Nice day for fishin‘, ain‘t it?

10 is average for an adventuring hero. Not necessarily for most "civilians" if you want to call them that.

Edit: I stand corrected. Must have confused it with some other system or an older edition.

Let's be honest here: Nixie is Pinkie Pie.

It can’t. German can only make compound nouns and even then it usually can’t combine multiple concepts. Instead, everything except the last component is there to specify what the last component is about.

Source: am German

I basically did the farmer once. My character was a winemaker with barely any skills that would be useful on an adventure. When his sister's fiance and that fiance's cousin - both wizards - got invited to visit some rich uncle at the other end of the realm, he took the chance to see a bit more of the world. By the time they arrived, the uncle had been killed by demons and my character basically got stuck at "I want to go home" and "Can we just let the inquisition handle this?"

Edit: to be fair, this wasn't D&D but The Dark Eye, so a lot more social and knowledge based skills that can make a non-fighting character useful.

I really need to look into that. I liked the setting in the original Tainted Grail board game but hated the difficulty level. If I remember correctly, you fail a skill check that's relevant to the story, the board game punishes you by sending you back to the beginning of the chapter with an additional debuff which of course makes it even harder to get a success on the check the next time around.

No, no, TTRPGs are all about solving the DM’s convoluted logic and linguistics puzzles that don’t make sense inside the world and have exactly one solution. Not about creative problem solving /s

Immerhin hält Appa tapfer die Stellung

Oh yeah, big shoutout to @elyukai@mastodon.social and the whole team for creating the best ttrpg software I‘ve ever used.

Without saying anything negative about D&D 5e, let me tell you about two of my personal favorites:

The Dark Eye

Under the name "Das Schwarze Auge", this is one of the most popular systems in Germany and has existed since the mid 80s and the latest edition has been available in English for about a decade now. There are dozens of source books and hundreds of official campaigns and standalone adventures, all set in the same world and a single ongoing canon (apart from a few early works that have been retconned). There are decades of detailed in-world history that you can use as a background for your own campaign if you want or selectively ignore if you want to focus on your own interpretation of what the world should look like.

Mechanics-wise it's a lot less board-game-like than some 70s/80s/90s systems while not going the full "storytelling first" route that many more moderns systems seem to prefer. On top of the eight basic attributes, characters can select from a pool of skills and feats that cover everything from combat to magic to social interaction to crafts and hobbies. The system focuses a lot less on combat than other high fantasy systems and it's absolutely viable to have a group of purely social-focused characters that never get into a single fight but still get to use a lot of the system's mechanics.

Overall it's relatively complex if you want to use absolutely every rule but at the same time very versatile and can be customized to your playstyle.

Opus Anima / Opus Anima Investigation

Sadly out of print and never officially translated to English so I'll focus on the one thing that works without the official setting: it's one of the simplest systems I've ever seen. It uses a pool of D2s (odd/even on D6, coins, red/black cards, whatever you have on hand) where the number of dice is determined by a basic attribute and a skill that can be combined however the situation requires. Dexterity + mechanics to build something, perception + mechanics to recognize a mechanism, knowledge + mechanics to understand the underlying principles or remember who invented something. To avoid experienced characters failing an easy check out of pure bad luck, everything over 10 dice is not rolled but gives half a success (rounded up) automatically. That's it. That's the whole system.

Posting it here again so you get a notification: I opened one at !DMWorkshop@ttrpg.network

Alright, I opened a new community at !DMWorkshop@ttrpg.network and posted at least a rough outline with more to come. Come on over.