D&D General D&D "influencers" need to actively acknowledge other games.

jdrakeh said:

Eh. Let influencers choose the scope of their content. If they want to focus solely on D&D, so be it. I can find other influencers to view/listen to when I want non-D&D content.

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Wofano Wotanto said:

First time I ever played the Sentinel Comics RPG using the original starter kit (not the new one that just dropped - this was pre-COVID) the GM bought it and had us playing a half hour later after he did a quick skim of the mechanics and the adventure he picked to run (it came with six). We used pre-gen characters, so no time spent on that. Pretty normal for better-made starter kits without complex game engines (eg Pendragon) IME, although the experience is probably better if the GM has actually read everything the day before.

If your GM is familiar with the system already the SCRPG core book would do the job just as well. It has pregen characters and a couple of starter adventures right in the book, but the full rules are about 32-40 pages and would take most GMs more than a half hour to digest on first read.

FIASCO is 100% pick up and play with a few minutes reading and explanation if no one's ever played it before. The very idea of prepping for it would feel weird. Same goes for Baron Munchausen unless you're going to declare it a non-RPG (which I wouldn't really argue strongly one way or the other).

Over the Edge could get you playing within a half hour including character gen and a real basic run-down of Al Amarja, although the GM would probably want to have everyone playing newly-arrived tourists rather than more in-the-know natives. The session's likely to be more about encountering and dealing with your first bits of weirdness than advancing personal schemes, but that's okay. I've had several good times just getting through the airport in past campaigns.

There's plenty of others if you allow the GM to be familiar with the system already. Explaining the basics and using published pregens or a simple chargen system can be a 10-30 minute process even with newbies. If the GM is just picking up the book for the first time then the game options are more restricted, but I don't generally consider "reading the rulebook" as session prep myself.

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Reynard said:

So, I want to make this clear: if your job, that you have decided for yourself, is to tell people how to D&D better, then doing your job well absolutely requires you acknowledging the decades of development in the RPG space, both within and outside D&D.

Nothing inspires less confidence than an "influencer" actively telling you that they have been running D&D for 5 years and they have it all figured out. (Note: I am NOT saying GinniD does that.)

My thesis for this thread is simple and right on the tin: if you want to give advice on how to GM good, look at the whole scope of GMing, from Elusive Shift to Apocalypse World.

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overgeeked said:

Only if you make it difficult. A simple Google search will give you all the games you could want. Pick-up games are designed to be picked up and played. You certainly can do deep-dive research on all of them up front, but that's a choice you make, not something that must be done. Many pick-up games come with in-built scenarios, so you don't have to come up with one yourself. Or they have simple scenario generators to use, or you can easily find them online with a simple Google search. Pitching people to play a game is a one-minute affair. Send texts or emails to people you know or post something on any one of dozens of players with looking for group options. Scheduling is the only real hurdle if you're playing with other people, but there's also solo RPGs.

But that's my point. People who don't regularly do these things complaining about how hard it is or how impossible it is to do these things when it's anything but. Because they're stuck in the D&D bubble and wrongly assume all RPGs are as difficult to learn, run, and play as D&D. That's simply false.

It absolutely can be that simple and easy as I've repeatedly explained. That people choose to make it harder than that isn't a universal law of reality. It's a choice. And a bad one. Mostly predicated on assumptions made by people inside the D&D bubble with zero desire to look outside that bubble.

Case in point. I got a group text on Monday that asked if people were interested in playing a new-to-almost-everyone game Saturday night (tomorrow). Everyone agreed so we're playing a new game tomorrow night. One person has read the book (me). The referee has maybe partially read the book. None of the 3-4 other players have read the book.

It can be literally that easy. It can be even easier if people let it.

If people were cool with their game of choice and left it at that, it wouldn't be a problem. It's people who are cool with their game of choice opting to have big opinions about games they don't play, haven't read, and likely never even heard of before another poster brings them up that's the problem.

As seemingly always, we return to Snarf's refrain of "it works in practice but doesn't work in theory." There's a lot of people who clearly don't like and don't play the games I'm talking about who have real big opinions about how they suck and don't work and can't this or that.

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Reynard said:

My only point (poorly made, I admit) is that many games have solved almost all the "problems" the D&D influencers are trying to provide solutions for their audience.

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Meech17 said:

And for what it's worth.. I don't see that many people poo-pooing on non-D&D games. Especially not here. I've learned a lot about other games here. Even on reddit.. They're more often not liking and not playing D&D whilst throwing around their big opinions about it.

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overgeeked said:

Any game with random character generation you can be playing in a few minutes.

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mamba said:

so there are some games out there that have each solved almost all the issues D&D has without introduction new ones, or are we talking about some games each having tackled one of those issues, so you can present their solution in your D&D video?

If it is the former, I would be interested in the name of some such games… for that matter, I would be curious to understand what the issues are, I am not sure there is agreement on that

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Thomas Shey said:

There's a certain set that is somewhat dismissive of storygames and adjacent designs, but its hard to tell how much of that is thought through and just based on a bad experience or two and some developed antipathy between certain groups on this forum.

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Oofta said:

All I can say is that I've played storytelling games. I find them boring. I also don't see how they would have any value regarding D&D.

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