On the Hegemony of D&D 5th Edition
A year ago I published Scavenger: Caches and Prizes, a third-party campaign setting for the Traveller system, or rather its’ Open License fork Cepheus Engine. I chose that system because I wanted to run campaigns based around salvaging wrecked spaceships and Cepheus has a granular and modular ship design system that lends itself well to breaking ships down for parts. Additionally, it doesn’t have ridiculous stat inflation for characters, regardless of which version you use your “hit points” are unlikely to ever exceed 30 and there are consequences to even taking light damage. While your combined characteristic and skill modifiers are likely to stay within the +1 to +3 range through the whole campaign, with +5 being extraordinary. And rolling 2D6 instead of 1D20 introduces a bell curve that mitigates the “swinginess” of single-die rolls while making criticals more rare and thus more dramatic when they happen. But this spring a crowdfunding campaign to convert Traveller to D&D 5th Edition was funded within minutes of launch. This was part of the larger trend of “5E” conversions that’s been going on for the past decade or so. Creators taking advantage of the Open Gaming License and most gamers’ familiarity with the system to promote their works. Or GMs getting frustrated with the difficulty in finding players for their favorite games and homebrewing conversions, even when the original system had a shorter rulebook than the 5E PHB. And this isn’t even the first time that this happened, when the OGL was first developed for 3rd Edition there was a wave of both official and fan-made conversions of other games. Including one for Traveller. And they died out swiftly, most D&D players weren’t actually that interested in playing a different campaign setting kludged onto their beloved game, and players of the original games preferred the original systems. And then Wizards of the Coast switched to 4th edition which did not have the OGL, finishing the conversions off. Then the 5th edition was published in 2014 and brought back the OGL, which led to another boom in third-party content and setting conversions. But then Hasbro got a new CEO who took offense at the notion of other publishers making money off their product and in 2022 they tried to rewrite the OGL so that they’d get a cut of all third-party sales. Of course, most small publishers would go bankrupt if they had to pay the rates that Hasbro demanded, resulting in a massive backlash until Hasbro backed down. But the ill will that Hasbro had garnered clearly didn’t stick around, as now it seems like every game designer has to keep D&D 5E in mind. It’s not dissimilar to how everyone knows Amazon is evil but indie writers need to publish on them because no other self-publishing host has the same reach. Even Renegade, who designed their own “Essence20” system, are switching their games to D&D5.5. And that’s not even why the Open Gaming License was developed in the first place, that document was intended to keep Dungeons and Dragons alive in the event of another publisher going bankrupt. TSR, the company Gary Gygax and his friends founded in order to publish D&D, went under in the 1990s, which would have relegated the game to an out-of-print collector’s item until it reached the public domain, if they hadn’t sold the property to Hasbro. Or not. As demonstrated by the Old-School Revival movement, you can’t actually copyright game rules, and at least half a dozen different publishers have taken advantage of that fact to put out games that are either slight modifications of 1st and 2nd edition D&D, or straight-up copies. With all the cruft and inconsistency those early games had. Now then, I feel a bit obligated to clarify something, yes, I backed Traveller 5E, I wanted to see how they manage ship design and combat. And I don’t care if you try to convert Scavenger to 5E or any other system, I was honestly considering Starfinder but Paizo announced the 2nd edition around the time I was writing and I didn’t know what to expect. Now that SF2 is out you might be able to run Scavenger using the vast amount of material just on the PF2 and SF2 wikis, most of the animal-like ancestries should fit if you cut out the more overtly magical feats and heritages. And the Awakened Animal ancestry from Howl of the Wild should cover the rest. Additionally, Stellagama has published a fantasy-oriented version of the Cepheus Engine, Sword of Cepheus, that should be compatible with Scavenger for campaigns on low-tech planets. But will I ever write a conversion myself, well… Maybe for Shadowdark.
Posted using PostyBirb
