{"id":31,"date":"2026-05-03T00:15:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T00:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/?page_id=31"},"modified":"2026-05-03T00:15:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T00:15:14","slug":"dnd-is-poison-and-the-prognosis-is-dim","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/dnd-is-poison-and-the-prognosis-is-dim\/","title":{"rendered":"DnD is Poison, and the Prognosis is Dim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The DnD system \u2013 5e in particular \u2013 is anathema to everything people seem to claim they want from roleplaying games. It\u2019s the butter churning system. The axe grinding system. The system that tells you cleaning your room is a fun game. It ruins people<\/em>, poisoning them down to their blood so that when someone suggests playing a game, the victim prepares themselves mentally to complete some long and tedious task. No, this is not an issue with what genres<\/em> of games we play. It\u2019s a problem with the godawful system and the habits it fosters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s pose a hypothetical. You teach high school and want to be a good teacher. You want your students to be engaged and enthusiastic, and you want them to not just understand the material, but to synthesize new observations about what they\u2019re learning. You want them to question the motives of historical figures \u2013 you don\u2019t just want them to know Napoleon attacked Russia in winter and think he was stupid. You want the kids to imagine themselves being Napoleon and understand how you\u2019d make that exact same stupid decision. This is a fairly noble objective, and one that most good teachers are striving to achieve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But let\u2019s suppose that the most common practice in classes prior to yours was to smack kids across the face with a grade penalty any time they expressed an observation their teacher felt was wrong. They try to get in the mind space of the world\u2019s greatest conquerors, and now they\u2019re outside the realm of verifiable fact, which has to be punished. As a result of that, every kid learns not to express themselves or think too much<\/em>, because if they talk too long and stumble into a creative idea or admit what they don\u2019t know, they\u2019re going to lose points. Much better to shut up and move along than to engage with anything!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would you call this an issue of \u201cgenre\u201d? Is it just that teachers have different personal preferences, and to each their own? Obviously, you can\u2019t control how every other teacher handles their classroom, so the even bigger question is, if you want more interaction, how do you un-teach the behaviors instilled by previous teachers and convince your kids they can be wrong without getting punished? Even if you tackle that, how do you then let your kids be wrong, but in a productive way that leads to good outcomes and better learning?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the guys I roleplay with is a school teacher, and these are the kinds of musings he throws around when we talk about how to run a good roleplaying game. We want people to learn to think like characters<\/em>, which we don\u2019t get through a system that punishes creative thinking by default. We\u2019re dealing with some pretty similar psychology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wallflowers and Dickheads<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DnD presents us with a terrible set of malincentives. Most games start every player off at level one, and at this level, a player can take one attack action and has between typically six and ten HP. An alley cat can deal one damage per attack, if it can hit the player, which means that if a wizard is ambushed by about ten alley cats, they can kill him fairly easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wizard just doesn\u2019t have the action economy to fend off a group of cats, and an average human only has 30 ft of movement speed. A cat can move 40 ft, which means if the wizard tries to run, the cats will catch him. If the wizard chooses to run at full-tilt, DnD lets every cat near the guy attack the wizard one extra time as he runs, and then they can catch up to him on their turn anyway since the free attack was free and didn\u2019t slow the cats down. This is how DnD introduces people to \u201croleplaying\u201d, in a bit of an absurdist nutshell. The reason the system behaves like this is buried in a long history of being frankly terrible while only concerning itself with being in a dungeon full of fearless, coordinated animals that specifically hate player characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, I bring up this thing with the cats not because wizards normally do get killed off by cats, but because it\u2019s been a joke about DnD for as long as I can remember. For some reason, in 3.5 edition, someone had created a stat block for house cats, and they decided house cats could do a dice roll\u2019s worth of damage, which meant it was possible for a wizard to lose a 1v1 argument with his pet cat and die in the process. Most DnD die-hards are quick to point out this is more of an issue with people trying to give everything a stat block, but it\u2019s not really the cats that matter here, stupid as it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What matters is the players, and how you\u2019re teaching them to approach roleplaying games that are designed the way that DnD is designed. In my experience, it won\u2019t usually be a cat that puts a level one player in his place, but something like a startled elk \u2013 and this is a real story! One of my GMs once had an elk attempt to run by us, and it was a precursor to a yeti attack. We were supposed to think, \u201cOh, what\u2019s that elk running from?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, our barbarian jumped out in front of it, because this was his first DnD game. He was thinking, \u201cI\u2019m a barbarian, like Conan. I can wrestle an elk!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, the elk clobbered him<\/em>. This is DnD, not a game where you are the hero of the story. You have to start off as a useless idiot with limited abilities, poor skills, and although thematically you imagine yourself fighting dragons because it\u2019s in the title of the game<\/em>, rules-wise, you can\u2019t. \u201cYou can\u2019t\u201d is DnD\u2019s mantra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You learn these lessons early and often while playing the system, and it\u2019s been like this pretty much from the beginning. People will say that the \u201cRanger\u201d class is meant to represent Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, but at level one, it ain\u2019t. In fact, the system has this weird hill where you\u2019re constantly looking up at a world that\u2019s too high-level for the party, where everything is imminently dangerous, and then suddenly, almost without warning, you just aren\u2019t anymore. You crest over the hill of level nine or so, and by that point your team can kill a Balor, which is a major demon. Yes, there are things that still pose a threat, but the further you progress, the more that curve inverts and the less anything really matters to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my own DnD group, the same where a party member nearly died on Elk Mountain, when we did finally kill a dragon it barely even registered. We\u2019d saved a town, and when the local lord asked us what we\u2019d wanted, we told him a few oxen and a cart would be good. It didn\u2019t seem like an act that really deserved a reward because we did it so casually. Only days before that we\u2019d all been flattened by a level 14 sorceress because she had a character sheet, and anything with a character sheet is generally going to be a lot more dangerous than something from the monster manual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I even remember how it dawned on the GM that we didn\u2019t feel like heroes<\/em>. Killing a dragon didn\u2019t feel like a heroic act because for most of the game, he was trying to keep us challenged, and we were frequently fighting uphill against things that were a little too strong, or a little too numerous. Our mentality was, \u201cIf we could do it, clearly anyone else might have come along and done it eventually. We aren\u2019t special.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He started having NPCs remark on how actually<\/em>, we were some of the most skilled people they\u2019d met. Other wizards acted astounded that my Dr. Putterdale could cast fireball<\/em>, a 3rd level spell, which wasn\u2019t even my highest spell slot. This power was, despite my misgivings, not something that random, helpless idiots could do. Our swordsman was in the upper quartile for talents. Our barbarian was dead by this time, but our new ranger friend was able to fire and reload two crossbows faster than any NPC thought was possible. Somewhere, somehow, and without feeling like it, we\u2019d become notable men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people like this about DnD, but if we rewind all the way back to when this first began, when we were just random losers getting nearly killed by the local wildlife, the system was enforcing something important in us. That we don\u2019t matter<\/em>. And that lesson sets in for a large core of people who play DnD, and especially for people who learn to play mainly from DnD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea behind this is that you aren\u2019t supposed to split the party and act like heroes on your own. You\u2019re supposed to \u201cshare the spotlight\u201d, and if a herd of cats is going to kill a party member, every player at the table needs to be there to watch it. The system uses HP bloat to make sure things stretch out for longer and to make sure that one guy can\u2019t just get lucky or clear out a dungeon with only a few spell slots. It\u2019ll let you be heroes later, but starting off, it\u2019s very important that you don\u2019t stand out, and that you don\u2019t deviate from things the GM intends for you to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, a player is encouraged to become a wallflower. Our barbarian nearly died because he was imagining himself as Conan. He was trying to stand out, and he immediately got slapped down because DnD, as a system, wants to teach the lesson at an early stage that this is wrong<\/em>. If he\u2019d just stood idly by and not reacted to the elk at all, it would have safely run by, the GM would have moved on to the yeti, and then we could have all hid from the yeti, with no one in any real danger. We\u2019d keep on playing like that, doing whatever the GM permitted us to do, until eventually we become a high enough level to start making our own choices, likely dozens of sessions in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s how you get the most common kind of DnD player. Those guys who don\u2019t speak up too much, and who don\u2019t do anything risky, because they remember that time they took a wrong turn and got killed by a racoon. If you don\u2019t speak up, you don\u2019t get creative, and you don\u2019t stand out, you won\u2019t be punished. Safe roleplay is detached, uninvolved roleplay, where you stick close to the team and only attack things when the GM asks you to roll initiative. If an elk is running by and the GM doesn\u2019t ask for initiative, don\u2019t fight the elk, it\u2019s just a set piece, and saying nothing about it is safer. Wiser. Better play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second most common kind of DnD player goes in the other direction. These people get sacked by their first elk, and they think, \u201cthere must be a better way\u201d. They start tearing through the rules to figure out how to launch an elk into space starting at level one, and by the gods, they find a way. The kinds of exploits vary a lot, but almost all of them tend to be meta in nature. Either they violate the spirit of the game, or worse, they violate the unspoken contract established by modern DnD: one of mutual destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see, players in the DnD system are all meant to be heavily<\/em> controlled and beaten into submission. You\u2019re going to be spending a lot of your game time battling monsters in an enclosed space, doing things that the GM discretely intended for you to do, but in return, there\u2019s kind of an unspoken understanding that the GM won\u2019t themselves become more\u2026 creative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is it that when you walk into a room with eight kobolds in it that they don\u2019t immediately run away and notify every other kobold in the den? A mere eight kobolds is a \u201cCR 1\u201d challenge, which is intended to mean it\u2019s a challenging encounter for a level 1 party. If all 800 kobolds in the den gathered together to trap the party in one of the dungeon rooms, barricading the doors before they set that room on fire, that\u2019s a CR 100 challenge, which means, in theory, it\u2019s kind of tricky for our level 1 heroes to navigate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Challenge Rating is not an exact science. In reality, 800 kobolds could kill a level 20 party because each kobold would get one crossbow attack, and just by the math they\u2019d be able to deplete the HP of the party in one round if the party didn\u2019t use their turns to get out of there. What it\u2019s actually meant to do is inform the GM that even if they think a Shambling Mound sounds cool, level one isn\u2019t the correct time to introduce your players to Swamp Thing. And that\u2019s the essential contract, here \u2013 in exchange for being heavily controlled and the GM knowing exactly what his players can do, the GM agrees only to use monsters that respect the level and abilities of the players. Hence, you create a constant environment where the players never feel powerful, but are somehow almost never overpowered by their enemies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previous versions of DnD, and some GMs, will choose to disregard this contract and have a purple worm, a CR 15 monster, appear as a random encounter for his level 4 party. In fact this is something that can just happen in the Princes of the Apocalypse module (if I\u2019m remembering correctly), and the players are expected only to get away from the worm, but it\u2019s kind of frowned on in the modern era (though this module was made for 5e, it\u2019s an older mentality you see less of today). See, the problem is, there are a lot of situations where monsters are rated to the players, so players become comfortable with the idea they can beat any monster presented to them, and when a purple worm shows up, if they don\u2019t already know what that is (and they fail their knowledge rolls), they assume they can fight it. Once the worm is in biting distance, it\u2019s too late to do much about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, this contract of mutual destruction tends to be more binding<\/em> to the GM. If one player starts applying his meta knowledge to solo a lot of monsters he\u2019s not really meant to beat alone, the GM can\u2019t pull a purple worm out of his hat without killing every other player. One of the most basic examples of players gently breaking this contract is using the Warlock\u2019s invocations to do weird things the game isn\u2019t often built to cope with. Casting Darkness while having Devil\u2019s Sight, for example, creates a magical field of darkness nothing but the Warlock can see through, so the Warlock just kills everything independently. Combining Eldritch Spear with Repelling Blast is another example, which lets you stand 300 feet away from a target and consistently shove it back so that it dies before it ever closes the distance. More broken things exist, but these are just things a player can do casually if they want to be a little<\/em> busted in some circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Players will learn to master little tricks and oversights like this, breaking all the conventions of the highly controlled environment while daring the GM to introduce monsters that can attack the rest of the party from 300 feet away (which then the rest of the players can\u2019t fight). These players are complete dickheads, and I tend to find they\u2019re some of the ones who enjoy DnD the most, because they feel like they\u2019ve really figured things out and can get their way in spite of the all the roadblocks holding everyone else back. No matter how much the developers work, no matter how many editions this game goes through, they will never, ever, be able to remove every possible \u201cdickhead\u201d build. There is no game system that does that, but DnD is one of the few that, through the contract of mutual destruction and the rewards that spring from abusing that contract, ironically really deeply encourages it by handsomely rewarding it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To make this all worse, because DnD offers a manual full of monsters, your dickhead players will eventually memorize all those monsters and know, out of character, exactly what to do with each one of them. I\u2019ve heard that this kind of thing is specifically why dungeons started featuring a bunch of deadly traps, because once players began to memorize the monsters, you couldn\u2019t surprise them anymore and you had to rely on weird, one-off mechanisms that were unique to a room. You can<\/em> homebrew your own monsters, but many DnD GMs don\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Third Players<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And while I cite the wallflower and the dickhead as the two core DnD players, I\u2019m always pressed to admit that there\u2019s a third type of player: the guy who is<\/em> creative and probably only puts up with this because he\u2019s long developed Stockholm Syndrome for it, or because he does so much homebrew that the conventions of DnD become meaningless. Often it\u2019s a combination of both. My favorite DnD GMs have always been this third type of player, but I always find that they get stuck being the GM in every game, because nobody else bothers to put in the love and care to make this fiasco work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Dickheads Meet an Intuitive World<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time, people internalize the rules of DnD until this all just feels natural to them. Any time they get invited to a roleplaying game, they think they understand what that entails. Either they are going to passively do whatever the GM instructs them to do, because they don\u2019t want to be systematically punished, or they are going to be dickheads and break the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an interesting example, I once volunteered to run a Warhammer 40k-themed dungeon crawler for some very DnD-brained players. I used the Hero System to create a list of weapons and gear they could use, but the party was mostly composed of DnDickheads. The dickheads all immediately and without fail bought Terminator Armor and Thunder Hammers, because they noticed that Thunder Hammers were surprisingly cheap for the sheer amount of damage they could do, and Terminator Armor had the best armor value they could get with the savings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked them if they were all sure about not having any firearms. Certainly, one of them could be an Assault Terminator, but I pointed out the guns had hundreds, occasionally thousands of meters of range, that I\u2019d designed all the guns and monsters myself, and that it might be prudent to use a gun in a war game. Rather smugly, they all told me that they had a firm idea of what they were doing, because in their DnD-addled brains, it seemed intuitive to them that anything worth fighting was certain to be within about thirty feet of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These guys did great! In the sewers<\/em>. They didn\u2019t do so well when the Tau called in close air support, and nor when a tank got a bead on them from a hundred meters downfield. There was an upside \u2013 they were able to ignore the resupply mission, since they didn\u2019t need ammo \u2013 and because they all had teleporters they were able to skip straight through a facility mission since they had a map of the facility and knew which wall was adjacent to the exit. We didn\u2019t actually finish the game, because in the second to last mission, they were faced with several dozen truck-sized carnifex barreling towards their position, with hundreds of Tyranid infantry racing ahead of those, and several house-sized hierodules with massive acid cannons behind all that. Given all they had were hammers, the players could do nothing but wait for all these massive, lethal nails to run towards them. The Admech was counting on them! Swing those hammers, guys!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had set this game up in its entirety before inviting these guys to choose their gear. I had just thought that, intuitively, somebody<\/em> was going to think guns had a strategic value on the battlefield. Somebody was going to see that I was offering every type of anti-tank gun the setting talked about, and one person might volunteer to get one of those guns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily, I\u2019ve buried the lede a bit here. There were two non-dickhead players in the group. The first was a resident creative who decided to be a psyker, which meant he had a whole mess of neat magic tricks. I\u2019m glad someone<\/em> grabbed that, because it had been a lot of extra work to design. The other was a completely new player who didn\u2019t even know what 40k was, and she asked if she could play as a squad of ordinary people. In Hero, the answer to that question is yes<\/em>, so she became a squad of Battle Sisters*, and thank the Emperor, one of them had an incendiary grenade launcher. She bought guns and wanted to play a squad of people because, to her, it seemed logical to want both those things in a war game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The regular person with a regular, non-DnD brain, and our team creative guy, saved the dickheads\u2019 asses<\/em>. Between her guns and his psionic brain beams, they managed to lay down enough covering fire and distraction to get the min\/maxed assault terminators close enough to kill anything that couldn\u2019t run away from the hammers \u2013 though a lot of things could and did run from the hammers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See, these two didn\u2019t approach this game like people trying to win a DnD module. For the new player, the conventions of DnD hadn\u2019t yet poisoned her. She looked at me offering anti-aircraft weapons and thought, \u201cGosh, there\u2019s probably aircraft, and people who are far away who are not going to stand in one place for a hammer to smash their brains in. It\u2019s probably going to be like a war, and they\u2019ll use guns, or something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a conclusion an ordinary person would make. An intuitive conclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did I mention the Tau Stealth Suits, which were shooting from the rooftops, only to bug out and move to a new position when the Terminators got close? Again, thank the Emperor for those psionic brain beams and the guns.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DnD is an extremely unintuitive game. A lot of its conventions are built around trying to control players and to keep them from doing things the GM wouldn\u2019t expect, while still giving them an illusion of free will. This causes them to internalize a lot of very stupid assumptions about any fictional world they\u2019ll enter later. I know that many DnD players will whine that I should have explained the system more, and maybe helped those players towards a more \u201cpowerful\u201d build**, but I did warn them. And really, those of you reading this without having played DnD before, or who discovered other game systems early enough to realize how bad DnD is, if I asked you to run a dozen consecutive war missions through multiple environments, and most of your team walked past hundreds of perfectly working guns to grab nothing but a bomb suit and a knife, would you really sit there and say, \u201cGosh, they\u2019re probably on to something!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At best you\u2019d assume you were missing some absolutely crucial information, that there\u2019s some major oversight someone<\/em> isn\u2019t seeing, because there\u2019s nothing naturally rational about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People who don\u2019t roleplay<\/em> make better intuitive decisions than experienced DnD players do, because their intuition has not been absolutely poisoned. They don\u2019t try to break the system because they don\u2019t even know what the system is yet. All they rely on is the real-world logic they accumulated by being normal people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*If you\u2019re wondering how they used teleporters to skip one mission in spite of being supported by Battle Sisters without teleporters, it\u2019s because the Battle Sisters got ripped apart by demons in the previous mission. The Terminators met a brand new squad of identically-armed Battle Sisters<\/em> on the other side of the facility.<\/em> Believe me, it was a brutal crawler game with the limited resources the group chose to use, and the stress was part of why the game came to an end early.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

**As for \u201cbuilds\u201d, there were several enclosed environments where having one Assault Terminator was a great idea because they could round corners without fear. It wasn\u2019t that buying the gear was wrong. Having three fifths of the team be exclusively that because they thought they were min\/maxing was how it all went wrong.<\/em> What they did to their team is called \u201cpigeonholing\u201d if you want to think in terms of sensible logic.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transforming Hero Right Back into DnD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I bring up the above example not because it alone is an inviolable proof of what\u2019s wrong with DnD. I have plenty of examples to further support this argument, but what I want to make clear with the war crawler story is that my distaste for DnD is not a \u201cgenre\u201d issue. It\u2019s not that I can\u2019t or won\u2019t do war games or crawlers, it\u2019s that I hate badly designed war games that encourage players to be obtuse. I hate that DnD will teach people to try to look for exploits in a small picture context \u2013 that it can convince people that bringing only knives to a gunfight is outsmarting someone if only because the stab-to-cost ratio seems really good once you\u2019ve been trained to think like an idiot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What DnD does to a person\u2019s perception of how games should work sadly doesn\u2019t rest with players alone. I\u2019ve had a story related to me by someone I was able to convert to the Hero System. Now, contrary to what seems to be a popular misconception, I don\u2019t encourage the Hero System because it\u2019s \u201crules lite\u201d. The Hero System has over 700 pages of rules and that\u2019s so intimidating that I respect and understand anyone who tries it and chickens out. Heck, I only learned by diving right into it and getting most of the rules wrong for a long time \u2013 it took ages before I could play the game correctly. Strong rules create a strong foundation for everyone to know exactly what they can and can\u2019t do, and now that I\u2019ve got a pretty good grasp of the system, I have an easier time teaching others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, this player\u2019s story is as tragic as it is infuriating. He convinced his GM to try the Hero System, and the GM went through all the trouble to sit down and learn it. But<\/em>, once the games began, the GM noticed that goblins kept dying after getting stabbed through the brain case. Like, a goblin would take a mace to the frontal lobe and just\u2026 die.<\/em> Rather, they\u2019d get brain damage due to Hero\u2019s \u201cStun\u201d mechanic, so even if they didn\u2019t die, they\u2019d be incapacitated pretty much every time they got hit at all. Their little, baby, goblin limbs would break like twigs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coming from a strong DnD background, the GM knew this is not how goblins work, so he began to up their Stun so that they would not black out and would more often take two or three shots to physically destroy. This dragged battle out longer, and made it feel more like a normal DnD encounter. Balance and comfort restored!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frustrated by this, the player began using Presence Attacks. The mechanic works like this: when you immolate a goblin with magical napalm, you inform the other goblins there is more where that came from and they\u2019re next. If the goblins don\u2019t have a ton of willpower, they throw down their weapons and run for their lives because burning to death in magical napalm seems bad. Now<\/em> most goblin encounters were ending quickly because the goblins didn\u2019t want to suffer a horrible, agonizing death<\/em>. Once again, the GM found himself in completely nonsensical territory to a mind utterly poisoned by DnD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knowing that a dungeon should take at least one or two real-life days to finish, the GM then decided to increase the willpower of all the goblins, so from then on, they never got scared and never surrendered. They fought to the death every time, and for the most part, every battle felt just like it did when the GM ran DnD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See, the Hero System is a highly modular, open-ended system, so you could easily do this to yourself if you wanted to, and because this GM was so badly poisoned by the DnD system, he thought this was something it was really important to do. Can you imagine a scenario where clearing rooms would be a rapid and one-sided thing? Like imagine a team of specialists going room to room, throwing some kind of explosion in each room, telling goblins to throw down their weapons and arresting them in front of their crying goblin wives. Small-scale battles shouldn\u2019t be that way, everything should be a long, horrific, conflict of attrition where nobody values anything, least of all their lives. Heck, the wives need to be holding spears too, and the babies as well, I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is one of the most depressing things about winning converts over to new systems. They may move to that system, but they always bring the DnD with them, because it\u2019s in their blood now. Sometimes they\u2019ll try the new system for a while and then get frustrated because it\u2019s not enough like DnD, and they go right back to their abusive, nonsense worlds where no goblin nor kobold wants to live unless a player names and kidnaps one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But why shouldn\u2019t trained soldiers be able to easily smash the head of a toddler-sized adversary with a mace? If we\u2019re going to do this, and the goblins are going to stand toe to toe with creatures maybe twice their size, can\u2019t we expect the fight to be swift and one-sided? Even at the early levels, should a swordsman really need to swing a sword two or three times per goblin? More on this later, but DnD-style goblins, which are shorter, lighter, and not that strong, are at a disadvantage<\/em> to humans in a swordfight, and they should play like it, always. The answer is not to give them more endurance or increase the passive effort required to kill them, but always, always<\/em> to actively make them think like bastards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A DnD GM \u2013 in particular from a 5e education \u2013 learns to think he needs a long, drawn-out, controlled environment. Without it, he feels like he\u2019s failing somehow. If his players aren\u2019t adequately slowed down by the combat, usually measured via how much real-world time they spend rolling dice at the monsters, then are they having a good combat? It\u2019s wild to me that GMs think this needs to be normal, even in spite of how many people are constantly telling me that combat is their least favorite part of the game just because of how damn long it takes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I say, I\u2019ve got numerous examples of how the system has screwed up people\u2019s brains. In another game, a first-time GM to Hero decided the way he\u2019d like to introduce the party to the plot was by arresting them, and then having a bunch of freedom fighters break the players out of jail. This would make the players receptive to the freedom fighters, in theory, and would start the main story action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my own and many opinions, this is not the best<\/em> way to start a game, but once you\u2019ve roleplayed long enough, you will eventually be in a game that starts like this. After all, it\u2019s how Skyrim begins. Knights of the Old Republic 2 has your character arrested or detained multiple times without giving you options to change course. What\u2019s more, this is extremely plausible in a DnD game where your characters are level 1 and a squad of ten house cats led by a wild elk could wipe the party. If the guards say to comply, your players are little more than ordinary people and must comply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, DnD had this GM confused about everyone\u2019s actual places in the world. When we asked him what the tone of the game was, what type of people we were supposed to be, he replied, \u201cNot the world\u2019s absolute best, but definitely on that trajectory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think this is, generously, what many people imagine themselves to be when they play DnD. A level 1 fighter is not, in the mind\u2019s eye, an idiot who dies after slipping on a juice spill at Walmart. Rather, many players view themselves as a temporarily embarrassed level 20 demigods, who will rise to their proper place after killing a discreet number of goblins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But we replied, \u201cSo are you imagining something like an action movie star? Like Gimli the dwarf, Rambo, or Zorro? Still humanoid, but kind of fantastically human. Almost mythical ability, but can be killed by their fellow man if they aren\u2019t careful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the GM replied, enthusiastically, \u201cYeah! Yeah! Exactly like that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So for those of you have never played DnD before, I\u2019d like to take a quick quiz. You are an evil king who would like to arrest a group of unusually skilled individuals before they pose a threat to you. These people are, in no particular order, Rambo, Zorro, Han Solo, and Austin Powers. You send ten ordinary palace guard to arrest them. Do you expect the outcome will be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A)<\/strong> The guards arrest all four men without incident or hijinks.
B)<\/strong> You don\u2019t even find all the guards\u2019 bodies. One of them turns up in a refrigerator next week.
C)<\/strong> Most of the guards survive, but all of their things are stolen and they have the letter \u2018Z\u2019 cut in their underwear.
D)<\/strong> A few of the guards return alive, but one of them is Austin Powers in a false mustache.
E)<\/strong> Anything except for A.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this case, the real answer was B, but if you thought it was even possible for the answer to be A, then either you\u2019ve never seen a film nor read an adventure book in your life, or DnD has taught you some really unfortunate lessons about what a fun adventure is. Using story logic, as soon as they chase Rambo into the woods, the evil king can send a hundred men and they\u2019re not going to catch him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I talk about enjoying \u201cnarrative\u201d games, this is what I mean. I don\u2019t mean that I want there to be no game rules, I mean that I expect games to follow a mix of practical and cinematic sense. Zorro should be able to swing from a chandelier. You can\u2019t catch Rambo if he\u2019s in his element. Enemies run for their lives when they realize they\u2019re losing. Games should be pithy, exciting, intuitive to a normal person, and fun. You shouldn\u2019t get stonewalled by a series of mechanics meant specifically to stop people from copying their favorite heroes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For that matter, if the GM had wanted the result he was expecting \u2013 for his players to actually be as strong as level 1 DnD characters \u2013 he needed to ask them to play at the \u201cNormal Person\u201d tier. That is, the power level reserved for a janitor, or a Wallstreet trader, or the weatherman. This is an ordinary person with a reasonable amount of job-related skill \u2013 such as some <\/em>sword-fighting talent. There are plenty of game ideas that you can play as an ordinary person, but it\u2019s just that most DnD players don\u2019t realize this is what level 1 is once you put things in context. Zorro, by stark comparison, is an action hero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So What is Supposed to be Correct, Then?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think back to your first ever roleplaying game, if you can remember. What did you imagine your character would be like? I\u2019ve met a lot of players. I know one person imagined being Legolas, naturally! That person, sadly, began their journey in DnD, and they had to learn to settle with what they got instead \u2013 a powerless, undercooked, generic elf, who in spite of living hundreds of years is no more experienced than the average person, and who must live in wary fear of feral alley cats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want you to be Legolas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if not Legolas, then whatever else you want to be \u2013 whatever you had in your head. If you want to be \u201cGrim Blackstar\u201d, the devil-blessed demigod son of Tiamat, then I will admit you\u2019re probably naval gazing too much, but we\u2019ll see what we can do with the tier we\u2019re playing at. I don\u2019t like a game system that teaches people to shut up and get with the program, or to think that your core imagination is wrong. This may sound ironic in an article about how much I think DnD is a bad idea and people shouldn\u2019t play it, but the difference is that DnD is a bad system<\/em> with bad incentives<\/em>. If you think the core idea of a human fighter is cool, then by damn, we\u2019ll set you up with that. We can do it. You don\u2019t have to be creative, but just don\u2019t learn to think you can\u2019t<\/em> be creative or a part of this story in the way you imagined it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is Legolas? He\u2019s not a nervous elf who\u2019s picked a few meager features from an anemic menu of skills. He doesn\u2019t need to figure out if he\u2019s a fighter, a ranger, or something else entirely. Legolas is himself. He\u2019s an expert bowman with keen eyesight, firm willpower, excellent swordsmanship, personal beauty, and is respected among other elves because he\u2019s a cut above even them. We can make exactly this character in Hero, it\u2019s not a difficult one. Why shouldn\u2019t<\/em> this be your first character? It\u2019s familiar, intuitive, and sounds fun to be!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a way easier time introducing people to Hero and teaching them to play intuitively if they\u2019ve never played DnD before. They don\u2019t expect to be told they can\u2019t do or be things. Go back to those old days again. Remember telling the GM you wanted to vault over an enemy and shoot them in the back? Your DnD GM laughed and gave you a penalty for it, or made you slip, or you succeeded but it wasted your actions and you didn\u2019t get to do anything else that round. Well, that\u2019s not what I think leads to good roleplayers or effective games. DnD wants you to stand toe to toe and deal damage, and it punishes clever maneuvers or dynamic ideas until you give up on them and settle for whatever stilted fakery their ramrod stiff program will tolerate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoy the excitement when people quiz me on Jojo\u2019s Bizarre Adventure powers, asking if they could do that show\u2019s various, ridiculous abilities, maybe as a character in a game. They ask if they can start the game<\/em> with these powers without it being a problem for anyone else, and are bewildered when I say it\u2019s possible. Of course you can play as an orangutan who lives in your own personal war machine that\u2019s made purely of willpower! We\u2019ll start here, and I hope that as you get comfortable, you\u2019ll start synthesizing new ideas and coming up with your own unique abilities. When I tell you that\u2019s the starting bar and you could do more<\/em>, you realize you don\u2019t have to think inside a box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this process is harder when interacting with players who have already been poisoned by DnD, because they develop a lot of expectations about how weak and unobtrusive a player is supposed to be. What they call \u201cbalance\u201d. A brand new entrant to the hobby will ask if they can have \u201cCrazy Diamond\u2019s\u201d powers, and after I look up what they are, then they\u2019re good to go. A new player will ask me if they can have an invisible dog that they talk to telepathically. Sure, buddy, sounds fun!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think about how easily an outsider understands the concept of an invisible dog that you can speak to with your thoughts. If you haven\u2019t played any roleplaying game, I don\u2019t figure you know how this would work mechanically<\/em>, but I\u2019m the GM and I\u2019ll get it put together for you. It\u2019ll play exactly how you expect, without stupid restraints. However, someone who knows DnD already will instead describe a mechanic<\/em>. So picture an invisible, telepathic dog in your head. You know what that is, even if the picture is blank because the dog is invisible. You\u2019ve got that. Now, instead, imagine a player comes to you and asks for this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to be able to summon an invisible dog anywhere within 30 feet of myself. The dog is unable to move, but it does have the ability to see invisible things and can see into different dimensional planes. If anything gets within 30 feet of the dog and doesn\u2019t speak a password that I gave it, the dog will bark at them. If they get within 5 feet of the dog, the dog can attack them, but the dog uses my spellcasting ability to attack instead of any physical attributes. To cast the spell, I need to have access to a tiny silver whistle, a piece of bone, and a thread, but these things aren\u2019t consumed by the spell, I just need them to be there. I also have to wave my arms around and speak a magic word. I can only do this a few times per day, but if I fall asleep for eight hours, it restores the spellcasting limit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other than being a salad of rules that makes my blood boil<\/em> for wasting so much written text, what the absolute fuck<\/em> is this person describing? It sounds almost like an invisible dog, but stripped of everything that would make an invisible dog cool or interesting. Don\u2019t give me all this insanity about how many exact feet away the dog appears, or how close people have to be for the dog to bark at them \u2013 that is not a description of a cool thing a hero in a story would have. A cool thing would be an invisible dog! It would function like a dog, albeit invisible! It can hear, smell, and see people as far away as dogs normally do. It will bark at strangers like a dog does. It will eat its own invisible poop. Why can\u2019t it move? Why does it only bark at things within 30 feet? The ability to see into alternate dimensions sounds absurd and like it\u2019ll never come up, so that\u2019s just fluff and I\u2019m not going to ask you to pay character points for that. What is it about sleep that restores your magic power? Abilities should be intuitive so that we don\u2019t have so much inane crap to parse, and when a power sounds like a story, it\u2019s more emotionally impactful and it\u2019s easier for everyone at the table to remember.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The above assault on common sense is Mordenkainen\u2019s Faithful Hound, a real DnD spell that I\u2019m fairly certain almost nobody uses. It\u2019s not anything<\/em>, narratively. If it appeared in a movie script, it\u2019d be cut to save time because no sane writer would want to waste precious minutes explaining this to an audience. If they had to keep it, it\u2019d become an invisible dog, because the audience will remember what that is, and they won\u2019t remember if the dog has a bark range limit of 30 feet. The spell as designed might be useful in an enclosed dungeon space for a DnD game, perhaps as something you put in a doorway before you decide to nap in your Leomund\u2019s Tiny Hut, but the whole thing is clearly built from a mechanical perspective and not with any thought in mind to be part of a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

See, the difference between Jojo\u2019s Crazy Diamond and Mordenkaininen\u2019s Faithful Hound is that Crazy Diamond was meant to be interesting to people who want to read about an adventure, and the Faithful Hound is created for something more wrapped up in its own rules and institutions that are about moderating and preventing adventure. DnD doesn\u2019t care what the system\u2019s spells are<\/em>, they only focus on what the spells do<\/em> when applied to its rule system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I wish I could say I didn\u2019t meet players who attempt to describe powers to me as though they were describing a DnD spell, but they do, and these players are very difficult to work for. A player once tried to explain to me a spell that created a strong gust of wind. The way they explained it was, \u201cI cast a spell that creates a strong gust of wind. The wind causes a creature to move away ten feet and fall down, and then afterward the creature should become frightened and run away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tried to ask, \u201cAre you wanting a mind control spell? Like it\u2019s a magical wind that makes the creature feel fear, so it has to run away?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They said, \u201cNo, it\u2019s a spell that creates wind somewhere within thirty feet from me, and it moves the animal ten feet away from me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRight, but you say the animal needs to move ten feet, fall down, and then run away, which is imposing behaviors on the animal. Do you want the spell to always produce those behaviors?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe wind will knock them prone, and the animal should run away afterward.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe need to buy mind control if the wind is making<\/em> the animal run away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo, because the wind should make the animal scared, so it runs away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut how does the wind scare the animal?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause it\u2019s magic and that\u2019s frightening to an animal!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOh! Okay! So you\u2019re saying you cast a gust of wind, and the spell does what you\u2019d expect a gust of wind to do. It might push the animal or make them fall down, but that\u2019ll depend on the animal and we\u2019ll use common sense. If that frightens an animal, it should run, per common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes! How do we build that into the spell?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This probably seems like a really dumb conversation if you\u2019ve never played DnD, but in a usual DnD game, monsters don\u2019t run away and no mechanic in the game works according to common sense. Animals don\u2019t get scared unless a spell has some zinger on it requiring them to pass a save, and then the spell explicitly scares the animal as a blackletter law. The player didn\u2019t imagine that hurling an animal with a magic gust of wind might startle it, and that it would simply run away if it made sense to run away. She didn\u2019t realize that adding these kinds of specifications to her abilities, such as the exact distance the animal had to move*, just made it more confusing. She didn\u2019t realize the game world is going to respond to a gust of wind in an intuitive way, because in DnD, it never would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In defense of this player, DnD veterans know<\/em> you need your powers to spell out basic, common sense interactions in black and white, because if you don\u2019t the GM won\u2019t use common sense. DnD GMs are trained to think in terms of battles, and they\u2019re supposed to assume the entire game is pretty much just battles, and that they\u2019re supposed to consume a lot of time. Nobody trusts each other in that system, and everyone has to be handcuffed to a radiator in the imaginary equivalent of a rundown Motel 8.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want people to play games in an intuitive, creative way, you have to play games that respond to common sense and respect intuitive inputs. We are not computers. Some play groups need the bumper pads that DnD provides because they have members who are too childish to play fun and fair games, but I find the majority of people are mature enough to be cool and have a fun time if you tell them they can be Zorro, or Spiderman, or cast a gust of wind that will naturally scare animals off even if the spell doesn\u2019t say it will in the legalese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But above everything, you need players to understand they can use their own intuition. They can be creative, and we won\u2019t have to go diving into the rulebook to see if their creativity is allowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*As another note on DnD, part of what made this interaction confusing was that she was trying to stipulate the distance the target had to be shoved. That\u2019s normally how DnD would do it, and then it would go on to limit the spell based on the size of the monster. It didn\u2019t make any sense to the Hero system, though. You just shove a creature, and it moves whatever distance the GM thinks is a rational distance.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creating Rational Play<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

See, DnD is built to treat everyone like morons. The GM isn\u2019t allowed to determine what a \u201crational distance\u201d is for a spell to throw something because it assumes the GM will act in bad faith. It then builds everything around these assumptions of bad faith. It creates a game world predicated entirely on malicious intent, where everyone is irrationally assumed to be a sociopathic, wandering murderer. Incidentally, this is where the term \u201cmurderhobo\u201d comes from \u2013 a murderhobo isn\u2019t a player that kills NPCs (a contract killer or even a serial killer isn\u2019t necessarily a hobo), it\u2019s a homeless drifter who does nothing but kill, which you might note fits the description of 99% of DnD characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DnD is only an ideal system if your players and GM are a creative desert. If you don\u2019t have any ideas of what to play, or what things should be like, or what would happen if a goblin were hit by a strong gust of wind, then DnD is great because it will explicitly and meticulously tell you exactly what to do, and nobody has to use much brain power. You can browse your phone and only perk up for your turn in combat. It\u2019s a wasteland, where people seem only to be creative by ignoring all the system\u2019s mechanics to invent \u201chomebrew\u201d content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But once you get away from that laziness and creative bankruptcy, you can find you\u2019ve never really learned to GM, nor how to roleplay. What do you do if your players aren\u2019t going to be trapped in a dungeon for most of their lives, and if they can fly, use telepathy, swing from chandeliers, and do the things they always thought a hero should be able to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside of a crawler game, at this point you\u2019re no longer really being constrained, so the key thing that has to be done is establish a task and then keep the players on that task. The best way to do this is to tell the players the premise of the game, then help them invent motives related to the story. Once the game begins, don\u2019t wait around for the players to introduce themselves in a tavern, because idleness leads to insanity. If your players get bored, they\u2019ll make their own fun and will burn down the tavern. Instead, set them in motion. It helps a lot to have a player who can lead the other players, so that you can make that player be the \u201cquest giver\u201d, and then your players are self-motivated and will work towards the game\u2019s plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For self-motivation, it\u2019s often important that your players feel like Zorro or Legolas. If they feel like powerful heroes, they\u2019re going to go off and take risks or do more extraordinary things. If you insist on making them play as level 1 wizards who get killed by house cats, they\u2019re going to be conservative, meticulous, and cowardly. You have to think about the tone you want, and be careful you don\u2019t instill a sense of \u201cmother may I\u201d, where the players are waiting for the GM to tell them what to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If your whole group is already poisoned by DnD, this is a pretty difficult hurdle to get over. I once tried to run a game where my players were meant to be taking down a criminal organization that was terrorizing the city. I talked them through their motives, established everyone as hating the gangs for specific reasons that mattered to them. Then, to get the players all together, I thought I\u2019d have an NPC call them with a promise they\u2019d \u201cmake a difference\u201d and bring down crime in the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The players met, but none of them had made the phone call. Sadly, because most of them knew DnD better than anything else, they thought the \u201cquest\u201d they were on now was to discover who had called them, so that they could receive the next step of the quest and be told by the GM what to do. These were characters who, between all of them, had a lot of intimate insider knowledge about the gang and its weak points. They all had family members who had been killed by this gang, or were being held back by the gangsters somehow, or were paying protection money they could no longer afford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless, for the next several weeks we played the adventure of \u201cfind the quest giver\u201d. My players combed through the city streets seeking clues as to who called them on that fateful day, so they could ask that guy what the next step of their adventure was. At one point during that adventure, they killed the NPC who had called them without realizing it, but by that point they\u2019d already been wrapped up in attacks on the local police and had no way out of the mess they were in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t until a new player joined the group that anything got on any kind of rational, intuitive track. I told him his motive was to drive the gang out of the city, and when he met with the players, his character was astounded at the damage they\u2019d done, and then was further astounded that their core mission was to get caller ID on some dude who\u2019d called them two months ago. He was talking to a man whose wife had been killed by the gang he was fighting, but that wasn\u2019t why he was fighting gangsters. This one phone call was that guy\u2019s life now. It\u2019s like if \u201cTaken\u201d wasn\u2019t about Liam Neeson trying to find his kidnapped daughter, but was instead about trying to find a scam caller from India so Neeson could ask him for job counseling, and yet there was still just as much murder \u2013 also the scammer had kidnapped Neeson\u2019s daughter, but Neeson forgot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d set up a world with a bunch of NPCs and various factions that would react to the players, and the problem was that, in spite of having a decent amount of background playing DnD games, a lot of the players had simply never been in an actual roleplaying game before. They were familiar with the idea of being DnD wallflowers, where they ask the GM what to do, go do that thing, and otherwise stay out of the way, but none of them went into it with the revelation that I was expecting someone to proactively grab the wheel and just drive<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you haven\u2019t ever done it, you have no practice doing it, and if everyone gets thrown into it with nothing but DnD as training, the game is going to be confusing and difficult, because the quest is to carry out your character\u2019s motive. The quest is not to find a discreet individual who tells you to go into a specific dungeon or warehouse. The world is open and rational, and trying to approach it like a video game where the only way to proceed is through quest-givers will make the party come across like\u2026 well, homeless contract killers, basically. You know, \u201cmurderhobos\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bottom line is, to set up an actual roleplaying game, you want to tell the players the premise, have them set up characters with motives that would drive the plot forward, and then try to figure out who in the group is most likely to lead, so you can make sure that they, especially, are going to pursue their motives. If you have a group trained through DnD, you need to understand that they\u2019ve basically never roleplayed before, and that they should use intuition and common sense, rather than trying to figure out what\u2019s the next abstract \u201cgame trigger\u201d or \u201cdungeon\u201d. The next step will be one they take with their own feet, rather than something handed out by an NPC with a glowing punctuation mark over their heads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DnD players get taught to be out of the way, to be homeless, and to wait for instructions before acting. It\u2019s what the whole system is built around and how it trains everyone at the table to think. If you want to play a different kind of game, your players should have homes, people they care about, and a reason to want to save the world or kill someone beyond \u201cbecause an NPC implies this is the quest\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a simple practice run, you can start really small with a game where the premise is that the players are ordinary people who are part of a cult, and they\u2019ve decided to sacrifice their neighbor to Fumdidlio, the dark god of composting. Tell your players they hate their neighbor, their neighbor has a nicer garden than them, and that your players do not want to be arrested by the police. From there, have it turn out that the neighbor is a retired Navy SEAL, which means he\u2019s much more skilled than the players. He owns a gun. He\u2019s an active member of the community so people might notice he\u2019s missing within hours. The neighbor is creeped out by the players to start with so he\u2019s not likely to go somewhere alone with them and he has told his friends how creepy the players are. Maybe have it turn out the neighbor is in a rival cult with a better evil god, and that\u2019s why his garden is doing better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then just let the players go. Play for a single day and don\u2019t worry that much about stats or whatever. Focus on their motives and stuff. If all your group knows is DnD, this will be unlike anything you\u2019ve ever done as players or as a GM, and you\u2019ll realize how unproven you are with a character-based game. If your players go nuts and have a ton of fun, you might be cut out to play a different system and do things that are more open-ended, and that involve actual heroics and hijinks. Or, you may find the group is hopeless, doesn\u2019t know what to do, and can\u2019t think of any way to complete the challenge \u2013 in which case, DnD might be your best fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the players begin the game by just killing their neighbor and doing a sacrifice in the front lawn, then there shouldn\u2019t be any reward, and the police will arrive pretty quickly to arrest everyone. You can play it out until everyone\u2019s in the back of the police car, but in this case it\u2019s not a terribly conclusive test. Probably, it reveals your players aren\u2019t used to grounding themselves or thinking of a game world as being a space that matters at all. Or maybe they just don\u2019t like the premise and want to get the game over with. It could be you as the GM, it could be them as the players. Every group is different. The cult thing might not be a great angle, I\u2019m just tossing an idea at the wall, here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless: set a premise, give your players a motive, make sure they understand they have to realize that motive themselves, and then keep them on task by moving forward whenever the party seems ready to act on something. \u201cTalk amongst yourselves\u201d or any kind of dead space will always lead to the game imploding, because if there\u2019s nothing to do for a long stretch, the players will make<\/em> things to do if they aren\u2019t already beaten into hopeless wallflowers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clever Challenges, not Mechanical Ones<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way you actually expect players to behave in a more open-ended game is to have them gather information, interact with the world, and try to figure out when and where their advantages are present. That\u2019s the point I\u2019m trying to get everyone to think about. If the neighbor is part of a rival cult, he might be ordering his cult paraphernalia from the same company on Amazon, so the jig would be up if the players don\u2019t scout around and find out a twist like that first. He\u2019d see their Darkington Brand ceremonial knife and recognize what it is, and then he might try to invite them over to sacrifice them before they can sacrifice him. We could get into some \u201cSpy Vs Spy\u201d silliness (and again, it takes practice to run games like this if you never have before).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a broader game, this same idea applies. You don\u2019t want 800 kobolds locking you in a room and setting it on fire, so you have to assume they could do that and would do that, and then figure out a way to deal with those kobolds that doesn\u2019t involve being in that risky situation. It might involve asking a town militia to help you set up a siege, to starve the kobolds out. This isn\u2019t something we normally encourage in a DnD game and might see it as \u201ccheating\u201d in that context, but it\u2019s very practical and what a sane person would do, so it\u2019s a reasonable answer in a sane roleplaying game. Really any answer the party comes up with using the tools they have is fair so long as you could explain it to a person who never played DnD before. If you\u2019d have to explain the rules that were exploited to make a plan possible, you\u2019re on the wrong track \u2013 or at least, getting trapped further in the system than you are escaping from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As another example, I\u2019ve played in a game once where the GM wasn\u2019t really used to his players blazing their own path, and we had a few players who weren\u2019t really used to operating outside of DnD. We were told the land\u2019s king had the ability to ensorcel the minds of his subjects to do his bidding, and a group of freedom fighters approached our player characters, who were mercenaries, to fight on their behalf and help destroy the king. The members of the group used to DnD quickly assumed the correct thing to do was work for the \u201cfreedom fighters\u201d, because they approached us first and had given us the \u201cquest\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other parts of our group, used to more narrative and character-driven games, began asking the GM questions about the kingdom. We found out that the land is relatively prosperous, the king is popular and waived grain levies this year to celebrate his rise to power, and there wasn\u2019t much evidence of any mind control magic. Since we were playing mercenaries, we asked the freedom fighters what they were offering as payment, and the GM pitched us a large sum of money. A perhaps unreasonably<\/em> large sum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we narrative guys began to talk about the only way these \u201cfreedom fighters\u201d could deliver that sum is if we personally did the fighting and reaved it from the king\u2019s coffers. If that was the case, there was no reason we had to work for a middle man, and it\u2019d be a long, hard conflict that wouldn\u2019t have a paycheck if anything didn\u2019t go to plan. To top it off, enemies of the state often get frozen out of local trade. We were being set up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of helping the freedom fighters, we killed them, then took their heads straight to the king. We informed the king we were skilled mercenaries who had been approached by terrorist traitors, and appalled at their disrespect to the throne we did the only thing loyal subjects would. If given a small contingent of ten thousand men, we could strike these separatists that very night and annihilate three generations of their families as retribution for their scheming. The king was pleased, but because the GM was more used to DnD, he only gave us ten of the king\u2019s soldiers instead of ten thousand (he was thinking in that weird, individualistic scale, where four people change the fate of the world by personally killing one wizard).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The GM admitted that this course of action was probably going to result in the game concluding within two sessions, because honestly the king held all the resources, and if we helped his ambitions we totally would be handsomely rewarded. My plan, as a player, was to gain a fiefdom through merit and be trusted in a military leadership role, and if it did turn out the king was somehow evil and an irresponsible ruler, then at some point down the line we\u2019d have our own resources and be there to pick sides during the inevitable civil war (or we could gradually usurp power), and have that much more to gain through careful politicking. If the king could have controlled our minds, he didn\u2019t bother trying at this point, because he didn\u2019t need to. It didn\u2019t seem like he needed magic to coerce anyone in his court, because he was the king, which was coercive enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To capture the traitors, I planned a trap. We found someone they trusted, offered the king\u2019s grace and pardon, then gave him information about a supply caravan passing through the area. We told him to deliver this information to the traitors, encouraging them to attack the caravan while it was in a valley, so it would be trapped and unable to escape. However, the caravan was full of nothing but dry kindling and saltpeter. When the terrorists captured the caravan, we\u2019d light in on fire, then ambush them. To give the plan the appearance of authenticity, we had the catspaw beaten, so that he could claim he\u2019d nearly escaped with his life after uncovering this information, and time was of the essence. In exchange for this, the king agreed to reward our catspaw with a handsome payment, recognition for his contribution to the state, and a small parcel of land for his family\u2019s benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether we wiped out the traitor\u2019s military forces in that attack alone didn\u2019t particularly matter, because we sent the king\u2019s forces to sack the terrorist stronghold while we were fighting that military. Undefended, they wouldn\u2019t have much chance at survival, and whatever military forces returned to their base would find the place already razed or occupied. Again, we were working with small scales, so it turned out the traitor military was, like, twelve men. The numbers didn\u2019t make real sense, but the plan was good and did make sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Except<\/em>, one of our DnD-trained players had been approached by a quest giver at the start of the game, and she had already clicked \u201caccept quest\u201d in her head. As soon as some freedom fighters told us the mission was to work for them and defeat the king, that was what the game was about for her. So she split off from the party and informed the terrorists about our plan. The king\u2019s soldiers were massacred, our catspaw was murdered, while the rest of the players spent the day waiting in a valley with nothing to show for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The terrorists then packed up and fled, realizing their position was compromised and they needed to go into hiding elsewhere. It wasn\u2019t a total loss yet, because two of the king\u2019s soldiers had survived. I sent our other DnD-trained player ahead of us to scout for an ambush. The GM had handled the betrayal in an aside, so we honestly didn\u2019t know what was out there, except that everything was peculiarly and concerningly quiet where it shouldn\u2019t have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it turned out our scout didn\u2019t like that I\u2019d promised to kill three generations of enemy family, because that implied we\u2019d be killing women and children. I think in antiquity you\u2019d normally adopt the kids and marry the women into other families so that they\u2019d no longer be part of the offending \u201cclan\u201d and legally would be in the clear, but the DnD scale where it was just us made that awkward because it was only us and a theoretical ten NPC soldiers who\u2019d have to be adopting and marrying these people. I don\u2019t know. What I do know is the player thought it was unethical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when he ran into the two surviving soldiers from our group, he got information from them regarding what had happened about the betrayal. Hope wasn\u2019t lost yet, because if we made sure to care for these guys and reaffirm our commitment to our mission, it seems unlikely those men would report us in a negative light. My immediate thought was to provide for the soldiers and make sure we delivered them to safety, before we did our best to catch up to the terrorists and harass them while they were in transit (which was not safe to do, because we could get ambushed, but we needed to make a heroic effort now). That\u2019s what was going through my head as a person trying to figure out how the people in this imaginary world are going to think, feel, and behave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then our DnD-trained scout stabbed both soldiers in cold blood while they rested. These soldiers trusted him, were in need of aid, and were not expecting this at all. Our plan had been respectable and detailed. They\u2019d respected us. Now they were dead, because the player didn\u2019t want my character to gain influence or merit if he was down with killing women and children. See, this sociopathic, morality-driven double-homicide was the most ethical choice he could think to make. It also ruined us<\/em>. It was amazing how concisely it ensured everything was absolutely lost, and even if we wiped out every enemy to the man, there\u2019d be no one to vouch for us. The men the king had given us were all we\u2019d had, we had every reason to want them to be successful alongside us, and now they were gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might think that this led to a fight between myself and that other player, but you\u2019d be wrong. His character never gave me reason to distrust him!<\/em> He\u2019d been on our side up until this point, he was competent, and above all, I couldn\u2019t fathom a logical motive that would drive him to do what he\u2019d just done. So when we met up with him and he told us, \u201cEveryone\u2019s lost,\u201d I followed the rules: I did not use out of character information. I trusted his report, and asked him to help us track down the traitors to see if we could catch up and maybe salvage some of the mission. He pretended to track, led us in circles through the wilderness, and then falsely reported he\u2019d lost the trail. Again, I had no reason to distrust him, so our scout successfully defeated our mission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point, we knew one of our party members had betrayed us and caused the death of all the men we\u2019d been trusted with. That was bad. For all we knew, she was still with the terrorists, and that was bad. We<\/em> were still alive and all<\/em> the loyalists were dead, which made us look complicit. We\u2019d lost the trail of the enemy completely. If we went back to report to the king, we\u2019d be beheaded, but we also<\/em> couldn\u2019t work for the freedom fighters. Our only remaining option was to flee the country, so that\u2019s what we did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our DnD-trained GM was positively floored by how this game was playing out. We\u2019d worked for the wrong side, concocted a bunch of clever plans that should have won the day within a single session of play, had that sabotaged by two internal betrayals from separate players, and our experienced non-DnD players didn\u2019t break kayfabe. After being stabbed in the back, I immediately trusted the traitor again, because my character had absolutely no reason to think he\u2019d been betrayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a bizarre anecdote. The DnD-trained players were acting on a certain level of meta knowledge. One player was helping the freedom fighters because she believed it was the quest the GM intended her to do. This made no in-world sense, and a rational person wouldn\u2019t think you\u2019d support terrorism just because it seemed like a \u201cquest\u201d, so there was no way for any rational characters to anticipate that betrayal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as for the second betrayal where the scout murdered the soldiers \u2013 there\u2019s some logic here, but it relied on game meta to be consistent. You get this a lot with DnD, where you\u2019ll be confronted with bandits and you\u2019re supposed to accept that they won\u2019t negotiate, won\u2019t surrender, won\u2019t run away. You kill them because they are bad, and killing them is something that makes you good. Killing women and children is evil, though, because the GM doesn\u2019t usually ask you to \u201croll initiative\u201d if you walk into an elementary school (though some DnD players might start attacking children if their GM did that, provided the tokens representing children had a red outline, or something implying they were dangerous). You get a weird, gamified disconnect, where a double-homicide is ethically good, because these are soldiers working for what is presumably the setting\u2019s bad guy. In character, our scout was an insane sociopath who could look a man in the eyes and murder him while feeling nothing, but somehow also really cared about what happened to the wives of our enemies. He also naturally got away with his betrayal because it didn\u2019t make sense \u2013 or at least not in the fashion it happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DnD games don\u2019t usually present many ethical gray areas and they don\u2019t ask players to think. Bandits are bad. You kill them. Civilians are innocent, you don\u2019t kill them. The GM gives you a quest and you follow it. You don\u2019t ask if the quest makes sense or who the real bad guys are. You aren\u2019t supposed to realize that both sides of a conflict are committing moral atrocities, and that the king\u2019s men likely had wives and kids of their own, who will never see their dad again now that the players have killed him. Mercenaries are not on a morally positive career track in even the best of cases, but you wouldn\u2019t know that from how many DnD groups consider themselves to be completely, morally positive in the context of their game world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you start seeing the gray areas and thinking about how people behave, and what the world might be like, and what everyone cares about, you can start suggesting things like using a catspaw to lure a planned \u201cencounter\u201d into the open where they\u2019ll be at a disadvantage. I actually find that GMs like this a lot, because to do things like this, you have to do a lot of interaction with the world, ask a lot of questions about the setting, figure out who people are and care about it. There becomes a game of wits, where the GM starts asking himself what his NPCs would do in reaction to your behavior \u2013 once you establish that bandits can be lured out of a hideout, and they aren\u2019t just going to wait in empty rooms to be killed sequentially, dungeon-style, then they become thinking people with reasons to fight the players and a desire to win that fight. The players can become subject to public opinion, to court intrigue, to set-ups and betrayals. The players are asking, the players are deciding, they are falling into traps and making their own choices on their own will, everything is fair, everything is on the table. The game is dynamic<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no \u201cbalance\u201d. You cannot balance this kind of game. How would it be balanced to ambush a group of soldiers who have just become the proud owners of a supply cart packed with fire and death? It\u2019s not, it\u2019s lopsided in favor of the ambushers. The players have to be careful this same kind of thing doesn\u2019t happen to them in turn, and if they are tricked, if they are ambushed, they have to know there are times to make a fighting retreat \u2013 a fighting retreat that is impossible<\/em> in a game with rules like \u201cattacks of opportunity\u201d. Unless you ignore all the rules, you can\u2019t play games like this in DnD, and you can\u2019t learn to play like this from DnD. All you can learn is a set of poisonous lessons that make you less imaginative and less able to think like an actual character in a real story. Most players don\u2019t even realize how badly the DnD system has been poisoning them. They don\u2019t realize what they\u2019d have to unlearn just to get started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Get Out of the Box, or Accept Why You\u2019re In It<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are some GMs and players who really hate the idea of all of this. They know the conventions of DnD well, and love them. If you told such a GM that you were setting an ambush, then after you lit the saltpeter, the GM would roll his eyes and have all the bandits fight to the death with no sign of surprise nor fear. You\u2019d gain no advantage and be discouraged from creating plans or thinking like a human. What players like this are looking for is a video game, but with short enough dev cycles that there can be new content every weekend instead of once per business quarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for anything else. Anything else<\/em>, virtually any system is better than DnD (or its play-alikes) to encourage people to think up stories, characters, and adventures. I like Hero, but realize it\u2019s scary to a lot of people and hard to get started in if nobody has played it before. GURPS is another popular \u201cuniversal\u201d alternative, which can be equally daunting (though personally I prefer Hero because there\u2019s a narrower gap between mundane and fantastical elements, and I enjoy games with a lot more supernatural and extraordinary components). However, most point-buy systems that are letting you create a character who acts and sounds like you imagine them is more ideal for playing a dynamic game or a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DnD is balanced around being in a dungeon. That\u2019s why it has a concept of balance at all, because the environment is controlled and stilted. It doesn\u2019t make any sense under scrutiny, but like any video game, people learn to play it and adhere to its systems. But you have to understand, learning to play DnD well is not the same as really learning how to roleplay well, and these two goals often run antagonistically towards each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a friend who sometimes tells me about his DnD games. Every time we hang out, he\u2019ll tell me they\u2019re boring, especially the combat which is the meat of the game, and he\u2019s not sure if it\u2019s the best use of his time. However, he knows why his group plays DnD. He knows that they\u2019re not the kinds of guys to tell stories, and that they wouldn\u2019t know what to do if they had to invent their own motives, and wouldn\u2019t know what to ask the GM in order to care about a fictional world. He sometimes wonders if his group would have a better time going bowling, but admits that\u2019d cost more money and he\u2019s not sure he could tolerate four hours of bowling a week. Sometimes it\u2019s just a social hobby, and for all its faults, it\u2019s just an excuse to hang out and eat pizza together. That\u2019s okay!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of the day it\u2019s a social hobby, not a job, and the group I\u2019ve curated likes these kinds of games because we\u2019ve practiced at them and enjoy the process of it. I strongly recommend trying this type of game, and trying to get out of the box DnD puts you in, because anything outside of DnD is a totally different world if you plan for it to be. Your first game outside of the DnD mindset is liable to be messy, because you\u2019ve never actually roleplayed before, and real roleplaying is harder to do. Our group has occasional false starts, where we\u2019ll run a few sessions and find the story isn\u2019t really materializing, so we have to move on to a new concept. It\u2019s just how it works. In time you can learn to really get something going, and you\u2019ll love the heck out of it because everything becomes so much bigger and involves everybody so much more \u2013 or you\u2019ll hate it and retreat back to the safety of the DnD box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s no formula for an amazing game, and even after doing this for twenty years I can\u2019t tell you a perfect way to create a perfect session, but I can tell you that DnD is one of the worst systems I\u2019ve ever tried to do it in, and it never helped my players get into the right mindset.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The DnD system \u2013 5e in particular \u2013 is anathema to everything people seem to claim they want from roleplaying games. It\u2019s the butter churning system. The axe grinding system. The system that tells you cleaning your room is a fun game. It ruins people, poisoning them down to their blood so that when someone suggests […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-31","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32,"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31\/revisions\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dawnsomewhere.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}