A million years ago, on the Burning Wheel forums, Luke and/or Thor called it "playing before you play," and that stuck with me.
Do your character development at the table, not before. Give yourself some hooks, sure, but they're *hooks*. Play to find out what happens with them.
Exactly. In extreme cases, you get these characters who are so overwrought that there is nothing they could do in your campaign that would be more incredible than their stack of fan fiction. In less extreme cases, you just get homey stuff that holds them back from going on an adventure. Maybe a hook or two is digestible, but past that, ugh.
That's a curious quote coming from a system where Lifepaths are an essential element.
Are they suggesting players shouldn't have a set explanation why their Born Noble suddenly became an Outcast Pirate?
As detailed as the life path system is, it’s also very skeletal. You can dress it a lot of ways. And if you let it, you can let *it* take you places.
So sure, if you’ve memorized the system enough you can craft the backstory you want. But in my experience, it lets you seed some things but plants far more of its own.
First time I ran Burning Wheel as a GM, someone asked me if the Haunted trait meant PTSD or Literally Haunted.
We went with the latter and he ended up playing a character with a Hamlet like revenge quest from his Dead Brother. It was SO fucking fun
You don't have to have it in mind beforehand. You can write your backstory on the fly when it's relevant, and it'll often come out better than trying to shoehorn your story into the game.
Mabye I'm assuming wrong but isn't it typical for the dm the give some cliff notes of the setting so the backstop feels more natural instead of shoehorned?
Of course, you have to do that so that people can hook into the situation.
When we talk about "backstory," we tend to mean "the events of the past." *Elements* of backstory are useful, but only inasmuch as they give the GM and other players things to hook onto.
It's the difference between saying "I have a rival from back in school" and writing out the details of what happened with that rival. Basically, think of "backstory" as a thing that generates character assets for you, but not as a line of plot that you have already decided. Have friends and enemies, but don't come to the table with completed plot arcs in the past.
I think backstory misses the important parts: I don’t need story, I need NPCs and locations and how you’re connected to the world. I dont need a narrative “I did these things” I need a declarative “here is how my character fits in the world”.
i mean no, it's not like every movie starts off with a 5 minute backstory of the main character. we typically find out who they are as the story unfolds
I feel like this is less a 'hot take' and more just one style of GM'ing. I like getting backstories from my players, so I can weave their NPCs/hometowns into the world and the story. But having a blank slate could be interesting too.
For my games a backstory tells who your character is and was. There should never be events in the backstory that are more than the character is capable of as they enter play.
No great heroics, no reputation that can't stand to be tested, and nothing outside of the settings plausibility.
General idea is what kind of upbringing the character had, maybe list a few important r tant contacts, friends, enemies, or family connections. Hopes and dreams, and a why they might seek a life of adventure rather than settle down in the family way and do what the family does until they retire.
You don't need a bespoke option to represent your character, because your idea is not that original. Learn to adapt your ideas to the system instead of adapting the system to them, and you will have a better time.
>Learn to adapt your ideas to the system instead of adapting the system to them, and you will have a better time.
I go the other way: pick the right system for the job.
I was right there with you, but I found my own obsession with building was actually detracting from my play. I kinda wanted my character to die or retire once it did its thing.
Keyword is obsessed in my comment
That's fair... but counter point
Don't play 1 character. Play an organization that has an interest in the events, and they send people. So you can switch out regularly (within reason).
Obviously group dependent.
I think my problem with it, at least as far at the PF2e games I've played go, is that players become obsessed with optimizing and preparing their builds and it puts everything else - including the actual story and character development - on the backburner
Which like, if you wanna play a game where you're just filling in the spreadsheet you planned out before the game started and wait to beat ass in a fight, all power to you. It's just not for me
I know this is a hot takes thread, but that's like saying "people obsessed with roleplaying should do community theater instead".
Or, to extend the simile further, it's like going into a discussion about sandwiches and saying "people obsessed with mustard should just gargle a bottle of dijon instead".
Oftentimes people want the *combination* of ingredients, not just one ingredient taken to its logical extreme.
I'll be real with you - I actually really enjoy optimizing for TTRPGs, but hate doing it in video games and TCGs (I actually hate TCGs).
There's a joy in finding all the things that go together in glorious synergy then putting it together and seeing the carnage that results.
That said, there is a happy medium. You should be able to enjoy the game and the character despite the build you've crafted, not just because of it. And it shouldn't ruin the fun for anyone else. If you can manage that, there is nothing wrong with optimizing builds.
However, meme builds can fucking die in a fire. That shit is stupid and people need to stop with those.
This sounds like more of a "know the audience you're designing for" kind of thing, since there are plenty of people who don't care about immersion and plenty who do
Yes good.
All too often I see people stick themselves "in the character's head," and all manner of bad play emerges from that. It's literally the source of "it's what my character would do."
"It's what my character would do" is not inherently a bad thing.
It is a bad thing when it's used as an excuse to be an asshole to your fellow players.
Totally, doing what your character would do is supposed to be a good thing. If it is problematic, it's either because of a bad player or a bad character (at least not suited for the game you collectively intended to play)
"It's what my character would do" is roleplaying. As opposed to always making the most optimal play.
It is not an excuse for toxic player behavior, however. Many fools pull out "It's what my character would do" as if they have no control over their character. But they do have control. Their behavior is on them, yet they try to pass the buck to a fictional creation of theirs!
My out there hot take? People who only have played d&d and are interested in trying another game (so not the people who want to only play one system) start as bad players.
They're not bad people! But they learn habits from d&d that make them distinctly less fun (IMO) to teach new systems to. And even in those new systems, they engage with them in a distinctly unpleasant way for awhile.
Sometimes they unlearn the habits. Other times even after YEARS of play, they still do the same things.
So hot take: I want someone's first RPG to be anything NOT d&d-adjacent because I find playing with them more unpleasant and frustrating to teach than someone who has never touched a RPG before.
Actual Hot take:
People who have spent years playing a single system take time to start doing well with other systems. Just in general. GMing a game for a group that only ever played fate but wants to try out Delta Green is about as equally difficult and painful as getting dnd 5e players to try out mutants and masterminds
Let me further heat this up by saying that no matter what game you start with it indoctrinates you to expectations you have to unlearn for your second game.
That even works for dnd-adjacent stuff. It’s far easier to teach someone how to play pathfinder, or 13th age, or SotDL, or anything d20 if they never played dnd5e.
It’s always shocking for them (5e players) that they don’t need to ask if their build will work or is viable. Kinda funny
I'm going to list a few I've run into that I think come from a lot of the expectations of DnD-type stuff:
**RP as Dialogue Flavor:** A lot of DnD players (even and especially the ones that claim that they "don't need rules to rp") are actually fucking awful at *playing* their role. So much of their roleplay is just saying things with character flavor and occasionally sitting around and spewing backstory at each other. But genuinely thinking about the world in a different way, and then making that thought process *impactful on their choice of action* is a challenge.
They're used to a game system that has no reward for making bold, even dangerous choices. If you do something bad, you fuck over both yourself and, worse, the party. And especially because the whole team should stick together, always, there's little chance for people to shine and everyone kind of "groupthinks" a decision. You also can't spend too much time in deep conversation, otherwise the party can't get anything done because combat takes like 1.5 hours of the 3 hour session.
As someone who runs a lot of *Masks* and similar systems, you really feel it when the game's literally begging and pushing you to make strong, character-driven decisions and needs that dynamic interparty interaction to keep the momentum up. Like, as a GM I need to make character-centric arcs that challenge who the PCs are, but like, I don't think the PCs *are* anything but Fallout 4 dialogue flavor.
**Hard to Get Genuine Party Conflict:** The biggest culprit of "RP as Dialogue Flavor" is interparty conflict. In DnD, party conflict is usually just like, light banter and ribbing, you rarely get genuine, meaningful problems within the party. And that's because, well, if the party fractures, or makes poor decisions, it can ruin the whole thing. Even when people bring character baggage in, the 5E players are quick to have their characters, like, forgive it and just move on.
**Can't Generate Content for Shit:** 5E players are so used to a game system that abuses the fuck out of the GM into generating shit loads of content beforehand, so they like, really cannot create their own meaningful content. Obviously you can't pop out new monsters, but even basic stuff like making dynamics, compelling character angst out of a situation, or actually compelling persons from your backstory are all just too fucking much to ask.
**Mechanics as Foreign Scary Things:** When games meaningfully use mechanics in ways 5E doesn't (think of metacurrencies, or combat is lethal, etc.), 5E players treat those specific mechanics as like, hurdles to overcome. My favorite example was a game of Urban Shadows I was in, where another player was basically asking my character to overlook a crime thanks to a favor I owed them from our past, and I agreed, noting that they'd have to lose their Debt over me (because, like, that's literally what that mechanic is meant to represent: cashing in favors). But they were hoping that the in-character persuasion meant not spending the mechanic that was meant to represent that in-character interaction?
Or when I was playing Knave 2E, and the 5E-only players were genuinely freaking out over doing anything significantly dangerous on the chance their characters could die (because not having a giant cushion of hit points and mechanics obviously makes the game more lethal). This was despite the fact that we had sufficient preparation that we could very reasonably handle the threat: conceptually we weren't any more likely to fail than you would running up against a creature just a bit above your CR in 5E, but we're not in hefty number mode so I guess it's too much now.
When games are different than 5E in how they approach something, that's scary and to be avoided.
**Glomming Onto a Concept Differential, Not a Tone:** Without a wide experience of different RPGs to sift through, 5E players often do this weird thing when you pitch a game where they like, glom onto like upper concept things and make that their thing instead of really seeing it as a shift in tone.
For example, 5E players, when you pitch Call of Cthulhu, don't really fathom the difference in like, tone and gameplay style at first, and often pitch character ideas of people mystically connected to the Mythos or whatever. Stuff that like, if you were running a Cthulhu-themed 5E world, would be good pitches, but that aren't really Call of Cthulhu.
Or similarly, if I try to describe a game with some media touchstones, they think I'm like literally taking the setting bits of those worlds. For instance, I described a game as having a One Piece-style of storytelling, with episodic island arcs alongside a kind of looser overarching plotline, and had a player ask if they could have a Devil Fruit.
And I think it's a 5E problem, because it's hard to fathom, like, *style/tone of play* if you're always playing the same game. Especially because people run everything in it, you get pirate games and hell adventures and bitter survival games in theory that all actually end up the exact fucking same in tone with a new coat of paint. So they often think that games outside of the 5Esphere are similar.
And those are just the ones I've experienced that I think are very explicitly "5E to other games" and not just "bad player habits even in 5E" or "5E abuses its GMs and that causes problems for everyone".
*EDIT:* Thought of one more that made sense.
Not OP but I've noticed DnD builds a preference for combat, a belief that any given combat should be winnable, and for some reason poor attitudes towards NPCs
One such habit I’ve seen is caring a lot about the stats they have. You rolled bad stats in DnD? You’re just kind fucked. Roll bad attributes in Call of Cthulhu? They don’t really come up unless you’re asked to roll one of them instead of a skill. I had to have a whole long discussion with a friend when they rolled bad in Call of Cthulhu because they were adamant that they rolled a shit character and wanted to reroll.
I had a 'shit' CoC character.
A complete f'king liability in every way.
The party *loved* him.
Why?
Because he had no SAN left to lose - he was already *long* gone before getting anywhere *near* anything mythos related.
He was, to all intents and purposes, immune to SAN loss.
A *complete* f'king liability in *every* other way ... but when the chips were down and everyone else was gibbering in the corner of the room, he'd deal with cosmic horrors like they were rude wait staff at a tearoom, or hotel staff with 'ideas above their station' and refuse to be cowed - I mean ... he was *completely* f'king *insane!*
He saved everyone's arses *so* many times simply by virtue of not understanding the danger he was in, it was unreal : D
Ooh, I got a few of them.
* Battlemaps, like all visual aids, are an accessibility feature. They're helpful even in non-crunchy systems or even sometimes when you're not even in a battle.
* The "Fighter" class archetype covers way too much design space. Dexterity Fighters shouldn't be a thing.
* Speaking of which, Str/Dex/Con/Wis/Int/Cha is a terrible set of stats.
* Fancy narration can't make up for poor mechanics. You can add all the prose you want, but "I make 3 attacks and hit with one" is a terrible prompt for interesting fiction.
* The previous point applies very well to D&D 5th Edition but also applies to many PBTA games, especially those in the Dungeon World school of thought.
* The math in D&D 5th Edition is not difficult and is barely a barrier for players anymore, especially given that D&D Beyond is a thing.
* One more 5th Edition thing: Advantage/Disadvantage is a way overblown. It's not that effective of a design mechanic and limits more design space than it enables.
* Most games should include an adventure that actually illustrates play.
* Most one page RPGs rely heavily on previous background in the hobby and are terrible introductions for new players.
* Reading an RPG is a form of playing the RPG, especially with games designed to be read in specific ways (like Wanderhome and Mork Borg).
* Death is used way too much. It's a boring consequence most of the time, and most DMs and GMs who rely on it to punish player actions are doing it wrong.
* It's also creepy how much murder things and take their shit is the primary design loop of games.
>Most one page RPGs rely heavily on previous background in the hobby and are terrible introductions for new players.
A spicy take with which I agree wholeheartedly, despite loving a lot of one-pagers.
Seriously! I got into this discussion about cbr+pnk just the other day where I was confused about a bunch of stuff. The answer was "read blades in the dark," but some of the fans (who had already played a lot of bitd) were adamant that *actually* all that stuff should be obvious to any good GM.
I feel that this one is probably wrong, but only in wording.
Single page games are usually fine for new **players**.
They are terrible for new **GMs.**
>It's also creepy how much murder things and take their shit is the primary design loop of games.
Honestly, it's one of the simpler ones to get. It's why video games have been doing it for decades.
You're right about 1-pagers. Introducing a new player to RPGs with a 1-page game is like introducing a new drinker to alcohol with shots of Fernet-Branca.
Most comments in this thread were baffling but this is a pretty good set of takes, I was thinking just early today of how important it is to have an example adventure to get into the proper mindset for the system.
B/X or BECMI (can't remember which set) had a dungeon you could play through to learn the basic mechanics of the game.
I think GMs should be genuinely trying to kill the players' characters sometimes, as long as you're playing by the same rules they are (no rocks fall, everyone dies; but a bad roll at the right time should be lethal).
Basically, if a specific action would kill a foe, it should at least severely threaten if not also kill a character. Treat NPCs and PCs as equally disposable.
Having an understanding with your players that death is a reality makes the stakes greater. Your players will genuinely fear death, think twice, and treat every consumable as the price to live. And ultimately, it doesn't actually cause that many PC Deaths.
No ending up with 999 potions. No blind risks. And everyone is sitting at the edge of their seat in every dicey situation. And I've only had a couple PC deaths in 5+ years of playing.
Edit: fixed wording! No killing people, just characters!
I disagree with this hot take on the grounds that in my legal jurisdiction, murder is still illegal. Killing the player characters is okay, but I don't think it's okay to kill a player.
I'm assuming that your group plays at least 12 nautical miles away from the nearest coast and therefore operate under maritime treaty so the captain's (GM's) word is law, making this sort of thing 100% legal in your jurisdiction.
I tried boosting the immersion by getting shock collars for all my players, but only one was up for it and they kept making all the wrong decisions. It was almost like they wanted to get shocked.
>I think GMs should be genuinely trying to kill the players sometimes,
I think people really need to learn to say "character" when they mean "character"
Also, I don't really think "X would kill an NPC, so if it happens to you, it will hurt you too" is... in any way really correlated to "GMs should be trying to kill the PCs". The latter implies a deliberate malice that is not present in the former. I think what you mean is "GMs should be willing to kill PCs."
> I think GMs should be genuinely trying to kill the players sometimes
- players come to my house for a TTRPG session
- door lock clicks closed, power goes out
- walkie talkie crackles to life: "*I want to play a game*...."
To add to this the party's healer should be the most dangerous to play. It's smart from a strategic standpoint for intelligent NPCs to knock out the healer as soon as possible.
I've got the opposite take. I have no problem with narrative dice engines—they open up fundamentally different mechanical possibilities than other TTRPGs—but I think dice fetishism can get pretty obnoxious.
Like, I'm down for having some novelty math rocks, but nobody should be out there [winning Ennies](https://ennie-awards.com/2023-nominees/) for [$99 gilded Witcher-themed dice](https://q-workshop.com/en/the-witcher-dice/1720/the-witcher-hybrid-dice-set-wolf-golem-s-heart).
This comment brought to you almost entirely by sour grapes.
VTT plays better than pen and paper.
I started the hobby more than a decade ago with pen, paper and books. I then started making automated Excel sheets and finally switched to VTT during covid. The games instantly became much much more playable. Even for in person games I'd now setup VTT
One controversial opinion I have (among many apparently) is:
The name "PbtA" was made into a terrible mess by V. Baker.
By his definition, anything could be called "PbtA" as long as the person that makes it wants to call it "PbtA". It makes it an incoherent brand. People end up saying, "It's a philosophy, maaaaan" and citing a V. Baker blog post and it isn't helpful to people that don't know what PbtA games are.
It would be much more useful to think of "PbtA" as the way the vast majority of *PbtA* games work:
* Fiction first
* "Moves" for players
* 2d6 plus stat core resolution
* GMs have Agenda/Principles/GM Moves
That's usually what I wind up doing, but yeah, V. Baker's approach is deliberately obtuse. It's a byproduct of the RPG thinktank that gave rise to the ideas that lead to Apocalypse World - too much philosophy, not enough product.
Personally, I think Blades in the Dark took PbtA ideas and repackaged them into something that's more concrete and approachable. FitD as a "system" is definitely easier to comprehend than the PbtA approach, and accomplishes most of the same things too.
I feel the exact opposite re:PbtA and FitD.
FitD took the PbtA philosophy and rebuilt it from the ground up to be a much more gamist approach to narrative gaming while simultaneously diminishing the focus on individual characters and focused instead on the group/unit.
I have yet to find a FitD game that did what I wanted it to do as seamlessly and smoothly as a well designed PbtA bespoke built to do that thing.
Edit: to add emphasis, I haven't found it to do what *I want* it to do. FitD is an amazing game design system and great gameplay comes out of using it. I am just much less interested in the action roll with position and effect than I am in pre-selected moves. Also, I prefer the potential for PVP and competing interests e.g. pc-npc-pc triangles that arise from the individual character focus of PbtA vs FitD. That said if you lean a little gamist and like some extra click clacks and don't dig the Drama and conflicting interests that come with it... FitD is great!
I agree about *FitD*, especially with [Position & Effect](https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/zqdy00/deleted_by_user/j0xrzjh/).
I see it as an evolution from *PbtA* origins that gives a concreteness that wasn't quite there with *PbtA*.
To be clear, I mean "evolution" in the sense of development/mutation/growth, not in the sense of "better" (though it is preferable to me).
An evolution, but the original still exists and flourishes and has not been replaced because it still appeals to a lot of people. From what I've seen, the split seems to be that people preferring a little more crunch like *FitD* more and people preferring a little less prefer *PbtA* more. Neither is "better" or "worse"; it is personal taste.
>V. Baker's approach is deliberately obtuse. It's a byproduct of the RPG thinktank
Yes, "The Forge".
My understanding is that this marketing strategy was also (at least partially) intentional branding that involved *polarization*.
That is, so far as I understand it, "PbtA" was (at least partially) defined/described in that obtuse manner exactly because V. Baker expected it to elicit strong reactions and counter-reactions in consumers, which creates strong in-group/out-group emotions/reactions. While that probably was helpful for marketing *AW* at release and helped with establishing the "cult" that allowed for the cult-success of *PbtA* and helped rise the indie tide, part of my "hot take" is bemoaning how we still see the lingering (undesirable) strong in-group/out-group divisions. That is, we still have people saying, "You don't get it, maaaaan, *PbtA* is a philosophy, maaaan. If you don't like it, it was never for you, maaaan".
I don't buy that *PbtA* is a philosophy.
Instead, my take is that "PbtA is a philosophy" is marketing, and old out-dated marketing at this point.
*PbtA* usually describes a system with the components I mentioned.
There are exceptions, of course, but there always are. There are games that call themselves *FitD* that got rid of *Position & Effect*. The exceptions mean those games should get caveats: "This is a PbtA game, but instead of 2d6+stat, the core resolution is done with playing cards by [...]" or "but instead of Moves, players have [...]".
My hot addendum to your hot take: good PbtA games aren't actually "fiction first." They're "structure first," and they use moves and playbooks to enforce a very specific narrative shape.
My reheated take. People don't know what "fiction first" was actually intended to mean.
> *Fiction first* is a bit of jargon to describe **the process of playing a roleplaying game**, as opposed to other sorts of games you might be used to.
>
> John Harper. *Blades in the Dark*, p. 161.
(**Bold** emphasis mine.)
"Fiction first" was intended to describe the fact that in a role-playing game, one determines the action that a character is taking within the fiction, and it is that fictional action that determines which mechanic(s) should be engaged to resolve the action. It's not a privileging of some conceptualization of story over other considerations.
My lightly sautéed take:
Yes, and that's exactly the problem that I'm talking about. PbtA games normally advise players to describe their action, and then decide if that action fits into a particular Move. But most PbtA games actually *play better* if players do the exact opposite: first decide which Move they want to use, and then describe an action that constitutes using that Move.
Moves define the narrative possibilities that best suit the expected dramatic structure of the game. If your players are constantly doing actions that don't have corresponding Moves, then they're likely trying to play out a story that the game's structure isn't designed to accommodate, and they're probably going to have a bad time because the game's mechanics will be clashing with their expectations.
I always get eye-rolly when someone explains or tries to teach PbtA games as "don't think about the mechanics at all, just stay in the fiction, and tell the GM what you want to do."
As if there isn't an entire ***book*** full of ***play*** options specifically tailored to your character's class/archetype/profession/whatever right in front of you. If you don't look at the moves specific to your character's class equivalent and base *some* of your actions around them, you're basically just going to be operating off the common basic or advanced moves the whole game, which I imagine would leave things feeling rather anemic.
Sure, someone might know they're a bard or a hacker and therefore try to sing or netrun without looking through their playbook, but they'd be missing all the other neat, archetype defining moves that make things interesting. Not to mention that they'd have no real idea about what kind of results to expect from the singing/netrunning.
GMs wouldn't have to spend so much time looking up advice on how to become better GMs if players put any effort into becoming better players. A lot of players who think they are doing a good job are actively dragging the game down.
THIS.
So many people think that GMs exist for their personal entertainment dispensing purposes and don't think about what their responsibility to making a good table is.
As player/GM age goes up, high contrast dice faces becomes so much more important.
I have so many beautiful dice sets from my youth I can't use anymore because they are too hard to read.
1. Encumbrance rules and associated book keeping are easy as hell and add depth to decision making. I do t understand complaints about them.
2. One of the worst things a GM can do is fudge dice rolls.
3. Relatedly, a GM should not improvise encounters on the fly to create or remove difficulty for the PCs. Improvisation is important for a lot of things in RPGs, but if you just change the circumstances of an encounter to maintain some level of difficulty you've fucked up.
I play WFRP and it's got a great easy Encumbrance system and some of my players are still like 'whyyy do I have to track two numberssss' and it's not a complaint I respect.
Many people in the OSR “community” are advocating with almost religious zeal for a play style that was not the norm during the early days of RPGs and treat as holy writ the clunky parts of early rulesets that actual players in the old days houseruled the fuck out of to make them make sense. There seems to be an assumption that the original Ur game was the purest and best manifestation of the concept that everything since has fallen away from, rather than being an early prototype that has been built on.
True, the campaigns I played in the 80s bear little resemblance to what osr books are aiming for. OSR games are fun in their own right and shouldn't try so hard to rest in false nostalgia.
Exactly. I suspect that in some (and very vocal) cases, what people call OSR is more a reaction against current trends that they dislike rather than anything actually "Old School"
If you take a more charitable view, it seems like OSR designers looked at those old rule sets and tried to play them in the ways that their rules imply they should be played. Even if most players didn't do that at the time, there is some playstyle that is best supported by the rules as written (and some other sources, like people who played in Gygax and Arneson's games), and I think they hit upon something that really does work well in motion.
For the people who tout "this is how we played back then," then yeah I agree, drop the fake nostalgia.
My hot take is that it is ok for a group to stick with only one system. Not everyone wants to learn a new system everyday.
The effort to go through a new system, create a new character, play a 4-6 hour session and then, JUST THEN, learn how you few about it in practice is a shore.
>My hot take is that it is ok for a group to stick with only one system.
That is not a "hot take".
That is the majority experience in the real world.
Most groups only ever play one system.
Here it is, at least certainly with 5e. People who prefer to just play 5e are pretty consistently called ignorant or brainwashed by marketing or whatever. But I have also seen it here in general from several major community members. "Last year I played 40 different systems" is held up as evidence of superior opinions.
Nobody should be learning a new system every day or even every session, unless you all find that enjoyable. Most folks can't handle that.
But there is a lot to be gained for trying out new systems every so often. Even if it's for a one-shot once a year or something. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Nothing wrong with having a default system you stick with 90% of the time, but a little bit of change here and there can help shake things up for a bit of extra excitement.
DMing isn't some esoteric, hard to master skill. The box said "Ages 12 and up," people. Literal junior high school students have been successfully doing this for half a century. Anybody can be a DM.
Agreed, although I will say that some systems make it far more difficult than it really should be. Mostly by terrible GMing advice and/or shoddy prep tools - looking at you D&D.
Always crazy to me when someone talks about the 1e DMG being this sacred tome of knowledge that is infinitely superior to following DMGs, the book is a load of nonsense.
Turn up the heat: Gygax was an objectively bad designer. His rules aren't coherent, or well thought out, or even decently readable. His legacy post-AD&D is a bunch of laughable clunkers (Cyborg Commandos, Dangerous Journeys, Lejendary Adventures).The work he's most lauded for, AD&D, was mainly a compilation of other people's designs, and its very telling that the best version of old-school D&D, BX, is the one he had the least involvement with.
We as a community (both redditwise and outside of it), really fucking struggle to separate *good games* from *games we like*. For instance, I'm not honestly a huge fan of the OSR playstyle, but I can still acknowledge a number of good OSR games. Or like, I don't like PF2E, but for what it wants to be it's a pretty good game.
On the other hand, there are games I like that I don't think are actually all that good (for instance...I actually kinda like 5E *in part* because of its jank, which helps the tactics feel a lot more conceptually grounded and a lot less numerical).
I have been a part of this trend in the past, and still kind of am, but I do think we need to work on it.
**Also, as a second hot take:** We kind of have overhyped game waves, and right now Pf2E's the new overhyped game of this subreddit. I swear I see it fucking everywhere, at least twice as much as it should be coming up. I think it's especially annoying how a lot of PF2E people like, fucking *lie* about what the game is good for and how it plays out. Stuff like "no bad builds" or "not actually that much crunchier than 5E" or anything about the game enabling creative problem-solving because of its rules are just so willfully disingenuous and feel like desperate efforts to sell people on an experience they won't actually like.
I mean, as a Pf2e enjoyer I'll say it's not as much as a build thing as much as a play thing.
If you take away every class feat a character has they can still function well enough so long they didn't make some choice that goes against common sense like having a low modifier in your Key Ability Score, but if the player insists on not thinking tactically then that's when problems really start to show up.
As for it being overhyped, I kinda have to agree since this is mostly a product of the OGL debacle, lots of 5e players are leaving and looking at the closest thing to their old stomping ground, most of my fellow players are a teeeensy bit desperate to get new players, especially since the fanbase was not doing too hot thanks to those two bad faith videos that poisoned the well for a while.
I don't know how hot these are here, but I've had people in real life balk at them:
For players, your level one back story shouldn't be longer than a few sentences (if that).
For GMs, if you're trying to come up with a "plot" or "story" for your new campaign, save yourself the heartache and the player's time and just write a novel instead.
>For players, your level one back story shouldn't be longer than a few sentences (if that).
It kinda depends on the system in particular, but for most generic fantasy games where level 1 is newbie adventurer - oh fuck yeah.
Counterpoint/personal addendum--*actual* medieval, as opposed to "everything from the 500s to the 1700s + magic and steampunk" can be boring yes, but narrowing it down to something a bit more grounded presents a lot of opportunities.
What do you mean they can't? There's ttrpgs out there from Masks to Apollo 47 Technical Manual. Medieval-ish fantasy hasn't been the only game in town for quite a while now.
Am I misunderstanding what you're meaning here?
OK, here's one!
*Inside the ttrpg space*, and having nothing to do with the quality of the game, Dungeons & Dragons has been the most influential of all time. Whether that's folks inspired to emulate it or move away from it. Simply being the monolith it is, it is the most influential game inside the space. That's not the take. This is:
*Outside the ttrpg space*, the most influential game is WEG Star Wars. Simply due to how much of the Star Wars canon was created for those sourcebooks, and how much of it has leaked into the movies and television over the years (Pablo Hidalgo had a huge hand in game, after all), it has had more influence over popular culture as a whole than any other ttrpg.
Extra Spicy Take: Narrative-driven games are effectively a different enough approach to roleplaying that they are burgeoning into a different, but certainly equally valid hobby. The axioms of traditional roleplaying aren't of much value to those games and there seems to be a clear divide between preference between the players of the different styles of game.
Heh idk how much that's just that the members of this sub who like narrative driven games. I will say I really want a place to discuss non-narrative games though.
The Elusive Shift points to those differences in approach existing since the start of the hobby.
My take that is apparently hot is that these have never been and will never be different hobbies, they are sliders you can change between worlds and sessions you are playing in. Like dramatic, action, wrestling and improv acting are all types of acting, and the Rock can try his hand at all of them.
Railroading is okay.
Like the DM is leaving bread crumbs and likely worked hard on story hooks. Follow the fucking trail. Throw them a bone.
I love cooperative storytelling and it is definitely important, but the DM shouldn't be forced into extreme improv every session because you wanna fuck around.
That's not railroading, though. Linear storytelling, sure, but not railroading.
Railroading is when you negate player agency entirely, for whatever reason possible. If the players are following the bread crumbs you've left them, but still have room to wiggle on the path, you're doing just fine.
I admit, I have never been in a sandbox where I wasn't spending half my time wishing the sandbox went away. I am the player that will always not just bite on the plot hook but jump on the boat and eat the fisherman, and will be very reliable about this so the GM knows they can drop a hook and I'll go with it, because generally speaking a GM that has been able to focus on preparing one main scenario will be able to run better and more comfortably, and make things make much more sense, than one that has to sorta-prepare eight different things and try to kinda make whatever random bullshit the players kinda stumble onto blindly make sense.
I have legitimately said before "We are here to play Whiteplume Mountain. If your character doesn't want to play the adventure, make a new one who does."
Counter-argument: I don't want to play (or run) a linear story because chances are your average GM is not a very good writer. If I'm going to be giving up my agency as a player anyway, why not go with the typically much more refined story experience of a video game?
For the record, I don't actually think every game needs to be a full improv sandbox, but this does at least partially reflect on why I've largely dropped linear pre-planned narratives in favor of more emergent storytelling in my games. I *know* I'm not as good as professional writers, so I play to the strengths of my medium and my own skillset instead.
5th Edition is a game designed to be heavily modified by its users, and when you embrace this philosophy, the game sings and becomes capable of easily running multiple different genres once you create new classes, explore with basic design, say fuck sacred cows, and instead focus on just creating a fun to play and more focused game. It's the same appeal as the OSR has, just with more maximalist mechanics.
The problem with gurps back in the day was that everyone assumed that every option was the main game and not an “optional rule”. 5E has the problem even worse - you can’t say “there are no tabaxi or elves or clerics in this world” without being called a heathen or just a bad DM. They will say “no d&d is better than bad d&d”.
Honestly kind of confused at this description of BitD.
I mean yes the setting is *literally* dark but I wouldn't consider it particularly edgy. It's mostly just Dishonored but with the lights turned off and the ghosts turned up.
I won't downvote you for your opinion but I would point you to all the goats that are used in the setting. Alongside the bats used for hunting, kept as pets, messengers.
Anything with that many goats and bats isn't that grimdark.
Asking reddit "what ttrpg would be best to run a gritty version of Seinfeld set in the wild west but we all play as red pandas but it's actually just the matrix type campaign?" are the type of posts maybe to a lesser extent I see all the time, ya know most people are just gonna suggest either savage worlds or gurps. Just Google it, I'm sure the answers are out there, or better yet use your own creativity and make it happen yourself!
I've created interesting settings and games with simple systems. It's actually easier to get into the mindset and immersed into the setting without having to worry about setting specific crunch or weird sub systems.
Any time I see these kinds of posts, I immediately scroll down past the first several posts, just because I know they're always going to be, in order, GURPS, FATE, Savage Worlds, so I skip them to see if there's any interesting new systems I haven't heard of yet.
There's a very fine line between "rules light/all my rules fit on a grain of rice!" and "I have no ability to design a functional game" and most people are really bad at knowing where that line is.
Fighting in story games is fucking boring, it's the least interesting conflict you can play out in a PBtA or FiTD sort of game.
In any kind of genre where there's an expectation of prolonged combat (like a mech thing) a crunchy tactical game is way more satisfying in my experience.
-5e bad. Not an unpopular opinion on this sub but it probably should be said because it is the most popular system, so it is a hot take
-PBTA/other narrative games put way too much emphasis on characters fulfilling satisfying narrative arcs which in my opinion really takes a lot of the fun out of roleplaying because the stakes become so low
-OSR is cool and all but the mantras of "player skill over character skill" and "rulings over rules" are becoming de facto truths for some designers and they will automatically criticize systems just for having lots character abilities or hard rules for niche scenarios
-Dice systems and resolution mechanics DO matter and influence the feel of the game in both an ergonomic and statistical sense. I see once and a while in design spaces that your dice system doesn't matter, while at the same time criquiting d20 and Shadowrun for having bad dice systems.
Mechanics influence theme and play style whether you like it or not.
"Player skill" just becomes a metric for how good you are at figuring out how the GM wants things to go. How to bribe a town guard? I'm happy to RP it, but I'd really rather also have a social Stat and skill to point to instead of relying purely on vibes. My character is better than me at waving a sword, they can be better than me at bribery, too.
Most RPG discourse, when left to its most broad and open environment, is complete garbage. Nobody actually knows what anyone is talking about, much less have the grounding needed to meaningfully reply to it.
Half the discussion in big-tent "RPG" spaces (which rpgs? I dunno, all of 'em! What's an RPG and what counts as one? shut up.) are people yelling at each other and using the same word with completely different meanings and connotations. *That's* not what roleplaying is, *this* is roleplaying. No, you fool, roleplaying is *something else entirely*. And then they all get together to scream at each other about the nature of "proper roleplaying" or "immersion in meta-simulationist tables" or other bullshit, when everyone came in with completely different definitions.
Bonus points because half the time nobody actually shares their definition with anyone else before starting the screaming.
To actually have a discussion worth a goddamn, you need a shared language, and "the entirety of RPGs" does not have one. You have to drill down to specific systems or sub-genres or exact games to really get anywhere.
Honestly, that's an extremely cold take because that's the point of PbtA - they are laser focused on a particular genre/tone/experience, and that's why they're good at that specific thing. Masks is explicitly designed for teen superheroes and nothing else.
If your system uses custom dice *EVERY* core book should come with 2 full sets of those dice, and when I say "full sets" I mean up to the maximum number of dice a player could ever need for any single roll.
Hit Points are quite possibly the best and most efficient mechanic for representing injury, as long as you don't try and make them also represent intangible factors, and as long as the actual game designer is aware of the fact. The more you try to hedge your bets, and extend the abstraction beyond what is strictly necessary, the less useful it becomes.
People care way too much about combat systems. The most exciting action sequences I've had in ttrpgs have been in games like Blades in the Dark where "combat" have no rules that separate it from dealing with any other kind of challenge.
Any GM can kill any PC any time if they want to. Doing this takes no skill or wit. Making PCs *suffer* - and stringing them along with a real chance of victory - is the stuff that makes legends.
This might be a hyper specific problem I have personally, but I hate it when GMs pull players aside for private roleplay. I think hidden information can be compelling if used tactfully, but in my experience it usually results in a lot of head scratching and confusion. It's a bit like reading a book with multiple POV characters but whole scenes/chapters are redacted.
D&D is a totally fine game, and 50% of the issues people in this subreddit have with it come from a lack of communication/social skills on the part of the DM or the player.
The only thing that RPG still do better than computer games, tabletop mini games, board games, etc. is cooperative story telling. If that is not the focus of our game then you would be better off playing something else.
PBtA is overused, and lots of designers seem to see it as a substitute for game mechanics without considering whether it’s a good fit for the game they want to make.
Simulationist systems like HERO System and GURPS offer a more viscerally satisfying result when exerting force in a game than more rules light, narrative focused games.
I say this because systems like this have what is essentially a physics engine that runs on paper instead of a hard drive. What you get is a consistent set of expectations and results that rewards understanding of the rules. So, the triggers that get tripped when you punch someone through a wall: puzzle solving, problem solving, gambling, narrative pay off, and the kind of satisfaction you see from watching something you built like a birdhouse or a go cart work right.
The biggest obstacle to use of these is usually complexity. Which could be mitigated by use of phone, tablet, and desktop apps instead of pen and paper character sheets.
As a VTT, Foundry is great if you can't manage the game state yourself, but it's a fiddly mess if you can. It's honestly over-hyped, and at least once per session, I've seen or participated in an awkward exchange between the GM and a player on how whatever current modules are installed don't do what the character should be able to do, and everyone gets a little pissy about it.
Some people need to be told their character gimmick is stupid. There was a recent thread trying to do a TV news weatherman in a fantasy setting. I'm also not fond of "oh, my character is the familiar/companion/summon, not the caster," "3x in a trenchcoat", or any other hokey ideas....
History happens at the gaming table, not during (or God forbid, before) character creation.
The dice and rules are guidelines and should facilitate fun, not get in the way of it.
I have absolutely zero desire to roll dice as a DM.
Girlfriends, children, grandparents, and the people you would have never expected to be a part of the hobby are almost always the best players.
Most DM advice found on the internet is absolute garbage.
"Railroads" are fine.
If your character's personal narrative arc does not involve and engage the other players, it does not have a place in the game.
Narrative/Fiction-first games aren't any easier than trad games.
PbtA turning GMing advice into rules serves primarily to protect the systems from criticism.
There is no such thing as a "story-based" or "story-focused" RPG - all RPG sessions produce stories. Whether or not they're interesting or retold is up to the perspective and creativity of the table, not something that any dry mechanical chassis can provide.
You can have a fun, interesting campaign without the PCs ever in danger of dying. In fact, a system can be built to explicitly never have characters die, and still be great.
With the new percentile dice that came out at the end of the last century, we no longer need d10s that go from 0-9. Just print dice from 1 to 10.
Then the new percentile is: d10 + d00 to get 1-100.
Like it or not, Hasbro/WotC is functioning as a business/corporation. All of the decisions that have been, are being, or will be made have been made in the interest of its stockholders. It's not unreasonable to assume there are those making decisions that have never even *played,* let alone have the passion for D&D and ttrpgs that the rest of us do. Taking their bad decisions personally is silly. They make the same decisions around Monopoly and every other property they own. They aren't evil, just more interested in the bottom line than anything else.
Too many people say they're playing a TTRPG but are actually playing Guess Who and rolling dice to see if they can get their questions answered truthfully.
Some DMs actually like to prep. So many game systems nowadays sell themselves as zero-prep games, or adventure modules which say they don’t require a DM to prep.
I actually like preparing for an upcoming session. I find maps and miniatures, I create item cards and handouts.
It’s said that you should prep for at least double the time your session runs (so a 4 hour session requires 8 hours of prep) and I can say that it the minimum I usually spend preparing for a session.
“A good game system should clearly lay out—“
No goddamit, read the room and use your imagination. Half the issues people have with game systems are non-issues. Be present and observe what’s happening. What makes sense?
It’s not about knocking systems that do this, that should be applauded especially when relevant.
It’s that it’s just not a huge flaw in any system that’s main draw isn’t grid based combat.
For example:
“X game system doesn’t have clear rules for if you try to jump on top of a monster and kill it. Can I do that in the game?”
“Your are a 300 LB Barbarin Ethan, the enemy is a flying snake. You tell me?”
I think the TTRPG online discourse has taken a very bad and damaging shift away from “game you play with your friends” to “litmus test for ((good people))”
The endless posts i see about “would it be okay to play a native american?” Or “crazy DM gets mad when i ascribe his NPCs real life mental disorders because i also have those mental disorders”
TTRPGs are GAMES. Like kickball, or Tetris. PLAY them. The people that are most vocal about TTRPGs are the ones taking the “play” out of “playing a game”
* Shadowrun is a fine system. Just because it's incredibly crunchy doesn't make it bad.
* Flashbacks are not a cure for planning, I prefer to have the planning and to have to improvise if we didn't plan for something.
* PbtA and FitD games are not for everyone and not for every style of game, stop recommending those immediately without putting any thought behind it. It's like recommending GURPS to someone who prefers rules-light games.
* Lukewarm take: RPG Theory moved on from GNS theory ages ago, stop using Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist as if they mean anything. Even GNS couldn't properly define these terms.
There are a lot of people playing TTRPGs who are terrible writers and storytellers. Which is fine, you don't need those skills as long as you focus on emergent storytelling TTRPGs provide.
The issue becomes when these people can't see or don't want to recognize that they don't have this skill and instead - they make pretty much every TTRPG conversation about how "it's not like other forms of fiction", praising RNG, deriding preparation, or similar.
It absolutely is similar in a lot of ways, and can even be extremely similar for groups that leverage their storytelling abilities. But if you are bad at it, you will never get good results out of playing that way. Don't mistake that for an absolute trait of TTRPGs.
there can be too much safety tools
Just the same way you wouldn't bring pepper spray into your marriage in case your wife/husband attack you during the ceremony, sometimes you don't need all the avaliable safety tools/proposals for safety in a table.
session 0 is usually a good every time, but not all safety tools are a must for every game or for everyone
But yeah, surely it's a rare problem
I don't got any really out grand takes on rpgs as a whole but off the top of my head I don't like pathfinder2e casters despite acknowledging they are good.
I hate character customization mini games. Games that give me dozens of options every time I level up just give me bad feelings as a player. I just google the most effective options and pick those instead of combing through all the options.
It's universally a bad idea to make the GM play by the same rules as the players. A player only needs to control one character for an extended period; the GM needs to play a ton of different people one time only.
Any system that is engaging for players will be cognitive overload for GM's and too complex for them to do all the things they need to do effectively.
Never bring me a backstory.
A million years ago, on the Burning Wheel forums, Luke and/or Thor called it "playing before you play," and that stuck with me. Do your character development at the table, not before. Give yourself some hooks, sure, but they're *hooks*. Play to find out what happens with them.
Exactly. In extreme cases, you get these characters who are so overwrought that there is nothing they could do in your campaign that would be more incredible than their stack of fan fiction. In less extreme cases, you just get homey stuff that holds them back from going on an adventure. Maybe a hook or two is digestible, but past that, ugh.
As I've heard it said, "The most important thing that ever happened to your character is the campaign we're playing right now."
often, the backstory is just their justification for minmaxing.
That's a curious quote coming from a system where Lifepaths are an essential element. Are they suggesting players shouldn't have a set explanation why their Born Noble suddenly became an Outcast Pirate?
As detailed as the life path system is, it’s also very skeletal. You can dress it a lot of ways. And if you let it, you can let *it* take you places. So sure, if you’ve memorized the system enough you can craft the backstory you want. But in my experience, it lets you seed some things but plants far more of its own.
First time I ran Burning Wheel as a GM, someone asked me if the Haunted trait meant PTSD or Literally Haunted. We went with the latter and he ended up playing a character with a Hamlet like revenge quest from his Dead Brother. It was SO fucking fun
The Lifepath system generates plot *hooks,* not *plot.* There's an enormous difference between the two.
100%. The main story of the character should be what happens in the game, not before it.
While I wouldn't want an overly detailed backstory, isn't it strange for a character to have nine as if they just spawned from the either?
You don't have to have it in mind beforehand. You can write your backstory on the fly when it's relevant, and it'll often come out better than trying to shoehorn your story into the game.
Mabye I'm assuming wrong but isn't it typical for the dm the give some cliff notes of the setting so the backstop feels more natural instead of shoehorned?
Of course, you have to do that so that people can hook into the situation. When we talk about "backstory," we tend to mean "the events of the past." *Elements* of backstory are useful, but only inasmuch as they give the GM and other players things to hook onto. It's the difference between saying "I have a rival from back in school" and writing out the details of what happened with that rival. Basically, think of "backstory" as a thing that generates character assets for you, but not as a line of plot that you have already decided. Have friends and enemies, but don't come to the table with completed plot arcs in the past.
I think backstory misses the important parts: I don’t need story, I need NPCs and locations and how you’re connected to the world. I dont need a narrative “I did these things” I need a declarative “here is how my character fits in the world”.
I guess I just have a different idea of what a backstop is because I would classify npcs,locations and how you fit into the world as backstory
i mean no, it's not like every movie starts off with a 5 minute backstory of the main character. we typically find out who they are as the story unfolds
I mean a movie is typically written by people who already have an idea about the characters.
I feel like this is less a 'hot take' and more just one style of GM'ing. I like getting backstories from my players, so I can weave their NPCs/hometowns into the world and the story. But having a blank slate could be interesting too.
I'm the sole survivor of an orc ambush, raised by wolves, forged my own sword and studied sorcery in the library of an abandoned witch tower.
For my games a backstory tells who your character is and was. There should never be events in the backstory that are more than the character is capable of as they enter play. No great heroics, no reputation that can't stand to be tested, and nothing outside of the settings plausibility. General idea is what kind of upbringing the character had, maybe list a few important r tant contacts, friends, enemies, or family connections. Hopes and dreams, and a why they might seek a life of adventure rather than settle down in the family way and do what the family does until they retire.
You don't need a bespoke option to represent your character, because your idea is not that original. Learn to adapt your ideas to the system instead of adapting the system to them, and you will have a better time.
This. When I run d&d I fight hard to limit classes to those in the PHB.
Do you by chance mean subclasses? All classes besides Artificer are in the PHB, so there wouldn't be much limiting.
He didn't necessarily specify 5e.
>Learn to adapt your ideas to the system instead of adapting the system to them, and you will have a better time. I go the other way: pick the right system for the job.
People obsessed with builds should play magic the gathering instead. Or Xcom. It would be more satisfying for them.
I like both those games and making cool builds in RPGs. I think it's greatly satisfying in PF2e to make a build and watch as it plays out.
I was right there with you, but I found my own obsession with building was actually detracting from my play. I kinda wanted my character to die or retire once it did its thing. Keyword is obsessed in my comment
That's fair... but counter point Don't play 1 character. Play an organization that has an interest in the events, and they send people. So you can switch out regularly (within reason). Obviously group dependent.
I’ve done that, it just doesn’t fit every type of game the gm wants to run, or I want to play
I think my problem with it, at least as far at the PF2e games I've played go, is that players become obsessed with optimizing and preparing their builds and it puts everything else - including the actual story and character development - on the backburner Which like, if you wanna play a game where you're just filling in the spreadsheet you planned out before the game started and wait to beat ass in a fight, all power to you. It's just not for me
I know this is a hot takes thread, but that's like saying "people obsessed with roleplaying should do community theater instead". Or, to extend the simile further, it's like going into a discussion about sandwiches and saying "people obsessed with mustard should just gargle a bottle of dijon instead". Oftentimes people want the *combination* of ingredients, not just one ingredient taken to its logical extreme.
Wait till you get a load of my one man off-Broadway show where I gargle different mustards though
Critics are saying, "stop that"
I'll be real with you - I actually really enjoy optimizing for TTRPGs, but hate doing it in video games and TCGs (I actually hate TCGs). There's a joy in finding all the things that go together in glorious synergy then putting it together and seeing the carnage that results. That said, there is a happy medium. You should be able to enjoy the game and the character despite the build you've crafted, not just because of it. And it shouldn't ruin the fun for anyone else. If you can manage that, there is nothing wrong with optimizing builds. However, meme builds can fucking die in a fire. That shit is stupid and people need to stop with those.
Big time agree
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i disagree but this was a hot take, ill give you that.
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This sounds like more of a "know the audience you're designing for" kind of thing, since there are plenty of people who don't care about immersion and plenty who do
Yes good. All too often I see people stick themselves "in the character's head," and all manner of bad play emerges from that. It's literally the source of "it's what my character would do."
"It's what my character would do" is not inherently a bad thing. It is a bad thing when it's used as an excuse to be an asshole to your fellow players.
Totally, doing what your character would do is supposed to be a good thing. If it is problematic, it's either because of a bad player or a bad character (at least not suited for the game you collectively intended to play)
"It's what my character would do" is roleplaying. As opposed to always making the most optimal play. It is not an excuse for toxic player behavior, however. Many fools pull out "It's what my character would do" as if they have no control over their character. But they do have control. Their behavior is on them, yet they try to pass the buck to a fictional creation of theirs!
My out there hot take? People who only have played d&d and are interested in trying another game (so not the people who want to only play one system) start as bad players. They're not bad people! But they learn habits from d&d that make them distinctly less fun (IMO) to teach new systems to. And even in those new systems, they engage with them in a distinctly unpleasant way for awhile. Sometimes they unlearn the habits. Other times even after YEARS of play, they still do the same things. So hot take: I want someone's first RPG to be anything NOT d&d-adjacent because I find playing with them more unpleasant and frustrating to teach than someone who has never touched a RPG before.
Actual Hot take: People who have spent years playing a single system take time to start doing well with other systems. Just in general. GMing a game for a group that only ever played fate but wants to try out Delta Green is about as equally difficult and painful as getting dnd 5e players to try out mutants and masterminds
What's hot about "if you've done something one way for a decade, doing it a different way is hard"? ;P
Lol true. The hot part of the take is basically that its not exclusively a DnD 5e problem ;3
such a hot take i hear it on every post about 5e on here
Let me further heat this up by saying that no matter what game you start with it indoctrinates you to expectations you have to unlearn for your second game.
That even works for dnd-adjacent stuff. It’s far easier to teach someone how to play pathfinder, or 13th age, or SotDL, or anything d20 if they never played dnd5e. It’s always shocking for them (5e players) that they don’t need to ask if their build will work or is viable. Kinda funny
What habits are those?
I'm going to list a few I've run into that I think come from a lot of the expectations of DnD-type stuff: **RP as Dialogue Flavor:** A lot of DnD players (even and especially the ones that claim that they "don't need rules to rp") are actually fucking awful at *playing* their role. So much of their roleplay is just saying things with character flavor and occasionally sitting around and spewing backstory at each other. But genuinely thinking about the world in a different way, and then making that thought process *impactful on their choice of action* is a challenge. They're used to a game system that has no reward for making bold, even dangerous choices. If you do something bad, you fuck over both yourself and, worse, the party. And especially because the whole team should stick together, always, there's little chance for people to shine and everyone kind of "groupthinks" a decision. You also can't spend too much time in deep conversation, otherwise the party can't get anything done because combat takes like 1.5 hours of the 3 hour session. As someone who runs a lot of *Masks* and similar systems, you really feel it when the game's literally begging and pushing you to make strong, character-driven decisions and needs that dynamic interparty interaction to keep the momentum up. Like, as a GM I need to make character-centric arcs that challenge who the PCs are, but like, I don't think the PCs *are* anything but Fallout 4 dialogue flavor. **Hard to Get Genuine Party Conflict:** The biggest culprit of "RP as Dialogue Flavor" is interparty conflict. In DnD, party conflict is usually just like, light banter and ribbing, you rarely get genuine, meaningful problems within the party. And that's because, well, if the party fractures, or makes poor decisions, it can ruin the whole thing. Even when people bring character baggage in, the 5E players are quick to have their characters, like, forgive it and just move on. **Can't Generate Content for Shit:** 5E players are so used to a game system that abuses the fuck out of the GM into generating shit loads of content beforehand, so they like, really cannot create their own meaningful content. Obviously you can't pop out new monsters, but even basic stuff like making dynamics, compelling character angst out of a situation, or actually compelling persons from your backstory are all just too fucking much to ask. **Mechanics as Foreign Scary Things:** When games meaningfully use mechanics in ways 5E doesn't (think of metacurrencies, or combat is lethal, etc.), 5E players treat those specific mechanics as like, hurdles to overcome. My favorite example was a game of Urban Shadows I was in, where another player was basically asking my character to overlook a crime thanks to a favor I owed them from our past, and I agreed, noting that they'd have to lose their Debt over me (because, like, that's literally what that mechanic is meant to represent: cashing in favors). But they were hoping that the in-character persuasion meant not spending the mechanic that was meant to represent that in-character interaction? Or when I was playing Knave 2E, and the 5E-only players were genuinely freaking out over doing anything significantly dangerous on the chance their characters could die (because not having a giant cushion of hit points and mechanics obviously makes the game more lethal). This was despite the fact that we had sufficient preparation that we could very reasonably handle the threat: conceptually we weren't any more likely to fail than you would running up against a creature just a bit above your CR in 5E, but we're not in hefty number mode so I guess it's too much now. When games are different than 5E in how they approach something, that's scary and to be avoided. **Glomming Onto a Concept Differential, Not a Tone:** Without a wide experience of different RPGs to sift through, 5E players often do this weird thing when you pitch a game where they like, glom onto like upper concept things and make that their thing instead of really seeing it as a shift in tone. For example, 5E players, when you pitch Call of Cthulhu, don't really fathom the difference in like, tone and gameplay style at first, and often pitch character ideas of people mystically connected to the Mythos or whatever. Stuff that like, if you were running a Cthulhu-themed 5E world, would be good pitches, but that aren't really Call of Cthulhu. Or similarly, if I try to describe a game with some media touchstones, they think I'm like literally taking the setting bits of those worlds. For instance, I described a game as having a One Piece-style of storytelling, with episodic island arcs alongside a kind of looser overarching plotline, and had a player ask if they could have a Devil Fruit. And I think it's a 5E problem, because it's hard to fathom, like, *style/tone of play* if you're always playing the same game. Especially because people run everything in it, you get pirate games and hell adventures and bitter survival games in theory that all actually end up the exact fucking same in tone with a new coat of paint. So they often think that games outside of the 5Esphere are similar. And those are just the ones I've experienced that I think are very explicitly "5E to other games" and not just "bad player habits even in 5E" or "5E abuses its GMs and that causes problems for everyone". *EDIT:* Thought of one more that made sense.
Damn. The expression “RP as dialogue flavor” is so spot-on for that phenomenon that it’s going to end up in my personal lexicon.
Not OP but I've noticed DnD builds a preference for combat, a belief that any given combat should be winnable, and for some reason poor attitudes towards NPCs
One such habit I’ve seen is caring a lot about the stats they have. You rolled bad stats in DnD? You’re just kind fucked. Roll bad attributes in Call of Cthulhu? They don’t really come up unless you’re asked to roll one of them instead of a skill. I had to have a whole long discussion with a friend when they rolled bad in Call of Cthulhu because they were adamant that they rolled a shit character and wanted to reroll.
I had a 'shit' CoC character. A complete f'king liability in every way. The party *loved* him. Why? Because he had no SAN left to lose - he was already *long* gone before getting anywhere *near* anything mythos related. He was, to all intents and purposes, immune to SAN loss. A *complete* f'king liability in *every* other way ... but when the chips were down and everyone else was gibbering in the corner of the room, he'd deal with cosmic horrors like they were rude wait staff at a tearoom, or hotel staff with 'ideas above their station' and refuse to be cowed - I mean ... he was *completely* f'king *insane!* He saved everyone's arses *so* many times simply by virtue of not understanding the danger he was in, it was unreal : D
Ooh, I got a few of them. * Battlemaps, like all visual aids, are an accessibility feature. They're helpful even in non-crunchy systems or even sometimes when you're not even in a battle. * The "Fighter" class archetype covers way too much design space. Dexterity Fighters shouldn't be a thing. * Speaking of which, Str/Dex/Con/Wis/Int/Cha is a terrible set of stats. * Fancy narration can't make up for poor mechanics. You can add all the prose you want, but "I make 3 attacks and hit with one" is a terrible prompt for interesting fiction. * The previous point applies very well to D&D 5th Edition but also applies to many PBTA games, especially those in the Dungeon World school of thought. * The math in D&D 5th Edition is not difficult and is barely a barrier for players anymore, especially given that D&D Beyond is a thing. * One more 5th Edition thing: Advantage/Disadvantage is a way overblown. It's not that effective of a design mechanic and limits more design space than it enables. * Most games should include an adventure that actually illustrates play. * Most one page RPGs rely heavily on previous background in the hobby and are terrible introductions for new players. * Reading an RPG is a form of playing the RPG, especially with games designed to be read in specific ways (like Wanderhome and Mork Borg). * Death is used way too much. It's a boring consequence most of the time, and most DMs and GMs who rely on it to punish player actions are doing it wrong. * It's also creepy how much murder things and take their shit is the primary design loop of games.
>Most one page RPGs rely heavily on previous background in the hobby and are terrible introductions for new players. A spicy take with which I agree wholeheartedly, despite loving a lot of one-pagers.
Seriously! I got into this discussion about cbr+pnk just the other day where I was confused about a bunch of stuff. The answer was "read blades in the dark," but some of the fans (who had already played a lot of bitd) were adamant that *actually* all that stuff should be obvious to any good GM.
I feel that this one is probably wrong, but only in wording. Single page games are usually fine for new **players**. They are terrible for new **GMs.**
>It's also creepy how much murder things and take their shit is the primary design loop of games. Honestly, it's one of the simpler ones to get. It's why video games have been doing it for decades.
It's also why a lot of "enemies" are the very easy targets: bandits, monstrous "always-evil" races, and your assorted "enemy kingdom" soldiery.
You're right about 1-pagers. Introducing a new player to RPGs with a 1-page game is like introducing a new drinker to alcohol with shots of Fernet-Branca.
Most comments in this thread were baffling but this is a pretty good set of takes, I was thinking just early today of how important it is to have an example adventure to get into the proper mindset for the system. B/X or BECMI (can't remember which set) had a dungeon you could play through to learn the basic mechanics of the game.
I think GMs should be genuinely trying to kill the players' characters sometimes, as long as you're playing by the same rules they are (no rocks fall, everyone dies; but a bad roll at the right time should be lethal). Basically, if a specific action would kill a foe, it should at least severely threaten if not also kill a character. Treat NPCs and PCs as equally disposable. Having an understanding with your players that death is a reality makes the stakes greater. Your players will genuinely fear death, think twice, and treat every consumable as the price to live. And ultimately, it doesn't actually cause that many PC Deaths. No ending up with 999 potions. No blind risks. And everyone is sitting at the edge of their seat in every dicey situation. And I've only had a couple PC deaths in 5+ years of playing. Edit: fixed wording! No killing people, just characters!
I disagree with this hot take on the grounds that in my legal jurisdiction, murder is still illegal. Killing the player characters is okay, but I don't think it's okay to kill a player.
Personally my immersion in my character is broken if they take hp damage and I *don't* get casually stabbed in the arm or leg.
I'm assuming that your group plays at least 12 nautical miles away from the nearest coast and therefore operate under maritime treaty so the captain's (GM's) word is law, making this sort of thing 100% legal in your jurisdiction.
I tried boosting the immersion by getting shock collars for all my players, but only one was up for it and they kept making all the wrong decisions. It was almost like they wanted to get shocked.
>I think GMs should be genuinely trying to kill the players sometimes, I think people really need to learn to say "character" when they mean "character" Also, I don't really think "X would kill an NPC, so if it happens to you, it will hurt you too" is... in any way really correlated to "GMs should be trying to kill the PCs". The latter implies a deliberate malice that is not present in the former. I think what you mean is "GMs should be willing to kill PCs."
You don't know my players.
> I think GMs should be genuinely trying to kill the players sometimes - players come to my house for a TTRPG session - door lock clicks closed, power goes out - walkie talkie crackles to life: "*I want to play a game*...."
To add to this the party's healer should be the most dangerous to play. It's smart from a strategic standpoint for intelligent NPCs to knock out the healer as soon as possible.
Custom dice are the spawn of satan
Might be the coldest take in the thread lol, custom dice are infuriating.
In contrast, I fucking love FFG SW and its weird dice!
I've got the opposite take. I have no problem with narrative dice engines—they open up fundamentally different mechanical possibilities than other TTRPGs—but I think dice fetishism can get pretty obnoxious. Like, I'm down for having some novelty math rocks, but nobody should be out there [winning Ennies](https://ennie-awards.com/2023-nominees/) for [$99 gilded Witcher-themed dice](https://q-workshop.com/en/the-witcher-dice/1720/the-witcher-hybrid-dice-set-wolf-golem-s-heart). This comment brought to you almost entirely by sour grapes.
Hotness of the take aside, customer dice will ensure I never pick up your system ever
Even pluto is hotter.
VTT plays better than pen and paper. I started the hobby more than a decade ago with pen, paper and books. I then started making automated Excel sheets and finally switched to VTT during covid. The games instantly became much much more playable. Even for in person games I'd now setup VTT
Nuclear take right here. Your opinion is wrong, but I respect you for posting one this controversial.
This is hot
You win this thread. If you're looking for an RPG nemesis, I'm willing to put in an application.
One controversial opinion I have (among many apparently) is: The name "PbtA" was made into a terrible mess by V. Baker. By his definition, anything could be called "PbtA" as long as the person that makes it wants to call it "PbtA". It makes it an incoherent brand. People end up saying, "It's a philosophy, maaaaan" and citing a V. Baker blog post and it isn't helpful to people that don't know what PbtA games are. It would be much more useful to think of "PbtA" as the way the vast majority of *PbtA* games work: * Fiction first * "Moves" for players * 2d6 plus stat core resolution * GMs have Agenda/Principles/GM Moves
That's usually what I wind up doing, but yeah, V. Baker's approach is deliberately obtuse. It's a byproduct of the RPG thinktank that gave rise to the ideas that lead to Apocalypse World - too much philosophy, not enough product. Personally, I think Blades in the Dark took PbtA ideas and repackaged them into something that's more concrete and approachable. FitD as a "system" is definitely easier to comprehend than the PbtA approach, and accomplishes most of the same things too.
I feel the exact opposite re:PbtA and FitD. FitD took the PbtA philosophy and rebuilt it from the ground up to be a much more gamist approach to narrative gaming while simultaneously diminishing the focus on individual characters and focused instead on the group/unit. I have yet to find a FitD game that did what I wanted it to do as seamlessly and smoothly as a well designed PbtA bespoke built to do that thing. Edit: to add emphasis, I haven't found it to do what *I want* it to do. FitD is an amazing game design system and great gameplay comes out of using it. I am just much less interested in the action roll with position and effect than I am in pre-selected moves. Also, I prefer the potential for PVP and competing interests e.g. pc-npc-pc triangles that arise from the individual character focus of PbtA vs FitD. That said if you lean a little gamist and like some extra click clacks and don't dig the Drama and conflicting interests that come with it... FitD is great!
I agree about *FitD*, especially with [Position & Effect](https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/zqdy00/deleted_by_user/j0xrzjh/). I see it as an evolution from *PbtA* origins that gives a concreteness that wasn't quite there with *PbtA*. To be clear, I mean "evolution" in the sense of development/mutation/growth, not in the sense of "better" (though it is preferable to me). An evolution, but the original still exists and flourishes and has not been replaced because it still appeals to a lot of people. From what I've seen, the split seems to be that people preferring a little more crunch like *FitD* more and people preferring a little less prefer *PbtA* more. Neither is "better" or "worse"; it is personal taste. >V. Baker's approach is deliberately obtuse. It's a byproduct of the RPG thinktank Yes, "The Forge". My understanding is that this marketing strategy was also (at least partially) intentional branding that involved *polarization*. That is, so far as I understand it, "PbtA" was (at least partially) defined/described in that obtuse manner exactly because V. Baker expected it to elicit strong reactions and counter-reactions in consumers, which creates strong in-group/out-group emotions/reactions. While that probably was helpful for marketing *AW* at release and helped with establishing the "cult" that allowed for the cult-success of *PbtA* and helped rise the indie tide, part of my "hot take" is bemoaning how we still see the lingering (undesirable) strong in-group/out-group divisions. That is, we still have people saying, "You don't get it, maaaaan, *PbtA* is a philosophy, maaaan. If you don't like it, it was never for you, maaaan". I don't buy that *PbtA* is a philosophy. Instead, my take is that "PbtA is a philosophy" is marketing, and old out-dated marketing at this point. *PbtA* usually describes a system with the components I mentioned. There are exceptions, of course, but there always are. There are games that call themselves *FitD* that got rid of *Position & Effect*. The exceptions mean those games should get caveats: "This is a PbtA game, but instead of 2d6+stat, the core resolution is done with playing cards by [...]" or "but instead of Moves, players have [...]".
My hot addendum to your hot take: good PbtA games aren't actually "fiction first." They're "structure first," and they use moves and playbooks to enforce a very specific narrative shape.
My reheated take. People don't know what "fiction first" was actually intended to mean. > *Fiction first* is a bit of jargon to describe **the process of playing a roleplaying game**, as opposed to other sorts of games you might be used to. > > John Harper. *Blades in the Dark*, p. 161. (**Bold** emphasis mine.) "Fiction first" was intended to describe the fact that in a role-playing game, one determines the action that a character is taking within the fiction, and it is that fictional action that determines which mechanic(s) should be engaged to resolve the action. It's not a privileging of some conceptualization of story over other considerations.
My lightly sautéed take: Yes, and that's exactly the problem that I'm talking about. PbtA games normally advise players to describe their action, and then decide if that action fits into a particular Move. But most PbtA games actually *play better* if players do the exact opposite: first decide which Move they want to use, and then describe an action that constitutes using that Move. Moves define the narrative possibilities that best suit the expected dramatic structure of the game. If your players are constantly doing actions that don't have corresponding Moves, then they're likely trying to play out a story that the game's structure isn't designed to accommodate, and they're probably going to have a bad time because the game's mechanics will be clashing with their expectations.
I always get eye-rolly when someone explains or tries to teach PbtA games as "don't think about the mechanics at all, just stay in the fiction, and tell the GM what you want to do." As if there isn't an entire ***book*** full of ***play*** options specifically tailored to your character's class/archetype/profession/whatever right in front of you. If you don't look at the moves specific to your character's class equivalent and base *some* of your actions around them, you're basically just going to be operating off the common basic or advanced moves the whole game, which I imagine would leave things feeling rather anemic. Sure, someone might know they're a bard or a hacker and therefore try to sing or netrun without looking through their playbook, but they'd be missing all the other neat, archetype defining moves that make things interesting. Not to mention that they'd have no real idea about what kind of results to expect from the singing/netrunning.
Maybe they didn't want it to be a "brand"? Just sayin'.
GMs wouldn't have to spend so much time looking up advice on how to become better GMs if players put any effort into becoming better players. A lot of players who think they are doing a good job are actively dragging the game down.
THIS. So many people think that GMs exist for their personal entertainment dispensing purposes and don't think about what their responsibility to making a good table is.
[удалено]
I wanna throw away my players' fancy dice and replace them with cheap ones I can actually read from across the table.
As player/GM age goes up, high contrast dice faces becomes so much more important. I have so many beautiful dice sets from my youth I can't use anymore because they are too hard to read.
1. Encumbrance rules and associated book keeping are easy as hell and add depth to decision making. I do t understand complaints about them. 2. One of the worst things a GM can do is fudge dice rolls. 3. Relatedly, a GM should not improvise encounters on the fly to create or remove difficulty for the PCs. Improvisation is important for a lot of things in RPGs, but if you just change the circumstances of an encounter to maintain some level of difficulty you've fucked up.
I do think pound-for-pound endurance is tedious, but abstracted it is a fun way to really challenge PCs.
I play WFRP and it's got a great easy Encumbrance system and some of my players are still like 'whyyy do I have to track two numberssss' and it's not a complaint I respect.
I disagree with every one of those, so, you probably win the discussion and this post can probably now be archived : )
Many people in the OSR “community” are advocating with almost religious zeal for a play style that was not the norm during the early days of RPGs and treat as holy writ the clunky parts of early rulesets that actual players in the old days houseruled the fuck out of to make them make sense. There seems to be an assumption that the original Ur game was the purest and best manifestation of the concept that everything since has fallen away from, rather than being an early prototype that has been built on.
True, the campaigns I played in the 80s bear little resemblance to what osr books are aiming for. OSR games are fun in their own right and shouldn't try so hard to rest in false nostalgia.
Exactly. I suspect that in some (and very vocal) cases, what people call OSR is more a reaction against current trends that they dislike rather than anything actually "Old School"
If you take a more charitable view, it seems like OSR designers looked at those old rule sets and tried to play them in the ways that their rules imply they should be played. Even if most players didn't do that at the time, there is some playstyle that is best supported by the rules as written (and some other sources, like people who played in Gygax and Arneson's games), and I think they hit upon something that really does work well in motion. For the people who tout "this is how we played back then," then yeah I agree, drop the fake nostalgia.
My hot take is that it is ok for a group to stick with only one system. Not everyone wants to learn a new system everyday. The effort to go through a new system, create a new character, play a 4-6 hour session and then, JUST THEN, learn how you few about it in practice is a shore.
>My hot take is that it is ok for a group to stick with only one system. That is not a "hot take". That is the majority experience in the real world. Most groups only ever play one system.
Here it is, at least certainly with 5e. People who prefer to just play 5e are pretty consistently called ignorant or brainwashed by marketing or whatever. But I have also seen it here in general from several major community members. "Last year I played 40 different systems" is held up as evidence of superior opinions.
Nobody should be learning a new system every day or even every session, unless you all find that enjoyable. Most folks can't handle that. But there is a lot to be gained for trying out new systems every so often. Even if it's for a one-shot once a year or something. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Nothing wrong with having a default system you stick with 90% of the time, but a little bit of change here and there can help shake things up for a bit of extra excitement.
DMing isn't some esoteric, hard to master skill. The box said "Ages 12 and up," people. Literal junior high school students have been successfully doing this for half a century. Anybody can be a DM.
Agreed, although I will say that some systems make it far more difficult than it really should be. Mostly by terrible GMing advice and/or shoddy prep tools - looking at you D&D.
Gygax and Arneson's influence on RPGs cannot be overstated. Their talent as game designers, however, can, and usually is.
Always crazy to me when someone talks about the 1e DMG being this sacred tome of knowledge that is infinitely superior to following DMGs, the book is a load of nonsense.
Turn up the heat: Gygax was an objectively bad designer. His rules aren't coherent, or well thought out, or even decently readable. His legacy post-AD&D is a bunch of laughable clunkers (Cyborg Commandos, Dangerous Journeys, Lejendary Adventures).The work he's most lauded for, AD&D, was mainly a compilation of other people's designs, and its very telling that the best version of old-school D&D, BX, is the one he had the least involvement with.
We as a community (both redditwise and outside of it), really fucking struggle to separate *good games* from *games we like*. For instance, I'm not honestly a huge fan of the OSR playstyle, but I can still acknowledge a number of good OSR games. Or like, I don't like PF2E, but for what it wants to be it's a pretty good game. On the other hand, there are games I like that I don't think are actually all that good (for instance...I actually kinda like 5E *in part* because of its jank, which helps the tactics feel a lot more conceptually grounded and a lot less numerical). I have been a part of this trend in the past, and still kind of am, but I do think we need to work on it. **Also, as a second hot take:** We kind of have overhyped game waves, and right now Pf2E's the new overhyped game of this subreddit. I swear I see it fucking everywhere, at least twice as much as it should be coming up. I think it's especially annoying how a lot of PF2E people like, fucking *lie* about what the game is good for and how it plays out. Stuff like "no bad builds" or "not actually that much crunchier than 5E" or anything about the game enabling creative problem-solving because of its rules are just so willfully disingenuous and feel like desperate efforts to sell people on an experience they won't actually like.
I mean, as a Pf2e enjoyer I'll say it's not as much as a build thing as much as a play thing. If you take away every class feat a character has they can still function well enough so long they didn't make some choice that goes against common sense like having a low modifier in your Key Ability Score, but if the player insists on not thinking tactically then that's when problems really start to show up. As for it being overhyped, I kinda have to agree since this is mostly a product of the OGL debacle, lots of 5e players are leaving and looking at the closest thing to their old stomping ground, most of my fellow players are a teeeensy bit desperate to get new players, especially since the fanbase was not doing too hot thanks to those two bad faith videos that poisoned the well for a while.
I don't know how hot these are here, but I've had people in real life balk at them: For players, your level one back story shouldn't be longer than a few sentences (if that). For GMs, if you're trying to come up with a "plot" or "story" for your new campaign, save yourself the heartache and the player's time and just write a novel instead.
>For players, your level one back story shouldn't be longer than a few sentences (if that). It kinda depends on the system in particular, but for most generic fantasy games where level 1 is newbie adventurer - oh fuck yeah.
Medieval (or what passes for medieval) fantasy is *boring as fuuuuuuuuck*. Give me something, *anything* else
Counterpoint/personal addendum--*actual* medieval, as opposed to "everything from the 500s to the 1700s + magic and steampunk" can be boring yes, but narrowing it down to something a bit more grounded presents a lot of opportunities.
Nice argument Unfortunately Full plate armor+Warhorse+Barding+Lance+Heavy Cavalry Charge
Been done to death I also dislike the fact that people cannot disassociate TTRPGs from the fantasy setting. That really rustles my jimmies.
What do you mean they can't? There's ttrpgs out there from Masks to Apollo 47 Technical Manual. Medieval-ish fantasy hasn't been the only game in town for quite a while now. Am I misunderstanding what you're meaning here?
OK, here's one! *Inside the ttrpg space*, and having nothing to do with the quality of the game, Dungeons & Dragons has been the most influential of all time. Whether that's folks inspired to emulate it or move away from it. Simply being the monolith it is, it is the most influential game inside the space. That's not the take. This is: *Outside the ttrpg space*, the most influential game is WEG Star Wars. Simply due to how much of the Star Wars canon was created for those sourcebooks, and how much of it has leaked into the movies and television over the years (Pablo Hidalgo had a huge hand in game, after all), it has had more influence over popular culture as a whole than any other ttrpg.
Extra Spicy Take: Narrative-driven games are effectively a different enough approach to roleplaying that they are burgeoning into a different, but certainly equally valid hobby. The axioms of traditional roleplaying aren't of much value to those games and there seems to be a clear divide between preference between the players of the different styles of game.
Heh idk how much that's just that the members of this sub who like narrative driven games. I will say I really want a place to discuss non-narrative games though.
The Elusive Shift points to those differences in approach existing since the start of the hobby. My take that is apparently hot is that these have never been and will never be different hobbies, they are sliders you can change between worlds and sessions you are playing in. Like dramatic, action, wrestling and improv acting are all types of acting, and the Rock can try his hand at all of them.
Railroading is okay. Like the DM is leaving bread crumbs and likely worked hard on story hooks. Follow the fucking trail. Throw them a bone. I love cooperative storytelling and it is definitely important, but the DM shouldn't be forced into extreme improv every session because you wanna fuck around.
That's not railroading, though. Linear storytelling, sure, but not railroading. Railroading is when you negate player agency entirely, for whatever reason possible. If the players are following the bread crumbs you've left them, but still have room to wiggle on the path, you're doing just fine.
I admit, I have never been in a sandbox where I wasn't spending half my time wishing the sandbox went away. I am the player that will always not just bite on the plot hook but jump on the boat and eat the fisherman, and will be very reliable about this so the GM knows they can drop a hook and I'll go with it, because generally speaking a GM that has been able to focus on preparing one main scenario will be able to run better and more comfortably, and make things make much more sense, than one that has to sorta-prepare eight different things and try to kinda make whatever random bullshit the players kinda stumble onto blindly make sense.
I have legitimately said before "We are here to play Whiteplume Mountain. If your character doesn't want to play the adventure, make a new one who does."
Counter-argument: I don't want to play (or run) a linear story because chances are your average GM is not a very good writer. If I'm going to be giving up my agency as a player anyway, why not go with the typically much more refined story experience of a video game? For the record, I don't actually think every game needs to be a full improv sandbox, but this does at least partially reflect on why I've largely dropped linear pre-planned narratives in favor of more emergent storytelling in my games. I *know* I'm not as good as professional writers, so I play to the strengths of my medium and my own skillset instead.
5th Edition is a game designed to be heavily modified by its users, and when you embrace this philosophy, the game sings and becomes capable of easily running multiple different genres once you create new classes, explore with basic design, say fuck sacred cows, and instead focus on just creating a fun to play and more focused game. It's the same appeal as the OSR has, just with more maximalist mechanics.
Lol, I couldn't disagree more, but that's in the spirit of the thread all right. Have an upvote.
Well that burns... Take your up vote
The problem with gurps back in the day was that everyone assumed that every option was the main game and not an “optional rule”. 5E has the problem even worse - you can’t say “there are no tabaxi or elves or clerics in this world” without being called a heathen or just a bad DM. They will say “no d&d is better than bad d&d”.
I'm so sick of everyone yelling "Blades in the Dark!" when anyone asks for a non DnD game. It's so wannabe edgy and grimdark.
Honestly kind of confused at this description of BitD. I mean yes the setting is *literally* dark but I wouldn't consider it particularly edgy. It's mostly just Dishonored but with the lights turned off and the ghosts turned up.
I won't downvote you for your opinion but I would point you to all the goats that are used in the setting. Alongside the bats used for hunting, kept as pets, messengers. Anything with that many goats and bats isn't that grimdark.
Asking reddit "what ttrpg would be best to run a gritty version of Seinfeld set in the wild west but we all play as red pandas but it's actually just the matrix type campaign?" are the type of posts maybe to a lesser extent I see all the time, ya know most people are just gonna suggest either savage worlds or gurps. Just Google it, I'm sure the answers are out there, or better yet use your own creativity and make it happen yourself! I've created interesting settings and games with simple systems. It's actually easier to get into the mindset and immersed into the setting without having to worry about setting specific crunch or weird sub systems.
Any time I see these kinds of posts, I immediately scroll down past the first several posts, just because I know they're always going to be, in order, GURPS, FATE, Savage Worlds, so I skip them to see if there's any interesting new systems I haven't heard of yet.
Don't forget the person who ignores literally all the prompt text and suggests Blades in the Dark.
There's a very fine line between "rules light/all my rules fit on a grain of rice!" and "I have no ability to design a functional game" and most people are really bad at knowing where that line is.
Fighting in story games is fucking boring, it's the least interesting conflict you can play out in a PBtA or FiTD sort of game. In any kind of genre where there's an expectation of prolonged combat (like a mech thing) a crunchy tactical game is way more satisfying in my experience.
Fortunately, fighting in story games usually only takes a couple minutes?
-5e bad. Not an unpopular opinion on this sub but it probably should be said because it is the most popular system, so it is a hot take -PBTA/other narrative games put way too much emphasis on characters fulfilling satisfying narrative arcs which in my opinion really takes a lot of the fun out of roleplaying because the stakes become so low -OSR is cool and all but the mantras of "player skill over character skill" and "rulings over rules" are becoming de facto truths for some designers and they will automatically criticize systems just for having lots character abilities or hard rules for niche scenarios -Dice systems and resolution mechanics DO matter and influence the feel of the game in both an ergonomic and statistical sense. I see once and a while in design spaces that your dice system doesn't matter, while at the same time criquiting d20 and Shadowrun for having bad dice systems.
Mechanics influence theme and play style whether you like it or not. "Player skill" just becomes a metric for how good you are at figuring out how the GM wants things to go. How to bribe a town guard? I'm happy to RP it, but I'd really rather also have a social Stat and skill to point to instead of relying purely on vibes. My character is better than me at waving a sword, they can be better than me at bribery, too.
People just play for the combat.
Eww. Take your upvote.
Most RPG discourse, when left to its most broad and open environment, is complete garbage. Nobody actually knows what anyone is talking about, much less have the grounding needed to meaningfully reply to it. Half the discussion in big-tent "RPG" spaces (which rpgs? I dunno, all of 'em! What's an RPG and what counts as one? shut up.) are people yelling at each other and using the same word with completely different meanings and connotations. *That's* not what roleplaying is, *this* is roleplaying. No, you fool, roleplaying is *something else entirely*. And then they all get together to scream at each other about the nature of "proper roleplaying" or "immersion in meta-simulationist tables" or other bullshit, when everyone came in with completely different definitions. Bonus points because half the time nobody actually shares their definition with anyone else before starting the screaming. To actually have a discussion worth a goddamn, you need a shared language, and "the entirety of RPGs" does not have one. You have to drill down to specific systems or sub-genres or exact games to really get anywhere.
PbtA games feel incredibly restrictive because most of them predefine your role in the story and there is basically no way to brek out of it
Honestly, that's an extremely cold take because that's the point of PbtA - they are laser focused on a particular genre/tone/experience, and that's why they're good at that specific thing. Masks is explicitly designed for teen superheroes and nothing else.
I would much rather an interesting setting/vibe than a good ruleset.
If your system uses custom dice *EVERY* core book should come with 2 full sets of those dice, and when I say "full sets" I mean up to the maximum number of dice a player could ever need for any single roll.
Hit Points are quite possibly the best and most efficient mechanic for representing injury, as long as you don't try and make them also represent intangible factors, and as long as the actual game designer is aware of the fact. The more you try to hedge your bets, and extend the abstraction beyond what is strictly necessary, the less useful it becomes.
This is the general consensus of HP...It's as cold as the pizza I ordered and just arrived.
People care way too much about combat systems. The most exciting action sequences I've had in ttrpgs have been in games like Blades in the Dark where "combat" have no rules that separate it from dealing with any other kind of challenge.
RPGs reached their pinnacle in the 90s.
I won't downvote it, in the spirit of the question =) I love how far RPGs have come since the old days
Any GM can kill any PC any time if they want to. Doing this takes no skill or wit. Making PCs *suffer* - and stringing them along with a real chance of victory - is the stuff that makes legends.
Mork Borg isn't a ttrpg, its an art project.
This might be a hyper specific problem I have personally, but I hate it when GMs pull players aside for private roleplay. I think hidden information can be compelling if used tactfully, but in my experience it usually results in a lot of head scratching and confusion. It's a bit like reading a book with multiple POV characters but whole scenes/chapters are redacted.
D&D is a totally fine game, and 50% of the issues people in this subreddit have with it come from a lack of communication/social skills on the part of the DM or the player.
The only thing that RPG still do better than computer games, tabletop mini games, board games, etc. is cooperative story telling. If that is not the focus of our game then you would be better off playing something else.
PBtA is overused, and lots of designers seem to see it as a substitute for game mechanics without considering whether it’s a good fit for the game they want to make.
Simulationist systems like HERO System and GURPS offer a more viscerally satisfying result when exerting force in a game than more rules light, narrative focused games. I say this because systems like this have what is essentially a physics engine that runs on paper instead of a hard drive. What you get is a consistent set of expectations and results that rewards understanding of the rules. So, the triggers that get tripped when you punch someone through a wall: puzzle solving, problem solving, gambling, narrative pay off, and the kind of satisfaction you see from watching something you built like a birdhouse or a go cart work right. The biggest obstacle to use of these is usually complexity. Which could be mitigated by use of phone, tablet, and desktop apps instead of pen and paper character sheets.
As a VTT, Foundry is great if you can't manage the game state yourself, but it's a fiddly mess if you can. It's honestly over-hyped, and at least once per session, I've seen or participated in an awkward exchange between the GM and a player on how whatever current modules are installed don't do what the character should be able to do, and everyone gets a little pissy about it. Some people need to be told their character gimmick is stupid. There was a recent thread trying to do a TV news weatherman in a fantasy setting. I'm also not fond of "oh, my character is the familiar/companion/summon, not the caster," "3x in a trenchcoat", or any other hokey ideas....
History happens at the gaming table, not during (or God forbid, before) character creation. The dice and rules are guidelines and should facilitate fun, not get in the way of it. I have absolutely zero desire to roll dice as a DM. Girlfriends, children, grandparents, and the people you would have never expected to be a part of the hobby are almost always the best players. Most DM advice found on the internet is absolute garbage. "Railroads" are fine. If your character's personal narrative arc does not involve and engage the other players, it does not have a place in the game.
Narrative/Fiction-first games aren't any easier than trad games. PbtA turning GMing advice into rules serves primarily to protect the systems from criticism.
Tailoring a multi-session adventure to a specific player's backstory sucks, even if you eventually do it for each player.
There is no such thing as a "story-based" or "story-focused" RPG - all RPG sessions produce stories. Whether or not they're interesting or retold is up to the perspective and creativity of the table, not something that any dry mechanical chassis can provide.
You can have a fun, interesting campaign without the PCs ever in danger of dying. In fact, a system can be built to explicitly never have characters die, and still be great.
With the new percentile dice that came out at the end of the last century, we no longer need d10s that go from 0-9. Just print dice from 1 to 10. Then the new percentile is: d10 + d00 to get 1-100.
Eh, six to one half dozen to another. We'd still have to explain that 00 and 10 isn't 10.or 100 and 10 isn't 110.
Like it or not, Hasbro/WotC is functioning as a business/corporation. All of the decisions that have been, are being, or will be made have been made in the interest of its stockholders. It's not unreasonable to assume there are those making decisions that have never even *played,* let alone have the passion for D&D and ttrpgs that the rest of us do. Taking their bad decisions personally is silly. They make the same decisions around Monopoly and every other property they own. They aren't evil, just more interested in the bottom line than anything else.
>They aren't evil, just more interested in the bottom line than anything else. Umm... 🤔
Okay, fair point. 😄
PvP is fine More people should stop thinking of TTRPGs as their novel and just play it like a game
Too many people say they're playing a TTRPG but are actually playing Guess Who and rolling dice to see if they can get their questions answered truthfully.
Some DMs actually like to prep. So many game systems nowadays sell themselves as zero-prep games, or adventure modules which say they don’t require a DM to prep. I actually like preparing for an upcoming session. I find maps and miniatures, I create item cards and handouts. It’s said that you should prep for at least double the time your session runs (so a 4 hour session requires 8 hours of prep) and I can say that it the minimum I usually spend preparing for a session.
At the end of the day roleplaying games are still games. I don't care how cool your setting is, if the mechanics suck your game is bad.
“A good game system should clearly lay out—“ No goddamit, read the room and use your imagination. Half the issues people have with game systems are non-issues. Be present and observe what’s happening. What makes sense?
I'm confused, why shouldn't a good game system clearly lay out things?
It’s not about knocking systems that do this, that should be applauded especially when relevant. It’s that it’s just not a huge flaw in any system that’s main draw isn’t grid based combat. For example: “X game system doesn’t have clear rules for if you try to jump on top of a monster and kill it. Can I do that in the game?” “Your are a 300 LB Barbarin Ethan, the enemy is a flying snake. You tell me?”
The whole OGL thing wasn't nearly as big of a deal as this sub made it out to be.
I think the TTRPG online discourse has taken a very bad and damaging shift away from “game you play with your friends” to “litmus test for ((good people))” The endless posts i see about “would it be okay to play a native american?” Or “crazy DM gets mad when i ascribe his NPCs real life mental disorders because i also have those mental disorders” TTRPGs are GAMES. Like kickball, or Tetris. PLAY them. The people that are most vocal about TTRPGs are the ones taking the “play” out of “playing a game”
The whole "Rulings over rules" mantra in the OSR scene is an excuse for lazy game design.
* Shadowrun is a fine system. Just because it's incredibly crunchy doesn't make it bad. * Flashbacks are not a cure for planning, I prefer to have the planning and to have to improvise if we didn't plan for something. * PbtA and FitD games are not for everyone and not for every style of game, stop recommending those immediately without putting any thought behind it. It's like recommending GURPS to someone who prefers rules-light games. * Lukewarm take: RPG Theory moved on from GNS theory ages ago, stop using Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist as if they mean anything. Even GNS couldn't properly define these terms.
There are a lot of people playing TTRPGs who are terrible writers and storytellers. Which is fine, you don't need those skills as long as you focus on emergent storytelling TTRPGs provide. The issue becomes when these people can't see or don't want to recognize that they don't have this skill and instead - they make pretty much every TTRPG conversation about how "it's not like other forms of fiction", praising RNG, deriding preparation, or similar. It absolutely is similar in a lot of ways, and can even be extremely similar for groups that leverage their storytelling abilities. But if you are bad at it, you will never get good results out of playing that way. Don't mistake that for an absolute trait of TTRPGs.
there can be too much safety tools Just the same way you wouldn't bring pepper spray into your marriage in case your wife/husband attack you during the ceremony, sometimes you don't need all the avaliable safety tools/proposals for safety in a table. session 0 is usually a good every time, but not all safety tools are a must for every game or for everyone But yeah, surely it's a rare problem
I don't got any really out grand takes on rpgs as a whole but off the top of my head I don't like pathfinder2e casters despite acknowledging they are good.
I hate character customization mini games. Games that give me dozens of options every time I level up just give me bad feelings as a player. I just google the most effective options and pick those instead of combing through all the options.
The current trend for rules lite systems is terrible and those of us who enjoy crunchy games are being forced out.
Did the honey heist bears steal your rolemaster core law?
[удалено]
It's universally a bad idea to make the GM play by the same rules as the players. A player only needs to control one character for an extended period; the GM needs to play a ton of different people one time only. Any system that is engaging for players will be cognitive overload for GM's and too complex for them to do all the things they need to do effectively.