I want you to realise that most systems, including the ones I mentioned, are simpler than D&D. It will not take multiple sessions to learn the rules. For the love of god, you are spending more time arguing against learning new systems than it would take to just learn the new systems.

Oh, I’m a good, law abiding person, definitely. I’d never pirate, even if it means I’m missing out on a whole cough Trove cough of games. Sorry, bad cough.

You also aren’t obligated to play D&D. You can play something else where you don’t have to ignore 70% of the game to get what you want. If you just want an action resolution system, play Kids On Bikes. Or Gumshoe. Or Genesys. Or flip a coin, heads you succeed.

If you’re going to buy a system just to ignore most of it, D&D is one of the most expensive to pick.

If that’s how you’re measuring it, then about half of the rules are about combat or magic. If you play D&D without that, you are playing half a game.

Just tell your players they can’t choose spell casting classes

In other words, remove those classes from your game.

To play without magic and combat, you’d need to ignore most of chapter 2 (only human); most of chapter 3 (only 3 classes get first level non-combat, non-magic features, and two are spellcasters); half of chapter 5 (no weapons or armour); half of chapter 6 (no combat feats); chapters 9, 10 and 11; and most of the appendices. I did a quick check, and you’d use less than 100 pages out of the 318 in the rulebook.

So much for “literally zero”.

I want you to look through the core rules and see how much of it you’d have to remove to reflect a non-violent, non-magical setting. And at that point, why are you still using D&D?

Are you saying you don’t wanna smooch Martian Manhunter yourself?

Okay, but also, all video games are multiplayer, so you can only play Stardew (or even just Oblivion) if you can convince your friends to play it with you. And the people I know will insist they don’t have enough hard drive space for Pong, so I guess I’m stuck playing Skyrim.

That would legitimately slap. Sadly, I feel like any company big enough to do the concept justice would be too risk-averse unless a big IP is attached.

If it’s such a huge chore to play your game, then why did you make it? More than that, why would anyone else play it?

This person needs a shower.

If I take a shower, that won’t suddenly make me attractive to girls. And yet, if I don’t take a shower, my stench will make me unattractive to girls.

On second thoughts, the “why bother voting” crowd would probably struggle with an analogy about taking a shower.

It’s just a keysmash

And one of those sides is a 20.

Robert Caro disagrees. Power does not corrupt, it reveals. If you somehow became a billionaire, you’d be able to do whatever you wanted, which means we’d be able to see what you wanted to do. If you start acting evil once you get money, it means you were evil but unable to act on it until you had money.

Specifically about Amazon, Bezos made it because he wanted to cash in on the early internet with his own startup, leaving a Wall Street firm to do so. And, yes, we was a dick to his only employee, which is why the man quit after only 5 years.

They made one comment. It’s a bit early to start drawing conclusions.

If you want an alternative, how about not giving it all to anyone? How about judging the company on their values and practices rather than their size?

You hit a false dichotomy. “Not your allies” does not automatically mean “class traitors”. They might be neutral.

Remember: Just because a business is small doesn’t mean it’s automatically better. For example, if Bezos ran a corner shop with only three employees, he’d still try and stop them from taking toilet breaks.

Trust me, you don’t need a stamina bar for people to do that. But those people are wrong and we should not humour them.

For me, at least, “like D&D” can mean a lot of things. There are some games where you can tell their starting design point was just D&D, and everything else is either a tweak, a replacement or an addition. It doesn’t matter what gets changed, so long as it’s obvious what it was changed from.

The Fantasy Age system does a lot of things differently, but you can still tell they were working with D&D as their base design. You roll 3d6, but you still add your ability (and a skill bonus if you have the skill) and compare it to a target number.