What can a TTRPG do that a videogame RPG can't?

What can a TTRPG do that a videogame RPG can't?

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  1. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    Give you actual freedom. In which videogame can you get into a tavern brawl where you throw a chair at somebody and after that get chased through the streets until you climb a nearby building onto the rooftops of the city?

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Actual freedom
      Depends on the DM. For every DM that loves out of the box solutions, there's another one that demands you just do a skill roll. That or they simply railroad from scene to scene.

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        Even if you have a railroading GM, there is STILL more freedom than the most open-neded vidya offers, simply by the fact GM can (and will) react to your non-scripted attempts to change the course.

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        If the question is "what can TTRPGs do that vidya can't", then the fact that there are DMs who don't do it doesn't change the fact that TTRPGs can still do that.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      It's mostly freedom. is on the right track. Freedom of action is one half of it. But there's also a freedom of experience.
      A movie director has tight control over what the audience will see, in which order, what they will notice about a scene or a character, etc. In a stage play there is a lot less control. The stage is visible in its entirety, there are no close ups on faces, etc. So some people will focus on this or that character or detail of scenery at their leisure.
      In vidya you most likely focus on controlling a single avatar during the action scenes while cutscenes are movies. There is director's control.
      In TTRPG the GM narrates and players create a scene in their minds. They can imagine it as grimdark or cutesy as they want. They can focus on and reinterpret characters as they see fit. They are in control of their experience.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      >In which videogame can you get into a tavern brawl where you throw a chair at somebody and after that get chased through the streets until you climb a nearby building onto the rooftops of the city?
      Baldur's Gate 3.

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        Only the chair throwing bit.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      Omicron the Soul Nomad

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        I knew I'm not the only /vr/ dude on this board.

  2. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    A lot, to the point that the reverse question would have been more interesting to discuss.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      >to the point that the reverse question would have been more interesting to discuss.

      Mostly rules that are increasingly complex and fiddly.

      Games like Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity and Dragon Age Origins have rules that could 100% be written out for a TTRPG, but include enough detail and record-keeping that I wouldn't want to handle the rules by hand.

      Vidya can also make stuff into a skill issue, with first person and third person over-the-shoulder and shooting and attacks and lockpicking mini games and whatnot.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      Bookkeeping. Stuff like: kill 100 Gobbos to get +1 to attacks against Gobbos.

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        TTRPGs can do book-keeping though. I run lewd RPGs and keep track of a lot of encounters because I wrote a list of hidden achievements for players to discover as a result of play. I just record their character sheets and place a copy/pasted archive at the bottom, where I update numbers as they achieve different stuff. It's not really that hard.

        • 9 months ago
          Anonymous

          We talking like you get the golden futanari wiener from banging both the mushroom people and king Midas, or something more interesting?

          • 9 months ago
            Anonymous

            Most of the interesting stuff was tied to the loot, progression, and fetish-acquisition mechanics.
            Achievements were just fun little bits of lewd wordplay and a raunchy thing to see on your character sheet, although a few of them did come with embarrassing Titles that heralds would publicly announce when your character visited court, partook in the arena, entered jousts, and so on.

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        >gobbos
        Plz don't kill mee.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      Combat that resolves quickly. Having all the party show up when you're playing the game.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      Availability independent of other people's schedule.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      >reverse question
      Better stealth and moment to moment combat (potentially). Much faster calculations allowing for more granularity and greater scale.
      Better writing too, in certain cases.

  3. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    Be a role playing game instead of an approximation of one.

  4. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    ... having more than pre-defined options, aka the whole fricking point of them?
    Horrible bait thread, 1/10

  5. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    It is significantly easier and cheaper to make your own TTRPG campaign than to make an entire custom-made video game that perfectly suits your tastes.

  6. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    You can form a cult in a TTRPG if you have high enough charisma

  7. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    I think the real question is what can Sega do that Nintendon't?

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      Make the greatest 16-bit sound chip of all time. All hail the Genesis grunge.

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        This guy fricks.

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        Neither Nintendo nor Sega designed their sound chips themselves. The SNES used a Sony chip, the Mega Drive Texas Instruments and Yamaha.

      • 9 months ago
        Smaugchad

        This guy fricks.

        WELCO
        METOT
        HENEX
        TLEVEL

  8. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    >OSR Boomer trying to recreate that feeling of wonder and being a teenager in 1983 who didn't have the Monster Manual memorized(it won't work)
    >Gen X former theatre hoe trying to recapture that feeling of being a carefree college girl in 1994 running a vampire chronicle with no smartphones/careers distracting everyone(it won't work)
    >Xennial who makes compromise after compromise to hold a group together like letting neckbeards join and playing every other week at most because he misses his college era 3.5 and AFMBE games(it won't work)
    >Millennial who thinks he's still cool and that he can create the perfect new RPG that will attract a diverse crowd and get them to try something besides 5E(it won't work)
    >Zoomer who longs for the authenticity of subcultures in pre-911/Columbine America and wants what they've seen on Critical Role and shows up for pickup games at the LGS in search of it(it won't work)

    What do all the different doomed tribes have in common? What does an RPG give them that a video game can't? Why, that sense of camaraderie of course. The rattle of dice rolling across a table. Cheering when the last PC standing gets a lucky shot that takes out the BBEG. Going out to Perkins after the game ends. Talking about that one perfect session ten years after the campaign has ended. Video games are ultimately hollow because there's no deeper human connection.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      I would call your post bullshit if this
      >Xennial who makes compromise after compromise to hold a group together
      didn't describe me to a t.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Video games are ultimately hollow because there's no deeper human connection.

      I have a friend who still goes on about events that occured on a freelancer roleplay server that we used to play on 10 years ago.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      who longs for the authenticity of subcultures in pre-911/Columbine America
      Do you enjoy hurting others?

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      I as a millenial ran a weekly game for a year and a half for three players and it wasn’t DnD either so get fricked.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      These seem off. Most people I know started playing ttrpgs in grade school and middle school, even VtM.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      >and wants what they've seen on Critical Role

      This makes me sad. Critical Role is a performance, not a game. It's lime wanting sex to be like porn.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      >Video games are ultimately hollow because there's no deeper human connection.
      Horseshit. My group still gets pumped thinking about content cleared, heists pulled, and even a mass evacuation that happened almost twenty years ago. If you play video games that require community building and cooperative play, you will have meaningful social connections with your peers. We get together multiple times a year to game, see a concert, hit a convention, attend various fairs, etc.

      • 9 months ago
        Anonymous

        Giving the devil his due, if you did it with other people, it'll have far more meaning for you than if you did it alone.

        • 9 months ago
          Anonymous

          Soloing Gankerdoorsman here. You're wrong.

  9. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    Aside from freedom, which has been pointed out by other anons already, TTRPGs can be tailored to the specific group playing them. They can account for the preferences of the players and the GM and the features of the particular campaign they're playing in a way videogames can't. Also making your own stuff is fun on its own right, and TTRPGs are better for coming up with locations, people, plothooks and so on than videogames.

  10. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    Whatever your weak Turing machine can't handle processing and your moron GM can. Results may vary.

  11. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    You can have watever fetish you want

  12. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    As others have said, freedom. For me, freedom of consequences. I have recently 100% Skyrim, and it constantly annoyed me how shallow everything i do is. Asking an npc about their shop does nothing, it doesn't give you a deeper relationship with them, you won't be able to experience anything with them. Even the better npcs like Aela, who I married, are only slightly less shallow, exhausting their dialogue options after 7 choices instead of 3. Our relationship did not change in a meaningful way once I married her either. She got a new dialogue option ("How's the shop" and "Please make dinner", absolutely worthless), but nothing more.

    Similarly, the way you interact with people doesn't matter. At some point in the Stormcloak quest you're supposed to deliver false order to the empire. I thought, yeah they're totally going to trust a guy wearing dragonbone armor. But, knowing how shallow the game is i just approached the general and handed him the info, his courier's bloody armor sitting in my inventory. Suprisingly, he commented "Why are you not wearing imperial armor?" Well because obviously it's easier to disguise myself while wearing dragonbone, replies my dragonborn.

    Another thing is that the personality of the pc is completly schizophrenic in different questlines. You can just never say a word during the dark brotherhood questline, but there's no way to keep that edgelord rp up outside of that, because other questlines don't have a (stay silent) option. Not that it matters anyway because most answers have the same outcome.

    I guess my point is, you're going to, almost inevitably, reach the end of any dialogue tree rather quickly unless the devs put weeks of work into each npc, which they obviously won't. Maybe an rpg with less than 10 npcs may satisfy me in that regard.

    • 9 months ago
      Anonymous

      >I guess my point is, you're going to, almost inevitably, reach the end of any dialogue tree rather quickly unless the devs put weeks of work into each npc, which they obviously won't. Maybe an rpg with less than 10 npcs may satisfy me in that regard.
      On the level of raw dialogue responsiveness, this is mostly on the advent of ASSUMING voicacting. Comparing Morrowind's dialogue choices to Oblivion's or Skyrim's is one HELL of a cruel joke, because the developers could just type out lines and that was fine so they could word-vomit thousands of lines of lore-dump, and that game was made under Hellcrunch much of the roughness of the later two entries is from the active avoidance of.

  13. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    First, you can easily make your own TTRPG campaign, leaving like 95% of it in your imagination, and not, you know, actually codding every line and writing every line of dialogue.

    Second, improvisation let your players affect the world and story in a different ways depending on who they playing. In video games it often doesn't even matter which sex are you, whic race, which class.

  14. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    You can buy it and own it, instead of "leasing a license" to DRM laden, microtransaction riddled excrement that won't even work two operating systems from now.

  15. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    A video game is restrained by the limited programing and the writers inability to account for everything.
    With a TTRPG you are not as limited and the person telling the story is right there with you and your group thus can change or add to the story if something that they didn’t account for happens.

  16. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    As per usual, the zero effort bait has performed like a trawling net.

  17. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    Separate out grinding and make it optional. Start at any level. Build your character exactly how you want. Play with other people in a social environment.

  18. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    Video games have only so amny branches to explore, ttrpg has the unqiue distinction of the game bouncing back & forth between GM & player(s) to infinite peaks.

  19. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    Why, character development stories of course! Video games will never match the ability of RPGs to have poorly designed action scenes strung together by people talking about their feelings.

  20. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    In games, everything is programmed and places, games like dishonored and thief are acclaimed for giving the player freedom to play how they see fit but in the end it's all limited by what the devs wanted. Say you reach a locked door, you can only really do whatever it is the devs intended, even if they did give you a dozen options you still only have a dozen options
    In an RPG however, you are often only limited by your any the other player's creativity. If you don't like the way the story is going you have the power to change it much more than you would in a vidya. Take Bioshock for example since I played it recently. No matter if you save or harvest the sisters they save you in Ryan's office and kill Fontaine, the "tough moral quandary" the game gives you only ends up affecting the end cutscene.
    In a (good) RPG your actions will normally have much more of an effect on how everything plays out, you're not limited, again, to what the developers intended on you using
    Both certainly have a place, I enjoy both, but they're very different experiences

  21. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    these days? be fun

  22. 9 months ago
    Anonymous

    Fundamentally, nothing. It's really just a matter of cost to implement. TTRPGs are near-free unless you get really into minis, modern video games are multi-million dollar endeavors.

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