Ok, fair enough. Let’s talk about it.

So here’s the thing, 5e is incomplete. It was shipped without being properly tested, and was pushed out the door because the whole D&D team thought they were getting axed after 4e flopped. It wasn’t designed to be “easy to learn, easy to run, easy to homebrew” – it’s actually none of those things – it was just designed to be a product on the shelves for the 40th anniversary that was not and that did not resemble 4e. There is more product management and marketing to the game than there is design, and somehow two mid-edition rebalances after it was printing money didn’t change this.

But why does 5e feel easy to learn, and easy to homebrew? Because it provides almost zero guidance on how to do these things. It all but completely abandons the player. This has been treated as a feature, rather than an issue, by apologists because it gives tables a lot of perceived freedom. A lot of people, seemingly, see having the responsibility of filling in the gaps as freedom, while also seeing having the option to ignore rules they don’t like as some kind of cage. So, lacking the cage of professional advice, people feel free to do whatever they want.

But here’s where it gets weird. The gaps provided by the PHB and GMG are relatively small. But having the reputation of not having rules for this, that, or the other thing matters much, much more than actually not having them. So, people nail down advantage and disadvantage, look up someone else’s class builds online, and then lean on setting-specific class content to flesh out their fantasy. And why is this? Because none of the sub-systems are as easy to understand and use as dis/advantage is. They are incongruent with the game’s core mechanic, and so they are unceremoniously thrown out. Often, these days, without knowing it, because people are learning how to run the game from YouTube and podcasts, not from reading the books, so they are inheriting someone else’s decisions to cast those systems aside.

Almost nobody is playing 5e as it’s designed, and when people do, many of them don’t like it.

erin (she/her) said in Math Matters: > I don’t fully disagree with you, but you’re just wrong about the area of effect shapes. The rules are very defined on how to represent and find spheres, cylinders, lines, cubes, cones, etc.

You understand that I was making a joke, right? “Embrace the cube of constant radius!”?

Have you actually read the rules? The game, as written, isn’t really meant to be played at all. It just vaguely gestures at activities and suggestions, and if you look too closely you’ll find a lot of junk that doesn’t fit or doesn’t really work.

People don’t play 5e. People leverage 5e’s one core feature and then build their own games around it, ignoring most of the published rules.

Fireball says radius, but in a non-Euclidian geometry radius doesn’t translate to a Euclidian sphere. Embrace the cube of constant radius!

His name translates to Ubermensch!

The ability to import new or custom items using JSON would be great. And support for custom fields in the process.

And multiclassing.

It’s also worth understanding that trauma is something that you work out through your daily life, not just in therapy. One of the models for trauma is that it’s caused by a sense of helplessness in the face of a great stressor or existential threat, and engaging in activities that let you react to dangers can be theraputic.

Theraputic, not therapy.

No one else at the table needs to be directly involved. No one need be asked to be a shoulder to lie on. It’s not any different in practice than the masturbatory power fantasies we’re all engaging in at the table. It’s just starting from a slightly different place.

I’m not sure how Ronald has time to post anything these days, what with the current activities of the federal policing agencies in the US…

“DM” is not a trademarked term, because it’s a pair of letters. “Dungeon Master” is absolutely a trademarked term, though, and has been since the TSR days.

You were a fan of Larry, well here is his cousin Darryl, and his other cousin Darrey.

Is… is there some reason to read “How to do X without Y” as some kind of value judgement against Y? Because, like, some of us just can’t do accents. I can’t even do my own regional accent, and never have been able to. There being a resource for someone like me doesn’t really invite this “fuck you” attitude you’re bringing, dude, and frankly, it feels like you’re saying it to people like me when you’re coming after something that seems targeted at me.

Careful, you’re risking summoning the Pathfinder Pedant Demon with that one.

I don’t know, I this phrasing seems quite evocative to me. Tremble means to waver in tone or power, gravel means to hoarse or growling in a low energy fashion, and words colliding means for words to flow into one another in a fluid and informal way. This all makes speech sound less confident, and less educated. Meanwhile, neat speech is formal, and clipped speech has clear start and end points to words, and so clear distinctions between neighbouring words.

* Laughs in Pathfinder 2 level scaling.

Touche. I guess what I should have more rightly said was, given the level of contribution users have shown themselves willing to make, it’s too small to be a job.

But in the end, I believe people aren’t willing to pay because we look like other spaces where they don’t have to pay, and we gate nothing behind paywalls. Most people don’t pay for services on the Internet, they pay for special privileges and to stand out. And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they’d milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.

Weirdly enough, community might actually be enough, but the Fediverse doesn’t really have much in the way of communities. As I think you yourself point out elsewhere, the Fediverse is lacking the connective tissue of shared ideology, goals, or even interests. It’s also both too large to create the familiarity that binds people socially, while also being too small to sustain itself off a donation model that makes sure there are professional admins and server mods. It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

Aping the aesthetic of commercial social media is a significant issue here, because form follows function, and the function of commercial social media is not community, but convincing end-users to be content generators. People on Reddit and Twitter are accustomed to an endless stream of input generated by nameless, faceless entities that they don’t give two shits about, with some celebrities and internet-famous people interjecting from time to time. That requires tens of millions of users fighting for fleeting attention from fickle consumers. We have tens of thousands of people who – as far as I can tell, based on the types and volume of posts – are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

These are not the people who fund these kinds of endeavours. Neither group is – the content generators are no more interested in paying to get attention than the content consumers are to give it. So, without the firm social ties that motivate keeping the lights on, there is only burnout for the few who are willing to materially support the place, and gradual decay for everyone else.

Paizocon 2025 Creature Feature Dead Writeup

People seem fairly split on their feelings on the new dragons. Many feel that they are not “dragon-like”. Others seem totally enamoured with how batshit insane some of them are. Personally, I like having as wide a range of enemies as possible within a given category, and since the modern western dragon is pretty well represented by Horned Dragons now, this all just seems like gravy to me.

I also really liked this quote: “Monsters should have mechanics that support their story elements, and should be fun to fight– fighting the monster means experiencing the story of that monster.” As strong believer that the designers have built a game that supports narrative and character driven play, this resonates.

Touché! A truth I have really started to take for granted.

You’ve triggered my trap card. I’m going to do the special interest info-dump now. Apologies in advance.

It’s good. It’s written a little weird – it uses inheritance, like computer programming, which can be a little more difficult to wrap you head around than it needs to be if you’re not at least a little familiar with coding, and it’s written as if it’s doing everything possible to shut down rules lawyers, so whatever doesn’t read like API documentation reads a bit like legalese – but the actual system is nice.

It’s highly balanced, which is an awful word that its fanbase doesn’t seem to understand, but it means that it totally shuts down winning in character creation, and shifts the power game to one of tactics rather than build. The result is that much of the discussion about the game treats it as if it’s exclusively a tactical combat game (because most discussing the game are crypto-power-gamers), rather than a fantasy RPG, and the most enthusiastic players push back hard against any kind of reframing. But it has a ton of support fo roleplay focused tables, and it pares down easily for casual tables.

Plus, you know, it’s free! And it’s fairly easy to convert from 3.x/PF1, meaning that there’s a whole generation of content out there for it beyond first party offerings, for just a little more effort than standard prep.