I would usually be sad to see another original RPG go 5e compatible but Neuroshima was infamously poorly designed ruleset, possibly worse than Shadowrun. I probably won’t be running it, but may steal statblocks for my 5e game if I need weird stuff again.
Seriously though why is there still coming 5e compatible stuff out after the OGL debacle?
Because when you’ve got like 4 hours a week of free time to prepare for the game, grabbing something 5e compatible and ad-libbing parts you didn’t feel like preparing ahead of time is easier than learning a whole new system.
@DmMacniel @TheGreatDarkness because it sells. And no matter what hobby stuff is going on, dnd players are disconnected from that to a point. There are people that do not even realize there is a wider hobby outside of 5e
I still think about an eye opening experience I had at a bar. Was chatting to some dude and he mentioned he was playing DND. I asked what edition. He didn’t know. He didn’t even know there were other editions. I can’t even guarantee he was actually playing DND and not some other RPG.
There’s a whole lot of extremely… Casual? I guess casual is the word? Casual DND players.
When I first got into D&D I didn’t know what edition I was playing. I knew there were multiple editions, but I couldn’t find the edition number. The box just said Dungeons and Dragons.
It was 4E, and I played multiple other systems before I finally got into 5E.
It can be sorta easy to be casual if you have an extremely knowlgeable dm. I sorta started that way, session 0 and 1 just had him help us build our characters and run a 10 minute solo goblin ‘dungeon’ where he explained basic rules and possible actions. The moral of the story was that you can do other things beside kill npcs. Turns out if I had attempted to talk to the goblins or even explored the area I would have realized they were orphan goblin children, malnourished and afraid… Instead I slaughtered them all for no reward or reason. One hint was that non of them were armed and they always ran at my sight. Definitely stopped any murder hobo tendencies from developing. After that he did mention our rule book and linked me to read but he could have very well not and we would have chugged along fine. I prefer pathfinder now a days better.
To be fair, even Neuroshima fans think this book only comes out to capitalize on Fallout show’s popularity, everyone sees it as a cashgrab.
The thing about D&D is that there is literally zero way WoTC can actually stop you from creating 5e content without their license. You’ll have a hell of a time publishing it, but there’s basically nothing they can so to stop you from just printing sheets or installing a dice bot on discord and getting to the races.
And they also dual-licensed most of the 5e SRD under Creative Commons as part of the “oh crap we didn’t expect everyone to be mad enough to actually hurt our bottom line” drawback from the OGL debacle.
Legally, they can’t keep you from publishing 5e content. You can even publish the 5e rules in their entirety so long as you change all the wording and pictures. I think they can keep you from publishing stuff involving their settings and characters, but you can still use their system.
Legally, they can’t send the Pinkertons to rob you, either.
Have you seen the installed customer base? An independent publisher would be extremely hard pressed to walk away from that.
We have seen branching out since the OGL fiasco, though, which is nice. More system neutral or OSR versions of modules and statblocks, or multi-system statblocks.
WotC aren’t making any money off my homebrew, and I genuinely like the existing designs for their dragons