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

[Ovinomancer]

Things falling apart in practice is built into BitD. Any time you roll the dice, you are more likely to either make things worse or bring something into the fiction that will make things worse, than you are to smoothly accomplish your goals. Much of the talk about how ultra-competent the PCs are in BitD (and PbtA games) is ... flattery. If and when an outcome is in doubt, the odds are by definition against you.

Eh, I think this is your bias at looking at success with cost/complication as a failure. The mechanics are weighted so that it's often possible to get at least 2 dice on an action, which is a 75% chance of success -- with a lot of that having a complication. So, you do tend to succeed, just not entirely like you may have wanted to.

 

[Imaro]

Things falling apart in practice is built into BitD. Any time you roll the dice, you are more likely to either make things worse or bring something into the fiction that will make things worse, than you are to smoothly accomplish your goals. Much of the talk about how ultra-competent the PCs are in BitD (and PbtA games) is ... flattery. If and when an outcome is in doubt, the odds are by definition against you.

Ok, I'm really confused here... @hawkeyefan just listed off a ton of mechanics based around giving the PC's more and more control and competency... what am I missing here? Is it an illusion so that the players feel this way but mechanically it isn't the case?

 

[prabe]

Eh, I think this is your bias at looking at success with cost/complication as a failure. The mechanics are weighted so that it's often possible to get at least 2 dice on an action, which is a 75% chance of success -- with a lot of that having a complication. So, you do tend to succeed, just not entirely like you may have wanted to.

"Success with a complication" = "bringing something into the fiction that will make things worse." As in, in the future, it will make things worse, not that it makes things worse immediately.

 

[Imaro]

Heh, you've never actually played a Blades game if you think this last paragraph describes play. It's possible it turns out like that, just like it's possible a 1st level character beats Tiamat, but not at all likely.

Seriously because this has been the main argument of proponents for Blades for the majority of this thread... BitD PC's are competent and D&D PC's are not... are you disagreeing?

 

[prabe]

Ok, I'm really confused here... @hawkeyefan just listed off a ton of mechanics based around giving the PC's more and more control and competency... what am I missing here? Is it an illusion so that the players feel this way but mechanically it isn't the case?

dingdingdingding!

In BitD, all resolution is on a d6. On a 6, you succeed--you get exactly what you want. On a 4-5, you get success with a complication (or a partial success)--you get what you want, but the GM brings something into the fiction that makes your life more complicated (meaning, eventually, it will make your life worse). On a 1-3, you fail--your life gets worse.

All the things players can do in BitD to increase the odds of their characters succeeding allow them to roll more dice and take the high. I've played enough games with dice pools to know sixes are still going to be pretty rare. And eventually you're going to get caught rolling on something you don't have a great stat, and you don't have any resources, and all the things pending that could make your life worse, will make your life worse.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Why are people finding heists so hard to prep? What are you doing wrong? Or am I a magic pixie?

This is really mystifying to me. Like, haven't you people run Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020 for years, where like, 90% of adventures are roughly "heists" (in that the players need to get in somewhere, get a thing/person, and get out)? How is that hard to write? I can write a good heist scenario, with a lot of moving parts, which I know will be a ton of fun, in like a few hours. You say "players will see six ways when you see four!", and seem to think this is a bad thing. It isn't. It's wonderful. If you just set up a fun scenario, with a few layers to it, then when the players take an unexpected tack, that's likely to still result in a really fun game. Only if you habitually design extremely fragile scenarios where the players averting one thing basically breaks the whole deal is the "oh no an approach I didn't consider!" thing even an issue. I think the last time I designed a scenario that fragile was when I was a fairly young teenager. Just add more layers!

That's ridiculously easier than writing a mystery that makes complete sense (i.e. no huge plothole that one of the players will immediately spot), or a really lengthy dungeon crawl, or just almost any other genre of adventure that's pre-written.

First, agreed that mysteries are the worst. You really need to bullet proof them.

Second, if we aren't touching Shadowrun/Cyberpunk hackers a heist in those games can be run as a dungeon crawl. A good heist includes "the blow" where the crew either successfully (or almost successfully) misdirects or otherwise ensures the bad guys are in no position to strike back.

There are two big differences in prep between a heist and a dungeon to me.
1: If I put interesting stuff into a dungeon the players are going to be poking it and trying to figure out how it works and will be at it for weeks; if I put interesting stuff into a heist the players are going to try avoiding disturbing at least half of it because they want to get away clean.
2: A heist is time and context sensitive meaning I can't prep too far in advance.

With Blades the PCs can say to me, the GM at the start of any session that they want to pick a specific target and go after them in a specific way armed with little more than a name, a status, and a headquarters and I can run that based on the improv tools available. I simply don't have 4-6 hours to prepare after the game session has started.

 

[BrokenTwin]

Well, in RaHoWa, a dozen or so of old ladies can scare PUREBLOOD ARYAN WARRIOR to death... Which, I'd say, is no less hilarious than rolling dish-sized areolas.

I would love to run a game where the players are a bunch of elderly women going around scaring white power folks to death.
... How difficult would it be to modify D&D 5E to do that?

 

[Neonchameleon]

I would love to run a game where the players are a bunch of elderly women going around scaring white power folks to death.
... How difficult would it be to modify D&D 5E to do that?

Very unless you picked certain very specific spells like Phantasmal Killer. On the other hand you could do it easily in Fate, and probably fairly well in both Blades in the Dark and any Cortex Plus game.

 

[pemerton]

I'm finding this thread a bit puzzling.

5e can do heists just fine in part because heists do not actually require special mechanics, but can benefit from them, and 5e is very good at handling add-on systems, because it only gets nitty gritty with combat.

If this claim is true - that D&D 5e can do heists just fine - then what RPG can't do heists just fine?

RuneQuest, Rolemaster, HARP, HERO, GURPS, Classic Traveller, CoC, Cthuhlhu Dark, Burning Wheel, The Dying Earth - all of these can, in exactly the same way, "do heists just fine". Likewise a duel, a skirmish, a mass combat, or a cooking competition.

Now I would assert that Burning Wheel is better at cooking competitions than D&D 5e for four reasons: (1) it has a cooking skill; (2) it has a universal mechanic for resolving contests of skill, with finality; (3) it has a character build framework that makes it very straightforward for everyone to tell, at the table, whether a cooking competition is something that a player is invested in for his/her PC.

But I'm sure a 5e D&D GM could call for some sort of check - DEX? INT? - to see how well a PC cooks a dish.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Seriously because this has been the main argument of proponents for Blades for the majority of this thread... BitD PC's are competent and D&D PC's are not... are you disagreeing?

I haven't seen that as a main argument at all. I've seen that Blades has support for this type of play and D&D does not. The competence of Blades characters is assumed in a way that isn't true in D&D, yes, but this isn't a primary driving differentiator -- it's a detail that goes into the mix. However, there's a difference between being competent and the nearly mythical perfection that you stated in that paragraph.

Competence in Blades is more represented by succeeding but with a cost.