I don’t hate 5e, in fact I’d join in as a player very happily, but I wouldn’t run it. 5e is geared towards a very specific kind of campaign that I’m not very interested in running.
I’m more of a social campaign with big action sequences kind of DM and Savage Worlds does that perfectly. It is:
- Classless
- 3 actions per turn, going over 1 heightens the chance you’ll fail on all actions. Players tend to spend less time thinking.
- Step die instead of d20, easy math.
- Extremely easy to make homebrew for.
- Generic, which means it can do any genre (I’ve done dark fantasy western and high fantasy medieval, next up I’ll do dark fantasy cyberpunk hopefully).
I tried to turn 5e into something that fit a cyberpunk setting for about 3 months, before just buying SWADE and being able to run every genre I could imagine from the go.
Because to some people, liking a thing that they do not like is the equivalent of slapping them in the face.
I personally prefer Warhammer Fantasy (either 2e or 4e), I think it contrasts to DnD like Dark Souls to Diablo. Armor is damage reduction instead of damage avoidance, everyone has access to a number of combat maneuvers, magic is limited and dangerous, every combat is dangerous and healing is limited.
I played that a few times. I love the early game lethality and gritty realism. I’ve heard Mörk Borg (sp?) is carrying that torch nowadays, have been meaning to try it.
I’m not seeing any mention of it, but I think a lot of people might be interested in Break! - it’s specifically aiming to make a game that has the vibes of an “adventure of the week” system, where you learn of an ancient ruin, gear up, venture through the wilderness, explore a crumbling tomb for loot, then get back in time for dinner and an ale. - Basically I’m saying that the game is specifically designed to try and tell the kind of stories that DnD is designed for.
Where break differs from DnD is in it’s approach to mechanics. Downtime, journeying, exploring an adventure site, and fighting are all their own small, light subsystems of rules, so there’s clear guidelines for how to run each of them, and they’re largely aimed at highlighting the cruical and interesting moments for each of those activities, while quickly glossing past the faff and monotony of what lies between.
I’ve lost track of the number of DnD campaigns I’ve played where the DM didn’t really have a clear framework for what to do on a long journey, and resorted to just tossing a couple of random encounter fights in because it “felt necessary”, but they never felt like they advanced the story or contributed anything interesting to the game.
It’s also a game you can recruit random NPCs and the like to join you and follow you around, and when they run out of HP you check to see if you remembered to give them a name. The world knows that characters who have their own names are important to the story, and characters who are just “that random bandit mook who surrendered and we brought them along” are not. If the character doesn’t have a name when they hit 0hp, they die on the spot.
Oh, and fights take 10 minutes, rather than 2 hours - so you can have one in the middle of a session without it becoming the whole session. Yum.
Stop replacing TTRPG by DnD and I would be fine 😜
It’s hard to extoll the virtues of my chosen system (Pathfinder2e) without comparing it to the issues of where I find 5e lacking.
That said, what I love about 2e is the great encounter balance, almost every single “build” for a class is viable, and when you say “I’m playing a rogue” there are like 4 major types of rogues that all feel like they play differently instead of just some tacked on homebrew class. Adding free archetype rules (supported by the system creators themselves in their books) adds even more customizability.
One of my favorite things is that PF2e makes it feel like it makes encounter design fun again; martials actually have more options than just walk up and attack repeatedly, spacing matters, defenses matter. Most classes have some sort of gimmick that makes them play differently. Been working with my girlfriend to make a swashbuckler for the game I am DMing, and the panache/bravado/finisher mechanics really excite us from a roleplay and gameplay standpoint.
The three action system is way more flexible than the action/bonus action system. You can spend all 3 actions on a huge spell and burn your entire turn. You can move away from enemies to force them to burn an action or flank them to gain bonuses to attack for yourself and allies. You can apply debuffs using your main stats with actions like Demoralize, and still attack or move on your turn.
You constantly gain feats, and they are what defines your character so much. No longer do you get a “choice” of an ASI or feat. You get ones every level. There are ancestry tests from your race, class feats, skill feats, archetype feats. They don’t just make you stronger, they instead give you more possible actions, give you unique traits, like being able to fight while climbing or use deception to detect when someone is lying instead of perception.
Also, you can find every rule for free online @ Archives of Nethys. No more being gated by purchases outside of adventure paths.
I could keep going, and I really want to extoll how awesome Golarion is, and the pantheon of gods, and everything. But I will stop here. Would happily answer anyone’s questions about the system, I love it. It gave me true passion for tabletop RPGs while DnD5e made me feel really mildly about it.
Okay but as long as we are complaining about shit we see on RPG forums
“I wish I could do
$thingin DnD”“
$otherSystemhas a very cool subsystem for$thing”“Omg how dare you”
Had this conversation enough times to make it a pet peeve of mine
Anyway the only thing about 5e that does suck is Wizards of the Coast. Otherwise it’s fine. It’s just fine. You can have fun with it.
I’m more of a Pathfinder 2e guy tho.
(And pf2 is basically a more advanced take on what 5e was doing so…)
5e needs a better way to balance encounters than Challenge Rating. It also has important rules for players in the DM book. Both of which are problems you can work around.
Yeah, it’s basically fine. It got a lot of new people interested in RPGs (and Critical Role certainly helped, too). If they’re all now looking for other systems to play, that’s fine, too.
Anyway the only thing about 5e that does suck is Wizards of the Coast.
The race/class system, the leveling mechanics, the Vancian Magic mechanics, and the general need to get into conflicts in order to progress the story / advance your characters has been a thorn in the side of the entire d20 universe from day one.
5e stripped out a lot of the math (which is good for bringing in new players but bad because actually having lots of gritty math in a game can be part of the fun of designing and playing) and smoothed the edges off 3.5e. But 4e also did this arguably too aggressively, giving us a game that was so bland and so generic that people flocked to alternatives for a good five years.
WotC is a mixed bag of old school TTRPG nerds and corporate suits that have somehow managed to keep the game cheap and fun while heavily investing in promotion. As enshittification goes, it could have been a lot worse. They’re a meaningful improvement over TSR, which is a low fucking bar. Lots to dislike, but nothing I can point to that I wouldn’t find in another system easily enough.
I’m more of a Pathfinder 2e guy tho.
IMHO, the math on PF2e is bad. They stripped out a lot of the more interesting abilities and features of 1e to make the game simpler. But, as a result, writing encounters is a balancing act between “trivially easy” and “functionally impossible”. Like, why even use the d20 if you’re going to build a game this way? Just make it an entirely points-based resource management game, with High Fantasy color.
I’d rather run up against the Big Red Dragon and have my DM say “You swing with all your might, but the beast barely notices” than to get handed a d20 while the DM laughs up his sleeve.
Those are all just
Like
Your opinion
Man
(Whereas wotc being a terrible company that mistreats its players is straight up fact)
I would say that the main thing that “sucks” about DnD is that DnD has often been portrayed as appealing to the kind of nerdy rules-lawyers that like to argue “hey, the rules say (x) so I can do (ridiculous thing)” and end up in a big argument with their DM about what the rules do and do not say. A lot of my groups have been like this, and it’s okay for a game to cater towards that specific playstyle.
I’m not trying to make a value judgement whether this is a good or a bad way to play a game. It’s also just one of many ways to play the game. You can (and given the stuff I talk about below, perhaps you should!) play it differently, but regardless it is quite a common table-style that the various holders of the DnD IP have encouraged throughout its history.
What is a problem is that this kind of playstyle can often be quite acrimonious, especially when combined with adversarial DM styles, and arguments can get rather heated and angry. I’ve heard many a tale of a group that split up over a rules argument that left everyone at the table too angry and frustrated to stick together as a group.
DnD 4e made huge strides to mitigating these problems by having a whole lot of very tightly defined keywords and language which could almost always be resolved into a solid, consistent, official ruling. You had to do a lot of work to learn exactly how the language was being used, but it was possible to get a table of six rules lawyers to sit down and develop a shared understanding of what the rules meant - and know there was a right answer to any specific question.
DnD 5e has taken huge strides to re-introducing the uncertainty in the system, by very loosely defining how things work, or not providing official answers at all, preferring to go with a “the DM will make a ruling” approach. This can be a nightmare for groups that like to have a defined, correct, answer to things.
Now of course, many alternate systems take this stance as a given “The rules are a set of loose guidelines, the GM will run the game and just make up a lot of the rules on the spot.” - and this has a lot of advantages. It makes it easier to write systems because you don’t have to be completely rigorous, and it leaves the GM with the freedom to run the game they want, and it encourages players to not get hung up on the details - all healthy…
But DnD is in the unique position of already having proven with 4e that it can nail down a rigorous set of principles and a style guide that leaves ambiguity behind, courting a whole section of RPG players who desire that, and then retreating from that position with a new, fuzzier, system document.
Why is this a “problem” for DnD specifically? Well… I find it’s extremely common on internet forums like this one for a person to say “I was in a game and (x) happened” and then immediately three different arguments spawn, running in separate directions, all founded on the premise that the poster is playing the game wrong or doesn’t understand the rules. It’s exhausting.
DnD has often been portrayed as appealing to the kind of nerdy rules-lawyers that like to argue
Not a totally unfair critique, but also not unique to D&D.
I’d say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules. So, for instance, “If I can’t move the big rock with a Strength check alone, can I get some ropes and set up a pulley system?” <throws a bunch of math at the table> “See? This should give me a 3x multiplier to my Strength, so I should be able to move it easily?” And the DM just looks at that, shakes his head, and replies “All that’ll do is give you Advantage (and if you move the rock you’ll derail my plot)”.
But more broadly, I’d say the problem with D&D is that it’s inevitably the same Medieval High Fantasy setting in one way or another. The format of the game is geared towards the classic Journey to Mordor, with challenges and story beats and pacing to match. It doesn’t play well with modern settings, because modern and futuristic technology tends to trivialize magic (especially under the Vancian system). It doesn’t play well with the Horror genre, because the game rewards “winning” rather than “survival”. It doesn’t play well with PC antagonists/betrayers as the class system puts you at a huge disadvantage when you’re not working as a team, so heel-turns and dramatic reveals can leave players with a sour taste in their mouths in a way a game more explicitly geared towards Finding The Traitor does not.
But DnD is in the unique position of already having proven with 4e that it can nail down a rigorous set of principles and a style guide that leaves ambiguity behind, courting a whole section of RPG players who desire that, and then retreating from that position with a new, fuzzier, system document.
As I understood it, 4e was an attempt to bridge the gap between the strategic tabletop genre and the D&D style of play. It was a kind-of Return To Chainmail, with this whole vision of the game really going back to these very grandious geographical set-pieces and large army combats, with the heroes playing as champions of great armies rather than rag-tag murder hobos. Very much inspired by Warhammer and Warcraft.
5e was more of a back-to-basics dungeon crawling game, keeping the streamlining of 4e but reintroducing a lot of the customization and flavor of 3e/2e/1e.
But they were still ultimately board games in practice. Positioning your models to flank or ambush or avoid a fireball remained a pivotal part of the game. Hell, the very act of flinging a fireball or swinging a sword to resolve a conflict was a fundamental cornerstone of the game.
Compare that to a game of Vampire or Call of Cthulhu, where a lot of the story is about investigating a conspiracy and surviving when you are surrounded by people who want to kill (and very likely eat) you, who you cannot trivially club to death in response. That’s the real bridge that you have to get people over. This idea that you’re not going into the spooky old house to simply loot it and bludgeon to death everything you find inside. The idea that you’re not playing in a world where Good Guys and Bad Guys are these equal-but-opposite forces clashing together along a territorial border. The idea that magic isn’t natural and meddling with these kinds of arcane forces comes at a terrible price.
Nevermind how the character sheets are all topsy turvy and new players - especially players coming from D&D - simply do not know how to build/play a character that isn’t geared to punch every problem directly in the face.
Why is this a “problem” for DnD specifically?
It’s a problem with any game that abstracts away reality in favor of dice and event tables, but still expects the players to Theater of the Mind their way through the abstractions.
This is all fine. I’m not arguing that this is a problem for ONLY DnD… It’s just that was the subject at hand, and it’s a problem with DnD.
I’d say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules.
This is an interesting point, but I would not say that the problem is with “certain players.”
DnD is heavily marketed and promoted as THE ttrpg. The default. The one for everyone. WotC talk about the game as being designed for an extremely broad pool of players, of many different styles. Players who want a more narrative experience, with less of a focus on rules are also a the target market for the system. If WotC say the game is for them, and the game doesn’t handle what they want from it, then the problem is either with the game design, or with the game’s promotion, marketing and reputation.
It’s interesting that my post was largely about how DnD 5e fails to cater towards people who want a strict set of rules for simulations, and your argument is about how DnD fails to cater towards people who want a loose set of rules that can be bent. I’m a firm believer that when you try to please everyone, you please nobody, and this is DnD’s biggest weakness as a system: If you have a strongly cohesive group of players who want a specific style, DnD will do an okay job at it, but there will always be a better system out there. It’s the ready meal you put in the microwave because it’s easy, not the specific gourmet restaurant that does that one dish you love perfectly.
DnD’s not really trying to cater towards any specific niche though - the design wants to appeal to the widest audience possible. By trying to cater to every style, it means you can pull together a group of players with a range of preferences, and put them in the same game. That’s a big part of why it’s got so much ubiquity after all. The logistics of setting up a group to play are rough for a lot of people, and just being able to put a game together is easier when your system promises fun to a wider range of players.
Basic Role-Playing (BRP), which is the system Call of Cthulhu is based on, is a great alternative to D&D as a roleplaying system. It is much easier to learn and understand, everything is based on percentages, and the system can be as mechanically crunchy or open as the DM prefers.
Runequest
No character classes: everyone can fight, everyone gets magic, everyone worships a god (with a few exceptions), and your character gets better at stuff they do or stuff they get training in. The closest there is to a character class is the choice of god your character worships (which dictates which Rune spells your character might have) but there is plenty of leeway to play very different worshippers of the same god.
No levels: your character gets better at stuff they do or stuff they get training in. As they progress in their god’s cult they also get access to more Rune spells.
Intuitive percentile ‘roll under’ system: an absolute newbie who’s never played any RPG before can look at their character sheet and understand how good their character is at their skills: “I only have 15% in Sneak, but a 90% Sword skill - reckon I’m going in swinging!'”
Hit locations: fights are very deadly and wounds matter, “Oh dear, my left leg’s come off!”
Passions and Runes: these help guide characterisation,and can also boost relevant skill rolls in a role-playing driven way, e.g invoking your Love Family passion to try and augment your shield skill while defending your mother from a marauding broo.
Meaningful religions: your character’s choice of deity and cult provides direction, flavour, and appropriate magic. Especially cool when characters get beefy enough to start engaging in heroquesting - part ceremonial ritual, part literal recreation of some story from the god time.
No alignment: your character’s behaviour can be modified by their passions, eg “Love family” or “Hate trolls”, and possibly by the requirements of whatever god you worship, but otherwise is yours to play as you see fit in the moment without wondering if you’re being sufficiently chaotic neutral.
Characters are embedded in their family, their culture, and the cult of the god they worship: the game encourages connections to home, kith, kin, and cult making them more meaningful in game and, in the process, giving additional background elements to take the edge off murder hoboism (though if that’s what the group really wants then that’s a path they can go down (see MGF, next)).
YGMV & MGF: Greg Stafford, who created Glorantha, the world in which Runequest is set, was fond of two sayings. The first is “Your Glorantha May Vary”. It is a fundamental expectation, upheld by Chaosium, that while they publish the ‘canonical’ version of Glorantha any and every GM has the right to mess with it for the games they run. Find the existence of feathered humanoids with the heads, bills, and webbed feet of ducks to be too ridiculous for your game table? Then excise them from the game with Greg’s blessing! The second is the only rule that trumps YGMV, and that is that the GM should always strive for “Maximum Game Fun”.
While we’re on the subject of Glorantha, the world of Glorantha! It’s large and complex and very well developed in some areas (notably Dragon Pass and Prax) but with plenty of space for a GM to insert their own creations. It is, without doubt, one of the contenders for best RPG setting of all time.
To continue on the subject of Glorantha, there is insanely deep and satisfying lore if you want to go full nerdgasm on it. But you can play and enjoy the game with a sliver-thin veneer of knowledge: “I’m playing a warrior who worships Humakt, the uncompromising god of honour and Death.” The RQ starter set contains everything you need to get a real taste for the game (ie minimal lore) and is great value for money since it’s what Chaosium hope will draw people in.
Ducks: ducks are cool and not to be under-estimated.
I just finished playing through a short Runequest campaign, and it’s certainly an interesting system and setting. It’s extremely “oldschool” in feel (probably stemming from the fact that it’s been around for forever.)
The big struggle with Runequest and Glorantha is that there’s just so MUCH of it, and a lot of the setting is rather dry. It’s a little like reading a history book, except you have to learn what everything means, because it’s a self-contained setting. I feel it appeals quite strongly to people who want a lot of “lore” and history in their game, and who want to really get into the weeds of what a political marrage between these two clan leaders means for future trade agreements and military alliances. People who like their fantasy stories to have an index in the back of character names with a pronunciation guide, and their family trees and stuff.
Like… the first hour of character creation was rolling through d20 tables that randomized the eventual fates of each PC’s grandparents through various wars and major historical events, so we could determine stuff like “is your family famous?” and “how much do you hate wolf pirates?”
Anyway, here’s my girl Tikaret, she’s a priestess of Issaries, and she discovered one of his lost aspects on a heroquest once.
Ducks: ducks are cool and not to be under-estimated.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I actually like D&D and much prefer it to every other family of games I’ve tried (WoD, GURPS, PbtA, etc). What i dont like is the current iteration of D&D, which is why my recommendations are:
Swords & Wizardry Complete: it’s OD&D with some of the rough edges sanded off and all the optional material added. Tons of classes, lots of tools for procedural world building, and very easily hackable. It’s simpler to teach to a new player, and its more flexible than 5e for experienced players. The tick-tock of the dungeon turn structure makes it easier to keep pace as a GM, and when in doubt, rolling x-in-6 always holds up. If you want a classic dungeon crawler, this is it.
Whitehack: Still D&D but more narrative. Skills are replaced with groups that can give advantages to tasks directly influenced by membership in that group. Magic is super flexible and everyone has access to some form of it, but the “magic user” class gets to just make up their own spells and pay some HP depending on effect size. Great rules for base building, good GM advice for making adventures that aren’t dungeon or wilderness crawls (but are structured like those things). The core mechanic minimizes table math so even your players who struggle with addition can play fast. Less deadly than actual old D&D but keeping the same vibe. It’s my favorite for those who prefer narrative to mechanics. In a lot of ways, it’s D&D rewritten for the way a lot of people actuslly play 5e.
Nope. You play what you want. I, however, will not play any game from a company that demonstrably dislikes its customers. So far, wizards of the Coast and games workshop are on my list. In the electronic space, EA, Microsoft, and Sony.
No D20 games is the rule I have lived by for decades now.
I’m of a similar, if slightly more relaxed opinion. I’m old enough to have played AD&D from the art-spined books (published before the yellow spines) and was a vocal supporter of TSR. I actually like the 3.5 ruleset, and I’m happy to play any of the indie projects based on the 3.5 SRD; SG-1 was a particular favorite of mine. Just don’t ask me to support WotC today either directly or indirectly, especially after this last attempt at a power grab.
When it come to more traditional RPGs, I really like Pathfinder 2E for the following reasons:
- It scales very well from level 1-20. The math just works
- Encounter design and balancing is easy for the busy GM
- All of the classes are good, there aren’t any trap classes
- Teamwork is highly encouraged through class and ability design
- Degrees of success/failure
- Easy, free access to the rules
- The ORC license
- https://pathbuilder2e.com/
- Pathfinder Society Organized play is very well done and well supported by Paizo
- Women wear reasonable armor
- The rune system for magic weapons/armor
- And so many more
- Encounter design and balancing is easy for the busy GM
- Teamwork is highly encouraged through class and ability design
ngl, you’re selling it.
Anything that improves combat is a win in my book. I’ve switched to Cyberpunk RED, and I’m discovering that good combat is hard to make in either system, but encouraging teamwork is a nice way to take a little load off the GM.
The bestiary is also really good (and free!). There are thousands of enemies, most of which have solid gimmicks that tell you straight from the stat block how you can best run the creature. And the they’re balanced to the same levels as players, so encounter power budgets are very intuitive.
The game gets a bit of a bad rap for having “nitpicky” rules, but people often seem to fail to recognize that the rules are spelling out how people already usually resolve things, rather than introducing something novel. It’s written in a very systematized way, and people aren’t used to reading about their intuitive experiences in systematized language.
The game’s broader community’s obsession with rules orthodoxy doesn’t help…
thousands of enemies, most of which have solid gimmicks that tell you straight from the stat block how you can best run the creature
That’s exactly what I want. I spent so much time looking at https://www.themonstersknow.com/ when DMing 5e. I like encounter design, but I feel like I had to work hard to make it passable, rather than work hard to make it excellent.
It’s with noting that the adventure paths and Paizo one-shots are also all very well-written (from the perspective of a novice GM). I’ve sat down with a group of 11yo kids after giving the adventure a 15-minute glance and been able to run a pretty decent session with next to no prep time.
I’ve also found that it’s really easy to convert D&D 3.x and PF1 modules to the system. Not so easy that thought and care doesn’t need to be put into it, but most creatures are based off of the 3e monsters, and there’s a similar philosophy of DC adjustments. So, you get both Paizo’s catalogue of well designed adventure books, as well as a massive back catalogue of classic favourites that you can dig out for a relatively modest effort.
That sounds great!
I ended up using a remix of the 5e Waterdeep: Dragonheist module because it really didn’t work for me. It would be a nice change to use a well-written module.
I’ve Cyberpunk RED’s Tales of the RED to be hit or miss. Some adventures are great, but many are meh.
If you’re looking to run a cyberpunk setting with Pathfinder, I’d recommend checking out Starfinder 2e. It’s currently wrapping up playtesting, and will be out in late July. It uses the core PF2 rules and is fully compatible with them, but a new set of classes, ancestorys and equipment for a science fantasy setting. If I ever run Shadowrun again I’ll probably use Starfinder as the rules.
Neat! Thanks for mentioning that.
For me it’s the 3 actions per turn. So much nicer to still have a turn even after I rolled an attacked and missed.
How did I forget to put that on my list? I love not worrying about action types and if I can do this action as this other kind of action. I just have to count to three.
Plus, I don’t know any other system that lets me pull my intestines out of my abdomen and use them like a lasso to climb a cliff when I forgot my rope at home.
The biggest “con” to PF2 is that it is decidedly not 5e, and people expecting it to work like 5e will have a bad time. AC generally hangs within 1 or 2 points for the entire party at a specific level, same for enemies. It is rarely a good idea to just walk up to the enemy and face tank them. Moving around is big for survivability. Synergy with other party members can be huge too. Sometimes that thing you can do doesn’t sound like a big buff or debuff, but if several party members are doing complementary buffs/debuffs it can turn the tide.
The synergy part is so huge. PF2 is very strongly based around making your party as awesome as possible instead of just making your character individually powerful, which I think trips up a lot of people coming from other systems or video games.
It definitely trips up people who usually just look at RPGBot to build their characters out from levels 1 - 20 before the first session. That’s how I made my build choices, and it was a pretty significant stumbling block for me when I made the switch.
The blue options aren’t always the best options, because the best options depend on what everyone else is doing.
OMG yes. I was trying to figure out how to say that but couldn’t put it into words, but you perfectly put together what I was thinking.
Plus, I don’t know any other system that lets me pull my intestines out of my abdomen and use them like a lasso to climb a cliff when I forgot my rope at home.
Nitpick: more narrative systems like Fate let you do this, but then you typically don’t get a lot of crunch. Plus it can vary if your group isn’t on the same wavelength about what’s cool and appropriate for the story.
I looked into playing briefly but it seemed more complicated and confusing than 5e which my players can already barely handle.
I think that the perceived complexity, particularly for people coming from 5e comes down to two issues.
There’s A Rule For That 5E leaves a lot of things to GM fiat, while in Pathfinder there is probably a specific rule. Now, the rule is going to be the same systemic rule that is used everywhere else and probably be the way you’d want to resolve it anyway, but there mere existence of the rule makes it seem like there is a lot of complexity.
Close, But Not Quite Because 5e and PF2 have a lot in common, players with a lot of 5e experience will assume that something works the same way as in 5e when it doesn’t. This can lead to gameplay feeling like walking in a field of rakes. I ran into this with a new player who had listened to a lot of 5e podcasts and picked up some 5e rules that they tried to use, like attacks of opportunity.
FWIW, I’ve been running a game with a group of new players, most of whom have never played an RPG before and they seem to be handling it fairly well. Well, once I talked with the person who listened to all of the 5e podcasts.
Exactly this.
The game’s rules are, mostly, simple, intuitive, consistent, and predictable. In fact, the rules very often seem to follow from the fiction presented at the table! Sometimes, they do it too well, even – I’ve seen people complain about Trip being Athletics vs Reflex rather than Acrobatics or Fortitude, but as someone who’s taken judo and karate lessons, Athletics vs Reflex is 100% right.
The rules follow the fiction at the table, and that means 9 times out of 10, if you know the fiction being presented, you can just ask for the roll that makes sense to you. No need to look anything up.
The game is also moderately systematized, and functional. That is, a lot of what 5e DMs would just treat as “roll skill against DC” is formalized into an “Action” with a concrete name. These actions act like mathematical or programming functions, in that they can take parameters. So, it’s not “Trip”, it’s “Trip (Athletics)”. If your character comes out of left field and does something acrobatic, or even magical, that I think would cause a creature to stumble and fall, then I will leverage “Trip (Acrobatics)” or “Trip (Arcana)”, which now makes it an Acrobatics or Arcana roll vs Reflex. This means “Trip (x)” is actually “Roll x vs Reflex. On a success, the target falls prone, on a… etc.”
Super flexible, and super intuitive. But formalized, and only presented with the default option, so it looks both complicated and rigid.
I started running the game for 8 year olds, though, and they picked it up very quickly. I do my best to run sessions totally in-fiction, but that honestly gets broken every other turn or so.
I’d argue it’s not more complex, just different. Once you play 3 action combat you’ll never want to go back.
People get intimidated by the depth of PF2e, but just remember that DnD5e/N is also a fairly complex system where you only reference specific rules when you need to, same as PF2e. The advantage is that PF2e is (in my opinion) more cohesive and better covers edge cases.
The downside of PF2 is if you try to engage with the core of the online community with this “rules for if I want/need them” attitude, someone will come out of the shadows to shank you.
There’s a rabid “by the rules, and all the rules” cohort within the community, and they are pretty effective at chasing new players away.
I’d argue DnD is no different and we only see it less because half the DnD player base is busy home brewing Pathfinder content into 5e
Fair. I definitely haven’t engaged with the 5e community to the same extent I have with the PF2 one. I never became a special interest to me the way Pathfinder has.
I’ve always felt the community was extremely kind and welcoming, personally. The publisher even goes out of their way to support and represent LGBTQ+ in their official worldbuilding.
There’s always going to be elitists in every hobby of course, they do exist in PF2e as well. But it’s not the majority by any stretch.
I don’t know. My experience with the community has been a lot of people yelling “You’re playing my fantasy XCOM board game wrong. You should probably play a rules-light game,” and no one stepping up to challenge them.
Hmmm, I’m very sorry to hear that, honestly. I’d say the average PF2e player takes it a bit more seriously than the average DnD5e/N player, but not a whole lot.
Perhaps it’s the part of the community you engaged with? Obviously every forum/chat server is going to have it’s own flavor. The older communities that started with PF1e and still focus there are going to be more elitist in general just because of how PF1e came to be and it’s target audience. But PF2e is much more widely targeted.
Discord isn’t free, private, or open source, but it does host several great PF2e communities I participate in if you’d like a recommendation. But if you are just sharing your personal experience and aren’t looking for a “solution”, that’s totally valid and I completely respect that.
Yeah, I’m mostly just… warning people to be prepared. The Paizo forums and the subreddit both house a significant number of people that actively chase people away for treating the game as a general purpose fantasy RPG. And as someone who champions PF2 as a really solid roleplaying game, and not just a tactical combat game, I’ve been repeatedly and harshly told I’m doing it wrong.
I haven’t seen a lot of that, but what I have seen comes down to organized play vs home games. The online community has a very strong organized play culture, which requires closely adhering to RAW and fairly strict guidelines for play in order to keep the ability to jump and character into any table of a random session. I’ve found that being clear about if this is a Society game or a home game helps to avoid those misunderstandings.
Any play podcast recs? Maybe listening to a few games will give me a better sense than just reading.
Mortals & Portals is very good. They made the decision to use PF2e like 2 weeks before they started recording, and learned the game on the fly. Sometimes they trip over the rules, but they also illustrate how to fail forward in that regard.
They also run it as a Theatre of the Mind game, which a lot of people will try to convince you isn’t really feasible. They fease it just fine, so I like it as an example.
Narrative Declaration also has several campaigns on YouTube. Rotgrind and Rotgoons are campaigns set in a gritty homebrew world. They had an aborted Abomination Vaults campaign that started off with the game’s beginner box. They’re currently running Rusthenge, which is a different beginner’s adventure. They also have a series of “teaching Pathfinder 2e to VTubers” campaigns, which… They’re good, but they’re just the beginner’s box over and over again, with different cartoon variety streamers. They use Foundry, and play gridded combat.
Hells Rebels on the Find the Path Presents feed. Hands down.
If you like a little more silly/lewd Glass Cannon campaign 2 is a lot of fun.
GURPS is my go-to system. It’s incredibly flexible, both in what it allows you to do as a player, and what kind of game you can run as a GM.
It’s an older system, and by default is rather simulationist - it grew out of the same tabletop wargaming that D&D did, and tends to take a more realistic approach to what players can do than more narrative systems. I like some of the more narrative systems as well - Starforged is my other go-to system - but the characters always feel a little more loosely defined to me. GURPS is perfectly happy saying “okay, you can fly, you can turn invisible, and you can’t be killed” - but if you want to make your character more nuanced, it’s not only possible, but encouraged!
On the other hand, if you just want to throw something together and go, you can do that too! One of my players has a character sheet that consists of their racial abilities, 5 or 6 regular skills, and a high level “Security!” wildcard skill. They’re a nightmare in combat, because “Security!” is their all-in-one skill with pistols and melee combat, along with anything else a person with a security background would be expected to know - it’s been rolled against to evaluate patrol schedules, reading a foe’s body language, and shadowing a mark, among other things. That character plays alongside someone with three different templates (classes), a mount, a bevy of different equipment options, and something like 55 different skills - because that player -wanted- that kind of detail. And they’re both very effective in their domains, and play off of each other well.
That’s the thing that really sticks out to me about GURPS - it’s very playable with a very minimal ruleset (GURPS Ultra-Lite is free, and 2 pages - http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/ultra-lite/), and can seamlessly expand when you want more detail. And not only are there a lot of options for that detail, they also show their work - so if you’re still missing something, you can generally still come up with reasonable rules. It just gets a reputation for being super complicated because the people who discover it tend to get excited and throw everything in…
Thank you for sparing me the rant I was inhaling to deliver.
The system is so good. You wanna run a political intrigue campaign? Great! Not only are there dozens of skills to navigate the nuances of that style, but there are multiple supplemental guides if you want to get real nitty gritty. You wanna run a hyper-tactical combat heavy campaign? Great! The combat can be extremely rich, with an entire book dedicated to Martial Arts.
You can run any setting you can think of: sci-fi, fantasy, modern, historical, cinematic, realistic. The mechanics are there. But the base system is so simple and modular, you can run it off an index card. I almost think of it less as an RPG than an RPG engine. You really can adapt it to any kind of game concept.
I used to play Cyberpunk with GURPS rules. It was great.
The Secret Service has traced your IP address and is converging on your location as we speak.
let me tell you about daggerheart!
having combed through a good portion of ttrpgs that have come out over the last 20 years, and having played a version of d&d since the 90s, i’ve found a system that does a lot of what i’ve been after in a system and i’m hoping that it’s popularity continues to grow.
things i like:
- new player friendly (either new to ttrpgs or new to this system particularly)
- heroic curve for player actions (2d12 > 1d20)
- narrative driven, but still tied to mechanics (in combat action doesn’t grind to a halt, which allows for a flow that i more appreciate.)
- degrees of success and failure (allowing for more gradient resolution to checks, which then allows for more opportunity for tension)
- hope & fear as mechanics (hope being used by players to boost what they do and fear being used by the gm to facilitate opposition. i like that there’s a tangible correlation between failure and the walls closing in.)
- the structure of monster and environment stat blocks (these work really well for me and it makes it easy to frame something with the mechanics with little effort).
- the emphasis on collaborative storytelling. (this is something i think either a lot of ttrpgs just don’t do, do a bad job at getting across, or gms/dms don’t take into account. i like being a fan of my players. i do not like the ‘me vs them’ mentality of running a game. this is the player’s story, i’m just furnishing it with extra layers and adding complications when things don’t go their way.)
if you like a heroic, narrative-driven fantasy system that makes combat less of a wargame, but doesn’t pull it’s punches, then i think this one is a good shout. i feel like it has enough rules to give players direction and enforce narrative choices, but removes some of the things i feel make other systems feel tedious or unrealistic.
other systems that i’ve eyed but haven’t had a chance to play yet:
- delta green (high on my list. horror/conspiracy setting that put regular folks up against lovecraftian horrors. not to solve or understand it, but to end it. it’s like call of cthulhu but you hate your job and you want to go home.)
- lancer (epic mecha building fantasy. make a big beautiful bot from a ridiculously large number of options over time and fight. super duper crunchy)
- the wildsea (post apocalyptic fantasy of sailing on the treetops of an overgrown world and dealing with what’s left behind after nature takes back the planet)
- mothership (aliens the ttrpg. shit goes down on spaceships. you will probably die in a spectacular way. it will be fun.)
most of these recommendations have come from quinns quest on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/@Quinns_Quest) and having followed quinns from board gaming to video gaming to ttrpgs, I feel like he does a great job of highlighting a lot of overlooked gems in this space. if not just to check out the possibilities that are afforded to you when you step outside the box of what has become popular, but to experience games that people put a lot of love into and it definitely shows in their work.
as a last point, i think it’s okay to be critical of things, even things that we enjoy. often times the things we like the most are the things we’re most critical of. i personally have watched d&d grow from ad&d to where it is now, and still play it. mostly because it’s popular and the people i play games with know it well. they’re the same people i’ve been making great strides with in terms of introducing new systems and showcasing all the neat stuff people have made. i’m not a fan of d&d anymore. mostly because i’ve grown tired of it, but also because of all the baggage that it has (wotc and hasbro being the biggest two). but i am a fan of tabletop gaming and getting together with friends to have fun. i think that’s the primary goal, so whatever you use to facilitate that is fine. just don’t close the door on criticism because you don’t want to hear anything negative about what makes you happy. open the door to new things.
lancer (epic mecha building fantasy. make a big beautiful bot from a ridiculously large number of options over time and fight. super duper crunchy)
Lancet is so much fun. It’s really about building super op mechs and the GM doing the excavation same thing to you.
The lore is amazing. NPHs, blink space, Ra, Horous, and more.
mothership (aliens the ttrpg. shit goes down on spaceships. you will probably die in a spectacular way. it will be fun.)
We had a total party kill within hour and half. So much fun. The GM was telling us the party before fucked up so bad, the planet had to get nuked.
The lack of initiative/spotlighting system in daggerheart is also chef’s kiss
I think part of the problem is that 5e is so pervasive and baked into the “people who play TTRPGs” population that you need to sell them on why 5e isn’t good before you can get them to consider why your alternative is good.
Frankly, I’m a White Wolf die-hard. I love Exalted. I love Werewolf. I love Mage. I tolerate Vampire. But as soon as I show someone a set of d10s and try to talk them out of the idea of “Leveling” they get scared and run back to the system they’re familiar with. I also have a special place in my heart for Rollmaster/Hackmaster/Palladium and the endless reams of % charts for every conceivable thing. And then there’s Mechwarrior… who doesn’t love DMing a game where each model on the board has to track it’s heat exhaust per round? But by god! The setting is so fucking cool! (Yes, I know about Lancer).
I will freely admit that these systems aren’t necessarily “better” than 5e (or the d20 super-system generally speaking). But they all have their own charms. The trick is that selling some fresh new face on that glorious story climax in which three different Traditions of Magi harmonize their foci and thereby metaphorically harmonize fundamental concepts of society is hard to do on its face. By contrast, complaining about the generic grind of a dice-rolling dungeon crawl is pretty straightforward and easy.
If you lead with “Thing you like is actually bad”, their immediate response will be to disagree with you and start defending the thing they like. And if you want someone to listen to your arguments, rather than just try to poke holes in them, you must avoid putting them on the defensive.
To get through to people, find common ground and build off that. “If you like FEATURE in GAME, you’ll probably love SIMILAR FEATURE in OTHER GAME because…” is something that’s actually going to get someone interested, rather than start a pointless argument :)
If you lead with “Thing you like is actually bad”
Why would you assume the critiques are of things they like? 5e has plenty of widely recognized flaws.
To get through to people, find common ground and build off that.
Often, simply catering to people’s priors means never leaving their comfort zone.
If they play a system, they probably like that system and find its shortcomings acceptable. You can’t convince someone that a system isn’t enjoyable when they have first-hand evidence to the contrary.
Asking people to stop being comfortable doing something they like, so that they can be uncomfortable doing something you like, isn’t a good value proposition.
Bingo. Especially when what they’ve done to trigger the comments telllimf them to “play something else” is ask how to extend the thing they already like, or to replace some subsystem that is so clealy not core to the game.
But with 5e, there are also just so many third party releases that you can also replace core systems, like magic, with little difficulty, and people know it.
They don’t want to play something else. They’re not ready to try something else. They want to keep their dragon ampersand and their dis/advantage rolls, and telling them they’re doing something wrong by holding on to that isn’t convincing. It just communicates that other games are played by fucking assholes with boundary issues.
If they play a system, they probably like that system
I don’t think you’ve ever actually gamed before.
Sute, but the thing they like is “D&D”, and D&D isn’t just a game anymore, it’s an identity signifier. Pointing people to other games before establishing yourself as firmly not attacking their identity is going to trigger a fight.
It’s not about identity as much as it’s a very poor way to try to convince someone.
Don’t base your line of argument on a statement you know the other person will likely disagree with.
For example “You should play Pathfinder because DnD sucks”, holds no weight to people who don’t think that DnD sucks. In fact if they happen to like DnD, it undermines your argument, because if you disagree about DnD, aren’t you also likely to disagree about Pathfinder?
D&D isn’t just a game anymore, it’s an identity signifier
Which is part of the problem. Like talking to someone who only drinks Coca-Cola about trying a new bag of tea you brought over.
attacking their identity
If you’ve wedded yourself so deeply to the brand that you feel attacked whenever someone levels a critique, you’re probably not mature enough to be at my table.
Ok, but these discussions aren’t happening at you’re table. “Well, fuck them then” isn’t exactly helpful.
“Well, fuck them then”
Isn’t what I said. But if that’s what you’ve heard, you’re illustrating my point.
try to talk them out of the idea of “Leveling” they get scared and run back to the system they’re familiar with.
I still think about the time in college I tried to get a D&D friend to consider Mage. I was telling him about how you can just do magic, and the real limitation is paradox and hubris. Like, it’s often not about ‘can you?’ but rather “should you?”
He couldn’t get over “you can just cast whatever you want? Fireballs every turn?”
“Yes, but that’s probably going to make a lot of paradox, and probably isn’t the best way to solve your problem”
“Sounds broken,” he said, and lost interest.
The main problem with magic in Mage is that you need a LOT of rule knowledge to even know what the fuck you can cast, especially if you mix different spheres. Your friend might’ve dodged a bullet, but for the wrong reason 😆
I think Mage: The Awakening 2nd edition was a cleaner version of the game, but yeah no version is something you can just phone in.
I ran a game of it a year or so back, and one player just refused to read the book in any detail. She was always frustrated by not knowing what she could do, or how to do it effectively.
👅 Thank goodness for D&D, a game where character optimization and mechanical balance has never been an issue.
The thing about Mage is that you probably can engineer a way to fling fireballs every round if you’re reasonably clever. It’s a modern setting, hand grenades and incendiary bombs and flame throwers exist, and shoving a rag (covered in arcana) into a beer bottle would probably be enough to cause any witnesses to accept what they were seeing at face value.
But the game isn’t D&D. Who do you think you’re throwing that fireball at? As often as not, the primary antagonists are The Cops, the Corporate Executives, the Pharmaceutical Industry, and Silicon Valley. You can’t beat a Pentex sponsored Facebook smear campaign or an FBI/Palantir partnered surveillance state by spamming it with Fire damage.
sigh
Easy enough to hash out between folks who have seriously played the game. Much harder to explain this to someone who only ever knows how to roll for initiative.
