D&D 5E D&D compared to Bespoke Genre TTRPGs

[The-Magic-Sword]

Its also worth consideration that the bespoke game (Blades in the Dark, for fantasy heists) tends to be less comfortable with alteration to support the things they weren't meant to. So if you don't want to plan, Blades in the Dark is great, whereas if you do it just doesn't work very well for your needs-- in contrast, I'd feel pretty comfortable running a DND5e or Pathfinder 2e game with or without the planning phase when it comes up based off how comfortable the group is.

If they want it the system supports me, and if they don't want it, it wouldn't be that weird to frame past it. You won't have the flashback system in place to emulate the planning and stress as a resource for how much of it you did, but you could just distill it into skill checks that govern how prepared you were for each challenge and narrate as thought it was preparation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't really disagree. In my case, I picked a system (5E) and started a campaign, and ran the stories (and the kinds of stories) that emerged. I don't think I would be as happy running a system that narrows the range of the kinds of stories that can emerge--or, perhaps, I'm happy running the kinds of stories that can emerge from 5E. If I were setting out to run shorter campaigns with narrower ranges of possible stories, I probably wouldn't be running 5E.

Well, I'm not particularly interested in running something quite that focused myself--and I'm not always allergic to taking the Swiss army knife approach either, given my predilection to generic systems--but I just think people need to realize these sort of specialist systems don't come out of nowhere.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Its also worth consideration that the bespoke game (Blades in the Dark, for fantasy heists) tends to be less comfortable with alteration to support the things they weren't meant to.

This is generally legit, too; to use my analogy above, a Swiss army knife or a Leatherman pocket tool isn't the best choice for a lot of things, but it'll work, and it'll work better than, say, trying to use a flaying knife to turn screws.

The problem, of course, is that some games--and D&D is one of those--are not always as general as people will paint them as being, either. It just happens to be that either they fit someone's expectations, or someone's expectations have gotten wrapped around familiarity with those systems.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

This is generally legit, too; to use my analogy above, a Swiss army knife or a Leatherman pocket tool isn't the best choice for a lot of things, but it'll work, and it'll work better than, say, trying to use a flaying knife to turn screws.

The problem, of course, is that some games--and D&D is one of those--are not always as general as people will paint them as being, either. It just happens to be that either they fit someone's expectations, or someone's expectations have gotten wrapped around familiarity with those systems.

Hard to say, I think people just have very different thresholds for what they need to run different types of experiences. For some people, it doesn't fit DND if it doesn't have frequent combat, whereas other people just want the good combat rules when it does come up, and the skill system/freestyling is actually perfect for them to do all that stuff a bespoke system would mechanize.

For some people, lethality matters a lot to low magic because they need that realism aspect to match (kinda like, if you wanted to emulate the lethality of Song of Ice and Fire, and that was part and parcel of your vision of low magic), but for others it doesn't matter at all.

That's also at the root of the "Horror in DND" Conversation, a lot's been written about disempowerment being central to horror so systems where you're empowered wouldn't fly, but for other people, that doesn't really matter, the presence of dark, disturbing things, with sordid histories and creepy implications is plenty for it to qualify as horror.

War wouldn't be good to run if your idea of war means turning the movements of armies into game play, but if war is mainly being used as a setting and you're running combat encounters that happen to take place as a pitched battle or siege rages around you, discussing logistics and dramatic wartime questions with NPCs, and interacting with individuals affected by the war instead, it works just fine.

If your idea of drama and intrigue is to have mechanics simulate it, then it doesn't work great, but if all you want is a system to resolve uncertainty while you freestyle it... again, it could work great, especially since the noncombat rules can be pretty lightweight compared to a system that puts a lot of weight on a mechanical framework for that.

 

[Campbell]

Not more focused. Differently focused.

 

[Bedrockgames]

A little off current point, but I have seen this 'bespoke rpg' term a few times now. Heard of bespoke for other things but never for RPGs. Are there a specific range of RPGs that fall under this category?

 

[Hussar]

I pretty much agree with what you are stating here, which is what is baffling to me about the claims that D&D can not do certain things. Is it really that it cannot do heist adventures, horror adventures, exploration adventures, etc. Or that it can not do them in the specific way another game does them and/or that a particular poster hasn't been successful in running them...

It's not that it "can't" do it, but, rather, it's just really, really bad at it.

Heists and other "stealth" type adventures typically devolve into combat sessions because the skill system is binary pass/fail and failure is often catastrophic. So, after an hour of planning how to infiltrate, the PC's are caught by something they didn't know about (probably because the DM didn't tell them and they never thought to ask) and now it's one big running combat.

At least, that's how I've seen it play out under multiple different DM's. Heck, our group refers to stealth missions as "Riding the Kank" after a particularly egregious example during a Dark Sun campaign.

So, @Imaro, if they work for you guys, that's fantastic. But, it's something my groups have never been able to pull off successfully. So, my experience is very much, 5e (and D&D in general) is a very poor system for Stealth Type scenarios.

 

[Hussar]

So you assume we are all playing to create or emulate a... movie?? And that this is the only "sensible" thing to want?

Well, if you're playing to emulate something from fiction - ie. a heist - in the context of the heroic fantasy genre, then shouldn't we be looking to genre fiction for inspiration?

Nothing about D&D is about emulating reality. Why would this be different? If D&D was about emulating realism, then it really has to be seen as a colossal failure.

 

[Hussar]

If you suggested this to either of my live groups, they'd mutiny. It's removing the part where they play the game and skipping to the part where they find out if they won, which would make any success hollow, to them.

Planning is the fun part, so skipping that would go over like a lead balloon.

In my experience, the group takes X time to plan and prep, they then attempt to go into the "Stealth" mission, and thirty seconds later, everything has gone entirely pear shaped and it's one giant combat encounter. In other words, that X time to plan and prep was a complete and utter waste of time because no matter what, it had zero chance of success because the DM will simply require so many checks, (and so many can be a very small number) that you are guaranteed failure and all failure is automatically catastrophic.

So, yeah, if your group likes poncing around for an hour or more on utterly useless activities, more power to them. My group doesn't.

Just a question to the crowd here. How many times has the planning and prep been successful in your games? In games I've played in, the success rate is 0. As in, it never, ever works in D&D. Any edition. It always ends in getting caught and giant combat. That has always been my experience, every single time. So, how often are your PC heists actually successful? 10% 50% 100%? Because, frankly, anything less than 50% means that we're just wasting our time most of the time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think that's a poor reading of what's been said; as I note Kenson has outright said "Icons is closer to what I want, but not everyone wants what I do". That and the fact for a number of years M&M was probably the most successful SHRPG on the market (including during periods when other more genre-hard games already exist) suggests to me, again, that what people want out of a game is not exactly what they want out of a comic book, movie, or TV show (and I'll note the expectations for those three aren't identical, either).

I'm just not sure I entirely buy that the success is actually due to people wanting X and not wanting Y. That's not how things work in the real world. It's never that pure, never that clean, never that neat.

I agree that what people want varies, but I would strongly disagree with any suggestion that people even slightly reliably play the RPGs that reflect what they actually want. There are so many other factors in play, not least people simply not knowing about a lot of games.

Icons is a good example. I just looked at Icons right now, and it is absolutely not even similar to how people online described it to me - including reviews (which had given me the incredible impression that it was some sort of grim supers game, leading me to ignore it). If I'd heard about truthfully and accurately from people back then, I'd have bought it for sure, but I'd never even seen the cover before (unless it had a really different cover at one point). I'm probably going to go and get it from DriveThru shortly, and this is really, hilariously enough, illustrating what I'm saying - it's not a matter of "don't want", and claiming that's the driver is misunderstanding what's going on.

M&M being so successful was because it was originally a slightly-compromised game at exactly the right time, which gave it a huge reputation, and made it the "go-to" RPG for Supers, not because it was best, but because it was most well-known. And retained that dominance because a whole "generation" of TT RPG players saw it as the "go-to" Supers RPG, just as HERO/Champions was a generation or so before. Neither might have been perfect, but people played them, because they were what they knew. Not what they wanted, what they knew.

I'm sure it's true that Icons isn't what some people want, but based on my experience right here, I'm telling you that marketing and people knowing about things are huge factors here, that you are seemingly almost totally discounting in favour of this idea that people all play what they actually want to.

I happen to have some history with the system's development and you'd simply be wrong. Most of them were consciously done right out the gate because people realized that there were areas where super universe reality simply didn't match up with real world expectations.

Whoa, so you were around in 1981 when all this was developed? Or when the HERO transition was made in 1990?

A lot of people would be perfectly happy doing something where they simply had a number of, say, "preparation points" where they could retroactively have an item/set up a place/found out some information that they need to do something and get on with the actual heist; the flashbacks and focus on the set up that is at least part of the genre, however you care to handle it, just isn't that interesting to them.

Really? I'm skeptical there are "a lot" of such people.

I know people who like really detailed heists, sure, who like the procedure and preparation and so on. I also know people who want cinematic heists, without much procedure or precision prep, and BitD exists primarily to support those cinematic heists (and is clearly popular), and who love the drama of them. I think some like both. I've never come people who don't like the procedure, and don't the drama, and just want points to allow them to "cheat" at heists as it were. In my experience people like that aren't interested in heists as a game element at all. They'd rather skip the heist entirely. I mean, sure someone like that technically exists, but what leads you to the conclusion that there are "a lot" of such people playing TT RPGs?

I mean, with BitD part of the deal is that you can retroactively establish stuff as having happened without having specifically planned it. And the Blood Money adventure I noted did the same. But in both cases you sort of earn the ability to do this by working up the heist to some extent.

The problem is that I think you're missing that some people want the game to play out like certain elements have occurred without having to engage with those elements.

If I can draw a parallel, old school D&D often put a lot of emphasis on things like making sure you had all the right gear and mapping out the dungeon in detail. A lot of modern D&D players just find that all tedious and would prefer to abstract most of that out--but that doesn't mean they assume their characters aren't doing it, any more than they assume their characters don't sharpen their swords. They just don't want to deal with it themselves.

I'm unconvinced by this analogy. Certainly people don't necessarily find the procedural approach to dungeoneering interesting today, it's more of a niche thing with Torchbearer etc. But I think extending that to saying people want like "heist magic" without anything at all around it is a bit of an overreach, or if not your intention, I don't think this analogy is clarifying anything. It may even be muddying it.

Even more complicated games, the biggest part is in character creation; and there are ways even in a game as detailed as Hero to fake one up on the fly if you need to and have a general sense of the system. Its damn near trivial in M&M (I used to fit simple one-off villains in literally two lines of text by simply noting Attack, Defense, Saves and Effect value, and a terse list of the powers they had).

Completely agree, yeah.

With planning on TTRPGs there are only two options:
A) The plan worked as expected, so you've wasted time on redundant execution
B) The plan didn't work, so you've wasted your time on planning next steps

Also, I really don't think there are that many uncannily smart people with the ability to plan contingencies that borders on supernatural playing RPGs out there. And that's exactly a thing that separates a heist from a plain robbery.

This seems to be based on the frankly erratic notion that "planning isn't inherently fun for anyone". I would argue that for a lot of groups, planning is extremely fun, and that very much includes factoring in that it's all likely to go to hell. Saying it's "wasted time" and "useless naughty word" is exactly the same underlying attitude as people who say RP is "wasted time" and "naughty word".

Also, re: the "uncannily smart", I don't think many RL or even movie heists have actually involved any "uncanny smarts", and even movie heists that aren't called "Ocean's X" only sometimes involve "uncanny smarts", they often just have a series of fallback plans. It's obviously not a fact that a heist and a robbery are separated in the way you describe. It's your opinion, sure, but it's not a commonly-held opinion. A heist is, I would suggest, for most people, any fancy, complex, pre-arranged robbery, especially it involves a lot of wealth, and a planned getaway. You seem to think it's only Ocean's 11/Mission Impossible-type stuff. Whereas, for example, I'd say HEAT was absolutely a heist movie and pretty much everyone would agree with me (if you look it up). HEAT doesn't feature any "uncanny smarts" - quite the contrary!

I mean, I think we could probably go through heist movies and novels, from the 1930s onwards, and separate them into two piles - one, slightly smaller pile, would be the Ocean's 11-style stuff, where it's all perfectly planned in a way that isn't really humanly possible to execute, or only barely, and requires Holmes/Moriarty levels of brilliance, and a larger pile, where expensive stuff is stolen by people with a plan, and where things probably go pretty badly wrong, but someone likely still gets away with the money in the end.

If you want to give the illusion of Ocean's X-style stuff, you do need something like BitD for most groups, but if you want just general fantasy heists, more like say, Locke Lamora, Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom, Mistborn (parts of it), Foundryside, and so on, I really do not believe that you the kind of Ocean's X approach BitD provides.

Maybe this is a cultural divide? People like me grew up on British heist movies which traditionally don't go great and usually aren't super well-planned. The classic being The Italian Job, where quite a number of things go extremely badly wrong ("You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" or rely on a lot of luck rather than judgement, but if I'd been raised on Ocean's X and modern Mission Impossible I might have a very different idea re: heists.

TLDR for @loverdrive You seem to be working on the notion that everyone who likes heists wants Ocean's 11, not HEAT, which is very wrong.

(And I would point out that Locke Lamora is a lot closer to HEAT in a lot of ways, than Ocean's 11 - even Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom is, ultimately.)