Has anyone actually played this module? I ask because I want to know if it has better design then: Open door -> solve combat encounter or puzzle -> open next door.

So who is the CEO of lemmy and when will they step down?

Staying because someone else wants to is a reason to stay though. Assumedly your character cares about them and all that jazz.

I am done arguing this. If you like to play in groups that infight constantly then good for you. Just clear up in session zero what is and isn’t acceptable.

However, I have not met many people who like that playstyle, hence my advice.

Literally stay in spite of your character not needing or wanting to? Sure you can do it, but what is the logic to it? Why would that happen?

I just find it a lot more helpful advice to go the other route, because it will for sure leads to less friction. The more you can find reasons to be into what the game is about at any given time, the more engaged you will be with the game itself, because your character is.

You can outwardly not want to be there, but you have to have a meta reason to stay anyway and be over the top miserable.

What you can’t do is actually have on reason to stay, cuz then why are you staying?

The secret to having a good time in a game is to make a character that wants to be there and will be okay interfacing with other people on some level. It’s not hard, yet many people don’t find this out for years.

If it has broke in the headline it’s clickbait, no matter the product. I fucking hate it.

“Also, thousands of gold worth of ink and reagents. Basically you have to be old money rich to be a wizard, or appropriate a bunch of riches from dudes who own way too large basements.”

I really hope that, within my lifetime, the CIA, FBI and any other state spy apparatus will be correctly seen as the evil, irredeemable orgs they are.

I don’t put much stock into generic gaming aids.

The worst single product for it is the 5E DM guide, because it has next to no useful information in it.

I think for digital gamin,g it has to be foundry. If there is a module for your game of choice, then it’s just better then Roll20. The Fabula Ultima module is pretty great.

Roll 20 is a honorable mention because the bar of entry to it is so damn low. It is a pile of jank though.

My graphics tablet is also a great too, I sometimes just sketch things for my group in real time. The same thing can be done with a whiteboard in your gaming room for physical games.

I don’t see the issue. Just make your own, it’s way more fun.

Time to break the displays I guess.

Ira Gamagori hours in this game

No worries, I am just opinionated about D&D ;)

So you decide that before the game starts? Weird.

The type of person that gets deep into TTRPG systems for their rules design will eventually want to apply what they learned (or think they learned) towards making a system themselves. Like with any skill, you want to flex it once you acquired it.

I am so done with D&D discussions. It’s a 10 year old system at this point and the new version won’t be meaningfully different. Heck, a lot of it’s systems are actually as old as it and it fucking shows.

Play different games. There is an almost unlimited number of them out there. If you stop talking about D&D, if you stop giving it this singular attention, you will feel better and,who know,s the authors of D&D might be forced to actually make something good, as opposed to focus testing subclasses like pasta sauce flavors.

I disagree that the system is simple. It’s dead easy. Which is why it is unacceptable and frankly terrible that it plays so badly.

And no I will not let you say ‘oh a good DM will just fix it’ because that’s true for any game. Just going off of the examples BitD gives for when you are supposed to roll makes it clear that they did not consider how their own damn game plays:

This is how they define a Controlled roll, aka the least risky roll you can make: “You have a golden opportunity. You’re exploiting a dominant advantage. You’re set up for success.” This is how thy define a Risky roll: “You go head to head. You’re acting under duress. You’re taking a chance.”

The phrasing of ‘you go head to head’ under risky means that any time I am rolling against an NPC, it’s a risky roll. By their own definitions, controlled rolls almost never happen. They state this again saying that your default roll is risk,y because if there is no risk, why roll? That’s fair enough as a guideline and I agree with the statement in principle, but the fact remains that you’re one failure away from a desperate roll in any situation where dice come up. That’s bad.

Since you need a 6 to succeed without issues, if you have 3 dice, that’s a 42% chance to actually get a 6 on one of them. Not great for what amounts to a great stat for a starting character.

I could trawl for more examples but I’d rather not read this book again.

As for me: I have played CoC, yes, though my TTRPG background is in Shadowrun, Feng Shui, Vampire, Mage and D&D mostly. But no, BitD is not comparable to COC is my opinion, because in CoC I can make a character that can almost always succeed in the things I deem important for the character. Sure they will be a bit of a lump otherwise, but since there is nothing keeping you from having 80+% in your main skills, when it’s your time to shine, you can more or less depend on that working out. And sure once the eldritch horrors come out you may die, but so much of a CoC session is sleuthing around, finding clues and unraveling mysteries at a slow pace…I have trouble imagining your average BitD session would feel similar. maybe on one of the guild types I didn’t play, but with the default of a thieves guild, I don’t see how it would.

I guess what it boils down to for me is that at no point did I feel I was playing a competent character in BitD. Any roll, even in your supposed expertise, was a crapshoot. I played a Lurk and tried to play to their strengths and it just didn’t work at all, which felt like bad luck because I didn’t think the DM was piling on unnecessary rolls.

Well, the main issue stems from pure success being unlikely to attain because most rolls will not be for ‘sure things’. Your combined chance to fail a roll outright or succeed at a cost is far far higher then succeeding a check, so when I played it, we entered a failure cascade pretty fast whenever we had to roll to do something.

Like, in any situation, you only succeed without issue if you roll a 6 in your die pool. Typically, that pool is between 2 and 4 dice, so your chance to roll a 6 is, at lest, okay. And if you don’t get that 6, you either have to escalate the situation or suffer complications, or you just fail, if you only have 1-3s on your dice. It’s just…I dunno.

edit wasn’t done typing: If you had more dice, this system would probably work, but each class is only good at very few things, so as soon as you are out of your characters comfort zone, you are in such high risk of failure that it’s just not very fun. When I played it (one time), it felt like a comedy of errors and not like a bunch of hardened criminals doing a heist.

Hell yes! Striking that ice-cold iron!