Nope. I dropped D&D in early 2013, and have no particular interest in playing 5e except for the experience of a session or two if I can find a pre-made that showcases its strengths.
4e got hit on a few major fronts. Some people accused it of not feeling like D&D because it attended to balance issues. Some people felt it was too mechanical because it did not attempt to (poorly) simulate a game world
I don't like it as much as skype or discord or this chat
but because some groups I have been part of, mostly my current job and some of the classes I used to take, I have it and use it to talk to specific people
@BESW just for the try, get yourself at least CoC and take a look at their system. Not because it is good or overall perfect, it just has some points that are qite good.
There's a decent chunk of the RPG landscape that I've read but haven't played and don't really intend to.
The best sanity-as-number mechanic I've seen is Cthulhu Dark's.
Though with a very small tweak, Shadowcraft's magic would make for some awesome Mythos ritual mechanics along the lines of CoC's sanity-for-power concept.
But I'm overall skeptical of the Mythos's approach to mental health in any form. Lovecraftesque handles it well, but that was part of the game's sales pitch.
Had some friends who liked it, I was never engaged by any of their descriptions. Moved away from D&D-likes before I had the chance to give it a chance again.
Read a D&D 3.0 book that seemed like it was supposed to be a port of Rokugan? Can't recall.
I have played only a bit of CoC and desperately wanted to include some sort of sanity tracker into Apocalypse World at first. The game at the time had a move "Open your brain" for which a little loss of sanity would've been the perfect failure consequence. Later on, they added psi-harm, which is essentially a short loss-of-sanity -like effect, and works for some situations.
Shadowcraft a Fate game where PCs have magical connections to stone, or animals, or shadows. You can draw on that power to do magic of the appropriate type, and you roll to control it (difficulty based on what you're doing). No matter what you roll, the magic works the way you want it to. Always.
But if you fail the roll, you get to describe how the magic powers coursing through you make you less human and more like the source of your power. You're encouraged to make it awesome and beneficial, like getting armor-tough skin or gaining a superb sense of smell.
You remove these effects by doing things which remind you of yourself and your humanity: hanging out with friends, meditating on your purpose, doing your hobby.
If you get too many of them at once... your character loses their sense of self and becomes an NPC or disappears into the magic entirely.
@kviiri In Cthulhu Confidential, lasting narrative effects are represented as short blurbs describing the specific thing. They might include a mechanical benefit or drawback like a penalty to a certain kind of roll, but sometimes they're just narrative statements. However, they can get so bad as "If you still have this at the end of the adventure, you die."
(CC is a one-player-one-GM game so characters don't really die mid-adventure; if you're going to Go Mad From The Revelation, you can still hold it together long enough to solve the mystery--but you're slowly unraveling.)
@BESW This is actually quite similar to a homebrew playbook concept I had earlier - a metaphorical ghoul who grows not on carrion, but on embracing their own humanity.
@BESW Sounds like a good idea, particularly for 1-on-1 but why not elsewhere too :)
@BESW i decided on that recently: i'm never going to play west marches, but i want to yoink part of its structure: players choose what they want to do during downtime, then GM responds by constructing something to let them do it. it'll be useful for, say, adventure guild play.
as opposed to the GM spending downtime constructing something for the players to do.
@Lord_Gareth now with how they handled 4e at the advent of 5e, i can understand how those people might have felt.
@doppelspooker There was a significant difference, I felt. As WotC were unveiling 4e, they published a series of articles explaining which design problems they tried to address with the new edition. Many of those issues I agreed with, so 4e was a welcome change. And yes, some felt they were saying how terrible 3.5 was just to sell 4e.
@Magician oh, so, they actually acknowledged the prior edition's existence in that scenario? :P
sounds like they just did worse for 5e then
"here's a great new game! let's market it exclusively from holders-on to much earlier versions, while completely ignoring the current version's very existence and refusing to acknowledge the various improvements we took from it and while going back on many others without explanation. also for good measure, let's delete basically all the web content we ever made for that version."
magic the gathering has some super rigorous design put into it, founding mechanical principles, etc. D&D historically seems to be held together more by spit & a prayer, with most content generation being arbitrary and mostly judged based on comparison to previous content generation. 4e had formulae to use and still most of its development was arbitrary, "whatever felt right".
i guess they could at least be open about that though
@DForck42 Are you familiar with RoboRosewater? It's a neural network that generates MTG cards. Most are ridiculous, some are impressively balanced. It has a twitter account.
@MikeQ I'm still subscribed to a MtG subreddit, but I rarely look at them
I do find the design of magic fascinating, and maro does a good job getting a lot of the details out there without revealing too much of their secret sauce
i just can't do magic anymore. it's too expensive.
and it's player base can be pretty heinous to be around
I still have the collection somewhere. Most of them are from 7th ed to the Kamigawa block. A friend of mine gave me some more recent cards in college, but MTG has a power creep problem and I couldn't compete.
I have a friend who is leaving Magic... at times he sounds like he's giving up the best thing in life and at other times he sounds like he's very relieved as if kicking off the worst drug addiction imaginable.
if i send them a design and they use it as-is, technically that's still my design, they didn't buy it from me, i didn't license it to them, they've violated my copyright and i can sue them. even appearing to have done this can be grounds for me suing them -- if i publish a custom card on my blog, and i know one of their design team frequently reads my blog, and they produce a card that looks like my custom card, i can still sue them.
i might lose the case, but they'll have to spend a lot of money on their legal team to see it through, or lose a lot of money on even a modest settlement.
wow. so, back when return to ravnica and theros were in standard, there was roughly 1250 cards in standard. there are currently just shy of 1400 cards in standard O_O
@Magician individual card designs were the basis of MTG suing another collectible card game maker for IP violations. game mechanics are not IP, but assembling a specific card with its own characteristics is a unique creation.
Okay, yeah, that was the exact case. They sued on the basis that not only did Cryptozoic use their game mechanics, they used an awful lot of them, many of them, including exactly recreating a great deal of thoroughly iconic cards with minimal difference.
@Magician Well, I don't know what to tell you. Not seeing unsolicited designs -- ever, any of them -- is WotC's policy. It's standard to avoid seeing unsolicited submissions in the games business so as to avoid apparent conflict with IP law and avoid lawsuits, and to have a very open policy of refusing unsolicited submissions so as to sandbag against any appearance of having used any.
the older i've gotten the more i tend to like cooperative games. that's not to say that i don't enjoy the occasional competitive game, but i find it more fun to do things together
@DForck42 Pandemic is simultaneously one of my favorite games and an absolutely horrible one. I love playing it, but it requires the right people to do it.
No, but I've played Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness quite a lot.
Losing is less bad than having a poor experience, and since the game is essentially a single-player game where the "player" is a group of 2-5 people, it can get rather bad if not everyone is as experienced or strategic as the others.
@kviiri I think they're made by the same publisher, but they're very different.
It's a race against the clock (by turns, not real time), and the dice-based randomness factor can result in difficult situations. But unlike Pandemic, the randomness is based on statistics, and I feel like the players have a greater degree of choice. I strongly recommend it.
@kviiri we got it for my birthday, and the first time my fiancée and i played we lost in 3 rounds, lol
i also am liking competitive games where your interactions are limited with other players. for example power grid. you share a board and resources, but it's a lot harder to crowd out and cut someone off than, say catan
One thing I both love and hate in Pandemic is how the game often ends with a very elaborate and hyper-optimized plan to cure the final two diseases or something.
One of my favorite moves is, as Generalist, to play the event that allows one to change any player's character. I changed mine to Contingency Planner, draw four event cards from the deck and spend each instantly, and finally redraw the reassignment card to change myself to something else :)
@DForck42 One houserule we've been using is that everyone has two character cards. They still play only one character, but have the powers of two classes.
We don't do that all the time but it's a nice change for the usual routine.
@MikeQ No, they just have the special powers of two different characters.
it might get weirder if one of the two character roles is Pilot, which is the only one I know of that severely reduces the character's ability to perform normal actions (but makes up for it in other ways)
so, Wish is supposed to basically be the most powerful spell in the game. so then, why is it pretty common for DM's to want to "punish" players with what they wish for?
Wish defines an explicit whitelist of "safe" wishes and notes that wishes beyond that realm of defined safety are potentially risky, which is the "why do innocent people who read this spell behave this way" answer.
The more detailed/historical answer is "Gygax enshrined some really garbage ideas about the relationship between a GM and their players and our hobby's culture is still gripped by his undead hand"
One of my major RPG player pet peeves is the type that knows nothing about railroading except that it's bad and keeps pushing against any perceived session agenda from the GM :<
@DForck42 Yeah, overall it depends on the system and the type of game desired. A DnD 4e game is much harder to run well off the rails than a Dungeon World game, for instance.
One of our players is a particularly rail-averse guy and he has been GM'ing a short minicampaign for us with no prior experience of mastering. He has had major trouble because he wants to come up with content for every situation we could wind up in. It's not easy...
@MikeQ Well it's usually not as a happy affair as the images would have them show.
To be clear, it's not just drinking a beer or a glass of wine at home alone, it's drinking heavily at home with the intent of becoming drunk. It's not exactly healthy
Alcoholism in general is a bit of a national condition here, and drinking at home contributes to domestic abuse incidents
Which aren't thankfully too common
Some really cool words were suggested for the "Suomen Sana" (word of Finland) contest, eg. "fillarikommunismi" (bicycle communism) which refers to the modern urban left wingers who are advocating for better bicycle and public transport infrastructure :P
It's pretty common, but there has been a recent backlash in terms of ideological blocks.
Bicycling is associated with environmentalism, environmentalism is associated with value liberalism, and value liberalism is associated with stuff like gay marriages, vegetarianism and feminism that some of the traditional manly men find abhorrent... so some people have taken to hating bicycles because they oppose something else entirely :P
For questions that are scoped across any and all editions of D&D we have the tag dungeons-and-dragons for that (among its uses).
Twice in two days I've noticed questions about monsters across D&D editions and tagged with dungeons-and-dragons being voted closed as “unclear” and comments asking fo...
I pretend to have a decent idea how to cook, and @BESW seems to have as well, so this would be more a philosophical endeavour tha a textbook learning experience :)
@Shalvenay I mean, there are cases mentioned all the time in the Sagas, and sometimes how they depend on interpretation (the other component is politics, not investigation), but the inheritance case at the drowning of Thorstein sticks out, because it's about in which order people died (they drowned with a single witness) and how that relates to inheritance, and that seemed to me to maybe transfer in structure.
@BESW I was being facetious when asking the question, but at the same time I knew in my heart you'd have something like that for me.
Urgh, I have a dilemma of "maybes".
I've invited people from my both regular RPG groups to try out Apocalypse World in a one-shot, the idea being I'll have one or two sessions depending how many people sign up. At the same time, I've asked a few extra people outside these two whether they'd like to join. And now I've got so many "maybes", I'm not sure whether I should ask more yet...
It can be disappointing to be solicited for a game and then there's no room after all :<
Once or twice I've invited a LOT of people to a game and told them that there were a limited number of slots and it was first-come-first-seated but later folks were welcome to observe and return for another game later if they liked it.
Also, for certain systems and groups it's totally possible to run a single session with a much MUCH larger group than I'd ever want to run long-term.
I'm rather uncomfortable running AW for groups larger than five, but it's something I might want to try later. This is not a very opportune time though - I'm trying my best to put on an excellent show.
@BESW Eh, you're right. Life's too short for worrying over whether everyone will fit. I'll just be honest and ask them but also let them know we might have issues with fitting everyone.
Besides, I can probably run a third one-shot if need be.
I think it's beneficial to start out the way you intend to continue: that includes setting an example that the GM isn't expected to be some super-capable being who can craft perfect experiences all by themself; they need the support and cooperation of the rest of the group and unexpected things will happen.
Aw, thanks. It's hard-won learning from painful experience, so I'm glad whenever I can help others skip the rough bits in their own journey.
I've been the GM who thinks it's his responsibility to create a perfect game experience, all on his own. And I became a lot happier when I started treating my fellow participants as active collaborators instead of a passive audience.
@Lord_Gareth It's a way to play and think, and I think it's awful if it goes unexamined, but I find it a completely valid playstyle if understood and desired all around.
@kviiri If I had a generic rule of thumb for this, it'd be something like "Don't hide your concerns from your fellow participants; instead ask them for help." And I'd apply it to players and GMs alike.
3
(And, hopefully obviously, it's about anything relating to the group, not just about specific gametime concerns. If attendance is a concern, or the kind of snacks, or the nature of jokes, or whatever, that's all part of the group's experience.)
@Shalvenay Ultimately, I've found that the crucial ingredient is a group of people who are willing to believe each other's feelings even if they don't understand them.
@BESW which interacts really poorly with someone who when confronted with something larger than table-scale, wants to apply the tools of large-scale, rationalist/bureaucratic ethics instead of trying to make their limited understanding of communal tools work by partitioning the larger environment into many smaller, overlapping ones
though it upsets me because I think a lot of 4e's bad rep came from people not bothering to look into it due to it not being similar enough to other editions :/
New Coke Fate: an Evil Hat setting about exploring all the worst parts of 80s nostalgia.
However, the fact that Fourth Edition was the Fourth edition of D&D indicates its summary replacement can't be laid solely at the feet of its poor reception.
Perhaps 4e's memetically poor reception is part of why 5e's publicity materials rarely mentioned 4e and instead mostly spoke about 3.x and previous editions. But it's not like 4e didn't itself supplant 3.5, to the extent that Wizards stopped selling 3.5 PDFs when 4e came out.
The only reason 3.5 seemed to survive through 4e is... well, Paizo.
Wizards' d20 licensing choices allowed the system to survive in third party products long after Wizards themselves abandoned it. They held 4e closer to the chest, so when Wizards stopped doing 4e nobody could take up its torch.
There was a rather good idea regarding 4e in this chat, that maybe they should've released it as "DnD Tactics", as a sort of spin-off franchise.
Although, while that would've created a better environment for the game to be accepted, it probably would've been a bad move in short-term marketing. There's plenty of people who will buy "the latest edition of DnD", just like there's people who will default to buying the new Civilization or Assassin's Creed or FIFA. That convenient default behavior might not activate if it's a spin-off, not a direct successor.
@Shalvenay I was actually meaning, they originally pitched 4e as intimately tied to a proprietary online Roll20-style platform. That platform never materialized, but 4e was designed and rolled out with artefacts of that plan in place. Among other things, this meant that when Wizards stopped supporting 4e, it was a lot harder for gamers to keep playing it with their purchased materials, because many of us were relying on subscription-based online tools which Wizards stopped supporting.
@LaMistemper @Jenetikitty @UrsulaV @KBSpangler @ksonney I fully subscribe to the potato theory of anatomy
The body is all the same thing
All the way through
Like a potato
@lauowolf @LaMistemper @Jenetikitty @UrsulaV @KBSpangler @ksonney That's our explanation of the Dungeons and Dragons hit point system. Unlike, say, Runequest which has a chart for every body part...
