Refocusing

Tales of the Valiant is still my 5E game; I have not walked away. I grew tired of the paid character creation systems out there and how expensive they were, and instead, I am collecting my most essential books on the Shard tabletop, one at a time. I loved having all the options, but it was not worth the cost.

Shard VTT is still my go-to 5E system, but it is just hard to support with all those subscriptions. One book at a time, I will get back to where I was.

ToV, like every other game, has to justify itself and answer the question, "Why play?" For many games, the answer to that is, "Because everyone else is playing." You will find the current Daggerheart surge behind this, and time will tell if it is a game with staying power or was just a fad. Some games emerge at the end of a boom, leeching onto try to provide something new, but the larger, crashing market is doomed to take them down anyway.

I have seen this at the end of the Atari VCS era, where new consoles with better games and graphics appeared, and they were all still doomed to fail since this was a larger consumer spending pattern shift than the market looking for something better than what they had. D&D's fall will kill the larger roleplaying market, and it will go back to being a niche hobby, and that is a good thing.

Companies don't want to hear that, and I don't either, but you do not get a market leader this large, with over 95% of the market going down, and nobody else gets affected. When D&D screws up, everyone suffers.

I am still excited for ToV and Shard VTT. I have other games that I like, too. Check my blog list. The biggest "threats" to ToV on my shelves? GURPS for realism, and Dungeon Crawl Classics for the fun factor and fantastic art. My copy of Daggerheart is still on the shelf, and Cypher System is the superior narrative experience and player-to-GM narrative token economy, even in fantasy.

Old School Essentials is such a fantastic game, too, with a very tight set of rules that is hackable and captures the core essence of the gaming experience in a minimalist, best-laid-out, and expressive set of core rules in tiny books. Shadowdark is taking a back seat to OSE these days as I explore that game.

And Kevin Crawford's "...Without Number" games are masterpieces. My copy of Ashes Without Number is due here very soon.

I am rebuilding my ToV to be a less-booky, core, tight, and compelling experience.  These are the games that attract my attention. The age of bloat killed D&D. While I love the new options in the Kobold Press hardcovers, I am being very stingy going forward on which ones make it into my core set of books.