Champions is the best system I know of for the Superhero genre. The mechanics fit the frame of reference: I remember having to borrow dice so I could roll a 30d6 Power Neuteralisation (Fire) attack to absorb a huge fireball being thrown at the Houses of Parliament. But those same mechanics do not work anywhere near as well at the “Agent” level, where skills and degrees of success matter more than raw power.

If you want to game in the “Action Hero” world then you need the Torg rules. But, despite being specifically designed for genre hopping, the Torg system only really worked in that one style of play. Its fantasy subsystem simply did not work.

For fantasy, well it depends what you are after. I was in a rotating GM world which used the Torg rules for a “police procedural” set in a fantasy world. That worked very well, and better than D&D ever could.

I have used Pacesetter rules for their Space Opera and Time-cop campaigns. Both worked quite well, though I suspect I would use Torg for Space Opera mechanics in future, Space Opera being a subset of Action Hero, though I might well use the Pacesetter campaign world.

So what sort of world would I use the D&D rules for? Sorry, but I can’t think of any which cannot be done better in another system.

Know what you mean about targeting powergamers; always a risk of power inflation

When WotC bought TSR, they were riding high on Magic: The Gathering. I even spoke with Peter Adkison once at great length about their plans, and he was incredibly enthusiastic. He LOVED D&D.

What happened was WotC took the ideas of M:tG and applied them to D&D. Feats, etc, were like cards, and encouraged a certain amount of min-maxing (granted, that was ALWAYS in D&D, back to White Box 1E, which I still have somewhere). When Hasbro got into the mix by acquiring WotC, things changed. Peter left (a very wealthy man), and the nonsense started. 3.5, and then 4.0.

And now, this.

Me, I’m an old d100 fan, of RQ2 and CoC days. West End’s TORG remains possibly my all-time favorite, but you know what? 3E *was* fun to DM and play.

There’s a wealth of games to choose from now, and I don’t envy the D&D folks trying to come up with something to capture their share of the audience / participators (and re-capture the old guard). But the biggest problem they face is trying to get people out from behind their computer desks and back into face-to-face gaming.

Do you think they really have any chance, even if they somehow produce something utterly amazing, of competing with the growing gaming culture of solitude? <— actual question, not rhetorical

4E I don’t really know, but it sounds like a complete ground-up re-write to me, and 5E aims to re-unite the sundered fanbase to pick up disaffected fans of earlier editions. Sounds like a recipe for a sprawling, incoherent mess. What has forked cannot be unforked.

There are a lot of great little small-press games out there which do precisely what you’re wanting. Some are essentially rewritings of early DnD (the so-called “Old School Renaissance”), others have a more story-orientated approach with very simple mechanics. All strip away decades of accreted cruft (“Do we really need a rule for this? No? Let’s toss it then”) for a back-to-basics approach.

Instead of creating new systems and rules and whatever else they might have planned, I would love to see it just rebooted to make it appealling to the next generation – create a game that promotes imagination over rule-mongering, and entices modern teenagers into trying out something that, when done right, can be truly magical.

But big companies are in it for the profit over game-play these days (look at the ever-spiralling cost of wargaming minatures) and I imagine the final product will be hefty tomes that cost a fortune and spoon-feed the players every step of the way.

Bring back the dungeonmasters who only needed a die and a group of friends to have a good time…