uses it. But that's still buried in an appendant text. And that's just one example. Called shots are another good example. Anything outside the narrow scope of the written rules is left up to the DM. That's not fundamentally problematic in a ttrpg, the game master always has the final say anyway, but it's lazy game design, and it's only getting worse with each release. I said elsewhere that I quit D&D after buying the 5e Spelljammer set, which dumped all mechanical decisions onto individual DM decision. I don't buy rulebooks to get permission to run my game how I want. I buy rulebooks for playtested rules.

Lancer seems interesting but terrifyingly involved between the fresh setting, combat that feels like two legendary monsters fighting, and the host of new adjectives I’ll have to incorporate into my vocabulary. I’d only heard about it once before, from a zee bashew video, and it seems far more fleshed out than what I expected. Mythras significantly cuts down on one of those, so I’ll probably try that one out. Multiple degrees of success and more gradation between the cost of actions seems pretty neat as well. Thank you for the recommendations! I’ll almost certainly need to chew on them for a while to really understand them, but I adore both setting and the mechanics behind them!

I will admit to being biased towards Lancer because I was already a big fan of one of the author's other work beforehand. Tom Bloom (ne Parkinson-Morgan) writes and illustrates [Kill Six Billion Demons](https://killsixbilliondemons.com/). I promise I do genuinely like the mechanics though. If you do decide to take a look at Lancer, there's a really powerful thing that makes it a lot simpler: [COMP/CON](https://compcon.app/#/). It manages character creation, initiative, tracking values in combat etc just like all the non-store parts of D&D Beyond, but it's a _lot_ smoother to use If you get a go at Mythras, have fun! I will have to quietly envy you because I don't a group to play it with