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

[AbdulAlhazred]

So, what you’re talking about is mechanical teeth, though I don’t really dig the term “teeth” here.

What I am saying is that the teeth don’t have to be mechanical, and can instead be social and narrative. D&D is, for many of us, an improv game of cooperative storytelling and narrative exploration. Combat benefits from hard structure because combat is the easiest aspect of play to become unfair without it, and because it, for many of us, benefits the most in terms of fun from having a lot of distinct moving parts. I want combat to be somewhat tactical. I will struggle to engage meaningfully with a game where interaction is tactical via detailed and complex sets of many moving parts.

Mechanical vs narrative teeth is just a preference.

And again, relate this back to the OP, because I’m not all that interested in “is BITD better at heists”, my position is based in the following;

• D&D 5e is a good system for hacking, because it chooses to keep 2/3 of the game open with a set of rules to choose from for situationally appropriate adjudication. It also kinda sucks at explaining and showcasing that. This will not work for everyone, but for those it does work for, it works very well.
• It is not reasonable to assume that because a thing doesn’t work for one group, it cannot or will not work for another.
• It’s rude to drop dismissive comments in a thread that amount to “your premise is bad and you shouldn’t want or like the things you want and like.”
• It’s good to give actual advice, including your reasoning behind the advice. Recommending games that might work better, or might just serve as inspiration, is generally good advice.

Yeah, we just (at risk of putting some words in some other people's mouths) feel that calling what 5e has 'support' is a bit of a stretch. It has a bare suggestion of a way to handle things in the form of a skill check mechanic and a tool proficiency. Since no structure or process attaches to these their USE is actually OUTSIDE THE GAME, they are effectively metagame resources! I mean, they have some narrative 'mass' within the game world, but without any actual principles of play or documented process there isn't an actual connection between them and fiction that is part of the game.

The thing is, this means that, outside of the realm of combat, D&D (basically all editions except 4e) merely suggest, at best, some way to handle various stuff. It is illustrative to compare this with games which DO have such structure. So, for instance, why would 5e be a better game in which to introduce a 'heist' than Dungeon World? Dungeon World explicitly declares that the game is about the PCs, that it focuses on what the players want to do with the PCs, and that the GM is a 'fan' of the PCs, and that his job is to make life hard for the PCs so they can try to shine. 5e also establishes table roles and goals, the GM is the inventor of the world, arbiter of all matters of application of rules to fiction, and plays the opposition in which the players test their ability to essentially 'beat the dungeon'.

Now, if we focus on the mechanics of Dungeon World we see that it has a play process in which the GM creates threats, fronts, and associated dooms (impending badness) which presumably are a backdrop on which the PCs will play out their stories. The GM describes a scene and fictional situation, and from there the players make moves, mechanically defined options available to their characters. The moves must comply with the fiction. Each move associates to the general resolution mechanism, and some moves are fairly universal and can be said to cover pretty much any situation where there is conflict (IE Defy Danger). In response to player success/failure/complication the GM may need to reveal information, and then certainly makes countermoves, which put pressure on the PCs, forcing them to act again in turn. This process simply repeats endlessly, with the fiction advancing each time. Now and then a scene will play out and its resolution will provide the impetus for the framing of the next scene. There are also less detailed 'vignettes' (travel and downtime) in which the move process continues but with a bit more structure and less granularity, at least until it precipitates another scene.

Dungeon World has equipment and inventory, money, encumbrance, rules for damage and consequences. So how would it not work AT LEAST as well as 5e for a heist? The milieu is essentially the same as D&D, same sort of medieval fantasy world, characters with levels, monsters, treasure, etc. A heist would be perfectly in keeping with a DW game, assuming the players are into it. The GM would presumably have/create a front which fictionally needs its money transferred to the PC's pockets (and various types of soft move pressure can apply here, like the local loan shark is impatient, etc.). Planning is supported, you can acquire special equipment, buy the services of NPCs, do whatever planning you want, etc. Once things move to the action phase moves are made, scenes described, more moves made, GM moves always apply pressure, but the 'Fan of the PCs' would be acting inconsistently to crash the whole job, certainly not until things are well and truly tossed up!

I mean, given that the BEST CASE I can see on the 5e side is that the GM has a job of making up every detail and how each action and skill use, etc. will fit in and what it entails, all with only the idea that the adventure is a test and should be fun, there's CERTAINLY no MORE here than with DW. Certainly there is less in that DW has a very clear process for how to determine where and when things get better or worse, and what relatively looks like success or failure and how to handle them.

I admit, DW doesn't inherently tell you how much 'soup' you need to 'make the meal' of the heist plot. Fronts, IIRC, are somewhat loosely defined. They can extend from simply minor localized opposition to the PCs, all the way up to the entire primary focus of the campaign. Nor is a front exactly a 'dungeon' or 'adventure'. So, there will have to be some decision at some point on when the PCs have reached the 'treasure vault' and successfully absconded. I would posit that a scenario like this might be somewhat more 'nailed down' than the usual "map with holes in it" advice. Or perhaps the 'holes' will be more in the way of 'plot hooks' which the players can follow after the main heist has happened.

At any rate, it certainly seems like DW has quite a lot of flexibility. It certainly has one characteristic which 5e doesn't bring to the table AS A SYSTEM, which is a built-in 'engine' that drives the game forward into more action and gives context to the actions the players choose their PCs to take.

 

[Thomas Shey]

All of which come after you explicitly say: "The question is can I mod the game easily for a specific story."

.

Of course the problem as you imply is that the word "easily" is doing some serious lifting there, but "easily" is not an objective value, so by someone's standard the question can always be answered "yes".

 

[tetrasodium]

No, I don’t think it’s fair to say that. You don’t know what will or won’t work for another group. The fact that something was bad for you does not mean it will be bad for everyone.

Look at the example you give here. You are literally describing a scenario in which something works for one group but not for another.

I don’t actually care at all about the abstract arguments regarding whether RAW or stock D&D can do XYZ, and I shouldn’t have let myself get dragged into them when they are tangential to the point.

This is the most important thing to me; If I am asking for advice on doing A Thing, it is rude and adds nothing whatsoever to just give a drive by “Don’t do the Thing, it sucks.” Without any explanation.

“D&D doesn't do that” is vague and unhelpful, especially when it is advice that is clearly incorrect for many people, because whether D&D can do a thing depends on the particulars of the thing, what the group wants from it, how the group plays D&D, and other factors. Warning someone that the system isn’t built with that thing in mind, and/pointing out specific problems with doing it in D&D, is great!

“Don’t do it.” Is presumptuous and rude, and attempts to make your experience universal.

That cute both ways. My being able to successfully employ work related security circumvention knowledge as the GM with a player able to do the same on behalf of the players to successfully run a heist type session does not in any way paint the system even partially responsible for that success. Even mediocre guidance in one of the core books for some of the common types of situations would equip the system to be orders of magnitude better supportive of it than my example does

 

[Thomas Shey]

I say, D&D fans always say that D&D can do everything because they count D&D houseruled to hell and back as, well, D&D, and not a separate, different system — because there is no clear way to tell, whether it is still D&D or not — so it makes sense that "a game where Fighters, Rogues, Wizards and whatnot are doing dirty bussiness in the crime-ridden city of Sharn" is a D&D game in their book. So they wouldn't say "Oh, we aren't playing 5e, we are playing my hack, The Long Knives of Sharn".

PbtA and Blades fans, on the other hand, treat houseruled system as a separate entity, based on the original one. So, if one would want to run Blades mechanics, but set in a vaguely medieval fantasy world with dragons and naughty word, they wouldn't treat it as Blades in the Dark — but as another game (khm-khm, Swords under the Sun).

I think the problem I have is I don't find either position particularly sensible here (while acknowledging that from my hearing of how PbtA is put together and my very cursory reading of a couple PbtA games like Monsterhearts that it may look moreso from within that community). I think there's a fuzzy spot in continuity where a game becomes derived from another game rather than being the other game, but I don't think one or two houserules automatically does that, depending on what they are.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I mean, that's a dangerous road to go down, because by that logic, very few games support anything. You'd need an extremely narrowly-designed or nearly perfectly-designed game to completely avoid that issue.

It also begs the question brought up earlier about games that have a lot of generic resolution, but may not engage with a specific situation in any detail or at all. And I don't even know how to assess it in the context of something like JAGS, which has a whole section about subsystem building for specific purposes (since its a generic system); how does it count?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think is pretty true, yeah, and if D&D + significant house rules/rules additions/rules changes consistent got referred to as "hacks" and got neat titles like they do with PtbA, it would actually be pretty helpful.

It stems from two very different game histories of course. Early D&D saw "hacks" absolutely on-par with PtbA hacks, and some of them did have different names, like for example Warlock/Caltech D&D, which in like 1976 featured stuff like spell points, Thieves having actual abilities like 4E/5E (rather than just percentile stuff) and some other changes with pretty significant results.

But EGG et al were not impressed by this sort of thing, and really wanted to standardize D&D, whilst still allowing people to have "house rules", so essentially worked against (as I understand it, obviously literally this was before I was born) versions of D&D that were essentially "hacks" to remotely the degree PtbA stuff is (and later, esp. in 2E, against 3PP content at all, which of course changed with 3E). So house rules became isolated and the concept was that each table had their own, rather than there being shared "hacks".

I was around, and it seems a pretty fair summary to me.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

There used to be a poster here on the boards, a RavenCrowking, who had a 300+ binder of rules for his 3e game that he INSISTED was still 3e D&D.

So, yeah, I've seen that.

The truly ironic thing about this whole thread is you could change 5e to AD&D, roll the calendar back about 20 years to when people were still arguing whether 3e or AD&D was better, and you'd see IDENTICAL arguments made in favor of AD&D as are being made about 5e. It's really funny. Trawl back to some of the earliest threads here on En World and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. The notion that a lack of mechanics = support is something that has been part and parcel of D&D for a very long time.

It’s hard to believe that your takeaway from that is that people don’t know what they’re talking about wrt their own experiences.
Maybe you could consider the possibility that people see things differently from how you see them.

I liked the concept of skill checks in 4E.

At the same time, I found (back when I was running 4E) that I enjoyed them far more (and felt they worked better) by constructing them in a way which heavily departed (and sometimes outright ignored) the official way of doing them.

One example is that instead of X successes before Y failures producing a binary yes/no or pass/fail result, I ran a few in such a way that the players had a certain amount of rolls for a situation and the number of successes and failures achieved within those rolls would help determine how good (or bad) the outcome was on more of a sliding scale.

So, let's say there were a total of 6 possible rolls to do an Audience With the King Skill Challenge. •6 success - 0 failure = the results were especially good; not only was the request granted, but the PCs receive something extra
•5 - 1 = The request was granted.
•4 - 2 = mostly granted, but with a small caveat
•3 - 3 = some complication prevents the request from being granted
•2-4 = the request cannot be granted either due to failure on the part of the PCs or due to some external complications
•1-5 = the request is denied
•0-6 = the results were especially bad and could range from simple refusal to the PCs having somehow insulting the king and making their situation worse... depending upon what exactly was said and etc

I had other different ways of constructing them too. The disease track was the basis for how I did a few of them if the problem faced was ongoing and didn't have a definitive beginning or end.

An example of that would be an encounter I ran in which the PCs were stuck in a room which was meant to be one huge magical trap & maze of doors. The idea was basically a room with multiple doors; choosing wrong door would lead to it appearing as though you had somehow walked back into the same room again, but with a variety of traps, monsters, and effects. Rolls could be made against insight, arcana, and various other skills to gain hints concerning which door would lead back in the "healthy" direction. Choosing wrong lead to a situation which became increasingly worse -sliding down the "disease" track.

In some cases, it wasn't necessary to even announce that a skill check was happening. In the audience example, it would simply be presented as an audience and I would keep track of skill check results as they occurred.

The same idea could still work in 5E.

I've found that using proficiency dice (an alternate rule from the 5E DMG) woks better than a flat proficiency bonus. It encourages people to try things rather than just asking who has the biggest bonus.

That’s actually how some downtown activities work in Xanathar’s. Crime is 3 checks with 3 different skills, and you either get jailed (no successes), caught but escape (only 1 success), partial success getting half the intended score (2 successes), or get in and out like a phantom, getting the full score (all successes). I would probably add a way to potentially get more out of it than planned, maybe all successes and at least 1 nat20, but otherwise it’s solid.

I think the heist discussion also suffers from one word meaning a huge scale of different things.
When I did a caper that involved a bank, a big Tourney, and a misdirect with the local paper and one of the criminal organizations in Sharn, each character acted independently. The Paladin was never trying to sneak. She was doing a con, and legitimately winning the joust, and using the joust to get close to the mark, another knight from her country.
There were two Firbolg bards (married couple), and one took an a false identity as a rich foreigner with a precious artifact in a case, and get the Kobold Wizard inside the vault of the bank, to plant a device that would allow him to hack the arcane security system. The other ran the misdirect with the paper, using faked letters of recommendation to get a job at the local gossip rag replacing the mysteriously ill reporter on the adventurer beat, covering the Tourney, and making contact with the crime family to alert them that the emerald claw terrorist group was doing a caper in their town, which bore fruit at the end of the caper when the claw would have otherwise been able to interfere with the real caper.

Each character had 3-5 key checks to make, with a whole bonus B plot involving competing in various events at the Tourney.
We also used a simple flashback mechanic that was entirely in the hands of the players. When a complication arose or they hit a wall in moving forward, someone would call a flashback, and we would cut to the scene at the beginning of the adventure where they’re noble friend hired them for the caper, and they formulated The Plan, and we’d collectively figure out what part of the plan had been constructed to account for this complication.

The whole thing where the Kobold had been snuck in and out of the Bank was a result of the Kobold rolling a 1 to disarm the Artifact Recognition Protocol of the arcane security system, and so we concocted the idea that he had tripped the alarm on purpose, because his device would hack the system during the system reboot, so 1 failed roll became 3 checks, 2 to get him in and out and 1 for him to set up the device and switch the artifact and the copy of it.

All of it was done using the same structure you’re describing in the first example you give, and it ran like a dream. I mean the stuff that emerged from finding clever solutions to complications was just wild. There was a whole scene involving a chase, and several buskers, and gathering a crowd for the whisper bard to influence to create enough confusion to disappear when things nearly went sideways with the emerald claw chasing another member of the team who had the real artifact, giving enough time for the crime family to show up and fight the claw.

Anyway, yeah skill challenge as a way to make resolution less binary is very cool, and has precedence in existing 5e mechanics.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There used to be a poster here on the boards, a RavenCrowking, who had a 300+ binder of rules for his 3e game that he INSISTED was still 3e D&D.

I've also seen some OSR-ish folks who would claim that, say, AD&D1 had particular traits, when what it turned out was that the house ruled version of it they used did. I tend to cut them a little slack because in many cases they'd done it for so long they'd forgotten the house rules were house rules and not in the original book(s).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

That cute both ways. My being able to successfully employ work related security circumvention knowledge as the GM with a player able to do the same on behalf of the players to successfully run a heist type session does not in any way paint the system even partially responsible for that success. Even mediocre guidance in one of the core books for some of the common types of situations would equip the system to be orders of magnitude better supportive of it than my example does

No, it doesn’t cut both ways. The fact some folks have done it means it can be done. Period. Therefor, telling someone to not try to do it because it can’t be done is nonsense.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think is pretty true, yeah, and if D&D + significant house rules/rules additions/rules changes consistent got referred to as "hacks" and got neat titles like they do with PtbA, it would actually be pretty helpful.

It stems from two very different game histories of course. Early D&D saw "hacks" absolutely on-par with PtbA hacks, and some of them did have different names, like for example Warlock/Caltech D&D, which in like 1976 featured stuff like spell points, Thieves having actual abilities like 4E/5E (rather than just percentile stuff) and some other changes with pretty significant results.

But EGG et al were not impressed by this sort of thing, and really wanted to standardize D&D, whilst still allowing people to have "house rules", so essentially worked against (as I understand it, obviously literally this was before I was born) versions of D&D that were essentially "hacks" to remotely the degree PtbA stuff is (and later, esp. in 2E, against 3PP content at all, which of course changed with 3E). So house rules became isolated and the concept was that each table had their own, rather than there being shared "hacks".

With the rise of the internet and later the OGL for 3.XE you might have expected these to re-appear and they kind of did, but only in pretty limited formats, like the E6 rules, which are essentially a "hack" of 3E (arguably all the d20 stuff was too, but it wasn't presented that way).

Apocalypse World started being hacked pretty much immediately and this worked for AW as to understand most early hacks you needed AW, and so it spawned this very different culture. I feel like the future potentially has more "hacks" of D&D and so on in it though.

It was a bit stronger than that... They Sue Regularly wasn't just some sort of myth. You can clearly publish a PbtA-based game, even a hack on some specific one, without any problem. TSR was not cool with that. There certainly were 'supplements' published by 3PPs, like Arduin Grimoire and Claw Law, that added features onto D&D. NOBODY was allowed to hack D&D itself and produce variant games! ICE eventually created an entirely separate RPG, Rolemaster, to be the home for their variants of D&D rules. AD&D was exactly, and ONLY, what Gary wanted it to be. You could add a new class, or a variant of combat rules, or something like that, but you couldn't really tinker with the way the game worked in an overall sense, because you would need to reproduce a bunch of it to explain that. Nowadays with OGL and CC licenses and so much being 'out there' it is quite possible to do it, and even WotC has learned to go with the flow. It just wasn't like that back in the day.