Hacker News Reader

Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

This is the same Hasbro that tried to retroactively close off the D&D Open Game License (and thus the third party ecosystem). It was a massive betrayal that caused a ton of pushback: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/jan/12/dungeons-and-d...

They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them (just a few pieces of paper, not enough dice, sub par instructions ). Or really expensive character toys.

D&D has undoubtedly gotten more popular, but I wish it were under the stewardship of someone more deserving, like a geekier board game shop than greed-enthralled Hasbro. They've become the Disney of board games, all quantity and profit and no real concern for a high quality gamer experience. I bet someone like Larian (Baldur's Gate 3) would've taken better care of the IP and rulesets (and they're working on a Divinity tabletop game!)

View on HN

> They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them (just a few pieces of paper, not enough dice, sub par instructions ). Or really expensive character toys.

For me this is the most telling part that Hasbro doesn't quite get what you're actually selling if you have a tabletop company; it's not the ruleset, that will be leaked as soon as you sell a single copy and people actually play the game. It's instead ideas and world building visions from the people who were directly involved in creating the world and rules the company tries to sell to people. People are creative, but even the best story tellers wouldn't turn their nose up at some lore to help spark creativity, long as the lore isn't needlessly restrictive.

Lore and adventure supplements are wonderful. Not only do I enjoy playing them, I enjoy reading them as their own form of literature.

For me the naive part is focussing on player options.

I understand that groups generally have one DM and 4 players, do if you include player options you might sell 5 books instead of one. But that's the shallow, cash-in-now-fuck-next-decade mentality.

Meanwhile they haven't put out a decent adventure in a decade. The internet is awash with people trying to glue their ramblings back into coherent campaigns and running D&D (always a huge time sink) is becoming a worse experience every year as they keep flooding the market with crap.

I love running games but I've come to the point where I'm not really interested in starting a D&D group anymore because of all the bullshit.

WOTC: support your DMs or die.

> Meanwhile they haven't put out a decent adventure in a decade.

Lost Mines of Phandelver, the adventure from the intro box, is pretty good (except when it switches to "every room has a monster" later on). It's very big for an intro adventure and there's tons of stuff in it.

But it's quite possible that it's the only good one they made.

They did expand on it with "Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk," which I understand to be quite good. Unfortunately it seems like most other paths are ok at best. I'm currently running the Dragonlance adventure, Shadow of the Dragon Queen, and that's very much how I'd describe it: ok. There are some really weird omissions where the game doesn't have info you need to run an encounter as described, and the world-building and information included in the book is woefully inadequate to "color outside the lines" without making up lots of details out of whole cloth. For a book that represents the first Dragonlance adventure in many years, it's a disappointing introduction to the setting.

I regret to inform you that was released in 2014, almost a decade ago.

That's longer ago than I thought, but still just within the decade, so it counts.

I admit it's a depressing performance by WotC.

Only a true D&D player would rules-lawyer the decade definition like that.

Sounds like a rollplayer, not a roleplayer.

I'm actually not a D&D player; I'm currently involved in Shadowrun, Blades in the Dark and Pathfinder 2. Despite that, I don't consider it very controversial to count a decade as 10 years.

Lost Mines was a terrific pack-in adventure - I got so much mileage out of it.

I would love to see WotC publish more adventure booklets of comparable quality.

> WOTC: support your DMs or die.

good thing WotC isn't the only company writing adventures for D&D 5, then?

Yes. But more importantly, there are lots of creators making excellent stuff for systems that are not compatible with their bullshit player option supplements.

No Steve, you cannot be extra-planar half-staplerkin half-mongoose demi-lich paladin/sorcerer with a lemming patron. I don't care what Tasha's Bulging Cupboard of Crap or Volo's Yard-sale of Absolutely Everything has to say about it.

This was a problem in 3 and 3.5 era too and was only exacerbated by the rise of forums and wikis. I don’t think it’s possible to release one-size-fits-all-the-crap-that’s-out-there campaigns that are going to be actually interesting. At some point the DMs job is to make decisions about what fits and what doesn’t, and to help cultivate a culture of collaborative storytelling.

Yes, 100%. I DMed during the 3 and 3.5 era, and the “bullshit player option supplements” were a major problem. Players want to ask for the most out of pocket stuff they pick up from the splatbooks. It was beyond difficult to build a coherent party of players when everyone was using radically different concepts to build their characters. Game balance went out the window. 3 and 3.5 had terrible game balance to begin with, but once you bring in books like Exalted Deeds, it was even worse.

4E fixed a ton of problems here. Character classes were much more balanced and there were not many supplements with new classes and options—partly because it takes a ton of effort to make a new 4E class.

I DM'd during the 2nd edition era, and yeah... Some player's option supplements had decent things going for them. Others were pure munchkin galore (looking at you, Bard's handbook).

Game balance in 3rd Edition was gone from the PHB onwards, out of like top 5-7 most broken classes in the game, 3 were in the PHB (Wizard, Cleric, Druid). A lot of stuff people consider broken (eg. Tome of Battle) isn't even really a power level boost for melee classes, just lets them in on the same move action + interesting option playstyle casters were doing since release (just at a much lower power level) vs. charge-> full attack full attack.

Not to say there wasn't broken shit in splats, but like half of broken nonsense was Core to begin with.

Yeah, core 3 and 3.5 was broken. You want to make an overpowered character? Play a straight cleric, but don’t bother healing the rest of the party. I have no desire to replay those editions.

> The internet is awash with people trying to glue their ramblings back into coherent campaigns

Cases in point, for the unaware: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44214/roleplaying-games... https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/41217/roleplaying-games...

I've gotten a lot of value out of Dragons of Stormwreck Isle that came in the new D&D Starter Set. That said, I'm now using it as a base for jumping off into OSR (Old School Renaissance) modules after the OGL debacle and now this.

> It's instead ideas and world building visions from the people who were directly involved in creating the world

Yes, but someone needs to impress their boss/shareholders this very Quarter, and then the next, and then the next. Planning for the long haul requires a vision and patience that is not on the table. Hasbro mentality is (probably) "release the game mid-December, let it sell tons for Xmas, rake it in, start planning for next Xmas release".

I don't know if 'slow burn' is in their scope. It would be interesting to hear from them on this.

This is where I always thought the vampire the masquerade games excelled. In fact, they seemed to have so much content that the game itself was less important. I spent way more time reading vtm books then DND books. But I played way more dnd. But maybe it's because it's a lot harder to convince people to play vampire.

If people are still going to pay money for D&D then they truly do not care about the hobby. I must admit before the OGL fiasco I didn't see much of the allure of other systems, but that really pushed me away and the world of TTRPGs is so much brighter and better than crappy D&D.

I still play in one D&D campaign, but it was started before the fiasco, but I have already decided that at least I won't be running another D&D game.

What system would you recommend?

Pathfinder is DnD but better; most others focus on different settings so it depends on your interests I have always liked Cyberpunk 2020.

In my experience (which is limited to Pathfinder 2e without any extensions) Pathfinder is by far inferior to D&D 5e.

The classes _are_ more interesting, but you pretty much have to maximise your character's potential if you want to keep the game going or you just have to be willing to re-roll often and let characters die and just abandon quests. i.e. it is not good for heroic fantasy.

Then again Pathfinder isn't gritty enough for me to be interesting as "bunch of peasants who try to be adventurers" either.

Yes; rulesets and even settings are not the most important thing and are highly subjective. It is hard to make recommendations. I would expect a GM to scale difficulty to prevent characters dying too much (at least if they don't want to) with any system. But I can see that Pathfinder dose incentivize min-maxing long lived characters which will not be everyone's cup of tea. Similarly the combat system is fairly terrible in Cyberpunk 2020 but never stopped me enjoying it.

As someone thinking about getting into Pen and Paper games, I'm surprised to read all this. What are the alternatives?

There’s hundreds, possibly thousands. Don’t Close Your Eyes and Glitch/Nobilis are three of my favourites.

Man, I _really_ want to play a Nobilis/Chuubo’s/Glitch game. But I can’t seem to wrap my head around the system(s), and it’s incredibly hard to find an AP that will help me understand how they work.

How would you teach a newbie the game(s)?

Asking the wrong person, unfortunately; I’ve never played it. I write fanfiction of it. :D

There's an AP of Chuubo's over on the Oneshot Podcast network! I think they're on episode 8 or so?

It would be hard to mention them all. I'd find a local shop or a TTRPG Discord if you don't have a local spot available.

To give you a small sample, some older non-dnd classics are Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu, but there are even some really awesome niche systems that you should consider like Symbaroum. It depends what you and your eventual group want to play.

Call of Cthulhu, Pathfinder, Harnmaster (my personal favorite--too bad it had such a shitty IP fight/divergence), Warhammer, Amber, Cyberpunk, and hundreds/thousands more. People in this space are incredibly creative.

There are literally thousands of other RPG systems.

If you want to stay close to the D&D experience, the big alternative is Pathfinder of course. Pathfinder 1 was basically an expanded/fixed version of D&D 3.5, but Pathfinder 2 is really its own thing and possibly a better direction than D&D5 is. But more importantly, Pathfinder is legendary for its massive thematic campaigns. (There are some duds, and none are perfect, but many are quite good and there are a lot of them to choose from.)

Another option is 13th Age, by Jonathan Tweet, one of the main developers of D&D 3.x, and according to some people, it's the system that D&D should always have strived to be. (I don't know it myself, though.)

Then there are tons of retro-clones trying to bring back the experience of older D&D editions, including:

* Dungeon Crawl Classics

* OSRIC

* Labirynth Lord

* Swords & Wizardry

* Old School Essentials

* Whitehack

And many, many others.

Some modern narrative-style systems:

Dungeon World uses the Apocalypse World system to simulate the D&D experience.

Apocalypse World itself is a post-apocalyptic Mad Max style game, with a very different, light-weight, narrative-focused system that's great at simulating different genres. There are spin-offs for almost every property imaginable, including Cthulhu, Star Wars, Cyberpunk and many others. The game itself is not generic, but specifically tailored for a specific feel, but the same approach can be used to create games tailored to different genres.

Blades in the Dark is a bit like that too, in that it's been modded for all sorts of different genres. It is however specifically tailored for heists. The original is a kind of pseudo-Victorian fantasy.

More traditional RPGs:

Shadowrun is cyberpunk + fantasy. Near future, dragons rule the boardrooms, corporate mages defend their employer's interests. And for plausibly deniable direct action, they hire teams of mercenary criminals (the players) who basically do heists. Violent, rich background, complex system, poorly edited rulebooks.

Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red: the system the Cyberpunk 2077 CRPG is based on.

GURPS is a system that's able to handle any genre (or so it claims, at least). Very generic, and if you want to mix cyborgs, wizards and superheroes, in space, this system can do it.

Savage Worlds: also generic, but lighter than GURPS and optimised for mass combat. You can have massive battles in this system while still remaining playable. But it's mostly used for pulpy action.

Star Wars. Of course there are several Star Wars RPGs, but the best ones are the original WEG d6 Star Wars (which created much of the expanded universe lore of Star Wars; Lucas Arts loremaster Pablo Hidalgo got his start there) and FFG Star Wars (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion and Force and Destiny, uses weird custom dice, but great system).

Traveller -- the original SciFi RPG. Must be up to about a dozen different editions by now. 11,000 worlds, millennia of history, aliens, spaceships, but often ends up focused on trade. In the original edition (and several others) you could die during character generation.

There's hundreds more. I'm not going to list them all; this is just a random sample.

It definitely ain't everyone's cup of tea, but my current favourite system is Mörk Borg and other "old school" rules-light systems like it. My next game will be run in either Mothership or Death In Space.

All in all I feel like D&D has too many rules (but crucially not enough to not leave details up to interpretation) and too many artificial limits on the characters one can play. The good thing about D&D is that many people are familiar with it, but again in various degrees, which will often (at least in my tables) leave into unexpected outcomes when either the GM or the player is not familiar with all of the nuances of the system. Ranging from simple stuff like using wrong skills for actions (using perception to find a hidden door instead of investigation) or having/expecting spells to penetrate walls when a foot of stone i.e. any stone wall will block most magical effects.

> All in all I feel like D&D has too many rules (but crucially not enough to not leave details up to interpretation) and too many artificial limits on the characters one can play.

Aye, that was my feel, and why I gravitated to other systems. GURPS for example lets you do basically anything (albeit by making it complex as hell), and things like FATE, or Powered By the Apocalypse games, just abstract or simplify it.

Cy_Borg is also a Mork Borg cyberpunk spinoff which was kinda cool. Didn't get around to playing it but enjoyed the book. Like MB it went hard on the style.

I didn't really enjoy D&D, but I loved Call of Cthulhu. It felt more free-form, i.e. more like an adventure and less like trying to game the mechanics. There is no board with CoC (at least we didn't use one). If the tabletop/board combat of D&D is its major appeal then obviously CoC will be less enjoyable.

As always, getting a good GM and a well-composed group is very important for how your experience will be.

Some interesting ones:

- Blades in the Dark: Players are members of a thieves guild. Focus on pulling off heists, creative ways of solving problems, and providing a spectrum of outcomes (e.g. "success but with consequences" or "failure but without consequences" instead of a binary pass and fail).

- Heart: Sort of a psychedelic cosmic horror take on underground adventuring. Has an interesting level up system where at the end of each session you tell the DM something you want to have the chance to accomplish in the next session in order to gain a level. Character classes are crazy (e.g. one revolves around sharing a connection with a hive mind of transcendent bees). Each class's tenth level ability is incredibly overpowered but renders the character unplayable (often dead but sometimes it's something like ascending to a higher plane of consciousness by becoming one with the previously mentioned bee hive mind). For example, there's a class that revolves around communing with a demonic subway system. Their tenth level ability summons a subway car to bust through a wall and destroy everything in the area including the player.

- Electric Bastionland: Set in nearly infinite city of Bastion "the one city that matters" in a society that's similar to a late Victorian era take on sci-fi. This one's difficult to describe because it's more about the vibe than the rules. The players are attempting to pay off their debt to a kafkaesque bureaucracy. The layout of the city changes daily. The Underground can be used to travel anywhere quickly, but it is controlled by sentient Machines that require the players to complete "tests" in order to pass. Sentient muppets are a canonical player race. The best comparison that I can give is if you've played Fallen London or Sunless Seas/Skies.

> Has an interesting level up system where at the end of each session you tell the DM something you want to have the chance to accomplish in the next session in order to gain a level.

Ugh, I play games to get away from sprint planning...

ttrpg nerd bait, my favourites:

Forbidden Lands: This is a whole old-school D&D exploration-based game. It's a big, huge setting with a lot of content to explore. Characters are simple to make, the rules are light, and it's easy to run with many groups or players dropping in-and-out without ruining the continuity of any stories.

Microlite20/Microlite70: These are super-small, cut-down, and free revisions of the old-school D&D style games. The rules fit in a couple of pages. It's all compatible with the enormous library of OSR content out there. And it's straight-forward to hack into your own setting, add your own house rules, etc.

Torchbearer: If you like the idea of down-on-their-luck mercenaries out on the edges of civilization robbing ancient tombs and hunting down relics for rich patrons in order to make a buck and scrape by; this game is great. It has the classic D&D feel of regular people picking up a sword and heading into the wilderness with plenty of story-telling hooks. Gameplay is much more structured than in Microlite* games but it's also very easy to prep for as a DM.

Burning Wheel This is the grand-pappy of Torchbearer (and other games made by the same publisher like Mouse Guard). It's a crunchier system than most as it has rule systems for debates, all kinds of combat, etc. However this game is more of a world-building toolkit kind of RPG where you are encouraged to build your game world and story at the table and pick which parts of the rules will be relevant to your game. Want a game with high political intrigue in a low-tech society with no magic but faith? You can use the rules for debating (called, Duel of Wits), skip on all the magic and creatures and limit characters to humans and faith-based paths. Want a high-magic setting with monsters lurking around every corner? You can build that too.

It's a bonus that the books are handsome and well made.

Root/Ironsworn/Powered by the Apocalypse: These are all games that use the same basic mechanics. More narrative-driven and light on the rules/mechanics. Generally pretty cheap to acquire and teach.

Wraith: The Oblivion 20th: My favourite World of Darkness setting. Very much not D&D... but still a TTRPG. I tend to play Vampire more because it's more popular. However this one is an overlooked gem of a game and setting. It's all about playing as ghosts and the afterlife. However what sets it apart from the rest of the World of Darkness setting is that it's possible to transcend from the world and have a good ending. This system, I find, is pretty rules-light and easy to get into... although it's the content of the game that's overwhelming! There are a lot of options for building characters and it will take a long time before you get a grips on all the different options. However stories here tend to be dark, dramatic, sometimes hilarious... it's worth making sure you're playing with the right group that can handle the subject matter and support one another playing through it.

I always wondered if anyone ever really plays Hackmaster? I'm guessing no. It seems to be a very intricate, rule heavy game.

As I understand it (parody RPG elements notwithstanding) HM was originally (and appropriately) based on 1e/2e and is actually playable (as much as those games were. I imagine enthusiasts of those games might prefer the originals for historical authenticity, but HM sounds entertaining and fun! And a sort of 2.6e, which is interesting (much as PathFinder 1 was a sort of 3.6.)

Hmm, according to wikipedia Hackmaster 5 was rewritten and is a "serious" game - which sounds like much less fun, even if it is more playable!

Ahh I'm only vaguely familiar with the more recent one having done a small amount of reading about it. It does appear to be serious and rule-heavy.

GURPS was always one of my favorites.

RuneQuest is another classic.

Been playing Kult: Divinity Lost since the pandemic and have never looked back. It's personal horror, similar to Call of Cthulhu and some World of Darkness titles, while being quite different from D&D, which always felt like roleplaying Excel spreadsheets to me. There's focus on flawed characters, improv and failing-forward. Requires really mature players and GM, and trust between them. Safety tools are front and center in the source material, due to the nature of personal horror and topics you may explore.

I just ordered the tarot deck! Excited to see how it plays with Kult's published tarot adventure.

The biggest thing that I've seen D&D offer is support for campaign play. Systems like Blades in the Dark, Heart, and Mork Borg are great, but they are built around the assumption that characters are replaced (or in the case of Mork Borg, the world ends) regularly. A lot of other systems also tend to abstract away treasure in a way that I think is less satisfying for some players.

Personally, I'd love to see more systems that are less "wargaming" oriented than D&D but with a focus on long term play and, where possible, player growth.

> Personally, I'd love to see more systems that are less "wargaming" oriented than D&D but with a focus on long term play and, where possible, player growth.

Did you actually mean player growth? I'm familiar with Player Character growth, but fostering the growth of the player (at least beyond simply a growing familiarity with the rules) is a new idea for me, although I'm not sure why the notion of helping players become more skillful at role-playing (if that was what you meant) was surprising to me.

It was part and parcel of early D&D. In the OD&D and 1E days, the tournaments and tournament modules were all about finding and testing the best players, not the best player characters/builds. The tournament modules purported to do that in a systematic way, usually judging skill by how far you got in the scenario before dying. Gygax would often pontificate about player skill being the key to success in his tougher scenarios.

Also their recent move to 3-book + DM screen sets is really annoying. They did it first with Spelljammer's rerelease into 5e and I think the oceanic thirst for Spelljammer content might have sent them the wrong signal about the popularity of the actual content which was pretty thin for the amount you paid for it with notable missing rules like long range travel... for the space setting.

OMG they rereleased spelljammer? Brb, gotta go buy some DND books.

Which is to say, I am clearly part of the problem here.

E-mail me at the profile, don’t give wotc money.

Oh man it was super-disappointing and the end of my willingness to buy WoTC 5E. You'd be better off with the originals from DriveThru.

It was a bit thin, but I still had fun playing! I will be sad if they don't develop it further. Then again, I'd kind of like to see more of their legendary forgotten settings like Dark Sun...

They will never release another Dark Sun. It is waaay to vile and racist. Personally I love the setting, but there is zero change they could publish it without some serious backlash from a lot of people ... for who that content is not intended. Let's put it that way.

If they ever release something with the name Dark Sun, it will be that in name only. Disconnected from the original. Even worse than Spelljammer.

racist? really? more than Tolken... or literally anything else D&D related?

sounds like another tumblr "anything I don't like is 'problematic'" take.

Yes, more than Tolkien.

It isn't just racism and racist stereotypes (DS halflings as "jungle primitives" as one example), but a history of extensive genocides, widespread cannibalism, pervasive oppression and slavery, systematic forced breeding to create the Mul player race...

All wrapped up in a very violent grim-meathook-future milieu.

Any one of these could be fixed without neutering the setting, but probably not all (or even most) of them at once. Even with the most respectful approach to the material, by the time you were done fixing, it just wouldn't be Dark Sun.

> Oh man it was super-disappointing and the end of my willingness to buy WoTC 5E. You'd be better off with the originals from DriveThru.

I mean 5e is less broken than 2e so maybe it would be OK (that's not a high bar, to be fair).

Hmmm, thanks for the feedback, will try to resist the urge to splurge.

5E Spelljammer only superficially resembles the 2E Spelljammer. As a fan of the original Spelljammer the 5E version is a massive disappointment.

The combat system is pretty piss-poor, too - to the point where many people have released their own, better, rulesets for combat to address these problems.

Spelljammer combat? You have any links to that my wife is running a Spelljammer campaign right now and those might be useful to her.

Over all yes the whole thing came across as very weak and half hearted but of course it's freaking Spelljamming so it still sold very well despite being a weak product.

Here you go: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/407191/Spelljammer-5E-Theat...

(It's pay what you want, so you can pay zero if you want to try it out.)

This was written by a DM friend of mine who also runs an excellent podcast, if y'all are into that :)

Which podcast?

For those of you who are sick of Hasbro/WotC's shinanigans, give Pathfinder a shot. Its setting and rules should be very familiar for anyone used to DnD, but I've found the small changes they made to combat and progression really make the game much more interesting and rewarding.

I've found Paizo's pricing to be much more reasonable than WotC and they work well with open source projects. I've been using the open source system for Pathfinder on FoundryVTT with Paizo's official content packs and it's amazing. My experiences with DnD in Roll20 and AboveVTT don't even come close.

It's like Oracle buying Sun. We just need to move on from Java to other languages at this point.

If you ever want another huge, ancient labyrinth of a language that also kinda sorta runs everywhere, the Javascript world welcomes you with open tentaces! Here we're controlled by an evil older than Oracle itself (Microsoft and Typescript), with upgrades and crossgrades and cross compilers that deliver astounding 15% improvements in performance in exchange for a mere few animal sacrifices and a lifetime of misery. In our delightful world, getting your app to run on other platforms is as simple as embedding your operating system into WASM and putting it in their browser. What could be simpler?

Looking forward to the day Amazon buys Rust

Is Rust deployed internally at Amazon?

Fire cracker (lambda backend vm) uses it

> controlled by an evil older than Oracle itself (Microsoft and Typescript)

Who still uses typescript? It's not the mid-2010s anymore. Plain javascript is everywhere and I'd argue using a framework implies an immature project or team.

According to StackOverflow’s 2023 Developer Survey, TypeScript is the fifth most popular language, beating C, C++, Java, C#, Rust, Go, etc.

This is an absolutely baffling take to me. Like, I don’t know if you are even being serious or not.

I've never seen a large js codebase without typescript and I'm not even sure how you could realistically manage one without.

It’s a disaster. The most knowledgeable dev on my team regularly uses ChatGPT to solve typing issues. At this point we’ve lost the plot.

> I've never seen a large js codebase without typescript

So you're explicitly identifying yourself as a non-authority (but in a weird tone that tries to suggest the opposite?).

<https://searchfox.org/>

> I'm not even sure how you could realistically manage one without

Pretty simple: write boring code.

> write boring code.

But who wants that?

What? Typescript solves an entirely different problem than most frameworks (you mean frontend frameworks?).

Did I miss typings in vanilla Ecma, or...?

> getting your app to run on other platforms is as simple as embedding your operating system into WASM and putting it in their browser

???

I'm kidding, but sometimes it feels like that. Javascript is never just Javascript.

It depends on whether you use Typescript (with tsc or tsx or esrun?).

It depends whether you use V8 or Node or Deno or Bun.

It depends whether you're using AWS Lambda or the Serverless framework or a Cloudflare Worker or a Vercel or Fastly edge function.

It depends whether you use vanilla or HTMX or React or Next or Vue or Nuxt or Svelte or Astro or Remix or Angular or or or.

Then if you go native, it depends whether you use React Native and Expo and Electron and Tauri and and and.

Somehow we went from a universal language that can run in all web browsers to a hundred mutants that each only work in some niche...

I've never seen two Javascript codebases that looked the same :/ Every one is like a new archeological dig. Sure, you can still find some identifiable generic pottery fragments and such, but somehow they managed to build an entire civilization in a totally different way from the one next to them, using technologies that no longer exist just a few years later.

> I've never seen two Javascript codebases that looked the same

I think you may have described every programming language.

Except maybe Go

Probably JS was a victim of its own success in this regard, being both incredibly popular and incredibly long-lived, which drew hordes of amateurs (myself included) in. We all re-invented the wheel, though in my case it was more like an oblong hexagon =/ I rolled with it... but I feel terrible for anyone who has to maintain my old code after me, lol.

Most languages have perfectly functioning wheels right there installed and ready for use.

People keep reinventing the wheel on javascript because it doesn't have any.

True, but Go codebases only look the same because there's only so many ways to make a neolithic handaxe.

that's why JS/TS is to easy to hate: it's got a lot of surface area.

May you descend into the Inferno…

Sure, but the JavaScript world won, and the Java world lost. A long long time ago, last century. The war has been over for decades, since the demise of Netscape Javagator in 1998. And C# was released 23 years ago, specifically designed to do to Java what Java did to C++, and it did. It's like you're trying to still fight the Civil War.

https://www.wired.com/1998/02/whither-crawls-netscapes-javag...

>WIRED Magazine: FEB 26, 1998 4:26 PM: Whither Crawls Netscape's Javagator? Netscape officials deny a report that work on Javagator, an all-Java version of the Navigator browser, has been suspended.

Oh, and then there's this:

Larry Ellison

In the browser. Javascript won in the browser, which was indeed Java's original target platform. They lost that, but they won nearly everywhere else.

JavaScript won the war of running the same language on both sides, because it runs in the browser, and you can run any language you want on the server. You can't practically run any language you want on the browser, only one, and it's JavaScript, so it's not possible for Java to run on both sides now. And in case you didn't notice, people run JavaScript on the server all the time, because they can share the same frameworks and libraries and data structures on both sides, like easy server side rendering. The cost of developing and deploying and running and maintaining two different languages and implementations of everything and incompatible frameworks on each side is just too high, and a huge waste of energy and time and human effort. Java usage is declining and stagnating, and JavaScript/TypeScript usage is rising rapidly. And JavaScript's and TypeScript's future is not controlled by Larry Ellison.

https://experttal.com/blog/top-programming-language-trends-i...

>Top Programming Language Trends in 2023

>Java Won’t Be as Popular as It Was

>In a similar vein, Java — a language central to the emergence of the software industry as we know it today — increasingly appears to be past its prime.

>Java slipped out of the top spot on the TIOBE index — a position it had held for nearly two decades — a couple of years ago. As of 2023, there's every indication that Java won’t recover the top spot.

>Although Java will likely remain widespread over the coming year, it's hard to imagine it returning to its former stature as one of the most popular languages. On the contrary, we suspect Java will continue to decline in popularity over the coming year and beyond.

https://marketsplash.com/javascript-statistics/

>50+ JavaScript Statistics For 2023 Trends & Facts

>Microsoft introduced TypeScript in 2012 as an extension of JavaScript, incorporating optional typing. This adaptation retained the syntax and essence of JavaScript while implementing supplementary features essential for developers. The contrast between JavaScript and TypeScript is noteworthy, as the latter presents heightened productivity and simplified maintenance for expanding codebases.

>For this reason, TypeScript transcends being merely a fleeting JavaScript trend; it has evolved into an established language. The most recent survey from 2022 indicates that JavaScript stands as the most utilized programming language, boasting a considerable 78% adoption rate among developers. This survey stems from the State of JS Survey.

Nobody is denying the popularity of Javascript. I'm merely pointing out that Java is huge. Java is still incredibly popular in enterprise environments, and so much Java code has been written there that I've called Java the COBOL of the future on several occasions. It's still very easy to find work in Java.

> You can't practically run any language you want on the browser, only one, and it's JavaScript

Everybody knows that, but are you aware of the history of that? Why Javascript is called Javascript, despite not being in any way related to Java?

Java was originally aimed to run in the browser as Aplets. That required a plugin of course, and those have since fallen out of favour for good reason. But Java was originally the language that ran in the browser, and Sun specifically marketed it for that. And then Netscape introduced their own language called Javascript specifically so people would associate it with Java, but it had the advantage that it would run in the browser without the use of plugins. And Netscape was so dominant that they could dictate this sort of thing.

Plenty of Web Aplets have been written at that time, but with browsers abandoning plugins, they've become obsolete. And requiring a plugin before it runs was definitely an obstacle.

Instead Java became the preferred language on the server, and it took a very long time before Javascript got any traction there. It has that traction now, and the advantage of running the same code in browser and server is definitely an advantage, but there's a lot of history before that.

And while Java's popularity is certainly dwindling (and deservedly so, if you ask me), it's coming from an extremely high popularity and has a very long way to go before it's gone. Because it did win almost everywhere outside the browser.

Not that I want to defend them, but Typescript is probably the best thing Microsoft ever created.

If we are liberal with the meaning of "Microsoft created", there's Age of Empires II.

"JavaScript" is a trademark of Oracle Corporation in the United States.

You sir go wherever you want but please leave Java to professionals that make companies just work (TM). Yes its not ultra fashionate with all new features in some other languages (but improving constantly), but TBH I don't care, at all, I can work till retirement with Java 8 and be very happy, at the end its just a tool to solve problems and darn good one.

Proper quality engineering is delivering good robust solutions to companies, and Java is great for that in many many aspects, moreso than most other platforms. And who steers it, that's a question I couldn't care less about, just keep it working as expected, completely cross-compatible across all platforms and all previous version (looking at ya Microsoft, that clusterfuck with 'MS Visual C++ redistributable' requiring 20+ sometimes conflicting installations, often ending up in games not working at all even if required version is present - that's just bad engineering, they don't even have solid internal registry to prevent these FUBARs requiring full clean reinstall of Windows).

All those wonderful technical and business arguments and whataboutisms and swag, but there's still:

Larry Ellison

OpenJDK is GPL 2, how is Larry going to take it away?

Also many people use "Java" in the enterprise without paying Oracle a red cent.

that's a good comparison given how litigious Hasbro has been in the past.

The lawnmower has arrived, adjust behavior accordingly. You can't reason with it, it only knows: "cut grass"!

I'm no fan of Oracle but Oracle's steward ship of Java has been pretty good. They have invested in long term (open source) improvements such as Loom and Graal and open sourced additional technologies such as Flight recorder.

Yeah, WotC should never have sold themselves to Hasbro. Buying TSR was great, but selling to Hasbro was not. It may have seemed like a good idea at first because they got a lot of freedom in those first 10 years, but Habro has been tightening the screws lately and none of that has been good.

I have enjoyed 5e greatly - I wish that Hasbro wasn't working so hard to kill D&D.

This happens in every industry once that business is opened to the stock market. Larian is great because its private. Steam is great because it's private. Facebook used to be great then it went public and went downhill fast. Same with basically any company that doesnt have 2 vectors of VERY solid competition (AMD v Intel v ARM, nvidia v AMD v Intel, Micro v Samsung v hynix, Ford v GM v Dodge, etc). Companies that exist only to drive profits will do shit to ruin their brand in the name of profits, because stock profits make more money than being a good company.

> They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them

Isn’t that the core business model of Hasbro?

We just need to move on from DnD to other IPs at this point, it is absurdly clear that everyone putting all their eggs in the basket with wizards of the coast and it is just a bad idea.

There are plenty of fantastic alternatives, we really don’t need the DnD universe. I mean, as highly acclaimed as BG3 is, people in general seem to feel that the dev’s previous game Divinity Original Sin 2 has better combat mechanics… so idk I just think it’s time to move past wizards of the coast and embrace better systems.

I think Forgotten Realms has a special place in many people's hearts (especially the millennials and around them), being a formative part of our childhoods: Minsc and Boo, Drizzt, beholders, mimics, etc. It's like Star Wars or LOTR, people get attached and emotionally invested and it's not so easy to let go overnight.

I enjoyed the Original Sin series and played them for many hours,but never finished either one. The characters and stories weren't their strong suit IMO (they were kinda cheesy, honestly), but yeah, tactically they played better than BG3. That's the downside of trying to accurately transfer tabletop mechanics, I guess, and combining it with the poor UI of the BG3 series (too many different types of actions and reactions to squeeze in the toolbars). Anyway that's beside the point.

I agree new IPs would be great, but those are rare! It would be cool to see an open source fantasy world where high quality fanfic could be curated into canon.

> The characters and stories weren't their strong suit IMO (they were kinda cheesy, honestly)

Yes, but so are D&D characters like Drizzt and Minsc. But they come with added feel-good nostalgia.

> I agree new IPs would be great, but those are rare!

I am really enjoying "The Timescape" at the moment. It's the setting from Matt Colville / MCDM. It's used in a range of D&D supplements, streams, literature books, videos and more. And soon in a new TTRPG as well. It is more concise and less "out there" that the Forgotten Realms. And it doesn't carry 40+ years of inconsistent lore baggage.

"Soon" in this case means 2025 or later.

The alternative systems flourished with DnD 4.0 back in 2008, since that system just wasn't as good as 3.5 or the new 5th edition.

Wizards of the Coast did a great job with the balance of customization vs simplicity of 5e and that's why DnD did so well recently. But the alternatives always were there.

Its a big community of literal house-rule makers (everyone plays DnD with their own houserules). Its a community used to making rules for themselves, buying 3rd party rules packages or discussing balance things online. The community will figure something out one way or the other.

Was 4 really worse than 5? Everyone I've heard speak on it is pretty hesitant to say 5 is better, and that a lot of of great design choices (martial classes not being completely outclassed, less frustrating saving throws, rule clarity, better handling of numbers on enemies, better rest mechanics, etc.) were thrown out in 5 because 4 caught so much shit for being "not 3.5".

> Was 4 really worse than 5?

They're just very different. 4 is as much a tactics game as an RPG.

Older D&D editions actually had a tactical miniatures game. Of course D&D originally evolved from the Chainmail miniatures rules. 4e had a miniatures game as well as some great tactical board games that are fun with friends and can even be played solo. With 5e they wanted to emphasize "theater of the mind" but you can still have fairly tactical battles with miniatures, terrain, etc.

All D&D versions seem pretty great. I've played the 2.5e CRPGs (fun!), classic Pathfinder (basically 3.5+ - also fun!), 4e RPG, miniatures game, boardgames (all definitely fun!), and lots of 5e (also very fun!) The classic rulebooks are baroque, fascinating, and immensely charming. The settings (Forgotten Realms etc.) are brilliant.

I loved 3.5, but it was really complex and unbalanced. 4E was a very different kind of game, more like World of Warcraft than 3.5. But I enjoyed it a lot too (the classes were much better balanced), and it was far easier to teach to new players because they couldn't as easily dig themselves into a grave with poor character development (anti-munchkinism, or whatever you call it).

I don't mean role playing a flawed character for story flavor, but that in 3.5e it's way too easy to accidentally make a non viable build that's drastically weaker than other party members (and level appropriate enemies).

5e is more similar to a simplified 3.5e with a little less complexity. And rather than focusing on the tactical turn based combat of the 4e (which was often kind a drag to execute without digital DM aids and digital tabletops), they shifted the focus more to storytelling and player involvement. It was the right move, IMO, for a tabletop role playing game.

On the other hand, I don't think the 5e rules translate as well to computer RPGs. BG3 shines for its exceptional narrative freedom, but its combat is lackluster compared to Temple of Elemental Evil or even Nwverwinter Nights or KotoR, which all used 3E/3.5E to allow really cool build diversity.

4e was a very different kind of game. They did fix the balance problem, but they did it by making every class work in pretty much the same way. Also, the focus was so strongly on the battlegrid that it felt more like a tactical skirmish game than a roleplaying game.

Yep.

Every character class was practically the same with the same mechanics (at will "spells", per encounter "spells", per long rest "spells") and a massive amount of repetition across abilities. As a DM, I was an over worked CPU; monsters were boring and scripted and every character class had liberal amounts of "force the monster to do x" actions that resulted in monsters having little to no agency.

I ran a few adventures in 4.0 and put the books away forever.

Yeah was pretty crap. There were some positive items here or there, like trying to balance the "linear figher/quadratic wizard" issues, and things like healing surges helped keep play smooth, but the whole thing basically felt like they saw that 'the yout' were all about those MMOs and they tried to make that on the tabletop.

> Divinity Original Sin 2 has better combat mechanics

While I think the combat in 5E combat in BG3 is fairly simple by comparison, DOS2 combat was definitely not better. All combat devolved into status effect versions of “the floor is lava” and a lot of builds become unviable late game.

You didn't like the environmental interactions? I thought it was awesome how the "floor is lava" could quickly become "the air is now noxious gas / steam / full of lava elementals", how undead and the living react to elements different, etc. But it's really more that the action points system gave you a lot more tactical flexibility than the D&D "attack/cast + move" limits.

Still, though, I loved the different builds in both games :) When Original Sin first came out, I made a wine barrel build that just had an insanely strong level 1 character with telekinesis and no other skills... he could insta-kill any enemy in a single turn just by throwing 600 kg wine barrels at them. Or in BG3 how you could have a party of shovers that just throw people off cliffs.

I think the environmental effects were fun, but in longer or large battles, too much of the emphasis was placed on managing them. One thing I appreciated about BG3 is that you can use them to your advantage, but they’re not a primary focus of combat. I like the scale and variety of combat in DOS2 better overall, however. All the BG3 combat, outside a handful of battles, felt trivial and anti-climactic.

> I think the environmental effects were fun, but in longer or large battles, too much of the emphasis became on managing them.

Oh, I see what you mean there. Yeah, I agree, the environmental effects were SO powerful they often occluded the usefulness of other skills. I'm glad they toned it down a bit in BG3.

>All the BG3 combat, outside a handful of battles, felt trivial and anti-climactic.

The final battle in BG3 was clearly rushed in design IMO. You just avoid the fight entirely and you're done. That's not what I want in a climatic final battle with an other-dimensional entity of immense power that has to be controlled by implements of the gods. You straight up shouldn't be able to cheese it, almost as a requirement; it should be the culmination of all the elements of strategy the game has offered, but it doesn't do that to me.

Yeah, you can beat the whole thing in a few turns. The enemies in the courtyard and ascent to final boss were a bit better, but still akin to any number of fights in DOS2 (vs. a climax).

Yeah, just to add on, Orin and Gortash were much more interesting fights for me even; Ketheric took a few iterations to realize what the pattern was. But the final battle is either Sisyphean or cheesed entirely. I haven't played either DOS games, I might take a go at em.

DOS2 holds up pretty well. DOS is kind of clunky.

> We just need to move on from DnD to other IPs at this point

Or go back to AD&D 1e like the good lord ... err gygax intended :)

Relatedly, Old School Essentials is, IIRC, B/X just more streamlined in presentation? They also have a cool-looking setting with Dolmenwood (as I gather, basically "a mix of darkness and whimsy in the style of old-school fairy tales") that just had a kickstarter for a big campaign setting guide earlier this year.

While I haven't played D&D in any form for nearly 30 years, I lurk in places like r/adnd. There's something I often wonder in the light of the OSR trend & renewed interest in B/X, early AD&D, etc. And that is - to what extent the style of play captures the older style of play vs. hybridizing the more modern style of play w/ the older rules.

When I talk to friends who play contemporary versions of the game, even if one normalized the rules, what they play isn't what I played way back when. There's much more focus on the actual role playing & narrative/story. It tends more towards high fantasy, almost more like a superhero game. That sort of thing.

I assume it must wind up as a hybrid, and find myself curious to see what that looks like. Granted, it's easy enough for me to try it first hand and find out :)

There's a YouTube channel called 3D6DownTheLine which has video series of two campaigns using OSE (one in Dolmenwood and another in a popular megadungeon). I can't really comment on how close it fits D&D from 30 years ago but it at least seems like it plays like how people describe old-school D&D (more emphasis on player skill and creative problem-solving).

From just watching a little bit of those videos, I think a significant part of the appeal today is that it's much quicker (thinking mainly in comparison to 3.5 since that was my introduction) to roll some attributes, pick a class, and go. It also makes the GM's job easier because they don't need to worry about balancing skill checks when the game doesn't even have skills.

Side note: I had tremendous fun doing a BG3 combat-only playthrough (meaning paying no attention to the story or characters, just min-maxing combat).

One of my most memorable encounters happened entirely by accident: I had just learned how to make my characters fly, and was exploring a new city by gliding from rooftop to rooftop. I ended up on top of some big castle thing by chance, and pissed off all the guards in what looked like a throne room. They chased me out onto a small patio, where I set up a perfect ambush: https://share.cleanshot.com/tPHhWk6p

A cloud of darkness blocked vision out of the only exit, with only my fighter visible at the end of the ledge. Each enemy would come stumbling out of the darkness, only to be ambushed by arrows fired from a dust cloud. Enraged, they'd run towards the ledge, engage my fighter, only to be blown into the chasm below by my warlock hiding on a tower above. Over the next couple hours, I ended up killing like 40-60 of these huge guards, a pile of bodies at the river bottom. (Apparently this was some sort of boss fight, which I had no idea lol). It was just such a perfect tactical setup to blow them off the ledge, one by one, unaware and so angry :D

One of the best moments I ever had in any video game.

My full review, with more silliness: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recomm...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com