I think it was a different thread where I posted about how a guy in my dnd group straight face told us something like "the beauty of DND is we can just try out different rules. If we want to do a chase scene we can try it one way, and if it doesn't work or we don't like it we can try something else".

I'm just like that's not a unique property of DND. That's just how playing make believe works. And I'd rather have a game that runs okay out of the box rather than keep playtesting as a DM, or deal with unchecked dm whims as a player.

This is why I'm switching to GURPS. It has rules for everything, but it's very clear that you only need a handful of them, and the rest are options you can decide to use or not. I'm probably not going to use the rocket equations in the Space book to make space travel more realistic, but it's nice that they're there in case I wanted to.

I like the middle ground where 5e is

They're not just calling it big, they're calling an elephant big in comparison to a crude 8 year old's drawing of said elephant (and of course the colouring is not inside the lines because it doesn't have to conform to the consistent rules of an elephant). What purpose does that serve unless you're the 8 year old trying to make your drawing sound impressive? See how small and unique my elephant is?

Meanwhile the whale sitting right next to the elephant is like wow that was a very specific callout on their size when I'm sitting right here. That kid must really hate that elephant.

It's quite ridiculous. Wrong or right don't factor into it.

I feel like pf2e has just enough rules to empower the players to the level I like

The more DM fiat a game has, the more trust I need from my players for things to go smoothly.

That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but for me structure is usually good as long as it doesn't raise the skill floor too high.

Once I've got trust built and feel a bit more experimental, I like Dungeon World or even Universalis

We’re ultimately dealing with a pretty simple underlying system: d20 roll high

I highly disagree with this sentiment. You do you, but this is not the general feeling of TTRPG players.

Lmao, I think you confused pf1 and pf2. In pf1 you can build yourself into a corner and create useless characters with ease. In 2e the worst characters are still decent

One risk with this is when you have a new player join your group. They might expect raw and be surprised by a whole kettle of home brew.

I for one would be annoyed if I joined a group and found they were ignoring the rest rules. They may be having fun but I would have made different decisions if I'd known what they were actually playing.

But that's valid criticism. Rules have to justify their existence

At that point, you lose a lot of verisimilitude, and that's pretty important to me.

The builds are an expression of character development tho.

What would it take to make it a RPG? Some characters are flawed in certain things while excel at others. But what you want your character to be, its in your hands due to how you build your character. That´s part of your character, same goes to the backstory you may have developed and inform your build.

But tell me when it becomes a RPG, it’s basically a video game system ported to tabletop

Uh.... tabletop came before videogames...

Anyway, no. An RPG is a Role Playing Game, it's a game where you take the role of someone, either created by you or given by the game (be it a videogame or not), and you experience the things that happens to that character.

Saying that TTRPGs are video games ported to TT is like saying that Lord of the Rings is a story written within the DnD lore. It's completely wrong.

So why not lean into it fully and make the GM responsible for the whole balancing?

Because having things balanced properly in regard to the myriad options that are possible in people imaginations is hard, especially related to combat. Improper balacing leads to people having a bad time, while having an established, fair ruleset lets the DM and the players focus on other things.

No need for the framework to do balancing, because a good GM will do that.

But at this point why even have rules? A "good GM" can just entirely improvise a system.

While GM decides what monsters to throw into players, they still need to know what they could use without it being either underwhelming or overwhelming. You dismiss this simply by saying: "just be a good DM".

• New DM's will want guidelines to start from.
• If combat is important having written rules help to use consistent ruling on same situation in different instances.
• Story focused DM might reduce amount of effort needed to plan combat, since there is no need to build it from scratch.

Disadvantage of having to look up rules then you don't remember them could be mitigated by just saying: Look guys, I don't remember ruling now, so not to break the flow, I will rule it this way, and look it up later.

So while for most players rule heavy systems are less accessible, they are actually more accessible for many DMs, and since mastering have much higher barrier of entry, such systems at least should not be dismissed outright.

Yes, the GM balances - they decide what type and how hard the encounters will be. But after that decision is made, it's the job of the system to provide the GM with tools to build that encounter and help me balance things: How much skeletons provide the difficulty I want? Is a lich too much? Red dragon or white dragon?

In 5e, you don't have the proper tools imo - the challenge rating is next to useless. In PF2, you have something akin to point buy for encounters - and if it says the encounter will be "moderate threat" - then you can trust that in 99% of the cases.

But at the end of the day, as a GM, if I want to provide my players with a hard, but fair fight, I don't want to have to guess what will work and what won't. Yes, with a lot of experience I will have an idea of that, but why would I pay for a system that just offloads the hard part of their game design to me? Good encounter-building tools don't get in the way of your creativity.

Balancing is the job of the GM.

And some systems make that job easier for the GM than other systems. Winning all the time without challenge is boring. Getting TPKd every other session does not feel good. A good GM should hit somewhere in-between. So you either have a system that helps you do that or you really need to have a lot of experience.

So why not lean into it fully and make the GM responsible for the whole balancing

Because they should have fun too? Having to rule and improvise everything makes for a harder job for them, needing to keep track of everything to make it consistent, and it's also bad for players too, since they don't really know what to expect.

The framework helps the GM be able to do so, its another tool.

I mainly say that in such a way that if a character is thought to be a pusher the player would know that to push I have to be this close and cant push something thats x times bigger (or some other thing). A GM can (and should) adjust and change things if it would make it more fun for the table but the framework helps understand the world better. for some parts the GM is not directing but explaining what happened.

I push the rock off the edge of the cliff, bar something else, it should fall. The GM at that point is giving the results of that action, what is the result? the GM could simply say that it fell and hurt someone it landed on nearly killing them. the issue comes when the same situation comes up and the GM does something different because they think it should do differently (a different GM more then likely ) this breaks flow if things are different. (assuming all things are the same in both situations for simplicity of course). The Frame work put that a rock fall would deal X amount for how far it fell and the players would have the knowledge (while it would be slightly meta, it would be a "world" known if the rock would deal less damage then the pointy sword XP )

That's what I meant by balance across areas, expectations are known on what some cause and effects are. Frameworks are great ways to help guide things through HOWEVER, a giving framework/gamesystem is not perfect nor a fit all for all game types and tables. A Group also shouldn't need to "go into the weeds" constantly (or at all during a session), something made on the fly or close enough is good to keep things moving.

I mean, pen&paper RPGs aren’t a players vs GM game, but instead the GM plays together with the players to create an interesting experience where everyone has fun.

Full Agree, but the next part is that the Framework helps the GM do the balancing

But if you have the tools that tell you how to make differently balanced encounters, it makes the job of balancing the game waaaay easier.

This is entirely correct. Balance does not matter in most games, because most games have resources that are depleted over a long term. You don't need balance when healing takes weeks or difficult to replace resources.

For games like 5e and pf2, where characters constantly are at full health, spells and equipment, combat needs to almost kill the party every time to be worth rolling dice.

Being less complex than 3.5 isn't indicator of being simple, that bar is on the floor.

Not on 3.5 per se, but I had years long GM burnout after running my first Pathfinder 1e campaign. Bad memories from it were what actually kept me from giving Pathfinder 2e a chance for a long time.

Frankly I could point it right back at you as the example of a good thing to have. If you need to dive underwater without equipment or cross smoke during a fire, it's useful to have a reference of how long you can keep at it, how many rounds does that take, how much distance you can cross, what happens once you can't keep at it anymore. We are talking about adventurers, it's surprising that this is somehow thought of as an irrelevant edge case.

Are we expecting that the player should always have spells or some magic scuba for this?

I really don't get what's with OSR and not wanting to roll. I'm playing an RPG, I'm up for rolling. Though in this case, the rule does not even require rolling until you are already drowning.

For the few times your players want to swim a lot underwater OR if you use monsters designed to drown them long term

Okay, explain to me why do you need rules for holding your breath in 5e.

Because water is generally everywhere and you might go in it? Surviving poisonous gases? Strangulation? If you wanted to point at rarely used rules there's a plethora of better options to pick. This is more like asking why do you need rules for combat.

I don't have a problem of caster vs martial in 5e. And I don't have a problem of balance either. But I know all people who do are indeed a lot better with pf2e.

To me this is a question of finding the ruleset that fits your table.

OSR has a vocal minority or reacitonaries giving it bad name. But even among perpetually online, they're a minority. Facebook had two OSR fan groups - one for reactionaries (it's now deleted) and other being very welcoming and progressive. The latter had ten times as many members.

He's likely referring to the New TSR, which did make a pretty racist race section for a game. But they already are basically dead as a company, if not actually bankrupt.

The only other scandals would be WotC getting sued for labelling Adnd stuff as racist, when WotC made at least 2 books with racist art in the 2020s. Or the Zac S lawsuit, where a pornstar OSR creator was accused of stuff then won the lawsuit so easily he looks like the nice guy in porn. Reggie (LotFP) is also weird, but not the average creator. He's basically just an eccentric artist.

The OSR is way less bigotted than WotC. Hell Shadowdark was made by a lesbian and she is very well regarded even by people critical of SD as a system.

I'm not complaining about having different kinds of opposed checks. I like that there are lots of different things to target, in fact I wish different kinds of checks were more accessible so that combat was more varied.

I just find it weird that they have different game mechanics. Like, attacking has the player rolling against a defender's static DC. Except actually sometimes the defender rolls to save against an attacker's static DC? And Dex saves are actually represented twice, once as an actual save to dodge things, and once as AC. Precisely because there are those two overlapping systems at play.

Yeah I wouldn't worry about it too honestly; it's very tough to get into OSR style games without having watched a session, played a game, or read a few OSR-y Internet thought pieces. Much of how it's done is cultural and not presented in the books. That is one of the things that later editions of D&D are better at.