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

[Argyle King]

@Argyle King

I appreciate your long post (hence the xp), but I cannot remotely conceive (in terms of how the actual system gives rise to antagonism/"being-an-obstacle-to-PC-dramatic-need") of what you're envisioning here. In the actual play of the game.

If I'm running a 4e game at Epic Tier for a level 26 party and they're trying to Parley with an Ancient Red Dragon (level 30), I'm running a Complexity 1, Level 30 Skill Challenge. The Medium DC is 32 at that level. They need to defeat 4 * DC 32 obstacles before they fail * 3 (and lose the Parley). Let us say this is the beginning of the framing:

"Jendyx the Inferno lays like a disinterested dog in the molten slag of the burning volcano. Only a quarter of his body uncovered and even that is waxing and waning as the lava pools all around him. He knows you need his help...and he clearly doesn't feel threatened by you.

Without looking at you, his voice rumbles. Your people hail from a furnace much like this Katerina (a Fire Genasi). Refresh my memory. Wasn't their volcano doused by the Frozen Wind of the North (an Ancient White Dragon). And with that dousing, your proud people turned refugees. Those that didn't die as cowards from the dragon's razing their home.

...not impressed...or am I mistaken?"

You don't roll dice for monsters in 4e noncombat conflict resolution (just like in PBtA). The GM provides the thematic adversity/obstacles, provokes the players to action, and then changes the situation with more/new/escalated adversity. The only numbers that matter here are 32 and * 4 vs * 3. But those numbers don't tell me how much history Jendyx the Inferno knows, how initially he is unwilling to aid the PCs, how initially unimpressed he is, how deep his reservoir of Arcana is (knowledge or power). Like 6-, 7-9, and 10+ in PBtA, they just tell me what target numbers PCs have to get what they want and move the fiction and gamestate along in a trajectory that nets them a Story Win (Jendyx's aid) or a Story Loss (Jendyx's ire).

Just like in PBtA games, its my job to faithfully frame conflicts and convey Jendyx as x, y, and z (and in so doing provoke PCs into action/decision-points).

Maybe the PC goes with a History move, succeeds, and corrects a detail of the record for Jendyx and turn his move back on him (which he'll naturally say it was a test and they passed...and then I'll move to the next Jendyx parley obstacle). And things will continue on from there.

Its unclear to me what you're imagine here is a problem. And I would have to imagine that you would have exactly the same problem running a dragon in Dungeon World (given that, like 4e, DW's monsters are a collection of tags and numbers and its up to the GM to appropriately render them into the shared imagined space...then players make moves and roll dice - just like 4e - and we find out how things go)?

Do you have an example of some kind that can clarify? An example in either 4e or Dungeon World would do the trick in helping me understand what is going on "under the cognitive hood" for you as it pertains to the actual systemization of these games?

Nothing you mentioned there is a problem for me.

The issues I had were what I mentioned in my previous post. There are times when monsters struggled to do many of the same things which would be relatively easy for PCs. It's been literally years since I have played 4E, but an example I remember talking about on a forum was designing an encounter in which the PCs were on gondola lift fighting against a group of enemies on a different gondola lift. It was rather trivial for the PCs to target and destroy the opposing gondola; for the monsters to use the same tactic was difficult.

I was in no way bothered by the PCs using that tactic. In fact, I expected that such a thing would be attempted. What I did not expect was that the numbers generated by the PCs would interact with the numbers the game world was built upon in very different way from how the numbers generated by the monsters were able to interact with the numbers the game world was built upon. In a game which was built around cool combats with moving parts and action (and a game which honestly did a good job at that,) something which was designed to be cool literally fell apart because I did not expect such a drastic difference in what the PCs could do versus what the monsters could do in terms of how they interacted with the world around them. Different? Sure. But that different? No. That was during one of my first attempts at running 4E. It did not upset me nor did it turn me away from the game; I simply learned that how the game instructed me to build things was not the best way to build things for the ideas I had.

If we're talking specifically about skill checks and narrative resolution, I mentioned a few pages back how I ran skill challenges differently.

Additionally, I will say that -if playing with one of the groups I played (from the player side of) 4E with toward the end of 4E- there were a few players who may be inclined to use brute force against the dragon because they would be confident (and probably correct in surmising) that they could beat it into submission. I did not start with saying that because part of the "problem" there is one of play style. Even so, some of what may be perceived as "bad behavior" was partially enabled, taught by, and informed by what they learned they were able to do power-wise in relation to other things in the game.

I put things in "quotations" because I am not attempting to make a judgement concerning whether or not that style of play is good or bad. However, they were experiences that I watched from the player side of things and mentally noted to inform how I ran the game differently. They were also things which I noticed were bothersome to the DM running the game at the time. It became unfun for that the DM to run the game.

 

[Argyle King]

Thinking more...

There is actually an example which covers both skill challenges and the game-world math.

I can't remember which book it is in, but I believe one of the official examples for how to incorporate a skill challenge into a combat was an example which had a rogue attempting to disable a trap as a skill challenge while in the middle of combat.

looks at character sheet

So, my choices are either...

a) attack the trap (with even one of my weak powers) and have a good chance of breaking it with one action

or...

b) one of the PCs chooses to not participate in helping to fight the enemy for 3-4 rounds, and the end result of doing that might be a failure which makes the situation worse

In my head, the idea of B sounds pretty cool for an adventure game and the mental picture of trying to hold off a zombie horde or whatever so that my ally can use his specific skill set to fix a problem facing the party is cool. That's a common scene in movies.

However, the reality is that the math of the game makes option A the far better option in most circumstances.

It is possible for the DM to fudge the numbers against the players or just simply say it doesn't work. Depending upon how exactly the scene is framed and what the particular trap or problem facing the PCs is illustrated to be, it may also be viable to say that attempting to smash it is an auto-fail and makes the situation worse.

Even then, the solution appears to be to simply just not use the numbers which the game says to not use. As my solution was to also not use them (by virtue of using altered math,) I suppose I have something in common with the previous paragraph.

That's part of where the cognitive block was for me. How the actual books of the game were telling me I should run/play the game from the perspective of framing a scene did not make sense in the context of how the same books told me the mechanics of the game worked.

A lot of things about 4E were really good. To be completely honest, if I were to run a game for the group of my friends who typically only play D&D, I may be inclined to choose running 4E over 5E. However, were I to do so, I would hope I were able to find my old notes from how I ran things differently from the published material.

~edited to fix a spelling error

 

[Campbell]

@Manbearcat

I love the game that 4e is and really enjoyed running it, but on an aesthetic level the stat block looks a lot like they should be part of noncombat resolution. It often would cause a level of cognitive dissonance for me as a GM. It's weird the more narrative stat lines in Cortex+ I'm fine with. Not having stats at all also fine with. It's when stats look like PC stats, but aren't used in the same way that I have a slight aesthetic aversion. It's like not a big deal, but aesthetically PF2's thing where DCs are based off character stats for who you are affecting feel somewhat better if the game provides stats. Brains are weird.

 

[Manbearcat]

@Manbearcat

I love the game that 4e is and really enjoyed running it, but on an aesthetic level the stat block looks a lot like they should be part of noncombat resolution. It often would cause a level of cognitive dissonance for me as a GM. It's weird the more narrative stat lines in Cortex+ I'm fine with. Not having stats at all also fine with. It's when stats look like PC stats, but aren't used in the same way that I have a slight aesthetic aversion. It's like not a big deal, but aesthetically PF2's thing where DCs are based off character stats for who you are affecting feel somewhat better if the game provides stats. Brains are weird.

Brains are indeed weird.

What if every 4e Monster included the DCs for their level, their Instinct and noncombat moves. For instance, take this level 30 Ancient Red Dragon:

DCs: 32, 42
Instinct: To watch the world wilt in your presence.
Moves: Test their mettle, raze a city with ease, bring ruination to precious bonds, casually belittle them, demand tribute.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not even sure what this discussion is about anymore. It certainly doesn't help that the OP has me on ignore.

Does make it more than a little confusing reading some posts, doesn't it?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think that's pretty fair. While they obviously have more traction I do think Dungeons and Dragons, Legend of the Five Rings, Shadowrun, Exalted and Vampire are pretty much just as idiosyncratic. A lot of RPGs seem to be a pretty weird mix of genre.

Well, D&D has always been kind of a kitbash of a bunch of fantasy tropes that normally don't hang together, so it depends on how you perceive that. I'm not qualified to talk about LotFR. Shadowrun is absolutely an odd hybrid (it landed just as a number of such things such as TORG were in the wings), but fundamentally its just one of the more surface takes on cyberpunk with magic layered over it, but the magic only really changes the overall feel in some peripheral cases mostly (things like the whole insect spirit) but it doesn't change the main thrust of that kind of sort of surface cyberpunk much. My feeling is Exalted seems to be exploring a broad strokes version of certain sorts of Eastern myth cycles in an accessible but high powered way, but I'm not altogether knowledgeable enough to judge it. Vampire, I can't say I see as anything but a pretty common take on vampire culture in urban fantasy, with a bit of all of it rolled it together.

So I have to disagree about most of them, at least. The things that have been mashed together in a number of these don't really change the basic thrust of the genre involved (though in some cases they're mashing together pieces of it that don't normally go together, and arguably don't work as well together as it could).

 

[Argyle King]

Well, D&D has always been kind of a kitbash of a bunch of fantasy tropes that normally don't hang together, so it depends on how you perceive that. I'm not qualified to talk about LotFR. Shadowrun is absolutely an odd hybrid (it landed just as a number of such things such as TORG were in the wings), but fundamentally its just one of the more surface takes on cyberpunk with magic layered over it, but the magic only really changes the overall feel in some peripheral cases mostly (things like the whole insect spirit) but it doesn't change the main thrust of that kind of sort of surface cyberpunk much. My feeling is Exalted seems to be exploring a broad strokes version of certain sorts of Eastern myth cycles in an accessible but high powered way, but I'm not altogether knowledgeable enough to judge it. Vampire, I can't say I see as anything but a pretty common take on vampire culture in urban fantasy, with a bit of all of it rolled it together.

So I have to disagree about most of them, at least. The things that have been mashed together in a number of these don't really change the basic thrust of the genre involved (though in some cases they're mashing together pieces of it that don't normally go together, and arguably don't work as well together as it could).

I think it may be fair to say that, at this point, D&D is almost its own sub-genre. It grew out of fantasy (as well as sci-fi and a few other things,) but it has grown into something which has its own tropes and genre conventions. I think part of this evidenced by discussions about rules and mechanical game structure I've seen, in which the debate about changing the rule becomes less about whether or not the rule should change than it becomes about whether or not such a change cause the game to be something that's "not D&D."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I look at it as that's only one type of RPG and D&D is at root the other.

D&D came from a hacked tabletop wargame where the players took the POV character and wanted to do things that the rules didn't account for and so they had the DM to handle that. (4e is only different in that it tried to move from wargame to combat centric boardgame). The two goals can work together at the same table but they are actually different foundations - and it's why most RPGs are so combat heavy.

The things the rules do for freeform are provide conflict resolution that lets you be heard and then blame the dice, and provide points of inspiration. And that's why success-with-consequences mechanics work so well for freeform plus; they make the game more interesting rather than just smoother than not having them.

And I'm with you that each rule and each second spent engaging with the rules directly or, worse, stopping play to look them up is a net negative unless they provide something else.

I see the history of RPGs differently. It was DAVE ARNESON, with his freeform RP Braunstein experience who invented D&D. The 'hacking a wargame' part came LATER, when a combat system was needed, THEN Chainmail, AC, and HP (stolen from Dave's naval combat rules) were added. While I think wargames ARE a great part of the DNA of D&D, it was the fusion of the two branches of 'Kriegspiel' that actually created D&D.

 

[pemerton]

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!).

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).

I agree with this. The most common complaints I saw about skill challenges were two:

(1) "Dice-rolling exercise" - this is a picture of the skill challenge in which (i) the GM stipulates the checks required at the outset, (ii) these are then made by the players largely independent of the initial fictional framing and with no unfolding framing over the course of the challenge, and (iii) the outcome of the challenge is determined by totalling up the results of those checks. This approach to skill challenge resolution obviously contradicts what the DMG says, and what it models with its examples, but it seems to have been extremely common.

(2) "Artificial pacing/outcomes" - this is a complaint that rests on a premise that the only way to frame and adjudicate skill checks is "naturalistic"/"process-oriented", and hence rejects or does not even consider (a) that failure can be narrated in all sorts of ways beyond you suck! (see eg @Manbearcat's gorge; or an example I once gave of a failed Diplomacy check, in an outdoor context, being narrated as the rain starting to fall part way through the character's entreaty) nor (b) that the whole point of the SC pacing (and much like hp pacing in combat) is to constrain the GM's narration precisely so as to deliver a degree of certainty and control to the players.

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.

On this point @Argyle King is correct. Here is the relevant passage from p 55 of the 4e PHB:

When damage of a power is described as more than one type, divide the damage evenly between the damage types (round up for the first damage type, round down for all others). For example, a power that deals 25 fire and thunder damage deals 13 fire damage and 12 thunder damage.​

This was later changed by errata; I don't remember when. The revised rule is found in the glossary in PHB 3, but I think that the errata predated that. (Sidenote: in looking up books on this point I also discovered that PHB 2 changed the MM definition of Overland Flight! I don't think I ever knew that before.)

 

[pemerton]

FWIW, I highly enjoy GURPS, so... Though, I would agree that it was a mistake on the part of 3.x because 3.x was trying to emulate what GURPS was doing while also adhering to the tenets of a d20 system and D&D style linear levels; the two design goals generally conflict.

This is very true. In the context of 3E it produces nonsense like "natural armour bonuses" of 30+!

It's not that I expected 4E to be "real" in terms of the real world; I simply expected it to be "real" in the context of the story it was telling. Edit: ...or more accurately, at least attempt to be real in the context of the story the game was trying to tell me.

If it is established in the story that some demon or dragon is a terror to behold and the scourge of the world, it's a bit strange when that same creature struggles to perform tasks which are trivial to the PCs. The lore of the game didn't match up with what happened when the game was brought to the table.

My view is that, especially at paragon and epic tiers, the skill bonuses in NPC/creature stat blocks are largely ignorable unless being used for some particular combat-related purpose like resolving a jump check or perhaps an escape from a PC's grapple. What is missing (which is not missing in the defence and attack numbers) is an integration of the sorts of bonuses that high-level PCs have that make their skill bonuses meaningful in relation to high-level DCs.

Solving this problem in a fundamental way would require revisiting the maths of skill bonuses from the ground up and trying to bring it into line with attack and defence numbers. I believe that @AbdulAlhazred does just this in his HoML hack/variant.