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Wizards of the Costco |
| 2020-11-19 |
Wizards of the Costco
"High Fantasy" or "Costco Fantasy"? Books after books of plenty? Cornucopia of feats, monsters, subclasses and optimizations?
The Systems Reference Document (SRD) is a wonderful document, it may turn anyone with a connection and a PDF reader into a dungeon master, in the dungeon koiné maybe.
I'd remove dragonborn, tiefling, gnomes, I'd even go human only, reserving other "lineage" for encounters. I'd remove all the classes except the fighter, the rogue and some kind of sorcerer. Want to play a bard? Make a witty rogue with a luth. Want to play a druid? The dungeon master will perhaps let you play some kind of grove living shaman on top of the sorcerer.
I think I was drawn to D&D 32 years ago because I thought it came without a world. But I was wrong. It came and comes with a lore. But nothing prevents us from riding the streamlining wyrm that went three, four, five a bit further and reaching a core.
There are excellent posts about going OSR (Old School Revival or Renaissance) from 5e
- D&D 5e Does "Old School" Better Than Many OSR Games
- How To Surprisingly Turn D&D 5e Into An Old School OSR Game
- Converting 5E to OSR
but I am not really interested into a revival of the old "lore", that lore lured me in, but I am longing for simple roleplay and tactical dilemmata, and a simple core can help setting it up.
Granted, I am the dungeon master, the dilemmas I come up with are offered to my players (and most of the time, they corner themselves in a dilemma and don't think out of it). The dilemmas are generated as the world is told to life along with the players.
"Become a dungeon master and build worlds at will!", I heeded the call and now what? "I want to play a dragonborn paladin and later on I'll take a few cleric levels". "Sorry, no dragonborn in this world, no paladins, and well clerics sit and copy manuscripts all day long,...".
The dungeon master tasks himself with building a world and the costco fantasy is getting in the way, too many choices up front and ninety percent of the magical and mythical and mystical already consumed at the start.
A tight core is what I want to run what I'm building. A lightened SRD seems an excellent core, and nothing prevents me from adding more flavour later on, flavours that suit the world and the story so far.
