Back in like 2016 I got a game of vampire going. I pitched it to two non-ttrpg friends as “what if you’re vampires but the head vampire in the city is basically Donald Trump…”. 100% player retention.
Game ran for like two years. Lots of blood. We still talk about how the highlights.
I got a mod where your wife survives and you can find her early on. It was pretty sweet.
Failure has to be the player’s fault.
I was going to say “they have to have low random factors” but I realized that’s the same thing. Dying to a random crit in a souls-like would be infuriating
✨ brand awareness ✨
I also want to point out the main reason I stick to using DnD and ttrpgs that are very similar (e.g. pathfinder) as a framework is it lets your group get right into the game instead of spending a lot of time getting used to an unfamiliar system.
That does have some value, but sunk cost is not always a great justification. Also, a lot of systems are way easier to learn than DND. I think people think it’s going to be as hard as memorizing all the DND jank - stat to bonus mappings, attack bonus by level, spell slots, a hundred different unique spells - but many systems aren’t like that. (Quick, can you Sacred Flame and object? Smite with a thrown spear?)
I’ve been playing Vampire and the guy that’s only played DND before has had no trouble picking up the rules. Fate is maybe easier, though more creatively demanding. Lot of tyranny of the blank page potential there.
It would be something like the player asking the goons to move, the goons saying no, the player asking why, the goons giving some answer, the player rolling insight and then deciding a follow up question, probably ending with a persuasion or intimidation check with a DC dependent on how well the rest of the discussion went, with the possibility for other shenanigans to influence as well (like maybe the party mage used minor illusion to fake a badge to pretend to be cops).
That’s how DND would typically play it out, but some things worth noting.
One, where armor class, saves, and HP are very codified, the DC for persuasion or intimidation is very loosey-goosey in DND.
Fate, by contrast, has a stress track (like hit points) for physical and mental harm. So when your character pulls a knife and says “I’m gonna cut your fingers off one at a time and make you eat them”, and you roll, there’s mechanical oomph to it. You roll +7, and they’re either out of the scene of suffering a consequence. DND is just DM whims.
I honestly don’t think something like “social HP” would be better than RP and shenanigans, but idk, I would be curious to try.
I like how Fate does it. You’re not limited so much by your personal ability to act and the GM’s mode. You roll high on Provoke and it mechanically hits.
Oh, another subsystem from Fate I’d recommend importing: Concede. Solves all those “omg I wiped the party” problems.
I think the issue with combat oriented spells is you have spells at each level that do “vaguely this level’s worth of damage” for every damage type so you get a nice progression curve.
This is almost certainly a root cause. I think you could build a neat system where you don’t have two dozen variations of “do damage” spells, but you rather have rules for how much damage and other effects can go into a spell slot. Which is kind of how Mage works, actually.
But then casters would be having all sorts of fun and fighters would be left out again. Which, come to think of it, is a common problem in DND.
Also I’m not sure what you have against exploration and movement type spells because those are very useful in an intrigue heavy campaign.
Nothing against them. I just meant the majority of spells are combat.
Anyway, DnD does have a lot of combat mechanics, but it has plenty of non-combat mechanics too. The combat is more regimented and structured, but I don’t see that as a weakness, just the difference between combat and intrigue.
And sometimes that’s fine. But it’s not the only way for a game to be. If your game has little physical conflict and a lot of social conflict, DND is probably the wrong engine. Be like wearing a winter jacket on a summer beach trip.
Anyway. Like I said this is one of my bugbears so I can go on. Thanks for reading
However, rolling a D20 is a lot of fun, which makes me not want to replace it with something like 3d6.
Fun is subjective, but I personally really enjoy rolling a big dice pool. 4 fire firearms, 3 for dex, 2 for equipment bonus, 4 for the fate blessing, 4 for the gun being magically perfected, 3 for aiming, that’s approximately Get Fucked dice to throw on the table.
it has a lot of assumptions deeply baked into the rules. You need the adventuring day, to rewrite all the powers, or sharply limit party composition, or it falls apart.
The adventuring day is a big one. TBH I’ve never seen a ttrpg without it.
Any whitewolf rpg. Fate. Gurps. Don’t rest your head. Unknown armies. Countless indie RPGs. Many games that aren’t close relatives of D&D don’t have a central model of “you have a limited amount of resources to get through the day”.
I recently started a game of Vampire: The Requiem. One of the guys had only played D&D before, and it kind of blew his mind that he can just do his iconic stuff whenever he wants. He was going to punch a bouncer and we were like “Why don’t you just use your mesmerize?”, and he was like “I forgot I don’t have to save that”
There are massive amounts of fan content for DnD out there and easy to find, if you don’t want to write your own. There are whole ttrpgs that are practically modded DnD but tweaked for a specific setting.
You can also use an actual generic system like Fate or GURPS. Both of those have a ton of fan content as well. This is not a unique strength of D&D.
Hard disagree on social conflict. DnD is full of mechanics for that.
Please share. From what I recall, the system is limited to something like “Roll persuasion vs a DC, and that determines how big of a favor they’ll do for you”, or similar for intimidation.
Imagine a scenario where the players encounter a group of goons blocking the road. If they want to get in a fight, D&D has a ton of rules. Movement, to-hit and damage, armor, saves. If they want to talk through it, the rules are comparably thread-bare. There’s no social HP.
Other systems give you more. I’m pretty sure a lot of PbtA games have social moves. There’s also Monster Hearts, which I never played because you need a particular kind of group for that one.
Side note: because of how D&D’s stats work, you end up with a lot of characters are mechanically bad at socializing, or underperform at their prescribed roles. You have to work against the system to get some concepts. The whole idea of “multiple ability dependent” is a D&D-ism that’s just not in every system. If you want to play a wise cracking dashing axe-man in Fate, for example, you can just do that. You don’t need to worry about how you can get both strength and charisma, nor about if you can just reflavor Hexblade because you don’t really want the rest of Warlock.
Meta game currency is something DMs usually add in from my experience, although DnD does have inspiration points as a kinda weak form. Succeed at a cost is something I usually see DMs add in, but I have seen other ttrpgs with that more baked into the rules.
Inspiration is kind of store-brand fate points, yes. You can easily add more to it, as well as bring succeed-at-a-cost into D&D. But the argument is more about how D&D provides little.
You pick from a list. If you want to play a game about creating your own spells, it’s going to provide little guidance. Yeah that’s fair. If you have an example of a game with a good “make your own spells” system I’m curious.
Mage: The Awakening (2e) is the crunchy one that I know. The book provides a ton of examples, but even those are flexible. You add or lose dice based on adjusting the spell details, and potentially create a pool of fuck-up dice in exchange for more dramatic changes.
Unknown Armies is an old classic that has “random magick” as a thing any duke can pull off.
Fate is a generic system, so it really depends on which splatbook you’re using, or what your table decides on. One game I ran had a “choose one: slow, dangerous, expensive” model for magic. The player can’t picking “dangerous” and things got really exciting.
Also, most of the spells are about combat, with a handful about movement. Hard, hard disagree there. Off the top of my head: prestidigitation, minor illusion, friends, zone of truth, tiny hut, message, command, good berry, that one that lets you ask god a question…
I was curious so I’m looking at a spell list on a dnd wiki. A majority of spells are for combat, followed by spells that also have exploration uses (eg: fly, alarm), and then there’s everything else. But you can’t deny that a large chunk of the spells are explicitly about doing damage, or helping you do damage.
I spent too long on this post. Hopefully it was worth it! “People should play more RPGs, even if just to steal stuff to port into D&D” is one of my bugbears.
The mechanics aren’t especially “nice”. It has a lot of legacy jank (15 strength is what bonus?). 1d20+stuff vs target produces a flat probability, which is problematic.
it has a lot of assumptions deeply baked into the rules. You need the adventuring day, to rewrite all the powers, or sharply limit party composition, or it falls apart.
It’s missing or has anemic offerings for whole subsystems - social conflict, meta game currency, succeed at a cost.
Character progression is very coarse. level up and a bunch of stuff happens at once. You can’t make a character that has a shit load of sneak attack without also getting a bunch of HP and other rogue stuff.
The magic system is brittle and poorly defined. There’s not really an expectation or system for players to make their own spells. You pick from a list. If you want to play a game about creating your own spells, it’s going to provide little guidance. Also, most of the spells are about combat, with a handful about movement.
You can change rules, but after a certain point you’re playing something unrecognizable as DND.
Most ttrpgs I’ve seen don’t play all that differently from DnD
Play more games. Even a basic traditional game like Vampire is a mind opener. No adventuring day. No levels. Social conflict. No attrition and resource management. These have a big impact on the experience.
No, I meant one where the business is owned by all the workers, not one where the owner also does some work.
This is saying if you have a module with public functions A and B, they shouldn’t call each other, right? But it’s not saying that module A shouldn’t call module B’s public functions. That’s what I thought it meant at first, but that seems crazy.
Capitalism remains a problem.
I don’t think worker owner businesses would be so rabidly eager to do this AI shit. It’s ghouls and anonymous shareholders. People who don’t even work on the stuff being made.
I’ve found that there’s a weird rift where a surprising amount of people who like board games dislike tabletop RPGs. I think because they’re so open, where board games are more structured and directed.
In the biggest polycule I know, there’s a mix of “likes both”, “doesn’t do RPGs but like board games”, and … I don’t know if anyone likes neither in that crew.
I did poly for a long time and wasn’t that into board games. But yeah a lot of poly people are into them.
I’m more into tabletop RPGs, but never achieved the dream of a polycule party.
Nowadays I wouldn’t even recommend crossing the streams that way.
“knock knock”
“What?”
“Interrupting cow”
“What are yo–”
“MOO”
Hm still works.
Anyway, about memes, there have been illustrations since maybe longer than the written word. You see a picture of the guy using the stairs during a fire instead of an elevator and you don’t go “I don’t know who that guy is I don’t understand”.
Good. Fuck that management. Oust them and give the company to the people who actually do work.
A guy at work got so mad when I asked if some confusing code on a PR he submitted was from his brain, he went directly to my boss to complain.
Fuck you, Sam. I hope your AI lover tells you to mix household cleaners.
I don’t relate to why some people need a call instead of just writing their words, but I guess that’s just how some people’s brains work. I’d almost always prefer clear written words I can refer back to.
Assuming they’ll respond in a timely manner. Some people seem to send a text message, then throw their phone out the window, and only reply again once they’ve fetched it.
This meme was posted pretty recently.
Dating apps are pretty bad. They’re not optimized for your happiness. They want your money. But they can get you dates, and some of those dates can be good. I’m a pretty average guy who doesn’t date men, and I could get a few dates a month by writing real messages and honestly engaging with people. Some of them were really good.
But no matter what your strategy is, it’s going to have a big “garbage in -> garbage out” factor. I’ve had friends who half-ass the apps, and then wonder why they don’t have good outcomes. I don’t mean paying- never pay for this shit. I mean actually reading the profile and, if there’s something you can engage with, actually write something. Yeah, it’s work, and most of the time it goes into the void. But just looking at it for 20 minutes and writing nothing deeper than “lol” and “hey” is counter productive. It’s like going to the gym and just looking at your phone. You’re not going to get fit like that. You’re just going to feel bad about yourself.
It’s fine to be like “i don’t have the energy for this” and spend your time doing something else. And it’s fine to take it seriously, write good messages, be present, be genuine. But half-assing it is the worst. Half-assing it sucks for you, and everyone you engage with.
I hope the ultra-rich lose everything. I hope they weep.
Because I want to interact with them, but don’t want to be on Instagram.
Oh I missed this earlier.
So one solution to the pain caused by the adventuring day is to let players rest more often. But some classes get way more powerful after a long rest than others, so that’s a problem. A party of {fighter monk wizard} that gets a long rest after every fight is going to have a superstar wizard. One solution to that is only let the party consist of classes on the same rest cadence. Wizard, cleric, paladin, ranger are all long rest based. Fighter, rogue, monk, warlock are short rest.
This causes tension even in a base line game. It’s very common for wizard players to whine about wanting a rest even when the rest of the party is good to go. You might say that’s their fault for not rationing their powers, but I’d say it’s their fault for playing a resource management game when they wanted to play a wizard game.
Removing the adventuring day and corresponding “you need to rest to recover resources” is really difficult in DND. But people want to remove it, even if not consciously, because it sucks unless you’re aiming for a narrow range of game modes.