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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • My hypothesis is that a lot of people are emotionally invested in DND, and if you say bad things about it then it feels like you’re saying bad things about them. Saying it didn’t happen or it was the players fault let’s them still feel good about DND.

    We’re all susceptible to this.

    For some reason DND fans seem less likely to just go “yeah it’s kind of garbage but I like it”



  • There’s a wide range between tpk and something interesting happening.

    Like, the players are dicking around and can’t decide how to ask the bartender if they can have access to the secret occult library in the basement. Just really spinning their wheels and being total PCs. Fine. Timer runs out. Their rival shows up, doesn’t acknowledge them, says something quietly to the bartender and is being lead to the basement.



  • I have a somewhat bad memory of playing DND as like a 13 year old. We were a mess. There was a cliff, a waterfall, and rope. Someone tied rope around himself and wanted to go down. There was a lot of cross talk and the guy with the rope around said he was going down.

    The DM was like “no one is holding the other end of the rope”

    “What?”

    One by one they went through what everyone else had said they were doing. Searching the cave rocks for secrets. Keeping watch at entrance. Fighting over who got the magic stick. Etc.

    Player went over the cliff.

    It was decided that the character would wash up downstream with 0 HP and would live, so long as we could get to him in a reasonable time. Lessons were learned, sort of.







  • A lot of my games sort of take place in the same universe, even when they’re different systems or settings.

    Like an old DND campaign had the players visit a wizard university, where they met many NPCs. One of them was Reg. He’s kind of a chill party dude. Loves playing wizard pong (it’s like ping pong, but with mage hands)

    My current game is a 2050s corporate dystopia using Fate. Heavy inspiration from World of Darkness and Shadowrun.

    And Reg is here. He fully believes he used to go to wizard school, but something happened and now he’s here. He’s pretty chill about it, though. Last game, a werewolf was going berserk and Reg was like “Dude. Fucking metal.” The werewolf gave him a knock-on-your-ass high five and Reg lived.


  • My characters often end up exasperated by how idiotic and chaotic the other characters players are. That checks out.

    “So the walls started bleeding, a thousand voices cried out in pain, and a sinkhole into the unseen depths opened in the kitchen.”

    “Right.”

    “And you, a normal human with no magical powers or special equipment, you jumped into the sinkhole.”

    “Yes.”

    “Why?”

    “It was there!”

    “And then your character died, as one would expect from a hundred foot drop onto stone. And now?”

    “I don’t understand. What else was I supposed to do??”


  • I started a game of Fate this year and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s less crunchy and tactical than D&D most of the time, but it handles social conflict and losing conflicts much better. And does other stuff I like.

    I tried to get my old D&D group to play other games but it didn’t go super well. In retrospect, there were game agnostic reasons why I didn’t really gel with that group, so it’s for the best I left. But I think converting people who only really play D&D and close relatives to something else is hard.




  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoRPGMemes @ttrpg.networkMy experience
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    2 months ago

    I think it’s like “you had to be there” tier jokes. Once you get far enough away from the shared framework and experience, things are less funny and relatable.

    Like, if you post a funny story about your soccer game where the goalie shot the ball out of the air with their nerf cannon, that’s cool but like what? That’s not how soccer typically works.



  • Best change I made for games was having a fixed schedule. I used to do a “when can everyone meet next?” but it was a disaster of people not responding or actually showing up when they said they would.

    Now we just play every Thursday. Quorum is two players*. Anyone who can’t make it, tough.

    *Turns out Fate works fine with two players. DND would probably be harder.


  • I don’t think I understand this meme template. Also am I going blind or is the text kind of small and blurry?

    Do people still make fantasy heartbreakers? That’s where someone’s only really played D&D sets out to make their own game. It’s full of passion and enthusiasm, but it kind of sucks because it doesn’t stray far from D&D. So you get a “creative new breakthrough” that’s like “our six stats go from 1-10” instead of, like, “We realized we don’t need stats like that at all”


  • This is part of why I can’t enjoy pandemic. (The other big part being we had a real life pandemic and it was nothing like the game)

    Teaching gracefully is a skill I don’t really have. So it’s easy for me to fall into “no, that’s a bad move because XYZ” and most people don’t like that.

    You can kind of see this in my other posts in this thread where I would be annoyed at players for making tactical blunders in DND.

    At least I recognize this is almost entirely a me problem, and that’s the first step towards not being a total party shitter.