In one of my old groups, I’d usually verify the player and I understood each other , and they understood the likely consequences. Like, “You can shoot her, but remember this is her club, with her friends , and she’s a vampire so she probably won’t die. But if you want to roll, it’s at -4 from her Celerity you’ve seen her use.”

One player was always like “you never let me do anything!”

I was like you can do it, but I don’t want you to be surprised and mad if there are consequences.

Another player, by contrast, would listen to me clarify what was likely to happen, and be like “cool bro let’s do it.”. We still talk about the time his character jumped out a 20 story window to save his friend’s girlfriend. Great player. Took a lot of damage, as warned, but lived.

Yeah, I mostly play Fate or nWoD. But a lot of people are really emotionally invested in D&D, so sometimes I think of ways to try to trick them into playing something different while they think they’re still playing D&D.

I bet some obsessive nerd has converted DND to point buy (like wod, gurps, etc) instead of class and level based.

You get XP for stuff, and you can spend that as you like on all the stuff you’d get from leveling. Follow the recommended route and get a standard looking fighter. Or go crazy and buy nothing but hit dice. Or make a glass cannon by buying all the sneak attack dice and second attack (in case you miss) and nothing else.

Or, per this meme, buy superiority dice and maneuvers, and then also buy extended crit from champion.

It would be a mess. I think part of why dnd is popular is its comparably small decision space. There’s just not a lot of room to fuck up your character

This is pretty good advice. I’ve sort of stumbled into it a few times.

Sometimes I’d be like “ok so here’s the room. Blah blah blah details. What’re you doing?”

Andy will be like “I’m gonna check out that detail”

I’ll get like “cool. You all see Andy head over to that detail. Good?” And sort of pause there for a beat to see if anyone wants to interrupt or preempt.

I think the linked article is a generally better method as it’s more complete, but I think mine is a little faster. Especially if you have a couple passive players.

I made a rogue bird-guy (aarakroka?) that built for strength. I really wanted to pick someone up with grapple and fly them off a cliff, but i never pulled it off.

Oh I’ve seen this joke before, slightly better, but now I don’t know which was the original.

It was like

Bard: I cast vicious mockery

Dm: cool. What do you say to him?

Bard: “You’re none of your best friends’ best friend”

Dm: …

Other players: …

Bard: So do I roll damage or…?

Dm: No… No, he’s dead.

One of the bars by me has a DND group in the back.

There’s a “community center” also near me that lets people hang out in the basement, and there are rpg groups that meet there

dangit i was going to make the same pun. well done.

My old pandemic D&D group was the best. They cared about everything. But I remember specifically one time they arrived at a large party. I was describing the scene- large tables set with food, small groups of people mingling, and off in the corner you see a man talking to a woman, her back is against the wall and he’s got his arm on the wall so he’s kind of trapping her there. She looks uncomfortable.

The players all beelined to those two to rescue the NPC from the guy. Oh, Pretty Paul. They hated him so much. Such a good villain. (Started as a riff on Handsome Jack, and it worked so well. One of the players wrote a song about how much they hated Paul)

Order of the Stick is so good, and has such surprising emotional depth for a stick figure comic about D&D.

Just be aware that the updates are intermittent.

I remember once my players spent like 15 minutes discussing how to get across a 10 foot long puddle of water in a cave.

Eventually I had to remind them that 10’ isn’t that far, and you can RAW jump your strength score in feet with a running start. They didn’t need to build a bridge or cut into the walls. They could also just go into the water, but I understand not wanting to submerge yourself in cave water when you don’t know what’s down there.

I think they said because she was a mutant, the clone lab won’t work on her. All the other party members are humans.

But like she’s a mutant the whole time, and it only comes up when she plot-dies.

(This is from memory, so I might be wrong.)

It’s a good game if you like old timey jrpgs. The dungeons are full on mazes.

Phantasy Star 2 has a named NPC die and it has a weird excuse why you can’t revive her at the clone labs, even though you could just fine up to that point.

Also when everyone else was like “omg no character has died in an RPG before” youth me was sitting there like “is phantasy star a joke to you?”

As the title says, moderation is key. If the game is just “whatever is the most convincing right now” then I’m going to be annoyed that I sat down to play D&D/fate/gurps/whatever, and we’re mostly playing improv. It’s important to set expectations in or before session 0.

If I was looking to join a game, and the GM was like “We’re all about the rule of cool”, I’d probably ask for some examples. If it’s like “we let the [D&D 5e] wizard cast as many spell as he wants” then I’m not joining, because that’s going to fuck up the game balance. On the other hand if it’s like “we don’t really care about carry weight unless it’s extreme”, that’s fine.

Stuff in the middle, like “one time we let them use create water in the bad guy’s lungs to drown him!” can go either way, but I’m usually not a fan. Mostly if I ask myself “if this works, why doesn’t the whole setting revolve around it?” and don’t have a good answer, I won’t enjoy it. Like, if everyone could do lethal damage with a cantrip, or if the “peasant railgun” worked like the joke, or “we let the real life chemical engineer make napalm and mustard gas as a 1st level rogue for massive damage”, then that probably isn’t for me.

yeah, it really depends on the group. Some people love learning new stuff. Some people are like absolutely phobic of it.

Though I have a half-serious hypothesis: Some players are so bad at rules, the kind of player that asks every week “what do I roll to attack again?”, that you could just change the system without telling them and they wouldn’t notice and do any worse.

Though that’s less true for systems that require creative player buy-in like Fate. D&D in the “I move and attack” mode can be phoned in easier, I think.

I do find it puzzling when people homebrew and tinker and modify D&D 5e to fix all the things they don’t like, but they don’t want to just change to another system. It’s mostly harmless, at least.

I think I would take a different route, because big randomness isn’t fun for me.

Have you played Fate? It’s very good, and free. It has “stress” that’s kind of like hit points, but it also has this idea of “consequences”. When you take a hit but don’t have enough free stress to cover it, you can take a consequence instead. Stress is easy to recover, but a consequence sticks around until you get treatment.

As I said, I don’t really like big randomness. In Fate, it’s always up to the player if they want to take a consequence or not. Sometimes the alternative is the character just gets taken out. But if you do take a consequence , it’s up to the table to negotiate what it might be. Fall off a ledge? Could be a broken leg. Got stabbed? Could be an infection. Bothered by a ghost? Now you have a fear of the dark.

To port this over to DND , I’d add three “consequences” boxes on the sheet- minor , moderate, and severe. Each one could be used to soak one hit. The minor one could be 25% of their hp, the moderate 50%, and the severe 75%. When you take a hit that’s less than the box, you can mark the box instead of it going to hp. Probably tweak the numbers a bit since I just made those up. If you want to be even harsher, lower the max HP some, too.

This probably would be a mess, but I started typing it out and don’t want to just throw it away.

But I do recommend looking at how other systems do stuff for ideas, and stealing them

Also make sure your players are into whatever ideas you’re pitching.

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.

I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.

The didn’t listen when the GM talked about Theme and mood and end up with a character who doesn’t fit with the party/canpaign

Hah, for a second I thought this was my own post because I wrote something very similar here. But yes, this is one that bugs me.