Oisin Duffy
@OisinDuffy15
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He/They. AroAce. Ecologist, Leftist and TTRPG fan. Opinions are my own.
Ireland
Joined November 2020
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Hot take. The way Brennan Lee Mulligan tells stories through D&D in Dimension 20 and Worlds Beyond Number is one of the best examples of a leftist stuck in capitalist realism out there, and I'm genuinely not sure if it's intentional or he's just American.
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@LilySimpson1312
Logistics are the death of Fantasy. Like we saw how enormous the ministry of magic was in the movies and they're telling us there's like 50 people who work there?
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So much of his stories about trying to build a lasting world fall apart at the end because the language of storytelling that Brennan is using is one inherently of violence and domination. The shows are pretty great, but it's a consistent through line.
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I think Dimension 20 is due a superhero season soon, but I hope to god they don't use 5e for it.
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Dimension 20 really is so illustrative of D&D's bone deep reactionary roots. In non combat episodes they talk the anti capitalist talk, but as soon as combat breaks out, they go into full murder cop mode. That's what the game's design encourages as the path of least resistance
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No shade on Daggerheart's actual quality (gonna give the playtest a proper read this weekend), but in no world should you get away with calling a 377 page playtest 'Rules Light'
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@LilySimpson1312
Also in Harry Potter, most of those jobs are done by magical second class citizens like goblins, or fully by slaves in the case of house elves
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Mythology nerds really need to recognise that d&d style pseudoscientific taxonomy is probably one of the worst lenses to interpret mythology through.
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Or, hear me out, it's not about that. D&D obviously doesn't encourage real world violence. It encourages domination through violence as the best solution in the context of stories told with it, something that routinely undercuts the themes that Dimension20 explores.
i’ve been trying to figure out what irks me about this tweet all day and i just now realized it’s bc it’s basically the “d&d is bad because it encourages our kids to do violence” argument but make it leftist.
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A game's design affects how people play it is one of the most basic principles of game design. The way that D&D fans refuse to engage with this simple and demonstrably true point really is something. The fact that it's often taken as a personal attack is even more telling.
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It's really interesting how people like Pundit here regularly claim their games are more realistic and mature and yet they want people who aren't people they can kill without considering any moral dimension. Turns out when orcs and goblins are people with interiority and culture,
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@osamabishounen
It's like talking to French people about what France has been doing in Africa. The only French friend of mine who doesn't basically deny it is half Moroccan.
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@rileyrethal
I will maintain that despite the great things they can do, professional AP GMs are pretty terrible sources of insight and guidance on game design and GMing because their perspective is fundamentally skewed by survivorship bias.
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@AdamBlumenau
I honestly think a lot of D&D's wonkiness could be resolved by declaring mechanics first and narrating based on the resolution. Nat 1ing that persuasion role after a genuinely effective speech sucks. Making up a comicly bad speech for that Nat 1 is better
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People are calling this out as an issue of bad GMing when it's really an issue of game design. D&D is really bad at doing boss fights because the flow of the game is built around the attrition of 6-8 fights per day. The design of the game and the desires of the gm aren't aligned
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I find it interesting that multiple 5e Youtubers have cited anxiety about trying to get other games 'right' as the reason they've given up trying other games and going back to 5e. Like, you do you, but it's kind of worth examining this.
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Really hard to break cycles of violence when the players solve their biggest problems with intense, domineering violence.
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@EKaleEdmiston
Isn't it more a case that there's a wider range of 'acceptable' male bodies in our society, so it's easier for transmascs to 'look male' than transfemmes to 'look female'?
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@vexwerewolf
@Ettin64
Musk and Grimes started dating after they talked to each other about Roko's Basilisk (i.e. what if Pascal's Wager but robots), and he bought twitter on the rebound from their breakup
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My take on the Mercer effect is that 5e just isn't all that good a game which is why gming it is difficult. If you find a game that suits your style and has good teaching tools, it's so much easier to get good at gming. Once my gaming group stopped playing 5e, there was a period
THE MATT MERCER EFFECT IS NOT A THING!
A thread🧵(1/5)
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@fiddlersgreen92
Trying for something better is risky. Getting the slop you expect is comfortable.
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@Eldritch_Velvet
I'm talking a layer deeper. It's the cognitive dissonance between having leftist positions while trying to tell stories through a game that is hostile to them that I'm getting at.
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To say more on this, I think the problem is that D&D's resolution system asks "Can you do this?", which is fine in combat or a dungeon crawl, but in a more narratively focused game, "What happens when you do this?" is a far more engaging question.
I've been enjoying World Beyond Number a lot but the most recent episode really highlighted why 5e was such a poor choice for that story. Dice rolls, instead of resolving uncertainty in an interesting way, just either allow the logical next step to happen or they say no to the
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@Saavykas
It's about an exerpt from an extremely popular D&D Actual Play DM and his take on D&D as a storytelling tool. Discourse has spun off from this.
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@hikarinowillpow
It's such a wild statemtent in hindsight. Brennan's achilles heel as a DM is that D20 has high production value combat setpieces as a central focus, so every 5e season is fundamentally shaped around the cast ultimately solving their problems through combat.
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I'm aware that capitalism is the villain in most seasons. That's kind of my point. Compare D20's villains as effigies of capitalism you can punch a lot to make meaningful change to capitalism as the villain of Disco Elysium.
Hot take. The way Brennan Lee Mulligan tells stories through D&D in Dimension 20 and Worlds Beyond Number is one of the best examples of a leftist stuck in capitalist realism out there, and I'm genuinely not sure if it's intentional or he's just American.
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In typical ttrpg discourse fashion, it seems like the discussions of 'Watcher' players is being coloured by people having completely different interpretations of what they even are. I think there's a difference between someone who is dead weight and brings things down for
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I think the fact that a lot of high profile influencers and ttrpg writers are progressive and largely anti-Zionist is a really good thing, but it has created a false impression that the people with power and money in this space aren't conservative.
This is extremely difficult on us, as we navigate the situation that we are finding ourselves in.
Updates as to what any physical event will look like will come at a later date, until then:
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Rules light and rules heavy is a false dichotomy when talking about the quality of a game. "Do the rules do what you and the game needs them to do?" is a much more useful question.
Hot take: Rules-heavy systems stifle creativity. The less rulebook flipping, the better the gameplay. Do you stand by the rules or throw them out?
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Wanna dwell on the implications of this at all?
Hot take: humanizing the monsters in a game about fighting and killing monsters doesn't make the game better.
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I dunno, maybe a season about how the dogma of rage destroys people and the space for forgiveness and redemption doubt affords doesn't gel well with fights where basically no quarter can be given to your abused teenage enemies.
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People desperately need to play other games. If you only play D&D, there is a good chance that your understanding of an entire creative medium is woefully limited by the base assumptions of one pretty mediocre game.
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@VoicesByZane
I mean, Andor is right there. It's back rooms politicking and the prison industrial complex there, but the principle stands. Ep 1 is bad because it's badly written and directed, not because of its high-level ideas
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then you have to consider that in your storytelling, which seems to me a pretty easy path towards more realistic and mature storytelling.
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Whatever else you think of my criticisms of D&D and its play culture, do you really think "play other games!" Is a relevant thing to say to me. How do you think I've come up with my opinions on this subject? It's certainly not from exclusively playing 5e.
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I think one of my pet hates is placing the blame for dodgy game design on unspoken social expectations. MTG's Commander format, D&D 5e and World of Darkness are full of this. Games that are not designed well for how they are actually played but with a culture that blames players.
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@Orbitaldropkick
If the backlash against 4e proved anything is that there is a large contingent of dnd players and designers who don't like the idea of characters having interesting abilities
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@shaun_vids
I think the aesthetic objections are rarely honestly held. More often there's an ulterior motive or people are just being reactionary
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Would you look at that? It's collapsed into the perennial casters vs martials debate, where people are complaining that in this tightly balanced tactical combat game, the classes have distinct strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. A downside of 2e's increased
The Pathfinder 2e subreddit is having its regular generalist vs specialist discourse, and it strikes me that there's a bunch of people who want specialist builds to be as good as generalist builds in all situations. Do they not realise that's not a specialist anymore?
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@CobbleSprite
Like apart from the fact that systems frame play even if you don't use them, I feel the bigger issue is that people will say anything to stay in their RPG comfort zone, even though it's undeniable that one game taking up so much space in an artistic medium is terrible.
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@jesawyer
It's riffing on an article on how to make David from Cyberpunk Edgerunners in D&D 5e.
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@AdamBlumenau
I always found WoD funny because of how American it was. You were equally likely to be trained with guns as you were able to drive
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@kaitave_
People constantly talk about the non-dnd games they enjoy. D&D fans if they aren't simply ignoring that, will interpret this as an attack on DnD
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And given that often as not, it's Pathfinder 2e they're talking about quitting, here's some advice. Don't listen to Reddit on anything. Come to grips with your levers and then learn to fuck about. It's nowhere near as strict as people say. It just has a functioning baseline.
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@AdamBlumenau
Some people genuinely don't seem to realise that media is made by people making a series of choices and not something that appears fully formed out of thin air
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@panny_lines
I ran a vtm chronicle set in 1990s Hong Kong a few years back and the players decided to become proper anarchist Anarchs, which led them to forming a coalition with the other supernaturals who weren't massive dicks, and what really struck me was how much they had to mechanically
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Btw, if you like DnD as a vessel for group storytelling and high stakes action, but don't actually like 5e's focus on tactical combat, do yourself a favour and look into Forged in the Dark. There's a good chance one of those games will suit you really well.
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@panny_lines
restrict themselves to make this happen. The language of VtM is violence and coercion, and trying to build something better than that using the mechanics the game gave us was fascinating.
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where we could barely get in sessions of our regular campaign because different people kept wanting to run one shots of new systems, and even though we were first timers with those systems they were all better at running those games than any of us were with 5e.
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@JesseJerdak
I think having one monolithic system is part of the problem. We should allow the medium to proliferate and grow. Most people's vision of what TTRPGs even can be is heavily limited by D&D's dominance. We should uplift and celebrate the diversity of experiences out there.
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@LilySimpson1312
It's so frustrating to see how this is being reported particularly internationally. His family are known to be the Irish equivalent of the westboro baptist Church and that's some pretty key context to leave out.
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@Srirachachau
I feel like both Tom Cruise and Nic Cage have eaten human flesh, but for completely different reasons
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I've been enjoying World Beyond Number a lot but the most recent episode really highlighted why 5e was such a poor choice for that story. Dice rolls, instead of resolving uncertainty in an interesting way, just either allow the logical next step to happen or they say no to the
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@AdamBlumenau
That's kind of the thing. The dungeon as an entire concept is completely unrealistic so how does it being wheelchair accessible make it less realistic?
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@kaitave_
"Why don't you talk about other games?"
Have they not seen the fury from D&D fanatics when Pathfinder is so much as mentioned in their vicinity, and that's basically the same game, if better designed
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@JaneOst_
This was my experience reading the first Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. I was waiting for the 'authoritarian rulers are bad' shoe to drop, and it just never did.
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@rileyrethal
But also Brennan is huffing his own farts here anyway. Every 5e game I've seen him run is inescapeably 5e, combat and all. This works really well for Fantasy High, but has worked against other seasons.
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When you're writing vampires, figure out what you are doing with them quick, because if you just thoughtlessly use every trope, it's really easy to accidentally lean into xenophobia, antisemitism, queerphobia etc.
What's a vampire opinion that'll get you like this?
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@evilvillain1231
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a lot of Fallout 4's worldbuilding exists basically to morally justify the player's actions regardless of what they are. And this is done at the expense of the setting's worldbuidling up to this point.
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@MoseyDm
This is fine. Your character sheet is an abstraction. You have skills in D&D to be good at some of them, and table talk to see who is good is fine, as a party would know who's best at each thing. Can't stress enough that D&D is a gamey-ass game and not a simulation.
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Always fun to see people get mad at Lin Codega for this, as if the last year hasn't completely vindicated their position here.
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At least half of the seasons would have been better had they played something other than 5e. Compare Mentopolis to Mice and Murder for example
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@LilySimpson1312
Or that women are now able to be candid about how they actually feel, instead of lying to avoid the risk of further patriarchal repression.
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@nmTdnAtlhom
@AdamBlumenau
Both are valid interpretations. They affect the tone and the distribution of narrative agency differently, but either can work.
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People think this is a ttrpg tweet, but it is actually my contribution to that cursed Hermaphroditus discourse. Multiple interpretations of that character are valid. Not a zee sum game
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@denimneverdies
The mix of cultural Christianity and terminal IP brain is fascinating here. So much mythology is people basically treating their gods like action figures.
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@open_sketchbook
It's fun how outside of the wildheart subclass, you make only one choice while leveling the barbarian, and that is the subclass.
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@PunishedLorelai
@Gender_Thief
@MrInsideEye
The big difference for me was that when the game made fun of or was mean about communism, it was always from the perspective of wanting it to be better. The game condemns fascism as the festering rot of an ideology that it is.
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@JoeLongBalls
We need more Harry duBois esque weirdos. More rpgs should be about getting into the heads of deeply unusual weirdos.
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Seriously. Keep an eye on how the pf2e subreddit develops over the next while if you want a case study on white fragility as a means of radicalisation towards open white supremacy. However you feel about the mods actions (the reactions are vastly overblown imo) there's pretty
Like it would be a lot easier to dismiss the mods' actions as misinformed and ultimately harmful in the pursuit of antiracist goals if loads of people on the sub hadn't since revealed themselves to be really racist.
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everyone and someone who does participate, but is largely along for the ride and happier when others get the spotlight. This is further compounded by that post about 5 that treats the game as Watcher friendly when really it just has a play
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@frostiefey
Do people really not understand how dogwhistles work at this point? Antisemites love to get obscure with their antisemitism so that gullible assholes play the defence by claiming the info is too obscure to have been deliberate.
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@RiotLinguist
Interestingly it's never "learn to give criticism". Basil's criticism, even if it were a good critique (it wasn't. It was a painfully immature understanding of comics as a medium) was not delivered in a way that's useful to Haus or anyone else. It was just sneering condescension
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@a_queer_wizard
Yep. There's a big difference between people who dislike 5e because it does tactical combat badly and people who dislike tactical combat overall.
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@DevTheGuy
Yeah. If every rule eludes (or as most people would say abstracts) then what use does it have as a rallying cry for a design movement? Words strung together in certain ways conveys meaning to those who can understand them. This tells me nothing about pulp literature.
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@LogantheGM
A fun thing about "species" as a scientific term is that every definition has massive flaws and exceptions, which just makes D&D bioessentialism even sillier as actual biology is even looser than the fantasy version they use.
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The DM (and probably to some extent the players too) is a massive dickhead here, but I can't help but feel like D&D's "you can do anything with this game" reputation plays a role. The game, the players and the GM are all working off different, incompatible wavelengths here.
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@AtomiskX
As an aside, I hope the live shows and the Madison Square Garden show have showed them that they are way more popular than they think and that they don't need to stick with 5e to stay relevant.
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@MusketAnna
There's a specific kind of insecurity that grows out of being a fan of something that is simultaneously very popular but generally considered mediocre by critics. Look at the MCU or D&D fandoms as similar examples.
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@ceruleanfive
I know some people would place the blame on 5e being combat as sport rather than combat as war, but IMO, a lot of 5e's problems would be fixed if it were more combat as sport. Make the rules of engagement tighter.
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scene and Brennan and co have to work around it. The storytelling itself is excellent but more times than not, when they engage with D&D's systems, the scenes becomes less engaging than if they hadn't.
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@squidias
Like, I cannot stress this enough, the reason people are so harsh with their critiques of D20 is because we know they can do and have done better. I think the crew have it in them to improve on so many fronts and the attitude that they shouldn't is so artistically bankrupt.
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culture where GMs are primarily expected to entertain their players rather than be a specific role in a group where everyone entertains everyone.
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@DragonCobolt
@Liv_Agar
Yeah, GRRM is really good at eliciting empathy for horrible people. It's literally Tyrion's whole arc and why Peter Dinklage being so charismatic ruined him in the later seasons of the show.
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@AdamBlumenau
Most of the worst aspects of PF2e, both mechanically and with their setting were holdovers from D&D.
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@RunnGunnerGunn
Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but using people in conditions that are a direct consequence of the kind of imperialism that the US army facilitates to explain why you behaved as you did when your military strategist friend was called out rings a bit insincere.
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@FarmerGadda
"Simulation as ideal state of play" has utterly blinkered some people's ability to engage with this medium.
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@JonreeceReece
Good points but I was more aiming towards how people have started to treat actual mythology (e.g. greek and Norse) like it's DnD.
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@LoveSheRaKal
It is also literally the point I'm making. Homebrewing to improve a game to your tastes is an example of designing the game so it affects the behaviour of the people playing it in a way that they desire more than the baseline.
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@riseupcomus
In RPGs you can do anything* your put your imagination to.
*Except adopt a less strict pacing device for combat. That's fully out of the question.
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@WinningerR
@Wizards_DnD
How many mechanical tools does a player character have for combat vs non-combat activities? You can have a lot of rp in a D&D session, but you barely interact with the game's mechanics in doing so.
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