Games

Yes, but only in a critical success and critical fail. If you’re supposed to always succeed because your character should be able to do the action successfully in their sleep, the DM isn’t even supposed to make you roll. The die may land on any value between 1 and 20, but if the DC is 10 and you have +7 to your roll, you’ve eliminated failures from 3-9 on the d20. I’m well aware of how the average chance of rolling a given number changes when rolling multiple dice, but I’m not sure why a 3d6 bell curve would be preferable to 1d20 when you’re only looking for a binary success or failure.

I forgot to bring up in my rant that DND has no concept of "degree of success" outside of unique effects like the sprite's poison. So that sucks, too.

I would prefer rolls were weighted towards the average instead of "any result is equally likely". Imagine you have a wizard and a fighter. They are trying to figure out some arcane riddle. The wizard rolls at +5 (16 int, proficiency). The fighter at +0. They're looking to hit DC 15, a tricky but not excessive target.

The fighter has a 25% to hit that. The wizard has like a 45% to just flub it. That feels weird to me. I want the wizard to have more reliable outcomes, and less zany "I rolled a 2 lol I can't read today".

A dice pool gives you more consistent results.

I also forgot to bring up DND has no concept of fail forward or succeed at a cost.

And I forgot to bring up how insane it is to still have "16 strength is a +3 bonus".

You could raise this about card in Magic: The Gathering as well, and I think the answer is just “balance”. I don’t know that I’ve found myself in a position where we needed a spell to be created. For me at least, some amount of rigidity is very much appreciated on my end when the fiction involves literal magic, because it breaks the rigid laws of nature by definition.

You've never wanted to create your own spell. That's surprising. There are many spells to pick from, so I guess that could be.

Even discarding the "make your own spell effects" for the moment, the fact that they all work basically the same is boring. Declare your action, check off the spell slot box.

Off the top of my head you could do like

• every spell cast in the scene has some effect
  • increase failure rate
  • increase potency
• some spells have preconditions
  • require specific actions
    • spell C requires B and A to be cast first
    • spell requires blood drawn from the victim first
    • context (phase of moon, for example)
  • spells must be made very specific for their targets and outcomes ahead of time. You don't prepare fireball. You prepare "Blow up Carl".

You could build whole classes, whole games, around that shit, and I just popped that out without any real thought. DND magic by comparison is extremely bland, safe, and mechanical. None of that is how you would typically describe magic.

Someone described the PF2e 3 action mechanics to me, and there are parts of it that I like, but at the end of the day, it incentivizes different behaviors and isn’t necessarily better or worse. What would you like to do on your turn other than move and attack (which also ignores class-specific options you get for your bonus action, as well as other types of regular actions you might take for one reason or another)? What choices do you make differently when movement is treated equally to attacking as opposed to movement being use-it-or-lose-it? It affects how it feels, and it’s great that there are other systems to mix things up, but I like how 5e handles it.

I don't know what I said that has you stuck on literal movement. I must have said "move" when I meant "take your turn" at some point. Moving in space isn't that important.

Anyway. First off, making a single attack is boring. Especially when you play with slow players. Especially when you miss and nothing happens. They should probably get rid of missing as a common possibility, come to think of it.

You get like a minute of activity and then wait 10 minutes for everyone else to go. There's not really much tactical or narrative depth. You don't really get to decide much. Especially if you're not using flanking rules.

Something where you can make decisions and tradeoffs might be nice. Some sort of action point pool where you can decide how much goes into offense vs how much you keep for defense. Or something like fate's "create an advantage" where you can do something to set up someone (maybe future you) for a slam dunk. Some sort of succeed at a cost mechanic, perhaps.

Or even just giving multiple attacks earlier would help. The odds shift towards "maybe something will happen" then.

I also forgot to rant about hit points. That's a classic topic though you've probably read it before. But man, playing a game where health is constrained makes so much more sense to me. None of that "this bandit is fifth level so he can take 5 axe blows" weirdness.

Let me know if I missed replying to anything important. Doing this on my phone is hard.