That is exactly how it works in The Islands of Miyu story world! I guess creativity is dead 😃

There's all sorts of ways to gain access to the full 5e and 5.5e ruleset for free on the internet. Spending money is only required if (a) you like possessing the physical books, (b) you and your friends play in person and find sharing the book at the table more comfortable than consulting a website/PDF, or (c) you are a lazy fuck who really can't bother with writing their own character sheet and need DnDBeyond to do it for you.

I played 5e for half a dozen years before quitting (because of how disappointed I was with the OGL debacle and the 5.5 update), and I never gave them a cent. Since we played a heavily customized campaign with homebrew ruleset, classes and subclasses, I never felt like they deserved my money.

That's cool, but also I feel I was a little judgy in my comment. If anyone just straight up enjoys d&d for what it is there's nothing wrong with that.

I’m not sure what you mean about limiting party composition.

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.

It is both true that I have spent more money on D&D than I actually needed to but also I have gotten much more enjoyment than I actually paid for. Kind of a paradox.

90 dollars, Fuck me! glad i don't do that anymore.

I am thinking about giving this one a try though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQE7jluxCms

I like Risus, its GM guide is 4 pages long and it's played with plain ol' d6's

you think that's... good?

Lol toons... Seemed like a great idea right after Who Framed Rodger Rabbit came out. Tried a few games, not my bag but interesting, fun character design.

Though, thinking of Steve Jackson games, Car Wars was a ton of fun, but I have not tried the remake.

i think there was an idea at bethesda to have the spouse be a companion in the base game, that would have been interesting. ill have to see if that mod is on console and try it out sometime

I’d pay money not to play D&D. Actually, I do pay money not to play D&D. Anything to not to play Hasbro bull.

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

When you include Changeling: The Dreaming, the average WoD player has a normal amount of joy, whimsy, and colour.

Sidenote, it's so weird how they never made any other version of Changeling. Thank god we don't live in the reality where White Wolf seriously attempted dark and edgy Changeling and politically neutral Werewolf. That would have been crazy.

the armour system is certainly realistic, but it's not exactly fun

Thanks for the recs, I do plan to look into them, but 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.

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.

This would be mostly RP’d discussion, punctuated with rolls to represent luck and stats to represent how the character and player might differ.

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).

I honestly don’t think something like “social HP” would be better than RP and shenanigans, but idk, I would be curious to try.

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.

This is definitely a weakness of DnD. It helps if your party is more into the RP aspects than absolutely optimizing their characters for combat. Another thing I’ve done as DM is to give players a choice, like jumping across a gap could be acrobatics or athletics, so they can use the stats they are good at.

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.

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. Out-of-combat spells are not so easily quantifiable. What is the level 4 version of minor illusion? (There are some answers to that tbh). There also are damaging spells that explicitly have non-combat purposes (one of the main ones I can think of is Phantasmal Force), as well as ones that may not explicitly say so but no DM would deny, like using fire bolt to light something on fire at a distance.

Also I’m not sure what you have against exploration and movement type spells because those are very useful in an intrigue heavy campaign.

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.

U wot m8?

The stranger says you can trust him with the money

Player: I want to roll insight

(dm hidden roll: deception: 15)

Insight 14 -> “you aren’t sure he’s lying, but you feel very uneasy trusting him”

Insight 5 -> “you really can’t read his expression”

Insight 16 -> “you aren’t totally sure, but you think he’s going to betray you”

Insight 19 -> “yeah this guy is totally going to rip you off”

The game not being interesting is largely a DM problem regardless of the framework you use.

I started with https://scratch.mit.edu/ as a kid and moved onto C after that

This has just the right amount of pixels.

To give you another rec, which is often named as an intro to PbtA systems for dnd players: Dungeon World. It still borrows quite a few things from DnD (which are imo the worst parts of DW).

And as the other user wrote, reading other system can even be helpful just to steal stuff for your DnD group. PbtA (or one based on it) is one that imo every GM should've played, because it teaches so many important principles that are relevant in any systems you play - but in PbtA they are far more explicit (and well explained in the rulebooks).

That's so sad. I feel like (perhaps pre-Microslop) Minecraft modding or Gmod scripting would teach people to code too, but Roblox is just so damn predatory.

It runs off the free labor of children hoping to make money. I feel like few people are going to learn to code and enjoy it with that kinda motive.

I noticed people would build skills so fast when it was about doing fun stuff to share with friends or a community because they thought it would be cool.