Yes! I usually take any opportunity to gush about Fate but I restrained myself here
The main weakness of Fate is you need more engaged players. Stuff like DND can mostly hum along with passive players, but Fate falls really flat if people aren’t engaging with it.
On player training, I like systems where you can bribe players to let bad things happen.
Like in vampire: the requiem, a player can always turn a regular failure into a Dramatic Failure, and get a little XP. This meant the players went from “oh no the cave is probably full of monsters let’s take forever stressing” to “I ROLLED GARBAGE CAN I JUST BARGE IN LIKE A CONFIDENT IDIOT FOR MY DRAMATIC FAILURE?”
Tastes vary, but I found it made a more interesting and snappier game.
Scheduling, mostly. The classic big bad of DND.
I always wanted to get one of my lawyer friends to play a devil in a DND game I ran. Just have him write the worst contracts for the players that are more air tight than I can come up with.
Did a one shot in high school where to cast any spell you had to sing a relevant line from an extant song.
I don’t remember everyone’s picks, but one player pulled out a pretty enthusiastic Beatles’ “got to admit it’s getting better, getting better all the time” for a heal.
120 feet seems pretty far. I guess you could shout, awkwardly.
There might be meetups near you doing games. There’s one here in NYC that’s very friendly I’ve been to.
I think the “they think they’re a hero but they’re just level 1” trope goes in the same bucket as “let’s make characters based on ourselves!”. Everyone comes up with it but it’s rarely as good as imagined.
Yep. Feel like we just had some posts about this. People who write that kind of backstory should just write a book. It’s especially bad in games like D&D where you’re starting out as a level 1 nobody. Some games, even some games of D&D, start at higher power levels, so the story is at least mechanically plausible.
I like a short backstory that provides hooks. “Disgraced son of a noble family that became a warlock when everyone expected a sorcerer” is fine.
12 pages where all the cool stuff already happened is bad. Write that as a book.
Yeah, it mostly worked. Mostly.
It’s hard to say if my previous group worked better because they were used to my style, or just a better fit for me, or some other factor.
Wizard I ran DND for in didn’t love this, but understood it.
The real problem with that group is we kept changing DMs, and some were a lot more easy going. You gotta get on the same page as a group
I can see why you might feel that way. Playing in that mode still has some properties of roleplaying- you’re often focused on one character and thinking about the world through their perspective - but you’re not trying to be them the whole time.
Maybe it’s like being an actor and director at the same time, for a film or play? You drop into the character but also zoom out for the bigger picture. I don’t think anyone would say like “Branagh wasn’t acting because he was also directing”
I don’t agree with “can’t accomplish both at once”, but this is a reasonable thing to disagree on. It can definitely be a mode of play people don’t enjoy!
I feel like there’s two poles of the RPG experience. At one end, there’s the writer’s room “let’s tell an awesome story together”. At the other, there’s “I am my character and I am in the world”.
I am super far in the writer’s room direction. I don’t want to “immerse” in my character. I want to tell a cool story about my character. So for me, when I try to jump onto a moving train and flub the roll, having input into what happens is great. I like being able to say “what if I land and roll and my backpack falls, so I lose all my stuff?”, or “what if I crash through the window of the wrong car, and it’s like a room full of security goons having dinner??”. If the GM just unilaterally does that, by contrast, it feels bad to me. I like having input.
It’s probably no surprise I GM more than play.
I imagine at the other end of the spectrum, thinking about that stuff gets in the way of trying to experience the character.
I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search.
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example.
It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own thing (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e’s Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me.
5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like “I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But… then if I need fireball I won’t have it later. So let’s do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn’t use magic.”. Rituals were a decent solution for that.
What kind of evil?
Power fantasy of abuse and subjugation?
Have them play vampires or demons. Awaken from their slumber in a small town and go about setting up a cult and securing their safety. Make thralls out of people. Add some sort of mechanic like “eating someone’s soul gives you a stat boost” so mechanically they’re rewarded for cruelty. Have NPCs beg for their life. Have some sell out their neighbors and loved ones for favor. Let the players kill them anyway.
Maybe some heroes show up to fight them and free the people. Maybe it’s just two hours of crushing limited resistance and making their temple.
I’m getting old and senile but I don’t remember a lot of clever use of magic in 3e. I know there’s a lot of jokey posts about it in 5e, but often to the tune of “I cast create water IN HIS LUNGS LOLOLOL”, and then people go “that’s not how the spell works”. 5e also has weird interactions and limitations like sneak attack or smite unarmed, or Eldritch blast and objects.
You mentioned the zeitgeist and I think that’s actually the key. When 4e came out a lot of 3e grognards didn’t like it, but casual players also didn’t like it because it was still kind of crunchy, and you had to make choices that could lead to a bad character.
5e came out and is vastly simplified. Now there’s a lot of players who would never touch 3e or 4e playing, because it’s easy and kind of a shallow game mechanically, so the online sentiment is different. More positive. Also a lot of the grognards have aged out. Without those new players, I feel like people would be repeating “5e is baby’s first RPG. It sucks” the way people said 4e is an MMO, it sucks.
My argument is that 4e has some dubious similarities to video games, but it was a loud minority and then bandwagon jumpers that cemented the idea. Without that loud minority, I think a lot of people who came to 4e as it was would have enjoyed it fine. People who dismissed it as “an MMO” would not have drawn that conclusion.
The 5-min adventuring day is more of a “poor GM management” problem than anything. If time effectively stands still when the PC’s rest, of course they’ll rest at every opportunity.
I think it’s partly poor GM management , but it’s also what players want clashing with what DND-likes are. Players want to use their cool powers. The game wants them to save them for when it “matters”. There’s no squaring that. So that’s why you get players blowing all their cool powers in the first couple scenes, and then wanting to rest. The GM can add consequences (eg: the villains plot advances), but that’s punishing players for how they want to play.
There are some players who truly, sincerely, naturally enjoy the resource management aspects. They are a minority. People pick wizard to do wizard stuff, not to use a crossbow for three hours.
In my personal opinion, player’s choices only feel important if they have real consequences
I am inclined to agree. One of the games I like, Fate, has a mechanic literally named Consequences. It’s still pretty open ended. Players make up consequences as seem appropriate, rather than looking them up in a book. It’s up to the table to enforce them. If you took a consequence “broken arm”, you have to remember that means you can’t swing your greatclub around like before.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a lot of people trying to weasel their skills in Fate. I’ve had “sure, your best skill is Fight so you can totally body slam the bouncer to get into the club, but then you’ll have body slammed a bouncer and people react appropriately”.
I’m not sure what your advice for making crunchier systems work for non-crunchy players would be. I tried to do Mage and the one player that never really learned the rules was always lost and frustrated. They had a strong power set but they didn’t understand it, so every challenge didn’t work. I didn’t want to have someone else back seat driving them, but they didn’t understand how to solve even problems tailored to their character’s strength. And then they didn’t understand the tradeoffs of the different options.
I’ve heard nothing but good things about Pathfinder 2e. I initially ignored it because I really disliked 1st edition.
I really intensely dislike powers-per-day and the five minute adventuring day, but I think PF2e has less of that?
The players available to me are probably more of a lightweight narrative game crew, though.
Sometimes I go to a meetup that does one-shots. They’re a pretty good group.
Most of my friends either aren’t interested, or aren’t interested enough to actually show up. It’s easier to make friends with people who want to play RPGs than get your friends to play. The worst outcome is when your friends are kind of people-pleasers, and they say yes to the game even though they don’t really want to. Then they half-ass it or flake, and the friendship suffers.