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 not in immediate danger. https://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/usingSkills.htm )
edit: fixed typo that reversed meaning
Years ago I kept having this argument with the party fighter. I was playing a rogue. He had some sort of magical lens with a bonus to find traps. I was like, “let me use that so I can find traps better. You can’t even find traps with a DC above 20, rules as written. That’s a rogue class feature. With the lens I’d be getting like 27 if I take 10.”
He was like “no. It’s mine. I found it.”
Like, my guy. We’re all in danger if we don’t find the traps. You don’t see me holding onto armor I can’t use.
In the same sense of wanting to go to the gym can be solved by watching videos of working out, or wanting to take up weaving can be satisfied by watching other people weaving. It may be enough for some people but it’s not really the same thing.
I feel like a common problem is people say they want to play D&D, but in the same way that people say they want to go to the gym, or take up weaving, or whatever. A lot of people are really bad at honestly, accurately, evaluating their future self’s energy level and interest.
There’s also people who say they’d totally like to join their D&D game, but they don’t really. They’re just afraid of conflict or hurting your feelings. There’s this thing some people do where they try to spare someone’s feelings by being a little dishonest, and end up causing a lot more problems. I would so much rather someone just say to my face “I don’t want to play D&D” than “oh yeah that sounds fun” and then they keep having scheduling conflicts or flake or ghost.
So yeah, I don’t know. Some people are just a mess.
I would be okay with a ban on AI generated content.
At the very least, I request a disclosure on any AI content.
So like, if you make a little RPG yourself and used some AI tool to make the art, you are required to disclose that. Likewise, if the flavor text for some of your game came from an AI, would-be consumers should be alerted. Heck, if it was used in the editing phase put that in the ai disclosure blurb.
Foreshadowing is a pretty effective tool, yeah.
Ideally when the thing happens, whatever it is, the players go “oh that makes sense.”
I’m pretty sure loads of other classes have alignment restrictions - notably clerics and paladins
I remember my D&D 3.x DM insisting we follow RAW, so if I wanted to take levels in assassin (who else remembers prestige classes?) then I had to be evil. 3 players went along, and the druid betrayed us to the “good” guys. Had a massive brawl where we (team evil) won, thanks in part to a hail mary “I run around the corner and hide. That’s… a natural 20 for 37” the betraying druid player couldn’t beat.
The class fantasy never appealed to me. They can be powerful, but I don’t have any real interest in being a dirt wizard or turning into animals.
More of a rogue guy, or arcane caster if I can get over spells-per-day being my anathema.
If I ever play D&D again, I think I’m going to spend a lot of time in session 0 getting on the same page about if we’re playing D&D as a resource management game, or as a wacky hijinks game. So many people want to play the latter, but expect a long rest to be as easy as it is in video games.
“I’m out of spells! Can we long rest?”
“You’re out of spells after casting nearly every single round of combat in the past 3 fights, and you want to chill out for 8 to 16 hours here, in the court of the evil duke’s castle, while he’s working on a ritual to summon a demon lord in a few hours?”
I mean, I kind of get it. The game is set up so you have all these cool toys. Of course you want to use them. That conflict is why I dislike per-day resources.
I feel like alignment hasn’t really been a thing in DND for more than a decade, but there’s a steady supply of people who only “know” DND from memes keeping the idea alive.
I mean, have fun with it, but it’s very “how do you do fellow kids” sometimes.
I bet someone has compiled a list of common video game tropes people try to bring into tabletop games. “Expecting a merchant to buy the blood soaked armor without questions” would definitely be on there.
Does anyone else reflexively recoil from videos with that kind of thumbnail? This could be the best game in the world and that kind of stupid face and hyperbolic text sends it right to my brain’s spam folder.
They argued that if the NPCs had been bandits they would just attack on sight.
Video game mindset is real.
I remember one of the first games I tried to run, when I was a young teenager. I described how there was a big rat in the first room of the ruins. The player was like “it’s just there? Looking at me? Ok i shoo it away and check the doors…”
I was like, oh. Right. Duh. Normal people don’t just kill every creature they see.
I have had players get confused when NPCs don’t want to drop everything and help them. Like, the NPC is just living life. They’re not going to risk their safety and livelihood because you asked nicely a few minutes after meeting them.
One player had her mind blown when she learned NPCs can lie. She’d sort of pissed off this one faction with mild misbehavior. She gets pissy with one guy and demands he tell her where the macguffin is. He lies. She says okay, goes to that place. Gets in some trouble, and has no macguffin. She’s looking at me like “where is it?”. After several increasingly overt hints I just tell her “maybe he lied to you, because you broke into his house, pissed off his friends, and demanded he help you. Maybe he just lied to you”.
“But… He said the thing is here”
Personally, I find “5% of the time the outcome is astoundingly good, and 5% of the time it’s shockingly bad” kind of unsatisfying. Jarring, even. Picture playing darts and every 20 throws, missed the dart board completely, no matter how good you are at darts.
I haven’t played pf2e but I think degree of success is a much more reasonable system.
I also prefer games that aren’t flat probability. When you only roll one die, every outcome (on the die) is equally likely.
But I think a lot of people playing DND don’t really care about rules, consistency, verisimilitude, or much anything beyond “lololol and then Kevin crit his stealth check so we said the goblin king didn’t see him at all as he stole the throne the goblin was sitting on!!!”. Which is fine, I guess.
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.