jtrek

I don't think I'll get it. Maybe if it's on deep discount on PC eventually, and it doesn't have horrible DRM, and the reviews are good.

I didn't really like gta5 that much. It's very on rails / Simon-says in a lot of the stories. I guess they're going for something cinematic. I'd rather have something more like an immersive sim.

I think it feels fiddly to people who already know a thing or two about mechanics, but most of the fiddliness can easily be ignored or barely paid attention to and you can still manage to play and have fun.

I mean, this is true, but if you ignore enough rules you're essentially playing a different game. I talked to someone once who "played DND" but didn't use skills or spell slots, and I think they just let casters interpret spells based on the names. That's so different it's arguably a different game. Or at least as different as a Chihuahua and a husky.

. It’s a lot easier to just hit straight brick walls in games like pathfinder or shadow run where the player is so lost they just can’t play.

I agree with this, but note those systems are far more crunchy than DND. Something like Fate goes in the other direction, and I think is why it's better for fast games.

Though as an aside, a downside of Fate is it's so open it can cause a tyranny of the blank page effect. DND puts you in a pretty small box, and that can be helpful for people. The small decision space is a positive for some kinds of players. Though if you were doing Fate, you could just tell people to pick from some core ideas similar to character classes.

but 5e is pretty damn good at it while also being popular enough that people have heard of it and are interested in trying. That last part is just as important as being technically good on paper.

This is also undeniable. Someone who's going to half-ass it will drag down a game in any system.

I think we agree more than we disagree for what it's worth. Check out Fate though. It's free ( https://fate-srd.com/ )

I was going more for like Shakespearean English or something similarly olde, heh

Good for you.

I got rid of my car many years ago (I'm agéd) when I moved into the city. I never miss it.

It’s by design.

This is true. However,

It’s just meant for more casual play, that’s all.

It's kind of bad at that goal. It's really fiddly and full of friction points. What bonus do you get for 16 strength? Why do they insist on keeping that mapping.

I’ve had to kick people for just refusing the learn what dice to roll after months of sessions.

Further evidence of it not actually being great at casual play.

Which leads me to

5e is a great gateway drug to get people into TTRPGs

Counter argument: it's actually really bad at that. It's so specific and idiosyncratic it pushes people away. Uncountable players just bounce off the whole genre because their first impression is fiddly "what does 15 strength mean again?" and "sorry, you can't fit your cool idea into this class/level system"

Fate Core or Accelerated would be much more in line with how people think about this sort of stuff.

Yeah, but unfortunately they kept 5e's design principle of "you barely get any feats". I want my characters to be interesting because of who they are, not because of what glowing doodads they looted from more interesting dead people.

Also class + level is so coarse. I'd rather be able to, like, buy individual things I want. Get XP for doing a quest, buy more sneak attack. Or a spell slot. Maybe hit dice. Really let me mix and match.

But DND 5e is designed to have a small decision space in builds. They want the half paying attention guy's character to perform about as well as the optimizer, instead of the huge gap between those archetypes that 3e had.

It's funny because while 5e has simpler math than the predecessors, it's still kind of clunky. 1d20 + proficiency + modifier isn't that bad, but I've seen a lot of players who can't correctly add 16 + 7.

I really liked the nWoD system where you roll a bunch of d10s and just count how many came up >= 8. No addition or subtraction.

Also 1d20+stuff is flat probability, which feels bad.

I think that a ruleset optimized for computer RPGs would probably look somewhat different.

But also 100 times this. You could do so many things that would be painful to do by hand at the table.

5e is a great system for a “Rule of Cool” style of DMing. That’s amazing for a decent DM and inexperienced/less technical players.

It's not even that good at that. Fate, for example, is a much lighter and better system for that. Aspects are a very simple system for setting expectations and letting players do wacky things based on them.

If I was going to run a game for new players I would absolutely not reach for 5e. It provides too much fertilizer for "can I move that far?" and "if he's flying 30' up can I still shoot him?" minutia.

I enjoyed bg3, but DND 5e is not a system I enjoy nor want more of. It's surprisingly shallow.

The problem has never ever ever been words per minute. That is a completely irrelevant metric. A distraction.

Anything the AI produces is going to need to be evaluated by a person, and that is a more difficult, less rewarding task.

And if it doesn't need to be reviewed by a person because it's magically flawless, that's extremely anti-labor so fuck that.

That's not a general problem with trains that proves they suck. The suck is places have been built out for cars with other modes as after thoughts.

I live somewhere with much better train and bus coverage, and it makes it easier than driving for the vast majority of trips.

The day to day suffering is because of cars. So fuck cars. Fuck the culture that made them primary.

Every coworker I've seen that uses AI code tools heavily is bad. They produce (or at least push) nonsense code they don't understand.

I would rather have a team that goes slowly and understands what they're building than a team of excitable slop pushers going a thousand lines a second.