Chebucto Regional Softball Club

> What they don't acknowledge is that the long rest problem is something of a self-inflicted wound. No shit. Players don't actually enjoy holding onto their powers all day. They want to use their cool powers. Some small, vocal, minority of players really enjoy the resource management game. Most people want to do cool shit every turn, not use a hand crossbow or shoot a cantrip. Spells-per-day has sucked the entire time I've played D&D, which admittedly is only 3.0 onwards. It has always caused pacing problems. > Back when D&D 5e was being playtested, its early designs openly said that the recommended number of encounters between long rests was four - or as few as two if you throw some particularly challenging fights in there. They fucked up changing that. There are also many other ways powers and abilities could work that aren't based on spells-per-day. D&D probably won't adopt them. The population of people in the hobby also has a survivorship bias- most people enter through D&D, so the people who stick around are mostly people who find its quirks acceptable. Who knows how many players bounced off because they looked at this system and saw "I can cast my cool spells twice? That's it?"

I'm not a product manager and certainly don't work at larian. I have no insight into the level of effort required with their tooling and skill sets. I don't know what they prototyped already. I can't answer that question meaningfully. You also didn't really engage with anything else I wrote.

I think that's a lot of interesting stuff you could explore, but the odds of doing that when the GM is running on unexamined defaults are slim.

I didn't use the word realistic. I called it unsatisfying. Also, it's kind of tired to be like "oh you want rEaLiSm in your game about elf magic??". You know what people mean when they say that. Given the premises presented, nothing is contradictory enough to break suspension of disbelief. People use "realistic" as a shorthand. Sometimes people use "Verisimilitude" for this. Having NPCs react reasonably in some cases (eg: scripted encounters, some law breaking) and not in others is *jarring*. You see the NPCs standing around the tavern having a chat and you go, "That's a reasonable scene. I can imagine this." Then you explode one of them, and they all run around in a panic. Still pretty reasonable. Follows from the premises given. But then you run away and come back, and all of them are back to drinking and chatting. All of them except the one you exploded, who's still a bloody mess on the floor. For some people, such as myself, this is too much. It's too high a contrast, and it foregrounds the limits of the game too much to easily suspend disbelief. > I don’t know what to say. Are you trying to say it clashes with the design? Are you saying every game should have every feature and ‘StarCraft’ should have the nemesis system from the ‘shadow of’ games? I don’t get it. I don't feel like you tried very hard to "get it". The game has a stealth and murder system you're encouraged to use. I'd like for them to have gone a little further with it. The NPCs sometimes look for you if you fire from stealth, but it's janky. The rest of the game is generally pretty immersive-sim, but the wheels fall off if you play one of the main playstyles. Unsatisfying. I'm not a game developer and I expect you aren't either, so I don't know how complex it would be to make the responses to stealth more robust. Maybe add a "There's been a murder!" state to scenes. But they did a lot of other stuff to cover more niche scenarios, so it wouldn't be out of character.

I'm still kind of disappointed and irritated about an old D&D group. The guy ran a game that was literally patriarchy. There was a king who died. He had a daughter, who was ruling competently presently. But he also had an infant son. Now a civil war is brewing because some people want the son on the throne, because that's the male heir. And he just played it straight and seemed to expect us to be like "Oh, obviously the son has a legitimate claim to the throne. and also absolute monarchy is unremarkable". To his credit he did let us decide which faction to support, but it was kind of exhausting getting a constant stream of "no, absolute male hereditary rule is good and normal". It was a pretty fleshed out setting in terms of details and subfactions, but the core of it was just so very basic and unexamined. No one else seemed to give a shit, though. I did not gel with that group. Meanwhile, some time before that I'd had a blast running a game. The players came upon an anarchist collective that had overthrown the old despot, but now there are counter-revolutionaries lurking that want to return the now undead tyrant to the throne. Also the neighboring state is rattling their sabers because they ideologically do not approve of a state without a king. So I guess the lesson is games are better when you vibe with the group?

While that is fascinating and worth considering, I think the way it's implemented in the video games is kind of unsatisfying. Specifically, how the NPCs just go back to their idle routine even if that means standing casually on the bodies of their friends. For days. The "for days" part is also particular to DnD. You can sleep for days while the world remains static. The rite of thorns never completes. The prisoners are never executed. Not even if you kill half the guards and take a snooze. I think the Batman video games did a better job of NPCs freaking out and not just calming back down, but most games don't invest in that. Also bg3 specifically let's you teleport to safety once you're 30 meters away, which is extra cheesy.

I've had players do that kind of counter-productive behavior. I usually tell them that we're here to engage with the game's premise. If the game's premise was "we're going to rob a bank", your character needs to have reasons to engage with that. You can write a book about Jimmy the Marketer that works a 9 to 5 and has a rich social life, but that's not what we're here to explore. If i'm running the game, I really make sure to hammer on this stuff during session 0. I also don't typically approve "you all met in a tavern" setups. Your characters should have history together when we start. I don't want to have to handwave "wait, why would i trust this guy I just met to take first watch?" again

Older editions had stuff like "small characters are harder to hit, so they get +1 AC. But then it's weird they have a hard time hitting each other, so they get a +1 to-hit, too". Trying to simulate reality gets wacky real fast, and quickly becomes more work than it's worth.

Yeah dnd has quirks that aggravate that problem. Fighting at full capacity until you drop dead, for one. Limited options for fighting defensively (bg3 took out the dodge action). Some stuff you can win by being really tedious. Assassin sneak attack, then run until you reset the fight and repeat. Real Dm wouldnt llow that.

I don't have a lot of shopping in my games, but I don't see why I couldn't handle this with a shared spreadsheet or other document.

Click bait title.

Personally, I generally dislike puzzles in RPGs. My character has 20 intelligence. In real life I'm rocking _at best_ 12. I am not going to make the intuitive leaps to solve this cipher like my character would. You're not asking the fighter to demonstrate a shield bash or the rogue to pick a lock. Riddles and puzzles aren't nearly as interesting as explained choices, anyway. Do you take the Sword of Rivers from the tomb, fighting the guardian and potentially causing drought and famine in the region? You've been told it's the only thing that can stop the Fire Elemental Incursion back home. Much more interesting than trying to figure out what a poem means or a sliding block puzzle, to me.

If you don't want the players to know the cliché weakness so badly, why don't you make up another monster instead of troll? Just sidestep the whole problem. It's not Troll Canyon. It's Grall Canyon. What the fuck are Gralls? No idea but they sound nasty. Because clearly, some players are going to balk at "you want us to forget this well known fantasy cliché?". And it doesn't matter if you think their playstyle is stupid. It's a game. People are trying to have fun.

> Like I think stealth rolls should be hidden. You shouldn’t have an idea that you’re not hiding well. I don't have the players actually make the stealth roll until something opposes it. They're doing the best they can. Here comes the guard. Roll, please.

> Plenty of systems have something for that, often with a variety of options. I believe 5e has a similar rule, but it seems rare for players to have actually read the rules. I don't think D&D is especially detailed about this, but I don't know where the book is to check. I don't think they give DCs, where I wouldn't be surprised if Pathfinder 2e had a simple "target number is 8 + the creature's HD" formula with guidance on what to do for the range of possible outcomes.

I feel like sometimes people refuse to "meta game" in a way that is also metagaming, except targeting bad outcomes instead of good. Like your characters live in a world with trolls. They're not a secret. Choosing to intentionally avoid fire because "that's metagaming" is also metagaming. You're using your out of character knowledge (fire is effective) and then avoiding it. Usually cleared up with a "hey dm, what are common knowledge and myths about this stuff? or whatever.

> Find people that want to play, there’s more than you can think. Something I learned a long time ago is it's easier to find people who want to play D&D (or whatever game) and make friends with them than it is to make your friends play D&D. There's probably a nicer way to put this, but frankly most people are a fucking mess. And who can blame them? This is a capitalist hellscape. But that means if you're semi randomly selecting people, you're going to get a lot of people who are barely holding on, and won't make fantasy elf time a priority.. Some of them might sincerely want to play, and overestimate their energy levels. Other people are terrified of confrontation, and will say yes even when they absolutely do not want to do that. But if you go the other way around, and find folks that seem friendly at a meetup or whatever for RPGs, they're more likely to show up. They already put in effort and showed up somewhere.

The fighter in my story is the rogue in your story? That makes sense.

That doesn't seem like the same thing at all. Can you elaborate?

Hah, I should have. I do remember letting him search first once and being petty about it. "Oh, you got a 12? A whole *twelve*? Woowwwww. I'm going to *take 10* and get a, let's see- **twenty-two**. Would be a *27* if only I had some sort of magical equipment boost" (For those of you who don't remember, "take 10" was a 3e rule where you can opt to treat the roll as if you'd rolled a 10, so long as you're in immediate danger. https://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/usingSkills.htm )