Should be careful not to just shut down player ideas. If everything they do slams into an annoying problem, it can quickly stop being fun.
I sometimes try to sync with the players and be like “hm do you think the 300 year old vampire has had to engage with the city before? What sort of plans and influence do you think he has?”. Then it doesn’t feel like I’m just screwing them, if they’re thinking about it too.
There are of course some weak points, and I’ll gladly expand upon them and any other points it if you’re interested. But I’ve really enjoyed my time in PF2e on both sides of the screen and consider it my TTRPG of choice currently, even as a 3.5 Grognard.
It’s still mostly a spells-per-day game, right? You probably don’t lose the first fight of the day because you can go nova
It’s been really interesting playing Vampire with a person who’s only ever played DND. We keep telling him “you can use your cool powers”. He keeps thinking it’s like a special move to save for a big encounter. No, you don’t have to come up with an elaborate scheme to get past the bouncer. You can just Dominate him. It’s a big shift in mind set!
Personally I hate the “save your cool powers for later” mode of play. I think Pathfinder 2e is less of that, but not free of it?
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but DND doesn’t do Star Wars well. There’s no adventuring day in the source fiction, really. Jedi are hard to model- they either shine too bright or don’t live up to the fiction. Force powers don’t really map to existing DND systems. Class+Level is very coarse, which makes it hard to model some concepts. DND is almost entirely a combat game, but I guess Star wars is mostly fighting so you won’t feel the absence of other systems that much.
I’m sure it’ll be make some people happy. The previous d20 Star wars games had their fans. I just don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy, and it’s a shame this is going to suck the air out of star wars tabletop game options.
A good post.
I personally find DND unsatisfying for many reasons (little to no degree of success, static magic system that encourages hoarding, the primary defense is all or nothing avoidance, very coarse progression, some character concepts are simply not representable, etc)
But what is even more annoying than that is when players respond with “but you can just change the rules!”. I know! That’s true of any pen and paper game! It’s not some unique property of DND. But sometimes I don’t want to do the work of designing a system, and I almost never want to play some stranger’s pre-alpha homebrew.
This supports my hypothesis that most players “playing” DND could easily swap to some other rule system and not even know. Many of them would probably be happier in other systems.
I’d rather spend N minutes reading a list of book recommendations than 5*N minutes watching a video. Presumably the target audience for books is literate.
I’m tired of video.
On the one hand, this might help fence sitters that are like “there’s no content there”.
On the other, I just don’t personally care for a stream of random images like Instagram et al do.
There’s something off about a video about books.
It’s not “retire and live a life of luxury” money, at least in many parts of the world.
It’s a lot of money in terms of paying down debt and covering rent for a while, though.
I love mage, but its magic is so involved and powerful I wouldn’t want to use it in a game unless everyone was a mage. You don’t really want one players options to be “I hit him with my club” and the others to be boundless.
Awakening 2nd edition was really good, imo, but I never actually got to play Ascension
I used nWoD for fantasy games. The core dice pool system works pretty well, and few things are tightly coupled to any setting in particular.
I mostly don’t like d20, so when someone tells me they’re doing a game about secret vampire societies in it, I’m a lot more disappointed than if they ported a system I like or am neutral on. Also 5th edition in particular makes a lot of assumptions about how things work.
I dunno man. I’ve had a lot of conversations with players that go like “do you think your character is the first to come up with this hijink? If it works, why doesn’t the entire setting revolve about this infinite damage trick you’re trying to sell me?”
Like, if it was as easy as casting Charm Person on the king to become the new ruler, other people would already be doing that. Therefore, there must be reasons why it doesn’t work.
My parents are difficult. Not the worst people and not monsters, but at many times unpleasant.
Plus it was a house in the suburbs. Not ideal for socializing or culture.
And lastly, living with parents in the suburbs would be huge negatives for dating.
All it takes is one cop to be like “he was resisting arrest and I feared for my life so I had to shoot him 17 times in the back”.
“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”
Yep.
Management is often out of touch and full of shit
Sounds like a good start
I don’t like to think of people as immutably good or bad, but I get what you meant.
There’s a bunch of factors.
So, someone who lies, is cruel, doesn’t care about anyone else, and leaves the world a mess is being a pretty bad person.
Someone who just keeps their head down, goes to work, and is polite to people they meet is kind of middling.
The cap was in place because the Social Security benefit doesn’t increase above the that income.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a good reason for the cap to exist. I expect it’s a compromise to get rich people and idiots on board.
The Oatmeal did a comic worth reading about this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
Some people are really loathe to do any self reflection or assessment. I gather their sense of self and worth is very fragile, and looking too hard might make it collapse.
Like, some people you could say “Eating meat is bad for these reasons” and they’ll just lash out. Not enough emotional HP to tank the hit.
I’m not sure I follow what you mean by originality and complexity as opposed concepts.
It’s important for players to be able to engage with the content. If you add too much new stuff up front, they’re not likely to retain it. If they can’t retain it, they can’t engage with it. You can drop them in store brand middle earth and they’ll be able to engage. If you drop them in a wholly original setting with winged squid people, eternally young goat poets, and living clothing, that’s a lot to try to integrate all at once.
One of the most disappointing games I ran was Vampire, where the players just didn’t do any reading about the game’s fiction or factions. They didn’t understand what the major NPC players wanted, so they were always lost and confused. After we abandoned that game, I started a new one that was basically Diablo. They did a lot better in that one, in large part because there was no up front details. Yeah yeah fallen kingdom, demon problem, we get it.
I think the real factor is “how much new stuff do they need to learn to engage?”