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

[Emerikol]

edit: two posts have pointed toward the title as indicative of conflict, interpreting “vs” as competitive rather than comparative as I intended, so I’ve changed the title.

So, there is a lot of traffic on the internet dedicated to the idea that DnD is a very limited game, and if you want to run a heist or have romantic fantasy narratives, or even just play a game where bonds with other people is very important, then you should play some indie game that is built for that thing, rather than D&D.

I disagree. I play other games sometimes, to tell short stories with my friends, or to explore and learn different ways of running and constructing a game. For my regular game, I'd almost always rather play dnd. Not only am I so familiar with it that I don't need to think about the rules to use them, but it is a game that is very easy to add to.

What I mean by that is, if I want to have mechanics relating to morale and the bonds formed between PCs and their closest NPCs, or with a community, etc, I can just add rules for that to D&D 5e, and D&D 5e absolutely can handle them without any problems. I have used "act now, plan later" mechanics in 5e. Nothing about 5e prevents or even mildly works against doing so.

What's more, I generally don't want to play a campaign of heists, or a campaign of city building, or a campaign of building a revolution. I want to use those elements within a larger campaign that features those things and more. When my Eberron group did a heist to keep a powerful artifact from being purchased by Emerald Claw terrorists, I stole mechanics and ideas from indie RPGs and from movies and tv shows. If it was a broadcast game, I'd have credited them in the show notes, but I certainly wasn't going to tell my group to remake their characters in Blades in The Dark, expect everyone to learn that system in order to participate in the next story arc, and then go back to DnD when we were done with that job.

So, for me, "you'd be better off playing a game that is made for that" usually rings hollow. What about you?

I haven't read the whole thread and just responding to the main poster.

So your premise is if you want to play a game that mixes a lot of different playstyles, choose the game with the most flexible game with lots of pieces as your base and then add in the other game.

The key would be you want to mix playstyles and not settle on any one approach. I think you might be right in that case though most on here would argue focus on a style because each game is a lot better at what it does specifically. If you must mix and match though then your approach doesn't seem outrageous.

Also I think where you go wrong is assuming people don't want to play a focused game like Blades in the Dark all the time. I think a lot of people do want to do that.

 

[dave2008]

I haven't read the whole thread and just responding to the main poster.

So your premise is if you want to play a game that mixes a lot of different playstyles, choose the game with the most flexible game with lots of pieces as your base and then add in the other game.

The key would be you want to mix playstyles and not settle on any one approach. I think you might be right in that case though most on here would argue focus on a style because each game is a lot better at what it does specifically. If you must mix and match though then your approach doesn't seem outrageous.

Also I think where you go wrong is assuming people don't want to play a focused game like Blades in the Dark all the time. I think a lot of people do want to do that.

Not quite. The premise of the OP is you are playing D&D (even in the early stages of planning a campaign) and want to add or modify some rules to support a particular style of play. If that is the goal, suggesting playing a different game is not great advice.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Really? Infiltration/heist scenarios were common in older fantasy? Would that be Conan? Well, no, most Conan stories are not about infiltration/heist scenarios, there's no "planning phase" certainly and even in stories like Tower of the Elephant, which is a kind of heist story, it still doesn't have any planning scene and most of the conflict is resolved by violence. It's a pretty bog standard dungeon crawl really.

I'm wracking my brains for the sneak and steal scenes in The Lord of the Rings. Or Three Hearts and Three Lions. Granted, I've read nowhere near as much Lieber as I would like to, but, Lankhmar is something of its own thing.

Frankly, D&D is about killing stuff and taking its treasure. And, as for doing that, it's really, really good at it. The further you move away from killing stuff and taking its treasure, the less apt D&D is to be able do it without a lot of legwork from the DM. To me, it really is that simple. Note, I LIKE killing stuff and taking its treasure, so, I certainly don't mean that as a bad thing.

They exist in a few places, but not many. There's some modern/urban fantasy where they come up. It isn't that common though, and they are usually not the main thrust of the story. Problem is really it doesn't work in literature, because the author can solve ANY problem the character's have with magic. So the entire story is perfectly contrived, and feels that way. A Hollywood heist movie OTOH has strong verisimilitude and genre restrictions which mean that nobody asks "why didn't they just cast Sleep!" or something like that. Likewise RPGs can do it for the same reason, the PCs have a menu of special powers, they cannot just order up any old effect as-needed. Or, like BitD maybe they CAN, but the game is really about what that does to you, not so much about planning out the heist itself.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Not quite. The premise of the OP is you are playing D&D (even in the early stages of planning a campaign) and want to add or modify some rules to support a particular style of play. If that is the goal, suggesting playing a different game is not great advice.

Sure it's useful. If you want to know how to do something looking at how other games have done it is a very good place to start. And if you are planning a whole campaign based on Alien, rather than just an episode, then using the whole Alien game is likely to be a lot less work and a lot more effective than modding D&D. There might be downsides (e.g. cost), but it's should still be considered, even if you choose a different path in the end.

 

[Thomas Shey]

They exist in a few places, but not many. There's some modern/urban fantasy where they come up. It isn't that common though, and they are usually not the main thrust of the story. Problem is really it doesn't work in literature, because the author can solve ANY problem the character's have with magic.

I should note this is only true with settings where the rules of magic are not strongly established; once you do, especially if they're fairly constrained, its entirely possible.

 

[loverdrive]

I think the problem I have is I don't find either position particularly sensible here (while acknowledging that from my hearing of how PbtA is put together and my very cursory reading of a couple PbtA games like Monsterhearts that it may look moreso from within that community). I think there's a fuzzy spot in continuity where a game becomes derived from another game rather than being the other game, but I don't think one or two houserules automatically does that, depending on what they are.

I also don't think that one or two houserules automatically mean that it's a separate system.

In PbtA, I think the line lies in Agenda and Principles. If some of the Principles no longer apply, you're probably stepping into a separate game territory, if some parts of the Agenda don't apply -- you're definitely making another game. Regardless of whether you change the mechanics or leave them untouched. Dungeon World with damage dice tied to weapons instead of classes is still a Dungeon World with a (very weird) houserule, but Dungeon World where the GM isn't filling the PCs' lives with adventures or isn't their fan is not Dungeon World.

One way or another, while Powered by the Apocalypse can handle every genre, at least to some extend, no one in their right mind would argue that Apocalypse World can.

There's also a fundamental difference in the underlying systems, that's worth mentioning. If, say, you want to run a game in a world where magic comes from evil twisted daemons of Warp, in D&D you now need to implement some kind of houserule to represent that (it may be very simple, or very complex, you still need one), while in Dungeon World you... just use the rules as they were written, unless you want to really highlight the importance of Warp -- at which point you're making another hack.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I should note this is only true with settings where the rules of magic are not strongly established; once you do, especially if they're fairly constrained, its entirely possible.

Yeah, but even the "Harry Potter-verse" will basically let you get away with anything, and clever readers can always say "but just combine X and Y, there is precedent in chapter Z." Perhaps you can get away with it in a few cases, but I think my observation probably does explain its rarity, and why modern 'magitech' type urban fantasy is the most likely place to see it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Blades actively discourage violence, unless you're playing Assasins or Bravos. In my experience, the guns are drawn for intimidation far far more often than for shooting.

All I can go in is Blades games I've played in and actual plays I've read and so on, and people's comments about their own games, and they all sound like violence is "on the reg". I can't remember what kind we were playing when we played though (not assassins, possibly bravos).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah, but even the "Harry Potter-verse" will basically let you get away with anything, and clever readers can always say "but just combine X and Y, there is precedent in chapter Z." Perhaps you can get away with it in a few cases, but I think my observation probably does explain its rarity, and why modern 'magitech' type urban fantasy is the most likely place to see it.

Nah, check out the Dresden Files. Perfectly good heist (don’t recall the title), in a world where magic is fairly loose.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Also I think where you go wrong is assuming people don't want to play a focused game like Blades in the Dark all the time. I think a lot of people do want to do that.

But nothing I’ve ever said in my entire life assumes that.

Sure it's useful. If you want to know how to do something looking at how other games have done it is a very good place to start. And if you are planning a whole campaign based on Alien, rather than just an episode, then using the whole Alien game is likely to be a lot less work and a lot more effective than modding D&D. There might be downsides (e.g. cost), but it's should still be considered, even if you choose a different path in the end.

It can be useful, if given in a way that isn’t telling someone they can’t do a thing. As I’ve said at least a dozen times in this thread, stuff like, “Hey this game does nothing but the thing you’re adding to D&D, you should check it out.” and “Hey I had a lot of trouble doing that in D&D , and ultimately couldn’t make it work” are both useful.