Why should i play Tabletop rpgs? There are video games that offer the same (monster slaying, character optimization...

...

...

>tfw group convinces me to try a female character
>gm just throws nonstop dick at me
>try and explain that my character isn't really looking to get filled out like an application
>gm just has npcs rape me

never again with a female gm

best ones are on my phone, somebody else post the legends (OMH, Noh, etc.)

damn son... you got shanghai'd into her pic related, and it wasn't the giggity kind. I feel for you, dude.

Thanks bro, I learned to just play old men forever.

If you want more depth, freedom, actual roleplaying, customization options in personality and powers, if you like to express yourself through storytelling or other creative mediums, etc.

Not to mention the socialization and stuff that you can get from TTRPGs. It's a personal case for me, but ever since getting more into TTRPGs I've socialized more, met more people, write games and stories for fun, and started drawing a lot more often than before.

I'd disagree with depth if you played Dungeon World or ANYTHING Monty Cuck has put out in recent memory.

(YOU) shouldn't. Easy as that.
Begone, thot.

Don't think of it as a video game

See it as a mix-up betweeen writing, impro-theater and tabletop games

Once you've learned the pleasures of rolling dice, you're not gonna ever look back.

>muh vidya gaems
listen, i know this is probablly bait, but it hurts me to think that there are actually people out there that think like this, so let me spell this out for you.

the point of a trpg is NOT TO WIN. It is to tell a story. Fun =/= winning. There is no winning. There is only good characters, settings, and roleplaying. So take your min maxing bullshit and get out of here.

Yeh true, shut it down boys!

Playing a video game is to role-playing what picking which channel you watch on the television is to playing a video game. By changing the channel on the television, you are controlling the action, in a pale imitation of how you control the action in a video game. By picking dialogue options in a video game, you are role-playing in a pale imitation of how you role-play in a table-top RPG.

Beautiful

You can change tabletop games on the fly.

Lets say that you're fighting a troll. Trolls are weak to fire, but you have no fire magic with you. Luckily, there's a torch on the wall.

In a tabletop game, you could grab that torch and kill the troll with it. In videogames, it would have to be an explicit mechanic for you to be able to do anything creative like that.

Don't play Shit games then. RPGs aren't comparable to individual games, they're more like Game Engines. Individual Groups are more analogous to games.

If your GM doesn't have an immovable rod up his ass, and if you have good imagination, you have infinitely more freedom than in any vidja.

>Why should i play Tabletop rpgs?
Please don't.

they don't really do the same thing desu

Shit DM

>In tabletop you are only limited by the dice and your imagination.

And the GM

Wow. Why do women hate other women so much?

>Not having the most imaginative person of the group as your GM

You presume too much.
This sounds far more like inserting bodice ripper fantasies into a game.

Dungeon World is a fun game. People enjoy it. Deal with it.

>what cucks would say about cuckoldry

You apparently shouldn't.

If you have to ask, you probably wouldn't understand the answers,

If this is your mindset and you're too dense to absorb the very tangible difference, especially as explained in this thread, then you shouldn't play TTRPGs, and save yourself and us grief.
Go, play your le ebin Skyrim and tell me it gives you the same satisfaction as getting together with friends, creating a character that can be pretty much anything with the GM's approval, and explore amazing worlds using your imaginatio.

Tell me you don't enjoy not being beholden to shitty programming, set-in-stone ways of doing things like completing quests, no collecting of bear asses, no escort quests, no NPCs repeating the same three lines of dialogue when you prompt them, nor a static world that never changes in any way.

if you don't want to then don't

I don't understand why you want anyone to convince you to have a hobby

>Don't play Shit games then.
It doesn't really speak well of your argument when you basically say "WELL JUST DON'T PLAY SHITTY GAMES LOL."

There are good games in both mediums that offer a plethora of depth and complexity and then there are shit games where can't do anything because someone (either the director or the DM) decided that you had to explore their world in THIS way, no matter what, regardless of how little sense it makes or how much it pulls you out of the story.

Unfortunately, truly imaginative GM's are a minority.

t. Someone has played D&D for almost five years with multiple DM's.

Yes.

...

Hate to say it but..

Have you tried not playing D&D

Video games are great because they operate on consistent rules that, for better or for worse, cannot be changed without a serious understanding of how the game works.

So you wouldn't be fighting against the Troll at all unless you had a means of actually defeating it because devs generally want you to complete the game.

In tabletop games though, the rules are nebulous and subject to the whims of the DM, who is, for better or for worse, a human being with flaws and bias and if they feel the need to, they can alter the rules in such a way that you could end up in an unwinnable situation because they view their position as one of an adversary, rather than that of an arbiter.

So you can end up in a game where you hear there's a troll around, you bring torches and fire magic, and because the DM thought you were a "meta-gaming piece of trash," the troll ends up being immune to fire and you end up being TPK'd because you didn't think to bring ice magic instead.

I've long since moved on to better systems but since D&D is so prevalent and most DM's start off with it more often than not, I felt as though it was worth mentioning.

>This is a D&D ad
>When D&D has more video games than it has editions in its tabletop library.
Fucking hypocrites I swear.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you cannot visit Upper Hengsha. it was originally planned as a separate-but-connected hub with Lower, but was scrapped for time. You cannot go there. the only places you may go are those that the developer prepared beforehand.
In a campaign I GM'd, my players threw me a curveball when their characters decided to have a night on the town getting drunk and laid at the nearest club (the group is generally as Good Clean Fun as it gets). The club didn't even exist until a couple minutes after they asked me where it was. I ended up rejiggering all my notes for a couple sessions and revamping one NPC into three.
I even wrote a thing about it
throughatouchscreendarklyblog.wordpress.com/2017/01/02/deus-ex-and-the-futility-of-choice/

Except the video games are also being made by flawed people and can be just as bad

They can, but then again, I'll also know that every time I play that particular game gain, it will suck no matter how many times I play it.

Which is more than can be said about tabletop as a whole unfortunately.

retard

But that's a mark against vidya and for tabletop.
Vidya always stays the same, but tabletop can improve

I guess you've run out of points to make?
Lord knows there's more than enough stories in the archive depicting an otherwise decent premise being marred by either a shitty GM, shitty players, or both.

Meanwhile, I can pop in Super Star Saga and still have just as much fun now as I did when I first played it.

Also, a video game can also be improved provided the devs take what they learned and use that knowledge to produce a better game for the sequel.

Video games don't allow you to write your own characters, and then have them interact and grow as individuals in a way that only you and your players can control. A video game story will always be set in stone.

If you enjoy imagining unique characters, their motivations, their flaws, their perspectives, and playing them as they struggle to achieve their goals with uncertain future. Then play tabletop.

Mass Effect sure followed through on it's great premise, right?
Also SSS will be the same good time you had before. Things other than quality and drive ( like money) can stop a sequel in its tracks, and unless your gm is demanding pay that's not really an issue. You are also depending on more than just one person, giving yourself more chances to fail.

>More possibilities in a single game/system. Infinitely more.
>Tabletop interaction is generally in person, so if you're the kind of person who has friends, then this is great

>filled out like an application

>Video games don't allow you to write your own characters, and then have them interact and grow as individuals in a way that only you and your players can control.
Honestly, you can't do that in tabletop either in most cases.

If you're stuck in a group that values combat over story, you'll just end up being shuffled from encounter to encounter with barely any time to interact with the setting, let along generate a story where your character grows as an individual.

There's also the fact that some rules may get in the way of that, either because the RAW is shit or the DM decided to spring a house rule on you that benefitted nobody at the table but his level 20 half-dragon waifu kitsune DMPC, who proceeds to take all the spotlight while leaving you with nothing to do but comment on how awesome and sexy she is, lest the forecast calls for a sudden storm of falling rocks.

Not to mention, even when story is the focus, a lot of players end up making Mary Sues anyways.

It blows.

>Mass Effect sure followed through on it's great premise, right?
Just because the ending sucked dick doesn't mean that Mass Effect as a whole wasn't a decent trilogy though, especially after looking at...whatever the fuck Andromeda was supposed to be.
>Things other than quality and drive ( like money) can stop a sequel in its tracks, and unless your gm is demanding pay that's not really an issue.
Except that in some cases, players in the group may have to cancel game because life shit happened and you can end up in a situation where you just never get to play because everyone is busy with something else.

To say nothing on DM's who make a campaign and then just never show up again.
>You are also depending on more than just one person, giving yourself more chances to fail.
Conversely, you're depending on more than one person, so the chances for failure increases exponentially as people refuse to learn or cooperate with other people.

Of the two games I've been in, neither of them have been remotely like that.

All have been very story driven, and have gone off the rails in quite satisfying ways due to character interactions.

It's been pretty great. Just find a better group and gm.

Mass Effect started following apart in 2, starting with a joke faction suddenly being a huge threat with limitless resources and access.
It also sidelined aliens to focus on humans, and decided to do what was cool instead of what made sense.

I never said that it was perfect, I just said that it was a decent trilogy overall.

>All have been very story driven, and have gone off the rails in quite satisfying ways due to character interactions.
Congrats, you stumbled upon the fabled 20% of games where you don't have to deal with the unrestrained autism of the tabletop community which comprises roughly 80% of all games.

No seriously, congrats man, I had to stumble through mountains of dogshit campaigns before I found a good group with a regular gaming schedule.

>character optimization
D&D =/= all tabletop RPGs

Depth isn't exclusive to mechanics. Character interactions in an environment of humans interact with each other has a much greater possibility of being complex and indepth than a prewritten story. Provided the humans are capable of providing such an experience for each other.

People have bad campaigns/sessions. There are also a lot of bad videogames.

This is about the potential of the medium, not the worst of both of them.

>waifu kitsune dmpc

Can we just blame this on the pathfinder people

Well both mediums have their shitty aspects and choosing one over the other basically falls down to a matter of preference.

I personally value consistency and freedom when it comes to games because I get the most enjoyment out of figuring out what I can or cannot do within the context of the game and discovering something new about how the game or the setting works.

If I do this in a video game, I might discover a weird glitch, a hidden boss, or maybe even a new quest line that I never noticed before.

In tabletop games on the other hand, I always feel as though I'm being punished whenever I go off the beaten path, either because the DM didn't account for someone going left instead of right, the party hating me because I uncovered a broken combo using different abilities in tandem, or I just end up being accused of being a meta-gamer just because I decided to go to town for a mace before deciding to run into a nearby crypt.

Friendship and socialization mainly.

>talk to NPC in video game
>four dialogue options if you're lucky

>talk to NPC in TTRPG
>you can say literally anything you want
repeat for every aspect of the game

100% this

You can play a tabletop RPG as just a game (Lord knows we have hundreds of stories about games like that), but you and your group can get much more out of it with a little group acting and improv.

*sessions like that

>talk to NPC in video game
>each dialogue option gives you unique dialogue, which can change depending on your race, class, sex, or the level of your stats.

>talk to NPC in TTRPG
>DM tells you what they say rather than showing how they say it and expects you to have a specific response to what they say, or else you get beaten with the stick for not loving their NPC as much as they do.

All these shit gm's and groups. Holy hell.

Dealing with people is the best and worse part of tabletop RPG's as a concept.

You, specifically, shouldn't. Your cancerous /v/ mentality will make you just another shit player and the hobby has an excess of those already.

You shouldn't

The funny thing is, video game players tend to be pretty decent once you teach them how to roleplay and think outside of box.

In fact, the most trouble I've ever had with a player came from old blood who had a specific way that they enjoyed tabletop and anything outside of that niche was BADWRONGFUN because REASONS and FUCK YOU FOR HAVING SHIT TASTE!

Reading this thread made me realize how lucky I am to have a good DM who enjoys it and a group that actually roleplays, to varying degrees of quality, but it's usually better than nothing.

>character optimization,
Even amoungst optimizers, if this is your main goal: You are on the wroooooong board.

>>When D&D has more video games than it has editions in its tabletop library.
>Fucking hypocrites I swear.

...
WHAT?

Emergent that doesn't have the limitations of being built around programming, as well as being an immediately social and shared experience.

In software you're inherently limited by both implicit and explicit boundaries--content and how you can ever interact with it must by necessity follow prescribed and anticipated paths with a limited number of prepared outcomes.
This can be effectively padded out when combining simple parallel subsystems and wrapping it all in narrative contexts: the same choice at the same time, but given by different characters with different narrative contexts attached to them, will feel like different and unique events when properly sheathed in the implications of your choice on the complete narrative.

This sort of "emergent storytelling" is ultimately what fuels tabletop RPGs as well--but without the limitations of having to be scripted. You could change anything on the fly, such as introducing characters or subplots or new items, without requiring arduous preparation.

Limitation breeds creativity.

When people can do anything, they end up doing nothing.

Again, stop playing in shit groups.

It's MUCH harder to find a good group than a good video game though.

There is no potential for story-telling creativity in vidya. Unless your the guy who made the game.

What video games give you is the potential for manual execution in gameplay and combat, and a set in stone story.

What tabletop gives you is indirectly simulated combat and story telling possibility, for both players and gm's.

When you've been playing vidya for as long as I have, and have developed as incredibly picky tastes, then nah. Sturgeon's Law is in full effect on both counts.

I had these same thoughts a few years ago, I loved KotOR and Baldur's Gate and Deus Ex and all those rpg type games and I hadn't played any tabletop rpg's.

I got into mtg and 40k, and from there slowly into the third big game at most stores, dnd.

Once I got to play a bit and discovered that I can do anything I can do in real life, I fell in love. No video game can let you actually do anything, even the most open world or dialogue heavy game.

Until the day we can write into the video what our character says with a full text box and the npc actually responds to the things we say, until that happens rpg's will have more freedom and realism.

I still love video games but they don't stand up to tabletop in my mind, they're still too limited by dialogue choices. I mostly play video games for the story or for shooting stuff, and I play tabletop for freedom and exploration, so it's not like either invalidates the other.

You shouldn't. Videogamers have nothing to see in tabletop RPGs because they treat it the same way. They just sit on their ass, waiting until the fun is served to them on a silver platter and the only thing they think they need to do is click the right options.

To play an RPG you need to flap your gums a bit more, act like you are actually there, see things that video games couldn't cater, think outside of the box and the ruleset, actually be surprised by what is happening and what creatures are doing. You can actually make a character that matters, a character that NPCs treat as a person instead of some genderless object. Where your own choices have a real impact instead of a rigid good/neutral/evil dichotomy.

Don't play tabletop RPGs. You won't get it.

It's more about whether you're creatively inclined and how much you value narrative then whether you like games or not.

Enjoying games doesn't invalidate any of that. You can do both, believe it or not.

Are you Wayne, an earnest Wayne fanboy, or an ironic deconstruction of Wayne's ironic deconstruction of the fa/tg/uy mentality?

Not even sure the difference matters that much, but I'm curious.

This is the essence of the difference between Veeky Forums and vidya: rather than a hard-coded quest, you have to--mostly--run through the way the devs intended you to, you can engage with the plot in any way that reasonably works. As long as you have a decent GM who won't throw a neurotypical fit when you step off his railroad.

I do both, but when you're GMing and you get another set of newbies who treat it as a fucking MMO where they expect the information to be shoved down their throats so they can just ignore it and just grind for money and powergaming, that's where I just quit.

This assumes your DM hasn't come up outta video. Not a sure thing, these days.

My DM? I AM THE DM!

>/v/
>mocks others for being autistic

Depends on the game and group you're speaking of. Certain games like classic rogue likes or more conventional rgp's like elder scrolls or others can offer a rough approximation of your average pathfinder or DnD game. However I can think of no game that offers the sort of versatility of say....exalted for example.

Oh right, I keep forgetting that EVERY DM is a railroading dmpc-waifuing dipshit who kills his players for leaving his railroad instead of planning around it.

Shut the fuck up until you outgrow that cashew you call a brain.

>Veeky Forums
>mocks others for having fun the wrong way