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

[Argyle King]

I guess we could ask him.

@Hussar , what are you saying?

Which of the two are you saying:

1) There is a right way to run 5e and its correct for 5e GM's to adjudicate "stealth obstacle failure = you're seen = the stealth ops part of the caper is up = deal with the new 'you're seen and alarm/violence is about to happen' framing = pretty much combat/A-Team or Wizard ensorcelling them if they can win initiative."

2) There is a stock/orthodox way to run 5e and thus an overwhelming majority of 5e GMs adjudicate "stealth obstacle failure = you're seen = the stealth ops part of the caper is up = deal with the new 'you're seen and alarm/violence is about to happen' framing = pretty much combat/A-Team or Wizard ensorcelling them if they can win initiative."

Which of those two are you saying?



Really? That is fascinating. We were in the same threads and our takeaway is entirely different. My entire experience and the point of my postings on here from 2012-2014 was to explain how Skill Challenges are indie conflict resolution that are informed by the techniques of Change the Situation, Say Yes or Roll the Dice, Cut to the Action, Genre Logic, Success With Complications, and Fail Forward.

I only saw math complaints unbelievably sparingly. The place I saw math complaints were in the Monster Math/Damage Expressions. THERE I saw plenty of complaints. Skill Challenges? Virtually nothing because the overwhelming majority of people weren't using them/hate them/didn't know how to use them.

Almost all of my interactions with complaints were:

* Skill Challenges don't work and end up in a pointless dice-rolling exercise disconnected from the fiction (because the people who were saying it didn't work weren't using the techniques above)...its all Fighters arbitrarily using push-ups to impress the king or lifting the king on his throne kind of incoherent nonsense.

* Both Success w/ Complications and Fail Forward underwritten by Genre Logic sucks because Genre Logic (rather than Process Sim) creates a lack of common inference-point between player and GM (hence the shifting sands commentary)...PROCESS SIM RULES!

* Fail Forward sucks because its EZMode for the players + GM Storytelling that removes player agency.

* Indie Scene Resolution (Skill Challenge) is garbage because Win Cons (x success) and Loss Cons (3 failures) for noncombat are metagame/artificial crap are jarring (remember that word!) and pull me out of my immersion (but HP...those Win Con/Loss Cons are not metagame in any way and are just fine!).


I mean, a lot of people in this thread were involved with those posts. Anyone commenting here want to chime in? Am I crazy? @AbdulAlhazred , @pemerton , @Campbell , @TwoSix , @Neonchameleon , @Aldarc and all the other folks who were on the other side of it who were among the vast chorus making the claims above (several of which are in this thread...but they're a tiny drop in the bucket of the outspoken Skill Challenge/4e detractors!)? I'm MORE than happy to be corrected!

I also remember complaints about Skill Challenge math in 4E.

Yes, it is true that Monster Math was the most common gripe. However, it was far from the only issue, simply the most visible one.

The Skill Challenge math in DMG1 was a little wonky; the "fix" in DMG2 could make things a little too easy, so neither was quite right. I vaguely remember sitting down with both books and eventually coming up with my own set of PCs which used both to inform my choices but matched neither.

Personally, one of my main issues with 4E was that there were three sets of (for lack of better words) Physics Engine Math in 4E: PC Math, Monster Math, and World Math. I disliked that PC Math and Monster Math interacted with World Math in drastically different ways. To clarify, I was okay with monsters being constructed differently than PCs, but it was weird to me that supposedly epic horrors of the world could sometimes struggle to do things which were trivial for a PC interacting with the world around them.

In time, I also learned that some of the weapon math was a problem. A lot of small ones and twos could lead to a PC failing to keep up. Choosing something like an axe (which had less of a bonus to hit) seems like it shouldn't be a big deal, but I've been at tables where that choice at first level put a player behind where the rest of the table was at when the group made it to level 10.

A lot of things in 4E worked really well, and much of the math was finely tuned. However, there were odd quirks of how it was built too.

Side note: I may be misremembering how this works because it has been a while, but I think this is accurate. I thought that the later way of doing resistances was weird. In the early books, if my character had Fire Resistance and I was hit with a power which had the Fire and Acid keywords, my resistance would apply to half of the damage. Later, that was changed to saying that the resistance didn't work at all; my PC would need both resistances to resist the damage. I understand that, in theory, this change was to make math easier at the table, but I believe it was a change which lead to a lot of late 4E shenanigans in which a PC could collect obscure keywords as a way to circumvent monster resistances. The need for system mastery was supposed to be lessened in 4E.

Somewhere, I have a notebook in which I started to redo a lot of the math for the game. It wasn't a drastic departure from how the game was already built; it was more of sitting down and figuring out how I could keep the idea behind how the game was built but also fix things I saw as problems. Things I had finished were encounter XP guidelines, changing how elites and solos were built, and skill challenge structure and math.

I stopped working on it because the group started to play other games. By the time we had thought about trying 4E again, 5E was being released.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I will have to take your word for that, but again, the question of 'popular vs good' is a complex question. I don't even know what 'based on' means, nor is 'sci-fi' a very narrow genre (IE Gamma World is called a Sci-Fi RPG, but it is nothing like Traveler, and the same system would definitely not work for both, not in 1000 years).

Okay? Replace "successful" with well reviewed and generally seen as quite good.

I disagree. TSR, or any other game designer which is seriously in it as a business, designed its games to be successful games. There were clearly game design reasons why D&D was not turned into a 'platform system' like BRP or GURPS.

And the game design reason was largely that the game wouldn't sell as well if it wasn't obviously and meaningfully mechanically distinct from their other games, because (in theory) gamers wouldn't view it as anything but a cheap way to claim to be putting out a new game while just reskinning an existing game.

See, again, you seem to be insensitive to the MASSIVE differences between Alternity and D&D. They are completely different beasts!

I've played at least a thousand hours of Alternity, and run hundreds of hours. I am very aware of how it plays. If you view it as completely different from dnd, then it's no wonder we don't see eye to eye on much of this discussion.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Argyle King

Oh don't get me wrong. Skill Challenge Math was absolutely a complaint. But it was comparatively a nothingburger (across the distribution of all of the commenters who complained about 4e, Skill Challenges, Objective DCs, Fail Forward, etc etc etc) when stacked up against the rest of that stuff (I'm talking total complaints + vociferousness).

EDIT - As far as 4e Resistances go, nothing changed from PHB1. I mean there may have been some clarification direct from the devs or something, but the PHB rulebook is clear enough to me that I never had any issues with it. Resistance is against a specific element only. So if you have a Thunder keyword attack, you only do Thunder keyword damage on that attack and Thunder Resistance 5 lops off 5 of that damage. If that same attack has a Lightning Keyword as well, it does both Lightning and Thunder damage so your specific Thunder Resistance doesn't negate the Lightning. The Lightning keyword infuses your attack with Lightning as well as Thunder and there isn't anything to indicate in either the Keyword section or the Resistance section or the Vulnerabilities section that would lead someone to believe there is any discretized math to it; eg half Thunder and half Lightning. Damage expressions are metagame units to resolve HP ablation only (not 1/3 Fire, 1/3 Frost, 1/3 Thunder if you have all 3 Keywords). Keywords infuse attacks with that property/element. None of that is "physics engine." Its just stuff to facilitate play expeditiously.

 

[tetrasodium]

You're not describing using rules directly re: SR, though. You're describing using the environment and drones etc. - this is absolutely possible in D&D mostly via magic, familiars, hirelings, and so on. It won't be identical, but the idea that in D&D you are just "riding the rail passively until the crash happens" is not rooted in the actual rules, it's rooted in play-approach.

Spoiler: There are literally 'class' equivalents devoted to the kinds of things I described

Shadowrun isn't quite a class game, but the way the pointbuy & prereqs work it's kinda midway between classless & having classes. Face, Decker, & sometimes riggers tend to have a lot of ways that can influence the path of that rail of disaster & even the others often have contacts if nothing else.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Personally, one of my main issues with 4E was that there were three sets of (for lack of better words) Physics Engine Math in 4E:

Thank you for using the term "Physics Engine Math", not because I agree with it but because I emphatically don't - but can see where you'd get if you used it.

In almost all RPGs the math is not intended to be a physics engine; it is a user interface. Treating it as a physics engine is a design mistake made by GURPS and 3.X among others and leads to a highly artificial feeling world. The game rules provide you an interface with tools to manipulate the shared fictional reality but are not themselves the reality, and a hit point isn't a real thing.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah, but that's light years from what you get in other games. Sure, it is good advice, but a bunch of it is optional or at least 'not the core way to do things', and even if you say "well, lets do a group check" there's not a lot of structure around what success, failure, or level of either one, that exists. I mean, 5e has bits and pieces, but it isn't a coherent system.

There is a bias difference at play here, by which I mean everyone involved has biases about game systems, many of which are incompatible with other folks' biases. You aren't ever going to convince anyone who gets more utility from more open-ended games with several paths to resolution that their preference is wrong and the game doesn't actually do the thing they experience it doing every single time they play.

Likewise, I won't ever convince you (difference being I'm not trying to) that your preference for a single hard-coded process in resolution is wrong, or that it doesn't get you the experience that you claim it gets you.

The fact is, there are people for whom DnD 5e is simply a bad game. For me, 3.5 DnD is simply a bad game. For others, in both cases, it's the best version of DnD yet, and the differences between the two systems absolutely contribute to why each is a good and bad game, depending on who is playing it.

So I guess you could say, system matters, but not always in the way folks mean when that phrase is normally used. Trying to force system to matter by tightly prescribing all resolution under one process, and mechanising every aspect of the game equally, decreases my enjoyment of a game, as a player and as a DM. For other people, it is what makes a game "coherent". Great! Have fun! I'll even purchase those other games sometimes because they're often very very cool, and I'll play them for short games both because I want to experience something mechanically different and I want to learn from different design philosophies. Just stop trying to tell me and others that our preference for 5e over pbta style games is wrong, or that the rules don't exist because they aren't universal resolution processes.

That anecdote does not remotely seem deranged or crazytown from where I'm sitting. Given what I've written above, my experience with 5e GMs/players in the wild, my experience on ENWorld, my experience with the backlash over 4e (which a big part was exactly these techniques that we're now championing for 5e)... I would be shocked if Hussar's anecdote is this deviant thing.

Who said it was deranged or deviant, or anything like that? Several of us have simply said that that outcome isn't necessary or inevitable, and that many groups run such scenarios without those outcomes, because different people play differently, and want/need different things from the game.

A lot of things in 4E worked really well, and much of the math was finely tuned. However, there were odd quirks of how it was built too.

Way too many stacking bonuses was one of the biggest problems. Get rid of that, and cut the accuracy math and damage/hp bloat in half, and you've got a much more manageable game, while losing nothing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ah, yes. The rules don’t exist if the GM can choose between multiple options.

No, but what we're saying is that a better system nails down the risk/reward/cost/benefit/context better than a basic unstructured 'check when and where the GM decides' does. When you simply add more options onto how the check itself works, that doesn't nail anything down! Imagine two scenarios:

1) GM uses basic core skill/ability checks as-written - The player cannot know when or if a check will be invoked, this is totally up to the GM. There's no 'context' (IE a check doesn't establish some increment of progress through some mechanism, like a track or SC, so it COULD be effectively ignored/insignificant). Once a check is called for by the GM the player simply rolls the dice. In a practical sense they can ask questions, but the fiction leading to the check is already set, and even if the GM is willing to revisit that (IE allow you to employ a consumable) you don't know if that is warranted or not, since the DC is totally up to the DM and hasn't been announced (again, you can ask, but nothing says you will either get an answer or be able to amend your actions based on whatever it is). Finally a binary pass/fail result is generated. There's no specific rules structure around what this implies. Does the fiction progress with the task now impossible? Or does the state remain as before? What determines which of the two is the case? If these rules are in play, then the player can expend Inspiration before rolling the check, but again this is a blind choice.

2) GM uses degrees of success - Literally nothing changes... The only difference is post-roll the GM may declare a partial failure/success with complications. The player doesn't have any way of knowing what these possibilities are, because again there is still no context.

This is the problem with 5e's entire check-based system, and none of the optional rules really address it competently. I think Inspiration and Hero Points were intended to do so, but they are not well-written and thus largely miss the mark. Even if you use them, you have not gained much without a broader structure to govern the whole process.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, but what we're saying is that a better system nails down the risk/reward/cost/benefit/context better than a basic unstructured 'check when and where the GM decides' does. When you simply add more options onto how the check itself works, that doesn't nail anything down!

No. You are simply assuming objectivity in a subjective metric of quality, and then applying to a game that never tried to meet that subjective definition.

This is the problem with 5e's entire check-based system, and none of the optional rules really address it competently. I think Inspiration and Hero Points were intended to do so, but they are not well-written and thus largely miss the mark. Even if you use them, you have not gained much without a broader structure to govern the whole process.

No, it is the strength of 5e's system, because each group creates their own, evolving, DnD. It's not your preference. That's it. Nothing more.

 

[Manbearcat]

Who said it was deranged or deviant, or anything like that? Several of us have simply said that that outcome isn't necessary or inevitable, and that many groups run such scenarios without those outcomes, because different people play differently, and want/need different things from the game.

The point I was addressing was specifically about Hussar and Ovinomancer having their positions being appraised and attacked for something that it doesn't look to me like they're saying.

Their positions (so far as I can reckon) is the following:

* 5e is SPECIFICALLY designed to produce massively heterogenous play (because its a GM-facing system with "GM decides" being multi-layered into action resolution mediation). This was one of their apex design priorities. We know because they talked about it constantly. And we know because their ruleset principles infuse 5e with this property. And we know because the play variance across the distribution of 5e tables is massive.

So, as far as 5e designers are concerned; Mission Accomplished.

* Because of (a) the cultural inertia of D&D (sans 4e) to NOT include the kinds of things that would fascilitate this kind of play (in fact be stridently against it) + (b) the fact that stock/orthodox 5e does not include the modular action resolution components that would fascilitate the type of play being espoused (Fail Forward isn't even in the rules text...its in the online Basic PDF + Success w/ Complications barely produces much in the way of that given its only a "fail by 1 or a 2" on a relatively large spread of results + Success w/ Complications is again, relegated to a module) = (c) the tables that Hussar specifically interacts with doesn't feature the properties of play that is being discussed here; the collision of stealth obstacles and failed action resolution = Stealth Op still online.

 

[Campbell]

@doctorbadwolf

Here's the thing. What you are calling an open ended approach does not contain the same approach as you see in games like Blades and Dungeon World within its core. It's not an expanded version of it. It's just different on a fundamental level. In other games you might be able to explore the same themes, but not in the same way. An approach that takes a more storyteller oriented methodology as you seem to you don't get to experience the tension of play in the same way that you experience in a Story Now game played with a sense of vulnerability. It's just not there.

Likewise your collaborative story telling / improv approach has advantages that's not apparent in Story Now play. I'm honestly not the best person to describe those advantages though.