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

[Ovinomancer]

Because whodunit is another type of story that typically can't be solved by fighting stuff. If tossing out the combat system ("80% of the game") as the way to "solve" an adventure is violating the conventions of the game, it doesn't seem as though it would make a difference whether that adventure was Cosmic Horror or a whodunit.

If you actually think that's what I'm saying, or is a logical outcome, then anything not fighting matches that. Do you honestly think I'm making an argument that anything that isn't combat is tossing out 80% of the game? Jebus, man, we've had some great talks in the past, why are you treating me like I'm a drooling moron?

Cosmic Horror is, by definition, something that cannot be defeated. If I'm going to do Cosmic Horror, then the combat rules just do not matter much -- I've tossed them in pursuit of the genre. This is not the same as having a social encounter, or an exploration one, where we're just not currently focusing on combat, but it'll come around again. The idea of Cosmic Horror is not conducive to a combat system. This is actually one of the larger complaints about older CoC versions, where they had all kinds of rules for combat that just didn't matter. You could make a serious bruiser in the rules, but when it came to actually fighting, they were as useless as everyone else because so many of the mythos horrors you just can't shotgun.

I don't think I specified Cosmic Horror. Yes, the Great Old One (there's exactly one in my campaign setting) has been a bit of a recurring theme, but that's not the only type of horror I've deployed. Many of the deeply unsettling things the parties have encountered have been deeply unsettling things they could fight, but I don't see that as suddenly making it Not-Horror.

I did. You quoted my post where I did when you asked my questions. If you're changing the topic, please do so more clearly. Of course you can have horror where you can fight the baddies.

(And generally one stops the Great Old Ones by stopping those trying to summon them, if one can stop them at all.)

I agree there are D&D-isms. Classes, levels, hit points, the magic system, the focus on combat. And yes, you're still playing 5E, even if there's something the PCs don't have the resources to defeat present; you're still playing 5E if you go three sessions without a combat; you're still playing 5E if you have a situation that cannot be solved by fighting. I don't think anyone has said they weren't playing 5E--I'm pretty sure I haven't. I think some of us have said we feel as though we can tell more kinds of stories in 5E than in some game that we see as more narrowly focused, even if we have to hack 5E on occasion to do so.

There's a D&D genre -- it's not just mechanics, it's a whole feel with it's own set of genre logic and tropes.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm happy you got your PhD, but I'm confused why you got it in a field you think is incomprehensible?

If people didn't there would be no scientists. There is no actual evidence to suppose that any comprehensible solution exists. Some scientists take it on faith that one can be found, but that is more religion than science. What scientists do is try and find a mathematical model that serves as a good approximation to reality. Science can never get to the actual underlying reality (if one exists - there is no way to prove that it does), because that would require an experiment to be repeated and produce the same result an infinite number of times.

Science works by testing hypothesise and showing them to be false. It can never show anything to be true, the best you can do is keep on trying as hard as you can to show that something is false, and fail.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

But anyone who has studied cosmology already knows that our understanding of reality is bollocks!

The most obvious reason people go nuts in Lovecraftian narratives isn't because they learn that the universe is unknowable. It's because they learn that we're not only insignificant (standard lesson to learn from astronomy/cosmology) but that there are alien intelligences actively trying to slaughter and subjugate us, using magic/tech/etc. that actively exploits rules we can't understand. It's the difference between knowing, intellectually, that matter moves in waves, and seeing something that can take advantage of that, and knowing there's nothing you can do to stop it.

But on a broader level the reason Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green have sanity rules is because they're trying to get at a more realistic sense of the toll that RPG-ish stuff would take on a real person. Delta Green, for example, has fantastic rules for losing sanity points not just when you encounter the unnatural, but for seeing someone murdered, or murdering someone yourself. You can become hardened to certain kinds of nasty situations, mitigating future sanity losses of a given type, but that has its own effects on you. There's even a mention of possibly losing a tiny bit of sanity from being fired.

Maybe that seems silly, but think about how being fired rattles and sticks with you. Or how, for most people, seeing even a single dead body over the course of your whole life becomes the big anecdote you can bust out to wow people, and how that visual can haunt you. And the trope of fully losing your mind in Cthulhu games is overblown--just play the game, or look at the rules, and you'll see it's usually a slow burn. A lot of people don't want to play that sort of game, and aren't interesting in telling a story about people unravelling (again, Delta Green has great mechanics for that, with your emotional bonds with family and friends fraying in order to stave off major sanity losses, essentially giving you rules for becoming a detached, thousand-yard-stare sort). But what they're getting at isn't some binary, zany "Ooop, you saw Cthulhu and now you're in a straightjacket" situation. It's that the captain you mentioned who rams Cthulhu is now permanently scarred by the experience. And if he does the PC thing and just keeps dealing with tons of horrible things and circumstances, he's likely to become more and more disordered over time.

In other words, you could apply CoC's and especially DG's sanity rules to a non-Lovecraftian game or setting, and they'd still make sense. But those games posit that seeing monsters wears and breaks you quicker than more familiar horrors.

That's not tropey or unrealistic at all.

 

[prabe]

@Paul Farquhar I believe you are making American Literature references at someone who is not American.

@loverdrive The references were to this:

The Old Man and the Sea - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Paul Farquhar]

@Paul Farquhar I believe you are making American Literature references at someone who is not American.

@loverdrive The references were to this:

The Old Man and the Sea - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm not American!

 

[Ovinomancer]

Well if you're claiming a game is not able to do something and it does... I think a counterfactual is the correct way to go.

Gainsaying isn't very helpful, either. D&D doesn't do Cosmic Horror, it does D&D with some different spices.

Uhm... this is flat out wrong and not how sanity works in 5e. Sanity is it's own stat that you make a save with... so no, the classes with higher Wis or Cha aren't better at it, those classes with a higher sanity score are. Madness is just used to generate the effect if they fail.

It's exactly how Madness works in D&D. Please double check your rules. And don't swap in a different rule for the one I was talking about. All Sanity does is add a different option to the Madness rules for how you make saving throws against Madness.

I'd be curious to know if the Call of Cthulhu game has indefinite madness effects that cause mechanical penalties... Though honestly if you want indefinite mechanical effects it would be trivial to institute the long-term madness as indefinite. Though I personally think most games nowadays leave things like this (incurable, indefinite madness) in the hands of the players to roleplay... but maybe I'm wrong.


It doesn't seem poorly conceived, and their are effects throughout the madness tables that have nothing to do with combat. I think your being a little disingenuous here or you didn't really look over the tables.

How do you enforce those effects? Let's pick one from the permanent table: "I keep what I find." How does that get at all enforced in the ruleset?

The Madness charts are all about applying combat reducing effects. The short term and even long term effects are easily waited out unless combat is forced on the PCs. They just don't do anything else impactful. The ones that aren't combat problems can only be enforced by the GM overstepping and telling a player how to play their PC. This may fly at your table, but it's a direct refutation of the opening explanation of play in the PHB - the player decides what their PC thinks, feels, and does. The Madness table is a terrible throwback to the bad idea that the GM enforces proper roleplaying at the table. It's trash.

 

[FrozenNorth]

It's a philosophical issue, but I think the cosmic horror genre simply has that wrong. The universe being unknowable and incomprehensible is something cosmologists deal with all the time, without going insane. They just stick all the weirdness in a box and go on with their lives.

To be fair, Lovecraft seemed to believe that EVERYONE had a tenuous grasp of sanity.

GASP! It turns out that I had a non-white ancestor. Well, it’s the asylum for me!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

To be fair, Lovecraft seemed to believe that EVERYONE had a tenuous grasp of sanity.

GASP! It turns out that I had a non-white ancestor. Well, it’s the asylum for me!

I'm pretty sure everyone has a non-white ancestor if they go back far enough.

But then maybe an asylum would be the best place for the human race.

Maybe we are in an asylum. If what we are experiencing is a kind of virtual reality it would make sense of some of the weirdness.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I am curious but how many of the protagonists in H.P. Lovecraft's stories actually go insane. I'm not well read on his stuff (not a fan of cosmological horror as it does nothing for me in the horror department) but I feel like I once read somewhere that this is a very exaggerated trope when it comes to his stories and even moreso with stories about the mythos that he didn't write.

I think it would depend on where you drew the line for insanity. Definitely, there are a number of characters that question their sanity, or reference having weak nerves or mention having spent time in an asylum when younger.

Then there is something like the Shadow over Innsmouth, where the protagonist isn’t stated to go insane, but completely changes their personality and outlook once they realize they have an ancestor from Innsmouth.

 

[Ovinomancer]

If people didn't there would be no scientists. There is no actual evidence to suppose that any comprehensible solution exists. Some scientists take it on faith that one can be found, but that is more religion than science. What scientists do is try and find a mathematical model that serves as a good approximation to reality. Science can never get to the actual underlying reality (if one exists - there is no way to prove that it does), because that would require an experiment to be repeated and produce the same result an infinite number of times.

Science works by testing hypothesise and showing them to be false. It can never show anything to be true, the best you can do is keep on trying as hard as you can to show that something is false, and fail.

Incomprehensible means not able to be understood; not intelligible. You're describing not yet understood, and the scientific principle that says to always test current understanding to see if it's false and can be improved. If a thing is incomprehensible, then you can't do even this. The universe being incomprehensible would mean that science is a complete lie -- all of it is complete delusion. Again, if this is your thinking, I struggle understanding how you've chosen to continue in the field. I think the majority of this side discussion is based on a failure to communicate.

I'm an electrical engineer, by training and trade, so I'm well acquainted with the process of science -- my livelihood depends on it like yours does. Granted, my focus is on exploiting knowledge for practical use while yours is discovery, but the foundations are the same. I could not be an electrical engineer if I actually though the universe was incomprehensible. I'm a strong proponent that we absolutely do not understand it, yet, that there are still huge mysteries about some pretty basic things, but incomprehensible? No. If that were true, I'd have to accept that anything I do operates entirely on chance and not understanding. Granted, some of that understanding is just observational and not theory -- I mean, we're still not really sure how electricity works at a quantum level but we can still use it with some excellent models based on both observation and testing. There's so much more to learn out there, but I have to believe it can be learned, that it isn't unable to be learned because it's unintelligible, so I can't agree with calling the universe incomprehensible.