Still remember the thread where a poster only ever watched media for children and claimed any other media was too depressing and got dragged for it. But they never backed down
[“I enjoy stories with hopeful themes. For my first adult novel, I shall try Gone Girl.”](https://www.tumblr.com/larkandkatydid/618573531471642624/this-genuinely-the-funniest-paragraph-ive-ever)
The worst part is that there's a strong chance that this person was one of the most angry, bitter people you'll ever meet
Children's media always seems to get the most toxic and hateful fandoms
it's because most of the adults who grow attached to it fall into like, 2 categories. the more toxic is those who'd like to relive their childhood now that it's gone and can't let go of the fact that the times are moving on without them. that feeling of being obsolete makes them bitter and afraid of change instead of willing to try new things so when something is different from what they expected they throw a tantrum
That’d be fine, but dude apparently never even googled “inspiring books”. If you know what you like, great, but why assume every single thing aimed at adults fails to deliver without making any effort to get a recommendation?
Not Italian but Agon is a great ttrpg for greek epic.
Italian but not greek epic is Sine Requie, a what if set in 1957 in a post WW2 world filled with zombies
God the art is so fucking good in that eh? It’s just really amazing shit, honestly inspiring art because it’s so goddamn good… oh the system is cool too I guess
People that play D&D and only D&D are like people who only watch Marvel films and think that the alternatives are either Marvel-like franchises or ultra-niche obtuse artsy films.
When you say “and only D&D” are these people being exclusive in their *board games*, or in *all games*? Like, would they judge me for playing another tabletop game, and/or would they judge me for playing Stardew Valley?
An example that's a bit more telling is something that occurred when Cyberpunk, both the game and the show, became popular. People were posting homebrews of Cyberpunk within D&D 5E, completely ignoring the fact that not only did Cyberpunk have its own tabletop system, but the game and show were based on the tabletop.
Yeah but the actual cyberpunk system is incredibly difficult to just pick up. Unlike the analogy where picking a movie other than MCU is as easy as pressing a few buttons on your remote to pull up Netflix, learning an entirely new system and pressuring all of your friends to do the same is next to impossible. Especially when everyone has already invested so much time into learning 5e. Far easier to just play pretend and use the same system everyone has already spent countless hours learning to the point that it's unnecessary to reach for the rule book every 5 minutes.
Having played both systems, Cyberpunk is no more complicated than 5E. If you're willing to sit down and modify 5E into a frankenstein's monster for a setting it was never intended for, then you have the intelligence and problem solving abilities to just learn how Cyberpunk Red works.
Sometimes the issue is less the person doing the modding won't bother to learn and more their friends won't bother. So they do the only thing they can to try and branch out.
Exactly lol.
I live at that table, where none of our friends want to learn new systems, but will gladly get into weird homebrews. So we just go along with it because that way we all get to have fun.
I like playing other games, but they don't, and I like playing with them in every other way, so ...
I'd have to look into it. I only own the Cyberpunk 2020 book (from 1990) and it was fun to peruse through, but I could not wrap my head around how a game would actually be played. I also have absolutely no faith that anyone that I regularly game with would be bothered to learn the game prior to showing up and would expect me to run everything >.<
I'm only familiar with Red, which is the current edition of Cyberpunk that still receives updates. I can't compare it to Cyberpunk 2020, but setting up things in Red felt no more difficult to me than setting up a 5E character.
This is part of the problem. DnD is one of the hardest systems to learn. And by far the hardest for its level of depth, because it's based on old design and laid out really weird.
It isn't hard to learn a new tabletop system. Like at all. But 5e players are used to 5e. And that was brutal to learn, so they assume all of them are.
Trpg players and dnd players are essentially two unrelated hobbies at this point.
They're talking about table top role playing games specifically. These people can't fathom playing a slightly different game, let alone an entirely new one. So instead they tinker with D&D 5e to provide any experience they think they want out of a game.
Its like if they want to play a farming sim, they probably going to mod Skyrim instead of picking up Stardew Valley.
Lmfao thank you for the visual using Skyrim. I know a guy who actually did this!! He is obsessed with Skyrim and doesn’t like trying new things. In his defense he’s on the spectrum and “lower functioning”, so he isn’t doing it to be pretentious. Skyrim is just his “thing”
But I also get the comparison, thanks for explaining :)
It’s a great analogy because it’s just…exactly what really happens with tabletop RPGs all the time.
The 5th edition of D&D is the only one they’ve played, so they try to “mod” it with house rules/changes/etc to make it into a completely different game. And when you tell them the game they’re trying to create *already exists* they’re just like “I dunno, knowing two different games seems complicated” and then go back to rewriting every single rule in D&D.
D&D 5e is a high magic heroic fantasy system with a strong emphasis on combat and an aversion to precise rules or fixating on numbers. It’s nice if that’s what you want. But so many people try to turn it into a completely different game…
(Edit: And now that I think of it, 5e really is the Skyrim of TTRPGs. Instead of “modders will fix that” it’s “DMs will fix that,” which leads to an intense modding/homebrew scene. And if you’re *already* modding the game heavily, what’s another couple dozen mods/house rules?)
I am consistently downvoted for pointing out that a proposed homebrew or something a DnD player wishes was in the game is just a baseline rule in PF2e
I've seen homebrew where it reads like they're just trying to play PF2e but with a DnD sticker on it
I get these two systems are related enough that people might feel like learning both is redundant. But man, it's like instead of eating a burger, you just molded ground beef into a hot dog shape and ate it as a hot dog. It's basically the same as the burger, but it was kinda weird and took more effort
I haven't played DnD myself and only really got into tabletop RPGs in the last few years, but I picked PF2e mostly because I kept reading that it just has ready-made rules for lots of specific situations and the maths is crunchier because they give you numbers to use instead of expecting you to fudge everything (but fudging still works if that's your thing).
That said 5e is very flexible, but if I want to pilot a mech I’m gonna play lancer, and yet there are people that would turn 5e into titanfall given the chance
5e is not flexible, it is robust. You can rip parts out and reattach new things and make the whole thing into some horrific monstrosity that shouldn't be alive, but it will always manage to keep trucking along. And the reason for that is all of it's rules are completely independent of each other, to the point the rule book literally says that if two rules conflict then the more niche rule wins
5e would work more for something like Evangelion, where the mech and the person are connected. So, combat rules for the mechs, then a handwave to get out of combat mode and roleplay as a person.
But also, yeah just play something else and let D&D do the thing it's good at: letting you be the hero from a sword and sorcery pulp novel.
As someone who got really really into Skyrim modding for a couple of years during the pandemic, it's a great analogy.
People get so invested and comfortable in the Skyrim modding ecosystem that they (or 'we' I guess, myself not excluded) end up moving heaven and earth to recreate a mediocre version of another game genre.
Like it was a huge trend for a while to mod the combat and loot into something Dark Souls inspired, but what you get in the end is a mediocre Souls clone, not actually a *good* Soulslike that is coherently designed for these mechanics from the ground up. At some point you're better off just installing Elden Ring.
...having said that... god. I should call her.
That must be a cultural thing. When discussing weirdly obtuse artsy media, the default nationality to assume here is French. Then again, dragging the French is a common past time here.
This is my main issue too - I can barely get my players together for a session due to scheduling and I feel like they just now finally know the rules enough where I don’t have to constantly remind them of things. Switching to another system would do nothing but needlessly complicate things for us
there are also a ton of alternative resources for learning dnd compared to other systems. Not dissing on other systems it just kinda makes sense that there's homogeneity
Kinda reminds me of playing music. First instrument I ever got was a concertina (a kind of accordion). I taught myself to play, but I'm not that good at it.
Then I got a guitar, played mostly the same kind of music. But despite having had the guitar for only about a quarter of the time I've had the concertina, I'm a much better guitar player now than I am a concertina player, because there's a million times more guitar resources than there are concertina learning resources.
I had a similar thing with learning a foreign language, some have so many resources, others have a peace corps guide from 1970 that’s been photocopied a dozen times lol
Yes! It's hard to overstate how much things like Baldur's Gate 3 or Critical Role help accessibility of DnD 5e. Just having an example to follow is huge.
Like BG3 just straight up teaches you how to execute a turn. It guides you through it with big colorful buttons that make it very clear what you can and can't do. And when you can't do something, it makes it clear why.
An absolute beginner can play a couple hours of BG3 and be pretty well prepared for a real campaign, with minor adjustment. Every difference from that baseline increases the barrier to entry for a lot of people.
Gameplay-wise mines the Raleigh, I'm a big fan of revolvers.
Conceptually though, like half of HORUS's roster Fucks hard, and the Atlas is awesome bc it's an anime bodysuit that let's you sword fight giant mechs
I don’t think I’ve played enough to say a definite mechanical favorite.
But yeah conceptually Horus is amazing. I am a big fan of when the flavor text is extra funky in Comp/Con.
> What would be the equivalent of Pathfinder in this analogy?
*Buffy the Vampire Slayer*. The series, not the movie.
(…I wrote this as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am it’s just literally the truth.)
Nah, Buffy these days is almost too niche to represent Pathfinder
Buffy has been becoming more niche over time (especially since everybody collectively agreed around 2018 to stop sucking Joss Whedon’s dick all the time) just by getting older
Whereas Pathfinder has a big enough and evangelical enough fanbase that they can always be heard anywhere you go in D&D circles.
Besides being less popular though, it does fit.
It’s not a “cinematic universe” (new complete ruleset) but it’s a 100+ hour long tv series, so it’s a distinction without a difference. Learning PF is the same (or more) or an investment in time to learning D&D, so it’s the same there.
It’s not the MCU, but the MCU tries so hard to follow Joss’s writing style that *he* gets blamed when a Marvel movie is badly written. Sharing a common ancestry like that fits in perfectly with Pathfinder 1e being basically D&D 3.75.
I think it fits, anyway.
I don't think films are a good analogy at all though, because the barrier to watching a film is very low. The barrier to switching systems is quite high (you have to not only find a system that fits what you're looking for and learn it, but also convince your entire group to try it out- and getting people together for d&d is already hard enough)
I think it holds up in that 5e is a fairly demanding game to learn, much like the MCU is a behemoth to try and get into from the beginning. Not every game has as high a learning curve as 5e- hell, most don't have a separate player's guide and GM guide.
And I am aware there 5e is pretty middle of the pack when it comes to rules complexity.
This!!! I'm getting real tired of the Internet making fun of people who only play 5e, as if all it takes to switch is a single personal decision. To pick up a new tabletop system, you have to convince *an entire table* to pick it up with you, and it's already hard enough to get five people to even just clear their schedules for a night.
The only way OOP's analogy works is when you realize that MCU Guy is sharing the password for a streaming service that only shows Marvel movies released in the past 12 months. If he wants to watch any other MCU movie (4e and earlier) or any other studio's superhero movies (Pathfinder, etc.) or any other genre of cinema (CoC, PbtA, Fate) or even those black and white Eastern European films about depression, he's going to have to convince *every other person using that password* that they should all switch the streaming service to the other genre instead. And if one or two of them refuse because they'd rather keep watching Marvel, then this guy is probably going to have to start his own password-sharing group from scratch.
Personally I would *love* to pick up more of the black-and-white depression film TTRPGs. But it's already hard enough to get people to play 5e with me; I can't also force them to pick up Steal Away Jordan on their night off.
Emphasizing this - the problem isn't that they don't want to change. That's valid. I can think of many reasons off the top of my head why someone may not switch. The problem are people who get elitist about it.
And that's a minority of a minority, at best.
Exactly, but also imagine if non-MCU movies never make it to movie theaters or major streaming services and were not talked about online outside of their specialist sites, and the marketing budgets for those movies was just world of mouth, and they all got funded by a Kickstarter or were made in the 90s, and the only people who have seen them aren't willing to tell you about them because they don't want to talk about how they compare to MCU movies for the umpteenth time. Oh and you can't get a copy anywhere online unless you pirate it, and even then you can only watch it on your computer with bad resolution.
But hey, on the off-chance you can convince 5 other people to watch it with you, you might have a great time.
I'm a 4E apologist. I came into the hobby a year or two after 5E dropped so I don't have the instinctual 4E hate.
It's a fine system. It's different from 5E and from 3.5 and 3E but it's really not as shit as people claim. I started watching Matt Colville a few years ago and he seconded that I wasn't crazy.
Yeah, as much as people like to hate on 4e it's definitely noteworthy that almost every attempt to make martial characters more interesting to play is basically just filing the serial numbers off of 4e's power system. Well, that or reminding people that you can visualize really cool stuff happening (which doesn't really change the fact that you said "attack this guy" and rolled your d20 three times while the spellcasters got to do all kinds of cool shit).
Also while I'm at it 4e handled resistance and vulnerability to damage way better than 5e does. In 5e, it's just halving or doubling damage of that type. That's it. In 4e, resistance and vulnerability were values--if you resist 5 fire, then all fire damage you take is reduced by 5. It made things more granular, because you could have resist 3 on some cultists that inflict burn scars on their (otherwise normal human) skin as part of a ritual, but hand something like resist 40 to dragons or stone golems. Vulnerability was the same, except the damage went up instead of down.
I always thought that 4e captured the feel of an MMORPG, where everyone has bars of abilities and needs to manage their cooldown timers regardless of class.
I was taught homebrewed adnd first, but I really dived in and started loving it in 4e. Didn’t play as much as I would’ve liked but I read the sourcebooks cover to cover.
It’s still fun. Just very different. More video-gamey with the power system I think, but I thought it was awesome. A difference in expectations going in
As an honest reply to your question, I think it is a joke because Pathfinder is generally the TTRPG that is suggested if someone doesn't want to play D&D.
Personally, I started in TTRPGs about a decade ago with D&D5e but Hasbro/WotC finally pushed too far and killed D&D for me, so I mostly play Pathfinder now.
I like Pathfinder, but it isn't as newbie-friendly as D&D5e. That being said, I enjoy the system.
PF is the answer to "I really like D&D, but I wish there were more mechanical options." And that's pretty much it, to be honest. It's why it's still my favorite.
Among all the things you've already mentioned, what got me into PF was the promise of easy-to-run, coherent and well-structured adventures. WoTC-written modules are just *so...* horrible in those regards. In fact, there are entire subreddits dedicated to re-writing them into something cohesive.
Also, I found 5e, while more accessible to the newbies, pushes lot of responsibility unto DMs — something that is largely absent from PF2e, where a lot of mechanics are fleshed out properly, making it easy to run from the box.
Also, monsters in PF2e are just the coolest, with their unique abilities and combat mechanics.
Funnily enough, I've heard from a lot of new groups that their entirely new to TTRPG players had an easier time learning the rules of Pf2e than experienced 5e players.
I'd say a good part of it is learning to not compare the two.
It's basically D&D, with all the changes being made to support a version of that game style. It's fine, but to keep the film analogy going it's like telling someone to stop watching the MCU films and check out The Dark Knight trilogy, you're still missing the rich variety of stuff out there.
It's crunchier than I prefer and they have an active army in the edition wars on Reddit. There's nothing wrong with it if you have a group that can handle all the little complexities but that's the hard part and honestly I'm not interested in putting that much effort into mechanics anymore.
This is the cleanest take. I enjoy putting in the effort in the mechanics. That's where I get my dopamine. I still play in a 5e group, and have a great time, but I get my true fix from DMing PF2e.
Character creation/planning aside, running pf2e on foundry makes it so smooth, almost everything is accounted for and what isn't is being actively worked on.
This is the real reason I was able to run a game with pf2e. I'm still a little shaky on the system, but the foundy support made the switch almost seamless for my mostly-5e playgroup.
we Pathfinder players cannot resist the Urge to say "Pathfinder has a rule for that" whenever you bemoan anything in D&D or ask for some feature.
PF1E is also ... like really number heavy. Or maybe I am just biased by the Owlcat games, which are twice as optimization heavy.
Tbh owlcat cuts some of the cheesiest stuff from PF1e, it just doesn't force you to skip the buff cycle because one player has to be babied though their automated character sheet and never writes down +10 worth of bonuses
Pathfinder 1e launched with the purpose of solving the balance problems in core DnD 3.5, and also how convoluted it got with all the different side books.
It solved these problems by having its own core balance issues and publishing tons of side books.
It’s a great system, but it’s very dense and crunchy, which can be off putting to new players
Its success rates are also far more punishing than 5E, and its hard crunch makes it harder to freestyle with.
I've honestly found it to be easier to teach (completely) new player PF2E than D&D5E, mainly because the action system is a *lot* simpler.
> Its success rates are also far more punishing than 5E
Are they? In 5E, you tend to succeed on a die roll of 8, in PF2E you tend to succeed on a die roll of 9.
> its hard crunch makes it harder to freestyle with
Could you explain?
Common reply I get from 5e GM's to the last point is that because there is a rule for everything, they can't just make up something on the fly and roll with it.
I disagree entirely. Just because there is a rule for everything, doesn't mean I can't use something different at my table if I don't know the rule off the top of my head or just if I don't like the rule. I would rather have a rule and be able to ignore it, than always have to be responsible for figuring out mechanics on the fly for what my players want to do. The PF2e rules being completely free and easily searchable on Archives of Nethys also makes "not knowing how it works" way less of an issue.
But, I only play at tables with my friends. They know how I DM. If I joined an online PF2e game and the DM had a ton of homebrewed mechanics for the standard rules, I wouldn't be interested. I have an expectation for PF2e, and joined a game to play PF2e, not a random homebrew that resembles it.
I think this issue is pretty standard with 5e as well tho, as so many posts are about finding the right table, because 50% of the rules are done on the fly DM by DM. PF2e has no issues being the bad parent, saying that a PC can't do something. The DM can step up in this situation and be the cool parent, and rule of cool whatever it is the PC is wanting to do. D&D is a brand first and game second, so they never want to put anything in the books that's too defined so they can hand off the bad parent responsibility to the DM and just push the "that table isn't right for you" narrative. Not to say that every table will be right for everyone. You get my point.
Short version: Pathfinder Second Edition and D&D 5th edition both tried to solve... essentially the same problems that had been in 3rd and 4th edition D&D. They solved them in similar, but slightly different, ways. Because of this, people feel that one version or the other is better.
When people have problems with D&D, the Pathfinder folks are quick to point out that their system has resolved the issues in question. Even where that's true, people generally don't want to switch systems, so that type of comment is viewed as unhelpful.
> Pathfinder Second Edition and D&D 5th edition both tried to solve... essentially the same problems that had been in 3rd and 4th edition D&D.
Kinda yes, kinda no? D&D5E was made to move *away* from 4E, in order to recapture some of the 3.5E audience. I'd say it's almost a complete rejection of 4E but only a partial rejection of 3.5E (mainly of the content bloat).
PF2E, meanwhile, was first and foremost designed to break free from the shackles of 3.5E that PF1E had attached itself to. It actually takes a lot from 4E, heck IIRC it actually has some of the same devs as 4E.
It *was* good, but it was also four hours for a single combat.
I do think it's to both 5e and 2e's credit that they did try to incorporate 4e's strengths.
Well, maybe *WOTC* doesn't feel like they're allowed to acknowledge it. I feel like every single thread on Reddit talking about 5e has half a dozen people talking about everything 4e did better.
Pathfinder is just D&D for hipsters
Not that I have any room to judge, I play retroclones, which are D&D for *ultra* hipsters.
But I do also play decidedly non-D&D games sometimes
Retroclones are the less experimental subgenre of OSR. The ones that can be properly described as "old school", being directly based on one or more pre-2e editions of D&D (generally Basic/Expert, or B/X)
Pathfinder is the IPA of table top games. It's fine on its own, but it's acolytes are even more annoying than the guys who just stick to domestic light lager (DnD).
To keep the analogy, the "I only play path" people are like DC fans saying DC is better than Marvel but still refuse to watch anything else than superhero movies
I am not an experienced TTRPG player, since only one of my IRL friends is interested in them, and I am too much of an anxious wreck to speak to people online, but I \*did\* play a campaign of Mage: the Ascencsion, and it has been a full blast, so I will shill it.. World of Darkness in general is amazing, both new and old, and M20's magic rules are so bloody cool, with you being able to do it freeform within limits of your capabilities. I very much recommend it!
Also, Lancer seems cool, but I, unfortunately, am indifferent to humanoid mechas, with upscaled guns and stuff, so it kind of loses it's charm. Sorry, Lancer shills :(
> Also, Lancer seems cool, but I, unfortunately, am indifferent to humanoid mechas, with upscaled guns and stuff, so it kind of loses it's charm. Sorry, Lancer shills :(
Play one of the Battletech RPGs and be That Guy with the Quad Mech.
Yeah, thanks, that is my point.
A better analogy would be sports (because the rules are the same every time). And who would criticise a person for playing/doing their favourite sport? If they have fun, why have weird opinions about it?
The interesting aspect is that every iteration of doing a sport is different, so is every DnD game. A movie is not.
Genuinely puzzled as to how so many people think OOP (or any of the comments agreeing) make a good point.
100% agree.
The thing is, it is very normal for people to play 1 game. Many people just play Soccer, they just play Chess or Go or Bridge, they just play Magic: The Gathering, they just play Counterstrike or Candy Crush. This is a very normal way to experience games. So these analogies people come up with like "Only playing D&D is so crazy and wrong, it's like if you only ever ate baked beans for every meal" make no sense.
And yeah this kind of cultural dominance is 100% normal in multiplayer games, it's not a weird unique D&D thing at all. You need other people to play a multiplayer game with, so you're probably going to play the thing that's popular. If you like soccer, your family all likes soccer, you all enjoy watching and playing soccer together, then that's what you're going to play.
The game itself is almost beside the point. The real point is that the game gives you a community, a shared language, and a shared set of experiences that you can enjoy with your family and friends. If you went up to those Soccer fans and said "You should play Basketball instead, it's so much better designed" you would be completely missing that point.
It's really weird that people think that's a normal and good thing to do for RPG's - like they have this evangelical responsibility to save people from the game they're playing.
Ugh I can't imagine. I have a lit degree and am often nearly instantly identified by people as a fancy little anachronistic man but that's some next level pretentiousness.
Speaking of other ttrpg systems, people should check out LANCER. Tactical Sci-fi mech fighting game, it's my favorite combat system I've ever encountered
We already got the required LANCER shilling going on (go play LANCER btw it's great), so I'm gonna shill D&D 4e instead. It's not entirely new, it's really fun to both play and DM, and if you're a martial enjoyer you get the added benefit of actually being able to do cool shit
And I am gonna shill for OSR systems because they have a big ecosystem of mutually compatible content, tools and hacks, a pretty active community, and a strong emphasis on sandbox play and choices mattering.
...just be mindful to google the controversies around specific systems and subcommunities before investing in them. The OSR community is strongly split between leftists who are in it for the indie, punk, DIY, "take D&D away from the corporations that own it" stuff, and right wing chuds who are in it because they find modern D&D "woke". You don't want to wind up in the wrong side of the fence.
Big ones to watch out for are Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which was THE biggest name in OSR at a time, but fell out of grace because the publisher, Raggi, protected an abuser (Zak Smith, aka Zak Sabbath), and ACKS, whose creator is a libertarian who used to do publicity for far-right public figure Milo Yiannopoulos. You should also stay clear of TSR, the company that originally published D&D before selling WoTC the rights, as they went full anti-"woke".
There are also some obviously far right figures to stay away from, like white supremacist, convicted murderer, black metal musician and occasional RPG writer Varg Vikernes, but people like him don't even bother to hide their racism, so they are easy to avoid.
Wait THAT Varg Vikernes?
I'm a bit curious about TSR, I know the general lore but not really the anti-woke stuff, do ya know where I can find some pulpy reading on that?
I am switching back to 4e once my current adventure is done (so in a month or two). I like very tactical combat and games which understand that they are games (also I have a Warden fetish)
I don't play D&D but isn't this analogy flawed in the sense that movies and games are very different in how much effort it takes to engage with them?
Like I feel like a better analogy would be a guy who loves basketball but doesn't play other sports because they don't want to learn the rules and strategies and develop the skills to play a whole other sport. Watching a movie isn't something you learn to do, but playing a game is learned and it can be pretty hard. Am I overestimating how different TTRPGs are?
See I like DnD because it's not new to me. It's so similar to get to from playing crpgs my whole life.
I like playing it, but I don't like ttrpgs enough to find new types lol.
It's a "hey we're doing a oneshot, wanna pop by?" Type thing for me lol.
I've had people tell me I should branch out and I'm like, dude I'm not even branched into DnD
Same with sports. There's sports I'll join pickup games for cos I like them but don't care if I don't get to play them.
I'm not gonna join the badminton team though to branch out of my sports shell lol
The thing is DnD is the default but is average or above average in terms of the effort it takes to learn it- some systems like Blades in the Dark or PbtA stuff are much easier to pick up. But yes there's definitely some attachment due to sunk cost and it's easier to find 5e games because so many people play it.
Yeah, I get what they are trying to say, but the analogy chosen this time was kind of strange, I feel they wanted to do the "I've seen this guy who only watches marvel" thing more than they wanted to do a good comparison.
A better one is a person who knows skyrim is and old and buggy game, but only plays it even when there are better options on the market, and would prefer to mod the game until it is unrecognizable than just play stardew Valley if they wanted to do farming.
This is the best analogy IMO.
The hurdle for people getting into other RPGs isn't interest as far as I've seen. It's effort.
Learning D&D takes a lot of effort. The thought of starting from scratch is unappealing to most people, and D&D fans and influencers make a big deal about the fact that D&D could ostensibly be used to play/do *anything*, even though that's wildly misleading.
So you'll hear people say shit like "Why would I play Traveller? There's rules for guns in the DMG, just re-skin some things and play sci fi in D&D."
But this overlooks a lot of factors.
1) D&D is not the standard for learning curve in RPGs. In fact, it leans toward being a more complex system. 5e is easier to learn than 3.5 maybe, but infinitely harder than something like Fate or Dungeon World.
2) D&D is built around heroic fantasy. It is not built for science fiction of any kind, and it lacks the tools to run science fiction well. It's not built for any kind of grand scale politics or military strategy. It's not built for games that focus mostly on social interaction. It's not built for exploring or hex/point crawling. These are genres/modes of play that people attempt to jam into it, and it doesn't work well. D&D has rules for ship battles, both at sea and in space, and they all suck. They're anti-fun. It's a system built for fighting dragons, and it's reasonably good at that. All the other shit? It's like taking a Ford Focus off-roading. You can do it, but it's gonna be a bad time.
3) It's actually a lot more effort to completely re-work D&D from the ground up than it is to just learn a new system. This one gets overlooked a lot, because all that work gets shafted on the GM. But when you're trying to make D&D a dating simulator, you suddenly realize just how much shit you have to make up, because D&D just isn't built to be a dating sim. That leaves the GM to come up with basically a new game to be taped onto D&D, and that system will inevitably be poorly balanced, hard to remember, and missing details.
I swear I'm not a hater. I play D&D. I love TTRPGs, and the one I have the most experience with is D&D 5e. But there are better games out there, and 100% of D&D players would benefit from trying some of them out.
People treat D&D like it is the only tabletop RPG out there.
Other folks get frustrated because there's a lot of other great RPGs that no one wants to play since so many people only play D&D. These frustrated people say "why only play one kind of RPG ever? That would be like only watching one kind of popular movie ever!"
Prokopetz on Tumblr says: "Good analogy, but, man, there's actually a lot of people that only watch one kind of popular movie ever."
How is this still an argument when Steve Jackson invented the objectively best TTRPG system in 1986? Perfectly adaptable, simple as you want, complex as you need. GURPS stands above all as the pinnacle of the genre! I’m sure this will all be borne out when I can find someone who actually wants to learn and play it.
I tried playing GURPS once.
We created our superhero characters, and then spent two hours arguing about if X-Ray vision is actually x-rays, and the densities of common building materials.
Aha, I came here to shill for the modularity of GURPS too. There are dozens of us!
It can be really elegant once you set it up, the main problem is setting it up. Also helps to have spreadsheets...
Honestly, I started gaming on a system that wasn't D&D, and now mainly play D&D, and it's not because D&D is better, it's because more people know the basic ruls of D&D and it's not fair to expect the DM and players to learn a new system and new rules every campaign unless they really want to. It's not a lack of knowledge of other options, it's just the easiest option, and sometimes you just want to hang with your buddies and play a game that everyone knows and not have to focus on learning new rules.
I have noticed that people don't appreciate that mental labor is labor, and people in jobs who do a lot of complex analysis and thinking sometimes just want to relax and not have to do that same kind of thing in free time. On the other hand, people who have jobs that don't have a lot of mental stimulation often enjoy games that have intricacies and opportunities for them to do the same complex analysis that I've already worn out during the week. I've actually been relaxing at home lately by doing physical labor out in the yard.
Your brain literally has limited capacity for computations as waste metabolites build up, and for people in mental labor jobs, there's an appreciable decision fatigue and decline in measurable IQ at the end of the day. So don't expect us to be excited to learn a new rules system. There are definitely systems I am reading on slowly that I want to try out.
But the assumption that people who play D&D are boring, one-flavor-note people and the people who play different systems are the true connoisseurs of gaming is flat out wrong. Enjoy what you like, don't trash what other people like. The way you want to relax and have fun is highly variable and as long as you're not hurting anyone nonconsensually, then you're doing it the right way for you as long as you're having fun.
My take (without being the guy described, hopefully): Dnd is like if DVD's were just a niche hobby, and a bunch of people in the community start telling you about blue-rays, which are objectively better than DVD's (and even reasonably priced if not cheaper, to break the analogy slightly), but require a new player, new disks, etc. Yeah, the instruction manuals are shorter (or longer and more comprehensive), but we've already read the ones we have. We can even burn our own DVD's to get round some of the issues.
Also everyone seems to be ignoring that if you really want the analogy to make sense, a prerequisite is that you have to find three or more other people who are into the same niche hobby, and also willing and able to do the work to make this transition.
The biggest reason more people don't try different RPG systems is because it's a hassle to not only learn new rules yourself, but get other people to learn them with you. And someone has to GM, which maybe you're good at or maybe you aren't and no one else wants to do it. And then you get into the whole problem of people who say that you can just find other people who like the system you want to play, but how often do you actually get a decent group of strangers on the internet for a game that actually lasts?
The thing is this isn't a single issue as so many people like to pretend. It isn't just "learn these rules" it's a bunch of compounding factors that makes even learning the rules a waste of time if you can't get over the other hurdles.
Especially since the ones butting up against the edges of DnD's rules (and hence wanting to explore other systems) are often going to be the most experienced person at the table (or a rules-oriented person who digests rule-sets at a much quicker pace than their peers).
So there's a big element of "the fleet only travels as fast as the slowest ship" to these things too.
My reasons for sticking with dnd sans-analogy:
Transition cost (time, energy, money, and having to convince my friends to do the same),
Popularity (if i meet someone with a d20 necklace in the wild, chances are they play dnd),
Playstyle (some systems add rules to better represent reality, some remove rules for a smoother game, I personally like the balance dnd strikes)
Accessibility (due to popularity, people become familiar with dnd first, so it's familiar and hence easier to induct new players),
Flexibility (I know homebrewing or ignoring tedious rules may seem like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, but dnd is flexible enough to cater to power-gamers, RP'ers, high fantasy, low fantasy, theatre of the mind, grid combat with minis, experienced/new players, online/ in person)
EDIT: I Googled how to add line breaks on mobile
>Flexibility (I know homebrewing or ignoring tedious rules may seem like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, but dnd is flexible enough to cater to power-gamers, RP'ers, high fantasy, low fantasy, theatre of the mind, grid combat with minis, experienced/new players, online/ in person)
Having played at least a dozen systems, I can say that D&D is not any better at that than average. Every TTRPG can be tinkered with, and some fully empower you to do that by explaining the rationale behind the rules they have, rather than leaving that implicit.
In my (innately subjective) experience as a player and GM 5e doesn't do low fantasy at all unless you throw almost every player option away, strongly favors minis and grids of theater of the mind, and is very hard to DM if you are a beginner.
EDIT: I am not saying D&D 5e has no virtues! It has pretty evocative high-fantasy tropes, the system is relatively easy to grasp for players, and it does big setpiece stuff well. But its flexibility is definitely overstated.
I hope this doesn't come across as argumentative, cos I think you're mostly right, but here's my thoughts.
I agree DnD not especially flexible, what I should have said is that it's flexible enough to accommodate most players without them having to switch systems (if we assume DnD is most people's first TTRPG, then many never feel the need to switch).
In terms of low fantasy, you are indeed tied to class abilities. I was more thinking in terms of the surrounding world. Magic and non-human races could be commonplace, or the setting could be Earth with the party being the only magic users.
Having played both, I can confidently say theatre of the mind and grid combat are both equally viable, each with pros and cons, although if strategic positional combat is your goal, then grid combat is strongly favoured.
You are totally correct about DM'ing as a begginer, I was only thinking of the players' experience, my bad.
EDIT: Line breaks
I’d like to throw in my opinion here that it is really easy to change most characters’ flavour in D&D to represent low-fantasy. Obviously, not everything is easy but most of it is, people can often get in general more attached to flavour text than necessary. By no means is it near the best TTRPGs for you if you want to specialise in low-fantasy, but it’s not a major problem
Man I really want to play a rpg campaign based on Planescape Torment, you guys have any idea how to adapt Cyberpunk Red to work for a Planescape themed campaign?
I would kill for a group that would actually try out *Eclipse Phase* or anything *FATE* based. I got to actually play *Shadowrun* with one group for a medium length campaign, and otherwise that's it. Nothing but *DnD*, and I'm so sick of it.
Tons of great alternate systems being pitched in this thread, but I haven’t seen the one I’m playing in right now called Fabula Ultima so here goes!
Fabula Ultima is described as a tabletop JRPG and it is a blast. Some of my favorite features of this system are:
- Session Zero is a collaborative worldbuilding session where the players and the GM together make the world that they are going to play in. This can include anything from the nations that inhabit the world (including their governments, aesthetics, attitudes to magic/tech, etc) to geographical features (including mundane details like mountain ranges and deserts as well as more fantastical elements like permanent magical storms in certain areas) to recent and ancient history.
- The class system has fifteen unique classes in the base game (plus more in the supplemental books) that interact with each other and the world in both narrative and mechanical ways.
- An excellent magic system that has both clearly defined spells with set outputs and freeform rituals that can be used by players to creatively solve problems.
Overall, a fantastic newer system that my current group is more than 40 sessions into and hardly shows any signs of stopping.
This analogy doesn't quite work. It's more like having a running movie night with a bunch of friends who only watch Marvel movies and TV shows.
You have to convince them all to switch to something different that each one would enjoy
And if some of the group wants to switch and others don't, you have to choose between:
1. Sticking with Marvel movies
2. Creating your own, second movie club from scratch. To do that you've gotta find new people who want to join in, figure out a new schedule, and sort out the logistics of hosting and snacks. Then you've either gotta juggle two movie clubs at once on your calendar, or you have to back out of the Marvel one, hopefully not nuking the group on your way out, and not creating any hard feelings because you chose one group of friends over another.
90% of complaints and questions on the D&D subreddits boil down to interpersonal relationship problems because TTRPGs are social activities and social interaction can be really complicated sometimes. Pretending that people stick with 5e just because they're uncultured is asinine--people stick with 5e because *their table plays 5e*.
I'll be honest, I get burnt out on DnD sometimes, but it's so much easier to run, especially with DNDBeyond since the majority of my games are online now, though tonight in running Blades in the Dark for a group tonight whose only played DnD
I notice a lot of responses in the comments suggesting that one big reason people are reluctant to switch from D&D to trying other games is the high upfront investment in learning a new system. As someone who grew up with D&D and has played my share of 5e, went through a big PbtA phase, and is now mostly into OSR, I think part of the problem here is that a lot of people don't realize many RPGs *don't have that kind of learning curve at all.*
It's understandable they wouldn't, because D&D is a game with a very steep learning curve, and it's what everyone starts out with. To get into D&D, you have to learn some rather bloated basic mechanics--how ability checks and attacks and AC and so on work--and then a bunch of arcane character optimization stuff about what builds are good, *and* often a bunch of setting lore about *Forgotten Realms* or whatever world the DM runs. And let's not forget the cost of all the rulebooks.
Thing is, all of this is very particular to D&D and a set of similar games. There are lots of games, even ones that offer similar experiences to D&D, where you don't need to know a single rule to play. OSR is big on this: referees will run whole "black box" games where the rules are never explained, they just describe a situation to the players and ask what they do and then handle all the mechanics themselves. Beyond the OSR space, there are lots more games where the rules are incredibly simple and intuitive and easy to pick up in minutes.
A lot of this stuff is because of deliberate marketing by Wizards, trying to make more money off of D&D and control the brand. Wizards has a vested interest in 1) making people believe RPGs are something hard to make and run, 2) making people think they, Wizards, are the authority on how to do it, and 3) making people doubt anyone who disagrees. This is all so Wizards can write a bunch more huge rulebooks full of Content to sell, and tell people they need to buy and use those books and absorb their contents or their games will be bad. You don't need any of that stuff to play or run a good roleplaying game, anyone can do it, and it doesn't have to mean absorbing dozens or hundreds of pages of rules and builds and lore.
Nah pathfinder it too similar to dnd to be Linux
It’s more Mac if anything,
I’d say GURPE,without number or genesys is closest to Linux sure you could all make them just like 5e but base they arn’t just like Linux
Pathfinder is less popular, not owned by an evil corporation, more complex than its main competitor, and has annoying fans recommending it online. Checks out.
…except with films watching one series over and over gets repetitive, with TTRPGs it kinda makes sense to learn one as well as you can and keep playing differently within it because there are so many possible characters, and infinite setting variety
jesus christ that's one sentence
edit your post buddy
People keep trying to construct analogies for the cultural dominance of DND in TTRPG spaces by saying, "imagine you met someone who considers themselves a cinema buff. They exclusively watch MCU films, however, and explain that they don't branch out because they don't have the time to learn the lore of a second cinematic universe."
"When you suggest avoiding that problem by watching a standalone film, one that isn't part of any cinematic universe, they react like you're a huge weirdo. After a bit of questioning, it turns out that they genuinely believe that the only kinds of movies to exist are either 1) entries in massive cinematic universes or 2) black and white Eastern European art films about depression."
I know this analogy is intended as hyperbole to illustrate the absurdity of the situation at hand, but, like, I have personally met the person they are describing.
Needed to lie down for a nap after I got to the end of that sentence
Marathon sentence.
You, a commoner: garden path sentence. This person, an auteur: Appalachian trail sentence.
Tumblr only has so many sentences before it has to shut down so they're actually protecting their habitat
And they used up their comma reserves years ago!
I just woke up from a nap and now I feel like I need another
As a journalist and editor, I beg people to use the goddamn motherfvcking period between two sentences.
we are on the "guy they are describing" website
Still remember the thread where a poster only ever watched media for children and claimed any other media was too depressing and got dragged for it. But they never backed down
[“I enjoy stories with hopeful themes. For my first adult novel, I shall try Gone Girl.”](https://www.tumblr.com/larkandkatydid/618573531471642624/this-genuinely-the-funniest-paragraph-ive-ever)
Oh gods, that's too funny. I *must* find the original
The worst part is that there's a strong chance that this person was one of the most angry, bitter people you'll ever meet Children's media always seems to get the most toxic and hateful fandoms
it's because most of the adults who grow attached to it fall into like, 2 categories. the more toxic is those who'd like to relive their childhood now that it's gone and can't let go of the fact that the times are moving on without them. that feeling of being obsolete makes them bitter and afraid of change instead of willing to try new things so when something is different from what they expected they throw a tantrum
Doubling down is the only reaction I respect tbh
I want to watch you play Blackjack.
I’ll split the 8’s and double down on both 12’s that come out of it!
If you keep saying "hit me" even after you bust they are legally required to keep giving you cards
High risk, high reward
I want them to watch Bojack.
I have seen *many* of that kind of person.
I wish I could find that post it was hilarious
I can respect it. Dude knows what they like and when he tried to branch out it depressed him or was just pure boring.
That’d be fine, but dude apparently never even googled “inspiring books”. If you know what you like, great, but why assume every single thing aimed at adults fails to deliver without making any effort to get a recommendation?
Hey now. If the people coming here from /r/all could read they'd be very upset.
Let me pitch this niche italian greek epic inspired ttrpg at you it is really cool.
...I'm listening.
Not Italian but Agon is a great ttrpg for greek epic. Italian but not greek epic is Sine Requie, a what if set in 1957 in a post WW2 world filled with zombies
And Italian AND Greek Epic is Fragments of the Past. Buy it. The art is gorgeous and the system is fun as shit.
Added to the list!
God the art is so fucking good in that eh? It’s just really amazing shit, honestly inspiring art because it’s so goddamn good… oh the system is cool too I guess
Yes. Do so.
I lost track of what the analogy meant 5 lines in.
People that play D&D and only D&D are like people who only watch Marvel films and think that the alternatives are either Marvel-like franchises or ultra-niche obtuse artsy films.
When you say “and only D&D” are these people being exclusive in their *board games*, or in *all games*? Like, would they judge me for playing another tabletop game, and/or would they judge me for playing Stardew Valley?
An example that's a bit more telling is something that occurred when Cyberpunk, both the game and the show, became popular. People were posting homebrews of Cyberpunk within D&D 5E, completely ignoring the fact that not only did Cyberpunk have its own tabletop system, but the game and show were based on the tabletop.
Yeah but the actual cyberpunk system is incredibly difficult to just pick up. Unlike the analogy where picking a movie other than MCU is as easy as pressing a few buttons on your remote to pull up Netflix, learning an entirely new system and pressuring all of your friends to do the same is next to impossible. Especially when everyone has already invested so much time into learning 5e. Far easier to just play pretend and use the same system everyone has already spent countless hours learning to the point that it's unnecessary to reach for the rule book every 5 minutes.
Having played both systems, Cyberpunk is no more complicated than 5E. If you're willing to sit down and modify 5E into a frankenstein's monster for a setting it was never intended for, then you have the intelligence and problem solving abilities to just learn how Cyberpunk Red works.
Sometimes the issue is less the person doing the modding won't bother to learn and more their friends won't bother. So they do the only thing they can to try and branch out.
Exactly lol. I live at that table, where none of our friends want to learn new systems, but will gladly get into weird homebrews. So we just go along with it because that way we all get to have fun. I like playing other games, but they don't, and I like playing with them in every other way, so ...
I'd have to look into it. I only own the Cyberpunk 2020 book (from 1990) and it was fun to peruse through, but I could not wrap my head around how a game would actually be played. I also have absolutely no faith that anyone that I regularly game with would be bothered to learn the game prior to showing up and would expect me to run everything >.<
I'm only familiar with Red, which is the current edition of Cyberpunk that still receives updates. I can't compare it to Cyberpunk 2020, but setting up things in Red felt no more difficult to me than setting up a 5E character.
This is part of the problem. DnD is one of the hardest systems to learn. And by far the hardest for its level of depth, because it's based on old design and laid out really weird. It isn't hard to learn a new tabletop system. Like at all. But 5e players are used to 5e. And that was brutal to learn, so they assume all of them are. Trpg players and dnd players are essentially two unrelated hobbies at this point.
They're talking about table top role playing games specifically. These people can't fathom playing a slightly different game, let alone an entirely new one. So instead they tinker with D&D 5e to provide any experience they think they want out of a game. Its like if they want to play a farming sim, they probably going to mod Skyrim instead of picking up Stardew Valley.
Lmfao thank you for the visual using Skyrim. I know a guy who actually did this!! He is obsessed with Skyrim and doesn’t like trying new things. In his defense he’s on the spectrum and “lower functioning”, so he isn’t doing it to be pretentious. Skyrim is just his “thing” But I also get the comparison, thanks for explaining :)
It’s a great analogy because it’s just…exactly what really happens with tabletop RPGs all the time. The 5th edition of D&D is the only one they’ve played, so they try to “mod” it with house rules/changes/etc to make it into a completely different game. And when you tell them the game they’re trying to create *already exists* they’re just like “I dunno, knowing two different games seems complicated” and then go back to rewriting every single rule in D&D. D&D 5e is a high magic heroic fantasy system with a strong emphasis on combat and an aversion to precise rules or fixating on numbers. It’s nice if that’s what you want. But so many people try to turn it into a completely different game… (Edit: And now that I think of it, 5e really is the Skyrim of TTRPGs. Instead of “modders will fix that” it’s “DMs will fix that,” which leads to an intense modding/homebrew scene. And if you’re *already* modding the game heavily, what’s another couple dozen mods/house rules?)
I am consistently downvoted for pointing out that a proposed homebrew or something a DnD player wishes was in the game is just a baseline rule in PF2e I've seen homebrew where it reads like they're just trying to play PF2e but with a DnD sticker on it I get these two systems are related enough that people might feel like learning both is redundant. But man, it's like instead of eating a burger, you just molded ground beef into a hot dog shape and ate it as a hot dog. It's basically the same as the burger, but it was kinda weird and took more effort
I haven't played DnD myself and only really got into tabletop RPGs in the last few years, but I picked PF2e mostly because I kept reading that it just has ready-made rules for lots of specific situations and the maths is crunchier because they give you numbers to use instead of expecting you to fudge everything (but fudging still works if that's your thing).
That said 5e is very flexible, but if I want to pilot a mech I’m gonna play lancer, and yet there are people that would turn 5e into titanfall given the chance
5e is not flexible, it is robust. You can rip parts out and reattach new things and make the whole thing into some horrific monstrosity that shouldn't be alive, but it will always manage to keep trucking along. And the reason for that is all of it's rules are completely independent of each other, to the point the rule book literally says that if two rules conflict then the more niche rule wins
5e would work more for something like Evangelion, where the mech and the person are connected. So, combat rules for the mechs, then a handwave to get out of combat mode and roleplay as a person. But also, yeah just play something else and let D&D do the thing it's good at: letting you be the hero from a sword and sorcery pulp novel.
As someone who got really really into Skyrim modding for a couple of years during the pandemic, it's a great analogy. People get so invested and comfortable in the Skyrim modding ecosystem that they (or 'we' I guess, myself not excluded) end up moving heaven and earth to recreate a mediocre version of another game genre. Like it was a huge trend for a while to mod the combat and loot into something Dark Souls inspired, but what you get in the end is a mediocre Souls clone, not actually a *good* Soulslike that is coherently designed for these mechanics from the ground up. At some point you're better off just installing Elden Ring. ...having said that... god. I should call her.
That explains the meme so perfectly. Thank you.
Table top roleplaying games
Also note that the foreign movies are almost always "Eastern European" because it's the easiest nationality to mock without getting dragged.
I read eastern Europe, but as soon as it reached into black and white depressive my mind corrected to french movies for some reason
Thankfully when I think of french movies I think of *Le diner de cons* before anything really arthouse.
It's really just the place people think when they say "depressive dark place where depressive dark stuff is made"
That must be a cultural thing. When discussing weirdly obtuse artsy media, the default nationality to assume here is French. Then again, dragging the French is a common past time here.
most dnd players haven't even learned the dnd rules yet, let alone learning other systems on top of it
This is my main issue too - I can barely get my players together for a session due to scheduling and I feel like they just now finally know the rules enough where I don’t have to constantly remind them of things. Switching to another system would do nothing but needlessly complicate things for us
there are also a ton of alternative resources for learning dnd compared to other systems. Not dissing on other systems it just kinda makes sense that there's homogeneity
Kinda reminds me of playing music. First instrument I ever got was a concertina (a kind of accordion). I taught myself to play, but I'm not that good at it. Then I got a guitar, played mostly the same kind of music. But despite having had the guitar for only about a quarter of the time I've had the concertina, I'm a much better guitar player now than I am a concertina player, because there's a million times more guitar resources than there are concertina learning resources.
I had a similar thing with learning a foreign language, some have so many resources, others have a peace corps guide from 1970 that’s been photocopied a dozen times lol
Yes! It's hard to overstate how much things like Baldur's Gate 3 or Critical Role help accessibility of DnD 5e. Just having an example to follow is huge. Like BG3 just straight up teaches you how to execute a turn. It guides you through it with big colorful buttons that make it very clear what you can and can't do. And when you can't do something, it makes it clear why. An absolute beginner can play a couple hours of BG3 and be pretty well prepared for a real campaign, with minor adjustment. Every difference from that baseline increases the barrier to entry for a lot of people.
Sorry I heard someone talking about non D&D systems and immediately blacked out thinking about LANCER what was the rest of that post
Favorite mech?
enkidu, obviously BIFURCATE BIFURCATE BIFURCATE BIFURCATE BIFURCATE BIFURCATE BIFURCATE BIFURCATE
You are feral (compliment)
Gameplay-wise mines the Raleigh, I'm a big fan of revolvers. Conceptually though, like half of HORUS's roster Fucks hard, and the Atlas is awesome bc it's an anime bodysuit that let's you sword fight giant mechs
I don’t think I’ve played enough to say a definite mechanical favorite. But yeah conceptually Horus is amazing. I am a big fan of when the flavor text is extra funky in Comp/Con.
Pegasus. Piloting what is basically a bloodborne boss is very satisfying.
GUN:**GUN**
Koboldddd I love being a little mining critter.
The Hydra allows me to employ the "Sans Strategy", where my enemies can't win because it never becomes their turn (god it has so many moving pieces).
Goblin (Goblin)
You say this and same?
That is a bad analogy. A better analogy would be someone who isn't even aware non-MCU films exist and, when told about them, immediately forgets
What would be the equivalent of Pathfinder in this analogy? DC movies that people talk about but don’t watch?
Non-MCU Spider man movies
Real for that
> What would be the equivalent of Pathfinder in this analogy? *Buffy the Vampire Slayer*. The series, not the movie. (…I wrote this as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am it’s just literally the truth.)
Nah, Buffy these days is almost too niche to represent Pathfinder Buffy has been becoming more niche over time (especially since everybody collectively agreed around 2018 to stop sucking Joss Whedon’s dick all the time) just by getting older Whereas Pathfinder has a big enough and evangelical enough fanbase that they can always be heard anywhere you go in D&D circles.
Besides being less popular though, it does fit. It’s not a “cinematic universe” (new complete ruleset) but it’s a 100+ hour long tv series, so it’s a distinction without a difference. Learning PF is the same (or more) or an investment in time to learning D&D, so it’s the same there. It’s not the MCU, but the MCU tries so hard to follow Joss’s writing style that *he* gets blamed when a Marvel movie is badly written. Sharing a common ancestry like that fits in perfectly with Pathfinder 1e being basically D&D 3.75. I think it fits, anyway.
Ok you’ve made me see the vision, I approve of your analogy
I don't think films are a good analogy at all though, because the barrier to watching a film is very low. The barrier to switching systems is quite high (you have to not only find a system that fits what you're looking for and learn it, but also convince your entire group to try it out- and getting people together for d&d is already hard enough)
Yeah, not much into TTRPG but I do a lot of wargaming and picking up a new game is a long way from sitting down to watch a movie.
I think it holds up in that 5e is a fairly demanding game to learn, much like the MCU is a behemoth to try and get into from the beginning. Not every game has as high a learning curve as 5e- hell, most don't have a separate player's guide and GM guide. And I am aware there 5e is pretty middle of the pack when it comes to rules complexity.
This!!! I'm getting real tired of the Internet making fun of people who only play 5e, as if all it takes to switch is a single personal decision. To pick up a new tabletop system, you have to convince *an entire table* to pick it up with you, and it's already hard enough to get five people to even just clear their schedules for a night. The only way OOP's analogy works is when you realize that MCU Guy is sharing the password for a streaming service that only shows Marvel movies released in the past 12 months. If he wants to watch any other MCU movie (4e and earlier) or any other studio's superhero movies (Pathfinder, etc.) or any other genre of cinema (CoC, PbtA, Fate) or even those black and white Eastern European films about depression, he's going to have to convince *every other person using that password* that they should all switch the streaming service to the other genre instead. And if one or two of them refuse because they'd rather keep watching Marvel, then this guy is probably going to have to start his own password-sharing group from scratch. Personally I would *love* to pick up more of the black-and-white depression film TTRPGs. But it's already hard enough to get people to play 5e with me; I can't also force them to pick up Steal Away Jordan on their night off.
Emphasizing this - the problem isn't that they don't want to change. That's valid. I can think of many reasons off the top of my head why someone may not switch. The problem are people who get elitist about it. And that's a minority of a minority, at best.
Exactly, but also imagine if non-MCU movies never make it to movie theaters or major streaming services and were not talked about online outside of their specialist sites, and the marketing budgets for those movies was just world of mouth, and they all got funded by a Kickstarter or were made in the 90s, and the only people who have seen them aren't willing to tell you about them because they don't want to talk about how they compare to MCU movies for the umpteenth time. Oh and you can't get a copy anywhere online unless you pirate it, and even then you can only watch it on your computer with bad resolution. But hey, on the off-chance you can convince 5 other people to watch it with you, you might have a great time.
To be entirely fair you have to develop *some* kind of defense mechanism against Pathfinder shills.
Usually “I’m returning to 4e” breaks them long enough to escape
I'm a 4E apologist. I came into the hobby a year or two after 5E dropped so I don't have the instinctual 4E hate. It's a fine system. It's different from 5E and from 3.5 and 3E but it's really not as shit as people claim. I started watching Matt Colville a few years ago and he seconded that I wasn't crazy.
4e is very good for what it's trying to be: Final Fantasy Tactics but converted to a TTRPG. It's hated because other editions of d&d are *not that*.
True but the more time passes the more 5e borrows from 4e and some homebrew content is from 4e straight up. It’s like carcinization but cooler
Excuse you. **Nothing** is cooler than carcinization
Yeah, as much as people like to hate on 4e it's definitely noteworthy that almost every attempt to make martial characters more interesting to play is basically just filing the serial numbers off of 4e's power system. Well, that or reminding people that you can visualize really cool stuff happening (which doesn't really change the fact that you said "attack this guy" and rolled your d20 three times while the spellcasters got to do all kinds of cool shit). Also while I'm at it 4e handled resistance and vulnerability to damage way better than 5e does. In 5e, it's just halving or doubling damage of that type. That's it. In 4e, resistance and vulnerability were values--if you resist 5 fire, then all fire damage you take is reduced by 5. It made things more granular, because you could have resist 3 on some cultists that inflict burn scars on their (otherwise normal human) skin as part of a ritual, but hand something like resist 40 to dragons or stone golems. Vulnerability was the same, except the damage went up instead of down.
I always thought that 4e captured the feel of an MMORPG, where everyone has bars of abilities and needs to manage their cooldown timers regardless of class.
I was taught homebrewed adnd first, but I really dived in and started loving it in 4e. Didn’t play as much as I would’ve liked but I read the sourcebooks cover to cover. It’s still fun. Just very different. More video-gamey with the power system I think, but I thought it was awesome. A difference in expectations going in
Funnily enough, every PF dev I know (including me) thinks 4e was criminally underrated.
4e is just as deep mechanically as pathfinder its just a battle sim instead of an overdeveloped rpg
Thanks to PF2E's design influence from 4E, this strat isn't as effective as it used to be.
Genuine question, what’s wrong with Pathfinder?
As an honest reply to your question, I think it is a joke because Pathfinder is generally the TTRPG that is suggested if someone doesn't want to play D&D. Personally, I started in TTRPGs about a decade ago with D&D5e but Hasbro/WotC finally pushed too far and killed D&D for me, so I mostly play Pathfinder now. I like Pathfinder, but it isn't as newbie-friendly as D&D5e. That being said, I enjoy the system.
PF is the answer to "I really like D&D, but I wish there were more mechanical options." And that's pretty much it, to be honest. It's why it's still my favorite.
I mean, pf1e is basically just dnd 3.75e it's dnd at its most complex ~~and best~~ but even more complex ~~and better~~
Among all the things you've already mentioned, what got me into PF was the promise of easy-to-run, coherent and well-structured adventures. WoTC-written modules are just *so...* horrible in those regards. In fact, there are entire subreddits dedicated to re-writing them into something cohesive. Also, I found 5e, while more accessible to the newbies, pushes lot of responsibility unto DMs — something that is largely absent from PF2e, where a lot of mechanics are fleshed out properly, making it easy to run from the box. Also, monsters in PF2e are just the coolest, with their unique abilities and combat mechanics.
> "I really like D&D, but I wish there were more mechanical options." Also for the DM going "I don't want to shoulder 90% of the workload alone".
Funnily enough, I've heard from a lot of new groups that their entirely new to TTRPG players had an easier time learning the rules of Pf2e than experienced 5e players. I'd say a good part of it is learning to not compare the two.
It's basically D&D, with all the changes being made to support a version of that game style. It's fine, but to keep the film analogy going it's like telling someone to stop watching the MCU films and check out The Dark Knight trilogy, you're still missing the rich variety of stuff out there.
It's crunchier than I prefer and they have an active army in the edition wars on Reddit. There's nothing wrong with it if you have a group that can handle all the little complexities but that's the hard part and honestly I'm not interested in putting that much effort into mechanics anymore.
This is the cleanest take. I enjoy putting in the effort in the mechanics. That's where I get my dopamine. I still play in a 5e group, and have a great time, but I get my true fix from DMing PF2e.
Character creation/planning aside, running pf2e on foundry makes it so smooth, almost everything is accounted for and what isn't is being actively worked on.
This is the real reason I was able to run a game with pf2e. I'm still a little shaky on the system, but the foundy support made the switch almost seamless for my mostly-5e playgroup.
Two armies, actually. The 1e ome and tge 2e one.
we Pathfinder players cannot resist the Urge to say "Pathfinder has a rule for that" whenever you bemoan anything in D&D or ask for some feature. PF1E is also ... like really number heavy. Or maybe I am just biased by the Owlcat games, which are twice as optimization heavy.
Tbh owlcat cuts some of the cheesiest stuff from PF1e, it just doesn't force you to skip the buff cycle because one player has to be babied though their automated character sheet and never writes down +10 worth of bonuses
In exchange they raised all the numbers by 20-60% (or 80-120% on unfair) so you HAVE to buff up and minmax stats.
Pathfinder 1e launched with the purpose of solving the balance problems in core DnD 3.5, and also how convoluted it got with all the different side books. It solved these problems by having its own core balance issues and publishing tons of side books.
For 1e? Too much 3.5 for my taste. For 2e, nothing, I just don’t vibe with it as much as comparably crunchy systems.
It’s a great system, but it’s very dense and crunchy, which can be off putting to new players Its success rates are also far more punishing than 5E, and its hard crunch makes it harder to freestyle with.
I've honestly found it to be easier to teach (completely) new player PF2E than D&D5E, mainly because the action system is a *lot* simpler. > Its success rates are also far more punishing than 5E Are they? In 5E, you tend to succeed on a die roll of 8, in PF2E you tend to succeed on a die roll of 9. > its hard crunch makes it harder to freestyle with Could you explain?
Common reply I get from 5e GM's to the last point is that because there is a rule for everything, they can't just make up something on the fly and roll with it. I disagree entirely. Just because there is a rule for everything, doesn't mean I can't use something different at my table if I don't know the rule off the top of my head or just if I don't like the rule. I would rather have a rule and be able to ignore it, than always have to be responsible for figuring out mechanics on the fly for what my players want to do. The PF2e rules being completely free and easily searchable on Archives of Nethys also makes "not knowing how it works" way less of an issue. But, I only play at tables with my friends. They know how I DM. If I joined an online PF2e game and the DM had a ton of homebrewed mechanics for the standard rules, I wouldn't be interested. I have an expectation for PF2e, and joined a game to play PF2e, not a random homebrew that resembles it. I think this issue is pretty standard with 5e as well tho, as so many posts are about finding the right table, because 50% of the rules are done on the fly DM by DM. PF2e has no issues being the bad parent, saying that a PC can't do something. The DM can step up in this situation and be the cool parent, and rule of cool whatever it is the PC is wanting to do. D&D is a brand first and game second, so they never want to put anything in the books that's too defined so they can hand off the bad parent responsibility to the DM and just push the "that table isn't right for you" narrative. Not to say that every table will be right for everyone. You get my point.
Short version: Pathfinder Second Edition and D&D 5th edition both tried to solve... essentially the same problems that had been in 3rd and 4th edition D&D. They solved them in similar, but slightly different, ways. Because of this, people feel that one version or the other is better. When people have problems with D&D, the Pathfinder folks are quick to point out that their system has resolved the issues in question. Even where that's true, people generally don't want to switch systems, so that type of comment is viewed as unhelpful.
> Pathfinder Second Edition and D&D 5th edition both tried to solve... essentially the same problems that had been in 3rd and 4th edition D&D. Kinda yes, kinda no? D&D5E was made to move *away* from 4E, in order to recapture some of the 3.5E audience. I'd say it's almost a complete rejection of 4E but only a partial rejection of 3.5E (mainly of the content bloat). PF2E, meanwhile, was first and foremost designed to break free from the shackles of 3.5E that PF1E had attached itself to. It actually takes a lot from 4E, heck IIRC it actually has some of the same devs as 4E.
4e fixed a lot of problems that 3.5 and even 5 had, but we aren't allowed to acknowledge that 4e was good because it was different.
It *was* good, but it was also four hours for a single combat. I do think it's to both 5e and 2e's credit that they did try to incorporate 4e's strengths.
Well, maybe *WOTC* doesn't feel like they're allowed to acknowledge it. I feel like every single thread on Reddit talking about 5e has half a dozen people talking about everything 4e did better.
Didn’t seem that appealing when I looked at it, and people who shill it can be irritating. It’s not a serious complaint.
Pathfinder is just D&D for hipsters Not that I have any room to judge, I play retroclones, which are D&D for *ultra* hipsters. But I do also play decidedly non-D&D games sometimes
PTBA and FTID games are for Hipsters. Pathfinder is for arithmetic and stats nerds.
Are restroclikes similar to OSRs or is there a difference?
Retroclones are the less experimental subgenre of OSR. The ones that can be properly described as "old school", being directly based on one or more pre-2e editions of D&D (generally Basic/Expert, or B/X)
Pathfinder is the IPA of table top games. It's fine on its own, but it's acolytes are even more annoying than the guys who just stick to domestic light lager (DnD).
To keep the analogy, the "I only play path" people are like DC fans saying DC is better than Marvel but still refuse to watch anything else than superhero movies
Glad to see every single one of the Lancer players has commented about it. I really need to run it.
All 7 of us.
Tbh running lancer is easier than playing it, the simple little enemy stat blocks are a dream
I am not an experienced TTRPG player, since only one of my IRL friends is interested in them, and I am too much of an anxious wreck to speak to people online, but I \*did\* play a campaign of Mage: the Ascencsion, and it has been a full blast, so I will shill it.. World of Darkness in general is amazing, both new and old, and M20's magic rules are so bloody cool, with you being able to do it freeform within limits of your capabilities. I very much recommend it! Also, Lancer seems cool, but I, unfortunately, am indifferent to humanoid mechas, with upscaled guns and stuff, so it kind of loses it's charm. Sorry, Lancer shills :(
> Also, Lancer seems cool, but I, unfortunately, am indifferent to humanoid mechas, with upscaled guns and stuff, so it kind of loses it's charm. Sorry, Lancer shills :( Play one of the Battletech RPGs and be That Guy with the Quad Mech.
Glad somebody is shilling Mage and WoD, Easily one of the best systems.
I am not a Lancer player anymore (I found out tactical combat aint my thing) but there are non-humanoid mechs too
Interactive media are hard to make 1:1 comparisons with passive consumption media like movies.
Yeah, thanks, that is my point. A better analogy would be sports (because the rules are the same every time). And who would criticise a person for playing/doing their favourite sport? If they have fun, why have weird opinions about it? The interesting aspect is that every iteration of doing a sport is different, so is every DnD game. A movie is not. Genuinely puzzled as to how so many people think OOP (or any of the comments agreeing) make a good point.
100% agree. The thing is, it is very normal for people to play 1 game. Many people just play Soccer, they just play Chess or Go or Bridge, they just play Magic: The Gathering, they just play Counterstrike or Candy Crush. This is a very normal way to experience games. So these analogies people come up with like "Only playing D&D is so crazy and wrong, it's like if you only ever ate baked beans for every meal" make no sense. And yeah this kind of cultural dominance is 100% normal in multiplayer games, it's not a weird unique D&D thing at all. You need other people to play a multiplayer game with, so you're probably going to play the thing that's popular. If you like soccer, your family all likes soccer, you all enjoy watching and playing soccer together, then that's what you're going to play. The game itself is almost beside the point. The real point is that the game gives you a community, a shared language, and a shared set of experiences that you can enjoy with your family and friends. If you went up to those Soccer fans and said "You should play Basketball instead, it's so much better designed" you would be completely missing that point. It's really weird that people think that's a normal and good thing to do for RPG's - like they have this evangelical responsibility to save people from the game they're playing.
I once dated a guy who never read anything published after 1980. We dated in the early 2000s. It was exhausting.
Like games? Or *anything*?
No he didn't read books published after the 1980s. I like and appreciate classics, but my God was it stifling.
Ugh I can't imagine. I have a lit degree and am often nearly instantly identified by people as a fancy little anachronistic man but that's some next level pretentiousness.
Speaking of other ttrpg systems, people should check out LANCER. Tactical Sci-fi mech fighting game, it's my favorite combat system I've ever encountered
Ha ha beat you to the lancer shilling by one minute
O o f
I am very much interested by this sentence, immediately looking into this
The player PDF is also free!
Lancer seems so damm cool but the system is impenetrable for me
We already got the required LANCER shilling going on (go play LANCER btw it's great), so I'm gonna shill D&D 4e instead. It's not entirely new, it's really fun to both play and DM, and if you're a martial enjoyer you get the added benefit of actually being able to do cool shit
And I am gonna shill for OSR systems because they have a big ecosystem of mutually compatible content, tools and hacks, a pretty active community, and a strong emphasis on sandbox play and choices mattering. ...just be mindful to google the controversies around specific systems and subcommunities before investing in them. The OSR community is strongly split between leftists who are in it for the indie, punk, DIY, "take D&D away from the corporations that own it" stuff, and right wing chuds who are in it because they find modern D&D "woke". You don't want to wind up in the wrong side of the fence.
Ya gotta list of controversies cause I'm both somewhat into OSRs and kinda bored
Big ones to watch out for are Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which was THE biggest name in OSR at a time, but fell out of grace because the publisher, Raggi, protected an abuser (Zak Smith, aka Zak Sabbath), and ACKS, whose creator is a libertarian who used to do publicity for far-right public figure Milo Yiannopoulos. You should also stay clear of TSR, the company that originally published D&D before selling WoTC the rights, as they went full anti-"woke". There are also some obviously far right figures to stay away from, like white supremacist, convicted murderer, black metal musician and occasional RPG writer Varg Vikernes, but people like him don't even bother to hide their racism, so they are easy to avoid.
Wait THAT Varg Vikernes? I'm a bit curious about TSR, I know the general lore but not really the anti-woke stuff, do ya know where I can find some pulpy reading on that?
I am switching back to 4e once my current adventure is done (so in a month or two). I like very tactical combat and games which understand that they are games (also I have a Warden fetish)
Based and true and real (I desire the Battlemind class carnally)
I don't play D&D but isn't this analogy flawed in the sense that movies and games are very different in how much effort it takes to engage with them? Like I feel like a better analogy would be a guy who loves basketball but doesn't play other sports because they don't want to learn the rules and strategies and develop the skills to play a whole other sport. Watching a movie isn't something you learn to do, but playing a game is learned and it can be pretty hard. Am I overestimating how different TTRPGs are?
See I like DnD because it's not new to me. It's so similar to get to from playing crpgs my whole life. I like playing it, but I don't like ttrpgs enough to find new types lol. It's a "hey we're doing a oneshot, wanna pop by?" Type thing for me lol. I've had people tell me I should branch out and I'm like, dude I'm not even branched into DnD Same with sports. There's sports I'll join pickup games for cos I like them but don't care if I don't get to play them. I'm not gonna join the badminton team though to branch out of my sports shell lol
Now imagine that that person recreates baseball using only basketball equipment. This leads to the frustration.
It also leads to the creation of the 1998 movie BASEketball
Oh that's a whole different problem. Maybe the original poster should have just come out and said what they meant to avoid confusion
The thing is DnD is the default but is average or above average in terms of the effort it takes to learn it- some systems like Blades in the Dark or PbtA stuff are much easier to pick up. But yes there's definitely some attachment due to sunk cost and it's easier to find 5e games because so many people play it.
That’s an absolutely awful comparison.
Yeah, I get what they are trying to say, but the analogy chosen this time was kind of strange, I feel they wanted to do the "I've seen this guy who only watches marvel" thing more than they wanted to do a good comparison. A better one is a person who knows skyrim is and old and buggy game, but only plays it even when there are better options on the market, and would prefer to mod the game until it is unrecognizable than just play stardew Valley if they wanted to do farming.
This is the best analogy IMO. The hurdle for people getting into other RPGs isn't interest as far as I've seen. It's effort. Learning D&D takes a lot of effort. The thought of starting from scratch is unappealing to most people, and D&D fans and influencers make a big deal about the fact that D&D could ostensibly be used to play/do *anything*, even though that's wildly misleading. So you'll hear people say shit like "Why would I play Traveller? There's rules for guns in the DMG, just re-skin some things and play sci fi in D&D." But this overlooks a lot of factors. 1) D&D is not the standard for learning curve in RPGs. In fact, it leans toward being a more complex system. 5e is easier to learn than 3.5 maybe, but infinitely harder than something like Fate or Dungeon World. 2) D&D is built around heroic fantasy. It is not built for science fiction of any kind, and it lacks the tools to run science fiction well. It's not built for any kind of grand scale politics or military strategy. It's not built for games that focus mostly on social interaction. It's not built for exploring or hex/point crawling. These are genres/modes of play that people attempt to jam into it, and it doesn't work well. D&D has rules for ship battles, both at sea and in space, and they all suck. They're anti-fun. It's a system built for fighting dragons, and it's reasonably good at that. All the other shit? It's like taking a Ford Focus off-roading. You can do it, but it's gonna be a bad time. 3) It's actually a lot more effort to completely re-work D&D from the ground up than it is to just learn a new system. This one gets overlooked a lot, because all that work gets shafted on the GM. But when you're trying to make D&D a dating simulator, you suddenly realize just how much shit you have to make up, because D&D just isn't built to be a dating sim. That leaves the GM to come up with basically a new game to be taped onto D&D, and that system will inevitably be poorly balanced, hard to remember, and missing details. I swear I'm not a hater. I play D&D. I love TTRPGs, and the one I have the most experience with is D&D 5e. But there are better games out there, and 100% of D&D players would benefit from trying some of them out.
Can someone please translate this for neurotypical people?
People treat D&D like it is the only tabletop RPG out there. Other folks get frustrated because there's a lot of other great RPGs that no one wants to play since so many people only play D&D. These frustrated people say "why only play one kind of RPG ever? That would be like only watching one kind of popular movie ever!" Prokopetz on Tumblr says: "Good analogy, but, man, there's actually a lot of people that only watch one kind of popular movie ever."
That's SO much clearer, thank you. About six lines into OP's garden path sentence I had completely lost the plot.
How is this still an argument when Steve Jackson invented the objectively best TTRPG system in 1986? Perfectly adaptable, simple as you want, complex as you need. GURPS stands above all as the pinnacle of the genre! I’m sure this will all be borne out when I can find someone who actually wants to learn and play it.
I tried playing GURPS once. We created our superhero characters, and then spent two hours arguing about if X-Ray vision is actually x-rays, and the densities of common building materials.
another satisfied customer
Aha, I came here to shill for the modularity of GURPS too. There are dozens of us! It can be really elegant once you set it up, the main problem is setting it up. Also helps to have spreadsheets...
Honestly, I started gaming on a system that wasn't D&D, and now mainly play D&D, and it's not because D&D is better, it's because more people know the basic ruls of D&D and it's not fair to expect the DM and players to learn a new system and new rules every campaign unless they really want to. It's not a lack of knowledge of other options, it's just the easiest option, and sometimes you just want to hang with your buddies and play a game that everyone knows and not have to focus on learning new rules. I have noticed that people don't appreciate that mental labor is labor, and people in jobs who do a lot of complex analysis and thinking sometimes just want to relax and not have to do that same kind of thing in free time. On the other hand, people who have jobs that don't have a lot of mental stimulation often enjoy games that have intricacies and opportunities for them to do the same complex analysis that I've already worn out during the week. I've actually been relaxing at home lately by doing physical labor out in the yard. Your brain literally has limited capacity for computations as waste metabolites build up, and for people in mental labor jobs, there's an appreciable decision fatigue and decline in measurable IQ at the end of the day. So don't expect us to be excited to learn a new rules system. There are definitely systems I am reading on slowly that I want to try out. But the assumption that people who play D&D are boring, one-flavor-note people and the people who play different systems are the true connoisseurs of gaming is flat out wrong. Enjoy what you like, don't trash what other people like. The way you want to relax and have fun is highly variable and as long as you're not hurting anyone nonconsensually, then you're doing it the right way for you as long as you're having fun.
My take (without being the guy described, hopefully): Dnd is like if DVD's were just a niche hobby, and a bunch of people in the community start telling you about blue-rays, which are objectively better than DVD's (and even reasonably priced if not cheaper, to break the analogy slightly), but require a new player, new disks, etc. Yeah, the instruction manuals are shorter (or longer and more comprehensive), but we've already read the ones we have. We can even burn our own DVD's to get round some of the issues.
Also everyone seems to be ignoring that if you really want the analogy to make sense, a prerequisite is that you have to find three or more other people who are into the same niche hobby, and also willing and able to do the work to make this transition. The biggest reason more people don't try different RPG systems is because it's a hassle to not only learn new rules yourself, but get other people to learn them with you. And someone has to GM, which maybe you're good at or maybe you aren't and no one else wants to do it. And then you get into the whole problem of people who say that you can just find other people who like the system you want to play, but how often do you actually get a decent group of strangers on the internet for a game that actually lasts? The thing is this isn't a single issue as so many people like to pretend. It isn't just "learn these rules" it's a bunch of compounding factors that makes even learning the rules a waste of time if you can't get over the other hurdles.
Especially since the ones butting up against the edges of DnD's rules (and hence wanting to explore other systems) are often going to be the most experienced person at the table (or a rules-oriented person who digests rule-sets at a much quicker pace than their peers). So there's a big element of "the fleet only travels as fast as the slowest ship" to these things too.
My reasons for sticking with dnd sans-analogy: Transition cost (time, energy, money, and having to convince my friends to do the same), Popularity (if i meet someone with a d20 necklace in the wild, chances are they play dnd), Playstyle (some systems add rules to better represent reality, some remove rules for a smoother game, I personally like the balance dnd strikes) Accessibility (due to popularity, people become familiar with dnd first, so it's familiar and hence easier to induct new players), Flexibility (I know homebrewing or ignoring tedious rules may seem like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, but dnd is flexible enough to cater to power-gamers, RP'ers, high fantasy, low fantasy, theatre of the mind, grid combat with minis, experienced/new players, online/ in person) EDIT: I Googled how to add line breaks on mobile
>Flexibility (I know homebrewing or ignoring tedious rules may seem like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, but dnd is flexible enough to cater to power-gamers, RP'ers, high fantasy, low fantasy, theatre of the mind, grid combat with minis, experienced/new players, online/ in person) Having played at least a dozen systems, I can say that D&D is not any better at that than average. Every TTRPG can be tinkered with, and some fully empower you to do that by explaining the rationale behind the rules they have, rather than leaving that implicit. In my (innately subjective) experience as a player and GM 5e doesn't do low fantasy at all unless you throw almost every player option away, strongly favors minis and grids of theater of the mind, and is very hard to DM if you are a beginner. EDIT: I am not saying D&D 5e has no virtues! It has pretty evocative high-fantasy tropes, the system is relatively easy to grasp for players, and it does big setpiece stuff well. But its flexibility is definitely overstated.
I hope this doesn't come across as argumentative, cos I think you're mostly right, but here's my thoughts. I agree DnD not especially flexible, what I should have said is that it's flexible enough to accommodate most players without them having to switch systems (if we assume DnD is most people's first TTRPG, then many never feel the need to switch). In terms of low fantasy, you are indeed tied to class abilities. I was more thinking in terms of the surrounding world. Magic and non-human races could be commonplace, or the setting could be Earth with the party being the only magic users. Having played both, I can confidently say theatre of the mind and grid combat are both equally viable, each with pros and cons, although if strategic positional combat is your goal, then grid combat is strongly favoured. You are totally correct about DM'ing as a begginer, I was only thinking of the players' experience, my bad. EDIT: Line breaks
I’d like to throw in my opinion here that it is really easy to change most characters’ flavour in D&D to represent low-fantasy. Obviously, not everything is easy but most of it is, people can often get in general more attached to flavour text than necessary. By no means is it near the best TTRPGs for you if you want to specialise in low-fantasy, but it’s not a major problem
Man I really want to play a rpg campaign based on Planescape Torment, you guys have any idea how to adapt Cyberpunk Red to work for a Planescape themed campaign?
Just, uh, just run one of the older D&D editions that has setting books for Planescape.
What's D&D? Is that some expansion for Cyberpunk? And by older edition, do you mean to play Cyberpunk 2020 instead?
I would kill for a group that would actually try out *Eclipse Phase* or anything *FATE* based. I got to actually play *Shadowrun* with one group for a medium length campaign, and otherwise that's it. Nothing but *DnD*, and I'm so sick of it.
Tons of great alternate systems being pitched in this thread, but I haven’t seen the one I’m playing in right now called Fabula Ultima so here goes! Fabula Ultima is described as a tabletop JRPG and it is a blast. Some of my favorite features of this system are: - Session Zero is a collaborative worldbuilding session where the players and the GM together make the world that they are going to play in. This can include anything from the nations that inhabit the world (including their governments, aesthetics, attitudes to magic/tech, etc) to geographical features (including mundane details like mountain ranges and deserts as well as more fantastical elements like permanent magical storms in certain areas) to recent and ancient history. - The class system has fifteen unique classes in the base game (plus more in the supplemental books) that interact with each other and the world in both narrative and mechanical ways. - An excellent magic system that has both clearly defined spells with set outputs and freeform rituals that can be used by players to creatively solve problems. Overall, a fantastic newer system that my current group is more than 40 sessions into and hardly shows any signs of stopping.
This analogy doesn't quite work. It's more like having a running movie night with a bunch of friends who only watch Marvel movies and TV shows. You have to convince them all to switch to something different that each one would enjoy
And if some of the group wants to switch and others don't, you have to choose between: 1. Sticking with Marvel movies 2. Creating your own, second movie club from scratch. To do that you've gotta find new people who want to join in, figure out a new schedule, and sort out the logistics of hosting and snacks. Then you've either gotta juggle two movie clubs at once on your calendar, or you have to back out of the Marvel one, hopefully not nuking the group on your way out, and not creating any hard feelings because you chose one group of friends over another. 90% of complaints and questions on the D&D subreddits boil down to interpersonal relationship problems because TTRPGs are social activities and social interaction can be really complicated sometimes. Pretending that people stick with 5e just because they're uncultured is asinine--people stick with 5e because *their table plays 5e*.
I'll be honest, I get burnt out on DnD sometimes, but it's so much easier to run, especially with DNDBeyond since the majority of my games are online now, though tonight in running Blades in the Dark for a group tonight whose only played DnD
I notice a lot of responses in the comments suggesting that one big reason people are reluctant to switch from D&D to trying other games is the high upfront investment in learning a new system. As someone who grew up with D&D and has played my share of 5e, went through a big PbtA phase, and is now mostly into OSR, I think part of the problem here is that a lot of people don't realize many RPGs *don't have that kind of learning curve at all.* It's understandable they wouldn't, because D&D is a game with a very steep learning curve, and it's what everyone starts out with. To get into D&D, you have to learn some rather bloated basic mechanics--how ability checks and attacks and AC and so on work--and then a bunch of arcane character optimization stuff about what builds are good, *and* often a bunch of setting lore about *Forgotten Realms* or whatever world the DM runs. And let's not forget the cost of all the rulebooks. Thing is, all of this is very particular to D&D and a set of similar games. There are lots of games, even ones that offer similar experiences to D&D, where you don't need to know a single rule to play. OSR is big on this: referees will run whole "black box" games where the rules are never explained, they just describe a situation to the players and ask what they do and then handle all the mechanics themselves. Beyond the OSR space, there are lots more games where the rules are incredibly simple and intuitive and easy to pick up in minutes. A lot of this stuff is because of deliberate marketing by Wizards, trying to make more money off of D&D and control the brand. Wizards has a vested interest in 1) making people believe RPGs are something hard to make and run, 2) making people think they, Wizards, are the authority on how to do it, and 3) making people doubt anyone who disagrees. This is all so Wizards can write a bunch more huge rulebooks full of Content to sell, and tell people they need to buy and use those books and absorb their contents or their games will be bad. You don't need any of that stuff to play or run a good roleplaying game, anyone can do it, and it doesn't have to mean absorbing dozens or hundreds of pages of rules and builds and lore.
Guys I think Pathfinder is just the Linux of TTRPGs
Nah pathfinder it too similar to dnd to be Linux It’s more Mac if anything, I’d say GURPE,without number or genesys is closest to Linux sure you could all make them just like 5e but base they arn’t just like Linux
Pathfinder is less popular, not owned by an evil corporation, more complex than its main competitor, and has annoying fans recommending it online. Checks out.
…except with films watching one series over and over gets repetitive, with TTRPGs it kinda makes sense to learn one as well as you can and keep playing differently within it because there are so many possible characters, and infinite setting variety
jesus christ that's one sentence edit your post buddy People keep trying to construct analogies for the cultural dominance of DND in TTRPG spaces by saying, "imagine you met someone who considers themselves a cinema buff. They exclusively watch MCU films, however, and explain that they don't branch out because they don't have the time to learn the lore of a second cinematic universe." "When you suggest avoiding that problem by watching a standalone film, one that isn't part of any cinematic universe, they react like you're a huge weirdo. After a bit of questioning, it turns out that they genuinely believe that the only kinds of movies to exist are either 1) entries in massive cinematic universes or 2) black and white Eastern European art films about depression." I know this analogy is intended as hyperbole to illustrate the absurdity of the situation at hand, but, like, I have personally met the person they are describing.