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

[Ruin Explorer]

Genres are never easy to pin down, and HEAT is certainly very close to how things are likely to go down if you use the D&D ruleset.

There's certainly some truth in that, though having done media studies at Uni (albeit as part of a Comp Sci course), the weight I would place on media studies-specific opinions re: genre is... limited (especially if they're trying to claim something can only be in one genre at once, which is suuuuuuch a 20th century view darling... < waves cigarette holder dismissively >). But the criminals in HEAT take a "big guns" approach to heisting (very literally so), which is more akin to the kind of tools D&D characters have at their disposal than BitD ones. It still relies on a great deal of knowledge and precise timing and preparation and cunning plans though.

Ultimately it doesn't go wrong because of the "big guns" approach though, note, but because they employed the wrong guy, something not relevant to either D&D or BitD approaches.

EDIT - the more I think about it, the more I find it interesting that BitD totally doesn't include the major genre element of betrayal/backstabbing/unreliable people within the crew. It's a good illustration of @Thomas Shey 's point re: excluding genre elements which don't work well for RPGs.

It's a crime drama.

See here: Heist film - Wikipedia

A "heist" is more than just a robbery, and may not be a crime at all. For example Thor: the Dark World features a "Heist" sequence.

You know HEAT is literally on that list right lol? I'm really confused as to why you linked that!

 

[Ovinomancer]

Its also worth consideration that the bespoke game (Blades in the Dark, for fantasy heists) tends to be less comfortable with alteration to support the things they weren't meant to. So if you don't want to plan, Blades in the Dark is great, whereas if you do it just doesn't work very well for your needs-- in contrast, I'd feel pretty comfortable running a DND5e or Pathfinder 2e game with or without the planning phase when it comes up based off how comfortable the group is.

If they want it the system supports me, and if they don't want it, it wouldn't be that weird to frame past it. You won't have the flashback system in place to emulate the planning and stress as a resource for how much of it you did, but you could just distill it into skill checks that govern how prepared you were for each challenge and narrate as thought it was preparation.

This post, and it's attendant likes, is hilarious to me because it is exactly what I said that everyone involved argued against, only here everyone's agreeing with it.

Let's review: I said 5e has no support for heist style play, meaning that it's left up to the GM to generate ad hoc solutions. I also said Blades has lot's if support for heists, but you may not like it and that the system is tightly integrated and hard to rip for individual mechanics. This was roundly decried by the likers here.

Magic Sword here said that if you don't like how Blades does heists, it is hard to ad hoc changes because the system fights you. However, with 5e, it is easy to ad hoc solutions, presumably because there's nothing in the system to get in the way. This has been viewed favorably by the same people that challenged my post.

It is, however, saying the same thing, just with a change in tone to laud 5e. And, I was told it was offensive to suggest that preference might be interfering with analysis!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This post, and it's attendant likes, is hilarious to me because it is exactly what I said that everyone involved argued against, only here everyone's agreeing with it.

Let's review: I said 5e has no support for heist style play, meaning that it's left up to the GM to generate ad hoc solutions. I also said Blades has lot's if support for heists, but you may not like it and that the system is tightly integrated and hard to rip for individual mechanics. This was roundly decried by the likers here.

Magic Sword here said that if you don't like how Blades does heists, it is hard to ad hoc changes because the system fights you. However, with 5e, it is easy to ad hoc solutions, presumably because there's nothing in the system to get in the way. This has been viewed favorably by tge same people that challenged my post..

It is, however, saying the sane thing, just with a change in tone to laud 5e. And, I was told it was offensive to suggest that preference might be interfering with analysis!

"Presumably because" better be made of an adamantium-mithril alloy because those two weasel words are holding up your entire claim there lol. I'm guessing that exactly zero other people are reading that post to mean what you're "presuming" it to mean, hence the disagreement.

 

[cbwjm]

What's so hard about running a heist in DnD? I feel like this has been the example for a while and that people think that it is somehow difficult. Doesn't seem to me like a heist isn't really any different than any other adventure. The party has a goal and decides how they will proceed. They use their skills, their abilities, and their equipment to complete it. Maybe I just don't understand what blades in the dark offers, but I see no reason why a heist couldn't be done in DnD, my friend even ran one and it worked fine.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Yup. As I pointed out earlier, you basically have two kinds of heist movie. The fanciful/elegant kind (which is often quite enjoyable) where everything goes pretty perfectly because a magical mastermind came up with the plan, and usually the only things that go wrong are the result of personally-motivated double-cross, triple-crosses and so on (though there is often a section where the heroes have to improvise because some part of the plan is stuck, usually because some individual isn't where they're expected to be), and the grittier kind where typically the planning is more shown, and there's a lot less of this "ahaha I knew this would happen so!" deal (sometimes none at all), and things often get a lot messier (though not necessarily immediately, and still often because of a personality clash). BitD tries to chart a weird middle path, doesn't really engage with the personality-clash stuff (unless I'm really misremembering it), perhaps for the obvious reason that it might not work well in an RPG, and really, really doesn't want you to do any actual planning at all (very different from the elaborate plans in stuff like LL).

BitD is only weird if you're comparing it to heist movies. That's because movies are a fundamentally one-shot thing; there's probably an excellent RPG to be made out of heist movies of successful heists (I'd argue that Fiasco covers a lot of the unsuccessful ones) but Blades isn't it. What Blades attempts to emulate are heist TV series like the classic Mission Impossible, the A-team, Hustle, White Collar, Alias, Burn Notice, or Leverage.

In a TV series you fundamentally expect the characters to make it out and show up for almost all of the episodes in the series; there are personality clashes but they are slow burn things that only come to a head in the season finales. And where, because you only have 42 minutes including credits, you can't really run through the heist multiple times to give the theoretical "this is what it should be" followed by "oops" - but you do derail the thing with incomplete information and the characters finding people where they aren't supposed to be.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

they employed the wrong guy, something not relevant to either D&D

I would say "the wrong guy" is something that is quite common in D&D!


But for players to want to do a heist, they want to think that there is a good chance it won't fall apart.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You know HEAT is literally on that list right lol? I'm really confused as to why you linked that!

Because linking only to sources that categorically support your position is cheating?

 

[Ovinomancer]

"Presumably because" better be made of an adamantium-mithril alloy because those two weasel words are holding up your entire claim there lol. I'm guessing that exactly zero other people are reading that post to mean what you're "presuming" it to mean, hence the disagreement.

I can't guess why Magic Sword thinks 5e is easy to create ad hoc rulings for heists, but I can absolutely say it's because there's nothing there to interfere with doing so because 5e has no structure at all to bump into. I was trying to not put words in MS's mouth, not weaseling on the point that 5e lacks any support for heist play.

Is that sufficiently adamantium-mithril allow?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What's so hard about running a heist in DnD? I feel like this has been the example for a while and that people think that it is somehow difficult. Doesn't seem to me like a heist isn't really any different than any other adventure. The party has a goal and decides how they will proceed. They use their skills, their abilities, and their equipment to complete it. Maybe I just don't understand what blades in the dark offers, but I see no reason why a heist couldn't be done in DnD, my friend even ran one and it worked fine.

I get that you've skipped a lot of posts, given you're asking this question, but basically what it boils down to is:

There are two kind of heist - procedural heists, where you literally plan out and prepare for stuff and then do the heist, and cinematic heists, where you may have a certain amount of preparation and planning, but mostly you just "do" the heist and use mechanics to allow you to assert fiction (like, "I planted a guard disguise behind the tree in the courtyard!", whereas in procedural, you'd have to have actually done that).

D&D has nothing that supports "cinematic" heists. It's relatively easy to add stuff that does, as was shown in 4E in Dragon 200 with Logan Bonner's adventure "Blood Money", but it doesn't inherently have it.

BitD only supports cinematic heists, but has a ton of tools to support them.

BitD is only weird if you're comparing it to heist movies. That's because movies are a fundamentally one-shot thing; there's probably an excellent RPG to be made out of heist movies of successful heists (I'd argue that Fiasco covers a lot of the unsuccessful ones) but Blades isn't it. What Blades attempts to emulate are heist TV series like the classic Mission Impossible, the A-team, Hustle, White Collar, Alias, Burn Notice, or Leverage.

Yeah I was actually noticing that as I was typing up my post. I'm not sure it really emulates any of those particularly closely, because it has it's own whole thing going on, and is missing elements that they have too, but it is going for a more TV-series-ish structure. I dunno if you could do the movie betrayal thing well in an RPG because the reasons for the betrayal are usually terrible, and who is going to want to be that guy? It might make an interesting one-shot though.

Because linking only to sources that categorically support your position is cheating?

Fair enough lol, it really looked like you were saying "Look at this, it supports what I'm saying!" though.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I can't guess why Magic Sword thinks 5e is easy to create ad hoc rulings for heists, but I can absolutely say it's because there's nothing there to interfere with doing so because 5e has no structure at all to bump into. I was trying to not put words in MS's mouth, not weaseling on the point that 5e lacks any support for heist play.

Is that sufficiently adamantium-mithril allow?

I mean until he says "Yeah, that's what I meant", I think you're in a bit of a quantum superposition.