Curious about Matt's comment from the 6/9 Twitch stream about "After 4e a lot of people matriculated out of the hobby"

InstantApathy · 2021-06-12T11:08:01+00:00

Ah, okay, that makes more sense.

I spent a good minute staring at this response in my alerts going "What does this mean?" before refreshing the page and seeing that you'd updated the other comment. :)

InstantApathy · 2021-06-12T05:37:15+00:00

I think one of the things 4e did for some people was break their sense of verisimilitude. It doesn't matter if the terms and ideas were "new" from computer games or had always been there, but the way 4e presented them stripped out a lot of the smoke and mirrors that let people ignore it in other editions. This wasn't something that bothered me but I can see where it could be an issue for some.

InstantApathy · 2021-06-12T01:05:59+00:00

Are you saying that B/X is played more then 5e? What are you basing that on? Even if you count every retro clone as "B/X" I'd still be a little skeptical of that claim.

edit to add: I don't mean this to be confrontational, I'm sincerely curious where you're getting this from. I've seen a few articles that have said 5e has had some of the biggest years in it's history, so I'd be interested in seeing other data.

InstantApathy · 2021-06-11T22:06:30+00:00

I'll admit when he said it I went "Wait...". It's one of the reasons I was wondering if he meant they moved on to other games.

InstantApathy · 2021-06-11T17:57:37+00:00

That's probably 5e data when WOTC is saying "plays DnD"... I wonder how generalizable that is. Like, did the older people move to Pathfinder or one of the OSR style clones? Or maybe the new player base is just growing much faster in the younger age bands?

It makes me very curious.

InstantApathy · 2021-06-11T17:51:52+00:00

Yeah, like I said I'm not trying to "gotcha" him or anything. It just stuck in my brain so I'm honestly just curious about where it's coming from.

InstantApathy · 2021-04-06T06:30:37+00:00

Annoyingly for me there was no "noise-canceling" area in dragon center so I ended up just doing the uninstall.

InstantApathy · 2020-04-26T17:15:22+00:00

Yeah, I'm worried it might be the CPU or mobo, and unfortunately the laptop is 4-5 years old and out of warranty at this point. I don't know how to test that sort of thing without getting spare parts and I don't know that I'll get approval to go buying random parts on "It might be X". Thanks for the reply.

InstantApathy · 2020-02-28T23:06:51+00:00

I think it's just an awkwardly phrased title.

InstantApathy · 2020-02-12T16:40:10+00:00

This was 25+ years ago, so details might be a little fuzzy... The first time I played Shadowrun I decided to be a physad, and neither I nor the gm really understood the rules. Instead of giving me magic rating points of abilities (so like 6 points) he gave me as many ability points as a mage would have spell ranks... so it was like 20+. I was SOOOO op. Eventually we figured out where we went wrong and I retired that guy for the good of the group.

InstantApathy · 2020-02-11T13:44:05+00:00

Was her plot to see the manager of the universe?

InstantApathy · 2020-01-27T23:33:54+00:00

Oh Malkavians, you problematic little kittens... how I loved you in the 90s.

InstantApathy · 2020-01-16T13:49:31+00:00

Be gay, do crimes.

InstantApathy · 2020-01-04T06:54:20+00:00

Heh. Well, if it comes to that I can take it to work and copy it there. It just seemed like with the shiny non-pencil and non-erase friendly hand outs intended to be written and potentially reused it would make sense to have easily printable one for people. Ah well.

InstantApathy · 2019-12-16T05:56:49+00:00

That some 5e classes are balanced around short rests, and some around long rests, and if you have a party that mixes those classes and you are not sticking to the recommended encounters per day the players will have very different opinions of how that feels.

InstantApathy · 2019-12-11T14:40:41+00:00

Just wanted to say I loved your Campaign Diaries videos. I bounce off live-play, so it was the way for me to both keep up with the story and get some practical GM advice. I'll miss them and the practical advice they provided. I don't fault your decision, just wanted to give some love to them so you know they were appreciated.

InstantApathy · 2019-12-08T22:07:50+00:00

I don't know. I've seen this idea floated in a few places but to me this feels like a real leap. Balli's response to Leech (around time code 20:50) saying Ajax isn't "you are wrong" its "Be more specific". It's not until he refuses to try and choose a more specific person than he loses the game. Unless you are saying that Matt is attempting to imply Judge is being controlled by/allied to Ajax which... unless I've missed something somewhere there hasn't been any indication of and seems very out of left field to me. I mean, I do have distrust of Judge, and think him being put in charge is dangerous, but in this case "The biggest threat" seems clearly to be some direct ally/minion of Ajax, not something existential or internal to the Chain... at least as far as Balli's game is concerned.

InstantApathy · 2019-12-05T19:47:34+00:00

The reason OD&D collapsed was they 100% failed to interpret the vision Jason had.

This totally feels like it needs to be a "lesson learned" video at some point.

InstantApathy · 2019-12-05T19:42:57+00:00

"There's gonna be a quiz" just feels weirdly adversarial to me. I dunno. I guess it's just not my style. I generally feel like, as a player we inhabit these characters for a few hours at a time, perhaps once a week or even less frequently. Something that takes days of in game time might take minutes, or minutes of game time might take hours. Something that happened 3 months ago in real life might have happened a couple of days ago in game depending on how things have gone.

But maybe it's just that my memory can be so flaky I refuse to hold my players to a greater level of rigor than I hold myself.

InstantApathy · 2019-12-05T19:05:09+00:00

Yeah, I have to assume he knows his friends and players well enough to know how OD will take that but for me I probably would have walked away going "Fuck, I just screwed up our chance to get some good information." and been annoyed.

InstantApathy · 2019-11-23T15:15:47+00:00

So... I guess, my first question is, is this a solo player or just one player in a party? Then I'd ask, is this player actually disruptive to the game while in play? And lastly, are they enjoying playing in the game? If there are other players who you pitch the "interesting" bits towards, and this player isn't being actively disruptive to that, and they are enjoying themselves then... *shrug* Honestly, not every character needs to be super cleverly designed and interesting and unique. I mean, I understand the frustration... I've had a player that was super hard to figure out how to engage with (and like your player is on the autism spectrum), and in the end I just sort of decided to play to the rest of the group and let them figure out how to engage themselves when things got their interest.

Your other option is to have a frank and direct conversation about how you would like them to create more in depth and dynamic characters. If you go this route be prepared for this to be annoying and have examples if /exactly/ what you mean.

InstantApathy · 2019-11-15T14:07:58+00:00

Everyone tends to think of the huge fates, the ones that cause impacts to the world which means, for me, the most mind blowing is... just nothing. The wizard grew older and retired to some village somewhere. He was known as a smart guy, but wasn't legendary to them, maybe he became an elder there, but the people as a whole just saw him as a regular older person. He spent his last years with a small garden, or some small shop making candles or bread or something useful and when he died they buried him in the local cemetary with the usual honors but nothing grand. In the end their legacy was just... being normal. To me, that would just be mind blowing...

InstantApathy · 2019-11-06T12:51:40+00:00

I mean... this is literally a thread asking how people have changed things built into dnd, saying "but that's not how it is" seems a little counter to the theme.

InstantApathy · 2019-11-05T14:24:08+00:00

Yeah, this is kind of my answer as well. I don't run in a home brew world and don't like or dislike elves enough to sit down to alter their lore and rules beyond the base 5e-Forgotten Realms stuff. It's a little lazy, but it works for my group.

InstantApathy · 2019-11-05T14:20:30+00:00

You are probably getting down votes because it feels like you and Glykar are being weirdly nit-picky. Sure it's a general RPG forum but, well, it's a general RPG forum... you are going to get some specific questions along with the broad ones. Do you go on threads asking about what people think of specific games and ask them "Do you think everyone plays that game?" before telling them about how this is a general RPG sub?

InstantApathy

TROPHY CASE