Spend long enough in the TTRPG fandom and you'll find yourself witness to - or participating in - an argument about which game has the best representation of your favorite fantasy class. YouTuber Deficient Master has a novel way of resolving that argument - he's gathered up a bunch of his fellow D&D content creator friends, gotten each one to build a wizard from the TTRPG of their choice, and thrown them all into an arena for a trial by combat. The results are, predictably, chaos.
The ADHDM is playing as the DnD 2024 Wizard; Nonat1s takes on a feat-laden Pathfinder 2E wizard; Indestructoboy plays a no-frills wizard from his own RPG Vagabond; while Bob World Builder plays a self-destructing wizard from Dungeon Crawl Classics. Seeing the range of stats, variety and effect of spells, and huge variation in rules complexity between the four games is like seeing a dog walker with a Chihuahua, Labrador, Great Dane, and St Bernard all on a lead - technically they're the same species, but boy is that hard to believe.
We've embedded the video here because it's only 20 minutes long, and it is really, really funny - you should probably just watch it. Despite all the characters being level one wizards, it manages to be as anarchic and catastrophically brutal as the Wizard War animations by Punkey Doodles - though no-one casts Power Word: Scrunch.
The fact that the games interoperate at all really reflects the influence that D&D has over the RPG landscape, and how much the Open Gaming License shaped the development of the industry. Pathfinder is a direct continuation of D&D 3.0, while Dungeon Crawl Classics and Vagabond are both part of the Old School Renaissance tradition of games inspired by earlier DnD editions - and though they all do things very differently, they all also have hitpoints, D20s, and Armor Class. Whatever you like - or dislike - most about D&D, you can probably find another D20 game that's just perfect for you.
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