Playing in the Blank Spaces of the System

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That's understandable, but there's a flip side to this. I'd like to role-play social situations, but I have a social disability. I can't bluff or persuade any more than I can shoot fireballs from my fingertips. But I'll happily play a charismatic wizard on paper, because RPGs are all about pretending to be someone else.

Crunchy social mechanics help fill the gap between [certain] players and their characters. If you loathe them, that's fine. What exists can be ignored. On the other hand, it's trickier to wish mechanics that don't exist, into existence.

I don't think Brennan, or anyone on this thread, was saying that what works for him necessarily works for anyone else. There are probably many people who would want rules for things that other players might not.

Do you find the social mechanics in 5E adequate to your needs, or do you wish there was more crunch?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

the game as a published game isn't "about" things that seasoned professional improv actors can do in the gaps.

He wasn't saying that 5E should be designed around his tastes, just answering the question of "why aren't you playing a story game, bro?"

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And, for the record, Brennan's big non-Dimension 20 game, Worlds Beyond Number: The Wizard, the Witch and the Wild One, is very interested in the mechanics of D&D, especially spellcasting rules. He's a big D&D fan in general, as he goes into on his Adventuring Academy videos.

 

[zottel]

I stumbled upon this video recently, and that way of thinking hit home for me. It's not that I can handle social encounters super well that puts me off mechanics for them, it is that those mechanics often kill the verisimilitude for me, making it obvious that it's a game mechanic. For combat that's not the case, strange enough.
Maybe because the social stuff is something I encounter daily in the real world, while combat thankfully is unknown to me. Or maybe it's that with combat, I can lose myself in the visuals of stuff, whereas with social encounters, there generally is not much going on, visually.

 

[Undrave]

There's not enough enough space in the blank space of the book for a battle map, that's silly.

 

[Amrûnril]

Here's the video with the original comments, starting around the 55 minute mark. Erika Ishii, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar and Lou Wilson are discussing why they chose to use to use D&D for Worlds Beyond Number (a narrative-focused campaign in which combat encounters are relatively rare).

There are a lot of interesting points in the discussion, but I think the ultimate point is that what kind of game a system was designed for matters less than whether it does the things you want a game system to do in a way that you find satisfying. This group of players (who do have a lot of experience with other game systems and have chosen to use them in other contexts) found D&D to be a good fit for their preferences for this campaign, even though the campaign diverges from some of D&D's traditional expectations.

 

[Umbran]

He wasn't saying that 5E should be designed around his tastes, just answering the question of "why aren't you playing a story game, bro?"

I'm sorry, but the video goes into "what games are about", and positing that games are about things not actually in the game. The phrase "can be" is used a couple of times, but I find they fall into the common trap of stating things without clear qualifiers.

It's like saying Monopoly is about what per-turn percentage rate players charge each other for loans within the game. Sure, you can play Monopoly that way, at your own coffee table, but that doesn't go beyond your table.

Brennan, and everyone else, is free to use games to be about whatever they want to be about. But that doesn't mean the game, in general is about those things.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm sorry, but the video goes into "what games are about", and positing that games are about things not actually in the game. The phrase "can be" is used a couple of times, but I find they fall into the common trap of stating things without clear qualifiers.

Brennan is not in the video. You are responding to what Ben Milton said about an article that it doesn't seem like most people in this thread have read. And that article, itself, is a restatement by a third party of what Brennan is saying in the original video -- not the Questing Beast one. At best, you have a disagreement with what Ben is saying.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

There are a lot of interesting points in the discussion, but I think the ultimate point is that what kind of game a system was designed for matters less than whether it does the things you want a game system to do in a way that you find satisfying. This group of players (who do have a lot of experience with other game systems and have chosen to use them in other contexts) found D&D to be a good fit for their preferences for this campaign, even though the campaign diverges from some of D&D's traditional expectations.

Brennan's take on familiars in the campaign is far more interesting than the RAW 5E ones, IMO, although it helps that Brennan is roleplaying the fox, which definitely helps make it a cool dog.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I’m not sure I agree with the main point of the video.

I actually had a situation in my Mothership game this past Monday where one player wanted his character to hide from some monsters. It played out largely as described … there was back and forth about where he wanted to hide and so on. Once we got to a final point, we had to determine if he was successful.

How did we do that?

There are a few ways I can imagine a GM handling it in Mothership given the absence of a Stealth or Hide mechanic. Call for a Body Save. Make a Speed Check. Make an Instinct roll for the monster. Maybe apply Advantage or Disadvantage depending on circumstances. These are all available to the GM.

What I did was I made opposed rolls. The character’s hiding place was behind some heavy machinery… so not bad enough or good enough to grant Disadvantage or Advantage. The situation was more about hiding quickly, so I called for a Speed Check for the character. Then I compared this to an Instinct roll by the monsters.

The game works on d100 roll under mechanics. In this case, we compared results. I figured a Critical Success (doubles on the d10s under the target) would win outright if anyone got one. If they both succeeded without a Critical, then whoever rolled higher would win.

This didn’t take me a long time to come up with, but I don’t feel like I did anything that couldn’t be accomplished with set mechanics of some kind.

And I also wonder how anyone would have fairly determined the outcome without relying on mechanics. Like, if the player declares some ridiculously obvious hiding spot, sure you can feel pretty comfortable saying they fail to hide. Likewise if they come up with some super great way to hide, you might feel fine allowing them to succeed.

But what about the rest of the time? I don’t think I’d find it satisfactory as a player or as a GM to just always leave it up to the GM.

Now, for Brennan’s game, I’m totally fine with what he’s describing because it clearly works for him, his players, and their audience. Good for them… they should pick whatever game they want and play it however they like.

But as general advice… if I think the important part of play is the human emotions and connections and all the other stuff he said, I’d feel like I’d want there to be rules that help with that stuff. I don’t want the GM deciding everything. Or, perhaps more accurately, each player deciding everything for themselves, and the GM deciding everything else.

There is an absence in such a case. It feels like an absence of game.