After enough posts on the nature of violence in D&D and how it's often racialized and even when it isn't (not orcs, bandits!) it still necessitates some class of being who it's okay to kill and how that has Implications, you start to wonder if The Underlying Problem Which Fixes Everything If Changed is just the assumption that the players are in fact literally killing everything they fight.
Like I was reading Fabula Ultima and they make a point that the players should be heroes, not hack and slash tourists, and explicitly make the point that 0 HP means "defeated" which can just as easily mean knocked out or disarmed or scared off or surrendered or dazed and falls into a garbage can as it can mean kill, and the players should not only consider if they should kill, but have to specify when they are killing someone. Which then gets me thinking about how Unknown Armies' chapter on combat opens with several paragraphs about how to de-escalate a fight or get what you want without violence. Both of which make it very conspicuous that in D&D the default assumption is that you're killing people unless you specify you're dealing nonlethal damage (or going for a knockout in editions without nonlethal damage), and that HP is some nebulous abstraction of literal flesh wounds and lucky dodges and morale and exertion from blocking and dodging, but hitting 0 still means lethal injury.
Obviously there would still be implications to violence both in how it's used and who it is used against, but I think one of the core snarls here is that a lot of D&D players operate under the assumption of pulpy lighthearted adventure heroes who beat up bad guys, while also indulging in gratuitous bloodshed and juicy depictions of killing ("how do you wanna do this"). A dissonance on par with "Looney Tunes but when Elmer shoots Daffy his brains actually get blown out". And that maybe shifting from "enemies killed" to "enemies defeated" like it's a SNES RPG that's not allowed to say "die" might preserve the "loveable rogues" angle you're going for.
It might also make other aspects of the game better in that if players aren't always angling to murder people, NPCs are also not always angling for murder, and so the players losing one single combat encounter doesn't necessarily mean the campaign needs to end or radically shift gears to an entirely unrelated cast of characters. In the same way that PCs should bloody the bandits noses and drive them off, the bandits should be trying to knock you out and steal your coins, not kill you for no reason.
oh my goodness, one of dian fossey’s first close up observations with gorillas happened when she was trying to climb a tree to see them better, but so badly that by the time she’d gotten up the entire group had come out of hiding to look at her: “Nearly all members of the group had totally exposed themselves, forgetting about hiding coyly behind foliage screens because it was obvious to them that the observer had been distracted by tree-climbing problems, an activity they could understand.”
[Image transcript: porch. The group had been day-nesting and sunbathing when I contacted them, but upon my approach they nervously retreated to obscure themselves behind thick foliage. Frustrated but determined to see them better, I decided to climb a tree, not one of my better talents. The tree was particularly slithery and, try as I might, no amount of puffing, pulling, gripping, or clawing succeeded in getting me more than a few feet aboveground. Disgustedly, I was about to give up when Sanwekwe came to my aid by giving one mighty boost to my protruding rump; tears were running from his eyes as he was convulsed in silent laughter. I felt as inept as a baby taking its first step. Finally able to grab on to a conveniently placed branch, I hauled myself up into a respectful semislouch position in the tree about twenty feet from the ground. By this time I naturally assumed that the combined noises of panting, cursing, and branch-breaking made during the initial climbing attempts must have frightened the group on to the next mountain. I was amazed to look around and find that the entire group had returned and were sitting like front row spectators at a sideshow. All that was needed to make the image complete were a few gorilla-sized bags of popcorn and some cotton candy! This was the first live audience I had ever had in my life and certainly the least expected.]
imagine some freakish not-a-human alien THING has shown up out of nowhere and is trying to get into your office building to study you. but it has no idea how to get past a revolving door. it tries for three hours. by the time it finally understands the concept of a revolving door and squeeze into the building everyone in the office is crowded into the lobby to watch and call helpful suggestions. it’s conclusively determined that the alien is definitely not a threat, except maybe to itself.
Fatigue and Combat Basics in Death Bed: An Impenetrably Medieval Dungeon Game
Combat is just one thing that some Death Bed characters might engage with, but Fatigue is involved in almost everything physical the PCs do.
So, while NPCs in Death Bed do have conventional “HP,” Death Bed PCs do not. Instead of a number that goes down, they have a track of squares that get filled in from right to left when they take damage and gain Wounds. When they exert themselves, they gain Fatigue, which fills in the same squares from left to right. If all squares are filled, the character dies. (Yeah I stole this from the Dark Souls Board Game but that’s because it’s a genuinely good way to represent a “stamina” system in turn-based combat.)
Fatigue is gained from any action that the performance of - once or repeatedly - would be considered “exercise.”
Wounds are relatively difficult to remove from the track, but Fatigue is removed from the track gradually over time at a rate determined by how much Weight the PC is carrying.
Fatigue also gradually starts building up when the PCs have gone too long without eating or sleeping.
This system overall provides a gradual attrition to overexertion in the dungeon (even though just walking around the dungeon outside of combat does not cause Fatigue in and of itself) and while long-distance traveling. In a long hike, the pace is usually going to be set by whoever in the party has the lowest tolerance for Fatigue accumulation.
The Fatigue system is really interesting in combat, because movement and actions cause Fatigue, which fills in and shortens a PC’s health bar. At the same time, the more Wounds a PC gets, the less Fatigue they can afford to accumulate.
Finally, with very few exceptions, there is no actual limit on the amount of movement and actions that a PC can do on their turn. If a PC has 20 squares on their health track, and an attack with their weapon causes 3 Fatigue, they could attack 6 times in a single turn. The obvious tradeoff to this is that with each attack they are essentially reducing their HP, and making 6 attacks will leave them with the equivalent of 2 HP until their next turn when their Fatigue reduces by 1-4 points (depending on Weight carried), at which point they will then have the equivalent of 3-6 HP. (It is also worth noting that an “attack” in Death Bed represents many consecutive swings because rounds in Death Bed are more like a full minute instead of a few seconds like rounds in Eureka.)
Also since I mentioned combat, “hit” and “damage” rolls in Death Bed are the same roll, and based on the weapon being swung, with modifiers based on the PC’s skill and advantage/disadvantage based on the circumstances.
PCs use rolls for their attack and defense, most NPCs use flat numbers. Armor is damage reduction vs attacks, and HP values are overall very low. Most human-sized enemies will have only 1 HP, meaning their Armor(which often also has their skill at fighting wrapped into it) is just a number that the attacker must roll above to defeat them.
I want Death Bed to be really strategic in this way, where, pretty often a kill on any given individual enemy can be guaranteed (like if a PC has a sword with an attack power of 1D8 and +4 from their combat skills against a weak enemy that only has an Armor of 3 against the damage type of the weapon), but there will never just be one weak enemy. Does the warrior take as many of the guaranteed kills as possible in a single turn, causing a lot of Fatigue and potentially leaving him vulnerable from exhaustion, or does he fight defensively and pace himself? What if there is an enemy whose armor has a chance to protect against a light attack, but would have no chance against a heavy attack which does more damage but also causes much more Fatigue?
It is funny thinking about my old art and thinking about how much I defined myself by other art that I was into. I really matured past that I think. All of my inspirations have been blended up into a nasty drink I have every morning. And it doesn't taste good. There's oil paint and turpentine in there
I wonder if it's contrary to what you said or, in fact, inspired by you (and other people) saying it, but I've spent a lot of time brainstorming way to adapt rules from other games to a D&D setting. I actually like the setting and the feel, but I wanna play with different rules.
Is that anything?
One of the dirty secrets of tabletop RPG design is that setting per se is almost entirely meaningless from a rules perspective. The rules have opinions about what player characters do; the setting only matters insofar as it imposes descriptive constraints on the answer to that question. That's how self-proclaimed "universal" RPGs get away with it: they're just as opinionated as any other game about what sorts of shenanigans player characters ought to be getting up to, but they take care to provide a game-mechanical model of those shenanigans that's compatible with a wide variety of settings.
(On the flip side, it's also how you end up with a lot of really shitty licensed RPGs. The fact that a given set of rules can construct a game-mechanical model of the characters and setting of a particular piece of media doesn't inherently mean that those rules have anything interesting to say about what those characters spend their time doing. I could very easily construct the cast of Pride and Prejudice in D&D, but the player-facing affordances of D&D's rules would never produce Darcy's proposal!)
So the short answer to "is adapting D&D setting(s) to other games' rules anything?" is that it ought to be business as usual. Pick your system based on what you're interested in having player characters do, not on where you're interested in having them do it.
You and several others I follow have written extensively on how actually reading and developing a firm understanding of a game's rules is fundamental, especially in the current ttrpg landscape where the biggest games on the market rely on deceptive advertising, second-to-thirdhand fandom folklore and the voluntary labor of GMs to paper over its flawed design.
I was wondering if you have any suggestions or advice on how to approach and digest a dense rules text to better internalize it. I'm very used to just treating the game like an open-book test, referencing it to find specific rules as they become relevant, but I feel like if I want to GM (if only because that may be the only way I can play some of these games AT ALL), that isn't gonna cut it.
Thank you for your work, regardless! I appreciate RPGs as an art form much more thanks to your posts. :)
No, you’ve pretty much got it, and if anyone thinks that makes you a bad GM, they’re the wrong ones.
Whenever I play any TTRPG, even ones I wrote myself and am therefore intimately familiar with, I also treat it like an “open book test.” I read the material all the way through beforehand, then keep the book open and reference it any time I am not absolutely 100% sure of a ruling. Not only does this make sure I get the rulings right in the moment, but it helps me memorize the rulings better too (this is why open book tests are actually better for learning than convention school tests too) and so the more I play the less I need to look things up.
The only reason this would be considered a bad thing is if you’re poisoned by toxic D&D5e and “actual play” play culture and expect the GM to be what @jburneko would call a “magician,” an entertainer more than a player or referee who is taking it upon themselves to be the game more than the game itself, and “keep the story moving” even at the expense of the gameplay. The magician never lets you see the strings, never pauses the “act,” and performs for an audience more so than plays a game with friends. The magician never expects the audience to commit to any participation beyond standing there and being amazed. The term A.N.I.M. usually uses for this kind of GM is “servitor GMing.”
“Well won’t that slow the game down and make it boring if you have to stop and look something up every five minutes?”
I have several answers to this question.
1: Imagine you’re playing a video game instead of a TTRPG for a minute. Would you rather have 15-30 seconds of loading screens every once in a while for a game that works perfectly, or would you rather have no loading screens but every time you pass a point that would normally be a loading screen, nothing is loaded and the textures are blurry and the collision bugs out and items despawn and so on? The game might even crash (this is your GM burning out and not being able to continue). Rulings made on the fly just because you don’t want to look something up (I’m not talking about when the rulebook doesn’t account for an edge case or something) can really screw the game up and lead to outcomes that really shouldn’t have gone that way, and makes it harder for players and GM to develop the ability to make informed decisions in play because the rules will not be consistent.
2: The more you look things up, the faster you are at looking things up, and often the more concretely you memorize the things you have looked up a bunch of times. So yeah maybe the first few sessions will have some stumbles and long pauses, but it won’t be like that forever.
3: Here’s the real secret. That thing I said about how I always keep the book open during a session and reference it constantly? I don’t GM that often. That’s me as a player. I know that the toxic play culture of the magician/servitor GM has deeply ingrained that only the GM needs to know the rules, but that’s not true. Players should know the rules, players should know the rulebook, and players should look up the rules. This spreads the burden of knowing the rules out around the entire table rather than relying on just the GM (who is already usually doing the most work out of the whole group).
If your players are adverse to learning the rules, try to convince them with the following arguments:
1: It’s just courteous. Like, the GM is already doing the most work, and the GM is presumably your friend, if reading a few chapters of a book would make it significantly easier for your friend to do something they’re doing for you, why wouldn’t you do that for them?
2: Even if they’re so selfish as to not want to read like 10-100 pages of text to make it easier for a friend to do something for them, in the vast majority of TTRPGs, players knowing the rules gives them much greater agency in the game. When a monster attacks, knowing the rules can save their PC’s life! If the PC is likely to get shot at, and the player knows how to identify “Cover” and being in Cover makes their PC less likely to die, they can position their PC in Cover before the bullets even start flying.
Of course both of these arguments rely on the players understanding that rules matter and make a difference to the play experience in the first place, and that the GM will actually enforce the rules rather than always bending them last minute to stop PCs from dying, both of which are counter to the zeitgeist of much of the hobby right now, but if you’ve got them to the point where they’re even going to consider another game at all, you probably already have a foothold there.
Oh and finally, for anyone who doesn't already know, there is a "tick" for more quickly navigating PDFs (that is not just CTRL+F).
💬 1 🔁 164 ❤️ 84 · How to Navigate the Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Rulebook (or any large PDF) More Efficiently · It came to my att
I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “collaborative storytelling” and that D&D5e does this great if you just ignore all the rules that make it not do that, or non-D&D players who realize that no edition of D&D5e is good for “collaborative storytelling” but still think that the primary purpose of all TTRPGs is to be “collaborative storytelling” and that not being good for “collaborative storytelling” a satisfying narrative is what makes D&D bad. D&D5e is bad for other reasons but you’re complaining that a cheap toothbrush doesn’t keep you warm at night.
An expectation is being placed on all pieces in this artform to do something that the majority of them were never meant to do in the first place.
I've only played solo journaling RPGs with the exception of video solo RPGs so apologies in advance. From what I understood from people who play D&D is that it's a flexible game. While I haven't played D&D so I don't know how different it may be from what I had in mind, if a game is flexible enough with rules defined per playing group (?), wouldn't it make sense that some groups believe collaborative storytelling to be a primary purpsoe? Or is the 5th edition meant to be something different?
Thank you for asking in good faith. There is a whole lot of WotC D&D5e marketing propaganda to scrape away at here so bear with me. It’s a two-part answer, and both parts are long and require a lot of context.
Part 1: Marketing, and How Hasbro Sells You Your GM's/Your Own Labor
D&D5e’s flexibility is a marketing lie. The only people who think D&D5e is relatively flexible are people who have little to no experience with any other TTRPGs besides D&D5e (and sometimes Pathfinder). It is in fact a very specific game (as the vast majority of TTRPGs are). Its rules adjudicate high fantasy heroic warriors and wizards with swords and spells engaging in tactical battles with monsters in a high fantasy world of some kind and becoming stronger and better at battling by doing so. That’s the only kind of game D&D5e can support. This premise is of course somewhat flexible in that it can support high fantasy battles in a variety of contexts with a variety of different types of warriors and wizards and for a variety of different reasons, but as soon as the occupations of the characters in your campaign do not primarily consist of high fantasy battles and preparation for more high fantasy battles, D&D5e is no-longer supporting it. In fact, D&D5e will quickly start to hinder it, at great strain to the GM.
As you can see, D&D5e is actually quite narrow in what campaigns and/or “stories” it supports. This narrowness/specificness is not, however, what makes D&D5e a bad game. Tons of very good TTRPGs are just as narrow or even more narrow. The people who force D&D5e to “flex” despite its relative inflexibility are doing so with a great deal of unnecessary effort, particularly on the GM side of things. This effort is unnecessary because for any given campaign/adventure premise, there are likely dozens of other TTRPGs which are either laserfocused on supporting that exact premise, or something much closer to it such that it takes less effort to “flex” them into it.
Despite it being difficult and unnecessary, they keep straining themselves to bend D&D5e into shapes it was never meant to be (and holds badly) because they don’t know any better. This is where the WotC/Hasbro marketing comes in. There is this marketing tactic called a “walled garden” that basically only monopolies with money to burn can pull off. Rather than competing with your competitors to have the better product, or even just hype up your product, to attract more customers, you build an enclosed ecosystem for your customers by obscuring their view of your competitors’ products entirely. With no frame of reference for what your competitors’ products are actually like, customers will have no reason to be skeptical of anything you say or imply about your product or your competitors’.
D&D5e is actually very narrow, very poorly designed (but again, narrowness is not an element of this poor design), not simple, and not beginner-friendly at all. But WotC’s marketing machine says it is extremely flexible, well-designed, simple, and beginner-friendly. In conjunction with the walled garden, WotC’s customers hear that and think “if a ‘simple,’ ‘beginner-friendly’ TTRPG is this complicated and hard to learn (not to mention expensive), I don’t even wanna know what a complex and advanced TTRPG looks like!” This makes them scared of other TTRPGs without ever having seen them, and makes them very unwilling to step foot outside the walled garden and see for themselves. (This is also somewhat relatable to how the US government keeps US citizens perpetually afraid of foreign nations and alternative economic frameworks, and how cults and abusers keep their victims from just walking out on them.)
“D&D5e/TTRPGs can be whatever you want them to be” is a marketing slogan for WotC and Hasbro, meant to tell you that the TTRPG you pick for your campaign doesn’t matter at all, so why not just settle for the one you’ve seen marketed the most? This is how WotC and Hasbro keep D&D5e players perpetually overpaying for undercooked products or, at the very least even if they pirate all their D&D5e books, not supporting any of the competitors. This facade is propped up by the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands of overworked GMs, who are the ones tasked by the wretched and insidious “Rule 0” with painstakingly bending D&D5e into all these different crude shapes (that another game would hold better) for the convenience of players.
That last part especially is where the cult comparison comes in. Those who do want to explore the world outside the cult and/or have seen through the lies are often trapped there still by their only relationships being within the cult. If they leave the cult, they can only do so by cutting all of their relationships and support networks off and entering the wider world with nothing. It’s a little less dramatic than that in the context of D&D5e of course, they aren’t literally losing their friends entirely, but they often are losing their gaming group, A.K.A. the big social activity they do with their friends. It is beyond count how many times I have heard someone say “I want to try out other TTRPGs, but my group only wants to do D&D5e because they think learning another game is too hard and also pointless because they think ‘TTRPGs can be whatever you want them to be’.” They try and try, but are eventually worn down until they go “Alright fine we can do a cozy farming game about reconciling with your past trauma in D&D5e. Roll Strength to pull up the carrots, I guess..” Dozens, possibly hundreds, reading this very post will be able to testify to being in this exact situation (and I urge you to do so in the tags or reblog comments).
(Also much like abuse victims and people who grew up in insular cults, many who do leave have great difficulty adjusting to the normal world, because they only know how to behave in the context of the bad situation they just left. This often manifests in TTRPGs as GMs reflexively trying to “fix” the rules of games that are actually well designed and don’t need to be fixed - or, topically, trying to squeeze “collaborative storytelling” out of games that were not meant to support such a thing, because WotC/Hasbro marketing taught them that when D&D5e doesn’t natively give you what you and your group want, it’s your fault because “a good GM could make it work.” The difficulties these maladapted behaviors result in even often lead them to giving up and returning to their bad situations.)
To summarize thus far, WotC/Hasbro marketing obscures other TTRPGs from the vast majority of TTRPG players, which allows them to imply those TTRPGs are not worth exploring by projecting the flaws of their own product onto the imagined conception of the competitors’ products. WotC/Hasbro tells players “TTRPGs are whatever you want them to be” to make their product, the design of which only supports one thing, appeal to customers who want many different things. They keep these customers they’ve lied to by encouraging GMs to do free labor contorting and rebuilding D&D5e on the fly to keep up the illusion as long as possible. People within these spaces who don’t buy into this illusion are shunned and only given the choice between continuing to prop up the lie or abandoning their social activities. People within these spaces who do buy into the illusion are liable to get very defensive-aggressive when the walls of the garden are shaken.
Part 2: “Collaborative Storytelling”
I described way up at the top of this comment that D&D5e has rules that basically only support fantasy warriors and wizards doing battles and getting stronger so they can do more battles. This is not inherently a bad thing, there are many good TTRPGs that support nothing but this same thing. (What makes D&D5e bad as a game is that it does its core premise very poorly. What makes it bad as a cultural force is how its dishonest marketing is choking and killing the industry and culture of TTRPGs.)
The other thing about D&D5e’s design that are important about this discussion is that it is s very “traditional” TTRPG, and thus very much built by the way its rules interact with each other to be a “challenge game.” A “challenge game” in this context is a game that challenges the cleverness and skill of both player and PC alike. The PC must overcome obstacles in their path through their cleverness and skill, and the player must use their cleverness and in-depth understanding of the rules to build a PC who can overcome those challenges and play them accordingly. If either is not up to the challenge, they fail, often with severe consequences to the PC. In video game terms, it is possible to get a “game over” when playing this type of game.
Where this becomes a "problem" is that challenge games are typically very, very bad at producing conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs through the default gameplay that their rules support, which is one of the main points of the original post. When people say they want/like “collaborative storytelling,” they are almost always referring to a desire for conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs.
And if this structure of game is bad at “collaborative storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story, and the point of TTRPGs as an artform is “collaborative storytelling,” then “challenge games” must be bad TTRPGs, right? Well, wrong; but that attitude is what the original post is criticizing.
They are calling a game bad because it fails to do something its rules were never written to support in the first place. D&D5e is lazily designed, but by calling it bad for failure to accomplish something that it was never built to do in the first place, they are completely writing off hundreds of much more effortfully and intentionally designed games which also fail at “collaboratively storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story because they were never meant to. This, indirectly, also only helps WotC and hurts smaller studios and designers, as well as closing the players off to experiences they might end up actually really enjoying.
The reality is “collaborative storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story with a plot and character arcs is not the only reason to play TTRPGs. Like many other artistic mediums, different TTRPGs have different experiences they are trying to present to the audience, and if the audience goes in expecting one and gets another, they will typically not enjoy the experience. It is only in TTRPGs however (due largely to the deceptive marketing described in Part 1) that there is such a pervasive acceptance of going to works within the artform expecting something they were never meant to be, and, instead of going and finding another one that actually is what you want, pushing forward stubbornly, as if trying to squeeze a novel full of twists and turns out of a math textbook.
Playing a challenge game expecting a conventionally satisfying narrative and character arcs will leave you frustrated and disappointed (unless of course the insidious “Rule 0” puts a gun to your GM’s head or brainwashes them and makes them take on the work of pulling thousands of strings behind the scenes to contort the game in real time so that that frustration never touches the players, only them). Likewise, if you play “story games” or similarly structured TTRPGs expecting a challenge, you will be frustrated and disappointed. Even if you put in the effort to "make it work," your experience with the result is significantly worsened and hindered compared to what the experience would be if you had just played a TTRPG that was built from the ground up to give that experience rather than trying to mod the game into something it's not. And here is a link to a post you (general "you," not specifically the person I am replying to, I mean anyone reading this) can click if you interpret the above passages as me saying "nothing should ever be homebrewed ever."
Part 3: I'm Kinda Just Rambling Now
I love “challenge games,” and many others do to, both for the in-the-moment thrill of them and for the unique (not usually conventionally satisfying) stories they produce as a secondary byproduct.
All TTRPGs (that I can think of) produce some kind of story as a byproduct of gameplay. Hell, most games in general do. However, just because it may produce it doesn’t mean the story is the primary purpose. It is the primary purpose of some games, but not others.
Actually I was going to go on, but I remembered I already said what I was about to say much better in a previous thread on this same post, so I am just going to link that here instead. This will explain different purposes I’m talking about.
💬 30 🔁 388 ❤️ 524 · Post by @anim-ttrpgs · 2 images · Yes, TTRPGs are mechanics-driven games, even the ones where the mechanics are actual
So many people who wanna argue with me about King Arthur clearly haven’t read the actual medieval texts. I know this because if they actually read the source material they’d know that when it comes to King Arthur, everything is made up and the points don’t matter.
Try telling that to Chrétien de Troyes. Aka the guy who invented Lancelot.
“Arthurian canon isn’t French”
Clearly you don’t own an air fryer. Also clearly you haven’t read literally anything written after the Norman invasion.
“Arthur needs to be a knight in shining armor”
If he lived at all he lived almost a thousand years before widespread adaption of plate armor.
“He can’t be in plate armor because that’s anachronistic”
Try telling that to Thomas Mallory.
“The fairy stuff is leftover from Celtic myth/Celtic gods)
A lot of that stuff including the lady of the lake wasn’t added until the 12th century actually. Centuries after England was christianized. It was also mostly added by the French poets.
I guess the big reason the sunk-cost argument for playing nothing but Dungeons & Dragons rings false to me is that, in my experience, most groups that hack D&D for non-sword-and-sorcery genres never actually get to a functional place. The GM is in permanent scrambling-to-make-just-in-time-fixes mode, and the only reason this flies under the radar is that D&D's culture of play insists this is normal.
Kind of funny to me that do a full blown “fuck it we’ll do it live” would be easier than what’s going on in a lot of dnd right now. Having to improv rules on the spot isn’t an easy skill to learn, but it’s gotta be easier than having to improvisationally build out from an established rule set that you’re also expected to have memorized.
In practice, trying to go that route often just makes things worse. If your experience with the medium is so narrow that you can't imagine what a game that isn't a D&D clone would even look like, inventing rules on the spot may not solve the problem of the experience of play the rules want to produce being askew of the experience of play you want to have – particularly if you've come up through a culture of play that treats that disconnect as expected. It's entirely possible for a rule you invented on the spot to disagree with you about what sort of game you're playing!
Oh yeah definitely. The world we have is one where trying to transition people from the current dnd mindset to a pure improv one would be just about impossible and make everything a lot worse before it got any better, if it ever did. I was more trying to comment that wotc offloading the work onto the DMs threaded the needle into the worst of both worlds, where DMs are expected to be expert improvisers with eidetic memories.
Hasbro's uncanny ability to make marketing decisions which produce the worst of all possible worlds has been something of a theme lately, if I've correctly taken the pulse of the Transformers fandom.
you've spoken at length about problems with D&D5e re: the disconnect between the game hasbro says that it is vs the game that it actually is, and have made it clear that such discussions aren't about the weaknesses of D&D5e itself as a game. I do suspect that you have some thoughts on that though, and I'd be interested to hear them. there are plenty of thinkpieces from others already, but I'd like to hear yours specifically, if you're interested.
A big part of the reason I don't talk a lot about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition as a system is because it's been my experience that, as indie RPG designers, there's a constant temptation to treat a game's culture of play as something which emerges purely from its published text. It'd be super convenient if that were the case: if the ultimate source of the problem is bad game design, then it can be fixed with better game design. In practice, this framing leads people to prattle on about how playing trad RPGs causes brain damage while overlooking the rather more obvious economic incentives for why D&D's culture of play is the way it is.
All that in mind, I tend to look at it the other way 'round: the main problems with D&D5E as a system stem from a shared set of circumstances with its culture of play. Hasbro wants to market 5E as a universal entry-level game, and to that end, they've given Wizards of the Coast a mandate to produce an "evergreen" D&D which appeals equally to fans of all past iterations of the game. This goal is of course both impossible and absurd, and the result is a game whose rules are put together based mostly on vibes, with greater weight given to whether any particular feature is deemed to reinforce D&D's brand identity than to how it actually operates in play, or to how it interacts with other features that have been included in the same fashion.
In the most extreme cases, this leads to a text which pretends to have features it does not in fact possess. For example, 5E wants to have the vibe of a game which cares deeply about logistical play, in order to attract players who like that sort of thing; however, it's also terrified of imposing entry barriers that might interfere with maximising the number of people playing D&D, so you end up with stuff like lengthy stats tables of functionally identical weapons, an economy that denominates prices of adventuring supplies to the hundredth of a gold piece and stops being relevant by level three if you're running the gameplay loop as written, and subsystems for carrying capacity and consumable resource tracking which ask you to do a lot of math for a mechanical impact so insubstantial that it doesn't materially affect said gameplay loop at all if you simply leave it out entirely.
Basically, it's a text that puts forth tremendous effort to obfuscate its own baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played, because it might hypothetically alienate someone who would otherwise have given Hasbro money if it ever expressed an opinion. I've talked in the past about how a lot of RPGs don't seem to understand how to engage in transparency about their own design goals, but Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is one of the very few games I've encountered that demonstrates it perfectly understands how to engage in design goal transparency by consciously doing the exact opposite.
Religion in fantasy worlds: Everyone believes the exact same things about Green Nature Goddess and has official rituals for her that are the same everywhere
Religion irl: Technically it’s heresy for me to worship this skeleton but my spiritual advisor said that it’s legit so I’m gonna keep giving it offerings of yogurt
Religion in fantasy worlds: These are the rules. The rules are law. Nobody can break the rules.
Religion irl: Okay you say that there are “rules” but how exactly are we defining “rules” here? Like is a suggestion a rule? How are we defining suggestion? No come back. Listen. Are we going by nuance in the original language or are translations fine or-
High control religions/cults recruiting in fantasy worlds: Join us! For we shall all eat the moon! This is a legitimate position to have!
High control religions/cults recruiting irl: We have free snacks. That shirt looks sooo cute on you btw. What, you heard that we wanna eat the moon? The media is always telling lies about us you know. We may have some unorthodox opinions about the moon but, tell you what. Come get some snacks, make some new friends, maybe chat about the moon a bit. See what you think. We’ve got pizza.
I might have misread snooter and thought "oh, I suppose he could have a scooter. He's going to race after the pumpkin carriage with his trusted Vespa."
There’s a term that has gotten thrown around since long before I even entered the space of TTRPGs, “rules lawyer,” and in the time I’ve been in TTRPGs I’ve seen it take a massive shift in how people use it and what they intend it to mean. I think that’s been a very bad shift, not because language or definitions can never be allowed to shift, but because the shift itself is downstream of a much larger issue of TTRPGs not being treated as art, Hasbro’s dishonest marketing, and game design not being treated as real.
I'm gonna go over the new definition i keep seeing, then explain the original definition, compare them, and explain why the new definition is bad.
How I Keep Seeing “Rules Lawyer” Used Now
“Rules lawyer” was always a pejorative term with very negative connotations, but super often in the past few years I’m seeing the term “rules lawyer” used pejoratively towards people for no other reason than they know the rules of a given TTRPG, want to play by those rules, and want to use the rules to their/their PC’s advantage. Here’s a few examples of where I have seen someone be called a “rules lawyer.”
Example 1
Like, saying in any context that you should try and understand and play by the rules of a game before you start modifying, overriding/ignoring, etc. the rules so that you actually understand what you’re modifying.
Example 2
Saying that people should find games whose rules natively support a certain type of campaign they want to play, and play by those rules, instead of changing all of D&D5e’s rules to sort of look like that concept.
Example 3
Saying that it’s good to read and be familiar with a TTRPG’s rulebook at all.
Example 4
A player reads the rules of [TTRPG with a heavy focus on combat] and figures out that by combining certain equipment and abilities, their PC can be very good at a certain aspect of combat. I.e. battle axes get bonus damage when used by characters with high Strength, so if they pick character options that maximize Strength, and pick a battle axe, their character can be very powerful with that battle axe.
Example 5
A GM says “If you want your PC to kick the gun out of [NPC]’s hand, they have to succeed on a Disarm Action because that’s what the rulebook says is the mechanic for when one character tries to knock a weapon out of another character’s hand. They can’t do it automatically just because it would be cool.”
Example 6
A character attacks another character in a game where this requires a roll, and the roll at first appears to be a success at the bare minimum number required to roll, and everyone starts going with that as the outcome. Then, the “rules lawyer” speaks up and says “Wait, since [character] was behind cover, according to the rulebook there should be a -1 penalty to the attack, so that would actually be a failure.”
What “Rules Lawyer” Means Originally
“Rules lawyering” or “being a rules lawyer” by the original meaning actually doesn’t even always have as much to do with knowing the rules as it does relying on other people not knowing the rules, to get away with cheating. “Rules lawyering” by the original definition describes a specific form of cheating.
It involves making spurious arguments you know are wrong or otherwise against the intent/spirit of the rulebook to gain an unfair advantage, and applying those spurious interpretations of the rules selectively rather than consistently. I.e. conveniently ignoring the rules interpretation you made just minutes ago now that it no-longer favors your character to interpret it that way.
I’m going to take the examples above and rewrite them to actually be examples of “rules lawyering” by the original definition. I'm going to skip examples 1 and 2 because there is no way to possibly twist them into fitting this definition.
Example 3
Saying “If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying hard enough.”
Example 4
A player reads the rules of a TTRPG with a heavy focus on combat and figures out that the rulebook says “A character can attack once per turn with each weapon held in their hand.” but it never specifies exactly how many weapons a character can fit in one hand. The player gives their character 20 swords and argues that because the rulebook doesn’t place a limit on the number of swords per hand, his character can make 20 attacks per turn by carrying 20 swords. (Extreme example for demonstration purposes, an actual rules lawyer would probably more realistically only try this with like 3 swords.)
Example 5
A GM enforces the rules arbitrarily and inconsistently, either relying on the culture of GM fiat and “rule 0” to get away with it or just getting by on nobody else at the table being familiar enough with the rules to argue, leading to the rules not actually mattering, since they only get brought up in defense or support of something the GM has already decided is going to happen no matter what. (Usually this will also be combined with the GM lying about their dice rolls or lying about the stats of NPCs/changing them arbitrarily in their head but that’s not really “rules lawyering” that’s just more conventional cheating.)
Example 6
When the rules lawyer’s PC is attacked, he says “The rulebook says ‘Cover’ is ‘any object a character could hide behind from an attack’ and [PC] was hiding behind the curtains when the bad guys saw him and started shooting, so the curtains should count as Cover and they should get -1 penalties to their attacks. Also, the rulebook says ‘Characters who are moving when they attack get a -1 penalty to the attack,’ and the bad guys had to move to draw their guns and pull the triggers, so they’re moving and should get another -1 penalty.’ Notably, earlier in the session when a character was getting shot at while hiding behind a small chair, the rules lawyer stayed silent and didn’t bring up the Cover section of the rulebook at all. Next turn after the bad guys miss their shots the rules lawyer has his character shoot back. (Even though his character would have also needed to “move” to draw a gun and shoot and so accounting to him would have a -1 penalty, he stays quiet and hopes nobody is paying enough attention to realize this.) When the GM says “Goon #2 is hiding behind the bed so he is in Cover and the attack has a -1 penalty,” the rules lawyer says “Oh come on, bullets can go straight through a feather mattress, there’s no way that counts as Cover.”
What is This Shift Downstream of and Why Should You Stop Using the First Definition?
Besides the regular Dunning-Kruger Effect of people having a couple of D&D5e rules explained to them and then thinking they know everything there is to know about TTRPGs as an artform, this is, like most things in the hobby right now, ultimately traceable to Hasbro’s dishonest marketing of D&D5e and its resulting toxic play culture.
This post
💬 39 🔁 777 ❤️ 880 · I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “col
sorta gets into it with a lot more detail, but the short version is D&D5e wasn’t really created with a lot of thought put into how it would actually play by its rules, but that doesn’t matter to the shareholders as long as it makes money. To make more money, Hasbro/WotC has to maximize the number of people playing D&D5e. To do this, they market D&D5e as “the game that can be whatever you want it to be” and encourage a culture of play where if you don’t like the rules you can just change or ignore them (instead of playing a different game that already has rules that you would like following).[1]
[1. Sidebar] I promise that learning a different game’s rules is not as hard, time consuming, or expensive as you might think. D&D5e’s rules are at the upper end of all of these metrics. Even rulebooks which have twice as many pages are often easier to learn than D&D5e’s rules.
By treating any of the first set of examples as a faux-pas and subject of derision or mockery you are playing straight into the hands of a monopoly that has a deadly stranglehold on the TTRPG industry. Ironically by treating the rules text of D&D and by extension other TTRPGs as essentially meaningless, you’re actually more of a corporate bootlicker than you would be otherwise.
How Does this Affect People Who Enjoy Playing by the Rules? Can’t They Just Mind Their Own Business?
I am extremely aware of the fact that many people who play D&D(or some other popular TTRPGs but mostly D&D) don’t really care about the game part of D&D, but rather treat it as a sort of “social lubricant,” an excuse to hang out with friends more so than a specific activity. They would be just as happy (perhaps even more happy) if D&D was swapped out for any activity on earth, like bowling, sitting around a campfire talking about anything, watching a movie, etc.. To these people, being told to pay attention and understand the game they’re playing is an offense. After all, “it’s just a stupid game, who cares, aren’t we here to have fun?”
Yes, we are here to have fun, but have you considered that the fun of the people asking you to pay attention is being disrupted just as much? Would you have the same reaction to somebody leaning over and telling you not to talk or use your phone in a movie theater? Come on. Or even in a home viewing experience, your friend asks you to come over and watch this movie he really likes, and you’re just blowing it off as some stupid movie, not caring if you talk over all the cool scenes he wanted you to see. In simplest terms, that’s rude.
The shift of the pejorative “rules lawyer” from “cheater who makes spurious arguments about the rules to gain an unfair advantage” to “player who wants to play the game by a written-out and consistent set of rules” is making the guy who actually wants to do the activity everyone nominally said they would do into the bad guy. Imagine if it was the activity or piece of art that you were passionate about.
Convincing people that it’s not “just some stupid movie” becomes much harder for that person when it was already hard as hell because of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Many people don’t realize that it can be anything more than “some stupid movie” because they never paid attention to a movie before. They are skeptical that paying attention might result in them having more enjoyment than just talking, and now getting them to pay attention is that much harder because the act of going “shh, don’t talk over the movie.” is the subject of mockery.
I am also extremely aware of the large percentage of TTRPG players who are passionate about D&D and other TTRPGs, but are passionate about the version that Hasbro marketing presents(this is completely synonymous with the “folkloric version of the game” that exists in oral tradition and “not letting the rules get in the way of the story”), not the version that actually exists in the rulebooks. This post has already gone on long enough and beyond this point I would just be repeating things I have already written other essays about so I’m going to just link a few posts. The TL;DR of these posts is that buying into this marketing of the rules not mattering supports Hasbro and disadvantages anyone else who wants to make it in the industry or even just cares about exploring and evolving the medium as it exists. As Hasbro’s marketing goes, if the rules don’t matter because you don’t let them get in the way of “the story,” then there really is no reason to move away from D&D5e.
💬 85 🔁 5158 ❤️ 7202 · I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is f
💬 39 🔁 777 ❤️ 880 · I don’t know what’s more detrimental to the health of TTRPGs as a medium, D&D5e players who think that TTRPGs are “col
💬 39 🔁 777 ❤️ 880 · First of all thanks for the good faith response.
The thing is you’re pretty much right, but I think it would be more
If you object to anything being said in the last paragraph, read these posts before arguing.
