Is there anything more cringeworthy than opening up an RPG board (yes, even Veeky Forums...

Considering it is the go-to explanation, at least some people are bound to believe it.

...

Didn't making metathreads used to be a bannable offence?

This legitimately upsets me. I am actually for-real angry about this.

I think I need a break from tabletop.

It hurts, but you get inured to it. Stopping caring about 3.PF is a good start. It was my first system, same as a lot of people, but it's important to realize it's garbage and that the people behind it don't have a fucking clue.

Probably because there's no credentials needed for giving elf game advice on the internet.
This isn't the type of meta that they were banning. Those were more like "Why isn't Veeky Forums as good as my screencap collection?" or "Quest threads are taking up too much space"

This is more like "Why does this common rpg scenario often result in bad advise?"

Meant to quote , not the OP

I know. I know, man. All I can say is 3.PF is dying, no new people are learning it outside of those poor fucks that are forced into it by forever groups.

But its dying, if slowly.

It looks like the furries are taking an interest in PF. Hopefully that will seal the game's fate, even though furries tend to have inexplicably large amounts of disposable income. That or they just make extraordinarily poor financial decisions, as a general thing.

Furries have been involved in PF since the inception. It's a large part of the reason why the official Kitsune race are anthro-foxes, despite it having no precedence in the mythology.

Yeah, how would furries taking an interest in 3.PF kill it, aside from what said?
Sure, it would give the game a slightly worse name on here, but Veeky Forums is hardly its only carrier.
And since when do anons give a fuck about what furries do beyond being furries?

I don't really understand why it matters much what other people play anyway to be honest. Just run a game of not-pathfinder yourself if you want the group to do something else. If they actually like it they might be willing to run other games in that system

>furries
You mean /pfg/, AKA /bisexual monsterpeople and kitsune general/, right?

I dunno, wouldn't furries gravitate towards stuff like Ironclaw? Even D&D 5e has the dragonborn race, as well as the upcoming catfolk.

3.PF had an unfortunate effect due to its popularity. A generation of roleplayers came into the hobby seeing it as the only way to do things, outright ignoring other systems and trying to force whatever they wanted to run into the d20 framework, resulting in various catastrophic failures. When people refer to the game dying, it's more about those patterns of behaviour ending.

The problem is not people who play 3.PF.
The problem is people who refuse to play anything else or try to play everything else as if it was 3.PF and then throw a fit because it doesn't work.
There is just a lot of the latter, so generalizations tend to be made often.

It's dated as fuck now, but it's not really surprising it hung on as long as it did considering 3.0/3.5 basically revived DnD. It also probably had a lot to do with the most obvious alternative being 4e which to make a longer argument short was a little too different

>how would furries taking an interest in 3.PF kill it

Because furries are terrible people who make the average Veeky Forums user seem normal by comparison (yes, even /b/).

If it was just some nerds who got turned on by anthros then it wouldn't be a big deal, but the problem is that furries tend to take their fetish to its ultimate conclusion and spam that shit everywhere so that you can't walk ten steps without stepping into someone's magical realm.

They also have a persecution complex that rivals that of feminists, so if you call them out on their bullshit, they'll just cry and shit and flail their malformed fursuit arms around until you either go away or the mods get involved.

And finally, furries are just plain unattractive weirdos. They are THE fanbase that everyone tends to steer clear of simply because nobody wants to be associated with them. If you think that's not the case, look at the sonic fandom, the FN@F fandom, the MLP fandom, etc. and look at how quickly they went from harmless to shit once the furries latched onto them.

TL;DR: Furries have the midas touch of shit and everything they're involved in ends up becoming a terrible over time.

The response to 4e was honestly what made me realize that the 3.PF fanbase was so bizarrely broken. They'd gotten so use to that one way of doing things they rioted at the lack of obfustication. 5e has a lot of the same ideas, but it's being praised purely because it conceals more stuff behind layers of bad wordings and ambiguity which is apparently what people desire. And, go figure, it works for them, but it always strikes me as utterly bizarre.

You're years out of date. The whole furry hate thing died off long, long ago. It's barely even a blip on the radar of outrage at this point.

>MLP fans start watching Steven Universe
>start talking about jumping from MLP to SU
>want to call themselves Gemtlemen
>SU fanbase reacts with vicious hostility and tells them to stay the fuck away from their show
>watch from the sidelines with popcorn

So, yeah. Veeky Forums-exclusive problem and everything else is business as usual.

What is even more cringeworthy is playing RPGs with players who constantly talk about "Builds". Actual competitive wargames and video games exist for a reason.

Somwtimes you gotta talk builds. Or else how would you figure out how to make a character that can koolaid 90% of walls? Or actually make garbage lke ais, technomancers, and free spirits viable? Not everyone has the luxury of a simplesam.

God it is way too much work to even make a half effective ai street sam.

Y'know what's even cringier than that?

When you're dealing with a power gamer who doesn't know how to build properly.

I still remember the time this ex-friend of mine would always pump his AC and think that he was invincible, only to get completely dunked on once he got hit with a spell or a creature that could easily crack 30AC.

You've pretty much described why I don't play shadowrun despite really liking a lot of things about it. Too bad Anarchy looks like garbage due to taking it too far in the other direction

This happens only in games that require/encourage "Builds", so the obvious solution is to play better games.

I wish shadowrun wasnt made by actually evil embezzling corporate types.
At the same time though, the contracted writers arranged heists to steal company computers to pawn for their bounced paychecks, and i imagine it makes them better at shadowrun writing.

Builds exist in every game, and talking about them isn't innately a bad thing. The initial point was about people who constantly talk about them, presumably to the detriment of all else.

>Builds exist in every game
Yes, but they don't become much of a topic in most of them.
Especially not enough to prompt people to talk endlessly about them.

Those types of players are way funnier than they are cringey. The dumb fucking idiot who thinks he's a goddamn master of optimization but actually doesn't know shit about the game is an endless source of entertainment. The best part is that people like that don't even know how stupid they are and are way too egotistical to take advice from players who know their stuff.

My absolute favourite is when they try to PVP players who know the system way better than they do and get fucking stomped.

Right, exactly. When a player doesn't see his character as a character, but rather as a build, is when they might as well just play a video game or competitive card game, because they're not roleplaying anymore.

Don;t get me wrong, it is hilarious, but it also becomes shitty because you'll never hear the end of it.

Going back to 3.5 I think making "builds" was really the only fun thing about that system. The inane bullshit you could pull off through character creation was fun in it's own way. If I had to guess I think the short lifespan of most campaigns in general is probably a part of why people actually liked it as much as they did. Actually playing the kind of characters you get from that sort of thinking tends to get old pretty fast

That was the accidental genius of 3.PF. It was such a broken, buggy mess with so much content that optimizing and finding new weird mechanical interactions became a fascinating puzzle for a huge number of people, who'd buy every book, campaign and module to find the next item, feat or PRC which would combine with something the designers never considered to do something off the wall.

Not that 4e wasn't free of that, but it had far fewer cases and the devteam actually fixed them, which seemed to upset the people who really enjoyed that kind of thing.

I'd say anything Damegami does is pretty crigneworthy.

That's why I'm glad 5e has been made with reducing that sort of thing as much as possible in mind. There's still the weird builds that give you things like running really fast or shooting a bunch of eldritch blasts a few times per day, but it's so largely toned down from all that BS with things like the ability score soft cap, bounded accuracy, and extreme hesitation to bring in supplemental material. That would be kind of off putting if I really gave a shit about making builds, but I really like it for leaving me with a character I want to stick with for a longer period of time

Because it's a common problem.

The end.

A friend of mine said this recently, and I think it sings true.

"I fucking love dumb wizard shit like metamagic and contingency, and if I had a game all about that, I would be fucking besides myself. The only issue is, the only game that's all about Wizards like that that I know of is 3.5.

Like. You know what I would actually play?
A 3.5 clone that cuts the bullshit and says "Fuck it. This is wizard town. You want to play a fighter? Play 5e. We aren't even gonna bother putting the classes in. Al lof our work is going into casters." No fucking around and paying lip services to "B-BUT MARTIALS CAN HIT REALLY HARD". Just embracing the Caster Edition-ness and not even fronting. Then the only problem would be that it was still a 3.5 clone.
It'd be a hell of a lot better than "Wizards can rewrite reality, but Martials are good too because they can hit super hard! Almost as hard as those things Wizards can summon!"

Your friend wants Ars Magica or something similar.

>¡Mientras tanto, los MAGOS DEL TIEMPO!

I wouldn't really mind a DnD setting that was full blown wizard town and all mechanics were about out-wizzing each other though. The biggest problem with the strongest casters in 3.5 I've found is making a good encounter for them, but I guess it's kind of non-issue in a world where everyone is just a wizard

I'd like that to. In such a high powered world as that of D&D 3.5e where you can square up against actual gods by the time you hit the highest levels, there should be no full martials. If you want to swing a sword around, go Gish and use your burning blade to cut through the fabric of time and space.

Some players understand the rules better than the DM. Some players misinterpret the rules for their own "gain" accidentally or on purpose, and the DM goes along with it thinking it's correct.

Except that's retarded. In such a high powered setting, there is no reason martial training should be any less potent than magic. Expecting physical combat to adhere absolutely to the rules of realism while leaving magic unchained is a pointless, arbitrary double standard responsible for a huge amount of idiocy and bad game design.

>there is no reason martial training should be any less potent than magic
Depends on the setting, friendo. And 3.5e appears to be a "either you're a caster or you suck" setting. The guy I responded to is okay with that, but at least wants WotC to be honest about it.

Like he said, if you want martials who are as potent as casters (roughly), there's 5e.

I agree that classes should be balanced with different strengths and weaknesses. But things can be overbalanced. I didn't like how in 4e magic and martial felt like 2 different manifestations of the same thing.

Casting a spell should be more potent than swinging a sword, but spell casters should be weaker than warriors in other ways (ways that matter).

I never really understand that argument. The only similar thing is the standard formatting, how they work in practice manifests in extremely different ways.

What I don't understand is if magic is supposed to be so much more effective than pure martial strength why wouldn't martial power go hand in hand with magic in such a setting instead? Like why doesn't every fucking high level warrior have a few spells handy that can help in combat since there's such an insanely high incentive to use them? For such a world why don't fighters get spells in the first place?

Interestingly, that's actually the way it works in MtG, or at least it did in the old fluff, I've not played the game in over a decade. Loved the books though, and it was basically standard for everyone to use some magic. It was absolutely pervasive.

Because he WANTS to be lied to, user.
He wants someone to tell him that A is different from B for arbitrary reasons, mostly because he is that uncreative.

I couldn't put it in such harsh terms, but I can't deny having noticed that a huge number of people in the RPG hobby seem to want a layer of obfuscation between themselves and the mechanics. It always confuses the heck out of me, why some people seem to prefer systems which lack clarity in that way.

It's really just the logical conclusion of magic being better than anything else. There would still be people who fight for a living, and they would ultimately just use whatever works the best. It's not all that surprising that something named "Magic" had reached that conclusion. Granted all of that might not really apply for those settings where only very few people can use any sort of magic

what replaced it?

Various things cycling in and out. MLP, tumblr, the current culture war seems to be acting as a singularity of outrage at the moment, drawing it all into its endless, pointless conflict that only serves to perpetuate itself.