Person with Internet Access wonders if there are any other Fantasy RPGs other than D&D
Simon Knueppel, an adult human with access to the internet, recently wondered if there were any other RPGs besides Dungeons & Dragons. Knueppel, who has owned a smart phone since 2012, began to consider the possibility after a rough D&D session, which was de-railed after a random encounter led to a combat that lasted four hours. Knueppel said, “That was a bit of a letdown, considering we really only play once a month, and it kind of made me wish that there was a game that was like D&D, but didn’t have the parts that I didn’t like. Trying to imagine a world like that seems like an even bigger fantasy than the Forgotten Realms.”
Knueppel sat on a bench outside of his local public library, which he had been a cardholder of since a field trip in second grade. He said he needed to think about this for a minute. “I don’t want to do anything brash, but I might need to see if there’s such a thing as another RPG,” he said, resting his chin on his fist. “On the one hand, I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons for a long time, almost three years now. I feel like if there were other RPGs, I’d have noticed them by now. On the other hand, the fact that it’s called an RPG suggests that it belongs to a larger category, where other games might share some of D&D’s characteristics, like dice, role-play, and a one-through-twenty leveling system.”
Eventually, Knueppel returned home, where he sat down to his desktop computer with a working ethernet connection. ‘I’ll bet there’s someone out there who’s gone through what I have. Surely there are other curious minds who seek to strike out into new and uncharted waters? What if there were grittier games, more relaxed games, settings that were sci-fi, or even completely mundane everyday settings?” Kneuppel’s eyes began to shine with the wonders his mind was beginning to comprehend, so he opened Google, typed “reddit.com” into the search bar, and proceeded to made a post asking if there were any other RPGs than D&D.
