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Reading your post it suddenly downed on me that the only good thing which might come out of Hasbro botching the OGL is that people might start playing games wit

Reading your post it suddenly downed on me that the only good thing which might come out of Hasbro botching the OGL is that people might start playing games with actually interesting rules rather than D&D.

dragontamer 4y ago
But "what is interesting" ?? If you just want to perform improv-roleplay out some scenarios, then Dread is probably the best. The only action the players do is: 1. Pull piece out of the Jenga Tower 2. Roleplay the result (success == You succeeded at the current situation. Tower-falls == you die). ------------ There's better systems out there (aka: Dread) if you really just wanted simplicity. World of Darkness is probably the more mainstream "simple / roleplay heavy" game of importance. (Dread is perhaps overly simple, but that's the point of it. Its basically improv / roleplaying simulator and that alone) D&D, for all of its faults, is a fully specified battle simulator. It doesn't mean that everything makes sense (what were the grapple rules again?), but most everything has been thought out, and what "should happen" is often written down somewhere. On the other hand, many people prefer improv / rules-free systems (like Dread, or World of Darkness to a lesser extent). Anyway, there's plenty of other games. But the niche of D&D is the well specified set of rules of how magic and physical interact with each other. (This magical force field has X HP and 30 Hardness, interacting with your Adamantine sword that ignores hardness 20 and less, etc. etc.)
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Oh yeah, I realise that my opinion is far from universally valid and that I both don’t play much tabletop roleplaying and came to it from an improv background which means I’m not necessarily looking for the same things that other players are. Still I’m firmly in the camp of those thinking D&D focus a lot of attention to the insanely boring and uninteresting part of role playing - aka how a sword interacts with a magic shield in excruciatingly tedious mathematical details - and very little attention to what’s actually fun which is, well, playing a role. I think its rules, its prevalence and the fact it’s mostly played in somewhat bland heroic fantasy settings have been a major turndown for a lot of people who would actually enjoy roleplaying so in a way I guess I should celebrate anything making it less popular.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    As a lot of my friends like to say, the two players are roleplayers and rollplayers. Roleplayers are here for the improv / acting. Rollplayers are here for the combat. D&D absolutely is combat focused. ----------- Lets take an example: When a Wizard casts Disintegrate, and a friendly Druid casts "Wall of Stone" to block it, what should happen? Are you interested in debating / improvising the result? Do you want it to be defined? Improv players want this to be ill-defined. They want to make something up, depending on the current situation / feel of the game. If its a big boss fight and the Wizard is the evil big bad guy, maybe the Disintegrate goes through and hits the players. If its just some mook, maybe its a "weaker disintegrate" and gets blocked by the stone wall. ---------- This is terrible for combat / tacticians. A tactician wants to know that Disintegrate _always_ makes exactly a "one 10-foot cube" hole in the stone structure (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/disintegrate.htm https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/disintegrate.htm), and always counters-and-dispels Force effects. Because the tactics + interactions have been agreed upon ahead of time, it means that the tactics of the game are focused. Its a battle closer to chess, or perhaps war-simulators / war-gaming, where you need to know what interacts with what, and how, to proceed. You can't just make stuff up in a war-simulator. They need to have pre-defined actions. Knowing that this level 5 spell (Wall of Stone) can effectively counter a level 6 Disintegrate is an oddity in the hierarchy of magic (usually, you need an equal, or higher-level spell to counter other magic). But taking advantage of resource-management (they spend level 6 spell, you spend level 5 spell, so you have more resources left over afterwards) is just part of the game.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      To give you an idea of how wide the gap is, my issue is not that I want the interaction to be ill-defined. I never ever want to have to think about the interactions between named spells in a fight. That’s a narratively uninteresting part of the situation. If there is to be a fight between people with fantastical powers, I want the rules to solve the thing quickly without unnecessary fuss so we can get back to what matters. Your two last paragraphs are just tedium from my point of view which is why I dislike D&D so much I guess.

dragontamer 4y ago

But "what is interesting" ?? If you just want to perform improv-roleplay out some scenarios, then Dread is probably the best. The only action the players do is: 1. Pull piece out of the Jenga Tower 2. Roleplay the result (success == You succeeded at the current situation. Tower-falls == you die). ------------ There's better systems out there (aka: Dread) if you really just wanted simplicity. World of Darkness is probably the more mainstream "simple / roleplay heavy" game of importance. (Dread is perhaps overly simple, but that's the point of it. Its basically improv / roleplaying simulator and that alone) D&D, for all of its faults, is a fully specified battle simulator. It doesn't mean that everything makes sense (what were the grapple rules again?), but most everything has been thought out, and what "should happen" is often written down somewhere. On the other hand, many people prefer improv / rules-free systems (like Dread, or World of Darkness to a lesser extent). Anyway, there's plenty of other games. But the niche of D&D is the well specified set of rules of how magic and physical interact with each other. (This magical force field has X HP and 30 Hardness, interacting with your Adamantine sword that ignores hardness 20 and less, etc. etc.)

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
Oh yeah, I realise that my opinion is far from universally valid and that I both don’t play much tabletop roleplaying and came to it from an improv background which means I’m not necessarily looking for the same things that other players are. Still I’m firmly in the camp of those thinking D&D focus a lot of attention to the insanely boring and uninteresting part of role playing - aka how a sword interacts with a magic shield in excruciatingly tedious mathematical details - and very little attention to what’s actually fun which is, well, playing a role. I think its rules, its prevalence and the fact it’s mostly played in somewhat bland heroic fantasy settings have been a major turndown for a lot of people who would actually enjoy roleplaying so in a way I guess I should celebrate anything making it less popular.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  As a lot of my friends like to say, the two players are roleplayers and rollplayers. Roleplayers are here for the improv / acting. Rollplayers are here for the combat. D&D absolutely is combat focused. ----------- Lets take an example: When a Wizard casts Disintegrate, and a friendly Druid casts "Wall of Stone" to block it, what should happen? Are you interested in debating / improvising the result? Do you want it to be defined? Improv players want this to be ill-defined. They want to make something up, depending on the current situation / feel of the game. If its a big boss fight and the Wizard is the evil big bad guy, maybe the Disintegrate goes through and hits the players. If its just some mook, maybe its a "weaker disintegrate" and gets blocked by the stone wall. ---------- This is terrible for combat / tacticians. A tactician wants to know that Disintegrate _always_ makes exactly a "one 10-foot cube" hole in the stone structure (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/disintegrate.htm https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/disintegrate.htm), and always counters-and-dispels Force effects. Because the tactics + interactions have been agreed upon ahead of time, it means that the tactics of the game are focused. Its a battle closer to chess, or perhaps war-simulators / war-gaming, where you need to know what interacts with what, and how, to proceed. You can't just make stuff up in a war-simulator. They need to have pre-defined actions. Knowing that this level 5 spell (Wall of Stone) can effectively counter a level 6 Disintegrate is an oddity in the hierarchy of magic (usually, you need an equal, or higher-level spell to counter other magic). But taking advantage of resource-management (they spend level 6 spell, you spend level 5 spell, so you have more resources left over afterwards) is just part of the game.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    To give you an idea of how wide the gap is, my issue is not that I want the interaction to be ill-defined. I never ever want to have to think about the interactions between named spells in a fight. That’s a narratively uninteresting part of the situation. If there is to be a fight between people with fantastical powers, I want the rules to solve the thing quickly without unnecessary fuss so we can get back to what matters. Your two last paragraphs are just tedium from my point of view which is why I dislike D&D so much I guess.