Hacker News Reader

Well your father was right in a sense that too much escapism is bad if it takes over your life and dominates it.

But the issue today is that that kind of thing is more likely to happen from online gaming or tik tok or YouTube shorts or Netflix or Twitter and so on.

I would say that playing D&D in real life every now and then isn’t where that danger comes from nowadays

It's ironic that many of our parents' generation, who kept warning us about disappearing into a fantasy world, have themselves largely disappeared into their own fantasy world of Fox News, Newsmax, Social Media bubbles and echo chambers, conspiracy sites, Q-anon, and so on. I'd take D&D over that fate.

I would liken it instead of disappearing into fantasy worlds to instead being enchanted in the traditional sense- to be taken over and made a thrall. In D&D, you roll dice to pretend to shoot fire; there can be very little illusion that you are actually doing anything with material reality effects. Fox News has real people telling the viewers about events that have film evidence that can, at least partially, be verified to be actually occurring amongst their peer group even if the depiction of the context is completely different. Lia Thomas is in fact a trans woman who competed in competitive swimming as a woman in college who won in a division of that competitive swimming team three years ago. Whether or not this represents a statistically significant takeover of womens sports by violent men with sexual fantasies of public female performance is up to framing.

> Please everyone, adults and kids alike, enjoy playing D&D without the stigma and derision.

I could not disagree more

Play something else, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Castles and Crusades

Please stop giving Wizards of the Coast your money, please start supporting other options in the TTRPG space

D&D is so huge in the hobby that it makes it impossible to find other people to play with and there are so many other games that are more fun out there!

D&D has been around for so long that you can easily play without giving a cent to Wizards of the Coast. However, I still definitely think having people try more options is good.

No, no you really cannot.

Unless you want to play with no book, no minis, no map, and a completely home-brewed campaign with all bespoke characters and stories.

At that point, you aren't playing the same game that everyone else is. Wizards has got their fingers in every slice of this pie. Even if you buy D&D stories written by someone else, you're still paying license to Wizards. When you buy a mini, you pay license to Wizards.

I bought my minis 3d printed off Etsy, I bought some random wet erase map and markers, and I bought a non-d&d licensed 5e module. I thought this was the whole license debacle which got walked back?

I already owned a 5e players handbook but there's no reoccurring money going to wizards here and we run a biweekly 5e campaign.

> Unless you want to play with no book, no minis, no map, and a completely home-brewed campaign with all bespoke characters and stories.

If you aren't concerned about legality, all the books are readily available without paying wizards (heck, most of the recent ones and many of the older ones are also legally available that way in deas tree form in the secondhand market); you can buy miniatures that aren't specifically D&D licensed (lots of people use them in playing D&D, whether alone or mixed with licensed D&D minis; it has no effect one way or the other on the game), there are plenty of D&D-compatible maps with no licensing relationship to Wizards. Its very easy to play D&D without paying Wizards.

Minis - you can print them on paper, you can use dice, you can 3D print them, you can use minis from other games, you can use Pathfinder minis.

Maps - you can print them for free (minus ink & paper costs), you can draw your own, you can use maps from other games. Even if you're playing a published adventure, you can still find maps for free online.

Books - you can pick them up second-hand, you can pirate them, you can borrow them. I also never fully understood the stigma against home-brewed campaigns - I strongly prefer both playing & running homebrew.

> Unless you want to play with no book, no minis, no map, and a completely home-brewed campaign with all bespoke characters and stories.

Honestly, with some of the books they've published for 5e, you're probably still half-way to homebrew if you do pay them. It's pretty frustrating that there's such huge holes in a lot of the first-party content. And we've been having a lot of fun drawing on dry-erase battle maps and paper minis.

Agreed, I'm running 5e for some friends and I really wish I could convince them to move to PF2e, Paizo has so much more respect for their customers. WotC keeps finding new ways to insult us, especially towards DMs.

You're going to have a hell of a time moving people from 5E to PF2E.

I've been playing 5E for awhile now, and recently joined a PF2E game as a cast member on a podcast. The rules are significantly more crunchy, building a character without assistance - both from people, and from software - is virtualy impossible, remembering all of the rules as a new-ish player is difficult, and I would not even want to try running a campaign with all of the rules, conditions, interactions, etc.

There are a lot of things that PF2E does that I really like, but as a whole system it's definitely geared at a person who liked 3E or 4E, but definitely not 5E.

The next campaign I run, I might try running in Wildsea, or maybe Spire or Heart, but I don't see myself joining or running a PF2E game ever again.

> The rules are significantly more crunchy, building a character without assistance - both from people, and from software - is virtualy impossible, remembering all of the rules as a new-ish player is difficult, and I would not even want to try running a campaign with all of the rules, conditions, interactions, etc.

This is a mindblowing paragraph to read

Yes, I've been playing D&D a long time

Yes, I used to make 3e characters by hand without any software, which are much more complex than 5e or PF2E

From my perspective, 5e and PF2E are around the same level of complexity

I strongly suspect that if you think 5e doesn't have a similar amount of rule complexity, you are ignoring a ton of 5e rules without even realizing they exist, or playing them wrong

Here's a question:

In 5e, can you drink a potion as a bonus action?

In Baldur's Gate 3, you can

But no. Drinking a potion in 5e is an action

However, you can ready a potion from your pack or belt to drink, as a bonus action, as long as you have a free hand to hold it with

Bet you've been playing that wrong, most people do

You're not wrong - I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of 5E. (I do know the potion rule, because I've homebrewed the potion thing in every game I've ran - bonus action to drink, full action to administer. I'm doing it "wrong", but in my opinion, and those of my players, it makes the game better.)

But consider just the conditions between 5E and Pathfinder2 - 5E has 15 conditions, most of which are fairly understandable (although things like "is a grappled character also incapacitated?" is an annoying issue that comes up more often than I'd like.)

Pathfinder has 42, and a lot of them feel like gradations of a single condition. What's the difference between Hidden and Concealed? (I'm sure you know, and I'd know too if I spent the past decade playing Pathfinder.)

But PF2E is, I would say, and objectively crunchier and more mechanics-heavy ruleset than 5E, and to go back to conditions, a lot of player actions (spells, attacks) mechanically impose conditions on enemies, and you as a DM and a player had better know what they actually do to play the game effectively. 5E is much less dependent on conditions affecting gameplay.

> building a character without assistance - both from people, and from software - is virtualy impossible

I'd be fine with this part, my biggest motivation to switch systems is being able to have a decent online character builder without having to rebuy every book AND pay a subscription.

Good news! Pathbuilder is free, and so is Archives of Nethys.

https://pathbuilder2e.com/

https://2e.aonprd.com/

5E is the most accessible TTRPG out there – lots of content dedicated content, a huge ecosystem, and a ruleset that's "easy enough".

No one, just starting out, should play Pathfinder.

5e is the most accessible (available everywhere and easy to find), but it's not the most accessible (easy to learn and play)

The 5e ruleset sucks, actually. It's deceptively complicated and the books are organized very poorly.

Even Baldur's Gate 3 gets a bunch of 5e rules wrong, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident, because the rulebooks are poorly written and sometimes contradictory

Pathfinder might not be any better as a starting game, but there are much easier beginner games out there. The only problem is no one has heard of them because D&D eats absolutely all of the oxygen in the TTRPG space

I thought the same as the person you're replying to, once - and then I tried to go through the (original 5E) PHB's character creation rules, and realized that they are actually written very badly, and that I've come to rely heavily on DNDBeyond for character creation.

I haven't looked at the 2024 5E character creation part of PHB, but I can't imagine it's worse, lol.

> Pathfinder might not be any better as a starting game, but there are much easier beginner games out there. The only problem is no one has heard of them because D&D eats absolutely all of the oxygen in the TTRPG space

I couldn't agree more! Pathfinder is too crunchy for new players who don't already have experience playing TTRPGs, and are sure they want that level of mechanics in their game. There are so many RPGs out there, ranging from one-pagers that could probably be printed on an index card (The Witch Is Dead), to something on par with 5E's complexity that nevertheless has a lot of interesting mechanics and stories to tell (Wildsea, Spire).

Here I am trying to talk about society's shifting attitude towards fantasy role playing games, and here you are disagreeing strongly, bringing the conversation around to your hobby horse topic centered on your animus towards Wizards of the Coast. Thank you for illustrating clearly to me why I'm not tempted to seek community in the role playing space.

> society's shifting attitude towards fantasy role playing games,

That's kind if my point though. Society has not had a shifting attitude towards "fantasy role playing games", it has had a shifting attitude towards "Dungeons and Dragons"

Society has not at all heard of any of the alternative fantasy role playing games, which may as well not exist as far as society is concerned

I love ttrpgs. I want it to be a big hobby like board games are currently. You're right I don't like WOTC as a company, but my primary motivation is to see other titles become more know and played, because there are so many great games out there

My "disagreeing strongly" part was meant tongue in cheek by the way

I was raised among scientists whose attitude was that reality was so interesting, delving into fantasy was a poor substitute. To be honest, I still rather feel this way, but I see that for so many people, the demands of knowledge, effort, and time required for positive outcomes in their corner of reality are too great for most people to experience much of significance. So I've become less critical of fantasy as an absorbing interest. Furthermore, in a world where the bulk of published research is non-replicable, I've become bothered by doubts about how much of my mental models of scientific reality are actually fantasy.

Of course that generation would park themselves in front of the TV for hours every night while warning you about the hazards of living in a fantasy world.