Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Battlefield2142EU]

Anyone here had any experiences with I kill puppies for Satan? I never met anyone who played it. Even if they had the book.

 

[Judge Dredd]

other TTRPGs are so ridiculously over designed that most potential players feel immediately overwhelmed and back out.

I don't think that's the case.

I notice two things when trying to move away from 5e. They don't want to learn a new system, as if it takes months to learn a new system, even though that's really only true for complex games like PF2 and 5e.

Then the other problem is too much crunch vs not enough crunch. I guess you could see this as an extension of the first problem. Many rules-lite systems lack significate crunch for gamers to get, even if their build is sub optimal. eg. For Savage Worlds, I notice people tend to max out their fighting or shooting stats asap then are lost on what to do with their build. Meanwhile games like MechWarrior, people take one look at the character sheet and refuse to play it.

I have many problems with 5e, but there is one thing it does (or used to do) masterfully and that's give enough crunch without being overwhelming. The first 3 character levels basically being a tutorial is a great concept and something I think could go even further. People shit on advantage disadvantage but after the horror show that is high level pathfinder 1 love it.

 

[Atypical Dog]

Then the other problem is too much crunch vs not enough crunch. I guess you could see this as an extension of the first problem. Many rules-lite systems lack significate crunch for gamers to get, even if their build is sub optimal. eg. For Savage Worlds, I notice people tend to max out their fighting or shooting stats asap then are lost on what to do with their build. Meanwhile games like MechWarrior, people take one look at the character sheet and refuse to play it.

I have many problems with 5e, but there is one thing it does (or used to do) masterfully and that's give enough crunch without being overwhelming. The first 3 character levels basically being a tutorial is a great concept and something I think could go even further. People shit on advantage disadvantage but after the horror show that is high level pathfinder 1 love it.

It just hits the sweet spot between enough crunch to have options to pick from and know pretty quickly what you want to pick and enough freeform that the DM is okay with just winging it. The re-use of basic stuff like expertise and advantage/disadvantage keeps things easy to remember, too.

 

[Overly Serious]

I think the ideal balance would be a lethal game, but one where most of the lethality can be avoided without relying on combat or saving throw luck. This is kind of a wooly concept because I admit I didn't get to play all that much AD&D before 3e bulldozed through back in the early 00s, but that was my first GM's philosophy.

There were traps, there were powerful single monsters and "unfairly" large groups of weaker enemies. But for the vast majority of threats if the players were smart, paid attention to the rooms they explored, and knew when to retreat to come up with a plan, they'd come out on top with remarkably little dice rolling. The inventory management mini-game wasn't just because the game designers were complete autists (although they were), it was so players could weigh their options and know when to retreat when the rogue came back from his scouting run and told the party of the monsters two rooms over. Do we wait to see if the monsters wander off? Do we leave and come back later? Do we have enough options to deal with them quickly and quietly? Can we take on them directly without taking too much damage in return? Does the wizard have a fireball still prepared? Etc, etc.

Sure, levels 1-3 were still incredibly lethal because a single arrow from a goblin archer taking cover behind an overturned table would one-shot half the classes available, but once player characters gathered enough HP, gear and knowledge deaths became far less likely (and resurrection a lot easier). They weren't meant to be difficult to kill because they were superhuman, as all the instant kill effects in the game even at high levels made clear, but because they were experienced and well-prepared. One of the guys on my first group joked that in order to get good at AD&D, you had to be AC&C: Awfully Careful & Crafty.

Of course, that was just my first group and my first GM. I have no idea what other groups were doing at the time, and once we settled into 3e there wasn't quite as much incentive to be careful & crafty. Which most of us were fine with back then because it was just fun to be able to play an impulsive character without getting one-shot by a poison trap or a hidden kobold with a blowgun five minutes into the session.

Personally, I feel 5e wouldn't be terrible when it came to lethality if you did away with death saves and going down to 0HP meant you were either dead or so seriously wounded spontaneous healing magic couldn't get you back up. All the HP characters have in 5e, plus the three chances to just refuse to die, on top of any healing getting you back up instantly, feels like it's too much. There's rarely a reason for player characters to run away unless things went poorly from the start. Even if one or two of them went down, so long as they knew they'd win the damage race they could just get their friends back up with barely any investment in resources.

This makes me think of the Alien RPG from Free League Publishing. It is fairly lethal with an emphasis on stealth, tactics and planning. Though of course it covers Aliens as well as Alien and does a reasonably good job of letting you play anything from working stiffs on a spaceship to trained marines deliberately seeking out the aliens, feeling suitably lethal and caution-inducing either way. It has a Stress mechanic that I feel works well despite my not generally being a fan of psychological rules applied to PCs. Stress score can rise due to events and there are things you can do to try and bring it down again like pacing yourself, finding safe places to hide or taking sedatives or whatever. Stress can be more lethal than injury in this game as a group begins to enter a death spiral of panic causing more panic. Think Hudson starting to freak out and Ripley trying to get him back under control. But in any case, you have the sort of lethality balance you're thinking of - not dropping like flies (hopefully) but wary of direct combat and encouraged to try and set up ambushes, retreat and regroup - all that good stuff.

If the system has a weakness it's primarily that as a fairly simple to play system without a huge amount of granularity, there's limited scope for progression and for supplements. There's little meaningful difference between assault rifle X and assault rifle Y. And though there is XP and talents you can spend it on, the reality is that it doesn't make a huge amount of difference. That's the downside of what you're talking about - levelling up your character and getting cool toys is something people really enjoy in most RPGs and when a rules system places heavy emphasis on needing to play tactically and deal with easy death that's at odds with an approach where you survive because of the cool abilities and toys you've accumulated.

5e definitely is, D&D sickness is very much a real thing because people want the easy rules for 5e and don’t want to try something different. I remember people asking for a cyberpunk D&D homebrew and I’m just like nigger, shadowrun and cyberpunk are TTRPGs that exist and are cyberpunk settings. People will ask for a D&D setting in America during the current times, and I’m like the various white wolf games are perfect for that, but they want to use the 5e system.

I had a player join who I definitely feel was suffering from D&D sickness, in that he was visibly just waiting for the next "encounter" to start. To the point that he's one of the reasons I'm quitting this hobby. The best RPG experiences I've ever had have been with people who have never played RPGs before. Most of my current group have only a very little experience with RPGs and I've been one of their main introductions to the hobby. They're engaged, proactive and think up their own solutions. Because they've never been educated out of it. They've never had a GM respond to their "I stick a grenade down the front of his trousers and run" with "Grenades do 3d10 damage and his Flak Jacket has a soak of 8, roll your Throw skill".

I ran the Doctor Who game from Cubicle 7 (surprisingly good system for what it's trying to achieve) and a D&D player was really struggling with it whilst someone who'd never played any RPG before took to it like a duck to water. The D&D player had a straight up brain-freeze when confronted by a robot that couldn't be hurt by bullets. Next round I asked what he'd like to do and he just said: "I shoot it again?" The player who'd never RP'd before looked at him like she just couldn't understand why he'd say that. Because she couldn't. (Happy story though, he had something of a revelation between sessions after being very despondent in the first and became one of the most imaginitive and fun players).

But sorry, I was talking about D&D and its rules and its encounter mindset. It's the "dungeon" mindset I hate most of all. The attitude where he's just sitting there waiting for the next "encounter" to begin whilst the other players are pro-actively working out how they might identify their enemy or what goals they want to achieve. It's like dropping a lead weight in jelly having him there. I do not want his mindset to spread. He's like disease vector to me).

D&D 5e is the only actually playable TTRPG. Not to mention the only TTRPG that you can reasonably get anyone invested in these days since other TTRPGs are so ridiculously over designed that most potential players feel immediately overwhelmed and back out.

This... does not match my experience. Rather the opposite. To me I have seen most RPGs become progressively simpler and progressively less focused on mechanics over time. Games like the Alien RPG I mentioned above, WoD, and so on... they're a far cry from everything I grew up playing with was 3.5e, Palladium games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Shadowrun, Traveller, Gurps etc. The most that modern games typically do these days is a curious balance between the simple and the detailed like the Star Wars line beginning with Edge of Empire, which has a very interesting degree of mix between flexible simplicity and crunch.

The most complex modern game I recall seeing was the recent-ish Terminator line which had a fairly old-school feel to it. That's not to say you're wrong per se, though. Because to use that Terminator game as an example mostly what I see of online reactions to it are "gah - these rules are too complex". I haven't played it but they're not complex to me. Each test is a roll of a success die and a number of result dice equal to your skill rating + 2. You add (from memory) your attribute rating to the result on the success die and compare it to a GM set target number. That determines whether you succeed or fail and whether or not any of the result dice also hit the number determines the degree of success or failure. It's not as simple as say the Aliens system and from my cursory reading it throws in some exception-based spanners like talents that give you particular re-rolls but nothing in it seemed complex. And yet those reactions I mentioned. I don't think its games becoming over-designed. I think its people getting less tolerant of learning something specific for a game.

Shadowrun is exclusively played by violent slobbering pedophiles.

I played 1st, 2nd and 4th. The 4/4e edition was unequivocally the best mechanically. I dropped it when Catalyst Game Labs started not paying the freelancers and replacing them with weird grognards who had been seething at the changes of 4th edition for years and were practically paying CGL to work on a new edition in order to undo the changes and get rid of anything so un-Eighties as say Wireless hacking. Total shitshow and I never touched the game again. Despite 4e being one of my favourite rules systems ever. Any specific reason for the above comment?

I don't think that's the case.

I notice two things when trying to move away from 5e. They don't want to learn a new system, as if it takes months to learn a new system.

Yeah, pretty much this. @DDBCAE CBAADCBE is right that people these days are getting overwhelmed by new systems. But I don't think it's the system's fault for the most part.

 

[Corn Flakes]

It just hits the sweet spot between enough crunch to have options to pick from and know pretty quickly what you want to pick and enough freeform that the DM is okay with just winging it. The re-use of basic stuff like expertise and advantage/disadvantage keeps things easy to remember, too.

IMO, D&D 5e is a solid set of core mechanics, implemented by the laziest, most unfocused developer possible. So many systems in 5e are underdone to the point of being almost vestigial, and character customization is so kneecapped in exchange for easy-to-follow "you get X at Y level" progression, that it feels like they didn't want to release a new edition and just did the bare minimum with it.

I'd love to see what the people who designed more modular systems that are built around multiclassing and heavily customizing your character through progression like, say, Sword World would do with the 5e core.

 

[FatR]

IMO, D&D 5e is a solid set of core mechanics,

You mean, it inherited the core DnD combat mechanic from previous editions, so it could mix and match stuff and get something generally satisfying.

When they tried to invent something, like, you know, with the entire non-combat part of the game, it was shit. Barely a fig leaf over just offloading everything to individual DMs, so that they can make things up.

 

[Abella]

CGL may have went full retard with shadowrun, but I'd still rather use it for a cyberpunk campaign than D&D. The point I was trying to make is there are better system for different settings. that said, now that it's been mentioned, I've had a better time getting people who don't play TTRPGs to play games like VtM or Wod/WoS than I've had getting people in my playgroups to play something that's not D&D/PF. I know it's probably just me tilting at the same windmill, but D&D sickness has bothered me for a while.

 

[General Woundwort]

Not sure this is the thread for this but I don't want to make my own. Has anyone tried the solo or co-op version of Vaesen? I've watched a couple of videos and it really looks like it's a game that needs a proper group.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

5e definitely is, D&D sickness is very much a real thing because people want the easy rules for 5e and don’t want to try something different. I remember people asking for a cyberpunk D&D homebrew and I’m just like nigger, shadowrun and cyberpunk are TTRPGs that exist and are cyberpunk settings. People will ask for a D&D setting in America during the current times, and I’m like the various white wolf games are perfect for that, but they want to use the 5e system.

Fuckers are too lazy/scared to learn new systems, too lazy to convert their shitty 5e rules for other ttrpgs, and I guarantee you they'll complain that certain systems are "bad" or "worse" because it's not 5e.

5e is superior and the sooner you can come to terms with that the sooner you can start feeling even the smallest hint of self respect return to your body.

This post not only justified my hatred for April Fools (even though it was 37 minutes late) but also made me laugh so props to you.

Meanwhile games like MechWarrior, people take one look at the character sheet and refuse to play it.

I think they redesigned it? Unless I'm retarded and it was just a fan made one.

Not sure this is the thread for this but I don't want to make my own. Has anyone tried the solo or co-op version of Vaesen? I've watched a couple of videos and it really looks like it's a game that needs a proper group.

Oooo, Nordic horror ttrpg? Looks nice, also I'm sure most ttrpgs can be played by your lonesome if you're willing to do a lot of work. And it does say the minimum is 2 players so I'd say you can co-op it. Not sure though, but now I might want to give it a go. Also this is a ttrpg thread, anything related to ttrpg should be allowed no?

 

[Corn Flakes]

You mean, it inherited the core DnD combat mechanic from previous editions, so it could mix and match stuff and get something generally satisfying.

When they tried to invent something, like, you know, with the entire non-combat part of the game, it was shit. Barely a fig leaf over just offloading everything to individual DMs, so that they can make things up.

Not just the core D20 + Mods vs. DC mechanic. Advantage and bounded accuracy are genuinely very elegant solutions to the problem of "hang on, did I forget any modifier?" and numbers eventually losing their meaning at higher levels. Even the proficiency and skill systems are solid solutions to the issue of the 3.5e character sheet being 1/3 skill table.

The problem is that the core mechanics are bad. The problem is, as I said, they were fucking lazy and didn't implement anything on top of those core mechanics. Take bounded accuracy, for example: the idea that attack rolls, saving throw/skill check difficulties, armor classes, etc, etc, are all more or less the same and easily understandable from level 1 (it's a lot easier to compare your total bonus on a saving throw to a DC of 15 compared to a DC 44) is fantastic for the readability of the game. But by itself it can make progression feel handicapped. Why? Because they didn't implement any additional power scaling worth a damn, particularly with martials. A Fighter with a greatsword and a +4 STR bonus is almost guaranteed to kill a goblin in a single attack whether he is Level 1 or Level 20, the only difference is how many attacks he gets and how often he hits them. That's not interesting.

By limiting or doing away with things that allowed you to cheat the action economy like Power Attack, Cleave, etc. (for martials) and making it much more difficult to target specific vulnerabilities or weak saving throws on opponents (for spellcasters), it feels like you're gaining in level and not becoming any more powerful outside of HP. You don't really get any more choices or actions outside of new spells and the occasional once-per-short-rest ability. Which leads to the HP bloat that afflicts both characters and monsters in 5e, and the action economy feeling as restricting as it does now.

But none of that is inherent to the core mechanics of this edition. The issues exist a result of there being not enough system built around the core. WotC carved a ton of fat off 3.5e for the sake of streamlining and "simplifying" the game, but didn't pack the frankly cavernous design space it opened up with anything worthwhile. And even things that people consider vital to the system, like feats...

... are fucking "optional". Which makes their attitude quite clear: they didn't want to put in the work to fill out the system. I'm sure they counted on releasing a ton of splats to pad out the rules, and for there to be as thriving a third-party market as there was for 3e. But neither really happened, and if their Unearthed Arcana "tests" were any indication there was no one who really knew what they were doing in the design department.

That's why I wondered how 5e would look like if it had been designed by people with actual skill with numbers and systems. Because the system isn't broken, it's fucking incomplete.

 

[BlazikenLover]

I think the ideal balance would be a lethal game, but one where most of the lethality can be avoided without relying on combat or saving throw luck. This is kind of a wooly concept because I admit I didn't get to play all that much AD&D before 3e bulldozed through back in the early 00s, but that was my first GM's philosophy.

There were traps, there were powerful single monsters and "unfairly" large groups of weaker enemies. But for the vast majority of threats if the players were smart, paid attention to the rooms they explored, and knew when to retreat to come up with a plan, they'd come out on top with remarkably little dice rolling. The inventory management mini-game wasn't just because the game designers were complete autists (although they were), it was so players could weigh their options and know when to retreat when the rogue came back from his scouting run and told the party of the monsters two rooms over. Do we wait to see if the monsters wander off? Do we leave and come back later? Do we have enough options to deal with them quickly and quietly? Can we take on them directly without taking too much damage in return? Does the wizard have a fireball still prepared? Etc, etc.

Sure, levels 1-3 were still incredibly lethal because a single arrow from a goblin archer taking cover behind an overturned table would one-shot half the classes available, but once player characters gathered enough HP, gear and knowledge deaths became far less likely (and resurrection a lot easier). They weren't meant to be difficult to kill because they were superhuman, as all the instant kill effects in the game even at high levels made clear, but because they were experienced and well-prepared. One of the guys on my first group joked that in order to get good at AD&D, you had to be AC&C: Awfully Careful & Crafty.

That reminds me of something I saw a on a youtube video explaining the differences of OSR and Post 3e D&D, the former has something called "Combat as war" which is exactly what you describe: The party will try to gain every advantage they can for example covering a room in oil and luring the monsters in before setting the room on fire. It described 3e and onwards as having "combat as a sport" where it was much more likely for the parties to fight head on and "fairly" since they could afford it.
While I agree with those definitions I did see my players getting really smart in how they approached some encounters, for example we set a house which served as a criminal's hideout to force them out and have an easier time investigating it once the flames had died down, or finding a hill overlooking a cultist camp and having the sorceror bombard it with a barrage of alchemist fire, severely weakening the enemy. Guess it depends on the kind of players and DMs, some really like doing stuff by the book while others see rules as guidelines.

5e definitely is, D&D sickness is very much a real thing because people want the easy rules for 5e and don’t want to try something different. I remember people asking for a cyberpunk D&D homebrew and I’m just like nigger, shadowrun and cyberpunk are TTRPGs that exist and are cyberpunk settings. People will ask for a D&D setting in America during the current times, and I’m like the various white wolf games are perfect for that, but they want to use the 5e system.

This was also the case for much of 3e and PF's lifecycle.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Does anyone know if AAWs mini dungeon books are any good?

 

[JJLiautaud]

Speaking of new and fun roleplaying games does anyone want to play a game of Lexicon?

 

[FatR]

Advantage and bounded accuracy are genuinely very elegant solutions to the problem of "hang on, did I forget any modifier?" and numbers eventually losing their meaning at higher levels.

Advantage/Disadvantage is just a +/-3 modifier on a task, except with extra roll in the process.

Advantage and bounded accuracy are genuinely very elegant solutions to the problem of "hang on, did I forget any modifier?" and numbers eventually losing their meaning at higher levels.

The bounded accuracy is a stupider version of what we had in early editions when the random number generator was only 20 positions long. Back then collecting all the +1 modifiers you could was impactful for obvious reason. Grabbing a big source of plusses, like a +5 sword or talisman, was fucking huge - it shifted your results by a quarter of the entire scale, after all.

Then 3E uncapped RNG, and suddenly these modifiers became near-worthless individually, and you needed to collect a lot of them, from spells, items and whatever, to make a real impact, and because the game presumed that you collect enough +1s to stay relevant (in particular, you now were assumed to have specific values on your equipment, instead of just a magical sword that allows you to actually hurt your opponents) you could not skip the process, and eventually things devolved to the point when pre-buff and post-buff character sheets often looked nothing alike even for mid-level characters. 4E and Pathinder then basically doubled down on "collect +1s or fall behind level-appopriate challenges" as the core part of the gameplay loop.

I'm a fan of collecting plusses and watching numbers go up... in CRPGs. On the tabletop, I agree, it was cancer. 5E, however, decided to excise that cancer by ripping off all of the patient's intestines. And so we got the whole problem that you described.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Advantage/Disadvantage is just a +/-3 modifier on a task, except with extra roll in the process.

On average, yes. But mechanically it also makes higher/lower numbers a lot more likely. And for builds that lean heavily on crits, for example, it would be a fantastic source of sinergy.

If only they hadn't basically removed crit builds. In 3.5e you had a handful of items and classes that provided you with expanded critical hit, on top of certain weapons having a naturally higher critical range. It was enough that you could make a handful of different crit-seeking character builds without repeating yourself. Someone with a 17-20 crit range (pretty doable in 3e at fairly low level) would get incredible results out of forcing Advantages. But in 5e you have... Champion (which expands to 18-20 maximum after slogging for 15 levels) and Hexblade's Curse (19-20). And I think one or two items from UA or other splats also offer expanded crit, but nothing stacks.

Again, they had plenty of design space open to them, but they decided not to explore it at all and just use Advantage/Disadvantage as the +3/-3 modifier it appears to be at a first glance. It's lazy.

The bounded accuracy is a stupider version of what we had in early editions when the random number generator was only 20 positions long. Back then collecting all the +1 modifiers you could was impactful for obvious reason. Grabbing a big source of plusses, like a +5 sword or talisman, was fucking huge - it shifted your results by a quarter of the entire scale, after all.

Then 3E uncapped RNG, and suddenly these modifiers became near-worthless individually, and you needed to collect a lot of them, from spells, items and whatever, to make a real impact, and because the game presumed that you collect enough +1s to stay relevant (in particular, you now were assumed to have specific values on your equipment, instead of just a magical sword that allows you to actually hurt your opponents) you could not skip the process, and eventually things devolved to the point when pre-buff and post-buff character sheets often looked nothing alike even for mid-level characters. 4E and Pathinder then basically doubled down on "collect +1s or fall behind level-appopriate challenges" as the core part of the gameplay loop.

I'm a fan of collecting plusses and watching numbers go up... in CRPGs. On the tabletop, I agree, it was cancer. 5E, however, decided to excise that cancer by ripping off all of the patient's intestines. And so we got the whole problem that you described.

Same fucking thing. They had the whole wide world of mechanics they could slot in to take advantage of bounded accuracy, but they refused to.

They could just flat-out have higher-level characters deal more damage to lower-level monsters. Or apply overkill damage to adjacent monsters as a base rule. Or, if they didn't want to deal with that since that would imply giving monsters actual level equivalence and not a completely useless Challenge Rating value, implement minions again and actually teach would-be GMs reading the DMG to use those as players go up in level. If they really wanted to simplify shit, they could have had magical items giving higher bonuses or additional effects to high-level characters.

5e is a tragedy of "what could have been" because of shit like that. The developers knew they had some gaping holes in the design that they could fill with interesting systems and custom rules. But they didn't, either due to laziness, rushed development, or sheer incompetence.

ETA:

This was also the case for much of 3e and PF's lifecycle.

I remember the complaints that nobody wanted to play anything other than d20 systems back in the day. It's worse now, but people orbiting a single highly popular system is how things have always been.

We had a brief reprieve from that in the golden years of Storyteller (where we had two large RPG communities, with GURPS hanging on for dear life), but despite what you'll see a few people claiming out there, there was never a time where you could just walk into a LGS and find a group for Castle Falkenstein or Paranoia or Cyberpunk 2020 ready to go. People who weren't playing AD&D (and later D20 and Storyteller) were always complaining that nobody wanted to play their games. As mentioned, GURPS managed to hang on but despite it being catered to with an ungodly amount of first and third-party splats, GURPS players were always mostly just doing their own thing.

 

[Brain Problems]

I ran the Doctor Who game from Cubicle 7 (surprisingly good system for what it's trying to achieve) and a D&D player was really struggling with it whilst someone who'd never played any RPG before took to it like a duck to water. The D&D player had a straight up brain-freeze when confronted by a robot that couldn't be hurt by bullets. Next round I asked what he'd like to do and he just said: "I shoot it again?" The player who'd never RP'd before looked at him like she just couldn't understand why he'd say that. Because she couldn't. (Happy story though, he had something of a revelation between sessions after being very despondent in the first and became one of the most imaginitive and fun players).

Your perspective on this is interesting but I'm curious if the D&D player is normally very creative in his natural environment or whether he's just as dull/uninspired there too. That said, if the dude isn't into the setting and can't be bothered to get into it I can see that type of response. Glad it worked out after though.

I had an inverse experience of playing Cyberpunk with a bunch tabletop enthusiasts + the GF of one dude who, as far as I can tell, had never played anything like this before in her life. She could not wrap her head around "do anything you want" insofar as it's a pretend world with rules, just be creative and think of stuff. She froze like a deer in headlights when a combat encounter started and basically did the "I uhhh shoot again!" thing you're describing.

To be honest, I find the cyberpunk setting more limiting than the medieval fantasy one for some reason, maybe just because I'm used to the latter versus the former.

 

[Overly Serious]

Your perspective on this is interesting but I'm curious if the D&D player is normally very creative in his natural environment or whether he's just as dull/uninspired there too. That said, if the dude isn't into the setting and can't be bothered to get into it I can see that type of response. Glad it worked out after though.

There might be some confusion. The old case of the guy in the Doctor Who game worked out. He always built purely mechanically optimised combat characters and Doctor Who was a big struggle for him for a couple of sessions and then he honestly became my best player.

But the situation I was talking about currently I don't think will change. What he's like in his home environment I couldn't tell you but his mentality is very much sit there and wait for the point in the story where he now does his skill rolls. I don't relate to it and I have no idea why someone would want to show up other than to think he must have nothing else to do - which is insulting to me.

 

[Tom Bombodildo]

I've actually noticed similar, but different issues with people who only played 3.5 and people who only play 5e.

3.5 people are willing to try other systems because the crunch of 3.5 was enough that most systems with moderate to extensive crunch weren't immediately off-putting. Despite this willingness to try other systems, every game in said other systems is essentially a 3.5 game. You have to have proper party comp, the goal is only to optimize characters, you have le heckin CE rogue that steals from the party, etc. Annoying, but the lesser of the two evils.

5e players are willing to try any tone or setting of game, but it has to be 5e, or some derivation of 5e. Other game systems are scary, the 5e rules are perfect and can be used for any setting or game style, and all you have to do is find some 3rd party/indie 5e conversion for whatever it is you want to run. These players are literally useless for any group that wants to do anything more interesting than endless Matt Mercer copycatting masquerading as an original campaign.

 

[Brain Problems]

I think that if I'm being fair to my friends, the majority are casual-enthusiasts if that makes any sense. They like D&D, they enjoy 5E because it's all they know, and they'd probably try out a new system with some cajoling from someone in the group strongly in favour of at least trying it, but generally it's a commitment thing. Are we going to switch over entirely? Are we splitting our attention between systems? It's an investment in time and effort from a group that is frankly fucking difficult to get together consistently enough on a semi-regular basis, let alone throwing learning something new at them, even if it's superior.

If you're younger or single/no kids and/or have tons of free time to game with your buds there's zero reason not to at least try other stuff but I won't pretend it isn't a bigger ask to get people to switch/learn something else than what we've been (mostly) playing for years.

 

[The Ugly One]

A Fighter with a greatsword and a +4 STR bonus is almost guaranteed to kill a goblin in a single attack whether he is Level 1 or Level 20, the only difference is how many attacks he gets and how often he hits them. That's not interesting.

A goblin in AD&D has 1-1 HD, and will almost certainly die if a Fighter with 18 STR hits him with a two-handed sword. Goblins have never been interesting.