I’ve made a habit of saying “Look, [city] was a powderkeg ready to go off before we even got there.” It’s come up in multiple campaigns.

Personally, I also like genericizing D&D.

It’s a shorthand for folks outside or new to the hobby, it skips a hurdle to talk to people about other RPGs with those people, and it weakens the brand identity. Considering how much D&D has coasted on brand identity as the game suffered, I’m all for that.

I’m less likely to do it places like here, because it causes more confusion, but still. It’s fun to say, “Pathfinder is a great way to play D&D.” :P

I’m super excited to give Barkeep on the Borderlands a go! :D

Also, this paragraph stuck out to me:

Before we take a look at Barkeep, I want to drop a few quick examples to demonstrate how tone can be affected by writing, mechanics, art, etc. I firmly believe that the tone communicated by an RPG author is inteded to be replicated by the GM. So while you could run Blades in the Dark as a sexy dating game, I don’t think that would properly reflect the game’s tone.

I absolutely agree. Burning Wheel has stuck with me for a decade and a half, even though I haven’t played it yet, because it’s the first time I opened a game with a clear authorial voice, and it was explicitly explaining to you not just how, but why the rules work the way they do.

Obviously that’s an extremely explicit example, but it’s also something that clicked for me with the -Borg games. The ratio of style to substance greatly favors style. That’s not to knock the substance, but the games are light and, to be honest, pretty standard for a new-school renaissance type game. It’s not that the rule book is also, separately, an art book. It’s that, when the rule book is an art book, then the acts of bringing it to the table and opening it up to reference the rules become acts that set and reinforce a tone. It made me realize that all games do this, even if it’s sometimes unsuccessful, or negligible.

Heck, to go back to Burning Wheel, I love the digest-sized hardcover with matte pages, because it looks and feels like a novel, and I think the game intends to create that style of play. I might join a Fabula Ultima game, and that rulebook looks and feels like a manga, which had to be intentional. It works.

So I really jive with what the author says about how RPGs should communicate their intentions, especially tone in an adventure like this. Obviously any GM will put their own spin on the performance, but hey, if they’re laughing and having fun just reading through potential encounters, that’s the vibe the GM is going to cultivate in turn. :)

/u/DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca is right on the money. Mana paces the game, so anything that can break that is super good. In an otherwise even matchup, if one player has a Lotus while the other doesn’t, that can easily make the game. It’s not going to win the game in and of itself, but it’s a huge enabler to play the thing that will win you the game, before your opponent can reasonably do anything about it.

On top of that, it’s literally good in all decks. It’s been banned in every format besides Vintage, where it’s restricted to one (and not including casual/fan formats). It had to be banned partly for power reasons, but also because it makes deck-building less diverse. There’s no deck that wouldn’t want a Lotus if it could have one, much less four.

It’s also part of the Reserved List. After WotC overprinted cards, they essentially promised not to reprint certain ones. I think it’s a dumb decision, but they’ve annoyingly stuck to it (and players are worse off for it). Black Lotus is on that list. And it was alreadly limited in printings, because it was a rare card, and a bit of a design mistake.

It’s also simply an iconic card. Despite being a design mistake, it’s a major part of Magic history, and gets referenced all the time. To some extent, it’s famous for being famous. That makes it the biggest prize for collectors.

So, all this together, it has an incredibly high demand, a very limited supply, and no indication of a reprint anytime soon.

So I printed off a proxy at a professional card printer for 30¢. :)

“If you’d rather play D&D, are you willing to DM while I recharge?”

In my group, yes. :| We actually have plenty of players willing to run games.

That said, they’re also willing to try out new games, so it all works out just fine. :)

I’d really like to give Monster of the Week a try! I really enjoyed when The Adventure Zone ran it.

Haha, thanks. I just meant that sentence at first blush, I know it’s a reasonable position after that. :P

I’m not sure I’d like it, because I “got” Blades in the Dark, but realized it wasn’t for me. It does what it does well, but my group and I didn’t like so much the “one session, one job” paradigm, and it seemed too abstract at times. I read a comment that said narrative games are like writing with the other players, and it seemed to click. I might just not like that kind of approach, as a matter of personal preference.

But I might like DW2 more, as it incorporates more of a traditional style. That and, to be honest, I might love Blades and other FitD games with some light tweaking. I need to explore!

Unfortunately, I can’t speak from experience at the table, so it’s just that my impression of BW’s mechanics seems more optimistic. That said, we can agree on the BITs, because the Artha cycle is the star of the show. I don’t know if they’re going to incorporate elements of that into DW2e, but it might just be a great direction to go.

Dungeon World was a big flop for us… and I’m excited about the next edition. :P

I think it flopped largely because we were playing it wrong. I know that sounds stupid, and you usually hear that from people making excuses when people don’t like their favorite game. What I mean is that we tried to play it like D&D, and while it’s clearly trying to bridge the gap between PbtA games and D&D-type games, you have to approach it a bit differently, which we didn’t. Maybe I still won’t like it, but I want to reevaluate it on its own terms.

I’m also a big fan of Burning Wheel productions. Burning Wheel is my favorite game I’ve never played, just because there are so many things I find interesting about the system, and I love the presentation. (Still trying to get a group together, though!) If DW2e takes the form of a chunky, digest-sized hardcover, I’d be thrilled.

I think part of it is that meme discussions are just a great place to actually talk shop about D&D.

Back on reddit, the vast majority of D&D subs were flooded with fan art and very little discussion. There were DM subs, but those obviously left out players. I loved /r/rpg, but that place was also a refuge for people who don’t want to talk about D&D and only D&D all the dang time. (And even if I’m mostly over D&D, I still like D&D in theory, if not always in practice). So… that kind of left /r/dndmemes as, unexpectedly, one of the few places to get in-depth discussion about all kinds of RPGs and experiences from around the table.

Oof. I wouldn’t like that at all. I’m already bothered with how many player powers just shut off certain parts of the game. Also putting it on the monster side seems like it will make the game an arms race of things not mattering.

Oh yeah. The campaign already had a lot of comedy in it (the whole cast are improvisers), and the one-off was extra silly, but there was also a log of nostalgia and genuine joy.

Somewhat off-topic:

I really enjoyed the NeoScum podcast, which is a Shadowrun actual play, but they also had a one-off side-quest in the digital world of Neopets. So I’ve kind of seen a Neopets RPG in practice, before this bespoke system. :P

It’s definitely something that’s a part of newer D&D, though it’s debatable when it started. It was inarguably a part of 4th edition, I think it was here by 3rd edition, and there’s even a case to be made that 2e was headed in that direction with some of the supplements.

Anyway, your dad was right. :P During 2e, that was still a big part of the game. It’s part of the differentiation between “old school” and “new school” D&D. Whatever I think of any particular edition, I think both approaches are rad for different reasons. :)

It’s just the mismatch of expectations that would be a problem. It sucks to die because you were expecting another epic set piece battle, and it also sucks to try to come up with a clever solution to avoid an encounter just to end up not doing much or getting railroaded.

Yeah, we had a near-TPK with our group recently. The rogue picked a lock and opened a door, which triggered a comical amount of explosives. We dealt with the consequences, but it was frustrating because it just kind of came out of nowhere. It didn’t seem to be that kind of campaign, y’know? Nothing remotely like it happened in months of play up to that point.

…so I was kind of reading my own experiences into this. :P

Alright, gotcha. Just taking it as a launch point for discussing the game.

Plus apparently situations like this happened in CR recently, so I thought it was about these kinds of situations in general.

Just to get it out of the way, I don’t watch CR, so I don’t know if this is a specific reference, and am just speaking about D&D in general. :)

Kind of inevitable with most D&D games. If you design adventures around having a series of more-or-less balanced encounters, almost always combat, where player characters are expected to be stressed but not generally killed the vast majority of the time… both the players and their characters are going to have the expectation that they can just do that.

So you need to manage those expectations. Make it clear up front, and either run the game so that death is a real threat more of the time, or find other ways to make it crystal clear when it is.

(Or just don’t make things lethal and find other consequences for failure. Or whatever you’d like, my point is just to get folks on the same page.)

It’s really the crux of a lot of issues with D&D, from table problems to game problems to publisher problems.

And as a player who wants to do that too, I keep in mind that the DM is also playing the game and wants to have a good time.

As someone who got burnt out on D&D, all these updates just seem like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

“I want actual DM support, a commitment to better supplements, a working CR system, faster combat with more interesting choices, a clear creative direction…”

“How about balance tweaks to the player classes?”

Ugh. Pass. I’ll just try out Pathfinder 2e next time I’m in the mood for running this style of game.