How to feel about D&D being the face of this hobby? The game that EVERYONE knows...

I mean, by the time you've got an arrow enchanted to +205, you're long past high epic and into domains there is no printed content for, likely somewhere around level 110 and therefore able to easily demolish entire planes with single actions or create and destroy deities.
At that point 10,000 orcs really aren't a threat.
Almost certainly not even worth the +205 arrow.

Veeky Forums newspaper comics?

I don't care that much.
The people who get really upset about it personally basically have way too much free time and care way too much about the opinions of complete strangers, while people who judge folks for it I honestly couldn't give a flying fuck what they think since there's a close to ninety percent chance I don't like them anyway.

...

Stranger Memes is only gonna make it worse

I think there was another one where Marcus got mad at Jason for trying to substitute a Bloodthirster model for a balrog.

Amend knows his stuff, and all throughout the comic's run he made it clear.

no dnd is bad and wrong because I say so the face of the hobby should be an obscure homebrew that nobody has played written by a dead hobo that I found lying on a train station

yeah, Jason puts down a bloodletter instead of a balrog, Marcus spergs out and Jason bikes 2 miles in the rain to the hobby store, where they're out of balrog models

I think the most charming part about Foxtrot as a whole was all the of the characters were basically sitcom stereotypes written by someone who knew how sitcom characters would actually act in real life.

>this thing is popular
>that's why I hate it

>martials
>getting more with levels than just a few attacks

> I don't feel threatened by "normies" (seriously fuck that word and everyone who actually uses it to describe people).

Eh, I used it pretty tongue-in-cheek. But I feel it CAN be pretty accurate to describe very social people who never have to worry about appearing creepy/weird or have to hide their power level. Why? Because they don't have a power level. Every hobby of theirs is deemed adventurous, quirky or cool. Meanwhile, I'm no social reject, but if I didn't hide my thoughts/hobbies and get into fashion just to make up for my boring looks I would still be a virgin to this day. Instead I have to trick people into thinking I'm well-adjusted and interesting by lying and manipulating them so that they feel comfortable becoming friends or entering a relationship with me.

Maybe I'm just a sociopath.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder

I know that feeling, brother.

The problem is not that it is popular. The problem is that it is a gateway for your average person to pretend they've been into that kind of shit they're whole life.

It's like Joy Division or Misfits t-shirts. Both bands are REALLY fucking good but they are also both bands that normies use to pretend they like punk/post-punk.

itmeJP has played a lot of different systems.

Also, Chris Perkins running Curse of Strahd on Dice, Camera, Action! is outstanding after its cringey start. There's no reason to consider a different system would result in a better story, and it's a 5e game using an adventure module. Comparatively, Critical Role is basically a Pathfinder game using 5e rules since that is what they are used to and something like Heroes & Halfwits is the bog standard shitty D&D people meme about.

It's not like Balance of Power is much more compelling using Age of Rebellion, or Friends at the Table is a fraction of how subversive it thinks it is (God that show is smug) using indie games. Hell, The Adventure Zone is complete D&D newbies playing the game in their own preferred way.

There's so many different way tables are run that D&D being the representation is not bad at all.

I'm totally open with my interests and hobbies and I've never been shut out because of them. But I also know not to sperg about my dislike of Elf tropes when I'm talking with friends who aren't interested. Not because I'm ashamed or embarassed but because there's a time and place.

>Maybe I'm just a sociopath.

Psssh....

That appears to be a manufactured home and not a trailer.

>fedora image

Seriously dude? Not once I did I mention anything like "IM SO EDGY I WANT TO KILL PEOPLE LOL, NO FEELIGS, IM SO DARK AND DISTURBING"

All I meant was that I don't connect with other people so I have to pretend to. Obviously I'm not a legitimate sociopath, but oft times I feel like one because of the manner in which I socially interact with people.

>2001. Get bullied for still playing Pokemon at school.

>2016. Get bullied at FLGS for not playing Pokemon.

Holy shit.

I live in South Georgia, the narrowness combined with the ceiling, that's almost certainly a trailer.

t. Have been in more than sixty trailers.

At that point you can't be a pure fighter anymore, user. There are only 30 fighter levels.
For all I know "Devastation" is an enchantment that makes your arrow deal AoE damage. Whatever it is it's not core.

This. Nobody's given me a hard time for my hobbies since junior high, when I learned to stop going on about them to people who aren't interested. If you just say what your hobbies are and only describe them when asked, you'll go far.

>this actually fucking happened
I still can't believe it.

My first thought was "that's obviously an edit, it's not even funny, it's just a reference." Then I thought "Wait, Family Circus is never funny anyway." Then I found the comic on the Family Circus website, and it's actually real.
Now I don't know what to think.

I honestly think it's one of the main barriers keeping the hobby from being more mainstream (I know, I know, REE NORMIES etc). The way the game is set up means that it has one of the highest barriers for entry for interested new players - the system is crunch-heavy (5e is better for this, but still), and the financial buy-in is way higher (three books instead of one 'core', mats and minis, wider dice range etc).

Honestly, the game that got me REALLY into RPG's was Mutants and Masterminds. Still d20 based but faster, more modular and a better feeling of agency in how you could put together your character, plus the one-dice element made the system feel more elegant and intuitive. I mean, it still had a fuckload of tables and sub-systems and is a huge pile of crunch but it still was a more interesting, accessible and readily-enjoyable pile of crunch.

This is part of what makes me so interested in trying new systems as often as possible, as opposed to just playing one game forever. I realised I'd hate the hobby if all there was to it was D&D.

It's terrible because D&D is such a shit system. I wish Call of Cthulhu got more attention.

So?

>mfw I found out it was real

This. Snobs who get pissy because people who like what they like don't have enough cred are the worst.

>not knowing that the game they played in Stranger Things wasn't D&D
No, user. You are the normie.

>half of the rules are written in blood

What the fuck?
How long has this comic been hiding its power level?

I guess you can only spend so long writing nothing but banal, unfunny crap before you have to dip into something more esoteric.

It is really fucking out of place though. Be like if Calvin started talking to Hobbes about his favorite anime.

It wasn't? Fuck maybe I am a normie.

Hobbes would be all "you're waifu a shit!"

Yeah but he'd say it in some clever, biting way.

I wasn't paying much attention to what they were actually doing, but demogorgon seems pretty DnD specific to me

They were playing the expert set, my dude. It's an expansion for the original rules if I'm not mistaken.

Only people with no "cred", and barely have shallow interest in everything complain about elitists. People who actually get into hobbies/music/interests/whatever understand.

Only people with shallow lives defined mostly by their consumption of media get assblasted about it.

This. My enjoyment of something is not determined by whether or not other people deserve to like it too.

>not knowing that the game they played in Stranger Things wasn't D&D
I mean, they weren't exactly following the rules, but they were clearly playing D&D.

It's Mentzer Basic D&D, or BECMI (for Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals, the boxed sets that comprise it). Basic D&D is derived from core original D&D (the 3 little brown books) with the Greyhawk supplement. AD&D, on the other hand, was derived from original D&D with all the supplements.

I don't know. In my experience, there is something about D&D that makes it click even with people who didn't have much previous exposure to other kinds of games or settings - the archetypical "race-and-class character, kill the monsters, get the loot" is something that is easy to set up and "get" for everyone.
I have my regular group of experienced gamers and we play very different rpgs, but when I find myself trying to explain the game to newcomers, D&D works in ways that other, better games don't.

There's also a simplicity to its setting. You don't have to come in knowing the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk or any of the official worlds used for it. Even people who don't consume a lot of fantasy literature are going to hone in on D&D's tropes very quickly.

Also, who actually followed the rules of any game at that age, especially when gaming with friends?

Yeah. I just put that in there in case his point was "I know D&D, and the rules don't work like that, therefore they weren't playing D&D." Though I will say that the whole "roll a 13 or over to beat the Demogorgon with a fireball spell" thing is more than just a bit of house ruling.

Yeah, this. If you didn't get Lord of The Rings or Conan, you probably know something about King Arthur and know some cliches about knights, so you've got a springboard for playing a fighter.

It's a shame that it was quite rules heavy for a long time--even 5e is pretty dense. Basic D&D was pretty sweet in that way. A little more organized and coherent than OD&D, but still just a rough skeleton for the group to riff on.

Maybe it's just pop culture inertia?

I think being removed from a real world/modern setting makes it easier for people to accept and suspend disbelief. It's much easier to accept "ok, these five goons just wander around looking for quests and stealing treasure".

I'd much prefer people start on D&D rather than something like FATE or a PbtA game. D&D informs everything, people are either doing something specifically unlike D&D or trying to chase the high.

For better or worse, D&D is THE rpg system. Even today if I want to describe a new game to someone it's like "space D&D" or "narrative bullshit D&D".

I like it. It keeps the normies out of our more indepth and better RPGs.

>Yeah, this. If you didn't get Lord of The Rings or Conan, you probably know something about King Arthur and know some cliches about knights, so you've got a springboard for playing a fighter.

If you ever watched cartoons when you were a kid you have almost certainly been exposed to basic fantasy tropes like wizards, dragons, and knights. Even if in a strictly satirical sense.

>I think being removed from a real world/modern setting makes it easier for people to accept and suspend disbelief.

This is also true. If I were to try running some kind of X-Files type game, it'd probably be pretty hard for people who don't watch a lot of horror or science fiction.

What exact edition would you recommend for a completely new player? The fifth most recent one?

For sure, but it's not implausible. If you'd ever seen me play Monopoly with my brothers, you'd know that house rules had no limits. We had rules for car chases, bank robberies, time travel, and fire insurance. At that age, fun is what you make of it. Maybe the kids got sick of round after round of combat and invented a way to speed things up. Who cares.

shit I mean the 4th, browsing Veeky Forums made me really interested and I feel like taking the plunge.

5th is the most recent edition and it's good.
Beginner rules are free, so just get some mates together and run it. Good luck!

>We had rules for car chases, bank robberies, time travel, and fire insurance.
This is amazing, makes me want to be young again and play chess with my friend where we house ruled that shit so much it looked like a Dragonball battle, every piece had special moves.

Eileen was a hot little piece of ass

...

We had at least 3 extra decks of cards for Special Events, Upgrades, and Cheating. Might have had more.

One fond memory was getting the "Yahtzee" rules change (which let you roll 5d6 to move, and adding an extra d6 for each set of doubles, or 2d6 for each set of triples...) during a "Go is replaced with Anti-Go, Lose $200" special event. After everyone had raced around the board half a dozen times, I revealed my upgrade letting me take all the money other players had placed into the bank in that turn, and used /that/ money to fuel my "Dollar Bill Flamethrower" and burn down three quarters of the board.

For multiple reasons I'd recommend 5. It's more simple to learn and run, it's easier to find people playing it that the other editions, if you're completely illiterate you would have an easier time figuring it out by watching some fags stream their games (since most of those I hear about are 5e). But it's not like you have to commit to whatever you play first. Many games have some degree of free shit online, and all have pdfs that are easy to find (usually here)
For 4e I'd just say check the general. Unless you know someone already familiar with it some of the early monster manuals might be kind of annoyingly slow for encounters, but despite its low popularity it's not like there's too much to complain about with 4e. It just doesn't really appeal to as many people (myself included)
Avoid Pathfinder like the plague though

What's wrong with Pathfinder? Isn't it just basically 3.75?

Yes, so it's terrible.

3.25 more like

>What's wrong with Pathfinder? Isn't it just basically 3.75?
Why ask the question if you're just going to answer yourself in the next sentence?

Thanks, I wrongly corrected to 4th edition because I thought that it was the most recent one instead of the 5th.

Im trying to find the beginner rules in german for some of my friends, though if that doesn't work I guess I could just help them along with some of the parts they don't understand. Luckily they are all familiar with the concept of roleplaying games.

Clearly, world of gothness needs to be the face for the hobby.

And it still isn't funny.

dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

English is here, if you have a look around the googles I'm sure someone's translated the rules to German.

>AD&D 1e to 2e
>Major rules changes
What is this shit? That should be a green arrow.

i like it, it makes it easier to draw in normies and covert them to the one true hobby. Plus we have much worse shit than DnD out there and i dont want the general public learning about it

D&D has a sorta rocky history in germany, the most recent translated edition is the 4th and of that only the basic rulebook. It seems unlikely that any publisher wants to pick up and translate the 5th edition right now but a few fan translations are floating around somewhere.

Yea, fan translations is what I was assuming.

>Dollar Bill Flamethrower
Holy shit that sounds dope

While I wouldn't put too much stock in what the thing says about the relationships of the editions, 1e and 2e are not as closely related as, say, Moldvay Basic and Mentzer Basic. Or 3e and 3.5. So maybe it's just a matter of where you draw the line. Technically speaking though, "rewritten but generally compatible" could apply to all old school D&D.

As far as I know Wizards doesn't want to license translations of 5e, too many issues in the past. So fan translations are the way to go.

>(seriously fuck that word and everyone who actually uses it to describe people).
Eh, I feel like most people who say it are using it ironically, or else deliberately calling attention to the fact that they're such a huge loser. When I use it, I'm usually talking about how "normies" can't get into some pretentious music that 99.9999% of people (even the weirdos) have never heard of. When the word isn't coming from a complete autist, it has a different meaning.

This should be updated to include Pathfinder and 5E.

Its literally just 8 hours of memberberries.

Not so much sick of it being the face as I am just sick of it and generic fantasy tabletop in general. I'm tired of Tolkien-esque cookiecutter settings and elves and dwarves and the like. But with D&D as the main "face" of this hobby, that's what a majority of the games are going to be.

I hate explaining to people what I'm playing. "Oh I do Tabletop RPGs" "What's a Tabletop?" "Uh... like D&D" "Oh, like wizards and elves and shit?" "Well, D&D was just an example, I play x" Every. Time. Not worth the time it takes to explain to normies, I just say "yeah I play D&D" nowadays.

I am thoroughly disgusted with D&D and utterly despise that it serves as the primary gateway into this hobby.

The worst part about D&Dfags is their asinine assumption that all games are D&D, and all settings are generic kitchen sink fantasy. They put alignment, a feature so bad that it literally only exists in D&D and its derivatives, on everything, define "characters" according to the metric of "race/class/alignment" and believe that Vancian magic is not only reasonable, but should be assumed as the default for all magic everywhere.

They will have picked up terrible habits by the time they decide to leave D&D and try something else, such as a complete inability to understand or participate in games that don't revolve around killing, and treat RPGs as video games, overly focused on optimization and mechanical progression.

And whenever they're criticized, they simply fall back on that tired yarn, "Dude it's just a game lol calm down xd".

D&Dfags are simply the worst players, absolute trash filth, and it's a blessing that at least they generally contain themselves to their garbage game - it's just a shame that this is how the public and newcomers understand RPGs.

>Maybe I'm just a sociopath.

Sounds more like assburgers to me. Recently got my diagnosis, and I also always felt this... rift between me and the rest of the world. Definitely showed some of the more classical "sociopathic" tendencies when I was younger.

The word "normie" is just nerds turning the entire thing back on the people who used to call them nerds. I mean, whoop-dee-frickin-doo, some nerds use a vaguely derogatory word to refer to people who aren't nerds. And often normal people who pretend to or actually have a vaguely nerd-ish streak. I don't see why anyone would get upset about that. I mean, we get the constant implication of being manchildren and generally being misunderstood. Even a legit condition is used as an insult by nerds and normies alike. But now I'm supposed to get my panties in a twist over people using the word "normie"? Fuck that.

It kind of reminds me of that hullabaloo over the use of the word "cuck" as an insult. It's not so much on abjection over the word itself, and it being insulting. It's more people being offended at WHO is insulting them and the fact that they now have their own word instead of just calling them an asshole. Yeah, welcome to the club, faggots. The fact that you can get pissy about it, and not have to just deal with it like the rest of the world, speaks of a sort of privilege in itself.

And "normie" itself is used in a manner that implies that the user is, well, NOT normal. So as you say, it's pretty tongue-in-cheek. It's more a reassertion of an already existing power structure than anything else. The idea that was used to insult nerds (being not normal) being thrown back at the people who used it (the implication that being normal makes one boring and ignorant).

in the same way Nintendo is the face of the Video Game hobby. Nobody lists Marcus Phoenix as the first Videogame character they think of.

If you want the actual list: the top five named video game characters are: Mario, Sonic, Laura Croft, and Pac Man.

if you want to talk about tabletop roleplaying, it's probably D&D, GURPS, and Vampire.

Fucking normie

I doubt most tabletop virgins have heard of GURPS unless they're good friends with a fa/tg/uy.

Haven't played any tabletop RPGs thought I really want to and I'm here for the stories and books, fite me, heard of GURPS even before D&D and before chans.

NARPfags like you are the reason this board is shit.

Veeky Forums is not a board for IDEAS GUYS, it's a board for TRADITIONAL GAMES. "Lore", "theorycrafting", "alignment", "that guy", "storytiem" and "magical realm" threads are not Veeky Forums. Stop posting them.

B-but I'm not posting, I'm reading... Pls no bully, I really fucking want to play a real game some day.

Wow, it's literally this image, in action. With a side order of "No Fun Allowed"

Maybe you should try one of the other RPG-related forums on the internet, if you don't like the 40k containment board bastard child of /b/ that Veeky Forums has been ever since it was created.

I think it will become a major point of contention in the next 10 years. I have no problem with D&D being the major face of the hobby. But as it stands it is the only noted face and that is plain unacceptable. Roleplaying is more than D&D and it certainly is more than hack & slash, loot & level fantasy, at which this game excels.

We need SOME more games rising to prominence, CoC, TOR, Star Wars, Warhammer, Shadowrun, Savage Rifts, whatever.

No, that's bullshit. The perception of the hobby does shape the hobby to a substantial degree. People want to play D&D because it's the brand they and others know. They want to be able to tell "I played D&D and it was good/bad/fun/boring".

This is NOT good for the hobby. It would be much better if normies were aware of at least 2 more titles. Actually, the point is that normies need to be aware that there is different styles of play, so that they can start with the style that intrigues them most.