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”

Ah, yeah. During combat there’s the related “if you can’t decide what you’re doing in a minute, you dodge and we go to the next person” rule you can bring out.

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 often do “I am starting a timer. When it goes off, something interesting will happen”

If the players are still fucking around, then the fire bears show up (or whatever).

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.

Still seems like this could just be a setting book for Fate.

Sounds a lot like aspects from Fate.

Fate still has numbers, but you could probably hack them off without too much trouble. I don’t know if “the troll is fantastic brawler and you’re a good swordsman” is especially better, but it’s an option

Some people never really learned DND either, but kind of get carried along by the group. I feel like you could switch out systems on those people and they wouldn’t do any worse.

But I get it. Some people are more casual. Some people have executive dysfunction. My current strategy is to find people who want to play what I want to play, and it’s working okay. Still makes me a little sad that DND is so mega popular, but okay.

I think it’s an error to treat “I play DND” the same as “I play RPGs”. It’s like “I play baseball” vs “I play sports”.

There are too many reasons to succinctly list why people might be sticking to DND.

In my experience, you’ll have better luck finding players who want to play something else rather than trying to convert DND players.

Well, I wasn’t having much fun with DND.

There are degrees of fun.

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.

There’s a lot of stuff I don’t think I like from PF2e*, but from everything I’ve seen and read it seems like a better designed game.

*I haven’t actually played it. I really burned out on 3.x, and my impression of PF1e was it’s 3.75, so that was a non-starter. Spells-per-day, 1d20+stuff, vertical power growth + high opportunity costs, are the main things off the top of my head I don’t like from this part of the subgenre and I think pf2e holds onto.

Very cool that you put this together and got it out there. Most people’s pet projects never evolve past half a page of scribbled lines.

I don’t think it’s quite to my taste- I’ve been in a Fate mood lately- but I hope this finds an audience.

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.

If you like this idea, you should read the webcomic The Order of the Stick. It’s surprisingly good for a comic that started out as DND jokes and stick figures. It deals a lot with the problem of evil in DND.

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.