The writer got mad when a goblin shoved Astarion off a cliff. It reminded me of when I had Karlach shove a goblin in lava, then a goblin ran up and shoved HER in the lava. I didn’t get mad; I took it as a learning moment: enemies can shove me back, so move away from the lava.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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    1 year ago

    It really depends on what you mean by “good” and “bad” for a table top game. Clearly many people are having fun with it, so it’s hard to say that it’s a complete trash fire except as hyperbole.

    However! I would argue that many of the people playing DND would have more fun with a different system. All those people who do one fight per day? Should play a game that supports that. All the people who do mostly social encounters with the occasional fight? That’s not what dnd is good at, and would have more fun with a system that was built for that.

    Unfortunately DND is mega popular and sucks most of the air out of the hobby. This has a important effects.

    One, I suspect there’s a huge survivorship bias in the hobby. DND is the first game most people play because it’s super popular. Thus, most of the people who stick around the hobby are people who didn’t hate DND enough to leave. There are probably lots of people who would like rpgs in general that don’t play anything because their first experience was DND, and they hated it. Most of them won’t come back to the hobby.

    Second, because DND is such a janky system that’s difficult to learn (don’t you tell me a 15 is a +2 is an easy system), most of the people who do stick around are hesitant to try something else. Why would they want to learn another system and memorize another set of stat mappings? Some people probably don’t even know there are rpgs without six stats, or character attributes like that at all.

    Anyway. I digress. 5e is very good at being 5e, but it is not a general purpose RPG. It also has something I dislike in pretty much every one of its systems. As a shorthand I often say it’s a bad game.