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

Manbearcat said:

What you guys are missing with this is what is trying to be demonstrated and how one should go about demonstrating that:

1) Its necessary to go to the tails of the distribution to demonstrate just how different these two games are in terms of both (i) genre and (ii) what is actually happening at the table to get us there.

2) I've talked about the extreme differences in genre (i), so lets talk about how one gets there. I've poked at it, but let me try to demonstrate just how enormously different the play yield is for the formulation of actual action resolution procedures + the resources that individual PCs can call upon to make this happen.

a) The Fighter that AA is proposing above is not your bog-standard D&D Fighter. Its not a shield-bearing, medium to heavy armor wearing tank nor a Strength-specialized, but Dex-average (or deficient), Berserker who isn't proficient in Stealth. Its a Dex-heavy duelist/skirmisher, archer, invested in Stealth or something like this. Out of the historical spread of the bajillion D&D Fighters that have been made...this makes up what ridiculously low %? Maybe 1 in 10 (at best)?

Let's take this guy at level 7. Lets give him +5 Dex and Training in Stealth. He's +8 Stealth. Against a DC 20 stealth obstacle (as proposed above), he's only succeeding 40 % of the time.

b) Now let's take the Blades analogue; the Cutter. This only a 1st level character...not a 7th level character. This character has NO INVESTMENT IN PROWL (Stealth in 5e).

This character can spend 2 out of his 9 available Stress or they can Accept a Devil's Bargain or a Teammate can spend 1 Stress to Assist to yield a Success w/ Complications (so he's done his stealthy thing but something else has happened to complicate the situation) 50 % of the time! And if they want, they can Resist the Complication (and they'll surely have 2d6 to do so because Prowl falls under Prowess...the physical "Saving Throw" to use D&D parlance)!

I don't have to go "off-script" or outside the bog standard Fighter in Blades for someone to be stealthy. I don't have to invest in stealth. I can be 1st level.

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If this doesn't demonstrate that the paradigm is fundamentally different in terms of breadth of competency/capability and the cognitive space that players are inhabiting during play, I don't know what will. Just like D&D 5e, Blades is absolutely about leveraging your strengths. But the active tools (and the player-facing nature of the whole game) to manage your weaknesses is fundamentally different.


The upshot of this is that everyone is managing their individual collective limited use resources (Stress, Armor, Special Armor, Loadout Slots including Consumables) and managing all of the other considerable aspects of PC and Crew play/life (Harm, Trauma, Heat, Coin, Cohorts, Clocks, Assets like Vehicles/Tools) to push every caper toward low-exposure (including body count as body count creates multiple feedback loops from Heat to potential Clocks that you have to deal with during Downtime) and expected return. So if you want to get something done, there are a great many individual buttons and levers to push to (a) leverage your (and others) strengths, (b) minimize your weaknesses, (c) deal with complications as they (inevitably) arise, (d) punch above your weight (higher returns) to ensure that things don't go all A-Team with explosions and body count and getaway chases and the attendant significantly increased exposure left in the Crew's wake (which they'll have to answer for because of the feedback loops of the system).

Yes, sometimes it turns into A-Team. But that is hugely rare in Blades.

I've probably run 200 Scores as a GM (maybe more). The number of times its turned into A-Team I could count on probably 2 hands. Lets even double that to 20/200. That is 10 % of the time it turns into A-Team. So its probably somewhere between 5 % at the low end and 10 % at the high end that Blades turns into A-Team. D&D capers? Its nearly A-Team all the way down (its got to be 75 - 90 % A-Team). Which is awesome. But its not the same play space, its not the same genre outputs, and that is because the system architecture and incentive structures ensures that.

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doctorbadwolf said:

Why is it odd? I’m not trying to play Aliens, I’m trying to run a fantasy horror story wherein the PCs cannot escape, cannot fight the monster headon and survive, and are in a fairly advanced facility with a lot of moving and movable parts they can try to use cleverly.

There are probably things from the Aliens rpg that would help me do that, and it will be less work for me than it would be to try and make the Alien rpg do heroic fantasy.

I’m not trying to run a game wherein you play a crew of professional criminals that all can do eachother’s jobs competently, I’ve got a story wherein the PCs will need something that is best gotten via criminal caper, and those PCs have to figure out how to use their competencies to do it. Part of the fun is that Vidanya the Paladin isn’t sneaky and doesn’t know how to hack magical systems, while Ocuthim the Kobold Wizard is small and able to hide and an expert hacker (Wizard, scribe), and Khalid is an expert sneak, able to teleport short distances sometimes, and dangerous in unarmed combat, etc, and if one of them gets taken out the team will struggle to fill their role.

If I get a good group together to play an actual “we are all professional criminals/spies/assassins/etc” campaign, it may be worth it to run that in Blades rather than D&D. It mostly depends on the group and what everyone wants from the experience. Also, whether any Blades playbooks can do any kind of magic. My group has a strong bent away from super-low magic games where a PC basically cannot play a magic user. Also for me, why play it as a fantasy game if the PCs can’t be supernatural?

But as I’ve said before, I’ve played very little Blades, and it was a simplified version that probably didn’t give a great impression of what the game is actually like. That GM tends to strip most of the mechanics out of a game and play the most simplified version possible.

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Dire Bare said:

I find it odd that you find this odd.

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hawkeyefan said:

You go on to say "it may be worth it..." to play another game with a more suitable focus. But there's doubt there, isn't there? Which seems odd.

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doctorbadwolf said:

That is hyperbolic, way past the point where it's bad advice and crappy behavior.

Absolutely never said anything remotely like this. A heist game, if done well, should be better than 5e at running a heist game. That isn't even really relevant to whether 5e can smoothly be modified to have some heist elements like flashbacks in the hands of the PCs and use of optional non-binary ability check resolution to run heists successfully. Which is what I actually said.

Right, so for me 4e wasn't that easy to add significant things to. On the other hand, probably less would need to be added for a lot of story types. On the other other hand, 5e is at least as easy to run, IMO, and doesn't fight you at all if you just use 4e skill challenges in it, or steal 4e's rules for stealth (which are basically what I've seen many brand new players assume stealth would work like. You make a check to become hidden, and then you're hidden until something makes you not hidden. Simple.), or seal 4e's active uses of the knowledge skills, etc.

But mostly, I know from experience that 5e can successfully do a lot of genre variants, and support many different playstyles, with fairly small changes, and go even further if you're willing to put in a bit more work.

Hell, in terms of archetypes from one genre to another, making subclasses is dirt simple, and making classes is only a big undertaking if you're making it for mass consumption and/or a potentially 1-20 campaign. Races are super simple.

5e and 4e both benefit from really good math (at most levels) that won't break easily, which also makes them easier to mod than games with greater math scaling. 5e then adds the benefit of fewer mathematical moving parts in the system than the 2 editions before it and most other rules heavy games (I might call 5e rules medium. It definitely isn't rules light), which also makes modding easier.

My 5e DnD isn't the same as Hussar's 5e DnD. That is literally the intention of the designers, and it's a benefit to the game.

Oof yeah. Someone, I think in another thread, claimed that 3e was more versatile than 5e and I just...inhabited the incredulous blinking man gif for a solid minute. But I am biased by the fact that I think 3(.5)e was a very bad game.

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AbdulAlhazred said:

I think if you were to say "which game, 5e or 4e, was easier to simply take a subsystem from some entirely different game and graft it on with minimal/no change" then I might agree that doing that with 5e is 'more natural'. You COULD do it with 4e, but it would be weird as heck, given that 4e really violently eschewed subsystems (I remember reading the chaos sorcerer mechanics and seeing an actual subsystem and being shocked). You are just less likely to NEED to do that with 4e, and the motive would presumably be "I just really like this subsystem, it is the snizzle for this!" in which case weird might not matter to you. But it would definitely seem like 5e is more 'welcoming' of that, and it might clash less with its simplified DC processes and such.

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dave2008 said:

I really enjoy D&D, so I naturally doubt I will have as much fun in another system, even it is designed for a specific genre that I want to run with D&D.

Until I experience it, there will naturally be some doubt. Just because a game is designed for a particular genre doesn't mean I will like how the game attempts to portray that genre.

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doctorbadwolf said:

Absolutely. I really think that if they make an anniversary edition of 5e, it needs a total rewrite of the DMG, with much more robust and effective advice, optional subsystems, etc.

So it does have magic playbooks. I figured as much, but didn't look into when I played with premade characters in a simplified variant.

Anyway, the question I have is, is it practical to have a crew that is a mix of all available playbooks? Not possible, but practical. Will it make the team less effective overall, or not?

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hawkeyefan said:

I think part of what makes me scratch my head is that, from most of the examples provided, folks who are saying D&D can be modified to deliver a different experience (horror, crime, etc.) are generally adopting the kinds of mechanics that are inherent parts of other games.

It’s odd.

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hawkeyefan said:

Sure, and that's fine. Although you've also said you're not really going to experiment with other games, so I suppose it is what it is.

For folks who only want to play D&D I would say that there's already an inherent bias (which may be a perfectly fine thing) that makes discussion of this sort kind of pointless, right? I mean, your post here sums that up pretty well. And I don't mean that as a criticism.....I just mean that you view any other game with doubt and D&D is comfortable to you to the point where you feel okay tweaking and hacking until it does what you like.

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