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

[The-Magic-Sword]

So if DM fait and player attitudes are the biggest factor in how a game plays out, then that means I run an old school game using 4E??

I mean yeah, you probably could, my playstyle is pretty much OSR adventure structure superimposed on player empowerment systems from modern games, it just works well for us, the things people normally see as deal breakers just aren't for us, so it totally works.

 

[billd91]

That is your takeaway?

Seriously?

1) A "heist" is a nebulous term that isn't remotely helping conversation (which I tried to poke at earlier).

2) If the intent is "infil > exfil with the McGuffin without a trace", then yeah...cue your PacMan sounds.

3) If its "plan > infil > eventually pear-shaped > cue A Team explosions and destruction > exfil (whether fighting your way out until their are no more HPs to ablate or teleporting via your Wizard or a big chase) with the McGuffin with scorched earth in your wake" then cue the PacMan defeats level sounds.

I don't care if the Win Con is (2) or (3) as I put upthread...BUT THEY ARE DIFFERENT THINGS in a number of ways. That is the entire point. It would be nice if everyone would recognize that. I don't know why, but people refuse to acknowledge that these two things are not the same.

4) HOWEVER, Fail Forward's role in this kind of thing can be ABSOLUTELY DYSFUNCTIONAL (eg - you can't actually lose because there is no legit Loss Con...the GM will just string you along until they feel you've done enough to give you your Win Con Trophy) or ABSOLUTELY AWESOME and it DEPENDS UPON MECHANICAL ARCHETECTURE/INTEGRATION.

Annnnnnnnddddd this must be different how? If a successful heist is defined as #2 above, then all sorts of fail forward results will have the same effect (sad PacMan sound) depending on how the group defines the drawback or complication of the failure. Did they leave behind a trace? Did they take so long that more guards showed up on patrol? And then there's outright failure - if their position is that they're sneaking in past security and they don't even achieve a 4/5 for success with consequences but get a 1-3 - what's the likely consequence? If #2 above, same PacMan sound - they probably aren't succeeding without a trace. Or is that somehow prohibited by BitD's rules? It may not have to be all or nothing (cue the "discovered clock"....) but there's nothing prohibiting being noticed is there?

In this thread, are people actually discussing the way these games can handle these situations or are people caricaturizing one game or the other to make "got one over on you" points in the argument?

 

[Lanefan]

2) If the intent is "infil > exfil with the McGuffin without a trace", then yeah...cue your PacMan sounds.

3) If its "plan > infil > eventually pear-shaped > cue A Team explosions and destruction > exfil (whether fighting your way out until their are no more HPs to ablate or teleporting via your Wizard or a big chase) with the McGuffin with scorched earth in your wake" then cue the PacMan defeats level sounds.

Thing is, these are two extremes on the spectrum of conditions that provide a net win. Most situations would reasonably fall somewhere between the two: things don't necessarily go as planned and maybe an over-inquisitive guard gets his throat slit somewhere along the line but there's no mass combat...that sort of thing. And it's this middle ground that's being ignored somewhat, I think.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

D&D is basically Plan Now (to develop rote power plays and reduce risk as much as possible...preferably to 0) > Act Later "A Team" where discrete characters with focused niches do VERY specific things when "plans come together" (eg rote power plays inevitably develop) > all hell breaks loose > they fight their way out.

Its awesome. I love it.

But it is absolutely not the same thing as the sort of hyper-daring, seat-of-your-pants, Spec Ops Caper-fest which somehow holds together through scoundrel guile/skill/panache that Blades produces. Not remotely in its inputs. Not remotely in the cognitive space each player is occupying during play (wholly and from decision-point to decision-point). Not remotely in the dynamism and emergent nature of "OP CHOICE + OP APPROACH". Not in feel. And certainly not in outputs (outputs here meaning - we were victorious on this entire Score without detection and without body count...that happens in D&D at a rate so ridiculously low that its pointless to even discuss...and this is by design).

---

Can we at least agree the two bolded things juxtaposed in the above 3 paragraphs are not remotely the same?

They're not the same in conception of genre, not in design, not in execution, and not in what ultimately emerges out of play.

I don't disagree with you. OTOH (and I missed most of this whole thread, forgive me) I think I concur with others that the stealthy op scenario might not be the best point of comparison in this specific situation. I, for example, recently played in a 5e campaign where my PC was a Catfolk Battlemaster, with a 19 DEX and specializing in TWF. He's EXTREMELY stealthy, can literally climb almost anything. My only point being, if you were building a 5e party to represent something similar to what a BitD crew is, then they would be able to carry out things like Stealth missions. So it might be better to use a more clearly distinct case.

I'd suggest something like Trail of Cthulhu, where you do paranormal type investigation, and there is a theme of facing overwhelmingly powerful entities (IE you will NOT win a fight, except maybe against some very minor opponents, any monster will basically eat the party if you fight it). The rules are pretty much Gumshoe and oriented towards research, investigation, and uncovering dark mysteries. It can also handle some sneaky stuff, and HAS a combat system, but it is pretty realistic and deadly. The game is intended to work more as a 'fiction first' kind of setup where the PCs always move forward and things like skill checks don't create hard fails. If you need to sneak, failing is not a hard catastrophic fail, usually. It is just causing you to need to mitigate whatever problem was created or go ahead with some penalties.

 

[Argyle King]

I do think there are areas of 5E which tend to be a bit shallow.

I still enjoy D&D, but -despite the claim of modular design- I've found that some aspects of the game are difficult to alter without also changing a lot of other things. In some cases, it really is just easier to play a different game system.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I do think there are areas of 5E which tend to be a bit shallow.

I still enjoy D&D, but -despite the claim of modular design- I've found that some aspects of the game are difficult to alter without also changing a lot of other things. In some cases, it really is just easier to play a different game system.

I think if 5e had a good skill challenge system, it would cover a lot more ground effectively. That is definitely something lacking for the core rules.

 

[cbwjm]

I get that you've skipped a lot of posts, given you're asking this question, but basically what it boils down to is:

There are two kind of heist - procedural heists, where you literally plan out and prepare for stuff and then do the heist, and cinematic heists, where you may have a certain amount of preparation and planning, but mostly you just "do" the heist and use mechanics to allow you to assert fiction (like, "I planted a guard disguise behind the tree in the courtyard!", whereas in procedural, you'd have to have actually done that).

D&D has nothing that supports "cinematic" heists. It's relatively easy to add stuff that does, as was shown in 4E in Dragon 200 with Logan Bonner's adventure "Blood Money", but it doesn't inherently have it.

BitD only supports cinematic heists, but has a ton of tools to support them.

Yeah, this thread is moving too fast for me to keep up with it, already another 8 pages from when I posted my question last night.

Cinematic sounds like all you really need to do is add in some bennies for the players to use to change the story, could even just be an expansion of inspiration. It's a small change that would enable small edits of a scene. I get that that isn't something which is already in DnD but it isn't a big add.

 

[cbwjm]

I've seen an old school dungeon crawl described as a poorly planned and extremely violent heist.

In practice the problem preparing a detailed heist where the players have the initiative is the sheer amount of preparation work for the time taken. There is a wide variety of possible approaches to heisting any given target - and if you prepare four the players are only going to take the one they think is the easiest - and if you as a DM can see four basic approaches your players between them will probably see six.

What Blades does is enables satisfying heists run on a wing and a prayer where instead of you the DM having to prepare complications to throw the complications normally arise out of success-with-consequences mechanics and the pacing tools that Blades has that D&D doesn't.

I think the issue I have with this example would be me preparing ways for them to complete the heist. I'd only create the location the players are going to break into, I wouldn't worry about how they do it, that's up to them, even though some possible ways might pop into my head as I'm creating the location. Players always come up with ways to overcome obstacles that I hadn't even thought of, I don't think a heist should be any different.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I do not know what "get gud" means, but I definitely do not consider it a failure if you can't hack a game. Everyone has different strengths and being able to hacka game is pretty low on the needed GM skills IMO.

exactly.

Spoiler

"Git Gud", an intentional misspelling of the phrase "get good," is an expression used to heckle inexperienced players or newbies in online video games, similar to the use of the phrase "lurk more" on forums.

It's pretty applicable summary given the amount of "I can do it easy, problem must be you" & "that's a strength not a problem skilled gm's should have dealing with" type comments

I’ve seen no such comments in this thread.

I'm not sure why this is controversial, or that some feel the need to decry this -- it's the biggest strength of 5e as I see it.

But it isn’t true.

We must be referring to different things when we're talking about conflict resolution mechanics.

What I’m not referring to, necessarily, is mechanics which are operationalized in prescriptive detail.

rules to tell you how to sneak past someone.

The stealth rules, and the rules for adjudicating ability checks, tell you how to sneak past someone. You declare that you’re doing it, preferably also how you do it. The DM decides if there is a reasonable chance of failure. If so, you roll against the creature’s passive perception. You either have a binary pass/fail result, or use one of a couple optional rules that create more variable results.

Those are literally the rules for sneaking past someone.

No one is mad at you for saying D&D has no rules for XYZ, we are just telling you that your arguments make absolutely no sense to us. The rules are right there in the book. Being a set of rules the DM chooses from doesn’t make them any less the rules for completing tasks.

It's more like having a menu with a type of chees and some milk but where you're never ordering these but instead béchamel sauce. You have to order the right proportions, bring your own salt, pepper, and flour, and know how to cook it.

Not at all. A closer analogy, if we must speak in analogies, would be subway or a buffet, or even better a pizza place where you build your pizza step by step and then they bake it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Cinematic sounds like all you really need to do is add in some bennies for the players to use to change the story, could even just be an expansion of inspiration. It's a small change that would enable small edits of a scene. I get that that isn't something which is already in DnD but it isn't a big add.

Yup absolutely.

I keep mentioning this adventure from 2010, for 4E, in Dungeon issue 200, Blood Money by Logan Bonner (I don't think I've convinced anyone else to read it yet lol), which does that an little bit more, and basically it makes D&D significantly better at doing heist-type stuff, especially of a cinematic nature, just with that.

I think if 5e had a good skill challenge system, it would cover a lot more ground effectively. That is definitely something lacking for the core rules.

Absolutely. People had a weirdly oppositional attitude to Skill Challenges, but because they make you roll multiple times, they help fight the major problem with high RNG linear-roll systems like D&D, and make investing in skills far more worthwhile.