Sometimes I feel like I want to play a game that I’d run, but then I realize that’s the cliche “Go write a book”

When I encounter a GM who has like pages of lore, I’m always like “Would you rather write a book?”

Stuff like this can be very good, but be aware there are some players who hate this. Some people just want to be told a story, and if you ask them to be too creative they’ll have a bad time. Sometimes it’s because they’re new and nervous, but sometimes that’s just how they are.

Also some players just routinely have difficult ideas that don’t mesh with the group. Like everyone else is vibing on a serious dark modern day vampire political game, and they’re like “I want to be a ninja turtle from Mars with a reanimated dead fish for a head”. Like, what. Maybe some people enjoy “zany” off-theme stuff. Not me.

Or the player that always wants to be themselves. Or an amnesiac.

Gosh I’ve had so many players I didn’t enjoy.

Anyway. Player input is also built nicely into Fate, both in campaign creation and scenes. I’m a fan. Spend a fate point and declare a story detail like “every Razer Space Technology office has a helipad with a chopper ready to go. It’s because the CEO is weirdly hands on and loves helicopters.”

Surely there’s a couple people still working there.

Yes. And no one’s going to do anything about it.

Most people are too lazy and thoughtless to stop using it .

The engineers that work there certainly aren’t going to stage a coup.

And no one’s going to just do violence to Musk.

A fantasy game years ago. The players learned there was a famine in the country, and the king was taxing almost all the food from everyone. Every month more food was taken, and the people were starving. There were rumors of people turning to dark arts, and demonic incursions, as well

So the players knocked some heads and eventually forced their way into the castle. They were ready to throw down with the evil king that was starving everyone to feed himself lavish feasts.

They discovered that the kingdom had drawn the attention of a large gluttony demon, and the king was feeding it all the food in order to keep it sated enough it wouldn’t eat the people. No one among his people were powerful enough to banish the thing, and the demon told them if they told anyone the truth the deal was off.

Luckily, one of the player characters was pretty good at dealing with demons. After some tense “wait is he lying? This GM loves having NPCs just lie to us” they decided to trust the king, and had a big ass “everything is on fire and the wall are melting” fight with the demon.

Good times.

My hypothesis is that a lot of people are emotionally invested in DND, and if you say bad things about it then it feels like you’re saying bad things about them. Saying it didn’t happen or it was the players fault let’s them still feel good about DND.

We’re all susceptible to this.

For some reason DND fans seem less likely to just go “yeah it’s kind of garbage but I like it”

Ah, yeah. During combat there’s the related “if you can’t decide what you’re doing in a minute, you dodge and we go to the next person” rule you can bring out.

There’s a wide range between tpk and something interesting happening.

Like, the players are dicking around and can’t decide how to ask the bartender if they can have access to the secret occult library in the basement. Just really spinning their wheels and being total PCs. Fine. Timer runs out. Their rival shows up, doesn’t acknowledge them, says something quietly to the bartender and is being lead to the basement.

I often do “I am starting a timer. When it goes off, something interesting will happen”

If the players are still fucking around, then the fire bears show up (or whatever).

I have a somewhat bad memory of playing DND as like a 13 year old. We were a mess. There was a cliff, a waterfall, and rope. Someone tied rope around himself and wanted to go down. There was a lot of cross talk and the guy with the rope around said he was going down.

The DM was like “no one is holding the other end of the rope”

“What?”

One by one they went through what everyone else had said they were doing. Searching the cave rocks for secrets. Keeping watch at entrance. Fighting over who got the magic stick. Etc.

Player went over the cliff.

It was decided that the character would wash up downstream with 0 HP and would live, so long as we could get to him in a reasonable time. Lessons were learned, sort of.

I have very fond memories of a pandemic DND game where the players were making their way through a large puzzle sort of encounter. The confusion, the despair, the panic - so good. And the rising mood when they started to figure it out! And the triumph when they escaped! It was fantastic. One of the players said afterwards “I’ve never been so stressed before” and I was like “that is the greatest compliment you could give me”

I miss that group. Alas, when the pandemic wound down they all returned to real life interests. We’ll never know what the gnome depot was up to in their corporate office, now.

Still seems like this could just be a setting book for Fate.

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

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.