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@amiplayingright
probably going to retire this blog since i've started just posting game stuff on my main. won't delete it since it sounds like the sideblog deletion bug is still a thing. if you want to follow my current campaigns there's the podcast Tales of Morterra, and the hasty retreat tag on my main (invisible-goats)
streaming services really looked at weekly release models and binge models and said "hey what if we combined the worst aspects of both of these" and started releasing seasons in "parts."
Oops I dropped my updated drive of DnD resources that I'd NEVER put the 2024 Player's Handbook on, or any other materials.
That would be so reckless of me. Who would leave 100+ DnD materials just laying around?
If the 5th Edition Player's Handbook was so popular why wasn't there a Player's Handbook 2?
I love dnd encounters that are just "you stumble across something fucked up" especially with a game-savvy party that expects combat when you start over-describing something.
Last night I had them stumble across a still pond deep in the woods that just reflected back dead, rotted versions of themselves, and they absolutely expected that the gruesome visions would rise from the mirror surface and attack. And when they didnt, the party didnt get the satisfaction of fighting and defeating them. They had to just walk away. Rather than being an anticlimax, the fact that they had no clear resolution added a lot to the tension of the session!
Adding to this, they came across a pixie hamlet in the woods. They were anxious about the overarching threat and were trying to find answers, and the pixies let them rest there and served them a sweet, fizzy, citrusy wine that's a favorite in their culture. So much so that they named it after themselves - Sprite.
It's important to psychologically torture your players sometimes. It's enrichment.
ttrpg player pro tip- just tell your GM when you have a plot in mind for your character. Ask for events to happen. Walk up and say "I want my evil brother to show up and be a huge fight and I try to save him from himself." Your GM will ADORE having a whole encounter outlined for her, you'll get to have an awesome scene play out, you'll be invested, your GM will be invested, it'll be memorable. Hopefully, just don't be foreceful.
The idea that you and your GM will be able to like, psychically intuit each other's ideas for character arcs is bullshit. This is a collaborative relationship; communicate!!
Also get comfortable undoing shit if you're the DM. If you made an off-hand comment that didn't fit the world you want to weave or if you realized pulling a character out now has bad implications. You can just pause and tell everyone "wait I changed my mind, forget I said that! it didn't happen." and go back to the previous scene.
Ultimately ttrpgs should be a fun play time; ask yourself if you're following invisible rules, and if those rules help or hinder your game experience.
As both a GM and player, the most influential Actual Play scene I ever saw/listened to was from the first arc of The Adventure Zone. It wasn't anything poetic or poignant, it wasn't an amazing bit of scene building or character work. It was the GM describing the boss encounter and going, "Wait, shit, I forgot, back up,"
and then the players absolutely roasting him for forgetting a key element of the scene.
It suddenly unlocked for me, oh. I'm allowed to make mistakes. They can be a fun and normal part of play.
once i was GMing and i forget exactly what went wrong, something like none of the proper bonuses had been applied for an encounter, but I wound up just saying "Chrona, goddess of time, stumbles over this world as she passes, and you wake up at dawn in your campsite for the second time today, as you suddenly find yourself starting your day over"
Seeing @thydungeongal constantly wrestling with people interpreting her posts about D&D in ways that seem completely alien to me has convinced me that there are actually multiple completely distinct activities both being referred to as "playing D&D" Before we begin, I want to stress that I'm not saying one of these groups is Playing The Game Wrong or anything, but there seems to be a lot of confusion and conflict caused by people not being aware of the distinction. In fact, either one works just fine if everyone's on the same page. So far, I think I've identified at least two main groups. And nobody seems to realize the distinction between these groups even exists. The first group of people think of "Playing D&D" as, well, more or less like any other board game. Players read the whole rulebook all the way through, all the players follow the instructions, and the gameplay experience is determined by what the rules tell each player to do. This group thinks of the mechanics as, not exactly the *whole* game, but certainly the fundamental skeleton that everything else is built on top of. People in the second group think of "Playing D&D" as referring to, hanging out with their friends, collaboratively telling a story inspired by some of the elements in the rulebooks, maybe rolling some dice to see what happens when they can't decide. This group thinks of the mechanics of the game as, like... a spice to sprinkle on top of the story to mix things up. (if you belong to this second group, and think I'm explaining it poorly, please let me know, because I'm kind of piecing things together from other people saying things I don't understand and trying to reverse engineer how they seem to be approaching things.) I think this confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Wizards of the Coast markets D&D as if these are the same thing. They emphatically are not. the specific rules laid out of the D&D rulebooks actually direct players to tell a very specific kind of story. You can tell other stories if you ignore those rules (which still counts as "playing D&D" under the second definition, but doesn't under the first)And I think people in both groups are getting mad because they assume that everyone is also using their definition. For example, there's a common argument that I've seen play out many times that goes something like this:
A: "How do I mod D&D to do [insert theme here]?" B: "D&D is really not built for that, you should play [other TTRPG] that's designed for it instead" A: "But I don't want to learn a whole new game system!" B: "It will be easier to just learn a whole new system than mod D&D to do that." A: "whatever, I'll just mod D&D on my own" And I think where this argument comes from is the two groups described above completely talking past each other. No one understands what the other person is trying to say. From A's perspective, as a person in the second group, it sounds like A: "Anyone have some fun inspirations for telling stories about [insert theme here]?" B: "You can't sit around a table with your friends and tell a story about that theme! That's illegal." A: "But we want to tell a story about this theme!" B: "It's literally impossible to do that and you're a dumb idiot baby for even thinking about it." A: "whatever, jerk, I'll figure it out on my own."
--- Whereas, from B's perspective, the conversation sounds like A: "How do I change the rules of poker to be chess, and not be poker?" B: "uhhh, just play chess?" A: "But I already know how to player poker! I want to play poker, but also have it be chess!" B: "what the hell are you talking about? What does that even mean. They're completely different games." A: "I'm going to frankenstein these rules together into some kind of unplayably complex monster and you can't stop me!" ---
So both people end up coming away from the conversation thinking the other person is an idiot. And really, depending on how you concieve of what it means to "play D&D" what is being asked changes considerably. If you're only planning to look through the books for cool story inspiration, maybe borrow a cool little self contained sub-system here or there, then yeah, it's very possible to steal inspiration for your collaborative story from basically anywhere. Maybe some genres are kind of an awkward fit together, but you can make anything work with a little creativity.
If, however, you are thinking of the question in terms of frankensteining two entire board games together, then it becomes a massively difficult or even outright nonsensical idea. For example, for skill checks, the game Shadowrun has players roll a pool of several d6 at once, then count up how many rolled above a target value to see how well a character succeeded at a task. The whole game is full of specific rules about adding or removing dice from the pool, effects happening if you roll doubles, rerolling only some of the dice, and all sorts of other things that simply do not translate to rolling a single d20 for skill checks. On a basic level, the rules of the games work very differently. Trying to make them compatible would be much harder than just learning a new game from scratch. Now, neither of these approaches is exactly *wrong*, I guess, but personally, I find the rules of TTRPGs to be fascinating and worth taking the time to engage with all the weird little nuances and seeing what shakes out. Also, the first group, "TTRPG as fancy board game" is definitely the older and more widespread one. I kind of get the impression that the second group largely got into D&D through actual play podcasts, but I don't have any actual data to back that up. So, if you're in the second group, who thinks of D&D as basically a context for collaborative storytelling first and a game second, please let me know if I'm wildly misunderstanding how you approach D&D. Because I'm pretty sure it would save us a whole lot of stupid misunderstandings.
I think an important part of the "D&D is easy to learn" argument is that a lot of those people don't actually know how to play D&D. They know they need to roll a d20 and add some numbers and sometimes they need to roll another type of die for damage. A part of it is the culture of basically fucking around and letting the GM sort it out. Players don't actually feel the need to learn the rules.
Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.
And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.
And to paraphrase @prokopetz this also contributes to the impression that other games are hard to learn: because a lot of other games don't have the same culture of play of D&D so like instead of letting new players coast by with a shallow understanding of the rules and letting the GM do all the work, they ask players to start making mechanically informed decisions right away. Sure, it can suck for onboarding, but learning from your mistakes can often be a great way to learn.
I think this also hurts group dynamics as well.
When you have people that have actually done some reading on the rules vs. people that just coast and foist the majority of the game onto the GM, it makes it appear like the more knowledgeable players are sweaty power-gamers or rules-laywers.
Best example I've got with asking players to make informed decisions was when I ran the Wilderfeast Quick Start. The GM has the info about what ingredients can be gathered in any of the regions, but the party then has to cook it. They know what the ingredient does and just have to make the decision on how they want to combine their ingredients as a party.
#i just wanna play a silly game#i feel like. gatekept. while reading this#i don’t have the drive to read a several hundred pg game manual i just wanna play a game w my friends#like. it’s a game. play it how u want#jeeze
My point is not to say that people who don't want to learn the rules shouldn't play, only that people who don't actually know the rules aren't necessarily engaging with the game to its fullest, especially in the case of a relatively rules-heavy game like D&D, and that as the previous poster mentioned it can actually result in a bad rules dynamic where the DM needs to do more work due to player unwillingness to learn the rules as well as casting players who actually know the rules and can engage with them in unfavorable light. All of these are negative elements of the culture of play surrounding.
Like, there isn't anything meaningfully gatekeepy about saying "players who don't know the rules of the game aren't as good at playing the game as the people who know the rules of the game." Because playing games is a skill that can be cultivated and knowledge of the rules is an important part of that skill.
And respectfully, if the idea of learning the rules of D&D seems like an insurmountable task, you don't have to learn them, but you might actually gain something out of actually making an effort because it can make engaging with the game more rewarding for you. Or if the idea of learning the rules of a game that has hundreds of pages is an insurmountable obstacle, there are lots of games with much more modest page counts! D&D is actually relatively heavy as far as RPGs go but it's not the only RPG, and you can get rewarding mechanical engagement combined with cool stories for a much smaller time investment.
Pointing out that, if you're playing a game with a several-hundred-page rulebook and haven't even made the effort to read the parts of it relevant to your character, then you're pushing a lot of cognitive load onto your friends, isn't gatekeeping. Nobody's kicking you out of your group for it.
i also think that the OP is kind of more about the people who bite back against people going "hey, maybe try something other than D&D" with "but those games are too crunchy/hard to learn" when they don't even really know the actual rules of D&D. i mean, i've had people like this push back against learning PbtA games.
i really hope this was just an unusual case, but i've even had that exist response from one of the local DMs where i live, when i invited him to be a player in a game of Masks i was starting up.
Oh yeah, that was definitely the original context. And it's really funny to hear "learning another game is hard" as a reason for not engaging in game beyond D&D when clearly people are not learning D&D either if they consider the act of reading the rules beyond the pale.
The folks this post is about are the reason you get dudes on Reddit posting about prepping to DM games for 60+ hours a week and still feeling inadequate.
At this point, it’s a fun game for *almost* everyone at the table. And nobody wants to take on the role that has you showing up to game night with a wagon full of paper, an external hard drive, and a heart condition due to anxiety.
Be kind to your GM. Learn bits of the rules and help out :)
Quite so. If you just want to fool around and occasionally roll some shiny math rocks, that's a perfectly cromulent aspiration, and there are plenty of games that will give you exactly that – but if you just want to fool around and occasionally roll some shiny math rocks while simultaneously insisting upon using a rules-heavy system whose rules you refuse to learn, what you're doing in practice is making the GM do all the work of playing your character for you. It isn't gatekeeping to point this out; it's simply a fact. To be sure, there are a few GMs who are receptive to that sort of thing – it's often termed "black box" play in the hobby's jargon, likening the rules to a box the players can't see inside – but most GMs merely tolerate having all the work of making your character happen dumped on them for the sake of avoiding drama. It can be worthwhile to think carefully about whether this is something you're really okay with doing to someone you call a friend.
Like, there's this stereotype of the "play literally any other game" crowd as a bunch of arty snobs who want to force everybody to play semi-freeform Jungian psychodramas about giant telepathic bugs or what-have-you, but in my experience, the greater part of them are folks who've been GMing Dungeons & Dragons for years, and spent that time single-handedly doing all the work of making the game happen, and all they really want is for their group to pick a game whose baked-in expectations regarding mechanical engagement are compatible with the level of engagement they're actually willing to put forth!
putting tiny amounts of dirt on mushrooms and casting "Purify Food and Drink" so I know which ones are edible
this was meant to go here, oops
Ankh-Morpork awaits
Exclusive: Discworld TTRPG in the works by studio behind Fallout wargames
Modiphius, the studio responsible for tabletop adaptations of Star Trek, Fallout, and more, is working on a Discworld TTRPG.
Having secured the rights to the beloved series with an agreement from the late author Sir Terry Pratchett's estate, Modiphius is already at work on a Discworld roleplaying game "around the city of Ankh-Morpork and the wider Disc." This will hit Kickstarter later in the year.
Read more here.
You do of course understand that the reason most people prefer DND 5E is that it's one of the easiest systems to learn? Like I'm sorry it's all well and good to 'break up the cultural monopoly' but I have Dyscalculia and DND is seemingly the only tabletop system that doesn't consistently ask me to do a hefty amount of complex math. I've never given WOTC a penny but the reason I've primarily played 5E over basically everything else is it's the only system that was extremely easy to learn and completely self explanatory. (Also - I like elves and magic and shit.) You roll one dice to see if you can do a thing, you add whatever your plus or minus is, and then roll damage where appropriate. Easy. Meanwhile seemingly everything else is like "Okay so you roll two dice except sometimes it's four and then you take this stat and you divide it by that dice roll and then you add a number equivalent to the day of the week unless it's a leap year then you times that by three and if you get a prime number you can lift that coffee cup." Like have you ever heard of Villains and Vigilantes, for instance? It's fucking insane.Like I'm not saying I don't get why you wanna make this point? But I feel like I have to point out that most people who make indie TTRPG's don't seem to focus on accessibility when designing their systems and they are EXTREMELY intimidating for new players. And often, what people who are big into TTRPG's do is assume that because THEY fully understand this system and how it works, new players will too just as easily. The amount of times I've spoken to a GM, said "This sounds a bit complicated", and they've gone "No no no it's easy" and then described the most complicated set of rules I've ever heard is ridiculous.
Okay it sounds you’ve had a very narrow range of experiences with RPGs then because D&D 5e is on the higher end of complexity when it comes to RPGs and most indie RPGs are actually a lot less complex than D&D 5e. Like, Villains & Vigilantes is not the median when it comes to RPG complexity. There are systems even lighter than D&D out there. :)
I think D&D being easy to learn has more to do with its cultural dominance and not the actual simplicity of its rules. Quick, someone explain how many spells a character can potentially cast per round.
Seriously, this argument is completely bogus. D&D 5e is not the most popular RPG by virtue of somehow being the easiest RPG to learn. Like it may be easy to learn in the sense that there’s a very large community interested in teaching it and it has so much cultural relevance that people roughly know what a game of D&D is supposed to look like without having able to play it.
But that’s a result of D&D’s cultural dominance. If a game being the easiest to learn would somehow be an indication of its cultural relevance we would live in a paradise on earth where everyone would be playing Mausritter (Mausritter isn’t the simplest RPG on the planet either but it’s a hell of a lot simpler than D&D 5e).
There are a lot of games simpler than D&D in terms of maths and essential principles. So I got to wondering why anon with dyscalculia finds it relatively simple. Possibly it’s because the other games they have come across have been more complex ones - in which case I theorise that they like meaty dungeoncrawly combat sorts of games. I was stumped thinking what makes D&D stand out in that genre besides popularity and then it hit me from something @thydungeongal posted recently. The mechanics are GM facing - a player in D&D, for example one that is still learning and has dyscalculia, can describe what they want to do with a decent sense of if their character is good at that sort of thing, roll a single d20, tell the GM the number on the dice, and get told what the resolution is. I can easily see how that helps someone get through the learning stage and get comfortable with a relatively complex system. Something with player facing mechanics is a lot more difficult for a learner with dyscalculia even if those mechanics are simpler or have fewer exceptions.
Yeah, it was a prokopetz post which I reblogged, just to give credit where credit is due! :) I think it is very pertinent here!
I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that i
And this is why D&D5e has a “DM crisis”, because DMing for D&D5e means doing 90% of the work while the “players” give you as little to work with as possible.
ur tabletop takes are fucking insufferable i can't stand the constant 5e hate coming from u and ur cliquewhat does it matter if i want to use 5e to play everying, do u want me to learn a new game for every setting? let people play what they want, u have no right to tell me what to play
Lemme screenshot something real quick.
Like. If you find my opinions so insufferable then good news! you aren’t forced to look at my blog or the blog of any of the handful of intense weirdos who agree with me. Blogs that post nothing but 5e content outnumber us dozens to one, go follow those instead.
WotC has largely succeeded in getting every mainstream space within this hobby to cater to people who think exactly like you. The idea that it’s okay to never branch out from d&d and you can hack d&d for any setting you wanna play doesn’t need to be defended, it’s the default opinion in this hobby.
Go to any popular tabletop space and the most common response you’ll find to “i want to play a game set in ______” is “here’s how to reskin d&d for it”. Many publishers are releasing 5e conversions of their non-d&d games, or straight up ditching their own in-house systems in favor of 5e because they know they won’t sell enough to stay afloat otherwise. Go to the RPG section of a bookstore and non-5e material will take up at best a tiny fraction of the shelf space if there is any at all.
You won. Your opinion is the dominant one and still you can’t resist the urge to butt in on the little spaces that people who don’t agree with it have carved for ourselves just to rile yourself up about the fact that we don’t share the dominant opinion in the hobby.
I know you’re agreeing with me but referring to the entire hobby of tabletop RPGs as “d&d versions” on a post where I specifically complain about the cultural stranglehold that D&D has on the hobby sure is uh… something.
unofficial 5e supplements/conversions are often physically exhausting to read because they're trying to do pretty dramatic things within their scope, but they're made by people who have been playing Exclusively dnd for so long that even the things that really should warrant stapling on a custom system wind up getting handled as weird statblocks
anyway I'm thinking about this because I remembered a conversion with 300 distinct mecha, all of which are statblocked to say "immune to poison" instead of just saying that mecha categorically can't be poisoned and trusting players to understand why that's the case
I don’t think I have the chops for D&D or other tabletop RPGs but I could make a good DM’s assistant. I don’t play the game but I sit and listen and then after the session the DM can ask me for ideas.
and I am in character as the king’s most trusted advisor the whole time
I could say things like “yes, my liege, most clever, my liege” and keep notes for the DM and maybe supply a few character voices. and serve everyone very sinister tea.
It's very funny to me that the stereotypical gelatinous cube is bright fucking green when the monster itself is almost perfectly transparent. Like its gimmick is that it's a monster that imitates an empty 10x10 hallway. How many people have fallen victim to gelatinous cubes because they "know" that the ooze is bright green and so don't bother to check the suspiciously clean corridor in front of them.
The cube is green because oh my god do you know how hard it is to draw a perfectly transparent cube? Especially in isolation, like in the monster manual? Even if you put debris in, it reads as "floating skull ft. helium sword." Awful. Absolutely wretched.
I'm picturing it appearing in in-universe bestiaries with a little caption like *specimen dyed for visibility.
Dungeon naturalists sneaking up on a cube with a bucket of green dye so they can see it well enough to study it.
Classifying your Slimes and Oozes by Gram staining them
It's called that because you dress Graham in non-colorfast clothes and throw him into the Ooze
I know I've posted this thread in the past but it's still like top TTRPG posting of the decade
The thing about fantasy worldbuilding is that verisimilitude and the rule of cool are not enemies. Someone who looks at a pod of flying whales and asks "what do they eat?" is not being a spoilsport – they're engaging with the premise. There are any number of much more serious objections to aerial megafauna than lack of any obvious role in a trophic web that could have been raised if they just wanted to shoot the idea down; a person who wants to know what the flying whales eat is all but explicitly yes-anding the idea. Sure, you might not have an answer at your fingertips, but acting like it's unimaginative for them to have asked is a really fucking weird way to react.
