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Skill checks
(media.piefed.world)
(in D&D at least)
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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The problem with DND¹ is that it's a wargame cosplaying as a role playing game.
We're not recreating historical battles. Let the players (and the DM) have fun.
1.— It boggles the mind that one of the early failed experiments at making role playing games (by slightly modifying the rules of pre-existing wargames) is still somehow the standard.
Sure, it was one of the main inspirations for the genre... but there's a good reason we're not still driving Ford Model Ts.
D&D today is almost an unrecognizable game from its first incarnation in the 70's, though. I'm not really seeing the parallels to war games other than the fact that you have the option of using a battle map in combat, which is hardly unique to D&D.
To borrow your analogy, no one drives the Model T today, but cars still have 4 tires and a steering wheel.
It's a game designed around math, combat, and dungeon crawling, not around roleplaying.
The objective isn't to have fun roleplaying, but to roll the right numbers to maximise damage to the enemy. Any real fun comes from ignoring the rules and homebrewing.
The car might have gotten a few coats of paint over the years and maybe more ergonomic seats, but it's still the same old chassis and engine underneath.
There are many games built around the concept of getting the players to have fun roleplaying, but DND has never been one of them, and if it ever became one it'd no longer be DND.
It's also not really designed to make combat particularly interesting, other games manage that much better. Either shorter or narratively interesting.