I have been not playing D&D for almost two years now, and don't plan on turning back.
The fact that I'm rewriting what I don't like and exercising the fact that I don't even need the books aside, it's pretty hard to play something that isn't a game.
it honestly never occurs to me. since all we play is D&D, whenever we have a problem with classes or an adventure, we just sort out how to make it work in D&D.
outside D&D it doesn't even matter, that's why this """"advise"""" comes off as pretentious. it's D&D or nothing at all.
Nobody plays D&D anymore. The original game died when it was replaced by a series of different games with the old famous tiltle slapped over it to make them sell to consuming morons who didnt know any better. Amercans always fall for the 'bait and switch', thinking they have the real thing.
I like Rolemaster, GURPS, and SR4e. If I run D&D these days it's 3e, with lots of 3pp & houserules. Yes yes, I'm 35.
I'm under no delusion that this is Holmes/Moldvay/Whitebox, or even AD&D1. Gygax & Arneson's D&D. That was my dad's D&D. I got interested because of the 1990s FR comic books and dos games, and then got into the setting books and novels after 3e came out. 2e's ok, but 3e, I like a bit better overall, though not it's not better in every regard. But I'm showing up for a Greenwood's FR sandbox RPG, which is a pretty different thing even if it has mechanical similarities in 2e.
4e and 5e are both very different games again, and I don't really like either one.
it honestly never occurs to me. since all we play is D&D, whenever we have a problem with classes or an adventure, we just sort out how to make it work in D&D.
outside D&D it doesn't even matter, that's why this """"advise"""" comes off as pretentious. it's D&D or nothing at all.
My group's been playing Traveller lately, and we recently wrapped up a Rolemaster 4e campaign. In 2020 we had a The Dark Eye game going for about 6 months. We had a SKT campaign that wrapped in 2019 (frick 5e), and a PF1 campaign that wrapped in 2019 as well. D&D is not the only game you can play.
I could also have just played Smash Bros or Munchkin or Jack box Party games, or many other games, if we're just mentioning alternate activities you can do with a group of 6. What's your point? The person I responded to said "it's D&D or nothing", so I pointed out people do play otger TTRPGs.
>Have you?
Yeah I run mutants and masterminds 3e with my longtime group and am looking into setting up a World of Darkness game on the side.
If I went back to d20 class-based fantasy it would be Pathfinder 1e with Spheres of Power or Shadow of the Demon Lord. 5e is just a boring game, the only class I ever genuinely enjoyed the gameplay of was Wildfire Druid because managing at-will teleportation of the entire party and multiple summons was fun.
Alien rpg is pretty fun yea but good luck fimdomg 8 people. We made it work with a skeleton crew on our ship, the thessius. Weve got a captain/pilot, a country do it all doctor, my roughmeck character, another roughneck, a scientist, a karen officer butch from h.r. and a short dr phil lookin motherfricker. And when we left off last week the alien came on board when we we're salvaging a space shitter for our new female crew mates to have their own shitters. We are running a campaign simular to the idea of lethal company. We are space salvagers
I did, it helped some things but not others. Honestly, 80% of 5e’s problems would be solved if the material they published for new dungeon masters wasn’t such dogshit.
Yes, my friends and I haven't played D&D or Pathfinder since... maybe 2009?
Once we discovered games that better met our tastes for any given type of campaign we wanted to play/run we never had a reason to play it again.
I'm the last man standing in my groups in actively proposing to play anything else than d&d. Right fricking now i'm running a 3.5e game out of desperation because was fricking forefever since the last time we had games (i tried proposing a supers game because a couple of players are huge capeshit nerds but not even that worked), and the other group i know with an active table is playing fricking PF2e right now.
To be fair it's not like i never play something other than d&d but almost all the times is because i'm the one GMing it, as a player i can consider myself lucky that i experienced 4 games other than d&d in 25 years.
All this shit about not playing D&D is 100% nogames homosexualry
It's like you're complaining about traffic and some moron says "have you tried buying a sailboat?" from his fricking couch
it's such a fricking stupid thing to say. Nobody here plays shit.
>Just keep playing a game you don't like
Even if i may enjoy the moments shared with the table regardless of the game played, that doesn't mean i have no fricking right in expressing preferences and acting upon that as in trying in playing something else Black. After a while killing shit in Fantasyland becomes stale and so everything that comes with the whole package deal (game design assumptions and general framework). And no, don't even dare to say >You can play d&d differently, even change the rules bro
because at some point you end beating a dead horse to the ground. There's an hard limit in which you're practically end playing d&d having insted a frankensteinish agglomeration of changes that may as well be a different game tout-court while also stepping in the same issue: the group wants d&d not whatever you're trying in cooking, so you can "trick" the table just as much by sticking to d&d homebrew territory but that's about it.
That said, sure, it's not like all the tables are composed by autistic kids that get a seizure if someone dares to propose a different thing but for the most part you have to walk the forevergm path if you want to have a non-d&d game and that's kind of a bummer, hence the htnpd&d sentiment.
If you want to play anything specific, and don't want to game with strangers online. If you just want a non-d&d game, you can find one. If you curate a group of GMs that play other systems, you may not get to play exactly the system you want, but you'll get a wide assortment of non d&d games to play.
I've played 5e a couple times, but I've mostly ran degenerate Mutants and Masterminds 3e and Prowlers and Paragons games. Ran FATE once...frick did that suck.
Yes, but the better question is why you're so ass-raped over what other people are doing with their lives? Fricking autistic parrots are ruining this site.
I had the pleasure of joining a group after they had gotten sick of DnD and have only ever played with them because they're pretty rad (and I have no other friends interested in the hobby).
I have literally never played DnD and only have a partial understanding of the system but have only heard bad things both from them and online.
The only people with a positive opinion of DnD seem to be turbonormies, solidifying my decision to not try the game at all.
Every D&D before 5e had more appeal to different demographics of actual gamers. Even 4e, catered to wargamers. It's good to play other games, but there's a decent chance you'd enjoy at least one of the older d&d editions once in a while.
Yes, but both times I've tried running the game fell apart and when I try to join there are always scheduling conflicts so I can't make it.
I just want to play some cyberpunk man
I like homebrewing stuff, but not enough to make my own game from scratch, and the ubiquity of the system means I have a practically infinite number of guinea pigs to subject to my bullshit.
Haven't played any D&D in years and the only reason I even played that last time was as a favor to some old friends I hadn't seen in a while who play nothing but D&D. It was fricking miserable and I attribute that both to the DM being fricking awful and the system being a fricking slog to engage with.
Almost exclusively. I started with the old brazillian 3D&T d6 game, was refused in a VtM table because the GM didn't think my "dude turning his war buddy into vampire" was convincing enough, moved cities and only found a 4e table to play, played 3.5 briefly over the internet and, finally, found out that a game can have rules that make sense and are easy to pick up if you play something outside of DnD.
I appreciate DnD for what it is, but the way it was made seems to have created a huge bloat of things that aren't cleanly removable.
Nowadays I mostly run WFRP 2e games, most of them very rules light, because, with nearly everything be a percentage, my monkey brain can mathematically understand which odds should be doable or not looking at simple numbers.
Last friday my players (Dwarf Giant Slayer, Halfling Vampire Hunter, Human Necromancer and Elf Scout) almost got decimated by a bunch of kobolds and their lucky rolls (they really should've retreated when they saw there were 8 of them in a room, the fact 3 of the 4 chests were mimics didn't help either).
At least I think the elf has outdoor survival skills, they could retreat to the wilderness outside of the cave and wait till they're feeling better, but that would involve crossing the underground river they nearly drowned in.
I gonna flip the script here and say I still haven’t tried D&D 5e yet. Played a lot of other systems: PF1e, STA, Genesys (by way of EotE), CoC 6e, Sentinels, Black Crusade, and to be honest I’ve yet to actually play 5e. There was one time I begrudgingly agreed to give it a try and… well… it fell apart before the first session.
And if I’m being honest, I have yet to have anyone sell me on giving 5e a shot.
And don’t get me wrong, I gave it a fair shot, got the PHB, DMG, MM, and too many supplementary books than I’d care to admit, trying to find something in the damn game that would grab my interest and, no, nothing, the game continues to feel too stifling and restrictive for my tastes.
You might still find that guy who insists it's a newbie friendly game and that it's so easy to run, but it's really just not even that good at being D&D, so if you want that heroic dungeon crawling fantasy there's no point to reach for 5e when you can easily get any of the older editions for free on the high seas.
either this is a >why would you want to get a game together?
or a >why would you want to get a game together every night?
obviously though, to play, either way. personal preference.
It's clearly a "why would you want to get together every day if it meant you had to play 5e"
As in "I would rather read a book by myself / watch TV / play videogames / paint minis / whatever than play *5e* with random people".
It's a "why the frick would you subject yourself to playing 5e every fricking night?" with a small dash of "why the frick would you want to play 7 different games of anything at the same time?"
I feel you. I finally gave it a chance in 2017, ran and played it for 2 years, bought like a dozen books and gradually bought a ton of DMs Guild homebrew trying to get it to be something I would want to play or run, and eventually I just gave up and boxed up my books, and concluded that fixing my problems with 3e (a task I thought was obnoxiously difficult) was far easier than fixing my problems with 5e. So now, I'm playing (currently Traveller), and instead of prepping a campaign like I would if I was GMing, I'm kit bashing and homebrewing my own d20 fantasy heartbreaker starting from 3e (with relatively easy cross compatibility with or conversions from other 3.x game systems as a big goal). Will it ever earn me money? Might get me a bottle of sambuca some day. Maybe even 2. Mostly it'll just be the thing I run instead of D&D, when I want something D&D adjacent.
Classic D&D is my favorite big dungeon crawler game. That's what I want. I played DCC and Ryuutama and Forbidden Lands. I looked at Cyberpunk 2020 and Sh*dowrun and Traveller. I read through White Wolf RPGs and PbtA shit and scanned Itchio. I looked at Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer fantasy. D&D is bad at a lot of things. Politics, drama, mysteries, and tea parties are going to be shitshows or effectively rules light. Survival and horror it can do but not very well. Tactics and gritty swordfights ain't too bad but I've seen better. And all those are fine things to play a game for. Even city adventures and wilderness adventures probably have better systems to use.
But I want a big autistic greybeard dungeon crawl campaign. So I think D&D is the one for me.
>Shadow of the poo poo pp lord is a better dungeon crawler >abstract movement >abstact distances >abstact line of vision >no lighting rules >very rules lite encumbrance rules >No rules or guidance for dungeon building >Very lite resource management >milestone leveling >absolutely no procedures for dungeon crawling
SotDL is ,appropriately, completely shit at dungeon crawling. Unless when you think dungeon crawler you think diablo for some inexplicable reason.
Btw >OSR is DND adjacent
OSR IS "classic" dnd. You know not of what you are talking about. >I'm kit bashing and homebrewing my own d20 fantasy heartbreaker
Give Legend D20 a look. It has some great ideas.
You forgot to tag me but it's clear enough where you stopped responding to the other guy, I think.
>Legend d20
It's in the queue of sources to consider. I haven't played it, and from other people talking about it I got the impression it goes in a bo9s-y direction, whereas I'm going more in a vaguely Rolemaster/2e/TDE5e/GURPS Fantasy-y direction. Still though, I've seen it recommended a few times, so I will be giving it a thorough examination for anything I might be able to use.
>Inb4 why not just play one of those directly then?
I do (not 2e, but the others). But most of them are ill-suited for Faerûn, as it's tied to a lot of specific content, mostly introduced in 2e. And sometimes I want Faerûn. I just think 2e and 3e are less good on some ways than the other games in that list. The big draw for 3e (to me) is the mountains of content (and subsystems, so many subsystems), moreso than buildmunchkin autism, but I do tend to be the GM.
Anyways. D20 Legend is on the list. I appreciate that you mentioned d20. Some people don't, and I never know if they mean the Mongoose d100 RPG I have a bunch of books for, or the unfinished d20 heartbreaker I never looked at very closely (because people told me it was unfinished).
Legend is really good and it's perfect for mining individual concepts from, but it's the wrong type of game for you for anything more than that. You want to look at FantasyCraft.
4 months ago
Anonymous
Also on the list. Yeah. I looked at fantasy craft many many years ago and I remember it looked pretty good. It's also going to get a thorough readthrough for ideas. I don't think I'd just run it over the non-d20 fantasy games I like, it's got a lot less content, and I heard it's not easily crosscompatible with 3e stuff either, which, I don't want a really involved conversion of all the creatures and d&d magic and magic items, and those are why I'm not just running forgotten realms in GURPS (the magic and items, people have done a decent ish job converting creatures).
For d20 stuff, I also like some AEG and Penumbra and Mongoose books that expanded on 3e's gameplay with new subsystems for trials or guilds or negotiations or nautical adventuring or construction or business stuff or exploration or survival gameplay. Eclipse is pretty good too. I plan on referencing it a lot. The prices could use some reworking, but still pretty good.
>Drama
Too vague. Don't know what you mean. >Politics, tea parties
Kingdom mgmt? Fields of Blood, strongholds & Dynasties, ultimate campaign, or the legendary games expansions to ult campaign. >Mysteries
Crime & Punishment >City adventures
City Works, Guilds, Mercenaries, City Builder >Wilderness
Wildscape, Wilds >Survival Horror
This one probably not.
>Politics, tea parties
Kingdom mgmt? Fields of Blood, strongholds & Dynasties, ultimate campaign, or the legendary games expansions to ult campaign.
Intrigue and political maneuvering? Dynasties and Demagogues.
Whoops. Missed a line after the third time my post got eaten while I was typing it.
Yeah, but my hacked to shit 5e is still my go-to for running a fantasy game because I've looked at the alternatives and I have huge gripes with all of them.
That's why I'm stealing from most of them and adding my own twist to make my own fantasy RPG
But other than that yeah I've tried a few different games, but some of them have been utter shit. BESM 3e for example is the worst TTRPG I've ever run. It was so bad that my group dropped it after 2 sessions. It's way worse than any edition of D&D. Mutants and Masterminds 2e also comes to mind as one I considered but discarded in favor of Prowers and Paragons. I ran Star Wars 5e at one point but once I found West End Games' D6 system I used that as my dedicated Star Wars TTRPG and never looked back.
I will say most of my issue with D&D and its clones is the d20 itself. I hate the die and how it works, and much prefer 3d6 or 2d10 for their consistency. Like even when I run my hacked to shit 5e I've subbed in 2d10 for the core roll instead of 1d10.
>I will say most of my issue with D&D and its clones is the d20 itself. I hate the die and how it works, and much prefer 3d6 or 2d10 for their consistency. >Has no knowledge of probability. >Still thinks he is qualified to hack his games.
Sad! Many such cases.
>Has no knowledge of probability.
D20s have a 5% chance to hit anything in their range. This makes them extremely random. 3d6 and 2d10 both have bell curves, tending towards the average, which means that your investments into your character hold more weight and ultimately matter more, and furthermore you're less likely to suck shit at something your character is meant to be good at. At least, theoretically, ultimately all dice are a slave to randomness and thus you have no garuntee that rolling any die or dice 20 times will line up perfectly with the math. >Still thinks he is qualified to hack his games.
More than you. Besides, as I noted above probability is a spook, you can do the math all you like and the dice will spit in your face because they are physical objects affected by forces outside your control such as gravity, so unless you're willing to sit down and do all the physics math before every roll you can never truly know the actual odds of rolling anything. >Sad! Many such cases.
5% chance to hit any value from 1 to 20 is more random than a 12% chance to hit 10-11. This is a fact, and if you deny it you are a lying moron.
The fact that a commoner in D&D has any chance to best a level 20 character specialized in something is proof of this, and also a reason why the d20 is a shit die.
It's caused by insisting you combine your dice with bonuses smaller than it's size.
With more dice the highs and lows become less common and you'll trend proportionally closer to the average, making it behave differently and effectively shrinking the usual range while still allowing very rare explosive outliers.
But you can accomplish a similar effect with bigger bonuses than the dice, which is what many other games with flat distribution do, including many d100 RPGs and 3e.
If the level 1 commoner has a d20+1, and the level 20 adventurer has a d20+64; the commoner is not besting the adventurer at *anything*. What you're complaining about isn't the d20, it's 5e's "bounded accuracy'".
In case you're wondering where the +64 comes from in 3e: >23 ranks. >+23 from a skill boosting item. >+7 from Ability Bonus (no Tomes) >+3 from Ability Score Boosting magic items) >+2 from Racial Skill Bonus >+2 from Synergy Bonus >+2 from Mwk Tool >+5 from feats
Yes. Such a character has invested heavily into the skill. But it's attainable.
If your DM lacks pattern recognition and can't see that all the many pre built skill bonus items have very formulaic requirements and pricing that matches the DMG perfectly and insists that you only use published items and not custom items from the DMG, then your +23 magic item becomes a +10 magic item unless it's for climb, then it's a +20.
You play D&D to get to know a good group, since it's an easy system to meet people.
Then after a couple of months you hit them with the idea of a new system, don't play down D&D, instead hype up what you think is good/fun about the new system.
Then you get them in, D&D is no more.
Yeah, I've had good luck getting people for CoC games. We've also toyed with other systems in one-shots. I like OSR and 4AD for solo dungeon crawlers. Is this really that much of a unicorn?
I haven't played Dungeoning Dragons since the 5e playtest, and every time it's been a lot more fun than any amount of 4e or the 5e playtest I ever touched.
currently about to wrap up a shadowrun campaign, only gotta get EVERYONE to the table for an epilogue session.
Yep, many times.
Wow, I haven't seen these in decades.
What about these?
That's a homegrown Ganker meme so I've seen that more often.
illustraded manual posting is something I miss for some weird reason.
I remember these...
...but this I've managed to miss.
e-chess: illustraded manual
The first page was already posted by that other anon.
Yeah, made my own system, nobody wanted to play.
That's what solo gaming is for, Satan.
I have been not playing D&D for almost two years now, and don't plan on turning back.
The fact that I'm rewriting what I don't like and exercising the fact that I don't even need the books aside, it's pretty hard to play something that isn't a game.
it honestly never occurs to me. since all we play is D&D, whenever we have a problem with classes or an adventure, we just sort out how to make it work in D&D.
outside D&D it doesn't even matter, that's why this """"advise"""" comes off as pretentious. it's D&D or nothing at all.
Nobody plays D&D anymore. The original game died when it was replaced by a series of different games with the old famous tiltle slapped over it to make them sell to consuming morons who didnt know any better. Amercans always fall for the 'bait and switch', thinking they have the real thing.
I like Rolemaster, GURPS, and SR4e. If I run D&D these days it's 3e, with lots of 3pp & houserules. Yes yes, I'm 35.
I'm under no delusion that this is Holmes/Moldvay/Whitebox, or even AD&D1. Gygax & Arneson's D&D. That was my dad's D&D. I got interested because of the 1990s FR comic books and dos games, and then got into the setting books and novels after 3e came out. 2e's ok, but 3e, I like a bit better overall, though not it's not better in every regard. But I'm showing up for a Greenwood's FR sandbox RPG, which is a pretty different thing even if it has mechanical similarities in 2e.
4e and 5e are both very different games again, and I don't really like either one.
My group's been playing Traveller lately, and we recently wrapped up a Rolemaster 4e campaign. In 2020 we had a The Dark Eye game going for about 6 months. We had a SKT campaign that wrapped in 2019 (frick 5e), and a PF1 campaign that wrapped in 2019 as well. D&D is not the only game you can play.
eh, you could have just played D&D
I could also have just played Smash Bros or Munchkin or Jack box Party games, or many other games, if we're just mentioning alternate activities you can do with a group of 6. What's your point? The person I responded to said "it's D&D or nothing", so I pointed out people do play otger TTRPGs.
good for those people?
Thanks! We enjoy those other games. And I enjoy not having to deal with 5e.
>Have you?
Yeah I run mutants and masterminds 3e with my longtime group and am looking into setting up a World of Darkness game on the side.
If I went back to d20 class-based fantasy it would be Pathfinder 1e with Spheres of Power or Shadow of the Demon Lord. 5e is just a boring game, the only class I ever genuinely enjoyed the gameplay of was Wildfire Druid because managing at-will teleportation of the entire party and multiple summons was fun.
>Yeah I run mutants and masterminds 3e with my longtime group
That's still dnd
Yes but D&D (3.5) is still my favorite game.
Yes. I hate PF2e, hate Cyberpunk RED, Cthulhu is okay, and the Alien RPG is fun in theory but doesn't work in practice.
Alien rpg is pretty fun yea but good luck fimdomg 8 people. We made it work with a skeleton crew on our ship, the thessius. Weve got a captain/pilot, a country do it all doctor, my roughmeck character, another roughneck, a scientist, a karen officer butch from h.r. and a short dr phil lookin motherfricker. And when we left off last week the alien came on board when we we're salvaging a space shitter for our new female crew mates to have their own shitters. We are running a campaign simular to the idea of lethal company. We are space salvagers
I did, it helped some things but not others. Honestly, 80% of 5e’s problems would be solved if the material they published for new dungeon masters wasn’t such dogshit.
Yes, my friends and I haven't played D&D or Pathfinder since... maybe 2009?
Once we discovered games that better met our tastes for any given type of campaign we wanted to play/run we never had a reason to play it again.
I play alien rpg bi-weekly. Speaking of which anyone have a pdf of the colonial marines handbook from alien rhwg2pg?
Yes, it's good and all.
Yes, one of the best decisions I ever made.
I'm the last man standing in my groups in actively proposing to play anything else than d&d. Right fricking now i'm running a 3.5e game out of desperation because was fricking forefever since the last time we had games (i tried proposing a supers game because a couple of players are huge capeshit nerds but not even that worked), and the other group i know with an active table is playing fricking PF2e right now.
To be fair it's not like i never play something other than d&d but almost all the times is because i'm the one GMing it, as a player i can consider myself lucky that i experienced 4 games other than d&d in 25 years.
All this shit about not playing D&D is 100% nogames homosexualry
It's like you're complaining about traffic and some moron says "have you tried buying a sailboat?" from his fricking couch
it's such a fricking stupid thing to say. Nobody here plays shit.
>Just keep playing a game you don't like
Even if i may enjoy the moments shared with the table regardless of the game played, that doesn't mean i have no fricking right in expressing preferences and acting upon that as in trying in playing something else Black. After a while killing shit in Fantasyland becomes stale and so everything that comes with the whole package deal (game design assumptions and general framework). And no, don't even dare to say
>You can play d&d differently, even change the rules bro
because at some point you end beating a dead horse to the ground. There's an hard limit in which you're practically end playing d&d having insted a frankensteinish agglomeration of changes that may as well be a different game tout-court while also stepping in the same issue: the group wants d&d not whatever you're trying in cooking, so you can "trick" the table just as much by sticking to d&d homebrew territory but that's about it.
That said, sure, it's not like all the tables are composed by autistic kids that get a seizure if someone dares to propose a different thing but for the most part you have to walk the forevergm path if you want to have a non-d&d game and that's kind of a bummer, hence the htnpd&d sentiment.
I'm not reading that but the truth of the hobby is that if you want to play a different game you have to run it yourself
If you want to play anything specific, and don't want to game with strangers online. If you just want a non-d&d game, you can find one. If you curate a group of GMs that play other systems, you may not get to play exactly the system you want, but you'll get a wide assortment of non d&d games to play.
I've played 5e a couple times, but I've mostly ran degenerate Mutants and Masterminds 3e and Prowlers and Paragons games. Ran FATE once...frick did that suck.
Right now playing two different games of Maiesta.
We literally agree anon.
Yes, but the better question is why you're so ass-raped over what other people are doing with their lives? Fricking autistic parrots are ruining this site.
I had the pleasure of joining a group after they had gotten sick of DnD and have only ever played with them because they're pretty rad (and I have no other friends interested in the hobby).
I have literally never played DnD and only have a partial understanding of the system but have only heard bad things both from them and online.
The only people with a positive opinion of DnD seem to be turbonormies, solidifying my decision to not try the game at all.
Every D&D before 5e had more appeal to different demographics of actual gamers. Even 4e, catered to wargamers. It's good to play other games, but there's a decent chance you'd enjoy at least one of the older d&d editions once in a while.
Yes, but both times I've tried running the game fell apart and when I try to join there are always scheduling conflicts so I can't make it.
I just want to play some cyberpunk man
I like homebrewing stuff, but not enough to make my own game from scratch, and the ubiquity of the system means I have a practically infinite number of guinea pigs to subject to my bullshit.
D&D is like democracy. It's not a perfect system, but everything else we tried was even worse.
>t. nogames
Frick off shill
T. hipster
Yes and I love it but most normies dont wanna bother with it and finding people online to play it with is exhausting
Haven't played any D&D in years and the only reason I even played that last time was as a favor to some old friends I hadn't seen in a while who play nothing but D&D. It was fricking miserable and I attribute that both to the DM being fricking awful and the system being a fricking slog to engage with.
Almost exclusively. I started with the old brazillian 3D&T d6 game, was refused in a VtM table because the GM didn't think my "dude turning his war buddy into vampire" was convincing enough, moved cities and only found a 4e table to play, played 3.5 briefly over the internet and, finally, found out that a game can have rules that make sense and are easy to pick up if you play something outside of DnD.
I appreciate DnD for what it is, but the way it was made seems to have created a huge bloat of things that aren't cleanly removable.
Nowadays I mostly run WFRP 2e games, most of them very rules light, because, with nearly everything be a percentage, my monkey brain can mathematically understand which odds should be doable or not looking at simple numbers.
Last friday my players (Dwarf Giant Slayer, Halfling Vampire Hunter, Human Necromancer and Elf Scout) almost got decimated by a bunch of kobolds and their lucky rolls (they really should've retreated when they saw there were 8 of them in a room, the fact 3 of the 4 chests were mimics didn't help either).
At least I think the elf has outdoor survival skills, they could retreat to the wilderness outside of the cave and wait till they're feeling better, but that would involve crossing the underground river they nearly drowned in.
I gonna flip the script here and say I still haven’t tried D&D 5e yet. Played a lot of other systems: PF1e, STA, Genesys (by way of EotE), CoC 6e, Sentinels, Black Crusade, and to be honest I’ve yet to actually play 5e. There was one time I begrudgingly agreed to give it a try and… well… it fell apart before the first session.
And if I’m being honest, I have yet to have anyone sell me on giving 5e a shot.
And don’t get me wrong, I gave it a fair shot, got the PHB, DMG, MM, and too many supplementary books than I’d care to admit, trying to find something in the damn game that would grab my interest and, no, nothing, the game continues to feel too stifling and restrictive for my tastes.
You might still find that guy who insists it's a newbie friendly game and that it's so easy to run, but it's really just not even that good at being D&D, so if you want that heroic dungeon crawling fantasy there's no point to reach for 5e when you can easily get any of the older editions for free on the high seas.
5e is popular, you can readily get games together every night of the week with different people.
Why the frick would you want to?
either this is a
>why would you want to get a game together?
or a
>why would you want to get a game together every night?
obviously though, to play, either way. personal preference.
It's clearly a "why would you want to get together every day if it meant you had to play 5e"
As in "I would rather read a book by myself / watch TV / play videogames / paint minis / whatever than play *5e* with random people".
It's a "why the frick would you subject yourself to playing 5e every fricking night?" with a small dash of "why the frick would you want to play 7 different games of anything at the same time?"
I feel you. I finally gave it a chance in 2017, ran and played it for 2 years, bought like a dozen books and gradually bought a ton of DMs Guild homebrew trying to get it to be something I would want to play or run, and eventually I just gave up and boxed up my books, and concluded that fixing my problems with 3e (a task I thought was obnoxiously difficult) was far easier than fixing my problems with 5e. So now, I'm playing (currently Traveller), and instead of prepping a campaign like I would if I was GMing, I'm kit bashing and homebrewing my own d20 fantasy heartbreaker starting from 3e (with relatively easy cross compatibility with or conversions from other 3.x game systems as a big goal). Will it ever earn me money? Might get me a bottle of sambuca some day. Maybe even 2. Mostly it'll just be the thing I run instead of D&D, when I want something D&D adjacent.
I'm looking for a new system to play for at least a one or two-shot with my main PF group. I'm open to suggestions.
Age of Soulbound was fun for my group.
cthulhu is perfect for one shots, try The Dare
Call of Cthulhu is good for 1shots. Rolemaster is a fun and different take on fantasy RPGs. Traveller is fun for sci-fi.
Barbarians of Lemuria.
Honor + Intrigue if you want something more in-depth.
Why try when you can don't?
Classic D&D is my favorite big dungeon crawler game. That's what I want. I played DCC and Ryuutama and Forbidden Lands. I looked at Cyberpunk 2020 and Sh*dowrun and Traveller. I read through White Wolf RPGs and PbtA shit and scanned Itchio. I looked at Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer fantasy. D&D is bad at a lot of things. Politics, drama, mysteries, and tea parties are going to be shitshows or effectively rules light. Survival and horror it can do but not very well. Tactics and gritty swordfights ain't too bad but I've seen better. And all those are fine things to play a game for. Even city adventures and wilderness adventures probably have better systems to use.
But I want a big autistic greybeard dungeon crawl campaign. So I think D&D is the one for me.
Shadow of the poo poo pp lord is a better dungeon crawler than D&D, OSR is an even better dungeon crawler (D&D adjacent, but hey).
OSR is just clones of the best editions of D&D. Maybe I should give SotPPPPL a read through though.
>Shadow of the poo poo pp lord is a better dungeon crawler
>abstract movement
>abstact distances
>abstact line of vision
>no lighting rules
>very rules lite encumbrance rules
>No rules or guidance for dungeon building
>Very lite resource management
>milestone leveling
>absolutely no procedures for dungeon crawling
SotDL is ,appropriately, completely shit at dungeon crawling. Unless when you think dungeon crawler you think diablo for some inexplicable reason.
Btw
>OSR is DND adjacent
OSR IS "classic" dnd. You know not of what you are talking about.
>I'm kit bashing and homebrewing my own d20 fantasy heartbreaker
Give Legend D20 a look. It has some great ideas.
You forgot to tag me but it's clear enough where you stopped responding to the other guy, I think.
>Legend d20
It's in the queue of sources to consider. I haven't played it, and from other people talking about it I got the impression it goes in a bo9s-y direction, whereas I'm going more in a vaguely Rolemaster/2e/TDE5e/GURPS Fantasy-y direction. Still though, I've seen it recommended a few times, so I will be giving it a thorough examination for anything I might be able to use.
>Inb4 why not just play one of those directly then?
I do (not 2e, but the others). But most of them are ill-suited for Faerûn, as it's tied to a lot of specific content, mostly introduced in 2e. And sometimes I want Faerûn. I just think 2e and 3e are less good on some ways than the other games in that list. The big draw for 3e (to me) is the mountains of content (and subsystems, so many subsystems), moreso than buildmunchkin autism, but I do tend to be the GM.
Anyways. D20 Legend is on the list. I appreciate that you mentioned d20. Some people don't, and I never know if they mean the Mongoose d100 RPG I have a bunch of books for, or the unfinished d20 heartbreaker I never looked at very closely (because people told me it was unfinished).
Legend is really good and it's perfect for mining individual concepts from, but it's the wrong type of game for you for anything more than that. You want to look at FantasyCraft.
Also on the list. Yeah. I looked at fantasy craft many many years ago and I remember it looked pretty good. It's also going to get a thorough readthrough for ideas. I don't think I'd just run it over the non-d20 fantasy games I like, it's got a lot less content, and I heard it's not easily crosscompatible with 3e stuff either, which, I don't want a really involved conversion of all the creatures and d&d magic and magic items, and those are why I'm not just running forgotten realms in GURPS (the magic and items, people have done a decent ish job converting creatures).
For d20 stuff, I also like some AEG and Penumbra and Mongoose books that expanded on 3e's gameplay with new subsystems for trials or guilds or negotiations or nautical adventuring or construction or business stuff or exploration or survival gameplay. Eclipse is pretty good too. I plan on referencing it a lot. The prices could use some reworking, but still pretty good.
i like old school essentials / dolmenwood, you should check those out
>Drama
Too vague. Don't know what you mean.
>Politics, tea parties
Kingdom mgmt? Fields of Blood, strongholds & Dynasties, ultimate campaign, or the legendary games expansions to ult campaign.
>Mysteries
Crime & Punishment
>City adventures
City Works, Guilds, Mercenaries, City Builder
>Wilderness
Wildscape, Wilds
>Survival Horror
This one probably not.
(This is why I like 3.x)
>Politics, tea parties
Kingdom mgmt? Fields of Blood, strongholds & Dynasties, ultimate campaign, or the legendary games expansions to ult campaign.
Intrigue and political maneuvering? Dynasties and Demagogues.
Whoops. Missed a line after the third time my post got eaten while I was typing it.
Yeah, but my hacked to shit 5e is still my go-to for running a fantasy game because I've looked at the alternatives and I have huge gripes with all of them.
That's why I'm stealing from most of them and adding my own twist to make my own fantasy RPG
But other than that yeah I've tried a few different games, but some of them have been utter shit. BESM 3e for example is the worst TTRPG I've ever run. It was so bad that my group dropped it after 2 sessions. It's way worse than any edition of D&D. Mutants and Masterminds 2e also comes to mind as one I considered but discarded in favor of Prowers and Paragons. I ran Star Wars 5e at one point but once I found West End Games' D6 system I used that as my dedicated Star Wars TTRPG and never looked back.
I will say most of my issue with D&D and its clones is the d20 itself. I hate the die and how it works, and much prefer 3d6 or 2d10 for their consistency. Like even when I run my hacked to shit 5e I've subbed in 2d10 for the core roll instead of 1d10.
>I will say most of my issue with D&D and its clones is the d20 itself. I hate the die and how it works, and much prefer 3d6 or 2d10 for their consistency.
>Has no knowledge of probability.
>Still thinks he is qualified to hack his games.
Sad! Many such cases.
>Has no knowledge of probability.
D20s have a 5% chance to hit anything in their range. This makes them extremely random. 3d6 and 2d10 both have bell curves, tending towards the average, which means that your investments into your character hold more weight and ultimately matter more, and furthermore you're less likely to suck shit at something your character is meant to be good at. At least, theoretically, ultimately all dice are a slave to randomness and thus you have no garuntee that rolling any die or dice 20 times will line up perfectly with the math.
>Still thinks he is qualified to hack his games.
More than you. Besides, as I noted above probability is a spook, you can do the math all you like and the dice will spit in your face because they are physical objects affected by forces outside your control such as gravity, so unless you're willing to sit down and do all the physics math before every roll you can never truly know the actual odds of rolling anything.
>Sad! Many such cases.
Thank you for writing all this to prove my point . People are quick to display their ignorance.
5% chance to hit any value from 1 to 20 is more random than a 12% chance to hit 10-11. This is a fact, and if you deny it you are a lying moron.
The fact that a commoner in D&D has any chance to best a level 20 character specialized in something is proof of this, and also a reason why the d20 is a shit die.
That's 5E's fault not the d20's.
That inherent to the d20
It's caused by insisting you combine your dice with bonuses smaller than it's size.
With more dice the highs and lows become less common and you'll trend proportionally closer to the average, making it behave differently and effectively shrinking the usual range while still allowing very rare explosive outliers.
But you can accomplish a similar effect with bigger bonuses than the dice, which is what many other games with flat distribution do, including many d100 RPGs and 3e.
If the level 1 commoner has a d20+1, and the level 20 adventurer has a d20+64; the commoner is not besting the adventurer at *anything*. What you're complaining about isn't the d20, it's 5e's "bounded accuracy'".
In case you're wondering where the +64 comes from in 3e:
>23 ranks.
>+23 from a skill boosting item.
>+7 from Ability Bonus (no Tomes)
>+3 from Ability Score Boosting magic items)
>+2 from Racial Skill Bonus
>+2 from Synergy Bonus
>+2 from Mwk Tool
>+5 from feats
Yes. Such a character has invested heavily into the skill. But it's attainable.
If your DM lacks pattern recognition and can't see that all the many pre built skill bonus items have very formulaic requirements and pricing that matches the DMG perfectly and insists that you only use published items and not custom items from the DMG, then your +23 magic item becomes a +10 magic item unless it's for climb, then it's a +20.
You play D&D to get to know a good group, since it's an easy system to meet people.
Then after a couple of months you hit them with the idea of a new system, don't play down D&D, instead hype up what you think is good/fun about the new system.
Then you get them in, D&D is no more.
Yeah, I've had good luck getting people for CoC games. We've also toyed with other systems in one-shots. I like OSR and 4AD for solo dungeon crawlers. Is this really that much of a unicorn?
I haven't played Dungeoning Dragons since the 5e playtest, and every time it's been a lot more fun than any amount of 4e or the 5e playtest I ever touched.
currently about to wrap up a shadowrun campaign, only gotta get EVERYONE to the table for an epilogue session.
I started playing tabletop with something that wasn't technically DnD. I didn't actually play DnD or Pathfinder until like 6 years after that point.
I have tried to but got bored 2 hours into the game because nothing was happening. I prefer monopoly because of that