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

[Hussar]

Cool. I’m glad we stepped back and chilled out toward eachother.

Okay, but that doesn’t actually change anything, even if we just take that all at face value. If people have done heists well in D&D, then D&D can do them well. Beyond that, I have given an example of play, and talked about how I have run a heist, and about what tools within the game help give less binary task results, and man...I’m kinda tired of defending my own lived experience.

To be fair, I might not have seen that post.

The only other example I've seen in this thread of anyone actually presenting experience is @dave2008. And, even then, we agreed that what he did wouldn't actually do what I wanted to do.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ultimately, because the structure of success conditions was arbitrary and the math was bad. At best, as presented in the 4e DMG, it was a rough draft. I’m convinced that the SC structure works best as a measure of relative success\failure. The prisoner escape example in SWSE Galaxy of Intrigue was a much better example of what a SC could be - each failure peels away prisoners from the group lessening the degree of success.

Honestly, this whole 'math was bad' thing is being overplayed. It is a point of view, which mostly prevailed, that the math was 'perverse', but I played with a very capable GM who was utterly convinced that the bog standard DMG1 SC system was absolutely working as intended, and proceded to make a VERY cogent argument for that point of view, and used it quite effectively! It worked fine. Honestly, I thought it was better once revised, but the original actually did have some virtues. This is not a thread about that, so we need not delve into it, and largely it is irrelevant, but just to note that this particular take on it lacks much force. The examples WERE terrible though, that I will happily grant you.

But even the DMG1 SC system would play that prisoner escape scenario just about exactly like SWSE GoI did. Consequences for each failure are quite well documented parts of the system from day 1.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

To be fair, I might not have seen that post.

The only other example I've seen in this thread of anyone actually presenting experience is @dave2008. And, even then, we agreed that what he did wouldn't actually do what I wanted to do.

Yeah absolutely, and how I run naval combat would probably be wrong for your group, from what you said about the 5e rules for naval combat. The wall in this thread isn’t facts, it’s very much preference.

Well that and the fact that it’s become an absurd rambling mess that’s much more about quibbling over semantics and detailed particulars of rules systems than it is about the thread topic.

 

[loverdrive]

This is the problem with the level of overhead involved in taking wotc up on the simplified for rulings not rules & to let each table customize it to fit the kind of game they want to run. The system needs to be built to support that from the start & the state of the dmg optional rules shows just how much of an afterthought it was. even simple things quickly start spiraling into the depths of "is this still d&d 5e" because there aren't enough hooks, things from past editions that would enable aren't even listed as options*, & frequently the system is coded against doing that.

* which I guess puts them in the same state as the unsupported "optional" feats & magic items minus actually having any ink or pagespace devoted to them

Hmm, now I think that the actual difference between us PbtA cultists and D&D cultists is that we make some little change and immediately go "Oh! I'M MAKING A HACK! I'm gonna call it... The Way Forward, sounds cool!" while D&D cultists rewrite half of the book and still maintain that they play D&D.

 

[tetrasodium]

Hmm, now I think that the actual difference between us PbtA cultists and D&D cultists is that we make some little change and immediately go "Oh! I'M MAKING A HACK! I'm gonna call it... The Way Forward, sounds cool!" while D&D cultists rewrite half of the book and still maintain that they play D&D.

The heck are you talking about?

 

[loverdrive]

The heck are you talking about?

I say, D&D fans always say that D&D can do everything because they count D&D houseruled to hell and back as, well, D&D, and not a separate, different system — because there is no clear way to tell, whether it is still D&D or not — so it makes sense that "a game where Fighters, Rogues, Wizards and whatnot are doing dirty bussiness in the crime-ridden city of Sharn" is a D&D game in their book. So they wouldn't say "Oh, we aren't playing 5e, we are playing my hack, The Long Knives of Sharn".

PbtA and Blades fans, on the other hand, treat houseruled system as a separate entity, based on the original one. So, if one would want to run Blades mechanics, but set in a vaguely medieval fantasy world with dragons and naughty word, they wouldn't treat it as Blades in the Dark — but as another game (khm-khm, Swords under the Sun).

 

[pemerton]

So, what you’re talking about is mechanical teeth, though I don’t really dig the term “teeth” here.

What I am saying is that the teeth don’t have to be mechanical, and can instead be social and narrative. D&D is, for many of us, an improv game of cooperative storytelling and narrative exploration.

<snip>

Mechanical vs narrative teeth is just a preference.

I'm not sure what you mean by "social and narrative" teeth. If the GM is free to choose whatever s/he thinks fits the narrative, where are the teeth? I mean of course the GM's choice will bite on the players - if the GM chooses to have the guard who spots the infiltrating PC to ask for a bribe, that is a different outcome from if the GM chooses to have that guard sound the alarm - but the point (that I intended, and that I took @Ovinomancer and probably also @Hussar to be making) is that how the heist unfolds now just turns on the GM's decision making. The game engine itself is really not bringing anything to the table - even its apparatus of Stealth proficiency and ability checks isn't doing anything but providing a prompt for the GM to decide what to have the guard do.

Combat benefits from hard structure because combat is the easiest aspect of play to become unfair without it

I don't feel the force of this claim at all. If I'm playing a game, or even a scenario, in which my PC is trying to pull of a heist then the main pressure point for fairness (I think) is what the GM has the guards do. If we've got to the point of combat it's already all over! - whether my PC escapes or is captured may make little difference beyond adding some colour and a bit of framing to my post-failed-heist situation.

I will struggle to engage meaningfully with a game where interaction is tactical via detailed and complex sets of many moving parts.

And I find this claim a bit of a red herring. There are many RPGs in which the mechanical process of resolution has teeth but there are few moving parts. PbtA games provide one example. Prince Valiant provides another.

 

[Jaeger]

That ain’t what the quoted text says, but okay.

I genuinely laughed at the idea that changing the way health works makes it a completely different game, but beyond that...I explicitly said I’d probably not be down to do that work.

But I guess feel free to just misrepresent my word to say whatever the hell you want.

-EDIT- It seems that doctorbadwolf has added me to his ignore list so that I can no longer see his posts or my quotes from them - Executing the time honored debating tradition of the: 'La, la, la, la, la, la, I can't hear you...' defense. -EDIT-

The full quote that I responded to:
doctorbadwolf:
"That ain’t what the quoted text says, but okay.
I genuinely laughed at the idea that changing the way health works makes it a completely different game, but beyond that...I explicitly said I’d probably not be down to do that work.
But I guess feel free to just misrepresent my word to say whatever the hell you want."

Sorry no.

I purposefully left those two paragraphs untouched so that people can read exactly what you said.

You explicitly said:
"I wouldn't bother unless I was making a whole game based on 5e, but if it somehow served what I needed for a story, it'd be work that I'd enjoy doing enough that I wouldn't mind it. "

"Nothing wrong with not making the same choice, but I'm not going to pretend that 5e can't handle that sort of thing just because the process would be time consuming."

The full quote that isn't hidden behind an expand button so people can make up their own minds:
doctorbadwolf:
"The salient question isn't whether I can easily mod the game for broad consumption. The question is can I mod the game easily for a specific story. If that means adding damage to monsters but not PCs to make PCs feel fragile, or to scoop out HP entirely and replace it with a system of graduated damage thresholds where damage over a threshold has increasingly deleterious effects, and massive damage can one-shot you out of the fight, the game won't break. It will play differently.

Average damage remains the same, stuff like DR and resistance and THP work the same, but are more important. Healing would need some kind of conversion system that can be made into a chart based on healing by level converted into "X healing has Y effect", and that would be possibly the hardest part. I wouldn't bother unless I was making a whole game based on 5e, but if it somehow served what I needed for a story, it'd be work that I'd enjoy doing enough that I wouldn't mind it. Nothing wrong with not making the same choice, but I'm not going to pretend that 5e can't handle that sort of thing just because the process would be time consuming."

My opinion:

No example anyone can give will persuade you that 5e can't do X genre.

Because just these two paragraphs show that you are willing to go from adding damage to monsters but not PCs to make PCs feel fragile, to scoop out HP entirely and replace it with a system of graduated damage thresholds. To if it somehow served what I needed for a story you'd go as far as making a whole game based on 5e, then taking the position that: I'm not going to pretend that 5e can't handle that sort of thing just because the process would be time consuming.

All of which come after you explicitly say: "The question is can I mod the game easily for a specific story."

.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If following the rules of the game results in the game not doing X, is it fair to say that the game does not support X?

I mean, that's a dangerous road to go down, because by that logic, very few games support anything. You'd need an extremely narrowly-designed or nearly perfectly-designed game to completely avoid that issue.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Hmm, now I think that the actual difference between us PbtA cultists and D&D cultists is that we make some little change and immediately go "Oh! I'M MAKING A HACK! I'm gonna call it... The Way Forward, sounds cool!" while D&D cultists rewrite half of the book and still maintain that they play D&D.

I think is pretty true, yeah, and if D&D + significant house rules/rules additions/rules changes consistent got referred to as "hacks" and got neat titles like they do with PtbA, it would actually be pretty helpful.

It stems from two very different game histories of course. Early D&D saw "hacks" absolutely on-par with PtbA hacks, and some of them did have different names, like for example Warlock/Caltech D&D, which in like 1976 featured stuff like spell points, Thieves having actual abilities like 4E/5E (rather than just percentile stuff) and some other changes with pretty significant results.

But EGG et al were not impressed by this sort of thing, and really wanted to standardize D&D, whilst still allowing people to have "house rules", so essentially worked against (as I understand it, obviously literally this was before I was born) versions of D&D that were essentially "hacks" to remotely the degree PtbA stuff is (and later, esp. in 2E, against 3PP content at all, which of course changed with 3E). So house rules became isolated and the concept was that each table had their own, rather than there being shared "hacks".

With the rise of the internet and later the OGL for 3.XE you might have expected these to re-appear and they kind of did, but only in pretty limited formats, like the E6 rules, which are essentially a "hack" of 3E (arguably all the d20 stuff was too, but it wasn't presented that way).

Apocalypse World started being hacked pretty much immediately and this worked for AW as to understand most early hacks you needed AW, and so it spawned this very different culture. I feel like the future potentially has more "hacks" of D&D and so on in it though.