Your Worst TTRPG Opinions

Come on lets here your worst shit. Give me your bad takes, controversial opinions, everything

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It doesn't get much worse than this.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      what the frick does this have to do with anything other then you being assblasted by some random who?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        This is a leaked internal document from NuTSR

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          thread is about your opinions, not random schizo ramblings that hurt your feelings

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            holy shit you're so mad

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      wasnt this an outright fabrication?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        No

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Ernie had a bunch of lies about him so im pretty sure this isnt real.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          who took a screenshot of his totally real excel sheet?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Still getting his panties in a twist about a made-up image

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    5e has actual complexity in its rules, special rulings, light levels, vision, cover, interactions, monster behavior, poisons and more that people forget about and it has the potential to be as gritty or as handwavey as your GM wishes for it to be.

    Similarly the 3 action system Pathfinder 2e has is atrocious and it is one of the least interesting parts of it. Its constant adding and subtracting of circumstantial bonuses, weird language, thousand maneuvers with middling effects and more are complex but they also bogged down the few sessions I did play severely and left me understanding why its less popular as a whole. All these options is bloat, even if some are amazing, most are meh.

    Savage Worlds not nerfing shotguns is a sign its a fricking shit system with lazy buttholes when they make all of these changes but still give a fricking +2 to hit and 3d6 or 2d10 damage dice that explode. It's moronic and all of these shitty things like monks getting -2 parry because they don't have weapons is utterly against the pulp that it supposedly runs on, where a fricking corny 80's shaolin monk just fricking gets hit by everything even with 8 or 9 parry because lmao no your fists of steel do not count. The Death Spiral is such hot dogshit that it basically cripples entire parties unless its a magical setting or you ignore the weeks of recovery.

    Classes are fricking based and classless gays are just whiny morons who take the same fricking optimized build every time to make Fighters Rogues Rangers and Paladins anyways but with at most 1 thing different. Shit's so generic it makes me look like a freak.

    breasts are actually better than ass 9/10 times.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The reason most people gravitate back towards 5e and its immediate derivatives is because the path for enjoying yourself is so cleanly laid out that simply rolling a d20 for hitting the bad guy requires no imagination and feels good when it works compared to systems that abstract rolls or make the user determine what successes mean (yes, "I roll to attack, I hit so I roll damage, there's my damage, turn's over" is fricking dull, but irl npcs just want to see bad guys die and maybe have the GM describe cool/funny stuff for them). 5e/3.x players want a game that gives them successes on average, but with so much randomness that it has the appearance of still being up to chance

      >5e complexity
      I think this take is colder than you expect. 5e has a lot of crunch in it, it's just poorly implemented and a lot of it feels tertiary to running the game, and the core loop the game seems to ask of you isn't done very well imo. If a GM is willing to put extra effort into making 5e fun with optional added system mechanics, they're probably a GM who is inclined to just go run a different system
      I have yet to play 5e as a dedicated dungeon crawler though, and when I made a rogue for a one-shot dungeon crawl I did have a lot of fun with it. Maybe that's the trick

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >(yes, "I roll to attack, I hit so I roll damage, there's my damage, turn's over" is fricking dull
        That's definitely true, but it doesn't prevent good players from still shining despite the limited mechanical aspect.
        While a bad player will just go "I hit orc with axe" a good player can still go into greater detail with every action to make the scene work.
        Mechanic heavy games force everyone to be Good just to play, but 5e doesn't prevent good or great players from playing at their level.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I suppose my contention with this, as one of the mentioned mechanicsgays, is that I don't find 'you can describe your basic attack in great detail,' any more interesting in most situations than just rolling it and getting on with things.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            That's definitely fair.
            I will say I mostly mean roleplaying during combat moreso than just going into detail, so that your combat isn't just an attempt at doing the most damage every chance and instead doing what your character would do even if it's impractical for the scene.
            Because of the incomplexity of 5e it forces you to be creative when these moments come up, since there's nothing in the rulebook to encourage you to use levitate to drop a large rock on an opponent as opposed to just hitting them with fireballs a bunch.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Fair enough on the cold take I suppose.

        Counter argument, legs. Also 5e cover always felt weird to me, couldn't tell you why. Light levels are OK except that 90% of races have darkvision so it doesn't matter. That is one of the big failures of race design in 5e I think, that basically everyone except humans and dragonborn get darkvision. If you want darkness to be a real environmental hazard your game design needs to have space for that.

        I can respect a leg man. Light levels are actually good because perception in dim light is still at disadvantage and there's good shit to be done there with obfuscation and more, but I do agree that frankly either everyone getting 60 feet of dark vision is fricking stupid.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        In other words, 5e is popular because dimwits just want the tactile feel of dice and for their one creative friend to tell a story that their OC gets to participate in.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >yes, "I roll to attack, I hit so I roll damage, there's my damage, turn's over" is fricking dull

        Have you considered how dull it is for players to sit and wait their turn in more complex combat systems? Such as rolling to hit, rolling hit location, rolling damage, subtracting armor and then possibly dealing and resolving any critical effect? Speed in rpgs is CRITICAL. You MUST engage your players, and fast mechanical combat is a necessity

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          If all your group are doing is waiting for their turn without paying attention to yours, the group has already failed.
          Something interesting to everyone should happen on every turn. Equally, everyone at the table should show some fricking sportsmanship.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            This does not occur in online games. Also, every single hit thrown towards a baddie should not be some kind of event. I hit the bad guy. He is hurt. He's a mook, so he dies instantly. Move on. Not "you hit the mook...okay, chart says you hit his left arm...you rolled 6 damage...let's add 3 from the weapon damage...that's 9 damage...okay, i subtract 4 due to his armor...you deal 5 damage. He still has 7 hp left, so you just shot him in the arm and he grimaces a bit." What part of that is designed to keep players' attention and make things exciting?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              If that process takes you more than 15 seconds, these sort of games aren't for you and that's fine. If 45 seconds is an agonizing eternity to wait to be the center of attention again, consider therapy.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >What part of that is designed to keep players' attention and make things exciting?
              Things went wrong when you said "mook."
              The scene evidently isn't interesting if the players are not concerned with the stakes. Nameless enemies, low expectation of danger, siloed players who need care nothing for the situation changing and who do not have to back each other up...
              You failed before you began.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >your brain on D&D

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          If you do not have the patience to wait, at most, four five minutes for your turn to come back around, my table is not for you, and this is fine.
          That said, the other anon is right. There should be plenty of entertaining tension and narrative going on during other people's turns, especially in more complex combat systems.
          The virgin 'whining because you have to wait for the fighter to make HP numbers go down," vs the chad "Passing your turn and cheering on the barbarian while he wrestles a guy to the ground and crushes his skull with his bare hands," if you will.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Literally just use an actual, physical timer. Time it anywhere from thirty seconds to one minute depending on preference. Each player has until the timer dings to resolve all actions on their turn...including their rolls. This ensures that the chief cause of turns taking too long (players being unable to decide on what to do) is eliminated, and people pay more attention because monkey brain likes ding ding timer

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          this is all a matter of routine.
          If you get to attack 10 times inone session the the 5th time you attack. the resolving of the action should already be way faster. If it's your 1000th attack roll, you don't even think about the individual steps anymore and you know most hit locations and armor values by heart.

          But too many people are just impatient and lazy.
          Having a more granular, authentic band immersive combat system is something that only needs a few sessions of breaking in, then it flows like bare bones D&D 5e.
          I play TDE with another group. The Dark Eye 5th edition has way more complex action resolve and combat resolve steps compared to dnd 5e.
          yet everyone knows enough to make turns go quick.
          For me, playing 5e forever is the NEETing of TTRPGs. Low effort, low reward.
          But with the right choice of system, you only need to put in effort for a few sessions and have a superior, more granular and complex system at your disposal.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Counter argument, legs. Also 5e cover always felt weird to me, couldn't tell you why. Light levels are OK except that 90% of races have darkvision so it doesn't matter. That is one of the big failures of race design in 5e I think, that basically everyone except humans and dragonborn get darkvision. If you want darkness to be a real environmental hazard your game design needs to have space for that.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Halflings don't get it either
        and if you are relying on darkvision, you count as being in dim light, which is disadvantage on perception checks (-5 to passive) and could stumble in to a trap or ambush

        Character design is terrible in dungeons and dragons 5e because skills are tied to attributes. Locks half the cast out of any meaningful gameplay outside of combat. And the combat is slow and boring with the action economy working to frustrate players. It's severely imbalanced between different combat options with heavy weapon master being better than virtually all other options.

        Two weapon fighting is so poorly implemented that it's been considered a trap since the game's inception. The bonus action requirement is so bad that two weapon fighting is considered suboptimal on all the classes that would traditionally want to use it.

        DMs build combat to intentionally frustrate players because the only way to offer a challenge during boss fights is to deplete the resources of a party using several filler encounters.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Two weapon fighting is so poorly implemented that it's been considered a trap since the game's inception. The bonus action requirement is so bad that two weapon fighting is considered suboptimal on all the classes that would traditionally want to use it.
          Good. With few exceptions, two weapon fighting is ridiculous.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Darkvision doesn't give you perfect vision in the dark, punish your players by giving them puzzles that rely on colors that they can't see because they are relying on their dark vision

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I agree with two out of your four takes. Good job.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >breasts are actually better than ass 9/10 times.
      Good ass is just getting rarer because brainwashed thiccgays are subhuman

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Good ass is just getting rarer because brainwashed thiccgays are subhuman
        I also fricking hate this trend and those who push it. The ideal ass is firm, sculpted and proportional but the vast majority of "thicc" women are literally just obese from the waist down.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >literally just obese
          It's not only that but the ideal ass shape getting pushed is that of black women's ass. It's literal propaganda.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          i don't hate the fatness of it, I hate how it's just fat.
          You get better asses in baranowadays unironically.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I can tell you've never touched 3e

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Quit correct, never played any 3e at all.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          All the systems you've listed as being complex in 5e are literally botched, incomplete and incoherent versions of what is in 3e

          5e is like a version of 3e made for one shots or small adventures so no, it doesn't have complexity, it's literally made not to have any complexity.

          If were to put the work to turn 5e into a gritty complex game it would literally just be 3.5

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            A shame then, sounds like some good fun. The testing they've done with the average consumer making it so only battlemasters and such could use maneuvers was just some of the most saddening shit ever so having that be ungimped would be a fun thing to see as a modern system.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              There's no such thing as a modern system, there's nothing new or modern about systems. Everything's been invented decades ago. We're just forever stuck in a cycle alternating complex and simple rules over and over because they need to sell shit regularly.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              3e has a whole book dedicated to just three classes and a system of weeaboo fightah magic aka maneuvers, battlemaster is a pale shadow of warblades and swordsages of old.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Fate is actually incredibly restrictive as the base game system and the way fate points and skills work is actively against it's core premise of the more open, imagination and storytelling based roleplaying game. The very fact that adding dice to your roll doesn't change it's expected value of zero (0) and that you have to spend points to invoke cool environmental features makes game fundamentally broken in my opinion.

      >breasts are actually better than ass 9/10 times.
      Good ass is just getting rarer because brainwashed thiccgays are subhuman

      I actually like the fat chicks and that makes me pissed that the current trend of "thiccness" is just skinnyfats crossing the line into literal lardasses and hopping for the flattering distribution. These asses have almost no glutes! Proper chub requires surprising amount of foundation and maintenance and even then it only looks good on a certain chosen few of women. I like the fat chicks, but I can't approve of the hip-hop slobs that are currently promoted.

      Most JRPG video games aren't even the best system for their own stories. They borrow garbage design from D&D like pointless random battles and XP-based character advancement and turn it up to 11.

      That's because the JRPGs started as the Japanese versions of the old school computer RPGs, which were either ports or rip offs of the old DnD. This is also why weebs and osr players agree on the (p)orc aesthetic.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >I actually like the fat chicks
        didn't read the rest, kys you judaized drone

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I half agree with the Fate paragraph.
        For very involved roleplayers, fate points seems like a restriction to put their characters neatly in a trope box.
        However, giving incentive to flavor can nudge rollplayers to see their characters more than just a bunch of numbers.
        The mechanic does its job to engage regular players with narrative awareness but stifles more creative players.

        I've been ruminating on a good design for narrative focused games for the last couple weeks or so.
        I'm afraid that I'm quickly coming into the conclusion that the best system for narrative focused games is the one where the system doesn't have any rules for it at all.
        Assigning a numeric value to a plot point might actually be bad for making a good story as it pigeonholes story beats into a rigid math equation.
        It's no different from a committee designing a "safe" movie.

        What I'm saying is DnD and its derivatives, a crunchy combat game with little regard to non-violent alternatives except for an almost insultingly basic dice check, might actually be the best system for narrative games.

        https://i.imgur.com/lqP7UPn.png

        Come on lets here your worst shit. Give me your bad takes, controversial opinions, everything

        You can count the above statement for the OP's question by the way.
        >Verification not required

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Savage Worlds
      The monk problem should be covered by the Martial Artist edge, that cancels the unarmed defender penalty. That's how it is in SWADE, not sure if it's different in older versions.
      In ETU it changes the damage for shotguns and drops the +2 to hit at close range, making it like most other systems where shotguns are less damaging from father away but have a greater chance to hit. That book was written before SWADE, it appears the writers love shotguns the way they are.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >That last point
      I am so glad that some sane people still exist.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >breasts are actually better than ass 9/10 times.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >breasts are actually better than ass 9/10 times.
      I don't like calling people morons but you earned it for that one, moron.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >5e has actual complexity

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >breasts are actually better than ass 9/10 times.
      Literally the only accurate thing you said

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Even though WOTC has pretty much finished off their customer base, I will continue to hold onto my books and I am taking the stuff off of other people's hands for cheap. I think that in 20 years people might want to buy 5th edition D&D books and attempt to play the system.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I like and play almost exclusively furshit and freaks hit and there is nothing wrong with it as long as your not coomer. And they can be done well if you make sure the character is still interesting if it was suddenly made a human.
    Warhammer outside of the lore is boring and so is wargames as a whole.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Warhammer outside of the lore is boring and so is wargames as a whole.
      Some of the videogames are alright.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Warhammer outside of the lore is boring
      Models are cool sometimes
      >and so is wargames as a whole
      Disregarding a huge hobby that encompasses multiple avenues of play just makes it seem like you haven't been exposed to many. Which to be fair, doesn't help that it's dominated by warhammer.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You know, off the top of my head I can't think of anything.
    I could give you a dumbass list of things I like that most people don't seem to enjoy and vice versa, but that's only a controversial opinion to dumbasses.

    Have this cool gnoll. I used it for berserkers who had their rapidstrike penalty brought down to only -2 for being completely fricking out of it on shamanistic speed boosting drugs. Guy is out here swinging that thing twice a turn for about as much damage as an ogre but with a lot more precision. Has no pain reflex and hard-to-kill from it to so they were hard to put down, just crashing through their own guys to try and frick the party frontliners up. If I remember right the party knife fighter solved it by slipping behind them and slicing their tendons and letting them just flail around on the ground. Lot faster than trying to knock them out.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Are you the guy who explained how to play GURPS the other thread?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Any time someone asks I give it my best, yeah.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I'm not that familiar with GURPS, does it have a good wound system? I'm considering homebrewing my own stuff for 5e. and I am looking for some inspiration on how to put wounds and damage into a game in a way that is easy to keep track of/institute.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Isn't it just 3d6 against the relevant skill or attribute?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          At its core, yes. If he means the thread I think, my advice was more about running it. How to deal with certain numbers, what books would be good for that anons campaign needs, that sort of thing.

          I'm not that familiar with GURPS, does it have a good wound system? I'm considering homebrewing my own stuff for 5e. and I am looking for some inspiration on how to put wounds and damage into a game in a way that is easy to keep track of/institute.

          I think so but It might be hard to adapt to a system with escalating HP. HP totals in GURPS don't really go up for most characters, not by much.
          In essence, you've got damage, DR, damage types, and HP. Damage types are usually a damage modifier and, possibly, some other effects.
          The modifier is applied after armor. So say a guy is wearing DR4 chain and I hit him for 6 cutting, at 1.5x. He takes 3 injury.
          Injury to a limb over half HP cripples it. Injury in general over half HP causes a knockdown test, and being at 0 or less starts you making consciousness checks. It's surprisingly hard to die, despite what people tell you, as you only make escalating death checks at every negative multiple of your full HP. That said, few characters ever get more than 20 HP.
          There's also some vagaries about hit location damage modifiers, eg, cutting being boosted against the neck, everything versus the skull, etc.As well as various rules about lasting injuries that I keep forgetting because my party's usual medics are too good at their job.
          It has its ups and downs, it's something I'm in the process of replacing/revamping even, but it's solid enough for what it does. It's part of an environemnt ith called shots, active defenses, and a whole bunch of other stuff going on. Likely hard to adapt to D&D, but maybe it'll give you some ideas.

          >Fun fact. The spell description of 5e levitate expressly stops it from being used to drop rocks on people.
          Oh frick you're right. I've been totally misinterpreting that spell for years and getting away with it.
          And I think it needs to be encouraged to players to come up with solutions to threats that aren't just "Kill everything." But that requires the DM coming up with stuff also, or having better rules in place.

          Absolutely. Or even just more creative ways to kill things. I feel like every thread I tell the story about my players distracting an ice worm with alchemical heating agents tuned to human body temperature and then shoving a big wooden spiky cross in its mouth and just, basically not fighting it since it freaked out over that. That's the sort of thing that should be ideally pretty common.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Interesting. I was considering something far more basic, maybe something along the lines of
            >Take 10 damage in a hit, take a minor wound
            >Take 20 damage in a hit, take a moderate wound
            >Take 30 damage in a hit, take a major wound
            >Take 40 damage in a hit, take a lethal wound
            Where wounds have different effects based on tier, and can stack up. This also has the effect of buffing both AC (via wound avoidance) and DR (via wound mitigation). Normal health rules could still apply, with different would levels adding conditions. Minor wounds maybe don't do anything, but a major would might slow you down, or a lethal wound (such as losing an arm) could affect your gameplay as well as cause you to make death saving throws while still concious. But it's really in the hypothetical stage. Ideally it would be modular enough to be an optional ruleset that could be tacked on to 5e's existing rules if the DM wants to use it.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              This is fair. unfortunately, I can offer little advice that's system specific.
              Mostly I just appreciate GURPS giving me easy guidelines to work with. "You've got 10 HP, you got hit in the hand for 4, your hand's broken, moving on." Compared to that "Roll on a chart and apply the relevant status effect at certain damage thresholds,' doesn't seem particularly basic. But that's I guess been my complaint with 5e as a whole, for a game trying to be streamlined, it's still bizarrely convoluted.

              I think that games shouldn't really have "social mechanics" even when the games are mostly centered around social interactions. Fricking roleplay that conversation instead of just rolling for persuasion. Mechanising those aspects might let people play charismatic characters when they lack those aspects themselves, but if they can't even pretend they have those, then it ends up just skipping it with those mechanics.

              I agree and disagree. I think the skills should exist. But they shouldn't be for small interactions like "I fast talk the bouncer," or "I haggle with this guy." They should be for shit we really don't have time for, like "I spend the next several hours trying to carouse my way into sitting at the jarl's table,' and "Steve spends the evening arguing with the johnson over contract details."

              I've played in games where we have chemistry but usually at best one or two players will be commited to an arc, and the dm rarely if ever takes a direct role in creating a character arc for a particular pc. As for players. most of them do not even know what makes up a satisfying character arc. they just want the flat character arc character in the dm's world. essentially, they want the dm to re-write everything so their character doesn't ever have to change and develop. While that can be cool if it's what the dm wants to do from the start, it's absolutely almost never the case, so instead the wanna be shonen flat character just seeths through the whole campaign, acting like a fish out of water but never affecting the game world in the way they want and becoming increasingly disinterested or mocking towards it as they refuse to let it affect their character.

              That is absolutely bizarre. I as a Gm don't take much of any role in creating character arcs either, I view it as outside my job, but it is my job to lean into and enable what the players are setting up for themselves.
              Hell I just put picrel down with the vague setup of "You got hired to help some elf prince clear an old ruined city of goblins," and they ran with that until I've wound up with the most compelling character development I've seen in a game to date. Not everyone to the same level, but, above a certain floor you've got to let people choose their own level of commitment. I think part of that is forcing worldbuilding duties back on the players some. I feel that's mandatory for getting people really invested.
              In the end I dunno. Your issues seem less about the style of game and more about the mindsets of the people you're playing it with. Though I'll agree that system influences mindset more than people say.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            I've noticed your character tokens have hexagonal sides. Do you actually see the (dis)advantages such as narrow field of view and such in actual play? I've never seen a player use them before ever.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Yes. A character's vision is restricted to the 180 arc to their front. Taken down to 60 degrees if wearing extremely enclosing headgear. It also lets me draw in flashlight beams and the like.
              The yellow bands to the side are at a penalty to defend, and it's impossible to defend into your red arc without some special measure like precognitive senses or 360 sensor visors or something. (Or in a grapple/close combat, since you can feel the other person against you and act on that, but I digress.)
              Positioning and awareness are extremely important. The reward for a rogue doing their job right isn't usually +2d6 sneak attack damage,it's "You get to stab them in the kidneys several times in rapid succession and they die."
              Really one of my first experiences in the system, having a giant spider jump over my character and then I just, had no idea what was going on until my next turn until I could turn around and look, is one of the things that sold me hard on it.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      thank you for the cool gnoll

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        You are welcome. Here is the original art that you may use it for your own purposes without my gurpshomosexualry all over it.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        NTA but here's my beastmen folder if you want.
        https://mega.nz/folder/YCp0EI4J#Nnpi98Z7pSP-jwexqoNckA

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Even at it's worst, 5e is still more enjoyable and playable than 3.5 and PF1e.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Frick off zoomer

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I actually agree with this. I massively enjoyed PF1E back in the day, but it's basically only enjoyable when you're in the weeds. I've been playing PF2E for the past 2 years and trying to go back is cancer. I've forgotten all the good shit. I hate the way actions are handled. I hate some of the intricate rules that are just fricking miserable, grappling. Some of my best memories are from the first Pathfinder, but I can't go back. It's too muddied.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I agree but that comparison is like saying someone on crutches is faster than a quadriplegic. It's true but it's not something to be proud of.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Nah. Pathfinder at its peak shows higher usage numbers than 5e did at its peak.

      But it was close for a little bit. CR almost surpassed Pathfinder.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Unless you're running something really crunchy there is absolutely no reason to require the players to read the rulebook. Only GM has to know it. The players tell you what they want their characters to do, you tell them what to roll, in 90% of cases nothing besides that is needed and in the remaining 10% you can just quickly explain the rule to them. I really don't get why so many people here are so assblasted about players not knowing the rules or refusing to read them.
    And before anyone accuses me of laziness, I'm a forever GM.
    I've ran over 20 different systems thorough the years and only 2 of them really required any rule on part of the players. In both cases a two page long summary of most important stuff I made for them sufficed

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >I really don't get why so many people here are so assblasted about players not knowing the rules or refusing to read them.
      Because I'm running a really crunchy game.
      Also it demonstrates a base level of investment, and allows me to talk about the game part of the game with the people playing my game.
      Just different GMing philosophies I suppose.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      You are a moron

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Dms who are attempting to teach you a lesson or make a moral grandstand to their players should be tarred and feathered.

    Those only interested in telling a story should never be allowed to dm.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Those only interested in telling a story should never be allowed to dm.
      Actually god tier opinion. GMing is best when you play to find out what happens. I never have story notes, I just introduce characters and complications and let the players bounce around in it. Great fun for all involved.

      Here is mine:
      PbtA games have actually good tips on how to pace your game and making it fun to run.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    RPG players should play solo. Not to replace group games but to complement them. And remove nogames bullshit.
    Solo play requires an understanding of both player and referee perspectives, gives an easy way to try new ideas and systems, and lets you be That Guy without bothering anyone.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I second this. Every player should run themselves a few solo games. So they can see both sides of the screen, appreciate the work that goes into a campaign. That Guys will always be That Guys, though. I personally enjoy it when my players let it all hang out. When you've known each other long enough, very little bothers you...

      My Take: 99% of RPGs based off pre-existing IP are dogshit. The ones that aren't shit are useless, because they're only decent by piggy-backing on an already established system. In which case, you could just use that system to homebrew the setting without paying an extra $50...

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >you could just use that system to homebrew the setting without paying an extra $50...
        You can use free systems (or your own brain) to homebrew anything. The 50 bucks buys you out of having to do the scut work.
        Good licensed RPGs:
        WEG star wars
        Alien
        Buffy and Evil Dead (same system)
        Call of Cthulu
        Firefly

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I thrive on the scut work. Why would I shell out money for someone else to do something I enjoy? But, yeah, Cortex RPGs are pretty good (Firefly, Supernatural, BSG ect.) But for every one of the good ones we get even more Avatar Legends (Lazy PBtA clone) and Star Wars Saga Edition (Gods, that game was broken)...

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        How dare you insult the Ghostbusters rpg

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      My group has a superhero campaign that is built on 1-on-1 games and it is amazing in part because of what you said.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    TTRPGs are more woke than any vidya

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      TTRPGs have definitely been woke for a longer period of time.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      TTRPGs were woke before being woke was a thing.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      When GM I remove every reference to groomer-sexuality and women in authority.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >When GM I remove every reference to groomer-sexuality
        The Catholic Church?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/10/15/sexual-assault-k-12-schools/

          https://www.bishop-accountability.org/AtAGlance/USCCB_Yearly_Data_on_Accused_Priests.htm

          I think he means public schools anon, considering they've had more molestations in less time.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >more molestations
            That article you posted is about students sexually assaulting other students.
            So I'm glad to hear that you agree that we should believe women I guess.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              atmentcenter.com/sexual-abuse-teachers/

              So then its even more dangerous, seeing as students and teachers can groom

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Just the gays seeing how its the boys that get molested

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    JRPGs are peak mood for table top RPGs. I want my games to literally feel like I'm playing one of those video games. I want character focused fantasy stories, not world building autism simulators.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I'd kill to play a Tactics Ogre campaign, tbh

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I don't know how you even get a game that isn't ultimately character focused unless your group has zero chemistry at all.
      t. autistic simulatorgay.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I've played in games where we have chemistry but usually at best one or two players will be commited to an arc, and the dm rarely if ever takes a direct role in creating a character arc for a particular pc. As for players. most of them do not even know what makes up a satisfying character arc. they just want the flat character arc character in the dm's world. essentially, they want the dm to re-write everything so their character doesn't ever have to change and develop. While that can be cool if it's what the dm wants to do from the start, it's absolutely almost never the case, so instead the wanna be shonen flat character just seeths through the whole campaign, acting like a fish out of water but never affecting the game world in the way they want and becoming increasingly disinterested or mocking towards it as they refuse to let it affect their character.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Most JRPG video games aren't even the best system for their own stories. They borrow garbage design from D&D like pointless random battles and XP-based character advancement and turn it up to 11.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Fate is actually incredibly restrictive as the base game system and the way fate points and skills work is actively against it's core premise of the more open, imagination and storytelling based roleplaying game. The very fact that adding dice to your roll doesn't change it's expected value of zero (0) and that you have to spend points to invoke cool environmental features makes game fundamentally broken in my opinion.

        [...]
        I actually like the fat chicks and that makes me pissed that the current trend of "thiccness" is just skinnyfats crossing the line into literal lardasses and hopping for the flattering distribution. These asses have almost no glutes! Proper chub requires surprising amount of foundation and maintenance and even then it only looks good on a certain chosen few of women. I like the fat chicks, but I can't approve of the hip-hop slobs that are currently promoted.
        [...]
        That's because the JRPGs started as the Japanese versions of the old school computer RPGs, which were either ports or rip offs of the old DnD. This is also why weebs and osr players agree on the (p)orc aesthetic.

        >most jrpg video games aren't even the best system
        a lot of it is a lack of innovation from points of time when the industry had to innovate drastically. Still, it changes slowly but surely. Just look at pokemon, who is the most conservative with gameplay changes. even they have lessened the random battles that where a result of hardware limits.

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Probably not Controversial but i viscerally hate Mary sue races (Tieflings being chief in that department)
    also planescape is weird & i don't like it because its literally such a mixed bag nothing is special IMO.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I don't think there's anything wrong with tieflings and their kin, it's the type of people they attract.
      The same type of person that makes being "Sports Fan of X" or "Gay" or "Christian" their ENTIRE personality is just as much of a gay as someone who makes "being a tiefling" their entire character at a table.
      Many of them are too shallow or unimaginative to lean into some of the more fun aspects of being a tiefling, or any other "freak" race for that matter, but there's a whole grandiose meta-discussion behind that statement.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    TTRPGs and wargames were better when it was mostly just white dudes playing them. Markedly, observably better in every way.
    People arguing about Warhammer lore is like arguing about GI Joe or transformers lore. Who fricking cares? All Warhammer shit should be banned to /toy/
    Questgays ruined the board by flooding it and it never recovered.
    GURPS and HERO are two of the best systems on the market and ninety percent of what pisses you off about D and D could be fixed by moving to a superior system. I'd add BRP even. If you hate on these systems, it's probably because you got filtered by granular mechanics.
    Streaming and let's plays ruined the hobby.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >GURPS and HERO are two of the best systems on the market and ninety percent of what pisses you off about D and D could be fixed by moving to a superior system. I'd add BRP even. If you hate on these systems, it's probably because you got filtered by granular mechanics.
      That's just true. It's not even controversial. There's a reason almost every thread on the board has HYTNPD&D posted in it within five posts, and the subsequent discussions are usually superfluous.

      https://i.imgur.com/lqP7UPn.png

      Come on lets here your worst shit. Give me your bad takes, controversial opinions, everything

      Buildhomosexualry is one of the worst elements of RPG culture, because it's so solipsistic. It's playing on your own with the books, and then trying to bring your perfect sculpture and clearing the deck of the session to make space for it. Best case, the other players are briefly impressed by your ingenuity. Normal case, you're a selfish gaymuffin making as much of the game about you as possible.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Buildhomosexualry annoys me when it's part of Ivory Tower game design - I don't mind deckbuilding in RPGs, but I hate when nine-tenths of the available options are shit on purpose simply to punish anyone who doesn't realize they're shit.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          At the end of the day, build cannot be as important as paying attention to the enemy, the environment, and your allies. If your build's intended action loop can win without paying attention to the situation, the system is bad.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Correct take. Either the system is bad or the GM is, or some combination of the two.
            As well, in an ideal world, the only 'build' you should be striving for is the one that describes the character you're playing, not the other way around.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Too based. You realise the powers that be won't let you live now you've enlightened the masses?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I've stated something at least. Enlightenment is difficult, and people need to experience it for themselves. Even then, it tends to be an uphill battle.
                One of my GM friends recently was teaching a classless game to some 5e folks, and they informed him they really hated it because 'the build puzzle was the point.'
                But people have vastly different reasons for playing. "RPG" is too broad an umbrella I often feel, and the vocabulary to differentiate the things it encompasses is quite lacking.
                It's why 'hot takes' like this thread is asking for stopped bothering me. I've come to accept other people's opinions seem 'stupid' because we're not even participating in the same kind of activity,not really.

                That's definitely fair.
                I will say I mostly mean roleplaying during combat moreso than just going into detail, so that your combat isn't just an attempt at doing the most damage every chance and instead doing what your character would do even if it's impractical for the scene.
                Because of the incomplexity of 5e it forces you to be creative when these moments come up, since there's nothing in the rulebook to encourage you to use levitate to drop a large rock on an opponent as opposed to just hitting them with fireballs a bunch.

                Fun fact. The spell description of 5e levitate expressly stops it from being used to drop rocks on people. (Unless you can lawyer yourself a method by which the object to be dropped is not the target of the spell.)
                However, I can't agree more that some of the most memorable moments in any game's combat are going to be shit the rules didn't cover, if the GM knows their job. Still, myself, I want the rules to be inherently satisfying over and above that, and to enable it if at all possible.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Fun fact. The spell description of 5e levitate expressly stops it from being used to drop rocks on people.
                Oh frick you're right. I've been totally misinterpreting that spell for years and getting away with it.
                And I think it needs to be encouraged to players to come up with solutions to threats that aren't just "Kill everything." But that requires the DM coming up with stuff also, or having better rules in place.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >People arguing about Warhammer lore is like arguing about GI Joe or transformers lore. Who fricking cares? All Warhammer shit should be banned to /toy/
      /toy/ here, you're the lore board. things actually stay on the board topic there.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >GURPS and HERO are two of the best systems on the market and ninety percent of what pisses you off about D and D could be fixed by moving to a superior system. I'd add BRP even. If you hate on these systems, it's probably because you got filtered by granular mechanics.
      To the wayward souls spurned by Wizards but scared to leave D&D, we are here to welcome you all with open arms.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I only picked up Pathfinder 1e because I am a weeb and the made an AP about going to fantasy not!Japan.

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    D&D 4e was an incredibly robust and solid system and the only reason people hated it was because it was harder for them to try and break the game by taking BS from obscure rulebooks and out-of-context developers commentary to try and make busted ass characters like they could in 3e

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      D&D 4e is probably the worst TTRPG system ever made (not counting stuff like F.A.T.A.L. I tried it for a few sessions and it is the only system I outright refuse to ever play again.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Quote from man who has played two entire systems.

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I hold no incorrect or bad RPG opinions (or bad opinions in general). I am very intelligent AND thoroughly educated. I have an understanding of both storytelling and statistical analysis, as well as decades of experience of both running and playing a wide variety of games, from the banal to the exceptional. I implement philosophical principles into my RPGs and am a friendly social fellow. No opinions of mine are wrong.

    >Shadowrun is better than Cyberpunk to run a Cyberpunk game. You can excise the magical stuff without a loss to gameplay. The setting can be abandoned - the system is surprisingly independent of its setting.

    >You can use any system for any type of game. So long as you're enjoying the activity with your co-players, you're doing it right. That being said, some systems are better than others for certain types of games. If I'm running a game about social intrigue, I'm going to use WoD. If I'm running a superhero game, I'll use Ascendant. And so on.

    >D&D is a good gateway RPG. But everything that D&D does can be done better by other RPGs. The one exception is 4th edition, where it developed its own thing, but it was too different, which got people upset.

    >The RPG market should be gatekept as well as every individual table.

    >Pic related.

    >Your character shouldn't be a walking statblock questing on graph paper with no rhyme or reason. Nor should it be a speshul snowflake that has a 50-page backstory. You're a slightly above average person who chose to break out the mold and do something special when you play an RPG. Also when you come up with a character, think about other shit. What does your character do on the weekend? What does she have in her pockets? What is his go-to workout song? Etc.

    >The best gameplay is emergent on the narrative of the GM and the narrative of the players.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I'm curious, why Shadowrun over Cyberpunk? And which edition? I've always found Shadowrun's system a lot clunkier in a lot of areas, particularly vehicles. I do kinda prefer it's lethality level to Cyberpunk's instagibfest, though.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        So for mechanics, I would say 4th is better than Cyberpunk. Yes, there are some clunky-ass rules and combat takes forever, but I am of the (correct) opinion that combat is a failure state for a Shadowrunner. You're a criminal, not a merc. Furthermore, the system itself is better. Yes there are some excesses in it such as treading water or that you can break it into pieces if you start making your own drugs, but no system is perfect.

        3e is way too clunky as a system. 5e and 6e are just garbage, so with those three I would say Cyberpunk is better.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          As a relative newbie to Shadowrun, why 4 over 5?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            4e has a lot less autismo going on than 5th
            Specially Anniversary edition. Its probably the only "clean" ruleset for Shadowrun

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Kind of what the other guy

            4e has a lot less autismo going on than 5th
            Specially Anniversary edition. Its probably the only "clean" ruleset for Shadowrun

            said. It's been streamlined and polished a lot and "standardized." 5e had some okay ideas, but it had these weird fiddly subsystems.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Shadowrun 4 is preferred by people who don't like Shadowrun because it ups the power level and drops the rules for supporting anything aside from being a badass super soldier working for a megacorp

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Can you elaborate? It sounds like you have an issue with it.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Based and correct opinions, get out of this thread.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      You're an arrogant ass, but I can't disagree with you at all and I hate that...

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      That's a lot of preamble to deliver a lot of common lukewarm opinions. I'm not sure any of these are anything but the most common standard among hobbyists.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        If more people shared my objectively correct opinions, TTRPGs as a whole wouldn't be in the shitty situation that they're in right now.

        I have 3 takes op that alot of people disagree with;

        1. Individuals who use only canon content or premade adventures outside tutorial games in rpgs shouldn't play rpgs because they have fundamentally missed the point.The setting should be nothing more than super high concepts or thematic backdrops for players and GM's to develop their stories in, not from.

        2. Parallel to this; Rules are always meant to be frameworks rather than immutable and unchangeable and should be developed for your own game and tweak as desired to maximise enjoyment.

        3. The idea of "balance" in rpgs is moronic because the reality is no world is ever "balanced" the idea that everyone should be mechanically "equal" in some way is fundamentally stupid.

        1 and 2 are good, 3 is... mostly correct. Balance should be strived for because it's more fun to the players when everyone is contributing semi-equally. But perfect balance is impossible and it's stupid to try to reach it.

        Midwit

        Aw, am I using words that are too big for you, sweatie?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Ad hominem
          Truly, the only weapon of the dilettante

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Midwit

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Pathfinder basic box is the best Pathfinder.

    Also if you removed feats from 5th or Pathfinder you would have a better game.

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    3.5 isn't worth playing unless you're using ToB; 3.5 WITH ToB is better than 5e.

    Earthdawn is great and dice pool systems are mechanically superior to both d20 and d% systems.

    99% of the problems with freakshit PCs comes from the fact that the people playing them have no idea how to play them.

    Metal minis are far superior to plastic in almost every way and most of the plastic minis with decent sculpts cost as much as metal minis anyway.

    It is possible to suck at playing TTRPGs and those that don't are usually DMs.

    Being a good DM is something that you have to have a knack for; it can be acquired slowly and painfully if you don't have it but some people have from the get-go and it's a system-agnostic skill.

    Putting on music during games is incredibly cringe.

    All players should be expected to know whatever rules apply to their character. Sometimes an exact wording has to be looked up or someone is trying a new class but an experienced player forgetting how Mage Hand or darkvision works is just fricking lazy.

    "I swing my axe into the elf's head" is fine to repeat ad infinitum; "I spin around, feint sideways and plant my axe the elf's skull with a sickening *crunch* as the elf screams and blood streams from his nose and eyes" gets old in a hurry and I also think that any sort of particularly dramatic effects like that should be left to the DM, who decides whether or not they're merited and can either come up with something himself or solicit a description from the player in question.

    Starting with elaborate world-building is a horrible idea; the superior method is to start with a basic outline and make it up as you go along but keep the old material.

    So long as it doesn't cause direct and serious conflict among the party, there is nothing wrong with evil PCs.

    The biggest problem with the classical alignment system is that people don't understand how it works.

    Most people are incompetent at playing any character in a world with black-and-white morality.

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Thac0 was never a problem, thus 3.x and onward were a bad idea. 2E was peak (A)D&D. Everything else is downhill from there.

  20. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Combat FRICKING sucks.
    I'm gonna spend the next hour and ten minutes fighting what the DM thought was gonna be a cool fight, It's mindless whacking, flinging, math, and rolling.
    Call me a cuck but Disco Elysium was right for allowing the only real fight scenes in the game be a series of quick Dex, Strength, and Willpower Checks

    Any long time game should start with the DM setting their preferences straight. Then, without a setting in mind,have the Players spitball character ideas.
    Not to focus on 5e shit, but if you have a party of "freakshit" races, don't throw them in an all Human or a cultureless multicultural tavern. If your party is a Tiefling, a Dragonborn Noble, and Dragonborn Paladin talk to each player about how they see their race and class in the world and build up the setting from there.
    The Tiefling player may imagine Tieflings have a history of bad luck in the world and want to be treated as a Doomed Outcast, or maybe they just want to play a Human with Horns and an aesthetic and be treated as such.
    Mean while, if two of your players are playing highly respected members of society like Nobles and Priests, talk to the players. Maybe you can change the setting around where the country you take place in is majority Dragonborn or maybe they were Imperialistically conquered. But if the players think their Dragonborn Paladin is an oddity in their church and the Dragonborn Noble wants their family to be states away. You can keep that in mind and make the game take place on the Frontier where people escape to where pasts don't matter, and later have the character's pasts catch up with them . Build the setting together

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Call me a cuck but
      Nah you just don't like most combat mechanics. That's fine.
      I love 'em but only certain systems and if the Gm knows what the hell they're doing. Given how much I hear people say they despise combat, I get the impression running it decently is somehow a lost art.
      >Then, without a setting in mind,have the Players spitball character ideas.
      Good take actually. I'll also accept 'you can have a setting in mind but it has to be flexible for what the players want to play.' Not outright protean, but flexible.
      >Everything about playing race
      Simply correct with no qualifiers.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Combat sucks in 3.x/5e*

      There are plenty of other systems with actively engaging combat mechanics

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        No there aren't.
        It's the same number grind in every system. Just with a different coat of paint.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Call me a cuck
      I am going to call you a fricking cuck. Get more innovative and get a better GM. If you find combat boring and repetitive it's because either you or he are fricking stupid.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Combat sucks in your games because you use it as a tool rather than a story telling opportunity. Of course it sucks when its based on mechanical intrigue, when there is at best loose connections between combat and plot, the combat and plot both suffer. Maybe try adding combat rarely and as an important narrative piece rather than the 'mandatory combat segment' of every session.

      Building the setting together is a foolish endeavor as it will almost always result in two or three players doing the work while the other players sit back and simply add things to make freakshit more playable, and make liscenced properties more easily playable. while the story is about the players, they chose the DM to tell it, so they should anticipate their choices being uncomfortable in certain circumstances, it is not the job of the GM to placate the players like children. I am not making a new setting or kingdom every campaign, the players must work with me to make PC's, I am not subservient to them, and ultimately they need me to run the game for them.

      Tl;dr, your care for players has made your games unfun, make the world harsh, force them to dig their teeth into a premade world that doesn't suck their wieners and isn't tailor made for them, you'll have more fun.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Try PBTA

  21. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Everyone should play a straight faced campaign where all the characters are tiny cute animal people at least once.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Agreed. Especially if it's a gritty campaign.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      check out mutant: Gen lab alpha

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Those are all (mostly) human-sized, aren't they?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Yes but there is character options to play smaller sized animals if they are applicable. It is just the closest thing I could think of without referring to bunnies and borrows or some GRUPS game.

  22. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Single die plus few modifiers is the best resolution system there is. Whether d6, d10, d20 or d% depends on the granularity you need. Rolling more than two dice is always moronic.

  23. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Systems dont matter, Im going to RP combat anyways.

  24. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    4e was the best D&D edition.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I wouldn't go that far but it is certainly in the top 3. I'd put B/X and BECMI/RC ahead of it but I know a significant portion of that opinion is due to nostalgia goggles kicking in.

  25. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    "tacticans" and "strategists" slow the game down to a fricking crawl by obsessing over combat, when in most games, the players will likely win anyway

  26. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    You don't need more than six playable races, tops. Everything else is an enemy, except for one or two allied races that players aren't allowed.

  27. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I think that games shouldn't really have "social mechanics" even when the games are mostly centered around social interactions. Fricking roleplay that conversation instead of just rolling for persuasion. Mechanising those aspects might let people play charismatic characters when they lack those aspects themselves, but if they can't even pretend they have those, then it ends up just skipping it with those mechanics.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Tangentially related, but I fricking hate social skills in CRPGs, because they drain points I would have gladly spent on something cool just so I can actually get good endings on quests.

  28. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I love the setting of Cyberpunk and Shadowrun but since the only tabletop im able to play with ease is Vampire the Masquerade i hate anything that requires a lot of number crunching for everything which is why i also don't touch D&D or Call of Cthulhu.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      In Coc you literally multiply numbers by 5 once. Then you never have to math again, just roll below.

  29. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I can actually see where Wizards are coming from with the OGL
    There's been a massive boom in popularity of D&D since 5th edition but it's not of the game itself as much as it is of content creators. If wizards aren't seeing increased sales and instead people are playing the free spinoffs they've been permitting, or if all the money wizards expected they'd get from their allegedly growing audience is going into patreons of people who do fricking podcasts what do you think they'd look to do?
    Nevermind that with catering to this secondary audience that watches/talks about the game more than plays it they've increasingly been alienating their actual core audience that actually buys the damn books.

    I fricking swear, nobody heard "Oh we can't say any race is evil now also all elves are trans and here's some wheelchair accessible dungeons so you better buy the new reprints" and forked out money for that shit, not even the ones who said they wanted it.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      My issue with the OGL problem is that, as usual, WotC is choosing the most fricking braindead solution to the problem. 3.5e was released in 2003, and by 2007 there were a dozen core rulebooks and like 50 supplements that had been released. Fricking 5e, by comparison, has been out since 2012, it has 3 core books at launch, 6 supplements, 8 campaign settings (6 if you don't count acquisitions incorporated and mercer's stuff, seeing that the WotC dev team presumably didn't do much for either), and a bunch of shitty modules. 5e is undermonetized because WotC doesn't put out any fricking books, and the ones they do release are notoriously hit-or-miss in terms of quality. There are so many fricking terrible subclasses that have been released I honestly don't believe they have any internal QA. And their solution is to instead monetize other peoples work because they're too lazy to create a functioning product themselves. It's literally
      >We can't compete with causal DM's who are releasing better stuff than us faster than us, so we'll just demand royalties and ownership of their work
      It's abysmally fricking lazy.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Or course it looks braindead if you think corporations only care about profit. But they don't. Control beats Profit every time.
        OGL 1.0 was a foundation that may have been shaky in places and could have collapsed anytime, but it was generally safe and solid to build on, so people came willingly and built the market up and out until it stretched endlessly in every direction.
        OGL 1.1 is a cage, where everyone inside is safer than before, but more people are left out, and even more people will slip through the cracks as the bars tighten. The framework limits the size of what can be built within it but gives WoTC what they really want: complete control over everything inside.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >It's literally
        >>We can't compete with causal DM's who are releasing better stuff than us faster than us, so we'll just demand royalties and ownership of their work
        >It's abysmally fricking lazy.

        The other thing to think about is that maybe nobody who has any TTRPG writing skills wants to be have anything to do with them. Wizards has had a reputation as a dysfunctional and shitty company for a long time now and I wouldn't be surprised if the main reason they keep getting their lunch eaten by literally whos is because they can't attract and/or retain talent and moreover that the reason for THAT issue is that their management is god-fricking-awful. The people at the top don't know or give a shit about RPGs and as such leave the smaller decisions (such as the content being published, as opposed to how many products and at what prices are going to be made) to their underlings so their underlings (probably fat middle-aged women who also don't know shit about TTRPGs and more interested in the usual petty tyranny than doing their job) are making the vast majority of the content decisions and as always happens things slow to a fricking crawl.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      5e is by far the most successful edition in the game's history, though, despite the skeleton crew of developers they've had to work with since 4e's failure and despite the glacial pace of releases. People were actually treating the name like it's worth a damn, and thanks to licensing and their partnerships with services like Beyond, they make money doing literally nothing. If physical book sales have flagged of late, it's because they've allowed quality to take a dive - compare shit like the Spelljammer "book" to anything they released before, and it's readily apparent the problem is on their end, not the customers'. But rather than address that at all, they instead overreached beyond all rational belief and targeted the earnings and content of third parties, including those made under the previous agreement which included language specifically guaranteeing protections against these sorts of changes. Attempting to cannibalize the people who help keep the game popular is the quickest possible way for the game to lose popularity - just look at the mass cancellation of Beyond subscriptions for proof.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Royalties is an easy stance to take, but a hugely negative one in implementation, as we've seen.

      I just don't know why they haven't been churning out content. Seems like a no-brainer. They can practically suffocate everything except paizo if they just had more books to go on shelves.

  30. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Furry Races aren't that bad. I mean what's really the difference between a furry, a Kitsune and a beastfolk? Just make some decent lore.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Furry races are only allowed if they're drawn by Ovopack. Otherwise, they're banned.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The problem isn't furry races/characters, the problem is furry players.
      Furry race played by a normal person is ok.
      Non-furry race played by a furry is ok.
      Furry race played by furry things are going to be fricked.
      Never ever let a furry play there fursona.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Can concur, played with a furry who ran his pet character in every fricking game, in every fricking system he could get away with. Every time, he'd beg the DM for all kinds of overpowered bullshit so he could be true to his concept, and yet he was still the least competent member of the party in EVERY GAME because he could barely even remember the basic rules, let alone the rules for the shit he asked for. And that's not even getting into his constant inane homosexualry. Guy could not let a single conversation pass without injecting the dumbest fricking thing anyone could possibly say at some random moment. Honestly, the only good part about playing with him was the fact that he was too stupid for his character to live especially long in any game.

  31. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They should have listed when we told them to try not playing D&D.

  32. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I use D an D 3.5 not because I like the system but for the sheer amount of awesome third party and homebrew content for it

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Based. I don't even play 3.5 anymore and I still use shitloads of content from it.
      These guys aren't third party but they are pretty neat.
      I've got the green ronin advanced bestiary, that one that's just like a hundred creature templates, and even if the stats aren't completely useful to me, the ideas certainly are.

  33. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Apologies, I don't Use Ganker much (beyond lurking, so I apologize if this is difficult to read.

    1. On historical accuracy, every setting is historically accurate to itself, as it is a separate world from our own. All of the soldiers in generica are equipped with swords and plate armor because their government can afford it, additionally, d2.espite the setting being in the classical era, they have gothic style plate armor, why? because that is the way it is in generica.

    2. Free form and crunch rules are both terrible and result in a formless mess with no tension and a math class respectively. The best rules have flexibility where it matters, but also don't allow for characters and dungeon masters to act without restraint.

    3.Halflings and orcs are the only fantasy races you should commonly see, elves and orcs are ruined by frequent use and lose their magical nature when every conflict is solved by elf magic or dwarf tech.

    4. NPC's should be wrong, not lie, but be wrong with information, no one is always right and characters should unknowingly hold superstitions that their players think are true, this is especially true for horror games, imagine if your wise-guy fighter prattles on about the 'nape of the neck' being the secret kill point of a sleeping giant, only for his sword to get lodged like a tooth pick and him devoured by a now furious hill giant.

    5. I care about your setting and your take on things, I am tired of seeing generic fantasy settings that discourage creativity and the general malevolence and ambivalence towards dm settings by people on this board and by players.

    6. Speaking of players, while the story is about them, it is the GM who is their chronicler and author, as such you, as the GM, should eb able to stipulate and even directly change the stats and abilities of a character based on arbitrary reasons story ones on a whim.

    7.Warhammer, all of its settings, are boring and seem like a first draft. The grimdark isn't cool its boring.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      *elves and dwarves

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      As far as plate armor goes, it just annoys people because it was a massive advancement in technology and it existing without any other contemporary advancements can seem really odd without some sort of justification. It's sort of like running a Call of Cthulhu game set in the 1920s but everyone has smartphones. There's no other anachronistic technology, no other derivatives of the Digital Revolution, just smartphones. Without a durn good justification that's just silly.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I agree, and I do think you should have to do some justification, my issue with it is that people will often ignore setting history in order to follow real history, which defeats the purpose of the fantasy genre the game is set in. for the case of games like CoC, characters having a smartphone is wholly unreasonable without justification (perhaps it is powered by eldritch technology or some other thing), but if it does not receive justification then it is absolutely reasonable to criticize and poke holes in the item being there.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        But plate armor is not a massive advancement in technology, it's just reflective of the steady increase in the availability of steel.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      4 is a good point. I'll admit that it hasn't occured to me. In fact, I think I recall a skill check in gurps where you could obtain info of different quality depending on your roll.

  34. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Alignment is a reasonably flexible system of ideals that works within the confines of an objective universe, and most of its critics either don't understand it or lack the conviction to apply objective morality to their universe.

    Aasimar are the best of the non-standard D&D and Pathfinder races.

    Religion is an often underused tool in almost every setting, and more people should strive to incorporate its superstitions, doctrines and presence in the daily life of people within that universe.

    Players who focus too much on their builds or get them from the internet rarely have the skill to play them, and end up being significantly weaker and less capable than other players.

    The chief duty of the GM is to handle issues and player choices as they come up, and adapting what's going on to what the players do - more like a referee than a storyteller. Telling a story, facilitating smooth gameplay, teaching the ropes and etc. are all secondary functions.

    Middlehammer has the best implementation of every Warhammer setting, straddling a perfect balance between being grim, gritty, darkly comedic, epic and overly insane.

    Shadowrun is awesome and 4e was its best implementation.

    Finally: Traditional art is always far better than anything digital can offer, and the fact that many traditional artists don't work for the industry anymore is a shame.

  35. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    D&D 3e and it's offshoots have irreparably damaged the game and is mechanically inferior if simpler than OD&D-AD&D. D&D 4e while heavily flawed was an interesting concept and tried to remedy some of the issues of the 3e/5e formula but thanks to it's own flaws and the frothing morons who think 3e/5e is "perfect" killed any homes of a successor system or edition to 4e.

    Min/maxing is a cancer and I actively avoid players from going my games if they over min max. Especially when it's done at the cost of roleplaying.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      If they were good then people would play them.
      No one is forced to play any version of any game and always play the most fun version. If AD&D was truly better then it would be more than just a thing hipsters and boomers reminisce about.
      OSR is happening not because those versions were good but because they suck shit and people have remade their concepts into games that are actually good.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Nobody forces you to spend ten years rushing into every attenpt at a /4eg/ to shit it up about fricking dailies, but here we are.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Plebian take. OSR and it's "fixing" of AD&D mechanics by making them work just like 3e+ makes OSR a steaming pile of shit. Its not nostalgia it's objective fact. The old TSR games had just as much roleplaying as WotC era but with combat that didn't take a eon to complete.

  36. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The DM should just say the AC of a target so no one has to continuously ask 'do I hit?'

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >The virgin 'roll against AC so I can tell you if it hit' vs the chad 'roll against your skill level and tell me if you hit.'

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        That's what I like about Delta Green from reading the book. You actually learn from mistakes and fails (those that don't involve mind rending cosmic horrors at least)

  37. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Give me your bad takes, controversial opinions, everything
    D&D is overrated garbage and has always been such. Even in the context of dungeon crawl games, Tunnels & Trolls was better built from the outset and only failed to become as big because advertising is everything.

    Shadowrun 2nd Edition is the best edition released. 3rd retconned Otaku in a shitty way and added all sorts of unnecessary mechanical changes. The game has been iterating downhill since.

  38. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Playing child characters is fun

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >play child character
      >encounter an orc band
      >get graphically mauled
      I feel like this would kill the mood. Why not play a small race instead?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        because then you don't get to RP a child-like sense of wonder and childhood innocence

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          You can just do that with a race that physically matures fast. It will make it less weird for everyone. Play an elf in his 30s or a 6 year old Dragonborn. Or play someone with a sheltered past if you want aspects of that play a Githyanki that needs to be explained the concept of a lie since this is his first time outside of his military boot camp childhood where such a thing literally never happened.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >you don't get to RP a child-like sense of wonder and childhood innocence
          WHY would you ever fricking want to roleplay that as a PC
          just GM and have the party interact with a sheltered princess

  39. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    90% of what makes TTRPGs enjoyable is the social aspect. If the people at the table aren't people you like it will be difficult to enjoy any game. I'd rather play a shit system like Shadowrun with people I like than a perfect system with a bunch of meme spewing globoblobs.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >90% of what makes TTRPGs enjoyable is the social aspect
      If you think this then you don't actually enjoy games, you're there to socialise.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        > t. No games.

  40. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Caster supremacy isn't a bad thing

  41. 1 year ago
    Anonymous.

    Trannies do not make good players, but make good GM's.
    They're naturally inclined to paying mind to the individual and their unique bits via culture and personality, both to the players and PC's, but also to their world, they don't get caught up in needing everything fantastical to be "realistic" fantasy material (women still having no rights, rape and socioeconomic power abuses, and anything GoT-y). When they make a world, they go full autistic storyshit, but aren't the kinds of personalities that will sit there and force everyone to listen to them explain it all in one sitting.
    PC's are generally friendlier, despite being grousy, instead of the weird autistic "who the frick are you, what are you doing here?" that a lot of people end up doing that the party hasn't smooth talked.
    They also tend to get more invested, and while being mindful of heavier shit, worry slightly less about minor sensitive material. None of the NPC's are rapists, or own a harem of broken in slave women, but NPC's will canonically frick, and joke about the PC's fricking.
    Also, a lot of trannies in ttrpg's are also grognards of some sense. Not all of them, but there's considerable overlap.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Personal experience I've found this to be the case for Transfem and Non Binaries. Former is the best DM I've ever had and the ladder... I don't think I'd ever want to play in a group with.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      yes, we get it, you're a chaser who hates women

      homosexuals who prattle on about Gygax as if he was the most perfect, genius game designer to ever exist only do so because they want to pretend like they have the correct opinion about how TTRPGs are supposed to be. Gygax was just a man, and a pretty shitty one at that. The way he treated Arneson, who actually refined the groundwork for what D&D would become, makes it more than clear that he was no different than any of us other morons and that his opinions about RPGs weren't any more refined or researched or based on anything but his own experiences.

      D&D is The Simpsons of TTRPGs. It's more likely than not that it's best years were over before you ever really took notice of it. It has has far more bad years than good and there's little, if any, chance that it will ever be as good or as genuine as people pretend it was. Also, just like the Simpsons, it wasn't entirely perfect all the time, and while a lot of it has aged well enough, being better than the slop we get these days is a low bar to cross.

      Arguing about builds, optimization, and the best way to houserule and fix games like D&D is a symptom of the game being utterly fricking terrible and most of that comes from attitudes cultivated in the 3.5 era, rather than the Gygaxian purist shit that some people trot out. The Ivory Tower homosexualry that turned the game into a pseudo-TCG where autistic rules lawyering about interactions between mechanics and subsystems is a tragedy of game design.

      Agreed for the most part, and I especially hate that people act like gygax was some kind of visionary. The only ones who actually see him for what he was tend to be the ones who hate d&d but yet also let it live rent free in their head.

      I have 3 takes op that alot of people disagree with;

      1. Individuals who use only canon content or premade adventures outside tutorial games in rpgs shouldn't play rpgs because they have fundamentally missed the point.The setting should be nothing more than super high concepts or thematic backdrops for players and GM's to develop their stories in, not from.

      2. Parallel to this; Rules are always meant to be frameworks rather than immutable and unchangeable and should be developed for your own game and tweak as desired to maximise enjoyment.

      3. The idea of "balance" in rpgs is moronic because the reality is no world is ever "balanced" the idea that everyone should be mechanically "equal" in some way is fundamentally stupid.

      Balance is fine. When 3.5 was the meta and everyone wanted to be a caster, that fricking sucked

  42. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Most fantasy worlds (mostly the ones are made by the big tabletop companies) are absolute trash that I could never imagine getting immersed in. Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, Golarion... They all feel like themeparks more than real worlds. They try to be everything instead of being something

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Ravenloft is more like a theme park than a real world. Just the "evil haunted funfair" kind of theme park.

  43. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    And before you say
    >why ass durrr it's so specific
    ass is literally the most sexual female body part you can show naked on TV

  44. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Fractional bonuses for BaB and saves in 3.5 should be retained and calculated each level. I.e. a level 5 rogue level 3 cleric should have a +6 base attack bonus not +5. Also dodge and toughness should be like in Pathfinder, and Deadly Agility and Deadly Aim should both be feats in the gsme. Also two weapon fighting offhand damage shouldn't be halved. Other than that, 3.5 is better than Pathfinder.

  45. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    furry PCs should be forbidden, but waifurs should be given to the worthy for that extra good ending

  46. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    homosexuals who prattle on about Gygax as if he was the most perfect, genius game designer to ever exist only do so because they want to pretend like they have the correct opinion about how TTRPGs are supposed to be. Gygax was just a man, and a pretty shitty one at that. The way he treated Arneson, who actually refined the groundwork for what D&D would become, makes it more than clear that he was no different than any of us other morons and that his opinions about RPGs weren't any more refined or researched or based on anything but his own experiences.

    D&D is The Simpsons of TTRPGs. It's more likely than not that it's best years were over before you ever really took notice of it. It has has far more bad years than good and there's little, if any, chance that it will ever be as good or as genuine as people pretend it was. Also, just like the Simpsons, it wasn't entirely perfect all the time, and while a lot of it has aged well enough, being better than the slop we get these days is a low bar to cross.

    Arguing about builds, optimization, and the best way to houserule and fix games like D&D is a symptom of the game being utterly fricking terrible and most of that comes from attitudes cultivated in the 3.5 era, rather than the Gygaxian purist shit that some people trot out. The Ivory Tower homosexualry that turned the game into a pseudo-TCG where autistic rules lawyering about interactions between mechanics and subsystems is a tragedy of game design.

  47. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Most controversial opinions?

    "Narrative based" RPGs like PbtA are cancer and will ruin the spirit of the game.
    However, the "narrative dice" of SWRPG are the best and most interesting dice mechanic since GURPs mastered the binary yes/no.
    CR and other roleplaying streams that focus more on highly emotional climaxes over simple dungeoneering or adventuring are cancer.
    OSR concepts are excellent (rulings not rules, frick balance, get back to exploration) but bogged down by shitty mechanics. Some of the best systems are so autistic that they push people away, but they are objectively the best systems ever created (Runequest, Mythras, Harn).
    Armor as AC instead of DR is for brainlets.
    Low fantasy, especially in highly niche settings (bronze age, dark ages, renaissance; anything non late middle ages) is top tier setting building.
    PC death should be much more common and systems should be unforgiving to encourage the growth of the player's problem solving abilities as part of the experience. Contrived/Low IQ horror DMs from the 2e and 3e days have ruined this and encouraged power fantasy video game bullshit.
    Gaming online with VTTs will kill the hobby faster than OneDnD

    Pic related, an actually good roleplaying system that nobody will play.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      How do "narrative dice" work in SWRPG?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        It's a dice pool system using proprietary dice where challenge resolution is done by rolling a set of positive and negative dice, where the positive dice pool is determined by the attribute and skill being used and the negative dice pool by the difficulty of the challenge, sometimes formalized (attacking an enemy at a given range) or on the fly by the GM ("how hard would this lock be to hack on a scale of 1 to 5?"), with additional positive and negative device being added for situational bonuses or maluses like familiarity with the task at hand or low visibility. Positive dice faces have 0-2 successes and 0-2 advantages, while negative dice have failures and disadvantages, and you just count them up, with failures cancelling successes and disads cancelling advantages. If the total is at least one success, then the action works, and additional successes can improve the scale of that success (for example, getting more successes increases damage on a successful attack). Net advantages are effectively narrative points, which you can spend to modify the effects of the action in a positive way as you see fit, the most straight forward application of this is to turn an attack into a critical hit or activate the special feature of a weapon or item, but could also be spent to say, knock down an enemy when you punch them, say that you managed to hack a door silently, or that your attempt to deceive someone was so successful that they would attest to the veracity of your lie if you are confronted about it by someone else. The book provides various examples of what advantages can be spent on and how much those would cost, but also encourages you to suggest your own and ask the GM for approval. However, net disadvantages do the opposite, allowing the GM to effectively say, "yes you did the thing, BUT", spending them to say, knock you on your ass with recoil, set off an alarm after you hack something, draw negative attention to yourself, etc.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          TLDR, It creates a very dynamic and heterogeneous gameplay experience without sacrificing much mechanical crunch.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Guy you are replying to.

        It's a dice pool system using proprietary dice where challenge resolution is done by rolling a set of positive and negative dice, where the positive dice pool is determined by the attribute and skill being used and the negative dice pool by the difficulty of the challenge, sometimes formalized (attacking an enemy at a given range) or on the fly by the GM ("how hard would this lock be to hack on a scale of 1 to 5?"), with additional positive and negative device being added for situational bonuses or maluses like familiarity with the task at hand or low visibility. Positive dice faces have 0-2 successes and 0-2 advantages, while negative dice have failures and disadvantages, and you just count them up, with failures cancelling successes and disads cancelling advantages. If the total is at least one success, then the action works, and additional successes can improve the scale of that success (for example, getting more successes increases damage on a successful attack). Net advantages are effectively narrative points, which you can spend to modify the effects of the action in a positive way as you see fit, the most straight forward application of this is to turn an attack into a critical hit or activate the special feature of a weapon or item, but could also be spent to say, knock down an enemy when you punch them, say that you managed to hack a door silently, or that your attempt to deceive someone was so successful that they would attest to the veracity of your lie if you are confronted about it by someone else. The book provides various examples of what advantages can be spent on and how much those would cost, but also encourages you to suggest your own and ask the GM for approval. However, net disadvantages do the opposite, allowing the GM to effectively say, "yes you did the thing, BUT", spending them to say, knock you on your ass with recoil, set off an alarm after you hack something, draw negative attention to yourself, etc.

        TLDR, It creates a very dynamic and heterogeneous gameplay experience without sacrificing much mechanical crunch.

        Explains it well.

        On one axis you have success and fail. On the second axis you have "threat" (complication) and "advantage" (beneficial complication). So this creates a scenario where you succeed with some kind of complication or any permutation of the above two axes. It also includes a "triumph" (think critical hit) and "despair" (think critical fail) roll

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Gaming online with VTTs will kill the hobby faster than OneDnD
      No it won't.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >"Narrative based" RPGs like PbtA are cancer and will ruin the spirit of the game.
      That's not Controversial.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >However, the "narrative dice" of SWRPG are the best and most interesting dice mechanic since GURPs mastered the binary yes/no.

      Absolutely agree. Have you tried Genesys (the generic version of the system that FF published a while back) yet, Anon?

  48. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    "Railroading" is another way of saying "coherent story", and players who whine about it should shut up.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Write a book, homosexual.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        TTRPGs are at their core just CYOA books with a far larger and more malleable set of options.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Shit gm, write a book

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Shit player, play pretend by yourself

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I'm a forever gm in my friend group. I've played about 5 sessions of games in total.

  49. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Nothing anyone does will directly affect your table unless you let it, and that's a fact.

    People who complain about other people at their table are the problem, not the people they're complaining about.

    GURPS, HERO, and other generalist systems are all dogshit, and a system will always be better when it has a clear focus and theme.

    There is no such thing as a good official setting.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Am I moronic or do those last two things contradict each other

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        They don't. You can have a consistent theme without having an official setting.

        The problem with GURPS, HERO, etc is that they're meant to be modular and adapt to any type of game; jack of all trades, master of none.

        A system should set out to fulfill a specific theme (i.e. "this is for hard sci-fi, this is for magic heavy fantasy, this is for occult horror, this is for cyberpunk), and its mechanics should tie into this theme and be refined to as near-perfection as they can be.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Key difference between GURPS and Hero: GURPS was generic from the beginning. Hero was Champions, a superhero RPG, long before it was turned into a universal system.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >The problem with GURPS, HERO, etc is that they're meant to be modular and adapt to any type of game; jack of all trades, master of none.

          >The “GU” in GURPS mean that it takes on most or all fictional genres and uses a single set of rules to address them.
          It’s a common fiction that the label has something to do with supporting the styles and goals of all gaming groups, but that’s never been a design goal for GURPS.
          >from 'How to be a GURPS GM'

          I find myself that the system has a very specific tone and style of game it handles. Some later supplements have tried to pretend it doesn't, as the book count spirals out of control, that much I'd concede. It's meant to cover any setting, or attempt to, but it really only 'does' one thing, though I have a difficult time expressing what the hell that actually IS, I know it generates a very specific feel to most my games that's both what I want and not liable to come about from anything else I've played.
          Just my two cents on the matter.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Not to steer the thread in this direction, but would you say the same of something like Savage Worlds?
      I want to give it a try but I do sort of agree that anything designed to paint in "broad strokes" will be lacking as systems designed for certain settings (scifi, high fantasy, etc. as you said)

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I've never played or run savage worlds but if it's a system that pitches itself as being able to run any theme, any setting, any tone then it's probably mediocre at best.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          It doesn't pitch itself that way.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >GURPS, HERO, and other generalist systems are all dogshit, and a system will always be better when it has a clear focus and theme.
      Name some.

  50. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >5e is fine for what it is.
    >Space Marines are the most boring thing in 40k.
    >d100 systems are objectively better than d20 or d6 dice pools.
    >Limiting character creation options is actually better than letting PCs be whatever zany bunch.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Limiting character creation options is actually better than letting PCs be whatever zany bunch.
      Agreed. I find that working within a limited framework and adhering to a theme results in a more cohesive party and characters who are more compelling. The best campaigns my group has played have had specific themes to the characters and restrictions on races and concepts.

  51. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I cannot understand why individuals who play a roleplay game struggle to have an adult conversation when players or difficulties arise.

    Like just roleplay being a functional adult FFS.

  52. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The book should always be organised as
    Setting > Rules > Chargen > GM section
    Any other way is total shit

  53. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I have 3 takes op that alot of people disagree with;

    1. Individuals who use only canon content or premade adventures outside tutorial games in rpgs shouldn't play rpgs because they have fundamentally missed the point.The setting should be nothing more than super high concepts or thematic backdrops for players and GM's to develop their stories in, not from.

    2. Parallel to this; Rules are always meant to be frameworks rather than immutable and unchangeable and should be developed for your own game and tweak as desired to maximise enjoyment.

    3. The idea of "balance" in rpgs is moronic because the reality is no world is ever "balanced" the idea that everyone should be mechanically "equal" in some way is fundamentally stupid.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I agree with all three.
      But would addendum on to the last part that it's up to the DM to make so the players feel useful or participate. If they choose not to that's on them.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >the reality is no world is ever "balanced"

      I think that's fair if what you want from a engine is a common frameworks to interact with a world. But if you want to engage in any way with the "G" in RPGs, then you want interesting moment to moment choices; that's why balance is a common talking point in the game design space.
      You can make a chess game where one side has significantly more pieces than the other because "the reality is no war is ever balanced" and watch it get ignore by every chess player because is just not good design.
      That being said, there is more going in a TTRPG than the raw game aspect, so Engines as simulations is a completely valid position, but obviously Role-playing games as games is also a non-moronic take

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I think the contention here is that 'balance' by its nature presupposes a completely confined scenario, which (most) RPGs purposefully strive to avoid as their principle difference from being a boardgame. In the most commonly argued example, a combat, an 'encounter' can only really be 'balanced' as most people describe it if everything is constrained to the strictest interpretation of a narrow ruleset.
        There are a thousand clever plans and cunning ploys by the players that can destroy 'balance' as easily as the GM putting down a creature with too big of numbers. Though I think

        I say balance is like realism: you don't actually need it, you just need something that vaguely resembles it so that everyone can buy in.

        has the reasonable right of it. "Balance," taken to mean "The players must be able to engage with the content of the game in a meaningful way," is self evidently correct. Though I think a lot of us sim/portalist gays get hung up on the definition of balance being strictly the boardgamey kind of assured symmetry like your chess example. whcih, as said, I don't hold to be possible by the nature of the medium, purposefully very restrictive games aside.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I can completely agree the open nature of TTRPGs makes traditional balance practically impossible and agree with

          I say balance is like realism: you don't actually need it, you just need something that vaguely resembles it so that everyone can buy in.

          I think balance should be a tool to guide game design but no a true goal. Even "restrictive games" can become a boring chore if you prioritize balance too much.
          And that's why Josh Sawyer is a fricking hack

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            There's balance as a concept that says there shouldn't be any options available to some players that are just absurdly, quantifiably superior to any other option.. and then there's "Balance" where some smooth-brained game designer starts making arbitrary and conflicting decisions in the name of keeping their other arbitrary decisions roughly equal, to the point of making moronic rulings for the sake of upholding some poorly conceived damage calculation or intended power curve.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >there's "Balance" where some smooth-brained game designer starts making arbitrary and conflicting decisions in the name of keeping their other arbitrary decisions roughly equal, to the point of making moronic rulings for the sake of upholding some poorly conceived damage calculation or intended power curve.
              Example(s)?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, and 5e.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      None of these ideas are wrong. Balance, especially. That shit is for board games and HEAVILY regulated competitive games, but it infected TTRPGs and now homosexuals get worked up about the game being "fair" when all they really want to do it find the perfect combo of bullshit powers to breeze through every challenge in their way.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I say balance is like realism: you don't actually need it, you just need something that vaguely resembles it so that everyone can buy in.

  54. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    TTRPG games that are 'narrative' focused are just boring. DnD is not 'a collaborative story telling game'

  55. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The Spellplague was the best thing to happen to the Forgotten Realms, and 4e was by far the best iteration of not only that setting, but also Dark Sun. I'll never forgive grogs for rejecting both.

  56. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    People who aren't genre savvy are better players than those who are. They don't know the cliches so they Plat into then rather than consciously playing against them, they assume less, and they're more willing to 'see what happens' rather than constantly trying to get ahead of things or edge out marginal advantages. Also the fact that they don't know the rules means they tend to try and role-playing solutions more, as opposed to 'I just roll [skill] to [accomplish goal]"

  57. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    ttrpgs with a combat focus always end up boiling down into stationary beatdowns where you roll a dice, and then subtract whatever stands for HP. doesn't matter how many abilities, skills, features, classes, or other game mechanics you tack on, it never addresses the flaw in combat focused rpgs where it's always a better idea to hit the enemy than do anything else.

  58. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >Give me your bad takes
    I think people on /tg/ can have good ideas sometimes

  59. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why the frick doesn't PF2e have Dragonborn? What am I going to do when my game switches from 5e? So fricking stupid.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      If you can't convert a racial stablock from one basic b***h D20 system to another basic b***h D20 system, I dunno what to tell you.

  60. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Balance is absolutely important, you fricking idiots. Players who have invested similar levels of time into a game are going to be frustrated if they are outclassed by their peers simply because some options are worse than others, and realistically you're going to end up with more homogenous characters if certain progression paths are obviously superior to others, even when playing with non-munchkins, especially given that more powerful classes and subclasses and what not are those that get more features than others, IE, more variety, more flexibility, more ways to have fun. None of this is to say that fun must be sacrificed on the altar of balance, but balance ought to be considered none the less.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Really I think this expectation is largely coming from people playing almost totally unrelated games.
      In a game where most of the focus is on player ingenuity anyway, it doesn't matter as much.
      In descriptive classless shit like I play, I'd say intra-party balance matters but that's a group effort. The game can't do it because the game doesn't explicitly tell you 'no you can't massage the points to bring a Tl10 assassin robot to this dungeon game," That's on the group.

      Secondarily, I think when most people say not to worry about balance, they more mean on the Gm side in adventure design, but this too is system dependent. GURPS is descriptive and I don't give a shit, I tell them what's there, and stat that based on what I described, and we're done. If you pay so little attention to it in some more mainstream games, everybody's going to be bored or die, I'll freely admit that much.

      So I suppose the real thrust of "Balance doesn't matter," is coming from people like myself for whom playing a game where I have to be that slavishly wed to the progression mechanics sounds atrocious.

  61. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I don't trust any GM who says they prefer GMing over playing.

    Every player should run games at points. GMing makes you a better player.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Nope
      I prefer DMing over playing because often times when you're playing it's more like one of those old hot seat multiplayer video games than a collaborative experience.
      When you're DMing at least you're constantly participating.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Exactly. You're selfish.

  62. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Complexity and crunch aren't actually fun to 99.9% of people.

    Something with 100+ pages for a core rulebook isn't even close to rules lite.
    So no, fate and other similarly badly written narrative games aren't fricking rules lite.

    In general any game system with a rulebook thicker than a board game pamphlet is more about rollplaying and autism then roleplaying or having fun with friends not already heavily invested in the hobby.

    Battletech is miserable to attempt to play using rules as written.

    Gurps even stripped down to it's core is pretty boring to actually play.

    D&D 3rd/3.5 edition was bloated to the extreme
    4th edition felt like someone tried to turn a party based online crpg into a table top game, which imo didn't work well.
    (Didn't play 5th ed enough to have strong opinions on it but it's probably shit too)

    A good judge of a well crafted rules system that I will actually play with other irl people often is if it is actually possible for a normie who has never played a ttrpg before able to learn and hop into a game session within a hour. I don't mean while being super handheld or learning a bit as they go along but mostly not knowing what they are doing.
    I mean they fully are able to comprehend the game and play it within a hour.
    Basically is it as easy to get new people into it as a board game. If it isn't then the pool of people to play with irl is going to be extremely restricted.

    I also don't use complicated systems to play solo because it isn't fun.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Complexity and crunch aren't actually fun to 99.9% of people.
      This isn't even a controversial opinion to the people who play those games. Basically pointing out that Candy Crush moms and Halo kids don't like Factorio and ArmA; exceedingly obvious.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      You are correct and this is a good thing. I wouldn't *want* to play with normies that get filtered by simple maths.

  63. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Maybe it's just because most of my friends are martial artist but using larp style combat duels and dice rolls non-combat is really fun and it's crazy that it isn't a more common thing.
    My nephew and his friends love it too, so it's kid friendly.

    I guess what I am saying is table top and larp should be mixed together.

  64. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Romance in games is fine as long as everyone in the table is comfortable with it and are adults about it.

  65. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    speaking to anyone here with encyclopedic knowledge of spells from all available sources, im looking for a 5ed version of a spell from ad&d, if it has ever in any capacity been ported over. Regenerate X Wounds series, which essentially let you cast the spell at the start of the day (or earlier) and when they take damage then the spell auto heals them appropriately instead of you needing to take an action in combat. Same spell level as the equivalent Cure X Wounds, but balanced by slightly less healing and not being able to focus a "most needed" target in exchange for better action economy.
    Alternately if it doesnt exist, if i just brought it in to my game, do you think it would still be balanced? Would you take it instead of Cures? Is it powercreep broken or trash broken?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The spells that give you Fast Healing 1 for a number of rounds equal to the max output of the equivalent Cure spell are balanced.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        thanks for responding even though i just realised i posted in the wrong thread oops

  66. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    you don't need loads of crunch and subsystems in a ttrpg. 4-6 basic stats that make checks, a couple unique mechanics that deal with the game's focus and relying on your GM/party thinking narratively is fine.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I don't like such games, but correct take regardless.

  67. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    5E is my favorite DnD edition

  68. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The real enemy of the hobby at the table isn't dumbass culture wars, narrativism, or even complexity, but the rapid video gaming by players and some designers, as well as time constraints due to real life.

  69. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    DnD does us all a favor by filtering most of the players in don't want to play with into a system I don't want to play. I hope it never dies.

  70. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Warhammer secondaries are superior in every way to the slaves who actually give gw their money

  71. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I find the D&D setting (with all the tolkienesque races) really dull and overdone. I wish we had more Sword and Sorcery RPGs that take more from Conan and CAS than Tolkien.

  72. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I have concluded that I hate furries. Furries aren't animal lovers. They're in fact just an extreme form of knuckle-headed HFY homosexualry. They're people who lack the basic decency of using their own species for their perverse fantasies, whether the dude is a human self-insert or a gay fursona. I fricking hate the use they make of animals, because it's really just a use, it's not an act of admiration or love. Leave the wolves alone you bastards, they've suffered enough

  73. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    this is actually a good opinion but i always found that despite their loathing for one another both 5e dnd/story gaming gays and osr gays all play games that in the end just boils down to saying "Mother may I do this" and then hoping you get something that you'd actually want. Which is why I find such games to be inferior to just free form roleplaying with maybe simple dice rolls to suss out conflicts in a chaotic way if two players are shonen one-uping each other.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Okay, but, and here me out here, that's not a game.
      Freeform RP is cool, I do a lot of it, but it fills a totally different need than playing a game, at least on my end.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        yes and a lot of osr stuff is just a really uncreative way to do it. DnD was only really saved by the 3rd edition and stuff like Planescape and Dark Sun that had it's own unique way of looking at standard fantasy stuff.
        Now that subversions and deconstructions are demonized nowadays we will just see waves after waves of boilerplate fantasy settings that are just reprints of some gay's homebrew that barely changes anything whatsoever. I would rather have a bunch of failed attempts of changing things and poor analysis of settings than a bunch of stock fantasy settings that all go through the same setting beats.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Fair. Can't really disagree with most of that. I think my brain glossed over 'such games' in your first post as just 'games,' which is a suspiciously common take on /traditional games/ for some reason so I didn't question it.
          Still a fan of more-or-less boilerplate fantasy, myself, but I don't really consume passive media about it, and haven't had nearly long enough to explore it in games to get bored of it. Then again, I may not have enough exposure for it to be truly stock. Dunno.
          So what I think I'm picking up is you'd be down for this autistic crunchy sword fighting game using the setting from Kenshi I keep putting off working on.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            i would love to see it posted. /tg/ used to do things, maybe it can do it again.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Was a thing I was going to run in GURPS, or the vestiges of GURPS, anyway. I just keep getting sidetracked by my other games, or game ideas, of which I have too many.
              I think the big blocker for a really sword-fighting focused game is my attempts to replace feinting, because feinting in gurps is fricking moronic.

              So get this, right? You've got two guys of equal skill. One wants to feint. Well how do we do that? We rolla contest of swordsmanship skill obviously. And if the guy doing the feinting wins, the other guy takes a penalty to active defenses equal to the difference in MoS. So this action has a 50/50 chance against a peer opponent of doing nothing, and an honestly not too awful chance, given the variance, of giving him something impossible and moronic like a -10 to defend, likely instantly ending the fight.
              This is dogshit. People will defend it with "oh well you gotta conceal if the feint worked or not," but that just obfuscates that it's dogshit. The player should know what the hell they're going to accomplish. The stakes for success or failure should be relatively visible. that's the entire reason you dipshits wrote the game on 3d6, right? Right.

              In any event, the rough plan is to take feinting and make it make it a skill+per opposed test still, but the feinter takes penalties to it to try and bid off specific active defense options. I feint to eliminate his retreat, I feint to draw his sword out of line and force him to dodge, I bid away the ability to use my blade for a bonus so I have to use a pommel strike to exploit the opening, all that kind of good shit. Bidding away attacks to boost feints is the important part, as this puts you in situations where maybe a mid-routine kick or pommel strike is actually a good exploit, instead of a moron option for niche contingencies. It also stops the defender from getting randomly skullfricked by capping the effect, so hopefully it'll be an improvement in testing.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Have you ever looked into that one conan rpg who's name I forget the name of? Riddle of Steel or some shit? Maybe you can pick up some shit from there. I Have no other comments honestly as I am still trying to figure ou tthe shit I want to use for my game

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Yeah. I actually own a hardcopy of that I got right before the price rocketed into the stratosphere.
                Its system is far too different to adapt much, and doesn't play in a way I remember enjoying, honestly. If there's anything worth stealing from it, it's, IMO, the level up system.
                In short, if I recall correctly, I haven't gotten it off the shelf in awhile
                >Your characters motivations are numbered stats
                >When you're following your motivations, you can add that many dice to your checks
                >You can burn a point for some more extreme bonus I honestly forget
                >Burning these is how you get XP.
                I believe they also played into the starting point allotment for your replacement character if you retire or die. Neat system.
                So far I've been fixing GURPS mostly because it manages to hit the sweet spot for me. Where it's not too simplistic and "i hit the guy"-ey, but not an autismal attempt to model actual swordfighting practices.

                What are you trying to figure out? Might have at least some idea.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                It isn't really for a tabletop system in particular. It's just some stupid roguelike. I got tired of all the fantasy shit proliferating the genre and wanted to do something a smidge different.
                Which is probably why I sound kind of bored of the genre, the only fantasy shit I'm even remotely interested in atm is zorbus and that has some interesting martial abilities that aren't weeaboo fightan magics. You can turn stamina into HP, a haste-like ability, and shit.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >turning stamina into HP
                Neat, that's a part of the replacement damage system I've been working on. Splits HP up into Hitpoints and Injury points, armor's mostly for turning injury into hits, and FP can be burned back into HP. Mostly solves the problem with armor being weirdly binary. And yeah, martial interest is a struggle. It's most of what keeps me with this game. I went from beinga die-hard 3.5 castergay to "who even wants to play with spells?" not long after making the transition. Some weeaboo fightan magics aside.

                And yeah, that follows. Not to turn this into Ganker shit too much, but I want to say the last thing I played with a really unique fantasy setting was Geneforge. Still have to go finish that some day but the longer I put it off the worse it runs on new computers, and it's become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
                Toyed with the idea of making a roguelike before myself. Had this idea for a sort of strategy game hybrid about driving a drone carrier truck into a space dungeon. Kinda Duskers by way of nethack, I guess.

  74. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    If I have never tried a line of RPG's before, start with the current and in print edition before looking at previous editions. I cannot be bothered to ferret around trying to get out of print books. INB4 pirate.

  75. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Some of my unironic opinions I'm sure someone will disagree with
    Anima beyond fantasy isn't as complicated as people make it out to be
    Battle tech is painfully more complicated than what it was made out to me
    Battletech a setting predicated on being a tactical hard scifi makes less sense than 40k a setting that defined by how nonsense it is and I hold this opinion 100%
    People who play exclusively female characters should be put on watch(this includes female players)
    GMs who try to make "sexy" NPCs should be beaten over the head

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >put on watch
      What am I looking out for?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Battle tech is painfully more complicated than what it was made out to me
      it's weird that I find this both true and false at the same time. Battletech is, at the decision making level, a brutally simple game. Where do I stand, what can I afford to shoot, what is the balance of my offensive and defensive bonuses if I do that? That's all there is to it.
      And then we spend four hours resolving fiddly resolution over which we have no control.

      Here's an actual unpopular opinion for /tg/:
      5e's Advantage is a good mechanic for a bad game.

      I think it's a bad mechanic as implemented. At its core, the idea of rolling two dice and taking the higher/lower is absolutely fine.
      Using it to replace any and all other possible mechanical nuance in the system, however, is shit. Unless "Good, bad, fine,' are the only states you want to model, ever.

      There is unironically nothing wrong with human, male, fighter.

      Correct.
      People who use playing ahuman male fighter as some sort of identity, however, are unpleasant.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Unless "Good, bad, fine,' are the only states you want to model, ever.
        Yes.
        5e's decision to remove the cancer that is modifier stacking is a good one for the bad game that it is.
        >But I want my +2 for flanking!
        That's tactical depth right up until people continuously make one-trick-pony donut steel builds to bypass certain encounters and crash full speed into others. If all your tactical decisions were made seven levels back by selecting a prestige class, your game is dogshit.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          The fact that 3.5 used modifiers in tactical situations like shit doesn't make them bad.

          >And then we spend four hours resolving fiddly resolution over which we have no control.
          Exactly this is the thing that made me especially hate BT from a ttrpg perspective I was in a game and the combat was almost boring lyrics simple(probably cause everyone controlled 1 mech) while everything else from the start was painfully tedious with no actual room for choice, I can see why it's more popular for purely war gaming over the horrid ttrpg rules

          IMO it's only marginally better in a wargame situation. And I, picrel, made a god's honest attempt to play a lot of battletech.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Oh god.....
            Now I'm remembering that a few friends of mine who are major programing and spread sheet autists have been working for almost half a year of trying to automate running a nation and waging wars using the battle tech rules.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Yeah I'd wanted to do something like that myself. The unit design aspect would be fun for such a thing. But it's a little too solved for custom units, and then the actual resolution isn't really that fun.
              "Rework Dirtside II for that," is another thing on my eternal list of projects. Seems more suited.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Interesting how you only view this from a character building/power gaming perspective.
          I think stacking modifiers are a thing of immersion and ultimately roleplay.
          In 5e, I'm as likely to hit someone who can't currently see me as I'm to hit someone who can't currently see me but is also tied up, on the floor and glowing with magic so I can hit him better.
          It should make a big difference but it doesn't ans it takes me out of the game.

          Not to mention that the advantage system just invites its own breed of powergaming, meaning that players will avoid stacking advantage even if it would make sense.
          Tackling a blinded enemy to the ground so my friends can hit him better would make sense narratively but in 5e we get only one advantage anyway so I will attack with my weapon instead.
          It narrows the pool of optimal actions and many supporting actions/spells become useless as soon as you have a single source of advantage.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >And then we spend four hours resolving fiddly resolution over which we have no control.
        Exactly this is the thing that made me especially hate BT from a ttrpg perspective I was in a game and the combat was almost boring lyrics simple(probably cause everyone controlled 1 mech) while everything else from the start was painfully tedious with no actual room for choice, I can see why it's more popular for purely war gaming over the horrid ttrpg rules

  76. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Here's an actual unpopular opinion for /tg/:
    5e's Advantage is a good mechanic for a bad game.

  77. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    There is unironically nothing wrong with human, male, fighter.

  78. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Black people should be included in your homebrew world so black players can play a character they can identify with

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      My black player prefers to play freak shit same as most other current ttrpg players.
      Why be black when you can be a purple super saiyan ripoff who uses potions for shonen style power ups.
      And his character before that was a goblin that was clearly inspired by Rocky, down to the flag trunks and using his face to block punches, lol.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Bro i've run games with a black guy, in a game he was in he played the whitest nerdiest guy you've ever met.

      Skin color is the last thing you should care about when making a character unless you're playing some 1940s historical.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Can't you identify with a character with a different skin color than yours ?
      If you're in a closed off part of the world, it's weird seeing the skin color diversity you'd see in your average large metropolitan subway. Coherence in worldbuilding primes over all
      The region where its logical for people to have black skin color will be almost all black and the region where it's logical for people to be pale as shit because they don't get much sunlight should be almost all white

      why mention black people specifically and not all ethnic groups though ?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Why I would want to play with black people, they are the most uneducated, shrill, second dumbest and violent of all the races and the more I can get away of them the better. In my world the darkest people are descendants of melanesians and sentinelese, where is africa is basically reptile world.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >second
        who are the first?

  79. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    If you’re a fascist, you’re not welcome to play tabletop games. It’s against the rules. If you’re reading this and thinking, “You just call everyone you disagree with a fascist,” then you’re probably a fascist, or incapable of drawing inferences from context and acknowledging a dangerous political climate that causes the oppressed to be hyperbolic. Don’t play this game. Heal yourself. Grow. Learn. Watch some Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood or something.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Opposite of controversial, but people who unironically put "The Olivia Hill Rule" in their games or celebrate it's inclusion should not be welcome in the industry. They can stay on twitter and reddit, where they belong.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      What about other types of authoritarians? Do monarchists count? Transhumanists? Radical enviromentalists? Etc. etc.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        stop sockpuppeting on your own shitty bait, you troony butthole

  80. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The overwhelming majority of "rules light" games instead of reducing complexity just offload it onto the GM

  81. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I don't say this to apply to you fine gentlemen, but rather friends and guys I chat with out the game shops and LCS in my town. I know you guys know your shit. Yet, I'm convinced most people I meet who run "homebrew" games are too lazy to learn lore. I'm in no way saying you have to follow a game lore nor am I saying that you aren't allowed to create your own realms. Just pointing out that *every* time I talk to someone RL they're ALL playing homebrew D&D 5 or V5 games. Whenever I ask what's your favorite realm (Dark Sun for me) or their thoughts on what happened to the Nosferatu between Revised and 5th Edition... silence. The subject just drops or changes. I think its just laziness. Those people read character creation, combat rules, and spells nothing else. You don't have to follow game lore. But you should at least know it.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Nah, that can apply to us too. I don't really do games with lore much at all anymore, and I never really cared.
      There are some exceptions, I've played some games very tied to their settings where they wouldn't work in any other context. But D&D isn't one of those, remotely. The game started with no lore, and what there is for it is a mostly extraneous secondary feature. The lore to D&D is exactly as important to the experience as familiarizing yourself with the example setting for GURPS.
      I don't think I even know people who would disagree with the above.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >too lazy to learn lore.
      Correct. Every time I've tried to run an official setting, the on-boarding process for getting a table of 3 to 5 people to give a frick about a setting that they haven't even had the chance to be immersed in yet, always goes poorly and we inevitably end up skirting around or abandoning any pretenses of adhering to a canon setting.

      Also, D&D 5e is a piss poor example because there is no lore in the PHB. The DMG is frontloaded with "how to make your own setting" anyways. Setting books were released years after the base game and all the adventure books gradually introduce the setting as part of the adventure and most of them are forgettable as frick, because really, who the frick is getting invested in "shitty hill in Barovia" or "shitty mud town a little further in Barovia" or "gypsy camp #3, still in Barovia"

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >lore
      It's called "fluff", and it's just not interesting in itself. It exists to give context to your games, so if you haven't played any games in a given setting it's irrelevant and largely meaningless.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Correct. But mainly because playing in official settings forces you to have enough background info so that you can RP effectively.
      So if a player wants to play at your table but doesn't know the setting very well, there will come situations where the player has to ask what his char would think/know about a certain topic because it might be an obvious thing for a character living in that setting (so wouldn't even need a knowledge check) but is impossible to know for the player. This is usually worst when playing a Cleric but not knowing shit about the God your character worships nor the doctrine of their church. Then it comes to questions like
      >would my Cleric think this is acceptable behavior
      While it's not that big of an issue, I prefer generic settings for that reason.
      Of course it's way more fun when all players are playing in a setting they all know very well for maximum immersion but I won't force my players to play Bloodborne 10 times do we can have a one shot in Yharnam.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Lore in ttrpg has become an obligatory vestigial feature.
      Almost everyone has more fun playing in a world they're personally invested in.
      But if you exclude setting, you lose an important marketing tool.
      People know DnD as that high fantasy rpg even though it's been hacked and homebrewed to be able to play every setting under the sun regardless of appropriateness.
      It's used to attract new customers and secondaries who've never touched a game in their life.
      Easier to attract attention with a specific aesthetic than whatever is in the cover of the Fate Core rulebook.
      Also an excuse increase revenue by releasing modules and IP-harvesting to adapt to other media.

  82. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Another bad opinion that I usually keep to myself. (Thank you anon for making this thread. Its nice to say some of this out loud.) Is that modern adults must be dumber than I thought. I'm not trying to be mean or a gatekeeper but there's something to be said for a group of people who celebrate D&D5 and V5 for being "easier to learn" when my cousins and I were able to figure out AD&D 2nd Ed on our own as pre-teens in the early 90s.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I blame the slow transition of the concept of hobbies towards being solely a different form of entertainment. Why would you put effort into entertainment? I don't have to do math to watch a movie, lmao. Basically how people seem to think of it.

  83. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    E6 PF1 is the best Old School game ever. It has modern game design like unified d20 mechanics, but old school nonsense with all of Pathfinder's weird corner cases and circumstantial bonuses. The level cap at 6 forces games to stay gritty and travel remains a meaningful drain of resources. And you better be tracking encumbrance, ammunition, food, water, etc. For extra based, Full Casters use the slow XP track, Partial Casters use the medium track, and Non-casters use the fast track.

  84. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Fudging rolls is fine if it serves the story

  85. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Armor soak is superior to armor making you harder to hit.

  86. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I love pathfinder 2e and I don't get why people hate it.

  87. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Probably not unpopular here but I hate races.
    On both my games everyone plays humans which was achieved by
    5e: Making human a +2 any, +1 any, can have one feat AND steal any feature from any race justified by being "ancestry".
    PF2e: Humans start with an archetype.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Some posts aside, this was a pretty comfy and agreeable thread. Before it sinks, I just thought I'd applaud that. Imagine, 300 posts of civil discussion of games. what is /tg/ coming to?

      I've always played with nonhuman races, but I still don't think it's a hot take or anything. A game with nonhumans vs a game with only humans have very different tones and appeals, and I think a humans-only dark fantasy sort of game is something I'd genuinely enjoy running some day.

      Interesting how you only view this from a character building/power gaming perspective.
      I think stacking modifiers are a thing of immersion and ultimately roleplay.
      In 5e, I'm as likely to hit someone who can't currently see me as I'm to hit someone who can't currently see me but is also tied up, on the floor and glowing with magic so I can hit him better.
      It should make a big difference but it doesn't ans it takes me out of the game.

      Not to mention that the advantage system just invites its own breed of powergaming, meaning that players will avoid stacking advantage even if it would make sense.
      Tackling a blinded enemy to the ground so my friends can hit him better would make sense narratively but in 5e we get only one advantage anyway so I will attack with my weapon instead.
      It narrows the pool of optimal actions and many supporting actions/spells become useless as soon as you have a single source of advantage.

      Correct answer. It's about the narrative constraint, not the fact anyone's autistically mad about there not being numbers to exploit. Well, a few people are I'm sure.

  88. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    PvP can be fun for players involved and the GM

  89. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Humans, Dwarves and Elves are the mirepoix of fantasy and you don't really need anything else. Other things can be good conditionally, but you can never go wrong with the trinity.

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