customizing of character is what i love

The good/fun sessions/games/campaigns are why people obsess about DnD.

Find a fair DM and a good Party to play with (not always easy). Don't be a dick. Find stuff to do and do it. Have fun and continue or find another group.

It's great because it allows you to immerse yourself in another world for a while.  And, unlike a movie or TV show, you control the action rather than just observing.  And unlike board games or video games, there are fewer boundaries or limits.  So it feels more immersive.  The best campaigns I've ever been in are ones where there was almost no "rules lawyering" and the story transcended the stat sheets and the dice and the gear.  D&D is best when this is the case.

Asheras wrote on Oct 6^th, 2015 at 1:07pm:


I'm with you on the rules-lawyering. That's what killed my last campaign. I was playing a sorcerer and running pretty fast and loose to try and have fun, I was also doing huge damage because even in PnP sorcerers are OP. This didn't sit well with the rest of the party, who felt like it was a competition and not teamwork, so they proceeded to start rules-lawyering the shit out of every action anyone tried to preform. The group fell apart fairly fast.

My favorite dumb episode of rules-lawyering. I was playing as a 6'2" warforged sorcerer who was raised by gnomes and insisted he was a gnome. I had thrown a lot of points into bluff, and passed a successful bluff check to convince the actual gnome in our party that I was, indeed, a gnome. Apparently that's not how bluff works, but whatever, it had no bearing on anything.

Later on he got super butt-hurt because apparently, according to some obscure rule, he was supposed to get a +60 on the check, which completely defeats the purpose of being able to lie about your race in a magical fantasy game.


Anyway, that random anecdote aside, what sorts of things help you feel really immersed?

noamineo wrote on Oct 6^th, 2015 at 1:52pm:


I had one DM who felt pausing to roll dice slowed down the game and impacted the story telling.  So he had every player take 5 minutes at the start of the session to roll each die 50 times, except D20 which you would roll 100 times, and record the results on these sheets.  Then, you turn them into him and when you are doing something that required a roll, he just looked at your next number and crossed it off. 

I think it also helped, because it made it more difficult for us to figure out enemy stats, hp, etc. 

Some people like rolling the dice, though, in them moment, so that might not make everyone happy.

It's the only kind of thing where I was good enough to kill God.

I view D&D as two possible outcomes

1. Shitty non immersive story, rules lawyering, meta gaming, POWER

2. Immersive story, then my interest is solely on that and not so much the math. Which, granted, is hard, I fucking love the math.

Athanor wrote on Oct 7^th, 2015 at 5:03am:

I'm also a long time player & DM (I started in 1980) and prefer 3.X or now mostly Pathfinder which is so close the modules are interchangeable.

I love the creative and cooperative aspects. We all have a hand in making up the story, we have a direct and clear cut role in the solution to big problems, and if we get frustrated we can take out our aggressions by beating the crap out of somebody or something that not only deserves it, but for which we will be praised not jailed.

It's got all of the interactions of real life, except we all get to be heroes, and we have Detect Evil to know who the bad guys are.

We did once have a DM who loved hard decisions, liked introducing dilemmas and bad guys who were not really bad, or who we killed and then found out we were wrong. Of  course, he also made us role play paying our taxes. We all found reasons to be busy a lot, and somebody else started a campaign we did have time for, and he eventually got the picture. I think of that a lot when I hear "I love hard decisions" on the official forums 

You guys didnt understand what he's talking about. He's question is why people are excited to see pnp things in DDO such as classic modules and items.

Vaultaccount wrote on Oct 7^th, 2015 at 12:00pm:


No actually my question was why do people get excited about PnP. Didn't even mean to bring DDO into it. And I'm no stranger to PnP myself, I've played some and really enjoyed it, I'm just trying to break down what elements get people really into it.

Meursault wrote on Oct 7^th, 2015 at 12:53pm:


Lol I'm with you on that. DDO is a fun video game but its not a faithful adaptation of DnD. Although I think that is something of the problem: people go into these games EXPECTING a faithful adaptation, and you either get the rules Nazis bitching about how its not "exactly like 3.5E" or you get the module junkies complaining about the modules not translating over.

No one ever says "Hey, this is a pretty neat game about hitting things with magical swords!"

noamineo wrote on Oct 7^th, 2015 at 12:49pm:


1 part socialization.
1 part storytelling.
1 part character building.
1 part tactics.
1 part strategy.
1 part pizza
2 parts cheetos
3 parts mountain dew.