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Terrible Opinions posted:Can we please not have this sort of thing, when the actual reason most people only use 5th ed is because they got introduced to it through Critical Role and don't really care about mechanics. Didn't you just say the same thing but with less sass? Or is that the joke and I'm the one being dumb?
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Jun 23, 2019 07:05
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It's the whole people are brain damaged weirdos for liking game I don't like thing. Especially when the game in question is something fairly mainstream.
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Jun 23, 2019 07:16
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Night10194 posted:The OGL's shadow is long and dark. No I'm pretty sure that's just the Skidmark from when Zak S poo poo his pants on the last day of Gen Con 2017.
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Jun 23, 2019 07:50
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Terrible Opinions posted:It's the whole people are brain damaged weirdos for liking game I don't like thing. Especially when the game in question is something fairly mainstream. But it’s not that? We can discuss if 5e is a good dungeon crawler to cover you in good tummy-feels from back in the glorious before time (it’s not but whatever). But it sure as poo poo isn’t good for other things. We can discuss your opinion on different kinds of hammer, but no matter what, they aren’t great for digging holes and you should get a shovel.
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Jun 23, 2019 08:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:But it’s not that? yeah but nobody here is saying 5e is a good game. the objection is characterising those who enjoy playing it with phrases like "brain-sick musings of people who have never been exposed to any other system and refuse to leave the comfort of their mud hovels." part. it's just kind of needlessly contemptful? like, it's true 5e is bad, it's also true that a lot of people are fundamentally pretty shallowly immersed in the RPG scene and are able to have a fun time playing a poorly designed system because they're playing it with their friends, and I don't think there's anything wrong with them for enjoying that and not caring about being Better RPG Players and Having Fun More Effectively?
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Jun 23, 2019 11:04
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And if anyone was making the argument that 5e is a bad game they shouldn't play, you'd be right on target. However, what we're discussing is that 5e is a terrible fit for doing anything outside of what it is designed to do, and recommending it as a good fit for other uses is bad and wrong.
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Jun 23, 2019 11:36
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Liquid Communism posted:And if anyone was making the argument that 5e is a bad game they shouldn't play, you'd be right on target. I don't think anyone has recommended 5e as a good fit for anything ever; it was pointed out that it's used that way because it's a popular system among people who may not have a lot of exposure to better systems, for any number of reasons, and I think what some folks are taking issue with is that phrases like "brain-sick musings of people who have never been exposed to any other system and refuse to leave the comfort of their mud hovels" is basically lovely gatekeeping and the hobby as a whole would probably be better off without it, I hope this helps
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Jun 23, 2019 12:16
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The hobbby as a whole would also be better off without 5e, but here we are.
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Jun 23, 2019 13:37
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moths posted:The hobbby as a whole would also be better off without 5e, but here we are. This sounds like defending gatekeeping because 5th edition is just that bad. Might as well call them brain damaged troglodytes if all they want to do is play the game that they saw on YouTube or that their friend heard about. What is the draw for people to explore other games/systems if people outside their group are calling them brain-sick and living in mud hovels? If I was playing 5th ed and my choices were presented as “keep having the fun I’m having right now, even if the system isn’t the best” and “spend time with people who were insulting me because I’m playing the most popular game and I haven’t checked out other games” then I’d stay firmly in my bubble where I’m having fun. That’s why this gatekeeping is lovely, it actively discourages people from exploring the hobby.
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Jun 23, 2019 14:25
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Oh I would actually agree that it'd have been better if 5th ed never existed and the Adventure Zone/Critical Role/Stranger Things were effectively tie-ins to a better game. The people is just that the reason most people do poo poo like try to use 5th ed for a space opera game, is just because it's what they already know and they were sold on rpgs by a podcast about it rather than any extremely online rpg community. No one gets brain damage from playing rpgs, unfortunately the largest influex in rpg players we've seen this decade is due to podcasts and tv shows about a bad one.
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Jun 23, 2019 14:35
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Yeah, there's nothing wrong with those players. They're just in part of the long cycle of discovering that d20 isn't a 'universal system'. Partly because there are no universal systems, since rules and mechanics are a part of tone and help shape fiction in this context.
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Jun 23, 2019 14:37
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, there's nothing wrong with those players. They're just in part of the long cycle of discovering that d20 isn't a 'universal system'. Partly because there are no universal systems, since rules and mechanics are a part of tone and help shape fiction in this context. You're right, there isn't anything wrong with those players and my rhetoric is extreme, because I'm exhausted by the nigh-infinite number of heartbreakers-in-waiting people drum up when there are beautifully crafted games out there that do literally everything about their chosen genre better.
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Jun 23, 2019 15:26
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VirtualBasement posted:This sounds like defending gatekeeping because 5th edition is just that bad. Might as well call them brain damaged troglodytes if all they want to do is play the game that they saw on YouTube or that their friend heard about. D&D is already a barrier that corrales players into a garbage design ghetto, teaches them how gaming "should be," and blocks access to RPGs as a whole because why would we eat anywhere else when we know Olive Garden is ok?
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Jun 23, 2019 15:46
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moths posted:D&D is already a barrier that corrales players into a garbage design ghetto, teaches them how gaming "should be," and blocks access to RPGs as a whole because why would we eat anywhere else when we know Olive Garden is ok? I really don't think those are features inherent to 5e It's not Olive Garden's fault if people refuse to eat somewhere else Andrast fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Jun 23, 2019 |
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Jun 23, 2019 15:49
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I am always amused when people start talking about the wondrous designs of the RPG industry, a niche hobby incapable of attracting people who can actually do math because said people can go get a real job, and also if you use math in RPGs you're not a REAL roleplayer.
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Jun 23, 2019 15:57
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Andrast posted:I really don't think those are features inherent to 5e They actually are - WotC leverages considerable resources to maintain D&D as the face of roleplaying games.
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Jun 23, 2019 16:05
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moths posted:They actually are - WotC leverages considerable resources to maintain D&D as the face of roleplaying games. So wotc does marketing for their own product? Andrast fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Jun 23, 2019 |
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Jun 23, 2019 16:07
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moths posted:They actually are - WotC leverages considerable resources to maintain D&D as the face of roleplaying games.
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Jun 23, 2019 16:11
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Terrible Opinions posted:They've been doing a real pisspoor job of it given that the majority of their players were brought in by independent podcasts. Used to be independent. Now sponsored and supported by and oh hey what do you know a bullshit brand ambassador job just happened to open up. I did that 90 minute live show during the Descent 2019 event (because I thought hey maybe they did actually muzzle Mearls) and my reward was a completely unlocked Beyond. I have every book in there now apparently.
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Jun 23, 2019 16:38
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neaden posted:Beyond the Wall does a great job of creating a social context for the PCs as a D&D game by having you create your village and backstories as a group and having that play into your characters stats. Goblinville does similar. WHat's available in your village at start derives directly from what jobs the PC's have.
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Jun 23, 2019 16:39
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moths posted:D&D is already a barrier that corrales players into a garbage design ghetto, teaches them how gaming "should be," and blocks access to RPGs as a whole because why would we eat anywhere else when we know Olive Garden is ok? D&D is a fine game to play, it's just that 5e is a bad edition of the game. Jeez, don't treat people who just want to stab orcs with their friends as less than.
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Jun 23, 2019 16:45
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I can’t claim to know everyone’s.reason for bagging on 5e and the lack of curiosity that players have around exploring other games, but I think that the piss-poor politics of D&D are part of it, not just the incredibly bad design principles. D&D is incredibly faux-progressive, talking up the importance of inclusion with one hand while on the other hand including material that is insensitive at best (like the treatment of Corellon) to outright bigoted at the worst (Chult). All while the names of a fascist and a domestic abuser are on the front pages of the book. This only makes it all the more frustrating that people are unwilling to leave the bubble of 5e and that I do put the blame on the players for. Their lack of curiosity and unwillingness to examine the biases inherent in the text suggest a viewpoint that privileges their entertainment over the potential for real harm done by the messaging of the game. That the game is mechanically flawed and that there are a cornucopia of games that actually do present a more politically sound ideology out there only sours me further on people whose sole interest is to scratch the surface and give money to the most commercially successful brand in the industry.
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Jun 23, 2019 16:55
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Arivia posted:D&D is a fine game to play, it's just that 5e is a bad edition of the game. Jeez, don't treat people who just want to stab orcs with their friends as less than. 5e isn't the best edition - but I think it's better for almost everything than 1e, 2e, 3.0. 3.5 (and Pathfinder). Which is a lot of the best known editions - and 5e does some things better than the rest.
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Jun 23, 2019 20:36
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I kind of like how a lot of the people I've met and have played with at one-shot nights and such are well-adjusted people who have gotten into it in the last year or two rather than being grognards who are steeped in decades of it. But I kind of wish that if it had to be D&D that 5E was more than bare minimum effort D&D flavoured entertainment product. Maybe there will be a well-considered 5.5E or 6E that takes into the huge number of play experience that it has gotten as the most popular D&D edition ever? Probably not.
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Jun 23, 2019 20:45
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BattleMaster posted:Maybe there will be a well-considered 5.5E or 6E that takes into the huge number of play experience that it has gotten as the most popular D&D edition ever? Probably not. The best thing WotC could do right now (for their TTRPG efforts, anyway) is fire Mearls and have his replacement start working on 6E.
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Jun 23, 2019 20:59
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neonchameleon posted:5e isn't the best edition - but I think it's better for almost everything than 1e, 2e, 3.0. 3.5 (and Pathfinder). Which is a lot of the best known editions - and 5e does some things better than the rest. christ what no there is nothing that 5e cannot do better than any one of the editions you have listed there objectively 5e is trash from a game design perspective compared to those, let alone in combination
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Jun 23, 2019 21:00
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Andrast posted:So wotc does marketing for their own product? They do, and it's something gamers are extremely unequipped to deal with. Hell, just look at all the pushback I got on this page. WotC put a lot of money and effort nurturing that positive brand image. More effort than they put into designing 5e, anyway. And nobody else is, at least on that scale. A lot of it comes back to the smaller guys lacking the resources to back all the streamers, organized play, brand ambassadors, influencers, etc. They're putting a lot of work into making sure gamers stay D&D exclusive brand-loyalists, which isn't hard since it's always been the biggest name in town. But it's still pretty crap for the industry as a whole.
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Jun 23, 2019 21:23
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neonchameleon posted:5e isn't the best edition - but I think it's better for almost everything than 1e, 2e, 3.0. 3.5 (and Pathfinder). Which is a lot of the best known editions - and 5e does some things better than the rest. There's just that little thing about Mearls and his rapist harasser and nazi best pals... (Also no, 5e is still poo poo.) Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jun 23, 2019 |
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Jun 23, 2019 21:28
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moths posted:They do, and it's something gamers are extremely unequipped to deal with. Hell, just look at all the pushback I got on this page. WotC put a lot of money and effort nurturing that positive brand image. More effort than they put into designing 5e, anyway.  . Only real way to resolve it is buying the games you like, running games for new people in a friendly manner, providing coverage for them if you have a podcast or similar venue, and vote for art grants in your country, and push for rpgs to be included in those grants.
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Jun 23, 2019 21:29
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Terrible Opinions posted:No one gets brain damage from playing rpgs, unfortunately the largest influex in rpg players we've seen this decade is due to podcasts and tv shows about a bad one. "Brain damage" is an incredibly insulting, reductive framing of the combination of default play assumptions and in-character behaviors D&D teaches new players and DMs, and it sucks because the implied dismissal of the vast majority of tabletop RPG consumers won't do anything to fix any perceived problems in D&D or its pervasiveness. We should be exploring how the rules, reputation, and design of educational material (both in the form of player and DM advice and premade modules) train people to have certain expectations and task-resolution habits in tabletop RPGs. Meinberg posted:I can’t claim to know everyone’s.reason for bagging on 5e and the lack of curiosity that players have around exploring other games, but I think that the piss-poor politics of D&D are part of it, not just the incredibly bad design principles. D&D is incredibly faux-progressive, talking up the importance of inclusion with one hand while on the other hand including material that is insensitive at best (like the treatment of Corellon) to outright bigoted at the worst (Chult). All while the names of a fascist and a domestic abuser are on the front pages of the book. I doubt a lack of "curiosity" is the biggest problem in getting something like Lasers & Feelings to overtake D&D. There are games out that have gotten a boost in sales because D&D podcasters have run short games or one-shots using solid indie RPGs, and there's also a lot of successful podcasts that host main games of other lumbering elder not-perfect rules systems like Vampire and Shadowrun, and even more beloved story games like various PBtA systems and FATE. People can spend a long time and a lot of money on a single RPG before they feel like they've plumbed it sufficiently, and some never get tired of it. It happens in all manner of hobbies, which is why you get things like that recent Todd Howard interview where he pointed out that thousands of people still play Skyrim daily and Bethesda's management has been thinking of all the microtransaction money they aren't getting from them. People don't dig deeper than the surface because they don't realize that there's anything there. Or because they assume getting into every game will require as much work as D&D. Or because there's no reliable way to find good alternatives other than trusting the word of mouth on obscure forums, and following the right people on Twitter. Because scrolling through DriveThruRPG is as helpful as scrolling through every game on Steam, and you're as likely to find A Quiet Year as you are Black Tokyo that way. Sure, there are going to be some who uncritically play D&D or try to apply it to a setting that's not a high fantasy dungeon crawler because  We're also cursed to live in a timeline when people still compare everything to a moment or character in a Harry Potter book. That doesn't mean that Harry Potter didn't lead to a massive surge in children reading other books, or cause publishers, writers, movie-produces, etc. to reevaluate the value of literature aimed at tween to teens and create Young Adult Fiction as an independent literary market.
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Jun 23, 2019 21:30
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Some people are saying don't blame D&D for its bad players. Other people are saying don't blame players for D&D's bad design. I just wanna know: should I hate the player or hate the game?
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Jun 23, 2019 22:07
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You should almost always hate the game. Deflecting blame onto the players is one of the ways lovely games shield their own bad design.
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Jun 23, 2019 22:08
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Jimbozig posted:Some people are saying don't blame D&D for its bad players. Other people are saying don't blame players for D&D's bad design. It depends. If the player is being intransigent and refusing to play anything else, it's reasonable to blame the player. In most cases, though, you should blame the game.
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Jun 23, 2019 22:11
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I've seen plenty of people who say they don't want to try other games because they don't want to spend time trying to "master" another RPG. Which I get is a statement on the person saying that, but I feel like that's the kind of mindset D&D, a game with a million ins and outs and bits to master, does foster.
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Jun 23, 2019 22:11
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Has anything other than Pathfinder (or perhaps back in the day White Wolf) had any significant success in the world beyond the dedicated rpg fans? It is pretty telling that the biggest threat to the utter crushing dominance of D&D was when they mixed it up and their former jilted magazine publishers just decided to make more 3.5. For all that Apocalypse World has given us what is essentially our decades d20 system, how many copies did it sell? Dungeon World? Fate? I assume that the main reason for the continued success of d&d is that everyone has heard of it. That counts so much more than being a better product at the end of the day.
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Jun 23, 2019 22:13
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Apocalypse World has the same problem late 2nd edition D&D had. Most of its supplements are essentially new campaigns. People aren't going to buy them for existing games so you're cannibalizing your own market. edit: also hate the game because D&D 5th ed is literally never the best option for any game type. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Jun 23, 2019 |
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Jun 23, 2019 22:27
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Terrible Opinions posted:It's the whole people are brain damaged weirdos for liking game I don't like thing. Especially when the game in question is something fairly mainstream.  On one hand: several posts on that search dismiss the claim. On the other: Search is hosed so it might be omitting results older than 2 years ago.
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Jun 23, 2019 23:47
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It's an old Ron Edwards quote and I think it was about Vampire the Masquerade of all things. It has come up in different contexts since then.
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Jun 23, 2019 23:53
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Arivia posted:christ what The games I've listed are all car-crashes from a design perspective and one thing 5e does better than than either edition of AD&D or any of the 3.X family is that it is easier to learn to play due to things like ascending AC, a lack of nonsense like non-weapon proficiencies, saving throws not being disconnected from almost everything else (easier to learn, not better when it compares to classic saving throws), and more. This is not a high bar - but you're I think forgetting just how fiddly and awkward 3.X is and how say what you like about THAC0 being rear end-backwards it was actually an improvement in speed and comprehensibility over the 1e look up tables. Also when it comes to being inherently evil, the whole purpose behind 1e was to screw Arneson out of royalties - and Gygax did it by adding in awkward and poorly thought out house rules and claiming it was an entirely different game. Meanwhile 3.5 is the shameless cash grab edition, intended to break backwards compatibility after a mere 2.5 years. I'm not remotely defending 5e as good, unlike BECMI/the Rules Cyclopaedia, or 4e. Where 5e does things better than those editions it's because they aren't trying to do those things at all - and in almost all the cases where 5e does something better than the Rules Cyclopaedia 4e does it far better - and vise-versa. I'm just pointing out that with 5e as the current edition it's easy to forget the problems with older ones.
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Jun 24, 2019 00:10
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Plutonis posted:
The results go back to 2011, but it won't show archived threads, and I think it takes a while for recent posts to show up in search because of the post history stuff being janked up.
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Jun 24, 2019 00:18
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