D&D and Pathfinder are like Baseball and Softball, maybe. But going from D&D to Fate or PbtA is like changing to football or fencing. It’s very different. Trying to get someone who’s playing Baseball to take up soccer is tricky. D&D is baseball. Pathfinder is softball. Easier transition.
This is very often a thing people believe! Especially if the other system they’re looking at is like Pathfinder (similarly complex) or some close D&D relatives that have a different set of arbitrary numbers. Like, in this game a 15 strength is +3! We have 50 feats with similar names but different behaviors! They might not even realize that not every game has six stats, or long lists of “feats”, or anything even like “feats”. And a lot of games (most of them?) don’t have weird tables and mappings.
Like if you’re playing Fate Core, and you want to burgle, you just your burgle score. One number.
But I think a lot of the time when people present that kind of resistance, it’s coming from an emotional place. Telling them facts isn’t going to do much. They might feel embarrassed about not being good at the new game. They might feel bad about spending $80 on the D&D books and unusual dice when the new game has a free book and just uses d6. That kind of stuff. Unfortunately, most people aren’t really introspective enough to surface those feelings quickly and accurately. (I include myself in “most people” there, sadly.)
I had a guy in an old group that once with full sincerity said “The best thing about D&D is we can just try out different house rules, and if we don’t like them we can change something out.” Like, my guy, that’s not a unique property of D&D. If anything, D&D is harder to homebrew because it has oddly specific rules and assumptions.
I haven’t played Pathfinder 2e but my understanding is it had a lot more choices at the turn level and character build level. that’s good if you want that, but I think for a lot of people the shallowness of 5e is a plus. There are other games that would also be a good fit if you’re not looking for deep tactics or builds, though.
Some people never really learned DND either, but kind of get carried along by the group. I feel like you could switch out systems on those people and they wouldn’t do any worse.
But I get it. Some people are more casual. Some people have executive dysfunction. My current strategy is to find people who want to play what I want to play, and it’s working okay. Still makes me a little sad that DND is so mega popular, but okay.
I think it’s an error to treat “I play DND” the same as “I play RPGs”. It’s like “I play baseball” vs “I play sports”.
There are too many reasons to succinctly list why people might be sticking to DND.
In my experience, you’ll have better luck finding players who want to play something else rather than trying to convert DND players.
Well, I wasn’t having much fun with DND.
There are degrees of fun.
A lot of my games sort of take place in the same universe, even when they’re different systems or settings.
Like an old DND campaign had the players visit a wizard university, where they met many NPCs. One of them was Reg. He’s kind of a chill party dude. Loves playing wizard pong (it’s like ping pong, but with mage hands)
My current game is a 2050s corporate dystopia using Fate. Heavy inspiration from World of Darkness and Shadowrun.
And Reg is here. He fully believes he used to go to wizard school, but something happened and now he’s here. He’s pretty chill about it, though. Last game, a werewolf was going berserk and Reg was like “Dude. Fucking metal.” The werewolf gave him a knock-on-your-ass high five and Reg lived.
My characters often end up exasperated by how idiotic and chaotic the other characters players are. That checks out.
“So the walls started bleeding, a thousand voices cried out in pain, and a sinkhole into the unseen depths opened in the kitchen.”
“Right.”
“And you, a normal human with no magical powers or special equipment, you jumped into the sinkhole.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It was there!”
“And then your character died, as one would expect from a hundred foot drop onto stone. And now?”
“I don’t understand. What else was I supposed to do??”
I started a game of Fate this year and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s less crunchy and tactical than D&D most of the time, but it handles social conflict and losing conflicts much better. And does other stuff I like.
I tried to get my old D&D group to play other games but it didn’t go super well. In retrospect, there were game agnostic reasons why I didn’t really gel with that group, so it’s for the best I left. But I think converting people who only really play D&D and close relatives to something else is hard.
There’s a lot of stuff I don’t think I like from PF2e*, but from everything I’ve seen and read it seems like a better designed game.
*I haven’t actually played it. I really burned out on 3.x, and my impression of PF1e was it’s 3.75, so that was a non-starter. Spells-per-day, 1d20+stuff, vertical power growth + high opportunity costs, are the main things off the top of my head I don’t like from this part of the subgenre and I think pf2e holds onto.
The rights everyone should have is irrelevant to the reality. You can’t steal a sandwich and be like “everyone should have the right to food!”. I mean you can, but you’ll still be punished.
Is this the hill for this kid to die on? Probably not. If they were trying to change the system for everyone to be more just, maybe.
You’re going to get in trouble and it’s not worth it.
Don’t do personal stuff on their network. What are you even trying to look at via the school network?
If you’re concerned about privacy while doing school stuff, use another device, or maybe a VM. Do they provide computers for students?
You might get off with a warning because you’re young (I assume you’re like 16), but bypassing network security stuff as an adult at work will often get you fired.
Very cool that you put this together and got it out there. Most people’s pet projects never evolve past half a page of scribbled lines.
I don’t think it’s quite to my taste- I’ve been in a Fate mood lately- but I hope this finds an audience.
I think it’s like “you had to be there” tier jokes. Once you get far enough away from the shared framework and experience, things are less funny and relatable.
Like, if you post a funny story about your soccer game where the goalie shot the ball out of the air with their nerf cannon, that’s cool but like what? That’s not how soccer typically works.
If you like this idea, you should read the webcomic The Order of the Stick. It’s surprisingly good for a comic that started out as DND jokes and stick figures. It deals a lot with the problem of evil in DND.
I’ve been playing Fate and haven’t missed anything about DND. But Fate is pretty rules light
Yeah, they’re both very bland.
For remove curse, there’s an easy bandaid fix: Remove curse must be upcast to remove stronger effects. Sure, you can break the ring of power’s hold over the knight, if you cast remove curse at 9th level. Otherwise, you have to follow the plot.
The plot route should be like all cursed items have a custom way of removing them. The sword of betrayal can be removed if you return it to the original owner’s crypt. The stones of drowning can be broken if you bury them in the desert under a new moon. The ring of power can be destroyed if you throw it into the volcano where it was forged.
For counterspell, well… Make it an extended check with some options on each exchange. You both declare in secret if you’re putting more spell slots or hp into the check, or folding. If you fold, the other person gets their way, but any extra resources they committed are wasted. If neither folds, you roll with bonuses based on what resources you put in. More spell slots or HP or hit dice give you some sort of bonus.
Probably get rid of counterspell as a spell on its own and just make this a thing you can do. Give wizards some more tactical depth. If you use the same spell you get a bonus to countering. If it’s the same school, bonus.
Like all of D&D 5e, there’s so much you could do that the game just doesn’t.
Best change I made for games was having a fixed schedule. I used to do a “when can everyone meet next?” but it was a disaster of people not responding or actually showing up when they said they would.
Now we just play every Thursday. Quorum is two players*. Anyone who can’t make it, tough.
*Turns out Fate works fine with two players. DND would probably be harder.
I don’t think I understand this meme template. Also am I going blind or is the text kind of small and blurry?
Do people still make fantasy heartbreakers? That’s where someone’s only really played D&D sets out to make their own game. It’s full of passion and enthusiasm, but it kind of sucks because it doesn’t stray far from D&D. So you get a “creative new breakthrough” that’s like “our six stats go from 1-10” instead of, like, “We realized we don’t need stats like that at all”
Sounds a lot like aspects from Fate.
Fate still has numbers, but you could probably hack them off without too much trouble. I don’t know if “the troll is fantastic brawler and you’re a good swordsman” is especially better, but it’s an option