One of the most important principles in game design is that meaningful benefits should require meaningful costs.

I do not accept this premise.

Resources are what make decisions matter. Hit points, spell slots, limited-use abilities, ammunition, time, and money all impose constraints on what a character can accomplish. Players must decide how to allocate them, when to conserve them, and when to spend them.

This is for specific kinds of games. Not every game is a resource management game. I personally have grown to hate dnd-style resource management.

My favorite games do not ask “can you?”. They ask “should you?”

Maybe you could strain yourself and say that’s a kind of cost. I doubt that’s what the author had in mind.

For example, a starting character in Vampire the Requiem 2e can, with no resource expenditure at all, mesmerize as many people as they want. Another can vanish from sight. Other clans have other cool powers they can just do.

A starting stats Mage can use a variety of means, at no cost, to throw an election the way they want it to go.

It’s trivial, then, to deal with a lot of problems. But that’s not the interesting question. We all know you can get past the bouncer. There are more interesting questions. How are you going to feel about yourself later?

This isn’t even touching on less trad games, which I’m not as familiar with. I’ve definitely played a few one shot games that had no resources management at all. I was a demon, once, and the conflict was about how the wizard room mate never did the dishes.

I’m not a big fan of … I don’t know what you’d call it - the franchisification of everything?

I played Baldur’s gate. It was fine. I don’t really need more. Especially when they’re going to introduce new canon that I don’t like.

I usually ask the players something like “if it was this easy, why doesn’t everyone else do it?”. Sometimes they’ll dismantle their own ideas given the prompt.

Or, sometimes I’ll say “are you sure you want NPCs to use this tactic?”

I’m not sure I follow what you mean by originality and complexity as opposed concepts.

It’s important for players to be able to engage with the content. If you add too much new stuff up front, they’re not likely to retain it. If they can’t retain it, they can’t engage with it. You can drop them in store brand middle earth and they’ll be able to engage. If you drop them in a wholly original setting with winged squid people, eternally young goat poets, and living clothing, that’s a lot to try to integrate all at once.

One of the most disappointing games I ran was Vampire, where the players just didn’t do any reading about the game’s fiction or factions. They didn’t understand what the major NPC players wanted, so they were always lost and confused. After we abandoned that game, I started a new one that was basically Diablo. They did a lot better in that one, in large part because there was no up front details. Yeah yeah fallen kingdom, demon problem, we get it.

I think the real factor is “how much new stuff do they need to learn to engage?”

Should be careful not to just shut down player ideas. If everything they do slams into an annoying problem, it can quickly stop being fun.

I sometimes try to sync with the players and be like “hm do you think the 300 year old vampire has had to engage with the city before? What sort of plans and influence do you think he has?”. Then it doesn’t feel like I’m just screwing them, if they’re thinking about it too.

Yeah I made an account on another instance because I was having trouble getting here reliably. It’s been okay lately, though.

There are of course some weak points, and I’ll gladly expand upon them and any other points it if you’re interested. But I’ve really enjoyed my time in PF2e on both sides of the screen and consider it my TTRPG of choice currently, even as a 3.5 Grognard.

It’s still mostly a spells-per-day game, right? You probably don’t lose the first fight of the day because you can go nova

It’s been really interesting playing Vampire with a person who’s only ever played DND. We keep telling him “you can use your cool powers”. He keeps thinking it’s like a special move to save for a big encounter. No, you don’t have to come up with an elaborate scheme to get past the bouncer. You can just Dominate him. It’s a big shift in mind set!

Personally I hate the “save your cool powers for later” mode of play. I think Pathfinder 2e is less of that, but not free of it?

Increasing Armor Class: Why make attack rolls at all if the game is designed for you to hit at least seven of the ten times you roll the dice? The joy of a success is only satisfying if there’s a realistic chance of missing.

I would have gone the other way and just removed the two-hit check altogether. Missing isn’t fun. Missing makes no progress. Get rid of it.

I don’t think this would seriously solve the problems I have with DND. The adventuring day model is a huge source of problems. The inability to reason about much of the world (I see a knight on the road. How many hit points does he have? 10? 20? 200? This information would inform tactics but is not provided). Many other problems I don’t feel like enumerating.

I had a really bad time once where I wanted to run a dark souls inspired “explore the cursed island” game, and only two of four players were on board. One literally tried to open a BBQ shop. The other was more of a wonder around and pick flowers, not fights, kind

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but DND doesn’t do Star Wars well. There’s no adventuring day in the source fiction, really. Jedi are hard to model- they either shine too bright or don’t live up to the fiction. Force powers don’t really map to existing DND systems. Class+Level is very coarse, which makes it hard to model some concepts. DND is almost entirely a combat game, but I guess Star wars is mostly fighting so you won’t feel the absence of other systems that much.

I’m sure it’ll be make some people happy. The previous d20 Star wars games had their fans. I just don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy, and it’s a shame this is going to suck the air out of star wars tabletop game options.

A good post.

I personally find DND unsatisfying for many reasons (little to no degree of success, static magic system that encourages hoarding, the primary defense is all or nothing avoidance, very coarse progression, some character concepts are simply not representable, etc)

But what is even more annoying than that is when players respond with “but you can just change the rules!”. I know! That’s true of any pen and paper game! It’s not some unique property of DND. But sometimes I don’t want to do the work of designing a system, and I almost never want to play some stranger’s pre-alpha homebrew.

This supports my hypothesis that most players “playing” DND could easily swap to some other rule system and not even know. Many of them would probably be happier in other systems.

I’d rather spend N minutes reading a list of book recommendations than 5*N minutes watching a video. Presumably the target audience for books is literate.

I’m tired of video.

On the one hand, this might help fence sitters that are like “there’s no content there”.

On the other, I just don’t personally care for a stream of random images like Instagram et al do.

There’s something off about a video about books.

It’s not “retire and live a life of luxury” money, at least in many parts of the world.

It’s a lot of money in terms of paying down debt and covering rent for a while, though.

Poor emotional regulation.

Someone speaking another language makes them afraid (maybe they’re talking about me) or feel bad (I only know one language am I stupid?). Getting angry at the other person is easier on the ego than healthier options.

I love mage, but its magic is so involved and powerful I wouldn’t want to use it in a game unless everyone was a mage. You don’t really want one players options to be “I hit him with my club” and the others to be boundless.

Awakening 2nd edition was really good, imo, but I never actually got to play Ascension

I used nWoD for fantasy games. The core dice pool system works pretty well, and few things are tightly coupled to any setting in particular.

I mostly don’t like d20, so when someone tells me they’re doing a game about secret vampire societies in it, I’m a lot more disappointed than if they ported a system I like or am neutral on. Also 5th edition in particular makes a lot of assumptions about how things work.

Isn’t that what people were calling it anyway? Well that’s nice I guess.