"This campaign will be using the Pathfinder system!"

When the question is something as subjective as "is this fun?", overwhelming popularity tends to be valued more than some random user's personal emotions.

But fun is objective user.

I can't actually think of any popular political settings for D&D. Care to name one?

Fun says nothing on the quality of the game except that it is possible to have fun with it. Good GMs can make bad systems fun. What a surprise.

Wait, so... The reason to run a political game in D&D is because it doesn't have rules for it?

Then why use a system at all?

He continues on to explain why people prefer systems like D&D with lighter social rules for politics over games like ASOIF right after. You can't really cut someone's argument like that.
Have you played the official ASOIF RPG? The books are great for setting reference, but the politics in that game and the system in general are pretty awful.

Heroic fantasy is a large umbrella. A Song of Ice And Fire is heroic fantasy, yet is deeply political in nature. Star Wars is heroic fantasy, while also falling into the science fiction category. You could run either of those in DND, though there would perhaps be better systems to hang your bets on.

What he said about social encounters is true; the rules are barren. Of course, because of this, I know very few people who actually use them in lieu of roleplay, but that brings about its own problems, and doesn't solve the system itself.

DND is, inherently, fantasy. Spelljammer is still heavy on fantasy elements. Heck, the cover of the book has an armored knight and a space-amazon with a regular old hand crossbow! It's possible to go out of your way to exclude orcs, elves, rivals, magic and everything that makes fantasy what it is, but the system is not designed with that sort of game in mind.

And unless you are operating only at very low levels, such as a level 0 or 1 game, it is difficult to run a campaign wherein the PCs, or their adversaries if the PCs are villainous, are not heroes. They will almost invariably outshine the common folk in every way, throw their weight around in a political game, and so forth. They will be the focus of the game, the heroes of the campaign, no matter what it's about. Even if a single fight is never had in the campaign, a level 10 Fighter is still a hero, and everyone should regard them as such.

"Most people prefer social systems to be rather light, since heavier systems tend to actually get in the way of actual roleplaying."
Such as?

>Have you played the official ASOIF RPG?
I have no interest whatsoever in ASOIF. Not sure why I would use a special system for it, either, when Fate'll do the job damn well.

Light rules doesn't mean it doesn't have rules.
Pay attention to what people are saying before you make a fool of yourself.

And, even saying D&D has light rules for politics isn't wholly true. It has a number of subsystems and references to help run large politically-minded campaigns, ranging from country building advice, rules and guidelines for creating and running organizations, mass-combat and siege rules, and adventures that include everything between brokering a peace between two warring nations to arguing a case in a court in Hell.

It doesn't take center-stage, but politics have been a part of D&D all the way back to when Gygax had his players take their high-level characters and act as a council of rulers.

What do you think climbing out the window implies?

...So you were complaining about subsystems in other systems, yet you're praising them in D&D?

At this point it barely seems like you're using D&D anymore. You're just making things up as you go along but praising the system instead of your GM and group managing to make it work. None of this is a trait of D&D, it's something that could equally be applied to any other system on the planet.

Where does the star wars is sci-fi meme comes from?
It's fantasy in space. There is no science fiction in it, like at all.

3.0, 3.5 and PF worked fin for us. For decades.
3.5 up to level 40th.
But we don't play in memes.

All of those settings are a variation of high fantasy. Except maybe Ravenloft, but even that's debatable.

Given how fucking awesome Paladins are in Ravenloft, I'd say its still high fantasy. They might burn out faster, but they burn all the brighter for it.

>DND is, inherently, fantasy.

But not heroic fantasy, and it can be easily reskinned to fit other genres quite well. There's even advice in the DM's guide on how to do so. Proposing it can't do this is just lying through your teeth.

>they will almost invariably outshine the common folk in every way,

Is it really too hard to make the common folk as strong as the PCs? I don't understand why you feel that there is anything barring the PCs from being actually rather weak in the setting if that's your preference. Aside from just adjusting the commoner levels to suit your tastes, there's established settings where the PCs are not quite so heroic. In fact, when you look at Planescape, there's a number of locations deep in the planes where the PCs are so comparatively weak that it fits the tropes of horror more than it does heroic fantasy.

There are plenty of systems, and many of them are great for specific genres. But, doing your best to try to establish fake restrictions in order to pretend that D&D can't do things it's been doing for decades is a really bad joke.

>its heroic fantasy niche.
This is the worst meme that ever happened to D&D. How long has the designers been designing D&D as heroic fantasy? 3E? 2E?
I know higher levels are heroic fantasy, but nowadays players think they are heroic from level one and the 5E DMG pretty much says the same thing, that even from level 1 players are local hero tier.

Regardless of setting, the rules of D&D simply aren't meant to support every possible genre of game. They are generally built for heroic fantasy with a specific focus on combat and dungeon-crawling. If that's not what you're doing, you'll need progressively more houserules to stop it from falling apart.

A simple example is the spells/day on classes. These are balanced with the intention that the party will be getting into about four level-appropriate fights a day, each consuming about 20% of the party's resources. Now, in political games, fights are often few and far between, maybe at most one or two a day if things are busy. This means that spellcasters have proportionally more resources than they are expected to, making them even stronger compared to martials. Not to mention that D&D/PF tend to have very minimalist social systems compared to other games that are actually built for it.

It stems from the fact that Star Wars features space travel, fully functional mechanical limbs, laser swords, artificial intelligence, and all sorts of other future tech. It may not put much focus on many of the elements that typical Sci-fi series do, but Game of Thrones is certainly fantasy despite the fact that there is all of a single good person in its world. It doesn't help that the matter of what forms the basis of a genre is sometimes subjective in the first place, though.

Sure, Star Wars also has ghosts, the force, and other fantastical elements, but those do not remove the sci-fi aspects of the franchise. End of the day, Star Wars takes facets of both genres and can't be accurately described as solely belonging to either, as is the case for many series.

Complaining about subsystems doesn't mean I'm giving D&D the green light. If you used all the political subsystems available for D&D, it would be rather cumbersome, which is why the political subsystems in D&D are largely optional, and most people only use a handful at a time.

>None of this is a trait of D&D, it's something that could equally be applied to any other system on the planet.
Welcome to understanding the flexibility of game systems. You can now graduate to not complaining about pointless things and enjoying actually playing games rather than embedding yourself in system wars.

So you don't know what science fiction means. That explains it, thanks.

So, you'd want to completely destroy any meaningful ability to discuss, criticise or compare game systems? Because that's fucking stupid.

'A system can do x' is a moot point. Sure, it might be able to with enough work from the group and the GM. But the much, much more important question is how much doing that is supported, whether the system actively helps you to do so or hinders you.

This is why D&D is a heroic fantasy game. If you are running heroic fantasy, the system (in general) will support you doing so. If you try to not run heroic fantasy in D&D, you will have to fight against the system to make it work. If you have to fight against the system to make it work, then I find any argument that the system is suitable for it highly suspect.

>A simple example is the spells/day on classes.

There's plenty of classes that don't use them. In some editions, there's even variant casters that use alternate spell casting systems, as well as variant rules that can be applied to all casters.
You seem to forget that even if you only used 5% of what's available for D&D, you still have a giant system to work with. If something doesn't match your vision, no one's forcing you to use it, and there's plenty of non-house rule ways to adapt the game.

It's really a bad joke to come into one of the world's largest games of imagination and to try and pretend that there's walls or limits all over the place, when the game was built to explore just how far the imagination can go.

D&D is not a generic system. D&D is a focused system built for heroic fantasy. That you happen to use it wrong doesn't change anything.

>So, you'd want to completely destroy any meaningful ability to discuss, criticise or compare game systems? Because that's fucking stupid.
Enough of your prancing. Saying D&D doesn't do things it's always done is just being stupid.

>If you try to not run heroic fantasy in D&D, you will have to fight against the system to make it work

The system has advice within itself to explore beyond heroic fantasy. The system is designed to help you with this, and it does a fair job in providing variants and advice in doing so. Stop trying to act like it doesn't just in hopes of shoehorning it into a little niche for the sake of system politics.

Why use DnD then?
It's faster, easier and more enjoyable to learn a new system for whatever the fuck you want to run than it is to try to shoehorn DnD into everything.

>when the game was built to explore just how far the imagination can go.

D&D was never built to do this. It was very specifically created to do one thing and one thing only. And that was to run high fantasy campaigns. It was never meant to be some sort of universal system, and it's never going to be that no matter how much you tweak and twist the mechanics to try and fit it into a mold where it just will not fit.

I await you providing evidence.

Because if you look at the core book, D&D tells you it's a fucking heroic fantasy game, and none of the variants you have mentioned or cited ever take it outside of that space, they just add other elements to it.

>You seem to forget that even if you only used 5% of what's available for D&D, you still have a giant system to work with. If something doesn't match your vision, no one's forcing you to use it, and there's plenty of non-house rule ways to adapt the game.
This.
It's amazing how something so simple passes over people's head so often. You could try, for once, a 1st-6th level adventure with only fighters and rogues. It would play in a completely different way (and need special attention).

And it would still be heroic fantasy. Because it's still D&D.

DnD is to war games what Dotas are to rts games.
You move from controlling an army alone against others you control a hero in a team.

Yes there are variant rules. The fact that you can choose to use the optional sanity mechanic and restrict player classes isn't going to make D&D a better Lovecraft game than Call of Cthulhu which is actually made for it. You could try to come up with a way to balance a bunch of templates and monsters so you could run a supernatural drama with vampire/werewolf/ghoul/slayer love quadrangles, but you're going to still have weird extraneous rules; that sort of game would need minimal combat but lots of social mechanics, which D&D is bad at, but which Monster Hearts is specifically made for. You can play an epic game at stupid power levels to simulate playing god-killing monstrosities, but the numbers just break down at that point, and you really should just play Mythenders.

D&D is not a generic system.

You can keep your definitions, I don't care.
The point is that would play in a completely different way.

>3.0, 3.5 and PF worked fine for us

>But not heroic fantasy

DMG 3.5 chapter 3, The Encounters, page 50 - Most encounters seriously threaten at least one member of the group in some way. These are challenging encounters, about equal in Encounter Level to the party. The average adventuring party group should be able to handle FOUR challenging encounters before they run low on spells, hit points, and other resources.

Lv 20 party. Let us kill 4 Balors before we need to rest. Let us kill 4 wyrm dragons before we take a rest. (also take into account as you gain levels you are more broken so it shouldn’t be hard to kill even bigger number of enemies because developers fucked up the math)

D&D is super-heroic. Higher the level more broken it becomes.You can have an opinion on it but facts are facts.

Now if I have to restrict bunch of stuff from the system so it works that doesn't mean system is good. It means system is butchered from its original shape and form in attempt to run some other game type in it and people being delusional and saying "look. It works fine in d20"

Also there is nothing heroic in beating 4 Balors in one days work.

I don't disagree?

Heroic fantasy is a pretty broad umbrella. You can do a lot of stuff within it. It's just pointing out that D&D doesn't operate well outside of it.

>D&D is not a generic system.
When did D&D try to adapt GURPS' philosophy of modularity and "can do anything"? Did I miss something?

>D&D is super-heroic. Higher the level more broken it becomes.You can have an opinion on it but facts are facts.
You say this as if it's a problem.
I like the fact that at level 1 a strike will down you, and at level 20 you travel planes, talk with gods and slay demonic armies.
If you like just on of these things, just focus on the appropriate level interval.

Some people earlier in the thread were arguing that the quantity of material for D&D meant that it could be effectively played for genres well outside of its intended heroic fantasy focus.

>It's faster, easier and more enjoyable to learn a new system for whatever the fuck you want to run than it is to try to shoehorn DnD into everything.

Because that's not true. At all.
Not only are there far more terrible games than there are good ones, games that are specifically built for certain niches tend to still require further adaptation to suit your specific needs. If you're going to be adapting a game anyway, might as well start with one you already like.

But, you're free to have your preference. I also enjoy looking through and learning new systems, largely because they open up ideas I wouldn't have explored simply by adapting systems I already knew. But, at the same time, I have no problem with other people choosing to use and adapt systems they like to suit their tastes.

I'd hear first what he allows, his insights about the system, his homerules, etc then I'll decide if bailing or not.

If he says something like core only and I'll give casters a magic item at the start because they have lower HD and that's unfair I'll 360º noscope moonwalk away so hard Michael Jackson will ressurrect immediately

It never did. D&Drones try to use this to justify their shitty way of doing things.

It isn't lying if one believes that DND doesn't handle other genres as well as the systems dedicated to them. That's simply a subjective opinion, as is believing that it can.

As I said, it's certainly possible to remove elements of fantasy, and that goes for heroic elements as well. I, personally, don't much like the idea of everyone in the setting being of equal power to the PCs, because holy hell could you imagine that sort of world, where any random barfight might result in an Earthquake'd town or a Fireball'd barkeep? It'd be fun gimmick, I grant you. If you kept them all as Commoners and simply scaled their levels up, well, that would still leave the PCs heads and shoulders above them.

It's very much true that DND is not inherently heroic in nature, but it's no lie that it's geared towards that style of game. Unless your campaign takes place solely in Lucifer's backyard, chances are a Level 12 Cleric is going to be a big deal. Part of the reason DND has so many over-the-top spells and abilities is because the system is designed to make the players feel like badasses. But heroes are only so because they overcome the challenges thrown at them, not because they're never challenged, which isn't what I meant to imply in my former post.

Horror is actually a genre that DND can handle relatively well, I think. Whether or not the PCs are heroic, they'll still fear Wolves In Sheep's Clothing or other monsters with horrific abilities, or ones that threaten their viability specifically such as Ability Drain. Wearing the characters down over time before fights is highly advised, and that's common in the horror genre as well; the long slog and buildup. It just comes naturally; you don't have to put much focus on it.

I never meant to argue that DND/Pathfinder cannot be used to run other genres, only that it often isn't the best choice for them, in my personal opinion. If it's all you know, and you can't convince anyone to learn Traveller or CoC, it's fine.

It happened when Wizards and every other publisher tried to use d20 for every theme and genre. Just look at d20 Modern, Vampire, Oriental Adventures, Future, Cthulhu, Sci-fi etc.

Broken as in save-or-dies and rocket tag, martial irrelevance, numbers for things like saves/attack/AC diverging so much that rolling is essentially unnecessary, etc. etc.

When that material includes stuff outside of heroic fantasy, it really shoots down any argument that D&D is limited to heroic fantasy.

Wow, you're really justifying the "I use D&D for everything" attitude, aren't you? Because that's what you're doing. You have to have at least a shred of self awareness, right?

Pathfinder tried to add social mechanics with Ultimate Intrigue. Their mechanics sucked. PF is not a social game.

Having rules to support another genre does not make D&D good at that genre, when compared to games which were built for it.

If you exclude d20 variants that is not true at all.

Even then, if you need such a degree of personalization that a game of the same genre is hard to adapt you end faster and easier adapting an appropriate generic game or build your own from scratch than adapting DnD.

Still waiting on that proof, chief.

The only barely valid point is the martial irrelevance, and that's depends from how the casters and martials are build, what's the danger for the caster in the gameworld, the equipment, and how the players interact.
A good number of these must fail to make it not working.

The rest is tastes or just bullshit.

>Their mechanics sucked
Is more that they don't have a strong design team.
I don't exclude the chance of an intrigue ruleset.. just not written by these people.

Ahh, so you're one of those people who've played D&D so much you've lost any ability to actually understand the system. Now it makes sense.

No, you are just one of these butthurt fags that plays in meme.
We bent the system to our will, and played for years.
You have been beaten by the system, but somehow you want to give me lessons.

>It isn't lying if one believes that DND doesn't handle other genres as well as the systems dedicated to them

However, it IS lying if the statement is "D&D and its ephemera never really functions outside its heroic fantasy niche."

Saying D&D might not do Lovecraftian Horror as well as CoC without heavy modifications is fair. But, at the same time, saying D&D can't do Lovecraftian Horror is ignoring that there's a fair amount of assets and material specifically designed so that if the DM is interested, they can readily adapt the standard assumptions of a D&D game and instead use it for Lovecraftian Horror.

D&D is intended to be versatile, and while some people may prefer other options such as using and adapting other systems, there's no reason to assume a group using D&D is somehow "playing it wrong" when they select options that don't match the specific assumed niche heroic fantasy.

Some people just like rolling d20's. Let them roll.

It's certainly /possible/ for a game to have an add-on which successfully adds support for another genre not covered by core. It's just difficult, and increasingly so if the core game is already wedded to a specific genre that it needs to work out of. GURPS is of course the classic example of successful modularity, but it was built with that in mind. Some hard work could get D&D to operate as a passable medieval court drama, but playing Shadowrun in it as successfully as Shadowrun itself is going to be an exercise in futility.

You're someone who, upon being told a wall is not a door, rammed themselves against it until, bloody and battered, they managed to make a hole.

And you're calling other people stupid for just using the fucking door.

>D&D is intended to be versatile
Sweet, when's your Star Trek game? I'm down.

>D&D is intended to be versatile

It's only intended to be versatile within its specific niche. So long as you're running some sort of variant high fantasy game, it does fine. But once you start to stray from that, you have to kludge things together and homebrew out the ass just to get it functioning again.

You can have any color of car, so long as it's black.

I think that, as now, one has to understand the "power level" and just accept that at level 18, your intrigues will be on multiple planes with multiple layers of deceptions and spell use.
You play game of thrones on levels 1-5.

Or you are just too stupid, or did not have enough resources. We had access to many manuals: we played as a team: I banned almost nothing but paid attention to encounters, motivation, and loot; in some are of the world magic did not function properly or gave taint, restricting the player options (not at the point of frustration, but is like a dedicated tripper: if meets an untrippable foe must find a workaround).
And yet, you are disappointed I had so much fun, in many different ways, with such clunky, flawed and beautiful system.
You are "s-stop having fun" tier. Off yourself.

There's really nothing inherently wrong with that attitude though.
You might not like it, but that might just be largely because you hate the system and don't share their opinions.
I mean, what? You really think it's hard for people who've played with a system for years to adapt it to whatever they need?
Give me a year with any system, and I'll be able to turn it into shonen competitive origami folding battle tournament system in a day or less.

I don't think the argument being made is that D&D is incapable of playing other genres, but rather that it will always do so less cleanly/elegantly/smoothly than games designed for it. Even then, you'll always see the traces of the original system underneath. Eldritch horrors aren't really meant to be fought, yet the bulk of D&D is built around fighting things. This is fine if you want to do an Eldritch interlude inside of a regular game, where you embrace that you're going to get a blend of traditional D&D alongside the eldritch horror. If you want a "pure" Cthulhu Mythos experience though, CoC is objectively better for the job.

You can't do Lovecraftian Horror in D&D. And here is why. There are so many elements that protect the character. First when you have 30-40 hitpoints it is hard to die. With high hitpoints and bunch of high saving throws it is hard to feel fear.

Just because you can use a system doesn't mean you should.

You're correct of course. D&D doesn't even function in that niche.

But that's not true. Can you try reading a DMG before opening your mouth again?

Actually, sanity is easy to wreck.

I don't care whether or not you have fun. If it's what you enjoy, go for it.

What I am saying, and have been trying to point out, is the significant difference between 'My group and I managed to do it' and 'The system is actually good for it'.

The only thing D&D is good for is heroic fantasy. If you made it work for other stuff, good for you I guess, but there are other options I'd recommend people look at first rather than going through the effort of kludging it. Because D&D is a heroic fantasy game, built to do heroic fantasy.

But it isn't good for heroic fantasy. D&D isn't good for anything.

What the fuck are you talking about? Please link to me where it says that. Just going by the damn levelling milestones you can easily tell a level 1 character is supposed to be barely above a commoner. Paladins don't have a fighting style or oath, wizards have no spells, druids can't even shapeshift, fighters, rogues, rangers... don't get their archetype yet. These are obviously not heroes, they're not even very good or learned in their chosen "profession".

forgot to mention when you have a Call of Cthulhu book that allows you to go from level 1 to level 20 someone clearly missed the point (by a mile) what is the theme of the setting.

SciFi and Fantasy are the same, except in one you can explain away the bullshit with "Magic!" and the other expects you to try and come up with a plausible explanation for the bullshit.

It's all speculative fiction, you autists!

And again, you are the one not getting that you have a toolbox, and you are trying to use all the tools at the same moment and then complain.

Meanwhile, people who aren't fucking stupid could just pick up Shonen Origami Tournament Simulator Plus and have the same game running within a week. You're falling into the sunk cost fallacy. Just because you have years of experience with a system doesn't mean you should use it for everything. I don't care how long you've been swinging a hammer or how experienced you are with using it to do things hammers aren't designed for. If you use a hammer to drive a screw, you're still an idiot.

Not only does Heroes of Horror provide plenty of rules and advice on how to shift the game towards horror, Elder Evils helps provide advice and rules on bringing Eldritch Horrors into your game.

With just those two books, you have all the pieces you need to run a pretty good CoC game, simply by using their variant options and then building appropriate low level characters. You can go ahead and scrap all the "tradtional" D&D trappings, and you're still left with a robust system to run.

And, that's just one of many hundreds of ways you could do it.

But it isn't. It literally isn't. It isn't GURPS.

The system you are talking about only exists in your imagination. You might have ended up using that way, but what you described is not a real thing.

D&D 5E DMG page 36 - 38.
Level 1 - 4: Local Hero
Level 5 -10: Heroes of the Realm
Level 11 - 16: Masters of the Realm
Level 17 - 20: Masters of the World

Right in the DMG for 5e
>Levels 1-4: Local Heroes
>But even 1st level characters are heroes

Why isn't it true?

A day is shorter than a week.

And, there's no guarantee Shonen Origami Tournament Simulator Plus doesn't suck ass.

And it would still be a garbage experience that took more work to do than just using fucking Call of Cthulhu.

Those books are meant for adding horror elements to D&D. And you can do that! Horror flavoured heroic fantasy can be cool. But the core fucking system is heroic fucking fantasy. This is such a fundamental statement of fact I am confused as to why it is so goddamn controversial.

>And it would still be a garbage experience that took more work to do than just using fucking Call of Cthulhu.

I disagree.

>He has to go outside the core rulebook to run CoC
You're proving his point you know. Books that come after the fact to shoehorn in mechanics that weren't present from the beginning and were given no consideration in the initial design p r o b a b l y are going to be garbage, as said.

And a week is shorter than a year. Glad we have that sorted out.

And there's no guarantee that it's awful either. It might even be good. You might even like it. You'll never know because you have your eyes shut, ears plugged, and keep screeching "LALALA CAN"T HEAR YOU LALALA D&D FOREVER LALALA!"

Expand your goddamn horizons.

>If you use a hammer to drive a screw, you're still an idiot.

If you're trying to call something as versatile as an entire tool box just a hammer, you'd be the idiot.

"Stop taking that screwdriver out of that box! You're only allowed to use that tool box like a hammer! Stop it! STOP IT!"

That's you. That's what you sound like.

>And a week is shorter than a year. Glad we have that sorted out.

If I already know the system though, aren't we comparing a week to a only day?

Glad we sorted that out. :)

Of all the arguments against Lovecraft horror in D&D that's the worst.

Make a monster that instakills you, or reduces your ability scores, or infects you, or just let a party of level 1 characters meet an aboleth/purple worm/tarrasque/etc

This is a slightly better argument but it's not that hard to say "ok you can't level past 3 in this campaign".

Except D&D was never intended to be a fucking toolbox.

3.5 might have ended up looking like one, with all the shit they heaped on it, but the system was built with a single, specific thing in mind. This is fact. This is not something you can disagree with because it is fucking true.

Why would a Lovecraft horror game's mechanics focus entirely on combat? Shouldn't it be focused on research, investigation, and chases (where the players are the prey)?

nope.jpg

And the argument that 90% of the mechanics, class abilities and rules in D&D are entirely irrelevant to lovecraftian horror, if not actively opposed to it?

So you have, in fact, missed the point of Lovecraftian horror as well.