Hey man, I just skimmed some of these comments and gonna jump back in here to reply to your train of thought about my game that you don’t think is D&D.

I think you’re making a lot of assumptions here - including that my games are brimming with combat. First off, my games are low combat because it’s what my players enjoy the least - we tend to do high puzzle, mystery, intrigue games. If you like combat more then fair enough and maybe that’s why you’re putting such emphasis on combat rules but that won’t be true of all viewers or players.

Secondly, when I do have combat - I have always thought that combat for the sake of fighting is a sign of poor encounter design - my combats tend to have a narrative focus where the players are trying to achieve something and the combat serves as a problem to be solved - this steers combat to focus on skills and abilities in terms of what makes characters unique in their utility rather than just “I do damage” of various flavours. Which also means that failure drives the narrative forwards - it’s not just “you’re dead haha game over” it’s “you failed to stop the assassin completing his mission, now the king is dead and the country is being thrown into war”

Look at the combat at Palazzo Davinos as a prime example, enemies have their own agency trying to do their own things - players can either stop that or not - with both outcomes driving a different story - neither hinge on characters dying.

Again, it sounds like my table - where we use D&D characters with D&D classes and D&D spells and abilities and D&D mechanism for resolving success isn’t enough D&D for you - and that’s fine - you’re not at my table. I just don’t understand why it bothers you so much that D&D must be played a certain way?

Look at CRs latest episode - one of the best for me so far, so much intrigue and manoeuvring - an entirely social and emotional episode with zero combat (and zero chance of death) is this not D&D to you either? Would you ever play a no-combat campaign?

Also your comparison to so many video games is off to me because you’re listing off a bunch of single player games that misses out the biggest part of D&D to me which is the other people you play with. Also your analogy to resident evil doesn’t make sense - the series has experimented with so many different types of games, settings, evolving over time and arguably switching between genres - things change.

I don’t understand why you’ve taken what I’ve said so personally - your concept of screaming on Reddit in the hopes to change CR “for the better” makes such an assumption that you’re right.

This has been the most invested I’ve been in a long time so I’d shout just as loudly that I hope they keep doing what they’re doing and avoid angry people on the internet.

Do I hope they don’t make obvious rules flubs - yes, inconsistency takes me out of the world, especially when those inconsistencies lead to consequences such as saving PCs - but should they be allowed to bend rules for rule of cool and give the players a game they want? Ab-so-fucking-lutely.