Wandering Adventure Party

Makes sense. The rich don’t try to prevent unionization and collective action purely out of spite.

I think Mage: The Awakening 2nd edition was a cleaner version of the game, but yeah no version is something you can just phone in.

I ran a game of it a year or so back, and one player just refused to read the book in any detail. She was always frustrated by not knowing what she could do, or how to do it effectively.

try to talk them out of the idea of “Leveling” they get scared and run back to the system they’re familiar with.

I still think about the time in college I tried to get a D&D friend to consider Mage. I was telling him about how you can just do magic, and the real limitation is paradox and hubris. Like, it’s often not about ‘can you?’ but rather “should you?”

He couldn’t get over “you can just cast whatever you want? Fireballs every turn?”

“Yes, but that’s probably going to make a lot of paradox, and probably isn’t the best way to solve your problem”

“Sounds broken,” he said, and lost interest.

I’m partial to Fate.

It’s very open. You don’t have to worry about looking up the right class or feats. You just describe what you want to play, and if the group thinks it’s cool and a good fit for the story, you’re basically done.

Now, the downside is this requires a lot more creativity up front. A blank page can be intimidating.

I like that players have more control over the outcome. You can usually get what you want, even if you roll poorly, but it’s more of a question of what you’re willing to pay for it.

Every roll will be one of

• succeed with style
• succeed
• a lesser version of what you want
• succeed at a minor cost
• succeed at a major cost
• (if you roll badly and don’t want to pay any costs) fail, don’t get what you want

It’s a lot more narrative power than some games give you. I don’t like being completely submissive to the DM, so I enjoy even as a player being able to pitch “ok I’m trying to hack open this terminal… how about as a minor cost I set off an alarm?” or “I’m trying to steal his keys and flubbed the roll… How about as a major cost I create a distraction, get the keys, but drop my backpack by accident. Now I’m disarmed, have no tools, and they can probably trace me with that stuff later. But I got the keys!”.

It’s more collaborative, like a writer’s room, so if someone proposes a dud solution the group can work on it.

The math probability also feels nice. You tend to roll your average, so there’s less swinginess like you’ll get in systems rolling one die.

Plus, I don’t know any other system that lets me pull my intestines out of my abdomen and use them like a lasso to climb a cliff when I forgot my rope at home.

Nitpick: more narrative systems like Fate let you do this, but then you typically don’t get a lot of crunch. Plus it can vary if your group isn’t on the same wavelength about what’s cool and appropriate for the story.

Oh, I believe you that it could have worked. Many people seem happy to go with easy even if it’s worse in many ways. Sometimes that’s fine and the trade-off is worth it. I don’t compile all my software from source.

Making DND more like a video game seems really sad to me, and I wouldn’t want to take the poison pill. But I guess that’s like looking at the Internet and longing for when it was free hobby stuff while most people just want Facebook.

I like to think people would be like “wait, this sucks, we can’t go off the rails?” but I think most people’s expectations are lower. They’d be happy with DND as board game.

Yeah, that still sounds terrible. Something about the game anchoring the players imagination to the easy assets is just upsetting to me in a gut deep level.

My old in-person group, we’d just use coins and stuff. The pennies are zombies and the quarters are necromancers. I feel like any time spent fussing with the platform itself instead of the game is a negative, and Sigil sounds like maximum fussiness.

I don’t think I’ve even heard of this.

Experience D&D in stunning 3D with Sigil, an immersive 3D virtual tabletop (VTT) for Dungeons & Dragons fans that is integrated with D&D Beyond. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, Sigil provides intuitive world-building and mini-making tools, and a connected 3D gameplay experience for the whole party.

This sounds like a huge waste of time. I need to go make textures and models for every thing i make up? or I’m stuck using preset stuff, crippling imagination?

I got the D&D 3e books when I was a kid. I completely, deeply, uncritically loved them. Read them cover to cover. Spent a lot of time drawing nonsense dungeon maps and coming up with terrible ideas.

I remember I went to some game shop in some local mall and asked the guy for advice. He was like, “yeah i don’t know, but that guy’s into it” and pointed me to some customer who was a mega D&D nerd. He was surprisingly patient with my youthful excitement. I remember being like “So I can just… do anything in the game? I can be like, you kill the orc and his eyes are magic??” The guy was like … i can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like “You can, but probably don’t spend a lot of time on minutia. You probably don’t want your players spending 30 minutes checking every single trinket and orc body part for secret magic.”

I don’t really like D&D/its close relatives much anymore, but like many people it was my entry point.

An advanced technique: ask your players to make shit up.

Like, the players decided to go to the wizard university the wizard PC graduated from. So I ask him, “what’s their entrance hall like?” and let him just riff on it for a while. Players feel more engaged with the world, and it’s a little less work for me.

Warlock is trying to commune with his patron. I ask, “what is your patron usually like?” and the player is delighted to describe “the great sculpin” in detail. This then inspires me further.

Note that some players are very much “just tell me a story” and don’t want any input, and won’t like this. Some players are also shy and don’t think well on their feet. And some players are just really bad at staying on theme. But if you know your players , this can be a powerful technique.