Jon Peterson: Does System Matter?

D&D historian Jon Peterson asks the question on his blog as he does a deep dive into how early tabletop RPG enthusiasts wrestled with the same thing.

Based around the concept that 'D&D can do anything, so why learn a new system?', the conversation examines whether the system itself affects the playstyle of those playing it. Some systems are custom-designed to create a certain atmosphere (see Dread's suspenseful Jenga-tower narrative game), and Call of Cthulhu certainly discourages the D&D style of play, despite a d20 version in early 2000s.

Does System Matter?

Dungeons & Dragons started out as a game with such an adaptable and open-ended set of rules that early adopters questioned whether any fur...

playingattheworld.blogspot.com

 

[TheSword]

It is not possible to run a gritty futuristic sci-fi horror game with 5e, though. To do so, you have to make changes to the system or outright ignore the system adhoc. 5e cannot do gritty futuristic sci-fi horror. Some other system you've modified from 5e might do it, to varying degrees of success.

Thank you for making my point.
That people make sweeping factually incorrect statements like this.

 

[TwoSix]

It is not possible to run a gritty futuristic sci-fi horror game with 5e, though. To do so, you have to make changes to the system or outright ignore the system adhoc. 5e cannot do gritty futuristic sci-fi horror. Some other system you've modified from 5e might do it, to varying degrees of success.

Hmm. I think that raises some interesting questions. I don't think anyone would define adding a single subclass, or a race, or some optional rules, as somehow changing the game into being "not 5e". But how far can we change a system until it's not recognizable as itself? Are the changes purely limited to resolution mechanics, or does a change in implied setting or genre also make a game "no longer X"?

 

[PsyzhranV2]

Thank you for making my point.
That people make sweeping factually incorrect statements like this.

The point is that 5e out of the box can't do that gritty sci-fi.

And quite frankly, when it comes to comparing the merits of different RPGs against each other, presenting the ways in which people might homebrew modifications to a system as a counter-argument against the system itself being well or ill-suited to certain genres and styles of play is pointless at best, intentional obfuscation at worst.

Or to put it another way,

 

[pemerton]

I'm kind of surprised that anyone would argue in support of the system not mattering.

I'm not. But I'm still waiting for anyone in this thread to actually own the argument.

Here it is:

System doesn't matter because the essence of RPGing is undergoing the experience of the GM telling you what is going on in your character's immediate environment, and then telling you what happens when your PC tries to act on that environment. And this can be done regardless of the details of the PC sheet in front of you, and regardless of the details of the action resolution framework.​

When RPGing is looked at this way, the main function of a PC sheet that says (say) Tracking +4 or Carousing-2 is not to provide input into a resolution framework but rather is to express the essence of the character, which the GM then uses as a guide to (i) moving the "spotlight" and (ii) deciding what happens.

That's not to say that the odd die roll isn't called for, but the function of those rolls is more likely to be to provide memorable moments of hijinks, like when the player whose sheet says Juggling +10 rolls a natural one and so drops all the juggling balls over the tavern floor, leading one of the serving staff to fall over it spilling drinks onto the surly dwarf. On the approach I'm describing, the fundamentals of what happens won't be determined by dice rolls.

Depending on the group, combat may be an exception to what I've just described, in which case you may see an exception to the view that system doesn't matter manifesting as a view about the merits of hit points vs debuff/death spiral systems etc.

I think that the approach to RPGing I've described above is pretty common, and is the basis - among those whose approach it is - for asserting that system doesn't matter.

 

[pemerton]

As I said, there have seemed to be people who've said, at least, that the system is more important than the people at the table--which isn't the same thing as saying the people don't matter at all. I don't think anyone is really saying the rules of the game don't matter, just that they don't matter more than the people at the table.

I think it is in this thread that I made the point that, played with the same group (ie my group), Classic Traveller produces a different experience from Prince Valiant, which produces a different experience from Cortex+ Heroic, etc.

That doesn't provide any evidence about the relative importance of participants as a cause of the overall experience. It does show that system matters (because the participants are a constant factor). It was a response to this post:

For the record I think system does matter. Just nowhere near as much as adventure design/story and group.

It has an influence, I just don’t believe it makes as much difference as the designers of those systems would like to believe

I'm not quite sure how TheSword knows what it is that various RPG designers belief about the degree of effect their systems have. What I think is that system clearly matters, because it changes my play experience, and that adventure design/story is itself an artefact of a particular sort of RPGing system, and so positing it as an influence on play is already positing a system as mattering.

 

[pemerton]

I think there are some elements of systems that seem to matter a great deal to some people that are utterly irrelevant to other people.

How many stats you have, how you calculate starting stats, what dice you roll, how you heal, and a pretty staggering number of things we argue about on here that most be people just let go over their head.

One of the reasons I think D&D 5e has done well is for a lot of these areas they’ve said... “we don’t care what method you use. Pick what you like.”

If these are the sorts of discussions that you think are at the core of system matters that does help explain why you think it doesn't much matter.

This is why @Campbell described D&D, PF and WHFRP as basically the same system for the purposes of the discussion about whether or not system matters.

That's not to say that there can't be serious discussion about healing rules in an adventure-oriented RPG. But that discussions will be about the relationship between the passage of ingame time and pacing at the table; how consequences are carried from scene-to-scene; whether ingame time is a player-side resource; who gets to frame scenes; etc. Relatively few discussions on ENworld about healing in D&D address these central questions.

If they were addressed, I think the answer that would emerge would be that the best healing system for D&D as it is generally played would combine aspects of 4e D&D with the core of Prince Valiant: from 4e D&D we would take the idea that healing resources (surges, some powers) are part of what the players are expected to work with during a given episode (be that an encounter or a delve); from Prince Valiant we would recognise that, when all the pacing and passage of time and off-screen events between episodes is controlled by the GM, there is no need for any healing rule beyond it takes as long as the GM says it does.

Part of what encourages the thought that system doesn't matter is the inclusion, in some RPGs, of stuff that looks like rules/system but really isn't. For instance, D&D 5e seems to have rules that imply that the passage of ingame time between episodes is a player resource (because it takes so-and-so many hours to have a long rest, which then recharges other resources including spell load-out, which can then be used by players to do stuff). But because there is nothing in the system that constrains GM decision-making around what happens between episodes, it's really not a player resource at all and all those rules about the passage of between-episode time are fundamentally window-dressing.

(I'm going to @hawkeyefan here, because this elaborates on my reply above about why some RPGers might rationally argue that system doesn't matter.)

 

[prabe]

But to the extent that all this is true, is it a reason to suppose that system doesn't matter?

The quoted bit wasn't so much about system not mattering (or mattering) as it was about why one might intentionally choose a system someone else thinks of as inferior. Specifically, the reasons I gave are pretty much my reasons for choosing to play D&D 5E--because the "system matters" conversation almost always seems to be about what D&D can and cannot do. About the only thing missing is that I wanted to game with new people, and I wanted to game at a FLGS, so the most-popular game (which I happen to like well enough) is, I think, a reasonable and rational choice.

I think it is in this thread that I made the point that, played with the same group (ie my group), Classic Traveller produces a different experience from Prince Valiant, which produces a different experience from Cortex+ Heroic, etc.

And I have had the experience of playing different games with the same people at the table, and the experience around the table being roughly the same. I don't know that they were quite so different from each other as the games you played, but they were pretty far-ranging. Part of it was that the guy who was the almost-constant GM at that table had ... tendencies, so the fiction tended to end up in similar shapes and places. Do I think your experience, as you described it, is possible? I absolutely do, and I don't doubt for a moment you experienced it.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Modern D&D is not some middle point. It's a specific game experience that is finely tuned to deliver compelling play to people that want that experience. That's a lot of people in modern D&D's case.

I'm going to only disagree on a technicality here. I'd call 5e intentionally pretty loosely tuned. It's intended to be a game that's driftable and intended to be a game that's never a bad one for anything you'd want to do something you'd use D&D for. The goal is breadth rather than focus.

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton - at what point is Starfinder essentially D&D does sci fi? I feel like you're making a different point, something about using the 5E PHB to play Sci Fi, but I thought I'd ask.

I don't really know Starfinder.

But saying that Rolemaster can be used to play sci-fi because it can be developed into Spacemaster isn't, to me, a very compelling argument that RM - as in, the books Arms Law, Character Law and Spell Law that one gets in the box labelled Rolemaster - can be used to play sci-fi.

And my attitude towards The 5e PHB and DMG can be used to play a gritty, futuristic sci-fi horror game is much the same. I just don't think it's true. Or to the extent that it is true, it's because we can freeform the game using the six stats on the sheets and a d20. In which case it's not actually using D&D in any meaningful sense that I can see.

 

[prabe]

I'm going to only disagree on a technicality here. I'd call 5e intentionally pretty loosely tuned. It's intended to be a game that's driftable and intended to be a game that's never a bad one for anything you'd want to do something you'd use D&D for. The goal is breadth rather than focus.

I agree. While it's pretty clear that the intended use case for D&D 5E is hardcover adventures, you can do other things with it. Since the hardcover adventures literally never make sense to me when I try to read them, I do ... other things.