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TBH I had a pretty good time since the CRPG-resurgence.
I'm glad you're finding content to your taste, but I kind of have the opposite problem: I find RPGs exhaustingly tedious and convoluted, and every genre is infected with its worst parts - grinding and levels and crafting and loot and fetchquests and equipment - because it's the "in" thing to do. everything feels so damn confused about what kind of game it's trying to be and ends up doing nothing well.
Boulders Gare 3 doesn't really even have a concept of grinding. There are no procedurally generated encounters and each battle can only happen once.
You could say doing all the side quests and exploring the side areas is a type of grinding but it's really just "content" IMO.
i'm glad you like it, DnD makes me actively disinterested anymore though.
What part of D&D do you not like? Depending on the specific issue, you could have fun with Pathfinder: Kingmaker or Divinity: Original Sin.
the part where you sit down at the table and it takes all night but it's 90% keeping yourself occupied while waiting around and nothing of consequence ever happens and everyone loses interest after four sessions max, and this is so predictable and dependable that in 20 years of never saying no to a TTRPG I've never leveled up a character
the part where the underlying rules systems are deeply flawed in every edition, down to the d20 being an awful choice for the skill die due to how swingy it is, to the point that you may as well make your own better game from scratch for how much you have to homebrew to make it not clunky as hell
the part where every group has been toxic as hell and defended their bigots to the person until I decided it wasn't acceptable and quit playing
the part where I would spend a month filling a binder with campaign plans and the average player does everything in their power to intentionally avoid everything I've prepared because it's funny to waste the fuck out of my time or something.
not to mention the setting is the genre equivalent of plain yogurt, it's just straight up uncompelling and done to death.
i used to LOVE the idea of TTRPGs but in two decades of "giving it a chance" it's literally never been a good experience.
The computer takes care of all the tedium, speeds the game up like 50 times compared to tabletop, and the genre is decidedly singleplayer so you never risk encountering toxic players.
Either way, there's lots of CRPGs that aren't based on anything tabletop, like Divinity: Original Sin.
Sounds like you've just had shitty friends / gaming groups.
over a dozen different groups in three cities over the course of 20 years. i don't think the issue is luck, i think it's the culture around the game.
I'd agree with your first point re: D&D ®️ esp re 5th Edition. My wife took a long time to get in to ttrpgs, something that I've enjoyed for over 30 years bc I kept trying to do the D&D®️ thing. I'd recommend you try other games that actually "play" at the table. Dungeon World is great and almost anything in the PbtA family does such a great job of driving the action forward (5e doesn't), having actual stakes and danger (5e doesn't), actually meaningful character choices (5e doesn't), not a beat-the-designer/video-gamist philosophy (5e DOES have this), and not ran by a shitty corporation that hires mercenary thugs to intimidate people, since literally anyone can make a PbtA game about anything.
Agree 💯 on the d20. I think it works in some games, notable Mörk Borg and like b/x D&D - games where if you are rolling dice, you already have fucked up
I can't speak to the groups you played with , but have you tried getting people that aren't in to the hobby in to it? I run games for new players often and they never have the baggage I think you're speaking about
Re the preparation you do, be sure to always prep situations not plots. There should be a law that states "the more prep the DM puts into a game is directly proportional to how quickly the players will force their prep off the rails". The game is a conversation, and I think D&D®️ 5e has fucked this up bc of how they format their adventures WITHOUT EVER TELLING YOU HOW TO ACTUALLY RUN A GAME! Plus, Christ they are fucking textbooks written by committee! I would say a couple things, first: look at Dungeon World as a guideline for how to format your adventures, and second: don't plan huge arcs, just plan individual moments that you want to happen. The characters will get there, even if it is a roundabout way. The Lazy DM by Sly Flourish has a lot of help here that can work for any game, and there's this blog post that talks about the literal easiest foolproof prep method.
Your last point doesn't make sense... Check out itch.io and their physical games category. There are RPGs for literally any genre or setting you can think of. TinyD6 and FAE are two really good generic games that if you can't find your setting, you just slap these bad boys in there and you have an RPG
It really is a fun and exciting hobby and I'm sorry you've had a bad time previously.
A lot of the worst experiences I've were trying to run games to get friends into it, doubly so because I have so little practical experience running a game beyond reading books and copying from them thinking I'm about to have fun, and none actually playing beyond what I described.
I've explored alternate systems such as GURPS and tried brewing a few of my own. I can criticize the rules all day but at the end it was always much the same experience trying to run those against a group that intentionally spites any prep (usually geared more toward worldbuilding and important NPCs than any specific story arc, I realize you can't force that stuff) I tried to do. Anything that I had a sheet of paper for, they would turn and walk away every single time.
As for setting... fam there's not a lot I can do when everyone i know who plays only ever wants to play vanilla DnD or their take on MtG flavored DnD, and they're not going to change what they're doing just because I'm sick to death of generic corporate fantasy worlds and waiting around for 9/10 of the time we're at the table.
after watching a BG3 gameplay video, I'd rather grind. it looks horrible to play.
I mean to each their own but all I've seen in this post from you is just negativity with very little knowledge. You shit on games while knowing very little about them, which is kind of sad
sorry anything short of abject praise registers as shit talk to you, up to and including subjective reactions to seeing gameplay. the game does not look to my taste and i think i would have a bad time with it. If I'm coming across negative it's because people have been trying to shove this game up my ass for 12 hours and throw fits when I say how it looks to me. not everything is for everyone and I wish we could be adults about it and let people speak their fucking minds here.
it's a niche game that i know little about, have no interest in, and definitely am not going to shell out money for; he's bitter that I don't care and I'm not impressed that a franchise older than I am shat out another entry.
This you? This was what I was referring to when I was saying you were being negative. You knew basically nothing about the franchise and yet automatically assume it's shit. For the record, neither do I, but I don't make judgements based off of zero evidence
Nowhere in that post did I say it was shit. In fact nowhere anywhere have I ever said anything about the actual quality of that game, I described the company "shitting out" another one because they do so every year and it's not a notable event in my book. Christ bro, Capcom will be fine without you rushing to their defense over someone on the internet being disinterested I promise. my god you are a thin skinned weepy bunch in here
Dude with how much vitriol you're responding to people with it's pretty clear you're the thin-skinned one.
And street fighter 5 came out 8 years ago, so I'm not really sure what you mean by shitting one out every year
Their average is more than one a year but okay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Street_Fighter_video_games
That's fair actually. I was looking at a release timeline of their main entries, not including remasters or the various re-releases.
I think you are depressed :/
thanks doctor i'll take that into consideration
Have you tried playing CRPGs instead of RPGs? They tend to be a lot less heavy on grind and crafting, and the combat systems are usually much more fun IMO (though I totally understand if you're not into that style of combat).
Diablo 2, skyrim, oblivion, the witcher 3... all felt like having a crappy boring job where i have to interact with people i don't like all day and nothing really feels worth doing but i gotta pick something and do it anyway. it also doesn't help that 90% of the genre is indistinguishable tolkien knockoff worlds either making no effort or trying way too hard to stand out as unique and I'm beyond sick of that crap.
Those aren't CRPGs. I'm talking the likes of Baldur's Gate, Divinity: Original Sin or Shadowrun. Completely different gameplay.
I looked up CRPG because to me it mean "computer role playing game" but apparently now it refers to top-down point-and-click games under the heading "classic role playing game", like that's any more descriptive or clearly defined. Because this disjointed, confused genre needed more vaguery in the names of its subgenres.
Anyway most of these examples look like Diablo 2 so I'm going to assume that's the type of game you mean - and I think it's the same crap from a different camera angle. I don't think I could say it's "completely different gameplay" to something like Skyrim without feeling like a liar because the loop is bang on the same.
This stuff is pretty much the opposite of Diablo. Honestly insulting that you assume that I wouldn't recognize that.
I'm sorry the terminology is so vague and inconsistent, and I'm so disengaged from "gaming" culture and behind on genre labels that I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Do you mean the genre formerly known as "point-and-click adventures", like Disco Elysium?
No, I'm not talking about adventures. Just look up some gameplay videos for Baldur's Gate 3.
bruh this looks identical to diablo. no really this is my first time seeing the game and i thought i must have typed diablo into the search by mistake. What makes it a different genre?
That's worse than saying Call of Duty and Counter Strike are identical. You shoot guns and play against other people in both, but they're significantly different experiences. You can play deliberately in COD or run and gun in CS, but that isn't what each game rewards. The focus of each game is drastically different. CS doesn't have killstreaks like in COD, and Diablo doesn't have comprehensive roleplaying like in BG3.
The top-down isometric RPG experience is what it always meant, because it's a computer replication of the original tabletop RPG experience. TTRPGs were just called RPGs, and adapting them to game format added the c, therefore becoming cRPGs.