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Quite a hard question, at least for me.

I don't have a lot of experience with D&D but I've red, out of curiosity, the books from several editions. Overall, I think it is "okay". You can do a lot of stuff, but from what I have experienced, having too many rules about too many different things is not a good thing. It can really slow down the pacing and since I'm more of a "narrative" player, I don't like it. I always thought that, unless you have a very experienced GM and good players, you need to house rule a lot of things. But you can say the same for many RPG and not just D&D.

Overall, I only play with close friends or people that were recommended by said friends, who are also "narrative" players and we never had a single problem because if we are not happy with a particular rule or something, we could always house rule it. However, then, we have to keep tracks of what was house ruled and it can be just as tedious as playing with the full ruleset.

But I have to say, because I'm a "narrative" player, I heavily tend to prefer simpler rulesets which are designed to support narrative play. One that comes to my mind easily is Mutant Year 0. Yes, it uses D6, but it just works (and it really does, unlike Todd Howard "it just works").

I give a 3/5.

Dungeons and Dragons has pretty much been okay every edition as far as TTRPGs go. It is a lot like Warhammer games in that it has a huge audience that understand how it basically works and that there is a huge audience playing it anywhere in the world. Plus, I think there is a lot of comfort in the familiar which keeps it and its clone, Pathfinder, going. It is only fairly recently with Youtube stuff would I ever encounter entire groups of people (save maybe children) that no one within the group had ever played when gaming. My experience has been up until that point that most of any given group has played D&D usually for quite a bit with only 1 or 2 brand new players that were just kinda expected to catch up with the game mechanics (which are simple enough to do) and Gygaxian Fantasy which is a whole lot easier post Lord of the Rings movies/video game rpgs. Like 40k, D&D is fairly accessible (read: easy to learn the basics) but tends to become more and more bloated with supplemental material as an edition lingers. And again, both games seem to have issues with players not self-restricting themselves--at least in my experience. It was very rare that any D&D group didn't allow every and any supplement a player managed to find including some years old Dragon magazine article for making ______ kind of character.

Probably the biggest issue I take with D&D is really only does Gygaxian Fantasy well. What I mean by Gygaxian Fantasy is that D&D is often its own kind of fantasy roughly based on Tolkien but with very dyed in the wool tropes and cliches that I am guess most of Dakka would recognize. Mechanically, D&D has a relatively simple attrition combat resolver where after a few levels players expect to win most fights only concerned with the amount of resources (hit points, spells and consumable items) used to win said fight. Death is usually not a quick affair in D&D which is a two-way sword. It is good that a player can accept some risk knowing even failure is probably not death but only a lost of hit points and maybe a status effect. Bad in that it is annoying difficult have quick life-and-death stakes without introducing an artificial system that circumvents hit points that I always felt tack on. So much of anything done in D&D is a grind. The game has always had a fairly weak non-combat skill resolution mechanic combined with a very pigeon hole class system making not combat campaigns a very poor fit compared many, many other TTPRGs. Up until 4th, the game also had a so class based balance issues in that non-spell casters power increased linearly while spell casters more more exponential. I remember one 3rd edition game, my 12th lv Transmutter found the party's fight against a Kraken adorable as they struggling in an epic battle until I got bored of the fight and disintegrated a large chunk of it finishing the fight. By 18th level, I was fighting a minor god solo, while my party kept her henchmen busy. That appears to be less of an issue now as I am playing a cleric in a 5th ed game and feel really dialed back in power compared to what I would have back in 2nd/3rd ed.

As for Dakka and TTRPGs, I think their is this wall or distance that many posters here place on the two games which I don't think are as far apart as they make them out to be. There seems to be a clear division that miniatures war games are adversarial contests between two parties and TTRPGs are co-operative, collaborative affairs to tell stories. While this is mostly true, it doesn't have to be the case in either and isn't a significant portion of the time. There is nothing stopping a miniatures war gaming pair of players to create a backstory for the game they are playing (I try to do that for nearly every game). It is even possible for both players collaborate on what moves would be the most optimal for both factions essentially playing both sides to their maximum effect (or at leas the best of the players involved). Conversely, I have played a few rpgs games where it was strangely adversarial with the DM/GM creating scenarios that they thought were just tough enough to kill a coupe of party members and played pretty much like a skirmish war game from there. That DM/GM's aim was to kill as much of the party as possible with no pulled punches. Their ultimate goal to leave at least one survivor to show that the encounter wasn't overkill or too hard for the party. I have even competed in a competitive rpg tournament way back in second edition where the goal was for your party to get further in a deadly dungeon within an hour of real time. It is was a competition where roleplaying mostly took a backseat (it was 2nd ed AD&D so par for the course) to fighting and surviving through a liner dungeon.

I don't think 40k players (at least on Dakka Dakka) not like D&D so much as they no longer see any connection between the two games beyond not really using electronic devices. I personally don't agree with that idea, but I do understand where it comes from. I play my war games like I play my rpg fights, I try my best to make the best moves most of the time, but I not going to let an epic moment go to waste. Besides, I have yet to play a GW war game that had as intense, pull-out-all-the-stops warfare that my 4th edition games had. I actually had to ask the DM of that game to tone it back as I didn't every single fight had to be a life or death struggle that took everything the party had to come out the other side.

D&D is currently my only game. I don't have to leave the house and drive for nearly 2 hours to play thanks to the internet.
I played just a little AD&D as I was getting out of the army the first time and that was very story driven and it seemed dice were optional. Later I played 3.5 or 3rd, which ever it was. I have my book around here some where.. But at that time I was playing lot more 40K and sitting t a table for several hours doing very little was not holding my attention, I could have played several games all day in the same amount of time and that seemed more satisfying. If I had it to do over again I would trade most of the time and money I spent on 40K for having played D&D and the whole not spending nearly as much money. 40K really cost too much when your an addict working on 3 or 4 armies at a time.
I do not really like 8th edition because it feels like a living rule book that changes right after I play a game and when I get the time to drive 2 hours out for a game I am lost and it's a real buzz kill. I have some physical disability which is aggravated more and more from standing around a table and the long uncomfortable drive. Playing a game with friends from home has been a fantastic experience, so much so that I have not missed a single game. I am new to 5th and some of the current rules seem to light on rules in places to me but I can live with that I guess. What's even better is that I have started drawing again after not drawing anything for the better part of 20 years.

 warhead01 wrote:
D&D is currently my only game. I don't have to leave the house and drive for nearly 2 hours to play thanks to the internet.

Check out table top simulator, I know there's 40k minis up there, don't know if there's a community to play with or not though.

That said, D&D is fine, the hipster jokes earlier in the thread are definitely not wrong, it's a big tropey fantasy setting that people take way to god damn seriously most of the time. Which should really feel in place for 40k players. 5th edition is actually rather quick to play and actively encourages you not to waste time flipping through the book which was quite nice. The game itself is fine and fun.

Now, adventurers league, you couldn't get me to play that shy a gun to my head. The power gamey weasely bs that people put into the fixed rewards structure of that play style drives me insane. It's like 3.5 came back to take a bite out of a good game and attached itself like a fething parasite. All of which I could entirely stand if not for the endless whining when some one who does these things finds out he can't actually do the over powered thing he wanted to because someone else with reading comprehension in the group actually understood the rules he blindly tried taking advantage of.

I will admit, that could just be the people near me, but for all the RPGs I've played, anything with an official codified reward structure has sucked the fun out of the games almost as bad as the players who really just want an oversized hump pillow.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Because lore is why you got into the game? Because lore is what helped you pick your faction?

40k is a pretty shoddy game as far as actual gameplay goes, so if you were playing it just for the sheer game-ness, I can think of tons of other, much better, miniature wargames. Even from GW

Edit:
I contest that they find little to no rules for doing so. I am in a campaign right now that uses CA2018's campaign experience gain rules, for example. There are rules supporting map campaigns, naming charts for your characters to find out names if you can't be bothered, etc. These are all pretty available, if you care to use them.

When we played FFG's Arkham Horror game as replacement for our regular P&P night, the guys also turned that into an full-blown role-play, despite having no support for that at all. You can do the same for pretty much any game, if you want to.

All the rules you listed provide no support for actual role-play - simply because they don't tell a story. The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself. That's the very opposite of support. The DoW hexfield campaigns do a better job of telling a story than all of GW's publications from the last four editions combined.

 Jidmah wrote:


All the rules you listed provide no support for actual role-play - simply because they don't tell a story. The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself. That's the very opposite of support. The DoW hexfield campaigns do a better job of telling a story than all of GW's publications from the last four editions combined.

*gestures wildly at the front half of every codex and rulebook, the entirety of Black Library, and 30 years worth of art, fiction and background*

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:


All the rules you listed provide no support for actual role-play - simply because they don't tell a story. The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself. That's the very opposite of support. The DoW hexfield campaigns do a better job of telling a story than all of GW's publications from the last four editions combined.

*gestures wildly at the front half of every codex and rulebook, the entirety of Black Library, and 30 years worth of art, fiction and background*

And yet, he's still not wrong.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:


All the rules you listed provide no support for actual role-play - simply because they don't tell a story. The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself. That's the very opposite of support. The DoW hexfield campaigns do a better job of telling a story than all of GW's publications from the last four editions combined.

*gestures wildly at the front half of every codex and rulebook, the entirety of Black Library, and 30 years worth of art, fiction and background*

And yet, he's still not wrong.

Uhhh…

The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself.

I enjoy D&D. Played everything up to 4th, and pathfinder. I’ve also played a huge number of other RPGs, and enjoyed them at various levels.

You can turn almost any role playing game into a roll playing game and min/max it’s mechanics and break the system. D&D gets a bit of a bad rep for the ability to break it, but it’s not exclusive to that. Unless you go diceless like Amber, anything with mechanics can be exploited by those with system mastery.

I will agree that any RPG requires a social contract. Especially if you have players with different levels of technical skills. In an RPG the goal is for everyone to have fun. Ideally everyone at the table is on board with this.

In recent years I prefer rules light systems. Savage Worlds probably being my favorite. Just enough structure to have you story on, and not a lot of places for the mechanics to show through. Currently playing in two games, one as the seneschal in a Rouge Trader game, helping our captain stay the course in the turbulent warp of the outer dark; the other a two-fisted pilot in a pulp-era Spirit of the Century game. Vastly different systems and characters, but both a lot of fun.

 Jidmah wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Because lore is why you got into the game? Because lore is what helped you pick your faction?

40k is a pretty shoddy game as far as actual gameplay goes, so if you were playing it just for the sheer game-ness, I can think of tons of other, much better, miniature wargames. Even from GW

Edit:
I contest that they find little to no rules for doing so. I am in a campaign right now that uses CA2018's campaign experience gain rules, for example. There are rules supporting map campaigns, naming charts for your characters to find out names if you can't be bothered, etc. These are all pretty available, if you care to use them.

When we played FFG's Arkham Horror game as replacement for our regular P&P night, the guys also turned that into an full-blown role-play, despite having no support for that at all. You can do the same for pretty much any game, if you want to.

All the rules you listed provide no support for actual role-play - simply because they don't tell a story. The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself. That's the very opposite of support. The DoW hexfield campaigns do a better job of telling a story than all of GW's publications from the last four editions combined.

Yes?

I mean, that's rather the point, innit? Telling the story with yourself and your friends, rather than reading it out of a novel.

Isn't that how D&D works too?

The preformed/prebuilt Curse-of-Strahd style adventures are suspiciously like campaign books in the vein of Psychic Awakening or that planet in the Indomitus Crusade during index 8th (fate of Konor iirc).

Edit:
I suppose I should try to understand your objections better. What do you mean when you say "support" that GW isn't doing?

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:

 warhead01 wrote:
D&D is currently my only game. I don't have to leave the house and drive for nearly 2 hours to play thanks to the internet.

Check out table top simulator, I know there's 40k minis up there, don't know if there's a community to play with or not though.

That said, D&D is fine, the hipster jokes earlier in the thread are definitely not wrong, it's a big tropey fantasy setting that people take way to god damn seriously most of the time. Which should really feel in place for 40k players. 5th edition is actually rather quick to play and actively encourages you not to waste time flipping through the book which was quite nice. The game itself is fine and fun.

Now, adventurers league, you couldn't get me to play that shy a gun to my head. The power gamey weasely bs that people put into the fixed rewards structure of that play style drives me insane. It's like 3.5 came back to take a bite out of a good game and attached itself like a fething parasite. All of which I could entirely stand if not for the endless whining when some one who does these things finds out he can't actually do the over powered thing he wanted to because someone else with reading comprehension in the group actually understood the rules he blindly tried taking advantage of.

I will admit, that could just be the people near me, but for all the RPGs I've played, anything with an official codified reward structure has sucked the fun out of the games almost as bad as the players who really just want an oversized hump pillow.

Thank you. I do remember a table top simulator from....I'm not sure how many years ago. I don't know many people who would be interested in that I recall being very skeptical myself but maybe.


As far as the unchecked behavior in peoples D&D ect games. I don't get it. I mean I kinda do but the game I am in, for example, is a closed group. My brother has DM'd for the same group for about 20 years now and wont put up with disruption. The game is a bit of a home brew setting over laying the Silver Marches with black powder, politics and it's own money system.
What bothers me about 5th is the lack of defined skill growth compared to 3rd. If it's there I am just showing how much of a noob I am.

One think I have brought over from 40K is looking for the averages of a D6. What's the "critical mass" of D6's I need for a fire ball to hit the averages for damage out put... (On a fire ball.)

another problem I had with D&D or role playing is just the social aspect of being in character which had always felt strange to me so unlike before where I would play a fighter or some similar class I am attempting to play a social character with my wizard and just do more and be more involved during the games and that's gone surprisingly well but I think that is also because of knowing the people in the group for not quite 20 years. The jokes are rotten, twisted and fantastic.
I had thought about trying one of those adventure league games when I was thinking about getting into D&D. Not sure but I may give one of those a try in the future if the opportunity is there. I didn't start playing until the end of June and had been house sitting in May but hardly left the house to go to the game shop. Maybe next time.
I do remember playing one session of living city, I think that's what it was, way back in 97' or 98'.

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:


All the rules you listed provide no support for actual role-play - simply because they don't tell a story. The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself. That's the very opposite of support. The DoW hexfield campaigns do a better job of telling a story than all of GW's publications from the last four editions combined.

*gestures wildly at the front half of every codex and rulebook, the entirety of Black Library, and 30 years worth of art, fiction and background*

And yet, he's still not wrong.

Uhhh…

The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself.

Yeah, the big bits of fluff in the codices and the BRB are great and all, but that's really just the world building part of an RPG. If having sufficient background, novels and art to role-play in is the metric, then MtG would qualify as an RPG as well, when it clearly doesn't.

 Jidmah wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:


All the rules you listed provide no support for actual role-play - simply because they don't tell a story. The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself. That's the very opposite of support. The DoW hexfield campaigns do a better job of telling a story than all of GW's publications from the last four editions combined.

*gestures wildly at the front half of every codex and rulebook, the entirety of Black Library, and 30 years worth of art, fiction and background*

And yet, he's still not wrong.

Uhhh…

The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself.

Yeah, the big bits of fluff in the codices and the BRB are great and all, but that's really just the world building part of an RPG. If having sufficient background, novels and art to role-play in is the metric, then MtG would qualify as an RPG as well, when it clearly doesn't.

MTG's computer game literally has a single player campaign mode where you battle it out against other summoners/planeswalkers, with each battle being part of the story.

It isn't terribly well written mind, but how small-minded must someone be to not understand that you really could play a narrative MTG campaign if you wanted?

I could, right now, whip up a plane and a few decks, with the players wandering around the Plane fighting each-other or my encounter decks when they reach certain hexes or whatever.

But… "Narrative" and "RPG" aren't the same thing? Nobody's saying 40k is an RPG!

Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Only War, etc are.

And lord almighty I would rather stab my eyes out with broken Christmas ornaments than have another thread turn into an argument about whether or not 40k works for narrative gaming. Especially not the nice, fun TTRPG thread.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I suppose I should try to understand your objections better. What do you mean when you say "support" that GW isn't doing?

Trying to understand what I want to say honors you and is done way to little

First of all I would expect campaign books that actually allow me to create and run a campaign - be it with my own story or one from GW.
I'm trying to get a narrative campaign off the ground for our group right now, but I'm basically writing an entire game system myself, drawing from old edition sources and third party material to do so.
Anything GW has published this edition is mostly worthless - battle honors allow no customization and are worthless for many units that don't fit the Space Marine template, custom characters range dude with worthless rules to unstoppable demi-god on the battlefield and more often than not fail to forge their narrative as soon as a squad of snipers get involved. Narrative missions are just fun missions, but don't actually tell a story. They can be used as frameworks for telling a story if you want to play a certain scenario, but so can most eternal war missions.
If something get's labeled "campaign book", my expectation would be that I can buy that book, get a couple of players and then run that campaign from the book to play 4-6 games and then reach some sort of conclusion. Neither Vigilus nor Psychic awakening managed to that to any extend.
Urban Conquest tried that somehow (I actually bought that book for this reason), but it failed. It has very specific requirements to your terrain collection and once again relies on random effects to spice up the game rather than actually adding narrative reasons for something to happen. As usual, these effects don't seem to have been designed with non-guard or space marine armies in mind, so if you are running Xenos or Daemons the mission/campaign round rules might randomly make you lose.
I wouldn't call just rolling up random monsters from the monster's manual and beating them with your D&D group for experience any more "role-playing" than these campaigns.

Second, I have found forging a narrative on the battlefield extremely difficult when you are playing a mission that is telling you to win the game and punishes you in the overlying campaign if you don't. If the character that is my warboss is supposed to always pick a fight the most powerful combatant on the table he not only will lose that fight 4 out 5 times (Warboss suck in duels because reasons), it will also cost me the game because I just tossed out my one option to destroy enemy heavy vehicles. Many armies run into this issue when they try to act according to their fluff - the rules are just terrible at transporting all those awesome stories from the fluff (some written 5+ edition ago) to the battlefield.
In addition, if you have some of your legendary models on the table, like the one devastator who killed three tanks in one battle with his missle launcher, the nob who fought 21 guardsmen on his own and killed them all or the dire avengers exarch who held out against Mortarion for four turns of combat until the battle ended - there is no way to actually keep writing their legend as the game is so deadly, that they are pretty likely to just go ker-splat turn one when a repulsor unloads a random ironhail something stubber into the only unit that is in range. We had a campaign where you could play a kill team mission and the winner could add his kill team to his army for the final battle. Guess what they did in that game? They were all shot dead by a unit of cultists.
Another issue that most armies aren't robust enough to support playing anything but one of the working archetypes supported by the current incarnation of the rules, and I'm not just talking about the top tier builds.
For example, if I wanted to run something like Buzzgobs Dreadmob, with a stompa, kanz, burnas and dreads, there is no chance in hell that this army is going to any serious damage to any shooty army before getting wiped out. A DA Deathwing, White Scar bikes, an eldar aspect shrine, a wych coven or a Night Lords jump pack force are all doomed to get slaughtered by someone who just put some guardsmen to hold the line in from of his imperial tanks or someone who just brought a random company of primaris marines.

Yes, you can put effort into making all that work, but I can also put the same effort into making a MtG RPG work, so from my perspective the simple truth for 8th edition is that it doesn't support role-play.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
MTG's computer game literally has a single player campaign mode where you battle it out against other summoners/planeswalkers, with each battle being part of the story.

It isn't terribly well written mind, but how small-minded must someone be to not understand that you really could play a narrative MTG campaign if you wanted?

I could, right now, whip up a plane and a few decks, with the players wandering around the Plane fighting each-other or my encounter decks when they reach certain hexes or whatever.

The point is that GW isn't providing something even remotely as good as those MtG scenarios for WH40k.
Oh, and don't underestimate the work you need to put into such encounter decks, talking from experience

Jidmah, how do you feel about Kill Team and/or Necromunda's campaign rules by comparison?

@Jidmah

Okay! I get a lot of your points and I actually agree. However, my response would be:

1) 40k *should* be able to be played narratively. GW has offered support for this too, however hamfisted and bad it might be.

2) the failure of 40k as a narrative game is due largely to balance issues.

This last one I would like to expand on a bit, partly because I am involved in a discussion about it in the "playtest competitively" thread.

40k's imbalance does, in fact, make it hard to be narrative. Your stuff just vaporizes off the table like water on hot asphalt. What's worse is that *everyone* is a victim. Even narrative lists that are accidentally hyperoptimized evaporate if they happen to go second.

This is a problem with lethality being dramatically too high right now, and plagues all of 40k. When you say "40k doesn't function well as a narrative game", what it sounds like your objections are is mostly "40k doesn't function well as a game", period, narratively or otherwise.

In the other thread you will absolutely see I agree with that point.

Lastly, I do think GW tries to support narrative play. You yourself mentioned several tools and supplements which exist; the problem is that they are executed with GW's typical disregard for their own game.

I actually empathize with your point. In the other thread I even make some of the same arguments.

But in general I think 40k games should be narratively inspired above all else, and the fact that it hardly functions at all is a detriment to everyone, and is not limited to narrative.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I am not certain why 40k cannot be about collaborative storytelling and imagination. A pair (or group) of people work together to confront fun challenges that they create for themselves and build a story about their characters and armies.

People talk like you can't use 40k battles to tell stories.

You can invent a story about your game versus I, but at the end of the day, one of us won and one of us lost and we went home to make new lists and play someone else next week.

D&D isn't about winning or losing. Victory is what you make of it. Theres an evolving story of the party's characters facilitated and curated by the GM.

40k "Narrative" is like old fashioned wargaming with scenarios and asymmetric objectives.


And of course, when you're playing D&D, you're playing with your friends together. If we play 40k, I have all my pieces, you have all yours, and I play against you for my guys to beat yours.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:


Lastly, I do think GW tries to support narrative play. You yourself mentioned several tools and supplements which exist; the problem is that they are executed with GW's typical disregard for their own game.

From the Duncan-Rhodes-Is-Leaving thread:

I think the Warhammer TV crew don't even get the early glimpses and previews, other then by maybe a few weeks to prep their promotional stuff.

I imagine for most of them the main perks are about the 50% employee discount, being around a whole ton of very passionate and talented hobbyists, and getting to work on something you love.

...which is part of why it baffles me when people complaining about things like 40k imply that GW's ground level employees are lazy, don't care about the quality of their releases, and/or are just trying to squeeze money out of the fans any way they can. The CEO and executive management are obviously prioritizing profits and keeping the shareholders happy, as is true of any company, and do stuff like impose a pretty ruthless release schedule, but the actual background writers, game designers / rule writers, sculptors, illustrators, product developers, and graphic designers? Aside from old timers like Jervis Johnson, Jes Goodwin, Aly Morrison and John Blanche, they're like 90% people who grew up playing Games Workshop games and are totally passionate about it, and try to make the best products they can. It's just that it's a hard job, done by fallible humans, with lots of priorities to juggle, and the aforementioned brutal release schedule, so they make mistakes and can't be all things to all people.

I mean, just look at Duncan. You can tell that guy 100% cares about the community and wants everyone to enjoy the hobby as much as possible, and get as much out of it as possible. I think he's the norm, not the exception.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I am not certain why 40k cannot be about collaborative storytelling and imagination. A pair (or group) of people work together to confront fun challenges that they create for themselves and build a story about their characters and armies.

People talk like you can't use 40k battles to tell stories.

You can invent a story about your game versus I, but at the end of the day, one of us won and one of us lost and we went home to make new lists and play someone else next week.

D&D isn't about winning or losing. Victory is what you make of it. Theres an evolving story of the party's characters facilitated and curated by the GM.

40k "Narrative" is like old fashioned wargaming with scenarios and asymmetric objectives.


And of course, when you're playing D&D, you're playing with your friends together. If we play 40k, I have all my pieces, you have all yours, and I play against you for my guys to beat yours.

One of us won and one of us lost, but that doesn't mean we make new lists next week. Oftentimes I'll take the same list, with the same characters, week after week, and when I play someone else I can fluff that game too. After all, unless they have their own fluff (in which case we should play a narrative campaign!) they could easily all be on the same planet.

No option for "used to love D&D, not anymore" (3.5th edition is good, everything past that was terrible)

LoftyS wrote:
No option for "used to love D&D, not anymore" (3.5th edition is good, everything past that was terrible)

Not that i'd agree with your assessment of the editions, but good thing with RPGs is that unlike with wargames it is pretty easy to keep playing the old editions. You only need to have the books convince couple of your friends to do it.

 Crimson wrote:

LoftyS wrote:
No option for "used to love D&D, not anymore" (3.5th edition is good, everything past that was terrible)

Not that i'd agree with your assessment of the editions, but good thing with RPGs is that unlike with wargames it is pretty easy to keep playing the old editions. You only need to have the books convince couple of your friends to do it.

Hell yeah. I still like playing 2nd edition AD&D!

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

LoftyS wrote:
No option for "used to love D&D, not anymore" (3.5th edition is good, everything past that was terrible)

Not that i'd agree with your assessment of the editions, but good thing with RPGs is that unlike with wargames it is pretty easy to keep playing the old editions. You only need to have the books convince couple of your friends to do it.

Hell yeah. I still like playing 2nd edition AD&D!

Bring Back THAC0

I love D&D and I am currently the DM for my group

nataliereed1984 wrote:
Is the Rogue Trader RPG from FFG really as bad, system-wise, as people make it out to be?

The concept of it - playing a rogue trader and the most trusted members of their crew - is INCREDIBLY appealing to me. All the agency and much of the power of an Inquisitor, but without any overarching moral imperative, and room to be a completely self-serving b***h!

But I keep hearing the rules are really, really, really bad and it's better to just transpose the setting, characters, adventures, etc into a different game system.

Thoughts on that?

P.S. I can't believe people are complaining about balance even here in a thread on cooperative TTRPGs...

I've never found it that bad. There's a huge amount of detail in the game, but it's not too bad mechanically. The key element is that Rogue Trader is completely foreign to 'classic' rpg play, and some people have trouble adapting, especially as the gm.

The party's main assets are their ship, wealth and political contacts. In a lot of cases, an adventure where a star trek setting would be "beam down to the surface with Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Security Officer Sucks-to-be-you", a perfectly sensible response in rogue trader is "flatten ten square kilometres with orbital gunfire, land a battalion of armsmen to secure the ruins, and then we -might!- think about going down in person...."

I find the FFG RPGs to be a fairly bland core system padded out with a massive dictionary of traits. Most of the play time every time I've tried it consists of people flipping through books to figure out what any of their abilities actually mean; unless you're prepared to have one person memorize the whole thing or write up your own reminder text it's fairly difficult to use.

locarno24 wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
Is the Rogue Trader RPG from FFG really as bad, system-wise, as people make it out to be?

The concept of it - playing a rogue trader and the most trusted members of their crew - is INCREDIBLY appealing to me. All the agency and much of the power of an Inquisitor, but without any overarching moral imperative, and room to be a completely self-serving b***h!

But I keep hearing the rules are really, really, really bad and it's better to just transpose the setting, characters, adventures, etc into a different game system.

Thoughts on that?

P.S. I can't believe people are complaining about balance even here in a thread on cooperative TTRPGs...

I've never found it that bad. There's a huge amount of detail in the game, but it's not too bad mechanically. The key element is that Rogue Trader is completely foreign to 'classic' rpg play, and some people have trouble adapting, especially as the gm.

The party's main assets are their ship, wealth and political contacts. In a lot of cases, an adventure where a star trek setting would be "beam down to the surface with Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Security Officer Sucks-to-be-you", a perfectly sensible response in rogue trader is "flatten ten square kilometres with orbital gunfire, land a battalion of armsmen to secure the ruins, and then we -might!- think about going down in person...."

God that sounds so much fun.

 Jidmah wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:


All the rules you listed provide no support for actual role-play - simply because they don't tell a story. The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself. That's the very opposite of support. The DoW hexfield campaigns do a better job of telling a story than all of GW's publications from the last four editions combined.

*gestures wildly at the front half of every codex and rulebook, the entirety of Black Library, and 30 years worth of art, fiction and background*

And yet, he's still not wrong.

Uhhh…

The entire "support" for narrative games by GW is basically telling you to create the narrative yourself.

Yeah, the big bits of fluff in the codices and the BRB are great and all, but that's really just the world building part of an RPG. If having sufficient background, novels and art to role-play in is the metric, then MtG would qualify as an RPG as well, when it clearly doesn't.

just gonna leave that there

As much as I hate what MTG has become recently, Ravnica is a fantastic setting. Time Spiral/Ravinica Standard was a golden age that will never be surpassed.