that site is horribly laid out, it breaks the entire story up with spam for it’s other stories that aren’t even related? Terrible.
Honestly i could care less if official D&D products used AI art, considering how little the art in the books matters. I’d honestly prefer if they were more like some other RPG’s books and had less art and more text.
I will say this: i’ve been on a binge of reading old dragon and dungeon magazine issues, and even AI art is better than the art that people endured for much of the 1980’s and early 1990’s.
Wasn't wizards of the Coast recently in a bunch of hot water for not paying their artists? And now they're trying to say that they won't use AI, but they won't pay the human beings that actually do the work for them either so what is the winning move at this point?
@DoctorTYVM
I did this last month with an idiot shiftless Hieracosphinx reluctantly guarding a treasure, and just had him ask the dumbest possible riddles in the most pompous and self-satisfied tone:
“Why did the chicken cross the road?” To get to the other side.
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” The egg. But he will argue.
“What is the difference between a duck?” One of its legs are both the same.
“What's got two wings and is going to eat you?” Point at the sky behind him and shout “That thing?!”
Solasta is a pretty fun story light DND game. I enjoyed it, but I never finished anything other than the original campaign. It’s pretty generous with long rests and short rests, which kind of ruins dnd’s precarious balance.
Personally I’m super tired of DND specifically. I’d love something like solasta but with a different system .
Whenever someone suggests Pathfinder over DND I’m reminded of that blues brothers joke “we’ve got both kinds of music here. Country and western”
Anyway it depends on if you mean for tabletop or computer.
For tabletop I’d want something that takes advantage of human creativity like Fate. Or Mage: The Awakening (2e). People will say that DND let’s you be creative because “you can do whatever you want” and that’s technically true, DND doesn’t really help you out. You can make your own spells, but there’s not much guidance (pun intended). Same with classes. Aside from that, stuff like “spend a fate point to declare a story detail” isn’t something computers can handle yet.
For computerized, something written from the ground up to take advantage of that. Tabletop games need to have simple math that players can do in their head. You couldn’t practically do like “randomly pick 100 numbers from 1-100, and count how many match.” at the table. The computer can do whatever weird math you want to get whatever outcome shape you want.
For either, there’s like a three page scried in me about all the dnd’isms I don’t like. I should probably just write it once so I can repost it when it comes up. I’ll spare you unless you really want to know what some rando online dislikes about DND specifically.
We would like to start playing some tabletop with a few friends, none of us played any game of the genre, what would you advice us to do? Is DnD a good choice for beginners given that it doesn’t have as much customisation as others, as I understand?
You are correct that DND doesn’t have as much customization. A lot of character choices are kind of eclipsed by the big 1d20 random factor, too. Like, it doesn’t matter a lot if you have +2 or +5 if you’re adding 1-20 to it and looking for a result of 13. You’re going to hit it a lot either way.
As to what you should play instead, that’s really hard to answer from here. What is your group like? What do they want out of the game? Is it really a bunch of people who have never played anything before?
Personally, I really like Fate and think it’s more intuitive. But it requires your players to be a little more bold and creative than DND. If you have a bunch of timid wallflowers it’s not going to be great. But if you have a bunch of fun storytellers it can really sing. Also it’s free and only uses standard d6 dice. But if no one’s played anything before you might struggle, and might want to look into sourcebooks for sale.
Powered by the apocalypse games are also really popular. Some of them are meh, but that’s sturgeon’s law. They tend to be a lot more narrative and less concerned with “you can move exactly 15 feet”.
Blades in the dark is also really popular. It’s about heists. Pretty easy to pick up. Probably I’d recommend this one if the theme is interesting. It’s a decent system and doesn’t have any dndisms.
There’s also a whole universe of dnd-likes, but to my knowledge most of them aren’t different enough to be worth it. Most of them bring a lot of dnd-isms with a handful of tweaks. I don’t see the point.
I personally really like the Chronicles of Darkness games. They can be a little crunchy, but I started them many years ago so they have a soft spot in my memories. If you wanted to play a game about being a vampire or werewolf or mage in modern day, they have you covered. They do require more reading and investment though.
Which goes back to not knowing your group. Most groups have at least one person who’s not going to read or learn shit. Some have more. How many do you have?
Tldr: fate is awesome. Pbta is worth checking out. Blades in the dark is good.
We are all beginners in the world of tabletop, as for what we want out of the game, I think we don’t have enough knowledge of what the different games out there entail to really know what we may want. I think everyone in the group is willing to learn how to play, but most won’t be going as deep as me, but that’s OK.
Yeah I didn’t like how they limited short rests in bg3. It’s pretty hard on warlocks. But letting people long rest as much as they want means you can solve most fights with three fireballs, which isn’t how the game is really designed. (Bg3 sort of limits it based on supplies, but supplies are plentiful and you can always cast good berry)
On the other hand, I’ve seen polling that shows most real life tables do like one or maybe two fights per long rest, which is insane.
On the other hand, I’ve seen polling that shows most real life tables do like one or maybe two fights per long rest, which is insane.
I always hated that fact, since when I was playing 5e, the tables I played at actually made liberal use of short rests. It meant that classes like Monk and Fighter were solid choices. People complain about 5e and then don’t play it the way the designers intended. I feel like most people just ignore maybe the most important bit of text in the PHB, which says that you can’t benefit from a long rest more than once in a 24-hour period.
I think a large chunk of people have simply never read the rules. They watch a podcast and “learn by playing” with their friends. A large chunk of that subset don’t retain rules very well, so no matter how many times you tell them “you have to roll to hit before you roll damage” they might not remember.
I don’t want to say they’re idiots because that’s mean, and they’re usually having fun, but as someone who’s extremely rules oriented it grinds my gears.
I agree, but then you get DMs complaining “my game isn’t fun, players are too strong and chew through encounters and I can’t challenge them” or players complaining “The warlock and monk are the worst classes in the game”, or people who convince themselves that “every party needs a dedicated healer” and then you find out they are doing a single encounter with a single monster every day with nothing else that drains resources and then long-resting. It’s like, no wonder your game is unbalanced, you’ve thrown the thing the entire system was balanced on out the window.
The adventuring day is a very specific kind of game and I don’t think it’s how most people actually want to play. I think most people would enjoy a game that wasn’t built around it more. There are countless other ways to balance a game.
But DND is so mega popular it sucks all the air out of the hobby. People don’t even imagine a game that’s not based on per-rest powers.
I have a wizard in my DND game who “just wants to do cool stuff”. He blows spell slots on silly or suboptimal stuff all the time. But if I’m like “do you want to play a game where that’s expected?” he’s like no I just want to play DND.
“You are driving a carriage. The carriage is empty when you begin your route. In the morning, you bring 2 merchants to an auction. In the afternoon, you take 3 farmers to the market. In the evening, you bring a noble to a ball. What color are the driver’s eyes?”
The creature was told this riddle by someone else, and misunderstood the answer: when the creature was “the driver,” the answer was “purple,” because its eyes are purple. It still believes the answer is “purple,” even though the players’ eyes are not purple.
“A man is sentenced to death. He has to choose from three rooms to receive his punishment. The first room has a firing squad holding fully charged Wands of Magic Missile. The second room is full of deadly poison. The third room is full of bulettes that haven’t eaten for six months. Which room should he choose?”
The creature believes the answer is the second room, because it is immune to poison. It does not understand that bulettes feed constantly, so a bulette that hasn’t eaten in 6 months would be dead, and refuses to grasp the answer no matter how many times it’s explained.
You could give ambiguous riddles, and hint at the trick by having the creature get flustered and angry when someone provides an answer that is correct but not the expected answer.
Like “I am a key that opens no door.”
There’s monkey, donkey, turkey, piano key, musical key, whiskey, malarkey, lackey, jockey, computer key, keystone, typewriter key, and probably some more that they will think of.
There are a bunch of riddles that can be made more ambiguous by leaving out one of the lines. Getting the riddle wrong could also be a hint that the creature is not as clever as he thinks.
There’s also the riddle my grandfather like to tell.
What is red, you hang it on a clothesline, and it has four legs?
A fish!
But a fish isn’t red! (Well, you could paint it red and then it would be)
You don’t hang fish on clotheslines (It’s mine, I can do what I want with it)
Fish don’t have four legs!! (Yeah, I threw that in there because I didn’t want the answer to be too obvious.)
Make sure the players understand that it’s not just you who is the idiot.
By “bad” riddles, do you mean riddles that are so blatantly obvious that they’re basically no-brainers? Or rather something like bad puns? Does the riddle itself need to end up in praise for the sphynx, in some “who is the goodest boy in the room” sytle?
A bad riddle being something stupid or overly simplistic but with a different answer or overwrought.
The creature doesn’t know it wants to be praised for the riddles it makes. It believes it is very clever and isn’t. Even if they guess the right answer it would only get angry and deny they got it.
But I also don’t want the players to waste too much time thinking of riddle answers that will never go anywhere. It’s supposed to be funny
So this creature likes to imagine himself a sphinx? I would just give simple riddles, and have it get frustrated if they say the riddle is too easy. Then hit them with a harder one and when they say that it’s harder, have it be pleased.
“Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?” “Because they both start with ‘R’.”
This is Lewis Carroll’s classic riddle the Mad Hatter asks to Alice in her titular Adventures in Wonderland. Interestingly, it is never answered in the story and was intended to be a nonsensical riddle that would have no answer. But Carroll did give a fun and clever answer later after years of people asking him. His answer was “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” Other writers have suggested clever meta answers as well, such as “Poe wrote on both,” and “Because there is a ‘b’ in both and an ‘n’ in neither.” I like to think that your fake sphinx would both be not very imaginative in his answer, and also clearly a poor speller.
“Say my name and you break me. What am I?” “A child named ‘nobody loves you’!”
The answer to this riddle is “silence”, because saying the word “silence” will also break the silence. Obviously the less clever/funny version is about emotional harm to children.
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