[andolanra]

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.

[kubb]

At this point I'm hoping for some names of high quality open source high fantasy RPGs with a lot of content ready to jump in and play.

[andolanra]

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?

[1]: https://paizo.com/pathfinder [2]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/255088/The-Black-Hack-S... with the open content collected at https://the-black-hack.jehaisleprintemps.net/ [3]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/197158/Maze-Rats [4]: https://www.burningwheel.com/torchbearer-2e-core-set/ [5]: https://www.burningwheel.com/burning-wheel/ [6]: https://www.mouseguard.net/book/role-playing-game/ [7]: https://dungeon-world.com/ [8]: http://apocalypse-world.com/ [9]: https://spoutinglore.blogspot.com/2019/05/homebrew-world-v15... [10]: https://bladesinthedark.com/greetings-scoundrel [11]: https://smallcoolgames.itch.io/raiders-in-the-dark

[kubb]

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?

[andolanra]

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!)