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

[loverdrive]

Is CoC even a thing these days? We've got Trail of Cthulhu, why the hell anyone would touch that old mess of a game?

 

[MichaelSomething]

Is CoC even a thing these days? We've got Trail of Cthulhu, why the hell anyone would touch that old mess of a game?

It's big in Japan I hear...

Horror RPG Call of Cthulhu is bigger than D&D in Japan

The classic RPG has seen its popularity explode in the last decade thanks to web series and anime.

www.dicebreaker.com

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think it is much simpler. Module writers are under different pressures than GMs.

I don't see a real reason they have to be exclusive.

If you write a module you want to write something that has all usable material. The simplest way to do that is a map and a key where you follow the map from 1 to 2 to 3... to 50, and there's a big boss fight at 49. And, as I've said before, a lot of the audience wants that. Yet there's a certain impetus to some sort of consistent logic within that sequence, so when you write up the guard shack at 10, you clearly have to assume that the procedure is to raise a general alarm when someone unauthorized and hostile, the PCs, shows up.

This still assumes that the failed stealth roll means that the guard detects the target fully though. Its easy enough to say "The guard is now alerted, but isn't sure what he saw/heard, so he'll investigate further." Or at least halfway the point by limiting full reveal to fumbles of the roll. That doesn't say anything about what the guard will do once the full reveal (where, frankly, blowing the whistle or banging the gong is what I'd expect, both in and out of character).

Its up to the GM what to do about that. They can simply fudge it so the alarm never goes off (or maybe the players are clever enough to spell their way to that result). Alternately some GMs will just blow the whole caper right there. Later they can devise some alternate path, or in some cases a module writer will suggest or even write in one.

Modules are mass market products, they are not designed for you, Mr Sophisticated GM. They are written for Joe Beer & Pretzels DM, who will not grok your techniques and isn't really going to read the DMG anyway, certainly not carefully.

As I said, if you have some matters of degree in the resolution in the first place (and don't have processes such as rolling all the stealth and all the perceptions separately, so the math is manifestly your enemy), you don't have to do backflips at the expression end.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do think it's somewhat fair to criticize scenario designers for failing to capture the unique value their game brings or actively fighting against it. Here's looking at you (early) PF2 and D&D 4e. I don't think scenario design is indicative of how a game is supposed to function though.

As I've noted before, this has been a disease of early adventures of new versions of at least all the D&D derivatives; one of the critiques of early 3e adventures is they often looked like they were written assuming nothing had changed between AD&D2 and D&D3e, when there had been big changes in how the game worked and what sort of adventures would work with it (this was particularly noticeable with big dungeons where it was entirely plausible that PCs would level multiple times by the time they worked their way through it).

 

[tetrasodium]

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.

That's a bad way of describing it. Since I recently mentioned how I sometimes use this sort of toil both for & against players Here are some other ways that work

• The guards recently discovered some climbing equipment on the west wall they suspect belongs to the assasin smiling billybob . Here's some things the elite sentinel marshals know about him(ie useful stuff if there' a fight!).
• A suspiciously armed individual recently fled from a checkpoint of elite guards at the gates here isn't any proof of it right now, but they think he may have been hired by such and such group and some of his equipment had to be left behind in the escape.
• Some low level smugglers got busted for smuggling recently & the construction crew was assaulted by someone we think to be an assassin trying to make use of the tunnel under the wall before they could finish sealing it. They got in a few whacks though & the assassin is going to be hating life right now ( trivial insight check: delayed assassination? penalties to the assasin's statblock? both?).

Without semi-qantum things like fate's aspects* or the 3.5 bonus types+gm's best friend the only way to do that ahead of time is either an immediate response or somehow knowing ahead of time what kind of success withconsequence/fail forward cost will be meaningful. Certain knds of checks require checking against intended goal more than stated method & potentially negotiating or adjusting accordingly based on the assumption that the individuals involved are competent & more skilled at doing the kinds of things they want to do than the player could reasonably be expected to be. Those are the kind of things that a fail forward/success with consequence type mechanic need to account for & arm the GM with enough understanding to leverage it in a meaningful fashion but those 5e optional rules don't even appear to have considered it when they were written

* I don't know bitd well enough to be sure I'm citing the right terms for that... complication maybe?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I mean, I think that bolded bit is kind of an interesting question. Obviously with third-party products we can rule that out, but with first-party ones? It seems to me that really, scenario design should capture how a game is supposed to function, in an ideal world, particularly with the early scenario/module products that are released as part of the line.

It should, but again, module/scenario designers are very prone to fighting the last war when a new edition comes out. You saw it at the start of 3e, 4e, and PF2e at the least.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I agree, but I also see it as failure in the presentation of the rulings- everything you said that could mitigate a stealth condition could be considered if the DM were given more explicit agency to adjudicate such things on the fly. The DM is, in the fine print, given that agency but there is an unfortunate truth that many DM's don't read that - or know how to do it - that plus an all too common expectation of a certain codified style of play. Commonsense should prevail over any ruleset - absolutely something should happen if a PC tosses a stone to distract the guard: that's where the DM has real agency to make real world sense of abstract mechanics rather than be hemmed in by a ruleset.

The one strength of RPGs is that every table is different, ones experience of The Game can, and should, vary wildly across different tables and groups.

Sure, but what would be even VASTLY better? A system like 4e's Skill Challenge system where the GM CLEARLY is being told "this is not the end of the scenario, come up with some fiction which depicts things getting more dangerous, but not ending the mission." Now, some GMs in an SC might call for another check, or they might accept that 'throw a rock' gets you past the problem, but now the guards are more alert, etc. You could even use your GM resource of a hard check or something like that to indicate how tough it was to get out of this specific jam. Or the player might expend one of THEIR resources. This is all very well facilitated because everyone understands exactly what the process is and how each check, and each result, fits into that process. 5e specifically lacks ALL of this. We talked about this up thread a ways, so you might have missed it.

 

[dave2008]

Is CoC even a thing these days? We've got Trail of Cthulhu, why the hell anyone would touch that old mess of a game?

It is typically right behind D&D and Pathfinder in popularity on Roll20, FG, & Amazon. IIRC

 

[Thomas Shey]

Is CoC even a thing these days? We've got Trail of Cthulhu, why the hell anyone would touch that old mess of a game?

Here's a thing: because its what they want. Or alternatively something like ToC have things they don't want (there are people who are extremely put off by some of the core conceits in Gumshoe).

But I should note there's some evidence that CoC may be the most popular RPG behind the D&D sphere these days, so whether you like it or not, it works for some people.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Here the PC does what the PC would do, which sometimes includes dealing with minor stuff on its own without waking everyone else.