Wotc is also doing this in their upcoming 5e revision (which at this point they are insisting on still calling “5e” very stupidly) which has had extensive public playtests and surveys. I wonder how much they are gonna look at how much BG3 is selling and steal mechanical ideas from it to put back in the tabletop game. Hopefully, a lot
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and all the grognards will crawl out of their abyssal depths to say “they turned it into a video game, play pathfinder instead, read this interminable essay about why it’s not realistic to jump that far”
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I now refuse to play any rpg where I can’t jump everywhere constantly
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And 4e will forever languish in obscurity…
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I hear the pathfinder games are impossible to play if you aren’t a true tabletop murderhead. they seem kinda cool though
It’s just d&d 3.5e bullshit. If you think that’s fun you will think Pathfinder is cool. Its nothing special it just happened to capitalize on grognards edition warring really well, but I doubt the Pathfinder games are impenetrable because there are many 3/3.5e games. if its impossible to play because grognard shit is annoying well that’s a different story
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If you want to play an annoyingly crufty system with a zillion modifiers you may as well pick like Shadowrun and get a way better setting out of the deal. If you want to do heroic fantasy but like 95% of your interest is what happens on the grid, you want to play 4e.
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What’s the good tabletop combat system? Every socalled grognard i know ‘round her’ just complains about rpg combat
out of the box? Like literally none of them. Cubas example shadowrun infamously has awful rules where like 60% of the time a grenade explosion will gib you like quake. Every single white wolf game is a fucking mess. D&D has been varying states of intolerable for decades. Even Feng shui kind of has an ass dice roll system…
When my friend was our GM shed just make us roll dice to determine just how cool the shit we were doing was because shadowruns combat sucks. The biggest larp in Denmark for world of darkness broke up because a guy broke some girls finger because combat took too long to resolve.
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everyone’s like “Shadowrun makes you roll 2000 dice to determine whether you Hack This Port or what angle your EMP grenade lands at” but i thought that was kinda the point??
some people really like rolling dice every 15 seconds this is kind of a critical debate among tabletop gamers as to how fun this actually is. nerds take it super serious… my title on a tabletop forum used to be “storygaming fag” because I didnt like Pathfinder and it wasn’t being used as a term of endearment let me tell ya
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In general though grogs love knowing how many silver pieces a farmer makes in a year and tons of rules and “verisimilitude” which I have literally never heard a non-annoying person use in a sentence. They love when you are rewarded for reading some random fucking splat book that has a ton of OP shit they can spring on the GM at the table because they have never read it before and fuck up the whole game. Also they love grids until they don’t because 4e is a gay baby world of warcraft game but having to measure how many feet away the goblin you want to nuke is in 3e is epic. Is this making sense so far.
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had the r slur put into my title several times on several forums lol fucking cool they could just. Do that
Anyway, i agree thats all part of why i like Apocalypse World/PBTA so much. combat is tiny numbers you can do ONE THING really well and its urgently tied back into the story
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Yeah apocalypse world is one of the most enjoyable tabletop games ever lol on a purely mechanical level, too me. The thing about shit like shadowrun and like vampire the masquerade is that the thing that actually appeals to people is the fluff, its the setting, the stupid cyberpunk or 90s goth college liberal aesthetic. like in so many games you can make your cool awesome character only to find out they fucking suck shit because the rules are poorly implemented or that you need some other book or whatever and its a huge bummer. This was an enormous problem with world of darkness. Like fuck everyone I know who did vampire larp liked it way better when it was rock paper scissors before they started making everyone carry around a fucking deck of cards to decide shit or whatever. It’s just a hassle and distracts from the interesting part, which is having another person synthesize a bunch of other peoples goofy ideas into a coherent story.
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I think it’s really telling that high level campaigns in d&d have always been a fucking chore because it’s like an arms race to find ways to fuck over the players for being too powerful after a certain point, and like nobody ever wants to retire the characters before it stops being fun since your like years into a fucking game probably and everyone is super attached. This even manifests in the PC games like the first fight in dark queen of krynn being ridiculous, like 4 red dragons vs the party or every stupid mage duel in baldur’s gate 2. There’s even a mod for bg2 that’s like “this game doesn’t engage with ad&d’s busted ass upper levels ENOUGH” and turns every fight into an hour long slog where everyone has sequencers and your dispelling like 11 fucking buffs from every enemy. And yes I know I complain about this constantly!!!
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4e’s rules are simpler in implementation and deeper in actual mechanical choice that Shadowrun. It’s a much, much, much better game.
I’m not sure it’s something I necessarily want in the year of our lord 2023 but if I had to pick between either 4e was tremendously better.
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4e’s biggest crime was making a game based on how people were actually playing D&D at the time. Every game I ever played in was a combination of extremely loose interpretation of skill and ability rolls mixed with the tactical grid based combat. That was every game of 3e based stuff I was ever in.
They optimized the game to make the grid stuff more interesting, and to streamline the skills so they’d make more sense in play and have less pointless fiddlyness and suddenly it was a problem.
I say this every time it comes up. I’ve probably said it a half dozen times on the forum. But it’s still true.
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have fighters ever been as fun to play as they were in 4e where you were a giant roadblock that could mark bitches for death and interrupt their bullshit every time they try to do anything that doesn’t involve you?? god forbid anyone but wizards get to have fun playing the fucking game
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Yeah, that’s what I said. Shadowrun is the bad game (like 3.5e and Pathfinder) with the cool setting. 4e is the good game with the heroic fantasy setting.
I am in no wise an expert on this and would only be paraphrasing more knowledgable people but: there’s 4e, as previously stated. Burning Wheel seems like an effectively crufty fantasy system if you’re looking for a dnd replacement. Dungeon World is a powerful lightweight option if you want less numbers and more go fast. If you’re looking for realism in melee combat without unnecessary bloat I think the usual recommendations are Riddle of Steel or the Usagi Yojimbo game? Weirdly?
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This is getting really out of thread scope and maybe mods should move this to the rpg thread but…
The burning wheel is remarkable because it is a medieval fantasy game about elves and dwarves and orcs and wizards that will in no way be anything like d&d when you sit down and play it. I do think it has one of the only good crunchy RPG combat systems, though, it’s true.
It’s much more about making a fantasy RPG by returning to the textual source material rather than letting d&d define the conversation.
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