Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8518155" data-attributes="member: 82106">That may be true in terms of how 5e is constituted, but I think that actually illustrates the issue I have with it! Lets contrast again with Dungeon World. In a DW 'combat' you would start with fiction, the GM indicates some sort of threat. There ARE NO MECHANICS FOR THIS! I mean, there is the 'constitutive rules' of DW which tell GMs to make moves and how a move works. Thus the fiction itself is constitutive of the game and in-fiction narration is completely necessary to initiate any sort of move to the mechanics whatsoever (which consist entirely of players making moves which happen to invoke one of the mechanical move types). The move back to fiction is vital here too. The mechanics will tell you that something happened, but the actual effects are generally left to narration (IE the enemy may be driven back, providing an opportunity to escape, or not, but the only determinant of this is how the player and GM fictionally narrated their parts in the action). A mechanical success could mean almost anything, theoretically, for instance, as long as it is favorable to the player and contains the elements dictated by the rules for that move.In D&D, generally, the fiction is rather less constitutive, in general, in that it is quite possible to reduce it to a very nominal element, and the game will generally 'still work'. It is literally impossible to do that in a DW game. It isn't just 'bad play', it is INCOHERENT (though I'm sure people have managed to do something they called 'playing DW' where they achieved it). Even the most perfunctory DW fiction has to actually describe the literal fictional actions taken by the PC. Also you will achieve very minimal results by simply narrating something like "I swing my sword at the orc." Yeah, the GM may say "OK, hack and slash, roll your dice..." but you can almost always do better. I'd say early D&D can be played in a bit of a similar way, but more 'technical' versions, like 5e, get bogged down in more elaborate mechanics. Even 1e suffers from this to a degree. 4e countered it by adding a rich set of keywords and many many game elements, which together at least highly suggests where you can go beyond mere 'running the mechanics', though it is pretty easy to bog it down in 'wargame mode' too if you aren't cognizant of those techniques. The best 4e group I had were all people that spent several years playing some WW games, they were pretty keen on the ideas of just generating fiction and not worrying too too much about the mechanical details until after. The guy playing the Halfling Rogue was the best, he would always find a way to swing into battle and use his Bowl Over (I think that's the name of it) power to knock all the enemies into a heap. It was hilarious and utterly ridiculous, but he'd figured out all these ways to leverage fiction into using powers like that. That game played pretty much like a supers game, lol.</blockquote>

Verification