If you want DND with working rules, Pathfinder 2e is what people recommend. Not first edition. I’m not a huge fan since it’s still basically DND.

If you want a lightweight system that’s mostly about narrative, I’m a fan of Fate. But Fate is absolutely not a crunchy system, and it’s largely up to the group to agree on what makes sense. Like, if you want character differentiation you can lean on “aspects as permission” and it’s right there. (That is, stuff that’s true about your character permits you to try stuff. The barbarian can’t even try to decipher the runes, because nothing about his character implies he could do that. You can’t just blindly roll something. The wizard can try, because of course wizards know runes)

The core rules are free, but you can find books with more specifics. I think there’s a Dresden files book people like? They don’t provide a complex magic system in the core books, but it has some ideas and the toolkit book has more.

I also liked the chronicles of darkness games, but they’re generally all modern day occult. You can take the core rules and move them to fantasy, if you wanted. It’s pretty light and I like it more than DND in all the ways I care about.

Yeah, but have you tried to convince people of anything? They don’t care. They just want to do the thing with their friends. Any sort of “here’s a better game” is going to smash into “did i make a bad choice? i spent all this time and money on D&D and they’re saying it’s bad? now i feel bad. this other person is making me feel bad. they’re wrong and stupid”

Some people might on their own decide to try other games. A lot of them are just going to enjoy hanging out with their friends. (Have you talked to casual D&D players? The kind that don’t post on obscure websites. Their house rules are bizarre)

I would love for D&D to be a niche game that focused on retro dungeon crawling instead of the most popular RPG. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

It also bothers me when someone’s character has like 7 charisma, but the player still acts like the sales guy he is in real life.

I was playing a max charisma warlock and the wizard with his whole 13 charisma kept trying to lead all the conversations. Irritating.

Personally, I think D&D’s social skills are so bad they should just rip charisma out of the game. I’d rather they no-ass it than half-ass it.

One of the reasons I like Fate is it has tooling to avoid that kind of anti-climax without it feeling like an asspull.

The BBEG is sitting in his office and the players, through hard work and planning, get the jump on him. Their first attack roll is net +8 stress. That’s enough to kill almost anything! I as GM decide the BBEG is going to take a consequence (“Covered in Acid Burns” or whatever), and then concede.

Conceding is at the player level, not the character level. This is where you as a group decide on how the BBEG survives, but loses this scene. Maybe he teleports away, but leaves his computer unlocked. Maybe he drains the life force of his favorite second in command to save himself, damaging morale and loyalty. It’s up to the group.

Some people hate this style of play, and want to be told a story rather then tell one as a group. That’s fine. But it’s hard for me to take off the GM hat, so I like when players also have a lot of say in the story.

Ring of protection. Grants everyone around you protection in a fairly large radius. Might be useful for long range combat, maybe. Might also be useful to navigating certain environmental hazards.

Boots of Flying. They can fly, but only have a carry weight of a few pounds. If you’re more than say ten pounds, the little wings flap but gain no altitude. They are not autonomous. Might be useful in condunction with other magics to reduce weight.

Gauntlets of Ogre Might. Do not affect strength. They do tell you the odds of nearby ogres taking particular actions. They might do this, they might do that, and so on.

Hammer of Striking. Social bonuses when organizing labor. Combat bonuses only when near many allies.

Boots of Haste. Gain extra actions but large penalties to all checks. Haste makes waste. May be useful if combined with large bonuses or fixed outcomes (eg: DND diviner wizard).

1d4-1 is 0 to 3. Sorry, not the point.

One factor might be location. I’m in a major city.

What do you mean exactly? If you think some people are just innately attractive and that’s immutable and unattainable, that’s nonsense.

Easily changed stuff like a better haircut, better fitting clothes, a better photo, all go a long way.

I’m a very average guy with a wardrobe of thrift store finds and band tshirts. I’m not even 6’ tall. But I did try to whole-ass engage with every potential match instead of doing bullshit like chatgpt or copy-pasted ice breakers.

Also a real fast way to be unattractive is having an ugly worldview. Most people aren’t going to like someone who treats them like shit. Someone who has a genuine conversation and shares interests will go farther.

I started buying music in 2015 (mostly Bandcamp) and I have no regrets. I have a big library now of drm free music. Some months I spend nothing and still enjoy music, without ads.

to meet the man she’d spent the last three weeks opening up to.

First off, don’t chat for three weeks before a date. That’s a terrible idea. You’re going to build up a faulty model of who they are and then be jolted when you meet them in real life. Which is exactly what happened here.

Second, to all the people using chat gpt, I don’t know how to say this nicely but fucking git gud. What a bunch of sad sacks that can’t have a conversation, can’t read a wikipedia article, can’t even try their honest best.

a workaround for what he sees as the coded jargon of modern dating. “Like, what do you mean ‘What’s my attachment style?’” he balks. “Every girl on the apps has this thing about ‘love languages’ – it’s just gibberish

Is it though? Take five minutes to read about it if it’s so ubiquitous. What a sack of shit.

I’m a pretty average guy and I was getting 1d4-1 dates per week just by matching with people and asking them out. You really don’t need to do more than be genuine, present, and interested in them.

Use a dedicated data type or library. Some languages also have something like python’s Decimal type

>>> .1 + .2
0.30000000000000004
>>> Decimal(".1") + Decimal(".2")
Decimal('0.3')

Yep. Open your browser’s console and do .1 + .2 and you get 0.30000000000000004.

One of the reasons not to use floating point when working with money.

It’s a recurring problem with humans that something makes them feel bad, and then they stop listening.

Someone who feels bad about how they didn’t go to college, and then stops listening to the contents, is a fool.

You are correct that there are many such people, and we should probably avoid triggering them, but it’s kind of frustrating we have to constantly walk on eggshells lest someone’s fragile ego cracks and a monster comes out.

I went back to windows for a few months on the newer desktop. I installed mint and discovered it had a lot of problems with the hardware. HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, and various downstream things didn’t work. I fixed some of it with help from forums and such, but eventually I went back to windows.

But a couple months later, I tried Pop!_OS and that has worked perfectly out of the box. No regrets.

I decided I was done with reddit. I never used apps so I just signed out of my account and never went back.

I’m not a product manager and certainly don’t work at larian. I have no insight into the level of effort required with their tooling and skill sets. I don’t know what they prototyped already. I can’t answer that question meaningfully.

You also didn’t really engage with anything else I wrote.

I think that’s a lot of interesting stuff you could explore, but the odds of doing that when the GM is running on unexamined defaults are slim.

Isn’t Yarvin an absolute scumbag who believes in enslaving others and other evils? Hope he meets an embarrassing end.

I didn’t use the word realistic. I called it unsatisfying.

Also, it’s kind of tired to be like “oh you want rEaLiSm in your game about elf magic??”. You know what people mean when they say that. Given the premises presented, nothing is contradictory enough to break suspension of disbelief. People use “realistic” as a shorthand. Sometimes people use “Verisimilitude” for this.

Having NPCs react reasonably in some cases (eg: scripted encounters, some law breaking) and not in others is jarring. You see the NPCs standing around the tavern having a chat and you go, “That’s a reasonable scene. I can imagine this.” Then you explode one of them, and they all run around in a panic. Still pretty reasonable. Follows from the premises given. But then you run away and come back, and all of them are back to drinking and chatting. All of them except the one you exploded, who’s still a bloody mess on the floor. For some people, such as myself, this is too much. It’s too high a contrast, and it foregrounds the limits of the game too much to easily suspend disbelief.

I don’t know what to say. Are you trying to say it clashes with the design? Are you saying every game should have every feature and ‘StarCraft’ should have the nemesis system from the ‘shadow of’ games? I don’t get it.

I don’t feel like you tried very hard to “get it”.

The game has a stealth and murder system you’re encouraged to use. I’d like for them to have gone a little further with it. The NPCs sometimes look for you if you fire from stealth, but it’s janky. The rest of the game is generally pretty immersive-sim, but the wheels fall off if you play one of the main playstyles. Unsatisfying.

I’m not a game developer and I expect you aren’t either, so I don’t know how complex it would be to make the responses to stealth more robust. Maybe add a “There’s been a murder!” state to scenes. But they did a lot of other stuff to cover more niche scenarios, so it wouldn’t be out of character.

I’m still kind of disappointed and irritated about an old D&D group. The guy ran a game that was literally patriarchy.

There was a king who died. He had a daughter, who was ruling competently presently. But he also had an infant son. Now a civil war is brewing because some people want the son on the throne, because that’s the male heir.

And he just played it straight and seemed to expect us to be like “Oh, obviously the son has a legitimate claim to the throne. and also absolute monarchy is unremarkable”. To his credit he did let us decide which faction to support, but it was kind of exhausting getting a constant stream of “no, absolute male hereditary rule is good and normal”.

It was a pretty fleshed out setting in terms of details and subfactions, but the core of it was just so very basic and unexamined. No one else seemed to give a shit, though. I did not gel with that group.

Meanwhile, some time before that I’d had a blast running a game. The players came upon an anarchist collective that had overthrown the old despot, but now there are counter-revolutionaries lurking that want to return the now undead tyrant to the throne. Also the neighboring state is rattling their sabers because they ideologically do not approve of a state without a king.

So I guess the lesson is games are better when you vibe with the group?

While that is fascinating and worth considering, I think the way it’s implemented in the video games is kind of unsatisfying. Specifically, how the NPCs just go back to their idle routine even if that means standing casually on the bodies of their friends. For days.

The “for days” part is also particular to DnD. You can sleep for days while the world remains static. The rite of thorns never completes. The prisoners are never executed. Not even if you kill half the guards and take a snooze.

I think the Batman video games did a better job of NPCs freaking out and not just calming back down, but most games don’t invest in that.

Also bg3 specifically let’s you teleport to safety once you’re 30 meters away, which is extra cheesy.