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Peasant Railgun

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280 points cainxinth | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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ourmandave ◴[] No.44455814[source]
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.
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nkrisc ◴[] No.44455863[source]
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.

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wheybags ◴[] No.44457351[source]
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?
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1. mrob ◴[] No.44459026[source]
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.