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How Difficulty Class and the D20 engine ruined roleplaying
  • seems kinda...nonsensical. don't get me wrong, i prefer other systems, but they don't really identify actual issues. first and foremost, the system absolutely needs to be able to resolve anything that happens in the world because the dm doesn't need to take into account the millions of factors that will be influencing a seemingly simple interaction. the whole spiel about rolling under ability scores? adds absolutely nothing imo, if anything it takes away from roleplaying by giving you a set number to always be working with. a simple "this seems easy" or "this would be difficult in even ideal circumstances" or "the vampire is dancing around even in thick plate armor" and the like is all a player needs when questioning the difficulty of rolls. the only example i've been in where knowing a hard number for difficulty doesn't seem to detract is when you have already committed to a spell in mage the ascension, because you might need to make a lot of rolls and get a lot of successes (i had to get 10+ successes with a dice pool of 4 once to do something awesome in the traditional meaning of the word) and it's just annoying asking the dm every single time you get a success if it goes off.

  • Why would I ever need more than this, silly?
  • worst part is i'd absolutely be the DM. having read a little of the book i feel like i could just learn whatever role i want to take pretty easily (lets go decker), but keeping everything in my head at once as a dm? a lot less simple

  • Diablo is getting a board game and tabletop RPG that will “continue the lore and story” of the video games
  • Very unexpected, i wonder how they are going to try to work a cash shop into that

  • Why would I ever need more than this, silly?
  • God i wanna get into shadowrun, but I don't want to learn shadowrun

  • Sometimes winging it is the best strategy
  • Like, 30 seconds? Throw a dhohanoid into a big cave with a barrier that causes fear. Have a group of shovelheads encroach on the party's territory.

  • Most DMs will adjust to your AC...
  • That's an issue inherent to the d20 system, although 5e is way worse about it. WoD and CoD have way better systems for this, even though they aren't about combat.

  • Sleep well, adventurers.
  • Pffft, malkavians say hi.

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  • Hitting the guy with three layers of holy protection, curses, and no spell failure chance seems like a bad idea

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  • Really shoulda seen that one coming. What's next? Making deals with dragons?

  • Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection
  • What are you talking about? There's all sorts of ways to bypass the ads

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  • And then there are the arcanists, born into power and learning more.

  • My sessions, every time my players run into a slightly difficult combat encounter
  • You don't get that in systems were a gun can just kill someone.

  • Which of your characters gets blorbod
  • the ascended mage that realizes reincarnation is a thing and the current world is fundamentally evil. When death is only an illusion then it becomes a very small price to pay for even banal ends, much less glorious ones.

  • It seems Gen Z is just fine with parents knowing where they are all the time
  • Scariest visual novel i ever played was about kids having their privacy personally violated (that is, not generic analytic data, but someone knowing that kid specifically was doing so and so) and just not caring about it.

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  • You mean like when someone brings up they can't make a full character in dnd on a forum not dedicated to dnd? Yeah, I'd say this was the time and place for my comment.

  • I have made an entire playable dragon race template. It completely defies all 5e conventional design.
  • I actually prefer world, like, by a massive margin, but Chronicles is by far the best game to recommend newbies imo (that I've had extensive time with).

  • I have made an entire playable dragon race template. It completely defies all 5e conventional design.
  • I'm just gone give you a quick run down of the simplest ttrpg i play; Chronicles of darkness.

    Every single roll uses the same type of dice and the numbers you need to hit are almost universally the same. Every skill, ability, power, or what-have-you uses the same simple system (with only two ways to resist/contest roles). All characters (including NPCs and monsters) are created in roughly the same way with roughly the same rules (with certain stuff added on depending on what you're making). The book has an entire section on homebrew, with guidelines and examples. Every book has advice on playing ttrpgs broadly (like setting up what's off limits from the start) and specifically Chronicles (like offering sources of inspiration). Speaking of books, there are plenty of them but you only need a single book to play a full game. The game also uses a major cheat code for the setting; it's set in the modern world, so new players have an easy time understanding what's going on.

    I say all of that to say 5e is all together bad for new players. It's price gouging, it's convoluted, and isn't actively friendly to new players like other systems.

  • I have made an entire playable dragon race template. It completely defies all 5e conventional design.
  • And that's a major issue with 5e too? 5e is very clearly designed to do one singular thing; dungeon crawl, and I'd argue it doesn't do it that well either. There are plenty of actual generic ttrpgs out there you can use, like GURPS (literally Generic Universal RolePlay System) or even besm if that's your thing.

  • I have made an entire playable dragon race template. It completely defies all 5e conventional design.
  • Now that's straight up not true. 5e is a lot of things (unfinished, unclear, underhanded) but it isn't simple. And thanks to it's inconsistency it's a nightmare to make good, reliable content for. There are many, many, many better systems to start a new player on and it's quite possibly one of if the worst to start a DM on.

  • shani66 shani66 @burggit.moe
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