Is "On Role-playing Games" by Alex Kierkegaard the most important piece of gaming commentary there is?

Spoken like a true autist. I bet your favorite game is some shit like Baldur's Gate or Morrowind though, cause you're too much of a fucking casual to play any of the older CRPGs. You love your fucking stats, but you'd shit yourself from anything made in the 90s, eh?

this guy starts with some good points and then devolves into autistic ranting
then calls deus ex the best computer role playing game despite the fact that you can't roleplay shit, you have to play jc denton and defect from unatco and follow the story exactly

He's not arguing that. He's saying the role playing aspect of rpgs has not become more fleshed out and instead it's gotten into prioritizing numbers, which honestly isn't even that bad. Skirmish games exist and they can be fun without any real role playing being done.

As a GM, I do see the point about number fetishism. I had way too many players who only cared about making their numbers bigger. When half the party is playing a spreadsheet rather than a character, roleplaying can suffer as a result.

Granted, this only applies to a handful of the people I have played with, so the problem might be more with those people than the system overall.

>hide stats from players
>people datamine them and determine the best builds regardless

Wew

stats have barely anything to do with roleplaying but to be fair the term "RPG" these days means "games where you level up and have stats" instead of "games where you roleplay"

So? For any given video game, there will always be someone who watches a lets play first, someone who plays with the walkthrough open right by their side, someone who uses cheat engine, someone who uses content mods.

There's always people who tamper with a game, nothing will change that.

So why bother trying to stop people when it's an offline game?

I agree, actually. Tried of all of the wanker about JRPGs vs WRPGs when neither are real RPGs to begin with. Do you think he'd consider Space Station 13 a real RPG?

I really miss reading Alex's stuff.
Thank you for showing me this.

How can you tell it's him and which accounts are him shitposting. Do you contact him often?

Hi Icycalm

he wants the game to not be 'about' the numbers, rather than to not have any (which is obviously impossible)

like instead of beating the Lich to death with your heavily optimized stat spread, you have to find a magic amulet that slays him on the spot, or persuade him to join your cause, or do some other such RP nonsense

I'd say a good example of a game he wants is Hitman - there are numbers behind the scenes in hitman, but nobody concerns themselves with how much dps the silverballers do, because they want to do the RP stuff like getting the opera actors to shoot each other with real guns during rehearsal.

This.

This has really put me off P&P RPGs over the last five years or so, the minute anything gets hairy my friends all turn out to be fucking accountants.

In part I think the simulationism and poor balance of systems like 3.5E and Pathfinder are the root of this problem: your numbers are directly tied to your impact on the world and in combat they are really the only difference between life or death. Coming up with a smarter plan will only get you so far: the execution is all numbers.

I have tried running systems like Fate but it's a trade-off, without any mechanical depth you don't have a challenging game.

I WISH I was Icy, but I'm a filthy brown person from Southeast asia, so he probably hates me, even if we both like Virtua Fighter.

It's not a discussion about hiding stats to stop people from abusing them, the idea is the player should never have to see or think about the numbers.

That seems accurate.

being a number cruncher is how you be good at simplistic dice-based combat systems. do you expect people to just roleplay being bad? in that case don't complain about not having a 'challenging game'. It's an inherit problem with D&D type games, don't blame your friends

always wanted to play D&D in a virtual setting too autistic for real life D&D
what are my options

Without some rules it's just people saying whatever they want to happen, like

I cut the dragon's head off

or

Fuck you I cut your throat

No you didn't that was an illusion and I just stabbed you in the back

No you didn't I teleported behind you and unsheathed your spine

Wade through the cesspool that is the Roll20 community.

Or see if there's anyone looking for games on /tg/.

>Roll20
this is interesting

maybe I can get a game going with 2 other autists or is 3 people too small for this kind of game

>stats MUST be hidden from the player
Does he like SaGa games then?

3 is okay, 4-5 is optimal, 6 is workable but anymore becomes a clusterfuck imo.

For an online game I would aim for at least 5 because people might not reliably show from session to session. I find turns online are normally faster too, and it's easy for the DM/players to message each other directly so that players feel like they are involved.

This, i play with 6 other schmucks in my group, sometimes 7, which is a total of 8, and that's just too many. People sometimes going off doing their own thing.
Thankfully i have a DM who can actually manage this many people due to having almost 25 years of experience.

>No you didn't I teleported behind you and unsheathed your spine

I laughed way more than I should have at this.

>8
Are you trying to play Dragonlance?

This, numbers provide structure and order. Otherwise you'll be one shotting Eldrith Dracoliches and their pet tarassque in one shot because "nuh huh I said I did it!"

Hackmaster. Despite the setback of 7-8 people, we have good times.
Yet somewhere in the back of my mind, i think we'd get more done if there were only 5 of us

Different people look for different things in games, but what lots of people do want is the sense of progression, and feeling that their actions make difference. Progression while obscuring the numbers would still be possible, but that would also make games harder due to not knowing facts, unless lots of time was invested into conveying things either visually or through other means.
The alternative is creating only illusion of progression, which is what Bethesda effectively did with Skyrim. If all numbers in armors and weapons were only replaced with "Higher than" and "Lower than" descriptors, it'd be very much that, thanks to game already being level scaled.
But many people don't like level scaling, which is where this falls apart. You need knowledge of numbers to make educated decisions about different situations. Sure, Final Fantasy VII could be level scaled, but I dare say that it wouldn't be as fun, and challenge levels being set allows for different play styles. You can play normally, grind like hell or run away from most battles and have harder time with required fights.

Fellow DM here. This shit drives me bonkers. I now understand why so many people calmer for a narrative RPG set when I used to be full against them. It's to force the players to do anything BUT powergame and turn their characters into the equivalent of a MtG deck.

>Told players ahead of time that the optional rule that allows for a feat at the beginning is off the table because I prefer low powered games
>Guy immediately starts getting into an argument with me, demands I put them back because if I don't, it's "literally nonviable" to play a human
>Tell him no
>Does this over three days
>Day of first game
>No call; No show
>Silently drops out of the discord group 3 days later

If you want to show me you're a roleplayer, than play with the fucking role you're given.

idiot

Stop playing games that fuck people over for not optimizing.

why are you mad at him wanting to win a game? inversely, why does he want to play D&D if he doesn't want to roleplay? As someone who doesn't play these games it's hilarious to see people whine about this ever since the game was invented. It's like roleplaying and gaming fundamentally conflict with each other at a base level

Yeah I'm going to have to chime in and agree here. One fucker kept minmaxing as a wizard in 3.5E despite me asking them not to since it makes the other players and I bored as hell when every encounter or mystery can be beaten at a blink of an eye. He said no so when he DM'd I on purposely did the most cheesiest wizard build I could think of (Book of Vile Darkness anyone?) with the permission of the other players to see how he likes his own medicine.

After that he stopped being so minmaxy even though he's still an annoying cunt sometimes.

You don't need to play a T1/2 class in 3.5E in order to win. Hell, going T3/4 classes and letting each player specialize is most of the fun in D&D.

>Hell, going T3/4 classes and letting each player specialize is most of the fun in D&D.
Which is still optimizing. It doesn't really change the fact that unless someone knows the game inside and out, going "I want to play Zorro!" and picking the options that are the most obvious for it will end in you having a borderline unplayable character. If the goal is to stop people from fretting about numbers, you should never ever ever allow a game to do something like that.

>garbage DMs getting mad that their players plan characters better than they can plan encounters

I think we're thinking about two different kinds of minmaxing, I think you're talking about "I want my character to be playable and not be shit" whilst I'm more thinking about munchkin minmaxing must be good at everything. If you're the former, then I really don't have any problems with you.

>It's like roleplaying and gaming fundamentally conflict with each other at a base level
No, it's just turbo autists who can't make a compromise. Winning in an RPG isn't about clearing the content, but doing so in a fun and engaging manner in a group setting. There's a DM guiding you through all of this, the challenge of the game is a different one. Some people just don't fucking get it and have a need to stroke their ego.

The problem is that having a game that fucks you over for picking options blindly pushes people towards the latter.

DMing is almost always a no-win scenario though because players will always find a way to break your shit.

>spend a week meticulously planning out a stage of my party's adventure, adding sidequests, optimizing NPCs, putting failsafes in place in case of minxmaxing bullshit
>50 minutes into the campaign they try to have a threesome with a shopkeeper and his wife, shoot the livestock they needed to deliver, set the main quest-giving NPC's house on fire, and end up arrested

If you're playing by yourself, then by all means do that but if you're playing with other friends that's what they're there for and that's how you involve everyone in the game instead of having one Munchkin Mary Sue do everything whilst everyone else plods along behind them.

>Implying you could plan an encounter that my Cancer Mage would struggle with.

maybe if you're playing with retards you should design your adventures appropriately

It was semi my fault, yes. Problem is I'm decently experienced at it while the folks I'm playing with now are all friends who are new to D&D. We started with a straightforward combat adventure that was basically nothing but your standard dungeoneering at level 1 for 6 hours and they did fine. Decided to focus scenario two on the more conversation-heavy side of things, and they immediately went apeshit and broke everything.

I was utterly flabbergasted at how quickly it all went to shit, honestly.

>minmaxing as a wizard
Not sure exactly what this means, but I run with two (2) wizards in my 7 man party.
My god do they get whiney about not having enough spells, despite how with what they have, they melt a lot of things, and i agree, it gets boring sometimes.
As a result, we get thrown a lot of shit at us that tend to counterspell or resist magic.
Seriously fuck wizards though.

>fuck wizards
>not 'fuck any melee class with 18 str'

I can live with casters melting encounters, you just have to start designing for that.

I can't deal with having to on-the-spot figure out how much damage a hay-cart does when the half-orc picks the fucking thing up and decides he wants to use it as an impromptu weapon.

It means I become a cancerous faggot that runs Cancer Mage and stacks on Festering Anger, Vile Rigidity, Warp Touch and has the feat Lost Tradition to the point where I could cast any spell I want whenever I want, laugh off dragons trying to claw me to death and one punch anything to death.

And yeah, off the top of my head the only way to provide a semi-reasonable challenge to wizards is to have them fight other magic users or have "mage-hunter" style NPCs with anti-magic shit. So I'm not surprised that happened.

did they start playing D&D because they wanted to do some roleplaying or because you pressured them into it like all /tg/ friends do for some reason?

Why not just disallow all feats then if you want "low power" games?

>Kierkegaard

>stats are a new thing

1975 says you're a stupid faggot who shouldn't talk about shit he doesn't know about.

I really hope you're just acting stupid on purpose. Cuase otherwise your lack of reading comprehension would really be fatal.

Maybe i'm just lucky with our fighters, who are smart enough to bring weapon chains and have sidearms in the case they get disarmed or something.
Never had the displeasure of running with guys like you describe.

>dnd isn't a CRPG

literally kys

How am I claiming that in any way?

I really urge you to seek help.

This is exactly why vidya RPGs can be so much better. The devs have enough resources to craft an experience where they can put in tons of obscure shit that only 1% of players will likely appreciate, and it'll be worth it because everyone's experiences is enhances by this level of planning and detail. Otherwise it's jsut not worth it when you've playing by the seat of your pants.

they're not even comparable to be honest, the game part of a video game rpg can be a thousand times better than dnd but you'll never have freeform role playing in a computer game

Perhaps you should re-read the string of conversation and attempt the barest amount of reading comprehension.

Seel help, BG/Morrowind shitter

The retard doesn't understand that a human DM can change and adapt the scenario (or even bend the rules) on the fly. A videogame can never do this unless it has a true intelligent AI bound to it (and this is only in theory).

He's just as stupid as some players that think more freedom of choice during character creation makes an RPG better, when it does in fact restrict the kind of story and choices avaliable to you.

Videogames and P&P are completely different.

It is absolute suffering to have high-strength chars, because they eventually realize they can break the laws of the universe if they want. You end up with chain-wearing 6-foot guys moving 50ft in a single movement, able to leap 20ft forward from a standstill who can lift 400lbs with one-hand over their head.

I once had a guy tackle a motherfucking dragon and hang on with his bullshit strength after it took flight while dealing unarmed damage all the while. Or use his unconscious plate-clad partymember as a 1-handed weapon.

pretty much true

people only think RPGs need numbers because they've always been there but if you removed them it would change very little

all games use numbers
all games ARE numbers

in a game like Mario how high you jump or how fast you are moving is a number too
the game doesn't show it to you because obviously you don't need to know it and it would just be unnecessary clutter
the number is irrelevant because you are directly seeing the outcome of your actions on the screen
if a game absolutely needs to show you numbers for you to understand what is happening then its obviously not giving the player adequate feedback but in this day and age its nearly impossible to even make a game where this is the case unless its literally a text adventure

>seel
>thinks the 1970's dungeons and dragons game is made by Bioware / Bethesda

shaking my head, to be honest family

Every since my first reply, my point was that you're a Bioware/Bethesda shitter that can't handle anything older.

Why do you deny your nature?

The game that was posted is 30 years older, retard.

So? I'm not arguing that old games exist.

Just that you're a braindead Bioware/Bethesda shitter, jack-off to numbers, yet can't handle any RPG game from the 90's and older.

As someone that never actually played the pen and paper games that sounds amazing.

And that's why people min-max, because that's honestly more fun than "roleplaying".

What a pile of horseshit. Hidden calculations are present in CRPGs and player character stats are not , just like in tabletop rpgs.

>unhealthy numbers fetishism who miss the point of role-playing entirely

I bet he was never a nerd to begin with. Fuck those sjw proxies.

>icycalm (=Alex Kierkegaard)
>calls pretty much every other person subhuman
>says that best thing that happened to blacks was being enslaved

I guess he's a SJW proxy, yeah.

Except the point was made about stats. RPGs literally started in the 1970's with D&D and have always, ALWAYS been about stats.

>implying SJWs are not racists

Oh you meant abusing literally everything that comes with 18 str and not just damage. Sorry im a little slow.
I'm actually one of the fighters, and the only one with 18 str (not natural).
Aside from being the only one to be able engage and attack enemies at a fairly long distance while wearing field plate, my DM doesn't really give me situations where i'm able to flex it, which i guess is what he's supposed to do for my case, and in some situations where i am able to, it usually comes with very bad consequences.
I once drank a potion of "titan" strength and gained temporary 5 (i think 5) str and leveled an entire 3 story building by pounding the ground (the context is that it was the hq of a lot of assassins that were rival to the rogue guild my party was aligned with, and the building was mostly cleared.)
In the end my hands were broke and it took in game months to heal and be able to use my hands again even with clerical magic.

That does sound pretty awesome

and both the character and the DM ought to be roleplaying in the first example at least

I agree with this

But I like my numbers
The thing is that you need to know how your strength is doing, so we do that with a number. Simply being told you're strong isn't very precise. In real life we can tell how strong we are intuitively. We can swing a bat or life a rock and get tactile feedback. But video games don't have that.

I disagree entirely.

As a dedicated DM, I've been doing this shit for longer than most have been on this board I can safely say this is horse-shit.

Even the most imaginative of us, the curious and creative are slaves to our fantasy. I've you've been playing a 50 hour campaign, and have hit level 15, you wanna feel like it. When all stats and calculations are taken away from you, progression is left solely to either player imagination, or the DM. Commenting in physical, mental, alignment changes and so on. Even though I'm a pathfinder fanboy, I've really liked the direction e5 has taken with the game. It puts so much in the players hands, as a DM, I'm glad dank rat doesn't kill of my escort npc anymore. It's a lot easier to really build and character and world now.

it's not easy to place my rant in cohesive form, so here a:
>tl;dr this guy is wearing nostalgia goggles and theres nothing wrong with throwing numbers at your players, when you tell them you bash a goblins head in. It's better to see the 20 nat roll with it. Then seeing nothing at all, that shit can be boring unless you a VERY veteran DM

You can show this in video games without showing numbers.
Emeny A takes less hits for it to go down than Enemy B. You can conclude that enemy a either has lower health or some other factor is in effect, like weak against certain weapon type.

If you start killing exclusively enemy a long enough, you start noticing they are taking less and less hits to down.
With that, you can conclude that either you got stronger or you became more efficient at killing enemy a, where you test this by killing enemy b to see if anything has changed.

Sure , abuse the save system , that will give you best RPG immersion /s

There was nothing in my post that has anything to do with a save system.
Perhaps i wasn't more specific. When i say Enemy A, i mean that enemy type, like a skeleton, and enemy b a human, or some shit.

Yes , and the player can just do trial and error save/loads or read a wiki.

Games shouldn't be like tabletop RPGs since those are primarily about improv acting with friends. The farther away from DnD stat systems games get the better

Wasn't there an indie RPG made recently that did this? As in it didn't put out exact weapon stats or magic items effect, you have to find it out through experiments.

Also I thought Dark Souls worked to similar effect with its armor, weapons and rings, but I never actually played it so I could just be wrong.

Honestly I would like if more RPGs had mystic and hidden mechanics behind it because my favorite things about games is the sense of discovery when encountering a new area, enemy, mechanic, item, and so forth.

Some games benefit/require numbers a lot though to be good. Like all the ARPG diablo clone games would be no where near as addicting and fun without stat spreadsheets.

But hey, just a person with reasonable opinions here.

You know, having equipment with hidden effects might be cool. Like you find a unique ring that's not written about in any weapons catalog. Then if you have it equipped while under certain circumstances its effect activates. Like you've got a ring that causes skeletons to explode or something. Then while the players cornered by skeletons in a dungeon and on low health, the ring suddenly activates its hidden power, saving the players ass. You could make the player record this effect by writing a note about it in an ingame bestiary.

Just like the classic roguelikes handle the items - you have no idea what they do until you try/identify them.

DnD 5 in a nutshell

Except if you deny people numbers, they cannot do that.

> This is how CRPGs should work.
Why?

there's an ideal halfway point, and that point is the FATE system

>In CRPGs, stats MUST be hidden from the player
Sounds retarded. I want to know my stats so I know how to not get myself killed or how I can utilize my character in the most effective manner. If I don't know my stats then it's all just guesswork.
Seeing die rolls makes no difference at all when the computer crunches the numbers for me anyway. I don't see why the ability to see the die rolls (like Icewind Dale) bothers this guy so much.

>Is "On Role-playing Games" by Alex Kierkegaard the most important piece of gaming commentary there is?
>Alex Kierkegaard
You do realize that this person is quite literally ManlyTears level of retarded shitposter, right? The person is an idiot. An intellectually dishonest idiot to the boot. I mean the guy calls himself fucking Kierkegaard for fuck sake. That is like if you shitposted about physics and unironically called yourself Einstein.

I never figured out how much of the absolute trash that insomia.ac is is pure shitposting and trolling people and how much is an honest delusion, but I don't think that it matters either.

Just by the way, in this particular "claim" of his, he is forgetting two things. First of all, the numbers exist as a form of feedback for the player. In real world, you generally have some idea of who you are and what your capacities are. You also generally have some insight into why and how your actions fail or succeed. The reason why RPG's use the stats is to give you abstracted form of that particular feedback, because presenting it in other forms is increasingly demanding and deprive the player of feeling of sufficient control or information.

He fucking tops the claim by aying that "secret of monkey island has more roleplaying elements than anything that gets passed for cRPG these days" except that game does not have a character-build which is what DEFINES AN RPG FOR FUCK SAKE.
Again, the person is a criminal idiot, why FUCK do people still take him seriously?

birds of a feather flock together

Hey look, it's an RPG that hid all the numbers from you.

And it's a fucking unplayable shitpile unless you have a guide that intricately explains all the hidden mechanics of the game.

>as gamemaster back in high school I used to roll all the dice behind a screen

What a tool. He's what /tg/ would call a "that DM."

Because it's a JRPG not an RPG.

i beat this without problems
git gud

so its a standard saga game, is what you are saying

JRPGs are intrinsically closer to real RPGs by virtue of all being Wizardry clones while WRPGs are all Call of Duty clones with a guns-skill stat

I would argue that visible stats are necessary since the player would otherwise have no idea about his character's abilities in order to make a decision.

If you don't know that the heavy attack against the lightly armoured opponent connects at 50% chance while the light attack connects at 75% - how would you tell which is better?

Blobbers like Wizardry are more RPG-party simulators than RPGs since you don't assume the role of a character within a party and make decisions as that character as you do in real RPGs like D&D.

really thinking about it, this would be easy to implement for people who want to use it

make it an option "immersive rpg" or something

make stat increases when you level up vary between 1 and 3, or something

change stat level up screen to say "stronger, more agile, more dexterous" instead of 12 +1

item descriptions show "makes you stronger" just the same

it really isn't that hard

It's either that or you end up being helpless.

The numbers are what keeps that sort of shit in check, and if you did happen to have some sort of arbitrary system made up of what does and doesn't work in order to have less stupid shit happen then there's no point in not just using numbers instead.

>easy to implement for people who want to use it
This is usually a bad design decision since it leaves out the intricacies of the system. It's like making a quest-compass optional but forgetting to put in the cues the player needs to navigate without it.

e.g. "makes you stronger" doesn't give you the same kind of information as a specific number. Instead of providing an alternative you just lose control so there is no incentive to play with this sort of system.
So instead of just giving a qualitative assessment you'd also need the ability to comparatively assess items in order to tell which is better.

This whole discussion is just "everyone should enjoy everything in the same way I do"

Personally I also like hidden stats. But I don't look down on people who like to metagame and the math behind it.

Why is this guy such a huge faggot?

>you're rewarded for running away from fights
>you're penalized for killing too good
>you won't know until it's too late

hiding everything from the player is pretty dumb, especially if it's a player new to the game series or genre.

Skyrim did a bit of that by having stats for things but then just saying "makes you 10% better at swords" instead of actually saying "+5 to One-Handed".

It was bullshit and dumb.

That wouldn't accomplish anything of value if it's just replacing numbers with words and otherwise works the same way.

Not only is he bad at video games he's also bad at roleplaying. What the fuck kind of GM does all the dice rolls for everyone?

bad b8
everybody knows that RPGs are about roleplaying, not math

>What the fuck kind of GM does all the dice rolls for everyone?
I've actually experimented with this, and it's not such a bad idea. It's a logistic nightmare though, and it got so tiring and pre-preparation intensive that I gave up on it. It would really need at least two GM's cooperating to get it right, and that brings a whole new set of it's own challenges and problems.
Or going extremely stat-light but that is just an entirely different pandora's box all together.

Why is that every single fucking time some writes everybody knows they always follow it up with complete bullshit

>What the fuck kind of GM does all the dice rolls for everyone?
Depends entirely on your group and your players.

Some people like it more and other people prefer rolling dice.

It's not an incorrect way of doing things. The real issue here is he seems to have problems doing basic arithmetic and would rather avoid it.

One thing you forgot to mention (and some people are unintentionally pointing out) is that you don't just want to hide numbers; you also want to tailor the game to where the decisions can be understood without those numbers. Getting some equipment that provides "really good health bonus, good defense bonus, exceptional magical resistance bonus," and so on is not productive. You're taking the numbers away but replacing them with words, which means you are STILL playing the numbers game - just slightly less precise.

Rather, you need to prompt situations where making the decision is meaningful, and not just a choice between which stats to bump how much. Make a choice between carrying a torch or carrying a sword, where the torch gives you advance notice but the sword makes you prepared for a fight. Make a choice between the fire-warding armor or the armor which deflects any blade, where the first would make you immune to a dragon's breath but the second would make fights with bandits all the easier. The reason that old-school adventure games typically feel more engaged with roleplay than most video game RPGs is because they involve putting the player in the role of the protagonist and finding their way out of the world. The problem with video game RPGs, and a lot of tabletop RPGs, is that they just involve throwing larger numbers at players and seeing how far they can get.

I'm just imagining how many times you'd fuck up because the PC has some bonus that you as the GM don't remember. And if you have the player tell you what modifiers they have to a roll, how is that any more "immersive" than actually doing the roll yourself?

Maybe I'm just being a grognard but there's a reality and physicality to rolling the dice yourself that gives you a connection and ownership over what happens. I could see a contextually hidden dice roll where it's specifically about the player character not being aware of whether they succeed or fail but that's conditional and specifically meant to build tension. Concealing all rolls feels like would make me feel like all the results are arbitrary.

Daily reminder that Alex Kierkegaard from Insomnia.ac is wanted for stealing over $100 000, constantly fakes his death, and regularly shills his own shitty website because he's starved for attention.

kiwifarms.net/threads/anthony-zyrmpas-icycalm.17863/

We really need to get the mods to ban his URL.

Nigger, the human bonus feat isn't optional. There are plenty of other races to min max, like Sun Elves. But taking away the only racial bonus for humans does make them worthless.

>I'm just imagining how many times you'd fuck up because the PC has some bonus that you as the GM don't remember.
Nobody knows, and nobody cares. Here is the main reason why you would do this: To minimize metagaming. To have the game more about the people and less about endless arguments about what fucking number you are supposed to add or subtract and what do the tabs and rules say.

The players don't know and see the rules. In my particular campaign, the players NEVER SAW their character sheets. They knew how they were, we had long debates and character bios, but never fucking saw the numeric representations themselves.

>Concealing all rolls feels like would make me feel like all the results are arbitrary.
The results are ALWAYS arbitrary, whenever you see the roll or not. And it's mostly a matter of you trusting the GM or not.

>design a character to fill in a certain role via battles and skills
>try them out
>do well most of the time
>focus more on roleplaying as I'm now confident in the areas I built around
>expand in ways that fit the character; not the meta or other sources
Am I doing it right guise?

The closest videogmes ever got to the real PnP experience is Roguelikes

modern """RPGS""" are fucking joke, just action games with stats

I dunno, part of why I choose a roleplaying game to begin with is because I like the rule set that the game gives me and I want to work with it. When all the rules are obscured, I might as well be playing FATE or doing improv. Not letting a player see their sheet is super weird to me. Did they know what traits they had or did the GM determine that? On some level that feels like a game the GM wants tight control over.

And yeah, I know dice rolls are an arbitrary source of randomness, but when someone else rolls the dice for you, there's less of a sense of ownership over the results. It's not logical, it's just psychological. When you do the rolls yourself, it's your results. Plus in terms of seeing the rolls, when you get to see them you have a much better sense of how your character's skills are working. You might get discouraged if you keep missing and have no idea what's going wrong, as opposed to knowing that you've got a high skill in shooting and you just had an unlucky run.

That's the way most D&D players do it.

I'd kind of prefer if you wouldn't need to solidify a specific role in a party, but D&D is all about killing monsters and TTRPGers are surprisingly resistant towards playing anything that doesn't let you do that, so we aren't likely to see any changes anytime soon.

This guy is... well, there's not really a word for a 'casual' in /tg/ lingo, but he's more or less a newby acting like he knows what he's talking about because he's had his hand held a single time through half a campaign.

>Roll behind screen, players don't roll their own dice

This is nigh sacrilege, right there. I would not even play with this guy, let alone allow him to run a game.

Also, I guaranfuckingtee you that he was bullshiting while he was playing. I've tried memorizing player's stats for shit so I could keep the meta to myself and see if they didn't or did see something out of their peripheral vision. Honestly, there isn't enough room on the table, an app good enough to help or the time involved to enter in every character and monster's stat to automate these tasks to make this viable. I've gotten close but in the end it's just better to go traditional. This guy is lying.

This guy is talking out of his ass.

thats a good and very valuable post
upvoted!

Did you ever fudge dice rolls, or just not roll at all for the sake of your story?

That would really cut down on that metagaming, just remove the gaming.

This guy knows what's up

It's literally whatever you want to do, as long as it fits the tone of the game. Roleplaying games run the gamut from super narrative-based to super mechanics-based and even games in the same system can vary widely.

Some people really like getting into the mathworks and strategy of combat, some people like roleplaying their characters and interacting with the world. Just got to find the right system/GM/group to fit what you want.

the game would basically become storytelling without any game-related aspect

if you take a look at Sony's audience you can understand that there are people out there that would like this concept

Wait a minute, why do so many people act like Icy is speaking about tabletop, when he's talking about video games?

Only good reply is this , which actually pinpoints some problems of what Icy wants.

The question is whether the real PnP experience should be emulated rather than striving for the essence of it that isn't limited by the short-comings of PnP. e.g. interaction with NPCs in PnP is usually fairly limited. While it's definitely more open in the sense that you can pick your dialogue freely, it's more limited in the sense that it takes place within the context of a 'multiplayer' game (thus the GM can't spend too much time talking to a single player) and that the GM has to fill in for all NPCs. Something as elaborate as Torment dialogue between Ravel and the Nameless One is something you won't find in a PnP.

Dialogue is something barely even present in roguelikes.

You missed the point, or refused to acknowledge it. It's a criticism of the numeric gameplay focus present in the vast majority of RPGs, which has led to the term "RPG" becoming synonymous with number crunching and stat min-maxing instead of actual role-playing. For instance, the Sims is technically more of an RPG than most games branded as such released in the past two decades, if we're operating on the original definition of role-playing.

That's not to say that the strategy/tactics/min-maxing aspect of these kinds of games isn't fun, it's just that it's been focused on so heavily in the genre that the potential growth for actual role-playing has been largely ignored. Alex Kierkegaard is a shitty, insufferable person and a literal criminal with a lot of garbage opinions and ideas, but he managed to make an actually valid point when it comes to the nature of RPGs and RPG-influenced titles in the gaming industry.

He's essentially talking about both, as the line has blurred with the development of "gamier" tRPGs and tabletop automisation; there's also the fact that video game RPGs have recently had substantial back-influence on tRPGs.

>The reason that old-school adventure games typically feel more engaged with roleplay than most video game RPGs is because they involve putting the player in the role of the protagonist and finding their way out of the world.
RPGs took a lot of inspiration from these old-school adventure games - in fact, I'd argue that RPGs took over their legacy. 'newer' adventure games put more emphasis on puzzles and cinematic presentation than exploration.

Actually, I think the Sims is more of an RPG in the role-playing sense than literally any video game released that I can think of.

>Did they know what traits they had or did the GM determine that?
They invented their characters, of course their stats were based on what they told me. They knew who they were: about as much as one can know about himself in real world, and they could learn more about themselves the same way a real human would - by testing it. When one of my players wanted to know how fast he was (he thought he was pretty fast, as he used to be an on-foot courier for a while), he'd ask another guy to race him and see how he fared.

> there's less of a sense of ownership over the results.
That is purely a matter of trust between you and the GM. Frankly, none of my players was interested in that, but I would have taken no issue is you being the one throwing the dice, but since you would not know your base values, or the values of the system you are rolling against, it would not really change anything...

>You might get discouraged if you keep missing and have no idea what's going wrong,
Again, that is a matter of the communication between you and the GM. And in real fight, what makes you sure you know why you keep missing your opponent? Bad luck? Are you slower than you thought? Is he faster than you anticipated? Is something else going on? Is a supernatural force at play?
That is the kind of shit you as a person (and a player) were supposed to wonder during the campaign. Like you would in real life.

Most of the time though, of course, my players had a pretty good idea what is going on, because I was taking care in giving good feedback.

>That would really cut down on that metagaming, just remove the gaming.
The rules were there for me, more than for the players. I wanted to make sure the story itself is still emergent, developing dynamically and naturally, have the player still having options to go against my plans and succeed if they wanted. It was there to make sure their agency is as relevant as mine. So no, I did not fudge the rolls.

>I used to roll all the dice behind a screen
Shit dm detected

It just seems like excessive verisimilitude to me, my dude. Like it's not as bad as insisting that characters have to spend time away from the party recovering from wounds, but not knowing your own stats changes the metagame significantly because you're not trading mechanics for narrative, you're just obscuring mechanics. I don't necessarily think that the way you did it is objectively worse, but I don't think it's better either, it's just trading off things in a weird way. Now either I as a player don't know how many times I can use my powers before I run out of energy, or I fluff it by saying that I test it out beforehand so I know how many uses I have, but at that point, it's just back to knowing stats. It reminds me of that huge copypasta of how, given D&D rules as written, characters in-game would be able to derive most of their statistics through experimentation.

>an unhealthy numbers fetishism
Math is unhealthy apparently.
Good to know.
>who miss the point of role-playing entirely
Rather he misses the point of video games.

>It just seems like excessive verisimilitude to me, my dude.
Verisimilitude is a tool, not the goal here. Immersion and relatability is the goal. To make the player think themselves as THEM being in the story, not some avatars made out of numbers navigating a grid of rules and abstract models.
The idea was to make it that the situation, not the abstractive models behind it, were what drove the characters choices and decisions.

>Now either I as a player don't know how many times I can use my powers before I run out of energy,
I'd tell you how tired you are. Although, do you know that "when you feel completely exhauseted, you are still just halfway through your actual stamina" wisdom? Yeah, that kinda applied to in my game.
It's fun when a character suddenly discovers that there was a lot more in him than he himself though. You can't exactly simulate that in a game where you have a fucking mana bar, essentially.

Also, keeping up with the spirit of the game, it's not like you had "powers" that were on cool-downs or set numbers of use per day.

I mean, what you're describing is kind of just a CYOA-style narrative game. The reason stats are there are to provide a mechanical background so that choices aren't just binary conditions. I guess the reason what you're describing isn't stronger in modern RPGs is because stats have tended to be homogenized, but really what you made me think of was Souls games, and particularly in the early parts before the systems open up and you've got to make a lot of choices about equipment and fights and what to use where to counter certan things like bleed or fire or whatever.

to be honest if you guys were playing an rpg and didn't know how much damage you're doing /taking wouldn't it bother you? I assume with zero numbers the level up system would be scrapped too and character building with it

I need to see the numbers because game developers suck at portraying these things without them, look at souls games plenty of the boss weapons look amazing but then you look at its stats and realize its worse than the starting weapon you're using

You sound like a shit dm. And really boring one too. You need to race some guy in the world to find out how fast your character is? Were all your player characters four year old?

I dunno, I've had no problem thinking of my character as being a person and agent within the story while also having a big list of all his stats in front of me. I just don't see why it's necessary to achieve your goal unless I was playing with a group of powergamers who I was trying to force to ignore the mechanics. And in that case, I don't even know if they'd be into it.

Plus, I agree with what someone said way earlier--I can't imagine trying to keep tabs on all of every character's stats myself. I just imagine after every action everyone sitting around and waiting while I alt-tab over to the character sheets again, and in my experience, waiting around for the DM to do something takes players out of the game in a practical sense more than anything. I prefer (both as a player and a GM) a style where you can be more reflexive and get a quick back-and-forth so that the players stay engaged and don't start checking their phones.

>"If you are not interested in videogames in the 21st century you are a peasant, plain and simple -- just as those who were not interested in, say, the theatre in the 18th or 19th centuries were peasants, and hence utterly incapable of having any meaningful relationship with people of class -- and no amount of philosophy can change this." -- Icycalm

"Stephen Hawking is in no way intelligent in my use of the word -- he is in fact quite stupid. It's funny how, whenever the subject of intelligence is raised, people always mention some "clumsy empiricist" as an example of an intelligent person. Never a philosopher! Never a Montaigne or a Spinoza or a Baudrillard! It's always some little dude who mucks about in a dark room for three decades with half a dozen little equations. He shuffles them around for a while and then eventually, finally comes up with a new one! And that's what people mean by "intelligence" -- Icycalm

"People do not realize nor care how much time editing this forum takes from my day. And so they continue to post as if this place was gamefaqs -- as if I had nothing better to do all day than sit in front of a computer making their retarded posts legible. Very well, then. Here is your last warning: If you so much as miss a comma or an apostrophe YOU WILL BE BANNED. If you post "fps" YOU WILL BE BANNED. If you post "2d" YOU WILL BE BANNED. Any retardation, no matter how minor, will not be tolerated. There are six billion people on this planet -- I have nothing to lose by banning 5.9999999 billion of them -- there will always be several million more to join my forum and contribute." -- Icycalm

no wonder he's afraid of math, he's terrible at it

507. The solution to the racial issue will come, not from politicians or ideologues, but once more from the scientists and engineers, at that point where skin color and facial features will become choices, as opposed to destinies. And it is then that everyone will at last become white. - Icycalm

>You need to race some guy in the world to find out how fast your character is?
How did you think people learn how fast they are?

Say that you want to join the fucking track team. You want to know if you have what it takes? What would you fucking do? Check your fucking medical records? Ask the magic mirror and then argue if the +5 bonus for having speed stripes on your shoes apply?

>I just don't see why it's necessary to achieve your goal unless I was playing with a group of powergamers
Actually, it was the exact opposite. The fact that most of my players really cared about the roleplaying aspect more than the ruleset that allowed me to propose this experiment. And when it worked, it was amazing. I can assure you, it was an ENTIRELY different experience from what you had ever played.

That said:
>Plus, I agree with what someone said way earlier--I can't imagine trying to keep tabs on all of every character's stats myself.
This turned out to be the major problem. It was just really damn intensive and really damn exhausting at times, and there were times where the game slowed to a crawl. I'm pretty good at buying time and filling up the dead space, but it was actually exhausting to keep up and the very moment I got some extra reponsibilities, and I could not focus as much time and effort into it, it started to crack apart.

Two well synchronized GM's could do it, we were considering trying that out with another similarly-minded friend (I had played some two-GM driven sessions in the past too, though more traditional Shadowrun ones and it worked well), but we don't have the time or energy to start putting it together now.

But peasants were interested in theater and plays

They were called penny knaves

The great challenge of this hobby is that when you take tabletop rpgs seriously, finding other good players is insanely hard. I live in Argentina, most people here don't even know what a tabletop rpg is, they can't even imagine it at first. For some people, it's the most alien thing ever. Finding good players among the very few that play is too difficult

I find this approach interesting, thanks for the tip

If I want to join the track team I can run one lap around the track and do some basic math to figure out my pace.

oh noooo now i know my own stats
better not start bench pressing or i'll figure out my own STR and i won't be able to roleplay as myself

So you redefine what RPG stands for now?

D&D was made is the early 70s. It had numbers in it. Critisize all you want but don't try to make the genre into something that it is not.

>The reason stats are there are to provide a mechanical background so that choices aren't just binary conditions.
But the choices are still binary conditions. Either you're hit by the swing or you aren't. Either the fall kills you or it doesn't. Either the attack sets you on fire or it doesn't. The result being determined by a die roll rather than an equipment choice or a GM decision doesn't make it any less binary.

The reasoning behind such things as "Armor Immune to Blades" is that is presents an interesting and specific benefit to the player. The player doesn't need to know the exact mechanics to really understand what such an item does. It's immune to blades, or makes the character immune to being stabbed. It doesn't make them immune to being crushed or burnt, so it isn't the best option at all times, but it's still one that they'd want in the specific circumstance. The player would just need to act in a way to ensure its benefit is useful, or to get around it if an opponent is wearing it. By contrast, a player generally doesn't know what a +15 armor equipment does. They just know it's a big number. And so, their decisions just boil down to wanting the biggest numbers. They're aren't choosing swords based on the balance or quality or knowing a specific attack technique with a certain one; they're picking them because they have the biggest numbers.

It's easy to design a game like that, which is why most video game RPGs do so. It is hard to not only think up something original for each piece of equipment, but also situations where decisions between them are relevant - which is why you don't see them.

He's not wrong.

498. The Chinese are not Chinese. The Arabs are not Arab. Your cultures are dead. Not only are you 90 percent Western and 10 percent your own culture today, but that 10 percent of your culture that you are so stubbornly preserving is precisely what's preventing you from competing with us on equal terms, losers.
The behavior of minorities is a negative feedback loop from which only an event comparable in effect to a miracle can save them. And that serves them right, for ALLOWING themselves to BECOME a minority in the first place. Nothing can be done about it now. The sexual war was won a billion years ago, the racial and ethnic ones half a millennium, and all that's left for the defeated to do now, in the aftermath of those complete and devastating for them victories of the opposing camp, as is indeed being done, is to patch up their wounds and count the victims. -- Icycalm

>The great challenge of this hobby is that when you take tabletop rpgs seriously, finding other good players is insanely hard
Funny. Where I live, it's actually very easy to find players, because tabletops are surprisingly popular among social and liberal studies intellectuals: there is always a dozen of philosophy, anthropology, religionistics, art history or history students who are actually really curious to play.
To me, the real problem was that if I wanted to do it right, it just requires massive amounts of time and effort sunk. Like: a well over a week of preparation for a session, which itself could often last well over 7-8 hours. We used to start at five in the afternoon and end up at six in the morning. It was fucking amazing, but my god was it exhausting and I just don't have the stamina to do it anymore.

>I can run one lap around the track and do some basic math to figure out my pace.
First of all: yeah. Because it's not like you and likely will run the same one lap always at the same speed...
Second of all:
That is literally racing you idiot. You are just doing what I said you would have to do in my owlrd. If you have a stop watch, know the lenght of the field, can do the math, it can save you the sparring partner and more relative understanding.
YOU ARE STILL TESTING YOUR FUCKING SKILLS YOU IDIOT. MY POINT WAS THAT IF YOU WANTED A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR OWN STRENGHTS, YOU WOULD HAVE TO TEST IT.

You claim it's stupid and then you say: "I could just test it but use stopwatch instead of somebody else!"
Again: What the fuck is actually wrong with you?

I wasted a minute reading this retarded comment.
Can't believe someone could have an opinion as stupid and wrong as this

By living. And unless your player characters are literally toddlers, they will have pretty good awareness of their capabilities. Especially if they are FUCKING ADVENTURERS.

Cool a DnD thread, Cred Forums ones are usually pretty alright compared to /tg/ though I wish I didn't miss most of it.

The choices are binary, but their effects don't have to be. Say there's a set of armor in the world that's very resistant to electric damage. You can still fight the boss that does electric damage to you without that armor, but it will be trickier, because you'll take a lot more damage and have to be more careful about leaving openings. Or, you can go and seek out that lightning-resistant armor, to make the boss fight a lot easier. The results aren't a binary win/lose, because it's down to the difference in damage you take with 50 Bolt Resist as compared to 250 Bolt Resist, but still have a tangible effect because it's stat-based instead of choice-based.

>interaction with NPCs in PnP is usually fairly limited
What?

>When computers enter the scene, however, there is absolutely NO REASON why the player should have to see any numbers on the screen. Indeed, in my days as gamemaster back in high school I used to roll all the dice behind a screen: my players would simply tell me the action they wanted their characters to perform and I would respond with the result, without them ever having to calculate anything.

Do people actually do this as DMs in real-life?

Is this a disease?

No, because I'm literally using the definition of "role-playing game." Numbers were always devised as a feature that was supposed to make the management of the games easier for DMs and players. If you look back at early editions of DnD, you can directly observe how much more esoteric and intuitively-driven it was in comparison to later editions that made everything more discrete and numeric at the expense of story-telling and role-playing in its most literal sense.

I didn't claim that it's stupid, just that it's pretty trivial to find out your average speed/ability. If I wanted to I could go skeet shooting and figure out my accuracy at hitting a moving target and round to the nearest out-of-twenty and find out my shooting skill.

>value of loot in gold is XP
d&d has always been a fucking game

>I roll for my player's characters as a DM behind the screen
>stats should be hidden so people can take the time to data mine them, changing nothing and just being annoying to the end-user
>173 replies

I honestly have no idea why this board still exists, literally everybody here is either retarded or shitposting. Split it into specifics (genre, region, platform) and be done with it.

The numbers don't need to be invisible, but he's right that they have become the focal point of RPGs rather than actual roleplaying.

Post one (1) person that isn't a fucking nerd that plays this game.

protip: you le can't

Nearly everyone makes rolls that the players shouldn't know the result of behind a screen, and yeah, a lot of groups roll everything behind a screen. Nothing too weird about it.

>they will have pretty good awareness of their capabilities.
Quick question, why do you argue with people when you clearly can't be bothered to actually read the things you argue against.

Also:
>Especially if they are FUCKING ADVENTURERS.
They were not. "Adventurer" was not exactly a profession in my world.

>If I wanted to I could go skeet shooting and figure out my accuracy at hitting a moving target and round to the nearest out-of-twenty and find out my shooting skill.
Did any part of my posts actually claim that was not a possibility for my players? Again, the fuck? Can you people not read? I've literally spelled out my players could easily get an actual idea of their skills by fucking testing them. They just did not have a fucking sheet with a bunch of numbers in front of them, instead, they would tell me, "grab a bow and arrow and fire twenty of them into a practice dummy", and I would do the math and tell them: "Yeah, got sixteen hits, five of them into the center."
And they would know that they are pretty good with a bow. In fact that would probably know that before, because the backstory they had told me contained something like "I was taught how to use a bow and arrow since I was seven, since my parents were nomads for whom bow hunting was a routine activity."

What they did not see was the number "24" under the line "Archery skill" or the specifics of the math that translated the number 24 into "hitting on average fifteen out of twenty shots on a stationary target hundred feet away."
That is how it worked. The fuck is so hard to understand about that?

>video games can never ever replace a proper DM (well maybe they can someday, but that's far away in the future)

>on the other hand they can greatly enhance the combat and all things related to rules and numbers.

hm

This has always been the case in videogames. It's a videogame. Let's not even pretend the modern videogame writer would be able to handle actual roleplaying and not just go with the good old (actually new) default [three possible responses, one nice, one neutral, one edgy]

>I want less game in my game

Just get into a local DnD group, consider making your own as well.

>Nearly everyone makes rolls that the players shouldn't know the result of behind a screen

Of course, that's not nearly the same thing as
>a lot of groups roll everything behind a screen
which I've never ever seen.

I never got even why behind a screen is necessary. If the GM doesn't tell you what the roll is for, what does it even matter?

Yeah, a game built around Role-Playing. Do you find it more enjoyable to achieve mastery of the arbitrary game systems built to support the focus of the game, or do you find more enjoyment from immersing yourself in the focus? Do you want to min-max the stats of a one-dimensional agent in continuous iterative calculations against progressive numeric decision checks, or do you want to role-play?

this is a really interesting and insightful point.
it would, however, need to be done well. There need to be descriptions like "grants you little/great/extreme mana regen" so people dont have to switch clothes abd try spells to figure out which is better.
such descriptions dont hurt the roleplay as your character would probably feel which clothing is more powerful or something.
detailed item and stat descriptions are necessary if you want to remove numberd

I like both crunch and fluff.

I've had a few DM's that roll in view of all the players, but on the other hand, i've NEVER had a group where the DM rolled for everybody which seems like a great way to get people to leave your group.

According to this cuck Mass effect and Monkey Island are better RPGs than PS:T or Arcanum. His opinion is completely worthless and I don't think he has much experience with P&P or with CRPGs.

I think he is just a retarded casual that should stick to writing articles about misogyny in videogames.

>Simple addition and subtraction
>OH GOD IT INTERRUPS GAMEPLAY AND GETS IN THE WAY OF EVERYTHING

Riiight.

You don't have to calculate your character's stats ALL AT THE SAME TIME

Most of the time it is: Throw d20, was it below your level? Success. So hard!

>he uses d20 not d100
lmaoing at your life

>Mass effect and Monkey Island

The confusing part is that there are literally no hidden variable stats in either of those games.

In general, a video game should never intentionally obfuscate how it works. Or at least avoid making critical aspects of the gameplay needlessly obtuse. Hiding the numbers in an rpg just makes things confusing, is this sword better or worse than the old one? Will this spell even do anything to the monster? The only time I can think of where intentionally hiding things from the player is a good idea is a horror game, where part of the suspense comes from not quite understanding what's going on.

I get the roleplaying argument, that you should be playing a character instead of a spreadsheet. But as long as that spreadsheet is a critical aspect of the game, hiding it doesn't magically make it less important. Just make an action adventure Zelda ripoff if you don't want to deal with numbers.

Are you mental? D&D 1st edition is basicaly Ad&d light.

Name me ONE sucessfull (commercially) roleplaying system without numbers in it.

holy shit some of you are fucking retarded.
let's say you've always dreamed of being some kind of bandit and you're running around with a club and you like that.
then you find a sword and becaude it deals a little more dps so you probably take the sword although you like the club more becuse it fits your character.
if you didnt know the items stats but instead just tried them out you would judge by the feel of the weapon. in that situation the fact that you want to use the club probably outweights the slight dps disadvantage (especially if there's rng involved) and you would be happy using the club because it's more fun.
what actually happens is that you feel obliged to use the sword because of its stats and you will continue the game with a sort of cognitive dissonance.

Reminder that Wizardry is an RPG in the videogame sense. You roleplay fags can go and stick to /tg/ stuff and leave videogames alone.

And it's faggot like this that have ruined tabletop RPGs and turned them into casual filth like 5E. Stats should be available in a CRPG - if you're going to min/max a single-player RPG is the fucking place to do it.

Hi Icycalm

best way to mitigate that is to do the dark souls thing of having every weapon be viable with different movesets so you choose what kind of moves you prefer instead of optimizing solely for damage

While you are right I will disrespectfully disagree with you since I don't like having a guy smarter than me around.

So fuck you. OP is right.

What was wrong with IcyCalm again?

He said scoring (in shmups) sucks and those who like it are aspies.

He's pretty much always wrong about everything concerning video games. But he writes long texts with smart words so people believe he's right.

I roleplay a mathematician what now

>Waah wheres my game where I can do anything

If every fag in this thread played PnP there could be 20 groups easy and you'd all get the RPG you want

Though I imagine people on Cred Forums would be terrible GM and players

>>Waah wheres my game where I can do anything
Literally nobody has said anything like that.
Are you speaking to the voices inside your head? Is that what you call "roleplaying"?

That's not the point I was making at all. The numeric aspect was always calculated for DM/player convenience and understanding, especially in what were essentially the earliest, most isolated iterations of role-playing games. The focus has evolved away from role-playing on to the numeric game-play systems that support it (especially in video games), a design philosophy that I think Gygax himself tried to avoid when he was still in control of D&D's development.

This article I read recently illustrates well the nature of role-playing and systems built to support it in early D&D, I think:
polygon.com/2014/7/14/5898063/the-dice-can-kill-you-why-first-edition-ad-d-is-king

Here comes another faggot with no imagination

Its ok Im an autist, no one normal could muster up the mental capacity of thinking about something that doesn't exist

Virtually every system I know would somehow represent the fact that my character really enjoys using clubs and give him some extra numbers when using this type of weapon.

But even if not, the sword has a couple more drawbacks, i.e. other bandits getting jelly, plus much more complicated maintenance and way more expensive to replace.

So no, "I" wouldn't necessarily feel obliged to use it.

>Here comes another faggot with no imagination
Because I don't talk to the voices inside my head?
The fuck is wrong with you user? You are sick.

what is wrong with you pal? not even him

Yes any trace of imagination is sczhiophrenia

Any thought someone has is a voice inside their head

Keep buying Mass Effect goyim

You are beyond retarded.

Nobody here in this thread asked for a game where they can do anything.
That is not what this is about.
Even just skimming the thread you would have figured that out.
Instead you said something completely unrelated.

How do you even fill out a captcha being this fucking stupid?

>ran an eight man campaign with an autistic grill, an SJW, an enormous hipster, a femNEET, a self-described memelord, and three competent people
>by far one of the most satisfying and engaging campaigns I've ever run
It shouldn't have been possible, but it was.

He is coming from the idea that the narrative is the point of a RPG...it may be true in a table depending on your group, but it will never be true in a game because of the constriction created by the engine, you can't have a game with more than 3-4 paths to do one thing so even if you hide the stats the game still would be stiffed and people would discover a optimal path for his "build".
It's like systems that have a specific class like a "driver" or a "hacker", if you can't really do anything else, you should at least be the best possible in the one thing you know,

tldr: min/maxing is the organic end in any pc rpg because you can't do a lot of things

Haha you got trolled you fricking moron

Thanks for the replies

I agree. I also believe that when you can make decisions based on your stats in dialogue it shouldn't tell you that those are your stat based decisions. Like, if you have a high lore skill then when your character decides he's going to start talking about such and such a nation at such and such a time, then you know he's probably got this. Now, if he has a low lore skill and he starts doing the same thing you should be like "Well. hang on a fucking minute, I don't know that" and should be able to work out that he's wrong or lying.

this is neo-Cred Forums

considering the number of absentees in online games it's quite possible that even in 8 there was never more than 5 in a same day

Haha no. But I counter trolled you.

Oh, no, this was in person.

>It's always some little dude who mucks about in a dark room for three decades with half a dozen little equations. He shuffles them around for a while and then eventually, finally comes up with a new one!

ahhh now I get where he's coming from

he's an imbecile

How do I get into pen and paper RPG's? Is there a way to play them online with tools etc?

I am totally ignorant to how they are structured and play out, so pointing towards any resource would be greatly appreciated.

I think that in a group that doesn't infight or split a lot maybe it's possible, but I would never try this

watch videos of people playing

you have vin diesel if you want to watch famous people do it

Roll20 is the bigger site, there is some begginer tables...if you want to read i would say that the quickrules for d&d 5 are the easiest way in, after this the player's manual

Start with something like 5e. It was largely designed with accessibility and actual RP in mind. Maybe move to 3.5 or PF if you're looking for something with more overall mechanical depth, once you feel satisfied with your mastery of 5e's mechanics. Avoid 4e.

>Doesn't use the Yautja system

>playing any system that doesn't utilize the glorious One Roll Engine
pathetic tbqh

Point-buy systems and over specialization are the culprit

Me and my brother were thinking of getting into DnD
We figured that instead of trying to learn it with a bunch of friends at the same time, it would be easier to just start with a few one on one practice sessions till we learn all the rules and shit, then teach/get friends to learn
is there much different to just doing DnD with one person and a DM? because we both figured it would be easier and controlable to learn it and teach basically one person at a time rather than trying with like 5 clueless retards trying to all learn it at once

There's a pretty huge difference, yeah. Most systems are balanced around 4-character parties and the ability spreads they have. You can throw together some quick practice encounters to get a feel for the mechanics, but you wouldn't go about designing a 1-man campaign nearly the same way you would a 3-5 man campaign.

Tabletop RPGs and Vidya RPGs do share a large crowd of people.

Ever met a DnD player under 40 that hasn't played Diablo?

The numbers fethism as the author described isn't the root cause.This is man's ancient reptilian brain spinning full bore, to be the strongest in a local society. Whether that society is real or not, man is a born and bred competitor and strives for alpha dominance. Roleplaying elements fill the rest and sates man's need for action, communication, and long-term gratification through goal setting.

The numbers are a carrot on a stick. Man will always have the drive to succeed, and fantasy is the path of least resistance for most.

1-on-1 D&D sessions are basically similar to a standard D&D session, yes. The biggest concern is that you may not have all your bases covered - the character's class may not have the skills required to take on the challenges that come up - and that an inexperienced DM won't necessarily know what is a good challenge for a single Fighter and what is a terrible one.

If you don't mind fucking up and (probably) re-doing things or modifying things, something like the character is "back" each day regardless of what happened last adventure, then it should go fine.

The only other concern is that, if you learn to play with only one player, then managing a group might be harder - and harder to figure out how to set encounters for a group, as well.

what a retarded drawing.

Tyranitar is a Godzilla rip off. He isn't a fucking dinosaur, he is an alien.

Hey, Icycalm, when are you gonna keep writing Orgy of the Will? I want to keep laughing.

well our plan is
>1 on 1 till we both get the hang of shit and got everything down
>then bring in a friend and teach him
>then repeat for anyone else that is interested in learning
we mainly prety much have to do it that way since most our friends are massive procrastinators and in the past with shit if we sent them a guide or some thing like that then they never get around to reading it or learning it themselves so we have to teach them and this way it won't entirely be the blind leading the blind

In 5th edition, feats are incredibly powerful, and also completely optional. As is the version of the human that gets a bonus feat called "Variant" human.

>Hide all the numbers
>Player receives new weapon
>No fucking idea if it's better or worse
>Level up
>No idea how they improved
>Some feat has a chance of proccing
>No idea how good it is
>Acquire new spell
>No idea how good it is until you've spent a spellslot
People want to know details before they commit to something, going in blind is rarely fun.

HIDE ICYCALM POSTS
REPORT ICYCALM THREADS
DO NOT REPLY TO ICYCALM POSTERS

>Book of Vile Darkness
I'm, like 70% sure the Book of Vile Darkness tells you that it's for DMs only .

Recently I have somehow ended up becoming my groups new DM when we decided to switch things up and take turns each being DM for a while and apparently They think I am a great DM and should do most our sessions from now on.
I assume that it is because usually when I am a player I am basically walking a fine line between being THAT GUY and just being creatively stupid leaning towards the former more often.
Where as when I DM'd I just went in with a vague Idea of what shit was going to be and made up most shit as I went along by pulling it out of my ass