I work at a multinational mega Corp, but not one you’ve probably heard of. I am very disengaged.

For one thing, I’m technically a “contractor”. I have to go to all the meetings, but I don’t technically work for them. They give me the legal minimum of paid time off, but only after I looked up what my rights are and fought them for it. They don’t pay for holidays. They say “have a nice Thanksgiving” and then dock me two days pay.

The pay is insulting. I’m making less than I made ten years ago.

There’s no technical leadership. These people are supposed to be doing python. They don’t know what unit tests are. They barely know how imports work. Trying to change everything is a months long battle and emotion massaging exercise. The people in charge don’t understand or care.

They do love AI though. Lots of AI generated code. They don’t understand it but it looks so slick. Vomit.

So fuck them. I used to go out of my way to fix problems and promote good practices. Not anymore. I hope the upper management and owners suffer.

They’re probably not even renewing contractors past the end of the year anyway.

I’m not sure what you mean about limiting party composition.

Oh I missed this earlier.

So one solution to the pain caused by the adventuring day is to let players rest more often. But some classes get way more powerful after a long rest than others, so that’s a problem. A party of {fighter monk wizard} that gets a long rest after every fight is going to have a superstar wizard. One solution to that is only let the party consist of classes on the same rest cadence. Wizard, cleric, paladin, ranger are all long rest based. Fighter, rogue, monk, warlock are short rest.

This causes tension even in a base line game. It’s very common for wizard players to whine about wanting a rest even when the rest of the party is good to go. You might say that’s their fault for not rationing their powers, but I’d say it’s their fault for playing a resource management game when they wanted to play a wizard game.

Removing the adventuring day and corresponding “you need to rest to recover resources” is really difficult in DND. But people want to remove it, even if not consciously, because it sucks unless you’re aiming for a narrow range of game modes.

Back in like 2016 I got a game of vampire going. I pitched it to two non-ttrpg friends as “what if you’re vampires but the head vampire in the city is basically Donald Trump…”. 100% player retention.

Game ran for like two years. Lots of blood. We still talk about how the highlights.

I got a mod where your wife survives and you can find her early on. It was pretty sweet.

Failure has to be the player’s fault.

I was going to say “they have to have low random factors” but I realized that’s the same thing. Dying to a random crit in a souls-like would be infuriating

✨ brand awareness ✨

I also want to point out the main reason I stick to using DnD and ttrpgs that are very similar (e.g. pathfinder) as a framework is it lets your group get right into the game instead of spending a lot of time getting used to an unfamiliar system.

That does have some value, but sunk cost is not always a great justification. Also, a lot of systems are way easier to learn than DND. I think people think it’s going to be as hard as memorizing all the DND jank - stat to bonus mappings, attack bonus by level, spell slots, a hundred different unique spells - but many systems aren’t like that. (Quick, can you Sacred Flame and object? Smite with a thrown spear?)

I’ve been playing Vampire and the guy that’s only played DND before has had no trouble picking up the rules. Fate is maybe easier, though more creatively demanding. Lot of tyranny of the blank page potential there.

It would be something like the player asking the goons to move, the goons saying no, the player asking why, the goons giving some answer, the player rolling insight and then deciding a follow up question, probably ending with a persuasion or intimidation check with a DC dependent on how well the rest of the discussion went, with the possibility for other shenanigans to influence as well (like maybe the party mage used minor illusion to fake a badge to pretend to be cops).

That’s how DND would typically play it out, but some things worth noting.

One, where armor class, saves, and HP are very codified, the DC for persuasion or intimidation is very loosey-goosey in DND.

Fate, by contrast, has a stress track (like hit points) for physical and mental harm. So when your character pulls a knife and says “I’m gonna cut your fingers off one at a time and make you eat them”, and you roll, there’s mechanical oomph to it. You roll +7, and they’re either out of the scene of suffering a consequence. DND is just DM whims.

I honestly don’t think something like “social HP” would be better than RP and shenanigans, but idk, I would be curious to try.

I like how Fate does it. You’re not limited so much by your personal ability to act and the GM’s mode. You roll high on Provoke and it mechanically hits.

Oh, another subsystem from Fate I’d recommend importing: Concede. Solves all those “omg I wiped the party” problems.

I think the issue with combat oriented spells is you have spells at each level that do “vaguely this level’s worth of damage” for every damage type so you get a nice progression curve.

This is almost certainly a root cause. I think you could build a neat system where you don’t have two dozen variations of “do damage” spells, but you rather have rules for how much damage and other effects can go into a spell slot. Which is kind of how Mage works, actually.

But then casters would be having all sorts of fun and fighters would be left out again. Which, come to think of it, is a common problem in DND.

Also I’m not sure what you have against exploration and movement type spells because those are very useful in an intrigue heavy campaign.

Nothing against them. I just meant the majority of spells are combat.

Anyway, DnD does have a lot of combat mechanics, but it has plenty of non-combat mechanics too. The combat is more regimented and structured, but I don’t see that as a weakness, just the difference between combat and intrigue.

And sometimes that’s fine. But it’s not the only way for a game to be. If your game has little physical conflict and a lot of social conflict, DND is probably the wrong engine. Be like wearing a winter jacket on a summer beach trip.

Anyway. Like I said this is one of my bugbears so I can go on. Thanks for reading

However, rolling a D20 is a lot of fun, which makes me not want to replace it with something like 3d6.

Fun is subjective, but I personally really enjoy rolling a big dice pool. 4 fire firearms, 3 for dex, 2 for equipment bonus, 4 for the fate blessing, 4 for the gun being magically perfected, 3 for aiming, that’s approximately Get Fucked dice to throw on the table.

it has a lot of assumptions deeply baked into the rules. You need the adventuring day, to rewrite all the powers, or sharply limit party composition, or it falls apart.

The adventuring day is a big one. TBH I’ve never seen a ttrpg without it.

Any whitewolf rpg. Fate. Gurps. Don’t rest your head. Unknown armies. Countless indie RPGs. Many games that aren’t close relatives of D&D don’t have a central model of “you have a limited amount of resources to get through the day”.

I recently started a game of Vampire: The Requiem. One of the guys had only played D&D before, and it kind of blew his mind that he can just do his iconic stuff whenever he wants. He was going to punch a bouncer and we were like “Why don’t you just use your mesmerize?”, and he was like “I forgot I don’t have to save that”

There are massive amounts of fan content for DnD out there and easy to find, if you don’t want to write your own. There are whole ttrpgs that are practically modded DnD but tweaked for a specific setting.

You can also use an actual generic system like Fate or GURPS. Both of those have a ton of fan content as well. This is not a unique strength of D&D.

Hard disagree on social conflict. DnD is full of mechanics for that.

Please share. From what I recall, the system is limited to something like “Roll persuasion vs a DC, and that determines how big of a favor they’ll do for you”, or similar for intimidation.

Imagine a scenario where the players encounter a group of goons blocking the road. If they want to get in a fight, D&D has a ton of rules. Movement, to-hit and damage, armor, saves. If they want to talk through it, the rules are comparably thread-bare. There’s no social HP.

Other systems give you more. I’m pretty sure a lot of PbtA games have social moves. There’s also Monster Hearts, which I never played because you need a particular kind of group for that one.

Side note: because of how D&D’s stats work, you end up with a lot of characters are mechanically bad at socializing, or underperform at their prescribed roles. You have to work against the system to get some concepts. The whole idea of “multiple ability dependent” is a D&D-ism that’s just not in every system. If you want to play a wise cracking dashing axe-man in Fate, for example, you can just do that. You don’t need to worry about how you can get both strength and charisma, nor about if you can just reflavor Hexblade because you don’t really want the rest of Warlock.

Meta game currency is something DMs usually add in from my experience, although DnD does have inspiration points as a kinda weak form. Succeed at a cost is something I usually see DMs add in, but I have seen other ttrpgs with that more baked into the rules.

Inspiration is kind of store-brand fate points, yes. You can easily add more to it, as well as bring succeed-at-a-cost into D&D. But the argument is more about how D&D provides little.

You pick from a list. If you want to play a game about creating your own spells, it’s going to provide little guidance. Yeah that’s fair. If you have an example of a game with a good “make your own spells” system I’m curious.

Mage: The Awakening (2e) is the crunchy one that I know. The book provides a ton of examples, but even those are flexible. You add or lose dice based on adjusting the spell details, and potentially create a pool of fuck-up dice in exchange for more dramatic changes.

Unknown Armies is an old classic that has “random magick” as a thing any duke can pull off.

Fate is a generic system, so it really depends on which splatbook you’re using, or what your table decides on. One game I ran had a “choose one: slow, dangerous, expensive” model for magic. The player can’t picking “dangerous” and things got really exciting.

Also, most of the spells are about combat, with a handful about movement. Hard, hard disagree there. Off the top of my head: prestidigitation, minor illusion, friends, zone of truth, tiny hut, message, command, good berry, that one that lets you ask god a question…

I was curious so I’m looking at a spell list on a dnd wiki. A majority of spells are for combat, followed by spells that also have exploration uses (eg: fly, alarm), and then there’s everything else. But you can’t deny that a large chunk of the spells are explicitly about doing damage, or helping you do damage.

I spent too long on this post. Hopefully it was worth it! “People should play more RPGs, even if just to steal stuff to port into D&D” is one of my bugbears.

The mechanics aren’t especially “nice”. It has a lot of legacy jank (15 strength is what bonus?). 1d20+stuff vs target produces a flat probability, which is problematic.

it has a lot of assumptions deeply baked into the rules. You need the adventuring day, to rewrite all the powers, or sharply limit party composition, or it falls apart.

It’s missing or has anemic offerings for whole subsystems - social conflict, meta game currency, succeed at a cost.

Character progression is very coarse. level up and a bunch of stuff happens at once. You can’t make a character that has a shit load of sneak attack without also getting a bunch of HP and other rogue stuff.

The magic system is brittle and poorly defined. There’s not really an expectation or system for players to make their own spells. You pick from a list. If you want to play a game about creating your own spells, it’s going to provide little guidance. Also, most of the spells are about combat, with a handful about movement.

You can change rules, but after a certain point you’re playing something unrecognizable as DND.

Most ttrpgs I’ve seen don’t play all that differently from DnD

Play more games. Even a basic traditional game like Vampire is a mind opener. No adventuring day. No levels. Social conflict. No attrition and resource management. These have a big impact on the experience.

Good. I’m sick of this “oh you’re not an employee we just treat you like one” nonsense.

The place I work abuses “contractors” like that. Full time responsibility, but less pay and no benefits.

This is a hard hitting point. We could have a better world, but a few rich people and their enablers don’t want it.

I haven’t heard of it being banned. Source and details?

I really don’t understand how so many people are unwilling to be mildly uncomfortable

One of my friends won’t get off Twitter “because that’s where the good memes are”. I’m like ma’am you can live on slightly stale memes.

It just takes one industrious plumber.

I don’t especially want to live in a world full of stochastic terror, but if we’re going to have some I’d prefer billionaires were on the receiving end sometimes.

billionaire could pay off someone’s $500,000 mortgage, their $30,000 car, pay off $50,000, give them $100,000 in cash and forget about it the next day

They could, but they won’t, and that’s part of the problem.

If billionaires walked around clearing people’s mortgages and paying for everyone’s dinner, they’d be less hated. They’d still be a problem, but they could buy popularity.

But they don’t. Because they’re assholes.

Maybe this will scare some of them into changing the behavior. Maybe it will get some of them killed.

You all remember that “you are Jeff bezos” game, I hope: https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos

Middle managers like to set targets and goals because it counts towards their bonus, and it looks less like they’ve got their dick in their hand when the boss comes calling.

It’s the same problem all over. Capitalism. You have people who don’t do work keeping the benefits from the work.

Most people aren’t going to give themselves stupid or useless metrics. Software people aren’t going to impose “tokens used” or “lines of code” metrics on themselves. They know those are stupid.

. The net result is that everyone has learned very quickly to praise executives on their visionary AI prowess, or they will be gunned down in the proverbial streets.

Once again, the people making the decisions are idiots.

Labor should keep the profits of its work. The owners just sit around and make bad decisions. Fuck them. They’d be lucky to walk away, if there was justice in this world.

This shouldn’t be allowed. We need to stop letting corporations consolidate.

That aside, I don’t think I’ve ever used either of these. I used to use seamless for restaurant delivery, but not so much anymore. Shit’s too expensive.

It’s a big multiplier on incompetence. It lets someone who’s kind of bad at their job produce a lot more bad than they could before.