This is broadly true, but given the low level of rules mastery I’ve seen I say “shared understanding of the rules” is a generous description.
Still, like a national fast food chain sometimes you just want something familiar even if it’s not as good as other options. You know it’s not likely to be worse than your expectations
Everything is an option according to them but it’s ultimately isn’t.
It really is a more restrictive system than people think. If you have a concept that’s like “psychic batman” you can’t really make that concept go in DND. Trivial to make in the other games I play the most (fate, CofD).
D&D is not as good as it is popular. It’s a very idiosyncratic game that’s mostly focused on a particular kind of play, but people treat it like it’s a general purpose tool.
Clearly people can have fun with it, and that’s what really matters. I’m still convinced many of them would have more, easier, cheaper, fun if they picked up a different game.
I briefly toyed with some of the early image generation stuff. It was a fun toy for making NPCs for RPGs.
But now it’s everywhere and being used as an excuse to squeeze labor harder and deliver dubious value. If it just stayed as a toy I wouldn’t mind it much. I get annoyed at the aggressive “do you want me to rewrite that for you??” shit that pops up now.
They’re not thinking with facts they’re thinking with feelings.
LinkedIn is so blandly bad. There’s a lot of formulaic slop, but apparently it’s effective enough that people don’t stop posting it.
Also I thought all reasonable people agreed that unconscious bias is bad and we should minimize it in the job process, but then LinkedIn goes and says “Everyone have a profile picture! This definitely won’t unfairly benefit some kinds of people!”
Also people who try to use it as a dating service need to be banished from the land.
This should be a climate crime and the management responsible forced to pick up trash or some other appropriate punishment
Then do universal basic income. Now people are free to spend a couple hours scooping ice cream without risking their safety. Assuming your basic income is enough to cover a dignified life
Kind of. You only get one extra attack for most classes (and most games, since a minority reach level 11 and also have a class with third attack).
It would be interesting if con only got you an HP bonus at first, fifth, and sometimes 11th level.
I read this as Rincewind like from discworld, and I was going to say he had a great con score. Lots of cardio.
Fate is the one that comes to mind. Just skills. Your big brawler dude might be like
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.
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You don’t need to know this guy has exactly 8 or 10 intelligence, or whatever.
DND stats are weird. Only con gets more impactful as you level. Imagine if strength was +damage and carry per level. 18 strength at first level is +3 damage, but fourth level is +12. That might be the path to reinventing Pathfinder, though.
I’ll also say, playing games that don’t have the six stats, or even character attributes at all was really refreshing. Just skills worked fine.
The confusion here is there are a few different ways of playing D&D and many different types of DMs out there.
This is an important point. There’s not really a “right” way to play so much as a “right way for your group”.
I don’t think D&D specifically does a good job of guiding groups into finding what they’ll enjoy. It comes loaded with a lot of assumptions, and then different players can sit down at a table without realizing how different their axioms are.
My elderly parents historically have been middle of the road democrats. Hated Reagan, hated bush.
Today my dad said “the radical left takes things too far”. My mother said, “I don’t feel safe in new york city! they’re targeting old white people!”
I don’t know what sludge they’re consuming but it’s not factual.
Bob presumably has been using player knowledge to inform character decisions in a way the group doesn’t like.
For example, illusions may require a wisdom check to realize they’re not real. When Bob rolls openly on the table and gets a 1, he decides as a player that his character is going to treat the lava monsters as illusions. If he instead had to roll in the opaque jar, he as a player would be less certain about if they’re illusions or real.
And that’s where the metagaming comes into play, with the player finding alternative ways to be able to act on what they believe was a lie, even though their character believes something to be a truth.
My favorite solution to this comes from Fate’s compels. In short, you bribe the player with the equivalent of Inspiration for buying in.
So, yeah, maybe the NPC is lying, but I can invoke their “Very Trustworthy” aspect, because the dice said they’re coming off as very trustworthy, and you get a nice shiny fate point so long as you go along with it.
It can channels the metagamer’s desire to win in a more story friendly direction.
Maybe! Most commoners only have like 1 hit die, so their explosions would be small.
I also intended only for the initially marked people to explode, but I realize I wrote it so it reads like “anyone initially marked or anyone hit by the explosion explodes”. The latter might be a “Greater Immolation” variant, where the explosions mark victims for subsequent explosions.
I feel like your post and my post are tangential to each other.
Having it cut off abruptly because of a mistake calculation on the DM’s part while prepping the session goes against the story.
As I said, if you don’t want situations where a character meets an abrupt end anticlimactically, don’t play games that do that. That’s a pretty big property of DND and close relatives, but that’s not how ttrpgs have to be. Or, if you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, have some sort of table rule to handle it. I guess “hey GM can you fudge it if we’re going to die stupidly?” would be a rule you could adopt, even. Informed consent is important.
I think it’s because DND is so old. It’s like a black and white tv, and people have all these tips and solutions to solve problems like “I can’t tell if that’s red or purple”, and ignoring people saying “if that’s important to you, get a color tv”. Black and white is definitely a valid choice for media, but it probably shouldn’t be the default.
Also, having a player sit around twiddling their thumbs for the rest of the session because their character died is not fun and goes against the reason why we play games in the first place.
This is also kind of a dnd-ism that can be solved in various ways. Fate’s consequence system, for one example.
Fuck realism, it is a fantasy game we play to have fun. So getting rid of unfun aspects isn’t just recommended, it is a necessity.
I mean, I don’t particularly disagree with this but my point wasn’t really about “realism”. It’s about the social contract. I don’t want a game where the GM is telling a fixed story, and will move the pieces around to keep it on track.
Like, in one game the party was trying to deal with a wyvern that was making trouble in the region. The players had several misfortunes that I could have fudged, but it wouldn’t have been better
They wanted to use some spell or other to keep it from flying away. I rolled the save in the open. It saved, and flew away. Yeah, I could’ve just lied and said it failed, but why even have a saving throw system if you want that? Other games have meta game currency to force issues one way or another. Play that. Or port that into DND.
They tried to poison the wyvern. Rolled in the open to see if the wyvern ate the bait, or spotted the players hiding nearby. It rolled well, and took off before eating a full dose. Could’ve just fudged it, but they knew the odds.
So they followed it to its lair, dealt with the kobold cult (they made friends because this group was great), and had a climactic fight with the wyvern on top of the plateau, by the lake. Including a dramatic “wait if I dive into the water I take less fire damage, raw? I’m a warlock of the deep I’m diving in!” moment.
Or the time they challenged an NPC group to a battle of the bands to see who would claim ownership of the macguffin. The players lost. The NPCs took the macguffin back to the university. But they negotiated a compromise to borrow a similar, weaker, tool, and went on with that. The story was different, but it wasn’t worse. Fudging the rolls to be like “oh wow guys they really borked it up” would’ve felt cheesy as hell.
So yeah, I could’ve fudged it, but I didn’t have to. I’m not writing a book with a fixed plot.
I don’t think the GM’s job is merely damage calculator. But this:
I’ll be fucked if I let a kobold derail the overall plan
I rather disagree with. If there’s a plan then why are we rolling dice? I don’t want to play to fulfill whatever the GM’s plan is. They should just write a book. I’ve had many great, memorable, scenes that came about because the players had a challenge and they overcame it. Sometimes after running away and trying again. If I just decided “oh I guess the dragon’s breath rolled really low” then, again, we should just write a story together. Or play a game that doesn’t have such a big random factor.
Like, I also don’t really enjoy a nameless kobold killing Finnigan the Fighter with a fluke natural 20 in what wasn’t supposed to be high stakes. But the solution for me isn’t to fudge rolls, but play a different game. I don’t really like stupid deaths like that, so I don’t play games that facilitate it. I know that’s kind of “baby with the bathwater” for some people, but I really do think some people are fighting against what D&D trends towards, when there are better tools. It’s a hammer. Sometimes you want a screwdriver or a pen.
Oh that’s a good pun on transitive reasoning