Quote from: Chainsaw;1134748Hahaha! Nice.

Cracks me up

That we have a hobby that's supposed to be about whatever you can imagine, and yet the hobby publicly presents itself as one half sharing their relentless dissatisfaction on all conceivable subjects with the other half who're too timid to make a ruling without getting their thoughts validated by at least two dozen other people.

I'm tired of people acting like you have to choose sides on f'n everything.  Why can't I like all different kinds of games?  Why can't I be disgusted will all politicians?

Quote from: VisionStorm;1134741Some stuff that comes to mind...

Initiative: I refuse to use "Initiative" ever again to determine order of actions in combat. I'm sick of it and every time I've tried it again just to play D&D RAW it reminds me how sluggish and disjointed it makes combat feel, and how much effort it is compared to just handling order of actions by GM fiat, PC/player readiness and/or proximity to target or objective. I might consider allowing individual test between opposing adversaries to see who strikes "first", but that's it--I don't care what the dice said, I determine order of actions, not them.

Alignment: Haven't used it in decades. It's silly, just play your character.

People Who Bitch About Min/Maxing: Which is a subset of "wrong-fun" and passive aggressive people who bitch at you for failing to fulfill some unwritten, unspecified expectation that they failed to properly and explicitly define from the get-go, or just expect other people to build their characters the way they want them to for arbitrary reasons. Min/Maxing is a virtue, not a vice, and any problems with it lie either in the imagination of people who have a problem with it, or systems that are unbalanced and/or fail to properly account for "RP" selections as a structured component of characters creation and/or progression (which IMO, ALL systems should explicitly define and provide for free, along with stuff like "backgrounds" to better define your character). But shrewd players are never wrong to make the best of what they're provided with. It's not their fault the system sucks or that you have different criteria than they do.

People Who Defend D&D Like It's a Wounded Animal Struggling to Stay Alive: Seriously, It's the 800 pound gorilla, not the underdog. And the only time it got passed by another game it was it's own fault, it still remained more prevalent than other games, and the RPG that passed it was a fucking clone of D&D.

Character Classes: They're limited and constricting, and paradoxically only gotten worse as more classes with more options have cropped up over the years. They are the center of bloat, and the more classes and constricted options within them that you have, the more bloat they become. Current D&D classes make me look back with fondness at old D&D, and I don't even like classes.

Spell Memorization: I haven't even enforced this in my life and it was literally the first house rule I ever implemented. Spell memorization is stupid and unnecessary, and I don't believe it adds anything to the game, but more bookkeeping and complications.

Spell Slots: I've been seriously considering dropping them entirely and replacing them with ability check with difficulty based on spell level. The only thing that's stopping me is the possibility of healing spells getting out of hand, and the fact that I hate...

D&D Spell Levels: They are useless and arbitrary, and you probably don't need that many. They were never properly defined in the entire history of D&D and there is no clear, objective criteria to determine WTF exactly constitutes a Level 5 vs a Level 3 spell, etc. Fireball is level 3, and it's more powerful than most level 4 or 5 spells. It's all guesswork. They do not facilitate determining the level of power of magic in the game, they simply add to the layers of bloated spells that exist within it, and every supplement that includes them adds to this mess with disparate degrees of power per spell level.

Sounds like you'd enjoy Mini Six RPG! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/144558/Mini-Six-Bare-Bones-Edition

I love running D&D style fantasy in Mini Six and not having any of the above to deal with (and no hit points either). Though we did go back to using Initiative after the playtest.

Burned out on...

RPGs becoming just another Brand Exercise for the various IPs.
Social Media making discussion around RPGs as pointless and toxic as it does everything it touches.
Culture War bullshit infecting RPGs.
RPG designer after designer going Full.SJW.
VTT's that require coding to customize.
The majority of new games coming out being OSR or PbtA.
Narrative bullshit in general, especially the Distinction Deniers playing the same game for 12 fucking years.
WotC D&D

A subset of what many have mentioned:
Edition Wars.

Freakshow parties with every race concievable represented but no actual character beyond "I'm a tiefling", no goals in character and no willingness to have influence in the game world. (I once told a player who wanted to play a unicorn "I'm not running a bloody freakshow!")

Kitchen sink settings where every conceivable race and culture all live in their isolated little enclave. (see above).

D&D in general. Mechanics as well as  implied "fiction" from mechanics. D&D as it's own style of fantasy.

Retro Clones/Inspired Bys.

TTRPG as a "community"/Cult/Industry.

Weird Fantasy

Arneson vs. Gygax and who did what.

Full Color Hardback rulebooks

Humanoids who look like they work out.



*Note- A few of these things I actually enjoy, but am just burned out on.

Explanations of what an RPG is, exp. those that refer to when you were a kid and played "make-believe" with your friends.

Spasmodic research of "balance".

Noticing marginally interesting threads on the RPG Site posted the day before but with already 58 pages of answers to read before I can post something substantial.

Posts about "The Men in Black want for you to play the Pleiadian Branch of Sartre's D&D version!" - presuming that someone beside my players can tell me how I run my D&D games.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1134761I am burnt out on art books pretending to be games.

SO MUCH THIS! There are a number of highly rated games out there I'll never bother picking up because their presentation is filled with this chaotic, chicken-scratch art style that looks like the doodles I used to fill notebooks with during class in high school. I'm not willing to say it's bad art because taste is so highly subjective. But I'll say my own response to it borders on outright revulsion and as such I want nothing to do with the game inside.

Just an addendum. Technically I'm not "burned out on", because I hated this editorial choice the very moment I met it. Anyway, I really, really, really hate oWoD habit to start every supplement with 2-4 badly written "stories" (usually printed in retina-ripping fonts on cornea-damaging backgrounds). Stories that made no sense at all until you actually read the book's "fluff" printed after them. How this habit didn't kill the oWoD on day one will always be a mystery to me.

For the same thing only done right just look at David Pulver's superbrief narratives that introduced the various chapters in his supplements for GURPS. Short, meaty and genuinely titillating for the contents to come.

Burned out on D&D as such in general; its been a long time and it still hasn't healed.
I'm burnt out on most art that is displayed with products starting around 3e and onward, if its right to say it as such; I miss that 2e and 1e art style, if the art even hints at anime I begin to loathe it. The Elmore paintings or the black and white art work of Savage Sword of Conan is what I require.

I used to be a huge realms fan, then the time of troubles began stress, as everyone felt they did not get to know or appreciate the dead 3 gods until those novels, which removed them in the process of giving them character, replaced them with Cyric, which was fine by me as the original version of Cyric allowed you to do both monolithic evil or to have him continue to appear to people as one of the dead 3 gods...

Then the prince of lies & Crucible  novels did the same thing in that it gave us a great look at the evil god Cyric before changing him from that very satan-esque/hades look to a more insane Loki-like entity. Players lamented a lack of Bane, the Hitler of realms gods, with those black and red banners and black platemailed warriors with red capes, they settle for Iyachtu-xvim, bane's son, but could hardly get past that god-awful name, then in 3rd edition Xvim became bane but with a black and green rather than black and red motiff...it seemed it was finally over, we could have Bane, Cyric, and Cyric-as-Bhaal, and with Velsharoon and the crown of horns we could have Myrkul too, and w/o "defying" canon or confusing new-player realms fans.

And then they raped the goose again with 4e, which i never bothered to try once i saw "power cards" for it in the book store and was like nope. I'm told they unraped realms again in a re-do for 5th that was hand wavium and amounts to yet another rape regardless. But long before that, once you have red wizard of thay walmarts and anime kiddies arguing about wealth by level charts and how they have a right to buy this or that item I was pretty well done with it. I liked the Netheril boxed set of second edition as a setting, very pre-world Conan-esque, and free of all this god drama, but it was never developed much past that one boxed set and at least one novel that I'm aware of.

We are all fans of Dragonlance, but as a setting, for me as a GM, it was hard to run, like, if you are not the heroes of the lance then the world and "what do" are a giant F'n questionmark. I hear they raped DL too with chaos war and war of souls material. I remember early on when the basic set boxes (red blue green black gold etc) could still be bought in stores they sold these huge fold out full color hex maps of mystara and karatura, i liked those but never retained them, turns out that was mystara, I just made shit up to go in each hex myself, those where fun.

Ravenloft. The best setting w/o being the best setting. Almost never did you encounter a player arguing canon or novel angles at you about Ravenloft. Not sure why. It's not nailed down and ever shifting nature I think perhaps precluded such. I'll mention darksun, it had great art, and was great for a 1 or 2 shot adventure but seemed to lack staying power as a setting, could never hold our interest for a whole campaign. I do not miss the strife of buying and trying all these things.

But i found nirvana, rules-wise, system-wise, when i found that the D6 star wars rules had been adapted to other genres as D6 fantasy-adventure-space. For me there is no going back. The only real complaint and something i've toyed with the idea of trying to remedy is concrete settings for these. The problem is that once you do that you've lost much of the versatility of these three wide-genre systems. D6 Adventure for example can cover so much crap, from napoleonic era to low-end sci-fi like firefly/serenity, james bond, rambo, top gun, cthuluhu, indiana jones, DOOM, Resident Evil, Terminator, Dresden Files, wild west/wierd west...ad infinitum...that trying to nail down a singular setting for it would be just a giant bowl containing sub-settings.

I think maybe I'm just burned out on everything in general and that stunning amazement feeling of yore is gone forever and nostalgia is a curse. I remember that elmore cover art for the boxed sets of basic (metzner?) and how my mind could extrapolate infinite scenes and adventures from what the eye could take in, and now it seems like so much crushed and powdered jade littering the floor of a cool and placid lake where once an emerald ship of fantasy and adventure had sailed. Now we set at the shores of that lake and try to remember, we cast stones of lamentation into it, we hope the nessy beast of the lake comes forward with the lakes lady astride it so that she may hand us an emerald sword forged anew of that shattered and forgotten ship...and we know only sadness as the water remains placid. not even luna's light upon the water, a majestic cgi effect to be sure, brings us closer to that coveted joy or dulls the ache of longing for what once was. There were moments of such human connection in those gone days where I'm positive each person at the table had exactly the same picture of the scene in their minds eye shared perfectly in exact detail as solidly as if we were all on the same holo deck.

But that was a more civilized time, before the dark times, before the builds and the manuevers and the tyranny of canon.

[video=youtube;r3_c1QeLO40]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3_c1QeLO40[/youtube]

Quote from: Slipshot762;1134936I think maybe I'm just burned out on everything in general and that stunning amazement feeling of yore is gone forever and nostalgia is a curse.

There's plenty of magic in the old tattered books.

With the right group of players, you can ignore the current nonsense and revel in grand adventures. If you love the original canon of any setting, its still there and there's no reason you must consider anything beyond.

The culture wars frankly tired of them

Revisionist history that group, gender etc were purposefully excluded from the hobby. One bad experience is not an concentrated effort by gamers to keep them out.

D&D First Edition I like the rpg and it will have a fond place in my heart as it was the first rpg I bought and ran, but man poorly organized and Gary Gygax comes off a pretentious asshole of a jerk in those books. One truwaysim "I'm not telling you that your doing it wrong yet if you don't do it exactly like how I do it your doing it wrong". I felt like asking him while he was alive to show whre on the DMG his players broke him.

Gamers who think they can by tommorow gaming products today at yesterday prices.

People who complain about min-maxers. I will take those kind of players over the ones that go out of their way to make the shittiest character around on purpose then moan it's unfair. The first group can actually do something the second most of the time is useless at the table. "what do you mean your not carrying my share of the treasure!". Sorry bucko you want to make the STr 10 Figter in D&D because of reasons and feels now suffer the consequences.

Fans of rpgs in decline in like Gurps and Hero Games yet want nothing to change, provide no solutions beyond maintaining the status quo then whine and complain they cannot find GMS to play with or gamers to run for.

Rpg designers jumping on the SJW bandwagon then having the stones to complain when their hypocrisy is called out. Fred Hicks is a good example of this.

I do not know if the fans are hurting GURPS insofar as changes.  I think it just has not made him money in a long time.  I thought they were on the right track with Dungeon Fantasy, and I think a Sci fi or post apoc presentation along those lines would have gone well.  I can not speak to Hero, I have the 5th edition book, and already having and playing GURPs, it looked better for supers with high power levels, but I do not play super hero games (well, every genre, the heros are essentially super heros already by human standards).  I did like the look of several of their full color books when they made that switch in 6th edition.  I am not sure that helped them or hurt them.  

    Out of curiosity what changes do you think can be made to GURPs to get more fans?  I honestly always thought better art,  and a couple of good fleshed out settings for various genres instead of toolkits.  I thought they sort of had too many toolkits.    I thought the templates and such for Dungeon Fantasy were a step to giving people a defined idea instead of too many tools and not enough training.   But I am also not the right person to ask.  If they came out with a new edition and 10 books in that edition, I would buy all of them.

I think where Dungeon Fantasy went wrong was the assumed power level.  It heaped option after option onto players without a chance to get used to them.  Same concept, but standard what... 100?  150?  That might have been more approachable.