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

[pogre]

Bespoke is a new word to me - so, I learned something from this thread...

Addressing the topic - I don't see it as strictly black and white. I'm a rules matter kind of guy. However, in a D&D campaign I'm not afraid to stretch the framework to accommodate other styles of adventures. I LOVE dungeon delving and combat. That is what D&D does really well. However, I will admit nothing but dungeon delving tends to get old.

Even though I think there are other systems that handle horror, mysteries, heists, etc. better - those kind of adventures still show up in my D&D campaign too.

 

[dave2008]

I still have zero idea where you are getting this from. "Ought"? Nope. It shouldn't work this way. It does because there is like, ZERO advice suggesting that it shouldn't. But, I'll get back to that in a second.

Is there advice that it should? I certainly don't remember that. Does it say anywhere in the PHB and DMG that the result of a failed ability check should be "catastrophic?" I know there is advice suggestion otherwise in the DMG (though it could be more clear and more in depth advice), but I don't recall reading a failed check should be catastrophic.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well, yeah, it is absolutely clear. Couldn't be clearer. Success means you get past. Failure means the alarm is raised. Seems pretty clear. Failure might mean the alarm is raised is less clear no?

If failure on a stealth check automatically means the alarm is raised, you’re moving past what the check was called for to cover and adjudicating another thing based on it.

Unless you specifically called for a check “to avoid the alarm being raised”.

If the check is to sneak by the guard, then all we know for sure on a failure is that you didn’t sneak past the guard.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The party goes in on little cat feet, execute careful strikes and then fall back.

Sounds like an infiltration scenario to me. It's not meant as a frontal assault. It's not meant as diplomacy. And, if the group isn't careful about their strikes, they will be completely overwhelmed and squished. I'd call it a series of infiltrations.

This is what I'm talking about re: definitions. You're proving my point.

So harassing attacks, guerilla warfare, hit-and-fade, raiding, whatever you might call that, to me that's not at all infiltration. That's an entirely different approach (I named a few names for it).

To you, it's apparently well-within a much-broader category of "infiltration". Thus I am correct to say we have fundamentally different definitions of infiltration.

I guess what's weird though is, if Against the Giants is "infiltration", right, like you say? And you're saying D&D is "bad at infiltration", right? But isn't pretty good for Against the Giants? I mean, it always struck me as a set of adventures that ran really well in 1E, 2E and even in other editions. Do you disagree? And if it works well, and is infiltration, surely that's running against the idea you're suggesting, which is that D&D is bad at infiltration? I'm honestly not trying to be a dick on this I'm just like... confused as to the point you're making.

Yeah, it's best if we don't replay to each other any more. It's simply not worth it. Feel free to have the last word.

Don't mind if I do! But fair enough, and to be clear, I like your posts generally, I think we're both talking past each other a bit due to definition issues (including of "catastrophic" I suspect).

 

[iserith]

Now, can you show me where you were told to do this? Because, I can show you a lot of threads from this board alone that would never, ever do it that way.

Paging @iserith. If you would care to weigh in here on this? I know that we disagree on how to run skills, but, AIR, you wouldn't do it this way either.

I haven't read the thread, but to answer just your question and nothing else, I do offer the DC and the stakes in my games, if the stakes aren't obvious prior to the roll. To my knowledge, this is not in the D&D 5e rules. It has many upsides and no downsides in my view so I think it's a good practice.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Such a good post until you got here lol.

First off, we're not talking about the modern day. And historically, it's absolutely fair to say that, it's particularly fair pre-1700 or so. In fact, pre-1700, it's probably an understatement.

But I nearly put in a caveat saying "obviously this doesn't apply to modern-day or recent past soldiers who have to stand guard as part of their duties" (same for police who have to do that too). But I thought "Naaaah, no-one is actually going to think that it does, because obviously we're not talking modern-style soldiers in most D&D heists, we're talking 1300s to 1600s hired help and low-INT monstrous humanoids". Apparently I overestimated the audience's desire to read generously there, in a sense. I guess the old adage is true.

But yeah, I don't mean modern-day soldiers or police because I'm talking about a D&D setting, not, like, your local military base or bank or w/e. Actual soldiers don't have the "embarrassment" factor either, because it's more embarrassing to not follow protocol than it is to "cry wolf", so that yeah a level of discipline like, say, modern-day US soldiers would make a heist near-impossible unless it was pure deception of a kind that relied on the machine working itself.

If you're running D&D like the sort of guys hired to guard a counting house or whatever are disciplined and highly-trained US soldiers (which even pretty basic recruits are today), with an extremely well-developed set of protocols and methodologies, a perfect chain of command, and so on, well, I think obviously then it's going to be real tough for anyone going up against that. I wouldn't do that myself. They're people who've been hired to stand around all day and look threatening. It's likely they're from various backgrounds, not well-disciplined (few armies were, and they're not an army), that they probably don't have any espirt de corps, bored, not necessarily very bright, and to have picked a job which doesn't involve them doing much work, and likely does mean they get to push some people around (just not the rich ones).

Anyway, ignoring those shenanigans, I actually agree that adventure has pretty bad guidance. I don't agree that means you have to take a catastrophist approach because of how one adventure is written, nor that it demands a catastrophist approach, but it's bad guidance, I can't disagree.

I... man, wow. I mean, you hear about the terribly false idea that pre-industrial peoples were stupid, but it's not often you run into it so bluntly. This is, all around, an absolutely bad take. People has always taken guard duty seriously -- it is, quite literally, often a matter of life and death. The idea that Romans were lazy at guarding things, or the Spartans, or the Huns, or the Mayans, or the Amer-Indians, or the Turks, or the Saxons, or Huns, or Vikings... just incredibly bad.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Its kind of a weird thing though, because if you think about it, in Dungeon World say, imagine you roll a 10+, you get what you want, and now its time for the GM to make a move, so something happens that is not, fictionally, good news for the PCs, and it is quite possible it is directly connected to what you just succeeded at. Likewise inf you roll a 7-9, you succeed, and then some sort of complication or other negative thing arises. This time it is pretty much guaranteed to be closely tied to what you just did, but really there's very little difference between the two classes of result, in fiction terms. How you FEEL about it, that may be different, I cannot say.

I think if you don't understand the psychological difference between "The GM decides this is going to happen" and "my die roll decides this is going to happen" then you're never going to get it; the latter produces a very strong feeling of incompetence in some people, and that's just the way it is. As I've noted before, they don't see it as "This is a success with complications"; they see it as "this is a mitigated failure."

Me, I'm more tolerant of failure in the first place, and since I GM more than I play I can see some of the function it serves. I'm just unconvinced its worth the cost, and since the degree of stylization in other parts of PbtA games are often not my cuppa, there's nothing to overcome that feeling, though I do admire parts of the design in some of its more unusual expressions like Monsterhearts.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Bespoke is a new word to me - so, I learned something from this thread...

Addressing the topic - I don't see it as strictly black and white. I'm a rules matter kind of guy. However, in a D&D campaign I'm not afraid to stretch the framework to accommodate other styles of adventures. I LOVE dungeon delving and combat. That is what D&D does really well. However, I will admit nothing but dungeon delving tends to get old.

Even though I think there are other systems that handle horror, mysteries, heists, etc. better - those kind of adventures still show up in my D&D campaign too.

This kind of nuanced, middle of the road logic has no place in this thread!!! Pick an extreme and act accordingly or else beat it!!!

 

[Thomas Shey]

"Rulings not rules" was most definitely propaganda, but it is propaganda that has taken root into the hearts and minds of the community.

That was a shibboleth with a certain part of the hobby well before 5e (which was pretty much the point, trying to see if they could fish some of the OSR folks back in).

 

[Aldarc]

That was a shibboleth with a certain part of the hobby well before 5e (which was pretty much the point, trying to see if they could fish some of the OSR folks back in).

Much like "roleplaying not rollplaying," but thankfully this has mostly died or at least faded to a much softer murmur than it once was in online discussion.