 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie and my entire life revolves around D&D. My job, my hobby, my serial, it permeates every facet of my everyday life. And if you've been watching my channel for a long time, chances are that my boisterous tone and charming way of speaking have convinced you to make D&D at least a bit more of your life than it used to be. You're probably eating your own flavor of dice right now. But now it's time to stop. It's time to stop playing D&D. Put down the D20s. Pull the Ranger out of the locker. The Wizard will especially know more. D&D is over. Society is advanced past the need for D&D. What I've seen in the past decade of playing tabletop games is that the tabletop RPG community tends to gravitate towards one game, while all the others exist sparingly through the crowdfunding efforts of a loyal fanbase, or exist as a flash in the pan before fading away into the memory of the collective dream state. When I started, it was D&D 3rd Edition, which quickly gave rise to 3.5, which through its efforts to make the most janky, broken game possible, opened up the doors for Pathfinder to swoop in and gain such a strong following that it actually rivaled the dragons in strength. Do you want to play Pathfinder or D&D? When I was growing up, that was the question, and it was only sparingly broken up with weird, third-party answers like Palladium. Paiso and Wizards of the Coast owned the market, and as much as we want to pretend that companies like White Wolf ever stood a chance, no, no they did not. But all that changed in 2014, with the rise of 5e. Between its incredibly low barrier of entry, the cast of Critical Role popularizing it by being famous people who played an outcast hobby, and the cultural upswing of all nerd activities across the board, 5e blew past Pathfinder and rocketed to the number one spot in the role-playing world. I have never, ever seen tabletop games galvanized like that before, and even people who don't like 5e can't resist the impact that it had. We got Vin Diesel, guys. Vin Diesel plays our game. So for the past five years, we have not needed anything else. Like I said, my entire life revolves around D&D, but now that revolution is starting to slow down. Having talked to a lot, a lot of people in the RPG space, I know that for most of them, 5e D&D was their introduction to the concept of role-playing games, and for most of those people, they have never actually really tried to do anything else, either because they didn't want to or they were too intimidated by a new system, or they just didn't have a concept for role-playing games outside of the world's greatest, so they didn't try, and it's led to a weird imbalance in the community. There are people who want D&D to be their perfect game where anything is possible and the rules serve you, and they homebrew the hell out of D&D, crafting it into a completely unrecognizable game using the bare-bone system that 5e provides. And yeah, that is the point of D&D, but in trying to perfectly fit one square into the peg, we've ignored all those other shapes that role-playing comes in. For instance, I've talked to people who wish there was more story and political intrigue in their games. Of course, my first suggestion is to find a DM that will facilitate that, but I also recommend that if you're looking for that kind of game, you might want to try out Call of Cthulhu, or Changeling the Lost, to which the usual reaction is confusion and aversion. That's fine, maybe you want all the fantasy elements of D&D, but wish it were more realistic. Have you ever heard a room quest? It's that! The game goes for people who want murder and violence. Did you know that there is a whole line of RPGs set in the Warhammer universe that'll give that to you? You probably have, since every fan of Warhammer will not shut up about Warhammer, but then you'll also say that it's too hard to find somebody to run it for you. And that's the major problem. D&D is perfect for getting people into the hobby, and you can spend your entire life playing it and be completely content and never have to change. I'm not telling you that you have to stop playing D&D ever. Play what you want, but the comfort that D&D provides makes it easy to never want to branch out, like a coddling mother. She's there for you, and she'll always be fine, but someday you might want to pull back and say, you're my mother. What are you still doing in my house? D&D makes it easy to never branch out, but the rewards for branching out as both a player and DM are massive. The first time that I played World of Darkness, I thought I was an immortal vampire, sent to take names and drink ass, just like how adventurers and D&D feel, but then I walked up into a bar full of humans, tried to kill somebody, and the whole bar picked up improvised weapons and punched me in my listats until I was dead. I don't blame the DM for doing that. I was young and didn't know better. And more to the point, I didn't think to know better because all my time before that was spent playing D&D, where when you find a cave full of goblins, you kill a cave full of goblins. Peace was never an option. Likewise, when I played my first Rogue Shraider game, I was thrust into a world where bullets were mini grenades and the people who shot them are turbo demons and their armor screams and their bullets scream and ice cream and then I'm dead. Through Rogue Shraider, I learned to be more thoughtful on how I approach my problems and to look for the environment for answers when casting Fist will just cause major damage to my being alive. And it's not all combat and violence either. I learned not to take games seriously by playing one of my favorite RPGs ever, Paranoia. In that game, it's 1984 all the time. You work for Big Brother and not following the rules is Treason, which is punishable by death. Sounds gloomy, but the entire thing is played for laughs. Your character is called a troubleshooter because you actually go out, find trouble and then shoot it. You have a six pack of extra clone lives because dying is supposed to be a cartoonish inconvenience and the amount of rules that you have to follow are ridiculous and meant to get you killed. That's the joke. Laughing out of game is treason, which is punishable by death. Abandoning your post is treason, which is punishable by death. Dying is considered abandoning your post, which is treason, which is punishable by you understand. These are traits that every player and every DM should pick up on because they're things that will help you learn to be a better role player. So why don't more people do it? Well, as soon as I asked that, you probably had the answer in the pit of your stomach. People feel uncomfortable stepping into the unknown. Trying to figure out a whole new system is a lot of work if you've never played it before. And especially if you're the DM, it's tough. I have a rule for myself that I'll never DM a game that I haven't played before because even I consider that to be madness. So fear not. Your best friend, Dabby Chappy, is here to be the Pepto-Bismol to your upset stomach. Over the next few months, I'm going to be making videos dedicated to the best that the tabletop world has to offer. I'm going to go down on everything from the cards to the cocks to even single page rules like mini games like Honey Heist and Everyone Is John. My hope is that by using my incredible platform to teach people how to actually play these games, I might be able to convince people to well, play these games. If not, then I can always go back to shoveling endless hours of D&D content out the gates of the Kingdom of Chap, and we can all pretend that no other games exist besides our Lord and Saviour Dungeons and Dragons. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, hit that like button, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford to buy every book from every RPG that has ever been published. But yeah, Dabby out.