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Something to make everyone unhappy :) 5e-based Traveller
(www.enworld.org)
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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I don't really have a lot of empathy for people who don't want to learn a new rule system.
First off, most of those people barely know 5e to begin with. You could swap them into another system and they'd probably perform about as well.
Aside from that, maybe they don't mean to sound anti-intellectual, but they kind of do. It's okay to read and learn new things. I've had potential players put up more of a fight than it would've taken to just read the thing.
Related, I think there's like a literacy crisis. Many people don't seem to read or think great.
...what many anti-fifth-edition positions miss is that it's not about learning a new system, it's about compatibility across a vast ecosystem of disparate settings and campaigns...
...fifth edition is by far the most-popular roleplaying game of all time, and if you want your starship to land in exandria, then hop through a planar gate over to quickstone before catching a lightning rail to innsmouth, where you join fantasy forest creatures and anime dragons fighting an armada of steam-mechs and undead pirates, fifth edition is ready to run that out-of-the-box today, tomorrow, or even repurposing last decade's campaign material, whether or not you realised at the time that you might want to do so...
...it's not about being the best system for any one genre or even mashing-up all genres, it's about unparalleled network effects, which includes breadth of material available, long-term development and support, and immediate accessibility...like it or not, fifth edition is the lingua franca of modern roleplaying and other contenders don't come anywhere close...
...if you love other game systems (and i certainly do), by all means play them!..but to disparage the unquestionable triumph fifth edition has wrought through organic community support i think misses the point...
Why are each of your lines wrapped in ellipsis?
I don't think 5e is especially compatible with disparate settings and campaigns. It's not an actually generic system like Fate or GURPS. It's got underbaked or entirely missing whole RPG subsystems and mechanics (eg: social conflict, succeed-at-a-cost, metagame currency). It's highly opinionated in other regards- hit points, class and level, resting. You can hammer the peg into the hole, but you could do that with anything.
It's not a good system for modeling anything outside heroic fantasy.
It's certainly a popular system, but many things are popular without being good. But, if your top priority is going where people are, by all means stick to D&D 5e, reddit, facebook, etc.