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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I introduced my kids to roleplaying and they didn't really like it. Then I tried with Warhammer Quest, and it was a wild success. Being able to focus on something simple like dice and squares helped my youngest focus. Now he plays "Warhammer Quest" with his friends at school - without boards, miniatures or dice, they just roleplay as heroes and villains of the boardgame.

The problem I have now is that these games require a certain amount of preparation (backstory, maps etc) and I'm very lazy.

My wife is a bit uneasy with it. She fears they will become "losers" and "shut-ins" like we were. The "hidden shame" that the writer here briefly touches on, for some of us is a bigger and heavier complex of self-loathing. Which is stupid: the world has changed, this is the new mainstream, and we should just enjoy it while it lasts. But I do have some of these worries at the back of my mind too (in my case mostly about computers, to be honest).

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> My wife is a bit uneasy with it. She fears they will become "losers" and "shut-ins" like we were.

By not doing something because of a fear of being labeled as a loser you actually become one.

Since certain age, I couldn't care less if other people think I am cool or not and just do what I like. I would hope to foster the same attitude in my kids as soon as possible and hope they do not grow up as slaves of what is currently trendy.

I've played a fair amount of D&D, but I've always enjoyed other RPGs quite a bit more. There's a huge variety of games out there covering every genre and playstyles ranging from the densest exercises in tactical spreadsheet juggling to storytelling fare so light it's more like improv than gaming. My tastes lean much more towards the latter. Try looking up the FATE Core system, there's a lot less dice and rules but just as much fun and adventure.

One of my biggest complaints about the games I play is the level of dice rolling for even tasks that your character should be perfectly competent in. To me, it breaks the immersion of, say, heroic-level skills in sneakiness when some random untrained person always has a chance of noticing you. I think some of the later versions of D&D "fixed" this with mechanisms like taking 10 and such, but as long as 20 is always an automatic success, that's a 5% chance of failure all the time.

Is this something that FATE fixes? If so, I'll have to look into it!

5e addresses this by assigning much more responsibility to the DM. According to the rules as written, the DM should only call for a skill check when there's _possibility_ and _consequences_ for success/failure.

On top of that, the way they rebalanced skill checks and AC ("bounded accuracy") makes the game feel a lot better. This [1] is a fantastic article specifically addressing those changes, if you're interested.

1: http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Understanding_Bounded_Accuracy_...

That's a rule annoyance for me as well that has been mostly fixed by 5e, and doesn't exist in most other systems I've played.

Examples:

FantasyCraft: D20 based, but drops the automatic success/failure rules, so at heroic levels you can have guaranteed success.

Shadowrun 3E: The maximum skill rank a starting character can have in any skill is 6, which translates to over 99.99% chance of success on "easy" difficulty checks and over 98% chance of success on "average" difficulty checks.

Earthdawn: Every 5 or 6 steps of a skill adds one more difficulty level that you can succeed automatically (starting at step 3, where you auto succeed at difficulty 1)

It's worth noting that technically 20 is only an auto-success on attacks and saves. The way you describe is a very common house rule, but it seems to frequently be an accidental house rule (more of a misreading).

Has it changed over time? It looks like what you say is true in 5E, though only for death savings throws. But I played 3.5E. My memory isn't good enough to know whether that makes a difference.

I looked it up in the various books I have on my shelf:

D&D Redbox:

No skill checks, Attacks succeed if the modified value is 20 or higher. So a level 1 Str 9 character can never hit AC -1. A level 1 Str 18 character needs only a 17 to hit any AC. These rules are different in later rulebooks when the THAC0 is introduced.

[edit] Checked my Expert rulebook, and found that the modified 20 always hits is just due to very low ACs not being represented in the Basic charts (In OD&D lower AC is harder to hit). The target number to hit goes up as AC goes down, but "sticks" at 20 for 5 points of AC. There is no special rule for auto hitting or missing with a natural 20 in OD&D. Note that monsters are quite good at hitting with the weakest monsters hitting about as well as a mid-level fighter with mundane equipment.

D&D 3E: Only attacks succeed/fail on a natural 20/1.

D&D 3.5E and Pathfinder: Attacks and saves succeed on natural 20/1

I don't own any AD&D rulebooks.

Too late to edit, but thiefs do have skills, and these are d% and always fail on a 100, which is a 1% failure no matter how good. Also, I forgot how bad pickpocketing is; if the opponent has HD equal to your level you have less than a 20% chance of success throughout the intermediate levels.

It is something that FATE fixes, albeit by handwaving for the most part! FATE is a much more story-focused rather than mechanics focuses game, and one of the core concepts is to only play through dramatically interesting conflicts with actual consequences for success and failure. In such a case, a routine skill check in D&D would just be explained as flavor in FATE; if you are breaking into a common shop as a master thief, just describe how you do it; now when you come across the merchant and the necromancer conspiring in the back, then the dice come out!

I would teach your children the value of not caring what other people think. Probably a difficult task at such a young age. But the sooner people realize that grade school is a bunch of social nonsense, the better. Once you've graduated, the real world forces us all to work together, regardless of what we do in our free time. Enjoy your life, do whatever you're interested in, stop worrying about others. Chances are, they actually don't care either. You'll be happier for it.

>I would teach your children the value of not caring what other people think

That's not a great lesson if taken absolutely. Other people can give valuable feedback to social interactions. You should be aware of what people think, and be able to examine it, but not be ruled by it.

I feel like english does not provide us with effective words for discussing this topic.

unless you live alone in a cave, what other people think of you is important. it is exceedingly difficult to succeed in the modern world without cooperation, and people will not help you out as much or at all if they don't like you. this means you really do need to care what others think.

that said, it is common to conflate this sense of "caring" with the deep seated need for external validation that many humans have. most people enjoy being appreciated by their community, and this is fine, but I think it is very important not to be overly dependent on this. ideally, one's self worth would come primarily from within.

"Taming the Mammoth"* was probably one of the most liberating things I've read on this subject.

* https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-op...

> I would teach your children the value of not caring what other people think.

I used to care very much about not caring what others thought of me. It didn't work out terribly well for me — neither professionally nor socially (nor, to be honest, spiritually). Eventually I started to care about others, and I've found that my professional & social lives have improved immensely.

Man is a social animal; he lives in a society. Not to learn how to navigate it is to doom oneself to spending a lot of time wandering in a maze.

Caring about others, and caring about what others think of you, are two totally separate things. The petty nonsense in, particularly in grade school, is NOT something kids should worry about. Because it's bullshit.

The stigma is lessened, but not entirely gone... you can be "cool" despite playing D&D, but definitely not because of it.

Anything creative will never be seen as cool outside of the niche it lives in. You are cool if you play in a movie, not if you write it. You are cool if you wear clothes, not if you design them. You are cool if you play football, not if you compose teams.

It's because it's difficult to assess the quality of creative work. It requires to take a personnal stand.

But it's easy to engage emotionnaly in a demonstration of something basic like wearing a shirt or hitting a ball.

Hence most of the world can do the later, but surprisingly not that many can do the former.

In the HN bubble it's easy to forget the vast majority of the world is composed of simple people. And they are the major force driving the world, just by sheer number.

Lets ignore that "cool" is not really well defined for a moment.

> Anything creative will never be seen as cool outside of the niche it lives in.

In my experience the exact opposite is true. The cool kids back in my school were the ones who were into music and art. It was mainly the lifestyle surrounding the "creative, don't care" type.

Even now that is still the case in my culture. People whose main profession is writing/painting/producing music are "cool". But maybe that is different in your culture.

Congrat, you live in a niche.

> You are cool if you wear clothes, not if you design them.

I disagree with this, because if this would be true, you would have no idea who Coco Chanel was.

Coco chanel was definitly not cool because she made clothes. Read her bio. She was actually made fun of, like all geniuses.

She became cool in her niche. Then rich and famous. Then mondialy cool because rich and famous.

Being rich and famous makes everybody cool. Pew die pie is cool now. Me playing in my living room ? Nope.

Take chanel or jobs or jk rolling before they became rich and famous. How do you think people consider them ? At best originals. At worst loosers.

There's nothing cool about sitting down and designing clothes for a lot of people, while Coco clothes are perceived as cool. Similarly, a lot of people don't see anything interesting in designing cars, but they get excited by seeing a lamborghini.

Not that it actually matters, but, didn't she wear what she designed?

I really don't understand. Looks to me like I am surrounded by different people, then. I didn't caught real RPGs because for some reason it is difficult for me step in someone else shoes but I love board games as well as PC games. The richer story, the better. All my friends are either playing as well, or at least aware about such kind of entertainment and none of them said a bad word about it. Certainly not avoiding the subject. Some of them even meet weekly, old chaps playing board games in a pub. If that's not cool, I don't know what is.

I don't think there's many activities which bestow coolness merely through participation at a casual level.

But thankfully, we have ultimate frisbee to fill the gap.

There is always pathfinder organised play where you are playing third-party scenarios.

You can look for local groups on warhorn https://warhorn.net/

> The problem I have now is that these games require a certain amount of preparation (backstory, maps etc) and I'm very lazy.

Try Dungeon World, which excels with very little prep. I’d recommend your first few sessions with a GM experienced in that system, though. It looks like DND, but it isn’t, and trying to force that peg results in a bad time.

I've not played them myself, but someone recently pointed me at these programmed adventures[1] that are supposed to require zero preparation; tokens maps and scripts are all included.

1: http://darkcitygames.com/

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