Dude, no one here is shocked or angry. There are just normal people calmly discussing ways to bypass yet another attempt from Google to stop AdBlockers. If anything, you’re the guy who spent the entire day yesterday screeching at people in another thread who don’t want to pay for YT Premium, and is still doing the same thing now, in a community dedicated to piracy no less. You just deleted the vast majority of your comments because you were too embarrassed when people called you out for licking the boots of a trillion-dollars corporation and being angry at other people who don’t want to follow your example.
Go touch some grass, it’s free (just like YouTube!).
There’s a lot of variety, it’s a great pack to have lying around when the party goes where it wasn’t supposed to and now you need a quick battleground.
That sentence only applies to the first episode. The rest of the series is an overly jingoistic power fantasy where the MC goes around collecting waifus for his harem and the japanese army exports democracy japanese culture.
I can relate to that. I recently went to the cinema alone to see Godzilla Minus One, because none of my friends and relatives were interested. Watched big lizard smash things. Felt happy for the rest of the day.
Same for me. I browsed Reddit exclusively for a bunch of small but active communities about books and niche games or shows. Most of those either don’t have a place on Lemmy, or the place they have is a ghost town. Too little posts, and even fewer engagement. I frequently see posts with upvotes in the single digits and zero comments.
I don’t plan on going back to Reddit, but at the same time I don’t think that Lemmy is a valid substitute yet. Maybe it’s also a problem of discoverability? Like, I heard of Lemmy during the APIcalypse, but I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere else, and I don’t know how a normal person looking for a community online is supposed to find Lemmy, or even learn the existence of it.
I see mobile games as the natural evolution of flash games from the old days. I used to spend my time playing those games and I had fun, but I would never insist on them being the best experience I’ve ever had in gaming. They were just cute games to spend some time on. To use your examples, Minigore is just like Boxhead. It may be fun but there’s nothing “genius” or ground-breaking about it.
In the end, gaming is just an experience, and our emotional attachment to it decides our rating. I hardly care about Call of Duty, but the people who spent their childhood playing online with friends rate it as one of their best/most formative gaming experiences. Surprise, people’s opinions on things are subjective.
By the way, as you’re the same guy who dunked on Uncharted, The last of us, God of war and Witcher for being games that rely too much on story exposition and have too little gameplay, you seem to have a preference for games with zero/near zero story and offer immediate gratification via gameplay. That’s also a characteristic that lots of mobile games share, so that may shape your preference as well.
Personally, I rate mobile games very low because I hate their monetization and I despise touch controls.
I meant to include a brief summary of the changes, but for some reason the message didn’t go through, so I’m writing it now:
MONK
Monk has been changed A LOT, from disengaging being free (you only spend Ki points to add Dash/Dodge to the same disengage bonus action), to being able to replenish Ki on initiative once per long rest, to Deflect now working on all melee and ranged physical attacks (and later upgraded to spells as well). It also retains the UA5 martial art die progression (d6 to d12 instead of d4 to d10 as it was in 2014).
It’s in a far better position than it was in 2014 and in UA5. It is worth mentioning, however, that Stunning Strike has been nerfed to once per turn (instead of once per hit as in 2014), making the class overall goal shift from the stunning dispenser that it was in 2014 to a glass cannon DPS build (which can attain ungodly amounts of AC with time, especially with the new capstone).
BARBARIAN
Mostly the same as the last UA, with a few changes here and there. Most notably, Brutal Critical has been replaced by a new feature, that lets the barbarian attacking with Reckless Attack forfeit the advantage on the first attack to add an additional damage die and an additional effect, including Push or disadvantage on the next saving throws the target makes. The video released on the official DnD channel confirms that this is meant to work in tandem with the weapon masteries.
It’s unclear what this means for optimization: from a mathematical perspective, it seems that attacking with advantage will lead to higher DPS overall, and the gap widens if magic items are taken into account. It seems that the designers meant the barbarians to choose between higher damage output and situational effects, kind of like the rogue is now able to trade sneak attack damage for their weapon arts.
DRUID
They decided not to go the stat block route for Wildshape, instead asking the players to “prepare” stat blocks from the monster manual as if they were spells, gaining more forms over time. I respect their decision, but it kills my interest in this class, so I didn’t bother with giving it anything more than a cursory glance.
SPELLS
Healing spells were buffed (Cure Wounds now gives 2d8 HP instead of 1d8, Healing Word 2d4 instead of 1d4, etc). Problematic conjuring spells like Conjure Woodland Beings and Conjure animals were nerfed, and don’t summon a bunch of critters anymore. There are some new spells as well, including Power Word Fortify, a 7th level Power Word that distributes 120 Temp HP in equal measure to up to six creatures, and Starry Wisp, a bard/druid cantrip that deals 1d8 radiant damage and makes the target glow.
Other spells are included in the playtest, including Conjure Celestial, Conjure Elemental/Minor Elemental, and the new Fount of Moonlight. I won’t discuss each and every one of them, as this post is mostly meant as a summary of the overall changes, but you can click the link and read it for yourselves.
OTHER CHANGES
Since the OneDnD playtest is almost over, it’s worth mentioning some of the other changes that were introduced in previous UAs that are still here and are probably meant to stay:
Invisibility grants advantage on initiative rolls; Nets are part of the adventuring gear, and are not weapons anymore; the new Dazed condition; Hide giving you the Invisible condition; Animal Handling being (apparently?) grouped with other Charisma skills, like Deception and Persuasion.
On a side note, Exhausted rules from the earliest UAs, which consisted of a (stacking) -1 malus to d20 rolls and spell save DC in place of the far more deadlier 2014 Exhaustion rules, are still nowhere to be found. I hope they’ll at least sneak them into the DMG as an optional rule instead of discarding them completely, as I think they are far better than the previous exhaustion rules.
World of darkness (Vampire: the masquerade/Werewolf: the apocalypse). I’ve never played it, but a friend of mine was really enthusiastic about it and from what she told me it’s really fun.
Some classes are substantially better, others have been cleaned up. For example, the fighter has an entirely new set of tools, from Second Wind now being +1d10 to any skill check, to indomitable being a pseudo legendary resistance; Barbarians gain new bonuses from their rage, including advantage on stealth; rogues get to flavour their sneak attack with extra effects at the cost of their damage output; Warlocks have bigger expanded spell lists which are automatically added to your known spells, and a few extra invocations; and so on. Additionally, most of the optional features, invocations and maneuvers from Tasha have been included, too.
There have been a few nerfs as well: +10/-5 feats being removed/reworked will drastically shake up the meta for martial classes. Unfortunately, we have no word on the main problem the game has faced since its inception - spells, which apparently are not going to be playtested. I wonder what the designers have in mind; the same designers who tried to give infinite Wish to three different spellcasting classes as a capstone, and an ungodly broken metamatic to Wizards. Yeah, not holding my breath for that.
They also decided to leave the rest system unchanged, while also putting some band-aids on certain short rest-reliant classes (Warlock and Monk) instead of fixing the rest system as a whole. So if you play a Warlock, you can recover half your spell points in 10 minutes, but if you’re a fighter stuck with a DM that doesn’t use short rests on a regular basis, you are still going to suck.
It’s basically just a Tasha’s cauldron of more things, but the options presented are no longer “optional” and are baked into the base rules, which is good because having your class/subclass fixed in an optional ruleset that your table may not accept was not great.
Different people having different opinions. Maybe the author of the article would like those games you mentioned. The others who denigrate them probably prefer D20 games for the reasons already discussed.
It’s certainly a good opinion piece that makes you think about the underlying state of the game and the inner workings of any D20 game.
I don’t agree with most of the assumptions, though. For example, the author says that, in previous editions, you could enter a tavern, roleplay your best interaction, and have the DM decide if your roleplay was good enough to make a good impression on the barkeep.
The author then compares that to modern day DnD, where the player would be required to roleplay their interaction, and then roll the die to determine if they make a good impression, taking in account the roleplay to decide whether they gain some form of advantage or bonus on the roll.
Somehow, the author decides that the first scenario is much better, because it incentivizes roleplay, while the latter uses the d20 roll to determine the success of the action, and the roleplay is only used for flavour (or, as they put it, to “gatekeep” the ability to roll a d20 behind the necessity to roleplay).
Needless to say, I wholeheartedly disagree with the above assumption, for a multitude of reasons.
In the first scenario, there’s no rule to determine whether or not the player has succeeded on the attempt, so the DM is forced to come up with a decision on the spot, which the player may not agree with. On the one hand, this makes the DM responsible for everything that can or cannot happen at the table, without any outside help to assist them in their decision, which is kind of overwhelming for beginners; on the other hand, it robs the player of the ability to shape the world around them, as they have no way to reliably doing so without asking their DM. It turns the entire game into the so-called “mother-may-I” game that lots of people despise.
Additionally, without dice rolls involved, suddenly you are not able to roleplay whatever you want anymore. You can only roleplay within your abilities. I bet no DnD player in existence would be able to fight off a dragon with their sword, or cast spells with a piece of wood, but the game allows them to roll for it. Yet I am not allowed to give a good impression on people, just because I frequently stutter in real life?
The game is make-believe. I describe what I want to do; When I roll, the outcome decides how well my character does what I’m trying to accomplish. I shouldn’t be required to be charismatic in real life to play a good bard in the game. I love good roleplay at my table, but I’d never gatekeep character archetypes just because the player is shy in real life. Otherwise I’d have to stop the barbarian mid-fight and ask them to punch the wall, and then decide if the strength of their punch is enough to convince me that their character is able to fight off the orc. That’s stupid.
Despite this, I agree with some of the shortcomings of the D20 system as underlined by the author of the article. First of all, the linear distribution of outcomes is too restrictive, and makes skill checks way too swingy. A trained burglar shouldn’t fail a lockpicking check 5% of the time, for example, and frail characters should not have 5% success rate on powerlifting checks. On top of that, the linear distribution of difficulty levels (DC10, 15, 20, etc…) makes for very arbitrary stop-gaps.
A bell curve, achieved by rolling multiple dice at the same time, would solve this issue, making the middle outcomes more frequent and the extremes (1, 20) much rarer.
I also agree that skill checks are sometimes called for way too frequently. The thief should not roll to lockpick that simple padlock at all; players should not be able to call for an Insight check to discern if a person that they don’t know and have never met or talked to in their life is lying to them; the bard should not roll to intimidate the bugbear unless they give me convincing reasons to do so through their roleplay.
I feel like the D20 system as currently implemented is trying too hard to simplify things by assigning arbitrary “difficulty levels” to everything, and making players randomly roll one D20 whenever they feel like. DMs should try to find some balance between the roleplay aspect of the roleplaying game, and the mechanical benefits of having precise numbers and skills that decide the outcome of the players’ actions.
In a way, this is not a shortcoming of the D20 system per se, but inexperienced DMs that don’t know when to call for a roll, and how to determine failure and success.
An expert thief rolling 1 to lockpick a simple lock, for example, is not unable to accomplish their task; Maybe they just take a few minutes instead of seconds. The DM could say that the cold is stiffening their fingers, that the lockpick unexpectedly breaks, or that the lock is very old and rusty and it jammed, requiring a bit more time to unlock. These are all flavourful descriptions that take into account the roll to decide the outcome of the player’s actions, without robbing them of agency by hiding basic actions that their character should be able to accomplish while blindfolded behind a neutral roll that has 1 in 20 chances of failing them.
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Dude, no one here is shocked or angry. There are just normal people calmly discussing ways to bypass yet another attempt from Google to stop AdBlockers. If anything, you’re the guy who spent the entire day yesterday screeching at people in another thread who don’t want to pay for YT Premium, and is still doing the same thing now, in a community dedicated to piracy no less. You just deleted the vast majority of your comments because you were too embarrassed when people called you out for licking the boots of a trillion-dollars corporation and being angry at other people who don’t want to follow your example.
Go touch some grass, it’s free (just like YouTube!).