Its okay to play DnD and Magic. But its not okay to give WotC money. Remember when they sent literal Pinkertons after a guy. Or when they tried to end the OGL. That was all last year.
Theft is moral. Paying corporation for the privilege of being stolen from is not.
I'm old enough to remember the debacle with D&Dinsider. I got such better service with piracy than my friends did behind the paywall. All of their development promises turned out to be shit also. To this day, I've banned ddb from my games.
I still have all my cards and still play with friends, but the Pinkerton move was the last straw for me. I haven’t, and won’t ever again give WotC money.
It's a really fun system, and there are some great tools out there to run a game. Been using path builder 2e for character sheets, and recently discovered their encounter tracker thing and it is the best I've used... See monster and player key stats (like hp ac and saves) or full Stat blocks, add conditions on the fly, even generate random encounters... It is truly an amazing tool for dms.
Aren't they planning to completely rework it, to cut all the existing ties to DnD/OGL?
Because that would mean it is.. not quite right time to start playing, no?
They already converted the core system, I have the GM Core and Player Core books.
That being said it's a minor remaster. all old content is compatible. My group has barely noticed the differences aside from a few naming differences. (There are more differences, I would say about 10-20% of the system changed, but it's not as confusing as that sounds)
Never has there been a company that I wanted to love so badly, but hate. I even proxy my pauper commander decks these days. In the magic world, so many bad decisions. 30 year anniversary cost $1k for non-legal cards. Power creep and complexity creep are frustrating. Huge inflation. Bad story. Bad quality cards. It could all be so much better, but they focus only on short term profit instead of the player experience
Following the Civil War, the Pinkertons began conducting operations against organized labor.[5] During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, businesses hired the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruit goon squads to intimidate workers.[6] During the Homestead Strike of 1892, Pinkerton agents were called in to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, who was acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, the head of Carnegie Steel.[7]
For the entirety of last year Lizards of the Coast had one scandal after another, starting with a leaked draft licensing agreement for 3ed party supplements that completely screwed them, including giving WOTC the ability to just use the content of 3d party publishers without paying them.
I'm not playing shit. I dropped ANR around 23 seconds, because they ran basically universal anti resource cards, and those cards got popular and I got the fuck out of there. Board wipes on one card do not belong in netrunner, and the design got worse for me since.
I left the country that my ANR community was in shortly after that anyway, leaving all my cards. As we all know, Nisei exists but 🤷
The games I'm playing these days are Balatro and LiChess.
My decks are flush fives out of abandoned , hyperaccelerated dragon and Blackmar-Diemer Gambit 2. e4
EDIT : back in the ANR days I used to homebrew like crazy, it was the entire point of the LCG format. Fond favourites :
Bypass val , barely any breakers, using DDOS, inside job, plenty of recursion
Free Glacier HB, ABT priori rec, all the expensive ice (Janus, Orion etc) I had team sponsorship for win more and defensive ABT triggers. One time I locked someone out 100% when all their shit was in their discard and I chronos projected their discard away.
Drip econ with linear breakers (inc garrote) out of Nero Severn, including Underworld contacts. Facechecking whenever the fuck I wanted while sucking on drip econ was awesome. This was my signature build
Teleporting Caprice Nisei vegan blue sun. government takeover. I'd put the Caprice Nisei on R&D and after the turn I drew the agenda, pick her up, put her in the scoring server with the huge ass agenda. One time I just advanced government takeover without caprice, opponent thought it was a jank trap, and the I discovered that Government takeover had a click ability.
Reina Roja econ warfare. Siphon and Vamp, complete tag me, multiple plascretes.
I failed most jinteki shit I tried. They just avoided the traps. Industrial genomics before museum ... I didn't make it work well. One time I had a shaper deck using the default breakers and got to escher all the servers so it would be efficient (I lost that game). I had some generic decks with Kate, Ken Tenma.
Android: Netrunner, as the other comment alludes to, an LCG originally made by FFG that is now supported by the non profit NISEI with print and play stuff.
I'll be a bit pedantic, but originally Android: Netrunner was made by WotC. It was one of the four TCGs created under the Deckmaster label, of which only MTG still exists.
FFG licensed it for a long time and made it one of their big LCGs, but a while ago WotC decided to not give them the license anymore (or did they ask for a lot more money for renewal or something? Not sure) so FFG basically had to stop making it despite it being quite successful.
There are thousands of excellent systems out there completely different from and much easier to learn than d&d. Just stop playing DND. It's not hard, and it's often free or inexpensive.
It's diceless. All characters have access to all abilities, as long as they're willing to pay the cost. Being good at something just means it has less or no cost. If you take on enough cost and don't get it down the safe ways, your character permadies.
This is a reflection of the fact that the player characters are gods of world ending power who can do anything... but it's hard. Maybe your character can blow up the moon if they so choose. But that's a lot easier than remembering to eat breakfast every day. That's right, the gods of the void have (a disability that's an allegory for) autism and ADHD.
Agreed, we’re about half a year and halfway through Abomination Vaults right now. Using PF2e with Foundry VTT has been amazing, especially with all the built-in automation.
The thing I like most about Pathfinder is how well documented their rules are. 5e had a bunch of hand wavy DM-fiat rules, while PF2e typically has a rule for almost everything.
Several friends and I are also being run through PF2e while using Foundry and it's been incredible. We've all casually played 5e in the past, but the learning curve for PF2e has been quick and short. And, like you said, much easier to find an answer to really specific or strange situations overall. Makes for a really solid experience as a player.
It'd because D&D 5E was fundamentally broken, and so much of the rules are just hacky ways to solve it. Things like bonus action weren't designed well from the start, with them having to have a hacky "one spell per turn" rule, which can be avoided with certain methods, and things like that.
Pathfinder 2E has such a solid foundation that it doesn't need all the hacky crap to work, which makes it so much easier to understand. There's no bonus actions or anything, just three actions per turn that you handle everything from movement to combat, and anything else, with. It let's it be "more complex" while also being easier to understand.
Yeah we tried a few other systems after our main 5e campaign ended. Ars Magica, Lancer, WH40k Wrath and Glory, Blades in the Dark, Cyberpunk Red. My group is not one for roleplaying much, so we prefer crunchy systems. Lancer was great for that, and so is Pathfinder 2e.
I still like playing but I think the last time I bought anything other than singles from my lgs was almost 20 years ago. I never understood the appeal of gambling just to have a bunch of trash in my collection, now I feel the same plus fuck giving WotC money
I used to go to FNM every week with a group, got into EDH, built decks, went to GPs, it used to be so much fun! Now it's just this cheap cash grab, Arena is miserable, Moto never gets talked about because they don't profit off it like Arena (and it's never going to get updated or fixed in any meaningful way), the power creep is absolutely bananas they're on track to invalidating years worth of cards. It's just really unfortunate it went downhill soooo fast. And we're going to get more of these stupid crossover sets with a billion stupid overlapping keywords 😭.
It's also frustrating because deck building games are fun, and Arena is the only "F2P" version that scratches that itch, but their hidden ranking/matchmaking system makes it borderline unbearable.
If you have an online group to play with, I can’t recommend tabletop simulator enough. You can play anything, but you can also play magic with any deck and no shuffling after purchasing tts once ($40 for 4 copies, so go in with friends).
