How do I get my group to play something besides D&D?
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How do I get my group to play something besides D&D?
How do I get my group to play something besides D&D?
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Tell them you're running something else.
I have played D&D with 5 other groups before and they all either refused or only played a couple of games using the new system and still played it like D&D and moved back to the old system so something tells me you never had to deal with this before.
> Odds are if you want to stop playing dnd, you arent putting any care into running it
People will put care into running it if it means they can play something else, its the players who won't put care into the game
>refusing to play something else
just do what I do and say its happening or that they can run a game or they can frick off
Thats how I got a Skyrealms of Jorune game up and running
Heck i even had people passive aggressively just no try to attempt to get us to move back, but we just stopped inviting them for a few sessions and they fell in line. It helps one of my players is up for anything and I have said I will run one on ones with only him if no one else shows up so they know I'm not gonna back down when it comes to trying new stuff, as they know I'll just play without em.
>something tells me you never had to deal with this before
Yeah because we play with people that actually enjoy games and don't just play D&D because they want to seem quirky and different despite it being one of the most main stream hobbies right now.
have you tried growing a pair of balls
This. If they refuse, then they're probably shit players to begin with who only use the hobby as an accessory to substitute a personality.
If you don't have players, you don't have a game.
You can't. Unless one of them is a tabletop game enthusiast it will be impossible, you may get them to play something for like one or two games but they will want to go back to the thing all the famous people they see on the internet plays.
We'll see about that, I'm running the second session of a V20 Chronicle for a bunch of new players, a couple or few D&D-onlys, and another enthusiast who's played and ran other non-D&D games but has never touched VtM or any WoD games.
Tell them you want to run something else. If they don’t agree find a different group.
Ask them nicely? It's really not hard.
Get a better motivation than just "not D&D."
Frick, are you really so easily manipulated that you've fallen for the mindless troll spam on /tg/?
Not playing D&D isn't a problem, but whem trolls do nothing but try and wage a culture war all as a substitute for actually playing any real games, it's morons like you who end up internalizing their mantras.
Grow a dick. Find a game you want to play, not just a game you were told you shouldn't play by a handful of desperate trolls on an anime image board.
this, if you want a game where they hold swords, use fireballs and beat orcs nobody will want to switch no matter how much you shit talk d&d
Naw. I'm playing Fantasy Hero and it's loads better than DnD.
DnD doesn't even do DnD well.
Have you tried not playing D&D?
>Get a better motivation than just "not D&D."
You also need to provide a better motivation than just "not D&D"
If I said to my group "I want to run pathfinder. We're going to be doing the same kind of world but I'm suck of D&D" they wouldn't be too excited.
If I said "I want to run pathfinder. You can do cooler things and there are more magic items and ways to make even incredibly niche ideas viable. You want to grapple someone to death?? You can. You want to kick someone in the nuts so hard they can't fight?? You can. You want to sing so aggressively all your allies get BARBARIAN POWERS? YOU CAN FRICKING DO THAT TOO!" they'd be far more excited.
Your problem is you.
It's possible your group is just made of useless dickheads but since you're the one who needs to learn how to convince people of things, it's probably you.
Frick, man, I wouldn't want to try anything in almost any context if you just said "it's not [the other thing], which is bad if you ask me"
I'm sick of it as a DM is more than enough reason
Never DMs need to learn their place
Pull your head out of your ass, you are trying to promote a different game to someone else.
>I'm sick of it as a DM is more than enough reason
It's enough reason to stop running D&D
It's not enough reason for people to care about whatever system you'd prefer
Understand this: you are not obliged to run D&D. They are not obliged to play not-D&D.
You can scream on here about how people should play not-D&D but unless you can convince someone who will actually play with you, you are pissing and whining to no effect.
Go convince someone to play what you want to run, or resign yourself to never running it.
Those are your options.
Suck it up.
I'll agree with this. If you can provide a better reason than only "I'm burnt out on D&D," and supply them with a half-decent pitch (which "I'm burnt out on D&D" can absolutely factor into because chances are that if you're tired of a system, at least one other person in the group is, too) on the system you want to try, especially if you offer to GM, the players are far more likely to be excited for and willing to try a new system.
When I wanted to run Call of Cthulhu, I used a pitch that went something to the effect of
>"Hey guys, I've been feeling a little burnt out on D&D lately, but I've been reading some cosmic horror recently so I want to try my hand at it and run, if not a campaign, then a session or two of Call of Cthulhu. It would be pretty standard Lovecraft-type stuff, lots of mystery, maybe a cult or two, horrors from beyond this dimension in a 1920s session, the works. I think it would be fun for us to try something different for a change. I've already got all the books we need and I can help out with character creation."
It wasn't anything ground breaking, but we all had a fun few sessions with it.
>try this
>Players look at each other
>look at you
>back to each other
>"Can you just, like...adapt it to 5e?"
Your players have overdosed on d20s if percentages are too difficult for them.
>"Can you just, like...adapt it to 5e?"
No i cant this game plays differently and the D&D rules dont work for it
Our DM did that after six months of a well-running 5e campaign. Ended up killing our group and made me realize just how badly designed CoC's rules are. Didn't help that he picked a railroady trainwreck of an adventure that is marketed as a good introduction.
You sound like you desperately need to broaden your horizons.
Have you tried not playing DnD?
>It is explained literally every thread why people don't like D&D
>"It's just trolls waging a culture war!!"
Schizos like you are a bigger problem, I'd say. People like you bumble into threads and ruin them because you are clueless, and then dismiss everyone as haters like a shitty musician that doesn't understand what criticism is.
This. /tg/ has been shitting on DnD for more than a decade.
If you don't understand the problems people have with DnD, it's because you've been intentionally not listening for years.
It's not that saying DnD is bad is ill intended or wrong. In fact, it is correct.
It's that saying it regardless of the topic is indistinguishable from trolling because it's been said so much that it has become a meme and is applied to any mention of anything that is in DnD and many other things.
>If you don't understand the problems people have with DnD, it's because you've been intentionally not listening for years.
All the argument that I can recall revolve around wotc being a pozzed, shit company (which is true), because d20 systems are too swingy, specially in skill checks (despite the fact that you could use "take 10" since 3e) and around its ivory tower design philosophy, but that was a long time ago.
Of course, there are also tons of mouthbreather arguments that didnt make any sense so I never really bothered remembering them.
You referenced two complete bullshit ones right here.
"d20 are too swingy" comes from idiots failing to appreciate that the dice are just one side of a larger equation, and in a binary pass-fail system the relative target number is ultimately what determines how "swingy" a system feels. 5e even addressed this by lowering the average TN down to around 7 rather than the 10-11 you saw in earlier editions.
The "ivory tower design philosophy" is another complete bullshit one taken from Monte Cooks writing why people should buy his friends "D&D for dummies", under the explanation that the Player's Handbook did not go in depth explaining every single mechanic and you should buy a guidebook that does. Except, the "Ivory Tower" doesn't really mean anything because not only does the Dungeon Master's Guide explain various mechanics in depth and even from a "Behind the Curtain" perspective, the very next books that followed the 3 core rulebooks were books that went in depth explaining to players how to build characters. The "Ivory Tower Design Philosophy" may truly be the biggest load of bullshit still repeated to this day, except for all the other ridiculous bits of outdated or outright false bits of bullshit trolls just repeat because it really doesn't matter how many times they're explained they're wrong, all that matters is that they have a volume of complaints to keep copypasting.
I agree, but that is usually what I see. If you have any other arguments to add, feel free to drop them.
"HP Bloat" is probably one of the worst ones, because it really just comes straight down to the classic "D&D does something, so I'm going to complain about it" reasoning that trolls use for everything from Levels to Classes to the Dice it uses.
"HP Bloat" is something that extends from people being mad about D&D using HP, realizing that a fair number of non-D&D games also use HP so they can't just complain about HP wholesale, so they try to focus in on the idea that since some editions of D&D use big numbers for their HP values, that means it's some kind of problem. What's worse, is that they often try to treat it like an "objective" problem.
Aside from the simple fact that it's a matter of preference that can be easily adjusted (you can scale HP up and down at your personal discretion), what many DMs, especially those that run 5e, are quick to discover is that HP being high is far from actually being an issue since the damage that players can dish out has increased to a ratio where DMs find themselves having to either use higher HP values or stronger enemies entirely.
It all originates from the 2e grognards mad about 3e, and trolls have actually just been repeating the same bullshit for decades now, trying to apply it to each new edition, regardless of how stupid they sound. For a minute, they may have had a point about 4e and it's rather high HPs and relative low damage in the earlier books, but the ease in which DMs fixed this and the semi-ongoing debate over the exact perfect ratio for HP/Damage just showcases how meaningless the "HP Bloat" gripe really is. Hell, in regards to 5e, where damage can easily reduce equal CR opponents down to 0 HP in a single round with good luck, anyone who offers up the complaint of "HP Bloat" might as well be signalling "I am just a braindead troll, disregard all that I am about to say."
>Levels
Another shitty thing about DnD
>a matter of preference
That's the heart of the matter isn't it? People have preferences for things that aren't in DnD or DnD doesn't do well.
And having preferences for things that aren't DnD upsets some diehard Hasbro fans, like it was some perfect universal system.
No one has a problem with people having preferences.
Hell, no one has a problem with you not liking D&D.
What people are tired of is you spamming, shitposting, and lowering the level of discourse on this board all in your pitiful crusade to get people to stop playing D&D. Hell, if you could martial up an actual argument, you might actually have a place on this board. Instead, you spam "Have you tried not playing D&D?" in every thread that merely mentions the game, shitpost the same debunked bullshit over and over again, and then retreat into your wienerroach tunnels whenever someone decides to shine some light on you, only for you to emerge when you think it's safe again.
Let me put it this way. If you act like a troll, even if you have the best intentions, you're going to be treated like one, called out as one, and all your efforts are going to work against you, because the only people who are actually going to take you seriously are the dumbest kind of idiots, the kind you would call kin.
>you spamming, shitposting
I think you have it in your head that there are a few dedicated trolls when it isn't.
>it isn't, I swear!
Except it is, and their desperation comes from the unfortunate fact that 85%+ of everyone who actually plays RPGs on this board plays some flavor of D&D, with a solid 50%+ playing 5e.
You are here, DESPERATELY trying to pretend there's more of you than there actually are, all because you think Ganker is a numbers game, and anonymously spamming with fervor is enough to convince people that there's more of you then there are.
Or, are you going to admit to being the kind of idiot who genuinely falls for such a simple troll action as aggressive spamming? Go on, tell me that you genuinely believe there's so many people dedicated to hating a system that they feel the need to copy and paste the same moronic bullshit every time a thread merely mentions the game.
Lol
You really should try some other games.
>maybe trolling now will help my position!
Seriously?
Your position is so absurd there's no point reasoning with you.
I think that's part of the reason HYTNPDND grew as meme. People got so defensive it was easier to just lob HYTNPDND into a thread than have the dang argument for the thousandth time.
>take my spamming seriously
>no you are a troll
>no i am spamming because i don't take you seriously
Man, your mental gymnastics are all sorts of pathetic.
Longs story short, you are a moronic troll. You spam to annoy people, all just because you wanted to turn this image board into your own personal game, a game of "See if I can wage a personal crusade against some brand of systems I dislike."
It's pretty pathetic. Instead of seeing people discuss a game you don't care about, you get mad and upset. So, you try to get people mad and upset in retaliation. And, when people call you out, you go through the same old song and dance of "Oh, it is not I who is unreasonable, it is the people who come to a Tradtional Games board to discuss the most popular traditional game, they are the one's who need to stop what they are doing."
Look. I don't like Exalted. But, I don't go into the Exalted General and scream "STOP PLAYING EXALTED" every chance I get. I don't shitpost every time someone asks a question about the game, or simply mentions the game in passing. It's because I recognize that even though I don't like the game, I have much better things to do than poison a board by shitposting about how bad it is, and then doubling down on my frustration that there are still people who DARE to play that game even after I have expressed displeasure towards it.
>All that text
Have you tried not playing DND?
>gets called out as a moronic troll who can only spam his forced meme
>spams his forced meme
Fricking lol. You've fricked yourself so hard that you can't stop fricking yourself.
Have you tried not playing DnD though?
D&D is not the only game with HP bloat. Fantasy AGE had HP bloat as bad if not worse as D&D at its worst.
The idea of balancing the game around 6 to 8 combat encounters per adventuring day when no group, outside maybe a pure dungeoncrawl, does that many and even most of your pre-made scenarios don't have that many is really bad (although easily fixable, but very few people read the dmg and ponder about how dumb this premise is), especially because it makes most of your classic monsters unusable when players are around level 5...like i'm 100% sure that all complaints about hp bloat, the rest mechanic or just the system being too easy come from this single decision...yeah and the conditions list also is kinda anemic
d20s ARE too swingy. Skilled and specialized characters still have to deal with signficant failure chances, while completley untrained characters still have some chance of success, the designers viewed this as a benefit but it isn't. 5e made it worse by making all the numbers smaller (and by making stats even more interchangeable, i.e. all the weapons that naturally use dex for attack and damage, though 4e was worse in that respect). The effect is that all characters play the same and it's dumb.
>Ivory Tower Design
Had nothing to do with D&D for dummies, it's just something he mentioned at the end. The specific example that Monte gives is toughness, "This feat was intended for low-level spellcasters, especially during 1-shots, and it sucks for everyone else, and I wish we had just said that in the core rules". In later books monte used more (usually in-world or in-character) sidebars to explain what game mechanics were for, and he also used a scaling version of Toughness.
You don't have the actual article on hand do you? I usually post it at times like this but I let my computer crash recently so I don't have it.
5e made the numbers smaller but frequent advantage changes the roll to the better of 2d20. More importantly, they lowered the DCs all around, and that's the principle component that makes d20's not swingy in a binary pass/fail system. If you've played 5e, and found players are failing too often, you're either making them roll too often or are just using too high DCs.
> the designers viewed this as a benefit but it isn't.
D&D isn't a simulation. You don't make random npcs roll every time they try to bake a loaf of bread. Generally, your complaint happens in the case when a DM is making players roll far more often than they should.
>The effect is that all characters play the same and it's dumb.
The effect is that all characters CAN play the same. You can still explore extremely disparate character options, but the unfortunate truth is that players tend to want to play a far more narrow set of character types. Very few people actually want to be the heal-b***h or the skil-monkey/HM slave, and trying to funnel people into those roles usually just isn't fun for anyone. 5e went the route of "You can roll through most adventures with just about any party your group decides to come up with", and that's a symptom of the game aiming to be a popular crowd pleaser.
It's not a pure weakness or fault so much as it is a choice, and a choice with benefits and drawbacks. Focusing solely on the drawbacks is just providing a biased and unfair assessment.
>The specific example that Monte gives is toughness
Funny, because all the X and Y books that immediately followed the Player's Handbook had advice on what feats to take for each class, including mentioning whether there was value in feats like toughness. But, if they decided to include that all in the PH, the book would have ended up being well over 1,000 pages, which seems like a bit much for the primary reference book.
Actually, "too swingy" does have an objective aspect to it in that disparate TNs get weirdly low differences in hitting and missing. I've ranted quite a few times about the need for overflowing the die to allow the same check to do more significant things or else you can't go very far with a flat curve because the upper bound is too reachable by low-level people and people up top are still very prone to wiff their Main Thing.
Which is Incredibly Bad with any attempt at having a skill-monkey scout with them, because there's separate checks for staying hidden, noticing what needs noticed, and actually moving around in any way but basic land motion. It turns 95% into sub-60% disturbingly quickly, if you can even reach that point.
Seriously, the entire reason Passive Perception exists is because the d20 makes checks for it bullshit, because of how ROUTINELY a Surprise Round can bugger a party.
No, HP bloat does drive problems, but it's again a matter of scaling going weird. If HP is constantly going up at an increasing rate, then damage numbers have to, which means characters have to have a lot of resources dedicated to raw damage output to deal with the HP. And, again, drastically messes with the combat pace the instant you leave exactly on-pace Challenge (Ratings), especially at low levels when it's swingiest.
Biggest complication is flat sources, mostly external items. The amount of stuff that's just utterly useless beyond the first 3 levels or so in WotC D&D is ABSURD, often driven entirely by the fact that the HP escalation means that anything to do with it MUST scale to be relevant and they just never print anything to do so.
You're talking in pure hypothetical la-la-land, with no actual relevance to any game. Hell, it almost sounds like you're still talking about 3.5, except even then none of what you said has any real application. Like, do you think being a scout is hard in 3.5? The edition where you can get +30 to any skill well before level 10? Hell, it's even stupidly easy to be stealthy in 5e thanks to how unreasonably low the NPC perception skills are.
When is the last time you've actually played a game? Not theory crafted nonsense about them, but actually sat down and rolled some dice with some friends?
In 5e, it's still a separate check to hide, to notice things, and to engage in almost any manner of verticality without an express Fly speed, but it's one for each instead of several each like 3.5. If you get to an 80% chance of success on all three, despite 5e's bounding factors, you fall to 10.7% chance of full successes after only 10 checks. 15 checks reduces 95% to 46.3%. 12 checks at 90% is 28.2%
How many checks do you expect from a stealth section? Because those "unreasonably low" NPC Perceptions add up quite fast with the swingy die and bounded accuracy making it impossible to get *certain* success. Probably why they're "unreasonably low" in the first place, on the assumption you'll want past groups and rendering that remotely plausible.
This is the stuff that makes CAMPAIGNS feel awful, because of the uncanny frequency of failure in practice, especially with the increasingly-rare-for-good-reason opposed checks having the chance they get high while you get low. -4 or worse effective penalty over a third of the time kind of bad.
Also:
>I've ranted quite a few times about the need for overflowing the die to allow the same check to do more significant things or else you can't go very far with a flat curve because the upper bound is too reachable by low-level people and people up top are still very prone to wiff their Main Thing.
3.5's issues are that the checks don't actually do too much with the inflating numbers, and the rate of inflation is thoroughly unpredictable. It does, in fact, escalate enough to deal with the d20, but doesn't do nearly enough with that to justify it, and there's too few rails to have useful ranges to expect. The latter being what crippled Truenamer, slightly overestimating the reasonable skill bonuses and their scaling made it a barely-usable mess.
This is still deep in hypothetical la-la-land territory, and for the most part I highly recommend you actually play a game again soon.
Above all else, you're still acting like the dice matter. In any game, you can have a 90% chance of success, whether you roll it with a d20 or otherwise. And, it's the GM that decides how often a player needs to roll. For the most part, any and all complaints you are imagining you are having are coming from GM decisions, and are irrelevant to the system itself.
If you have someone go out on a scouting mission, and you expect them to make 12 straight rolls that need to be successes in order to avoid failing the mission, what are you doing? You're not playing D&D for one thing, hell, you're not playing any RPG I know of.
D&D likes to make rolls exciting and interesting, and the dice are geared towards that. Generally, you're not supposed to roll unless you have at least a 5% chance of either success or failure, because any percentage smaller than that is generally beyond our ability to perceive and might as well be an automatic success or automatic failure. If you are making people roll when they have a perceived 95%+ chance of success or failure, you're just wasting time. A baker is not fricking up 1/20 of his loaves.
Hell, most of your complaints are about things addressed even before D&D existed. Things like not requiring individual rolls for every action, batching together actions, all simple stuff that any ordinary game referee was doing back in the war game days.
A typical scouting mission in 5e might be a stealth check, and that's it. A perception check is only needed if they're looking for something hard to spot, and a climb/swim check could be thrown in if you're feeling spicy. You're not making a constitution check every round to see if you're still breathing, mate.
>If you have someone go out on a scouting mission, and you expect them to make 12 straight rolls that need to be successes in order to avoid failing the mission, what are you doing?
I had to do that playing a rogue back in 3.5 when I scouted half of the dungeon out by myself. Dunno why you think rolling a check when a situation that calls for it comes up is uncommon.
>Dunno why you think rolling a check when a situation that calls for it comes up is uncommon.
Largely because one person going through half the dungeon by themselves is uncommon and should be uncommon.
Like, there's almost no better way to make a group sick of your ass then spending half an hour or more playing a solo adventure while they sit around, pretending they're invested in whether you live or die while privately hoping that you frick up and die.
I did that because they wanted me to. Stop projecting.
I wonder how much they regretted asking you after 10 minutes. You probably don't know, because you were too invested in your personal little adventure.
Either way, it doesn't change the main point, in that extended solo scout missions are not that common, and if they are, they really shouldn't be.
Not at all because it let us get anti-vampire countermeasures in place instead of getting fricked right off the bat. Extended solo scout missions are not the only time you will be asked to do an extended skill test, either, so your point is irrelevant.
good thing you arent the end all be all decision maker on these things. you sound like an insufferable autistic homosexual that cant handle people doing things differently than you. MY WAY IS THE ONLY ALLOWED WAY! fricking sperg virgin
>one player playing by themselves for more than half an hour is great
Gee whiz, you're a smart one.
gee whiz, you're opinions are always irrelevant and never asked for. please stfu and stand in the corner like you used to in highschool nerd. stop replying I dont normally talk to dweebs with stupid moron takes
>wah wah, don't keep spanking me by tearing apart my arguments!
Like how your whining post did nothing but make you look like a delicate homosexual?
>A typical scouting mission in 5e might be a stealth check, and that's it.
So you play with DMs who reduce getting by multiple distinct positions of enemies, identifying the variety of enemy they are, and bypassing some level of defensibility for most cases where specific forewarning that you should scout comes up to... A single skill check?
Seriously? One skill check for everyone in the location, no matter the changes in sightlines, no matter anything about its layout, ONE check for entire camps? This sounds to me like your mind is thoroughly warped by playing campaigns that utterly embrace the softballing to handwave away anything that sets the spotlight on a lone character.
Also, the "basic" limit for 90% success is only DC 14 since you only get +11, being +5 from ability and +6 from Proficiency. Which is of course limited to 17-20. If Expertise is mandatory for your expectations, then you're saying that scouting is functionally niche-protected to Rogues only.
With LITERALLY ANY care to the fact that scouting is a multi-function mission, at just two rolls per outing, three such missions drops to 53.1%. Nearly a coin-flip in not even a full day, where binary failure is an extremely high risk of death.
>Above all else, you're still acting like the dice matter.
The dice do matter, because they shape how much of a shift is needed to hit that 90% chance. With 1d20, that's bonus+3, out of average 10, meaning that in 5e it takes MORE than the entire Proficiency progression to go from 50% to 90%. With a basic 3d6 hack, 90% occurs at bonus+7, so you go from 50% at 1st to 90% at level 13 before touching anything else.
In an opposed 3d6 check, the Proficiency bonus is "lost" to the dice 9.65% of the time, while in opposed 1d20 you end up at -12 relative to a static target number 9% of the time. The bottom 10th percentile is literally double the effective penalty. Workable if you can climb to +30 by level 10, awful if the game expects no more than 17
...Wait, those numbers don't look right. How the frick did I shift over 10%? Think I latched on to the "basic" limit case of +17 in 5e, of Expertise+20 at 17th+. Granted, that reinforces the point, as 50% to 90% in 1d20 needs +8, while 3d6 is +4. With how low 5e's accuracy bounds are, this is the difference between "Prelude to Endgame" and "literally impossibly without either a particularly poor starting Ability or Expertise".
>that you should scout comes up to... A single skill check?
Make it two then. Three if you're feeling spicy.
Shit man, let's not beat around the bush. The key point of your la-la-land business is assuming the GM is not in control of how much any player is going to need to roll, and that they're going to doing something dumb like set up a situation with only a 10% chance of success as a typical challenge.
>The dice do matter
Not really. You're pretending the scaling of the modifiers matters when the scaling of the modifiers is made to match the dice, effectively balancing the equation. For frick's sake, it's like saying the shape of the peg matters because it determines the shape of the hole it goes into, when the bottom line is that the peg is going to go into the hole and that's the only question that needs to be answered in the present application.
Hell, I don't even understand why you're so concerned about the proficiency bonus, especially when 5e makes advantage readily accessible and cutting down failure percentages typically in half. At the end of the day, what funky dice and mechanics you use can be as wild as your imagination can take you, but the bottom line results in percentages of success in a binary pass/fail system, and for 5e a good chunk of that is boiled up not just in character stats, but the circumstances.
>I don't even understand why you're so concerned about the proficiency bonus
And you never will understand because you're willfully ignorant to other playstyles.
I'm far from ignorant to the playstyles of people who deliberately don't understand how to make a game work and are actively trying to make the game not fun, since I have people like you who are more than willing to describe how they play and then pretend this is how other groups do it and should do it.
It's like you're trying to be stupid or something.
Shit man, these games are not complicated. They managed to get a man on the moon with nothing but pencils and slide rulers. And here you are, professing to the world you're too stupid to make 5e, a game dumbed down enough that even 5 year-olds can have fun playing it, fun. And then you want to blame the system instead of looking at yourself.
Shit. I understand people will go to great lengths to blame everything but themselves, but frick, it's like watching someone drink a bottle of bleach and then try to blame the bottle. For frick's sake, just read the goddamn bottle instead of imagining you're too smart for it and then wondering why you fricked up.
5 year olds don't have standards.
You've never met a 5 year old.
>and that they're going to doing something dumb like set up a situation with only a 10% chance of success as a typical challenge.
My point is that 1d20 creates far stronger eventualities of this over the campaign, where it's downright likely to get fricked by the die roll alone at some point, whereas the bottom of the curve just before it drops into irrelevance is fractions of a single percentage point for 3d6.
Even at 90% success on the roll, which is FAR above anything expected to be a challenge in 5e, you're expecting these "You Eat A Dick" outliers in under 20 such rolls.
>Not really. You're pretending the scaling of the modifiers matters when the scaling of the modifiers is made to match the dice, effectively balancing the equation.
...How do you compensate midpoint probability (10+11) of 25% with a function where it's 10%, while also replicating extreme unlikelyness but not impossibility of exceptionally low values, without having more than three stages to rolling the d20 before checking the final result?
I specify three stages because you could have an extended critical mechanic verifying particularly high and low results, but then you're specifically rolling 1d20, then if it's below or above a certain pair of values you roll it again, with a third specific rule to create a reversion to mean.
Importantly, who the frick would use that multi-stage curve-tapering clusterfrick slowing resolution to a crawl when they can just make a bell-curve roll in the first place? Seriously, 3 or less is over 30 times more likely on 1d20 than 3d6, how the frick are you making compensation for that playable?
>if i ask for unneccesary rolls constantly, it's the dice at fault!
Major problem people have with GURPS? The simulationist mindset that makes games turn into a fricking drag, with GMs that play slowly and enjoy using the dice as a form of systematic confirmation rather than moments of excitement and entertainment.
Dice are neither exciting nor entertaining.
...It's literally inevitable unless you go diceless. That is just how math works. Even in the absolute furthest extreme of making a 1d20 roll at all, where you have a 5% chance to fail, it takes a total of 13 rolls to hit a coin-flip of one of them being a failure. For a remotely plausible 80% chance of success, you hit that coin-flip in THREE.
21 rolls through the course of a campaign sees a 1/3rd chance of all successes from 95%. 80% per roll, which is four and under failing, drops to 10% all-good in 10 rolls. The attenuation here for extremely low results is psychotic. They're not outliers, they're commonplace eventuality.
Fundamentally, different dice create different averages create different experiences, and modeling one set of dice with another will always have a drastic loss in efficiency of play.
>The simulationist mindset that makes games turn from unbelievable woo-woo bullshit into something that makes sense
Fixed that for you.
While I appreciate comprehensive just-in-case rules, I see them as a long-term goal rather than something for startup, because at a certain point exception cases become onerous to learning the game.
Core rules should cover just what The Point of the system is in enough detail to hold it together under some scrutiny and player pressure, so that the intended way of playing is as straightforward and optimal as possible.
Then expansions kick in to cover increasingly specific cases, some being minutia and others general additions, extending the scope gradually towards going Dwarf Fortress with it, always looking to ensure that the intended results are as clear and straightforward as can be.
Because if you're designing something around any level of specificity in experience, it really should have firm protections against playing it wrong. So very much torture in D&D's history from that mistake because WotC apparently hates ludonarrative resonance.
There's a difference between rules for everything and having a consistent, believable framework for the game. The entire point of the BR anon's posts is that 5E's framework does not produce something believable.
Which is indeed exactly what I was getting at. I like having comprehensive rules, but understand it's important they've been extended sensibly from a core with a clear direction so that it all fits together.
It's also a killer business model with how splatbook friendly it is.
>I highly recommend you actually play a game again soon.
I hope your shit posting from work. Would be a shame to think someone was white knighting Hasbro game design for free.
>When is the last time you've actually played a game?
1 and a half weeks ago. It would have been half a week ago but the GM had to run out of town on game day.
>You're talking in pure hypothetical la-la-land, with no actual relevance to any game.
lol
>Hell, it almost sounds like you're still talking about 3.5,
5e plays out a lot like 3e, except for bounded accuracy, which makes the stated issue (swingy d20) a lot worse. Also you aren't expected to get a +20 bonus from items the way you were in 3e.
>Hell, it's even stupidly easy to be stealthy in 5e thanks to how unreasonably low the NPC perception skills are.
Yes, there's little difference between a stealthy character and a non-stealthy version of the same character, this is a failing of the system.
>When is the last time you've actually played a game?
It's been like 3 years for me, it was 5e but not my game, I've been "working on my 5e game" during plaguetimes and the main complaint I come away with is that low-level monsters all seem the same, they have basically the same attack paramaters and basically the same defense paramaters, and their unique abilities are a very small piece of the pie. I'm tempted to use unconverted 3e and 4e monsters just for variety.
There's part of me that doesn't want to run real 5e, I want to do this thing where I replace the d20 with a d6 and otherwise use the exact same math, because I think it would give me exactly the game that I wish I was playing. But I should probably have more experience running normal 5e first.
You would have to rewrite AC pretty hard for that to function.
>Caster supremacy
>HP as meat points
>HP bloat
>broken rules
>trap options
I'm sure there are more. These are just the one's I can recall of the top of my head.
>caster supremacy
Doesnt really happen that way in practice
>muh hp
See the post above yours
>broken rules
Every game has broken rules. 5e specially, but we are talking about dnd as a whole, right?
>trap options
Refer to the ivory tower critique at
With this I agree, but only in theory. Running many encounters per rest is not realistic and one of the main issues with 4/5e. But it is still fairly easy to circle around. Still, that is easily fixable. For example, here in Brazil we have a system called T20 that fixes that masterfully in a 3.5-5e mix. This mostly fixes campaign pacing problems, though. as, in practice, I am yet to run into resource problems running my games.
>.like i'm 100% sure that all complaints about hp bloat, the rest mechanic or just the system being too easy come from this single decision...yeah and the conditions list also is kinda anemic
Its easy on purpose and it has more to do with the way they design monsters, imo. It represents a general shift in the industry towards acessibility and mass appeal. They cant make a monster that can dispatch a party of poorly skilled players with possibly subpar builds anymore. The PCs need to "win". They are marvel superheroes, after all.
And yes, that is also easily fixable by going to an older edition of dnd or simply adjusting the math.
Skilled and specialized characters do not have to rely on dice rolls to perform routine tasks under ordinary pressure parameters.
>while completley untrained characters still have some chance of success
In skill tests, a 20 does not guarantee a success save for house rules that say so.
Now, if we are talking about saves and attack rolls, I think having the 1/20 failure/success rule is perfectly valid.
First, if you need to fix it, it's a failure of the system, no matter how easy...second I don't think it's a popular thing, even the most casual players complain about how combat is boring, uneventful or just that it takes too long...like you said yourself, specialized characters shouldn't need to rely on dice rolls to perform routine tasks, if players don't have a chance of losing, wasting time rolling in combat is useless
>First, if you need to fix it,
Man, what a moron.
Adapting/adjusting a system to your tastes isn't "fixing a failure."
Can you please elevate your arguments above the moron troll level, or just crawl back where you came from? No one here can take your dumbass bullshit seriously.
How is it not? The system failed to be what you wanted it to be.
I just asked you to rise above troll bullshit. Seems like you can't.
>Skilled and specialized characters do not have to rely on dice rolls to perform routine tasks under ordinary pressure parameters.
>ordinary pressure paramater
"When it matter", you mean. You only have to rely on dice rolls in situations that mater. You know this, anon, "ordinary pressure paramaters" is sophistry.
>In skill tests, a 20 does not guarantee a success save for house rules that say so.
DC 18, an unskilled character succeeds 10% of the time, a character with a +8(!) bonus succeeds 55% of the time, and a character with a +15(!!) bonus succeeds only 90% of the time. At 1st level this would be fine, like if the first-level wizard has +0 and the first-level acrobat had +15, that might be acceptable to me. We shouldn't really expect 1st-level characers to be "masters" of anything. The thing is, in the game world, they're trying to tell us that "masters" have +8 or +10, and +15 is freakishly good. Which, again, would be acceptable if we were rolling smaller die, but we aren't. If you want the skilled character to always perform better than the unskilled character then you need at least a +20 bonus because the d20 is huge.
I'm not here to argue with you. That's been done to death.
Someone asked about the complaints people have and I listed some.
Personally I'm not going to play DnD because it's a class and level based system that doesn't handle combat well despite that being the game's main focus.
Tell me a game that runs combat well, then. Savag/dungeon world is even more swingy and too freeform. L5R is the same most of the time, except in specific situations where pandora's box opens and it jumps in complexity. Gurps? Also about the same, the main difference being that it uses a different set of dice. ACKS? Exalted? S&S? MYFAROG? Thieves World? All these systems run into the same issues regarding combat as DnD does: They are too slow and that the combat does not offer a satisfying level of abstraction to the player. The systems that escape this rule tend to be those that are not focused on combat, like CoC, but then, to my experience, they also tend to get boring real quick...
>I'm not a troll!
>It is explained literally every thread why people don't like D&D
And it's always just petty gripes, exaggerations, bullshit, and various forms of "didn't ask".
Shit man, it's like you walk into a Chinese restaurant, drop your copy pasted list of "why Chinese food sucks" and then wonder why everyone thinks you're a dumb butthole.
With dndrones you can't "convince" them. They're moronic. What I did was just say one day
>ok next week I'm running a different system instead, I'll send you all the rules, please read the quickstart guide
Granted none of them read anything because players are laziest types of people I have met but by the second session all but one guy were having fun and loving it. They preferred that system's action economy, combat, pace.
>How could you not read 20 pages on something I want to do but you don't? how lazy and inconsiderate
Yeah, this.
An important thing to remember when introducing people to what is probably their second system ever, is that you will likely have to work with them pretty hard to make their character.
People are more likely to be willing to have a conversation with their friend about what they'd like their character to be than read a handout that amounts to homework.
Hell, they'll read the handout if they know the conversation is coming or if you simplify it and present it well.
And this is considering that you have played the game before and can help them in making a sheet, which isn't truth a lot of times...if it isn't the case the group probably need to make some mock scenarios, test characters or run a couple of one-shots with pre-made character just to get the gist of the game
Run something else. Simple as
Play an order edition of DnD, it's basically a different game from 5e anyway. This will start to ween them off of 5e and you can explore other games.
Alternatively, pull out a different game's rulebook and say "tonight we're going to try something new."
Have you tried not playing D&D?
Just ask them, if they are apprehensive about changing systems just say you'll use something else with the d20 system.
Just pitch a new setting. Odds are if you want to stop playing dnd, you arent putting any care into running it, and the players are getting sick of your passive-aggressive boring game. Tell them about something with a cool premise that you're excited to play and they'll get on board. They're followers, that's why they're players
Odds are if you want to stop playing dnd, you arent putting any care into running it.
Fricking kek, here's a pity (you)
It's already too late or just tell them you are running a homebrew or modification of D&D 5e.
>DM buddy of mine I play online with a lot mentions wanting to do a Star Wars campaign and if I was interested in joing his game
>Get excited, break out my PDFs and ask for what kind of campaign/characters he wants
>He sends me the link to SW5E
Had a similar occurence a couple years back with a "Call of Cthulhu" game that was just 5E in the 20s with Cthulhu.
I bought the physical starting kit for CoC earlier this year, and passed it around my local group. One or two claim to have played the opening segment to give them a taste of how the game works, say they want to play a game if I dm, then just go back to 5E.
Run something other than DnD.
secretly switch the covers
This. Honestly most DnD players don't know the rules well. I'm fairly certain if you switched to a different system, but the character sheet had a similar lay out a big chunk of players wouldn't know the difference.
Pick a system and gradually homerule toward it,
Eventually you should just be able to glue a rulebook inside the 5e DMG and treat it as if nothing has changed.
If it's a good system your players shouldn't mind, they might be pleasantly surprised as they dont lose interest 3 months into their 5e campaign.
how do i get my group to play D&D
Step 1: Purchase a gun
have you tried actually playing dnd
I'd suggest trying to pin down a campaign concept that 5e is especially bad at but older editions are genuinely good with that the players express interest in, then have the group run parallel campaigns in 5e versus the better-suited D&D ruleset to viciously beat it into their head that there's more than one worth-playing system without having to deal with brand-name b***hing.
3.5 and AD&D 2e are the best "target systems" for this due to their derivatives letting you branch out of the name-brand bubble without a full set of player retraining. The former lets you shamelessly bait with a wide variety of franchises, the latter lets you trawl the OSR generals for advice on running it and getting new players settled in.
>asks how to get his group to play something besides D&D
>suggests playing older versions of D&D
>to viciously beat it into their head that there's more than one worth-playing system without having to deal with brand-name b***hing
>due to their derivatives letting you branch out of the name-brand bubble without a full set of player retraining.
Roadmaps are important, there's a lot less resistance if you can avoid confronting the D&D label and then avoid confronting full system changes.
Two phases, first dodge the D&D name with older versions, then dodge "it's a different system!" with not-D&D games with heavy mechanical similarities.
The unstated third phase being to get them into a fully non-D&D system with decent thematic specialization in derivatives, thus exiting the brand power brain-rot in full.
Finally, the fourth phase, if desired, is the nightmarishly specialized truly niche games with core rules built wholly around doing one thing very well.
There's a CHANCE of being able to get some of them directly to White Wolf products or CoC as the nearest things to D&D competitors, but again, better to teach them the wider TTRPG space by steps of divergence from 5e.
AD&D has very, very little in common with 5e, anon.
But if you insist, LoTFP is a good, modernized version of older D&D systems. About as deadly and significantly better streamlining of the rules (not to mention straight up clarity) for new players.
>AD&D has very, very little in common with 5e, anon.
Yeah, it's way worse.
but d&d haters only play d&d, if they played anything else they wouldn't be b***hing about it
Thats not true. I play Genesys and Savage Worlds, and I come here to exclusively shit talk the worst thing to happen to table top since the satanic panic. 5e has ruined an entire generation of tabletop
>Savage Worlds
Thats kind of a shit system... Even compared to 5e.
>dude just do what you want lmao
>it's shitty because you can do what you want
Of all the complaints you could have made against Savage Worlds you went with "it's a generic system"? So is Genesys.
I'm thinking a lot of the random "Savage Worlds bad" posting is caused by GMs trying to trick 5e-tards into playing a generic system with this "E-Z" game. Doesn't work like that, you need to make up classes and tell them exactly what their character can and can't do. You could probably get the little morons to play GURPS by doing that.
5e created a new generation of tabletop. If not for 5e, you'd be stuck teaching your obscure games to people who had never heard of tabletop. Which you can still do, of course, but self-victimizing idpol shit is easier, isn't it?
I think the problem is most players don’t really care about the system at all. They care about the characters, the world, the roleplay, and good time. Why bother changing the system?
Run a scenario with a nice mystery in it.
Afterwards tell them that if they enjoyed solving the mystery that you could run a game of Call of Cthulhu next time.
"The answer? Use a gun. And if that don't work? Use more gun."
Precons and a tutorial mission.
No homework. Show up, learn by doing, THEN you can build a character.
Figure out what they like and would interest them? If they like tolkien fantasy adventures Don't try to run a Cyberpunk or straight space starwars game.
Don't start a new RPS with a homebrew. Try an adventure book. It's a bit easier to agree to becuase it has a set length.
You can also dangle the carrot. Just mention you want to run something else on the side, a bundle deal only.
Or an obvious one, tell them you are burning out on D&D and you want to try something different before you lose interest all together
I give my group intermissions during lulls in the dnd campaign where we play something weird like paranoia for a session or two and its been warming them up to alternatives
Try remaking their characters in another system (I suggest GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; It's got fairly good 1-to-1 compatibility with "classes") then run that system for a few weeks.
Once the players see what they can do with the new system (removing D&Ds limits on things like spellcasting, barbarian rage #, etc.) they may start having more fun with it.
this thread make me remind that I forgot to filter anyone that uses "troll" in this browser
Are you truly so uninterested of discussions of the regenerating Large-sized monster that you're perfectly fine filtering out all mention of it?
I had a group of 4 newbies all say they want to play DnD and my friend who works at a game store convinced me to GM for them since I'm pretty experienced with pick up games.
Long story short I had no interest in running DnD at the time, so I just ran WHFRPG and told them it was homebrewed DnD.
They had a blast and were non the wiser, until a month later when one of them tried GMing himself and asked me where to find my homebrew since none of the rules in his 5e PHB even resembled what I ran.
How did they react when they found out they weren't playing D&D?
This thread is like the perfect encapsulation of /tg/ - ''I hate popular thing, how can I make someone else hate popular thing?'' Have you tried making a convincing case for something else? ''W-well.. no.. but I hate popular thing.'' Newsflash, disliking the most popular system, TV show, music, etc isn't a personality or virtue. If you can't make a case for a WoD system, Pathfinder or anything else then chances are you're the type of low effort, zero creativity person that baby's first tabletop was built for.
This is well crafted bait. Designed to get as many people to seetge as possible.
Bravo.
Poison them and tell them the antidote will only be provided after they solve tonight's stand alone mystery, then hand them their CoC investigors.
Or just tell them you are sick of dnd I dunno. I just run whatever I want and everyone does whatever I say. I don't know why things are this way for me and not for you.
Just tell them you're going to run something else and if they b***h about it tell them they can DM if they want to go back to D&D.
The system, D&D 5e is not the problem.
Lots of variant rules people don't even know about:
You want NSR:
Remove skills.
Want more NPC interaction in RP:
Remove social skills.
Want faster combat:
Use group initiative, no +CON to HP and exaustion on passing out.
Even faster:
Dead at 0 HP.
Too complex and fidlly:
New spells and abilities are quested for and not automatically unlocked on leveling. No fricking feats (except cool story ones.)
THE PROBLEM IS:
I playing DnD = I hit goblin with stick.
I rogue = I steal
I fighter, low CHA, I no part face = I no RP
Or as I call them: The common DnDisums players fall in.
You don't even need to implement any moronic rules changes to turn D&D into a good good game. You literally just preset your players with scenarios that force them to play the game.
True. I just reminded people that theres a plethora of official "moronic" variant rules created by the same "moronic" game designers that created the core "moronic" rules. But the "moronic" DnD players and DMs don't even know they exist.
How do I get my group to play D&D?
never played d&d myself, but since I'm the one asking my friends to play with me, I'll be the dm.
usually when I get interested in a new hobby I don't do the reasonable thing and spend as little as possible and so I bought the starter kit, the source books for good measure and curse of strahd before we even met to create a character. yes, yes I know.
I thought, I'd start off with a homebrew that's aimed at first timers - a dungeon that contains all the basic things you can do and then transition to CoS. would that be advisable? or should I go with icespire peak first? are there any other official adventures that would be suited better for a new dm and new players?
I did a test run of the homebrew with my gf and we both had fun, took us around 2-3 hours.
Why are so many people stuck on 5e anyways?
It's not a simple system, they don't know the rules, the character options are extremely limiting, combat is boring and you can't lose.
>how do I get my chess club to play something other than chess
Are you moronic?
You found a set of people based on a shared interest in a game.
5e has almost nothing in common with pre-2nd editions of D&D, let alone other systems entirely.
You're showing up to chess club with a backgammon board.
Except chess is good.
Find a group that wants to play the game you want to play.
>Run something other than high fantasy.
Your players don't want to learn 3.pf, an OSR, or whatever your pet game is when 5e is working well enough for this.
>Have a pitch for a campaign that isn't just "we're playing wiener World".
This is especially needed if you're going to play a generic system like GURPS, HERO, or Genesys!
>Help the players learn the system
More important the more rules there are.
>Have decent players
The most important part.
But since you're going to play 5e forever, I suggest using some of the variant rules in the DMG to make it more bearable.
Be someone that people like and show your passion for what you are into.
I was able to rope in 5 guys to play Lancer with me, while none of them had any true interest in Mechs or Mecha related media.
The campaign fizzled out after 3 or so years of nearly weekly games, was a fun romp.
We ARE playing 5e again atm but that's because the most fun part of Lancer for me (mech+pilot tagteam) was more or less axed because the (discord)community is shit and filled with minmaxers.
I'll get them to play Shadowrun one of these days. Once I get a hand on a actual usable edition.
If you're a good DM your group will trust whatever you decide to run.
>be gm
>decide what to play
wew, hard
Alright, listen, you gotta slap in shit that is CLOSE to D&D in tone and mechanics just enough to NOT have them running away.
Shadow of the Demon Lord is close enough, use that.
3.PF is still D&D but not as shitty as 5e.