jjjalljs

"death and life of great American cities" by Jacobs talks about this. The suburban mode where everything is car focused and isolated is really bad. Having spaces with foot traffic and community is much better for people.

I do believe that DND is a poor first RPG, and creates a weird survivor bias in the hobby. Because it's so popular most people try it as their first RPG, and then some of them hate it. Some of them then think the whole hobby is like that, and then leave.

So the bulk of the people left in the hobby are people who like dnd, or at least tolerate it enough to stick around.

One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, tactical combat (as much as DND is that), or resource management. They had no interest in DND. But they really liked Vampire.

I keep trying to get people to play fate, but all of these games struggle with finding people who will show up. Everyone seems to be just barely holding it together, and asking them to be creative and present once a week seems like a big request

I love Fate and think it's much more intuitive. DND tends to crush player creativity with a lot of "sorry that's just flavor", and guides players towards "just move and attack".

I’m not sure I agree about splitting hit and damage feeling weird,

It feels weird to me when you roll a really big number to hit their AC, and then roll the minimum for damage. Or the other way, where you just barely roll their AC and then roll max damage. There are narrative ways you could justify it, but I don't see why you would want to. It's not adding anything worth having to the experience, imo. The game doesn't care if you beat the check by 0 or 20. It's just an extra step and the information is discarded.

I think pf2e fixes this.

Forgot in my original: DND 5e barely has a concept of degree of success

DND is not a good universal game system. It's pretty good at being DND, but that's a particular beast that's mostly about resource management.

You can definitely use it for a game about social intrigue, or horror, or modern day anything, but it's not really good at any of that. Like using a hammer to put screws in, you'll probably get something done, and if you're hanging with your friends you'll probably have a good time. But it's a weird tool to reach for.

Personally, I don't think the core of the rules system is very good at all. Flat probability feels weird. Armor as all-or-nothing is weird. Hit and damage being split into two rolls is slow and weird. In the latest edition, making very few choices about your character often feels bad. Levels are a very coarse unit of growth. The magic system somehow manages to make magic not feel like magic- no wonder, no mystery, it's just safe and standardized. I could go on.

But it's mega popular and people are emotionally invested, so there's not much to be done about it. There are dozens of people playing the thousands of other games out there.

Also a lot of people have never played anything else, so their analysis and defense of it is often lacking. Like if I've only ever played baseball, and never even watched any other sports, I wouldn't feel qualified to talk about bowling. But you get people saying like "no you need to wear cleats that's a universal property of sports" when bowling comes up. Like, not every game has six stats. Not every game has attributes like that at all.

And again, if you're having fun with dnd then that's the primary goal achieved. We don't need to maximize fun and efficiency in all things all times. I just think that it would be a good experience to branch out more, even if it's scary, because that will lead to a richer experience overall.

I have ascended to a higher level of old-man-yells-at-cloud and just don't watch youtube*. I'd rather just read words. It's really depressing how illiterate many people seem to be.

*with the exception of like music videos and the occasional "this is how you do this weird thing in a video game"

I ran a game in near future New York and used Google maps and street view for guidance. Worked well. None of the other players lived here, so I think the visuals helped them.

I had one really good game of Vampire. Lasted a couple years. We still talk about it sometimes, and its best scenes. Like how one PC saved an NPC by jumping out a 10th story window with her. Or the time they had a huge in character fight because the job they'd tried to do went sideways.

But I've also had a couple really bad games. There was one where they just didn't read and retain anything from the books. One of the players on like session 4 was like "wait. How do I get more blood? Do I like... Bite people?". My friend what do you think was happening in the other scenes when people were hunting for blood? They also didn't retain anything about the different factions, so they didn't really understand anyone's motivation. It was bad. Still feel bad about it.

Yeah this feels like another thing that's downstream from low wages.

Movies are a luxury. If most people are struggling to get by in debt, they're less likely to splurge.

I don't think "This other, largely unrelated, problem is bad so we shouldn't do this thing" is good reasoning.

I don't think in the real world, in all places (or even most places) all the stores are in a cartel. Where I live, there are several large supermarkets and a handful of smaller groceries all within walking distance. They are not a cartel. They compete. You're just making stuff up for some weird dark fantasy of yours.

Furthermore, if there was a monopoly, and we have the political might to implement UBI, I dare say we'd also have the political power to do a tried-and-true popular move of breaking up monopolies.

If there's only one grocery store, maybe. But that's a monopoly, and that's going to be shit no matter what. Ideally you have multiple grocery stores that compete, and if one raises prices the other will take their customers. (If they all coordinate to raise their prices, that's a cartel and that's also bad.)

So you're not really exposing a problem with UBI, but rather with unregulated capitalism.

When I play an RPG (or RPG-like game), I want to know upfront: is this a storytelling kind of game, or a problem-solving kind of game? The rulesets that try to blend both often feel like they pick up the worst of both worlds, demanding players switch between two very different sorts of minds or risk spoiling the whole affair.

This is an interesting point I'd thought about before but never articulated.

I think it was part of why I didn't gel with one of my old DND groups. They'd sometimes be faffing around doing "funny" stuff, but I mostly was sticking to the "use your resources wisely or perish" mode of DND.