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

[Emerikol]

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.

I didn't read it exactly that way but perhaps I misread. Perhaps I was simply trying to generalize his principle.

If you want a Story Now game as your top priority then sticking with D&D would not be a good plan in my opinion. That does not though mean you couldn't add in elements of Story Now in places. I think system does matter as someone mentioned above.

What perhaps I missed is the posters desire to stick with D&D. I assumed that was because he primarily wanted to do D&D things and of course he is familiar with the system. He just wanted to add some elements from other games. That is great and with that goal in mind I think it can be done. If he was wanting to just do a Story Now game though I believe he'd be better off playing a different game.

 

[loverdrive]

 

[loverdrive]

Damn, I just realized that the second ??????? is a screenshot of me calculating DPR of a character with Dex 20 and CE+SS against a creature with 15 AC...

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think part of what makes me scratch my head is that, from most of the examples provided, folks who are saying D&D can be modified to deliver a different experience (horror, crime, etc.) are generally adopting the kinds of mechanics that are inherent parts of other games.

It’s odd.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I didn't read it exactly that way but perhaps I misread. Perhaps I was simply trying to generalize his principle.

If you want a Story Now game as your top priority then sticking with D&D would not be a good plan in my opinion. That does not though mean you couldn't add in elements of Story Now in places. I think system does matter as someone mentioned above.

What perhaps I missed is the posters desire to stick with D&D. I assumed that was because he primarily wanted to do D&D things and of course he is familiar with the system. He just wanted to add some elements from other games. That is great and with that goal in mind I think it can be done. If he was wanting to just do a Story Now game though I believe he'd be better off playing a different game.

There seemed to be an implication that D&D was just really super flexible and so there was no strong reason to use another system, at least if you were doing "D&D stuff, including some things that other games might focus on." Obviously if you want to do one single mystery story and the rest of the game is classic D&D, even at the planning level you'd probably not want to choose to use Gumshoe for the campaign. I think that's obvious. It seemed like the OP developed this more to "since some people have managed to do pretty much everything we can name in some D&D game successfully, D&D is fully capable of all these things." which I think was less justifiable.

It was pointed out that having no support for something, beyond maybe there's a skill check mechanism that could theoretically be deployed in any situation, doesn't equate with support. Again, "someone did it" was then said to be incontrovertible evidence that said thing "is supported." We all obviously mean very different things by that word, 'supported'.

I mean, by this definition Traveler supports Vancian Spell Casting. It certainly doesn't PREVENT it, you could make up some houserules to do it! I think that tied into the side discussion that @loverdrive started about the way even the most thoroughly hacked D&D is still called 'D&D' and this makes it pretty hard to say what D&D does and does not support.

My own line of argument has been that if you want to have support mean something, then you need to have actual process and agenda/principles which support it, because a disconnected mechanic like 5e's skill system has no traction, it doesn't decide anything. Meanwhile general resolution systems that DO have said process DO have traction (or as @pemerton puts it 'teeth'). So it is hard to say that an RPG with such a system doesn't support a LOT of things, though specific games may be pretty narrow based on the actual details of implementation. Still, a game like 4e seems to at least provide a ready-made structure to handle most anything, so how is it not 'better support' than just 'maybe you can make a skill check for that'?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think part of what makes me scratch my head is that, from most of the examples provided, folks who are saying D&D can be modified to deliver a different experience (horror, crime, etc.) are generally adopting the kinds of mechanics that are inherent parts of other games.

It’s odd.

Well, I'm not sure. I think the most basic response was just "DM's have managed to make it work in 5e, so 5e does it all!" I mean, at its most sophisticated this argument claims that the design of 5e is a work of genius in which its lack of process and structure around general conflict resolution/plot direction is a powerful tool which frees it from some imagined large number of constraints which would make doing all this other stuff harder.

I am reminded of all the silly OSR arguments that building a hodge-podge of subsystems incorporating whichever size of die Gary happened to first grab hold of on the day he decided to do X was a work of genius too, when it was plainly nothing of the sort.

Now, I think MM is a lot more deliberate, systematic, and theory-aware game designer than GG was. So, maybe the 5e argument is somewhat more cogent. OTOH my take on it, personally, is they just got to a point where the arguments were endless and settled on a design that basically doesn't raise the outrage of too many people. Then they declared it all optional anyway, so that you can simply ignore it if you really ARE outraged. Sure, it gets out of your way, because that's all you can, politically, attach to D&D anymore. The ship has sailed, and 4e-esque resolution frameworks are simply out of the question.

Of course, with OGL, there's always an option, but for myself I've hacked the pattern established by 4e and found that it can do pretty much anything I want, really well! It certainly manages a mild form of story game pretty well when combined with appropriate principles of play (which 4e has, but is a bit weak on).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think part of what makes me scratch my head is that, from most of the examples provided, folks who are saying D&D can be modified to deliver a different experience (horror, crime, etc.) are generally adopting the kinds of mechanics that are inherent parts of other games.

It’s odd.

Why is it odd? I’m not trying to play Aliens, I’m trying to run a fantasy horror story wherein the PCs cannot escape, cannot fight the monster headon and survive, and are in a fairly advanced facility with a lot of moving and movable parts they can try to use cleverly.

There are probably things from the Aliens rpg that would help me do that, and it will be less work for me than it would be to try and make the Alien rpg do heroic fantasy.

I’m not trying to run a game wherein you play a crew of professional criminals that all can do eachother’s jobs competently, I’ve got a story wherein the PCs will need something that is best gotten via criminal caper, and those PCs have to figure out how to use their competencies to do it. Part of the fun is that Vidanya the Paladin isn’t sneaky and doesn’t know how to hack magical systems, while Ocuthim the Kobold Wizard is small and able to hide and an expert hacker (Wizard, scribe), and Khalid is an expert sneak, able to teleport short distances sometimes, and dangerous in unarmed combat, etc, and if one of them gets taken out the team will struggle to fill their role.

If I get a good group together to play an actual “we are all professional criminals/spies/assassins/etc” campaign, it may be worth it to run that in Blades rather than D&D. It mostly depends on the group and what everyone wants from the experience. Also, whether any Blades playbooks can do any kind of magic. My group has a strong bent away from super-low magic games where a PC basically cannot play a magic user. Also for me, why play it as a fantasy game if the PCs can’t be supernatural?

But as I’ve said before, I’ve played very little Blades, and it was a simplified version that probably didn’t give a great impression of what the game is actually like. That GM tends to strip most of the mechanics out of a game and play the most simplified version possible.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I didn't read it exactly that way but perhaps I misread. Perhaps I was simply trying to generalize his principle.

If you want a Story Now game as your top priority then sticking with D&D would not be a good plan in my opinion. That does not though mean you couldn't add in elements of Story Now in places. I think system does matter as someone mentioned above.

What perhaps I missed is the posters desire to stick with D&D. I assumed that was because he primarily wanted to do D&D things and of course he is familiar with the system. He just wanted to add some elements from other games. That is great and with that goal in mind I think it can be done. If he was wanting to just do a Story Now game though I believe he'd be better off playing a different game.

I had you on ignore from a long time ago, so you also couldn’t see my follow up posts. I’ve fixed that now.

And yeah, the idea is that it’s perfectly valid to want to play D&D, and add elements of other games to tweak the play experience, rather than playing Alien when one wants to play a magical fantasy horror story on a floating castle.

 

[Argyle King]

That’s actually how some downtown activities work in Xanathar’s. Crime is 3 checks with 3 different skills, and you either get jailed (no successes), caught but escape (only 1 success), partial success getting half the intended score (2 successes), or get in and out like a phantom, getting the full score (all successes). I would probably add a way to potentially get more out of it than planned, maybe all successes and at least 1 nat20, but otherwise it’s solid.

I think the heist discussion...

...Anyway, yeah skill challenge as a way to make resolution less binary is very cool, and has precedence in existing 5e mechanics.

For me, the idea came partially from personal preference and partially from a time when I was playing both D&D 4E and GURPS 4E.

I liked the general concept of 4E skill challenges; I also liked the idea of margin of success from GURPS.

On the surface, the systems are very different, but I learned a lot about DMing by having familiarity with different ways of doing things. Surprisingly, I found there were ideas from each that made running the other better.

In a lot of ways, 5E is an improvement. But there are also areas in which I think the design isn't quite as modular or flexible as was originally advertised.

 

[dave2008]

I think part of what makes me scratch my head is that, from most of the examples provided, folks who are saying D&D can be modified to deliver a different experience (horror, crime, etc.) are generally adopting the kinds of mechanics that are inherent parts of other games.

It’s odd.

If I do it is a convergent evolution. I haven't play another system since the 80s. I do check out other systems occasionally (for instance the BitD clocks are similar to the PF2e VP system and if needed I may incorporate them into my games).

So when I do horror, or low magic (our standard game), or gritty (also our standard game), it comes from modifying what 5e (and originally 1e and 4e) gives me to suit what I want. If it is similar to other games, that is mostly coincidence. I have not run a heist, but I did not feel I needed any special rules to run an infiltration style encounter(s).