I loved the Winamp channels. That’s where I learned about the existence of anime. I had no concept that things like Cardcaptors, Dragonball, Pokemon, etc were actually anime because I just saw them in English. But I found dubs through Winamp streaming and it sent me down the rabbit hole to buying DVDs and manga and learning to torrent fansubs. The good old days of my blazing fast 3mbps cable connection. It blew my mind coming from dial up.
One of my favorite stories was from a D20 modern campaign we were playing. This is a setting where it’s modern time, but some supernatural stuff still exists. There was a cave system under the city that we were exploring and we found a mummy and a bunch of skeletons. I rolled a 1 on an attack roll and my DM said I dropped my sword, so for my 2nd attack I said I was going to headbutt the skeleton and I rolled a 20 so my DM ruled that I headbutted this skeleton so hard my head just went down his spine as all the bones just exploded apart. Next turn I was like, that went pretty well, who needs a sword. I tried to headbutt the next one, and rolled another 1. He then ruled that this time I killed the skeleton but it’s spine impaled my head and I died. It was the most swingly battle ever, and kinda outside the actual rules, but it’s something I’ll never forget (this was 10 years ago) and all because we made an effort to ham up critical successes and failures.
I second the world of darkness suggestion, though learning a whole new game can be intimidating. But I like the relative simplicity of the dice pool concept. Everything is a 10 sided die. 7 or higher is a success. So for example, you have 6 strength die. If you want to break down a door that takes 7 successes, well good luck. Pretty hard to roll 7 successes on 6 die (though not impossible because 10s get a bonus roll). And then overall I feel like the lore is easier to roleplay because I feel like it’s easier to picture yourself as a pack of werewolves or a coven of vampires or whatever version you’re playing.
Body language. It’s way easier to “read the room” and figure out what the players enjoy and what they don’t when you are physically sitting around a table and can monitor players reactions both actively and in your peripheral vision.
Sorry in advance for random stream of consciousness.
There’s definitely a learning curve to being a DM. And some people, like myself, just aren’t cut out for it. If you want to keep playing with these people, I would suggest being honest with your feedback. Talk to the group about how you’d like to incorporate more roleplaying and cut back on combat. It might be a good idea to try running a pre-built campaign if you aren’t already. But even those can be kinda dry without the right DM.
I haven’t really played in years, but my DM got to the point where basically, the rules were just guidelines. If a player wanted to try something, the DM would just roll with it. They’d try to come up with a reasonable check for you to roll and then just see what happens. Most of the “funny” moments come from massive failures or critical successes. Ham those up. Instead of saying, “nope, you fail”, make up a consequence. “You tried to mount the giant moth, but you couldn’t get a grip and it flung you up to an outcropping” or “you missed so bad you hit the column and it comes crumbling down, you and the enemy both take 2 points of bludgeoning.”
The rules are great for combat simulation, but if combat was all you wanted, you’d be better off playing Warhammer. The best advice I can give is just loosen up. And again, like Jack Sparrow says, it’s more like guidelines. We eventually got to the point where we said, no opening the books during the session. If you don’t know a rule, make it up. The goal is to have fun, not to follow the book.
So yeah, it’s about mindset and teamwork and cooperation and communication. Being honest in what you want out of a session is the most important thing, because nobody knows what you want unless you say so. They may be able to tell when you aren’t having fun, but they may not know why or how to fix it and may just throw more monsters at it because that’s what they think will fix it.
As for player death. We embraced it. If we really liked our character, we’d just come back as MyGuy the 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th, and when we got tired of that character we’d move on to something else rolling a new character at the level everyone else was at and picking a few items to keep (assuming someone else made it out alive).
Right. Like, my use case for SD cards is for my cameras. I want to take pictures and bring them home across international borders. And a 4TB card would be amazing, though probably not fast enough. I simply don’t put files that I don’t want people to find onto my SD cards in the first place.