@@DeficientMaster "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." I have suffered this old maxim as DM and I have being guilty of it as a player.
I once made a clown and chose all his sorcerer spells based on how easily I could use them to replicate clown gags (Shocking Grasp joy buzzer, Blindness pies to the face, etc...)
@@derricgreene Those are easily the best kinds of characters, both as a player and as a DM. I once played a bard that was just a nonmagical dude who worked as a personal trainer in a gym, so all of his "spells" were just training tips and motivational encouragement, maybe some energy supplements. Outright the most fun character I've ever played, no question.
I'm not quite a full-on optimizer, though at the same time Hexadin is basically my favorite build both because of its power (Being able to use my Casting Stat as my Stabbing Stat is kinda crazy) and because I am a complete slut for spellsword gish type builds and it really just handed me everything I could ever want on a platter. Edit: Which, Admittedly. That's a problem that I'm not sure how to handle it. If my magical heroic power fantasy is best brought out by a dumb optimized build, then how do I NOT do something stupid with it?
That's not always the case. For instance, "Gift of Gab" is incredibly powerful if used well, but I wouldn't pick it since I know I barely understand it and wouldn't use it properly.
You might not know it, but your advice feels very different than other Dnd UA-camrs. At least in my opinion, you bring like Matt Colville level critical thinking to the table, and it's very much appreciated. So - and I mean this in the best possible way - please keep dancing for us, video monkey.
He must know this since it seems to be the exact reason he's invested the time to create his channel and his videos. So glad that he made the decision to bring his philosophy on GMing to UA-cam!
My wife and I recently started a D&D. One of the players (being completely new to TTRPGs) chose a totally weird, unconventional build: Dragonborn Wizard; main stat: STR At first, the DM and I were like, “uhh are you sure? You might not like that once you learn how this game works…” But then I heard myself and changed course. We should let him decide if it’s good or bad. So far, he was enjoying the heck out of his character, and his character *is* awesome. Who doesn’t love a muscle wizard? After getting past the optimized “correct” way to play, I realized his character was the most interesting and memorable in our party. It’s especially easy to tell someone they’re playing wrong when they’re younger or less experienced. Just remember that they’re ALSO less funneled into certain ways of thinking. New players can be super refreshing 😊
@@cubescihist6737I'm playing a Githyanki abjuration wizard no multiclass and it works well. Armor and swords are enough to make him decent on the front lines and magic just enhances the experience. The arcane ward makes it so keeping concentration spells up easy. But most builds can be viable if you put a little time and energy into it
This resonates. A little over a year ago I got invited into a (5e) D&D group via a mutual friend. I wasn't new to TTRPGs (my first session was in '89, and I gamed extensively through high school, college, and into the early 2000s - but in all that time I'd never actually played D&D. I was joining a campaign that had already started, so my character didn't appear until episode (session) 10. I really had no idea what I wanted to play, but I found out what everyone else was playing and tried to slot into a relative void in class/abilities. Despite there already being a rogue in the party, one of the first and "stupidest" concepts that popped into my head when looking through the options was a Swashbuckler (soon to be) ex crew member on a pirate ship who probably had a higher opinion of her own notoriety than anyone else in the world. She also happened to be a Centaur, and as a Rogue, also had *no* proficiency in stealth. Or Sleight of Hand, or most of the other typical "sneaky Rogue" skills you'd commonly expect. At best she had middling combat skills, but where she truly excelled was in things like Perception, Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception. Her approach was more, "Why do all the work when I can get someone else to do it for me?" She was, essentially, more like a Bard than a Rogue, but the idea of a semi-incompetent "seahorse" amused me greatly. Despite that, I initially discarded the idea because it was "too silly", and felt like I had some weird "responsibility" to bring a more useful character to the table. She wouldn't go away though, she stuck around in my mind and no other more practical concept I could come up with connected with me as a player nearly as much, so in the end I decided to go for it. She's been an absolute blast to play, and for the longest time kept most of the other players guessing and trying to figure out whether she was a total idiot, or actually *really* amazingly skilled and just hiding it. We're 52 sessions in now and only recently have they truly started to figure her out. She's impulsive, at times flighty, reward oriented - except when to everyone's surprise - she's not. On a random whim one session (after the party seemed to find themselves surrounded by fire after each major battle) she started carrying bags of marshmallows around with her, and she's been passing them out to random people she meets as the party makes its way across the game world. It was only when she recently reached level 9 that she acquired proficiency in stealth, after being absolutely terrible at it up to this point. The in-game joke is that she *finally* realized that just because she can't see them, doesn't mean they can't see her. She constantly refers to the group's Ranger (who seems to be obsessed with trees) as, ""The weirdest Druid I've ever seen." It's something we've all just had fun with. She's so far from an optimized build it's borderline criminal by today's gaming standards, but she's SO MUCH FUN. Not just for me, but for everyone else in the party as well, because when she runs off and does something stupid we all (including myself) only know it's either going to be an absolute disaster, or completely awesome - but it's going to be interesting either way, and that helps drive a LOT of RP. Combat-wise, yes, she's fallen into a bit of a rut, but I've viewed that as playing more to her strengths than anything else. She has a shortbow for range, but with her increased speed (50), her bread and butter is, and always has been, hit and run tactics, where she'll close to melee range, attack with her rapier, and then dash out of range again before they can counterattack. But even then, she'll be creative as needed - recently when fighting a Big Bad in a blinding cloud, she pulled the necklace of fireballs with its two remaining charges off of her neck and threw it to the ground in front of her, where she could hear the target but not see it. Anyway, I'm rambling - but YES! "unconventional builds" really are the most fun, IME. Steamrolling everything with a perfectly planned and optimized build is fun for a little while, but gets stale quickly. I love that even I have no idea how what my character does next will pan out. Heck, half the time as a player I find myself saying, "This is incredibly stupid and is probably gonna get me killed, but it's what she'd do right now", and that has resulted in some of the most tense and emotional and memorable moments in the campaign. Despite all of her flaws, or more precisely *because* of them - she's the best character I've ever made or played in all my years of tabletop gaming. The only thing she's optimized for is fun - and that was the result of taking a "silly concept" and running with it, throwing all planning to the wind, and letting the game and story drive her growth and skill choices as she gains levels. It's never about choosing "what's best mechanically", it's about "given these options and her experiences, what would she do?"
Muscle wizard is near the top of the list of things I want to play if I ever get out of the DM chair. The concept is a farmer's son who just happens to be maaaaaybe the smartest kid in a small community, which isn't saying much, but the resident hedge wizard needed an assistant and at least one parent was willing to let their son hang out with the weirdo.
@@Flyingbrickyard wow! That’s a fun ramble! It’s obvious you’re really enjoying your goofy character. Imperfect characters have so much more …character. More memorable and engaging. :) I especially felt this quote of yours: "This is incredibly stupid and is probably gonna get me killed, but it's what she'd do right now.” Our muscle wizard is the 10 yr old son of other players, so when his character approached an obvious trap with gold as bait, everyone yelled, “NOOOOOO! Timmy, DONT DO THAT! Come on! If you want to play, you have to remember you’re part of a team!” etc. Then he pointed to the (often under utilized) “Flaws” section of his character sheet, where he had written, “would do anything for gold.” I had to stop the uproar (mostly from his parents and older sister who interpreted his actions as “typical Timmy” bullshit) to commend the kid and say, “no he’s right! And it’s awesome that he knows his character that well!” So the trap is sprung. Indiana Jones bolder accelerates toward him. No where to hide, he strikes a strong man pose to catch the massive rock. Rolled 1. Flattened. DM has the death talk, and explains death saving throws. Rolled 20. Muscle wizard re-inflates like Wiley Coyote, and hops back on his feet lmao All said and done, DM awards inspiration to Timmy for playing his character well. 😂 I doubt we’ll forget that, especially Timmy!
I think one big reason players end up focusing on character builds is because that is their version of "lonely fun." The reality is that most folks spend less time actually at the table playing than they'd like due to life, work, and other responsibilities. So, most of us spend more time engaging with the materials of the hobby in our free moments alone - but that "lonely fun" is vastly different for the GM vs. players. The GM's solo engagement with the game world covers so much more - the setting, all the NPCs, the factions, the events in the world, all the mechanics, all the PCs, etc. Their portal into the game world is expansive because they're handling/creating everything of interest behind the curtain. On the other hand, a player's main portal into the world when they're away from the table is much narrower - basically just their character. I think this is why players fall down the "build" rabbit hole - that's what they have access to engage with when they're looking for some RPG "lonely fun." This is why I prefer being a GM. Both at the table and away from the table my brain needs more to stay engaged. My lonely fun is an entire world rather than just a single character. I got back into "D&D" a few years ago through a wonderful rules-light game called Knave created by Ben Milton over on the UA-cam channel Questing Beast. Having no classes was liberating because it highlighted the fun and freedom of "tactical infinity" in TTRPGs. It was more immersive as a player and a breeze to run as a GM. Because it's so lightweight it was easier to get to the table with less prep and overhead. Two thumbs up for more rules-light gaming 👍👍
echoing the "lonely fun" perspective! i'm a newer player that hasn't gotten many chances to actually play the game at a table and so most of my time engaging with this hobby that i've fallen really quickly in love with has been character creation. i felt really called out by the opening of the video because i've been so desperate to find a group to play with i've been making characters almost non-stop to quell the itch, and i already know they'll likely never see the light of day. what hurts even more is getting all these ideas for character "builds" but never feeling quite satisfied with them because they're made in a vacuum; there's no world to go by and no campaign to attune them to, so if anything they end up feeling flat
You make a good point about builds being a way for players to engage away from the table. It’s sort of a chicken-and-the-egg thing with relation to content aimed at players. There are LOADS of UA-cam videos, for instance, about the myriad ways you can improve your DMing skills, but scant content about being a better player. It’s an area ripe for exploring, I think, but we’d have to look at the engagement numbers. There are so many topics - how to support your fellow players, in game ways to show your appreciation for all of your DM’s hard work, how to engage with the campaign world, how to build a backstory that supports play at the table, roleplaying tips to make your character stand out, etc.
yep and their are even some dms that take away your ability to make your backstory or ignore it completely so the only things you have is combat growth
Great take also can we get rid of the term “ lonely fun” I used have so much fun reading or playing video games by myself or UA-cam or whatever I just hate that term it makes it feel like it’s a less valid form of fun.
I'm old school and from the 1E years. Lonely fun. I would call my existence back then as a forever DM exactly that. I grew to love my lonely fun. It was lonely though. Even if it was fun and frustrating and exhausting and wore my creativity down to exhaustion. Game time as a forever DM after weeks of lonely fun? It NEVER turned out as I thought it would. The dice disagreed with me. The players thought of stuff I hadn't expected. The 1E set was very explicit in many of the rules and there were MANY taboos to sidestep or keep holy. Halfling wizard? Forgetaboutit. 15 level Elf Magic-User? No way. Humans: Dual class. Demihumans: multiclass. That was carved into stone.
Ya know, you’re the first “anti-optimization” person I’ve seen that didn’t just respond with some variation of, “wHaT dO yOu ThInK tHe Rp StAnDs FoR???”, and I respect that. Your insight makes a lot of the changes over time make a lot more sense. Funny thing is though, I solved the problem for my group with copious amounts of duck tape lol. All of us, including me the DM, are min-maxers. In my current campaign, everything is almost as strong as they are, and we are using the custom crafting rules from Xanathar’s. I’ve seen more creative play in this campaign than many others, just because the players have the option to use new tactics, train abilities, or build equipment in response to an area’s specific threats. Overall, this prevented the “mid campaign boredom” because it was impossible to solve the game. The main weakness of this solution is that it requires a lot of time to do right. It definitely won’t be a good solution for incredibly busy people. lol that’s it for my Ted Talk. Love the videos my guy, keep up the good work👍
I'm still getting only, "I yuck your yum," just with good presentation and editing; he still talks down to people. I actually quite admire the OSR playstyle and I understand how it turns a _lack_ of rules into agency; the only thing stopping me from getting into it is OSR _gamers._ Some of them seem to be under the impression that modern games with intricate buildcraft are some sort of anomalous quicksand into which players got stuck in by accident, and if only they could pull these victims free they'd all instantly understand _true_ roleplaying.
@@ikaemos Yeah, his humor can be abrasive, but he at least provides reasons why he thinks the way he does. I kid you not, the 7 or 8 times I’ve asked people why they don’t like min-maxing, they’ve all said, “because it’s a role playing game.” No elaboration at all. At least DM makes points, even if it’s with snark lol.
@@ikaemoshonestly you summerized up a lot of my frustrations with this type of video and some of my frends who think like this. Like, people can enjoy both the RP and the G parts. Most of my characters were thought of as a concept first then build later, yet all of them came out both strong story-wise and mechanically-wise. Does it mean that "mu-mu-muh optimazations bad for ruin gaem???? And that ur BAD for makeing stronk charactor????" Of course not.
Hey. You’re really fucking good at this. I don’t know if you had UA-cam channels before this or work in video production in another realm- but you bring so much personality and knowledge to a wonderfully, tediously crafted but effortless feeling video! So just, yeah, it’s great, thanks for sharing it with us. :]
Who in the hell is this guy? He knows what he’s talking about; he knows how to explain things; he’s really good at editing; or has enough money to hire someone that’s really good at editing; all while being funny as all hell. Kudos! I’m right there with you and entertained as hell! Five stars, would recommend.
I understand your frustration! My first DM ever unintentionally saved me from builds. In 2012, when I was in 8th grade, my friend introduced to me dnd 3.5 (and partially 4e). We were exited to play together, but I had a language barrier. Everytime when they tried to explain rules to me, I was confused. So they simplified the game for me to it's maximum: I was required to tell what I want to do and roll a d20. Nothing else! I asked to be an elf druid - sure! I asked if I can turn into an animal - sure! I asked if I can do it multiple times -they said no, once a day and tried to explain the rules. I didn't understand, but I agreed. They sighed and told me that i can wildshape as many times as I can. That is when I got that spark!!! Even though I barely remember these oneshots, I remember how much FUN and CREATIVITY there was at the table CONSTANTLY!!!
This was me as Meen Meen Nups. "You're a Gungan Jedi", was all I needed at the time. Then I play a few more sessions and look up all the listed Force powers and Lightsaber related feats and now I'm using Force Slam and Force Lightening every chance I get.
It's funny, that grognard type of play you described, where every object is a tool, is _exactly_ how I like to play. My current character, a Fighter/Rogue who's going to take a few levels of Bladesinger Wizard next, is made to do _exactly_ that: Use traps, items, tactics and general ingenuity to win. I took the level of Rogue to get Expertise in Thieves' Tools (for trap-making) and Investigation (to uncover as many monster facts to exploit as possible). In a recent fight against some witches, we tried to take them by surprise, but they noticed us and got a higher initiative. So, plan B: Set their lair on fire using oil, a lantern I made sure was lit beforehand, and Action Surge. They were busy using their lair actions keeping the fire in check and had to leave the lair to fight us. But I also really enjoy Builds. My reasons are not because I want to be a power gamer, but because they help me realise my character concept WHILE still being effective. I never stick to a build, I only take its interesting ideas and use them for myself. And to that end I really appreciate Colby of D4: Deep Dive's approach of pushing the concept to its limits, because it lets me alter it while keeping a decent level of effectiveness AND gives me the most amount of tools to use. A Build, for me, is a proof of concept. Not the character I want to play.
There is something immensely satisfying in creating a character whose toolkit reinforces their story and concept. When your abilities allow you to demonstrate the core ideas of the character mechanically and thematically. Wonderful stuff.
It’s somewhat interesting to see you describe a person as absolutely useless until they have gone up Roughly 5-6 levels of experience as they can’t do anything. Did you have this same sense of usefulness with your own education and challenges in life? Did you have to study to run a company? Did you have to learn how to create a child? We’ve lost some serious talent in our young people who don’t think they can do something without the appropriate credentials. Most of our music heroes were dead within five years of graduating college. After taking over the world. 💡
I had the exact same problem. My answer was a different ruleset. Found Basic Fantasy. Everything is free in PDF download, and if you WANT a physical book it's sold at cost. Very basic and rules light. It's not for everybody, but I liked it and as a father of 3 it worked for what I needed. Hopefully, should people hit that point, they can find the solution for them.
My suggestion is a different game entirely, instead of just a different iteration of D&D. Chronicles of Darkness, Blades in the Dark, Dogs in the Vineyard, Shadowrun Anarchy, something like that.
I second Basic Fantasy. I just started playing through the Morgansfort adventure with my wife and kids on Sunday and had a blast. I'm not a fan of D&D (specifically the IP) and generally prefer Savage Worlds as my go-to RPG, but BF seemed simple enough to play and I had a blast running my family through the first couple rooms of the Olde Island Fortress. I think my favorite thing about it is that all the players need to choose are their race, class, and equipment and they're ready to dive into the dungeon. I supplemented with a few additional races and classes, then threw them into the adventure.
I've played a few sessions of it, and honestly, while I dislike the system (due to it sharing the bones of other old school games), I did at least appreciate that I could ignore the parts I didn't like unless they were specifically relevant. My suggestion in this camp is actually Castles and Crusades, as it was just inherently more fun for me due to feeling like there was more feedback between the game and my character's abilities
"I choose TTRPGs because they can offer strengths that no other medium can emulate - and combat is *not* one of them." Fucking THANK YOU, JESUS CHRIST.
Once upon a time my sister built a druid to participate in a discord guild. She was very happy with her druid. People liked her druid's personality and quirky actions. Then, someone else built a druid with a similar concept but it was better optimised. Suddenly, my sister didn't care about her character's personality anymore. She was upset because she wasn't as useful (optimised) as the other druid. "I built my druid wrong," she said. "I don't want to play as them anymore. But I really liked this character. But I can't fix it or it'll look like I'm copying the other player. I can't do anything." She abandoned her druid. Recently, she's joined a proper campaign. And she built a druid. Guess which build she went with: her original build that was created with enthusiasm and now had a chance to live a new life in a new setting? Or the other player's build which was perfectly optimised for combat? :/ Her guild druid deserved better than this.
I'm the kind of person who will resolutely refuse to optimize a character strictly for combat efficiency. I like to be effective, of course, but I optimize my character builds for character themes and personality. I enjoy the challenge of making a character with an interesting personality and then figuring out how that works mechanically way more than I enjoy going the other direction with it, although I suspect min-maxers approach it more in the way of finding an interesting/powerful combat strategy and then figuring out how to build the rest of the character to work toward that. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a very different type of gameplay and honestly, other systems exist that can handle it much better.
I remember building a Creation Bard once. Their Performance of Creation feature lets you conjure a medium or smaller mundane item into existence. It's a very open-ended feature. I imagined that this would be fun because I could make almost anything I could think of! I imagined having fun solving the DM's traps with a random broom, navigating roleplay by conjuring sentimental items for NPCs. I imagined it would make combat more exciting because I could create cover. I could barricade doors. I could always have just the right tool handy. I hated it. I did none of those things. EV-ER. Because when you take the guardrails away and ANYTHING is possible, I have no idea what to do. I was never sure how to use Performance of Creation, and by the time I had thought of something, if I did at all, a safer option had already presented itself. I just retreated into the reliable, the safe, the mechanically justified: Bardic inspiration. Vicious Mockery. Song of Rest. I knew how to use those things. The open-endedness of the subclass made me like it less than any other subclass I've ever played. All this is to say, for some people, guardrails enable the fun. They let us know what's possible and help us organize the possibilities that otherwise would just overwhelm us.
I feel this happens a lot with the minor illusion cantrip lmao Everyone is always saying how versatile it is, but I have yet to see a player (I've played with) use it for anything that isn't getting cover.
@@alanmiraanime I played a Descent into Avernus campaign once where my warlock had the invocation that gives at-will Silent Image, and she used it once to conceal dead bodies in a destroyed temple from someone who was already very nervous about going in, but was helping the party navigate. Kept the person from being any more hesitant than they already were; idk if it had any mechanical advantages, but it was fun RP. I've also used that same invocation (plus Minor Illusion) with my current sorcerer/warlock for telling stories of the party's exploits in a tavern complete with visuals and sound effects, for showing people what enemies we fought, and once for creating an illusory box in an alleyway to hide inside when we were being chased. It's hard to use for mechanical effects, but it's a lot of fun for roleplay.
Same! Honestly, I didn’t even fully understand my feelings on this until this video. Now understanding them, I am going to try something new: I am going to get a group of players together, tell them about the world(its magic, technology, gods, etc), and tell them to have a very good understanding of who their character is. I will give them each 6d6s, and then whenever they need to roll, what they are doing is described, and then they determine how many dice to roll, coresponding to how good they think their character is at that task. The rest of the table, and especially the GM, is there to double check them, and make sure they are consistent. The GM sets a difficulty for the action by determining the “depth” and “width” of the task. The depth is the number that a die has to roll above to succeed, and the width is the number of dice that have to succeed for the player to succeed. I think this needs a good deal of maturity and experience from the players and the GM, but it forces players to think outside the box because there is no box to think inside of. It also allows for players to tell stories with their characters rolls by adjusting(usually subconsciously) the number of dice they roll for certain actions(with GM supervision). I don’t know if it will work well, but it seems to address both my problems with the system limiting player creativity and the players limited ability to affect the dice to tell their story.
As a Pathfinder 2 GM, I see a curious phenomenon among people deeply engaged with the game: The printed rules are treated as gospel. It's very strange to me, as I saw the big advantage of a rules-heavy system like Pathfinder to be that I can referee the game buffet style without needing to go hunting down a bunch of supplements or trying to be consistent about whichever homebrew rules I pulled out of my ass mid session. That extends to the feats system for character advancement. There are a handful of feats in the game that seem to indicate that you need to take them in order to have access to certain basic actions or abilities (I'm looking at you, shield block), but most of them just seem to give you a bonus to doing things. Gain proficiency in X. Great! That suggests that anyone can attempt X, but without a proficiency bonus. Perfect. And for those abilities that are binary options (you know who you are, shield block), I've just started gating them behind a reflex check. It hasn't caused any issues so far. But yeah, I see the appeal of rules light systems when people seem to treat first party rules as the word of god, rather than the opinions of the developers with respect to best practices.
As someone who's only getting into D&D now, this video is super helpful. Having seen the optimised builds videos, I can't say they appealed to me very much. I can't imagine playing a role-playing game and making character build choices centred on optimisation rather than what your character would want, even if it's somewhat sub-optimal. Just found your channel, and I absolutely love it, been bingeing all your videos
The stupidest thing about builds is they are so theoretical and don't take into account that in order for your power to 'really COME ONLINE' at level 12 you'll have to be playing a game for maybe a year+ with a set of mechanics you have no real attachment to and half functional power combos that won't do the cool thing you want them to do for another 6 months, that's the main reason I've seen these build-monkey types get incredibly bored. They didn't come up with it themselves, they just followed a guide online and they barely understand it
@@PlotsAndPoints this is why I like complexity in character creation (haven't played yet but Pathfinder seems good for it). Otherwise, I like a simpler, lighter rule set.
@@robertschroeder9858 Pathfinder is not nearly as complex as people make it out to be or as crunchy (at least 2e); it just has a lot more options. This _can_ be crunchy optimization but it's far more built around being able to express a character in so many ways. It's great.
The DUCKTAPE analogy! Thank you! I am so tired of people homebrewing the crap out of D&D to the point its not D&D anymore but that they will not even try any new RPG system because its not D&D.
A big whole in this video, which I wish you cover, is the adventure style itself. What the table concentrates on. If combat is taken out, what would be the majority of time in the session be taken up by. It’s maybe themes like Blades of the dark, a lot less combat and more thief guild missions from Skyrim. A more social/intrigue/faction play session? Please make a video showing what Would be happening for 3-4 hours if combat did not time sink. Paint me a picture mr piano man, paint me a dream
That all depends, but in games where there has been 0 combat, I've done everything from spend 4-5 hours in a near real-time conversation with NPCs (usually at important parts, like talking to a ghost for a quest, or interrogating the BBEGs right hand man.) to doing weeks of downtime and RPing multiple small scenes with every party member doing something different. It could also be skill challenges, like a whole puzzle/trap dungeon, or chasing down, tracking and trying to capture a bounty.
The simplest answer here is more encounters. If each encounter is taking 45 minutes to an hour, imagine all the stuff you could get done if each encounter only took 5 to 10 minutes.
There's this thing called role play. My current group I DM just had their first combat in 4 sessions. Plenty of dice were rolled in each session but it wasn't focused on fighting, it was focused on being in the world and figuring shit out as their characters.
DuDe, i just discovered your channel. mad editting - "pressing paper buttons" - your content is entertaining and inspiring AF at the same time. I pray that youll get the rewards you so heavenly crave (from the godess of dnd tubers).
I do actually like character builds, but only when they’re focused on playing out the fantasy of a certain character instead of trying to break the game. For example, I create characters to learn the rules of RPGs, and made one in Vaesen yesterday. I wanted to make a pugilist/boxer character, so I focused my efforts on doing that while also thinking about what else a character like that could do. The build was really good at unarmed fighting, but not to the point where it broke the game (I think, haven’t played Vaesen yet but it’s on my list) because that’s the fantasy I wanted for my character. I like builds because they can differentiate a character and showcase their personality through how they fight. I hate multiclassing for the same reason.
Yeah, there's a difference in trying to make THE BEST CHARACTER EVER and just having a specific vision in mind and trying to do that vision particularly well. In a current game, I'm playing a pugilist boxer/wrestler whose also a tank. Obviously I want to pick feats to be a good tank because my character is supposed to BE a good tank, but it's also important to remember people aren't defined by one thing so she has stuff unrelated to tanking to round her out.
@@amelialonelyfart8848 The pugilist class by Benjamin Huffman? Thats one of my absolute favorites! Played the dog subclass one time and had a lot of fun.
Literally the type of character I've been working on, tanky grappler/ pugulist that I'm focusing solely on that fighting style, which I worked into his BG. And the main thing I love about my dm is that he allows homebrew stuff, like I usually enjoy perusing the dnd 5e feat wiki to find specific types of feats that can make my character both a beast in combat but also fun for role play or passive buffs like a +5 on passive perception bc he's been on the run for decades and got a habit of being more paranoid type of thing
This is funny, because I've seen the exact opposite complaint within MMO forums about Theme based class design verses role optimization based class design. For those wondering, most of its coming from Guildwars 2. "E-spec sucks because other E-spec does the same thing with less steps". And it got worse over time as more of the old WoW/WoW-clone player base made their way into game, along with some of the Ex-Blizzard Raid designers. Every class in the game is pretty flexible from a role perspective, but Raids ended up codifying roles build metas, due to several buffs that started out unique, but ended up being distributed to each class. So in an ironic twist, by giving each class access to similar group buffs, it ended up making specific classes "better" at the job, and causing alternatives to be ignored 90% of the time. It ignores so much of what the game does well, because Raids are too focused on total DPS output; which in turn causes the meta to get hyper fixated on things that boost DPS metrics. And to break that habit, you'd have to design class specific side mechanics for the raids..... which eventually get broken by players figuring out a design flaw, or the class itself changing in a balance pass. I can't express how sad this makes me, because when the game first added formal raids 2 years into its life, the singular meta Tank build came out of the Mesmer, which is famously a top PvP duelist class, due to strong 1v1 capabilities. It didn't even need a healer to back it up, since it just avoided taking damage. But whats most insane, and why I love bringing it up, is that the Chronomancer E-Spec (designed and added specifically for Raids), exposed a design flaw in conventional Raid Comps that enabled 1 Chrono Mesmer to compress 3 roles into one build. Boss Tanking, Group invulnerability (aka Panic button), and group DPS increase by way of 2 AOE buffs, Quickness (Attack Speed) and Alacrity (Cool down reduction). It was supposed to be a support build that only really added Alac and Quickness; but since the core trinity designs demand a Tank to control the boss, it makes sense the class that was already good at avoiding damage in 1v1 scenarios would be a competent tank.
@@freelancerthe2561 I mostly agree tbh. As much as I like unique builds, I very much prefer most of your abilities come from a central class or other defining set of features. I drastically prefer TTRPGs with classes (and especially lots of classes) because it makes your character unique and gives them a niche. I think character expression works best when a character falls under the banner of a class while having some variation under it (which is something 5E actually does really well with its subclass system). It’s also a reason why the new edition isn’t looking very promising, since they’re marginalizing all the classes and giving them copy paste features like extra skill proficiencies and whatever the hell the weapon mastery system is.
Ah yes, my skill proficiencies choices are definitely tailored for combat, I shall now roll survival to know which parts of the manticore are edible all while I'm fighting it, this will allow me to grab a bite before my turn ends.
Pathfinder 2e GM and player here. My last character was a thief rogue who died and became a ghost. This meant that I had to spend 10 minutes picking up anything, meaning I could almost never steal anything. It. Was. Amazing.
DMs hate builds and not for the reasons many players think. It has nothing to do with winning encounters or butthurt combats. Players tend to tunnel into it, effectively boring themselves. The first time, having your sorlock do 100 damage per spell at level 5 feels great, but doing that every single turn, every single encounter gets old really fast. In my 15 years Dming, not a single of thos characters has seen a full campaign. They are not really characters, but gimmicks.
On the topic of character optmization, even though I'm waaay more of a player interested in creating a nice story, most of my tables were alongside newbies or first-timers, so while creating my character I've usually felt like an optmizer since I've knew more about the system and there was some things I'd never pick up since I know they're useless/don't work well. Then, one day, I played a oneshot with a friend where I showed up with a fun and interesting character but with well tought sheet thingies; meanwhile, this friend's friend was presenting his character and he had like 3 different classes, where he stitched a chaotic backstory as to make some sense of that, all of that so... He could heal a lot of HP with Goodberry using feats of said classes. When he explained that I was like "Oh. OH. So apparently I've never been an optmizer at all." I had no problem whatsoever with that, but I couldn't help but wonder why he was doing all that effort and spending time to play a TTRPG when he could obtain a better result just playing any RPG game on a computer or console.
Rules light(er) Systems I like: Cairn by Yochai Gal Grok?! by Lester Burton Shadowdark by Kelsey Dione Snomes by Firith Studio Dragonbane by Free League Beetle Knight by Jim Hall Mouseritter by Isaac Williams
Brilliant vid as always! I’ve been having a lot of fun with 5E atm after 2 home brew rules. The first is long rests only being available in cities and inns which completely changes any ‘balance’ seen in online builds since everyone’s resources are stretched over a much bigger time period. The second is using ‘hero points’ whenever player do anything cool or creative. Hero points can be spent in varying quantities to let players bend or break the rules to actually do whatever they want. They reset to 1 at the start of each session so everyone’s encouraged to use them as often as possible. In my game it’s helped bring back some of the creativity of those early days we all long for.
Hmm I like the first idea, I guess for a city campaign the characters would only be able to rest where and when it made sense and was safe to do so. Not sure if this is the same thing, but this is from page 264 of the DMG. A player can spend a hero point whenever he or she makes an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw. The player can spend the hero point after the roll is made but before any of its results are applied. Spending the hero point allows the player to roll a d6 and add it to the d20, possibly turning a failure into a success. A player can spend only 1 hero point per roll. The second part also reminds me of the 5e variant rule called "Plot Points" on page 269 of the dmg.
@@FringeFinder I’ve defo not seen those rules thanks for pointing that out! I will have to crack out my dusty dmg and see if there are some cool improvements I can make to the way I’m using hero points in my game
Simple solution: Roleplay. It seems you see builds as taking away from the fun instead of being part of the fun. Obviously the point of optimization is to make a battle strong character, but that doesn't mean you can't roleplay. You can be a powerful character while still roleplaying, they aren't mutually exclusive. Even high levels can be fun with the right planning, look at Tomb of Horrors, it challenges the minds of players instead of the skills of characters. It's a tabletop roleplaying game, roleplay is as much of a part as fighting monster.
It really goes to show how true "The Danger of Skills" article really was considering how often people forget this. I mean, just look at 4e and how often people say you can't roleplay there because.... because.. Well somethings supposedly gone... or maybe something's too noticeable??? No one ever really elaborates on it, they just kinda say it
Whilst I agree to an extend, it does simply boil down to this: Every person has their own preferences about what to get out of a game of DnD, you just gotta find people that have those same big lines in common. Love party dynamic RP and social encounters? Play with similarly minded people and DM, the internet is here it's easier to do so than ever.
I don’t mean this perjoratively but you really might just have more fun playing a war game. Some of them have continuing narrative for a whole war, and you can make a whole backstory for your army. You’ll know *for sure* that your opponent has the same goals as you for the session even if you make a backstory and they dont
@@andrewenderfrost8161and I'd reply that :not everyone wants to deal with an army , some people want the fantasy of the skill focused single character who is an expert due to the math elements ...the idea it's got to be a war game who fulfills this role is simplifying the views of ops /others and forgetting not everyone wants to play pvp but pve with ever increasing odds. I say this as someone who's very much into the T'au but not into the fact that the meta of war games have them focused to units I don't like at all and that I have to pay or print in order to use instead of *Puts down a single figure* here's my fire caste warrior who's stuck in a crazy situation where he has to get back to his sept after accidentally getting trapped on ship that got shot through the warp to the other side of the galaxy from T'au space, I'm here with a sister of battle, a guardsman who was about to be up for inquisitor and a mechanicus...and did I mention the system we find ourselves in is one of mostly Ork and Tyraids battling with some Eldar presence? Mind you that's my custom hack of Rogue Trader with a touch of Only War
I'll do you one better- Literally just play something else. Since 3.5ed D&D _specifically_ has encouraged this sort of thing. Want to avoid it? Play literally any other RPG (that isn't Pathfinder) and go ham.
Ive wondered why i was doing less stuff and building so many characters for 5e that i never get to use. You've managed to express something i hadn't figured out i needed to be said to me. Ive played a little 2e and can honestly say the difference in character agency is night and day between the two. For instance: i play an elf cleric in 2e............. he wrangled a giant spider with his bare hands and nothing in his pockets except a crappy sling made from his own ripped up prisoners clothes and two rib bones from a dead orc skeleton he found earlier in the labyrinth. That spider became an mvp named Larry that i had to hunt for so he wouldn't eat the party. Saved our asses many times. My cleric in 5e? Cast lightning bolt/ heal the party, cast lightning bolt/ heal the party so on, and so on, and so on. They are Not the same. That's one more reason i prefer monks in 5e. Or as a bard I can at least add narrative and poetic justice to outcomes instead of the same thing over and over. If you read this far, you rock.
What a treat and worth the wait! A 17 minute video!!! I got super excited when I saw that, and you did not disappoint, sir. It must have taken you forever to plan, animate and edit. Thank you for the opinions, the knowledge and the fun!
Games that I’m currently playing that fix this issue Old school essentials Cy_borg Mausritter Dragonbane Best part is…. The prep for any of these games is fast and done at the table. And making a character is sooo fast if someone wants to sit down with us …. They just do. And they are playing in a few minutes
Building on this for anyone else who's scrolling for game recommendations. Most of what I've listed below is what I have laying immediately around me, can be had for free or very little to get, but please consider supporting these creators. Shadowdark: 5e "inspired" old-school gameplay. Pretty hard NOT to know about this one at this time Cairn, Runecairn: The first is generic, the second is dark-souls and norse-inspired. Both are 3-stat booklet games that offer a LOT of room for creativity. Liminal Horror: Modern/scifi/horror gameset. 3 stats and no waiting. Mothership: 4 stats, 3 saves, sci fi horror. There is a massive market of community-made stories, settings, adventures, etc. and most are two-sided, trifold adventures that can be read in one bathroom break.
I will also add the Weird West TTRPG, GUN. Very different from D&D, but brings a lot of interesting and fairly unique mechanics. GUN is also rather fast to start, as little prep is needed for each session, and character creation is largely randomized by design.
I would recommend the old D6 system (D6 Fantasy/Sci-fi/Adventure, Star Wars D6) Also, running a TinyD6 game with my kids now, which is super-simple but also helps them with the "me-sa can do ANYTHING?!" 😁
I love power building, but you make a lot of good points. As a coming college freshman with time on my hands I’ll probably keep making builds. But I’ll never forget what my new player did in the games I ran. I’m usually stuck as the forever dm in my group, so I tried dming for my high school dnd club. I will never forget the ideas of “could I ride my magic missile down the castle walls?” or “Can I eat the tree?”. The ideas are so stupid most of the time I was like “sure screw it” cause like, removing an enemy’s toupee with your character’s tail is hilarious, and sure they’re demoralized so you get advantage. I only wish to bring the same chaotic energy to the table as a player in the future.
My two big problems with 5e are: - The gaps in DM tools. We're talking really basic stuff like suggestions on when/how best to give out magic items, and also their costs in GP (arbitrary ranges suck) - DM traps. 5e stopped doing the "Ivory Tower" game design of previous editions on the player side- but hidden throughout the DM material are things that feel *made* to warp your game. Flametounge is #1 to me; because it's so unassuming as an "uncommon" magic item; but it nearly *doubles* the damage output of any martial that picks it up- it's like having haste always on, or having smites always on, or being 5 levels ahead of the damage curve. Play BG3, and realize that for all the broken shit in that game, they still don't have a Flametounge. The Everburn Blade is *the best* weapon until you find another weapon with bonus damage- and that's only a d4! And Larian "gets away with it" because they know most players have a quick save before a fight- and therefore they aren't afraid to TPK. Live DMs meanwhile have to live with the warp no. The only alternative is to warp all the rest of the players, or remove the Flametounge from the game somehow (maybe even ooc)
There is exact prices for the rarity of items. Its in XGE and its not just ranges. Also flametongues aren't uncommon magic items they are rare and I know you don't play the game cause we know that the fucking Dragon wrath weapons are better. Take a flame tongue but make it radiant or force or any other dragon breath type damage and once per day allows the player to do a cone attack for basically a breath weapon damage on crit 5 damage of the type oh and +1 to +2 to +3 to hit and damage. BG3 also is more like 2014 5e than anything it plays like it. It plays like D&DNext rather than 5e proper.
@@WhyYouMadBoi My bad, they're rare not uncommon. They're still far lower rarity than they suggest. I don't play the game? I've played it since it was D&DNext- I was off by one rarity, chill. Point is- there's a lot of magic items of higher rarities that don't multiply damage. The equivalent rarity Dragon Wrath still only does 1d6+1 extra damage, plus the critical effect. That series is also more like an artifact, because of how it upgrades...
Funny enough when I got some good rolls one day and told my DM I planned to make a half-orc wizard (End up as an Artificer/Wizard multiclass, mostly for Art profs) he was like 'go for it'.
11:12 Complete games are better and less profitable. Games like Blades in the Dark or World's Without Number give you all the tools you need in the base game. You see less optimization and content online for them because it doesn't need to be created. For this reason, good and complete games don't advertise themselves as well because because once you have them you don't need to go online for help.
You have never gotten over your optimizer ways. You still see doing something that isn't optimal as something not worth doing. Being free of this means taking bad actions, even when you recognize them as bad actions, because they make sense or make a good story. Limitation is sublime and ultimately, human.
Man, this is something I’ve been trying to put into words for years, and you’ve done it while also being absolutely hilarious! I’m definitely adding this to my short list of “RPG content that legitimately shifted how I think about my games”
This is why I only play with the core rules and a bunch of homebrew. Players be pulling races out of some obscure book and now they can teleport, read minds, and are immune to bad dice rolls.
Great video! I can't imagine how long it took to make a 17 minute video with the amount of editing you put into these beasts. One of the perks of having players who don't speak a lick of English: I'm pretty sure none of them have ever heard the word "hexblade". It's great. They pick the elemental adept feat and go "WOW THIS IS SO STRONG, HOW IS THIS EVEN ALLOWED" and I'm over here, cursed with the knowledge of what lies in the deepest parts of the abyss (reddit), and I'm like "Yes it is, baby boy, you make sure you tell yourself that every night before you go to bed. Do not ever succumb to the temptation of peering beyond the veil. For it will break you, and everyone you love." And since you asked UA-cam friends to make recommendations: in horror games like Call of Cthulu, as well as in the OSR sphere, your skills aren't "what you're good at" so much as they are "stuff that maybe won't get you killed instantly if you're lucky". Even if you're proficient at something, you *generally* don't want to be asked for a roll, because rolling is, in and of itself, a fail state. And that changes the way people approach those games significantly. Because when you can't rely on having a +14 auto triple advantage +1d4 guidance + lucky feat + silvery barbs on every single ability check... You're going to want to explore all of your other options first. You're going to ask about what's in the room, and interact with the world in an immersive way. Your character sheet isn't a video game menu showing you what your different moves are anymore. If you want to know what you can do, you're going to have to talk with a human being.
My laptop was begging for the coup de grâce. The roll as a fail state is exactly what I look for anymore. I still play around with the modern systems because I play these games with friends first and foremost & I'm not too high and mighty to play what they want, but when you're playing at my table, we're playing a game that involves conversing with a human being within the game's fiction 1st and looking at our character sheets for what to roll 2nd.
@@DeficientMaster I absolutely agree that some systems (especially D&D 5e) can be extremely restrictive. That said, I've found myself a bit frustrated with the OSR approach of rolls as a failure state: I could not really enjoy the character I was playing. Our characters "won", but I realized I didn't actually care about them. I'll explain: the few times that I played OSR, I put myself into the practical, creative mindset that is expected for that type of play, to think outside your character sheet and so forth. And it was effective. We did come out on top. We did solve problems. We did "win" the scenario. But I always felt that I did so by using my own skill as a player and nothing that was particularly unique about the character I rolled, so it didn't really matter who they were. You might say that should not matter: every character is unique, it depends on how you roleplay. And it would be true. But I'm talking more from a gameplay perspective: if I always have to think outside the box, then it doesn't matter what's inside the box, so I will always approach the game in the same way independently on what is inside the box. And at that point, no character feels unique, or something I can look at and say "wow, I can't wait to play as that and tackle the game from this very unique perspective". Because yeah, I can roleplay whatever character I'm playing as. But let's not kid ourselves: a lot of the time spent playing any RPG will be spend staring at problems and trying to think of solutions to go around it. If character skills are relevant, your character will inform how you can approach a problem. If they are too relevant, they will give you only one good way to approach a problem, which is bad. Personally, I'd like to strike a balance between open systems where everything is up to the imagination and closed system with codified rules for everything, a game that is open and where rules can force you to focus on some areas where your character is good at, but at the same time the rules should give you tools that you can play with in ways that might not have been obvious or that you otherwise would not have assumed your character would be able to do.
I am a DM for my home games and while I do homebrew a couple monsters or items here and there, when it comes to actual gameplay I reward my players for creative thinking, a recent example is they were in an abandoned town in the snow, there was a snow golem so they stole the alcohol from the tavern, covered the tavern in it and let the tiefling lure the golem into the tavern before setting the tavern on fire, weakening the golem and allowing them to kill it in like 2 turns, all you have to do to stop players focussing on making their characters as combat efficient as possible is allow and even reward other options think Undertale pacifist vs genocide runs combat will give this bonus and talking out of the situation will give this other bonus or something like that, it's more of a choice to the players than see enemy, kill enemy. This works at my table and encourages more roleplay than combat which is much appreciated by everyone as combat can take a god awful amount of time especially if your players don't know what they are going to do two turns in advance.
Really good video! I started with 5e and this is a big reason why I’ve given up on the system after about playing it about six years. Initially, it started out fine but then, as mentioned, we all saw “the code” and went from there. Over the years, it felt like I wasn’t challenging them as players, I was just competing with the numbers on their character sheet, especially at higher levels. This burned me out overtime (and 5e is the big thing, so I couldn’t really switch easily) and ever since, I now default to Fate Core RPG, as I prefer games that emphasize who and what the characters are and seeing their actions have impact.
@@surprisedchar2458 It's a very flexible and fluid system. The best way I'd describe it is "Movie Logic." The game focuses more on who and what the characters are as they do their actions. You only focus on what needs to be focused on. Compared to Fate, 5e is more of a resource management system which gets worse at higher levels for the DM to challenge.
My friend who introduced me to TTRPG didn't even had any rulebook, he had a scenario and did some very basic rule that would supplement that scenario. Our character sheet was basically a name, a background story, a like 6 or 7 skills and few item will would start off with that the GM agreed on before. Very basic but honestly, it was just fun because we could really do whatever we wanted. We had our story hook, a few basic location that was drawn on a map and he would describe shit on the fly. Most fun I had in years.
My old D&D games had so much crazy homebrew that the combat became more like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure than it was... how everyone else does D&D. Two of the villains had an instant kill mechanic. It was so fun and creative I dont think less rules is inherently better. You just need the rules and mefhanics to be applicable in the widest array of possibilities as you can. Now we play a low power post apocalyptic ttrpg of my own design. My players are building all kinds of wonky stuff.
This is why I started leaning into rules-light homebrew systems as I got more experience DMing. Once you have a grasp of how something vaguely "ought to go" you can make a ruling on the fly and move on pretty easily. Jumping through technical hoops just complicates the process and distracts from developing an actual character.
YOU are the DM, YOU determine what is important at your table: Scenario 1: My sorcerer level 1 enters a room filled with evil goblin. I know that none of my spells will allow me to kill them fast enough before they kill me. So I ask the DM if I can lie to them and convince them that I'm a new guard that the BBEG hired to protect the dungeon. as the DM you can : - Ask me for a deception charisma role and base the DC on the chart offered in the PhB (5= very easy, 10=easy, 15= medium, 20= hard 25= very hard and 30 = nearly impossible), determine that goblins are easy to trick so the DC should be 10 and let me roll. You know that if I roll a 5 or more I will succeed but it's fine, I'm a charismatic sorcerous I should have a good chance for success. - Ask me for a deception charisma role but since you know I'm a sorcerer and I have a +5 you will make this a challenge and crank the DC to 15 - No you were planning for a fight here and their no way the goblin will listen and they shoot on sight any PC. If you choose option A gratz, you show me that I can actually do anything I want in your game and I might try various things in the future. No need to hyper-specialise in one specific thing, and I will try various solution in the future. If you choose option B, well sure I can do anything but I'm better to hyper-specializing in whatever I do because the DCs are ridiculously high, so yes I might dip 3 levels in eloquence bard for that expertise on my deception and the silver tongue feature. If you choose option C, well yeah social is useless in your game, if I meet a monster I need to kill him before he kills me, you show me that there is no alternative way to go around a problem, it's kill or be killed. It's you the DM who need to show me that I do not need my optimized build in order to play in your world. If I try something that you didn't expect, give me a chance to succeed at it. Yes if the only solution to your encounter is to kill them before they kill me, yes I will bring my fighter/paladin build who can dish out 500 damage on round 1. But show me that if I explore the dungeon I might find a ritual cercle that will weaken the BBEG, then by talking to some monster they might help me and open a door or tell me when the BBEG sleep, once I reach the BBEG while he sleep without his sword nor his armor, show me that talking to him I can convince him to accept to become our prisoner instead of fighting to his death show me that all the 3 main pillars are important and trust me those hyper specialized build, why would I play a paladin/fighter who only thing he can do is spend all his divine smite to power up his 4 attacks with action surge to kill the BBEG one shot, meaning I cannot use any spell to find a secret door or activate a mysterious magical circle. When actually finding that magical circle and activating it might prevent me from having all my spell slot for that nova burst, but I will discover extra lore, extra loot, a better ending, a new companion, maybe the BBEG will accept to become the blacksmith in my castle and empower my weapons, if I don't kill him one shot. The problem occurs with all those adversarial DM, who consider each TPK as a badge of honor, how enjoy gathering the tears of the player and drink them... Those DM who will always try to one up you. Oh you want to cast minor illusion to try to distract the enemies? no they ignore it and attack you directly. Oh you want to do a skill challenge to succeed a task, let me calculate a good DC, you got a high stat, and proficiency, the bard can give you bardic inspiration, and the cleric has guidance... ok the DC is 30... to open the jar of pickle and help this old lady... and if you fail she get mad at you and transform into an hag and fight will start.
I think it's important to have your character still be functional in a mechanical sense. You can flavor anything however you want, but you still wanna be able to land attacks. Nobody has fun missing every attack four combats in a row, even if your character is clumsy and a beginner.
Exactly this. I don't play dnd to play an incompetent buffoon who seems to be attacking with their eyes closed. How do you reconcile designing a character that is extremely capable both in and out of combat without optimizing? When the fantasy fails to align with the character's capabilities and performance, the character kinda starts to feel like a fraud.
But you don't need to optimise everything just to be able to land attacks. And you can definitely still have fun if you don't hit anything if it fits the character. I have a storm sorcerer suffering from amnesia and who's just an average guy other than the fact that he has storm related magical abilities who has only +2 on cha and a redemption paladin who's more of a tank/support rather than someone who deals damage with a +1 on strength. Both of them are still very fun.
I have a flavor-optimized character who's Sorc 8/ Warlock 7 in a 15th level campaign, with a bunch of other characters who are mostly optimized for various different things, and she's great! Her highest level spell slot is 4th, but 2 of them recharge on short rests so throughout multiple encounters she can keep up with the Druid or Bard for combat impact, since they both max at 7th or 8th level spell slots but have a lot less of the higher level slots. She'll never beat the Fighter/Ranger/Paladin archer or the Barbarian/Paladin for single target damage, probably, but she has the highest spell DC/attack of the party and she can cast an unnecessarily large number of mid-level Fireball spells if she wants to, so she's *great* at clearing mooks. But I usually approach character design by coming up with a concept that's exciting, and then trying to find a good way to execute that concept. I adore playing with different ways of fulfilling a character idea, and finding the one that puts the "fun" in functional.
And that's why I run my own 15 pages long ruleset. It's based off zero edition, so it's only 3 classes, and super simple. Streamlined, straightforward, rulings by me, the GM, more than rules. And collaborative storytelling at the table.
(Even) as someone who is currently building a rules-heavy, build-heavy system, this is one of the most important TTRPG videos of all time, imo. Many people, myself included, are stuck in this paradigm where we need rules for everything, and feel compelled to build around the given options. My first intro to DnD was in 3.5e, and even though I still find building characters wicked fun, I'm also so desperate to encourage players to play non-optimal builds, that a lot of the game I'm designing centers around the idea. A lot of the (potential) magic in TTRPGs has been lost as we've moved more toward streamlining and optimization, and away from talking, building, and just enjoying the human experience.
Here is a tip. If your game is about something it should either have NO mechanic for that thing, or entire complex system for that thing. For example, in a game about sneaking there's no skill called "sneak". And if there is well... The game isn't about sneaking, even if it claims otherwise.
Strong agree with every point in here, except you don't necessarily need to switch to a rules light system. You just need to switch away from D&D and D&D-likes. Or to put it more specifically, you need to switch away from games where the bulk of rules is concentrated in character options, rather than game options.
Fellas, is it bad to want a capable character? (I also hate lock dips and dipping in other classes just for a few bonuses without any justification in character) But the rest feels......quite aqusatory of something I never actually did. It's kinda why I love playing the barbarian, since I can focus on combat, but everything else is veery customizable and able to be woven into the narrative as it unfolds
You can always be a warlock mechanically without being a warlock narratively. For my hexadin I basically just flavor eldritch blast as a holy spear of light granted by their oath. I feel like people only have a problem with hex dips because of how universally good they are for certain classes. I doubt people would even care about them if they were suboptimal, but because they're optimal everyone jumps on them like they're public enemy #1, like "how dare you pick a clearly strong option, you fiend."
The 1975 Thief skill thing is misunderstood. It was misunderstood then, and continues to be so. Look extremely carefull at the Thief skills, and you will find that "Move Silently" does not mean "Sneak". It means moving with zero sound. Anyone can be stealthy, with varying results. Move slower, crawl even, leave your armor and shield behind, pick which terrain to sneak through, create distractions. But a Thief can just boogie through silently if he passes his check, and cats don't hear him. That's a big difference. Traps were defined in various ways. Players would roleplay searching, by tapping with a 10' pole, looking for tripwires or ominous holes in the walls, etc. These traps could be found by anybody!! So why play Thief? Because many traps are too well-hidden to be found by this kind of descriptive exploration, such as a poisoned needle hidden under a chest handle, or a gas trap accessible only via the keyhole of the door it guards. And Thieves have a higher success chance than anyone else to find the bigger, cruder ones like pit traps. So the Thief does these things better. Climb Walls is NOT just a generic climbing skill with varying difficulties based on surface roughness and slipperiness. Instead, anyone can climb a tree by hand. Anyone can climb a rough mountain surface and pound in pitons and secure themselves with ropes because they'll slip sometimes. But Thieves can Scale Sheer Surfaces. A slippery brick wall for example. Nobody else has a chance to succeed. And Thieves are better at climbing the easier surfaces so they can reliably free-climb, faster and leaving no evidence.
So it is a misunderstanding of the 1975 Thief that leads people to assume the Thief ability mechanics take away from capabilities non-Thieves used to have.
idk I always thought it was more like the thief always has a chance to do these things. like you said, anyone can try and disarm a trap, but a thief will always have a percentage chance of doing it. not sure if they were around in OD&D, but I know by at least 2nd ed. skills had situational modifiers so things like trees had a huge percentage bonus, but a sheer surface gave a huge penalty.
@@PandaXs1 The concept had become divorced from the initial intent almost immediately. Gary got the ideas down over the phone from the west coast gaming group who came up with it, and we actually have the original Thief from the Complete Warlock book that group made. Then the Greyhawk Supplement Thief was different, but sensible according to how people were playing back then. B/X Thief and 1e AD&D still had the original trap-finding concepts subsumed in the slow "exploration pace" of dungeon crawling at 1" MV = 10' per turn, while the full combat move was 1" MV = 10' per round. But the 1e DMG is unclear in many places. So by the time we get to 2e, there's no concept that non-Thieves can search for traps, and we just have the searching for secret doors mechanic and Dwarf/Gnome underground detection of things like sloping passages and shifting rooms. And these are all but vestigial given 2e modules rarely using them. 2e's equipment list doesn't even HAVE a 10' pole! So by 2e the old method was totally forgotten.
I agree, to an extent. I made the transition from dnd to pf2e since I like how solid the system is, which yeah codifies game, but it doesn't leave you hanging when someone thinks of something outside the box, most of the time. I like building characters, but because I like the challenge of exploring how and why the build came to be. And I am not afraid to go off of my previous path if I think its thematically apropiate during the actual game. I build my character from levels 1 to 20, and while I am subscribe to a lot of the optimizer channels I rarely build one of those kinds of characters myself. I usually grab a mechanic or an idea and build a character, not just numberwise, but roleplaywise as well. For example, I have a level 3 Inoxerable Iron Magus with Chronoskimmer archetype (free archetype variant rule) with the College Dropout background, and his background is that he was a time magic apprentice that made a mistake and destabilized his timeline, and he uses heavy armors and weapons as its easier to ground himself on a timeline with their weight, and I thought of that beacuse the idea of going slowmo, just to slash at light speed with a stupidly big ass sword was a cool concept to me. And I come to find that often I prefer to just embody that character and how he relates to the world around him than I do combat (keep in mind Magus is a spellsword class, and combat IS its main focus). I ground my combat mechanics in a path so I can explore how I will reach it. I know when we level up, I will grab Striker's Scroll and Turn Back the Clock. Striker Scroll is a change I made when I saw how it performed and helped my pave a new way, with my Magus studying scrolls and how to apply them to his spellstrike so his mind can be free to control better his timeshenanigans, leafing to his Turn Back the Clock feature. But in the end, we can play however we want.
Exactly. I find it disingenuous that when he describes a bloated system, he refers to Pathfinder. He's right when it comes to Pf1e, but he's incorrect about Pf2e, which has been around for several years now. Talking about ttrpg complexity and referring to Pf1e is like trying to advise a current dnd5e player about problems only Dnd3.5e had
I really appreciate you opening up the comments to RPG recommendations at the end there! A lot of people get angry when you suggest another game as a solution to a 5e problem. It sounds like you might really enjoy Dungeon World! Or maybe another game in the PbtA family. The core appeal of those games, to me, is that they rip the tactical war game out of the roleplaying game, leaving just the roleplaying part. That really fun “meesa can do anything?!” element of RP, where it’s just a conversation between you and the GM with the occasional dice roll? That’s how **everything** works, including combat.
As a GM I absolutely loved running Dungeon World, how it puts "fiction" before "mechanics" and also how it keeps GM on their toes by forcing an active resolution of players' failed rolls. The players though, they were like oh no where are my builds. They didn't get the point at all.
People get angry with suggesting other systems because some just don't want to play other systems. They are happy with 5e on the whole but may have one or two issues with it.
Agreed, I've been running PbtA games for a while now and they are much more fun for me as a GM. Highly recommend everyone to at least take a look at them.
@@kimitsudesu Yeah it is a very very different philosophy of play. Even as the GM it can be hard to switch over. I think it’s something the whole group has to be very intentional about.
Back when I played Starfinder, one of the fun things I did while away from the game was to look through the huge amount of options in abilities, augmentations, tools and upgrades I could eventually acquire to create something which fit what I wanted my character to be. And here is the kicker: almost *none* were to support combat, but *provide new ways of engaging with the world.* I was having the most fun exploring the world our GM build for as and defeating obstacles by outwitting the problem. The one character I distinctly remember from that game that I played was a mechanic named Cez that played like a secret agent, being able to take on the shape of anyone with a morphic skin, numerous tools for breaking and entering, enhanced vision to spot traps and oddities in the world and more! I once ran into a scenario where I was caught and all my fellow party members where shipped offworld and I was bound and thrown into a garbage compactor. I looked down on my skills and noted I had installed an acid dragon gland into my throat, so I waited a moment and burned my way through the bindings and escaped with some help of webbed feet out of the death trap. Morphing into another person as I emerged, I convinced the personnel that something terrible had happened to me (which they believed) and eventually located my stuff, which I got back by, again, outwitting my foes with the tools and knowledge at my disposal. I believe that character builds aren't the problem. It's encouraging abilities that don't broaden your choices but narrow them down along a single path since taking any other choice would be seen as suboptimal. I loved playing Starfinder not because of the zero to hero mentality, but because of the enormous number of options it provides to build a character the way you want to play! Sadly, that doesn't carry through with combat scaling and so when battle inevitably ensues, you will feel regret for not having taking any options into combat, one of the pillars of the game that likes to go into the ridiculous end of the spectrum. It's actually this "wanting every option to matter even later in the game" and "build a character the way YOU want to interact with the world" that lead me to work on my own RPG system (which I have done now on and off for about 3 years now). Let me experiment with what you are offering me, give me a bunch of tools and set me in front of a problem. Even if the odds are significantly stacked against me, I will try and think my way through to a solution! And that's one of the key things I find most fun about an RPG: *Creative problem solving*
Another genius video. Truly. Yes, some other UA-camrs have touched on these points, but your approach is holistic and critical, while maintaining balance.
Everyone should try Dungeon Crawl Classics if you are looking for rules light game that is both silly and chaotic. Warhammer 4e is a great game if you want more of a crunchy game with the ability to do builds that dont overpower an entire game. And Call of Cthulhu if probably the best game made (totally only my opinion), but not really for a fantasy genre so not always everyones cup of tea.
I use my builds like a loose guideline for I think would be useful at that time, but as sessions go on, it changes, for example, I had a Warlock/Bard, initially he was setup to only have a minimal amount of bard, but after meeting the party, he leaned more into his music than his pact, and his spell selection changed too, which made for a hilarious set of hijinks with the party Sorcerer. It's something to look back on and realize how much they've changed from the original thought you had, which I think is kinda fun to see happen.
Another amazing video that summarizes my feelings (though in all honesty it doesn't stop me from min-maxing when I'm playing unlimited 5e). This is the reason why I'm really enjoying running and playing Savage Worlds. I wouldn't call it rules lite because the code is definitely there but with it being classless, setting agnostic, and have no true path to perfect optimization it really does lend itself to a stronger player experience where they say "I can do anything?" and I really like that.
The 3.5 in me says the same thing. I still try to make my build make sense to my character but... I also love just being the very best like no one ever was
As someone who started D&D by straight-up reading through 3.5 books in high school, I think my "I can do AAAANYTHING" feeling died long before I even got into a session. Although this might at least partially be because my class of choice was ALWAYS the Gish/Spellsword/Eldritch Knight/ (insert whatever title you'd give to the powerset "guy who uses both magic and swords"). Which under 3.5 and Pathfinder meant you had a relatively small handful of classes. In 3.5 your choices amounted to... - Go through the GRUELING process of multiclassing a Caster and Martial class with the EXP penalty, so you can eventually get your choice of Eldritch Knight, Spellsword, Abjurant Champion, or maybe Jade Phoenix Mage if you were lucky enough to be in a Tome of Battle game. (There are probably more gish PrC's in 3.5 but those are the 3 I remember off the dome) And deal with the fact that only ONE of these helps you deal with the problem of Somatic Spell Failure Chance on armor, meaning no armor for you. - Pick from the even smaller handful of pre-built gish classes like Duskblade or Ye Olde Hexblade back before it was the powerhouse it would become. Pathfinder made such options a bit easier since they were a lot more plentiful. Spiritualist with its Ectoplasmatist, Skald and Bloodrager from the Advanced player's guide which served as 2 different fusions of Barbarian and Spellcaster. And the Magus, which was THE spellsword class... Except when it wasn't. This class too had the baggage of 3.5. It took 7 levels before you had access to Medium Armor, and 13 before you got Heavy, meaning that unless you were playing a one-shot or something that already started at high levels, you had to pick a Dexterity build, and Spell Combat explicitly requires you to have a hand free since it basically literally acts like you're Dual Wielding a sword and magic, meaning that the class was basically "Solved" from the moment it came out. Dervish Dance Scimitars channeling Shocking Grasps with as much Metamagic as you could shove onto it for max damage. Since it basically covers everything you want to do with it. (Which, Granted. Nothing's stopping you from making a non-optimal build here, though when you're rocking 14 AC at 6th level because you finally got a chainmail shirt, in a system where attack rolls by big monsters are around +9 or +10 (assuming +6 BAB and 16-18 in an attacking stat like strength) meaning enemies hit you on a 4 or higher, the choice is going to destroy you.) So, by the time I managed to get myself into a 5e game, I long-since understood the idea that your ability to do "ANYTHING" was a bold faced lie.
Also, as to the question of "Building out to level 20 before you even start playing". I never really build EXACTLY to level 20, though I basically knew what I wanted in my back pocket from the start because the specific combination of class abilities usually correlated to the abilities I wanted overall. For example. My admittedly Blatantly Powerful character. a Tabaxi Hexadin named Simon Dayglow. His backstory was basically that he was adopted by an adventurer who retired after doing his own world-saving quest. Then some tragic backstory stuff happened and said dad's ghost wound up possessing his Holy Avenger Wannabe Sword, transforming it into a powerful sentient weapon and a Patron. Which basically makes the fact that he starts off Hexblade and veers off into Paladin represent a basic progression of his powers. Warlocks don't have any patron for a Holy sword, only a Cursed one, so leaving hexblade after I've gotten the handful of features I want from it (And the fact that I can now have 13 strength and make it make sense that my cat is swinging around a Greatsword without needing to be built likeHe-Man) and moving into the Holy Knight Of Justice and Divine Magic to get the mechanics that better suit my flavor makes sense.
Addition 2: Like I don't mean this as any genuine animosity beyond the joking (hisses in optimizer) type thing other comments have made, but it feels like a genuine question that... My D&D Power Fantasy just so happens to be the set of abilities that some would argue should never be allowed in the first place.
well said. optimizing violence (in my experience) has never been very interesting. BUT...when players are into it banning stuff doesn't go over very well. i've found it fair in the past to let obscene build combos function in the game exactly as they are designed to work (and get really excited for the players when they go off), but to also introduce problems that just can't be solved through violence or their very very specific build focus.
That's an interesting way of letting them discover the problem themselves. Let them have their fun with their "OP" builds for a bit and then wait 1-3 sessions for them to get bored. God mode is only fun for about 15 minutes.
No matter how optimized you are, it's never "God mode." If a dm wants to challenge you, you will be challenged. Optimizing for combat doesn't have to come at the cost of not optimizing for RP. You can do both at the same time. I just want to play a capable character without glaring weaknesses that are likely to end their story prematurely. If you can't fight effectively, you're not cut out to be an adventurer and would likely not have survived to level 5 realistically, especially in a particularly brutal, high combat campaign. Different things work for different campaigns. If your players roll up to Tomb of Horrors with full combat optimization, they're going to have a terrible time. But if you roll up to a combat heavy, brutal meat grinder campaign with a twig of a Bard built solely for roleplay, you're actively a detriment to your allies.
What's really rubbed me the wrong way about 5e that took me a while to realize is more than any other games it's backbone is the DM's ability to improvise. Which, you might say is obvious but it is on a level unlike other TTRPGs. While codified skills may seem obstructive it allows players to interact and understand what everyone can contribute in an obvious way. 5e not only greatly limits this but it scales poorly for out of combat focused players. It makes rolling to convince someone to lay down their weapons either way so easily anyone could've done it, or so hard not even the Bard has good odds. The DC system doesn't translate well over to abstracting conversation. Which really sucks as someone who's played Bard for years across games as the magical support that can talk their way out of situations. I realized this when a DM running Out of the Abyss actually let me keep going after failing a dice roll to try and salvage a conversation. While it was purely on me to convince the DM at that point, it let me actually play out being that kind of Bard. This is also just one moment, there have been many that opened my eyes. The thing is though there is nothing to help DMs understand or prepare for situations outside of combat in 5e or even most TTRPGs. They just have to abstract the DC system into what feels right. 5e I just found particularly abrasive because the rules almost purely concern themselves with combat. I don't think codified skills is really the issue at its core, but if a system is going to do that it needs to create the full frame work. Otherwise it's just a bad combat simulator. If you have only feats and buffs that increase your ability to punch things, as you pointed out everything becomes crossbow. One of the whole points, at least from what I can see, of a TTRPG is too good you that framework. Otherwise it's on the DM to pick up the slack and make up everything in addition to playing all the NPCs, keeping track of the world and making the encounters. When anyone can do anything, the DM can focus a lot less on micromanaging situations as they occur. Which is great, and if we want people to shine in specialized ways with skills, then we have to have systems that actually support it. Part of playing these games is to do things we can't and we like to see ourselves excel, so a system where combat is the only thing you can excel at, that's kinda lame. Obviously, just my thoughts. People can play however they want and they can want to excel at fantasy combat as their hexsniper ranger. That is pretty dope after all.
Damn man you content is really amazing, i cant wait until your channel blows up and i can be like "I watched that guy befor he had a million followers."
12:38 My character due to nearly dying from the enemy they face (let's say for this example it's in the ravenloft setting), Sthrad, took the deal from the local necromancer who wished to rule Ravenloft and us now a warlock of the undead patron I had this situation happen in my game that JUST wrapped up , where my character almost died and called on a being they probably shouldn't have and was saved, I then naturally after leveling up took the situation we narratively made as an out for my character to live from a situation they'd probably have died from. I then made it into their build All this to say: You can do a multi class like this that reasonably works within the story , it's all about presentation and creativity. I didn't tell my DM this in advance (and even if they read this I doubt they'd realize I actually planned to multiclass before the situation happened ), I just saw the chance to do something that made sense and went for it.
@@DeficientMaster It was a situation of both though , I took a multiclass that made sense for the narrative but also saw it was the rpgbot/online build recommendation for the level . And I don't mind if you have a problem because you're not my DM and my DM has seemingly no issue with it .
My copy of Shadowdark came in recently, i think it nicely solves the trouble of skills by giving you advantage on skills that might relate to your background or class. Anyone can try to pick a lock, but a Thief is less likely to suck at it. Overall, it's a super pared down system, with descriptions for each class fitting on one or two pages.
In case anyone is wondering, he uses Peeples board game pieces, and Lego accessories to dress them up. He'll use a reusable art putty to help some accessories stay on.
One of the most important video on youtube about gdr, this is a must see video for all the players for me. I'm 32 years old, I start to play videogames at 4 years old and D&D at 8. I was inside mathfinder like you and I have all the manuals from the 2.0 (D&D). Yes, we can play however we want, but still we feel there is somenthing wrong, because when you start to play as a player and not a gm after 12 years of gm, people look you as a crazy person when you say "I just want have fun, i don't care about builds". Thank you deficient Master, because for me, this video is a master piece, hope one day I can see you, and talk, but for now from Italy it's impossible. With respect, a deficent player.
I love all of the points you make, I just want to add that I believe these things can co-exist. I find it a matter of over the table intentionality that's almost as hard to pin down as tone, but if we look at the Dimension 20 core cast for example, we can find wickedly competent players who also understand that the most important thing is the fun nutty nonsense and creativity they bring to the table. I think many players do eventually make there way to that space of freedom and creativity again, but it takes a level of reflection and party support to figure out what exactly is the fun that you play this game for.
As someone who has played DnD 5e and Pathfinder here and there for a few years and i just starting to DM myself, these videos are so helpful. After i was complaining to my friend about 5e and introducing new TTRPG players he said "i gotta show you this youtuber, you have exactly the same mindset" and he could not have been more right lol. Awesome videos!! This is what TTRPGs should be!
Your example of "warlock dips making no sense" when I made my water themed sorlock I made her patron/mermaid demigod mom an important element of the story. Sure I picked fathomless warlock because I liked the tentacle of the deep feature, but that was because I liked the idea of commanding a water whip with my bonus action. And I picked divine soul sorcerer for access to cleric spells, because it has cool water spells and healing I can flavor like a waterbending that sorcerers don't usually get. And out of the flavor text and personality I imagined I made something fun out of it. But that was fun because I made the build myself based on what I wanted from my character rather than stealing builds online with no actual thought. I like taking strong options, but I'm taking Tidal Wave rather Fireball, Hypnotic Pattern or Spirit Guardians, not because it's any stronger outside niche situations, but because watching my water sorcerer use water to kill things sounds more fun and thematic than the stronger options
See, I really like this approach. As a DM, I don’t mind if someone makes the most disgusting munchkin cocainelock with 8 different dips as long as they give me a damn good RP reason as to how they’re an artificer, warlock and a sorcerer all at the same time. Requiring narrative intention behind mechanical decisions is an excellent way to increase engagement in the game and its story and contributes to merging the combat and non-combat sides of DnD far better than a “just role playing” and a “just combat” approach, I think.
I personally make characters based off of a thematic idea or concept that I like, usually based on the world of the story, and then from there I build out my character to be optimized within the boundaries of that concept. It's the idea of limitation breeding creativity; when Crossbow Expert is strictly better but doesn't suit your character so it isn't an option, you have a lot more options to pick from that also feel thematicly satisfying. This is how I've been making characters for a while now and I've enjoyed it a lot. It's kinda like how in some in competitive games certain strong options are banned to make it more interesting. When I first started D&D I wanted to play a waterbender/character with water powers, and since D&D doesn't have much support for that, my DM graciously made me a homebrew class to suit the concept. As time went on, I homebrewed less and less, instead trying to appreciate the limitations and find a way to navigate around them to make a unique and fun thematic character. Reflavoring has become a lot more popular in the D&D space in the last year or 2 I feel, and that's where a lot of my excitement in figuring out how to build characters comes from now; trying to "make it make sense". How do I build a character with this playstyle and this aesthetic? It's kind of like Game Design in a way, figuring out what Mechanics lead to the desired Dynamics which facilitate the desired Aesthetics? It's a fun challenge! And it can often lead to a character that's fun to play too :3 I've been playing D&D for around 5-6 years now, and only in the last 2 years have I joined a couple campaigns that actually lasted longer than a few months (I've had very bad luck with long-term games fizzling out ;w;), and while one of them is kinda starting to collapse I hope I get to start pivoting my character's build based off of things that happen in the campaign, that sounds absolutely fucking AWESOME
I think the video, here, definitely is onto something, but I also don't think it's as clear-cut as presented (and I disagree that you can get the same experience - even for that level of complexity - at a video game as you can at a table; though I acknowledge that sometimes I absolutely *also* want to play a video game of that format as well: I would assert there's room for both and both can be good, if different, experiences). But over-all, a decent set of points made, and worth thinking about. One of the interesting things about codification of skill sets is that it happened more-or-less by player-driven demand and, over the course of Advanced 2e, became increasingly stratified, so that by the time 3e baked that level of specificity into the rules, it was a de facto acceptance of what had been expected for a long time anyway. You can see this in the proliferation of player's options books in 2e, the separation of kits (some of which were truly terrible) and skills (especially thief skills were part of the beginning of this change all the way back in their original introduction) and, of course, non-weapon proficiencies. Most of these things started as optional rules in 2e, but by the end of that edition, they were expectations at many tables, and no longer really "optional." This, of course, was tacitly encouraged by TSR, as it meant they sold more books. Then in 3e it started granular and into and blasting through 3.5's attempts at crackdown and codification the options just exploded into realms of impossibility (or at least improbability). The option-bloat was real and, though (like 2e before it), it had attempted to cast these options as explicitly not-guaranteed, the internet culture that developed over time came to expect that any option was on the table. This is especially true of prestige classes. And it makes sense - you bought a book, shouldn't you be allowed to use it? But with this bloat plus mechanical precision comes unexpected and unintended side-effects, and so you end up with builds that absolutely explode tables, while you end up with other builds that are almost entirely ineffectual, and you stumble across builds that are just what the game expects. And, of course, there's an endless demand for more. PF would initially clear this out, but they built in additional complexity into the base level and then things just kind of exploded from there. When 4e came along, it realized the option-bloat of 3e/3.5e (PF wasn't invented, yet, and wouldn't be until after 4e was released) was a potential problem, and both codified the math into a simpler less option-heavy format, and then proliferated those options right back in with feat- and power-diversification (much of went into a level of mathematical precision that was not appreciated by many at the time - and still isn't by most, because it's not intuitive to most players, and has a high [in fact the highest of any edition] round-to-round memory-to-play burden baked in - while 3e/3.5e/PF absolutely could get to those extremes, the game functions well without them, but 4e just kind of expected that level of commitment every round). 5e attempted to correct course pretty hard by (as many said it should, during 4e's lifetime) "flatten the math" - this, then, was the origin of bounded accuracy. But 5e also opted to de-diversify powers, going back to the 3e system of class features, but under the 2e system of "ask your GM" optional rules. It does a decent job over-all, but it obviously has its flaws, as you've pointed out... to the point where the D&D movie actively avoided following the rules, because it would have been confusing, diluted the value of individual party members, and confused an audience. (Also, as 5e has aged, it's shifted very much so away from "all creatures use the same rules" to "monsters just do what they do; players go by the rules" which sort of makes sense, but also creates a very unbalanced and inconsistent world-building experience that can feel more empty to some.) ((And also, also, they refuse to call it "5.5e" or "6e" and insist on "OneD&D" - no, wait, sorry, uh, "the 2024 revision of the game; definitely not 6e, guys, don't worry about it" which is so incredibly silly, and they have entire articles written by "it's not 5.5e" - articles that prove it really is 5.5e and also they don't know what the ".5" actually represented. Aa;ldhnfa;klfgna;klsdhfgaksdjfnh. ANYway. Ahem. Still absolutely going to look at it, though.))
it's funny because i'm having this discussion about keeping or changing our game system (adios dd5 and pf2, hello, fate and pbta) with a dm/player friend of mine... we're both having fun with our campains , but feel that the "build" problem takes over what we really want for our players: their creative inputs in our little imaginary worlds. so thank you for this video, it will definitely help us!
It is very much up to the DM as well. I once rolled a character in a new campaign. Had a lot of ideas about the character, and spend a ton of time preparing all of the RP aspects. I used multiclassing as a character choice, less than a build choice, and prioritized wisdom over constitution as my secondary stat. So what happened. A few sessions went by with one brutal combat after another, and then my character was eliminated in an almost TPK. Lesson learned. With my replacement character I still spent lots of time thinking about backstory and role playing. But I definitely also optimized for survival. Came to the table with a wizard multiclass with high AC, high constitution and lots of mobility. He wasn’t always the highest damage dealer, and often played a more support oriented role. But he definitely had a solution to survive almost anything the DM threw at us, and the tools to avoid getting pined down.
I tried multi classing once in the middle of the campaign saying it was for character reasons when in reality I wanted to have reckless attack on my Paladin then realized this goes against my entire character and came to my dm “hey can I go back to being a full Paladin ?” He said sure but I had to earn it and it led to one of my favorite role playing moments that made a huge bond between my character and another players as we prayed to my paladins god to make sure her dead brothers soul could pass peacefully after she was forced to kill him. I honestly always try to persuade my players from multiclassing just cause it always feels fake at that point.
I like Dungeon Crawl Classics "Quest for it" mentality. It's not a hard coded rule, but more of a mentality of play. Your players want to do or get something weird/cool? Quest for it. Want to play as a dragon? Quest for it. How your DM handled your Paladin was dope.
Thank you for helping re-frame some of my thinking on this subject. This is a huge problem for me, because, as a player, I absolutely loathe being herded down a preset ability track. Plus, I'm a bit of a puzzle-gamer. So it's the most natural thing in the world for me to search through rulebooks and online SRDs and figure out insane, stupid, flavorful builds that allow me to do something really cool and unique feeling... or just let me do dump trucks of damage. Problem is, when I get to the table. All I want to do is get in, and stay in, character. I hate looking up rules. It just kills all flow. I want to react to what's going on in the moment, and not have to worry about if I have a particular feat or not.... but I still want to feel like I'm winning, but thanks to my choices, and tactical mind, not random die rolls. DnD so thoroughly frustrated my dual impulses, that I set out on the madness-inducing journey of crafting my own damn RPG system. And THIS, exactly this, is one of the huge things I'm trying to solve with better game design. I've got a few answers, but there are still gaps. And you helped re-frame a bit of my thinking. So thank you very much. Love and peace. :P
This was fantastic. I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe with the head-pat graphic. If I had to name a system, it would be Olde Swords Reign or Cairn. Cairn is my ... well ... it's kind of an obsession lately. You can do anything with that system and it's incredibly simple. I'm sure you knew about Cairn before I did, though!
@@DeficientMaster nice. Olde Swords Reign is cool too. It's got the same idea as basic fantasy - pdf is free, books printed at cost, etc, but it takes the OSR mentality and builds it on the 5e SRD. It's actually really cool and the community is really giving it a heck of a go as well.
I love Cairn, but my players got PTSD from it! We now play Olde Swords Reign, and it really hits the sweet spot. Free, and compatible (mostly) with Basic Fantasy RPG, which has an insane amount of extra content.
I tried 1st back in the day and there was the issue of each DM deciding just what exactly can your character can do or not do. Is the DM being fair and consistent in their rulings ? Things were very inconsistent very different from group to group
All the OSR "rulings not rules" folks miss that back in the day that lack of mechanic didn't lead to pure beautiful RP, it led to games that were wildly inconsistent because there was no coherent means to making decisions, and also immensely bloated as each decision becomes established canon to bring up in the next argument. It's why an entire magazine existed to bring your rules arguments in front of the designers. 99% of imagined complaints about skill based systems are eliminated by the approach of: "Anyone can try to do [X], and we only need a skill check if you try to do something difficult or of the degree of your success matters", which is followed by most modern skill-based systems.
7:55 God I’ve never felt so seen by a DnD UA-camr before. This near exact situation happened to me with a ranger I played and I straight up optimized the fun out of what was otherwise a great encounter.
A thing I like doing (as a only player never dm’d guy who literally has only played dnd for like half a year), is taking characters I find suuper cool, and spend a few hours on how I can make them through dnd beyond’s character creator (I am borrowing a friend’s login for all the juicy extra content!). So far I’ve made a few, and yk what they are probably HORRIBLY optimized and just dumb, but man am I so proud, and still think it’s so cool, to have a robot sorcerer that changes his hands or parts of his body to emulate spell casting, where as in the role play side of things, it’s not even magic! Just science. It’s probably very unoriginal too, but I just love the idea. Or another character I made was a druid rouge pirate, who had this fun character trait where whenever he got scared he’d wildshape into an octopus. As a somewhat new player, I’d say this is what I love about dnd’s character creation! *now I only wish I had a place where my wacky characters would fit in, so I could experience their story unfold for myself :’)*
Unhinged and On-point at the same time?! What sorcery is this?? You are only allowed one character focus at a time! This is outrageous!! And I need more of it :D
I'm a bit confused by what you mean, it feels like it's both a complaint about how characters can't do everything because some characters can be built to be better over one specific thing and how some builds can't do everything well but that everything is actually only fighting and it might only be one way of fighting too. The crossbow example is a bit confusing, wouldn't a resistance to piercing damage be enough? If the character knows it ahead of time, wouldn't they just try to do things differently, use strategies even if it's not their best ones? Or just rely on allies that'd be better equipped to deal with it? If they'd feel left out because they can't do the only thing they're good at then they should play video games as you said cause it's also about seeing other players do what they're good at too, not just them. You did mention characters multiclassing to make up for any weakness they might have but wouldn't that either hyper specialize them or leave them less effective on certain situations than a full class character? Missa can do everything. Missa just can't do everything as well as some others can. I feel like wanting Missa to do everything well is just being an optimizer, again. The game is made to be played with others after all.
Holy crap this is BRILLIANT - the entire video. Should be required watching for everyone playing. They don't have to agree or believe in everything presented, but it most certainly should be considered. This video is a huge contribution to the community. Thank you! (Also, I think this is my first UA-cam comment, ever?)
My DM Side: 'See! We should focus on the fun, not bloated rule sets and build optimization.'
My Player Side: (Hisses loudly in optimizer)
Yeah that's not me at all. Not me at all...
@@DeficientMaster "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." I have suffered this old maxim as DM and I have being guilty of it as a player.
I once made a clown and chose all his sorcerer spells based on how easily I could use them to replicate clown gags (Shocking Grasp joy buzzer, Blindness pies to the face, etc...)
@@derricgreene Those are easily the best kinds of characters, both as a player and as a DM.
I once played a bard that was just a nonmagical dude who worked as a personal trainer in a gym, so all of his "spells" were just training tips and motivational encouragement, maybe some energy supplements.
Outright the most fun character I've ever played, no question.
I'm not quite a full-on optimizer, though at the same time Hexadin is basically my favorite build both because of its power (Being able to use my Casting Stat as my Stabbing Stat is kinda crazy) and because I am a complete slut for spellsword gish type builds and it really just handed me everything I could ever want on a platter.
Edit: Which, Admittedly. That's a problem that I'm not sure how to handle it. If my magical heroic power fantasy is best brought out by a dumb optimized build, then how do I NOT do something stupid with it?
“They all picked one of the blue ones!!!”
I didn’t expect to be personally attacked
That's not always the case. For instance, "Gift of Gab" is incredibly powerful if used well, but I wouldn't pick it since I know I barely understand it and wouldn't use it properly.
he got me again with Silvery Barbs. 😂
You might not know it, but your advice feels very different than other Dnd UA-camrs. At least in my opinion, you bring like Matt Colville level critical thinking to the table, and it's very much appreciated. So - and I mean this in the best possible way - please keep dancing for us, video monkey.
maybe Matt Colville that drank a bit too much coffee...
He's the hopped up 3 AM Matt
He must know this since it seems to be the exact reason he's invested the time to create his channel and his videos. So glad that he made the decision to bring his philosophy on GMing to UA-cam!
video monkey omg im dying hahaha
True…but the energy is psychotic. 😂
My wife and I recently started a D&D. One of the players (being completely new to TTRPGs) chose a totally weird, unconventional build:
Dragonborn Wizard; main stat: STR
At first, the DM and I were like, “uhh are you sure? You might not like that once you learn how this game works…”
But then I heard myself and changed course. We should let him decide if it’s good or bad. So far, he was enjoying the heck out of his character, and his character *is* awesome. Who doesn’t love a muscle wizard?
After getting past the optimized “correct” way to play, I realized his character was the most interesting and memorable in our party.
It’s especially easy to tell someone they’re playing wrong when they’re younger or less experienced. Just remember that they’re ALSO less funneled into certain ways of thinking. New players can be super refreshing 😊
I'm really curious now! How did the player play his Dragonborn wizard? I'm curious to hear some anecdotes and stories!
@@cubescihist6737I'm playing a Githyanki abjuration wizard no multiclass and it works well. Armor and swords are enough to make him decent on the front lines and magic just enhances the experience. The arcane ward makes it so keeping concentration spells up easy. But most builds can be viable if you put a little time and energy into it
This resonates. A little over a year ago I got invited into a (5e) D&D group via a mutual friend. I wasn't new to TTRPGs (my first session was in '89, and I gamed extensively through high school, college, and into the early 2000s - but in all that time I'd never actually played D&D.
I was joining a campaign that had already started, so my character didn't appear until episode (session) 10. I really had no idea what I wanted to play, but I found out what everyone else was playing and tried to slot into a relative void in class/abilities. Despite there already being a rogue in the party, one of the first and "stupidest" concepts that popped into my head when looking through the options was a Swashbuckler (soon to be) ex crew member on a pirate ship who probably had a higher opinion of her own notoriety than anyone else in the world. She also happened to be a Centaur, and as a Rogue, also had *no* proficiency in stealth. Or Sleight of Hand, or most of the other typical "sneaky Rogue" skills you'd commonly expect.
At best she had middling combat skills, but where she truly excelled was in things like Perception, Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception. Her approach was more, "Why do all the work when I can get someone else to do it for me?" She was, essentially, more like a Bard than a Rogue, but the idea of a semi-incompetent "seahorse" amused me greatly.
Despite that, I initially discarded the idea because it was "too silly", and felt like I had some weird "responsibility" to bring a more useful character to the table.
She wouldn't go away though, she stuck around in my mind and no other more practical concept I could come up with connected with me as a player nearly as much, so in the end I decided to go for it.
She's been an absolute blast to play, and for the longest time kept most of the other players guessing and trying to figure out whether she was a total idiot, or actually *really* amazingly skilled and just hiding it. We're 52 sessions in now and only recently have they truly started to figure her out. She's impulsive, at times flighty, reward oriented - except when to everyone's surprise - she's not. On a random whim one session (after the party seemed to find themselves surrounded by fire after each major battle) she started carrying bags of marshmallows around with her, and she's been passing them out to random people she meets as the party makes its way across the game world.
It was only when she recently reached level 9 that she acquired proficiency in stealth, after being absolutely terrible at it up to this point. The in-game joke is that she *finally* realized that just because she can't see them, doesn't mean they can't see her. She constantly refers to the group's Ranger (who seems to be obsessed with trees) as, ""The weirdest Druid I've ever seen." It's something we've all just had fun with.
She's so far from an optimized build it's borderline criminal by today's gaming standards, but she's SO MUCH FUN. Not just for me, but for everyone else in the party as well, because when she runs off and does something stupid we all (including myself) only know it's either going to be an absolute disaster, or completely awesome - but it's going to be interesting either way, and that helps drive a LOT of RP.
Combat-wise, yes, she's fallen into a bit of a rut, but I've viewed that as playing more to her strengths than anything else. She has a shortbow for range, but with her increased speed (50), her bread and butter is, and always has been, hit and run tactics, where she'll close to melee range, attack with her rapier, and then dash out of range again before they can counterattack. But even then, she'll be creative as needed - recently when fighting a Big Bad in a blinding cloud, she pulled the necklace of fireballs with its two remaining charges off of her neck and threw it to the ground in front of her, where she could hear the target but not see it.
Anyway, I'm rambling - but YES! "unconventional builds" really are the most fun, IME. Steamrolling everything with a perfectly planned and optimized build is fun for a little while, but gets stale quickly. I love that even I have no idea how what my character does next will pan out. Heck, half the time as a player I find myself saying, "This is incredibly stupid and is probably gonna get me killed, but it's what she'd do right now", and that has resulted in some of the most tense and emotional and memorable moments in the campaign.
Despite all of her flaws, or more precisely *because* of them - she's the best character I've ever made or played in all my years of tabletop gaming. The only thing she's optimized for is fun - and that was the result of taking a "silly concept" and running with it, throwing all planning to the wind, and letting the game and story drive her growth and skill choices as she gains levels. It's never about choosing "what's best mechanically", it's about "given these options and her experiences, what would she do?"
Muscle wizard is near the top of the list of things I want to play if I ever get out of the DM chair. The concept is a farmer's son who just happens to be maaaaaybe the smartest kid in a small community, which isn't saying much, but the resident hedge wizard needed an assistant and at least one parent was willing to let their son hang out with the weirdo.
@@Flyingbrickyard wow! That’s a fun ramble! It’s obvious you’re really enjoying your goofy character. Imperfect characters have so much more …character. More memorable and engaging. :)
I especially felt this quote of yours:
"This is incredibly stupid and is probably gonna get me killed, but it's what she'd do right now.”
Our muscle wizard is the 10 yr old son of other players, so when his character approached an obvious trap with gold as bait, everyone yelled, “NOOOOOO! Timmy, DONT DO THAT! Come on! If you want to play, you have to remember you’re part of a team!” etc.
Then he pointed to the (often under utilized) “Flaws” section of his character sheet, where he had written, “would do anything for gold.”
I had to stop the uproar (mostly from his parents and older sister who interpreted his actions as “typical Timmy” bullshit) to commend the kid and say, “no he’s right! And it’s awesome that he knows his character that well!”
So the trap is sprung. Indiana Jones bolder accelerates toward him. No where to hide, he strikes a strong man pose to catch the massive rock. Rolled 1. Flattened. DM has the death talk, and explains death saving throws. Rolled 20. Muscle wizard re-inflates like Wiley Coyote, and hops back on his feet lmao
All said and done, DM awards inspiration to Timmy for playing his character well.
😂 I doubt we’ll forget that, especially Timmy!
I think one big reason players end up focusing on character builds is because that is their version of "lonely fun." The reality is that most folks spend less time actually at the table playing than they'd like due to life, work, and other responsibilities. So, most of us spend more time engaging with the materials of the hobby in our free moments alone - but that "lonely fun" is vastly different for the GM vs. players. The GM's solo engagement with the game world covers so much more - the setting, all the NPCs, the factions, the events in the world, all the mechanics, all the PCs, etc. Their portal into the game world is expansive because they're handling/creating everything of interest behind the curtain. On the other hand, a player's main portal into the world when they're away from the table is much narrower - basically just their character. I think this is why players fall down the "build" rabbit hole - that's what they have access to engage with when they're looking for some RPG "lonely fun." This is why I prefer being a GM. Both at the table and away from the table my brain needs more to stay engaged. My lonely fun is an entire world rather than just a single character.
I got back into "D&D" a few years ago through a wonderful rules-light game called Knave created by Ben Milton over on the UA-cam channel Questing Beast. Having no classes was liberating because it highlighted the fun and freedom of "tactical infinity" in TTRPGs. It was more immersive as a player and a breeze to run as a GM. Because it's so lightweight it was easier to get to the table with less prep and overhead. Two thumbs up for more rules-light gaming 👍👍
echoing the "lonely fun" perspective!
i'm a newer player that hasn't gotten many chances to actually play the game at a table and so most of my time engaging with this hobby that i've fallen really quickly in love with has been character creation. i felt really called out by the opening of the video because i've been so desperate to find a group to play with i've been making characters almost non-stop to quell the itch, and i already know they'll likely never see the light of day.
what hurts even more is getting all these ideas for character "builds" but never feeling quite satisfied with them because they're made in a vacuum; there's no world to go by and no campaign to attune them to, so if anything they end up feeling flat
You make a good point about builds being a way for players to engage away from the table. It’s sort of a chicken-and-the-egg thing with relation to content aimed at players. There are LOADS of UA-cam videos, for instance, about the myriad ways you can improve your DMing skills, but scant content about being a better player. It’s an area ripe for exploring, I think, but we’d have to look at the engagement numbers. There are so many topics - how to support your fellow players, in game ways to show your appreciation for all of your DM’s hard work, how to engage with the campaign world, how to build a backstory that supports play at the table, roleplaying tips to make your character stand out, etc.
yep and their are even some dms that take away your ability to make your backstory or ignore it completely so the only things you have is combat growth
Great take also can we get rid of the term “ lonely fun” I used have so much fun reading or playing video games by myself or UA-cam or whatever I just hate that term it makes it feel like it’s a less valid form of fun.
I'm old school and from the 1E years. Lonely fun. I would call my existence back then as a forever DM exactly that. I grew to love my lonely fun. It was lonely though. Even if it was fun and frustrating and exhausting and wore my creativity down to exhaustion. Game time as a forever DM after weeks of lonely fun? It NEVER turned out as I thought it would. The dice disagreed with me. The players thought of stuff I hadn't expected. The 1E set was very explicit in many of the rules and there were MANY taboos to sidestep or keep holy. Halfling wizard? Forgetaboutit. 15 level Elf Magic-User? No way. Humans: Dual class. Demihumans: multiclass. That was carved into stone.
Ya know, you’re the first “anti-optimization” person I’ve seen that didn’t just respond with some variation of, “wHaT dO yOu ThInK tHe Rp StAnDs FoR???”, and I respect that. Your insight makes a lot of the changes over time make a lot more sense.
Funny thing is though, I solved the problem for my group with copious amounts of duck tape lol. All of us, including me the DM, are min-maxers. In my current campaign, everything is almost as strong as they are, and we are using the custom crafting rules from Xanathar’s. I’ve seen more creative play in this campaign than many others, just because the players have the option to use new tactics, train abilities, or build equipment in response to an area’s specific threats. Overall, this prevented the “mid campaign boredom” because it was impossible to solve the game.
The main weakness of this solution is that it requires a lot of time to do right. It definitely won’t be a good solution for incredibly busy people.
lol that’s it for my Ted Talk. Love the videos my guy, keep up the good work👍
I'm still getting only, "I yuck your yum," just with good presentation and editing; he still talks down to people. I actually quite admire the OSR playstyle and I understand how it turns a _lack_ of rules into agency; the only thing stopping me from getting into it is OSR _gamers._ Some of them seem to be under the impression that modern games with intricate buildcraft are some sort of anomalous quicksand into which players got stuck in by accident, and if only they could pull these victims free they'd all instantly understand _true_ roleplaying.
@@ikaemos ever thought that maybe they were right and you were wrong ? Just asking for a friend... (-; 🎯
Imagine Playing some kind of Role in this Game
@@ikaemos Yeah, his humor can be abrasive, but he at least provides reasons why he thinks the way he does.
I kid you not, the 7 or 8 times I’ve asked people why they don’t like min-maxing, they’ve all said, “because it’s a role playing game.” No elaboration at all. At least DM makes points, even if it’s with snark lol.
@@ikaemoshonestly you summerized up a lot of my frustrations with this type of video and some of my frends who think like this.
Like, people can enjoy both the RP and the G parts. Most of my characters were thought of as a concept first then build later, yet all of them came out both strong story-wise and mechanically-wise. Does it mean that "mu-mu-muh optimazations bad for ruin gaem???? And that ur BAD for makeing stronk charactor????" Of course not.
Hey. You’re really fucking good at this. I don’t know if you had UA-cam channels before this or work in video production in another realm- but you bring so much personality and knowledge to a wonderfully, tediously crafted but effortless feeling video! So just, yeah, it’s great, thanks for sharing it with us. :]
Oh wow you're like... a REAL UA-camr.
@@DeficientMasterand yet you’re still better at it after like 3 months!! 😂😂
@@DeficientMaster Brizzy is amazing 🥳✨
people would hear someone speak earnestly and from the heart and think "wow, he's a fantastic entertainer, i bet he has tons of experience acting"
@@DeficientMasteryou're so good that I bit my hand a few times.
Who in the hell is this guy? He knows what he’s talking about; he knows how to explain things; he’s really good at editing; or has enough money to hire someone that’s really good at editing; all while being funny as all hell. Kudos!
I’m right there with you and entertained as hell! Five stars, would recommend.
I understand your frustration! My first DM ever unintentionally saved me from builds. In 2012, when I was in 8th grade, my friend introduced to me dnd 3.5 (and partially 4e). We were exited to play together, but I had a language barrier. Everytime when they tried to explain rules to me, I was confused. So they simplified the game for me to it's maximum: I was required to tell what I want to do and roll a d20. Nothing else! I asked to be an elf druid - sure! I asked if I can turn into an animal - sure! I asked if I can do it multiple times -they said no, once a day and tried to explain the rules. I didn't understand, but I agreed. They sighed and told me that i can wildshape as many times as I can. That is when I got that spark!!! Even though I barely remember these oneshots, I remember how much FUN and CREATIVITY there was at the table CONSTANTLY!!!
This was me as Meen Meen Nups. "You're a Gungan Jedi", was all I needed at the time. Then I play a few more sessions and look up all the listed Force powers and Lightsaber related feats and now I'm using Force Slam and Force Lightening every chance I get.
It's funny, that grognard type of play you described, where every object is a tool, is _exactly_ how I like to play. My current character, a Fighter/Rogue who's going to take a few levels of Bladesinger Wizard next, is made to do _exactly_ that: Use traps, items, tactics and general ingenuity to win. I took the level of Rogue to get Expertise in Thieves' Tools (for trap-making) and Investigation (to uncover as many monster facts to exploit as possible).
In a recent fight against some witches, we tried to take them by surprise, but they noticed us and got a higher initiative. So, plan B: Set their lair on fire using oil, a lantern I made sure was lit beforehand, and Action Surge. They were busy using their lair actions keeping the fire in check and had to leave the lair to fight us.
But I also really enjoy Builds. My reasons are not because I want to be a power gamer, but because they help me realise my character concept WHILE still being effective. I never stick to a build, I only take its interesting ideas and use them for myself. And to that end I really appreciate Colby of D4: Deep Dive's approach of pushing the concept to its limits, because it lets me alter it while keeping a decent level of effectiveness AND gives me the most amount of tools to use.
A Build, for me, is a proof of concept. Not the character I want to play.
There is something immensely satisfying in creating a character whose toolkit reinforces their story and concept. When your abilities allow you to demonstrate the core ideas of the character mechanically and thematically. Wonderful stuff.
It’s somewhat interesting to see you describe a person as absolutely useless until they have gone up Roughly 5-6 levels of experience as they can’t do anything.
Did you have this same sense of usefulness with your own education and challenges in life? Did you have to study to run a company? Did you have to learn how to create a child?
We’ve lost some serious talent in our young people who don’t think they can do something without the appropriate credentials. Most of our music heroes were dead within five years of graduating college. After taking over the world. 💡
I had the exact same problem. My answer was a different ruleset. Found Basic Fantasy. Everything is free in PDF download, and if you WANT a physical book it's sold at cost. Very basic and rules light. It's not for everybody, but I liked it and as a father of 3 it worked for what I needed. Hopefully, should people hit that point, they can find the solution for them.
Basic Fantasy is an amazing game. I can not recommend it enough!
My suggestion is a different game entirely, instead of just a different iteration of D&D. Chronicles of Darkness, Blades in the Dark, Dogs in the Vineyard, Shadowrun Anarchy, something like that.
@@AspelShuyinsome people would rather stick to a setting or aesthetic though, and different games do different things in that regard.
I second Basic Fantasy. I just started playing through the Morgansfort adventure with my wife and kids on Sunday and had a blast. I'm not a fan of D&D (specifically the IP) and generally prefer Savage Worlds as my go-to RPG, but BF seemed simple enough to play and I had a blast running my family through the first couple rooms of the Olde Island Fortress. I think my favorite thing about it is that all the players need to choose are their race, class, and equipment and they're ready to dive into the dungeon. I supplemented with a few additional races and classes, then threw them into the adventure.
I've played a few sessions of it, and honestly, while I dislike the system (due to it sharing the bones of other old school games), I did at least appreciate that I could ignore the parts I didn't like unless they were specifically relevant. My suggestion in this camp is actually Castles and Crusades, as it was just inherently more fun for me due to feeling like there was more feedback between the game and my character's abilities
"I choose TTRPGs because they can offer strengths that no other medium can emulate - and combat is *not* one of them."
Fucking THANK YOU, JESUS CHRIST.
Once upon a time my sister built a druid to participate in a discord guild. She was very happy with her druid. People liked her druid's personality and quirky actions.
Then, someone else built a druid with a similar concept but it was better optimised. Suddenly, my sister didn't care about her character's personality anymore. She was upset because she wasn't as useful (optimised) as the other druid.
"I built my druid wrong," she said. "I don't want to play as them anymore. But I really liked this character. But I can't fix it or it'll look like I'm copying the other player. I can't do anything."
She abandoned her druid.
Recently, she's joined a proper campaign. And she built a druid. Guess which build she went with: her original build that was created with enthusiasm and now had a chance to live a new life in a new setting? Or the other player's build which was perfectly optimised for combat?
:/ Her guild druid deserved better than this.
I'm the kind of person who will resolutely refuse to optimize a character strictly for combat efficiency. I like to be effective, of course, but I optimize my character builds for character themes and personality. I enjoy the challenge of making a character with an interesting personality and then figuring out how that works mechanically way more than I enjoy going the other direction with it, although I suspect min-maxers approach it more in the way of finding an interesting/powerful combat strategy and then figuring out how to build the rest of the character to work toward that. Nothing wrong with that, but it's a very different type of gameplay and honestly, other systems exist that can handle it much better.
I remember building a Creation Bard once. Their Performance of Creation feature lets you conjure a medium or smaller mundane item into existence. It's a very open-ended feature. I imagined that this would be fun because I could make almost anything I could think of! I imagined having fun solving the DM's traps with a random broom, navigating roleplay by conjuring sentimental items for NPCs. I imagined it would make combat more exciting because I could create cover. I could barricade doors. I could always have just the right tool handy.
I hated it. I did none of those things. EV-ER. Because when you take the guardrails away and ANYTHING is possible, I have no idea what to do. I was never sure how to use Performance of Creation, and by the time I had thought of something, if I did at all, a safer option had already presented itself. I just retreated into the reliable, the safe, the mechanically justified: Bardic inspiration. Vicious Mockery. Song of Rest. I knew how to use those things. The open-endedness of the subclass made me like it less than any other subclass I've ever played.
All this is to say, for some people, guardrails enable the fun. They let us know what's possible and help us organize the possibilities that otherwise would just overwhelm us.
I feel this happens a lot with the minor illusion cantrip lmao
Everyone is always saying how versatile it is, but I have yet to see a player (I've played with) use it for anything that isn't getting cover.
@@alanmiraanime I played a Descent into Avernus campaign once where my warlock had the invocation that gives at-will Silent Image, and she used it once to conceal dead bodies in a destroyed temple from someone who was already very nervous about going in, but was helping the party navigate. Kept the person from being any more hesitant than they already were; idk if it had any mechanical advantages, but it was fun RP. I've also used that same invocation (plus Minor Illusion) with my current sorcerer/warlock for telling stories of the party's exploits in a tavern complete with visuals and sound effects, for showing people what enemies we fought, and once for creating an illusory box in an alleyway to hide inside when we were being chased. It's hard to use for mechanical effects, but it's a lot of fun for roleplay.
As a longtime, now retired 5e DM, I feel so seen.
Same. This speaks to me lol
For real, it's so cathartic.
Switching away from D&D and similar systems in favor of more narrative ones recently has been a revelation.
Ditto, dude. I literally posted this on Reddit and got roasted. But damn, this is so well explained compared to me!
Same! Honestly, I didn’t even fully understand my feelings on this until this video. Now understanding them, I am going to try something new: I am going to get a group of players together, tell them about the world(its magic, technology, gods, etc), and tell them to have a very good understanding of who their character is. I will give them each 6d6s, and then whenever they need to roll, what they are doing is described, and then they determine how many dice to roll, coresponding to how good they think their character is at that task. The rest of the table, and especially the GM, is there to double check them, and make sure they are consistent. The GM sets a difficulty for the action by determining the “depth” and “width” of the task. The depth is the number that a die has to roll above to succeed, and the width is the number of dice that have to succeed for the player to succeed. I think this needs a good deal of maturity and experience from the players and the GM, but it forces players to think outside the box because there is no box to think inside of. It also allows for players to tell stories with their characters rolls by adjusting(usually subconsciously) the number of dice they roll for certain actions(with GM supervision). I don’t know if it will work well, but it seems to address both my problems with the system limiting player creativity and the players limited ability to affect the dice to tell their story.
If you don't play dnd then what other systems do you try? I wanna get into something new
As a Pathfinder 2 GM, I see a curious phenomenon among people deeply engaged with the game: The printed rules are treated as gospel. It's very strange to me, as I saw the big advantage of a rules-heavy system like Pathfinder to be that I can referee the game buffet style without needing to go hunting down a bunch of supplements or trying to be consistent about whichever homebrew rules I pulled out of my ass mid session.
That extends to the feats system for character advancement.
There are a handful of feats in the game that seem to indicate that you need to take them in order to have access to certain basic actions or abilities (I'm looking at you, shield block), but most of them just seem to give you a bonus to doing things. Gain proficiency in X. Great! That suggests that anyone can attempt X, but without a proficiency bonus. Perfect. And for those abilities that are binary options (you know who you are, shield block), I've just started gating them behind a reflex check. It hasn't caused any issues so far.
But yeah, I see the appeal of rules light systems when people seem to treat first party rules as the word of god, rather than the opinions of the developers with respect to best practices.
As someone who's only getting into D&D now, this video is super helpful. Having seen the optimised builds videos, I can't say they appealed to me very much. I can't imagine playing a role-playing game and making character build choices centred on optimisation rather than what your character would want, even if it's somewhat sub-optimal.
Just found your channel, and I absolutely love it, been bingeing all your videos
The stupidest thing about builds is they are so theoretical and don't take into account that in order for your power to 'really COME ONLINE' at level 12 you'll have to be playing a game for maybe a year+ with a set of mechanics you have no real attachment to and half functional power combos that won't do the cool thing you want them to do for another 6 months, that's the main reason I've seen these build-monkey types get incredibly bored. They didn't come up with it themselves, they just followed a guide online and they barely understand it
Optimised build videos are to role Play what painting by numbers is to art.
@@PlotsAndPoints this is why I like complexity in character creation (haven't played yet but Pathfinder seems good for it). Otherwise, I like a simpler, lighter rule set.
Y'all need to realize that other, less shitty RPGs exist.
@@robertschroeder9858 Pathfinder is not nearly as complex as people make it out to be or as crunchy (at least 2e); it just has a lot more options. This _can_ be crunchy optimization but it's far more built around being able to express a character in so many ways. It's great.
The DUCKTAPE analogy! Thank you! I am so tired of people homebrewing the crap out of D&D to the point its not D&D anymore but that they will not even try any new RPG system because its not D&D.
A big whole in this video, which I wish you cover, is the adventure style itself. What the table concentrates on. If combat is taken out, what would be the majority of time in the session be taken up by. It’s maybe themes like Blades of the dark, a lot less combat and more thief guild missions from Skyrim. A more social/intrigue/faction play session?
Please make a video showing what Would be happening for 3-4 hours if combat did not time sink.
Paint me a picture mr piano man, paint me a dream
That all depends, but in games where there has been 0 combat, I've done everything from spend 4-5 hours in a near real-time conversation with NPCs (usually at important parts, like talking to a ghost for a quest, or interrogating the BBEGs right hand man.) to doing weeks of downtime and RPing multiple small scenes with every party member doing something different.
It could also be skill challenges, like a whole puzzle/trap dungeon, or chasing down, tracking and trying to capture a bounty.
What whappened to the whole?
I didn’t even know combat was required in dnd till my third time playing. I thought it was a role playing game which could have action.
The simplest answer here is more encounters. If each encounter is taking 45 minutes to an hour, imagine all the stuff you could get done if each encounter only took 5 to 10 minutes.
There's this thing called role play. My current group I DM just had their first combat in 4 sessions. Plenty of dice were rolled in each session but it wasn't focused on fighting, it was focused on being in the world and figuring shit out as their characters.
DuDe, i just discovered your channel. mad editting - "pressing paper buttons" - your content is entertaining and inspiring AF at the same time.
I pray that youll get the rewards you so heavenly crave (from the godess of dnd tubers).
I do actually like character builds, but only when they’re focused on playing out the fantasy of a certain character instead of trying to break the game. For example, I create characters to learn the rules of RPGs, and made one in Vaesen yesterday. I wanted to make a pugilist/boxer character, so I focused my efforts on doing that while also thinking about what else a character like that could do. The build was really good at unarmed fighting, but not to the point where it broke the game (I think, haven’t played Vaesen yet but it’s on my list) because that’s the fantasy I wanted for my character. I like builds because they can differentiate a character and showcase their personality through how they fight. I hate multiclassing for the same reason.
Yeah, there's a difference in trying to make THE BEST CHARACTER EVER and just having a specific vision in mind and trying to do that vision particularly well. In a current game, I'm playing a pugilist boxer/wrestler whose also a tank. Obviously I want to pick feats to be a good tank because my character is supposed to BE a good tank, but it's also important to remember people aren't defined by one thing so she has stuff unrelated to tanking to round her out.
@@amelialonelyfart8848 The pugilist class by Benjamin Huffman? Thats one of my absolute favorites! Played the dog subclass one time and had a lot of fun.
Literally the type of character I've been working on, tanky grappler/ pugulist that I'm focusing solely on that fighting style, which I worked into his BG. And the main thing I love about my dm is that he allows homebrew stuff, like I usually enjoy perusing the dnd 5e feat wiki to find specific types of feats that can make my character both a beast in combat but also fun for role play or passive buffs like a +5 on passive perception bc he's been on the run for decades and got a habit of being more paranoid type of thing
This is funny, because I've seen the exact opposite complaint within MMO forums about Theme based class design verses role optimization based class design. For those wondering, most of its coming from Guildwars 2. "E-spec sucks because other E-spec does the same thing with less steps". And it got worse over time as more of the old WoW/WoW-clone player base made their way into game, along with some of the Ex-Blizzard Raid designers. Every class in the game is pretty flexible from a role perspective, but Raids ended up codifying roles build metas, due to several buffs that started out unique, but ended up being distributed to each class. So in an ironic twist, by giving each class access to similar group buffs, it ended up making specific classes "better" at the job, and causing alternatives to be ignored 90% of the time.
It ignores so much of what the game does well, because Raids are too focused on total DPS output; which in turn causes the meta to get hyper fixated on things that boost DPS metrics. And to break that habit, you'd have to design class specific side mechanics for the raids..... which eventually get broken by players figuring out a design flaw, or the class itself changing in a balance pass.
I can't express how sad this makes me, because when the game first added formal raids 2 years into its life, the singular meta Tank build came out of the Mesmer, which is famously a top PvP duelist class, due to strong 1v1 capabilities. It didn't even need a healer to back it up, since it just avoided taking damage. But whats most insane, and why I love bringing it up, is that the Chronomancer E-Spec (designed and added specifically for Raids), exposed a design flaw in conventional Raid Comps that enabled 1 Chrono Mesmer to compress 3 roles into one build. Boss Tanking, Group invulnerability (aka Panic button), and group DPS increase by way of 2 AOE buffs, Quickness (Attack Speed) and Alacrity (Cool down reduction). It was supposed to be a support build that only really added Alac and Quickness; but since the core trinity designs demand a Tank to control the boss, it makes sense the class that was already good at avoiding damage in 1v1 scenarios would be a competent tank.
@@freelancerthe2561 I mostly agree tbh. As much as I like unique builds, I very much prefer most of your abilities come from a central class or other defining set of features. I drastically prefer TTRPGs with classes (and especially lots of classes) because it makes your character unique and gives them a niche. I think character expression works best when a character falls under the banner of a class while having some variation under it (which is something 5E actually does really well with its subclass system). It’s also a reason why the new edition isn’t looking very promising, since they’re marginalizing all the classes and giving them copy paste features like extra skill proficiencies and whatever the hell the weapon mastery system is.
Ah yes, my skill proficiencies choices are definitely tailored for combat, I shall now roll survival to know which parts of the manticore are edible all while I'm fighting it, this will allow me to grab a bite before my turn ends.
Pathfinder 2e GM and player here. My last character was a thief rogue who died and became a ghost. This meant that I had to spend 10 minutes picking up anything, meaning I could almost never steal anything. It. Was. Amazing.
DMs hate builds and not for the reasons many players think. It has nothing to do with winning encounters or butthurt combats. Players tend to tunnel into it, effectively boring themselves. The first time, having your sorlock do 100 damage per spell at level 5 feels great, but doing that every single turn, every single encounter gets old really fast. In my 15 years Dming, not a single of thos characters has seen a full campaign. They are not really characters, but gimmicks.
👆This comment here, players.
On the topic of character optmization, even though I'm waaay more of a player interested in creating a nice story, most of my tables were alongside newbies or first-timers, so while creating my character I've usually felt like an optmizer since I've knew more about the system and there was some things I'd never pick up since I know they're useless/don't work well.
Then, one day, I played a oneshot with a friend where I showed up with a fun and interesting character but with well tought sheet thingies; meanwhile, this friend's friend was presenting his character and he had like 3 different classes, where he stitched a chaotic backstory as to make some sense of that, all of that so... He could heal a lot of HP with Goodberry using feats of said classes. When he explained that I was like "Oh. OH. So apparently I've never been an optmizer at all." I had no problem whatsoever with that, but I couldn't help but wonder why he was doing all that effort and spending time to play a TTRPG when he could obtain a better result just playing any RPG game on a computer or console.
Rules light(er) Systems I like:
Cairn by Yochai Gal
Grok?! by Lester Burton
Shadowdark by Kelsey Dione
Snomes by Firith Studio
Dragonbane by Free League
Beetle Knight by Jim Hall
Mouseritter by Isaac Williams
Brilliant vid as always!
I’ve been having a lot of fun with 5E atm after 2 home brew rules.
The first is long rests only being available in cities and inns which completely changes any ‘balance’ seen in online builds since everyone’s resources are stretched over a much bigger time period.
The second is using ‘hero points’ whenever player do anything cool or creative. Hero points can be spent in varying quantities to let players bend or break the rules to actually do whatever they want. They reset to 1 at the start of each session so everyone’s encouraged to use them as often as possible.
In my game it’s helped bring back some of the creativity of those early days we all long for.
could you expand on/give examples of that hero point system? i'm interested in using this for my own home campaigns!!
Sounds to me a lot like "FATE" points. :)
Hmm I like the first idea, I guess for a city campaign the characters would only be able to rest where and when it made sense and was safe to do so.
Not sure if this is the same thing, but this is from page 264 of the DMG. A player can spend a hero point whenever he or she makes an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw. The player can spend the hero point after the roll is made but before any of its results are applied. Spending the hero point allows the player to roll a d6 and add it to the d20, possibly turning a failure into a success. A player can spend only 1 hero point per roll.
The second part also reminds me of the 5e variant rule called "Plot Points" on page 269 of the dmg.
@@vangandur3629 oh yeah good point! I tried out fate as a player ages ago, super cool system
@@FringeFinder I’ve defo not seen those rules thanks for pointing that out! I will have to crack out my dusty dmg and see if there are some cool improvements I can make to the way I’m using hero points in my game
Simple solution: Roleplay.
It seems you see builds as taking away from the fun instead of being part of the fun.
Obviously the point of optimization is to make a battle strong character, but that doesn't mean you can't roleplay. You can be a powerful character while still roleplaying, they aren't mutually exclusive.
Even high levels can be fun with the right planning, look at Tomb of Horrors, it challenges the minds of players instead of the skills of characters.
It's a tabletop roleplaying game, roleplay is as much of a part as fighting monster.
It really goes to show how true "The Danger of Skills" article really was considering how often people forget this.
I mean, just look at 4e and how often people say you can't roleplay there because.... because..
Well somethings supposedly gone... or maybe something's too noticeable???
No one ever really elaborates on it, they just kinda say it
Whilst I agree to an extend, it does simply boil down to this:
Every person has their own preferences about what to get out of a game of DnD, you just gotta find people that have those same big lines in common. Love party dynamic RP and social encounters? Play with similarly minded people and DM, the internet is here it's easier to do so than ever.
I don’t mean this perjoratively but you really might just have more fun playing a war game. Some of them have continuing narrative for a whole war, and you can make a whole backstory for your army. You’ll know *for sure* that your opponent has the same goals as you for the session even if you make a backstory and they dont
@@andrewenderfrost8161and I'd reply that :not everyone wants to deal with an army , some people want the fantasy of the skill focused single character who is an expert due to the math elements ...the idea it's got to be a war game who fulfills this role is simplifying the views of ops /others and forgetting not everyone wants to play pvp but pve with ever increasing odds. I say this as someone who's very much into the T'au but not into the fact that the meta of war games have them focused to units I don't like at all and that I have to pay or print in order to use instead of
*Puts down a single figure* here's my fire caste warrior who's stuck in a crazy situation where he has to get back to his sept after accidentally getting trapped on ship that got shot through the warp to the other side of the galaxy from T'au space, I'm here with a sister of battle, a guardsman who was about to be up for inquisitor and a mechanicus...and did I mention the system we find ourselves in is one of mostly Ork and Tyraids battling with some Eldar presence?
Mind you that's my custom hack of Rogue Trader with a touch of Only War
@@andrewenderfrost8161 not really the same thing as a roleplaying game tho, as adjacent as it may be
@@andrewenderfrost8161 being the general of an army isn’t quite the same as being a individual that has to deal with conflict in a tighter scale.
I'll do you one better-
Literally just play something else.
Since 3.5ed D&D _specifically_ has encouraged this sort of thing. Want to avoid it? Play literally any other RPG (that isn't Pathfinder) and go ham.
Ive wondered why i was doing less stuff and building so many characters for 5e that i never get to use. You've managed to express something i hadn't figured out i needed to be said to me. Ive played a little 2e and can honestly say the difference in character agency is night and day between the two. For instance: i play an elf cleric in 2e............. he wrangled a giant spider with his bare hands and nothing in his pockets except a crappy sling made from his own ripped up prisoners clothes and two rib bones from a dead orc skeleton he found earlier in the labyrinth. That spider became an mvp named Larry that i had to hunt for so he wouldn't eat the party. Saved our asses many times.
My cleric in 5e? Cast lightning bolt/ heal the party, cast lightning bolt/ heal the party so on, and so on, and so on.
They are Not the same.
That's one more reason i prefer monks in 5e.
Or as a bard I can at least add narrative and poetic justice to outcomes instead of the same thing over and over.
If you read this far, you rock.
What a treat and worth the wait! A 17 minute video!!! I got super excited when I saw that, and you did not disappoint, sir. It must have taken you forever to plan, animate and edit. Thank you for the opinions, the knowledge and the fun!
guys I'm starting to feel like he doesn't want me to play however I want
Games that I’m currently playing that fix this issue
Old school essentials
Cy_borg
Mausritter
Dragonbane
Best part is…. The prep for any of these games is fast and done at the table.
And making a character is sooo fast if someone wants to sit down with us …. They just do. And they are playing in a few minutes
Love it. This is why you're one of the girls.
Building on this for anyone else who's scrolling for game recommendations. Most of what I've listed below is what I have laying immediately around me, can be had for free or very little to get, but please consider supporting these creators.
Shadowdark: 5e "inspired" old-school gameplay. Pretty hard NOT to know about this one at this time
Cairn, Runecairn: The first is generic, the second is dark-souls and norse-inspired. Both are 3-stat booklet games that offer a LOT of room for creativity.
Liminal Horror: Modern/scifi/horror gameset. 3 stats and no waiting.
Mothership: 4 stats, 3 saves, sci fi horror. There is a massive market of community-made stories, settings, adventures, etc. and most are two-sided, trifold adventures that can be read in one bathroom break.
I will also add the Weird West TTRPG, GUN. Very different from D&D, but brings a lot of interesting and fairly unique mechanics.
GUN is also rather fast to start, as little prep is needed for each session, and character creation is largely randomized by design.
Dragonbane is so good, just a lighter DnD that encourages creativity.
I would recommend the old D6 system (D6 Fantasy/Sci-fi/Adventure, Star Wars D6)
Also, running a TinyD6 game with my kids now, which is super-simple but also helps them with the "me-sa can do ANYTHING?!" 😁
I love power building, but you make a lot of good points. As a coming college freshman with time on my hands I’ll probably keep making builds. But I’ll never forget what my new player did in the games I ran. I’m usually stuck as the forever dm in my group, so I tried dming for my high school dnd club. I will never forget the ideas of “could I ride my magic missile down the castle walls?” or “Can I eat the tree?”. The ideas are so stupid most of the time I was like “sure screw it” cause like, removing an enemy’s toupee with your character’s tail is hilarious, and sure they’re demoralized so you get advantage. I only wish to bring the same chaotic energy to the table as a player in the future.
My two big problems with 5e are:
- The gaps in DM tools. We're talking really basic stuff like suggestions on when/how best to give out magic items, and also their costs in GP (arbitrary ranges suck)
- DM traps. 5e stopped doing the "Ivory Tower" game design of previous editions on the player side- but hidden throughout the DM material are things that feel *made* to warp your game. Flametounge is #1 to me; because it's so unassuming as an "uncommon" magic item; but it nearly *doubles* the damage output of any martial that picks it up- it's like having haste always on, or having smites always on, or being 5 levels ahead of the damage curve.
Play BG3, and realize that for all the broken shit in that game, they still don't have a Flametounge. The Everburn Blade is *the best* weapon until you find another weapon with bonus damage- and that's only a d4!
And Larian "gets away with it" because they know most players have a quick save before a fight- and therefore they aren't afraid to TPK.
Live DMs meanwhile have to live with the warp no. The only alternative is to warp all the rest of the players, or remove the Flametounge from the game somehow (maybe even ooc)
flame sword cool tho
There is exact prices for the rarity of items. Its in XGE and its not just ranges.
Also flametongues aren't uncommon magic items they are rare and I know you don't play the game cause we know that the fucking Dragon wrath weapons are better. Take a flame tongue but make it radiant or force or any other dragon breath type damage and once per day allows the player to do a cone attack for basically a breath weapon damage on crit 5 damage of the type oh and +1 to +2 to +3 to hit and damage.
BG3 also is more like 2014 5e than anything it plays like it. It plays like D&DNext rather than 5e proper.
@@WhyYouMadBoi My bad, they're rare not uncommon. They're still far lower rarity than they suggest.
I don't play the game? I've played it since it was D&DNext- I was off by one rarity, chill. Point is- there's a lot of magic items of higher rarities that don't multiply damage.
The equivalent rarity Dragon Wrath still only does 1d6+1 extra damage, plus the critical effect. That series is also more like an artifact, because of how it upgrades...
also, XGE still gives ranges, compare/contrast to PF2 which is really specific on item pricing and what level said item relates to
@@Inuvash255A 2d6 extra dmg weapon attunement rare is mid at best.
Funny enough when I got some good rolls one day and told my DM I planned to make a half-orc wizard (End up as an Artificer/Wizard multiclass, mostly for Art profs) he was like 'go for it'.
11:12 Complete games are better and less profitable. Games like Blades in the Dark or World's Without Number give you all the tools you need in the base game. You see less optimization and content online for them because it doesn't need to be created. For this reason, good and complete games don't advertise themselves as well because because once you have them you don't need to go online for help.
You have never gotten over your optimizer ways. You still see doing something that isn't optimal as something not worth doing. Being free of this means taking bad actions, even when you recognize them as bad actions, because they make sense or make a good story. Limitation is sublime and ultimately, human.
Man, this is something I’ve been trying to put into words for years, and you’ve done it while also being absolutely hilarious! I’m definitely adding this to my short list of “RPG content that legitimately shifted how I think about my games”
This is why I only play with the core rules and a bunch of homebrew. Players be pulling races out of some obscure book and now they can teleport, read minds, and are immune to bad dice rolls.
Great video! I can't imagine how long it took to make a 17 minute video with the amount of editing you put into these beasts.
One of the perks of having players who don't speak a lick of English: I'm pretty sure none of them have ever heard the word "hexblade". It's great. They pick the elemental adept feat and go "WOW THIS IS SO STRONG, HOW IS THIS EVEN ALLOWED" and I'm over here, cursed with the knowledge of what lies in the deepest parts of the abyss (reddit), and I'm like "Yes it is, baby boy, you make sure you tell yourself that every night before you go to bed. Do not ever succumb to the temptation of peering beyond the veil. For it will break you, and everyone you love."
And since you asked UA-cam friends to make recommendations: in horror games like Call of Cthulu, as well as in the OSR sphere, your skills aren't "what you're good at" so much as they are "stuff that maybe won't get you killed instantly if you're lucky". Even if you're proficient at something, you *generally* don't want to be asked for a roll, because rolling is, in and of itself, a fail state.
And that changes the way people approach those games significantly. Because when you can't rely on having a +14 auto triple advantage +1d4 guidance + lucky feat + silvery barbs on every single ability check... You're going to want to explore all of your other options first. You're going to ask about what's in the room, and interact with the world in an immersive way. Your character sheet isn't a video game menu showing you what your different moves are anymore. If you want to know what you can do, you're going to have to talk with a human being.
My laptop was begging for the coup de grâce.
The roll as a fail state is exactly what I look for anymore. I still play around with the modern systems because I play these games with friends first and foremost & I'm not too high and mighty to play what they want, but when you're playing at my table, we're playing a game that involves conversing with a human being within the game's fiction 1st and looking at our character sheets for what to roll 2nd.
You two are the most helpful dnd youtubers for me right now. Love you
@@DeficientMaster I absolutely agree that some systems (especially D&D 5e) can be extremely restrictive. That said, I've found myself a bit frustrated with the OSR approach of rolls as a failure state: I could not really enjoy the character I was playing. Our characters "won", but I realized I didn't actually care about them.
I'll explain: the few times that I played OSR, I put myself into the practical, creative mindset that is expected for that type of play, to think outside your character sheet and so forth. And it was effective. We did come out on top. We did solve problems. We did "win" the scenario. But I always felt that I did so by using my own skill as a player and nothing that was particularly unique about the character I rolled, so it didn't really matter who they were.
You might say that should not matter: every character is unique, it depends on how you roleplay. And it would be true. But I'm talking more from a gameplay perspective: if I always have to think outside the box, then it doesn't matter what's inside the box, so I will always approach the game in the same way independently on what is inside the box. And at that point, no character feels unique, or something I can look at and say "wow, I can't wait to play as that and tackle the game from this very unique perspective".
Because yeah, I can roleplay whatever character I'm playing as. But let's not kid ourselves: a lot of the time spent playing any RPG will be spend staring at problems and trying to think of solutions to go around it. If character skills are relevant, your character will inform how you can approach a problem. If they are too relevant, they will give you only one good way to approach a problem, which is bad.
Personally, I'd like to strike a balance between open systems where everything is up to the imagination and closed system with codified rules for everything, a game that is open and where rules can force you to focus on some areas where your character is good at, but at the same time the rules should give you tools that you can play with in ways that might not have been obvious or that you otherwise would not have assumed your character would be able to do.
I am a DM for my home games and while I do homebrew a couple monsters or items here and there, when it comes to actual gameplay I reward my players for creative thinking, a recent example is they were in an abandoned town in the snow, there was a snow golem so they stole the alcohol from the tavern, covered the tavern in it and let the tiefling lure the golem into the tavern before setting the tavern on fire, weakening the golem and allowing them to kill it in like 2 turns, all you have to do to stop players focussing on making their characters as combat efficient as possible is allow and even reward other options think Undertale pacifist vs genocide runs combat will give this bonus and talking out of the situation will give this other bonus or something like that, it's more of a choice to the players than see enemy, kill enemy. This works at my table and encourages more roleplay than combat which is much appreciated by everyone as combat can take a god awful amount of time especially if your players don't know what they are going to do two turns in advance.
Really good video! I started with 5e and this is a big reason why I’ve given up on the system after about playing it about six years. Initially, it started out fine but then, as mentioned, we all saw “the code” and went from there. Over the years, it felt like I wasn’t challenging them as players, I was just competing with the numbers on their character sheet, especially at higher levels. This burned me out overtime (and 5e is the big thing, so I couldn’t really switch easily) and ever since, I now default to Fate Core RPG, as I prefer games that emphasize who and what the characters are and seeing their actions have impact.
Anyone reading this comment follow this man's path to freedom. Fate Core rpg is absolutely brilliant
I rarely ever hear anything about FATE. How is it? I’ve toyed with running it every now and then.
@@surprisedchar2458 It's a very flexible and fluid system. The best way I'd describe it is "Movie Logic." The game focuses more on who and what the characters are as they do their actions. You only focus on what needs to be focused on. Compared to Fate, 5e is more of a resource management system which gets worse at higher levels for the DM to challenge.
My friend who introduced me to TTRPG didn't even had any rulebook, he had a scenario and did some very basic rule that would supplement that scenario. Our character sheet was basically a name, a background story, a like 6 or 7 skills and few item will would start off with that the GM agreed on before. Very basic but honestly, it was just fun because we could really do whatever we wanted. We had our story hook, a few basic location that was drawn on a map and he would describe shit on the fly. Most fun I had in years.
My old D&D games had so much crazy homebrew that the combat became more like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure than it was... how everyone else does D&D. Two of the villains had an instant kill mechanic. It was so fun and creative
I dont think less rules is inherently better. You just need the rules and mefhanics to be applicable in the widest array of possibilities as you can.
Now we play a low power post apocalyptic ttrpg of my own design. My players are building all kinds of wonky stuff.
This is why I started leaning into rules-light homebrew systems as I got more experience DMing. Once you have a grasp of how something vaguely "ought to go" you can make a ruling on the fly and move on pretty easily. Jumping through technical hoops just complicates the process and distracts from developing an actual character.
you're like jim carrey's dnd uncle this is awesome
YOU are the DM, YOU determine what is important at your table:
Scenario 1: My sorcerer level 1 enters a room filled with evil goblin. I know that none of my spells will allow me to kill them fast enough before they kill me. So I ask the DM if I can lie to them and convince them that I'm a new guard that the BBEG hired to protect the dungeon.
as the DM you can :
- Ask me for a deception charisma role and base the DC on the chart offered in the PhB (5= very easy, 10=easy, 15= medium, 20= hard 25= very hard and 30 = nearly impossible), determine that goblins are easy to trick so the DC should be 10 and let me roll. You know that if I roll a 5 or more I will succeed but it's fine, I'm a charismatic sorcerous I should have a good chance for success.
- Ask me for a deception charisma role but since you know I'm a sorcerer and I have a +5 you will make this a challenge and crank the DC to 15
- No you were planning for a fight here and their no way the goblin will listen and they shoot on sight any PC.
If you choose option A gratz, you show me that I can actually do anything I want in your game and I might try various things in the future. No need to hyper-specialise in one specific thing, and I will try various solution in the future.
If you choose option B, well sure I can do anything but I'm better to hyper-specializing in whatever I do because the DCs are ridiculously high, so yes I might dip 3 levels in eloquence bard for that expertise on my deception and the silver tongue feature.
If you choose option C, well yeah social is useless in your game, if I meet a monster I need to kill him before he kills me, you show me that there is no alternative way to go around a problem, it's kill or be killed.
It's you the DM who need to show me that I do not need my optimized build in order to play in your world. If I try something that you didn't expect, give me a chance to succeed at it. Yes if the only solution to your encounter is to kill them before they kill me, yes I will bring my fighter/paladin build who can dish out 500 damage on round 1. But show me that if I explore the dungeon I might find a ritual cercle that will weaken the BBEG, then by talking to some monster they might help me and open a door or tell me when the BBEG sleep, once I reach the BBEG while he sleep without his sword nor his armor, show me that talking to him I can convince him to accept to become our prisoner instead of fighting to his death show me that all the 3 main pillars are important and trust me those hyper specialized build, why would I play a paladin/fighter who only thing he can do is spend all his divine smite to power up his 4 attacks with action surge to kill the BBEG one shot, meaning I cannot use any spell to find a secret door or activate a mysterious magical circle. When actually finding that magical circle and activating it might prevent me from having all my spell slot for that nova burst, but I will discover extra lore, extra loot, a better ending, a new companion, maybe the BBEG will accept to become the blacksmith in my castle and empower my weapons, if I don't kill him one shot.
The problem occurs with all those adversarial DM, who consider each TPK as a badge of honor, how enjoy gathering the tears of the player and drink them... Those DM who will always try to one up you. Oh you want to cast minor illusion to try to distract the enemies? no they ignore it and attack you directly. Oh you want to do a skill challenge to succeed a task, let me calculate a good DC, you got a high stat, and proficiency, the bard can give you bardic inspiration, and the cleric has guidance... ok the DC is 30... to open the jar of pickle and help this old lady... and if you fail she get mad at you and transform into an hag and fight will start.
I think it's important to have your character still be functional in a mechanical sense. You can flavor anything however you want, but you still wanna be able to land attacks. Nobody has fun missing every attack four combats in a row, even if your character is clumsy and a beginner.
Exactly this. I don't play dnd to play an incompetent buffoon who seems to be attacking with their eyes closed.
How do you reconcile designing a character that is extremely capable both in and out of combat without optimizing?
When the fantasy fails to align with the character's capabilities and performance, the character kinda starts to feel like a fraud.
But you don't need to optimise everything just to be able to land attacks. And you can definitely still have fun if you don't hit anything if it fits the character. I have a storm sorcerer suffering from amnesia and who's just an average guy other than the fact that he has storm related magical abilities who has only +2 on cha and a redemption paladin who's more of a tank/support rather than someone who deals damage with a +1 on strength. Both of them are still very fun.
@@Eo-ms3kw Yeah, that's fine as long as the DM pulls their punches and doesn't run truly deadly encounters.
I have a flavor-optimized character who's Sorc 8/ Warlock 7 in a 15th level campaign, with a bunch of other characters who are mostly optimized for various different things, and she's great! Her highest level spell slot is 4th, but 2 of them recharge on short rests so throughout multiple encounters she can keep up with the Druid or Bard for combat impact, since they both max at 7th or 8th level spell slots but have a lot less of the higher level slots. She'll never beat the Fighter/Ranger/Paladin archer or the Barbarian/Paladin for single target damage, probably, but she has the highest spell DC/attack of the party and she can cast an unnecessarily large number of mid-level Fireball spells if she wants to, so she's *great* at clearing mooks.
But I usually approach character design by coming up with a concept that's exciting, and then trying to find a good way to execute that concept. I adore playing with different ways of fulfilling a character idea, and finding the one that puts the "fun" in functional.
And that's why I run my own 15 pages long ruleset. It's based off zero edition, so it's only 3 classes, and super simple. Streamlined, straightforward, rulings by me, the GM, more than rules. And collaborative storytelling at the table.
(Even) as someone who is currently building a rules-heavy, build-heavy system, this is one of the most important TTRPG videos of all time, imo. Many people, myself included, are stuck in this paradigm where we need rules for everything, and feel compelled to build around the given options. My first intro to DnD was in 3.5e, and even though I still find building characters wicked fun, I'm also so desperate to encourage players to play non-optimal builds, that a lot of the game I'm designing centers around the idea. A lot of the (potential) magic in TTRPGs has been lost as we've moved more toward streamlining and optimization, and away from talking, building, and just enjoying the human experience.
Its called real life. Where there are rules for everything. We have limited options for success, and a great many options for failure.
Here is a tip. If your game is about something it should either have NO mechanic for that thing, or entire complex system for that thing. For example, in a game about sneaking there's no skill called "sneak". And if there is well... The game isn't about sneaking, even if it claims otherwise.
Oh my gosh, I can't believe someone aside from my irl friend played a gungan Jedi!
Can't believe you actually ended it with "just don't play dnd" mad respect tbh
Strong agree with every point in here, except you don't necessarily need to switch to a rules light system. You just need to switch away from D&D and D&D-likes. Or to put it more specifically, you need to switch away from games where the bulk of rules is concentrated in character options, rather than game options.
Fellas, is it bad to want a capable character? (I also hate lock dips and dipping in other classes just for a few bonuses without any justification in character)
But the rest feels......quite aqusatory of something I never actually did. It's kinda why I love playing the barbarian, since I can focus on combat, but everything else is veery customizable and able to be woven into the narrative as it unfolds
You can always be a warlock mechanically without being a warlock narratively. For my hexadin I basically just flavor eldritch blast as a holy spear of light granted by their oath.
I feel like people only have a problem with hex dips because of how universally good they are for certain classes. I doubt people would even care about them if they were suboptimal, but because they're optimal everyone jumps on them like they're public enemy #1, like "how dare you pick a clearly strong option, you fiend."
The 1975 Thief skill thing is misunderstood. It was misunderstood then, and continues to be so.
Look extremely carefull at the Thief skills, and you will find that "Move Silently" does not mean "Sneak". It means moving with zero sound. Anyone can be stealthy, with varying results. Move slower, crawl even, leave your armor and shield behind, pick which terrain to sneak through, create distractions. But a Thief can just boogie through silently if he passes his check, and cats don't hear him. That's a big difference.
Traps were defined in various ways. Players would roleplay searching, by tapping with a 10' pole, looking for tripwires or ominous holes in the walls, etc. These traps could be found by anybody!! So why play Thief? Because many traps are too well-hidden to be found by this kind of descriptive exploration, such as a poisoned needle hidden under a chest handle, or a gas trap accessible only via the keyhole of the door it guards. And Thieves have a higher success chance than anyone else to find the bigger, cruder ones like pit traps.
So the Thief does these things better.
Climb Walls is NOT just a generic climbing skill with varying difficulties based on surface roughness and slipperiness. Instead, anyone can climb a tree by hand. Anyone can climb a rough mountain surface and pound in pitons and secure themselves with ropes because they'll slip sometimes. But Thieves can Scale Sheer Surfaces. A slippery brick wall for example. Nobody else has a chance to succeed. And Thieves are better at climbing the easier surfaces so they can reliably free-climb, faster and leaving no evidence.
So it is a misunderstanding of the 1975 Thief that leads people to assume the Thief ability mechanics take away from capabilities non-Thieves used to have.
idk I always thought it was more like the thief always has a chance to do these things. like you said, anyone can try and disarm a trap, but a thief will always have a percentage chance of doing it. not sure if they were around in OD&D, but I know by at least 2nd ed. skills had situational modifiers so things like trees had a huge percentage bonus, but a sheer surface gave a huge penalty.
@@PandaXs1 The concept had become divorced from the initial intent almost immediately.
Gary got the ideas down over the phone from the west coast gaming group who came up with it, and we actually have the original Thief from the Complete Warlock book that group made.
Then the Greyhawk Supplement Thief was different, but sensible according to how people were playing back then.
B/X Thief and 1e AD&D still had the original trap-finding concepts subsumed in the slow "exploration pace" of dungeon crawling at 1" MV = 10' per turn, while the full combat move was 1" MV = 10' per round. But the 1e DMG is unclear in many places.
So by the time we get to 2e, there's no concept that non-Thieves can search for traps, and we just have the searching for secret doors mechanic and Dwarf/Gnome underground detection of things like sloping passages and shifting rooms. And these are all but vestigial given 2e modules rarely using them. 2e's equipment list doesn't even HAVE a 10' pole! So by 2e the old method was totally forgotten.
Dude I just found this channel and a new video hits NOW… it’s a sign.
Yea dude. This channel is great. Every single video is AMAZING.
I agree, to an extent. I made the transition from dnd to pf2e since I like how solid the system is, which yeah codifies game, but it doesn't leave you hanging when someone thinks of something outside the box, most of the time.
I like building characters, but because I like the challenge of exploring how and why the build came to be. And I am not afraid to go off of my previous path if I think its thematically apropiate during the actual game.
I build my character from levels 1 to 20, and while I am subscribe to a lot of the optimizer channels I rarely build one of those kinds of characters myself. I usually grab a mechanic or an idea and build a character, not just numberwise, but roleplaywise as well.
For example, I have a level 3 Inoxerable Iron Magus with Chronoskimmer archetype (free archetype variant rule) with the College Dropout background, and his background is that he was a time magic apprentice that made a mistake and destabilized his timeline, and he uses heavy armors and weapons as its easier to ground himself on a timeline with their weight, and I thought of that beacuse the idea of going slowmo, just to slash at light speed with a stupidly big ass sword was a cool concept to me.
And I come to find that often I prefer to just embody that character and how he relates to the world around him than I do combat (keep in mind Magus is a spellsword class, and combat IS its main focus).
I ground my combat mechanics in a path so I can explore how I will reach it. I know when we level up, I will grab Striker's Scroll and Turn Back the Clock. Striker Scroll is a change I made when I saw how it performed and helped my pave a new way, with my Magus studying scrolls and how to apply them to his spellstrike so his mind can be free to control better his timeshenanigans, leafing to his Turn Back the Clock feature.
But in the end, we can play however we want.
Exactly. I find it disingenuous that when he describes a bloated system, he refers to Pathfinder. He's right when it comes to Pf1e, but he's incorrect about Pf2e, which has been around for several years now. Talking about ttrpg complexity and referring to Pf1e is like trying to advise a current dnd5e player about problems only Dnd3.5e had
I really appreciate you opening up the comments to RPG recommendations at the end there! A lot of people get angry when you suggest another game as a solution to a 5e problem.
It sounds like you might really enjoy Dungeon World! Or maybe another game in the PbtA family. The core appeal of those games, to me, is that they rip the tactical war game out of the roleplaying game, leaving just the roleplaying part. That really fun “meesa can do anything?!” element of RP, where it’s just a conversation between you and the GM with the occasional dice roll? That’s how **everything** works, including combat.
As a GM I absolutely loved running Dungeon World, how it puts "fiction" before "mechanics" and also how it keeps GM on their toes by forcing an active resolution of players' failed rolls. The players though, they were like oh no where are my builds. They didn't get the point at all.
People get angry with suggesting other systems because some just don't want to play other systems. They are happy with 5e on the whole but may have one or two issues with it.
Agreed, I've been running PbtA games for a while now and they are much more fun for me as a GM. Highly recommend everyone to at least take a look at them.
@@kimitsudesu Yeah it is a very very different philosophy of play. Even as the GM it can be hard to switch over. I think it’s something the whole group has to be very intentional about.
@@tuomasronnberg5244peanut butter temple arena?
Back when I played Starfinder, one of the fun things I did while away from the game was to look through the huge amount of options in abilities, augmentations, tools and upgrades I could eventually acquire to create something which fit what I wanted my character to be. And here is the kicker: almost *none* were to support combat, but *provide new ways of engaging with the world.* I was having the most fun exploring the world our GM build for as and defeating obstacles by outwitting the problem.
The one character I distinctly remember from that game that I played was a mechanic named Cez that played like a secret agent, being able to take on the shape of anyone with a morphic skin, numerous tools for breaking and entering, enhanced vision to spot traps and oddities in the world and more! I once ran into a scenario where I was caught and all my fellow party members where shipped offworld and I was bound and thrown into a garbage compactor. I looked down on my skills and noted I had installed an acid dragon gland into my throat, so I waited a moment and burned my way through the bindings and escaped with some help of webbed feet out of the death trap. Morphing into another person as I emerged, I convinced the personnel that something terrible had happened to me (which they believed) and eventually located my stuff, which I got back by, again, outwitting my foes with the tools and knowledge at my disposal.
I believe that character builds aren't the problem. It's encouraging abilities that don't broaden your choices but narrow them down along a single path since taking any other choice would be seen as suboptimal.
I loved playing Starfinder not because of the zero to hero mentality, but because of the enormous number of options it provides to build a character the way you want to play! Sadly, that doesn't carry through with combat scaling and so when battle inevitably ensues, you will feel regret for not having taking any options into combat, one of the pillars of the game that likes to go into the ridiculous end of the spectrum.
It's actually this "wanting every option to matter even later in the game" and "build a character the way YOU want to interact with the world" that lead me to work on my own RPG system (which I have done now on and off for about 3 years now). Let me experiment with what you are offering me, give me a bunch of tools and set me in front of a problem. Even if the odds are significantly stacked against me, I will try and think my way through to a solution! And that's one of the key things I find most fun about an RPG: *Creative problem solving*
Another genius video. Truly. Yes, some other UA-camrs have touched on these points, but your approach is holistic and critical, while maintaining balance.
5:45 I'm gonna stop you right there (in a good way). as a DM I solve this by... drumroll... adding more good options! We CAN still do anything! :D
Everyone should try Dungeon Crawl Classics if you are looking for rules light game that is both silly and chaotic. Warhammer 4e is a great game if you want more of a crunchy game with the ability to do builds that dont overpower an entire game. And Call of Cthulhu if probably the best game made (totally only my opinion), but not really for a fantasy genre so not always everyones cup of tea.
DCC is a blast!
I use my builds like a loose guideline for I think would be useful at that time, but as sessions go on, it changes, for example, I had a Warlock/Bard, initially he was setup to only have a minimal amount of bard, but after meeting the party, he leaned more into his music than his pact, and his spell selection changed too, which made for a hilarious set of hijinks with the party Sorcerer. It's something to look back on and realize how much they've changed from the original thought you had, which I think is kinda fun to see happen.
You really, really should look *back to the past* with Oldschool Dungeons & Dragons. Trust me, it's something incredibly special.
This guy is so good that I literally bite my hand.
Another amazing video that summarizes my feelings (though in all honesty it doesn't stop me from min-maxing when I'm playing unlimited 5e).
This is the reason why I'm really enjoying running and playing Savage Worlds. I wouldn't call it rules lite because the code is definitely there but with it being classless, setting agnostic, and have no true path to perfect optimization it really does lend itself to a stronger player experience where they say "I can do anything?" and I really like that.
When I play in "build" type games I still look for the best choice. It's the Pathfinder in me. Send help.
The 3.5 in me says the same thing. I still try to make my build make sense to my character but... I also love just being the very best like no one ever was
As someone who started D&D by straight-up reading through 3.5 books in high school, I think my "I can do AAAANYTHING" feeling died long before I even got into a session.
Although this might at least partially be because my class of choice was ALWAYS the Gish/Spellsword/Eldritch Knight/ (insert whatever title you'd give to the powerset "guy who uses both magic and swords"). Which under 3.5 and Pathfinder meant you had a relatively small handful of classes.
In 3.5 your choices amounted to...
- Go through the GRUELING process of multiclassing a Caster and Martial class with the EXP penalty, so you can eventually get your choice of Eldritch Knight, Spellsword, Abjurant Champion, or maybe Jade Phoenix Mage if you were lucky enough to be in a Tome of Battle game. (There are probably more gish PrC's in 3.5 but those are the 3 I remember off the dome) And deal with the fact that only ONE of these helps you deal with the problem of Somatic Spell Failure Chance on armor, meaning no armor for you.
- Pick from the even smaller handful of pre-built gish classes like Duskblade or Ye Olde Hexblade back before it was the powerhouse it would become.
Pathfinder made such options a bit easier since they were a lot more plentiful. Spiritualist with its Ectoplasmatist, Skald and Bloodrager from the Advanced player's guide which served as 2 different fusions of Barbarian and Spellcaster. And the Magus, which was THE spellsword class... Except when it wasn't. This class too had the baggage of 3.5. It took 7 levels before you had access to Medium Armor, and 13 before you got Heavy, meaning that unless you were playing a one-shot or something that already started at high levels, you had to pick a Dexterity build, and Spell Combat explicitly requires you to have a hand free since it basically literally acts like you're Dual Wielding a sword and magic, meaning that the class was basically "Solved" from the moment it came out. Dervish Dance Scimitars channeling Shocking Grasps with as much Metamagic as you could shove onto it for max damage. Since it basically covers everything you want to do with it. (Which, Granted. Nothing's stopping you from making a non-optimal build here, though when you're rocking 14 AC at 6th level because you finally got a chainmail shirt, in a system where attack rolls by big monsters are around +9 or +10 (assuming +6 BAB and 16-18 in an attacking stat like strength) meaning enemies hit you on a 4 or higher, the choice is going to destroy you.)
So, by the time I managed to get myself into a 5e game, I long-since understood the idea that your ability to do "ANYTHING" was a bold faced lie.
Also, as to the question of "Building out to level 20 before you even start playing". I never really build EXACTLY to level 20, though I basically knew what I wanted in my back pocket from the start because the specific combination of class abilities usually correlated to the abilities I wanted overall.
For example. My admittedly Blatantly Powerful character. a Tabaxi Hexadin named Simon Dayglow. His backstory was basically that he was adopted by an adventurer who retired after doing his own world-saving quest. Then some tragic backstory stuff happened and said dad's ghost wound up possessing his Holy Avenger Wannabe Sword, transforming it into a powerful sentient weapon and a Patron. Which basically makes the fact that he starts off Hexblade and veers off into Paladin represent a basic progression of his powers. Warlocks don't have any patron for a Holy sword, only a Cursed one, so leaving hexblade after I've gotten the handful of features I want from it (And the fact that I can now have 13 strength and make it make sense that my cat is swinging around a Greatsword without needing to be built likeHe-Man) and moving into the Holy Knight Of Justice and Divine Magic to get the mechanics that better suit my flavor makes sense.
Addition 2: Like I don't mean this as any genuine animosity beyond the joking (hisses in optimizer) type thing other comments have made, but it feels like a genuine question that... My D&D Power Fantasy just so happens to be the set of abilities that some would argue should never be allowed in the first place.
well said. optimizing violence (in my experience) has never been very interesting. BUT...when players are into it banning stuff doesn't go over very well. i've found it fair in the past to let obscene build combos function in the game exactly as they are designed to work (and get really excited for the players when they go off), but to also introduce problems that just can't be solved through violence or their very very specific build focus.
That's an interesting way of letting them discover the problem themselves. Let them have their fun with their "OP" builds for a bit and then wait 1-3 sessions for them to get bored.
God mode is only fun for about 15 minutes.
No matter how optimized you are, it's never "God mode." If a dm wants to challenge you, you will be challenged. Optimizing for combat doesn't have to come at the cost of not optimizing for RP. You can do both at the same time.
I just want to play a capable character without glaring weaknesses that are likely to end their story prematurely. If you can't fight effectively, you're not cut out to be an adventurer and would likely not have survived to level 5 realistically, especially in a particularly brutal, high combat campaign. Different things work for different campaigns.
If your players roll up to Tomb of Horrors with full combat optimization, they're going to have a terrible time. But if you roll up to a combat heavy, brutal meat grinder campaign with a twig of a Bard built solely for roleplay, you're actively a detriment to your allies.
This is why I like thief rogue. Fast hands basically allows for you to do dumb shit in a way that works with your action economy.
Honeyy get upp!! Deficient Master just dropped a new video!! 🗣🗣🗣🗣
What's really rubbed me the wrong way about 5e that took me a while to realize is more than any other games it's backbone is the DM's ability to improvise. Which, you might say is obvious but it is on a level unlike other TTRPGs. While codified skills may seem obstructive it allows players to interact and understand what everyone can contribute in an obvious way.
5e not only greatly limits this but it scales poorly for out of combat focused players. It makes rolling to convince someone to lay down their weapons either way so easily anyone could've done it, or so hard not even the Bard has good odds. The DC system doesn't translate well over to abstracting conversation. Which really sucks as someone who's played Bard for years across games as the magical support that can talk their way out of situations.
I realized this when a DM running Out of the Abyss actually let me keep going after failing a dice roll to try and salvage a conversation. While it was purely on me to convince the DM at that point, it let me actually play out being that kind of Bard. This is also just one moment, there have been many that opened my eyes. The thing is though there is nothing to help DMs understand or prepare for situations outside of combat in 5e or even most TTRPGs. They just have to abstract the DC system into what feels right. 5e I just found particularly abrasive because the rules almost purely concern themselves with combat.
I don't think codified skills is really the issue at its core, but if a system is going to do that it needs to create the full frame work. Otherwise it's just a bad combat simulator. If you have only feats and buffs that increase your ability to punch things, as you pointed out everything becomes crossbow. One of the whole points, at least from what I can see, of a TTRPG is too good you that framework. Otherwise it's on the DM to pick up the slack and make up everything in addition to playing all the NPCs, keeping track of the world and making the encounters.
When anyone can do anything, the DM can focus a lot less on micromanaging situations as they occur. Which is great, and if we want people to shine in specialized ways with skills, then we have to have systems that actually support it. Part of playing these games is to do things we can't and we like to see ourselves excel, so a system where combat is the only thing you can excel at, that's kinda lame.
Obviously, just my thoughts. People can play however they want and they can want to excel at fantasy combat as their hexsniper ranger. That is pretty dope after all.
Damn man you content is really amazing, i cant wait until your channel blows up and i can be like "I watched that guy befor he had a million followers."
12:38 My character due to nearly dying from the enemy they face (let's say for this example it's in the ravenloft setting), Sthrad, took the deal from the local necromancer who wished to rule Ravenloft and us now a warlock of the undead patron
I had this situation happen in my game that JUST wrapped up , where my character almost died and called on a being they probably shouldn't have and was saved, I then naturally after leveling up took the situation we narratively made as an out for my character to live from a situation they'd probably have died from. I then made it into their build
All this to say: You can do a multi class like this that reasonably works within the story , it's all about presentation and creativity. I didn't tell my DM this in advance (and even if they read this I doubt they'd realize I actually planned to multiclass before the situation happened ), I just saw the chance to do something that made sense and went for it.
If it works within the narrative, I'm all for it.
If it works because that's what RPG Bot told you to take at level 5, we have a problem.
@@DeficientMaster It was a situation of both though , I took a multiclass that made sense for the narrative but also saw it was the rpgbot/online build recommendation for the level .
And I don't mind if you have a problem because you're not my DM and my DM has seemingly no issue with it .
My copy of Shadowdark came in recently, i think it nicely solves the trouble of skills by giving you advantage on skills that might relate to your background or class. Anyone can try to pick a lock, but a Thief is less likely to suck at it.
Overall, it's a super pared down system, with descriptions for each class fitting on one or two pages.
DnD is the Skyrim of TTRPGS.
A shallow game where you mod it with hundreds of Homebrews until you make whatever monstrosity you want.
Does someone know where to buy those simple minis that can wear lego hats? 2:11[I'm talking about these ones]
In case anyone is wondering, he uses Peeples board game pieces, and Lego accessories to dress them up. He'll use a reusable art putty to help some accessories stay on.
@@sweatyetiTHANK YOU! Like serioulsy I was looking for those for a while now!
@@Tomatowski
No problem, friend! :)
One of the most important video on youtube about gdr, this is a must see video for all the players for me.
I'm 32 years old, I start to play videogames at 4 years old and D&D at 8. I was inside mathfinder like you and I have all the manuals from the 2.0 (D&D). Yes, we can play however we want, but still we feel there is somenthing wrong, because when you start to play as a player and not a gm after 12 years of gm, people look you as a crazy person when you say "I just want have fun, i don't care about builds".
Thank you deficient Master, because for me, this video is a master piece, hope one day I can see you, and talk, but for now from Italy it's impossible.
With respect, a deficent player.
I love all of the points you make, I just want to add that I believe these things can co-exist. I find it a matter of over the table intentionality that's almost as hard to pin down as tone, but if we look at the Dimension 20 core cast for example, we can find wickedly competent players who also understand that the most important thing is the fun nutty nonsense and creativity they bring to the table. I think many players do eventually make there way to that space of freedom and creativity again, but it takes a level of reflection and party support to figure out what exactly is the fun that you play this game for.
As someone who has played DnD 5e and Pathfinder here and there for a few years and i just starting to DM myself, these videos are so helpful. After i was complaining to my friend about 5e and introducing new TTRPG players he said "i gotta show you this youtuber, you have exactly the same mindset" and he could not have been more right lol. Awesome videos!! This is what TTRPGs should be!
Your example of "warlock dips making no sense" when I made my water themed sorlock I made her patron/mermaid demigod mom an important element of the story. Sure I picked fathomless warlock because I liked the tentacle of the deep feature, but that was because I liked the idea of commanding a water whip with my bonus action. And I picked divine soul sorcerer for access to cleric spells, because it has cool water spells and healing I can flavor like a waterbending that sorcerers don't usually get. And out of the flavor text and personality I imagined I made something fun out of it.
But that was fun because I made the build myself based on what I wanted from my character rather than stealing builds online with no actual thought. I like taking strong options, but I'm taking Tidal Wave rather Fireball, Hypnotic Pattern or Spirit Guardians, not because it's any stronger outside niche situations, but because watching my water sorcerer use water to kill things sounds more fun and thematic than the stronger options
See, I really like this approach. As a DM, I don’t mind if someone makes the most disgusting munchkin cocainelock with 8 different dips as long as they give me a damn good RP reason as to how they’re an artificer, warlock and a sorcerer all at the same time. Requiring narrative intention behind mechanical decisions is an excellent way to increase engagement in the game and its story and contributes to merging the combat and non-combat sides of DnD far better than a “just role playing” and a “just combat” approach, I think.
I personally make characters based off of a thematic idea or concept that I like, usually based on the world of the story, and then from there I build out my character to be optimized within the boundaries of that concept. It's the idea of limitation breeding creativity; when Crossbow Expert is strictly better but doesn't suit your character so it isn't an option, you have a lot more options to pick from that also feel thematicly satisfying. This is how I've been making characters for a while now and I've enjoyed it a lot. It's kinda like how in some in competitive games certain strong options are banned to make it more interesting.
When I first started D&D I wanted to play a waterbender/character with water powers, and since D&D doesn't have much support for that, my DM graciously made me a homebrew class to suit the concept. As time went on, I homebrewed less and less, instead trying to appreciate the limitations and find a way to navigate around them to make a unique and fun thematic character.
Reflavoring has become a lot more popular in the D&D space in the last year or 2 I feel, and that's where a lot of my excitement in figuring out how to build characters comes from now; trying to "make it make sense". How do I build a character with this playstyle and this aesthetic? It's kind of like Game Design in a way, figuring out what Mechanics lead to the desired Dynamics which facilitate the desired Aesthetics? It's a fun challenge! And it can often lead to a character that's fun to play too :3
I've been playing D&D for around 5-6 years now, and only in the last 2 years have I joined a couple campaigns that actually lasted longer than a few months (I've had very bad luck with long-term games fizzling out ;w;), and while one of them is kinda starting to collapse I hope I get to start pivoting my character's build based off of things that happen in the campaign, that sounds absolutely fucking AWESOME
I realy love your vids
Ive solved most of these problems by being good friends with the people that I play with
I think the video, here, definitely is onto something, but I also don't think it's as clear-cut as presented (and I disagree that you can get the same experience - even for that level of complexity - at a video game as you can at a table; though I acknowledge that sometimes I absolutely *also* want to play a video game of that format as well: I would assert there's room for both and both can be good, if different, experiences).
But over-all, a decent set of points made, and worth thinking about.
One of the interesting things about codification of skill sets is that it happened more-or-less by player-driven demand and, over the course of Advanced 2e, became increasingly stratified, so that by the time 3e baked that level of specificity into the rules, it was a de facto acceptance of what had been expected for a long time anyway. You can see this in the proliferation of player's options books in 2e, the separation of kits (some of which were truly terrible) and skills (especially thief skills were part of the beginning of this change all the way back in their original introduction) and, of course, non-weapon proficiencies. Most of these things started as optional rules in 2e, but by the end of that edition, they were expectations at many tables, and no longer really "optional." This, of course, was tacitly encouraged by TSR, as it meant they sold more books.
Then in 3e it started granular and into and blasting through 3.5's attempts at crackdown and codification the options just exploded into realms of impossibility (or at least improbability). The option-bloat was real and, though (like 2e before it), it had attempted to cast these options as explicitly not-guaranteed, the internet culture that developed over time came to expect that any option was on the table. This is especially true of prestige classes. And it makes sense - you bought a book, shouldn't you be allowed to use it? But with this bloat plus mechanical precision comes unexpected and unintended side-effects, and so you end up with builds that absolutely explode tables, while you end up with other builds that are almost entirely ineffectual, and you stumble across builds that are just what the game expects. And, of course, there's an endless demand for more. PF would initially clear this out, but they built in additional complexity into the base level and then things just kind of exploded from there.
When 4e came along, it realized the option-bloat of 3e/3.5e (PF wasn't invented, yet, and wouldn't be until after 4e was released) was a potential problem, and both codified the math into a simpler less option-heavy format, and then proliferated those options right back in with feat- and power-diversification (much of went into a level of mathematical precision that was not appreciated by many at the time - and still isn't by most, because it's not intuitive to most players, and has a high [in fact the highest of any edition] round-to-round memory-to-play burden baked in - while 3e/3.5e/PF absolutely could get to those extremes, the game functions well without them, but 4e just kind of expected that level of commitment every round).
5e attempted to correct course pretty hard by (as many said it should, during 4e's lifetime) "flatten the math" - this, then, was the origin of bounded accuracy. But 5e also opted to de-diversify powers, going back to the 3e system of class features, but under the 2e system of "ask your GM" optional rules. It does a decent job over-all, but it obviously has its flaws, as you've pointed out... to the point where the D&D movie actively avoided following the rules, because it would have been confusing, diluted the value of individual party members, and confused an audience.
(Also, as 5e has aged, it's shifted very much so away from "all creatures use the same rules" to "monsters just do what they do; players go by the rules" which sort of makes sense, but also creates a very unbalanced and inconsistent world-building experience that can feel more empty to some.)
((And also, also, they refuse to call it "5.5e" or "6e" and insist on "OneD&D" - no, wait, sorry, uh, "the 2024 revision of the game; definitely not 6e, guys, don't worry about it" which is so incredibly silly, and they have entire articles written by "it's not 5.5e" - articles that prove it really is 5.5e and also they don't know what the ".5" actually represented. Aa;ldhnfa;klfgna;klsdhfgaksdjfnh. ANYway. Ahem. Still absolutely going to look at it, though.))
it's funny because i'm having this discussion about keeping or changing our game system (adios dd5 and pf2, hello, fate and pbta) with a dm/player friend of mine...
we're both having fun with our campains , but feel that the "build" problem takes over what we really want for our players: their creative inputs in our little imaginary worlds.
so thank you for this video, it will definitely help us!
DMs will see this and just think “hell yeah”.
Another banger video!
Got to ask: where do you get those color minis with the helmets? Love those!
Peeples from Amazon. Hats are LEGO.
@@DeficientMaster awesome, thanks for answering and the great videos! 😄
It is very much up to the DM as well. I once rolled a character in a new campaign. Had a lot of ideas about the character, and spend a ton of time preparing all of the RP aspects. I used multiclassing as a character choice, less than a build choice, and prioritized wisdom over constitution as my secondary stat.
So what happened. A few sessions went by with one brutal combat after another, and then my character was eliminated in an almost TPK.
Lesson learned. With my replacement character I still spent lots of time thinking about backstory and role playing. But I definitely also optimized for survival. Came to the table with a wizard multiclass with high AC, high constitution and lots of mobility. He wasn’t always the highest damage dealer, and often played a more support oriented role. But he definitely had a solution to survive almost anything the DM threw at us, and the tools to avoid getting pined down.
I tried multi classing once in the middle of the campaign saying it was for character reasons when in reality I wanted to have reckless attack on my Paladin then realized this goes against my entire character and came to my dm “hey can I go back to being a full Paladin ?” He said sure but I had to earn it and it led to one of my favorite role playing moments that made a huge bond between my character and another players as we prayed to my paladins god to make sure her dead brothers soul could pass peacefully after she was forced to kill him.
I honestly always try to persuade my players from multiclassing just cause it always feels fake at that point.
I like Dungeon Crawl Classics "Quest for it" mentality. It's not a hard coded rule, but more of a mentality of play. Your players want to do or get something weird/cool? Quest for it. Want to play as a dragon? Quest for it.
How your DM handled your Paladin was dope.
Thank you for helping re-frame some of my thinking on this subject.
This is a huge problem for me, because, as a player, I absolutely loathe being herded down a preset ability track. Plus, I'm a bit of a puzzle-gamer. So it's the most natural thing in the world for me to search through rulebooks and online SRDs and figure out insane, stupid, flavorful builds that allow me to do something really cool and unique feeling... or just let me do dump trucks of damage. Problem is, when I get to the table. All I want to do is get in, and stay in, character. I hate looking up rules. It just kills all flow. I want to react to what's going on in the moment, and not have to worry about if I have a particular feat or not.... but I still want to feel like I'm winning, but thanks to my choices, and tactical mind, not random die rolls.
DnD so thoroughly frustrated my dual impulses, that I set out on the madness-inducing journey of crafting my own damn RPG system. And THIS, exactly this, is one of the huge things I'm trying to solve with better game design. I've got a few answers, but there are still gaps. And you helped re-frame a bit of my thinking. So thank you very much. Love and peace. :P
This was fantastic. I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe with the head-pat graphic. If I had to name a system, it would be Olde Swords Reign or Cairn. Cairn is my ... well ... it's kind of an obsession lately. You can do anything with that system and it's incredibly simple. I'm sure you knew about Cairn before I did, though!
I've seen so many recommendations for Cairn here and in some of my other videos & I haven't checked it out. Definitely will though!
@@DeficientMaster nice. Olde Swords Reign is cool too. It's got the same idea as basic fantasy - pdf is free, books printed at cost, etc, but it takes the OSR mentality and builds it on the 5e SRD. It's actually really cool and the community is really giving it a heck of a go as well.
I love Cairn, but my players got PTSD from it! We now play Olde Swords Reign, and it really hits the sweet spot. Free, and compatible (mostly) with Basic Fantasy RPG, which has an insane amount of extra content.
@@Kinglota Olde Swords is a great game, and Damien is a very cool guy as well.
13:19 Hello Charlotte Music? Holy fuck you're a man of culture.
I tried 1st back in the day and there was the issue of each DM deciding just what exactly can your character can do or not do. Is the DM being fair and consistent in their rulings ? Things were very inconsistent very different from group to group
All the OSR "rulings not rules" folks miss that back in the day that lack of mechanic didn't lead to pure beautiful RP, it led to games that were wildly inconsistent because there was no coherent means to making decisions, and also immensely bloated as each decision becomes established canon to bring up in the next argument. It's why an entire magazine existed to bring your rules arguments in front of the designers.
99% of imagined complaints about skill based systems are eliminated by the approach of: "Anyone can try to do [X], and we only need a skill check if you try to do something difficult or of the degree of your success matters", which is followed by most modern skill-based systems.
7:55 God I’ve never felt so seen by a DnD UA-camr before. This near exact situation happened to me with a ranger I played and I straight up optimized the fun out of what was otherwise a great encounter.
I feel as though this is just a psyop to play more OSR. And it's working.
🤫
A thing I like doing (as a only player never dm’d guy who literally has only played dnd for like half a year), is taking characters I find suuper cool, and spend a few hours on how I can make them through dnd beyond’s character creator (I am borrowing a friend’s login for all the juicy extra content!).
So far I’ve made a few, and yk what they are probably HORRIBLY optimized and just dumb, but man am I so proud, and still think it’s so cool, to have a robot sorcerer that changes his hands or parts of his body to emulate spell casting, where as in the role play side of things, it’s not even magic! Just science.
It’s probably very unoriginal too, but I just love the idea.
Or another character I made was a druid rouge pirate, who had this fun character trait where whenever he got scared he’d wildshape into an octopus.
As a somewhat new player, I’d say this is what I love about dnd’s character creation!
*now I only wish I had a place where my wacky characters would fit in, so I could experience their story unfold for myself :’)*
Have you read dungeon world or any pbta system? It solves all your problems in my opinion
Unhinged and On-point at the same time?! What sorcery is this?? You are only allowed one character focus at a time! This is outrageous!! And I need more of it :D
I'm a bit confused by what you mean, it feels like it's both a complaint about how characters can't do everything because some characters can be built to be better over one specific thing and how some builds can't do everything well but that everything is actually only fighting and it might only be one way of fighting too.
The crossbow example is a bit confusing, wouldn't a resistance to piercing damage be enough? If the character knows it ahead of time, wouldn't they just try to do things differently, use strategies even if it's not their best ones? Or just rely on allies that'd be better equipped to deal with it? If they'd feel left out because they can't do the only thing they're good at then they should play video games as you said cause it's also about seeing other players do what they're good at too, not just them.
You did mention characters multiclassing to make up for any weakness they might have but wouldn't that either hyper specialize them or leave them less effective on certain situations than a full class character?
Missa can do everything. Missa just can't do everything as well as some others can. I feel like wanting Missa to do everything well is just being an optimizer, again. The game is made to be played with others after all.
Holy crap this is BRILLIANT - the entire video. Should be required watching for everyone playing. They don't have to agree or believe in everything presented, but it most certainly should be considered. This video is a huge contribution to the community. Thank you! (Also, I think this is my first UA-cam comment, ever?)