You may not understand just how prevalent bot traffic is. I self-host a small personal website that real people only actually visit once in a blue moon, but I get constant attempts to access the Wordpress admin console (my website isn’t made with Wordpress lol)
Thanks for the recs, I do plan to look into them, but I also want to point out the main reason I stick to using DnD and ttrpgs that are very similar (e.g. pathfinder) as a framework is it lets your group get right into the game instead of spending a lot of time getting used to an unfamiliar system.
Imagine a scenario where the players encounter a group of goons blocking the road. If they want to get in a fight, D&D has a ton of rules. Movement, to-hit and damage, armor, saves. If they want to talk through it, the rules are comparably thread-bare. There’s no social HP.
This would be mostly RP’d discussion, punctuated with rolls to represent luck and stats to represent how the character and player might differ.
It would be something like the player asking the goons to move, the goons saying no, the player asking why, the goons giving some answer, the player rolling insight and then deciding a follow up question, probably ending with a persuasion or intimidation check with a DC dependent on how well the rest of the discussion went, with the possibility for other shenanigans to influence as well (like maybe the party mage used minor illusion to fake a badge to pretend to be cops).
I honestly don’t think something like “social HP” would be better than RP and shenanigans, but idk, I would be curious to try.
Side note: because of how D&D’s stats work, you end up with a lot of characters are mechanically bad at socializing, or underperform at their prescribed roles.
This is definitely a weakness of DnD. It helps if your party is more into the RP aspects than absolutely optimizing their characters for combat. Another thing I’ve done as DM is to give players a choice, like jumping across a gap could be acrobatics or athletics, so they can use the stats they are good at.
I was curious so I’m looking at a spell list on a dnd wiki. A majority of spells are for combat, followed by spells that also have exploration uses (eg: fly, alarm), and then there’s everything else.
I think the issue with combat oriented spells is you have spells at each level that do “vaguely this level’s worth of damage” for every damage type so you get a nice progression curve. Out-of-combat spells are not so easily quantifiable. What is the level 4 version of minor illusion? (There are some answers to that tbh). There also are damaging spells that explicitly have non-combat purposes (one of the main ones I can think of is Phantasmal Force), as well as ones that may not explicitly say so but no DM would deny, like using fire bolt to light something on fire at a distance.
Also I’m not sure what you have against exploration and movement type spells because those are very useful in an intrigue heavy campaign.
Anyway, DnD does have a lot of combat mechanics, but it has plenty of non-combat mechanics too. The combat is more regimented and structured, but I don’t see that as a weakness, just the difference between combat and intrigue.
You also can just use the rules everyone is already familiar with instead of spending the first couple sessions with everyone learning a whole new system
The stranger says you can trust him with the money
Player: I want to roll insight
(dm hidden roll: deception: 15)
Insight 14 -> “you aren’t sure he’s lying, but you feel very uneasy trusting him”
Insight 5 -> “you really can’t read his expression”
Insight 16 -> “you aren’t totally sure, but you think he’s going to betray you”
Insight 19 -> “yeah this guy is totally going to rip you off”
The game not being interesting is largely a DM problem regardless of the framework you use.
I started with https://scratch.mit.edu/ as a kid and moved onto C after that
Most of my DnD campaigns have combat maybe like 1 in 5 sessions even in a fairly vanilla DnD setting. Even though there are a lot of rules for governing combat, I don’t think it’s fair to consider them half of the game.
I always like playing in magic settings so tbh I’ve never really played without it, but I do know some settings like Cyberpunk have magic it’s just rebranded as tech themed.
I guess in my mind the core rules are things like the stats and how ability checks work, and I’d describe classes as something like “core content”.
its only good for a narrow pulpy sword and sorcery adventure that asks no interesting questions.
d&d is unusable for intrigue or investigation that isn’t fully railroad.
Dude you just have had shitty DMs
EDIT actually on second thought the Arcana stat and related checks you’d either have to scrap or get creative about repurposing.
Huh? The answer to this is actually literally zero.
Just tell your players they can’t choose spell casting classes, make a decision on whether half-casterish classes like Ranger have spells that are magical or could be explained through nonmagical means, and tell your players to expect no combat.
TLDR I feel like I think “Minecraft is anything you can make with any of the mods out there plus in the in-game tools and your own creativity” and you think “Minecraft is vanilla Minecraft played with the main goal of slaying the ender dragon”.
It has a lot of legacy jank (15 strength is what bonus?). 1d20+stuff vs target produces a flat probability, which is problematic.
Yeah these things are the biggest issues with DnD and related games IMO. However, rolling a D20 is a lot of fun, which makes me not want to replace it with something like 3d6.
it has a lot of assumptions deeply baked into the rules. You need the adventuring day, to rewrite all the powers, or sharply limit party composition, or it falls apart.
The adventuring day is a big one. TBH I’ve never seen a ttrpg without it.
There are massive amounts of fan content for DnD out there and easy to find, if you don’t want to write your own. There are whole ttrpgs that are practically modded DnD but tweaked for a specific setting.
I’m not sure what you mean about limiting party composition.
It’s missing or has anemic offerings for whole subsystems - social conflict, meta game currency, succeed at a cost.
Hard disagree on social conflict. DnD is full of mechanics for that. Meta game currency is something DMs usually add in from my experience, although DnD does have inspiration points as a kinda weak form. Succeed at a cost is something I usually see DMs add in, but I have seen other ttrpgs with that more baked into the rules.
You pick from a list. If you want to play a game about creating your own spells, it’s going to provide little guidance.
Yeah that’s fair. If you have an example of a game with a good “make your own spells” system I’m curious.
Also, most of the spells are about combat, with a handful about movement.
Hard, hard disagree there. Off the top of my head: prestidigitation, minor illusion, friends, zone of truth, tiny hut, message, command, good berry, that one that lets you ask god a question…
Play more games. Even a basic traditional game like Vampire is a mind opener.
Thanks for the rec! I’ll look into it.
DnD is more like Minecraft in that it lays out a nice set of general mechanics that can be tweaked into whatever setting you want. Most ttrpgs I’ve seen don’t play all that differently from DnD
EDIT: it seems like a bunch of people have had weak experiences with DnD because either they or their DMs are not that creative or don’t like roleplaying.
DnD isn’t the only ttrpg. DnD isn’t necessarily the best ttrpg. But it is a great framework and there’s a reason why a lot of other ttrpg’s copy from it.
Also yall aren’t considering that sometimes people just want to get to the part of telling the story they want to tell without having to learn a whole new system.
You’re giving hexbear too much credit
I’m playing Ocarina of Time Master Quest on the GameCube instead.
Download Ollama. Download one of the smaller Qwen models. Have at it.
Try qwen3.5:9b (a 7.6Gb model) to start.
I have a $15 USB powered soldering iron and it scares me a bit every time I use it. Nothing should be able to get that hot off of a 5V USBA plug.
To check if it’s hot I always just poke it into the wet sponge to hear the hiss. It’s also a very satisfying noise.
My Crahgers
The Zelda games on DS are almost entirely touchscreen controlled