Well, thankfully I included examples other than magic.

However, I do think trying too hard on “martials should be like real life” easily leads to harsher limitations for them. It’s not always intentional. But when someone says “I want to leap 15 feet over the chasm” some people get all “you can’t do that! I can barely jump five feet and I’m athletic (they’re not)” and you have a whole digression where someone looks up human records and then argues about if 16 strength is really Olympic class and what about all your equipment and blah blah blah.

It’s much rarer for that kind of argument to come up with wizard types, in my experience.

Clearer rules up front help, though I feel like half of DND players have never read the rules.

“it seems silly that you can just go around the corner and suddenly you’re hidden. They know you’re there”

This was rebutted with “they know I’m somewhere over there, but not exactly where or when I’m going to pop out. I’m a 7th level rogue, I’m sure I have tricks you and I can’t even think of”.

Sometimes people get like selectively simulationist. They’ll ignore most of the game’s gamey bits (inventory management, hit points and recovery, magic) but some things throw them off. Usually things that are closer to lived reality. For example, someone having no problem with a wizard hypnotizing an entire room, but balking at a fighter climbing a tall fence.

There was also: “It seems like a lot of damage…”

“I’m pretty sure rogue is balanced around doing sneak attack almost every round. The fighter gets multiple attacks, but I don’t. Almost every other class gets a resource to burn like spell points or ki points or superiority dice. I have nothing. All I do is sneak attack. Without it, I’m a particularly accurate peasant that can run away real good. And I still miss about a quarter of the time, which means my whole turn accomplishes nothing”

I wonder if the DMG or something published expected damage per round or per encounter somewhere.

I had a dm once say he was thinking about saying no about my rogue’s “I shoot, move, bonus action hide around the corner” loop. But then he said he realized if he said no, my character would suck and it’d be no fun.

I think that was the right call.

I skimmed over the srd ( https://www.daggerheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Daggerheart-SRD-9-09-25.pdf ) and it doesn’t look like a terrible system but I don’t think it’s for me. Class and level, tables, different shaped dice. Meh. Still too close to DND for me.

This seems a little more detailed than I usually go with.

I’m happy cribbing from Fate. Every NPC has a high concept (eg: royal assassin, gig worker delivery man) and Trouble (eg: drinking problem, haunted by well meaning but overbearing grandfather)

If they need more flesh, they can pick up more aspects or goals.

Sometimes I go to a meetup that does one-shots. They’re a pretty good group.

Most of my friends either aren’t interested, or aren’t interested enough to actually show up. It’s easier to make friends with people who want to play RPGs than get your friends to play. The worst outcome is when your friends are kind of people-pleasers, and they say yes to the game even though they don’t really want to. Then they half-ass it or flake, and the friendship suffers.

People’s inability to grapple with cognitive dissonance, and how people often go with “I’m a good person making good choices” instead of the more difficult path of changing, is part of why everything is so horrible.

But of course, she shrugged it off and said she did not care.

Getting people to care is strangely hard. I think it’s because accepting some of the things we want people to care about means grappling with how the world is unfair and fucked up, and people are emotionally just not ready for that. People are stupid cowards.

I feel like there should be circumstances where if you’re accused of something and found innocent, you need to be made whole. Maybe that’s a huge payout. Maybe you get all your stuff back.

If the police bring you in for questioning because you were riding your bike, and you’re shown innocent, they should pay out like $500/hour to you.

Yes! I usually take any opportunity to gush about Fate but I restrained myself here

The main weakness of Fate is you need more engaged players. Stuff like DND can mostly hum along with passive players, but Fate falls really flat if people aren’t engaging with it.

On player training, I like systems where you can bribe players to let bad things happen.

Like in vampire: the requiem, a player can always turn a regular failure into a Dramatic Failure, and get a little XP. This meant the players went from “oh no the cave is probably full of monsters let’s take forever stressing” to “I ROLLED GARBAGE CAN I JUST BARGE IN LIKE A CONFIDENT IDIOT FOR MY DRAMATIC FAILURE?”

Tastes vary, but I found it made a more interesting and snappier game.

In my imagination, some sort of referral/voucher system might work. A invites B, B invites C. C turns out to suck. Ban C, discredit B heavily and discredit A lightly. Enough discredit and you get banned or can’t invite more people.

Scheduling, mostly. The classic big bad of DND.

I always wanted to get one of my lawyer friends to play a devil in a DND game I ran. Just have him write the worst contracts for the players that are more air tight than I can come up with.

Did a one shot in high school where to cast any spell you had to sing a relevant line from an extant song.

I don’t remember everyone’s picks, but one player pulled out a pretty enthusiastic Beatles’ “got to admit it’s getting better, getting better all the time” for a heal.

120 feet seems pretty far. I guess you could shout, awkwardly.

There might be meetups near you doing games. There’s one here in NYC that’s very friendly I’ve been to.

I assume the person who made the video did more than just read the cited papers, but added some of their own analysis and commentary on top. Like, for any paper that cites sources you cannot get the its meaning merely by reading the cited sources. That’s absurd.

Presumably you thought the video’s content was worthwhile, because you linked it instead of the papers directly (which aren’t even about DND).

Video is a shitty medium for many use cases, but is popular because it is monetized more, and many people are only semi-literate.

I don’t know who or what SciShow is. i guess it’s good they linked their sources that’s not really the contention.

I also am really tired of whole ass videos that could be a three paragraph blog post.