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

[pemerton]

The current D&D ruleset, maybe. In the 1e DMG there's a section on insanity that might provide a half-decent jumping off point were one looking to overlay some sort of spiralling loss of sanity mechanic onto a D&D chassis.

I don't think the AD&D insanity system is very useful for Cosmic Horror. It would be a poster child for a free-floating, non-integrated mechanic that parallels @Hussar's forgettable iron rations!

 

[Imaro]

I am curious about this as well, but from your end of things. Earlier I asked you:

Sorry I missed replying to that this thread moves fast and I can only really post intermittently

But I didn't hear anything back from you about how, why, and when you apply/use the madness rules, even if they are your modified versions. What did the madness rules add to your game? Do you have some concrete play examples of the madness rules working well?

1. How, why and when did I apply the sanity rules? To answer simply it was GM fiat that relied heavily on genre tropes and used the guidelines in the book around what should be rolled for. I didn't use stock monsters (or at least the ones I did were reskinned heavily so that they were not recognizable) and decided which ones evoked a sanity check... Mostly monsters from a place in my campaign world called the Stygia ( At a high level it's a realm/dimension of people, places, ideals, creatures that never were and have been imprisoned in this never-realm for so long that they have gone mad and when released into our world spread madness like a disease). So anything from the Stygia along with select creatures, items, etc. outside of Stygians sanity checks were decided by DM fiat. As a note CR or level was often used as a determiner for how severe the check was but there were exceptions as I didn't want the sanity and madness to have a predictable feel.

2. The sanity rules modeled the characters descent into a less and less rational state of mind as their sanity decreased and gave markers that were identifiable (sometimes) by the PC's and others that one had been touched by the Stygia.

3. I don't write up play examples... I don't really have the time (or the desire) to write up play except what I need to know from session to session. I could possibly provide notes but that won't show how it plays out at the table. This campaign went on hiatus when the pandemic started and with Ravenloft releasing and my group all vaccinated the plan is to start back up soon... I may start recording my sessions though and if I do I will try and post that.

 

[Hussar]

I generally agree (though that is not always strictly the case in the fiction) and that is exactly what happened in my 5e Cthulhu Horror game. They all ended up dead (and Cthulhu free). That is definitely worse than how they started!

Sort of.

They were better than they started all the way up to the end. That's not quite what I meant. Killing PC's is easy, particularly when you stack the deck like that. Making D&D PC's suffer is not easy. There are very few mechanics for long term disabilities, ability score drain, and whatnot. I was not sitting at your table, so, I cannot comment and obviously YOU enjoyed what happened, so, that's a win. It just doesn't really sound very Mythos to me from what you've described. Horror? Certainly. Cosmic Horror? I'm not so sure.

 

[Campbell]

When it comes to fault tolerance, the ability to adjust on the fly, and iterating changes to a game's design few games have a more solid core than Blades in the Dark or Apocalypse World. Apocalypse World in particular goes into substantial detail in its text on how to expand and alter the game. Vincent Baker goes into detail in this blog entry how Apocalypse World was designed with the idea of concentric or layered design in mind:

Apocalypse World is designed in concentric layers, like an onion.

• The innermost core is the structured conversation: you say what your characters do. The MC, following their agenda and principles, says what happens, and asks you what your characters do next.
• The next layer out builds on the conversation by adding core systems: stats, dice, basic moves, harm, improvement, MC moves, maybe some setting elements like the world’s psychic maelstrom.
• The next layer elaborates on the core systems by adding playbooks, with all their character moves, gear, and additional systems; and threats, with their types, impulses, moves, fronts, and maps.
• The outermost layer is even optional: it’s for your custom moves, your non-core playbooks, your MC experiments, stuff that doesn’t even appear in the book.

A crucial feature of Apocalypse World’s design is that these layers are designed to collapse gracefully inward:

• Forget the peripheral harm moves? That’s cool. You’re missing out, but the rules for harm have got you covered.
• Forget the rules for harm? that’s cool. You’re missing out, but the basic moves have got you covered. Just describe the splattering blood and let the moves handle the rest.
• Forget the basic moves? That’s cool. You’re missing out, but just remember that 10+ = hooray, 7-9 = mixed, and 6- = something worse happens.
• Don’t even feel like rolling the dice? Fair enough. You’re missing out, but the conversational structure still works.

Or:

• Don’t want to make custom moves and countdowns for your threats all the time? That’s cool. You’re missing out, but the threat types, impulses, and threat moves have got you covered.
• Don’t want to even write up your fronts and threats? That’s cool. You’re missing out, but your MC moves have got you covered.
• Forget your MC moves? That’s cool. You’re missing out, but as long as you remember your agenda and most of your principles and what to always say, you’ll be okay.

The whole game is built so that if you mess up a rule in play, you mostly just naturally fall back on the level below it, and you’re missing out a little but it works fine.

This is what modular design actually looks like in practice. The idea that this is somehow a less flexible game is utterly bizarre to me.

 

[Hussar]

I'd be interested in a little more depth here. I see broad blanket statements like this all the time... "needlessly fiddly" (really... a save, possibly subtract 1 from a score and rolling on a table is needlessly fiddly, in what way?)... Did not interact with what rules very well? And what were the rules supposed to add to the game that they didn't? I thought it was on the GM to make sure the rules came up... again ignoring the rules or forgetting them isn't a failure of the rules it actually is a failure of DM'ing (assuming you wanted to use those rules in the first place). I could describe a million games like you just did and no one could really offer a counter because nothing of substance is really being stated. So can you go into more depth here? That last sentence makes me think you forgot about them and thus didn't actually use them as intended, if I am mistaken please elaborate...

EDIT: Also... you played 100 hrs... with what you considered "garbage" rules... why??

I'm sorry @Imaro, but, I refuse to play this game with you. The goalposts are on roller skates and no matter what I say, it will never be acknowledged that there is even the possibility that the mechanics are the problem. After that back and forth about infiltration/heists, I have zero interest in providing you with any evidence or depth. You insist that the mechanics worked for you, yet provide no examples (that I saw anyway) or description of how they worked for your table. So, I will return the favor, insist that the mechanics didn't work, and I can say that I will never use them again because they were so bad.

 

[Hussar]

/snip To answer simply it was GM fiat that relied heavily on genre tropes/snip

In other words, the success at your table had very little to do with the mechanics and your success would be unreproduceable by anyone following the mechanics. Since I don't play at your table and don't have the benefit of your DM's fiat, why would you be surprised that using the mechanics would be unsuccessful at my table?

So, if it was largely GM fiat, the mechanics don't really matter.

 

[dave2008]

Look, @dave2008, I am not trying to start a fight here, but, how is this Cosmic Horror? The baddies are big and largely unkillable. Well, that's Horror in pretty much all forms. Dracula was largely the same thing too. Jason or Freddy as well. Being unkillable =/= cosmic horror.

As you noted in another post. Different idea of cosmic horror I guess. I've taken to calling mine Cthulhu Horror (since we literal played out the short story Call of Cthulhu) to help with the confusion. But for me cosmic/ Cthulhu horror is about a few things:

• Cosmic entities of reality bending / destroying might that simple do not care about humanity. Their desires and goals are unknowable to humanity. If summoned they are as likely to kill their cultists as do their bidding.
• An uncaring universe. There are no forces of good to rescue humanity. We are all we have to stem back the tide.
• Various cultist and alien beings with wicked agendas.
• The only hope is to escape notice or delay the inevitable doom. You cannot "win," only delay.

To achieve those goals, the only change I need to make to 5e, IMO, is to make PCs insignificant. The rest is handled by the extant rules and how we roleplay / DM. I chose to do that by limiting the level range, class restrictions, and reducing HP.

I do want to acknowledge that sanity is a thing in cosmic horror; however, as I have fairly recently read Call of Cthulhu (a year+ ago) and At the Mountains of Madness (yesterday) I want to point out that narrator / protagonist in both stories does not suffer any madness (other characters do). And that is the role I see the PCs, the protagonist of the story. They investigate and fight (futilely) the horrors, but are rarely driven insane by them.

PS Have you read Dracula? Once Van Helsing gets involved the title character is pretty much running with his tail between his legs the whole time, and he ends up destroyed.

 

[Imaro]

There's an important difference between offering options and telling the group "do whatever you want! have fun!" and leaving them stranded. 5E does the latter, actually designed games do the former.

As evidence by all the people playing it.

I'm not the one being asked, but I did play a game with both sanity and madness rules. And I agree that they're garbage.

There's a laundry list of issues I had with madness rules (sanity is serviceable, but far from being good):

• It's absolutely unclear what calls for, well, madness. Ok, aberrations with tentacles probably are madness-inducing, but what about other things? Is something like discovering that the town you've been living your whole life was an illusion all along mind-shattering, or is it's just "who the hell had enough time and 6th-level spell slots to do that?"? That's not exactly issue with madness rules themselves, but it's an issue within a context of D&D. When you have a dude who can hurl fireballs and build life-like major images, the line between "normal" magic and things that defy reality starts to get kinda blurry.

I feel each individual campaign should decide this for themselves either via GM fiat or group decision, but if you need the book to tell you here are the suggested causes...

Sanity Checks
-Deciphiring a piece of text written in a language so alien that it threatens to break a character's mind
-Overcoming the lingering effects of madness
-Comprehending a piece of alien magic foreign to all normal understanding of magic

Sanity Saving Throws
-Seeing a creature form the far realm or other alien realms for the first time
-Making direct contact with the mind of an alien creature
-Being subjected to spells that affect mental stability
-Passing through a demiplane built on alien physics
-Resisting an effect conferred by an attack or spell that deals psychic damage.

IMO this is more than enough of a framework of examples for me to extrapolate from for my own needs. I don't need the game to give me hard cases because my world isn't the same world as the designers.

• Short-term madness table often produces results that are just stupid and belong to slapstick comedy and not lovecraftian horror. A character that starts to eat naughty word because they've seen an alien visitor from the Great Beyond isn't something I'd expect from a cosmic horror story.

This isn't slapstick if it's not roleplayed for comedy... it's strange off putting and is similar to many portrayals of Reinfield in Dracula media when he eats bugs or other disgusting things.

• Long-term madness often table produces results that are either just debilitating (ah, yes, falling unconscious for 1d10x10 hours is so fun) or largely meaningless. And both categories are something that I'd expect to happen to a secondary or a tertiary character, not a protagonist.

So we want mechanical teeth... without teeth?? The unconscious for hours is a genre trope...are you serious??

• Indefinite madness table produces nothing but gimmicks, that are, again, much more suitable to NPCs, not the PCs.

Nope, it trusts the player to roleplay the actual flaw just like some of the other games presented here... and honestly for an indefinite madness I think it's the best approach since player buy in is crucial.

• And, most importantly, there's zero incentive to seek madness. The rules punish the player for doing things they're supposed to be doing -- y'know, meeting fish people, deciphering evil books, and looking beyond the illusory veil of comfortable "normality".

Huh?? You seek it because you need to... not because you want to.

Using madness rules not only ain't gonna turn 5E into a cosmic horror story generator, but place additional obstacles on the way.

I'm sorry you had such issues with it, but it did work and will be working for me when my campaign starts back up.

 

[Imaro]

In other words, the success at your table had very little to do with the mechanics and your success would be unreproduceable by anyone following the mechanics. Since I don't play at your table and don't have the benefit of your DM's fiat, why would you be surprised that using the mechanics would be unsuccessful at my table?

So, if it was largely GM fiat, the mechanics don't really matter.

GM fiat= when to use them... the mechanics themselves were from the rulebooks

EDIT: I just have to say how ridiculous it is to claim that because I decide how and when to apply a rule for my campaign... I am no longer using the actual rule... think about that for a second... seriously you're trying so hard to score points you're making some ridiculous statements here.

 

[dave2008]

Which, I would argue, is somewhat of a misreading of cosmic horror. Or at least, not all of it. The main essence of a cosmic horror story, from a structural point of view, is that your protagonist will always be worse off at the end than at the beginning. Which is why D&D doesn't do Cosmic Horror very well because the core essence of D&D is the level system. At no point in a Cosmic Horror story do the protagonists get a clean win. At best they escape. And, the point of playing Cosmic Horror isn't to defeat the Cosmic Horror, because you can't. The point is to see how much your character will suffer before its inevitable end.

If there was a win condition in your game, then you weren't really playing Cosmic Horror. You were playing fairly standard heroic fantasy with horror elements.

IDK, I just reread At the Mountains of Madness yesterday and Call of Cthulhu a year+ or so ago. The narrator/protagonist in those stories is disturbed by the events and what they uncover, but they are not noticeably worse off than from where they began.