Indie Games Are Not More Focused. They Are Differently Focused.

[doctorbadwolf]

It is true that 5e D&D has little or no structure for non-combat resolution. That doesn't make it particularly flexible in my view

Okay. Argument over then. We disagree fundamental on what words even mean.

edit: no really, if you don’t see how presenting an action resolution mechanic, basic descriptions of what your character descriptors mean, and a framework for being better at some tasks than others, and then stepping back and letting the table do whatever they want with that, is flexible…there is just no way we are going to be able to have anything approaching a meaningful discussion.

Our POVs on the basic causality of fundamental game design philosophies (ie, this design element will lead to this outcome) are incompatible.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Furthermore, and as I already posted in this thread, I think this dependence of D&D on this sort of GM decision-making renders it not very suitable for co-/"round robin" GMing where each player plays a character but frames the scenes and adjudicates consequences for another player's character.

It…facilitates…exactly that…okay I should put the forums down for the evening I feel like I’m in the twilight zone talking to people who think the Beatles originated Ziggy Stardust and grass is generally purple.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I mean, yes there's no justification for that position, but is this really something you've come up against a lot? I've never seen anybody posit such a position. I'm not saying it hasn't happened in conversations you've been in, but I don't think it's a widespread sentiment.

You get very focused indie games and very flexible indie games. Indie games encompass a massive, wide range of game types. The most flexible tabletop RPGs in the world are usually indie games.

I'm not sure what you're defining as 'mainstream' (D&D?)

Yeah, it comes up a lot. I think @Umbran might have been in a few of those threads of late... I mean, I'm not complaining, nobody is really trying to be narrow-minded, but I think there are different levels of exposure to a wider variety of types of games, and it tends to be a point of view held by some who have stuck to a fairly traditional way of playing mostly D&D. Honestly, I'm sure there are a variety of backgrounds. Still, yes, there is a very strong contingent here and at RPG.net to an extent sometimes, who feel that systems like PbtA or other 'story games' are simply inherently niche games with very limited range. I think the standard argument goes that any whiff of meta-game takes them out of character. I don't want to be on risk of mischaracterizing though, I'm sure people can speak for themselves

 

[Campbell]

@doctorbadwolf

I said that D&D is not especially flexible, not that it was good at just one thing. That in this regard it is not remarkable or special. Feel free to disagree with me, but please do not twist my words. If you disagree please provide an actual case for why it is uniquely flexible.

I have put substantial man hours into learning how to run Apocalypse World in particular. I have internalized the principles. I can run the game with a great degree of skill. All I'm asking is for a degree of respect for the idea that I'm not doing this for nothing. That there's something there you cannot easily get without developing that skillset.

I have the same degree of respect for a well run D&D game. The specific skills it takes. The deftness at managing encounters. Weaving individual character stories into the adventures at hand.

Honestly this flexibility thing feels pretty damn elitist to me. Like you do not want to give any other game credit for doing something well that D&D does not do well. If that's not what you mean to imply please clarify what you are actually arguing because it feels like you are being pretty damn dismissive of other games to me.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But that wouldn’t be an assumption, because the person has said they don’t have much experience. I haven’t done that, and you’ve assumed ignorance because I see various games differently from you.

No, if I've assumed ignorance on your part it is in regard to Blades in the Dark, which I think is a game with which you obviously only have a passing familiarity.

I have no doubt about your familiarity with D&D, though.

We are not talking about the same things. You’re also being fairly pedantic. I’ll try to start from scratch later, I think, and get out of this loop.

I'm not trying to be pedantic. Saying that D&D is not structured because the structure isn't blatantly pointed out isn't me trying to say "gotcha".

It's a very structured game in a variety of ways. I sincerely think you are just not acknowledging the structure that is there.

Do you not have a score, that involves a set order of phases, each with its own rules?

Sure, there are scores. You might consider them adventures. Then you have downtime, in between the adventures, where you rest and recover and pursue other goals.

The adventuring day isn’t a rule. Almost no one I’ve ever seen or listened to or played with uses it, and I’ve seen maybe 6 people ever claim to stick to it online.

And this is what I mean by you not perceiving the structure. I don't care if DMs running D&D refer to the Adventuring Day as if it's a unit of measurement like "Wow that was quite the Adventuring Day wasn't it?"

The fact is that is absolutely how the game is structured. That's what a long rest is.....it divides the adventuring days. Short rests (may) divide the encounters. The classes were designed with this in mind. If you deviate from this structure, you will have to make adjustments in other ways.

Don’t be ridiculous. Perhaps I should go through every thread in these forums and find every statement you’ve ever made without explicitly saying it’s your opinion?

Okay. Offer something that says that the D&D community is more open to modding/hacking/homebrewing than the indie community beyond the fact that you think it's so. Anything that's specifically D&D or unique to D&D or that supports your thesis beyond "I think it is".

And don't forget, I'm not saying that D&D doesn't have plenty of DIY spirit going for it. I think it does. I've just also seen enough examples of that for plenty of other games that I think of it as a trait of RPGs more than D&D.

Show me where I said any game did, first.

Here:

Likewise, more GMs will mod a game that tells them to do what they want and "follow their bliss", than a game that is clearly built under the design ethos that the GM should follow the rules and trust the process or play something else.

Do you have any examples of RPGs that say they should be played one specific way only or else play something else?

Completely changing how players see their characters, how often they can do things without severe decrease in efficacy, how players view danger, etc aren’t big changes. Lol okay.

I don't think changing the frequency of the rest mechanic does all of that so much as it stretches things out. You can pull off all of that without changing the rest mechanics if you just throw a lot of encounters at the PCs. Since they reset resources on a long rest, the question is really "how many encounters between long rests".

That is not how you came across.
And no, I’m not going to write my entire gaming history for you. I did as much of that sort of thing as I’m ever willing to in the last tread related to this topic.

I'm not asking you to do that. You mentioned how Blades in the Dark players aren't as open to hacking/modding, so I asked you if you were familiar with some places where that happens quite a bit. I'm not asking for a resume, man......I'm pointing you to the resources that you were saying don't exist.

Generate a very lethal broken world by player input/choices/playbook for post apocalyptic archetypes to interact with, usually with no planning (I say usually because IME a lot of folks ignore design intent stuff like that) before the first session. A simplification, but I’m not here to write dissertations.

A simplification is fine for these purposes. Do you think D&D could be similarly simplified? Let's say the bit of text @pemerton quoted from the basic rules (and which is also in the PHB on page 5)...does that accurately summarize D&D?

I'd say it does. But does it encompass all that D&D can do? Of course not.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's still far more broad than, say, Mouse Guard or Grey Ranks. And both of those more broad than Dogs in the Vinyard. Note that I'd not consider Mouse Guard indie, even tho' it's a forge-influenced design. Small corporate, yes. The designer and IP owner are different people, and the publisher a company.owned by neither.

It is easier to write a narrow scope than a broad one; broad ones, however, have a wider audience.

Mouse Guard IS BW. It is simply an application of BW to a specific niche genre. So obviously there are a lot of custom rules with regards to the setting and the PC's place in it, and how their world works, but it seems more like an argument for the FLEXIBILITY of BW than an example of a niche game (though obviously if you take MG as it stands it isn't made to do much else). Even so, I think I'd rather base some hack on MG and assume I could bend it to the task vs relying on trying to make D&D do various arbitrary sorts of game. D&D particularly is a VERY focused game in its classic incarnation! Later WotC D&Ds have at least skill systems and such, but they still fall far short of general applicability (actually they are just quite poor and thus fairly impotent).

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I don't find DnD (and anything built on the chassis like PF) to be all that flexible. In the olden days I tried using DnD to play different genres. At best it did okay, but never great. There are just things built into the system that don't work well for anything other than a traditional DnD game.

Spell casters become the be all and end of all of much of the game at even mid-level. For example, the spell system rapidly becomes: Spell X trumps situation Y, unless someone trumps spell X with spell Z. This is a poor fit for many (most?) types of stories.

Another area I find DnD poor at is long duration stories. Thanks to the steep power curve of the levelling system stories that go on for a while will either become a rather different story, at least in style*, or be rendered inert by the new powers that are made available. For example, I don't find it easy to run a mystery (say a long term mystery like the X-Files) across a wide range of levels thanks to all the divination spells that become available. Globe trotting adventures in which the journey plays a large part become kinda moot with teleportation.



*I have found Adventure Paths to be guilty of this.

 

[pemerton]

if you don’t see how presenting an action resolution mechanic, basic descriptions of what your character descriptors mean, and a framework for being better at some tasks than others, and then stepping back and letting the table do whatever they want with that, is flexible…there is just no way we are going to be able to have anything approaching a meaningful discussion.

What does letting the table do whatever they want with that mean?

I mean, any table of people meeting for a leisure-time activity can always do whatever they want. I can treat a Burning Wheel PC sheet as a set of descriptors if I want, just the same as a table of 5e D&D players might.

But my very strong impression, from reading many posts and correlating them to my own experience of games that take a very similar approach to PC build (ie stats + skills + special abilities whose basic design template is the classic D&D spell), is that what we have is a system where the GM decides, on the basis of more-or-less table conversation and consensus, what happens next.

To me that is not flexible at all. It's a single way of playing a RPG. And at least on this point, I think @Campbell agrees and as I read his posts this is a part of (not all of) what he is saying.

I think this dependence of D&D on this sort of GM decision-making renders it not very suitable for co-/"round robin" GMing where each player plays a character but frames the scenes and adjudicates consequences for another player's character.

It…facilitates…exactly that…okay I should put the forums down for the evening I feel like I’m in the twilight zone talking to people who think the Beatles originated Ziggy Stardust and grass is generally purple.

Can you point me to actual play accounts of a 5e D&D game involving two players playing two PCs and simultaneously GMing for one another? The only accounts of this I've ever heard, as far as D&D play is concerned, involve random dungeon generation along the lines of Gygax's DMG Appendix A - which doesn't really involve simultaneous GMing so much as outsourcing the content generation to the charts and relying on the resolution processes alone, without GM judgement, to decide what happens next.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I’m bowing out of the thread. It was a mistake to even try to engage.

Im sorry, but I haven’t and won’t read the posts replying to me. If I offended, I apologize.

Good gaming.

 

[Aldarc]

Yeah, it comes up a lot. I think @Umbran might have been in a few of those threads of late... I mean, I'm not complaining, nobody is really trying to be narrow-minded, but I think there are different levels of exposure to a wider variety of types of games, and it tends to be a point of view held by some who have stuck to a fairly traditional way of playing mostly D&D. Honestly, I'm sure there are a variety of backgrounds. Still, yes, there is a very strong contingent here and at RPG.net to an extent sometimes, who feel that systems like PbtA or other 'story games' are simply inherently niche games with very limited range. I think the standard argument goes that any whiff of meta-game takes them out of character. I don't want to be on risk of mischaracterizing though, I'm sure people can speak for themselves

I have often brought up a lot in various discussions about how exceptionalism rarely holds up to scrutiny, and it's often a red flag of a person's prejudices and biases. It tends to say more about a person's views rather than the subject itself. This comes from my own academic experience, broadly working in ancient West Asian and Mediterranean cultures. When Egyptologists, for example, claim that "only in ancient Egypt do we see X phenomenon..." - often with the implicit judgment of Egyptian cultural superiority or uniqueness - it's not long before someone more familiar with other ancient Near Eatern/Mediterranean cultures (e.g., Hittite, Mycenae, Sumerian, Israelite, etc.) than the Egyptologist pipe in with "Well, actually..." (And a correction of such exceptionalism is sometimes followed-up with a moving of the goalposts.)

But I find it quite applicable to how some people talk about TTRPGs, particularly when it comes to D&D. I think that anyone claiming that D&D is more open to hacking and a DIY attitude than other games displays a certain degree of ignorance and lack of wider TTRPG awareness about other gaming communities and what goes on therein. IME, gigantic chunks of Discord discussions regarding these "niche" games is dedicated to hacking the game and demonstrating a tremendous degree of flexibility along the same veneer as D&D's. There is almost a double-standard that sees people hacking D&D as a sign of its flexibility and a lack of focus, but then regard people hacking non-D&D systems (e.g., Fate, PbtA, Cortex, BRP, Cypher, SW, etc.) as signs that they are more specialized, niche, and focused.

Stonetop, Masks, and Urban Shadows feel like completely different games despite all being PbtA. I think that calling them niche ignores the tremendous degree of flexibility and hackability that PbtA must possess as a system to even be hacked into such different games. That a system could produce such different "niche games" from a common resolution system and set of principles is not an easy feat. But the focus of PbtA is (1) genre emulation and (2) putting characters in situations of snowballing dramatic tension and conflict. I don't that is somehow more focused than D&D being designed for zero to hero fantasy adventure and fighting monsters in a series of tactical skirmish minigame encounters. I think that most (but not all) games of D&D that didn't have semi-common combat encounters would result in a mutiny because that's what the characters are designed for and what players often want to experience!

I can tell you from my own discussions with other people who are not part of the hobby that any game that has cultivated the reptuation of people putting tremendous amount of personal investment into pre-play game prep, dungeon design, and decorating purchased terrain/miniatures is going to look like one helluva specialized, niche game regardless of whether theater-of-the-mind or dungeon crawls are part of the experience or not.

I don't find DnD (and anything built on the chassis like PF) to be all that flexible. In the olden days I tried using DnD to play different genres. At best it did okay, but never great. There are just things built into the system that don't work well for anything other than a traditional DnD game.

Spell casters become the be all and end of all of much of the game at even mid-level. For example, the spell system rapidly becomes: Spell X trumps situation Y, unless someone trumps spell X with spell Z. This is a poor fit for many (most?) types of stories.

Another area I find DnD poor at is long duration stories. Thanks to the steep power curve of the levelling system stories that go on for a while will either become a rather different story, at least in style*, or be rendered inert by the new powers that are made available. For example, I don't find it easy to run a mystery (say a long term mystery like the X-Files) across a wide range of levels thanks to all the divination spells that become available. Globe trotting adventures in which the journey plays a large part become kinda moot with teleportation.



*I have found Adventure Paths to be guilty of this.

I wish more games would be designed with horizontal progression in mind, particularly for spellcasters, such that you are not so much growing in terms of a vertical progression leveling power curve, but, rather, you expand horizontally in your versatility by virtue of having more tools at your disposal.