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

[KainGuru]

Honestly, this sounds like he's playing two different games and just switching between them at various moments. I thought about doing that once -- cobbling together a rough hack for social/exploration of some other games and then using 5e's combat mechanics during combat. It's not terribly coherent.

But, that said, what mechanics is he using from 7th Sea and which edition? 1e had little guidance, although I appreciate that system so much more now that I've had some broader experiences. I'm not terribly familiar with 2e.

No, I understand this. This also assumes that people in general are good game designers and capable of making changes that work well. Given the level of interaction on this board about houserules, it doesn't seem well indicated. There are lots of asks to help fix problems that other houserules have caused that don't even understand that it was the first change that caused it -- they assume that there's something more to fix in 5e. This is also assumes that people have the time and inclination to do this level of work. Most people are leery of this in part because they understand that it's not easy and you can put in the work and still end up with a dissatisfying result.

Usually, the argument that rules are just suggestions and can be ignored at any time is a shallow justification for doing so ad hoc and on a whim in a given person's game. It's not a fundamental truth that needs saying, because everyone already knows this. It's a claim to make the obvious sound profound. And, it has a nasty little barb in it that if you don't do it yourself, it's a failing of you.

But, overall, you can't design something if you don't fully understand it. Or, at least, any success in this environment is accidental. Granted, the satisfaction criteria are often loose enough that you can stumble into acceptable designs much more often that you can if you were building a car, but that just perpetrates the false tale that game design is easy.

No, I've followed what you've actually said and stuck to that. You've directly claimed a desire for fewer restrictions on the GM to make things up in the moment, to make ad hoc rulings, and to be less tightly bound by the rules. This is a strong theme in all of your posts. I'm not extrapolating anywhere past this. If you didn't mean to convey this, then I'm really uncertain what you've been intending to convey with your posts.

What's telling is that you have the opportunity to correct any misunderstanding here and expound on what you do want, if it is different, but you've chosen to not do this but instead try to claim offense.

Well, this is certainly an unexpected statement, and one I am genuinely surprised by because of what you said about WotC needing to not ignore outliers. I'm uncertain of how to reconcile these two statements, but I'll go with this. I'm not sure what your point in saying this, is, though. I certainly haven't claimed that one game can account for every group's needs -- I've been strident that many games are, in fact, quite different and that different groups are quite different in what they want. You've been pretty consistent in arguing that 5e can support just about anything though, and in arguing that there's little difference in system -- it's just flavor changes. Again, I find it hard to reconcile your arguments in just the last few posts.

I reference outliers and variation because when I changed continents I became an outlier - social conventions are funny things. More so with RPGs.

I look at mechanics and fluff as separate entities - I'm not saying doing something in 5e that emulates a better suited game is the solution. I'm simply rejecting the notion that it can't be done to any degree at all - which some posters seem to believe. I think that those posters are assuming a certain type of play is universal - that's the danger, assumptions. ie: how they play may make it impossible but not everyone plays the same way.

Note that I'm arguing the 5e aspect simply because an indie game will, by virtue, support that style of play better - as I say that point is moot.

I'm not actually a huge fan of 5e TBH. But I do feel, at times, that it is a bit of a hobby punching bag. Mostly because a lot of its criticisms aren't really fair - there are options with it. I don't envy the writer of the next DMG as, short of having it in huge fonts and bold face: they're rulings not rules. To be fair if you're in a forum like this you are aware of these caveats - but, being honest, only a small percentage of players ever find their way to these types of forums.

I'll have to ask Johnathan how he use 7th Sea when he finally reopens his shop properly. Its been order and pickup only for over 12 months now - no instore gaming.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes. You've summed up my take quite well here.

But then you jump to this, which doesn't really fly. Both PCs and NPCs can fail in non-catastrophic ways. For example, reverse the situation: if a PC standing watch sees someone sneaking up on the party's camp does she wake everyone with a holler or does she maybe try to deal with it herself (maybe even via diplomacy!) and not disturb everyone's sleep or does she just wake one other person as a backup?

Well, no, that creates real problems when the GM says "Yeah, the assassin failed his check to get past your elite gate guards, but they were too cocky to sound the alarm immediately and so he got through anyway." It is pretty likely to get you stink eye real quick. I mean, I don't want to make it sound like I'm just building a wall of objections. Of course it works, some of the time. It is just quite likely that there's a temptation to soft sell PC failures and hard sell NPC ones, and then what you really need is a system that does NOT treat PCs and NPCs the same, which is what I am really saying. In fact, I think I mentioned it before, my own game's current iteration doesn't have GM tossing ANY dice at all. Only PCs have conflicts which need/benefit from stochastic mechanics at all.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I reference outliers and variation because when I changed continents I became an outlier - social conventions are funny things. More so with RPGs.

I look at mechanics and fluff as separate entities - I'm not saying doing something in 5e that emulates a better suited game is the solution. I'm simply rejecting the notion that it can't be done to any degree at all - which some posters seem to believe. I think that those posters are assuming a certain type of play is universal - that's the danger, assumptions. ie: how they play may make it impossible but not everyone plays the same way.

I tend to look at mechanics and fluff as separate -- the very terms are separable by definition. If they apply, you can separate. So, that's not an area where I'm going wrong. Also, the weasel wording of to any degree at all is doing a heck of a lot of work here. I can run a story about teenage romantic drama while being a monster in 5e with no changes and get that to work to some degree. It'll be a terrible experience for those looking for that, though, but it would work to some degree. The goal of to any degree is not acceptable -- minimum acceptability is to at least a reasonable degree, and that's were people differ. I'm not sure I can hack 5e to get to what Monsterhearts delivers to a reasonable degree. 5e isn't at all built to impose the weirdness of uncertain teenage libido on PCs.

Note that I'm arguing the 5e aspect simply because an indie game will, by virtue, support that style of play better - as I say that point is moot.

I'm not actually a huge fan of 5e TBH. But I do feel, at times, that it is a bit of a hobby punching bag. Mostly because a lot of its criticisms aren't really fair - there are options with it. I don't envy the writer of the next DMG as, short of having it in huge fonts and bold face: they're rulings not rules. To be fair if you're in a forum like this you are aware of these caveats - but, being honest, only a small percentage of players ever find their way to these types of forums.

I'm actually a fan of 5e. I'm criticizing it from a position of being quite happy with what it does do. I'm not sure I really want people that don't care for it white knighting it because they have a need to defend something. That's an odd thing to do.

I'll have to ask Johnathan how he use 7th Sea when he finally reopens his shop properly. Its been order and pickup only for over 12 months now - no instore gaming.

Well, I have a lot of experience with 7th Sea 1e, and I've hacked it into a couple of different genres -- Firefly-esque space opera and swords and sorcery fantasy. I also have a lot of experience with 5e, but, admittedly, I haven't done any hacking into different genres -- largely because I play 5e for the default genre. And, with all of that, I'm not sure how I'd go about coherently integrating the two games. I can see lots of rough hacks that kinda/sorta do a thing, but they'd have some serious incoherencies with either system due to the fact that the games run differently. And, if you're saying your friend leans into the narrative approach to 7th Sea (which isn't fully necessary, but I'd recommend it), it gets a bit harder.

I've tried pulling narrativist approaches into 5e. I do have a pretty robust skill challenge that is fiction forward, so I guess that might count as a 5e hack. But, I've pulled back from that a bit, as even that doesn't play well with the core game. It's a tad incoherent to go from a narrativist risk/reward approach and slam right into the hard coded combat engine of 5e. It jars.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Can we PLEASE start talking about the forest and not the bleeding tree? Ok, ok, G series was a BAD example. How about the A series then? Or Keep on the Borderland? My point was, virtually every module since day one has the same reaction for guards - see the party, raise the alarm. The argument was that this was some bizarre corner case of DM's gone bad. My point was that it wasn't that at all. It was DM's who have played the game for years, and the advice by the game writers nearly every single time has been "see the party, raise the alarm".

So, no, it's not some bizarre interpretation that has been pulled out of the ether. It's based on how the writers of the game have presented the game FOR FORTY FREAKING YEARS.

Totally agree, though TBH I stopped buying modules somewhere in the mid-80's, so I'd be poorly positioned to tell you where things stand in anything like even the early WotC material. B2 does give the GM some ideas/leeway as far as the different monster groups don't get along, so an EFFECTIVE response to an alarm might not always work out, or the players SHOULD be able to come up with a strategy to avoid inevitable defeat (IE force all the goblins to come out and fight you or else starve). OTOH I can think of ways the GM could spoil some of those. I seem to recall we gamed through a lot of this WAY WAY back in the early days, but I really couldn't say what the results were.

I also had and ran the A series. My recollection is that the scheme there was to get yourselves identified as members of the slavers, or at least 'associates'. Like it was more of an 'undercover' mission vs a sneak into the lair thing. Although each module has a bit of its own setup, so I am not real sure about all of it. I seem to recall that A4 was more of a straight "gate crash the bad guys and wipe them out in detail" Anyway, I'm sure that any of them would end badly for the PCs if any significant fraction of the Slaver's forces massed and attacked them.

 

[Manbearcat]

I’m seeing some (predictable) trends emerge in my 5e thread/poll. Primarily around “Action Resolution Techniques as Tools” (which are toggled on and off).

I figure I’ll post my comment and questions from there here as well (as it’s relevant to this discussion and the two discussions feature different participants):

---

Here is a comment and some follow-up questions:

COMMENT

I see a form of action resolution (eg Fail Forward) sometimes called a “tool”.

QUESTIONS

1) Whose “tool” is it? The GMs?

2) If it’s the GMs to invoke (or not) at their discretion, what are the principles they use to inform their discretion?

3) Is the player made aware of when the “tool” comes “online” in an instance of action resolution? If they aren’t explicitly aware, is it inferable from first principles?

4) What say does the player have in this - when it comes online (if any)?

 

[loverdrive]

I look at mechanics and fluff as separate entities

This is only true in D&D and other rules-first games.

Doesn't work in fiction-first games. Like, at all — because fiction there is the mechanics.

I'm simply rejecting the notion that it can't be done to any degree at all - which some posters seem to believe. I think that those posters are assuming a certain type of play is universal - that's the danger, assumptions. ie: how they play may make it impossible but not everyone plays the same way.

Anything can be done with anything to some degree.

Can I run a game of court intrigues in 5e? Sure, even without any modifications, just calling for ability checks and whatever. Would it be fun? Maybe. Would it actually a 5e game, and not what we call словесочка here in the East — a game of "GM will tell you what happens"? I'm not sure. I think it'd be the latter.

Can I modify 5e to the point where the rules actually work for the game, help me run it and contribute to the experience? Yeah, I can. But then I'd put my own name on it, because Crowford and Co. would have approximately zero relation to the thing I've built.

When people say "5E can't do [X]" they probably mean "5E can't do [X] without a significant effort either during the game (in which case, you did it and not 5E) or beforehand (in which case... Yeah, you did it and not 5e).

 

[Thomas Shey]

If it happens, I've never seen it. A player on watch that didn't wake the party when they saw something strange would be looking for a new group PDQ in any group I've ever seen. This ranks up there with "don't steal from the party" for stuff that you just don't ever do.

Same. Any group I've played with would be looking at the ones who did this and both in and out of character going "How was this a good idea?"

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A lot of people say 'system matters' etc but if you disentangle the core mechanics from the narrative fluff this arguement begins to fail. To run a high romance or heist style game would require describing new narrative fluff to bolted onto the core mechanic - a good, real world and proven, example of this is Chaosiums BRP: it underpins CoC, RQ and Storm Bringer. When people say ' it can't be done' they're ignoring a very long history in the hobby of doing exactly that ... ADnD was reworked to fit Dark Sun.and Plane Scape, Spell Jammer, Birthright and others.

When people say 'it can't be done' I hear 'you cannot mess the coded narrative presented with a system because "reasons"' - so is home brewing/hacking a system not a thing?

And yet...

I rate CoC unplayable. Its mechanics are horribly antiquated, even in the latest edition it doesn't really work. The system fights you at every step. BRP is pretty much exactly like 5e in that there's no structure or context around checks, they are just things that a GM can call for at any point, set any arbitrary difficulty for, and isn't instructed to do anything like negotiate on hazard vs payout, or even just explain what you're getting into mechanically if you want to try something. Its supposed to be a game of solving mysteries, and yet, aside from GM's being experienced with the right techniques, or a particular adventure spelling out how to avoid blocking, there are constant problems with things getting stuffed up by a single check.

I don't say this lightly. Back in the old days I ran a couple CoC campaigns, as well as running Masks of Nyarlathotep and a few CoC Now adventures too. It was a lot of work, but back in c 1983 we didn't know any better and thought this was the snizzle. Then after running a bunch of 4e some friends and I created a little mini-campaign to run with the latest CoC rules (whatever it was that came out around 2011 or so). It was incredibly frustrating and we ended up ditching CoC and just used PACE or something. It was really painful and horribly apparent that BRP/CoC was just not mechanically up to this. Trail of Cthulhu (based on Gumshoe) is a 1000x better game.

Now, is RQ a bad game? No, though I think more DESPITE BRP than because of it. Glorantha and the conceptual underpinnings of RQ are really cool. OTOH I think you could lift the idea and implement it in a modern rule set and make a much better game. One that would actually bring the whole 'deep myth' thing much more into focus and be a lot more thematic game.

Anyway, even if we are talking about generic platform systems, wouldn't it be better to build a narratively driven 'indie' type of engine that drove things like CoC and RQ? I think something like SotC or Cortex+ could probably do both, though obviously there would be extensive genre-specific elements attached. Both games BEG for an approach that focuses on STORY.

 

[Seramus]

Not sure where the confusion lies. I never referred to the games you’re citing at all, much less calling them indie.

The way you phrase the paragraph suggests you consider non D&D games to be "indie", unless you literally mean people on the internet are only recommending indie games to replace heists, romances, etc. I dont think you mean the latter, so the former is my occam's razor read.

 

[Thomas Shey]

When people say 'it can't be done' I hear 'you cannot mess the coded narrative presented with a system because "reasons"' - so is home brewing/hacking a system not a thing?

It absolutely is, but I'd suggest looking at the discussion up-thread of how much you can do that before its effectively a different game with a common basis. Its certainly not RAW at the very least, and that's what people are talking about here.