ttrpg

The primary reason you are there is to have mutually positive social interactions. Everything else is subordinate to that purpose. Oh, it's something your character would do? It's necessary for the plot? Someone is excluded from several sessions in a row because you split the party? The rules say this? Yeah, ok, but how can we make it work so that everyone is generally excited to show up for the next session and no one is crying in the next room because someone else stole their imaginary hat.

Resurrection magic is a mess that most tabletop games outright ignore when it comes to what their material and sociopolitical consequences would be in rules-as-written application.

Death in most settings should be perceived, if resurrection magic really is just a sufficiently leveled cleric and some diamonds away, as a lack of health insurance and nothing more. A punishment for poor people. Sure, typically there's a maximum lifespan limitation, but so much killing and death that happens in a typical D&D setting is basically just untreated yet treatable medical conditions. Funeral services at a typical temple would have a pretty loud subtext of "the deity comfort you in your grief, but if you had more money, you wouldn't be grieving at all."

On top of that, pretty much any slain enemy with money and means that doesn't have extensive preparations made against them to prevent resurrection should basically be as returnable as a typical saturday morning cartoon villain, and pretty much anyone with sufficient means should also be the same way. The fact that so many stories as written sort of ignore that and just have the dead stay dead unless they're player characters is too damn high.

It would cheapen a lot of dramatic moments, but that's the price that having such predictably applicable death-cheating magic should have in a typical setting.

what a game says it's about is usually bollocks

what are the players rewarded for, and/or what is the longest section of the book?
that's what the system is about

• Any RPG game based around fighting opponents (or sneaking around and robbing their "dungeon") and taking their stuff as a reward is inherently and intrinsically colonialist. Recasting the antagonists from orcs to either "bad people" or undead or robots or whatever is just obfuscating the colonialist power relations. This extends to RPG video games as well.

• Having collaborative world building or ways to grant players authorship is nice in theory, but often most players aren't actually that interested so things fall back to the GM or you end up with a self-appointed co-GM.

• I think it's okay that game PDFs cost about as much as a print book (~$30 to ~$35) since the majority of the value is in the writing and artwork as opposed to the physical construction of the product. I'm just going to get it on sale anyways.

• Generic systems like GURPs, FATE, Genesys or Cortex are just toolkits to design your own house system. They shouldn't be recommended to people looking to play a specific genre unless there are literally no decent games for said genre.

• Trying to play music or have soundtracks, especially for online games, doesn't work and is only distracting.

• When introducing TTRPGs to people, "rules-light" TTRPGs are less friendly compared to more traditional games since they are more open ended and can more easily confuse players who don't have this experience. On the other hand, D&D 5e is a terrible introduction as well. The are definitely good middle ground options.

• TTRPG Kickstarters delays are generally okay. People who collect and kickstart games are never going to run most of what they own anyways, so if it comes even a few years late there's little difference.

• Tables with only male-aligned individuals kinda suck.

• If you have a group of 3 or more people and you post a LFG for an external GM, unless you plan to pay said GM then one of you should just bite the bullet and take that role. Asking for a stranger to cater to an existing group for free is cringe.

More of a general fiction take, but if you've constructed your world in such a way that the genocide of a sapient race would be justified, you need to go back to the drawing board

After playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I can say with absolute conviction that D&D should only be played as a video game. There is no reason to try and struggle through it on the tabletop. Everything good about it is made better by automating the mechanics. A BG3 combat that takes 20 minutes might take hours if you played it on the table, and you’d inevitably screw up or forget a bunch of the mechanics, not to mention that balancing encounters takes a lot of work.

Outside of combat, the difference is even bigger. Making D&D a video game shows that the role playing elements are either nonexistent or bad. If you have fun role playing in D&D, it’s because you and your friends are good at role playing. The system itself is doing little for you aside from providing some high-level consistency between characters (something that literally every TTRPG does).

In short, D&D should be a video game, and the only reason it wasn’t from the start is because it was created before video games existed. The role playing elements are basically optional, and decided almost entirely by GM fiat. If you like TTRPGs, you are better off playing any number of other systems.

This is not meant to be a criticism of D&D overall. The thing that’s made very clear by adapting it into a video game is that it’s actually a really excellent system for what it does. As much as I might criticize it as a tabletop game, it excels as a turn-based tactical game, with a crazy amount of optinality in how you approach any given situation. It’s not that it’s a terrible tabletop game, it’s that it’s so good as a video game that I can’t imagine playing it as a tabletop game.

Combat is not fun. It’s fun in that it creates character constraints and theory crafting and can be a proxy for puzzle solving, but combat actually sucks and is boring and takes forever.

less of a hot take and more of a tip:

if you're playing a game with a narrative currency (bennies in SWADE, fate points in FATE, destiny points in genesys etc.) make them flow thick and fast, especially early in the campaign
if they are rare then most players will just hoard them, rendering them kinda pointless
those games are designed to have them be common

I have two:

5e is a terrible system for classic D&D play - levelling up, ongoing stories, grand adventures etc - that combined some of the worst aspects of previous editions with a vague goal of simplification. The unbalanced gameplay, lack of high level support, and general lack of rules instead make it the perfect system for short, low stakes fantasy side stories. Don't even give the players real PCs, just a disposable npc statblock, and tell a 1-2 session story with a high amount of randomness and no need for the players to succeed and you'll have an absolute ton of fun. Use a real system for longer campaigns.

The widespread hatred of Kender is just racism - Pathfinder's Goblins share a lot of personality with Dragonlance's Kender, but their non-human appearance makes their non-western morality, particularly their concept of ownership existing in use, more palatable to players. Kender are held to western standards and regarded as theives and troublemakers, whereas Goblins are just seen as uncivilised and condescendingly regarded as not knowing better.

95% of the players I've played with in D&D are objectively garbage at the "miniatures skirmish combat" aspect of the game. This includes all of the best players I've ever played with and the most fun campaigns I've ever played or DMed. Min/Maxing is primarily a phenomenon that occurs in online forums and when you describe to the average person how to maximize their damage they are going to be completely uninterested and choose to take the Keen Mind feat instead.

It is for this reason that bad balance doesn't matter nearly as much in practice as it does in theory. You should still aim for "pretty good" balance of course, but having a lot of interesting options is more important than having all of the options be perfectly balanced (see: the reaction to D&D 4th edition).

Traditional rpg style tabletop is hot garbage.

Roleplay based systems like forged in the dark are far superior, and I’m tired of pretending it’s even close.

Beam Saber is straight up the best campaign I’ve played.

I don't know how hot of a take it is, but mine is that DnD fucking sucks. I'm mainly familiar with 5e, so that's mostly what I'm talking about, but my hatred for it is so strong that I retroactively hate all the previous editions as well

Dungeon world is the best system even though its a bit harder to DM. 2d6 fail forward really punches things up and addresses a lot of the complaints of 5e

3.5 was peak D&D, and 5E is the worst edition they've had. They're so concerned about balance and simplification that everything feels totally samey. 4E started that, but they went all in with the design constraint with 5E. Obsession over balance in a TTRPG is dumb--if some option doesn't work for your table, you just don't use it--and simplicity is a bad design goal for a system like D&D.

D100 is the best system and nobody can change my mind

really dislike numerical representation of "health" i think classes are restrictive, I do think that the powered by the apocalypse playbooks are a good way of going about it however for the most part having descriptive traits and skills is a better system for encouraging roleplay

I hate 'gamified' XP.

There's a lot I like about the more 'narrative' approach ttrpgs have been taking, but between Chronicles of Darkness, ICON, Forged in the Dark, Apocalypse world, etc. all having XP be earned for specific actions in game, its just a pain in the ass, that takes me out of the action.

FWIW, I mostly GM, but I just vastly, vastly prefer milestone XP. For some of the above games, its easy enough to gut their bespoke XP systems out of it, and just have players advance over time, but in several of them, it fucks with the overall balance, since several actions are 'bad', but made worthwhile because they earn XP.

Even beyond the pain in the ass nature of interrupting session to dole out tidbits of XP, I hate, hate, systems that have players advance unevenly. There's always going to be a certain degree on uneven-ness in player attention, of rules mastery, and of spotlighting. As GM, its important to manage those so that everyone gets a chance to shine. But I despise as GM needing to seperately pay attention to the XP actions, and try to drag or XP share the players that don't find those systems engaging to not mechanically fall behind.

And as a player, I tend to have higher system mastery and attention than the others I play with, and tbh it feels Bad to end up with more XP because of that... but it also feels bad to knowingly pass up free XP by purposefully not engaging with those systems.

My big "hot take" is that D&D-gamergoblin-mindset has ruined the bulk of TTRPGS. There is so much more than fighting dudes and getting loot. It has also captured the form of fighting dudes and getting loot. There is more to gameplay than roll d20 to hit and roll for damage. There is more than one way to play these games and we should all be more open to more ways to play. It's like treating every anime like One Piece or reading every comic as an X-Men. Don't get me wrong One Piece and X-Men are solid, but there is more to the medium than those two respectively.

D&D needs a radical redesign to be anything approaching fun, but any time anything changes from the formula everyone shits their pants so we're stuck with these sacred cows forever.

Specifically, HP, the 6 attributes, vancian casting, and classes more broadly.