Thing that you know will be shit

>RP heavy D&D
>In depth character building D&D
>Modern D&D
>Muh "halloween/Christmas one shot!"
>epic lvl 20 one-shot (the last two reek of plebbit)
>"Rules light" D&D
>"I'm a killer GM" "plan well or die"

What else should I add to this list

Other urls found in this thread:

squaremans.com/PlayersGuidetoSanctuary.pdf
youtu.be/i23p7QRDFck?t=54s
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

>Ironclaw

As always, add the following to your list:

>threads made by OP

>"dark fantasy" setting
>any homebrew setting
>evil campaign
>session 0
>inspiration from [insert any video game or anime here]
>two page backstory
>any single player makes any reference or mention to Reddit, Tumblr, or Veeky Forums

>"low magic" D&D
>"political intrigue" D&D
I actually like D&D but there's some shit it just isn't meant for.

I agree with every single one of those except for:
>any homebrew setting

Why?

>session 0
Okay, you're going to have to explain to me why this is bad.

>any game involving OP

Not him but IME it's been pretty useless, the players didn't really want to be there and had already decided what their characters would be,

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree here, or say it's entirely situational.

Hell, our group has pretty much never done an established campaign or setting.

>strong womyn characters
>GMs who make maps and cannot understand how rivers works
>"muh session 0 is mandatory"
>Mention of reddit
>GM or players suggest the use of X cards

>RP heavy D&D
Why would I play D&D with people who don't roleplay a lot?

>session 0
>homebrew
You're shit m8

>RP heavy D&D
Can easily slip into melodrama, depends on the group
>In depth character building D&D
This is just complaining your thatguyisms get caught in session 0
>Modern D&D
Obviously.
>Muh "halloween/Christmas one shot!"
Naw, listen here nigger, those are 10/10
>epic lvl 20 one-shot (the last two reek of plebbit)
This is never a good idea
>"Rules light" D&D
5e's great, fuck you
>"I'm a killer GM" "plan well or die"
Obviously
>threads made by OP
Obviously

>"west marches"
>"living world"

>Muh "halloween/Christmas one shot!"
My campy one shot of Shadow of the Demon Lord would not be to your liking then. Running it specifically because it's Halloween.

>The game uses a deck of normal playing cards

Not him but around plebbit and in other corners of the Internet they treat session 0 like it is a must and a panacea. They attribute every problem a campaign to the lack or (in the case there was a session 0) not good enough session 0.

It is like a religion "hey one of my players didn't show up yesterday" "I BET THERE WAS NO SESSION 0, ALWAYS DO A SESSION 0, *link to Colville video talking about mandatory racemixing and session 0 video* WATCH IT AND LEARN".

I'm really happy that Jasmine James exists so I can enjoy SuperMary's Face choking down on the dicks that it so desperately needs to.

Never seen one that's good, including my own. Maybe it's just personal bias.

Always end up boring, and nothing gets changed or influenced by it because the GM and players almost always know what they're going to play anyway. It also seems to frequently turn into "sandbox" AKA boring games.

>Any game company that makes a game or miniatures that are GW 40K rip offs

You could really condense the entire list by just putting "D&D"

This thread

>>Muh "halloween/Christmas one shot!"
Oi, piss off. I haven't played any bad Halloween oneshots yet.

Christmas one shots though should never be considered. Ever.

>DM houserules in crit fails

>any homebrew setting
So wait, it's literally impossible to do good creative work without getting paid for it?

>Trying to lose weight
>There's a Domino's literally around the corner
>That fucking picture makes me hungry
>It's almost midnight
FUCK YOU

>Plays D&D without rolepay heavy players
OP, why are you trying to tell people how to play D&D when you dont play it right yourself?

>I'm shit and only play with shit people so every group must be as shit as me

squaremans.com/PlayersGuidetoSanctuary.pdf

>My friends guide to his homebrew world.

>"I will revise rolls if they mess up the story"
Yep.

Stay strong, my brother. Invest in fruits. Lots of fiber to fill you up and you shit it all out.

The thread IS about shit

Buddy, how is that appetising?

Like seriously what is half the shit in it, I see ham, mushrooms and brocolli, but what the hell is the rest, is that fucking mayo? And God knows what is the red thing.

>RP heavy D&D
>In depth character building D&D
>Modern D&D
>Muh "halloween/Christmas one shot!"

Fuck off

>"Rules light" D&D
>"I'm a killer GM" "plan well or die"


Alright, I agree here.

Thanks bro, I'm already trying that. Grapes are my new 'candy'.

I haven't had pizza in a trillion years, so it looks good to me. Especially the ham half. That red sauce looks like it's spicy, me likey.

user is probs a fatass who eats anything they see

>Maybe it's just personal bias
>Maybe

If every sentence on Veeky Forums were autocorrected to begin with "in my opinion", the site as a whole would improve. I mean, it used to be implicit, but I don't know what the fuck happened with that.

Reddit responses

What the hell is a living world

>*link to Colville video talking about mandatory racemixing and session 0 video*
Wut? Colville's never done a session 0 in his life, let alone made a video about it.

Basically, it's meant to be a campaign, usually Sandbox games, whose setting is constantly advancing and progressing in the background while the players are running around and doing shit.

Most GMs are either too shit to pull it off, or rely too much on the mechanics that the game gives them to pull it off. They also tend to struggle/fail once the players get above a certain wealth/power level because the players are able to make huge changes to the socioeconomic and landscape with their actions because said GM has no idea to adjust too due to said reasons.

What's wrong with the one-shots?

>That guy who thinks he's a genius tier DM because he doesn't do any planning, fudges everything and doesn't even bother rolling monster HP when really he's just a lazy piece of shit.

>Any user who opposes my views is a post-moot reddit newfag
Obvious shit b8 is obvious

>That DM who doesn't even own the books, makes up everything on the fly and claims that he has everything memorized

Nope, I do not agree with 80% of this thread, yet those are the only reddit responses.

Living worlds are easy as fuck to dm, idk what your talking about. The past two campaigns i did were living world and both went perfect

Well, yeah, but you have to realize that plenty of GMs aren't competent enough to handle the antics of their group, let alone the kind off assbackwards stuff that'd happen in their setting because of said players.

All worlds should be living worlds. If they are not then what is the point of the decisions your players take?

>plenty of GMs
Other GMS that dont GM good enough arent my problem

>creating art
Then let us judge your 'art' by the message it intends to convey.

I had a friend who almost got away with it once. The fact that he threw a monstrous hissy fit during a game in which he was a player over a rules dispute brought everything into the light.

I see "roleplay heavy D&D" in this thread and I want someone to elaborate on it. I agree that D&D and even more so the newer editions of D&D aren't systems that encourage roleplaying, rather it probably detracts from it. But what aspects of roleplaying are we specifically talking about? Roleplaying your character in combat? NPC interaction? What part is specifically worse when its an RP heavy campaign? Is it just cause the flow and pacing of the campaign gets dragged into the mud or what happens? Also whats the right amount of roleplaying in your opinion?

Oh I'm an idiot I meant modern D&D as using the system for a world with cars, guns and shit like that not 3.X to 5e

I find that by "roleplaying" most people are actually thinking about theatrics, but I think it's more useful to think of roleplaying as actually exploring the world by the decisions you make for your character.

This is going to sound like pretentious /osr/ wankery, but they do have a point, games where conflict & resolution is adjudicated heavily (or even, God forbid) solely by rolling to meet difficulty class/target numbers isn't really roleplaying, it's plugging your character sheet into the scenario to do it for you.

Roleplaying comes from the choices you make, whether it is simply using a 10 foot pole to try to trip trap mechanisms from a safe distance or
making a decision to jump from a ledge and plant a dagger into the back of a poor villain.

Story, character development, slice of life stuff is secondary & emergent to the game that values player decisions before codifying rules for adjudicating them.

I'll counter with
>Any pre-existing setting.
Great way to display your lack of creativity as a gm right there.
If I know the setting already you lose any sense of mystery, and open up disagreements in interpretation.
If I don't know the setting I'm invariably playing with people who do and am immediately ostracised, or they metagame so hard that I lose interest in the game.

I did an Xmas special and the party actually really seemed to get a kick out of saving Santa from evil wizards who wanted Santa's scrying magic, especially since Santa gave each of them a free magic item equal to or less than 5,000 GP from the Dungeon Master's guide.

I'm not sure this is usually a house rule so much as a failed understanding of the rules, like how people think "lol nat20" is auto-success in skills purely because they think you Crit Success in skills.

D20 Modern does kinda suck, especially driving rules. That said, I've never seen driving actually done WELL. It is passable, but there's enough moments where the system does pretty decent that it makes you realize that chunks of it are service-ably mediocre at best.

The real issue with Living Worlds is knowing where to put the party. The right man in the right place can make all the difference in the world. It's like a lever; with a big enough lever you can move anything. The party is the stick, you just need the right fulcrum, and make them feel that they matter at the right times.

Level 20 adventures are, to say the least, hard to write for and it takes a bunch of time to draft up a character for what will become a "save or die" parade of Finger of Death/Implosion/Dragon fire spam. It's just a lot of effort, and will almost certainly derail in ways you don't anticipate since PC spellcasters will almost certainly have world-changing levels of magic that are difficult to account for without it seeming like you are using outside knowledge against them. For instance, the party tries to do X, but the Lich conveniently has a defense against X... It may have been planned well in advance, but you have a defense for plan A, B, C-Z, it may seem like railroading or bullshit to the players.

This is really a good answer. D&D is good at high fantasy. Political intrigue can lightly be shoved in, but not super well.

>This is just complaining your thatguyisms get caught in session 0

Seriously; if you see their shit coming you can fuck'em right back.

There is nothing wrong with Session 0 if you are starting with a new system or they are new to playing. You have to explain the rules, often hold their hands, and it's easier to do it in person with theoretical examples rather than have them get ganked because they can't figure out how their stuff works. They may even need walked through the basics of the setting if they are interested but poorly informed about what it is, or what the DM has changed to an existing setting. sometimes it's also nice to make characters together if the players have good chemistry, since they can each make their character in a way that fills critical party roles.

>Level 20 adventures are, to say the least, hard to write for and it takes a bunch of time to draft up a character for what will become a "save or die" parade of Finger of Death/Implosion/Dragon fire spam. It's just a lot of effort, and will almost certainly derail in ways you don't anticipate since PC spellcasters will almost certainly have world-changing levels of magic that are difficult to account for without it seeming like you are using outside knowledge against them. For instance, the party tries to do X, but the Lich conveniently has a defense against X... It may have been planned well in advance, but you have a defense for plan A, B, C-Z, it may seem like railroading or bullshit to the players.

Okay. Try not playing D&D maybe.
Also about halloween one-shots, there's a ton indie horror games that work in one session out there, and Halloween is just an excuse to whip them out and take a break from regular gaming, and they're also bretty gud. Unless you meant using D&D, in which case I agree that it's not a good fit. (Christmas themed games are bad in general).

I always do group and setting creation with the players. Don't know if that's session 0, but my games improved significantly.

>The right man in the right place can make all the difference in the world.

So much this. I am running an L5R game where a player may have completely changed how things are shaking down due to their actions.

In the "canon" metaplot the Emperor is due to die in about a month when he comes to acknowledge his illegitimate oldest son. That PC has sent information that REALLY REALLY makes that guy look bad to one of the Emperor's Advisors (who the party was tasked by to gather information on said illegitimate son). Depending how the next few adventures shake out, it could lead to the disgrace of the bastard and the emperor denying any connection to him. Said bastard has gathered quite a few men under his banner and this could lead to a civil war.

Meanwhile another PC thinks said bastard is having his character assassinated (he doesn't know who is behind and doesn't really care, he's just taking advantage of it) and is in the process of setting up one of his own political rivals as the one undermining the Bastard's claim in hopes of ruining his rival by siccing the bastard on him while at the same time appearing to be an ally of the bastard, the PC is just using the bastard as a convenient stick against his rival.

This is rapidly turning into a glorious mess and I am loving every minute of it.

I always thought that "session 0" just meant "run a dungeon game for them and see what they do, how they do it, what the dynamic is like and build the campaign from there".

...And it's reviled because it's a Dungeon World thing and as we all know, story games = the sjw menace, we like titty demons in boob plate and they're the badwrong ones.

>(Christmas themed games are bad in general)
Fuck you, the one time I played in a Judge Dredd game about defending a Mega-City mall from the rampages of a robotic Santa expy and the *real* Santa showed up to give all the good Judges presents was fucking amazing and you're a faggot for dismissing the possibility.

Define "rules light", i think i may fall into this

I disagree with everything, save for one.

There's nothing wrong with dark fantasy. The problems that it faces are the same with any other genre, and it's with delivery of mood and setting.

Homebrew? What's wrong with homebrew? As long as the group and the DM are all in conjunction about what they want, then it's all good as far as I'm concerned. Hell, I run a group with my own homebrew setting and they've enjoyed it more than the Forgotten Realms settings.

Modern D&D is kinda odd, but I'm okay with it.
>b-but muh status quo always fantasy no guns

There's nothing wrong with holiday-themed one-shots.

Rules Light can be a good thing with inexperienced players or who are new to the game. Get the game out of the way to focus on story.

>"I'm a killer GM" "plan well or die"
Gonna have to agree on that one, though.

I think if the sarcasm of the quotations is allowed, OP means "doesn't know the rules"

>Halloween Games
Not to mention the always good Ghostbusters RPG from WEG.

>Oh I'm an idiot
You got that right

sometimes i let my players just get attacks if i can't think of a reason why they wouldnt hit/wound. (IE hitting them while they're down)

There are exactly three kinds of people who pick up a game of Pathfinder/D&D and decide to homebrew a setting:

The first is the kind of smug, self-satisfied, pretentious person who has active disdain for foundational fantasy conventions and thinks that "subverting the tropes" constitutes quality writing. This is where you get all the the eye-rollingly "wacky" settings that people propose instead of the dreaded "Generic European Fantasy:"
>What if we ran a D&D game with gunpowder weapons in a post-apocalyptic wild west?
>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to city states floating on sky islands?
>What if the only playable races were gnomes and bugmen, and everyone lives underground, and magic comes from eating mushrooms that grow on the backs of wild elves?

How twee. How wacky. How inteszzzzzzzz....

The second is the kind of person who's too lazy to run someone else's world consistently. They can't put in the effort to memorize the base details of Dragonlance or Ravenloft or even Forgotten Realms, so they create their own Forgotten Realms with the serial numbers filed off and the geography mixed up a little bit. They throw another bog-standard fantasy setting on the pile: another laundry list of proper nouns that the players have to re-remember even though they mean the same thing as any other D&D setting.

The third is the failed fantasy writer; the wannabe Tolkien who is actively more invested in showing you their fantasy realm than running your campaign. They're no less self-congratulating than the first, no more creative than the second, but has become so enraptured with their own escapist flights of fantasy that they'll stew in disdain for their players not caring as much as themselves on the obligatory globe-trotting slog.

In all cases it's not a good sign for the quality of your GM, both in the sense of the quality of their game and the quality of their character.

>but they do have a point, games where conflict & resolution is adjudicated heavily (or even, God forbid) solely by rolling to meet difficulty class/target numbers isn't really roleplaying, it's plugging your character sheet into the scenario to do it for you.
>Roleplaying comes from the choices you make, whether it is simply using a 10 foot pole to try to trip trap mechanisms from a safe distance or making a decision to jump from a ledge and plant a dagger into the back of a poor villain.
You still make your choices as your character. There's just an overall way to know, mechanically, what happens.

None of those are as bad as a phoneposter who can't even save a gif properly.

And then there is the fourth who think the default setting is shit and don't want to deal with th "elves are actually aliens and everyone conforms to SJW bullshit because we are cucks who play it safe" that golarion turned into.

Or maybe I don't want to have to deal with a lvl 20 NPC bard tavern owner or my players wanting to meet Drizz't

But there's the huge disconnect of how you achieve it that is so important to getting the sense of actual freedom and the emergent quality of RP.

It's the difference between rolling a 16 and adding your characters bonuses to check a room for hidden doors versus actually exploring that room through tangible decisions that you made for your character.

>My games 'realistic' , prepare your (female) character to be raped.

>itt: STOP HAVING FUN THAT WAY REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This is pasta, and bait.

>any homebrew
>session 0

But why tho

>It's the difference between rolling a 16 and adding your characters bonuses to check a room for hidden doors
That's literally how it's always worked.

>It's the difference between rolling a 16 and adding your characters bonuses to check a room for hidden doors versus actually exploring that room through tangible decisions that you made for your character.

The difference is that in the second case you are not playing a game, you are putting up a performance to be judged by the GM. If he likes you well enough you succeed. That's nor RPG, that's adulation.

youtu.be/i23p7QRDFck?t=54s

I can't get ye flask.

Exactly what happens with no game.

...

You've misunderstood the argument being made. Nowhere have I stated that rules don't matter. We just tend to put the cart before the horse and our games suffer by relying too heavily on abstraction.

Wow you sound like a barrel of fun

Don't you think that this method of not rolling for everything and having your players interact with the scenario through in-game actions and not exclusively rolling dice relies heavily on GM performance as well? If you can't clearly understand what's actually in a dungeon room, then there's clearly an issue with the GM isn't there?

You a shit

Look, Tarroka decks don't grow on trees.

You can design the game in such a way that rewards a player for being creative without falling into a mother may I situation or only allowing for skill checks to pass obstacles.

You create the situation, think of 3 ways the players could resolve it, and then you remain further open to other methods if they make sense within context and adjudicate appropriately based on the game rules, the established rules of the world and a degree of 'common sense' for use of a better word. (It helps not to be autistic here too.)

So a simple example. The players face a magically sealed door in a 'warrior trial's dungeon. The door speaks a riddle to them. If they answer correctly the door opens, if they fail the door shoot south a lightning bolt directly forwards and seals shut.

Ways to resolve it
>Answer the riddle
>Dispel magic on the door
>find the secret entrance in the room before this one , behind the book shelf that has some scratches on the floor beneath it, and circumvent it.
>Anything else random the players may come up with (forcing the door open though this can trigger the trap anyway ) , reflect magic / a mirror to flip the lightning back at the door this damaging it, finding whoever made this door and asking them to open the bloody thing. Etc.

All these can be done without skill rolls and simply by exploring the world organically and picking up on clues within.

It's not wrong.

>B-but why is roleplay heavy D&D bad?
Because at some point around when World of Darkness hit the scene, "roleplaying" in D&D went from meaning "approaching situations from the perspective of your character" to "hours of obligatory improv theater drama nonsense."

Back when I played 2E in High School, sometimes you would come across a captive in a dungeon and have to figure out what to do with them. The Rogue would suggest giving them a dagger and sending them back to the entrance so they could press on, but if someone was lawful or particularly chivalrous they would step up and say that the captive had to be escorted back to the entrance to make sure they were safe. There would be a bit of back-and-forth over what was better for resources, other people would weigh in, and a decision would be made. Then, the group would continue. Sometimes you would come across a talking sword. The guy playing the barbarian would be distrustful of magic and refuse to pick it up, so another martial would use it. Then, the group would continue.

Nowadays,you sit down at a table and play 5e, everyone has pages worth of background written for their character, and entire character arcs pre-planned character arcs that are supposed to accompany it.

Before you go out adventuring, it's not enough for the bard to say he's saving money for his sick sister - he needs a "scene." The GM needs to put on a little girl voice and they need to talk about childhood promises.

You're on the road, and the druid needs to talk with the animals. Not for any particular direction or rumors, but just because the druid is the kind of person who would talk to animals, and we need to make it a "scene." Idle conversation with wolves, the height of role play.

Then you make camp, and the barbarian starts talking about the tribe that exiled her. She and the dwarf talk about honor, but to no end in particular. It's character building. It's a "scene."

It's fucking tiresome, is what it is.

So instead of rolling investigation to find secrets you want players to just go down the mandatory OSR exploration checklist every time, or just have the DM tell them the answer. Woo so fun.

Actually, if a "OSR exploration checklist" becomes a rote and overly reliable thing in your game, don't you see how a GM worth his or her salt can maybe take it as constructive criticism to improve the design of their scenarios & encounters?

Wow, you totally convinced me there. Yep. Totally proved me wrong.

I've run homebrew settings before, and the best campaign we had was in one of them.

Things that worked out well were that I tried to keep the mechanics in line with what was already established in the system--so, expanded knowledge and craft and profession checks, combat basically unchanged, and so forth. Geography and map design needed thought but helped players get a clear idea of how things fit together.

The way we did explosives in setting worked really well, as rare but *super super* dangerous and unpredictable. Like, "whoops you fucked up and half the party has lost half their health, be careful next time idiot" with firework artillery shells.

What *didn't* work so well, from a world-building standpoint, is that Pathfinder/D&D *really* don't lend themselves to any technology. On the economics front, they're also totally broken.

Like, a non-crippling starting gold for, say, level 3 players at session 0 is like 3K gold, more if you're feeling generous. And in-world, that much gold is basically fuck-you money. Why adventure? Why not buy a villa or manse and settle down?

Other things that didn't work well were vehicle rules. I was able to wing some reasonable airship stuff (yeah, fuck you, they're neat) but it really needs some consistent mechanics to feel right.

Also, trying to manage travel over distances (because airships yo) made life annoying, and also made worldbuilding triciker.

My biggest advice for anyone trying to do it--without it sucking!--is to really think through any changes you make to tech level, to work on fringes of societies instead of major population centers, and to be ready to work with your players on keeping the narrative fun.

>Badwrongfun
Fuck off.

You hit the nail in the head. As someone who grew up playing 2e this is exactly how I feel. I mean I am probably younger than your average 2e player(I got hand me downs so even though 3.0 existed I couldn't afford it but I had all the 2e books, so I played 2e with my friends) but holy shit your average redditor and 5e players is exactly how you describe.

The other day I was having a conversation in discord with 5 or 6 other DMs and they were talking about "player arcs" "character development" how every session the "spotlight of RP should move from player to player", until I read your post I had still a bit of doubt if I was doing something wrong because my games don't involve any of this.