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

[dave2008]

Relating to the OPs topic is an example from last year: Earthsea Magic in D&D.

There the OP specifically asks:

How would you adapt this to D&D 5E?

And you quickly get comments to try something else:

Honestly, I wouldn't. Any adaptation of Earthsea to 5e would be about as faithful of an adaptation as the SyFy Channel one.

I can't say that I agree with this. There are so many other TTRPGs out there, including Archipelago, that would be more suitable for Earthsea's style of fantasy and magic.

The magic system of D&D really doesn't work like the Earthsea one at all. There are better systems to try to work with.
Mage: The Ascension
HERO
GURPS
Fate

Someone asked earlier how much is this really happening, is this an issue at all I can't really answer that question, but so far it has happened in every relevant thread I've looked at (which is 1 by the way)!

 

[jayoungr]

You know, I used to get all riled up about discussions like these.

Then I realized that no amount of people telling me I can't do certain things in D&D will stop me from doing those things at my table.

 

[jmartkdr2]

You know, I used to get all riled up about discussions like these.

Then I realized that no amount of people telling me I can't do certain things in D&D will stop me from doing those things at my table.

It's worth noting that OPs original complaint was against tone-deaf advice. Which no one is in favor of.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Or maybe a book. I do think that genre emulation is an important part of our general TTRPG play. I mean, if I wanted to play a game of superheroes, then I’m certainly hoping to emulate one or more superhero media, whether in comic book, film, or televised form. I’m not sure why crime heists would be different.

Though I'll just note again that there are significant differences in how those are presented amidst the three forms (and books, far as that goes); I tend to be insistent that acting like medium doesn't matter too does no favors to trying to figure out the appropriate way to game a genre.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yup, seen a lot of this in D&D. In a typical heist story you have a group of highly specialised experts, and everything goes perfectly apart from one tiny insignificant error that causes everything to fall apart at the end. In D&D 5e you have - whatever random group of PCs you happen to have, and lots of skill rolls that have to be made first time or it turns into a straight-up fight.

Now, I don't know of a particular game system that does heists better, so if someone suggested one it would be very helpful.

They talk a bout characters being genre savvy/genre blind, but it is also possible for players to be game system savvy/blind. If they are system savvy and the system is D&D, players will know there is little point in elaborate plans because things will go south very quickly, and "making it up as you go along" is a better strategy.

This is a perspective thing you have to engage with to usefully discuss this sort of thing in the first place:

Do you really expect an RPG session to look like a given work of fiction?

Because I think if you do, the vast majority of games aren't going to produce that. Works of fiction work as they do because they're deterministic; failures only happen at points that they do because they're dramatically desirable or necessary. Games are, barring some uncommon narrative heavy cases, random to at least some degree.

That means both premature failure and outright anticlimax are possible, and if those bother you, they're liable to be a problem (even metacurrencies, which exist largely to flatten this effect, can usually not prevent them but just mitigate them) in almost all games to some degree (some more than others, but then, games have different allegiances so how hard a game is trying to avoid these things varies considerably; you can have one that makes better stories at the price of making less interesting game-play, for example, and that's not going to be a desirable tradeoff for everyone).

This is what makes some genres more brittle in how they see games handle them; because their perception of how tolerant the genre is to convention violation and such timing aberrations tells them that you don't have as much wiggle room as you do with other genres. Other people won't see it that way. Sometimes this is because they're not really attached to the genre, so such violations don't bother them at all, sometimes its because what part of the genre they find important is not the same as others.

 

[Thomas Shey]

"Heist" is a very specific genre to those who have studied media. "Features a robbery" is not sufficient. HEAT is not, by media studies definition, a heist movie. The Mission Impossible TV series is a better example of the genre.

That's why I tend to use "caper" as a preferred choice, since "heist" is a term-of-art to some degree when talking about stories, and one that, like a lot of terms-of-art can be confusing to people not used to seeing it used in that extremely specific way.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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. "Is HEAT a Heist movie" is certainly long essay material for a media studies student. It focuses on a particular element - the bit where it all falls apart. Which is pretty much a morality thing - criminals can't be shown to be rewarded for their crime.

Unless you're in some older French films.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Its similar to why almost no superhero RPG adventure you ever see involves the heroes splitting up to handle multiple problems; unless (and perhaps not even then) the GM is capable of handling all the pieces in parallel, it produces a dynamic almost no one wants to deal with on a play level.

(There are, of course, exceptions to both but they're rare for reasons).

 

[Aldarc]

Relating to the OPs topic is an example from last year: Earthsea Magic in D&D.

There the OP specifically asks:

And you quickly get comments to try something else:

Someone asked earlier how much is this really happening, is this an issue at all I can't really answer that question, but so far it has happened in every relevant thread I've looked at (which is 1 by the way)!

I stand by my comments, Dave. I think that D&D would do a huge disservice to the spirit of Ursula LeGuin's work and what her magic system was about. If you really wanna drag up old arguments, Dave, then I think joining Morrus by putting you on ignore may be a good call after all.

Though I'll just note again that there are significant differences in how those are presented amidst the three forms (and books, far as that goes); I tend to be insistent that acting like medium doesn't matter too does no favors to trying to figure out the appropriate way to game a genre.

Of course medium matters, and that's why flashbacks will look and be handled differently between books, film and television, comic serials, and TTRPGs.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Right, but that’s something all games do. They all involve fiction where the GM can place narrative pressure in different ways.

So that’s not unique to 5E.

So what? What does how another game does the thing have to do with giving advice to a DM on doing that thing in their D&D campaign? Other than providing inspiration, absolutely nothing.

Hit dice are so connected to hit points as to be nearly the same thing.

Okay. Look at how I worded that part of my post. I am grouping them together. Not sure why you’re saying this as if in counter to my post.

I don’t entirely agree about spells, though. Yes, they are a resource that needs to be managed, and they create decision points for the players and so they can be an engaging part of the game.

And they create pressure when they run low, because pet of your team is markedly less effective now. Even just running low with the end of the action not clearly in sight is stressful.

But with the exception of low level characters who have few slots, are most casters burning through all their spells without engaging in combat? What are they using that many spells on?

With the exception of very high level characters, yes, and all kinds of stuff. Like, spellcasters cast spells in damn near every scene.

It’s all designed around the expectation of a certain number of encounters per day. All the resource management that’s meaningful in 5E goes back to that.

Capers have encounters.

if you like the GM creating these kinds of things ad hoc and running with it, if you trust your GM to do so and do so well, then AWESOME! This is great. The problem comes in not in that you cannot get a good outcome for a heist in 5e, but that any such outcome is entirely a product of your table and your GM. 5e does not help you.

It does help you, by providing the tools to adjudicate play and then getting out of the way. This isn’t your preference, and that’s fine.

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

Who cares? What does Fate’s ability to do capers have to do with giving a DM advice about doing a caper in their D&D campaign?

It doesn't seem to tell us anything about whether or not the character should do better in a cooking competition than another character without the feat. That would be something the GM would just have to decide, I guess.

Cooking Utensils. Proficiency. Proficiency increases the average d20 result when performing tasks using the relevant proficiency. What are you not getting, here? 5e even has rules specific to opposed ability checks, and a pretty clear framework in downtime activities (especially in Xanathar’s) if you want to have the PC roll against a variable DC that represents how well the other contestants did, instead. You set a DC by rolling a couple dice, usually 2d10, though some activities have a set DC (crime has a scale in increments of 5) and adding a number or not depending on how hard you want things. The PC then rolls 3 different checks. To do a solo caper in your downtime, it’s Stealth, Thieves Tools, and PCs choice of Investigate, Perception, or Deception.

It’s a good framework, though newer DMs would benefit from having the moving parts of the framework explained rather than just being given examples.

So, 5e has several ways to run a cooking competition, but they’ll all involve making a check with cooking utensils, which means that someone trained in them will do better than someone not trained in them.

But unlike both D&D and other PbtA games, in Blades you can resist the consequences (which, depending on where your game is on a sliding scale between Ocean's 11 and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, may be either negating it entirely or reducing it) and have an ability to make a complication into a benefit.

That dynamic is great, and I’ve used it in D&D because it can be used entirely as a narrative “running the game” thing rather than a mechanical framework, or it can be tied to a limited resource that exists in the game already, and I’ve done both for different situations, but it isn’t a requirement of running a caper.

I guess if 5e D&D is not special, then either (i) no one can ever talk meaningfully about any RPG being better than any other, or (ii) it must be possible for some RPGs to be better than others (in general? at this specific thing? for this particular purpose?) in which case the OP is wrong.

The OP never claimed that it isn’t possible for one game to be better than another.

It's worth noting that OPs original complaint was against tone-deaf advice. Which no one is in favor of.

And yet several people in this thread have given such advice in other threads.

At least one person literally ranted at me that I’m a bad person for suggesting that it isn’t a waste of time to do a caper in D&D .