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 think “cultural values” are a better mechanism for that. Like america teaches that capitalism and individualism are good values. Anyone raised here gets a lot of that, but it’s not an innate property of being from Ohio

One of the frustrating things about humans and mass communication is the “for me it’s Tuesday” effect. For someone, this is the first time they’ve encountered “maybe orcs being innately evil isn’t a good idea”. They want to explore it and go through their feelings and blah blah blah. It’s a day that might change their life. For someone else, it’s Tuesday. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times before. It’s old hat.

It’s hard to be patient to faceless newcomer #3742 when you’ve already done this conversation so many times. They feel stupid and slow because they blend in with all the other people who brought this up. They’re bringing up points they feel are fresh and clever but have been discussed and settled already. But they’re a person seeing it for the first time. Somehow.

It feels like “are you stupid? We just went over this”, but that’s an illusion. It’s new to them .

(This doesn’t account for bad faith actors, who are trash and should go away)

Some stuff like mysteries you need to be ready to tell the players they got it right, even if their idea is a little crazy. Players are famously bad at noticing details and remembering plot. But if you do some subtle shifting instead of going in with a fixed, canonical, right answer then it can be fun.

I did a one shot the other day that was about people being murdered. We found out they were being done in by golems, but the solution we came up with (do the golem creation ritual with the opposite elements) wasn’t what the GM had in mind. But they decided that our idea was good, so they went with it, and we all felt very smart.

On the one hand, it’s fun to fuck with players. “So you enter the room? Cross the threshold of your own free will? Ok who’s wearing metal?” when none of that matters, but you write it down anyway.

On the other, sometimes I’ve had to be like “ok guys seriously there’s no traps here. Put away the ten foot pole and chickens let’s just move along”

That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.

That sounds interesting, that weak monsters can work together to be mechanically threatening. I’ve heard about PF2e having more teamwork, but I’m not familiar enough with the system to comment on it. I have noticed that D&D tends to be very much “everyone does their thing on their turn, and then spaces out until they get attacked or are up again”.

I like how Fate lets anyone “create an advantage”, so your party face that can’t throw a punch can use their “Bravado” skill (or whatever) to distract the enemy, so someone can use that to land a big hit. I imagine PF2e has stuff like that

My character has grown in power, why is the rat from the beginning still able to down me?

I read an article online somewhere about bounded accuracy, and it brought a question like that as a litmus test for if you like the idea. Should a novice archer, no matter how lucky they are, be able to shoot the ominous black knight? For a scratch? Or a lucky hit in the throat?

D&D 3e says no. You can only hit them on a natural 20. I think PF2e also says no in the same way.

D&D 5e tried to say yes, the archer should be able to hit the knight. The knight’s armor is probably ~22, and the archer is rolling at +5, so there’s decent odds. But he certainly won’t be able to kill him, because HP is what scales up with power.

Other systems are more deadly.

Personally, I don’t like the “these goblins can’t even touch me anymore” mode that much. I prefer less superhero heroics, where a goblin with a knife can be a real threat

Ehh, not really. In D&D 3e-like games, a low level goblin that attacks at +4 can barely hit a mid level character with AC 30. You could have a thousand goblins, and they’d only hit on natural 20 (and for regular, non-crit damage).

How often do pathfinder games do the thing like “The soldiers in the first area attack at +4, but these basically identical soldiers two plot beats later attack at +12, because you’re higher level and I want the math to be challenging”? Because I’ve always disliked that in games. That’s more of a video game trope, but I’ve seen it leak into tabletop games before. I liked the idea of bounded accuracy, and how a goblin is always a goblin. You don’t need to make mega-goblins to fight the higher level party, because even the little ones can still hit and wear you down.

I haven’t really played PF2e, but from reading it I don’t really love that it does the “numbers go way up” thing. I did 3e and I didn’t like the “I rolled a 4, but I have a +47 on my check” thing. I’m told PF2e has a “without level bonus” mode, but I don’t know if anyone plays it.

The world of darkness games can run like this. If you play new vampires, there’s going to be a whole political landscape that is at best neutral to you. Same with Mage. The other types probably also, but I don’t know them as well.

It does have a paradoxical element in that your character will be a big fish as far as the mundane world is considered. A freshly statted vampire or mage is far more powerful than a mundane person.

It does have paths for players to become big fish, too

I’ve heard of Bleed, but maybe in the context of a horror story. A player’s character was cursed so they couldn’t play music anymore without some unknown bad stuff happening. They were going to play anyway, since music was everything to them. The other player characters intervened, and took away their instruments. The cursed player had their character sneak back, break into the cleric’s chest, and steal their instruments back.

We were all like “Wow this is such good drama and tension!” But then the cursed player got really mad and upset at us in real life, and was like “Of course I’m upset! You wouldn’t let me play music and stole my instruments!” We were all like, “…in the game, right?”

They were like, “No! I’m really upset at you all! Don’t you feel bad when you watch a movie and bad things happen to the characters?”

We were like, “Well, sometimes, yeah, but it’s not like… the same as it happening for real.”

They calmed down eventually, but left a few sessions later in a similar blow up.

So whenever I think of bleed, i think of that player just yelling at us in real life for stuff that was happening to their character.

I think a lot about this one time in a game of modern day magic. The players wanted to contact another group. They knew the other group was double warded against magic. An anti-teleportation spell on top of a general anti-magic spell. Serious business.

The players wanted to some time and resources trying to punch through these wards to teleport directly to this other group. I told them the odds, they said ok, and rolled. The dice said no. They mulled about for a bit, and then said they wanted to try again. I said ok. They got their spells together, spent their resources, and rolled. The dice said no, again.

I said, “Do you want a hint?”

They said, “Yeah”

I said, “You just want to talk to them, right?”

“Yeah”, they said.

“Why don’t you just call them on the phone?” I said.

“…oh.”

Sometimes players get tunnel vision.

Some people just aren’t a good fit. That doesn’t mean they’re a bad person, nor you’re a bad person, but sometimes you just don’t get on with someone in a particular context and that’s okay. You can still be friends or do other things together. You don’t have to do everything together to be friends.

It’s okay to let people have fun even if it seems stupid to you, or they’d have more fun doing something else. So long as they’re not hurting anyone, let it be. It’s tempting to be like “you know, there’s a whole game series about playing modern day vampires doing politics while holding onto their fading humanity” when some folks are doing that in D&D 5e, but it’s almost certainly not worth it. Many people don’t care about what you care about.

People learn in different ways. Some people really struggle with things that seem easy to you. That person who asks every week “what do I roll to attack?” or “Can I roll my armor against their sneak attack?” probably isn’t doing it to be annoying. They’re probably trying their best, even if their best is pretty bad by objective measurements like "getting the rules right’. Don’t be a jerk about it. You can gently ask them about what they think would help them keep the rules straight (one player liked little notecards, another player benefited from watching games on youtube), but you can’t just make someone learn.

I’m very much “old man yells at cloud” so I don’t really watch actual plays or consume podcasts, but the fate site has a list: https://fate-srd.com/actual-play

I can’t speak to their quality, but there’s a bunch on that list.

The game should feel different than DND. Players have a lot more control, and that kind of affects every aspect of the game. DND tends to put everything on the DM, and players can only do stuff in character. a fate player can be like “I want to spend a fate point to say the king is in fact looking for a witch to hire” or “I wanna declare a story detail: the farm is run by a family of loyalists, so I’m a loyalist they will hopefully see me as a friend”. That plus the ways to change rolls and outcomes makes for a different game. And the lack of focus on minutia like distance and spells per day.

Happy to go on about fate if you have questions!

A note, if you pursue this: There’s fate core and fate condensed that are very similar, but have a few minor changes. Stress (similar to HP) is handled slightly differently between them. I prefer core’s method, but some people like condensed.

There’s also fate accelerated which is even lighter weight.

They’re all free on the website linked above - https://fate-srd.com/ - rules drop down has all the options

You could use Fate. Fate is a generic system that can do high fantasy just fine. It doesn’t need a full party like D&D does. It handles social and physical conflict equally well. The way aspects work is very “As long as I can justify it in the story, it could happen”. You can spend fate points as a player to alter the story, too, which is fun. I also like that it’s generally “You can get what you want, if you’re lucky or pay the price”. “Succeed at a major cost” is almost always on the table.

The downside is it has big “tyranny of the blank page”. D&D-likes you can just point at “Human Fighter” and go. Fate asks you to come up with your high concept, trouble, and background on your own. If you’re creative and that excites you, it’s freeing and exhilarating. If you’re shy, it can be overwhelming.

The core rules don’t have a detailed magic system. It’s up to you to decide how you want it to work, or to buy a splatbook where someone else made a system. It’s pretty easy to tinker with.

It’s also up to the GM to make sure the threats are reasonable. There’s no “CR” system like D&D. But players also always have the power to concede, where they lose the immediate conflict but survive. You don’t have to worry about accidentally wiping the player(s) usually.

You could look for some PbtA games, which are extremely popular. I personally don’t like them much because playbooks feel more like mad libs than creative writing. I also don’t like the dice system, and often find it punishing to the point of not being fun. (I just played a PbtA game last night and don’t think I rolled even a success on like 6 rolls in a row. I felt incompetent and it sucked).

I definitely learned from the experience. Specifically, be explicit about what tone and such we’re going for, and be firm if someone is going off in some other direction.

In her defense, she’d played little to nothing before.

Then again you did say they physically stopped the player so maybe they’re not the only person whose lines are a bit blurred.

I communicated poorly! In-game they stopped the player character by saying their characters physically took the instruments away. We were playing remotely, so no one was physically interacting.

I’d never heard of “Bleed” until one player got very in-real-life upset about their character having a moderately bad time. The rest of us were like “this is some great drama and storytelling! And good job {upset-player} roleplaying!”, but then they were like actually mad at us. Kind of unsettling. Not a good experience.

Their character was a musician and had been cursed, in a recent session, so if they played music then unknown bad things to the tune of a demonic incursion would happen. The other players didn’t like this, and the bleed player didn’t really believe it. They’d tried to play a song anyway, and when I described how the lights in the room became thin they physically stopped the player character from continuing, and put their instruments in their locked chest. The bleed-player didn’t like this. They secretly went and broke into the chest to get their stuff back. The other players were then mad, in-character, that this had happened. Like, they put the group at risk by fucking with their curse, and also broke into their personal belongings. It was good drama. Good interpersonal conflict. Big argument and juicy scene. Both sides had good points.

Except the bleed-player was actually, genuinely, real-life, upset about all of this. We had to pause the game.

To me it just felt messy and, I don’t know, like poor emotional regulation. You can feel a thing but why are you lashing out at the other players?

Maybe that’s not a typical usage of bleed, but that’s what they said was happening.