Games You Rarely See Played "Correctly"

Jahydin said:

Monopoly. I don't know a single person who plays it RAW.

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I'm here to represent. No money on Free Parking. Auctions when a property isn't bought. Limited houses and hotels.

accidental duplicate removed

The already mentioned Monopoly. Card game of Spades, every group has its own set of house rules.

A lot of current RPGs are ran as an almost constant combat but with minimal real risk of character death. It seems that we just go through the motions. What ever happened to the social side of things? Or being able to sneak past something? Or maybe it is just groups in my area.

And for games with magic - spell research for new spells? Used to be a thing. Now spell lists are often considered sacrosanct and not to be altered or have things added. I think it is still in many rule sets but it has been a couple of decades since I heard someone ask about researching a new spell.

Koloth said:

The already mentioned Monopoly. Card game of Spades, every group has its own set of house rules.

A lot of current RPGs are ran as an almost constant combat but with minimal real risk of character death. It seems that we just go through the motions. What ever happened to the social side of things? Or being able to sneak past something? Or maybe it is just groups in my area.

And for games with magic - spell research for new spells? Used to be a thing. Now spell lists are often considered sacrosanct and not to be altered or have things added. I think it is still in many rule sets but it has been a couple of decades since I heard someone ask about researching a new spell.

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I think the lack of downtime means people don't really think about it, I feel like many adventures instead have a story arc and you follow that, finish it, then start the next campaign.

Very few people use the beautiful and magnificently designed Inspiration rules for 5E. Degenerate play!

Koloth said:

And for games with magic - spell research for new spells? Used to be a thing. Now spell lists are often considered sacrosanct and not to be altered or have things added. I think it is still in many rule sets but it has been a couple of decades since I heard someone ask about researching a new spell.

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Part of that is there's already so many spells out there it can be hard to come up with a new idea.

Lanefan said:

Part of that is there's already so many spells out there it can be hard to come up with a new idea.

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Swarm of Butterflies.

You can look at this from the perspective of the designers theme/genre expectations or from a following the RAW. As for the former, there are players who will turn any TTRPG game into slap-stick comedy (or a soap opera, etc.), so I find this to be more of a discussion about table expectations. There are some games I will only run for some players or players who will not be interested in playing in certain games. For most games, it doesn't really matter. If you want to play CoC as a slapstick humor game and the entire table is enjoying it, more power to you. For some games, it may be harder. If your players play Alice is Missing as Who Cares About Alice, I would think that would be a lot harder to pull off satisfactorily.

I would expect, however, that most groups decide to play a specific game because they want to at least somewhat engage in the experience it tries to create. Rules on the other hand often change from table to table, campaign to campaign, even session to session. I usually try to play a game RAW for at least a few sessions so that I can experience the game the designers were trying to create before I drop or change things. With crunchier systems that can be difficult.

Warhammer Fantasy 4e has a good core set of rules but there are many specific modifiers and exceptions that only arise in specific circumstances. The rules are not well organized and often scattered around and hidden in skill, talent, weapon properties, and creature train descriptions. Then you have additional rules spread across a number of books, some (more infamously the magic system) wholly replace the rules in the core book, in part to fix confusion and issues with the core rules. I doubt many tables are fully adhering to the RAW even if they just stuck with the core book.