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

[pemerton]

CoC leans pretty hard into the no-win scenario aspect of the genre; so does Cthulhu Dark, from what I can tell.

The only CoC modules I've looked at recently - The Vanishing Conjurer and The Statute of the Sorcerer - are predicated on PC victories.

In my play experience of Cthulhu Dark, in our first game the PCs were able to crash the freighter with a shoggoth in its hull onto rocks, causing it to sink; they escaped on a tugboat (and some of the cultist NPCs escaped in a lifeboat). All of the PCs ended up with a 4 on their sanity die. In the second game one of the PCs went mad, but the replacement PC and the other PC were able to foil a plot involving the transportation to London of were-hyenas from East Africa and were-wolves from Central Europe.

Some of HPL's stories are "no win" in the sense that the protagonist's victory is keeping the secret rather than stopping anything bad from happening. But that isn't true of all of them, and doesn't have to be the case in Coc-type RPGing.

 

[dave2008]

The instance of insanity I remember from At the Mountains of Madness is someone other than the narrator snapping after encountering the shoggoth. There might be another--it's been some time since I've read the novella.

That was the fuzzy tickle in my brain too. That is pretty much a jump scare horror scene. Though I don't remember the specifics of how the describe his loss of sanity.

 

[prabe]

That was the fuzzy tickle in my brain too. That is pretty much a jump scare horror scene. Though I don't remember the specifics of how the describe his loss of sanity.

I don't remember it so much as a "jump scare" as "I just barely dodged an attack from an amorphous blobby thing the size of a subway train," but I don't know that I'd trust my memory of it.

 

[dave2008]

I don't remember it so much as a "jump scare" as "I just barely dodged an attack from an amorphous blobby thing the size of a subway train," but I don't know that I'd trust my memory of it.

I just looked it up. It actually wasn't the Shoggoth (or at least not in total).

Last 6 paragraphs of "At the Mountains of Madness"

Spoiler

But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely—yet I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.

I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, daemoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake’s camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.

He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about “the black pit”, “the carven rim”, “the proto-shoggoths”, “the windowless solids with five dimensions”, “the nameless cylinder”, “the elder pharos”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”, “the colour out of space”, “the wings”, “the eyes in darkness”, “the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the undying”, and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.

The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls of ice-dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest—and of course Danforth did not hint any of those specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.

At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word of all too obvious source:

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Thought the last line is the sound the shogoth made (in mimicry of the elder thing, AKA old one)

 

[pemerton]

Well, ideally it would be something like 'roleplay your fear, or expend 1 point of precious resource X to avoid becoming afraid.' That puts more teeth into it and makes it more of a choice where the player has some power over it

In Cthulhu Dark the only player-side resource is the sanity die. I'm not sure it's worth introducing more mechanical elements just in order to create a context for choice not to have to roleplay your character's fear.

 

[prabe]

The only CoC modules I've looked at recently - The Vanishing Conjurer and The Statute of the Sorcerer - are predicated on PC victories.

In my play experience of Cthulhu Dark, in our first game the PCs were able to crash the freighter with a shoggoth in its hull onto rocks, causing it to sink; they escaped on a tugboat (and some of the cultist NPCs escaped in a lifeboat). All of the PCs ended up with a 4 on their sanity die. In the second game one of the PCs went mad, but the replacement PC and the other PC were able to foil a plot involving the transportation to London of were-hyenas from East Africa and were-wolves from Central Europe.

Some of HPL's stories are "no win" in the sense that the protagonist's victory is keeping the secret rather than stopping anything bad from happening. But that isn't true of all of them, and doesn't have to be the case in Coc-type RPGing.

It has been more than ten years since I did anything involved with CoC, so I'm not inclined to argue with your interpretation, here. It certainly felt as though the game was leaning into no-win scenario--or blaring the no-win thing from the proverbial mountaintops--and everything we played very much felt like a no-win scenario in play.

And, of course, my impressions of Cthulhu Dark have no experience of playing the game--and frankly, straight Lovecraftian isn't my jam at this point, so it's ... unlikely that I'll play it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Blades in the dark is literally purpose built to tell a fairly narrow range of stories very well. That isn’t a bad thing. It is very well designed, and every component works together to deliver a particular type of experience. It is, by definition, bespoke.

5e can only be called the same if you view all fantasy adventure as the same thing, in which case we just disagree about how broad fantasy adventure is.

It is also built to be more broad than Blades is built to be, as shown by things like having multiple variant rules to modify gameplay, and being more open ended in many facets of the game.

I don’t agree that what I’ve said implies that other games are just a narrow slice of what D&D does, particularly since the premise includes needing to add mechanics to 5e in order to make it do different things well.

Nah, Blades can be tweaked and hacked, as well. I've played military-fantasy, sci-fi, and super heroes using the Forged in the Dark system, they're just different settings. There's an entire chapter in the book about making the game your own. You can tweak the game to do quite a bit. If you look into it, you'll see all manner of games using the system.

The setting? Maybe not so easy, though by no means impossible. There are several areas that lend themselves to dungeon delving and general adventuring. There are several different types of crews to choose from that can alter the feel of the game. There are other cities in the setting that are rife for expansion. There is a playtest on how to play the police in the setting; even just a shift in the kinds of Actions that are available to characters can really give the game a different feel.

I think the difference is that folks tend to separate system and setting for D&D quite readily. But Blades in the dark is both system and setting.

The setting of D&D is an oddly specific one, as @Campbell suggested. It's a stew. So the setting inherently has a little of this and a little of that, and can be spiced to taste. I don't know if that makes it quite as flexible as you're making it out to be.

 

[pemerton]

I've always favored the 4e-like handling of these things, generally speaking.

I don't object strenuously if someone plays a lower-INT character as less thoughtful, or having a poor memory, or whatever; nor do I object strenuously if someone refuses to dump INT because they want to play smart. I don't insist on either, though.

As I said, it depends on the system.

In 4e there is nothing to suggest that the INT score is an important consideration in how to roleplay one's PC. The PHB (p 17) says the following about INT:

Intelligence (Int) describes how well your character learns and reasons.

• Wizard powers are based on Intelligence.
• Your Intelligence might contribute to your Reflex defense.
• If you wear light armor, your Intelligence might contribute to your Armor Class.
• Intelligence is the key ability for Arcana, History, and Religion skill checks.

The following pages that discuss establishing and playing a character's personality don't mention INT at all; it turns up again in discussions of how checks are made. Taken as a whole, this (to me) makes it pretty clear what INT is for in 4e. I see it as similar to ME(mory) and RE(asoning) in Rolemaster: in these systems, the stats are really only generators of numbers that feed into check/resolution processes. They have no self-standing significance.

Classic Traveller is (in my view) not like that. Stats don't tend to feed into resolution, at least not in any straightforward way. They do feed into PC lifepaths, and are affected by those too. INT can drop due to age, just like physical stats can. I didn't need to say anything to my players for them to infer that INT establishes part of the parameters for deciding what actions to declare for one's PC, and more generally for deciding how to portray the character.

Likewise when I am playing NPCs, I will sometimes mention their INT to the players as part of the context for a decision I make as to what the NPC does. Less bright NPCs will make different sorts of decisions from cunning ones. (Again, 4e handles this in completely different ways: what makes an ogre act brutishly in 4e is not the GM playing its INT score, but the GM playing its attack abilities.)

I just see this as a difference in systems.

EDIT: I saw this, later, post from AbdulAlhazred:

I think one of (maybe originally THE) purpose of ability scores was to act as 'tags' that would signal what sort of RP was appropriate for your character. Later they acquired a 'mechanical bite', which I think was an improvement. That doesn't mean they LOST their original purpose. I think if you are running an INT 5 PC in a D&D game, then you are not really doing good RP if you depict them as super intelligent, particularly if they then fail all their INT based checks!

I think this was true in early D&D. Moldvay Basic has rules about how low INT scores correlate to linguistic ability, for instance.

I think it is the 2nd ed AD&D PHB that has advice on how to correlate INT, WIS and CHA scores against roleplay. I don't know if this is present in 3E. It's notably absent in 4e, as I said above. And I think it's still absent from 5e.

 

[pemerton]

Thanks! If that is the case I don't remember it well enough! When did that happen? I don't remember anyone going insane from simple reading the history. I thought some people where distrubed by the mutilation caused by the elder thing or possible the shogoth, but I couldn't remember clearly if it they truly went "insane." I.e. I think the insanity was less a cosmic knowledge horror and more body horror / threat induce psychotic break. But again I don't really remember clearly.

I'd have to go back to the story. He's the one who flies them out at the end, after catching the final glimpse of the Shoggoth.

When I get a chance to check I'll update this post or make a new one!

EDIT: The previous sentence is redundant - you already did the homework!

 

[Thomas Shey]

It feels like any game that features nonstandard genres or dares to represent psychosocial elements in the rules (rather than elaborate physical details) immediately gets labeled as hyper focused. A game like Burning Wheel is certainly no more specific than D&D genre wise, but because it is a game of emotive rather than procedural storytelling it becomes focused while D&D gets to be flexible, despite there being no rhyme or reason for the label.

Point of order: there are psychosocial elements in any system with an extensive drawback/disadvantage system, and I think there's a few too many of those that are popular for this to be true. Now if you wanted to say primarily focused on such things, you might have an argument (though mostly I see those being referred to as non-mainstream than anything about focus).