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

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

We will be doing a retrospective tonight on Dice Scum. From the rpgs we reviewed to what happened in the hobby and entertainment over the year. Come and join in on the Festivus celebration!

I assume by the Storm Trooper in the thumbnail and the one as your avatar that this is your channel? None of you are painful to listen to so good on you.

 

[PuffMacMuffin]

I was playing 5e and before that 3.5 e, the 3.5 game fell through because the..."zoomer DnD expert" said it was over complicated and everyone else gave up. The 5e one just fell through because of people not taking it seriously and showing up. I think I just have bad luck with groups, but thanks for the suggestion I may stick with 5e in the future when I work up nerve to try and find more groups. I think I just gotten burned out with groups falling through over the years.

 

[EleventySeven]

I was playing 5e and before that 3.5 e, the 3.5 game fell through because the..."zoomer DnD expert" said it was over complicated and everyone else gave up. The 5e one just fell through because of people not taking it seriously and showing up. I think I just have bad luck with groups, but thanks for the suggestion I may stick with 5e in the future when I work up nerve to try and find more groups. I think I just gotten burned out with groups falling through over the years.

If you prefer the older 3.5e style of game, I would recommend Pathfinder 1e. Similar enough that 3.5e stuff can be used with it, and it has a much more active scene from what I can tell, especially online. Plus a very good official archive of all the stuff so you don't need to buy or find any books to run it with all the bells and whistles.

 

[2LtMashengo]

Man, that reminds me of the time I joined a group where the DM was encouraging players to 'power-game,' because it was going to be an intentionally-tough campaign. Session 1 was cool and very fraught with peril right up until the last 20 minutes where a CHALLENGE RATING TWENTY DEMON showed up and killed all but I think 2, maybe 3, of our 8-player party. Motherfucker sat there and rolled for a fucking Balor.

That's some cartoon "fight Tiamat in the first episode" tier shit.

 

[soup peddler]

Shilling a campaign I'd like to run of modified Care Bears: The Staring, the fan-made TTRPG of the 80s Care Bears franchise, If there's enough interest, I'm hoping to run two games, one of Care Bears + an unspecified horror component, and another of Care Bears + The Burning Wheel. Otherwise I can just run one or the other. Both are kind of experiments, but you could expect rules-light and RP-heavy gameplay! Prior knowledge of the franchise isn't needed, but it does help. I was huge into it as a kid, and I would for sure be less all-about-it were that not the case lol

 

[The Ugly One]

I want to play more DnD/ttrpgs but most groups I run into have the most insufferable, min-maxing, meme spouting retards this side of modern gaming.

Every group i have run with just want to dungeon crawl, no time for fleshing out the story or interaction with the world.

I feel like the problem is me, and fully accept that but there has to be people who actually enjoy role playing in TT right? Maybe i should just stick with CRPGs

Call of Cthulhu and Traveller are both more story-oriented. Try to find groups into those.

 

[Judge Dredd]

thunderstones

What are those?

5e is so utterly bereft of mechanics and build diversity

It is, which is strange because it does a good enough job until level 3.

I can see the appeal in simple mechanics, however,

In a way, 5e isn't even that simple. At least as far as normies or even old DnD goes it's complex. The problem is PathFinder is a maths heavy mess of a game.

Hell, there are rules for managing properties and the commodities they produce, so you can make an entire campaign centered around real estate development if you want.

Kingmaker right? I heard good things

A DM ran a homebrew campaign based around settlement building, I assume using Kingmaker rules, but I don't know. It was okay. My character was the treasurer who kept rolling terribly. In a way, it felt kind of pointless. There were lots of mechanics, but none of it seemed to matter. Though that might be because there was a couple of players who made all the decisions, and we just voted yay on everything. Mechanically, it just seemed to feed into itself. There wasn't any real reason to do things for adventure benefit. It was years ago so I forget the rules, but for sake of example, let's say we wanted to build a blacksmith to get a discount on common weapons. By the time that happened the discount was basically meaningless because we had stacks of treasure and were looking for magic items.

I want to play more DnD/ttrpgs but most groups I run into have the most insufferable, min-maxing, meme spouting retards this side of modern gaming.

Every group i have run with just want to dungeon crawl, no time for fleshing out the story or interaction with the world.

I feel like the problem is me, and fully accept that but there has to be people who actually enjoy role playing in TT right? Maybe i should just stick with CRPGs

It depends what you want. For a dungeon crawl it's not about the characters backstories or the DM writing scenes, but things that happen in the dungeon itself. A zany scheme that fails spectacularly, or succeeds.

As for a linear story based game, which sounds more like your thing, you're going to get some memes and jokes. Though I don't know to what degree they were happening. The goal is to have a good time. I used to run horror games, and online I see a lot of talk about scaring the players, but that's not a realistic prospect. As a DM, I take the world seriously, but the players will make fun and have a laugh.

 

[AnOminous]

Call of Cthulhu and Traveller are both more story-oriented. Try to find groups into those.

Traveller had a fairly unique character generation system where you'd go through the character's entire life from early education through the rest of their career up until the game started. In theory you could get killed during character generation (I usually blocked that unless you went out of your way to do something stupidly dangerous). Generally, the longer career you had, the more skilled the character, so you could start out pretty badass, although you'd have a much higher chance of having something like an amputated limb or an eyepatch or whatever.

Prosthetics were available, some better than the original, although that would also come out of starting money. So every character would have a complex backstory and motivations. It wouldn't necessarily be a Captain Pegleg thing, you might have connections with certain kinds of licit or illicit merchant, have bounty hunters after you because you pissed someone off in the past, etc.

 

[Ghostse]

No one should ever play 5e.

There were lots of mechanics, but none of it seemed to matter.

This is my usual experience with a ton of Pathfinder add-ons. Lots of moving parts, but only a few of them actually matter except where are very specific, niche cases where you can use something or another for extreme min-max but otherwise its a waste that uses complexity to try appear 'deep'.

 

[Revelator]

No one should ever play 5e.


This is my usual experience with a ton of Pathfinder add-ons. Lots of moving parts, but only a few of them actually matter except where are very specific, niche cases where you can use something or another for extreme min-max but otherwise its a waste that uses complexity to try appear 'deep'.

As my friend said, the best part in Pathfinder is there's a mechanic for everything down to scratching your and. That's also the worst part, because why are you checking to scratch your ass?

 

[Ghostse]

As my friend said, the best part in Pathfinder is there's a mechanic for everything down to scratching your and. That's also the worst part, because why are you checking to scratch your ass?

My issue isn't there's an ass-scratching mechanic, its that the mechanic is gay and pointless except if it becomes part of big-brain min-max build or workflow. Because they have too many subsystems to have any hope of balance or playtesting for obvious munchkining.

 

[White Slaad]

I want to play more DnD/ttrpgs but most groups I run into have the most insufferable, min-maxing, meme spouting retards this side of modern gaming.

Every group i have run with just want to dungeon crawl, no time for fleshing out the story or interaction with the world.

I feel like the problem is me, and fully accept that but there has to be people who actually enjoy role playing in TT right? Maybe i should just stick with CRPGs

D&D is, at its heart, a Dungeon Combat game rather than a storytelling device. CRPGs don't really emulate a true "D&D" experience (they're still fun, though, don't get me wrong). You might want to find a different system, since while you could theoretically find a good group interested in worldbuilding and character development, in practice advertising a 5e game like that provides that brings the absolute worst of the worst a playerbase can offer. Vampire: the Masquerade or other WoD games might be more your speed, though I've seen a lot of players of that who buy hard into the memes, fishmalks and all that.

 

[PuffMacMuffin]

D&D is, at its heart, a Dungeon Combat game rather than a storytelling device. CRPGs don't really emulate a true "D&D" experience (they're still fun, though, don't get me wrong). You might want to find a different system, since while you could theoretically find a good group interested in worldbuilding and character development, in practice advertising a 5e game like that provides that brings the absolute worst of the worst a playerbase can offer. Vampire: the Masquerade or other WoD games might be more your speed, though I've seen a lot of players of that who buy hard into the memes, fishmalks and all that.

I appreciate everyone's advice. I think I may try a different system like VtM. I think it's been mentioned here before but I definitely feel burnout for the last few years of many groups falling through, not to sit here and whine about it.

Like I said I think the problem is me in regard to the meme spouting part. I realize it's just people having fun.

But I'll definitely look for the other systems maybe I should more seriously consider online groups, to expand the possible people I can play with. Thanks again power peeps.

 

[The Ugly One]

Coming from 3rd ed and Pathfinder, 5e is so utterly bereft of mechanics and build diversity that I can't get into it.

RPGs are primarily about playing a character in some kind of story, not character sheet min/max minigames a la Diablo II. Play any other RPG, and I really do mean literally any other RPG. Virtually none of them have massive lists of feats and lego-kit stacking of character levels like 3.x does, aside from some of those games in the 80s made by people who felt AD&D wasn't nearly complicated enough. 3.x is the absolute peak of that sort of thing in D&D. Every other edition and basically every OSR game is dialed way, way, way back from where 3.x is.

Hell, there are rules for managing properties and the commodities they produce, so you can make an entire campaign centered around real estate development if you want.

This is an unplayable set of rules. It's an example of the all-too-common mentality in RPGs, and the 3.x ecosystem in particular, that more numbers = more realism = more better. But what is here is neither engaging nor "realistic" in the sense of bringing verisimilitude to the game. This fundamentally flawed approach to rules results in useless systems that nobody uses, because not only are they boring to engage with, but they actually damage the overall system.

You have small buildings costing around half of what major public works projects do. A castle costs less than the cumulative wealth of a 3rd-level party, begging the question of why high rollers with the wealth of minor nobility are out cleaning barely-sentient vermin from lairs in the wilderness. It further makes you wonder why fairly boring NPCs are carrying enough wealth on their persons to buy sports arenas. If you were to try to incorporate this in the game in a systematic way, it would make total hash of things.

On top of that, the list is just a massive waste of ink. Do we really need a separate cost listed for each and every civilian building the author could think of? It's a huge list of resource costs without ever establishing a meaningful or useful building system.

By contrast, the ACKS rule system (ACKS II is now the highest-selling OSR game on DTRPG) integrates buildings as a coherent part of the rules system, which first comprehends the player's place in the world according to their level, and structures costs, populations, economies, and so on in a meaningful way so that they don't absolutely break the game by having Level 3 Grue Hunter For Hire accidentally be carrying enough money to buy Northshire. There are complete rules for strongholds and magical research labs, because these are things that have a meaningful game impact. They are extremely useful, and players want to build them. For things that don't matter, i.e. 99% of what's on the list you linked, there is a small table taking about 1/3 of a page column.

 

[2LtMashengo]

Kingmaker right? I heard good things

Ultimate Campaign includes the business rules, Kingmaker stuff is geared more towards building your little fiefdom with embezzlement and events. Our cleric rolled assassination attempt in the last campaign, that was cool.

 

[Ghostse]

It's an example of the all-too-common mentality in RPGs, and the 3.x ecosystem in particular, that more numbers = more realism = more better.

This really does covers a lot of 3.5/PF approach to things. See: Grapple flow chart, infinite skills

 

[God of Nothing]

Man, that reminds me of the time I joined a group where the DM was encouraging players to 'power-game,' because it was going to be an intentionally-tough campaign. Session 1 was cool and very fraught with peril right up until the last 20 minutes where a CHALLENGE RATING TWENTY DEMON showed up and killed all but I think 2, maybe 3, of our 8-player party. Motherfucker sat there and rolled for a fucking Balor.

did your group actually kill it or just ran?

 

[White Slaad]

did your group actually kill it or just ran?

Balors are big number-sticks that clap back against any melee attack. There's no way a level 1 party lucks out and kills it unless they use very boring kiting tactics (against a 40ft walk speed, 80ft fly speed) or the DM is very liberal with """creative""" ideas. Plus, there's the Death Burst.
With proper setup, a balor in a level 1 dungeon could be fun, but I'm sure that's not what happened in that case.

 

[The Ugly One]

This really does covers a lot of 3.5/PF approach to things. See: Grapple flow chart, infinite skills

There's also a mentality that "system" means "one mechanic for everything." Just because you introduced a way to resolve wilderness travel with d20 + Modifier vs Target -> Table Lookup doesn't mean it's really part of a system. It needs to interlock with the whole rest of the game meaningfully to be a system, there has to be a reason why the players would bother engaging with the mechanic at all other than, "its an RPG so there need to be dice rolls." With ACKS, Alex Macris put some real thought into how social standing and economy should connect on a deeper level to dungeon bashing and leveling up, and it really works. You couldn't really graft it onto 5e or PF. You'd have to completely redo all the pricing, treasure guidelines, XP tables, and so on. And on the flip side, if you take it out of ACKS, you'll break it.

 

[God of Nothing]

Balors are big number-sticks that clap back against any melee attack. There's no way a level 1 party lucks out and kills it unless they use very boring kiting tactics (against a 40ft walk speed, 80ft fly speed) or the DM is very liberal with """creative""" ideas. Plus, there's the Death Burst.
With proper setup, a balor in a level 1 dungeon could be fun, but I'm sure that's not what happened in that case.

oh, i know
i'm surprised there were any survivors at all