kichae

The downside of PF2 is if you try to engage with the core of the online community with this "rules for if I want/need them" attitude, someone will come out of the shadows to shank you.

There's a rabid "by the rules, and all the rules" cohort within the community, and they are pretty effective at chasing new players away.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

I will not make a Pathfinder joke.

* Kichae has a stroke.

People are very bad at explaining what they like about things, because usually they like things in contrast to things they don't like. And people who do identify what they like positively often just get told that their input isn't welcome, either.

The problem isn't whether someone is focusing on negative aspects of what you're playing or the positive aspects of what they are, it's that discussions about minority systems are often just puked up onto people who weren't asking. The conversation is often:

"Hey, how can I do [thing] in [game I'm playing]?"

"[Game you're playing] sucks at [thing]/isn't designed for [thing]. You should play [something else]."

"But I like [game I'm playing], and don't want to convert to a whole new system."

This means not only is the asker's question being totally ignored, but they're being hit with -- sometimes even bombarded by -- value judgements they weren't interested in.

FATAL fixes this.

Have you seen the discourse around 5.5? The toxic individuals are the ones bringing the culture war shit to the table. Shutting down mention of it ensures that there are only toxic tables.

They're talking the probability of failure, not the specific number on the die. If your skill bonus meets the DC, you have a 1/20 chance of failing, assuming a natural one equates to an auto-fail. If your bonus doesn't meet the DC, you have a higher chance of failing.

You know how it's "RPGMemes" and not "D&D 5e Memes"? You're making assumptions about where the joke is rooted.

Enemy Perception DC? 25

Not sure how you're supposed to use them while carrying around that heavy armoire.

Ok, fair enough. Let's talk about it.

So here's the thing, 5e is incomplete. It was shipped without being properly tested, and was pushed out the door because the whole D&D team thought they were getting axed after 4e flopped. It wasn't designed to be "easy to learn, easy to run, easy to homebrew" -- it's actually none of those things -- it was just designed to be a product on the shelves for the 40th anniversary that was not and that did not resemble 4e. There is more product management and marketing to the game than there is design, and somehow two mid-edition rebalances after it was printing money didn't change this.

But why does 5e feel easy to learn, and easy to homebrew? Because it provides almost zero guidance on how to do these things. It all but completely abandons the player. This has been treated as a feature, rather than an issue, by apologists because it gives tables a lot of perceived freedom. A lot of people, seemingly, see having the responsibility of filling in the gaps as freedom, while also seeing having the option to ignore rules they don't like as some kind of cage. So, lacking the cage of professional advice, people feel free to do whatever they want.

But here's where it gets weird. The gaps provided by the PHB and GMG are relatively small. But having the reputation of not having rules for this, that, or the other thing matters much, much more than actually not having them. So, people nail down advantage and disadvantage, look up someone else's class builds online, and then lean on setting-specific class content to flesh out their fantasy. And why is this? Because none of the sub-systems are as easy to understand and use as dis/advantage is. They are incongruent with the game's core mechanic, and so they are unceremoniously thrown out. Often, these days, without knowing it, because people are learning how to run the game from YouTube and podcasts, not from reading the books, so they are inheriting someone else's decisions to cast those systems aside.

Almost nobody is playing 5e as it's designed, and when people do, many of them don't like it.

erin (she/her) said in Math Matters: > I don’t fully disagree with you, but you’re just wrong about the area of effect shapes. The rules are very defined on how to represent and find spheres, cylinders, lines, cubes, cones, etc.

You understand that I was making a joke, right? "Embrace the cube of constant radius!"?

Have you actually read the rules? The game, as written, isn't really meant to be played at all. It just vaguely gestures at activities and suggestions, and if you look too closely you'll find a lot of junk that doesn't fit or doesn't really work.

People don't play 5e. People leverage 5e's one core feature and then build their own games around it, ignoring most of the published rules.