There might be a problem remembering the ongoing stacking. Perhaps player needs to be given a physical die or token to represent it.
Once one sees the GM is another player at the table - one with different moves and remit - then for me it seems very likely that it can be achieved. As I prefer traditional DMing, and also like many structural aspects of DW, I've been thinking out how to revise the artifact (e.g. , the moves) and the principles, to suit my ends. Why do you put GM centrality as a blocker to the process?
Well, we have some similar thoughts. I'll put some notes together and maybe it will make a good fodder for another thread. It has been quite a while since I dug into that in a thread here.
Is your argument here that - regardless of whether it can or can't be done - WotC won't do it? Because that is different from what I am arguing. I don't really know what WotC
will do, only what I think they
could do. Possibly it will fall to someone else to do it. I'm intrigued by the problem of
how to do it. I don't believe armies of good game designers have
tried to achieve it, so it remains moot to me whether they could.
Setting aside the question of WotC's moral or commercial commitments, and what game designers may have attempted or not attempted, do you have any thoughts
how one might marry D&D combat, GM centricity, probably neo-vancian magic, with a skills system that learns from AW? Some questions on my mind
- How to marry the tempo? I'm currently thinking of 10-min scenes as the next frame up from the circa-1-min combat. I'm assuming (but very much undecided) that there will need to be some sort of action economy in each frame. A hard problem to solve is preventing that from clashing with conversation-driven eventing. Perhaps a solution will be in ongoing resources (DW generates some dynamically - hold, 1 forward) that refresh on another cadence or with commitment to some interregnum.
- We're still going to want to jump and climb in combat frame as well as out of it, so how to clearly divide combat-frame use from scene-frame use?
- Is it right to say explore and social will be handled in the one process-space? (So we have a combat process-space, explore+social process-space, maybe a spells process-space, character class process-space... any others? Some classes could seem to have their own process-sub-spaces.)
- What rules and tempo-constructs would be most powerful to lift out of individual process-spaces, and lie across them?
That sort of thing. What questions would be on your mind?
My argument is that WotC clearly staked itself on going to basically a 'rehash 2e in a better form than 3e' direction. That direction is THOROUGHLY, even AGGRESSIVELY traditional. It is about as hard a rejection of anything else as you could possibly make, really in the form of a D&D edition. So, in any practical sense WotC pretty much has to die on that hill from here on out.
As for what is theoretically possible with D&D? Well, 4e says it all! 4e, if you take the various parts where it says 'how to play' seriously, IS a Story Game. I mean, it is a bit broken, it isn't a pure story game. It is close though. It can be played, legally within the stated rules, process, agenda, etc. as such. And it works. I know, I did it for 10 years.
@pemerton did it, I'm pretty sure
@Manbearcat did it, etc. etc. etc. So, you have to go back and abstract out those elements, clarify them a bit, dig the 'hooks' in a bit better and more explicitly, and then get rid of a few elements (like stand-alone checks) which work against it. I've conveniently written that game (partially and somewhat inexpertly, but it is good enough that I can run it). Even my version really needs a rewrite because I didn't START OUT understanding all of this 5-6 years ago to the degree I do now. I have much refined the agenda of my game, and a lot of things don't fit well anymore, etc. Still, it is clear to me how to write a follow-on game to 4e that would be 'Story D&D'. Frankly I'm not even really concerned with things like pseudo-Vancian casting vs A/E/D/U and whatnot, those are all secondary. What matters is the core 'resolution loop' of the game.
And that is my core hypothesis, that the 'traditional resolution loop' in all its variations, cannot do much more than it is doing in 5e. The things where 5e stumbles are not peripheral design issues with 5e subsystems or matters of adding some minor optional rule or whatnot. They are CORE LIMITATIONS of its very game process model and can only be 'fixed' by implementing a new game process model. That has implications throughout a system! Yes, you could stick as close as possible to 5e rules (I would think that would be wise if one were to actually undertake such a project) but every element of the game would need to be revisited and re-imagined to some degree based on serving as part of a fluid narrative resolution process model vs an action resolution process model. Since 4e already did that, I concluded that starting with 5e would be a lot more work and basically crazy, so I took 4e as my point of departure in my own gaming.
On your points:
1. My solution here has been to simply retain the Skill Challenge as the primary framework. My SC rules are really not materially different from 4e's, though there are some tweaks which more formally tie resource expenditures into the success/failure tally mechanism in a clearer way. RC-grade 4e SCs already have 'ongoing resources', and the scope issue is not really a problem, they last the scope of the challenge, whatever that is (I guess I could theorycraft some situations where that would clash with fiction).
2. This is an interesting question. So, 4e combat is made up of turns and actions. SCs naturally have a sort of similar pace, and overall the valence of things is handled in roughly similar ways. There may be cases where this isn't adequate, but what I imagined and have done is to provide many fewer individual 'powers' but to describe them in a more flexible way, such that they can work in combat, in non-combat, as rituals, as consumables, etc. In terms of your examples, 4e already handles things like jump and climb adequately out of combat as checks during an SC. Obviously things like distance jumped and whatnot is more abstract, but I think
@pemerton has quoted Maelstrom Roleplaying here and there where it talks about this sort of stuff, it is just dramatically appropriate. If you have to make a jump check, by gosh it means the distance is challenging for you. If you're level 1 fighter, that might be 15 feet, if you are a level 30 STR 30 Demigod, it might be a mile! HoML 2.0 I have also contemplated that combat would 'scale'. Instead of 4e's fixed 5' per square, maybe Legendary combats have a larger scale, and Mythic combats cover large regions or something.
3. There would be 3 spaces (this is how HoML covers it). There is the combat process space (action sequences, they might cover stuff that is combat-adjacent too). There is the Skill Challenge process space, which covers ALL other conflicts besides combat and combat-adjacent (maybe like escaping a collapsing building or something). Finally there is what I call 'Interlude'. In this space there are no dice. It is free RP in which the players take on pure characterization and background developing play. It is really just a formal recognition of 'table chit-chat'. I could see some downtime operations falling within 'Interlude' possibly. Certainly 'plot seeds' usually develop during interludes. They would also be the technical process space of something like a cut scene or a flashback (ala 4e DMG2) as long as it is pure narrative and isn't resolving any ongoing conflict. You can always drop from Interlude to Skill Challenge and back very easily.
4. I haven't found a strong need to formalize transitions of process model. I mean, frankly, the combat model could be done away with and handled using SC rules, but it would certainly be a big change in terms of mechanics that currently exist in that model. It would also definitively break from being anything like D&D. I'm old, and I actually LIKE D&D in many ways. So, I haven't done that. From a pure game-design perspective it might be better to run things with just 'Challenge' and 'Interlude'. As soon as someone has an urge to roll dice, and can define a goal and an obstacle, Challenge is invoked. Once the challenge resolves, then in principle you go back to Interlude, though in practice another challenge may instantly arise (I would expect that to be fairly common during an adventure). I'd note that you can also 'nest' challenges. 4e hinted at that possibility a couple times. I haven't ever really taken it on directly in a formal way, but I think I mentioned that SCs and skill checks have 'closure', so you can use an SC (or a combat I guess) to resolve a check in a 'higher level' SC. I don't tend to do that too often, but a game could be built entirely around that sort of 'Russian Doll' design. It could even handle things like a lot of the higher level stuff that BitD does with its faction rules and whatnot! My programmer mind likes this idea... lol.
