this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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Barely making it through is more fun than casually strolling through
As a DM I usually make things to utilize my parties resources to the fullest so when they decide to hoard abilities and not use them it usually makes things harder than it has to be
Today my party will be encountering a creature with an aura of silence (like the spell but a bigger area) which will basically put half the party on survival duty (managing the layout of the encounter) while the other half are on combat duty (as they're the only ones able to do damage)
It's going to be rough but some encounters I make primarily focus on the abilities of some party members over others and it shifts about for who that is
Hell a few weeks ago I had an encounter where no one was very effective and it was super intense where a party member jumped in front of another shielding them and keeping them alive for the remainder of the fight even though they knew it would probably put them into death saves (didn't by 2hp)
Basically what I'm saying is that sometimes the best tool for a power fantasy is having powerless moments, it helps to make the world more alive and encourages out of the box thinking
The way D&D is designed, you'll very often stroll through the first couple encounters of the day. You have way more resources than you need to handle them, since a medium encounter is only designed to take like 1/6th out of you. The last fight or two in the adventuring day might be extra tense, but you have to do some filler first. I don't like that. I'd rather have all the conflicts be meaningful.
Now, in 5e you could just run all deadly encounters, but this quickly creates several problems. Short-rest and no-rest classes don't get to shine, for one thing. Secondly, if you're doing a lot of long rests you can't really have time sensitive plots.
You could instead run a different rules system that has the desired feel from the start instead of putting the round peg in the square hole. But as I said elsewhere in the thread, D&D is so mega popular it sucks all the air out of the room. It's hard to find players for other games. Hard to find community discussion for other games. Plus, if you take someone who's only ever played D&D and plop them into another kind of game, that's often a difficult transition.
Could you recommend a few other systems to me to take a look at? I am interested in finding new ways to play :)
I posted some off the cuff answers elsewhere in this post: https://ttrpg.network/comment/3849752
But that was specific about the rest thing.
Fate is my game crush. It's a general purpose RPG. And i know some people cram DND into any setting but it usually doesn't work great. Fate is actually designed to work for any setting.
It's very open and honestly I think requires more engagement from the players. If you have a bunch of wallflowers who look at their phone and then just say "I attack" on their turn, fate isn't going to go well.
But if you have good players it can be fantastic.
The core of the game is "Aspects". They're free form short phrases about your character. "Fresh Faced Wizard", "Last Knight of the Silver Shield", "Royal Accountant", or whatever. Those inform what your character can do, and you can invoke them to get a bonus on rolls.
The dice system is also more to my taste. It's a fixed dice pool, so you tend to roll average results more than outliers. 1d20 means every outcome on the die is equally likely. I kind of hate that.
It also has better rules for succeeding at a cost. DND just doesn't have any rules for that. The DM can handwaive something but it's not codified at all.
It encourages anymore writer's room approach where players are encouraged to add to the story. More than just being zeroed in on their character. Some people hate this. I like it.
I could go on, but I'm on my phone and supposed to be working. Fate is really cool though.
The world of darkness / Chronicles of darkness games are also very good. I like cofd more but I think that's uncommon. Very clean dice system. Honestly could do fantasy with it without much changes.
I like that stats and health are pretty tightly constrained. You know that on average a person has 7 health. So you can be pretty sure that if you have a hammer that does two damage, and your dice pool gives you on average two hits, you'll probably take them out of the fight pretty quick. Compare with DND where that bandit might have 8 HP or 20 or 40. There's not really a way to gauge what you're dealing with. Some people like it. It feels bad to me. Like the worst kind of video game where the red goblins have twice the hp as the green ones just-because.
The rules for supernaturals are also pretty good. Mage just blows DND magic out of the water with the flexibility and depth.
There's also blades in the dark and related powered by the apocalypse games. They're popular. They have a pretty simple but effective dice pool system. I'm not a huge fan but they're worth checking out.
I could go on but I really should go back to work. Been fussing with this between tasks all day, heh.
Thank you very much for the detailed information. Fate looks really interesting but also a little bit intimidating. I will have to read up on it. Thanks again!