Thomas Shey
Legend
While you see some variations, as soon as you get outside of obviously D&D-derived games, its not a coincidence how rare fire-and-forget spells are.
Unpopular opinions go here
- Thread starter Whizbang Dustyboots
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While you see some variations, as soon as you get outside of obviously D&D-derived games, its not a coincidence how rare fire-and-forget spells are.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
The spellcasting system in Ars Magica/Mage: Word that Starts With the Letter A is vastly superior to what's going on in any D&D-derived fantasy game, but it feels like it would hog the spotlight if it was dropped in alongside the already unhappy martial class players in D&D. It'd be a hell of a lot more interesting, though.
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humble minion
Legend
Now that D&D seems to be getting rid of half-orcs, they should embrace the Warhammer canon of orcs being genderless fungal creatures that spring up from toadstools. Warhammer plays their orcs for laughs 99% of the time, but WH orc lore is much weirder and cooler than d&d orc lore.
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Guest 7042500
Guest
Modules are the worst thing that ever happened to RPGs.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
The best thing WotC could do for goblins, orcs and other "humanoids" would be to create a setting with no player character humans, elves, dwarves or halflings, forcing them to really invest in making the other ancestries well-rounded peoples. (Something they also haven't managed for halflings, IMO.)
Yeah. They made the act of GMing accessible. Disgusting.
Old Fezziwig
Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin.
Well, unpopular opinions, yeah?
I think you're right about accessibility. That's a huge point in their favor. But I wonder if they've not been a net negative for the hobby otherwise — conceptually, they often represent a pretty narrow idea of how to play D&D, and, because they're so convenient, they can have an outsized influence on how to play the game and what a good game looks like to people.
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Guest 7042500
Guest
Wrong. To quote my review of "Dave Arneson's True Genius",
"Dungeons & Dragons, in its original appearance, changed the way people thought of and played games in much the same way. And most importantly, people grasped on an instinctual level the supremacy of the conceptual parts of the game over the mechanical. A few days after that first adventure in “Greyhawk,” I nabbed some graph paper from math class and drew up a dungeon level and started running it for a couple of high school friends, using dice I swiped from a Yahtzee game and rules I made up as I went along. Other kids at high school did the same thing. I started running it at college in 1973, and within weeks most of my other players had “dungeons” of their own… ultimately, including Professor M.A.R. “Phil” Barker, who created Empire of the Petal Throne.
And it wasn’t restricted to existing gaming circles. People would play a game or two and start running it on their own at home, or at science fiction conventions, or in college student unions, or in any venue where there was any interest in the fantastic. In those first few years the game spread like wildfire; people would see it and couldn’t wait to start exploring their own conceptual realms of imagination."
All before the first module was ever published.
"Dungeons & Dragons, in its original appearance, changed the way people thought of and played games in much the same way. And most importantly, people grasped on an instinctual level the supremacy of the conceptual parts of the game over the mechanical. A few days after that first adventure in “Greyhawk,” I nabbed some graph paper from math class and drew up a dungeon level and started running it for a couple of high school friends, using dice I swiped from a Yahtzee game and rules I made up as I went along. Other kids at high school did the same thing. I started running it at college in 1973, and within weeks most of my other players had “dungeons” of their own… ultimately, including Professor M.A.R. “Phil” Barker, who created Empire of the Petal Throne.
And it wasn’t restricted to existing gaming circles. People would play a game or two and start running it on their own at home, or at science fiction conventions, or in college student unions, or in any venue where there was any interest in the fantastic. In those first few years the game spread like wildfire; people would see it and couldn’t wait to start exploring their own conceptual realms of imagination."
All before the first module was ever published.
CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
They can also have a positive impact. if folks learned how to create adventures from the dungeon in the 1983 Basic Set or from the 3E era Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury, that is a net positive. The biggest modern problem is that people think "campaign" and "adventure" are synonyms.
ETA: I should also include Phandelver. Whatever weaknesses the Starter Set has otherwise, that is a solid adventure for explaining to new DMs what a D&D adventure can be.
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