I feel like you've made a lot of assertions that don't make a lot of sense when compared to the real world. I agree that WotC is nothing like they used to be, have been gutted by Hasbro, and 5e is a pretty stale and lame example of a TTRPG. That doesn't make it any less easy to learn or homebrew. The starter sets and basic adventures were simple enough for my mother, a teacher, who has absolutely no TTRPG experience, to run a game with her 5th grade students, who were perfectly capable of handling the premade characters and simple module. The game has a very easy entry point, and even when approaching the full ruleset, isn't hard to understand when actually reading the books (especially the new ones, all their other major flaws aside), which more people do than you're suggesting. New players get excited, the PHB is easy enough to follow with interesting art and ideas, and you really don't even need the DMG to run a successful game, though the frameworks it sets up can make your life easier. There is a reason other than branding that DnD remains as incredibly popular as it is, as no matter how many streamers play it and how much sponsorship money DnD beyond gives out, if new players enticed to try the game couldn't get the hang of it pretty quickly, they wouldn't stick around. Are there better systems for modularity and ease of play? Obviously. But that doesn't make those things untrue for 5e. The million Kickstarter projects with homebrew should be examples enough. You keep asserting that "no one plays 5e as designed," which is technically true if you define that as only using rules strictly in the books, but really misses the point. People are using the classes and mechanics put into the game, and a great deal of official optional rules have become ubiquitous in every game. Popular house rules get added on, and people make up their own mechanics, because it's a TTRPG, and that's true for *any* of them. Obviously there aren't great sources that aren't anecdotal, but a quick glance around LFG posts, LGS events, and online DnD specific communities should be enough to show that people are indeed playing the game "as intended," and home brewing to their heart's content. The reputation you claim 5e has simply doesn't exist to the casual player. You're totally right, in that this is how most dedicated TTRPG communities see the game, but to the casual player (which is most of them), 5e is what the cool streamers play. They watch it, think "Hm, that doesn't look so hard," grab a book and run with it. I've seen this happen repeatedly with friends that have never played a TTRPG in their life. They don't know about WotC's past, they don't know about the company being gutted, and they don't know about the designers abandoning a lost cause. All they know DnD as is the default TTRPG (which it shouldn't be), and pick it up, finding it easy enough to play and homebrew.

A wild Ryutama reference is crazy. What a charming system.

Used it in practice in my head the other day - even nailed the sqrt to a decimal point. I have created human life, but I think I was more proud of this lol

yeah exactly. i understand it as follows: - in the manhattan metric, points have length one if the lengths of their coordinates sum to 1. so you get the points (1, 0), (0, 1), (-1, 0), and (-1, -1). and then you connect these four points with straight lines to get the diamond shape. this follows from the observation that if the x coordinate decreases in length by 0.1, then the y coordinate must increase in length by 0.1. - in the euclidean metric, the points of length one lie on the unit circle, since x^2^ + y^2^ = 1 is the equation defining the unit circle. - in the chebyshev metric, points have length 1 if one of the coordinates has length 1 and the other coordinates have a length smaller (or equal to) 1. and these conditions also describe the square with sides x = ± 1 and y = ± 1.

Chebyshev distance can also be called chessboard distance if you want something more descriptive.

I think you'd like how Exalted handles money. (Note: I'm talking about second edition here; I never got familiar with third edition.) In Exalted, wealth is represented by a Background called *Resources*. Backgrounds are essentially stats that represent useful things your characters has in a general sense like wealth, fame, contacts, or a mentor. They go from zero to five. Resources is a vague representation of wealth. At Reduces 1 you're one meal away from total poverty. At Resources 5 you have something that passively generates substantial amounts of money for your character, whether that's ownership of a lot of land or an army of accountants maintaining your investment portfolio. Whatever is is, it works without you having to deal with it. In terms of game mechanics it's easy to use: Prices are expressed as Resource scores. If you want to buy something you just compare your score to the item's. - If yours is higher, you just get the item as the price doesn't affect your wealth significantly. - If both scores are the same you get the item but have to reduce your Resources by one. This represents you having to liquidate a large amount of your assets to cover the price. - If your Resources score is lower than that of the item, you can't afford it. It's a nice system for a game that doesn't want resource management to get in the way of epic adventure.

Sounds cool, thanks for the explanation!

Of those that has been the least common at my tables.

That's fair. Perhaps another style of DMing and/or a different system are more your speed.

> I’ve always just treated it as a natural 3D extension of the 2D grid rules I believe that's how it's handled in D&D too, or at least how my table has always done it. I meant more as a practical matter, you're very unlikely to have a vertical wall grid and some kind of stand of the correct height for your minis, so you can't just count squares like you would for horizontal movement. That's when the Pythagorean Theorem comes up in my experience.

And there are more then enough systems out there for everyone to find his perfect match and then some.

RAW yes, they're 30 feet away. To avoid trigonometry, I like to run the rule of long distance plus half the short distance. It also lines up with every other diagonal being 10'

The lack of dnd-style multiclassing in Pathfinder was something I struggled with at first, but honestly now (especially with the "free archetype" optional rule) it's one of my favourite underrated things about having switched. It's not as flashy as the 4 degrees of success or three action system, but it's a really great system.

Ironaically enough, you just take either the horizontal or the vertical distance (whatever is longer) instead of calculating. I hate that rule and never use it, but that's what RAW says.

Happy cake day!