I don't think that's controversial. I think it's a subjective matter, and so your specific stance that D&D is more flexible than "indie games", a potentially very broad category of games, is what's controversial.
Except that isn’t what I’ve said. I’m blanking on names atm, but I know there are indie games that are just “action resolution mechanic and narrative descriptions of archetypes” and a half page of additional rules to cover like, dying, or winning hearts, or whatever. Those games are often extremely flexible.
My position is that games that don’t mechanize toward specific outcomes are more flexible than those that do. That if I didn’t play D&D I would instead be playing several different pbta and fitd games, along with games like The One Ring that aren’t part of either community, because each game is more focused, and thus less flexible.
Flexibility isn’t all there is, otherwise I’d just write a 1-10 page TTRPG and play that.
Different people are discussing this in different ways. I think that's also part of the problem; what it means for a game to be flexible may be different things to different people. Hell, I'd say that it can mean different things to just one person.....I can see many ways in which we may classify a game as being flexible.
Okay. I think this is a case where not establishing a shared definition is the problem. I mean, at no point have I said anything that I would consider negative about indie games. The closest I’ve come is stating that I don’t see the appeal of having a game try to induce involuntary neurological states, and view it as trauma tourism. My comments on flexibility certainly aren’t judgements of general quality. It’s good that Monsterhearts and The One Ring and Monster of The Week etc are all focused games. It’s part of why they succeed at providing enjoyable experiences.
Sure, but that goes to the social element mentioned earlier. What if you're playing with a new group? Let's say an online game or a game at a store or convention. In those cases, you can't lean on knowing the participants well and being able to anticipate what they'll like or what they expect nearly as much as you can with your home game. So what you have to rely on in those cases is what the game provides, both rules and advice.
I would never try to play even the games that are designed to do those things with people I don’t know, much less a game that relies on conversational consensus. I’ve run D&D for strangers at local cons, and at the library, and it’s fun, but we didn’t set up the play process or tone/theme to encourage emotional intensity.
I really don't need to do that. I play D&D because I enjoy the combat element. If I wanted a game that was not about combat, I would play a different game.
Could I get D&D to work without combat by adding a bunch of rules or changing the ones that exist, and restructuring everything? I'd say almost definitely. But why? What's to gain by that when I can instead just select another game that will do what I want it to do without needing all those changes?
I don’t think you can really understand what I’m talking about without having played D&D differently from a combat action game. As well, I’m not sure why you’re so confident in saying D&D isn't all that flexible when you’re only willing to even try to play it one specific way.
And again, I don’t use many houserules. The process of play varies depending on the adventure style, often session to session or even changing within a session (like when combat recently turned into a ritual magic skill challenge scene to stop the necromancer’s contingency bomb from killing everything within a few miles radius).
How a game is run is always a matter of consensus. When I play Uno with my daughter we have to negotiate what rules will apply, because she has various idiosyncratic house rules she picks up from her school friends that I find annoying.
UNO doesn’t make consensus the primary mechanic of the game.
But the actual play of the game doesn't depend on consensus - we follow the rules of play as agreed.
Exactly. That is the difference between it and D&D .
Because there are multiple editions of Burning Wheel, plus the possibility of house rules and tweaks, playing a game of BW depends on consensus. Eg on the weekend, when my friend and I were building PCs for a new campaign, we had to decide which version of the root stats for Martial Arts skill to use: the Revised version or the Gold version. (We went for Gold.)
But that is different from the actual gameplay depending on consensus. Sometimes it did: for instance, we agreed by consensus that the game would start in Hardby. But sometimes it didn't: for instance, when my friend had to roll tax checks following his PC's casting of spells, we applied the rules for tax, which at one point meant that my friend's PC fell unconscious. Which then meant that my PC was able to take all the money we were in the process of taking from an innkeeper.
Right, parts of any TTRPG are going to be determined by mechanics. In D&D the DM has authority to override the rules, but in practice that authority exists only insofar as the group consents to it. My ideal D&D , and thus the D&D i Play at my table, is one wherein that group consent dynamic is explicitly part of the rules, but I’ve never claimed D&D is perfect.
To your specific example, D&D 5e has optional rules that allow spellcasting to be more taxing, and the new rules for stress in VRGtR can also be applied to whatever the group wants, including Spellcasting in order to induce a more magically restricted game where you need to think before casting. To get to the level of the spellcaster passing out from a spell, you’d need to add a new rule.
To me, this is more versatile than if D&D only had the more restrictive Spellcasting rules, because it is easy to add those rules in and make them work with the existing rules.
As I've said upthread, I don't know what the measure of flexibility is supposed to be. But I would think of flexibility as ranging over such dimensions as the fiction - genre, theme, etc - and the play dynamics - eg how is fiction established, how are consequences and what happens next worked out - and participant roles. These various dimensions are not fully independent - eg some play dynamics might better suit some thematic content, such as I suggested above discussing BW.
For me, it’s “the ability to change and adapt based on different circumstance”, in this case circumstance meaning things like desired gameplay, theme, genre, so close enough to how I’d define it.
The fact that a system uses consensus as its action resolution procedure doesn't seem to me to make it particularly flexible in any of the dimensions I've identified: it doesn't change the scope of genre or theme that can be addressed;
Sure, other aspects of 5e do that.
it is one particular play dynamic;
I disagree, from experience.
and it is pushes towards one particular approach to participant roles (ie everyone's role is in helping establish and support the consensus).
Seems fair
It seems to me that if what one is taking from D&D is the barest basics of PC build (6 stats, skills and proficiency bonus) and action resolution (roll d20, add the appropriate stat and proficiency bonus, equal or exceed a target number); but is using processes of play that are not set out in any D&D text but are set out in other RPG texts; then it seems just as plausible to locate the flexibility in those other systems - they are able to incorporate those basic D&D elements into their processes - rather than locating it in D&D.
Ah, now I see where you’re at. I disagree, but that’s certainly a fair position.
To me, this “counts” as D&D flexibility because it isn’t actual mechanics. I wouldn’t be as comfortable changing the process of play in The One Ring, because it’s process of play
is built into the rules text, not advice for ease of gameplay, and it has a culture of play that tends to reject even additions if they change the tone from strictly Tolkien fantasy, because it’s a focused game. Someone once made and shared a module that added more magic to the game, while still keeping it
very low magic, and there were literally several people who were offended by it, and tons of others who just had no interest and/or told the author to just go play D&D instead.
Ive also seen that, on Twitter especially but also in the subreddits for those games and the general rpg subreddits, in response to actual play shows using an indie game “wrong”, and there being people legitimately
offended by it. See, The Adventure Zone: Any non-D&D season, or any of Critical Role’s indie game one shots.
I rarely see such reactions to people changing D&D, even as someone who is very online and changes D&D all the time, and espouses a philosophy that there actually are no rules. I’ve seen it most on these forums, a little on Twitter, but even then I had people having my back on the legitimacy of modifying D&D and It still being D&D.
I took
@hawkeyefan to be making a similar point with his remark upthread about CoC: it seems as much as D&D's PC build and resolution basics, the CoC build and resolution basic might be slotted into the sorts of processes of play you have described yourself adopting.
I may be misremembering, as it has been years and I was only ever a player, but my memory of CoC is that you’d have to take actual base mechanics, equivalent to even more change than changing D&D to a pbta action resolution system, to make CoC not have the “you are less effective as you progress” dynamic and add in a feeling of pulp “plot armor” and “narrative threat of death” (ie you are only gonna die if you choose to).
Either way, in summary;
I see D&D 5e (and I do specifically only mean 5e. My experience is mostly 2e-5e, and only 5e is
especially flexible IMO) as flexible for reasons related to both mechanics and process of play, as well as culture (though hawk seems to have completely different experience, apperently discord is the place to meet the less elitist and purist sections of the indie scene) and there are multiple aspects of each of those that contribute to flexibility in different ways/contexts. Combat, I consider the least flexible aspect of the game, but still more flexible than 3e or 4e dnd combat.
Mechanics:
- The mechanics don’t interfere with your play process much, so you can choose a play process, change it over time, use different processes for different games or adventures, etc.
- The game also features many optional mechanics that change how the game is played.
- Conversational resolution is IMO more flexible than prescribed or “if, then” resolution, with the trade off of being less focused and requiring more teamwork to get the most out of it.
Process: by putting the prescribed parts of the system mostly in direct action resolution, and not in process of play, people can run the game how they want, and stuff like “who initiates a check” become very variable as a result, not to mention the rest of the process of play.
I can only agree with the position of
@hawkeyefan that this openness reduces flexibility on a purely individual preference level. Ie, it can if you experience a loss of creative impulse in the face of very open ended options. Not everyone does. Further, not prescribing it in the book makes it easier to seek out different prescribed systems and add the one that works best to the game. I refuse to even entertain the notion that it isn’t objectively easier to add than it is to replace. One may argue that the trade off isn’t worth it, but that’s a separate discussion.
Culture: IME, few people (pretty much only “very online” purists, an extreme minority) care about any idea of someone playing D&D wrong because they changed the tone, or the focus, or the genre, or whatever. Folks care if the core books change those things, not if you do so at your table. Not only that, vanishingly few people view a game as no longer the same game if you run the play a bit differently in order to make a heist adventure satisfying.
