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

[prabe]

Well, I would make other-language literature references if I knew any other languages!

Same.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Same.

Pretty sure my wife did French lit at Uni. I guess I could ask her "Did Victor Hugo say anything clever about this?"

 

[pemerton]

When we've played it (a couple of one-shots) we haven't been especially Cthulhu-ish. But the sanity rules are an important part of the system.

Heh, there's a bit of irony here. When we talked about importing horror and Cthulu stuff into D&D, I believe it was @dave2008 who mentioned that sanity rules weren't necessary.

It's just interesting how we all prioritize different things. To me, a Cthulu game that doesn't have some sort of sanity death spiral isn't really Cthulhu at all. It's just tentacly horror.

In the context of Cthulhu Dark, the sanity rules are a crucial part of the resolution system - putting your sanity die into a roll gives you a better chance of success, and can permit rerolls, but runs the risk of going insane.

Without the sanity die, there isn't that capacity for the players to push harder at a higher risk. I think it's pretty good design!

But this again goes back to a point that I made how the necessary elements or breaking points of genre play/emulation will differ between people. 5e can work for @dave2008's low magic games, but it wouldn't necessarily work well for either of us or what we are looking for in a low magic game. So our solution is to look elsewhere because hacking the game isn't worth the effort, particularly when plentiful valid alternatives exist.

I just want to make it clear that when I say Cthulhu Dark needs the sanity die, I'm not making a judgement about the aesthetics of genre. I'm making a judgement about the fundamentals of the game's resolution system.

It's very close to saying that Fate needs fate points and aspects.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You seem to be pre-judging how we played cosmic horror (more literally the story Call of Cthulhu) without seeing our house-rules or how we actually played. Perhaps I misunderstood you, but you certainly came off that way to me.

Well, you certainly didn't provide them, just talked in generalities. All I've spoken to is your directly claim you had no sanity mechanics and felt they were not necessary to the genre. I don't recall speaking to anything else.

 

[Imaro]

In the context of Cthulhu Dark, the sanity rules are a crucial part of the resolution system - putting your sanity die into a roll gives you a better chance of success, and can permit rerolls, but runs the risk of going insane.

Without the sanity die, there isn't that capacity for the players to push harder at a higher risk. I think it's pretty good design!

I just want to make it clear that when I say Cthulhu Dark needs the sanity die, I'm not making a judgement about the aesthetics of genre. I'm making a judgement about the fundamentals of the game's resolution system.

It's very close to saying that Fate needs fate points and aspects.

@pemerton out of curiosity how does Cthulhu Dark handle madness?

 

[pemerton]

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.

Sure. HPL is a certain sort of person from an era where relativity was seen as a terrible blow to whiggish scientific certainty and even to confidence in some basics of human cognition. Bertrand Russell's is a different response, but has some points of similarity. It's also no surprise that conventionalism about scientific truth (found in some Vienna Circle members, and in a certain fashion in Popper, and then developed in a particular direction by Kuhn) is an idea that emerges around the same time.

Cosmic Horror's generalisation of that response is implausible. But can be interesting nevertheless as an idea to take out for a spin.

Though as I posted upthread, when my group has played Cthulhu Dark it's not been particularly Mythos-esque.

 

[pemerton]

Again that is a definition of cosmic horror, but I was explicitly referencing my experience from reading HPL, not someone else's definition, posibly even the standard definition, of cosmic horror. The sanity mechanic in CoC didn't make me feel like we were playing a HPL story and that is what I want in my "cosmic horror," and that is what I was able to achieve with my D&D 5e hacks.

I mean in the story Call of Cthulhu a person literally rams a ship into Cthulhu, after seeing the rest of his group destroyed by it, and then escapes.

PS The adventure I ran for my group was an interpretation of Call of Cthulhu were the events happen in a more linear fashion (not through flashbacks) to the protagonist (players).

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.

Earlier this evening I was reading the treatment of this in Trail of Cthulhu. That system uses Stability + Sanity to try and capture the full range of HPLesque responses (from madness, like in Shadow out of Time and Danforth (I think it is) in At the Mountains of Madness) to pulp-y attempts to destroy horrors from other worlds (The Dunwich Horror is more like this).

The ToC book also discusses the ramming of Cthulhu, and treats it as a one-off that the system isn't committed to allowing replication of.

 

[Campbell]

So the argument being made by folks like me is not D&D is altogether inflexible, only that it is not especially flexible in comparison to other games. Like any game it has areas it provides strong support in, areas it is largely silent on, and areas where it's rules and procedures are counterproductive.

Most of the claims that I see about D&D's flexibility come from people who for the most part enjoy the game's wheelhouse and don't really want to venture all that far off course. They like D&D stories and the game as whole. They should not be made to feel bad for wanting party based action adventure fantasy. They also should not feel the need to claim that D&D is fundamentally more flexible or resilient to change then other games.

The sort of stories Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Exalted 3e, and Burning Wheel are mostly concerned with are pretty far afield of D&D's wheelhouse. It takes a lot more work to make those sorts of stories work in D&D just like it takes a lot more work to make D&D style stories work in those games. We can always try to make something work outside of a game's wheelhouse, especially if it's something rare that we can see coming. It's harder to do something consistently (and generally requires more support to do so).

 

[dave2008]

Well, you certainly didn't provide them, just talked in generalities. All I've spoken to is your directly claim you had no sanity mechanics and felt they were not necessary to the genre. I don't recall speaking to anything else.

Right, so based on partial information you determined we couldn't be playing "cosmic horror."

 

[Ovinomancer]

Incomprehensible means can never be understood. Like Literature to a goldfish. If something is not yet comprehended, but can be comprehended in the future it is, by definition, comprehensible. There is no way to determine if something is, or is not, comprehensible, until it is comprehended.

Some scientists choose to believe the universe is comprehensible, but this is faith, not science. There is no evidential proof.

You are right, if the universe is unintelligible, then science cannot function. There is no way to prove the universe is intelligible, other than experience. Every time the Sun comes up in the morning it makes it seem that the assumption that the universe is intelligible more reasonable, but it is not proof.

In my field I, of course, speak to many in my field. It is a view shared by many of those in my field, although there is a tendency to pretend to non-scientists that we are a lot more confident than we are.

Engineering only needs to know "does it work?". "Is it true?" is irrelevant.

Things that work tend to be true in the way they need to be, unless you're arguing that it could change tomorrow.

You seem to, oddly, be putting forth that claim that since I cannot prove that the Sun will not rise tomorrow for reasons we cannot comprehend that it therefore means the Universe is incomprehensible. You've subbed in a requirement to prove a negative in order to defend the argument that you cannot prove the Universe is comprehensible. Rather, logically and scientifically, it would be better formulated to say that you need have only one instance of something truly incompressible to show the theory the Universe is comprehensible is incorrect. The inverse, that I can't say the Sun will rise tomorrow until it does, is a flawed argument requiring a negative proof.

I get what you're saying, it's the fundamental point of the scientific method - you always look for evidence that your current understanding is incorrect, you never assume you're correct and stop looking. However, the scientific method is not fully independent -- it is a philosophical argument not a objective truth. And, as such, it is rooted in axiomatic statements. The scientific method is rooted in the axiom that the universe can be understood, and that iterative observation, hypothesis, and testing is the way to understand it. If you knock out that axiomatic underpinning, and say that the universe is incomprehensible (which, by the way, is as much as statement of faith as that it is comprehensible, so you're guilty of the same in asserting so) then you've removed the axiomatic underpinning of the scientific method and rendered it false.

To say that we may never fully understand the universe is an acknowledgment of the shortcomings of mankind, it's not a statement on the nature of the universe. We may not understand it, like a goldfish may not understand literature. But, we do understand literature, so it is comprehensible, if not to goldfish. This is a shortcoming of goldfish, not of literature.