What Licensed RPG Do You Wish Used A Different System?

[CleverNickName]

The moment someone sits down next to me and asks "How do you do character X?" in a SHRPG game system, and it answers "You can't" other than on game balance grounds (there are some characters who even in-setting are clearly only restrained by the writers) I consider the superhero game has to that degree, failed its job.

Oh man. Now I want to stat up my favorite X-Man, using 5E rules.

Here goes nothing...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Oh man. Now I want to stat up my favorite X-Man, using 5E rules.

Here goes nothing...

Oddly, I was thinking of a specific X-Man with my qualification there. I used to be an Admin on an X-Men based MUX (and on such places, most X-Men and their foes of that period are played by actual people, though they have to be applied for). There were characters, even some most people would probably think of as "PCs" we were, shall we say, extremely careful about evaluating a player before we let them have them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh man. Now I want to stat up my favorite X-Man, using 5E rules.

Here goes nothing...

Most of them are physically-oriented sorcerers.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Most of them are physically-oriented sorcerers.

I suspect you'd run into extent or duration problems pretty fast.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I suspect you'd run into extent or duration problems pretty fast.

True, but 5e has its issues.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Avatar is one of the few IPs I think would actually work really well in d20/d&d

Yeah just use skills and/or something like the mechanics of using magic in a game like Monster of The Week for Bending, and the rest of the system fits pretty well.

 

[pemerton]

"central protagonists, united in a common purpose against a common threat." Like the Fellowship of the Ring, or the Rebel Alliance, or Starfleet.

The Fellowship splits up. So at various points do the Star Wars protagonists. Personally, I think D&D struggles with this.

 

[Aldarc]

I think it works pretty well for most genres, as long as you keep it heroic: you're all heroes, and you're all working together using (mysterious power) to defeat the (generic threat) and save the (big place). Sub in Magic/Dragon/World, or The Force/Sith/Galaxy, or Technology/Corporate Overlord/City, or Technobabble/Klingons/Quadrant, or Eldritch Mysteries/Cultists of Cthulhu/World.

But break that formula and it gets weird in a hurry IMO. Some cyberpunk, horror, and sci-fi games have everyone working against each other, with their own agendas and such, and I don't think I'd want to try to run those with the 5E/SRD framework. Yikes.

I now realize that "heroic" can mean different things to different people, so I think I should clarify: when I say "heroes" I don't necessarily mean "the good guys." I mean "central protagonists, united in a common purpose against a common threat." Like the Fellowship of the Ring, or the Rebel Alliance, or Starfleet.

But for other types of games--where one player at the table is secretly the BBEG, and two other guys at the table have to die or be driven to madness before the last man standing "wins"--I'm not sure 5E has the right toolset to handle it. The 5E character classes are designed to be complimentary, not opposed. The DCs and CRs all assume the players will be working together, not against each other. I think it would be too much trouble to be worth my time.

IMHO, the fundamental design quality of 5e D&D isn't about being "heroic." It's about "bounded accuracy." Pathfinder 2 and 4e D&D lean heavily into the "heroic," especially the feeling of being "big [darn] heroes" as the PCs level, but they don't do so through bounded accuracy, so they produce a very different feeling of "heroic" than 5e D&D because of its bounded accuracy. This is one reason why I think that the idea that 5e D&D can do everything is flawed. It often overlooks the massive impact that bounded accuracy has on the tone and timbre of any game that uses its framework.

In the unpopular opinions thread, I made a recent comment that saying that a game can do any setting is about like saying that a pig can wear any color of lipstick. This gets to the heart of what I meant by that. The 5e framework of "bounded accuracy" (among other things) is the pig that you are getting no matter what shade of lipstick it is wearing.

 

[pemerton]

IMHO, the fundamental design quality of 5e D&D isn't about being "heroic." It's about "bounded accuracy."

Bounded accuracy tends to make numbers matter in a fight- at least, that's my understanding from the reports of others. That doesn't seem like a good fit for space opera, nor for LotR.

 

[Reynard]

The moment someone sits down next to me and asks "How do you do character X?" in a SHRPG game system, and it answers "You can't" other than on game balance grounds (there are some characters who even in-setting are clearly only restrained by the writers) I consider the superhero game has to that degree, failed its job. When someone goes into the design knowing its going to do that, I hold that as an even higher order of failure (unless it was never designed to cove the range in the first place--AMP Year One and its sequels was never intended to be a full featured supers game in the first place so the fact there's a number of not supported character types gets a pass.)

That's one way to hold a standard, but not every superhero game is trying to be Champions. No one judges fantasy or sci fi games for not being able to cover every possible corner of the genre. Holding supers games to that standard is a failure of your perspective, not design.