I’ve been a gamer since 1983 or 1984, when an elementary school classmate introduced me to Car Wars. Tabletop roleplaying got on my radar a few years later when I picked up a copy of Autoduel Champions for the helicopter rules and found a bunch of other material on superheroes. My first actual RPG was probably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, followed closely by Mechwarrior and Twilight: 2000.
Prior to 2000, I had played in two sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, separated by about five years. The third edition Player’s Handbook was the first D&D book I ever owned.
Today, I have approximately 49 shelf-feet of RPG material between my library and my office. My combined D&D material across all editions is under 2.5 shelf-feet, making it roughly 5% of my total TTRPG collection.
A cursory survey of my library yielded a small number of RPGs that can give me some form of high fantasy gaming experience with no meaningful connection to D&D, Wizards of the Coast, or the Open Gaming License:
- Ars Magica
- Blade of the Iron Throne
- The Burning Wheel
- The Dark Eye
- Dominion Rules
- Dragon Age
- Dungeon World
- Earthdawn
- Exalted
- Forbidden Lands
- GURPS
- Iron Kingdoms
- Legend of the Five Rings
- Palladium Fantasy
- The Riddle of Steel
- Runequest
- Symbaroum
- Talislanta
- Worlds Without Number
And that’s just what I have in print. Those vastly outweigh my D&D materials, even combined with the other games I own that rely on the OGL (13th Age, Blue Rose, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Fantasy Craft, Pathfinder, and The Wheel of Time).
Has the OGL been a huge boon to the subsidized hobby (I can’t call it “industry” with a straight face) that is tabletop roleplaying? Absolutely. But Wizards of the Coast’s complete implosion and irrelevance will not meaningfully affect my ability to play games, even in the genre space that D&D currently dominates.
Sadly, I don’t have a D&D Beyond subscription to cancel.