Chebucto Regional Softball Club

yeah, it really depends on the group. Some people love learning new stuff. Some people are like absolutely phobic of it. Though I have a half-serious hypothesis: Some players are so bad at rules, the kind of player that asks every week "what do I roll to attack again?", that you could just change the system without telling them and they wouldn't notice and do any worse. Though that's less true for systems that require creative player buy-in like Fate. D&D in the "I move and attack" mode can be phoned in easier, I think.

I do find it puzzling when people homebrew and tinker and modify D&D 5e to fix all the things they don't like, but they don't want to just change to another system. It's mostly harmless, at least.

I think I would take a different route, because big randomness isn't fun for me. Have you played Fate? It's very good, and free. It has "stress" that's kind of like hit points, but it also has this idea of "consequences". When you take a hit but don't have enough free stress to cover it, you can take a consequence instead. Stress is easy to recover, but a consequence sticks around until you get treatment. As I said, I don't really like big randomness. In Fate, it's always up to the player if they want to take a consequence or not. Sometimes the alternative is the character just gets taken out. But if you do take a consequence , it's up to the table to negotiate what it might be. Fall off a ledge? Could be a broken leg. Got stabbed? Could be an infection. Bothered by a ghost? Now you have a fear of the dark. To port this over to DND , I'd add three "consequences" boxes on the sheet- minor , moderate, and severe. Each one could be used to soak one hit. The minor one could be 25% of their hp, the moderate 50%, and the severe 75%. When you take a hit that's less than the box, you can mark the box instead of it going to hp. Probably tweak the numbers a bit since I just made those up. If you want to be even harsher, lower the max HP some, too. This probably would be a mess, but I started typing it out and don't want to just throw it away. But I do recommend looking at how other systems do stuff for ideas, and stealing them Also make sure your players are into whatever ideas you're pitching.

The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like "just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup" can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping. I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.

> The didn’t listen when the GM talked about Theme and mood and end up with a character who doesn’t fit with the party/canpaign Hah, for a second I thought this was my own post because I wrote something very similar here. But yes, this is one that bugs me.

Having a minor crisis realizing that 9th grade was far more than seven years ago for me. This is fine.

I think there's also a pair: - Takes the setting and theme very seriously. Reads the lore. Knows the details. Can tell you why the Lancea Sanctum and Invictus are traditionally allies - Absolutely does not take the setting and theme seriously. Wants to play Barney the Dinosaur in your game of Vampire, and Punisher in your game about running a bakery. I'm old and tired and generally am super tired of "wacky" ideas like the second one there. I feel like I've come full circle. As a youth, I thought like "let's play vampires and struggle with humanity was cool!" . Then there was a bit where i wanted to flip it- "let's play vampires but like go to theme parks and don't do anything sad or deep!". Now I'm back around to wanting to just play the theme as intended. This is especially true if it comes up after session 0. Like, if you want to do a D&D game about running a BBQ shop, fine. Let's do it. Let's kill, cook, and sell some weird monster parts. But please don't derail the whole game on session 3 when you insist on going back to town to cook the monster meat when it was clearly a random encounter and everyone else wants to continue the dungeon dive pitched in session 0.

One of the reasons I despair D&D is the most popular RPG. It's almost all combat, and not even great combat at that.

Counter-hot-take: Rip the charisma stat and its skills out of the game. It's half-baked as it is. The cha classes can be moved to int or wis.

I always encourage my players to paraphrase if they're trying to be more than they are in real life. It's totally fine to be like "I tell him with a lot of big words that he's a doodyhead"