Changing Tabletop Game Systems

My gaming group has had a rough time with our current fantasy adventure campaign. Though we play a lot of systems to try them out, there was one campaign started about two years ago that is considered our "main" campaign, but even though we've played in it multiple times, it's been moving in fits and starts. We're older than when we first got together (two-thirds of our group started playing together at my first job out of college) and now people have kids and responsibilities. Instead of once a week, we now play once a month, and that's assuming nothing goes wrong, which it often does.

And then there are the game systems themselves.

We started our current campaign in Hackmaster (5th edition) because that's what our Dungeon Master wanted to try. He sold it to us as an updated remake of the older 1st and 2nd editions of Dungeon & Dragons with the kinks hammered out. I cut my teeth on 2nd Ed D&D. That was what I played in high school, so I was willing to give it a shot.

And though Hackmaster was a lot more granular than 2nd Ed D&D, it really did seem to capture the feel of it. I liked that everyone's stats were meant to be taken as rolled, with a few build points to do some customization afterwards. Best of all, I liked that all characters, even those with middling stats were considered playable, and they were! (Needing obnoxiously high stats just to be viable was my biggest beef with 4th Ed D&D. My 4th Ed group used a point-buy system and I went for what I considered "reasonable" stats and ended up missing with my sword more than half the time because a Str 15 on a cleric wasn't considered passing grade.)

My level 1 ranger came out of the creation system with mediocre rolls. His stats averaged a 10, and there was only one above 13. I probably could have pushed his stats up more with build points, but I spent a lot of them on non-combat skills because I love me some RP and he's based on one of my novel characters, which means that I wanted to have a lot of his personal history and skills represented in the game.

In 4th Ed, he would have been hopeless. In Hackmaster, his arrows were doing so much damage due to the penetrating dice mechanic that a car backfired in the alley next to us and we joked that was my character's shots landing.

We finished our opening adventure (which took three sessions and a hell of a lot more months), and got to level up, where we ran into a jam. It was difficult enough getting everyone to create their characters the first time around, but leveling up in Hackmaster required more effort than D&D since there are all these build points to go into feats, skills, stats, etc. I had fun with it, because I love customizing around a framework. (I dislike truly classless RPG systems, but give me classes and a ton of ways to customize them and I'm pretty happy.) But the rest of the group was not as enthusiastic.

So we changed systems, to make character maintenance easier for everyone, and we went from Hackmaster and its tons of customization to Dungeon Crawl Classics, which has zero customization, other than you can RP that you have the knowledge for something if it seems reasonable (to replace having a skill list).

There were a few problems with this transition. Our elf rogue turned into just a rogue as far as his class was concerned, because DCC is like playing original red box D&D where only humans get classes and all the other races are just elf, dwarf, and halfling. Our elf mage went with the elf class and suddenly could use swords, but our dwarf fighter was largely okay because the generic dwarf is pretty fighter-y anyway.

The biggest problem was that my character was a ranger, and that class simply did not exist in DCC, and shoehorning him into a fighter did not feel appropriate since they aren't built to be archers. So we found a couple fanmade ranger class write-ups and tried one of them.

It was terrible.

Aside from the fact that my damage sank into the toilet, I was missing, a lot. It was so bad I spent half a battle shooting and missing while we were on a boat, and it was only after the enemies got on board and I switched to a sword that I actually hit someone.

I told my DM that maybe we could further mod the class so I could get a power boost, since I was the only one suffering this badly from the transition. If my character had been this way from the beginning it would have just been a shrug and a joke, but knowing what I'd lost actually made my ranger a lot less fun to play. Frustrated, my DM decided to just chuck DCC as a bad fit.

Which brings us to our current system.

We came home to D&D, but it's now 5th Ed. This is my first time playing it, and I recreated my ranger, using the same stats from Hackmaster, and without the human racial stat boost, because my DM was afraid of what the dwarven stat boost would do to our overpowered dwarf, who decided to become a barbarian in this latest transition. (In universe the transition was pretty funny since we did it in the middle of a siege, so the dwarf went from axe and shield in chainmail to a raging dude in leather in a few minutes.)

I was skeptical this would work, given my stat pains in 4th Ed, and especially because my Hackmaster stats are below average for 5th Ed (which uses 4d6 drop lowest rather than a flat 3d6 with no rearrangement).

But I was surprised. The power I'd lost in DCC had come back. It helped that I was using the Unearthed Arcana version of the ranger (one of my group members heard it was improved over the one in the PHB and suggested I use it), which gave me advantages towards attacking first. Aside from that, 5th Ed adds a number of attack bonuses that I didn't have in the DCC version of the ranger (and bonuses I would have been hesitant to ask for). I was hitting more often than not and I was killing things again. I even had a nice AoE ranger spell that shot out thorns from where my arrow landed.

Suddenly I was something resembling a killing machine again.

We're probably going to stick to D&D from here out. Everyone knows the system to some degree, even if it's not in depth, and it seems everyone's found what they want to be. The elf rogue is now both an elf and a rogue again, and our elf wizard has settled into being an elf warlock, which he seems quite proud of. And I get to shoot things again.