I prefer games with player-facing rolls. I also prefer emergent gameplay so I’ll roll on random charts, but that’s it. Stakes are stakes, and character death should be something in the forefront of player minds imo

What stakes do you have in your games? What does your prep look like?

Idk it’s like my second favorite edition of D&D©️ after b/x. There are dozens of us!

Strikes and gutters, ups and downs. This year’s been the drizzling shits, and it’s tough to keep my chin up but I’m getting by.

Hope you’re doing great OP

Calcium means the stones are calcium oxalate which comes from having too much oxalates in your diet

I get recurring kidney stones which are from oxalates and sodium

I keep my oxalate intake per day under 40mg

Spinach has 755 mg per HALF CUP!

Fuck spinach

If those children are representative of the oppressed group, shouldn’t they also have a voice and a face?

Emmet Till’s mother was just using his death as a tool by your logic.

I love BG3 as a video game, but I feel like Hasbro is going to take a lot of the ideas and try their best to translate them into the trrpg space and shittify both on the way through.

I’d agree with your first point re: D&D ®️ esp re 5th Edition. My wife took a long time to get in to ttrpgs, something that I’ve enjoyed for over 30 years bc I kept trying to do the D&D®️ thing. I’d recommend you try other games that actually “play” at the table. Dungeon World is great and almost anything in the PbtA family does such a great job of driving the action forward (5e doesn’t), having actual stakes and danger (5e doesn’t), actually meaningful character choices (5e doesn’t), not a beat-the-designer/video-gamist philosophy (5e DOES have this), and not ran by a shitty corporation that hires mercenary thugs to intimidate people, since literally anyone can make a PbtA game about anything.

Agree 💯 on the d20. I think it works in some games, notable Mörk Borg and like b/x D&D - games where if you are rolling dice, you already have fucked up

I can’t speak to the groups you played with , but have you tried getting people that aren’t in to the hobby in to it? I run games for new players often and they never have the baggage I think you’re speaking about

Re the preparation you do, be sure to always prep situations not plots. There should be a law that states “the more prep the DM puts into a game is directly proportional to how quickly the players will force their prep off the rails”. The game is a conversation, and I think D&D®️ 5e has fucked this up bc of how they format their adventures WITHOUT EVER TELLING YOU HOW TO ACTUALLY RUN A GAME! Plus, Christ they are fucking textbooks written by committee! I would say a couple things, first: look at Dungeon World as a guideline for how to format your adventures, and second: don’t plan huge arcs, just plan individual moments that you want to happen. The characters will get there, even if it is a roundabout way. The Lazy DM by Sly Flourish has a lot of help here that can work for any game, and there’s this blog post that talks about the literal easiest foolproof prep method.

Your last point doesn’t make sense… Check out itch.io and their physical games category. There are RPGs for literally any genre or setting you can think of. TinyD6 and FAE are two really good generic games that if you can’t find your setting, you just slap these bad boys in there and you have an RPG

It really is a fun and exciting hobby and I’m sorry you’ve had a bad time previously.

They are remaking Wizardry 1 under the banner Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord in early access on Steam

No, he just dehumanizes trans people and reduces them to their genitals and is generally tone-deaf to all of that.

Quotes from The Closer:

“…The transgenders…”

“Every time I come out onstage, I be scared. I be lookin’ around the crowd, searching. For knuckles and Adam’s apples to see where the threats might be coming from.”

“And then she hikes her skirt up and she pulls a real live, meaty dick out!”

“If I was honest, I wouldn’t have fallen for it. I’d have just looked at the picture like, “Look at that big chiseled jawline, that big thick Joe Rogan neck. Is that a dude? Is your daughter a man?” Can’t say that shit. It’s really annoying.”

“…trans-bitch from the picture.”

“A couple of more drinks and these fellows are gonna start asking her for some pussy, she might not have.”

“I was careful to call her a bitch, ’cause I didn’t want to blow her cover.”

" “Well.” I am a girl now, n*gger. You must treat me as such."

“Gender is a fact.”

“Now… I am not saying that to say, that trans women aren’t women. I’m just sayin, that those pussies that they got… You know what I mean?”

“I’m not saying it is not pussy, but that’s like Beyond Pussy or Impossible Pussy. You know what I mean? It tastes like pussy but that’s not quite what it is, is it? It’s not blood, that is beet juice.”

I’m not going to quote his story about the one trans person who passed whatever litmus test he decided to implement to determine if someone deserves his respect or not, but it summed up to the equivalent of someone saying something racist and finishing with, “well, I have black friends, though!”

Literal hot trash