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

[Thomas Shey]

Likely "their dice; their failure."

Yup.

But the thing is, a lot of systems with success with complication states also have ways to mitigate failure or boost complicated successes into full successes. In Fate, for example, you can spend a Fate point, invoke an Aspect, and get a +2 (or more) on your roll.

Unless you can do it pretty consistently, that's not going to change how people feel about it much.

 

[Manbearcat]

I've seen fail forward design discussed a lot going back into the '00s. Success with complications I didn't see get big until PtbA games got really big, so more recently, but I haven't played a single D&D game which uses Success with complications (and I don't think it's a great idea for D&D).

My recollection of Fail Forward is that (a) the discussion of it started on The Forge in the early '00s ("no whiffing"). (b) The first actual game I recall deploying it was Burning Wheel in '02.

Both the OSR and 3e crowd pretty much universally hated The Forge (and still do so far as I can tell) and most either hated (without ever having played) or hadn't heard of BW as of very recently. The also hated 4e (surprise!)!

So if suddenly there is this significant acceptance of these concepts in the D&D community, it would be a massive reversal (to say the least!).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Both the OSR and 3e crowd pretty much universally hated The Forge (and still do so far as I can tell) and most either hated (without ever having played) or hadn't heard of BW as of very recently. The also hated 4e (surprise!)!

I don't mean to like, be mean, but I feel like you may overstating how broad and deep these sort of feeling were, re: "hated" and "hadn't heard of" and so on. Like, I think there were a few vocal people who did hate that stuff (but who would have heard of BW), but I don't think that was really as much of the "OSR and 3E" crowd as you're implying.

I mean, what you defined crowd as though? People who play those games? Or people who exclusively play those games in a conscious and ideological way? The second being like a single digit percentage of the first.

I feel like you're maybe traumatized or something and see the feelings as running a lot hotter than they did.

Also, like, looking at real people, not internet people, who play/run RPGs who I've met in the real world or even on video conferences or the like, I'd say generally feelings are a lot less overwrought than messageboards, and like, one of the DMs who runs one of my D&D campaigns is keen on BW conceptually, for example, but he doesn't run D&D like that at all.

So if suddenly there is this significant acceptance of these concepts in the D&D community, it would be a massive reversal (to say the least!).

Well, it might factor in that from 2015-2020 the D&D community has enlarged many times over, and many of the people are joining from outside TT RPGs, or having been absent from online discussion of them for a long time. We're talking about more people playing D&D alone now than were playing RPGs at all in height of the d20 era, maybe several times more.

That's obviously not the case at this fairly grog-tastic site (god bless us our hearts), but it's certainly pretty obvious on, say, reddit.

 

[tetrasodium]

What I'm curious about is when this alleged Success With Complications or Fail Forward revolution came online.

It sure as hell wasn't online during the 4e era of 2008-2014. The pushback against 4e SWC and FF action resolution in Skill Challenges was nothing less than an onslaught. And those that weren't involved in that pushback either (a) didn't run Skill Challenges

It sure as hell wasn't online during the early 5e era of 2014-spring 2017 when I was posting on the 5e forums. Same goes for pretty much no one was using the Social Interaction conflict mechanics (when I posted about this on the 5e forums, damn near no one even had a clue what I was talking about!), people were sparingly using IBFTs and Inspiration, and the actual Player Fiat deployment of Background Traits was enormously controversial. I have no idea if any/all of those things are overturned at this point.

So if SWC and/or FF handling of 5e action resolution has suddenly come online, it has only come online in the Summer of 2017 to now.

I'm going to post a poll to see if we can get any actual data on the usage of this.

Back when 4e was.. well... 4e People started looking at other systems, some of them were fate pbta & the games that forked off of them. dfrpg came out in 2010, fate core 2013 & BitD 2017. As more people experienced playing those types of gams it more people talked about how they help them with d&d or provide differences that are meaningful to showing strengths & weaknesses in d&d in ways that allow good room for discussion into them. When 5e came out in 2013 some of those people who left 4e started coming back & brought their experience in other systems with them to discuss.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The problem is that Hussar's position (not @ ing him because he said he's out and that'd be rude) was that he had seen nothing else, and he himself ran D&D that way (this last bit was confusing, because he also suggested later it was the wrong way to run D&D... so...?!).

I'm not going to comment on the latter part, but if you'd talked to me during a particular period of my life, I'd probably have seen nothing else, either. That's the gig; even though its not universal, nothing in my gaming life has taught me its anything but fairly common. Others in this thread seemed to have seen the same thing. You, and some others, on the other hand, haven't.

So which is more typical? I don't see any way to demonstrate one way or the other, do you?

And without that, everyone is going to go with the experiences they expect. In my case that's if you don't actively teach people to use gradients, they'll at least pretty likely not use moderation in too many cases. As I said, I used to see this with things like Climbing all the time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In my case that's if you don't actively teach people to use gradients, they'll at least pretty likely not use moderation in too many cases. As I said, I used to see this with things like Climbing all the time.

Yeah makes a degree of sense though I guess it sort of has an issue that "at least pretty likely not" is bearing an awful lot of weight.

So which is more typical? I don't see any way to demonstrate one way or the other, do you?

Not really but the charge laid was that D&D wasn't merely encouraging of this, it somehow mandated it. Like it was literally intended. And not doing it was "doing it wrong" (maybe doing it wrong for great justice, but still wrong).

I guess if I think about it, the fact that I learned primarily from D&D and D&D-like RPGs and didn't get that impression actually proves D&D does not mandate it. Because I wasn't doing anything special or wacky.

So that simplifies that!

Of course, this also allows that D&D doesn't do enough to prevent catastrophism in those naturally tending towards that mindset. And I think that's the real issue with D&D. D&D neither formally embraces catastrophism, nor actively and clearly denies it, and the d20+X vs TN system is binary and so linear in its math, and D&D is so lacking any kind of nuance or re-rolls or the like that it's easy to fall into that trap.

 

[Manbearcat]

I feel like you're maybe traumatized or something and see the feelings as running a lot hotter than they did.

I don't know what to tell you.

You were there. We interacted with the same deluge of edition war against 4e by dozens and dozens of posters on here. I'm not traumatized. My position on this is straight-forward. You're misremembering the intensity and the breadth of pushback. I don't know why you are...but you are. @innerdude posted several threads on subjects about this or adjacent subjects and all of these were monstrous in size because of the controversy. Virtually every 4e thread that was posted that discussed these subjects featured either a deluge of drive-by thread-crapping and/or (typically both) a concerted effort by the same posters (which numbered well into the double digits) to push back.

I don't know why you're underselling the toxicity and intensity of this aspect of the Edition War, but...here we are. I'm assuming you were mostly indifferent to this particular aspect of it so the signal just didn't register with you. Who knows.

But that is where I'm going to leave it (I'm not traumatized...you're not correct).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't know what to tell you.

You were there. We interacted with the same deluge of edition war against 4e by dozens and dozens of posters on here. I'm not traumatized. My position on this is straight-forward. You're misremembering the intensity and the breadth of pushback. I don't know why you are...but you are. @innerdude posted several threads on subjects about this or adjacent subjects and all of these were monstrous in size because of the controversy. Virtually every 4e thread that was posted that discussed these subjects featured either a deluge of drive-by thread-crapping and/or (typically both) a concerted effort by the same posters (which numbered well into the double digits) to push back.

I don't know why you're underselling the toxicity and intensity of this aspect of the Edition War, but...here we are. I'm assuming you were mostly indifferent to this particular aspect of it so the signal just didn't register with you. Who knows.

But that is where I'm going to leave it (I'm not traumatized...you're not correct).

Yeah you’re definitely not exaggerating the pushback. I remember being told that FF and Skill challenges and partial success and all the rest were “inimical to roleplaying”, back in the day.

But stuff changes. A lot of times, folks aren’t especially willing to recognize that they changed their minds. The thing is, we don’t change our minds in a discussion very often, we mostly bunker down and shield up and double down. But people do change minds later, because of a discussion. They just, IME, act like the process never happened later. As if they weren’t crying havoc against the thing they now support, a year before. (Best examples I can think of are political, so we can’t get into them, but Gay Marriage in the US is an excellent example. Literally no one I know who used to oppose it ever recognizes having opposed it when talking about it now.)

People are weird.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Sorry, no.

Strawman naughty word about "stupidity" (since when is laziness a sign of stupidity lol?) has nothing to do with it, and I'm not talking about "The Spartans, or the Huns, or the Mayans, or the Amer-Indians, or the Turks, or the Saxons, or Huns, or Vikings", am I? Did they exist 1300-1600 in Europe?". Were like literally looking for excluded examples to increase how wrong you were? It's working pretty hard to include the Huns TWICE lol dude, when they're significant before this period!

Strawman harder though, or maybe we can talk about the sort of people who actually had this kind of job in the sort of societies we're discussing in, say FR D&D.

The idea that most of these people were as disciplined as modern soldiers shows a profound and extreme lack of understanding of those societies. With people like the Romans you can see it in their own writing, even. A Roman Legionary is going to be a far more dedicated and disciplined guard than a lot of these groups, because they have a discipline structure, formal ways of handling various procedures and so on, but some random Saxon levy? No. Nor a random Saxon who was is being paid by another Saxon to guard a thing.

You see this in the 20th century even - many heists/robberies IRL are successful entirely because the guards are lazy and/or don't follow procedures (or even have procedures in some cases).

The issue isn't modern/ancient, the issue is "pretty the best trained soldiers (or up there) in the 21st century" being compared to random mercenaries (essentially) being paid to guard stuff in the 1500s or whenever.

Wait, you've specifically called out 1300-1600 Europe as being the only place people were stupid enough to tolerate lazy guards? I mean, you want to complain that saying stupid is a strawman, but exactly what condition do you use to explain why anyone would tolerate lazy guards? The strawman is that you think that modern soldiers are any more disciplined about guarding than people who's lives where on the line. The only place you end up with lazy guards is in very safe locations where the guards often have little to no contact with anything dangerous, and then it's not a guarantee.

You want to complain about me putting up strawmen when you're expounding on a particularly stupid idea.

 

[Ovinomancer]

What I'm curious about is when this alleged Success With Complications or Fail Forward revolution came online.

It sure as hell wasn't online during the 4e era of 2008-2014. The pushback against 4e SWC and FF action resolution in Skill Challenges was nothing less than an onslaught. And those that weren't involved in that pushback either (a) didn't run Skill Challenges

It sure as hell wasn't online during the early 5e era of 2014-spring 2017 when I was posting on the 5e forums. Same goes for pretty much no one was using the Social Interaction conflict mechanics (when I posted about this on the 5e forums, damn near no one even had a clue what I was talking about!), people were sparingly using IBFTs and Inspiration, and the actual Player Fiat deployment of Background Traits was enormously controversial. I have no idea if any/all of those things are overturned at this point.

So if SWC and/or FF handling of 5e action resolution has suddenly come online, it has only come online in the Summer of 2017 to now.

I'm going to post a poll to see if we can get any actual data on the usage of this.

It's not online now. It's an internet argument searching for a way to be right, not an indication of anything broadly in place. I know, because I've been in threads advocating for it, and the pushback is strong and quick.