Biggest thing that has always confused me about these games is why there is a constant need for some central authority to regularly distribute a rulebook. Did the rules of the previous game just not work? I think it's just marketing and wanting to sell stuff. The only "table games" I play would be poker and chess to a lesser degree. Yeah, there's variants to poker especially, but I don't have to have "Official Poker rules, 28th edition, 2024 revision" where they just up and decide that queens defeat kings now.
why there is a constant need for some central authority to regularly distribute a rulebook
I don't play myself, but a couple reasons off the top of my head:
Consistency- imagine if you had to go over the entire rule set every time you join a new group.
Laziness- most people don't want to spend hours, days, years developing speadsheets for their own OC.
Did the rules of the previous game just not work?
Balancing- it's practically impossible to fine tune a game perfectly before public feedback. Even then, you'll never please everyone, but that's what home-brewed rules are for.
Patches- I doubt they exhausted all creativity in existence before the 1st release, so new races, spells, actions or whatever you can imagine might get added in later versions.
I've heard the rule books come with their own scenarios/lore etc that could make it easier for new DM's or players to get used to. Some people might even buy them for the art.
What surprises me isn't how popular it is, but rather how few competitors there are. I've heard of Pathfinder, and that's about it.
Yeah, that is curious. Haven’t I seen before that they love to file lawsuits? I’m not sure how they would win, tons of those type fantasy things are just lifted from Tolkien and the like anyway. They can still litigate you to death though.
I think in the end it’s all far too autistic for me. Maybe if I had a group of friends that played only for fun, sure. Going to “public” where to going to mostly people who breathe DnD air, eat DnD cereal, and wipe themselves with DnD toilet paper, well that doesn’t sound too enticing. Interesting to learn about though.
It's kind of like a live service game, isn't it? I guess you can keep playing older versions though so there is at least that. I never got into this stuff either because of what you are talking about here. It also seems to be full of trannies and shitlibs now anyway.
Chock full o nuts. I watched a video reviewing "dm horror stories" A quarter of them were about "racist" players acting in ways that make the story obvious bullshit to anyone who isn't woke
They're not games, more like peer pressure simulator. It's your turn, but DM says you tripped on a rock and miss your turn or something dumb and arbitrary like that, but he can only do that if the other players go along with it.
New ruleset is like Congress passing some new "workers rights" bill - now things are fair, peon's rights, my gripes are important - but really it's the same bullshit as before, you just feel like this time it'll be different.
That made me more interested into what you're on about. So I went and looked and came across several places with stories about dungeon masters. Uh, yeah, the insanity. My brain doesn't work in the way that would be required to play that game or participation event or whatever you want to call it.
The issue is that D&D is not the sum total of TTRPG.
TTRPGs were one of the first casualties of the culture war. Many publishers and much of the industry fell to woke-tards.
It hasn't made any difference at all at the table level. TTRPG players are fantastically fractious and if the don't like something they just ignore it. Once they have their books they don't need anything else. They can (and frequently do) write entire settings and only use Rules Reference Documents, which are cheap as fuck or free.
I stopped playing D&D in 2003. There are so many better settings and systems. I'll talk about what and why if anyone cares.
GURPS is great. I love it. It is the preverbal kitchen sink RPG ruleset.
GURPS Lite is on of my favorite lightweight rulesets. I like GURPS can do everything between rules light and super-complex just by picking how many of the rules you want to use.
I like EarthDawn for Fantasy / Horror. I enjoy Reign by Greg Stolze. Both of them are vastly superior to D&D.
Yeah, I've played traditional sword and sorcery games, a zombie apocalypse game, a space pirate game, a historic reenactment of the first crusade, an alternate history of World War 2, and even one-shot where everyone is a boring office worker in a failing financial firm. Just the basic set is enough to do that, albeit a bit janky. The dedicated supplemental books helps a whole lot, thank god for pirated PDFs. Though you really need to know what the hell you're doing when making a character, it's a running joke in my playgroup "did you remember to put points into the 'breathing' skill?"
It was recently implied that I lack intelligence for not being interested in TTRPGs. I submit this as exhibit A for the defense.
The verdict is in: based.
Biggest thing that has always confused me about these games is why there is a constant need for some central authority to regularly distribute a rulebook. Did the rules of the previous game just not work? I think it's just marketing and wanting to sell stuff. The only "table games" I play would be poker and chess to a lesser degree. Yeah, there's variants to poker especially, but I don't have to have "Official Poker rules, 28th edition, 2024 revision" where they just up and decide that queens defeat kings now.
I don't play myself, but a couple reasons off the top of my head:
I've heard the rule books come with their own scenarios/lore etc that could make it easier for new DM's or players to get used to. Some people might even buy them for the art.
What surprises me isn't how popular it is, but rather how few competitors there are. I've heard of Pathfinder, and that's about it.
Yeah, that is curious. Haven’t I seen before that they love to file lawsuits? I’m not sure how they would win, tons of those type fantasy things are just lifted from Tolkien and the like anyway. They can still litigate you to death though.
I think in the end it’s all far too autistic for me. Maybe if I had a group of friends that played only for fun, sure. Going to “public” where to going to mostly people who breathe DnD air, eat DnD cereal, and wipe themselves with DnD toilet paper, well that doesn’t sound too enticing. Interesting to learn about though.
It's kind of like a live service game, isn't it? I guess you can keep playing older versions though so there is at least that. I never got into this stuff either because of what you are talking about here. It also seems to be full of trannies and shitlibs now anyway.
Chock full o nuts. I watched a video reviewing "dm horror stories" A quarter of them were about "racist" players acting in ways that make the story obvious bullshit to anyone who isn't woke
They're not games, more like peer pressure simulator. It's your turn, but DM says you tripped on a rock and miss your turn or something dumb and arbitrary like that, but he can only do that if the other players go along with it.
New ruleset is like Congress passing some new "workers rights" bill - now things are fair, peon's rights, my gripes are important - but really it's the same bullshit as before, you just feel like this time it'll be different.
That made me more interested into what you're on about. So I went and looked and came across several places with stories about dungeon masters. Uh, yeah, the insanity. My brain doesn't work in the way that would be required to play that game or participation event or whatever you want to call it.
And all umpires are just on power trips. The sport (any of them) would be better without them, AM I RITE?!
The issue is that D&D is not the sum total of TTRPG.
TTRPGs were one of the first casualties of the culture war. Many publishers and much of the industry fell to woke-tards.
It hasn't made any difference at all at the table level. TTRPG players are fantastically fractious and if the don't like something they just ignore it. Once they have their books they don't need anything else. They can (and frequently do) write entire settings and only use Rules Reference Documents, which are cheap as fuck or free.
I stopped playing D&D in 2003. There are so many better settings and systems. I'll talk about what and why if anyone cares.
I play GURPS these days.
GURPS is great. I love it. It is the preverbal kitchen sink RPG ruleset.
GURPS Lite is on of my favorite lightweight rulesets. I like GURPS can do everything between rules light and super-complex just by picking how many of the rules you want to use.
I like EarthDawn for Fantasy / Horror. I enjoy Reign by Greg Stolze. Both of them are vastly superior to D&D.
Yeah, I've played traditional sword and sorcery games, a zombie apocalypse game, a space pirate game, a historic reenactment of the first crusade, an alternate history of World War 2, and even one-shot where everyone is a boring office worker in a failing financial firm. Just the basic set is enough to do that, albeit a bit janky. The dedicated supplemental books helps a whole lot, thank god for pirated PDFs. Though you really need to know what the hell you're doing when making a character, it's a running joke in my playgroup "did you remember to put points into the 'breathing' skill?"