elves best race, excluding the likes of tiefling but they’re less of a definitive fantasy staple outside of d&d so elves still win overall
fae are also cool
From what I’ve heard, the current time that the old world is set in doesnt involve these factions - dark elves don’t invade ulthuan for a while, skaven are mid brutal civil war, ogres and chorfs are just too far away - and it’s likely they will get introduced later, particularly with the stink raised from this announcement
Brettonian vampires are not allowed.
Roleplaying games are best played with a group of friends or like-minded acquaintances, whether online or offline.
I personally don’t approve of the whole Adventurer’s League or open-invitation Roll20 approach. These styles of playing D&D and other games breed really strange behaviours that can involve:
- Some people rapid-fire signing up for dozens of different campaigns with heavily optimised/homebrew-heavy/“special snowflake” pre-made characters, who don’t care about the campaign or other players, but just want to play their pre-made character.
- Some people refusing to commit or care about campaigns, to the point where they might flake out and ghost groups that they’re playing with before they play a single session together, because it’s just that easy to find a new game these days.
- Some people having really strange and starry-eyed expectations of how D&D games are supposed to be played based off of their favourite influencers streaming their sessions live or creating funny memes about how D&D should really be played, only for those memes to be taken seriously.
- Some people literally deciding that they can make money out of this hobby by being to paid to DM and will charge strangers on the internet for the privilege of being a player in their campaigns. The monetisation of creativity always rubs me the wrong way.
On one hand, it’s great that the hobby is more accessible and more people get to enjoy it. On the other hand, I’ve got really mixed feelings about the new culture that has sprung up around D&D as a result of that accessibility.
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Eh, I’m kind of in two minds about it honestly. DMing is a lot of (often thankless) work and if people are willing to pay to get run through some standardised module stuff then let a dude get some grass for it.
I will admit, I’m a little biased - one of the players in one of my games does paid DMing as a side hustle. It’s not about the privilege of being in their game, it’s about being in a game, one that you can be sure is going to happen (since people paid in for it, which also helps cut down on ghosting).
While there’s a load of open roll-20 games to pick and choose from, player spots are limited, and a lot of people will get rejected not for any quality reason (though sometimes for quality reason) but instead just because there’s too many people.
I do play by post stuff, usually as a DM, sometimes as a player, and last time I threw up a game I got like 3x as many people as I could reasonably take. Some I ruled out immediately because of quality concerns, but others I had to make a hard decision on, and that sucks!
Paying helps players guarantee a game actually happens.
I wouldn’t do it myself - my itch gets scratched either way and I’m generally happy to step into the DM seat, but for others…eh, I get it. There’s a market for people paying, so there’s a market for people to get paid.
The ideal, in my eyes, would be for WotC to make DMing far less burdensome so more people are encouraged to do it on their own. A lot of 5e is “DMs make it up” which means a lot of work both before and during games that players don’t have to invest in, leading to this weird imbalance at the table and beyond.
We’ve not seen much/any of the 5.5e DMG, but frankly I don’t have high hopes for it making those changes.
p.s. I know I’ve disagreed with you a lot today but I promise I’m not trying to call you out or anything
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I’ve no personal experience with it since I’m always in personal groups where everyone knows the vibe and etc. but I’m sure it helps out anxious/nervous people in some way but its also a deeply-flawed system because you can just end up with 5 disconnected personalities all with their own agendas.
If I have one (I think) very unpopular opinion its that D&D players nowadays, at least from what I see on forums, social media etc. are deeply entitled when it comes to what they expect of a DM, even moreso than in the past. Critical Role should be applauded for making D&D incredibly mainstream however the side effects this has had have been pretty negative at times honestly, there’s an expectation that every game is now done in the style of everyone getting a 200-episode story arc and it just isn’t possible or feasible (especially not when even CR relies on hundreds of background people helping set it all up).
Also CR has created a popularity for the type of player who has an extremely customised character with a “quirky” backstory and characterisation post-campaign 2 of the show and I cannot vibe with it at all personally.
Edit: Also it has started a really insufferable argument that paints linear-narrative DMing styles that rely on a form of “railroading” as the incarnation of Lucifer themself. Or maybe the full-sandbox D&D Players are just an extremely loud minority. I couldn’t fathom being in a heavy-sandbox game myself I don’t think, I need a driving force and narrative both as a DM and as a player, sandbox D&D has the same vibe as Starfield to me, it looks nice to travel freely wherever you want sure but after 10 hours you realise it actually just means there’s nothing going on.
I know it was a criticism of the 3.5e DM Guide for being too detailed and offering tables, advice, scenarios and etc. for basically everything and every outcome but I’d actually prefer that I think.
Mallobaude isn’t a vampire!!! he doesn’t get Blood Kissed until the End Times!!!
I think elves are - for the most part - an easy horse to flog in regards to the crowd they attract. In the same vein that Silvermoon and Stormwind are; roleplayers have a bizarre affinity to punching down on each other.
For example; there’s a good discussion to have about the spate of weirdly hyper-sexual and misogynistic homebrew clan guilds that pop up every so often like a spot on the nose. Yet it’s an area that never really gets much flak when it’s arguably more damaging than Elfward Cullen.
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I think to me the biggest problem is the lopsidedness in the design.
Combat is incredibly crunchy. It takes up 90% of the rules, easily. That’s not too surprising, given the game’s wargaming roots, but then social/exploration stuff is like “ehhhh, the DM will make something up, and it’s usually just an eyeballed skill check”.
I don’t necessarily need tables for everything, but a bit more guidance (even just suggestions for some DCs) wouldn’t go amiss.
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The entire fact they just tacked on a crafting system that doesn’t even coherently work within its own rules with downtime tells you everything you need to know.
Also: please god give us Roleplay and Downtime (that actually does something) info in the DM guides WOTC, I can’t do everything my corporate overlords.
I mean, don’t you want your downtime to be reduced to…
a skill check?
Honestly the idea of D&D where it had equal development through all three branches is kinda funny. No more turn by turn combat, no more tracking of spell slots or anything like that, just “make a combat ability check to see if you succeed or lose”, same way you would if you were climbing a tough cliff.
The 5e DMG spending the first half talking about world creation instead of how to run the game remains one of the biggest lols.
Debating with people over my lukewarm centrist takes is 90% of what I do on these forums, it’s cool.
Again, I’d argue that this is only the case for post-Roll20 D&D, at least the “thankless” part. Running games for people who you know and get on with can be an absolute blast and can be its own reward.
It only becomes thankless when you’re one of hundreds of DMs recruiting on an open platform where you have to sift through dozens of applicants who you don’t know, many who obviously didn’t read any material that you wrote, many who are clearly more interested in playing their pre-made character than playing your campaign and many who you struggle to get even an ounce of enthusiasm out of, who will likely flake at the drop of a hat.
The thanklessness is a result of the same super-accessible platform that enables paid DMing in the first place.
It definitely can be - when people say I do a good job and they really enjoy my games it makes me giddy for like…a day, but there’s enough RPG horror stories going around about “my flatmate” or “the guy from work” or “friend from school” (people you know, in other words) where it definitely isn’t universal, and it’s hard to blame all of that on the new digital VTT age.
And like, I’ve been playing for a while, and even back in ye olden days there’d be players who just…didn’t know what their characters do.
Guy I know playing with friends doing his BG2 campaign was still a dozen sessions in with players not really knowing what they can/can’t do. These are guys who’d probably be better off playing board games or a more lightweight system than D&D, granted, but D&D’s the dominant…
Wait, what?
Not allowing certain races in your homebrew setting is bad DMing now?
What if they simply don’t fit the setting? Do these people not realize what a daunting task worldbuilding is? That every race needs a culture and a place in the history and ecosystem of the world? I’ve always been for depth over breadth — I’d rather have five races with developed history than twenty that have no lore besides the couple of sentences imported wholesale from the rulebooks.
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pfah, fairies… how about you play a real man’s race…
Honestly, “elves” is such a broad term that I feel it’s meaningless to talk about elves without mentioning the setting, as there’s no trait that’s universal for every single fictional race called elves, other than maybe a humanoid shape.
Like I said before: Tolkien’s “lofty immortal echoes of a lost golden age” elves are not D&D xenophobic forest ranger elves are not Warcraft long-eared magic addict elves are not Dragon Age subjugated ethnic minority elves.
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Well, according to the things this poor guy had thrown at him (who I should add is Queer), you would be:
A Homophobe
A Racist
Transphobic
Generally Queerphobic
A Terrible DM
A Railroader
Bland-and-Boring
The most actively saddening part was that all of this largely came from a lot of fellow Queer people who I think must have just really badly misunderstood and misread the person’s tweet and then also not bothered to read the context that the DM was running an OSR-esque system (think, Lord of the Rings type of DnD, classical fantasy).
Edit: I think in general there’s a pretty solid argument to be made that a lot of people who participate in D&D Discourse have:
A) Never actually played a game of D&D
B) Probably are going off what they see in popular media
C) Have unnecessarily strong opinions about easily solved problems
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Ah, so it’s basically Twitter being Twitter.
What race’s exclusion riled them up, anyway? Was it tieflings? When in doubt, it’s probably tieflings, I hear they’re the darlings of the Twitter queer circle for some reasons utterly unfathomable to me.
90% of the fury and rage is about Tiefling not being available, yes. Also Half-Elf, but the DM themself clarified that the race half-elf is there they just use a Human and or Elven statblock based on player decision.
Eh, it can be, but isn’t on its own. Twitter being twitter immediately jumped past anything else and went straight to bad.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GC-OXoLXQAA9yzO?format=jpg&name=large