What caused such a big turnaround?

Rogue is worse. I played a rogue for a while and it didn’t really deliver a great experience. Every combat was “I shoot, move, cunning action hide”.

Scouting was largely outclassed by the wizard’s familiar, and even more so the pact of the chain familiar. Splitting the party is tedious and risky.

One GM tried to make a system to abstract scouting- you’d make some checks and get information and maybe trouble. But that guy liked PbtA way more than me, and it clearly influenced his design, because pretty much every time you used this system something bad would happen. I don’t play these games to be a fuck up. I want to be exceedingly competent in my niche.

I guess some of that is up to individual GM style, but I think some of it is on the system itself.

I’ve had a lot of DND players, often people that exclusively play DND, tell me they like it that way. They like that there’s basically no rules for conflict outside of combat. “Just talk it out” and “we’re here to role play stop looking at your sheet”.

Personally, not my taste. If we’re just going to “talk it out” I feel like we should write a book instead. That or actually rip out the stunted social rules in DND. That would help the annoying thing where the real life Sales Guy brings his whole personality into his 8 Cha Fighter.

But I also think a lot of those people have never really played anything else, and like dnd’s “barely any rules” better than whatever fantasy they’re imagining.

I like that games with working social rules can let someone who’s shy or quiet play someone socially powerful, just like a physically weak person can play a strong barbarian.

Do you think the people who make Dr Farts want to play with other people who make Dr Farts type characters? And the people who make 1500 dmg/turn combat monsters, do they want to play with other combat monsters?

I feel like sometimes no. Sometimes people want to be the odd one out. Which sucks, because a group that’s homogeneous on this aspect I think can work pretty well. If everyone’s a combat monster the GM can go crazy. But if there’s just one or two combat monsters, now they have to figure out how to keep it fun for them and also Bob The Fighter that hits for 1d8+2 each turn.

Neat idea.

Kind of similar to Fate’s standard game creation, where you go around and come up with how your backstory connects to everyone else. These connections can be invoked for bonuses later.

There’s some truth to this, but I don’t want to be the white guy telling the new hire in the US in 2025 “our line length is 88”. They probably won’t think anything of it, but if they do they probably won’t think I’m into Chinese superstition.

The only change I made to black was setting the line length to 120, because its default of 88 is too short and oof that number means something else already.

Yes, you can fucking do “stand on the table and make a speech” work. You know how? By breaking it up into detailed steps (pun intended), something that LLMs are awesome at!

My intended point was the LLM at run time taking user input wouldn’t be able to do “make a speech” if the game engine doesn’t have that concept already encoded. And if the game is presented as “take user input and respond believably” then users are going to ask for stuff the engine can’t do. Maybe there’s no animations for climbing. Maybe they did some shortcuts and the graphics look bizarre when stuff is elevated.

I wasn’t talking about Skyrim specifically.

But also you’re being unpleasant in this exchange, so you can win.

lol if you had read the rest of my post you would have seen I admitted you might be right. But go off, I guess.

LLM generated code is notoriously bad. Like, “call this function that doesn’t exist” is common. Maybe a more specialized model would do better, but I don’t think it would ever be completely reliable.

But even aside from that, it’s not going to be able to map the free form user input to behavior that isn’t already defined. If there’s nothing written to handle “stand on the table and make a speech”, or “climb over that wall” it’s not going to be able to make the NPC do that even if the player is telling them too.

But maybe you’re more right than I am. I don’t know. I don’t do game development. I find it hard to imagine it won’t frequently run into situations where natural language input demands stuff the engine doesn’t know how to do.

I don’t think it would be easy to map free form text to game behavior. Not just like “make the NPC smile” but complex behavior like “this NPC will now go to this location and take this action”. That seems like it would be very error prone at best.

It would be interesting if NPCs could react believably to free form input from the player, but that seems unlikely to be reliable. I’m not sure how you’d map the text to in game actions.

Like, you could have the LLM respond with “ok I’ll let you have my horse if you leave in the morning, and solve the zombie problem” but it’s not trivial to make the game world respond to that. Not even counting it breaking out into “sorry as an LLM I can’t …”

Sometimes I feel like everyone who would care already knows , and everyone who doesn’t care won’t care no matter what the facts say.

You could prove definitively that LLMs summon demons that eat live babies, and they’d shrug and dismiss it.

This whole conversation is at least using the words “DND” even if one could argue they’re not actually talking about DND specifically. Thus, I was making the point that if you do want a system that rewards creative players DND is not a good one.

What system are you thinking of that stands in contrast to dnd’s “explicit permissiveness”?

I’m not even sure what you mean by the “permissive interpretation”. Is that the Calvinball mode? Games can definitely go badly when it turns into an inconsistent, unpredictable mess. Games have rules so we don’t argue like children on the playground going “I hit you. No you didn’t. Yes I did. I have a force field. Well I have an anti force field laser…”

Personally I rather dislike “5% of every attempt will be wacky”, especially when multiplied by “higher level people are making more attempts, and thus are having more wackiness”.

The fighter who makes three attacks a round is going to have three times as many “hilarious fumbles” compared to the lower level fighter only making one.

This is part of why I prefer dice pools over a flat single die system.

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it’s fine. That’s not even an especially lightweight distribution.

D&D is great because it allows for creative freedom

This is not something unique to dnd! In fact, DND is not even especially good at this!

It’s like people are saying “mayonnaise is great because you can add it to any meal”, which is technically true, but meanwhile salt is right there being ignored on the shelf.

What’s with the weird censoring of the post metadata? Do we not want to credit the original poster for some reason?

But dnd’s paradox is it is both open ended and rigid. My problem is it’s too open ended in many ways (eg: social conflict), almost completely missing rules in other parts (eg: meta game mechanics, conceding conflicts), and too rigid in others (eg: Eldritch blast targeting rules, unarmed smite and sneak attack). That’s not even going into the bigger problems like the adventuring day or how coarse class+level makes many concepts impractical at best.

On top of that, it is so mega popular many players have no other reference points and don’t realize its assumptions are not universally true. It’s like people who have only ever watched the Lord of the rings movies, and they’re like “of course movies are four hours long and have horses. That’s just how movies are.”

The main things DND 5e does well are popular support, and the very small decision space for players makes it hard to make a character that’s mechanically very weak or very strong. It brings nothing special to the table for roleplaying.

Compare with my go-to example of Fate, which has simple systems to encourage it. CofD, my second favorite, also does.

DND is a team game, and both have agreed upon rules. Not sure I follow your objection