And we played the first thing that came to our heads
Just so happened to be
The best song in the world
It was the best song in the world

It's not the anger that's cowardly, it's the refusal to try. It's taking any other path, so long as you don't have to risk your own stupid pride. Have the humility to accept you might not make the right call, but the courage to actually make it for yourself.

This adventure comes from a time when modules were a toolbox. One of the most popular modules from the era had a plot of "there's a bunch of monsters in some nearby caves, and they don't all like each other". Tunnels were blocked by debris, allowing the DM to connect it to another dungeon they wanna try. You might come back to the same dungeon a second time, and the contents of the room will change. A module is a starting point, but the DM continues the story from there.

If you don't know how to prep that, then the empty room is a boon. If you do, then the empty room isn't an issue. If you don't want to prep a campaign like that, then maybe this style of module isn't for you in the first place.

This is a room. After seeing dozens of rooms with monsters and furniture, you are given a room with nothing in it and told to fill it yourself. You know the general sort of thing that goes in the room, so all that's left is to decide precisely what. Everything before the room has been given to you, and everything after will be given as well. You just need to come up with one room.

You can have a paid product full of things to put into that room and not learn a damn thing about actually preparing rooms like that. You can memorise every entry on a multiplication table and still not know how to actually multiply two numbers. The most valuable teacher is experience, which is why you have to actually figure out what the gaps in the number sequence are.

So you can try. You can come up with a few monsters you think would be fun, and would fit into that room. You add a bookshelf and a table for flavour, and to make the fight a little bit more interesting. It could go well or it could go wrong, but you learn either way.

Or you can rage against the system that dared tell you to figure out a single room by yourself; dared to tell you to put your pride on the line and risk making a mistake.

The second one sounds cowardly to me.

I think it's mostly cowardice, personally. People don't want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren't as good. It's better to use someone else's decisions than risk your own pride.

Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don't know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren't something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.

Ironically for a post complaining about reading comprehension, but you misrepresented the original post you're talking about. Even have the classic "quotation marks around a thing that was never said" in the title.

First, and perhaps most obvious, this wasn't "everyone". This was one person, and they didn't get many upvotes. When I recommend a TTRPG, for example, I'm recommending Genesys (like someone else did).

Second, they weren't saying to homebrew old editions of D&D. They were saying you don't need to homebrew at all. At most, they said you could reflavour something in 4th edition. Their entire point was that you don't need to homebrew when you can just find a system that already has what you would have homebrewed in.

Third, they were suggesting this as an alternative to homebrewing specific material into D&D 5e. Pathfinder can provide the experience of "5e with time travel" that you wanted without any modifications. BitD is so different from 5e that it can't.

You are, however, correct that they did backtrack. I'll put this down to poorly explaining their argument to start with, as they downplayed the "5e but better" games in their first comment while that was really their entire point.

Personally, I like homebrewing. It's fun to tinker with the rules and materials. But there's also an argument to not repeat work someone else has already done.

Nah, the genre is targeted towards teen boys. So the hero is a generically nice person with no skills or social experience. His "useless" ability is actually a super-powerful skill that makes him a hero. All the girls fall for him because he's a nicer person than some other people in the setting, even if he does buy them as slaves. And any bullies enemies the protagonist has are easily defeated in a single move.

In some settings, the super-powerful ability is knowledge of the setting, so the hero has amazing powers due to being a nerd who likes fantasy stories. Like you, the reader!

And right at the start, the hero finds out there is an afterlife.

I guess it depends on how Konsi feels about garlic bread.

I have a slight feeling you're making it more complicated than it needs to be... Like, how are you in a building with security cameras AND illusions? Surely the illusions make it harder for the cameras to do their job. And surely, since you're in a building, the giant worms can't get close enough to affect anything. Plus, the number of banshees would be unchanged since 10 feet ago, as would the scry spell.

I mean, I assume the youtube video? I don't know, I didn't watch one that talked about chicken eggs. You'd need to say which youtube video you mean. My explanation came from me.

I don't think we did, no.

The answer is egg, because egg-laying creatures predate the chicken.

If we count it as a chicken egg only, then it depends on if you describe a chicken egg as "an egg laid by a chicken" or "an egg that could hatch into a chicken".

This honestly sounds like an amazing quest giver.

Evil Quest Giver: Yes, go and fight the dragon in this remote mountain and get treasure! I hope you survive, hehehe...
Party: (One week later) Wow, that dragon was kidnapping the locals and planning a conquest of the valley! Good thing we put a stop to that, huh?
EQG: Uh... Holy heck... W- Well, you're just the people to deliver this letter to this outpost in the middle of nowhere! Go now, take your time with the trip!
Party: (One week later) Turns out the guy you sent that letter to was researching occult rituals and accidentally unearthed a swarm of demons. We saved him and found this sword of sacred might.
EQG: Okay, plan C. Join me, and we shall overthrow the crown!
Party: The one terrorising the common folk? We were hoping there was a resistance group we could join!

Whether you're preparing magic for war or the bedroom, always have protection ready. And perhaps a few healing spells if you think it's gonna get rough.

What's truly funny is that this isn't the first time this happened. 4th edition had WotC bamboozle third party creators by fiddling with the OGL, and third party creators responded by making a rival to D&D. They called it Pathfinder.

Then you look a little further afield and you see a massive indie TTRPG community that I have to assume had an influx of new designers who only found out about it due to the OGL incident.

Social Anxiety Survival Horror. You're a guy at a friend's party trying to avoid conversations while putting in an appearance with your friend so they know you were here. You can deflect conversations with small talk you pick up by eavesdropping, but it won't work on drunk people, so you also need to run and hide. Your ex-partner eventually shows up and is hunting you down to have a frank conversation about your relationship, which is instant game over.

Throw a few goblins their way. Maybe a Rhino.

Ever seen Interspecies Reviewers? This comes up. There are fun, sexy things you can do that aren't just putting dick into hole.

Terry

The first time Heinrich Kramer tries to show someone the Malleus Maleficarum, I appear directly in front of him and set the book on fire. Not only is the book destroyed, but a clearly supernatural event took place to put the fear of god into him. Bam. No witch trials.

There's a classic Japanese story about a boy called Jugemu Jugemu Gokō-no Surikire Kaijarisuigyo-no Suigyōmatsu Unraimatsu Fūraimatsu Kuunerutokoro-ni Sumutokoro Yaburakōji-no Burakōji Paipopaipo Paipo-no Shūringan Shūringan-no Gūrindai Gūrindai-no Ponpokopii-no Ponpokonā-no Chōkyūmei-no Chōsuke. That's all the first name. No nicknames allowed.