Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Corn Flakes]

B/X is new all-around favorite since I got OSR pilled. Combat is fast, 1-minute rounds make complex actions easier to handwave away, lvl 1 or lvl 10 combat is still dangerous, and it makes stuff like travel between places matter.
New favorite for oneshots. Once I find a group of regular players this might take over my campaign go-to.

Delayed reply since I lost track of this thread for a while.

Is that a B/X thing? I thought rounds there were 10 seconds long and 1-minute rounds were more an AD&D thing.

 

[Ghostse]

Delayed reply since I lost track of this thread for a while.

Is that a B/X thing? I thought rounds there were 10 seconds long and 1-minute rounds were more an AD&D thing.

You're right, I think I was getting that muddled with with Maze Rats. Guess that's going to be a permanent house rule at my table, cause I'm not changing it.

 

[strawberry15]

Do any of you niggers actually play and/or run games that you enjoy? Do you always hit your players up with this kek or cringe inquisition instead of trying to enjoy the hobby or find people to enjoy the hobby with? I hate theater kid tourists as much as the next guy, but damn, it seems like some of you guys are just incapable of having fun with a game.

All the games i am dming are the games i enjoy to some degree (apart from that one time when i accepted to st a vtm game because i pittied my friends) Of course not everything can be as i desire but i have my fun.

There is no escape. I started recruiting for Dungeons & Dragons and this is these are the characters a bunch of randoms from Roll20 made:
View attachment 6390659
Bland, disposable, what the kids these days call "freakshit".

I advertised the game on /tg/ since I popped in and there was a Gamefinder thread for the first time in 15 years. To honor the traditions of my forebears, I called the first poster a cuck and was told I'd "flagged myself as someone not worth playing with" for "randomly attacking people in the thread". Zero players from there. Joined the Gamefinder Federal Honeypot posted, advertised, got a single ladyboy from South-East Asia doing the laziest trolling I've seen in a while claiming to not be able to find or edit his sheet, which yes, I doublechecked it. His roll20 has way too many hours for it to be a real problem he's having. So I banned him and left the Honeypot. I got a swath of Roll20 Randos because my game at the advertised time is the only one that's free to play and not in chinese or spanish. Half of them randomly vanish and this is what I'm left with. No wonder so many GMs on Roll20 run Pay-To-Play. I can't imagine anyone looking at these characters and thinking it's worth even reading whatever pathetic tripe their players have fat-fingered into a "backstory".

Unsure if I should remove them, torture them or give in to my inner-jew and run Pay 2 Play myself. At least then they'd be fueling me with the alcohol and cigarettes I'd need to swallow the stilted, awkward, inattentive mumbling they undoubtably consider "role-play."

HATE. HATE. HATE.

This is the corruption of society after the late 20th century, which, of course, has spread into everything known to man.

The keyword here is "feel." In the past, D&D focused on achieving something, but now it’s all about the 'feel' of it. For example, 4th Edition (which I really like and respect) aimed to make people 'feel' powerful and players 'feel' special. 5th Edition adopted a design philosophy centered on 'feel.' They asked players what a rogue should 'feel' like. This concept of 'feel' mirrors society, where a man might 'feel' like a woman because he likes pink, or a white woman 'feels' like a Black person just because she likes jazz.

Because my friends have different preferences in games, I DM 4e or Lancer for them. I’m kind of bored, to be honest. 4e is especially underrated, but it’s not a game I can truly enjoy. So, I convinced some of my players to try AD&D 2nd Edition Birthright. I feel blessed—it's so fun to prepare for a game because it’s so different from 5e in design philosophy.

In 5e, people can play any race in any way they 'feel.' It’s often a fetishistic, superficial, and idiosyncratic way of playing. I’ve seen many Tabaxi monks chosen simply because they move fast, all of them played like a person in a furry costume—burping up hairballs, grooming with their tongues, that sort of degeneracy. They never look at the books, and even if they do, there isn’t much there beyond "Oh, they are hunters, killers," etc.

Beyond aesthetic and build value, race doesn’t matter.

Then you look at Dark Sun’s Thri-Kreen. There are 60 pages of lore behind them: their habits, culture, behavior, psychological and physiological traits, their speech abilities, their written and spoken languages, their behavior toward others, and so on. In 5e, they are just there for their traits and maybe for some quirky degenerate to have fun with.

In older games, they are having an adventure. They are checking supplies, investigating, trying to survive. In 5e, all abilities are focused on combat. A wizard with Survival skill is as useful in survival as a ranger. The ranger is the only class with abilities not solely focused on combat, and even those are weak. They tell you it’s an RPG with exploration, role-play, and combat, but outside of combat, everything is secondary. Even then, the combat itself is lackluster. There’s no need for tactics or strategy—bounded accuracy and the advantage system have prevented it from being any deeper.

 

[Quintus]

Do any of you niggers actually play and/or run games that you enjoy? Do you always hit your players up with this kek or cringe inquisition instead of trying to enjoy the hobby or find people to enjoy the hobby with? I hate theater kid tourists as much as the next guy, but damn, it seems like some of you guys are just incapable of having fun with a game.

My main game consists entirely of friends, so I have no issues aside occasionally butting heads with our German rhetorically. My second game, I only have one person I wouldn't consider a friend because I don't know her well enough. Both groups are great. I think it helps that I have a no politics at the table rule, as I am the most right leaning person in my groups.

 

[Ghostse]

The most recent person I had to evict from my table is a friend. We still hang out regularly.
But they were miserable and were making me miserable to the point I'd booted them, and if they'd been a LGS rando I'd have nudged them out long before it came to that.

So "just play with friends" isn't the perfect solution people seem to say it is.

 

[Atypical Dog]

In older games, they are having an adventure. They are checking supplies, investigating, trying to survive. In 5e, all abilities are focused on combat. A wizard with Survival skill is as useful in survival as a ranger. The ranger is the only class with abilities not solely focused on combat, and even those are weak. They tell you it’s an RPG with exploration, role-play, and combat, but outside of combat, everything is secondary. Even then, the combat itself is lackluster. There’s no need for tactics or strategy—bounded accuracy and the advantage system have prevented it from being any deeper.

This is the big thing, imo. A lot of the exploration and crafting and adventuring things feel vestigial and combat seems to have taken over. We've come full circle and gone back to a wargame - just look at how much emphasis is placed now on character optimization and aligning ability scores with whatever your class needs. Contrast the age of 3d6 straight no rerolls being the standard, which would be unimaginable in modern D&D. You'd just die.

 

[EleventySeven]

I love my current players. They only cause me headaches when they latch on to some minor NPC and I have to do more work to actually give that character a personality and lines beyond whatever I had planned, and that's not fun to bitch about.

Some of the people in this thread are to blame in one of my games for putting so much care into a talking, giant, mutant bee I put in once for a baby's first moral dillema. They made sure Scrimbo got all the material he could work with to become the sculptor of his dreams. From butter to wood to stone to gold, none could sculpt like a man with six arms, acid spit, and no idea that a bee cannot be an artist.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

I was flipping through old Dungeon magazines looking for encounters. They translate pretty well to Pathfinder mostly because they just reference the monster manual and 3e stuff just tends to be a lot simpler and easier to run than Pathfinder stuff to the point where I'm questioning why I switched to PF in the first place. I saw an ad for Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal and it made me realize how good we had it.

I want to go back.

 

[Brain Problems]

The most recent person I had to evict from my table is a friend. We still hang out regularly.
But they were miserable and were making me miserable to the point I'd booted them, and if they'd been a LGS rando I'd have nudged them out long before it came to that.

So "just play with friends" isn't the perfect solution people seem to say it is.

Jesus, how'd you actually boot a friend from a game? Or was it one of these, 'Dude you're obviously not having a good time, don't sweat about bailing" conversations? I am trying to imagine how awkward it would be kicking someone from the table because everyone we play with is close. Not that it's an issue, everyone is great minus some issues with obnoxious cellphones and scheduling.

And while I'm here: how anal are you guys about spell components? It seems like the consensus with us is that if you maintain a certain amount of general resources/cash the GM assumes you are acquiring what you need (provided you're in a place that it makes sense) but beyond that super high level stuff you need to make an effort to get what you need for them.

 

[Tom Bombodildo]

My main game consists entirely of friends, so I have no issues aside occasionally butting heads with our German rhetorically. My second game, I only have one person I wouldn't consider a friend because I don't know her well enough. Both groups are great. I think it helps that I have a no politics at the table rule, as I am the most right leaning person in my groups.

See, maybe I have the luck of the devil, but I made most of my close friends through tabletop and the only ones I would call lackluster players drifted away from the group for various reasons over the years. And I ran Organized Play for Pathfinder 1e for about 5 years (and I ran a lot during those 5 years) and even when I ran into people I would never allow at a personal table, there was still enough investment in the game and the purpose of the scenario (do hard combats, get mission rewards) that just about all of us walked away from the table satisfied. I've been trying public games for a new system in its Discord server and same deal there. Would I invite these people to a personal table? No, never. But the clearly delineated purpose of the one-shot session helps rein things in and keep it fun. I just find the doomsaying (here, Youtube, social media, everywhere that isn't theater kid tourists) silly when this hobby is practically the definition of making your own fun.

And while I'm here: how anal are you guys about spell components? It seems like the consensus with us is that if you maintain a certain amount of general resources/cash the GM assumes you are acquiring what you need (provided you're in a place that it makes sense) but beyond that super high level stuff you need to make an effort to get what you need for them.

You know, I can't actually recall ever reading the rules on it, but in all my Pathfinder games, the understanding was that as long as you buy a spell component pouch, you're assumed to have the material components of any spell you have prepared and you only have to worry about material components with a listed gold value. But I have no idea if that's the same in other editions.

 

[The Ugly One]

And while I'm here: how anal are you guys about spell components? It seems like the consensus with us is that if you maintain a certain amount of general resources/cash the GM assumes you are acquiring what you need (provided you're in a place that it makes sense) but beyond that super high level stuff you need to make an effort to get what you need for them.

One of my players consumes a lot of gems. You need to go to a major city to find that kind of scratch.

 

[AnOminous]

So "just play with friends" isn't the perfect solution people seem to say it is.

I was pretty lucky in having a stable circle of people who played throughout middle school to high school, and then to have another at college. I think the only real static we had was when someone had a series of catastrophically bad rolls, tard raged, and flipped over the table. But everyone just found it funny. To be fair the run was absolutely fucked, we calculated the odds later at well over a million to one.

You know, I can't actually recall ever reading the rules on it, but in all my Pathfinder games, the understanding was that as long as you buy a spell component pouch, you're assumed to have the material components of any spell you have prepared and you only have to worry about material components with a listed gold value. But I have no idea if that's the same in other editions.

I remember even in early AD&D spells would have verbal, somatic and material components, so you could stop someone from casting certain kinds of spells or all spells by gagging them, tying them up, or taking their materials.

I'd also use this mechanic sometimes if I had no other ideas to just have a mission to go get some rare component. I got that general idea from Ultima IV.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I remember even in early AD&D spells would have verbal, somatic and material components, so you could stop someone from casting certain kinds of spells or all spells by gagging them, tying them up, or taking their materials.

It's still the same in 5e, it's just there are no rules for actually doing any of those things. You can go full WWE and put a wizard in a perfect camel clutch, and he'll still be able to fireball the rest of your party.

 

[Tactical Wizard]

I was flipping through old Dungeon magazines looking for encounters. They translate pretty well to Pathfinder mostly because they just reference the monster manual and 3e stuff just tends to be a lot simpler and easier to run than Pathfinder stuff to the point where I'm questioning why I switched to PF in the first place. I saw an ad for Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal and it made me realize how good we had it.

I want to go back.

I was looking back over some of my old 3E stuff and my Living Greyhawk Gazeteer and marveling at how we used to be able to spend fifteen dollars to buy a 64-128 page book that only has information on a subject that I want and isn't twenty pages of afterthought in a module that I don't care about and Greyhawk was the default setting.

We didn't know how good we had it.

 

[Ghostse]

Jesus, how'd you actually boot a friend from a game? Or was it one of these, 'Dude you're obviously not having a good time, don't sweat about bailing" conversations? I am trying to imagine how awkward it would be kicking someone from the table because everyone we play with is close. Not that it's an issue, everyone is great minus some issues with obnoxious cellphones and scheduling.

Spoiler: Background

Background: It was one half of a couple (which necessitating firing the other half). They were hosting, and had been doing a bunch of shit like trying to backseat GM, always trying to break the world instead of play the game, and broke down crying once after the BBEG escaped (I should have fired them then, and LGS rando would have been), and issues with rules laywering. Oh and of course never taking notes but always trying to dictate the story despite forgetting half of what was going on. Because no notes.
Biggest part of the issue was both halves of the couple would get high before and drink 3-4 glasses of wine during session and lose track of what was going on and This one would get beligerent when corrected. I was working my way to talking about them not drinking at the table, but its hard to tell someone to not drink in their own house (again, an LGS rando, unless they owned the store, would have been told "Wine or D&D, pick one").
Add to this, a couple months before, they had pulled me asside after a non-D&D game night to bitch about the campaign. They said "the party this" and "the party that" when talking about things wrong with the campagin, but I talked to the other players and they said 'I never said that'. So they send me an email about how I didn't seem to listening and basically gave me a bunch of shit that if I didn't do, they'd walked. I thanked them for being honest and talking to me about this , but I'd been bending over backwards for them for months and if they weren't happy now, they weren't going to be. If they wanted to not host or stop hosting, I had other options. (Tl;dr was they hosted because they had dogs. So if they weren't attending, my self or the other players could host and it'd be closer).
Made me mad enough (the trying to gaslight me about the other players' opinions part) I just declared a holiday hiatus. (again, LGS rando would have just been fired)

Things settled down for a couple months and I figured I'd at least be able to wind up the campaign with no more drama. I was wrong.

They had said when the game started they wanted to focus on their character's story, etc. So I reworked a bunch of subplots so they'd tied together and involve their character, including really big pivotal part of the story waiting on the outcome of their character's decision from a meeting with a shadowy figure right before a delve; i told them we could table it and get back to it before the delve was over. (If it had been a LGS rando, I'd have not molded a good chunk of the campaign around their character and would have just dropped the plot line when they dallied).

The booting: Anyway, that weeks session they had been pretty sloppy drunk, and I was sort of sick of it. I pinged them between sessions "hey, I'm still waiting on that character action we talked about." They gave me a mini-screed about not wanting to think about the game between sessions because it stressed them out. I wanted to say some shit back, but instead just asked if they wanted to quit; they gave me another paragraph of meallymouth 'well I dunno its just not too much fun in sessions', so then I told them they were quitting. I was going to continue with the other players, there NPCs set to cover their abscences so it was cool and they didn't have to worry about anything in the land of makebelieve anymore.
They then tried to backtrack about 'oh but I really wanted to see how things would turn out', but I told them they could get the rest of the story from the other players, I was done GMing for them.

Spoiler: Afterwards

they wanted to talk about it, I told them - in effect - I didn't care if they had wanted to stop playing but they had been pissy about things for months and had tried to pass their opinions off as those of the the rest of the group. And I'd get over it and forgive them because its just elf games and I'll chalk some of it up to everyone losing their shit over COVID/them having a stressful time at work, but probably best if we avoid each other for a couple months till I cooled down.
I cooled down, moved on, we'd hang out and shoot the shit at least once a month and Elf games never came back up.

And I told our mutual gaming friends I had no interest in playing anything with them with more abstract rules than Betrayal at the House on the Hill, and that was pushing it. Continued the modules for the two remaining players with them each running their main and an NPC.

And that was that.

tl;dr no game is better than bad game

And while I'm here: how anal are you guys about spell components? It seems like the consensus with us is that if you maintain a certain amount of general resources/cash the GM assumes you are acquiring what you need (provided you're in a place that it makes sense) but beyond that super high level stuff you need to make an effort to get what you need for them.

It depends on how anal the player gets with me. If they are cool running some abstractions and aren't digging out some super rare shit out of their asscrack every 5 minutes, are willing to accept the negatives of carrying around a sack of miscellaneous shit used to cast all their spells, and are cool with "the BBEG captured you and took your stuff, you have no spell components thus no spells", and when on edge cases when told "no" will say "OK, GM said no" and not be a sulky bitch, I will figure they knew what spells they have and would have kept a little pouch of components on them to cast said spells.

If they are going to play fuck-fuck games with me though, I will have them to track exactly how much bulldung they have and how fresh each clump is.

 

[2LtMashengo]

James Earl Jones is kill, there will be no more bitches for Thulsa Doom.

 

[Battlefield2142EU]

You want to see a leftist out of touch with reality. He outright said governments don't get into bed with corporations like they did under Ronald Reagan in the 80s in his Shadowrun SNES game review. Even ignoring the fact corporate Woke is American foreign policy. That statement retarded. Also, it's pretty funny for him to slowly admit the Native Americans are the genocide racists in the Shadowrun universe. I think he noticed Shadowrun accidentally, a pro-racial realism game, and racism was 100% justified in the universe. It was bugging him. I find it funny he makes fun of 80s cybeprunk technology. When META and others spent billions trying to make the virtual internet a reality, a gay reality.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

And while I'm here: how anal are you guys about spell components? It seems like the consensus with us is that if you maintain a certain amount of general resources/cash the GM assumes you are acquiring what you need (provided you're in a place that it makes sense) but beyond that super high level stuff you need to make an effort to get what you need for them.

Any spell component without a listed price, or less than 1gp in price, you are presumed to have so long as your character is equipped normally (i.e., your wizard hasn't been strip-searched and relieved of his gear).

Costly spell components you may have to buy. Or possibly trade and quest for. GMs take note that players can and will abuse things like planar binding if they find themselves in need of expensive components like diamonds for resurrections/restorations.

 

[Ghostse]

Re: Spell components, one thing I've seen pitched but I haven't tried to do yet is:
(Well, sort of. I've technically done with 4e and rituals)

Allow your wizard to have just a "Components" resource. So in town they just buy "Spell Components", you set a weight per-gp, and the wizard just spends from that when they need a component.

 

[Atypical Dog]

Re: Spell components, one thing I've seen pitched but I haven't tried to do yet is:
(Well, sort of. I've technically done with 4e and rituals)

Allow your wizard to have just a "Components" resource. So in town they just buy "Spell Components", you set a weight per-gp, and the wizard just spends from that when they need a component.

The Artificer carrying a whole bucket of dry ice for Fog Cloud, flour bombs for fireball, and a gun Wand of Magic Missile: "Spell components?", he asks, loading it all up onto a magitech mule.