NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8522705" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here are a couple of concrete examples, taken from Burning Wheel play.In the basic trappings of its fiction, BW resembles D&D - quasi-mediaeval; Tolkien-esque Elves, Dwarves and Orcs; a tendency towards swords & sorcery but with somewhat more ubiquitous or at least less uniformly sinister magic; etc.There are peasants, villages, cities with temples and wizards, ports and pirates, rogue wizards and mad summoners. Knights of holy military orders wear heavy plate armour. Taverns are places to obtain rumours and meet people.Despite these similarities, I don't think either of the following examples of play could occur in D&D as they have, for me, in BW.(1) Thurgon - knight of a military order amd my PC - and his sidekick Aramina, were travelling upriver in the borderlands. The GM wanted to skip a few days, but I insisted on playing out the first evening, as Thurgon and Aramina debated what to do. Aramina - being learned in Great Masters-wise, believed that the abandoned tower of Evard the Black lay somewhere in the forest on the north side of the river (a successful check, initiated by me as her player), and wanted to check it out (and find spellbooks! - one of her central movitvations as stated in her Beliefs). Thurgon persuaded her that they could not do such a thing unless (i) she fixed his breastplate, and (ii) they found some information in the abandoned fortresses of his order which would indicate that the tower was, at least, superficially safe to seek out (eg not an orc fortress a la Angmar/Dol Guldur). My recollection is that we resolved this as a Duel of Wits with me scripting for Thurgon and the GM for Aramina.As I posted at the time,5e D&D has no system of damage to armour, and hence no way to make repair of it a substantive matter of contention among characters. And it has no way of resolving that contention other than talking it out - treating the sidekick as a NPC, there is a system which permits the PC to persuade or fail to persuade them, but not for them to generate a change of commitment on the part of the PC.That's before we get to the broader context for this debate, which is a fiction shaped by the player, not the GM, through PC build (where all the knightly stuff comes from) plus action resolution (which is where the Evard stuff comes from).(2) Me and my fellow player, each with a PC and co-GMing in a somewhat round-robin style, framed an opening scene with our two PCs, Alicia the weather witch and Aedhros the bitter (Tolkien-style) dark elf, together on the docks:I think this action would not be replicable in 5e D&D.D&D has no clear system for determining whether or not an offer of work and an offer of payment are accepted. It has not real framework for making small things like shoes, or a night's accommodation, matter. These generally sit below the level of loot and expenditure with which it is concerned. It has no analogue of a sorcerer's tax, nor any way of linking that to a test for working in the heat of the kitchens, which helped build up the pressure on Alicia and in the end led to her collapsing. And D&D 5e has no framework for establishing that a PC is not as cold as they took themselves to be, and hence unable to follow through on their murderous intent without hesitation.Furthermore, I've played and GMed a lot of D&D, but have never had an experience occur where ordinary, unremarkable shoes are part of what is at stake. On the AD&D price list boots cost from 8 sp to 2 gp depending on make, in a context where most PCs starts with 10s of gp and where treasure acquisition is expected to be in the 100s and 1000s of gp (given the XP rules). In 4e D&D a PC starts with basic clothing as a default. In 5e D&D clothes tend to come as part of a PC's background, and common clothes cost 5 sp in the context of starting money of around 100 gp and expectations of comparable sorts of money being found on adventures.************************************************************This post is not an argument about the relative merits of 5e* and Burning Wheel. Rather, it is an attempt to show - via concrete examples taken from actual play  - that what counts as meaningful is highly dependent on system.I could give actual play examples from other systems, too - eg 4e D&D, or Cortex+ Heroic, or Rolemaster - that would show how those systems shape what is or isn't within the range of "meaningful consequences" and "meaningful narration".</blockquote>

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