What the heck is cluck tho
Edit: oh, clunk lol. I’m tired
Maybe you intend this as banter which I’m just not picking up on, but I don’t think it’s fair to jump from “game systems good & bad” to “Tulpa is gatekeeping”. Maybe we don’t need to have a huge formalist discussion about the nature of quality and different folks’ rubrics for evaluation to agree that it’s possible to enjoy a thing regardless of whether it’s bad or not without considering evaluations of quality as an attack on those who enjoy that thing.
This is my “I am still playing World of Warcraft in 2018” post! Thank you for reading.
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I can only assume you are saying this from a lack of familiarity with what games are being made right now.
Like… Torchbearer, the black hack, whitehack, beyond the wall, into the odd, dungeon world, blades against darkness, shadows of the demon lord, etc are all way more interesting versions of dnd’s specific thing than dnd itself, and that’s without even talking about all the games that exist outside the space of dungeon delving adventurers.
I mean, its great that people are having fun playing it, I am literally running a 5e game on sb. But, I think acting as if it is some sort of triumph of game design is absurd. Its not the worst game, it’s basically functional. But it still needs a fistful of house rules just to rise above “its not busted”
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I did, don’t worry. I meant it mostly as a joke about Tulpa’s intensity of opinions on stuff like this. I really don’t care that much. In fact, I would really like it if more people would move past the DnD/PF school of RPG-ing, but oh well.
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I do want this discussion to continue so I can say things like ‘Run Shadowrun campaigns in Paranoia’ and so forth
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(But what should we run Paranoia in? Hollowpoint, of course.)
((or Chuubo))
take me to that game place when i come back again
What Tulpa isn’t telling you guys is that he’s only running a 5e game because I forced him to on purpose to make him mad
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Sorry for not being clear, what I meant when I said “most pnp systems out at the moment”, I was referring to commercial, professionally published stuff you buy at Barnes & Noble.
i’d be interested to hear about your house rules
no putting a drink down without a coaster
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what kind of coasters do you have?
I mashed in experience questions and the way alignments are handled from Dungeon World/Class Warfare; we used the adventure setup phase of Beyond the Wall to build the starting town + characters so there was already a bunch of shared history, I’ve used a variety of sources to build overland locations + handle overland travel, we will be switching over to Mutant: Year Zero/Forgotten Lands style resource management (resources like rations and water and even ammunition represented by a die which shrinks in size whenever a 1 or 2 is rolled, resource completely exhausted if a 1 or 2 is rolled on a d4)
And we have a bunch of tweaks to melee combat that @Father.Torque put together and I edited slightly that I don’t feel like copying over right now.
On the GM side, where most of my personal houserules have gone, I’ve been using Mouse Guard style twists to determine what happens on failed rolls, though this doesn’t show up on air very often but its what I’m doing behind the scenes. As well, I’ve been actively structuring the bits of the game that are typically unstructured in dnd. Skill checks have been systematized behind the scenes so that a lot of rolls end up being partial successes as well (because I can’t stand the idea of binary failure/success in stock d&d)
Maybe we should split off all the rpg talk to a dedicated thread and I can talk more about this. I still don’t feel like I have 5e houseruled to where I want it to be.
A lot of this is to make the game more to my tastes rather than to straight improve the game! I would argue that my statement that dnd needs a fistful of house rules remains true, nonetheless, but that each fistful of house rules is… house dependent. What works for No Rangers Allowed doesn’t necessarily work for other groups. BUT I believe every group benefits from tweaking the game to fit their table. This isn’t true of all systems but it is 100% true of 5e. If some group is playing 5e with rules exactly as written, they are not having as good a game as a group that put in the time to tune the game to what works for them.
FURTHER EDIT: I think most groups can benefit from trying games that aren’t like what they already play, if only to figure out what they really like. There’s a lot of resistance to trying different systems because it is commonly assumed that every system is as convoluted and exception based as Dungeons and Dragons (or Shadowrun, or GURPS, or World of Darkness, or any other system that follows 1980s-1990s design trends) but that simply isn’t true. The amount of bandwidth needed to keep the modern D&D rules in your head is orders of magnitude larger than what is needed for most games. The core rules of D&D are ~900 pages long (and yes most of those are monster entries and spell descriptions but still, its an absurd amount of data to keep track of). Even other complex/heavy games from the modern (post-00s) era are typically 1/3 the length of a modern D&D edition, but you don’t really feel like anything is missing when you play them. In fact, I’ve found you usually get a more complete experience and don’t have to make up for big blank spots in design with nebulous concepts of “GM Expertise”. Like, D&D is completely vague on how to best handle… everything outside of combat. A game like blades in the dark? It structures every session by splitting it up between downtime, heists and free roleplaying, with pages and pages of helpful examples and advice so that the game runs smoothly, and its designed so that even if you forget a particular rule, the basic core mechanics will be able to handle the situation in a detailed manner anyway.
I’m not saying D&D should become a “specific” game as its nebulousness for everything outside of combat makes it well suited to being adapted to the tastes of every group (with the help of generously applied house rules), but I do think people should be willing to give more games a fair shake instead of assuming they’re going to fall into a pathfinder-esque “lifetime commitment to figure out how to make a character that doesn’t suck” game.
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I’m sorry
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Yeah, this is probably part of why I am OK with playing PF (though I wouldn’t ever want to run PF as a GM) in that I am completely cool being a character that sucks at like everything and just fumbles through PF adventures, because hell if I am going to take time theory crafting a minmaxed whatever. In my current (on pause) PF game, I am a monk with a gift for getting almost killed a lot and occasionally doing stupid acrobatic shit just because I can. But yeah, PF and D&D both kind invite this kind of crafting in their vanilla forms.
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These aren’t all that obscure - it’s not like you buy Dungeon World out of someone’s van outside a con, it’s in game stores right next to all the WotC stuff. The Adventure Zone has used multiple Powered by the Apocalypse systems. But yeah of the ones I’ve played, they are easy to pick up (seriously, Dungeon World is the lightest thing, character creation can be done in a few minutes and all your rolls & their details are laid out in 2 pages, with more storybuilding tools than I’ve ever seen in D&D) and to implement piecemeal in other systems. The “alignment as guiding impulse” & character bond elements of Dungeon World have been the most helpful things for me in 5e. They really help you get into the spirit of role playing and collaborative story-telling instead of e.g. Pathfinder’s emphasis on billions of numbers.
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I mean part of why this is all true is because D&D, in its bones, Really Is a tactical combat game in a way all these other games are not. Playing it as written makes sense if what you care about is kicking down doors and moving your miniatures in optimal ways to make use of all your powers and etc. Like a Matt Colville, “core” D&D experience is more like Fire Emblem than either, on the one hand, King of Dragon Pass, or on the other, Mass Effect (say).
From what little I know of tabletop D&D’s strength is that it leaves everything else open enough that as long as you’re interested in the extremely broad aesthetic of “fantasy adventure” it can accommodate basically anybody - but it does so through being open to the same houseruling Tulpa is recommending.
Literally I made Tulpa use 5e because I like the tactical stuff juuuuust enough to try and figure out as many ways not to use it as possible, if that makes any sense. Like I want combat to be a last resort but when it happens I want to make use of these stupid old rules I’ve had banging around in my head since middle school. (Why no more THAC0 D&D??) This is highly particularized to my desires and not generally relatable to anyone else. I want the game to be highly player-directed and story-based, but when the swords get unsheathed I want to calculate all my +2’s.
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What’s funny to me is that I have encountered a decent number of people who hate the minis/tactical combat part of D&D, but also seem hesitant to move to any other system. It’s weird.
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Nerds love their comfort food, man.
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