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Only the worst things to happen this year...so far. The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG as an Industry: Dungeons and Dragons This Past Year (CONTINUED) Dungeons and Dragons This Past Year (CONTINUED) quote:#ttrpg #fantasy #dnd quote:Spelljammer: A D&D race called the Hadozee, a primate-esq race, was given a background connected to slavery. Wizards of the Coast (D&D's publishers) apologized and removed that aspect of the race. Comstar fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Dec 15, 2023 |
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Dec 15, 2023 08:07
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quote:GOTG: One of the artists for the book fed their art to an A.I. Art Generator to finish their work faster.
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Dec 15, 2023 08:34
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Zoeb posted:There's also been talk in dungeons & dragons circles about a DM shortage. I run games myself. My experience has been that there is no DM shortage, what happens instead is that you go looking for players and they turn their nose up at everything that isn't DnD 5e, and even then turn their nose up at it when it's not on their terms. Sometimes it's a pre-existing group of five or six friends looking for a dungeon master and they want you to run a module they already picked out and have already made characters for. I would feel like I was free entertainment instead of someone who is actually part of the group. Moreover I would not have creative freedom in that situation. They want the dungeon master to be the dungeon submissive. loving lol that 5e's shittiness and the attitudes it's fostered in players have finally come home to roost. DMing it sucks, people don't want to do it anymore.
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Dec 15, 2023 10:16
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I mean, that seems decently fair if you have a collection of people who want to run a specific module and specific game lol. Like if me and some friends read up on Blood Lords found it cool thematically and wanted to play that module and made characters but none of us could or wanted to DM we would look for one, who would run it for us. loving Lmao at the notion of dungeon submissive. Sorry that the players and not just the DM want to have some agency in picking what is played? Yes the DM is a player, but like no poo poo if group of players come to you with a premade module they want to play in any system they are only limiting your freedom in the sense that this is the thing story module they want to play. It's no different than a GM and a friend saying hey we want to run Abom Vaults, and then they go looking for players who want to play Abom Vaults. Dexo fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Dec 15, 2023 |
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Dec 15, 2023 11:42
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My rant on 5e is basically that it is the laziest designed RPG I’ve ever experienced from the publisher with by far the most resources. Every design decision was made on the basis of how popular it was with the player base and how easy it made life for the designers. “Rulings not rules” was a bit of car salesman bushwah to cover the pure laziness of making the GM do all the work of balancing the game. It sounds great, but in reality it’s cover for not doing the job of making the game workable. From an Indy designer, that would be regrettable and a black mark against their game, but from the group with infinite resources compared to every other RPG maker it’s loving outrageous. I believe effort in games design and trying to make rules that are both elegant and complex is the best thing a designer can do and the games that do that are the best games. It offends me on a visceral level that 5e is monstrously dominantly successful as it’s the most loathsomely lazy edition of D&D. TLDR: If there was work in the bed, they’d sleep on the floor.
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Dec 15, 2023 12:25
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Completely outside the whole 5e discourse, I don't think elegant and complex rules are inherently better than elegant and simple rules.
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Dec 15, 2023 12:28
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YggdrasilTM posted:Completely outside the whole 5e discourse, I don't think elegant and complex rules are inherently better than elegant and simple rules. That one is personal preference as it’s the hardest to do, but I think ultimately the most rewarding for people who enjoy engaging with mechanics. It’s also vanishingly rare.
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Dec 15, 2023 12:31
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YggdrasilTM posted:Completely outside the whole 5e discourse, I don't think elegant and complex rules are inherently better than elegant and simple rules. you're not wrong, and it's certainly possible to design a game with [relatively] simple rules that still produces "good" gameplay, but the issue with 5e is that exists in this space where the simplicity of the rules ends up harming the whole project because it's just holes in the design rather than deliberately crafted niches for the players to fill with their creativity
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Dec 15, 2023 12:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:you're not wrong, and it's certainly possible to design a game with [relatively] simple rules that still produces "good" gameplay, but the issue with 5e is that exists in this space where the simplicity of the rules ends up harming the whole project because it's just holes in the design rather than deliberately crafted niches for the players to fill with their creativity And it's "simple rules" that fill three 300 page core books and an extra expansion book every year or so. No one got mad at a rulings-not-rules approach for Moldvay Basic D&D because that book is 64 pages long for EVERYTHING. If you're gonna sell me a $50 book every year, it should really come with more rules than "the GM will make something up for this!" because I can already do that for free.
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Dec 15, 2023 13:20
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Ghost Leviathan posted:loving lol that 5e's shittiness and the attitudes it's fostered in players have finally come home to roost. DMing it sucks, people don't want to do it anymore. I mean, much as I'd like to believe that, I doubt it. Every TTRPG community I've ever been in doesn't have enough GMs to meet player demand. e: The last time I signed up for a public game on SA I was one of like 30 people who applied (to a PBTA game, even, so it's not a question of rules complexity either); the LANCER discord had to restrict LFG posts to GMs only because the reverse is basically useless. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Dec 15, 2023 |
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Dec 15, 2023 14:12
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HidaO-Win posted:My rant on 5e is basically that it is the laziest designed RPG I’ve ever experienced from the publisher with by far the most resources. D&D 5E was an ashcan copy. It was designed to get rid of 4E by doing something else with the D&D name because the designer and his rear end in a top hat internet friends had a bug up his rear end about 4E. This lack of care manifested in the stuff you listed and so much more, like gridded combat being an optional rule and Warlords getting the cut because "you can't shout someone's arm back on" when 5E itself has a textbox in the combat chapter saying HP is stamina and fighting spirit and the only major wounds are caused by the attack that drops someone to zero. It's a shame that its popularity is completely in spite of how shat-out it was - if they actually put effort in it would probably be equally as popular just because of the timing of the whole Actual Play thing. So the lesson they learned is you don't have to give a gently caress. I mean I've GMed for D&D 5E every week for the last 4 years, I have fun, but I have fun because I can play so loosely with the rules. I use tons of custom monsters with elaborate abilities because the base monsters are all so boring, and I can just eyeball the numbers and know I'm not going to tip any sort of delicate balance. Sure would be nice if there was something with better balance and rules out of the box though! BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Dec 15, 2023 |
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Dec 15, 2023 14:19
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Dexo posted:I mean, that seems decently fair if you have a collection of people who want to run a specific module and specific game lol. I personally disagree in that if someone comes to me with a premade character before I've even agreed to DM it's kind of a red flag? An entire group of people like that would be the same red flag multiplied moreso. Maybe they'd turn out great after talking to them, but there's a lot more to be done than just grabbing someone and going "Hey please run this for us". Admittedly from a bias perspective I'd be much more interested in a Pathfinder 2e party than a 5e party in that sense because Pathfinder 2e character creation has enough of a bar to filter out some of the worst people I've gamed with. Lmao at "Dungeon Submissive" though. That reminds me of what running 5e was like at points.
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Dec 15, 2023 14:43
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LukasR23 posted:Lmao at "Dungeon Submissive" though. That reminds me of what running 5e was like at points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn2R-WtwuPY
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Dec 15, 2023 15:06
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LukasR23 posted:I personally disagree in that if someone comes to me with a premade character before I've even agreed to DM it's kind of a red flag? An entire group of people like that would be the same red flag multiplied moreso. Maybe they'd turn out great after talking to them, but there's a lot more to be done than just grabbing someone and going "Hey please run this for us". I think that's fair, Like I get the DM's who might want to turn that down. Not saying that's an incorrect like decision to make. As in that situation you would be an outsider playing with a friend group But also it could just be a group of friends who want to play a tabletop game, but no one has the experience of being GM, or none of them want to. It's why in that case it's as much of a discussion between the players and the DM. And they got excited about playing a game and started the creation process. I think it's pretty silly to expect players in at least like Pathfinder/D&D type TTRPG to not have done some sort of work on a character concept and plan ahead of time. It's not like I haven't made up a character for a game that hasn't had it's first meeting or session zero. I have like 4-5 character concepts laying around in Pathfinder 2e that I want to play, and in a game I just started playing in had my character made before session 0 for the AP I'm playing. I've also done this when playing 5e historically. I like creating characters, especially when planning playing a module that I have a rough idea of the setting and tone. Like you can just chat with them for 5 minutes, which is something you'd do anyway, as like I'd still have a session zero even with them having everything made since I am someone who is coming into an established group of people to see if like I would enjoy DMing for them or whatever. Now if those people are like set in stone on everything, and are dicks about things that you might want to not allow or change or tweak or whatever, then yeah bail, but that type of stuff happens even in situations where the DM puts together a table, or a collection of people come together who don't know each other. I just personally think that the behavior of people having an idea of the pre-made module they want to play, and then creating characters isn't particularly outlandish or worthy of being a red flag. Just a sign that none of them want/or know how to be a DM. at least in my experiences. Maybe it's because have pretty much exclusively operated in online TTRPG spaces and play all my games online with randos or at the least I'm a rando to them, when GMing or playing. Because I don't live in place where in person games are doable. Dexo fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Dec 15, 2023 |
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Dec 15, 2023 15:18
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BattleMaster posted:Sure would be nice if there was something with better balance and rules out of the box though! It sure would be, but WotC will never give a poo poo again. At this point, just run 4E if your friends want a crunchy tactical combat murderhobo game that's actually designed by human beings with functioning brains, or play literally any other game in existence. Not like we aren't spoiled for choice when it comes to good games.
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Dec 15, 2023 15:23
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Glazius posted:Yes, the same company does their own in-house system to have Doctor Who adventures in. It reflects the original series' treatment of combat by using a priority action system that only resolves combat actions after all attempts to flee or dissuade combat have failed. I’ve heard of it and it’s not all that great. Apart from that tweak to the initiative system there’s almost no support for Doctor Who style solutions other than GM fiat or a single dice roll. There’s no coherent model of timey wimey stuff to provide a framework for regular problem solving, nor any standards for quality or necessary properties of creative writing solutions.
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Dec 15, 2023 15:30
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5e is pretty good
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Dec 15, 2023 15:35
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Something D&D offers that's unfortunately pretty rare is support for very long term games.
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Dec 15, 2023 15:37
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It does? In what manner does it do so that other games with advancement systems don’t?
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Dec 15, 2023 15:47
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Colonel Cool posted:Something D&D offers that's unfortunately pretty rare is support for very long term games. D&D players not beating the "don't actually play other games" accusations
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Dec 15, 2023 15:48
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Mors Rattus posted:It does? In what manner does it do so that other games with advancement systems don’t? Lots of modern games, see anything PbtA as a big example, have advancement systems that are designed to cap out at somewhere in the 8-20 session range and start to break down if you try to play them past that. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, tightly designed systems that are designed to provide a satisfying narrative arc and then end are often going to be better designed that sprawling systems that are designed to run indefinitely. But it is a trade off.
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Dec 15, 2023 15:52
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Colonel Cool posted:Lots of modern games, see anything PbtA as a big example, have advancement systems that are designed to cap out at somewhere in the 8-20 session range and start to break down if you try to play them past that. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, tightly designed systems that are designed to provide a satisfying narrative arc and then end are often going to be better designed that sprawling systems that are designed to run indefinitely. But it is a trade off. Yeah, i kinda agree with that- the consideration of what's good in a lot of modern rpg design comes down to being good, and very well suited to one particular experience, and just doing it ruthlessly, which creates a lot of really neat games with very specific campaign timeframes. I don't think D&D's late tier stuff is very good, but it does at least kinda go there in a way Blades doesn't.
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Dec 15, 2023 15:58
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Panzeh posted:Yeah, i kinda agree with that- the consideration of what's good in a lot of modern rpg design comes down to being good, and very well suited to one particular experience, and just doing it ruthlessly, which creates a lot of really neat games with very specific campaign timeframes. I don't think D&D's late tier stuff is very good, but it does at least kinda go there in a way Blades doesn't. I don't know, Blades is closer to having that kind of extended tail than most RPGs. Sure, individual characters will probably burn out before your gang can legitimately claim to own this town, but there's a lot of crew advancing you can do that would let you maintain one coherent campaign for a very long time. In any case, on one hand it's really hard to design a game that's intended to go for that long, both because big complicated games that last that long are hard to justify making in the current market and because players probably won't see any of that late-advancement content for literal years if they have to do the full 1-20 climb. (There's a reason Paizo started making adventure paths generally shorter and sometimes had them start at higher levels with Pathfinder 2e. It's because they want people to play more than one adventure path every two years.) On the other hand, D&D 5e has two main forms of reward, XP and gold, and gold stops being useful after level 2. We should have higher standards for a game being good at promoting ultra-long-term play than "has an advancement structure that can physically go that long".
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Dec 15, 2023 16:14
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Nah. Gold is still relevant until level 7-8, I think. At level 3 gold is still needed for sure.
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Dec 15, 2023 16:29
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Colonel Cool posted:Something D&D offers that's unfortunately pretty rare is support for very long term games. 5e falls apart after level 10 or so. That doesn't make for great long term campaigns.
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Dec 15, 2023 16:29
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Even that is an exaggeration. 5e falls apart way later. Level 10 is till reasonable.
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Dec 15, 2023 16:31
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i will admit that most of the games i can think of that are designed for long play are aping D&D at least in terms of basic structure (if they aren't outright retroclones) but at the same time there definitely aren't any shortage of them, especially compared to like 5-10 years ago LANCER is 3-4 encounters per LL and scales to LL12, so ~40 sessions assuming you're efficient enough to do a full encounter every session (which personally i'm not! but YMMV) Fragged Empire (and its spin-offs) assume one level per 3 sessions and a cap around level 20 (arguably with a soft cap of closer to 12-14, after which things get unwieldy and the options that remain are of marginal benefit, but a) that's still a solid ~40ish sessions and b) the above is kind of true of D&D as well) the entire White Wolf / OPP ecosystem tends to assume very long games, especially with default rates of XP gain Dungeon Crawl Classics anticipates 273 encounters to hit level cap if every single encounter rewards the maximum amount of XP folks have already mentioned Pathfinder Glitch is extremely un-D&D-like and its real priority is, I suspect, being PbP-friendly, but deserves mention here; by default assumptions your character is slowly drifting towards a permanent death and/or becoming an NPC; ~480 points fed to Wounds is roughly the point at which a character is "finished," and while the exact rate at which you accumulate those points is extremely variable you're mechanically prevented from accumulating large wounds (25+ points) more often than every other session, and in any case your progress is largely player-determined. so even if you're intentionally hurtling towards a conclusion for your character the built-in pacing is designed to draw it out to perhaps 30-40 sessions, and most of the section on Endings discusses ways to tweak the system for longer games if you want to run for "years of weekly sessions"
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Dec 15, 2023 16:32
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King Arthur Pendragon even has time-based progression where characters can get too old to adventure as effectively and you can play their kids instead.
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Dec 15, 2023 16:32
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Advancement is a weird bird. D&Ds advancement is so gradual and demarcated that it ends up affecting fiction - playing a sandbox is made much harder by the need to guess the level of each area, or the players having to follow OOC cues or railroads to know if Duke Evil is level 5 or level 20. It also creates the build business embodied in 3.5e and Pathfinder where the eventual aim of the game is to play the super powerful character you really want to play, for the few sessions you’ll get to before the campaign ends, thus avoiding that character breaking balance or becoming boring as it would if played long term. Yet advancement systems are absolutely critical for player engagement..
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Dec 15, 2023 16:36
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3 Action Economist posted:5e falls apart after level 10 or so. That doesn't make for great long term campaigns. Also Jesus god I had completely forgotten about the Hadozee
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Dec 15, 2023 16:37
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Dexo posted:It's not like I haven't made up a character for a game that hasn't had it's first meeting or session zero. I have like 4-5 character concepts laying around in Pathfinder 2e that I want to play, and in a game I just started playing in had my character made before session 0 for the AP I'm playing. I've also done this when playing 5e historically. I like creating characters, especially when planning playing a module that I have a rough idea of the setting and tone. I've only ever played in online space as well. I think I might have just been much less lucky in the people I met and gamed with, and I'm seeing "having a premade character they come to the game with" as the problem rather than the other issues they had as players. Between that and the amount of effort I try to put into working with people who I'm going to run a game for while they're doing creation the idea of being told "Hey, we've all got characters" just gets my hackles up. I'll have to keep that in mind next time I try to pull someone new(ish) into a group, my current one is decently stable. Edit: Also in my experience 5e falls apart pretty early, but truly falls apart once spellcasters can just throw out things like Banishment and outright end encounters with a single bad roll. Legendary resistances only do so much and even if the game survives the martial-caster imbalance will tear it apart.
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Dec 15, 2023 16:41
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i will admit that most of the games i can think of that are designed for long play are aping D&D at least in terms of basic structure (if they aren't outright retroclones) but at the same time there definitely aren't any shortage of them, especially compared to like 5-10 years ago I've been in a weekly Star Trek Adventures game for about a year and a half now and while I'm leaving it for other reasons, the game is showing no signs of stopping down in this group. But that's probably its own very specific outlier example of being in a roleplay-heavy series that isn't really placing any mechanical value on advancement and character progression outside of the Values system (though STA does have rules for it, our group has been very much just using STA as a framework for roleplay and less as a game, if that makes sense). I ran an FFG Star Wars campaign that hit around 60ish sessions and that system really creaks at that levels of power as well, imo. Or maybe I was just bad at GM'ing it, could be a distinct possibility, as I know I'd do a lot of things differently if I were to do it again today 
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Dec 15, 2023 16:42
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Drone posted:I ran an FFG Star Wars campaign that hit around 60ish sessions and that system really creaks at that levels of power as well, imo. Or maybe I was just bad at GM'ing it, could be a distinct possibility, as I know I'd do a lot of things differently if I were to do it again today FFG Star Wars can definitely get a little sketchy once players are rolling like five yellow dice on a skill check, and there are a few specific builds that can trivialize combat, but I've found that the dice system's high shenanigan level has kept it interesting (and accessible) for far longer than any other crunchy system I've played.
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Dec 15, 2023 17:28
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One of the things I like about the iterations of the 2d20 system is that the complexity informs campaign length. You can teach John Carter of Mars / Dishonoured level 2d20 in a hot minute, and the game isn't meant to go on forever. A few sessions, maybe 10? Dune goes as long as a Fate game. Star Trek Adventures can go on for as long as you recognize that the underlying IP doesn't do character advancement. Conan and Infinity and Achtung Cthulhu are all about those long campaigns because there's enough crunch you can take your characters in a wide variety of mechanical depths.
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Dec 15, 2023 17:28
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Ghost Leviathan posted:King Arthur Pendragon even has time-based progression where characters can get too old to adventure as effectively and you can play their kids instead. Yeah, it's inevitable. The full timeline-ish of the Uther/Arthur period is like 85 years of adventures up to Arthur's death, so if you're playing for even like 10-15 sessions your starting character will get too old to fight (stats start decreasing with age checks, when a stat reaches 0 they die), or die in a fight. If you're actually trying to play the full period from start to finish you'll go through at least 3-4 generations of knights in a family line.
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Dec 15, 2023 18:20
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Anonymous Zebra posted:The thing that really upsets me about these firings is that it's exacerbating a problem that has been rampant in a lot of new games I've been trying out recently, and that's a lack of institutional knowledge when it comes to game design. I'm not going to name any names here, but I've been dipping my toes into a few other tabletop systems and have been broadly disappointed at the quality of the writing, organization/layout of the books, and ease of understanding of how to run the games. I've basically been chalking it up to lots of these being tiny little companies that lack the kind of experience that comes with having a consistent crew of designers/writers/editors that can refine the stuff being put out. I can't tell you how many times I've started reading a game book, checked out the company's website and found that they don't even have an office and everything was put together by email and "virtual" work by mostly freelancers. Jump down my throat all you want, but both WotC & Paizo were at least keeping some of that institutional knowledge in house, and now it appears WotC is going to dump a lot of that and just hire newer, cheaper people to pick up the slack. I fully expect to see a huge drop in the quality of the output from WotC because of this. I think you're confusing their house style for competence. Their products, in both cases, get glossy color art, decent copyediting, and wide availability. However, most of the design is mediocre at best in different ways. Also, you're very, very misinformed if you don't think WotC and Paizo both don't use mostly contract freelancers to crank out splats. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Dec 15, 2023 |
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Dec 15, 2023 18:22
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Nuns with Guns posted:Yeah, it's inevitable. The full timeline-ish of the Uther/Arthur period is like 85 years of adventures up to Arthur's death, so if you're playing for even like 10-15 sessions your starting character will get too old to fight (stats start decreasing with age checks, when a stat reaches 0 they die), or die in a fight. If you're actually trying to play the full period from start to finish you'll go through at least 3-4 generations of knights in a family line.
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Dec 15, 2023 18:30
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hyphz posted:I’ve heard of it and it’s not all that great. Apart from that tweak to the initiative system there’s almost no support for Doctor Who style solutions other than GM fiat or a single dice roll. There’s no coherent model of timey wimey stuff to provide a framework for regular problem solving, nor any standards for quality or necessary properties of creative writing solutions. A Doctor Who game that mechanically represents the show would likely not be fun! One player constantly hogging the spotlight, GM fiat everywhere -- so so so many narrative obstacles in both the historical and modern runs of the show are resolved with convenient coincidences and deus ex machina. Remarkably few episodes are resolved with actual time travel, and (anecdotally) "timey-wimey" is used to explain why something already happened or couldn't happen. It solves problems for the writers, not the characters. re: character advancement: What games have put advancement pacing significantly or entirely in the hands of the PCs as a group? Not just "electing to play to the character as-written gives XP", but "we've solved the problems of this town; let's move to the next tier so we can tackle the problems of the kingdom" or even "that was a tough fight, let's all level up." It sounds crazy at first and at second, but ... maybe not?. Consensus would be important, so that the campaign organically stays longer at arcs and tiers the players find satisfying. I think it might nudge leveling to right before the "boss fight" (or other big narrative moment) rather than after...but maybe that's ok? Shorter campaigns, but they actually reach the end? hmm.
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Dec 15, 2023 18:40
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hmm, wonder if you could get away with a game where the GM is the doctor, and the players are like companions or allies in that episode/arc.
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Dec 15, 2023 18:45
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Dexo posted:hmm, wonder if you could get away with a game where the GM is the doctor, and the players are like companions or allies in that episode/arc. Roll d% on this table for character generation. You are a: 01-12: surprisingly annoying alien male 13-26: nearly useless Earth male 27-87: attractive and easily-endangered woman 88-98: attractive and easily-endangered, but occasionally competent, woman 99: competent woman 00: robot dog
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Dec 15, 2023 18:55
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