No really, they’re the worst. Play another game. Also while we’ve got that picture of Radcliffe up there, our opinion is that JK Rowling is a TERF piece of shit, so. Everyone sucks. Just sucks. Sorry about it.
System Mastery
Jef and Jon review roleplaying games, Star Wars novels and anything else that crosses their paths.
System Mastery 
Is there a part 2 somewhere i am missing? Or was it the lost episode? Or maybe it was targeted by wotc’s dreaded dire lawyers and taken down?
I must have similarly missed part 2 as well. Part 1 ends about nr20 and this part starts at nr44.
Where be part 2?
If I recall, part 2 was posted to Patreon but wasn’t uploaded directly to the site for some reason.
I also just wanted to share one of the weirdest arguments I’ve ever heard from one of those “No Dragonborns and Tieflings, Elves and Dwarves only” purists as to why they didn’t like the “weirder” modern races: Because they felt like players only ever play the new races in only one way. I remember thinking “My dude, have you ever played in a game with a Dwarf who wasn’t a Scottish alcoholic?”
Behold, part 2:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/system-mastery-d-37679242
Granted, I would have never even looked for it, if I hadn’t known part 3 came out.
Speaking of monoculture demi-humans, it has always annoyed me how tabletop RPGs in general and D&D in particular use heavily-implied Alignment ranges for demi-humans to effectively treat demi-human sub-races as different cultures.
Essentially, you will never run into a kingdom of cruel slave owner dwarves unless those dwarves are actually Crue Slave Owner Dwarves who have separated from regular dwarves aeons ago.
Likewise, you can’t have evil elves without these elves actually being some type of Drow or something.
Humans are allowed to have nice kingdoms and asshole kingdoms. Just let others have that as well to make your regular dwarves and elves a bit less predictable.
Some RPGs actually have “Culture” as a step between “Race” and “Class”, but even those have a tendency to have way too many different sub-races of elves and dwarves.
Honestly 3.5 Psionics was actually pretty good in my opinion. Way more functional and balanced than the default vancian
Regarding simplified classes in part 2.
If you look at video games, if the game wants to teach new players how to play, the game starts simple and then gets more complex as the player gets further into the game. There’s no reason why every character class in a game can’t be like that. That would be a better way to teach people the game, rather than- giving them a simple character which gives them no understanding of a complex one.
I think another problem from John & Jeff’s perspective is that, while it’s probably okay to have some character classes more complicated than others- I think the disparity in complexity is the problem. Like if one class is super simple, and another is super complex- then, it seems weird because the simple class seems like its missing something. Instead, all classes could be varying degrees of simple to start with, and then become varying degrees of complicated as the game progresses. And not necessarily on a linear scale as well, maybe one class starts simpler than another when the game begins, but meets and then exceeds the complexity of the other class as the game progresses.
You basically remade 13th Age with the ways to fix the things you hate about D&D.
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