Rogue is worse. I played a rogue for a while and it didn’t really deliver a great experience. Every combat was “I shoot, move, cunning action hide”.

Scouting was largely outclassed by the wizard’s familiar, and even more so the pact of the chain familiar. Splitting the party is tedious and risky.

One GM tried to make a system to abstract scouting- you’d make some checks and get information and maybe trouble. But that guy liked PbtA way more than me, and it clearly influenced his design, because pretty much every time you used this system something bad would happen. I don’t play these games to be a fuck up. I want to be exceedingly competent in my niche.

I guess some of that is up to individual GM style, but I think some of it is on the system itself.

I’ve had a lot of DND players, often people that exclusively play DND, tell me they like it that way. They like that there’s basically no rules for conflict outside of combat. “Just talk it out” and “we’re here to role play stop looking at your sheet”.

Personally, not my taste. If we’re just going to “talk it out” I feel like we should write a book instead. That or actually rip out the stunted social rules in DND. That would help the annoying thing where the real life Sales Guy brings his whole personality into his 8 Cha Fighter.

But I also think a lot of those people have never really played anything else, and like dnd’s “barely any rules” better than whatever fantasy they’re imagining.

I like that games with working social rules can let someone who’s shy or quiet play someone socially powerful, just like a physically weak person can play a strong barbarian.

I think it would be pretty funny if jesus did return and cast all these rich assholes into the lake of fire. Because they fucking deserve it.

Do you think the people who make Dr Farts want to play with other people who make Dr Farts type characters? And the people who make 1500 dmg/turn combat monsters, do they want to play with other combat monsters?

I feel like sometimes no. Sometimes people want to be the odd one out. Which sucks, because a group that’s homogeneous on this aspect I think can work pretty well. If everyone’s a combat monster the GM can go crazy. But if there’s just one or two combat monsters, now they have to figure out how to keep it fun for them and also Bob The Fighter that hits for 1d8+2 each turn.

Neat idea.

Kind of similar to Fate’s standard game creation, where you go around and come up with how your backstory connects to everyone else. These connections can be invoked for bonuses later.

I’m pretty sure Reagan’s administration decided to just stop enforcing anti monopoly stuff

may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.

I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.

Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.

Sometimes I feel like everyone who would care already knows , and everyone who doesn’t care won’t care no matter what the facts say.

You could prove definitively that LLMs summon demons that eat live babies, and they’d shrug and dismiss it.

It’s hard to say. I think too much can lead to the kid not appreciating how much things cost, or how hard it is for other people.

My parents paid for most of my education, and that made a big difference. I entered adulthood without massive debt. (Low five figures seems low compared to many of my peers, anyway. USA! USA!)

Generational wealth is powerful. Many of today’s richest people became super wealthy because their parents paid for stuff when they were getting started.

I think the most important question is if your kid is going to be a kind and decent person, or a scumbag who says “I earned all of this! no one gave me a handout” whild voting to gut aid programs.

Went to protests, volunteered for better candidates, tried to get other people involved. The bare minimum, perhaps, but more than another run of Baldur’s gate 3.

This whole conversation is at least using the words “DND” even if one could argue they’re not actually talking about DND specifically. Thus, I was making the point that if you do want a system that rewards creative players DND is not a good one.

What system are you thinking of that stands in contrast to dnd’s “explicit permissiveness”?

I’m not even sure what you mean by the “permissive interpretation”. Is that the Calvinball mode? Games can definitely go badly when it turns into an inconsistent, unpredictable mess. Games have rules so we don’t argue like children on the playground going “I hit you. No you didn’t. Yes I did. I have a force field. Well I have an anti force field laser…”

My current plan is to wait for my basic coworkers to have kids, and those kids to be old enough to ask “what did you do in the 2020s to fight fascism?”. They’ll lie and say they did a lot, and I’ll burst through the wall to shout “NO THEY DIDN’T. THEY DID SHIT. THEY STAYED HOME AND PLAYED VIDEO GAMES. YOUR DADDY IS A COWARD”.

Hopefully somehow this will result in my coworkers dying alone and unloved in a pit of shame or something.

But the reality is their egos are indestructible and they will always think they’re good people, and their kids will probably be the same.

Personally I rather dislike “5% of every attempt will be wacky”, especially when multiplied by “higher level people are making more attempts, and thus are having more wackiness”.

The fighter who makes three attacks a round is going to have three times as many “hilarious fumbles” compared to the lower level fighter only making one.

This is part of why I prefer dice pools over a flat single die system.

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it’s fine. That’s not even an especially lightweight distribution.

D&D is great because it allows for creative freedom

This is not something unique to dnd! In fact, DND is not even especially good at this!

It’s like people are saying “mayonnaise is great because you can add it to any meal”, which is technically true, but meanwhile salt is right there being ignored on the shelf.

What’s with the weird censoring of the post metadata? Do we not want to credit the original poster for some reason?

But dnd’s paradox is it is both open ended and rigid. My problem is it’s too open ended in many ways (eg: social conflict), almost completely missing rules in other parts (eg: meta game mechanics, conceding conflicts), and too rigid in others (eg: Eldritch blast targeting rules, unarmed smite and sneak attack). That’s not even going into the bigger problems like the adventuring day or how coarse class+level makes many concepts impractical at best.

On top of that, it is so mega popular many players have no other reference points and don’t realize its assumptions are not universally true. It’s like people who have only ever watched the Lord of the rings movies, and they’re like “of course movies are four hours long and have horses. That’s just how movies are.”

The main things DND 5e does well are popular support, and the very small decision space for players makes it hard to make a character that’s mechanically very weak or very strong. It brings nothing special to the table for roleplaying.

Compare with my go-to example of Fate, which has simple systems to encourage it. CofD, my second favorite, also does.

DND is a team game, and both have agreed upon rules. Not sure I follow your objection

I’m pretty sure the browser has more sandboxing than a desktop app running as me. The desktop app could do anything. Firefox tries to prevent webpages from doing nefarious stuff.

There’s a spectrum of play that runs from strict rules-as-written to complete calvinball. Calvinball can be fun, but it’s not really a transferrable game. It’s very particular to that moment and that group.

Sometimes people post wacky calvinball moments (eg: rolling damage against the floor, a free action to eat tiles, a +2 bonus to hit) as if that’s baseline RAW DND. It is not. Many tables would be like “wtf, that’s not how this game works”. So it can be kind of weird when it’s presented as obvious, as if it’s raw, when it’s just make pretend.

Imagine if the post was “we were playing basketball and I missed the shot, so I got in my car and drove up close so I could jump off the roof and dunk”. Like, wacky story but not how you’re supposed to play the game.

Furthermore, DND specifically is kind of bad at creativity. It’s very precariously balanced, with specific rules in odd places and no rules in others. Compare with, for example, Fate, which has “this thing in the scene works to my advantage” rules built in. DND is almost entirely in the hands of the DM.