Peasant Railgun

I hadn't heard of this until it was called out in a paragraph in the new DND 2024 rules explaining that the game is an abstraction and not a physics textbook.

I think games this are most fun when you play within the bounds of the rules (as written) and not consider them reality simulators (...magic...). Then you can approach the rules as merely constraints in which to optimize solutions to problems.

Of course as games like DnD are also a social affair, it's worth making sure everyone is having fun with something like this, otherwise what's the point?

I never could get into DnD because of the roleplaying. To me games are a set of rules which I view as a puzzle.

I've definitely had to raise the fact that D&D is not Real Life Simulator at games, both as a DM and a player, when people have argued either that "the rules technically allow this", and "well, in real life, it would work like this." (Sometimes as part of the same argument!)

For what it's worth, there are plenty of tables that focus a lot less on plot & roleplaying, and more on the combat & puzzle aspect. There are even whole RPGs that are effectively dungeon crawls, where your characters don't need much of a personality, and are often explicitly disposable.

D&D may not be for you, but I bet there's a RPG out there that is!

Which is a perfectly fine way to play if everyone at the table is having a good time. I think of RPGs as the lovechild of wargames and improv theater: some people favor one parent, and some the other.

DnD 5e seems like it’s already on the generic rules side of things and gives DMs a lot of room for interpretation. That’s why the railgun seems silly. “I guess that’d be a persuasion or performance check, your pick”, etc.

> some people favor one parent, and some the other

A number of the responses here say things like this, and I'm picking this one somewhat arbitrarily to call out that "people" isn't the only dividing line - some people very much favor different sides of it at different times, in different moods, in different contexts, to varying degrees.

I personally haven't found much luck with finding tables that focus less on plot and roleplaying. Ever since Critical Role became very popular, the hobby has skewed heavily towards Roleplay and it's really disappointing

I don't know why people bother to play a game with rules when they don't actually want to engage with the rules ever

Check out simple combat games by Steve Jackson Games (melee, wizard) circa 1977. No RP required

I don't really understand this - to me, DnD without rp is just a bad facsimile of a video game. Wouldn't you rather just play skyrim? Or Baldur's gate in coop mode, if you still want to be social?

That was us way back in the day. The same dungeon map over and over with nothing but random encounters. I forget how long it took before someone finally lived to make 2nd level.

> I don't know why people bother to play a game with rules when they don't actually want to engage with the rules ever

There are definitely groups of players where there is an overemphasis on rules and combat.

To each their own.

An overemphasis on playing the game using the rules in the book?

Why even buy the book if you aren't going to play by the rules in the book? I have never understood this

I'm heavy into roleplay, and that's how I prefer to play D&D.

And I think you're probably right.

D&D is barely the right fit for the kind of game I like to play. But D&D is wildly popular, and it's much easier to find people who'll play D&D with a heavy emphasis on roleplay, than it is to find people who'll play Heart, or Wildsea, or things that are even further way from the "roll-play" aspect.

For what it's worth, we still engage in combat, we use our various abilities outside of combat, etc. Most of the rules are about combat. Even the magic section is framed around using magic in actions. But exploration, etc., is still a part of the game; it's just that those rules are jotted down on like 5 pages out of the 200.

> But D&D is wildly popular, and it's much easier to find people who'll play D&D with a heavy emphasis on roleplay,

Yes, to my dismay.

I like classic D&D, dungeon crawling and what people so derisively call "rollplaying". I find amateur theater improv quite tedious and uninteresting

I haven't been able to find other players like me at all for ages. Everyone I meet "Just got into the game because of Critical Role"

I feel quite strongly that my lifelong hobby has been warped away from me. I try hard not to be resentful but it sucks I can't find groups to play with that want the same kind of game I do

You should play Nethack. Not a TTRPG though.

The only video game I can think of that seriously tries to replicate the experience of playing old-school D&D is Nethack and its forks. Nethack goes to great lengths to allow for player creativity, even at the cost of game balance. E.g. there are monsters (cockatrices) that petrify on touch. If you kill one, it's possible to pick it up (wearing gloves) and instantly petrify other enemies by hitting them with the corpse. This isn't without risk, e.g. if you fall into a pit trap while attempting this you'll end up petrifying yourself, and enemies can do the same to you if they're capable of wielding weapons and are wearing gloves. There's a simulationist approach to its design that goes beyond other games. There's a community saying: "the dev team thinks of everything."

The problem is this isn't actually true. They certainly think of a lot of things, but it's still only a finite, predetermined set. All the clever tricks are common knowledge now. Anybody can read the Wiki and learn how to win without much difficulty. Nethack becomes boring once you understand how it works. If you want to play it but haven't yet done so I recommend avoiding spoilers as much as possible (the cockatrice thing is so well known that I don't think there's any real problem sharing that one; the game was designed around less extensive pre-Wiki-era sharing of knowledge, not zero sharing).

Real D&D doesn't have this problem. A human DM can adjudicate improvisation without needing to program it in advance, and do this while maintaining consistency in a way that LLMs still fail at. Well-run tabletop RPGs are still the best games available for allowing player creativity.

The first dungeon from the red-book DM guide was merciless for parties of less than 6ish. Before you even got into the dungeon, there was a carrion crawler that got a guaranteed surprise round with 6 attacks with paralysis on each attack. The only time it didn't TPK a new group I ran it with was when the thief ran back to town.

Finding local players is always an issue, but there's tons of folks who prefer the more classic style of D&D. Take a look into Dungeon Crawl Classic and OSR takes on D&D like the Black Hack. Those tend to put dungeon crawling front and center. Finding a group usually involves trawling OSR discords or GMing your own local playgroup, but sometimes you can luck out at your local game store.

I strongly believe that the influence of Critical Role has been detrimental to D&D. So many people believe that the "acting" style (for lack of a better term) is the right way to play, and that others are invalid, because their introduction was from that show. Moreover, a lot of DMs stress out putting pressure on themselves to try to run sessions on par with what these shows have. I wish people would embrace just hanging out with friends and rolling dice more.

I'm right there with you. I want D&D to be the equivalent to a board game night, not amateur improv sessions with a ton of pressure on the DM to deliver an 'experience'

(BG3's local co-op is worse than the one that its predecessor : Divinity : Original Sin 2 had, which had dynam8c split screen, where the split screens merged when both characters were close enough to each other.)

An overemphasis on never having any homebrew rules and only using the rules in the book verbatim and being OCD about it.

I thought that would be clear from the context, but I guess it wasn't.

If I wanted to play a video game, I'd play a video game. I'm not talking about video games, I'm talking about tabletop games (and even board games). Besides, video games a fixed, finite experience. Very few video games (if any) can do what a tabletop game can do (basically anything you all want to do).

Isn't DnD with roleplaying just a bad fascimile of a theatrical performance? Wouldn't you rather just put on a play instead of play DnD?

I have played plenty of Nethack

I like TTRPGs because they involve other people