Seize the means of pwoduction uwu

The shape spoke. “You ever hear the one about the wolf and the lamb?” Her fangs and eyes shone in the minimal light that spilled in from the door. She waited for a moment before continuing. “Lamb’s living in a nice fenced in farm on the outskirts of the village, right near the woods. One day a wolf comes in and slaughters some sheep. Then more, then more, even the farmer with his shotgun can’t stop the attacks. The sheep tell the lamb that there’s nothing to be done, that this is the way of the world, but the lamb disagrees.”

Her form was tall and broad. She had a relaxed posture. “Breaks out one day, goes up the mountain, and demands the wolf teach it how to be powerful and ruthless and monstrous.” A flash of light from outside illuminated her wedge-like muzzle. “Lamb trains for years, growing up to become this twisted monster with horns like railroad spikes and jaws that could crush bones even if it couldn’t digest the meat. Wolf tells the lamb that the training is done and they’re going to go together to the sheep pen to hunt.”

Her uniform came into view. Old, without pins or flags, sewn and patched until little beneath remained. “Lamb walks behind wolf. Wolf doesn’t so much as turn around to see the lamb drive its horns into the big dog. Lamb slaughters the wolf in front of all the sheep then says ‘I’ve saved you, we don’t have to live in fear anymore.’ But the rest of the sheep are terrified. The lamb is a monster. The lamb broke the laws of nature. They don’t even recognize their kin anymore. The lamb walks off into the woods and that’s the last the sheep ever hear of it. Soon enough, the ‘laws of nature’ return back to how they once were.”

Ladd Waters, decorated counter-intelligence operative and veteran of two wars, coughed and glared at her. His top half had not yet received the message that his bottom half was exsanguinated on the floor of the boxcar.

“Now imagine that the sheep were able to recognize their kinship with the one who went through hell trying to save them, that maybe she was a monster but she was still as deserving of love and affection and community as the rest of them.” Her eyes were alight, and shining with tears. “I don’t just destroy, I deconstruct. And I live with people who can build something better from what I do.” She took a step forward and growled the last words. “So there’s not a force on this planet strong enough to stop me from protecting them.”

The train moved out from a copse of trees to reveal the warm buttery skies of twilight. The sun was out of view and the purple and pink brushtrokes over the clouds looked like fingers reaching out.

“Seems I’ve been rambling a bit. Sorry about that.” She produced her gun and pointed it at him. “Still, hell of a final view, huh?”

The title: "How to keep your party challenged and engaged"

The thumbnail: "Do this one weird trick!"

These tags just demonstrate the issue that this post is about: people think D&D is a completely unopinionated game that you can just take whole systems out of without altering the gameplay. But D&D is a game that is opinionated about many things, resource management being one of them, and once you remove the resource management out of it you end up with a worse game with no tension and DMs suddenly having to fix a bunch of new problems that arise out of that, like having to suddenly figure out ways to challenge their party when tracking resources (this includes stuff like spell slots and daily uses of abilities) is no longer an issue except on a per-encounter level.

And honestly "DMs can change anything" is not unique to D&D. If I wanted to run a game that doesn't care about dungeon-crawling and resource management I would much rather run a different game. And I wish people in the D&D playerbase realized this as well, because not only is it bad for their game and its play culture, it also stifles creativity within the hobby.

You can totally change any rule you don't like. In D&D, or any other game. You can change the rules in Sorry! if you want. You don't have to play Chutes and Ladders instead.

I've noticed over the years that WotC and Hasbro have changed the game from encouraging players and DMs to change rules they don't like, to severely discouraging them. (I assume this is to sell more minis, and now D&D One subscriptions.) We used to call people like that rules lawyers, and most of us stopped inviting them to our tables.

This post is about observations of a play culture where people clearly are not having fun, as attested to by hundreds of GMs trying to run the game in a way it's not optimized towards and suddenly having to do a bunch of work to patch over those newly discovered issues! That's what the first post in this chain is about: people have self-inflicted a playstyle onto themselves which simply does not harmonize with D&D, but because the current play culture of D&D doesn't consider the GM's fun a factor they need to deal with toxic memes like "a good GM can fix it" when they shouldn't, in fact, have to fix things if the game were fit to purpose!

D&D 5e is capable of running a political game in the sense that the game won't actively prevent you from doing so, but this is the absolute bare minimum in terms of actually having support for running a political game. In the context of a political game D&D characters can fall back on a bare bones social skill system and if your gameplay is mostly politicking you will have to suspend disbelief for the fact that the player characters will be largely growing in terms of combat effectiveness. In these ways, yes, you can absolutely run a political game in D&D 5e, but the game itself will end up doing very little of the heavy lifting and such gameplay will ultimately end up being something where the group (and most likely the GM) does most of the work to make it function at all.

You know what D&D 5e does have lots of mechanical support for so that the group won't have to do most of the work? Fighting monsters in dungeons. There are other games that will serve you much better if you want to run a political game.

EDIT: found the post

A game where the systems are built from the ground up assuming that you, the player, will be putting yourself in front of world-ending threats, standing up straight, and blocking the enemy.

Not dodge-rolling, not skipping around going "tee hee hee i'm a lil guy you can't hit", blocking.

A game where the systems are built from the ground up assuming that you, the player, will be putting yourself in front of world-ending threats, standing up straight, and blocking the enemy.

Not dodge-rolling, not skipping around going "tee hee hee i'm a lil guy you can't hit", blocking.