How do you know if someone on Veeky Forums doesn't play D&D?

How do you know if someone on Veeky Forums doesn't play D&D?

Don't worry, they'll tell you

Easier then that. Look for a contrarian child. Every contrarian child must rebel against the "Man"/parent/popular kid who is D&D. It's in their nature.

Let them grow up. The will get it eventually.

...or maybe they don't enjoy the game because they prefer something that plays differently?
Just a thought.

Going in D&D threads to complain about the game is really contrarian and autistic. Do you also go to MtG and 40K to call their games bad because you prefer Netrunner or Infinity?

As someone who reads threads on both those topics: yes, people do in fact do that.

it's because often the threads raided by "have you tried not playing D&D" types are just trying really hard to shove a square peg in a round hole, which would be easily solved by a different game. Personally I just don't give a fuck about D&D really hard, this game can go die. Eastern europeans all play warhammer fantasy 2e anyway as a default.

How?

D&D is the most widely played RPG, shortcoming of every edition as well as valid criticism and proposed fixes of them have reached meme status.

You could have never played D&D and you could still name its flaws, criticise them, and not be wrong. You don’t even need to have a brain, chatbot could do that at this point.

Not just D&D, I've never played a TRPG in my life.

The problem with the "have you tried not playing D&D" is that people use it more often than not when playing a different system wouldn't solve anything.

Few problems discussed on this board can be solved just by switching systems, largely because at the end of the day, the system is actually only a small component to the game that's being run, and that switching systems just leads to a new veneer on the same old problems.

"Try X system" is not always bad advice, but it's not particularly helpful in a thread about problem players, or about story issues, or even alignment arguments, because even in the last case it's just a name (or a different name) for things you'll find in find in almost every other game. Even games "without" alignments still have degrees of morality to them or factions with codes of conduct, and most alignment arguments typically revolve around these two features of alignment.

Does D&D have flaws? Certainly, but most of these are remedied in far less time than it takes to learn a new system, and the idea that you should abandon a system just because something didn't work out is why we find a lot of people hopping through multiple systems hoping that a change of game will solve their problems.

Most of the whole problem with system discussion is that it's actually political in nature. Play X game or play Y game is a tactic to try to garner support for one game or dissuade people from playing another, and is largely dishonest in its lack of transparency. D&D becomes a target not because it's a bad game by any measure, but because it's popularity means people are less inclined to play other games.

As a person who has played his share of everything under the sun and now plays homebrews almost exclusively, I've really gotten tired of people claiming system superiority or inferiority when they're all just talking about the same inferior games just under different disguises.

If only they knew how amazing Duck in the Circle was.

How do you know if someone irl plays D&D?
He's wearing the WotC approved D&D headgear of course!