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

[doctorbadwolf]

Not really. We’re talking about rules, so I think that’s very relevant.

What mechanics does 5E D&D have that makes the players think “oh boy we may be in trouble here”?

The game has other resources that can be depleted, but generally speaking, most of those are about trying to preserve Hit Points.

Again, that’s the countdown clock of D&D. And what makes it tick is combat.

My point is exactly that “having a specific mechanic to induce pressure outside the fiction” is not better than avoiding that and letting consequence speak for itself.

Also 5e has not only HP and HD, but spells slots and other limited use character abilities. If you’ve never seen loss of those create pressure...I don’t know that we even play the same game.

 

[Lanefan]

It's a 20ft sphere, you can't cast it on a creature any more

Sigh. So, like so many other spells in 5e, it still exists but it's been nerfed to the ground. Got it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I didn’t say it was. I said that over prioritizing the rules is a bad strategy for running a game. (And that applies to any TTRPG)

Sure, I wouldn’t say that’s wrong. But it seems that you maybe have a much lower threshold for over-prioritizing rules.

Hyperbolic nonsense doesn’t make a compelling argument.

Oh my god it was a joke.

The post I responded to literally talked about the silent image distraction giving some characters advantage, but not the heavy armor characters.

I’m not quite sure what you mean here. I didn’t think @Manbearcat ’s example was nit picky or that those were examples of a GM over-prioritizing rules. But my examples were just ones I came up with off the top of my head as a joke, not as a comment on what he offered.

Advantage and Disadvantage cancel eachother.

Sure I know. I talked about Spamming Guidance as an example of awful gameplay to shore up a weakness.

 

[Lanefan]

Not really. We’re talking about rules, so I think that’s very relevant.

What mechanics does 5E D&D have that makes the players think “oh boy we may be in trouble here”?

Can't speak to 5e specifically, but in my game last night for the first time in memory a party bailed back to town because they'd run out of rations.

 

[hawkeyefan]

My point is exactly that “having a specific mechanic to induce pressure outside the fiction” is not better than avoiding that and letting consequence speak for itself.

Right, but that’s something all games do. They all involve fiction where the GM can place narrative pressure in different ways.

So that’s not unique to 5E.

Also 5e has not only HP and HD, but spells slots and other limited use character abilities. If you’ve never seen loss of those create pressure...I don’t know that we even play the same game.

Hit dice are so connected to hit points as to be nearly the same thing.

I don’t entirely agree about spells, though. Yes, they are a resource that needs to be managed, and they create decision points for the players and so they can be an engaging part of the game.

But with the exception of low level characters who have few slots, are most casters burning through all their spells without engaging in combat? What are they using that many spells on?

It’s all designed around the expectation of a certain number of encounters per day. All the resource management that’s meaningful in 5E goes back to that.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Can't speak to 5e specifically, but in my game last night for the first time in memory a party bailed back to town because they'd run out of rations.

Sure....that’s more a throwback to the early days when the game was designed around exploration of a dungeon, and so rations and torches were consumables that helped pressure the players to get more done each day.

And that can still happen in 5E or any edition really, but I think most games aren’t too concerned with it, with maybe some OSR exceptions.

And even back in the day it was something that was often quickly mitigated through magic in some way. Resolving those mundane needs was usually an early accomplishment of any party.

 

[Hussar]

9th level?? Invisibility is a 2nd level spell... there are also other spells like guidance we can use to enhance our chances. You're addressing the specific instead of the point... magic is a resource PC's have access to and can use to push this scenario into their favor.



What specific classes or specific magic items did I state were necessary... again you're not addressing the bigger point. The classes as a whole have abilities, equipment they can buy and magic that can skew the scenario in their favor. I'm not going to list out every singular ability, piece of equipment or spell that could possibly be used in a D&D heist scenario.



No it doesn't . I didn't mention anything about going ethereal but an average D&D party of fighter, rogue, wizard and cleric have an imense suite of abilities that can be leveraged for success in a heist scenario. Is that clear?

How did you teleport with a 2nd level spell? And, yup, you can turn one character invisible with the second level spell for one hour. Doesn't help the other three characters, but, hey, you can do it.

So, what suite does a, say, 4th level group of a fighter, rogue, cleric and wizard have? They don't have Pass Without a Trace. They have a couple of invisibility spells. They might have guidance - if the cleric took it. Meanwhile, the fighter and the rogue are contributing what exactly? The fighter and likely the cleric are both at disadvantage to stealth. The rogue can stealth, sure, but, that's only one likely success and two likely failures in a group check - and any failure is a catastrophic failure for the mission.

Not really a high chance of success here.

 

[Hussar]

To be fair...your DM is being needlessly nit picky about the rules, and seems unprepared for the situation, and not particularly willing to honor the player’s improvisation.

Perhaps nit picky is the wrong term. Too worried about the rules as a way to restrict the player characters rather than guidelines with which to guide improvisation?

And, we're right back into Oberoni fallacy territory yet again. We're just not quite good enough DM's to make this work and if we were just a bit better, there'd be no problems. So, just to be straight, you think that following perfectly normal rules (we're not talking some rarely used rules here - this is all included in the Basic rules for 5e) is being "too worried about rules"?

 

[loverdrive]

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.

Oh, I know of "things go bad" kind of heists movies, but in that case planning makes even less sense.

If we already know that the "perfect plan" isn't supposed to actually work and the exciting stuff is going to be the result of naughty word going south, then what's the point of spending time on formulating a perfect plan?

 

[Aldarc]

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

Or maybe a book. I do think that genre emulation is an important part of our general TTRPG play. I mean, if I wanted to play a game of superheroes, then I’m certainly hoping to emulate one or more superhero media, whether in comic book, film, or televised form. I’m not sure why crime heists would be different.

When I read through BitD, it reminded me A LOT about The Lies of Locke Lamora. A fantasy book of ambitious thieves pulling elaborate scores against the upper crust of a quasi-Venetian city. The story often involves jumping into the action of the scene, only to do a flashback later (generally the next chapter) that reveals the behind-the-scenes planning.

And I was not the only one who noticed the similarity but apparently John Harper had not read Locke Lamora. He only included it as a touchstone after other people mentioned it repeatedly.

I think that these sort of flashbacks are common to the heist genre because it creates tension for the audience while still making the characters feel competent. If we only saw planning and everything go perfectly in the execution, then there is little dramatic tension.