#or just say fuck d20 systems and get into PbtA

[rosesrambling]

Anyway because I haven’t seen posts about it yet WotC officially “apologized” for the “misunderstanding” and walked back their “draft” of OGL 1.1 and promised a new, updated draft that lacked the many of the more controversial elements (revoking 1.0a, giving WotC rights to OGL content, requiring royalties, etc.). It also clarified that a lot of fan content people were concerned about (actual play podcasts and streams, minis/dice/apparel/prints/etc.) aren’t covered by the OGL at all. WotC is officially committed to releasing a new draft on 20 January, and have promised to do an Unearthed Arcana-style survey feedback for it*

*it’s been pretty widely known for a long time that the Unearthed Arcana surveys primarily look at the numeric survey responses, not the text portions. People are looking at it partially as a PR measure from WotC—they would way rather you write your essay response on why their OGL draft sucks to their email inbox than put it up on social media for the entire community to see, mull over, and create a PR fiasco for them about, kinda like what just happened for OGL 1.1

but also,

It’s been leaked that Hasbro was considering a range of changes to DnDBeyond, including $30/month subscription fees, banning homebrew content for non-subscribed users, and adding an AI DM to run their officially published adventure paths. The first two are just blatant cash grabs but the last one is… a concerning lack of understanding for the core of the game. It makes D&D into a multiplayer CRPG, not a TTRPG, and if I wanted that, I’d play Baldur’s Gate 3 for a whole lot less than $30/month from a company I dislike a whole lot less than Hasbro. I dunno. I’m particularly angry about this cash grab because I love DMing and I love designing. I don’t like the idea that I’m interchangeable with an AI tool. I’m supposed to be a player, too—hell, the DM is classically their primary customer because it’s handy to have all of the books of stat blocks and printed APs.

[dice-wizard]

So I have a pretty basic question

what’s the benefit of a dice pool rpg system over just rolling a d100 or something?

Okay so, a single die (but also d% even though this is rolled as two dice) has a flat distribution. There is an equal chance of all results on the die. When you roll a d20 your odds of a 1 are the same as the odds of a 20. The d20 was intentionally used for attacks in D&D because of the swinginess of that probability.

When you use a dice pool, it creates a bell curve instead, broadening and stabilizing your results. This is why PbtA is built around the 7-9 mixed success result - this will happen with much more stable frequency than rolling 10+ on 1d20. Similarly, Exalted uses pool math that allows the player to estimate every 2 dice generating one success, around which all the base difficulties are structured. When you start fucking with things like ones taking away in classic World of Darkness, you destabilize the nice curve and get into bad swinginess again.

The smaller your single die, the tighter (andore difficult) the framework for where you can adjudicate failure. My butthole clenches when I see people using single d6 resolution and have failure on 3 or less.

I don't really think people understand the importance of mathematical stability underpinning your basic resolution, if you're going to do something with randomization at all.

When someone says "We'll just roll a d20" I ask, is it because you want that level of swinginess? Usually no. Usually the answer is because that's what that person is familiar with - which fuels some of my distaste for WotC's stranglehold on the ttrpg zeitgeist.

Anyway, the difference is all in the control you want to have over success, failure, and your system's ability to predict and adjudicate that.

[mountainashfae]

thinking about various ttrpgs and their complexity and here is my comments on that based on games I have played or owned the books for:

Pathfinder 1e - CRUNCHY. Character creation can take hours but it’s fun. Not for the faint of heart but I would drag people into it anyway. A system I can really bite my teeth into. ����

Savage Worlds, VtM V20, Hunter the Vigil 2e - fairly straightforward with a comfortable level of crunch that isn’t overwhelming. Genuinely some of my favorites to play. Would love to play more than a single session of Savage Worlds ever

Legend of the Five Rings - CRUNCH. A bit more confusing to me than the ones higher on this list. Really funny watching your group say they aren’t gonna use Japanese honorifics and then they do anyway.

D&D 5e - there’s still crunch to this you guys just see it as the default game. It’s lite for a d20 game. The build customization feels sad. I am yelling just to yell.

FATE, Monster of the Week (PbtA) - I haven’t played these in a bit but I remember they’re pretty simple and easy to pick up. Not my favorite for a long game but they do what they do pretty well and I’ve had a lot of fun with oneshots

Cyberpunk 2020 - fuck you I have no idea what’s going on here and not for lack of getting infodumped to. I have a character sheet for a guy.

Blades in the Dark - I own it but I haven’t read this book oops

VtM V5, PF2e - I refuse to touch these systems every time I hear about the mechanics and try to wrap my head around them I just get mad. Fuck your School of Ars Grammatica and blood Resonance.