There are a truly massive number of RPGs out there with a wide variety of open licenses, especially the various Creative Commons licenses. The indie RPG sphere is massive and includes tabletop systems that range from "mild variations on the core D&D formula" to "almost fundamentally alien approaches to doing structured role-playing". D&D has long-standing brand recognition and cultural cachet, but it hasn't been the only player in this space for decades.
Absolutely and then some! I personally would argue that D&D itself—5E in particular here—is actually a fairly middling tabletop game. It's held back by a lot of historical cruft because even new editions end up being forced to stick to decades-old design decisions for the sake of tradition. A simple example here is the distinction between ability scores and ability modifiers: this is an old D&D-ism and trying to remove it sparks complaints about how it's "not D&D", but it's frankly some unnecessary complexity and other tabletop games lose nothing by dropping scores and just using modifiers.
Apart from the core design, D&D is also pretty middling as a product. Being a DM for D&D is hard—a fair bit harder than running many other tabletop games—and the book are at best a so-so resource: there's a lot of extra prep and careful balance that rests on the DM's shoulders, and doing it right means either falling back part-and-parcel on adventure modules or doing a lot of careful tuning and reading forums and Reddit threads. In an ideal world, the core books would include everything you need to know, but in practice the best DM advice is outside the core books (and sometimes even contradicts the books themselves!) Many other games don't have this problem.
To be clear, I don't think D&D is a bad game, but plenty of other games out there have clearer core designs, better presentations, easier-to-grasp rules, and overall more polish.
It depends on what you're looking for! I'll give just a handful here, but I'm happy to expand if you have a specific follow-up questions to these.
If you're interesting in something very D&D-like, there's obviously Pathfinder 2E[1], which builds on the same D&D skeleton but has a much sharper and cleaner approach to grid-based tactical combat. However, I'd also suggest looking at some of the games in the OSR ("Old School Renaissance") space. Games like The Black Hack[2] or Maze Rats[3] provide a much smaller set of rules which are easy to adapt to other adventures: the goal is that you can take adventure modules for effectively any existing D&D-like game—including both present and past versions of D&D—and run them with little overhead.
Something pretty different mechanically but which is quite compelling in that space is Torchbearer[4], which is based on the underlying Burning Wheel[5] system but made significantly simpler (and shares a lot of those simplifications with Mouse Guard[6] except it's, well, not about sword-wielding mice.) Torchbearer is a great dungeon-crawl-focused system that can really capture grit and difficulty in a way that's a lot of fun, but it's also the kind of game where you can get a total party kill not just by a dragon but also by running out of food and torches, so expect a grimy tough game out of it!
If you're looking for something even further afield, I'd suggest taking a peek at Dungeon World[7], which borrows the core mechanics from indie darling Apocalypse World[8] but applies them to a traditional D&D milieu: that said, I'd actually start with Homebrew World[9], which streamlines and clarifies a lot of the rules, but it might require Dungeon World itself to get a handle on how to run the game. Games inspired by Apocalypse World—sometimes called Powered by the Apocalypse games—definitely play a bit differently—they tend to be a bit more "zoomed-out", e.g. combat being resolved in a fewer high-level rolls rather than playing out a full sequence of six-second slices like D&D—and they aren't to everyone's liking, but I think they're worth trying.
I'm also going to plug my personal favorite tabletop game, Blades in the Dark[10], which is not a traditional fantasy game (although people have adapted the the rules to more traditional fantasy, c.f. Raiders in the Dark[11]) but which I think is super compelling. It's about criminals in a haunted Victorian-ish setting doing odd jobs, and builds a system that's top-of-its-class for doing that, including mechanical support for heist-movie-style flashbacks and a lot of systems designed to let you do risky moves and narrowly avoid failure from them. Some of my absolute favorite TTRPG moments have been in Blades games.
Any of that sound interesting? Want other examples or directions?
Thanks for your detailed response, it's excellent and so kind of you to give me such detailed suggestions. I feel I have to check out every single one of these systems. I only knew Pathfinder and Dungeon World.
I like the idea of the OSR systems with small rulesets. So I'll check The Black Hack first. Do you know about any systems like this one that have been published under the Creative Commons license?
The other one I mentioned—Maze Rats—is licensed as CC BY 4.0, so that might be a good place to start! (The Black Hack is licensed under the OGL 1.0, which unfortunately means it's not immune to the whole mess that this thread is about, but I'm hoping that a lot of the creators who put stuff out under the OGL 1.0 either come up with a new license that's not associated with WotC or relicense their stuff under something like a CC license. I guess we'll see!)
It's kinda wild to watch HN suggest that a tech company can do as well as established tabletop gaming companies as if it's as easy as asking ChatGPT. I suppose considering how beloved Tesla and Theranos were I shouldn't be surprised.
DnD has inconsistent quality and has a ton of rules, but few of them add much value. There's really not much polish either imo. The vast majority of the rulebook get ignored because they don't make the game better and often make it worse. The current generation of players, largely inspired by the rise in acceptance of geeky hobbies, by Critical Role and similar shows, etc, would be better off with a different system entirely. These people play to have fun with friends, to have exciting stories and moments, not to follow the ten thousand rules and baggage dnd has acquired over the years.
Dungeon Masters make or break the game. They do it by storytelling, by presenting challenges and helping players overcome them, by creating a sense of ownership and reward. DnD is not good at teaching people to do those things.
I've played some other systems, and immediately they were easier to play and more fun for the group. You don't need 20 rule books, you need a simple set of rules and a desire to participate in a shared storytelling experience, and that's really it.
> Sure, but do any of them have the quality and polish to replace DnD?
D&D isn't anymore polished than Runequest or Warhammer in the commercial space, or a ton of Creative Common RPG. D&D is just more popular. This isn't polish, this is "corporate".
The OGL was intended to be the GPL but for table top games.
Admittedly, the settings, characters, books and similar content were never part of the deal. It was more meant to be a common standard that everybody could build on.
But a common world that everybody could expand upon, would very quickly become a gigantic mess.
