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

[doctorbadwolf]

That being said, are you positive DND doesn't have those things? I seem to remember it having some systems for managing social relationships we didn't use, and a faction system somewhere. Pathfinder 2e certainly has both of those things, designed in a modular way so you can decide if you need or want them without blowing a hole in the game by leaving them out. I seem to remember 4e giving plenty of guidance on them as well.

Right, and 5e has not only an open and robust enough system that you can add subsystem from related games without issue most of the time, but also enough optional 5e mechanics and systems that do the same thing but in another context, that you can usually transfer a mechanic from one part of the system to another with vanishingly little work.

For organizations, there are several options. The patron rules are easy to extrapolate to a web of relationships wherein you have clout or [im blanking on the term for negative clout lol] with each faction that you’ve interacted with or impacted. For more detailed work involving becoming a leader within a faction, you have the Aquisitions Inc rules, where most of the work is just rewording passages to not be so full of jokes. I’m sure someone has done it somewhere, already. Anyway it’s very solid for being in a leadership position and having benefits and responsibilities because of it. Definitely something I’d want for intrigue, since I’d want an intrigue game to leverage factions and our rise or fall within them and within the court at large.

Let’s see, you could also use the piety score system, combined with the light rules for guilds in Ravnica to give a little more oomph to backgrounds.

Hmmm, yeah, I’d want to take the supernatural gifts of Theros, make them part of backgrounds, add in a Loyalty combined with Group Patron, and possibly use Piety as Loyalty or Clout, depending on whether we are loyal members of a House or free agents, or the leaders of a very minor faction working our way up. I’d eventually want to have the option of gaining subordinates using rules taken from Aquisitions Inc.

Honestly if I actually wanted to run this, I could write up a short campaign Bible collating those systems with stuff reworded and recontextualised, in a week? A weekend if I was single and didn’t have ADHD.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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 think this is about familiarity and expectations. D&D has been around forever (literally in the universe of RPGs). Many people misunderstand it, or mutate it in various ways, etc. However a fan of 5e need not be concerned that there is a general misperception of fundamental aspects of the game. Nor that if someone is misconstruing it that they will not be corrected, or at least that they will be exposed to the normative approach.

OTOH if you play some other RPG, pretty much ANY other RPG except I guess D&D-likes, that is unlikely to be the case. There is a very good chance that anyone exposed to such a misperception will NEVER encounter a situation where it will be challenged or where they will be exposed to the intended approach or best practice. So, if I go off and create some BS video about how to play Dungeon World that gets it all wrong, people will simply be misinformed forever. People who are fans of that game know this. I run into people all the time who know exactly one wrong thing about some Indie game or other less mainstream RPG, but nobody ever corrects them.

Also I don't think it is so much that people have high resistance to home brewing of other RPGs. I think it is more that its a different scenario. Whether 5e is 'more flexible' or not, you are more likely to find players if you hack it, than if you even play most other games straight. Beyond that people play niche games for what they are, not so much for what they are not. So there may well be a "why are you generating noise in our space, we play Middle Earth straight up here!" The assumption being, as the response literally said "you can play higher magic with D&D. We don't want to do that, or WE would play <insert game here> instead of One Ring." I think that's fair, though maybe a little insular. Now, if instead, you came back to say RPG.net Game Design Forum and posted "Hey, here's my OGL/CCSA high magic variation of One Ring, take a look at it." You would get a much different response. People would be interested in seeing what you did, why, how, etc.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Right, and 5e has not only an open and robust enough system that you can add subsystem from related games without issue most of the time, but also enough optional 5e mechanics and systems that do the same thing but in another context, that you can usually transfer a mechanic from one part of the system to another with vanishingly little work.

For organizations, there are several options. The patron rules are easy to extrapolate to a web of relationships wherein you have clout or [im blanking on the term for negative clout lol] with each faction that you’ve interacted with or impacted. For more detailed work involving becoming a leader within a faction, you have the Aquisitions Inc rules, where most of the work is just rewording passages to not be so full of jokes. I’m sure someone has done it somewhere, already. Anyway it’s very solid for being in a leadership position and having benefits and responsibilities because of it. Definitely something I’d want for intrigue, since I’d want an intrigue game to leverage factions and our rise or fall within them and within the court at large.

Let’s see, you could also use the piety score system, combined with the light rules for guilds in Ravnica to give a little more oomph to backgrounds.

Hmmm, yeah, I’d want to take the supernatural gifts of Theros, make them part of backgrounds, add in a Loyalty combined with Group Patron, and possibly use Piety as Loyalty or Clout, depending on whether we are loyal members of a House or free agents, or the leaders of a very minor faction working our way up. I’d eventually want to have the option of gaining subordinates using rules taken from Aquisitions Inc.

Honestly if I actually wanted to run this, I could write up a short campaign Bible collating those systems with stuff reworded and recontextualised, in a week? A weekend if I was single and didn’t have ADHD.

You can of course, also just run it without, with characters from the organizations appearing and the GM keeping previous interactions in mind when trying to decide how the organization interacts in future dealings. Similarly, a notebook where you list off what each NPC wants can similarly be used to freeform intrigue, with attitudes changing with events as seems organic to the GM, and social checks resolving uncertainty about trust and such. I'm not suggesting your way isn't good, just illustrating that if you ain't got time for that, its still very much runnable.

I do have players who do prefer the freeform experience to the bespoke game one, deferring to mechanics in situations like this can really take them out of the moment and the feeling of method acting and character embodiment.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Jumping in, the answer is that one nuanced element of 'system matters' is that sometimes you don't want system where it doesn't belong (this being a 4e era april fools joke from WOTC) as an intentional design choice. Sometimes a designer says 'this part of the game needs a lot of rules because we think its hard for the GM to adjudicate well, or because we want a curated metagame to form around it' and then they say 'this other area of the game doesn't need many rules because you can just do it, and the experience won't be unfair or inferior, or our broad skill system and action resolution system cover it.'

"D&D has no rules for managing the state of relationships between different characters, for instance. Nor for modelling factions, as another example of something you might want. "

My instinct is actually that I don't need a system for managing the state of relationships between different characters, nor do even the newest of GMs. That is more suitably handled by the GM's own sense of how the narrative elements might naturally progress. We did that kind of stuff in play by post roleplaying on forums when I was 10, so I can't imagine its a particularly necessary system to have. Granted, one could certainly produce a fun game by mechanizing it, because that could create particular ways of playing off it-- Masks does so for instance, but it isn't per say a superior experience to managing it in DND, just a more curated one, and one where you trade some agency concerning your character's mental state in exchange for mechanics that actively push the narrative-- the snowballing of tension and situation mentioned up thread.

That being said, are you positive DND doesn't have those things? I seem to remember it having some systems for managing social relationships we didn't use, and a faction system somewhere. Pathfinder 2e certainly has both of those things, designed in a modular way so you can decide if you need or want them without blowing a hole in the game by leaving them out. I seem to remember 4e giving plenty of guidance on them as well.

Well, I don't disagree with you that there's no point in having rules where rules are not needed, unless your agenda is to play a game of navigating a lot of rules (and that may actually be pretty fun for some people). My point about 'rules for the state of relationships' was made in terms of the post I was responding to, which posited a game of 'courtly intrigue'. Now, we haven't actually designed that game, nor specified some existing one. Surely there may be such games which lack 'state of relationships' as an area of concern, there are many approaches to any given genre. However, it would appear to be a pretty significant area of concern within that genre, so it AT LEAST merits attention from game design in terms of asking what is required. It is quite likely to be something that will come up often in play!

Likewise I suggested some other sorts of rules or mechanical areas that might receive focus, like the relationships between factions at court. You might also want to deal with general reputation, specific aspects of reputation (do people fear you, respect you, what), etc. Most tellingly, the one variant of D&D which I know of that focused on such a thing was Oriental Adventures, and it has EXACTLY this kind of stuff in it! However, it definitely runs into issues in terms of the difficulty within the core D&D play process of dealing with things like narrative direction, and the ambiguity of checks within the very open context of 'court' (or similar) vs dungeon. If you play OA you will find that it really lacks some badly needed tools in this regard, certainly IMHO (having actually run it back in the day with experienced 1e players whom I would consider to be fairly adept role players).

The problem with a GM's (especially a new one) 'sense of how the narrative elements may naturally progress' is that it WILL INVARIABLY differ greatly from the player's understanding of the same. It will also be highly subject to factors outside of the fiction itself (like making the inevitably canned D&D plot work). So this is not going to play well IME. You can do a kind of game, like most OA modules, where there's lots of excuses laid out to go solve everything with Martial Arts or swordplay, but that is at best akin to Three Musketeers, and more like a 'dungeon in a castle/city' sort of play and not what I would call 'courtly intrigue'. If the prime focus of the game IS the interplay of opinion, reputation, access to power, etc. of a court, then you need process which binds (or there is no game in your RP) and mechanics which support that focus and produce the desired tone, etc.

 

[Numidius]

Suddenly came to my mind that in B/X the "social combat" happens when you beat an intelligent creature to 0 hp, having declared in advance you're not attacking to kill, but to tame.

Just a thought. Kinda funny, thinking about uncollaborative npcs...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You can of course, also just run it without, with characters from the organizations appearing and the GM keeping previous interactions in mind when trying to decide how the organization interacts in future dealings. Similarly, a notebook where you list off what each NPC wants can similarly be used to freeform intrigue, with attitudes changing with events as seems organic to the GM, and social checks resolving uncertainty about trust and such. I'm not suggesting your way isn't good, just illustrating that if you ain't got time for that, its still very much runnable.

I do have players who do prefer the freeform experience to the bespoke game one, deferring to mechanics in situations like this can really take them out of the moment and the feeling of method acting and character embodiment.

But again, I want to reiterate that I don't see where the GAME is in this! You have now just basically free-form RP. NOTHING in the 5e core process binds the GM in any way whatsoever. He decides if and when a check is required in his sole opinion. He decides what the DC is. He decides what the fictional valence of success or failure are, and even what any mechanical consequences would be. The only exception might, to a degree, be spell casting.

In fact I would expect that the most likely approach of an experienced D&D player in this kind of basically combatless socially intensive scenario would be to go whole hog into maximizing ones casting ability at the expense of virtually anything else (certainly of any non-social skills, though knowledge skills might come in handy too). I mean, OK, Stealth seems pretty useful too, potentially, but that is often easy enough to bypass magically.

Anyway, this is the core problem, 5e adjudication is toothless for the reasons I've listed above, so once you have no combat, 5e itself is almost perfectly free form play with some numbers and maybe dice rolls that hint to the GM what he might want to have come to pass. At best the players can make worthwhile tactical decisions that relate to things that literally within their eyesight or which have been fictionally established to be plausibly reliably true at this moment. It isn't nothing, but even within that sphere the resolution of all actions is still almost entirely the GM's call.

In fact if I was going to use a system which didn't really address the whole intrigue aspect mechanically I would pick something like PACE, which at least allows the players to force the GM to be bound by fiction that they are willing to buy with their chits.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

What would happen if there was a disagreement on employment of the rules though? I mean, most editions of D&D (you didn't really specify one) don't really state much in the way of principles of play beyond "if there's a choice, it is up to the DM" basically. You can certainly create some rules around that (handing around a baton for example that gives rule 0 authority until you use it, then you pass it left for instance). I think you may run into that sort of need with any game you are 'hacking on' of course, D&D isn't atypical in that sense.

Informal voting, basically. We eventually developed a cyclical method of running NPCs in combat and social skill challenges, that would have applied had we run into this problem more than we did. When your turn is done, you take on most of the job of running NPCs until the next PCs turn. We evenly spaced PCs and NPCs based on initiative, so about the same number of NPCs go between any two PC turns, and that order stands throughout a scene even if a combat switches to a skill challenge or vice versa.

However, in at least a lot of editions, you would be ignoring quite a lot of rules, and hacking a lot of subsystems (there are a lot of places in 1e for instance where Gygax advocates/dictates, depending on his mood, hidden checks for instance). The DM role in that game is very pervasive! 5e is a bit of a different case in that you have mostly unified mechanics at the core, but the fundamental issue still bites, which is DM authority pervades the process of play so thoroughly that the game is extremely sensitive to inconsistency.

That is generally the cost of open ended flexibility, sure. Just like PC gaming vs console gaming, for instance.

That is, I am sure you worked out your co-DMing activity without much problem. I don't think it is a replicable process though. If you took 100 tables and did this experiment at them, how many would run into enough issues to give it up? If you started with a PbtA core, I think an equal amount of 'hacking' would get you to a place where the game was fully playable, though I certainly would want to do some experiments to see what worked best.

IMO you’d get even better results by taking some specific elements of pbta games and adding them to the D&D game, but I suspect it will end up being a situstion where the D&D model works better for established groups (as a lot of trust based dynamics do), while the pbta model will be easier to pick and and play without extensive instructions. Then again we played MoTW wrong at first, because we didn’t fully read the play guidance. It was still very very fun, however. So much so that my own TTRPG has moved a bit more toward a pbta model in some aspects.

At the risk of recapitulating what is probably already answered, this is a reasonably good question:

So, the question IMHO here in terms of flexibility is which of these processes can be best adapted to other types of situations and play? I mean, I'm assuming games A and B both focus on some sort of genre and tone that is related to this example, reading the room and leveraging that information in terms advancing the agenda of the game (whatever that is). In other words, the question is "If I change the genre/tone/agenda, in which type of system will I have to make the most adjustments, or achieve the least satisfactory results?"

I think we would most likely need to develop more detail about the systems in question to answer that. I will make a few assumptions here, as few as possible, to see what I can come up with (I haven't predetermined an answer to the question here, lets find out):

System A sounds like a 'traditional model RPG' in which the rules govern resolution of application of character elements to fiction. The GM describes the fiction, players declare actions of some sort, and that gets mapped onto skills or something similar which simulate the varying degree of competency and talent of each character. System B sounds, well, pretty much like PbtA, but it might also fit other games, depending.

So, now imagine that we want to have a 'gunfight'. That is, neither system A nor B explicitly provides a mechanism for this, but we've taken ourselves to a new genre, lets call it 'old west gun fighting' and we are wanting to handle this situation. Now, regardless of agenda, whatever this mechanism is it will have to

A) leverage our existing resolution scheme (IE skills or moves according to your description)
B) produce some sort of fictionally appropriate results (IE someone outshoots somebody else, possibly with variations like outdrawing, hitting/missing, shot in the back, etc.).
C) mesh with our agenda such that it leverages the things we care about in terms of both agenda and principles and processes, or else build new ones.

Now, 'traditional' RPGs don't tend to be very explicit about C. Usually a game simply advertises its target genre and then perhaps its material and mechanics produce some variation of that (or perhaps even something wildly different in a few cases...). Agenda is TYPICALLY in those cases unstated or embedded within it. So, for example, classic D&D embeds its agenda in 'XP for GP' pretty much, and its deeper agenda in the architecture of leveling, which requires you to gain XP to 'unlock' much of the potential content, combined with the various exploration/encounter/terrain/architecture type rules. So, what would be an agenda for System A 'Shoot 'em Up'? We just don't know exactly, but let me just leave this question until after we talk about System B for a minute.

As for points A and B, System A probably 'works' here, to some degree. That is, some 'skill-like' resolution scheme can include something like 'gunfighting' as a skill and resolve attacks. Where it may fall short is in B, but we can reasonably engineer something that embodies basically "It hurts to get shot." Depending on tone (gritty, pathetic, heroic, etc.) you might vary things like exactly how much damage you can take, its immediate effects, healing, etc. Obviously if you are building on a system which already has these rules, you can 'just use them' assuming they produce the correct tone. Otherwise you will need to hack those too.

System B is a more 'indie' kind of system. So our process is going to be 'fiction first' in focus, typically. That means fiction will govern mechanics, much like DW reads the fiction of a fight and has the GM translate it into moves based on how the players describe the PCs These games also don't typically map resolution mechanics so much to 'physical parameters'. That is, System B might potentially not even focus on things like 'firing a gun' so much as maybe 'Can I Control My Fear'? or maybe its an exploration of the cultural impact of violence in society, etc. Moves might be pretty abstract, or they might be quite detailed. There isn't a really specific requirement here that we can generalize without really building a game. A seems simple, B seems straightforward once we know about C, but C is deep.

Getting back to agenda in System A, it is hard to see how you will approach something like an agenda of 'Explore the Effects of Violence on Society' or something like that. You COULD make a much more granular system, like instead of modeling gunfire, you could model the effects of various tactics, terrain, and other factors to reduce the results to a much more abstract level. You might even create an agenda like "Arrest and Convict Bad Guys" (that might leverage the mechanics of the original game's social skills). Traditional model games generally are limited to focusing on 'action agendas' which are mostly described as 'Do X'. That's because they work on an action basis. Once you go beyond that, you start to need more narratively focused process/mechanics. Of course, you MIGHT be able to add some of those to System A, but the core process is going to limit you to things you can do in a 'GM presents the material, players call out actions' loop where each action is a specific 'apply skill X to perform action A on target B' kind of a thing. In a game like DW you do clearly state actions, but the process is more just pushing you to "what must the GM describe next?" vs "Did the bullet hit the guy I fired at?" and that is a more generalizable kind of process IMHO.

I think one of the reasons that traditional games SEEM very flexible is simply that RPGs have avoided addressing things that model doesn't do well.

Okay, I won’t go point by point on that, but you raise some interesting points. I’m going to address the thrust of the above as best I can while be a distractible rambler.

Gunslinger’s Creed! The weird west TTRPG of gunfights, broken dreams, and love won and lost!

I’d play it, either way system, first of all. Okay, so, I like D&D combat for shootouts, but I’d model duels using the basic structure of the cleverly hidden 5e skill challenge. Downtime activities! Using specifically Crime as my model, I’ll do a rough sketch of how I’d approach this.

Establish stakes for a total loss, mixed result, and total victory. Next prescribe 1 - 3 proficiencies, possibly letting the player choose from a list, using each proficiency only once. The DC is determined by the skill of the opponent, either in opposed checks, or giving each NPC a Gunfighting DC based on their proficiency bonus, and how many relevant proficiencies they have. Crime just has three DC options the player can select from by choosing a small, moderate, or big, score, but I’d want it more dynamic. Other activities in Xanathar’s have a modifier that you add to a 2d10 roll to determine the DC.

Regardless, you’d have variable DCs, but the player would be able to find out how hard the DC will be by either observing the opponent in a fight, or by making an Insight or Investigation check while interacting with them socially. Being hard to read, being good at sizing up someone you may have to fight, etc, is a big deal in these kinds of stories. You could break this down into multiple checks with variable success, if you want to emphasize it more.

On consequences and stakes, I’d definitely advise making them transparent in general, along with how difficulty works, etc. Ironically, perhaps, I always advise making this stuff transparent and reliable, even prescribed, in the context of a group and campaign. I just like to be able to change it to better fit the campaign, adventure, etc. but my players know what they can do and how hard it will be. Any given adventure I run is quite focused, but the campaign, much less all my campaigns taken together, are very very varied.

Anyway, consequences would probably range from a clean victory, to getting taken down, to a middle state where you can either take an injury to win, or neither get a good hit and transition into a gunfight, or neither gets hit and sue for calling the duel a draw.

In general, I find a lot of the statements you’ve made as to why “will inevitably happen or result from a thing” or what can’t be achieved, etc, to be fairly confusing. I may go back and collect them all at a later time, and use them to start a separate discussion about D&D specifically (rather than comparatively) if you’re okay with that?

To John Harper's points I would add that part of the reason we might not want consensus is that if we want to experience emotional bleed with the characters we are playing is that we do not want consensus because they do not have consensus. We want to feel the tension they feel.

You don’t feel the tension your character feels in D&D? No matter how it’s run? Is it possible for you to believe that other people do?

Making play dependent on that consensus forces us into a position some of us do not want to be in all the time.

Okay, but even if we just accept all this without challenge, how does that make a game based on applying these principles to a specific genre not more focused than 5e D&D?

And again, why is it a bad thing to be more focused? I see 5e derided all the time for lacking focus, particularly in comparison to games like blades or AW. People who are really into those games often say that D&D doesn't know what it wants to be, and site all kinds of focused mechanics to bring about a specific intended play experience, and claim that 5e D&D has nothing like that.

Before this thread and the last one, I’d never seen anyone treat focus as a bad thing, or suggest that 5e was as focused as the other games.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But again, I want to reiterate that I don't see where the GAME is in this! You have now just basically free-form RP. NOTHING in the 5e core process binds the GM in any way whatsoever. He decides if and when a check is required in his sole opinion. He decides what the DC is. He decides what the fictional valence of success or failure are, and even what any mechanical consequences would be. The only exception might, to a degree, be spell casting.

In theory only! In practice, only a fairly new group even has to negotiate these things. Established groups have negotiated them, and know what to expect and which mechanics are in play, and how. What’s more, it’s a conversation even when the DM adjudicates, because players can freely challenge a ruling or suggest something different, and social norms then come into play.

Which is why I don’t recommend D&D by RAW for every group, and don’t really get the appeal of organized play unless you know the people involved. It runs better when you have a group of friends who know eachother and can communicate.

In fact I would expect that the most likely approach of an experienced D&D player in this kind of basically combatless socially intensive scenario would be to go whole hog into maximizing ones casting ability at the expense of virtually anything else (certainly of any non-social skills, though knowledge skills might come in handy too). I mean, OK, Stealth seems pretty useful too, potentially, but that is often easy enough to bypass magically.

I’ve never seen that happen in any game I’ve run where combat wasn’t going to be an important aspect of the campaign. I do see some classes not getting used, but that’s a whole different discussion.

Anyway, this is the core problem, 5e adjudication is toothless for the reasons I've listed above, so once you have no combat, 5e itself is almost perfectly free form play with some numbers and maybe dice rolls that hint to the GM what he might want to have come to pass. At best the players can make worthwhile tactical decisions that relate to things that literally within their eyesight or which have been fictionally established to be plausibly reliably true at this moment. It isn't nothing, but even within that sphere the resolution of all actions is still almost entirely the GM's call.

In fact if I was going to use a system which didn't really address the whole intrigue aspect mechanically I would pick something like PACE, which at least allows the players to force the GM to be bound by fiction that they are willing to buy with their chits.

But most groups develop procedures and norms that govern their game, so no, at the table it isn’t the case that this is all free form. They know how DM Bob handles social challenges of various kinds, non-combat physical challenges, etc. they know how knowledge skills are used and how they’re not, whether expertise in a given skill is fluff or useful in Bob’s campaigns, etc.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Well, I don't disagree with you that there's no point in having rules where rules are not needed, unless your agenda is to play a game of navigating a lot of rules (and that may actually be pretty fun for some people). My point about 'rules for the state of relationships' was made in terms of the post I was responding to, which posited a game of 'courtly intrigue'. Now, we haven't actually designed that game, nor specified some existing one. Surely there may be such games which lack 'state of relationships' as an area of concern, there are many approaches to any given genre. However, it would appear to be a pretty significant area of concern within that genre, so it AT LEAST merits attention from game design in terms of asking what is required. It is quite likely to be something that will come up often in play!

Likewise I suggested some other sorts of rules or mechanical areas that might receive focus, like the relationships between factions at court. You might also want to deal with general reputation, specific aspects of reputation (do people fear you, respect you, what), etc. Most tellingly, the one variant of D&D which I know of that focused on such a thing was Oriental Adventures, and it has EXACTLY this kind of stuff in it! However, it definitely runs into issues in terms of the difficulty within the core D&D play process of dealing with things like narrative direction, and the ambiguity of checks within the very open context of 'court' (or similar) vs dungeon. If you play OA you will find that it really lacks some badly needed tools in this regard, certainly IMHO (having actually run it back in the day with experienced 1e players whom I would consider to be fairly adept role players).

The problem with a GM's (especially a new one) 'sense of how the narrative elements may naturally progress' is that it WILL INVARIABLY differ greatly from the player's understanding of the same. It will also be highly subject to factors outside of the fiction itself (like making the inevitably canned D&D plot work). So this is not going to play well IME. You can do a kind of game, like most OA modules, where there's lots of excuses laid out to go solve everything with Martial Arts or swordplay, but that is at best akin to Three Musketeers, and more like a 'dungeon in a castle/city' sort of play and not what I would call 'courtly intrigue'. If the prime focus of the game IS the interplay of opinion, reputation, access to power, etc. of a court, then you need process which binds (or there is no game in your RP) and mechanics which support that focus and produce the desired tone, etc.

I find that the solution

But again, I want to reiterate that I don't see where the GAME is in this! You have now just basically free-form RP. NOTHING in the 5e core process binds the GM in any way whatsoever. He decides if and when a check is required in his sole opinion. He decides what the DC is. He decides what the fictional valence of success or failure are, and even what any mechanical consequences would be. The only exception might, to a degree, be spell casting.

In fact I would expect that the most likely approach of an experienced D&D player in this kind of basically combatless socially intensive scenario would be to go whole hog into maximizing ones casting ability at the expense of virtually anything else (certainly of any non-social skills, though knowledge skills might come in handy too). I mean, OK, Stealth seems pretty useful too, potentially, but that is often easy enough to bypass magically.

Anyway, this is the core problem, 5e adjudication is toothless for the reasons I've listed above, so once you have no combat, 5e itself is almost perfectly free form play with some numbers and maybe dice rolls that hint to the GM what he might want to have come to pass. At best the players can make worthwhile tactical decisions that relate to things that literally within their eyesight or which have been fictionally established to be plausibly reliably true at this moment. It isn't nothing, but even within that sphere the resolution of all actions is still almost entirely the GM's call.

In fact if I was going to use a system which didn't really address the whole intrigue aspect mechanically I would pick something like PACE, which at least allows the players to force the GM to be bound by fiction that they are willing to buy with their chits.

Ah but the trick is that it isn't a game, its a part of another game, one that has fairly deep (ymmv by edition) combat resolution mechanics and a working skill system. The classic problem of freeform roleplaying is the "Godmode" or as we prefer here at enworld, the "Calvinball" where capability is arbitrary and character-to-player identification biases their sense of fairness.

But in my experience, its way less of a problem in social interaction than combat resolution. Probably because we can by blow a conversation by just doing it and there's very little meanjngful argument to be had since the only argument you could have is about how a character you didn't create mught respond, whereas a fight is more subject to subjective assesments of genre and such.

So to summarize, freeform social mechanics coupled with strict physical simulation mechanics is a design with a well supported basis and often feels right for many.

 

[aramis erak]

CoC is just 'BRP with SAN', LITERALLY (the BRP book I own even lists the rules for SAN as an option you could use). OTOH it has exactly the same structural limitations as D&D, because the process is pretty much the same, the GM authors a story and the players simply tour around in it making discrete 'moves' that affect the fiction in exactly whatever way the GM decides. It won't do 'court intrigue' any differently than D&D, effectively (the tone might come out a bit different due to differences in success probabilities and such). BRP has only one leg up on D&D, it has a built-in (though optional) levels of success mechanism. That has the same issues as the 5e one though, since the game still doesn't engage with position and effect, consequences, nothing like that in any formal way (it is basically toothless, the GM still decides).

BRP does have several mechanical elements that D&D 5e doesn't - 5 success levels (Fumble, fail, success, special success/impale, and critical success). Last edition I looked at also had rules for social actions that were slightly more nuanced than D&D 5E has. A larger number of skills with narrower scope each. Advancement by use, rather than by experience points and/or levels. No classes (but templates can be created for quick gen of archetypes). The system also places very different priorities and relationships between attributes and damage capacity, attributes and skills, and a significantly different action sequence action economy.

D&D 5E officially only has 3 levels of success - Fail, Success, and Critical Success, with that last being optional. (I don't recall if a fumble exists in the DMG as an option other than for death saves; a nat 1 is merely a fail, not a fumble for combat and att saves, and not even an autofail on skills. Not that it hasn't stopped a lot of people from adding fumbles as house rules.)

5E is indeed a simpler engine - were it not for the sheer and insane number of options, it would be the simpler game. It's also worth noting that some of the 5E SRD based games have moved considerably away from the 5E advancement mechanics, while retaining the simple core mechanics. The new SG1 is a very good candidate for a "5e Modern" baseline...