Serious question Veeky Forums:

it's called dnd. there are plenty of campaigns going on it there taking place in some CoCers magical realm

I honestly love all of the weird cultural detritus and bizarre assumptions that D&D has built over it's 40 years of existence. Shit like Spelljammers and Grue and Mindflayers and evil BDSM elves are so fun and WEIRD when you think of them outside of the fact that they're just considered normal in D&D. I think D&D is at it's best when it acknowledges this weirdness, and either takes in knowingly in stride, or pokes and prods at it to see how it ticks.

Like, D&D, with it's status as the most played RPG in history BY FAR has built up this incredibly batshit shared mythology, developed communally by thousands, if not millions of different people. D&D, more so than other RPGs, is this wonderful and ridiculous shared experience.

Sure, D&D may not be the best at doing a high fantasy game. There's definitely better options for games heavier in theme, or grittier and more realistic. It certainly isn't well balanced, or good at any type of game that isn't at least partially focused on combat.

But the thing that D&D is good at, better at than all other RPGs, is being D&D, with all the weird baggage, disparate influences, and shared history it entails. And I love it for that.

I like most things about it. It's fun. Only thing I hate about it with any passion is the lack of supported monster player races. You should damn well be able to be a Beholder or a Illithid if you want to, without having to ramshackle houserule it.

0D&D is good for hex-crawl exploration.

That would be literally all.

So what's better than D&D, for general D&Dery? More race options, better mechanics, less stupidity, for instance.

Retroclones, my nigga

4e. It's not 'real' D&D, because the system actually has design goals and is good at them. Also, y'know, narrative mechanics and stuff, but that's more people interpreting 'it doesn't suit my playstyle' as 'it's a bad game'.

I hate this, and I hate Vancian magic, I think it's absolutely ridiculous. Lord of the god damned elements cannae cast a spark without reading his wee spellbook for an hour.

5e is pretty much my ideal level of complexity in a system.

the gameworlds
I know Veeky Forums being Veeky Forums likes to shit on them, and to be honest most of them are either badly designed (or get screwed as time goes on) or raped by corporate interest, mostly both but I still love all of them. Not only the sacrosanct settings that get hardly any criticsim (perhaps rightfully so) Planescape , Darksun etc but also the ones that got ship upon Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, the ones that are nearly forgotten, spealljammer birthright, the few obscure ones, kingdoms of kalamar etc.

I like them all, curising through them makes me feel lost in whole different worlds, that is a feeling I long and desire. Guess I'm the "explorer" type of player that game designers etc talk about.

If there is heaven I will wake up in Candlekeep.

This user pretty much gets it. D&D is its own wierd little cultural niche that does its own thing and it does its own thing fairly well.

The only problem I have is when people try to make D&D not D&D.

Mostly the spinoffs and the theme. I play games to overcome challenges, and OSR stuff and 4e stuff are both great for that (in different ways).

The only version of D&D I like is 4e, and I like it for the complex set-piece battles where everybody can contribute and be effective, the minimalistic but very functional setting, and the epic feel character have.

I also have a sweet spot for AD&D because that's what I learned to play as a kid, but for all the lovely memories I couldn't bring myself to play it again.

Huh, interesting. Most grognards hated 4E and the only lowers were those who were introduced to game 08-14.

or maybe grognards of 1st-2nde dnd were more lenient towards 4e while 3rd e fags absolutely detested 4e.

The weird monsters. Especially in older editions.

>or maybe grognards of 1st-2nde dnd were more lenient towards 4e while 3rd e fags absolutely detested 4e.

This is my experience.

So you like 5e as it's returning monsters from older editions? Because I like that myself

IME that's right. The butthurt against 4e came primarily from 3e players, which is partly understandable seeing how many design choices in 4e were direct responses to faults in 3e.
Forse what I've seen, older players either despise all forms of modern D&D (possibly 5e gets a pass, not sure), or took a sort of liking for 4e as a very focused game (it doesn't do everything but what it does it does well).
At least that's what I saw from the communities I used to follow. I'm sure that someone is going to pop out now and tell me I'm wrong, but that's it.

3.5 strikes a great balance between total PC customizability and newbie-friendliness. The optimal options are right there in front of you, but there is also potential depth that adds a lot replayability for non-munchkins.

Later editions are more balanced for combat but feel much more bland and narrow.

Exactly. D&D is at its best when you let it be D&D. That doesn't necessarily mean that every session has to be an endless cycle of Kick in Door, Kill Monster, Loot Corpse, Repeat. There's a LOT of room for variation and creativity, but it's necessary to have some basic understanding of the structure of the game before you start messing with that structure, or the result is almost certainly going to be a mess. You've gotta lean in to the weirdness.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who only know one system and who are afraid to learn new things, which leads to a lot of square pegs getting forced into round holes.

>3.5 strikes a great balance between total PC customizability and newbie-friendliness.

Is this a troll? The worst of the trap options are right in the corebook for chrissakes. Tier 1 and Tier 6 classes back to back with no inkling of the different potential.

I think proficiency is cool, gets of rid of fiddling with skill points per level.

I'm addicted to buying the shitty miniatures

>4E
I'm surprised you've gone 3 hours without getting flamed to dust all things considered.

There's no point in flaming a bot.

There's a few of us that still like it, and we are starting to get desensitized to trolls.

I'm with you on this truly. I really like how powers synergize to make this sort of Avengers-esque team cohesion it's fuckin great

What I played of 5e is just so stale desu it's so basic

>cannae

I feel like people are coming round to realising how good of a game 4E was. It killed a lot of sacred cows. 4E is a great tactical, grid based, miniature skirmish game.

I like 5E, but it just isn't the right game for my group, so have switched to GURPS. I agree D&D is at its best when you just let it be D&D, and that's not what my group likes... It's going OK so far.

3.5 is the worst system ever made except for all the rest.

Behold! The fucking FLAIL SNAIL, fucker of your shit.
so goofy these things i fukken love it.

Yeah 4E is awesome. It's up there for me with 40k, heroclix and warmachine for our groups game of choice for when we want to roll some dice and watch some monsters die. I love how it flips the normal 1v1 aspect of the game into a 5 v 1 situation and really well balances it so the Dungeon Master and Players are well matched against one another.

No people are just contrarian as fuck edgelords on this board who cant like anything good or popular in fear it makes them a normie.

When 4E came out it was the new hotness so everyone here shit all over it and starting jerking off over OSR.

Then Pathfinder came out and that became the new cool thing, so everyone shit on it and said how worthless D&D was in general as a game.

Then 5E came out and that was the cool new thing so everyones shitting on that now by saying how great 4E was.

By the time we get 7th edition D&D everyone will be saying what a fucking masterpiece 3.5 was.

There's no shitting on 5e, or not to the degree there was for 4e at least.

There are no, and weren't any 5e threads shitposted to death with futa porn, for instance.

>If you start out running Gurps or CoC, you are going to scare away new players.
that's what deendeefags unironically believe

You aren't far off from what I've seen as an /osrg/ regular. A lot of people like 4e as a focused game - myself included. As a younger guy, who wasn't around for TSR's heyday, it does make sense. I feel like a lot of OSR stuff is a reaction to 3.PF; OSR went one way, 4e went another but both came from dissatisfaction with 3rd. When they complain or contrast with "Modern D&D" they are rarely talking about specific 4e elements.

And they are pretty hard to take down I recall, need to throw them at my party

3e grognards don't really understand that 4e is simply the logical outcome of their game design approach, it just pulls out the "timmy" card design approach and undermines their system mastery, which is the only way they tolerate rolling to meet DCs in lieu of actual exploration.

OSR was rather explicitly a reaction to 4E which was seen as a complete reversal in the from a traditional RPG to a video gamey miniature combat game which a lot of people didn't want to play, rather than much to do with 3.5. (4E was a reaction to 3.5)

This is why the likes of the Westmarches style of play as well as multiple osr systems all originate from around 2008 when 4e was released.

Mythras Classic Fantasy

4e.

5e didn’t even start being shit on until recently. After all, 5e is pretty good. It was universally met with faint praise like “it’s a good intro to the hobby” and “it seems like everyone’s second favorite D&D,” and only virt would rant about it back then.

Lately, most of the shitting comes from people that list a 3.pf problem while pretending it is a 5e problem. And just about every hate thread still breaks down into 3.5 versus 4e edition wars.

The best complaint has been “the llaytests has some innovative stuff that got drummed out by the masses,” and WotC has been pretty freely admitting that. Mike Mearls originally wanted to make a “Basic” and “Advanced” product line again, but they realized that as soon as they did that everyone buys the “Advanvced” and feels like”Basic” is an insult so they made class disparity because people that buy D&D expect there to be disparity between classes and subclasses.

Same goes for the paragraphs a few /pol/-minded types lob out to prove it’s SJW edition. Jeremy Crawford is gay and has trans family, so he wanted to make sure some of the in-lore inclusivity was presented in the book.

I wish they made detailed battlemap rules in the DMG to make a pseudo-AD&D be the DM’s decision, but there is such a truckload of solid DM advice for more tactical play out there that I can see how they would push the devs to make 5e more flexible instead - which it is.

Boy could you be more wrong. Most stuff for the OSR is explicitly opposed to 3e, see the primer. The fact that they came out at the same time is due to the fact that both were different approaches to the saturation of 3.5.

5e is so innocuous a game that even those who don't like it are just meh.

All my group plays is fucking Pathfinder premade adventures and I fucking hate it.
Although I've got to say that the information is very, very easy to access.

I honestly can't think of anything about D&D I'd specifically like. It's easy to get a game of it going, but there's nothing in it itself that makes me go "aw yiss gotta get some of that".

DnD 5e is very flexible and allows for a good balnaced base to expand upon with what you want for a fantasy RP campaign.

Its easy to understand, with depth, and very allows for lots of easy customization.

Compared to say...MnM which took practically an entire day for everyone to set up their characters.

Also, 5e DnD does a very good job of making sure everyone in the group feels like they contribute.

Theres no more "Just sit back and let me solo the boss" classes any more that invalidate 90% of the players

I feel like with the addition of some of the UA (such as revised ranger) 5e DnD is pretty much perfect.

I'm still goddamn salty that one of the new Ranger archetypes coming out in the new source book next month has a high-level ability that turns him into a fucking tree.

I'm obsessed with Vancian casting, everybody talks about how point-based casting is better but I've yet to play one that isn't hilariously broken at a fundamental level.

>It was universally met with faint praise like “it’s a good intro to the hobby” and “it seems like everyone’s second favorite D&D,” and only virt would rant about it back then.
that's because the WOTC viral marketing machine was on full spin then.

I don't hate 5e because there's just not much there. I can see it being a good beginners game, or a space filler for people who just want more D&D that works okay, but it just struck me as really kinda meh. Losing the innovative ideas in the playtest is part of it, but I'd have been okay with that if they'd included any innovative ideas at all.

As it is, 5e is just kinda there. It does the job for people who want D&D, but as an RPG I don't see it doing anything well enough to make me want to play it.

Because you're retarded.

>Jeremy Crawford
It doesn't exclusively come from Crawford, Mearls pushes and encourages it as well and It's cringeworthy as fuck. He exclusively chooses to play with white male internet celebrities then goes on about the lack of diversity at tables? fucking Christ Shakespeare is rolling in his grave.

Go on, prove me wrong.

Well first of all why do you think something like Psionics is broken.
>inb4 blatent misurndstanding of the rules
>or "you always should you max points for everything" despite the same issue applying to Vancian spell-casting in which most lower level spells become utterly irrelevant after a certain point.

No, I mean Crawford literally requested that line because of his own experience and his family.

Yeah, you know those Hasbucks really shelled out for bots on the cash-rich money machine that Veeky Forums is.

I love CharOP

Building a character is basically just solving a gigantic, multi-faced maths problem, getting the most bang for your buck by squeezing every feat, every class ability, every possible bonus you can get is really fun for me

Also, I was introduced to roleplaying via dungeon crawling games, so they'll always hold a soft spot in my heart

It shouldn't be a surprise that 5e is my least favourite D&D edition

Pathfinder.

Modern D&D as a system has moved away from that though.

>I SHOULD GET TO PLAY MY SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE RACE IF I WANT TO
No. Just stop. I am so sick of fucking morons who join a game, consisting of somewhat normal (but still interesting) characters, then ask: "can I play a minotaur?" No, you can't, faggot. Get the fuck out. I am so sick of you jackass mongoloids who think you have a right to play whatever you want in my games. "You should damn well be able to be a beholder or illithid if you want" well how about you fuck off, stop saying "damn" like a reddditor nu male. What the fuck do you want to be an illithid for anyway? ANYONE on the surface world would either attack you, or flee immediately. You cannot have normal interactions with NPCs. You are completely fucking your group over, just so that you can enjoy the 2 seconds of wanking over "lol look what a cool creature I am." Fuck yourself. You are a selfish human being, who wants to fuck with other peoples' enjoyment, just so that YOU can get what YOU want. What an imbecile. I can't believe you think you have a right to this shit. I bet you're still on roll20 gamefinder threads to this day, trying to find a DM that will accept you and your level 10 illithid necromancer. "b-b-b-but, I balanced him for a 1st level party by giving him fear of the dark!" Jesus fucking christ I hate people like you.

>More race options
>inherently better
Uh

The edition wars are over, grandpa.

>Same goes for the paragraphs a few /pol/-minded types lob out to prove it’s SJW edition.
The bit about futa elves was taken out for the second (and subsequent) printing.

Crawford's a fag, with trap daughters? Christ. He certainly looks the party.
Daily Reminder: archive.is/JUHvE

>The best complaint has been “the llaytests has some innovative stuff that got drummed out by the masses,” and WotC has been pretty freely admitting that.
Yeah. Because the new edition is dumbed down for faggots. There is no reason for feats to be an optional rule when the game already has class features and skills to keep track of. Given how rare feats are, there is barely any significant added complexity to including them, that you wouldn't encounter by playing a more complex class. Fucking retarded. Also, trying to make the game palatable to grognards who are still playing AD&D, is also retarded. The ASIs are set up in a retarded way (my analogy is "standing on a stepstool to jump against the ceiling") for instant gratification (+2 to one score, or +1 to two scores). As a result, all that the ASIs are, is just filling in the slots between your starting score, and 20. Which is the cap. And pretty much all fighters will end up with a 20 Strength, because why not? Ability scores matter so goddamn much and are so necessary to being "viable" that every high level fighter is going to be mostly the same. They took all the good ideas in 3.5 that were badly executed and decided that that meant they were bad ideas, and went with metacurrency instead like superiority dice. I love when faggots on this board attack 3.5 tactical feats because they were bad (and they were) in execution, yet they attack the concept as well because they cannot separate the two, then pretend that superiority dice and shit like Action Surge are better because they are "simpler." Just proof that Veeky Forums has become infested with the same nu males who are ruining D&D.

>there's just not much there
Well, there's not really supposed to be. It's a system, it's a tool for getting to the important bits rather than an important bit by itself.

>if they'd included any innovative ideas at all.
I like how they did backgrounds, mechanically. And subraces would have been great for allowing setting variation if they'd run with the idea instead of pretty much abandoning it after launch.

Why are you salty about that? Too little practical utility?

We haven't really had bots since moot added captcha.

Exploration rules, a lot of games seem to never cover that kind of stuff.

I guess that's the difference. I tend to view the system as an important part of the experience, since how the rules work affects the themes and tone of the game. In a good game, this supports the GM, in a bad game this detracts from them.

But in 5e the rules are just kinda... there. Which seems to be what a lot of people want, and more power to them. It just doesn't interest me at all.

So what's so bad about 5e?

Nothing, but there's nothing that good either. It's the porridge of RPGs.

I dont, I hate the the combat and thats often what 90% of sessions are.

But all my friends enjoy it and I dont want to feel bad ditching them

You take that back. Porridge can be fucking delicious.

>how the rules work affects the themes and tone of the game.
Yes, but the themes and tone are what's important there, the rules are just a tool to get there. And considering you have many other tools to get there, a system that doesn't force its own themes and tones onto the campaign is necessary if you want to have an adaptable system which can be used for many different kinds of games. D&D aspires to be applicable to all fantasy, and moreso in 5e than ever before during WotC's tenure, so it makes sense that there won't be strong themes jumping out from the system itself.

I actually also prefer to have a system built around what I'm trying to do with it, I think most people do (at least if they're into traditional games enough to spend their free time posting about it in a cambodian bas-relief forum) but if you want something for which there is no obviously applicable system and can't be bothered making, testing, and balancing your own, and the genre's more or less fantasy, having something like 5e available is quite nice.

But what does the system of D&D include besides combat?

As others have said, it's easy to find a group due to exposure. That's pretty much it. It's a pretty bad system. Not the worst, but still really bad.

Eh. I'm always very sceptical of the claim that D&D is a broad system. That it's been used broadly is one thing, but the D&D fantasy it's appropriate for is honestly kinda niche.

It's why I prefer 4e, which took that niche and went all in on it, rather than 5e's attempt at breadth through absence. But, really, all I learnt from watching 5e's success is that I'm not their target audience, and that most people don't care about the aspects I do, so that's that.

This will sound pretentious but I can't find single thing.
Really, there isn't one thing in D&D, save the bare minimum that defines RPG as a medium Which is narrator/GM+players, controlling fictional characters defined by numerical and descriptory attributes with randomized resolution mechanics based on dice, telling interactive story) mechanics wise I'd incorporate in my hypotetical perfect game. Everything D&D does, some other game does way better.

From class vs classles, HPs vs other methods of wound/resilience management, dice choice and distribution, low vs high crunch, general vs specific rules, lvls vs point buy, abstract vs explicit positioning and movement, low vs high magnitudes of character advancement, low vs high combat focus... and many more, every single design issue I find myself on the opposite side.

Fluff-wise I despise kitchen sink high fantasy so it's also a nope.

One good thing I can say about D&D is that it generally went in a good direction with 5E, at least mechanics- and production value- Art direction, text structure, quality of physical product, etc if not really fluff- wise.

It's honestly not. It just feels that way because due to its popularity, it's the baseline for quality. But there's tons of small systems out there that are way worse than D&D, it's just that nobody ever talks about them outside of their sycophantic groups so nobody notices the flaws, and when people do notice, they place much less emphasis on those flaws because it's such a small game and it's expected that it will be flawed. So the games people typically hear about are the ones better than D&D - although the same effects that apply to games which are small and shit help to de-emphasize faws even here. You only rarely have games (like Exalted) where people actually pay close attention to what's wrong with it.

>the D&D fantasy it's appropriate for is honestly kinda niche.
This is true historically, but the blandness of 5e stems from an effort to make it less true.

>most people
I don't know about that. 5e didn't bring D&D's profits back to the height of the 3.x days. Probably nothing could, but...

I don't get it. 5e just seems to streamline the rules to make the game more approachable. Nonetheless, the ruleset seems convoluted enough to be applicable to a wide number of actions that the DM or party might wish to take.

It seems to me that regardless of what system you choose the most important thing boils down to the story-telling abilities of the party and DM. No matter which ruleset you use, you can construct a fantastic story in any of them.

Well, that's likely due to the changes in the market rather than the quality of the system. Every edition of D&D has outsold its predecessor, but 5e emerged into a larger marketplace with more competition than ever. It's still the top dog, but there's also a lot more people playing other things.

While that's true, it's also not the whole story. A good system can support a GM, making their job easier. I tend to think that's the point of the system, providing structure, guideline and rules that let you focus on telling the good story, with the rules supporting you when appropriate and staying out of the way otherwise.

Still, this is clearly something that varies by playstyle. Some GM's like to stick to rules very heavily, others mostly use them as a theme to improvise off of. I tend to fall somewhere in between, as I imagine most GM's do, but I think it's fair to say that the relative value of the system to a group varies significantly more than the value of a good GM and good players, which are always a key part of the experience.

The thing is ANY GAME can run ANYTHING theoretically when you understand basic conflict resolution and apply it to any action.

"I wanna do this social thing" "well such and such skill and stat do the social thing roll it and add your modifier and I'll decide arbitrarily whether or not you do it" and that's like 90% of D&D games that're 'roleplay' heavy. It's almost freeform except there's a venere of structure.

Compare this with games that have things like honor or wealth or what have you. I think L5R is far from perfect in terms of its 'social combat' but it at least takes into account how mechanically one might have lost standing or clout after a particularly harsh put-down by a political opponent.

D&D's focus has always been on combat. It has armor class and saving throws and HP. All things that just physically describe how easy/hard it is for you to get hit and take damage.

>But there's tons of small systems out there that are way worse than D&D
As I've said.
>not the worst, but still really bad.

SOrry but I cannot take you seriously. Fost you state that nothing in D&D is worth keeping, which is a strong nut understandable sentiment. Then you go on saying that you save 5e mechanically? When it's the most bland and baseline game out there? Nah, not buying it. You're just trying to stir shit.

>Compare this with games that have things like honor or wealth or what have you

...like D&D? I think every version of D&D has had variant rules for Honor. Certainly 3e and 5e did.

that's not how it works. the concept of evangelists is a thing in the viral marketing of RPGs though. and, by god, WOTC has many of them, Veeky Forums included.

>It seems to me that regardless of what system you choose the most important thing boils down to the story-telling abilities of the party and DM. No matter which ruleset you use, you can construct a fantastic story in any of them.

This is a commonly-held opinion, that actually crumbles when you try some really focused games, like some of the small-press storygames that are built from the round up to facilitate one explicit kind of narrative.
Those might be extremes, but the truth is, system matters. A good group AND a good game are both needed for a decent experience.