Problem of a Cat

Just over a decade ago, D&D 5e came out and quickly became so dominant that it sucked a lot of the air out of other systems. Many third-party publishers quickly switched to it, and many alternative systems adapted to be "5e compatible." For a few years, most TTRPG players and creators gathered around this one standard, and it was easy to bounce off each other's ideas and creations. That domination seems to be faltering over the past few years, mostly due to profit-driven decisions from the corporate overlords that caused many creators in this space to abandon the ship for alternative systems or even those of their own making.

This is, in many ways, a good thing. There is a lot of innovation happening as a result of this shift. Small, genre-specific TTRPGs are getting more visibility and resources poured into them. That said, this fracturing comes with the problem I call the "problem of a cat." Do you want to play fantasy with magic? You will need a stat block for a cat to be a wizard's familiar. Do you want to play a cyberpunk hacker fantasy? Your cat companion will help you get those bugs into that data center. Lovecraftian horror investigations? Cats are good at detecting eldritch horrors, so you need a stat block for a cat. Steampunk airships? A cat is an essential part of the crew to catch mice (see Wooding's Katty Jay series). Futuristic sci-fi? You guessed it, still cats. Having TTRPGs for every genre and setting is nice, but all of them will have to reinvent a cat.

The cat is, of course, only representative of this problem. There is an entire core of things that exist in pretty much all genres and that have to be reinvented over and over again. Some creators are solving this problem by congregating around the "old school renaissance," but that is pretty much genre-specific. Projects like Cortex Prime are also promising, as they could offer some compatibility between systems created using it. A lot of systems also still offer advice on how to translate to 5e-compatible systems and back, which helps alleviate this workload at least a little.

I do not have a good answer to the problem of a cat (yet). Movements like OSR are very genre-specific, and Cortex is too flexible to force any type of standardization. There should probably be a way to make a fully modular TTRPG kit with a built-in notion of "genres" or "fantasies." This would allow one to build a "core" cat that is just a normal cat that can use its claws. Then, for people that want to have magic, it could be upgraded to be an elemental fire cat, and for people trying to play cyberpunk, that cat could be upgradeable with cyber enhancements—making it a higher level, more useful (and genre-flavored) cat while saving both the work of creating a normal street cat.