shani66

worst part is i'd absolutely be the DM. having read a little of the book i feel like i could just learn whatever role i want to take pretty easily (lets go decker), but keeping everything in my head at once as a dm? a lot less simple

God i wanna get into shadowrun, but I don't want to learn shadowrun

Like, 30 seconds? Throw a dhohanoid into a big cave with a barrier that causes fear. Have a group of shovelheads encroach on the party's territory.

That's an issue inherent to the d20 system, although 5e is way worse about it. WoD and CoD have way better systems for this, even though they aren't about combat.

Pffft, malkavians say hi.

Hitting the guy with three layers of holy protection, curses, and no spell failure chance seems like a bad idea

Really shoulda seen that one coming. What's next? Making deals with dragons?

I actually prefer world, like, by a massive margin, but Chronicles is by far the best game to recommend newbies imo (that I've had extensive time with).

I'm just gone give you a quick run down of the simplest ttrpg i play; Chronicles of darkness.

Every single roll uses the same type of dice and the numbers you need to hit are almost universally the same. Every skill, ability, power, or what-have-you uses the same simple system (with only two ways to resist/contest roles). All characters (including NPCs and monsters) are created in roughly the same way with roughly the same rules (with certain stuff added on depending on what you're making). The book has an entire section on homebrew, with guidelines and examples. Every book has advice on playing ttrpgs broadly (like setting up what's off limits from the start) and specifically Chronicles (like offering sources of inspiration). Speaking of books, there are plenty of them but you only need a single book to play a full game. The game also uses a major cheat code for the setting; it's set in the modern world, so new players have an easy time understanding what's going on.

I say all of that to say 5e is all together bad for new players. It's price gouging, it's convoluted, and isn't actively friendly to new players like other systems.

And that's a major issue with 5e too? 5e is very clearly designed to do one singular thing; dungeon crawl, and I'd argue it doesn't do it that well either. There are plenty of actual generic ttrpgs out there you can use, like GURPS (literally Generic Universal RolePlay System) or even besm if that's your thing.

Now that's straight up not true. 5e is a lot of things (unfinished, unclear, underhanded) but it isn't simple. And thanks to it's inconsistency it's a nightmare to make good, reliable content for. There are many, many, many better systems to start a new player on and it's quite possibly one of if the worst to start a DM on.

I'll never get why Republicans are so damn scared of everything.