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Fair point, but only to a point. I still don't believe that just about anyone sticks with a single system for financial reasons, and the amount of time and effort it takes to wrestle 5e into other forms isn't any less than checking out something else.

If someone is that uninterested in learning any non-D&D systems I'm not sure what they have to contribute to any discussion of game design/criticism/etc. Like hearing someone's take on writing when they've read one book, and refuse to read others. Also, I just flat out don't believe that folks...

This is an interesting point to me, since one of the reasons I'm drawn to FitD right now is that I think games like Blades pretty much take system mastery out of the equation. Like once you learn the basics of the rules, there aren't a whole lot of optimized choices, each job and scene could...

There's a difference between dismissing entire play modes—specifically when it's because those modes aren't the dismisser's only personally preferred mode, and is only discussing them to say that they suck—and critically analyzing how and whether different games are successful for those modes...

For sure, there is some "anything but 5e" sentiment here. But that's an undercurrent throughout the hobby, and I think what's problematic is this notion that everyone should constantly tiptoe around the issue, including by constantly praising 5e's design and never criticizing it. For example...

Not trying to minimize your experiences, honestly. But @pemerton 's right that 5e hasn't really come up in specific ways all that often in this thread, but then you obviously had a reason for bringing up people denigrating it. Assaults on 5e, real or imagined, are one of ENWorld's most enduring...

Good question. And that’s part of the issue—folks seeing any critical discussion of trad play as a veiled attack on the hobby’s biggest game.

I get that it can be a bummer to see your favorite game slammed over and over. But a lot of what's happening in this thread, and in previous ones like it, isn't actual denigration of 5e, but merely discussions of other games and approaches, including sometimes pointing out things that 5e doesn't...

If people don't want to engage in a thread about game criticism, or who drop out over of the course of more than 50 pages, what sense does it make to throw shade at the people who are interested enough to stick around and keep discussing it? To whit: What observations do you have about anything...

I'm not sure why these threads inevitably get bogged down with these zoomed-out meta-discussions about potential slights and furrowed-brow reminders that such-and-such behavior might lead certain people to feel a bit icky about their preferences, etc. etc. There's a real temptation on ENWorld to...

I'm certainly not evangelizing, at least in this instance. But I'm extremely glad I gave FitD and PbtA multiple tries, because they wound up solving a whole slew of frustrations that I've had with trad gaming, ever since I started playing any RPGs more than 30 years ago. I just had to embrace...

Lack of map-and-key was one part of it, but I think I was most freaked out by success-with-consequence as the most common roll result, even when doing something I thought my character was good at. It felt out of control to me, or like the math was wrong. I hadn't heard of PbtA or storygames of...

Definitely agree here. Blades is specific in its play loop and guidance to a degree that, imo, makes it very hard for a lot of GMs to wrap their heads around, especially if it's your first storygame. When I first tried it about 5 years ago I was genuinely repulsed, and even years later it took...

Apologies, I honestly didn't mean it to be snarky. If anything I think it's relevant to the overall topic. Anyone can write a game or tweak game mechanics, and homebrewing to some degree is basically inevitable once you GM for long enough. And as has come up in this thread, discussions of game...

If you're posting on here you have the time. It's not rocket science.

We aren’t going to settle this question here, especially if we aren’t all speaking a common technical language about what LLMs can and can’t do. But a central question is whether creativity can be quantified, to the extent that you can measure success or failure, both key requirements in a...

When I was a kid I was in love with GURPS because it meant I could whip up just about any kind of campaign in any genre, try it out, then drop it and move on to the next experiment. But that was a long time ago, when there really weren't as many different kinds of systems that focus on nailing...

Discussing ChatGPT can understandably (maybe unavoidably) veer into existential "what does it all mean, man?" questions, so I get it. And I write and edit for a living—often about AI—so I'm clearly biased. But imo there's a difference between how AI does something like style transfer (applying a...

Tossed-out example, I know, but 2d20 is pretty good! Like in a lot of trad systems combat can get bogged down and it can be easy to exploit (moreso with older versions, like Conan) but imo it does some stuff extremely well. I think Star Trek Adventures is an incredible marriage of mechanics to...

From a technical standpoint that's a great example of just how stunning these models suddenly are. Their improvement over the last five years or so is amazing. There's no doubt that these things are basically blowing the Turing test out of the water, in these specific text-generation tasks. As...