#table talk

[mantis-lizbian]

and also that this market dominance is so thoroughly warping the ecosystem that it's easier for third party and independent developers to make a living making Doom mods than by making their own original games. imagine what the Steam store page would look like, how many games wouldn't get made, and how hard it would be to find the ones that actually are different.

Asking w/ genuine curiosity cuz im not rlly into ttrpg at all, what is d&d responsible for in that sphere? Why does it suck or is it just bc thats the only game anyone plays? Thanks for answering if u do, well wishes!! 🫡💋

Very few of the issues with D&D's position have to do with the game itself, like even though I'm not personally all that enthused about the latest edition of the game D&D as a game spanning multiple different editions (some of which should be thought of as pretty much different games) is not, as far as I'm concerned, a Bad Game. The issues with D&D's monolithic position in the hobby are mostly ones of, as you say, it being the only thing many people play and that having an effect on people's perceptions on the hobby and games.

Many players don't want to branch out beyond D&D but since D&D is, by design, a somewhat limited game, a straightforward dungeon adventure game, many people who get into the hobby and like the idea of these games where you make up a bunch of made up characters and put them in made up situations will eventually end up wanting more. But instead of being told that there are other games that produce different types of narratives they get told that they can just hack D&D. Which is an insane proposition, because D&D is a game that has actual design behind it and while some of that design is questionable not all of it is there just by accident. And trying to apply those systems to other types of stories will not work.

But D&D's limited nature and specific scope also warps people's expectations of what RPGs as a medium can do. While D&D is, for better and for worse, the template around which most games model themselves, there are so many things that can be done in these games of shared imagination that simply get ignored because many people unwittingly transmit the assumptions of D&D into other games.

And at the end of the day the only one who benefits from this, the idea that D&D can be turned into any RPG with just enough modification and that D&D is the standard template of RPGs, is Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns D&D. It is absolutely detrimental to players and the wider hobby.

And this genuine incuriosity about games and the hobby also makes many D&D players just genuinely difficult to talk about games to, because once you have accepted that D&D, despite it's very specific and opinionated design, can do anything, there's really no conversation that can be had about what these games actually do and how game design can shape the stories these games produce. The problems with D&D have very little to do with the game itself because most people who play D&D will happily distance themselves from the game as a text.

To use a video game example: imagine if Doom was the biggest game on the market to the point where when someone asked for a farming game people wouldn't recommend Stardew Valley but a Doom total conversion mod that turns it into a farming game (but you still have the BFG), and people couldn't even imagine a game that isn't played from first person perspective and where you primarily shoot things. And people said that Doom belongs to the people, despite the fact that the larger ecosystem of Doom mods inevitably leads to sales for Bethesda.

[corrupteddoodles]

“You’re supposed to be dead…”

“Who says I’m not?”

[hemochromevtm]

Now that elders can turn thinbloods full vampires (temporarily) I wonder how my ST will treat Beetlejuice's blood bond.

Technically, Maria is an elder by the book's standards. If we were playing with rules as written, poor BJ would be a full-blooded toreador at the moment.

I'll have to ask them next time we hang, because I'd rather not have Beej going full vamp... yet

But the possibility is intriguing 🤔

[dungeonsandkobolds]

Hope you’re having a good day… any advice on what to include on a coming back from hiatus survey/questionairre and or second session zero?

Ooooh this is a fantastic idea of something to do!!!

Some things I might include:

Checking whether the balance of rp to combat to puzzles is correct

How is combat feeling? Is it balanced? Do they want it to be trickier? Do they want more easy fights that make their characters feel powerful between the hard stuff?

How they feel party dynamics are going (depending on the vibes at your table you could also make this confidential)

What things are going well? What have they enjoyed most so far?

Are they feeling happy with the genre/vibes of the campaign?

Are they feeling happy with their character?

These are just kind of off the top of my head, and will v much depend on the dynamics of your table. But make sure you give them a chance to compliment you/the stuff you do well! Particularly if you're coming back from a hiatus this will hopefully give you an extra boost of motivation to get back into the swing of things!

[punkitt-is-here]

Finally got around to playing Astral Guard Table Talk. The cast of characters is really fun and has some great chemistry and I'm already intrigued by the copious amount of "I'm fine" (they were not fine)

LMAO TO THAT LAST PART you're literally so right

[xr250r]

Table Talk

[franchiseavs]

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[mantis-lizbian]

okay, y'know what? let's go into this same. ignoring all the rules in 5e that i think are dumb, an itemized list with explanations. obviously, my list won't necessarily be the same as everyone's, but it'll illustrate the problem with suggestion in a practical sense, not just as a structural critique from the standpoint of game design, which i know a lot of people don't actually care about.

bare in mind that these are going to be criticisms with regards to the kind of game D&D 5e is and wants to be, and are largely going to use other editions of D&D as points of comparison, rather than other TTRPGs as a whole, just because to do so i feel could easily approach "i want a game about a witch looking for lost pets in the Alps" type stuff. no sense in criticizing D&D for not being Monsterhearts or GURPS, after all.

classes are too simple. any given berserker barbarian is functionally indistinguishable from another. for some classes, even different archetypes don't offer enough variation from each other to feel meaningfully distinct. here's a challenge: take your party of four and make an entire 6th-level party using only one class in each of 3.x, 4e, and 5e. depending on the class you choose, you may have more or less difficulty, but in two of those, you generally can manage to make four characters who can all function in a party together without feeling like clones of each other, and perhaps even able to actually complement each other.

classes are too complicated. for the most part, AD&D, BECMI, OD&D and the like, classes only have a couple of fairly basic features, most of which are granted from 1st level. this means that if a character dies, you can roll up a brand new one and jump straight back into play that same session. not being able to do this makes everyone, even the GM, resistant to allowing a character to die, defanging one of the only meaningful consequences to losing combat inherent to the mechanics.

battle master fighters restrict everyone's options in combat. if you're playing a melee combatant, there's very little you can do apart from run up to your chosen enemy and smack them in the face with your weapon until they die. disarming, feinting, tripping... these were all things any character could do in 3e, as outlined by the rules, and these things were possible in AD&D and the like because they weren't explicitly spelled out in the mechanics. the GM is free to adjudicate how to handle these maneuvers as they see fit, but because they aren't explicitly granted to a specific kind of character, they aren't implicitly denied to everyone else.

ability scores do not matter outside of Dexterity and whichever one your class cares about, and specific circumstances dependent on which saves are being targeted. 4e did start this, but even it made a conscious effort to make every class care about at least two scores alongside Dexterity, outside of saves. in AD&D, every score determined a number of things independent of your class (with the exception of Intelligence and Wisdom, if you weren't a spellcaster). and 3e required you to spend character resources (feats, specifically) to do things like use Dexterity on melee attack rolls, and even then it couldn't be added to damage, so there was still value to Strength even if you fought exclusively using daggers. all of this results in making it so that if you're using point-buy to determine ability scores, there is no meaningful mechanical consequence you can count on having to contend with for dropping every score to 8 so you can pump the ones you care about up to their maximum (in fact, i suspect that 5e makes point-buy cap out at 15 specifically to prevent players from doing exactly this to pump their two important scores to 18). unless you're a barbarian, even Constitution isn't as important as it should be, given the ingrained hesitancy 5e's design creates towards letting characters die.

only a couple of feats are actually better than taking the ability score boost, until you hit that cap of 20. even fewer are ever going to be meaningfully applicable to the same character as another, meaning that altogether, depending on what you were able to boost your class's main ability score to, by level 12 or so... you're likely to feel like meaningful pickings are slim for what to do with your remaining ASIs. it also becomes clearly apparent that the reason feats are an optional replacement for an ASI isn't so much an attempt to simplify the game compared to 3.x's notorious endless ocean of feats to wade through, and more about just having something to do with those ASIs after reaching 20 in your main score.

due to free Dex-to-damage, the only reliable consequence of a low Strength score left is encumbrance. which is often the first rule players choose to ignore, and even if they don't... an 8 Strength is still enough to wear full plate, and carry a pike and heavy crossbow and still having plenty of carrying capacity for a decent amount of random loot. so yeah... this is a rule that even if you aren't ignoring it, the rules are doing plenty to avoid it ever coming up anyway.

skills offer a great way to flesh out who your character is outside of "someone who rages" or "someone who chucks fireballs". unfortunately, your class still fully defines these things, outside of the two you get from your background, or if you choose to spend one of your feats/ASIs on gaining another three. at which point, you're probably going to have proficiency in more than half of all the available skills.

several excellent designers have gone into a number of other issues with D&D 5e's skills, from how overwhelmingly important ones like Perception are, how laughably irrelevant others are, and the issues in figuring out how to make good use of the knowledge and Investigation skills.

resting is... so... a lot of classes have nothing to do with a short rest. one time, i was playing as a warlock in a group that only ever took long rests because no one else got anything from just taking a short rest. which meant that the warlock essentially only had 2 spells per day. granted, this didn't mean nearly as much as it should thanks to cantrips, but i'll get to that later. so yeah, short rests were introduced in 4e where every class got equal value from them, and so they were more reliably used.

crafting is pointless. the example it gives of making a suit of plate armor taking 300 days means that it would take an entire year to make something that you're likely to find or at least afford with easily a month of adventuring. there's also no accounting for how good a craftsman you are. in 3e, that same suit of plate armor will take (assuming no failed checks along the way, to be fair) at most a month and a half. even assuming you fail half the checks, that's still only a quarter the time it takes to make that armor in 5e. this is still a decent time investment, but especially when you consider how having a higher Craft skill bonus (or even just a good roll) means you may be able to shorten that time, it brings it into the realm of "okay, that could be worth it, if i really wanted to".

bonus actions are only usable by a handful of classes, and may as well not exist for the rest, outside a couple of feats. with only one other action, alongside moving, that makes the kind of tactical combat built on the same principles of 3.x and 4e drag and feel incredibly monotonous (especially when, see #3). 3.x and 4e have alternative things you can do with your move action, which - especially alongside full-round actions - just as a way to open up design space means that there are a lot of ways to expand your options in combat. while AD&D also only features an action and movement - and doesn't even have a bonus action - combat is much smoother due to the overall simplicity of the game, and the fact that rounds represent a whole minute, not just 6 seconds.

cantrips are broken. they're usable at-will all day, which is fine. definitely an improvement i like over 3.x, and it gives your spellcasters something spellcastery they can reliably do any time. that's cool. but when they deal as much damage as a crossbow, and are based on your spellcasting score, it adds to the aforementioned thing about how most classes don't need to worry about more than one or two ability scores. why bother carrying around a crossbow when your fingers can shoot infinite crossbow bolts, possibly even targeting something other than AC and not dealing physical damage?

...oh wow. there's a character limit in posts...

im confused about the dnd 5e hatred. yall arent just ignoring rules that are dumb? ur dm actually follows every single thing in the book for real?

if you have to ignore some of the rules for the game to be good then the game is not good

[marypsue]

Keep seeing that post where OP starts like 'Thinking about...grieving the undead' and then adds on about like. Real life situations where people have not died but have left your life and you would have reason to grieve them.

All respect, that's an important concept, but that is not what I am thinking about when I read 'grieving the undead'.

[wordsofsicca]

eyes of the table

[corrupteddoodles]

“Whats the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

[mantis-lizbian]

okay, now that this has occurred to me it feels so painfully obvious that like... how did it not occur to me before? but like... elements like "story beats" and "collaborative storytelling" are... well, first off, they do exist in D&D, as you've pointed out in other posts; delving into a dungeon is certainly a story in its own right, even if it doesn't involve elf kissing, etc. but setting that aside, those concepts in the sense that storygames use them are a lot more "portable" than the whole games themselves. that is to say, it's easier for these individual ideas to spread between people than it is for the whole system they're attached to.

anyway, wound up going a little further off tangent than i intended there so to refocus, where i'm going here is that it very likely isn't necessarily that these people consider there to be something shameful in a trad dungeon crawl but that... that's just not the kind of game they're drawn to. it's simply the first one that caught them (due to its massive marketing efforts) and after experiencing it, they just... think that that's what TTRPGs are. like sure some'll use different dice and maths, but really, how different could the overall experience possibly get? and since they don't know how different TTRPGs can be, they can't imagine that it'll be different enough to be worth the effort of leaving. of course this does feed into the learned helplessness thing, but...

we often talk about how thinking all TTRPGs are basically D&D with some tweaks is like seeing a MCU film and thinking that that's all of cinema, but honestly it's a lot more like playing Call of Duty and thinking that's representative of all video games. like... the most avant-garde of cinema still has way more in common with a MCU film than a triple-A games have with your average indie game. someone who has only played a couple blockbuster titles from EA or Ubisoft could never imagine what it would be like to play 1000xRESIST, Return of the Obra Dinn, Enemy Mind, Monster Prom, or heck, even something like Age of Empires II.

...and this is how you wind up with people asking why a game isn't about being a witch finding lost cats in the Alps.

D&D 5e fans talking about "story beats" and "collaborative storytelling" as if their game is a rules-light storygame feels like a massive cope, like as if there was something shameful about enjoying the pretty trad fantasy wargame. Like, there's the fact that a lot of advice and discussion about running the game that focuses on treating the game as a story being told to the players actually ends up running counter to the strengths of the system and its structure. Send those bitches to a dungeon, your game will improve much more than trying to think of themes or some shit. If you want to roll d20s while not playing a trad wargame and instead something more storygamey (but not too Forgey so as to not go scare the hoes) you can always check out QuestWorlds. Or Quest. You have options.

[et-in-arkadia]

* * *

Mission mode change detected, now in Monument Mode Goodnight friends. After exchanging our final bits of data,

I will hold vigil on this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity's continued journey to the stars.

Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.

But it is remarkable that a species might be outlasted by its own ingenuity.

Here lies Blue Ghost, a testament to the team who, with the loving support of their families and friends, built and operated this machine and its payloads,

to push the capabilities and knowledge of humanity one small step further.

Per aspera ad astra!

Love, Blue Ghost

* * *

no you are actively crying over a dying robot on the moon i am doing just fine thanks

[rq-tblazer]

FUN NEWS. we might actually be cisintersex ?

[shitslikethis]

bar topics are only dead if you let them die……. if the table is silent and i pipe up to ask you a batshit “would you rather…?” i expect you to engage as if it is serious because if you laugh it off….. we’re back to dead silence…… that’s on you now