It says to roll a D6 and then gives eight possible results…

The reason many still associate D&D and anything else remotely related to it with fat, basement dwelling, socially inept virgin incels is because those people actually made up a significant percentage of the original following of the hobby. Because it’s founders were only a half step away from most of those descriptions in many cases. And anybody that insists otherwise is either willfully ignorant or, more likely, angry at being called out by association because they’re the same.

So either get over it or go join the people that still insist that the confederate flag is anything but the war banner of a rebellion raised as an attempt at preserving slavery as a legal institution. You have the same mindset and validity as they do on this matter.

“DM, are we on drugs?”

Every system has to decide where to draw the line on the prioritization of realism versus simplicity and speed of play. On one extreme you have the “one page RPG” system where you have exactly two stats and everything uses one or the other, rolled on a single D6. About two thirds of the way to the other extreme you get “Pathfinder has a rule for that,” with some systems going into truly absurd levels of detailed minutia in ways that vary from being mote or less mechanically consistent to the old school D&D method of the designers pulling a random table out of their ass for every new thing they don’t have a rule for yet and filling it out with whatever nonsense comes to mind in that moment.

Yeah, and my personal opinion of the Drow is that you can still have matriarchal spider themed villains and not be “problematic” if you just st officially decannonize all of the weird-ass kinky fetish stuff that Ed Greenwood wrote into their original description. And the same can be said of most “problematic” things in Forgotten Realms, which is the source of a lot of the stuff that many consider to be “generic D&D.”

Seriously, go through the deep lore of FR and you will find a bunch of stuff that reads like it was written by a horny thirteen year old that wants to be edgy and kinky but clearly doesn’t know how fetishes or anything occult actually work beyond involving leather, whips, and bloody sacrifice rituals at orgy parties like a midwestern church granny will tell you happen every time anybody plays Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder where they got that impression from…

Short answer, no. There is a lot of nitpicky fine print and “nuance” involved but while you cannot copyright rolling a twenty sided die you can copyright a bunch of distinct and organized thoughts and specific groups thereof, such as the collection of rules that make up a class or subclass. If that class, subclass, spell, made up monster with a specific name and abilities, etc is published in some work that is sold for profit then legal action can occur.

Anything under creative commons effectively becomes public domain. If it appears in a WotC book, digital content, etc and is not specifically under CC, like say spells and subclasses from any supplement not included in that (such as Xanathar or Tasha), it is copyrighted and WotC can and will sue you if you republish it.

Maybe if those games had more appealing rule systems, other publishers would make products using them.

If it’s under a CC license you can literally publish it yourself with a few things tacked on. That’s what creative commons does. It’s basically public domain at that point.

Among other things, yes. Some things I have seen do strike me as logical tweaks and fixes much like 3.5 was to 3e, but some are clearly attempts at “fixing” PR problems by people who don’t understand why they’re having those problems in the first place. And at least in some cases I expect are personally responsible for said PR problems. It’s kind and like a Three Stooges skit about corporate mismanagement, but they honestly think they’re doing a good job.

At that point she didn’t have any sleeves.

You know you’re in the fun religion when your ecclesiastic superiors tell you to up your card shark skills.

“Gee” with a hard G as in geek, then “us.” Stress on the first syllable.

Unfortunately this one actually happened in Florida. Police arrested a guy who, among other things, someone had said was in possession of something that “looked like a pistol with a suppressor.” After searching the guy and finding no such weapon the cop put the guy, handcuffed, in the back of his cruiser. As he walked away from the car an acorn fell and hit the roof, at which point the cop started shouting into his radio about shots fired and that he had been hit by gunfire, dove and rolled around a bit (nowhere near any actual cover), then unloaded the entire magazine of his pistol at his cruiser with the suspect locked inside it. Another officer on scene, reacting to the first one yelling that he’d been shot, also fired all of her ammo at the vehicle. None of the shots actually hit the handcuffed guy in the back seat.

A “thorough investigation of the incident” (including body camera footage from both officers involved which is now publicly available online) determined that the noise the first officer thought was a suppressed gunshot was, in fact, an acorn hitting the roof of the police vehicle after falling from the large oak tree it was parked next to. The acorn was still on the roof. Despite his panicked reaction and assertions otherwise it was also determined that he had not been struck by gunfire and that he was certainly the first person present to start shooting. The other officer was cleared of any wrongdoing as she was determined to have had legitimate reason to believe there was a clear and present danger. The first cop, who gave the second one that reason by freaking out over a fucking acorn, was determined to be whatever the official wording is for delusional, unstable, and dangerously incompetent and he resigned. In statements he still insisted after the fact that, while not disputing the findings of the review, he still recalls having heard a gunshot and feeling an impact to his torso.

As a tall person I can confirm that using a short girlfriend’s head as an elbow rest is a gesture of affection. I also do this with platonic friends, to mixed results. My favorite recollection is walking up to a college friend on campus who was talking to someone else, she introduced me and I did the armrest thing while joining the conversation. After a minute the other person said “Um, are you gonna…” And my friend said “Nah, he’ll get bored with it eventually and I’m used to it. I have a lot of tall friends.”

If you feel you’re getting your money’s worth from just reading the stuff then you’re fine. Though if you really do want to actually play games using them I recommend finding a group and doing so, either in person or online. This community has an LFG section attached to it if you don’t know where to start.

One of my favorite characters of all time would default to using her mace to open locks if the rogue wasn’t around.

The only thing I have personal experience for something like this is the old D20 Modern, which is based on the same general ruleset as D&D 3.5 and PF1e with a bunch of little tweaks and different base classes and such that are based on a focus on skills and traits associated with a particular ability score. With a goal to being more flexible it’s designed to be adaptable and generally expected for characters to do at least some multiclassing both with multiple base classes then to prestige classes that focus on things like Soldier, Infiltrator, Celebrity, etc. There’s gear and modern equipment with rules for stuff like car chases and gunfights. It also has a full sourcebook dedicated to a campaign setting called Urban Arcana with rules for adding magic and other fantasy elements. Spellcasters generally feel a little bit weak because all classes only go up to ten levels and spells to 5th (with all casting coming from prestige classes so you need a few other levels first), with the general structure to go up to level twenty or higher by just adding more classes to your build after maxing one out. A lot of the spells are more useful for things other than direct combat and there are rules for doing things like planting an attack spell into an email or such. More powerful magical effects are achieved via rituals, which often involve occultish stuff like getting a bunch of people to chant around a big arcane sigil on the ground to add more power to a lead caster and can do some pretty crazy stuff if you get enough people with high enough bonuses to the appropriate skill (mystic lore or something, been a long time since I’ve actually played it).

Battletech? At Target? So what’s the current count on the “license holders not getting sued by Sunrise” clock? Because that’s how they usually go bankrupt and lose the license. I’m a fan of the setting and games, but FFS they aren’t good at copyright laws.

I don’t know if there are any elsewhere, but this is part of a group of communities and you could start a Lancer one here. There’s a thread for such requests (https://ttrpg.network/post/6427). Per the current policy (unless something has changed) by requesting a new community to be added you also volunteer to mod it, at least until you find someone else to pass it off to.

While I have very little direct personal experience playing WoD games I wouldn’t think anything associated with the setting would actually make a good MMORPG. At least not anything remotely resembling resembling a “traditional” one, such as World of Warcraft, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, ESO, etc. Games like that fundamentally focus on, to use fancy game design terminology, bonking and blasting things. While there are combat mechanics in WoD and combat situations can be very important to the games, combat is not inherently a primary focus of the system. While D&D is basically a combat game that you can tell stories around WoD games are designed primarily to tell stories that sometimes just happen to involve violence.

The dice pool mechanics that WoD uses are a big example of this: gradient levels of success and failure are great for giving wiggle room to tell a good story and using for social interactions but simply do not define combat as clearly and neatly as the much more specific system that games like D&D use. MMO combat is almost always based on a clearly defined ruleset modeled after something along that latter idea; a clearly defined formula (typically using some automated RNG in place of physical dice) determines if you either hit or you miss, then another formula decides how much damage you do by taking into account any and all the myriad bonuses and penalties involved from class traits, gear, target resistances, etc. With WoD games that really isn’t the point. In a WoD game you generally take some time to roleplay and set up a dramatic situation then maybe have a brief but intense fight that erupts as a result. It’s the kind of thing that might take up a two minute scene in a movie as opposed to, well, a video game where the majority of the gameplay is just bonking and blasting things in different ways occasionally broken up by a cutscene or to clear your inventory at a merchant.

Short version: You play MMOs to go on “dungeon crawl” type bonking and blasting sprees and you play a WoD game to tell a story that might occasionally involve brief bits of bonking and bashing. If you want to do a tabletop dungeon crawl style bonk/blastfest you probably aren’t playing WoD. You play WoD to focus on telling a story about your characters and the format of an MMO just isn’t a good match for that. And I’m not even going to try thinking of how you’d adapt Mage’s magic system into a video game.