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I bet some obsessive nerd has converted DND to point buy (like wod, gurps, etc) instead of class and level based.
You get XP for stuff, and you can spend that as you like on all the stuff you’d get from leveling. Follow the recommended route and get a standard looking fighter. Or go crazy and buy nothing but hit dice. Or make a glass cannon by buying all the sneak attack dice and second attack (in case you miss) and nothing else.
Or, per this meme, buy superiority dice and maneuvers, and then also buy extended crit from champion.
It would be a mess. I think part of why dnd is popular is its comparably small decision space. There’s just not a lot of room to fuck up your character
This doesn’t seem like a good idea.
One, releasing should be easy. At my last job, you clicked “new release” or whatever on GitHub. It then listed all the commits for you. If you “need” an Ai to summarize the commits, you fucked up earlier. Write better commit messages. Review the changes. Use your brain (something the AI can’t do) to make sure you actually want all of this to go out. Click the button. GitHub runs checks and you’re done.
Most of the time it took a couple minutes at most to do this process.
My old pandemic D&D group was the best. They cared about everything. But I remember specifically one time they arrived at a large party. I was describing the scene- large tables set with food, small groups of people mingling, and off in the corner you see a man talking to a woman, her back is against the wall and he’s got his arm on the wall so he’s kind of trapping her there. She looks uncomfortable.
The players all beelined to those two to rescue the NPC from the guy. Oh, Pretty Paul. They hated him so much. Such a good villain. (Started as a riff on Handsome Jack, and it worked so well. One of the players wrote a song about how much they hated Paul)
I remember once my players spent like 15 minutes discussing how to get across a 10 foot long puddle of water in a cave.
Eventually I had to remind them that 10’ isn’t that far, and you can RAW jump your strength score in feet with a running start. They didn’t need to build a bridge or cut into the walls. They could also just go into the water, but I understand not wanting to submerge yourself in cave water when you don’t know what’s down there.
As the title says, moderation is key. If the game is just “whatever is the most convincing right now” then I’m going to be annoyed that I sat down to play D&D/fate/gurps/whatever, and we’re mostly playing improv. It’s important to set expectations in or before session 0.
If I was looking to join a game, and the GM was like “We’re all about the rule of cool”, I’d probably ask for some examples. If it’s like “we let the [D&D 5e] wizard cast as many spell as he wants” then I’m not joining, because that’s going to fuck up the game balance. On the other hand if it’s like “we don’t really care about carry weight unless it’s extreme”, that’s fine.
Stuff in the middle, like “one time we let them use create water in the bad guy’s lungs to drown him!” can go either way, but I’m usually not a fan. Mostly if I ask myself “if this works, why doesn’t the whole setting revolve around it?” and don’t have a good answer, I won’t enjoy it. Like, if everyone could do lethal damage with a cantrip, or if the “peasant railgun” worked like the joke, or “we let the real life chemical engineer make napalm and mustard gas as a 1st level rogue for massive damage”, then that probably isn’t for me.
The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.
I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.
I think there’s also a pair:
- Takes the setting and theme very seriously. Reads the lore. Knows the details. Can tell you why the Lancea Sanctum and Invictus are traditionally allies
- Absolutely does not take the setting and theme seriously. Wants to play Barney the Dinosaur in your game of Vampire, and Punisher in your game about running a bakery.
I’m old and tired and generally am super tired of “wacky” ideas like the second one there. I feel like I’ve come full circle. As a youth, I thought like “let’s play vampires and struggle with humanity!” was cool . Then there was a bit where i wanted to flip it- “let’s play vampires but like go to theme parks and don’t do anything sad or deep!”. Now I’m back around to wanting to just play the theme as intended.
This is especially true if it comes up after session 0. Like, if you want to do a D&D game about running a BBQ shop, fine. Let’s do it. Let’s kill, cook, and sell some weird monster parts. But please don’t derail the whole game on session 3 when you insist on going back to town to cook the monster meat when it was clearly a random encounter and everyone else wants to continue the dungeon dive pitched in session 0.
In one of my old groups, I’d usually verify the player and I understood each other , and they understood the likely consequences. Like, “You can shoot her, but remember this is her club, with her friends , and she’s a vampire so she probably won’t die. But if you want to roll, it’s at -4 from her Celerity you’ve seen her use.”
One player was always like “you never let me do anything!”
I was like you can do it, but I don’t want you to be surprised and mad if there are consequences.
Another player, by contrast, would listen to me clarify what was likely to happen, and be like “cool bro let’s do it.”. We still talk about the time his character jumped out a 20 story window to save his friend’s girlfriend. Great player. Took a lot of damage, as warned, but lived.