In my honest opinion D&D is great, but the combat takes so freaking long unless you're fighting kobolds. I find it so tedious..
Huh? I find 5E combat to be over way before characters really get any good use out of many of their abilities. When I DM I limit the spiky damage on crits and opt for an 'effects' based crit system over piling on more and more damage. I also increase the HP of the monsters (most people I know do this as well). In my ideal D&D edition I'd make combat last significantly longer so more tactics, strategy, and abilities come into play.
In my experience, most roleplayers seem to dislike D&D and consider it a poor RPG. I've been a member of three different RPG clubs each with dozens of members, and been to the UK nationals, so I've met a fair few roleplayers.
Personally I'm on the fence. I like D&D, particularly Forgotten Realms, and one of my all time favourite RPG campaigns is one I ran 8 years ago in 3.5 edition. Which to this day remains one of the best experiences I've had GMing. Still when I compare it to World Of Darkness, Shadowrun, GURPS, WHFRP, and more; D20 games just seem to come across as poorly balanced hack-n-slash games that push combat whilst heavily limiting any social aspect of the game. I also find the frankly cartoon like healing breaks immersion, and some of the abstract systems like "class" and "weapon proficiencies" irritating and anachronistic. I still enjoy D&D, and I'm running a game in 5e now which has me more invested than anything else, but it's flaws are still apparent to me.
My issue is, amongst RL gamers I find I'm the one defending D&D saying, "it doesn't have to be just a dungeon crawl where you just kill shit and take their stuff, a decent GM can craft really great stories with D&D, just give me a chance and I swear you'll enjoy it". Online however I'm being pegged as the D&D hater who only goes to D&D forums because he wants to tell people why it sucks...
It sounds like what you want out of a roleplaying game is quite different from most people. Most people just want to have a laugh with their friends and fight challenging bad guys.
Sounds like you want an elite gaming system where its all about the mechanics. Maybe try more modern systems like world of dungeons.
Approaching a person and asking, Do you want to play [Champions? Fantasy HERO? Shadowrun? Traveller? Gamma World? Boot Hill? Top Secret? Star Frontiers? GURPS? Earthdawn? Paranoia? Call of Cthulhu?]?
Often ends up with them asking what is that?
And me saying, "It's just like D&D except..."
Lots of people know D&D and for some they prefer the "I've heard of that" over some mystery game they never knew existed. Only my Shadowrun campaign lasted two years, every other game not nearly so long. But my current D&D campaign is going on over three years.
D&D is easy to get into and easy to play. I might like other systems but finding players for them is harder.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
D&D is a solid game. It's easy to introduce friends to. It's got enough good mechanics to interest tactics-focused players, but is simple enough not to lose role-players or casual slayers, so everyone has fun. And it does its particular brand of pulp fantasy really, really well.
However, it falls apart when you try to do something it's not made to do. I've successfully run a heist game in D&D, but they were still basically re-themed dungeons, and while the trappings made it feel like a heist, Blades in the Dark would've been a better choice. Other themes, like horror or no-combat, are just strictly worse with the D&D ruleset. It annoys me that D&D fans fail to recognize other games, because they're often really well designed. (Honestly I hate D&D "culture" in general: the pretentious CR wannabes and horny bard memesters make me cringe hard.)
Oh, and I'm tired of the false dichotomy between combat and roleplay. Of my two groups (one at college, one over summers), one is way more into the roleplay: we've told stories that feel to me like watching a movie! But that same group is more into tough combat, with dice rolled in front of the screen, monsters hitting downed characters, etc. The other group is more neutral on both fronts.
In my honest opinion D&D is great, but the combat takes so freaking long unless you're fighting kobolds. I find it so tedious..
Huh? I find 5E combat to be over way before characters really get any good use out of many of their abilities. When I DM I limit the spiky damage on crits and opt for an 'effects' based crit system over piling on more and more damage. I also increase the HP of the monsters (most people I know do this as well). In my ideal D&D edition I'd make combat last significantly longer so more tactics, strategy, and abilities come into play.
There's really no reason as DM you can't make combat last longer.
You already suggested raising HP of enemies, you can always add more. (Adding higher AC or saving throws on enemies could prolong combat too, but I'd suggest inflating HP before those as it's kind of less fun for players to just make their abilities and attacks work less often to prolong combat.)
You can add more enemies. Or build encounters that have multiple phases. Such as having enemy reinforcements show up mid battle after a few enemies are mowed down, so that you're not running too many enemy creatures at once. Or have multi phase encounters. There's a homebrew encounter I got on patreon for example, Chaos at the Coral Court: Shark Queen's Lair. It was a really fun three phase encounter. All in the same place, same initiative roll, but progressing from one phase to the next as the players cleared the enemies. It's a one shot I look back to a lot for inspiration on making my own homebrew boss fights more interesting and dynamic.
Personally, I tend to prefer most encounters only last 3-4 rounds unless it's a big climactic boss fight or large scale event like a city siege or something that should feel more epic. But if you feel like the fights you're running are too short, you absolutely have the tools as a DM to make them longer.
D&D is to me what World of Warcraft is to MMOs: it's not my favourite but it's the one I'm most familiar with, likely to find people for, and the one I would prefer teaching people how to play. I would much rather play Pathfinder, Vampire: The Masquerade, and I'd like to dabble with my Buffyverse RPG books or Dark Conspiracy, but they don't have the brand recognition and their respective Starter Sets in Waterstones. And however much I love those, I would still one day just prefer to come to D&D Beyond, create a character without agonising over the sheet, have them fully functional and fleshed out in minutes, and get into a game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Zero is the most important number in D&D: Session Zero sets the boundaries and the tone; Rule Zero dictates the Dungeon Master (DM) is the final arbiter; and Zero D&D is better than Bad D&D.
"Let us speak plainly now, and in earnest, for words mean little without the weight of conviction."
So I spent 20 years not playing DND because the view of it was as a dungeon crawl monster fight then buy stuff game. To my friends and I who where used to role playing Vampire (including live action roleplay), and playing the roll and keep systems like L5R and seventh sea, it seemed dull and boring.
I got into 5th edition because a friend was running it and enjoyed it, the D20 system is working me of the weaker RPG system mechanically, it is far to block and white in terms of success and failure but I get round that by setting sliding scale DCs rather then a hard fail pass. It is a lot less brutal then other systems, L5R for instance can genuinely force a player to commit ritual suicide for a roleplay faux pas, Vampire at low levels can see characters killed very easily just to prove a point, or because you stupidly travel in the day.
Mage is probably my favorite game in terms of magic in that you can make anything happen, my fav ever character in all systems is still my technocracy necromancies mage who was able to raise the dead by claiming his company owned nanotech that allowed the reanimating of dying and dead humans.
But by far the best system of them all is paranoia, it hands down beats any other roleplay system for sheer immersion, when you have a roleplay game that causes people in real life to send pictures between sessions of other players holding a banana or writing with a blue pen, when you have a game that can get 16 hours of madness and fun out of the simple act of delivering a pizza I think you have the perfect gaming system. Would I run a long term campaign, probably not, but it is amazing how immersed you can get as a group when you are forced to fill out a bathroom break request form just to go to the toilet in real life.
D&D is a solid game. It's easy to introduce friends to. It's got enough good mechanics to interest tactics-focused players, but is simple enough not to lose role-players or casual slayers, so everyone has fun. And it does its particular brand of pulp fantasy really, really well.
However, it falls apart when you try to do something it's not made to do. I've successfully run a heist game in D&D, but they were still basically re-themed dungeons, and while the trappings made it feel like a heist, Blades in the Dark would've been a better choice. Other themes, like horror or no-combat, are just strictly worse with the D&D ruleset. It annoys me that D&D fans fail to recognize other games, because they're often really well designed. (Honestly I hate D&D "culture" in general: the pretentious CR wannabes and horny bard memesters make me cringe hard.)
Oh, and I'm tired of the false dichotomy between combat and roleplay. Of my two groups (one at college, one over summers), one is way more into the roleplay: we've told stories that feel to me like watching a movie! But that same group is more into tough combat, with dice rolled in front of the screen, monsters hitting downed characters, etc. The other group is more neutral on both fronts.
I'm totally with you on how quality RP and combat action are by no means mutually exclusive. My opinion is that good roleplaying and storytelling makes the combat feel like the stakes are higher, and the results of the fights affect how you go forward with the story.
I'll also say something about "pretentious CR wannabes and horny bard memesters." Yes, they're both annoying as heck, and they're also usually either very inexperienced players or actual idiots. CR is a very entertaining show because the people in that game are very good roleplayers and I sometimes shudder to think about how much time Mercer actually spends preparing for games. The upsides to that is that it is very entertaining and brings a lot of good attention to the game/hobby (I'm pretty sure that sales of D&D products went up quite significantly at the time CR was becoming popular). The downside is that not all of the people who are inspired by it to take up D&D are nearly as intelligent and creative as they think they are. You get idiot memesters with any and every hobby and subculture, it's an unavoidable symptom of the internet existing. Also, the Dunning Kruger effect applies to these types; CR (and quite a few similar streams/podcasts) is done by talented people who take it seriously and make it look easy so viewers of low intelligence and/or creativity immediately think "I can do that with no effort at all! Watch me pull a funny character out of my butt! Derp-a-derp memey-meme I'm gonna $&%# a dragon!"
If someone is new and inexperienced, the best thing to do is help them get comfortable and learn how the game works so they avoid (or recover from) falling down that idiot hole. Start with making sure they understand that all those memes, like all of meme culture, are either based on hyperbole or making fun of stupid people doing stupid things and should not be taken as examples to follow in an actual game. If they're just idiots, then don't play with them. Either boot them from your game or leave it yourself and find one that better fits you.
To me, any gaming system is a means to an end. You want to get together with friends to socialize and oh by the way maybe play a game. At least that's my experience (and I'm OLD so I remember way back!). That being said, some systems do some things better than others.
GURPS is a great system IMHO because it blends many things well. There are only a few stats so it's simple in that regard. You can buy skills even at a half-point level so you can represent everything from the weekend warrior who knows a little something to the Ph.D. who may have written the book on the subject at hand. The combat is also more realistic than many IMHO because even an experienced character can be killed outright by a bullet to the head.
The Hero System does the superhero thing REALLY well. You can literally duplicate ANY power you can read about or see in the movies if you try hard enough. However, it's not very good at the low-level spy type of stuff. We used it for a fantasy game though and it worked just fine so YMMV.
D&D is what I consider a good 'all-access' RPG. You can play lite and just run a bog-standard Fighter or Rogue and still have fun. Or you can deconstruct your backstory, build what you consider to be a perfect character, and have a blast if that's your thing. My biggest complaint is that scaling it can be hard on the DM. Example: I hate the Short Rest/Long Rest mechanic. The idea that you can go from death's door to fully healed overnight is stupid to me. But most people play it that way and if you want to change it then it could wind up changing the whole dynamic og your game and not for the better. IMHO D&D puts a LOT on the DM and I think that's why many players are too intimidated to DM their own games.
Role-Master isn't bad mechanically except that it's TOO mechanical. There is (or there used to be) a chart for every single weapon in the game. So a party with 5 different weapons means 5 different charts to look up during combat. No thanks.
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Huh? I find 5E combat to be over way before characters really get any good use out of many of their abilities. When I DM I limit the spiky damage on crits and opt for an 'effects' based crit system over piling on more and more damage. I also increase the HP of the monsters (most people I know do this as well). In my ideal D&D edition I'd make combat last significantly longer so more tactics, strategy, and abilities come into play.
And you can't have both because?
Approaching a person and asking, Do you want to play [Champions? Fantasy HERO? Shadowrun? Traveller? Gamma World? Boot Hill? Top Secret? Star Frontiers? GURPS? Earthdawn? Paranoia? Call of Cthulhu?]?
Often ends up with them asking what is that?
And me saying, "It's just like D&D except..."
Lots of people know D&D and for some they prefer the "I've heard of that" over some mystery game they never knew existed. Only my Shadowrun campaign lasted two years, every other game not nearly so long. But my current D&D campaign is going on over three years.
D&D is easy to get into and easy to play. I might like other systems but finding players for them is harder.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
D&D is a solid game. It's easy to introduce friends to. It's got enough good mechanics to interest tactics-focused players, but is simple enough not to lose role-players or casual slayers, so everyone has fun. And it does its particular brand of pulp fantasy really, really well.
However, it falls apart when you try to do something it's not made to do. I've successfully run a heist game in D&D, but they were still basically re-themed dungeons, and while the trappings made it feel like a heist, Blades in the Dark would've been a better choice. Other themes, like horror or no-combat, are just strictly worse with the D&D ruleset. It annoys me that D&D fans fail to recognize other games, because they're often really well designed. (Honestly I hate D&D "culture" in general: the pretentious CR wannabes and horny bard memesters make me cringe hard.)
Oh, and I'm tired of the false dichotomy between combat and roleplay. Of my two groups (one at college, one over summers), one is way more into the roleplay: we've told stories that feel to me like watching a movie! But that same group is more into tough combat, with dice rolled in front of the screen, monsters hitting downed characters, etc. The other group is more neutral on both fronts.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
There's really no reason as DM you can't make combat last longer.
You already suggested raising HP of enemies, you can always add more. (Adding higher AC or saving throws on enemies could prolong combat too, but I'd suggest inflating HP before those as it's kind of less fun for players to just make their abilities and attacks work less often to prolong combat.)
You can add more enemies. Or build encounters that have multiple phases. Such as having enemy reinforcements show up mid battle after a few enemies are mowed down, so that you're not running too many enemy creatures at once. Or have multi phase encounters. There's a homebrew encounter I got on patreon for example, Chaos at the Coral Court: Shark Queen's Lair. It was a really fun three phase encounter. All in the same place, same initiative roll, but progressing from one phase to the next as the players cleared the enemies. It's a one shot I look back to a lot for inspiration on making my own homebrew boss fights more interesting and dynamic.
Personally, I tend to prefer most encounters only last 3-4 rounds unless it's a big climactic boss fight or large scale event like a city siege or something that should feel more epic. But if you feel like the fights you're running are too short, you absolutely have the tools as a DM to make them longer.
D&D is to me what World of Warcraft is to MMOs: it's not my favourite but it's the one I'm most familiar with, likely to find people for, and the one I would prefer teaching people how to play. I would much rather play Pathfinder, Vampire: The Masquerade, and I'd like to dabble with my Buffyverse RPG books or Dark Conspiracy, but they don't have the brand recognition and their respective Starter Sets in Waterstones. And however much I love those, I would still one day just prefer to come to D&D Beyond, create a character without agonising over the sheet, have them fully functional and fleshed out in minutes, and get into a game.
Zero is the most important number in D&D: Session Zero sets the boundaries and the tone; Rule Zero dictates the Dungeon Master (DM) is the final arbiter; and Zero D&D is better than Bad D&D.
"Let us speak plainly now, and in earnest, for words mean little without the weight of conviction."
- The Assemblage of Houses, World of Warcraft
So I spent 20 years not playing DND because the view of it was as a dungeon crawl monster fight then buy stuff game. To my friends and I who where used to role playing Vampire (including live action roleplay), and playing the roll and keep systems like L5R and seventh sea, it seemed dull and boring.
I got into 5th edition because a friend was running it and enjoyed it, the D20 system is working me of the weaker RPG system mechanically, it is far to block and white in terms of success and failure but I get round that by setting sliding scale DCs rather then a hard fail pass. It is a lot less brutal then other systems, L5R for instance can genuinely force a player to commit ritual suicide for a roleplay faux pas, Vampire at low levels can see characters killed very easily just to prove a point, or because you stupidly travel in the day.
Mage is probably my favorite game in terms of magic in that you can make anything happen, my fav ever character in all systems is still my technocracy necromancies mage who was able to raise the dead by claiming his company owned nanotech that allowed the reanimating of dying and dead humans.
But by far the best system of them all is paranoia, it hands down beats any other roleplay system for sheer immersion, when you have a roleplay game that causes people in real life to send pictures between sessions of other players holding a banana or writing with a blue pen, when you have a game that can get 16 hours of madness and fun out of the simple act of delivering a pizza I think you have the perfect gaming system. Would I run a long term campaign, probably not, but it is amazing how immersed you can get as a group when you are forced to fill out a bathroom break request form just to go to the toilet in real life.
I'm totally with you on how quality RP and combat action are by no means mutually exclusive. My opinion is that good roleplaying and storytelling makes the combat feel like the stakes are higher, and the results of the fights affect how you go forward with the story.
I'll also say something about "pretentious CR wannabes and horny bard memesters." Yes, they're both annoying as heck, and they're also usually either very inexperienced players or actual idiots. CR is a very entertaining show because the people in that game are very good roleplayers and I sometimes shudder to think about how much time Mercer actually spends preparing for games. The upsides to that is that it is very entertaining and brings a lot of good attention to the game/hobby (I'm pretty sure that sales of D&D products went up quite significantly at the time CR was becoming popular). The downside is that not all of the people who are inspired by it to take up D&D are nearly as intelligent and creative as they think they are. You get idiot memesters with any and every hobby and subculture, it's an unavoidable symptom of the internet existing. Also, the Dunning Kruger effect applies to these types; CR (and quite a few similar streams/podcasts) is done by talented people who take it seriously and make it look easy so viewers of low intelligence and/or creativity immediately think "I can do that with no effort at all! Watch me pull a funny character out of my butt! Derp-a-derp memey-meme I'm gonna $&%# a dragon!"
If someone is new and inexperienced, the best thing to do is help them get comfortable and learn how the game works so they avoid (or recover from) falling down that idiot hole. Start with making sure they understand that all those memes, like all of meme culture, are either based on hyperbole or making fun of stupid people doing stupid things and should not be taken as examples to follow in an actual game. If they're just idiots, then don't play with them. Either boot them from your game or leave it yourself and find one that better fits you.
To me, any gaming system is a means to an end. You want to get together with friends to socialize and oh by the way maybe play a game. At least that's my experience (and I'm OLD so I remember way back!). That being said, some systems do some things better than others.
GURPS is a great system IMHO because it blends many things well. There are only a few stats so it's simple in that regard. You can buy skills even at a half-point level so you can represent everything from the weekend warrior who knows a little something to the Ph.D. who may have written the book on the subject at hand. The combat is also more realistic than many IMHO because even an experienced character can be killed outright by a bullet to the head.
The Hero System does the superhero thing REALLY well. You can literally duplicate ANY power you can read about or see in the movies if you try hard enough. However, it's not very good at the low-level spy type of stuff. We used it for a fantasy game though and it worked just fine so YMMV.
D&D is what I consider a good 'all-access' RPG. You can play lite and just run a bog-standard Fighter or Rogue and still have fun. Or you can deconstruct your backstory, build what you consider to be a perfect character, and have a blast if that's your thing. My biggest complaint is that scaling it can be hard on the DM. Example: I hate the Short Rest/Long Rest mechanic. The idea that you can go from death's door to fully healed overnight is stupid to me. But most people play it that way and if you want to change it then it could wind up changing the whole dynamic og your game and not for the better. IMHO D&D puts a LOT on the DM and I think that's why many players are too intimidated to DM their own games.
Role-Master isn't bad mechanically except that it's TOO mechanical. There is (or there used to be) a chart for every single weapon in the game. So a party with 5 different weapons means 5 different charts to look up during combat. No thanks.