Chebucto Regional Softball Club

I like a short backstory that provides hooks. "Disgraced son of a noble family that became a warlock when everyone expected a sorcerer" is fine. 12 pages where all the cool stuff already happened is bad. Write that as a book.

Yeah, it mostly worked. Mostly. It's hard to say if my previous group worked better because they were used to my style, or just a better fit for me, or some other factor.

I think most games get shut down when they still have players. Plus they could release server code so people could host their own games, like in the olde days of the 1990s. They don't because they're primarily concerned with profit. That aside, "it brings joy" is not sufficient on its own as a justification. Heroin brings joy, but you likely wouldn't say that's a fine gift for a child. Why is that? Probably because we recognize the potential harms and unhealthy habits. Maybe you accept the risks and harms of digital slop are acceptable. I don't think I'd want to encourage that in children.

Wizard I ran DND for in didn't love this, but understood it. The real problem with that group is we kept changing DMs, and some were a lot more easy going. You gotta get on the same page as a group

I worry about how I would raise a child in this landscape. Two of the people I know with kids, the kids don't care about video games. One of the kids is super into iPad games, and that feels like a haazrd brewing. Maybe I'd try to stick to real games for any child I was responsible for, but I don't think that would survive impact with peers.

Physical cards last for years. Maybe the online game will be around in ten years, but maybe not. I have most of my magic cards from my youth. They're a thing I own. I can do what I want with them- play the game, use them for decorations, sell them. Digital shit is transient with few options for the buyer.

I can see why you might feel that way. Playing in that mode still has some properties of roleplaying- you're often focused on one character and thinking about the world through their perspective - but you're not trying to *be* them the whole time. Maybe it's like being an actor and director at the same time, for a film or play? You drop into the character but also zoom out for the bigger picture. I don't think anyone would say like "Branagh wasn't acting because he was also directing" I don't agree with "can't accomplish both at once", but this is a reasonable thing to disagree on. It can definitely be a mode of play people don't enjoy!

I feel like there's two poles of the RPG experience. At one end, there's the writer's room "let's tell an awesome story together". At the other, there's "I am my character and I am in the world". I am super far in the writer's room direction. I don't want to "immerse" in my character. I want to tell a cool story about my character. So for me, when I try to jump onto a moving train and flub the roll, having input into what happens is great. I like being able to say "what if I land and roll and my backpack falls, so I lose all my stuff?", or "what if I crash through the window of the wrong car, and it's like a room full of security goons having dinner??". If the GM just unilaterally does that, by contrast, it feels bad to me. I like having input. It's probably no surprise I GM more than play. I imagine at the other end of the spectrum, thinking about that stuff gets in the way of trying to experience the character.

I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search. https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example. It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own *thing* (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e's Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me. 5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like "I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But... then if I need fireball I won't have it later. So let's do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn't use magic.". Rituals were a decent solution for that.

What kind of evil? Power fantasy of abuse and subjugation? Have them play vampires or demons. Awaken from their slumber in a small town and go about setting up a cult and securing their safety. Make thralls out of people. Add some sort of mechanic like "eating someone's soul gives you a stat boost" so mechanically they're rewarded for cruelty. Have NPCs beg for their life. Have some sell out their neighbors and loved ones for favor. Let the players kill them anyway. Maybe some heroes show up to fight them and free the people. Maybe it's just two hours of crushing limited resistance and making their temple.

I'm getting old and senile but I don't remember a lot of clever use of magic in 3e. I know there's a lot of jokey posts about it in 5e, but often to the tune of "I cast create water IN HIS LUNGS LOLOLOL", and then people go "that's not how the spell works". 5e also has weird interactions and limitations like sneak attack or smite unarmed, or Eldritch blast and objects. You mentioned the zeitgeist and I think that's actually the key. When 4e came out a lot of 3e grognards didn't like it, but casual players also didn't like it because it was still kind of crunchy, and you had to make choices that could lead to a bad character. 5e came out and is vastly simplified. Now there's a lot of players who would never touch 3e or 4e playing, because it's easy and kind of a shallow game mechanically, so the online sentiment is different. More positive. Also a lot of the grognards have aged out. Without those new players, I feel like people would be repeating "5e is baby's first RPG. It sucks" the way people said 4e is an MMO, it sucks. My argument is that 4e has some dubious similarities to video games, but it was a loud minority and then bandwagon jumpers that cemented the idea. Without that loud minority, I think a lot of people who came to 4e as it was would have enjoyed it fine. People who dismissed it as "an MMO" would not have drawn that conclusion.

> The 5-min adventuring day is more of a “poor GM management” problem than anything. If time effectively stands still when the PC’s rest, of course they’ll rest at every opportunity. I think it's partly poor GM management , but it's also what players want clashing with what DND-likes are. Players want to use their cool powers. The game wants them to save them for when it "matters". There's no squaring that. So that's why you get players blowing all their cool powers in the first couple scenes, and then wanting to rest. The GM can add consequences (eg: the villains plot advances), but that's punishing players for how they want to play. There are some players who truly, sincerely, naturally enjoy the resource management aspects. They are a minority. People pick wizard to do wizard stuff, not to use a crossbow for three hours. > In my personal opinion, player’s choices only feel important if they have real consequences I am inclined to agree. One of the games I like, Fate, has a mechanic literally named Consequences. It's still pretty open ended. Players make up consequences as seem appropriate, rather than looking them up in a book. It's up to the table to enforce them. If you took a consequence "broken arm", you have to remember that means you can't swing your greatclub around like before. I'm not sure I've seen a lot of people trying to weasel their skills in Fate. I've had "sure, your best skill is Fight so you can totally body slam the bouncer to get into the club, but then you'll have body slammed a bouncer and people react appropriately". I'm not sure what your advice for making crunchier systems work for non-crunchy players would be. I tried to do Mage and the one player that never really learned the rules was always lost and frustrated. They had a strong power set but they didn't understand it, so every challenge didn't work. I didn't want to have someone else back seat driving them, but they didn't understand how to solve even problems tailored to their character's strength. And then they didn't understand the tradeoffs of the different options.

I've heard nothing but good things about Pathfinder 2e. I initially ignored it because I really disliked 1st edition. I really intensely dislike powers-per-day and the five minute adventuring day, but I think PF2e has less of that? The players available to me are probably more of a lightweight narrative game crew, though.

I don't remember any aggro mechanic from 4e. Do you mean the "marked" stuff? I remember that being pretty interesting and much better than 5e's "lol they just walk around the fighter" lack of rules. > The way abilities between martials and caster were unified bled the line between magic and ability in ways that felt similar to MMOs. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I always found D&D's "linear fighters quadratic casters" to be kind of garbage. I do not find "wizards can rewrite reality, but fighters can swing their sword three times" to be interesting or satisfying. Giving all classes fun stuff to do is significantly cooler, and comparing it to MMOs feels like a non sequitur. Many games give cool powers to various archetypes. Limiting the cool shit to half the classes is legacy weirdness. > More than anything for me was that it felt like the system was only for combat in a way that 3.5 didn’t. Obviously DnD in any edition has been a combat focused system, but the way it was systematized in 4e was a drastic step away from the rulings not rules mindset that makes TTRPGs feel more alive than video games. With that flexibility stripped on the systems level, it felt like playing a video game with your friends, and the analog for that at the time was MMOs. Skill challenges were pretty cool, if I recall. That was a non-combat system that I don't believe was in 3e. I often see people accidentally reinventing them in 5e, because they want some sort of _system_ for non-combat challenges. I kind of despise OSR games, so "rulings not rules" reflexively makes my skin crawl. You know what I absolutely do not want in my games? Today my character can climb a wall because the GM is in a good mood, and tomorrow that same wall is impossible because his boss chewed him out at work. That's not to say I want specific rules for every situation, but the "GM is the absolute authority" is my ick. Also my ick: not even trying to be consistent across scenes. The whole condescending attitude is just awful. Anyway. I don't even remember 4e being more rules-y than other editions, but I admittedly only played like two campaigns of it, once with new players and once with 3e old-hands. I'd need to see specific sections of the 4e rules that are too rules-y, and how they compare to 5e's implementation. 5e is missing whole systems, or has barely a skeleton of them (social conflict, metagame currency, degree of success, succeed at a cost, conceding conflict, item and spell crafting, to name a few). Not that 4e had those in spades, but I don't think "5e doesn't even try" is a selling point.

Someone else already said the World of Darkness games like Vampire. I'm one of the dozens of people who prefered Requiem over Masquerade, but either should work for you. I'll also throw out my current game crush: Fate. It's a general purpose system, so it focuses where you point it. Players are encouraged to come up with the major "Faces and Places" in the setting, along with the big issues, and then pursue their goals in that world. That could be as much about getting a favored candidate elected as taking out a corrupt CEO.

World of Darkness was exactly what came to mind. In my experience, you do need players who are going to put more effort in than "Dave the fighter"-tier D&D efforts. You can run a game of D&D where the players just walk down the hallway, fight everything they see, and have a good time. But a game about politics, with multiple factions? You need players who are going to pay attention and take some initiative. I had a very frustrating game of Vampire many years ago where none of the players were really engaging with the fiction. They didn't remember who the different factions were, so they didn't understand any of their motivations. I had a much better game some years later where the players really went for the story, and really got into who the major characters and groups were.

4e didn't deserve the reputation it got. Many people who frankly don't know what they're talking about jumped on the "it's an MMO" train for upvotes and feelings of in-group belonging. It's a recurring problem with humans- they can just say anything. I personally didn't play it much because around when it came out I wasn't interested in fantasy combat games, but was spending time with the whitewolf games instead.

Imagine you roll 3d6. There's exactly one way to roll a 3. You need all three of those dice to come up 1. But there are many ways to roll a ten. [{1,3,6}, {1,4,5}, {2,2,6} ...etc]. You're more likely to get totals in the middle of the range. If you rolled 3d6 many times and charted the outcomes, it would look like a bell curve. Most of the results are in the middle, with fewer results of the outliers like 3 and 18. If you roll 1d20 many times and chart the results, it's a flat line. You're just as likely to get one number as any other. Go play around with https://anydice.com/program/e6 if you like. I personally find the flat probability of 1d20 unsatisfying. I prefer when the average, most expected result comes up more often. Like imagine you're throwing darts at a dart board. You probably don't have an equal number of darts on the floor as in the bullseye, and also an equal amount in between. They're probably mostly clustered, with some outliers.

One of the reasons I don't really like 1d20+stuff. Just as likely to get the best possible outcome as the worst.

Is there a name for this trope of cramming really wacky, difficult, high spotlight, stuff into a game like DND that doesn't especially support it? I usually feel bad because I want to encourage creativity, but I also don't want this guy to have 80% of the table attention while Bob the Fighter and Joy the Rogue are playing by the numbers.