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

AD&D 5E or advanced 5E is what the new edition should've been called in the first place.
Interestingly, a 3rd party publisher beat them to it. Advanced 5E fixes some of the things the community designers tend to bitch about and seems to be more inclined to listen to their fanbase. It's also pozzed to hell like much of the industry, but they at least release their rules fundamentals for free.
The problem that GMs noticed years ago and Wizards neglected to remotely think about is fucking them; the 5ers are refusing to hop ship.
Given that 5e is now over a decade old at this point and with all of the "how do I do x in 5e" posts, it's a wonder they even bothered. Realistically, who were they going to piss off by not releasing a rules revision? They'd already alienated old school players. The hobby tourists were going to fuck off anyway. Their inbuilt fanbase were absolute niggercattle who probably would have been content with the same shitty churn modules for another 5-10 years or more. Even a lot of the 5e competitors that came out like CR's shit didn't gain a great deal of traction beyond becoming shelf fodder or DnDtuber circlejerk material. It seems like they managed to trip with a golden goose in hand and crushed it under their MtG load bearing asses.
 
Dice Scum will be reviewing an rpg made by a lolcow. #iHunt, created by David Hill. Are you ready to hear about the oppression of capitalism and the perils of being a middle-class deadbeat circa 2019 in a game about hunting monsters?
You know it's going to be good when the author has already got a years old thread.
 
I once went to a Dungeon Master training event this year and it was absolutely overloaded with corporation speak, (the whole thing was about connecting skills in the corporate world to being a Dungeon Master) the pinnacles of DEI art. They mentioned multiple times about how "DnD used to be dominated by White men but now it is more open and diverse!" I hated that entire fucking event and what leftists have done to D&D.
Are loads of events like this as corporate entities viewing D&D/TTRPG hobbies all think if they can be the company to crack the code and open the hobby up to a wider audience then they can rake in huge amounts of money. It's rather funny in a way that all these companies trying to make money off Dungeon Masters/Game Masters are at the moment now also gambling on which game system to support too.
 
Given that 5e is now over a decade old at this point and with all of the "how do I do x in 5e" posts, it's a wonder they even bothered. Realistically, who were they going to piss off by not releasing a rules revision? They'd already alienated old school players. The hobby tourists were going to fuck off anyway. Their inbuilt fanbase were absolute niggercattle who probably would have been content with the same shitty churn modules for another 5-10 years or more. Even a lot of the 5e competitors that came out like CR's shit didn't gain a great deal of traction beyond becoming shelf fodder or DnDtuber circlejerk material. It seems like they managed to trip with a golden goose in hand and crushed it under their MtG load bearing asses.
Nah. The reality is that the annual books(tal rashas and all that crap) weren't selling as well as they wanted, and would never sell as much as a new set of core books would. Remember they also wanted to remove the 2014 edition content fron the dndbeyond page to force people into buying the new stuff as microtransactions there again, but lost enough subscribers quickly enough that they backpedaled on it. Their fiancial reports for the past couple of years, and especially the one right before the movie came out were full of statements about how D&D was "under-monetized" because they want to treat it like a f2p mobile game with a marketplace. Hence wanting their own VTT, wanting AI DMs for people who can't find a DM, microtransactions for customizable characters like heroforge, the time they tried to put together a 24 hour streaming channel and wasted a bunch of money on celebrity guest stars, and so on. D&D has always been a niche, but they want it to become a billion dollar a year IP.
 
Anyone here play GURPS? I've been playing for a couple years now and I've taken the initiative to GM a campaign now that one of our games (we're playing three right now...) has ended and the guy who ran it said he needs a break from being GM. I've done some half-assed one offs in the past, but this will be my first serious attempt.
 
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Gotta admit I wouldn't mind having one of those proposed AI DMs for myself, both because it's interesting and I could enjoy full-blown tabletop-rules D&D without actually interacting with some of the charming individuals in the hobby.
 
Gotta admit I wouldn't mind having one of those proposed AI DMs for myself, both because it's interesting and I could enjoy full-blown tabletop-rules D&D without actually interacting with some of the charming individuals in the hobby.
The AI DM is a bit of a myth, started out a few years back when people who could DM would feed questions into chatGPT to have it write a one shot adventure that they would then DM by feeding very specific questions into chatGPT "so it was DM" and from that and people not fully knowing what they had watched it's basically created this idea of AI DMs that won't go away. The hasbro attempt seems to revolve around turning D&D beyond into such a computer game style experience that the "AI DM" was just coded to keep them on track in an as close as they can get to baldurs gate 3 while still calling it D&D game.
 
Gotta admit I wouldn't mind having one of those proposed AI DMs for myself, both because it's interesting and I could enjoy full-blown tabletop-rules D&D without actually interacting with some of the charming individuals in the hobby.
The AI will just be an AI version of those very troons.
 
A big marketing problem with 5.5 is it didn't have a proper name until now.
It still doesn't as far as I know. People call it DnD 2024, but I don't know if that's the official title.

I once went to a Dungeon Master training event
What even is that? An event run by WotC at cons or something?

The problem with advanced 5e is that it slows down an already slow game, and adds a bunch of things to track without adding anything meaningful. I hear people shill it online, but don't know anyone who actually plays it.

Realistically, who were they going to piss off by not releasing a rules revision?
They were afraid of pissing off the casuals/tourists/critical roll crowd who saw their £300+ book collection going up in a poof of smoke. Anyone could've told them that ship had sailed. If Clownfish TV is to be believed (and I don't think they're the only one to say this) but DnD was just a tag along with the deal to buy MtG, and it was only when it started making money hand over fist that Hasbro took notice.

Edit: Because it didn't quote and I almost forgot to reply.
The only house rule I felt I really needed was a list of banned races (no Tabaxis, Tortles, or Aarakocra), and the artificer wasn't allowed. College of Swords Bard broke the core conceit of the class, but it wasn't worth the hassle of making someone stop using it. I didn't even need to write down the ban list. Oh and a total ban on everything in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything except the Ranger revision.
And goodberry (ruins survival scenarios), and silvery barbs (though I don't think it's terribly OP, and I think was tashas?). Basically, the list of exceptions can start to get long unless you limit it to PHB or maybe a couple of books. There's also house rules for things like initiative and inspiration, and everyone has their own desired house rules. Eventually you get to weird situations where you're writing a bunch of house rules. "No tasha, except ranger, and no strix, and side based initiative, and 3 short rests per long rest." "Can we have BG 3 true strike and weapon flourishes? What about Bloodhunter?" "Which version of bloodhunter?" and so on.


Speaking of which. What was Radiant Citadel about? I know strix was meant to be harry potter with gay prom. Radiant Citadel I either forgot or don't know, beyond it being woke.
 
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I once went to a Dungeon Master training event
I'd be interested in going to one of those just for shits and gigs. When I'd go with a big group of friends to GenCon back in the day we'd all get the cheapest hotel we could find and drive in at like 7 AM. I was mostly there to hang out with my friends so I never signed up for events and thus I would end up at seminars half asleep while my friends drafted Magic when the con opened. Monte Cook did one that was really good. I'd like to sit in on a bunch of retarded danger hairs yelling about how I suck just for fun though.
 
"DnD used to be dominated by White men but now it is more open and diverse!"

I hate this phrase, "dominated by white men," as though D&D were just lying in a field, and those wicked old white guys, Gary Gygax, David Arneson, Tim Kask, David Cook, and the rest of them grabbed it away from the BIPOC genderqueers who were on their way to pick it up.

D&D was created by white men
 
Eventually you get to weird situations where you're writing a bunch of house rules.
I didn't, though. No Tasha's, except ranger, no furry races. That's it. I ran the game just fine for 10 years playing it like that. Never felt any need to house rule initiative. A big contrast here is with 4e, where the math was fundamentally broken, and 3.5, where players could cherry pick feats and MC dips to do really stupid things. I didn't have to play Build Cop or substantially rewrite core mechanics. It all worked well enough out of the box. (And I house-ruled the furries out because they're fuckin' gay.)
 
Gotta admit I wouldn't mind having one of those proposed AI DMs for myself, both because it's interesting and I could enjoy full-blown tabletop-rules D&D without actually interacting with some of the charming individuals in the hobby.
Aside from the fact that it'd be utter garbage at best basically just railroading an adventure along, it'll also have a stupid subscription fee attached to it. And of course the AI chatbot will be completely poz'd admonishing you for not befriending the trannies and inviting them to your party and shit.
 
The problem with advanced 5e is that it slows down an already slow game, and adds a bunch of things to track without adding anything meaningful
That's why I clarified the community content creators. The sorts who make CharOp shit and do a lot of white-room theorycrafting. It solves their bugbears on paper but makes an already grindy game a veritable crushing mill. At least 3.PF's got numerical verisimilitude and the gleefully dumb build sandbox going for it. If I want fast and punchy I usually do Knave, LotFP, or d6 Fantasy with some restrictions on magic.
(And I house-ruled the furries out because they're fuckin' gay.)
I've always wondered why more GMs don't just put a hard limit on the number of races in their worlds. Not even necessarily something like just PHB races, but having combos like human, warforged, duergar, goliath, nothing else. I've done stuff like that a few times and it definitely helps worldbuilding feel a lot more cohesive when you don't have to account for some retard attempting to bring a sparkly catgirl or tumblr poisoned tiefling rogue to the table. Then again, I've largely played with people who have been vouched for by friends and almost never have to fish for strangers when running new games.
 
Speaking of which. What was Radiant Citadel about? I know strix was meant to be harry potter with gay prom. Radiant Citadel I either forgot or don't know, beyond it being woke.
Journeys through the Radiant Citadel was yet another in the long list of "we're too lazy to write a cohesive adventure spanning multiple levels, so here's a bunch of one-shots that you can run to fake a full campaign" adventure books for 5e. The selling point for that one, however, was that all the adventures were written by token minorities, so it was supposed to be inherently better than anything those obsolete old white men could write. In practice, it proved everyone's criticisms of wokeshit completely correct.

The Radiant Citadel itself is a hippie commune in the Ethereal Plane where everyone always gets along thanks to the power of diversity. Everybody shares everything, there is no military or police presence (but there are mental health counselors!), its only defense is a shield that can only be activated if all of the ruling council agrees, and it gets its funding thanks to high taxes on anyone wealthy who visits (but they only give out of the goodness of their heart because the Radiant Citadel is just so heckin' wholesome they can't help it). Oh yeah, and if you commit a serious crime, you get heckin' reeducated (read: mindbroken) and banished forever. Isn't that great?

I'm not even going to go into the adventures because that would take too long, but it's my understanding they're based on various real-world cultures besides medieval Europe. That's not a bad thing in theory, but in practice, I'm assuming most of them involve talking about feelings and shit like that instead of just going and killing a dragon. Considering the introduction involves telling the DM not to be racist, I think that should give you an idea of the writing on display.

Not too long after it came out, I remember someone posting in here about a group using it as a setting to utterly lay waste to because of how juicy a target it was. A fabulously wealthy city with practically zero defenses and ruled by a bunch of peace and love hippies? You better believe they tore it a new one.

ETA: My autism won't be satisfied until I do this, so I went back and looked at the adventures released for 5e to determine how many of them fell into the "loose collection of one-shots" category. I'm focusing only on adventures released in books for sale, so I'll include adventures released in setting sourcebooks but no free supplements or anything like that.

By my count, there have been 31 adventures released in either dedicated adventure books, sourcebooks, or starter sets. If we remove the adventures included with sourcebooks, that drops to somewhere between 24 and 27 (depending on whether you count the Spelljammer, Dragonlance, and Planescape books). Of these, six are one-shot collections: Tales from the Yawning Portal, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Candlekeep Mysteries, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel, Keys from the Golden Vault, and Quests from the Infinite Staircase. Ever since Candlekeep Mysteries, one of these one-shot collections has been released every year. So while they don't make up the majority, they still make up a noticeable fraction, and their continued recurrence in recent years makes them stand out more.

I don't know enough about older versions' releases, but I'm curious if they had this loose one-shot collection concept crop up as frequently then as well.
 
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Not too long after it came out, I remember someone posting in here about a group using it as a setting to utterly lay waste to because of how juicy a target it was. A fabulously wealthy city with practically zero defenses and ruled by a bunch of peace and love hippies? You better believe they tore it a new one.
HAHAHAHA fuckin love it. Any chance they kept chat/playlogs?
 
HAHAHAHA fuckin love it. Any chance they kept chat/playlogs?
The video was posted either here or in the community thread.

Shit was beyond Kino; the donut steel Romans raid it, kill the guardian, slaughter all the furries, kill the men, enslave the women and children, and plunder the resources and then proceed to haul off the Residuum and gems which is all promptly wasted on lavish displays of wealth.

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Found it

The thing I love the most about the take down is despite RC being a liberal wankfantasy, they are made as serious of an opponent as they could possibly be, with the complete ruination being "a clever opponent with a couple minutes to plan" and not due to some retarded Aryan Ubermensch or w/e. Obviously any attacker will pack anti-dragon weapons to end the #1 threat, and all you have to do is confine a couple council members and they can't activate the defenses. Small number of elite soliders overwhelmed so skill at community policing isn't even an issue.
 
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