Laurefindel
Legend
Do you mean "hackable" as a complete reskin? Like Savage World used for dozens of different genre/settings? Or "hackable" as in sections of the game can be added, removed, or modified?
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D&D 5E D&D compared to Bespoke Genre TTRPGs
- Thread starter doctorbadwolf
- Start date
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I don’t know about that. I’d say GURPS is harder to hack than any edition of D&D (you can add skills and advantages or disadvantages easily, but actually changing how the game works is harder), and 3.5 is harder than 4e, and both are harder than 5e.
3.5 especially hard because it is meant to be run in a way where balance matters to player enjoyment, but is incredibly poorly balanced, on top of being complex, nitpickey, and hyper specified.
4e is hard because most big changes would require rewriting immense amounts of player options, or reducing the game dramatically to avoid that work. We did hack it a bit, but not nearly as deeply as with 5e, in spite of the fact that I and at least one other dm in my group understood that system completely, and definitely had things we wanted to change.
5e is balanced in a way where some pretty hefty changes can be made without any need to rebalance the game, the systems involved are very simple, and the same math balances everything. In play, the rogue and Wizard are roughly balanced against eachother. That means we can take per day stuff and make it at-will and actually make it work.
The only system I’d say is easier to hack, because it’s a system you use to make a bespoke game, is pbta, but IMO it isn’t very easy to make an individual pbta game with the breadth of play experience options that D&D has, so the only reason I’d use it instead of D&D would be if I enjoyed it basic mechanics more than D&D’s.
Hell, I’m building a system from scratch, that is built to do a less “superhero” but still quite pulp fantasy adventure game, set in a version of the modern world where magic and folk lore creatures are secretly real, and there are 8 other Worlds besides the mortal world. It’s all skills and traits, with quick build archetypes and ancestries, and attributes are resource pools rather than directly altering your dice rolls, which are a dice pool using skill rank dice added to an “action die”, using a success ladder.
Gameplay is focused on investigation, use of contacts, favors, assets, getting the help of communities, and using a broad range of skills and specialties to solve problems, in a world where the train conductor who is secretly a forest troll can save the human townsfolk from a group of knights of a “holy order”, and succeed by gathering allies, calling in favors, leveraging contacts, bartering with assets, and investigating, researching, and/or training, with a focus on the threat.
So, it’s not like I’m over here only playing D&D and games very like it.
Yes, we you don't get guarantees on most things in life, so that's not a terribly strong argument.
When we want to stop talking about absolutes implied by "guarantees" and want to start talking about levels of confidence, then maybe this becomes productive.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
You did but it doesn't make it true.
I mean, I can keep saying "the sky is green", but that doesn't make that true either. In any remotely objective sense, D&D's mechanics are all over the place in terms of "ease of hacking". Some are trivial to hack, or add-on. Some are a nightmare that requires deleting or rebuilding half the classes in the game.
If one is being objective and has a wide-ranging knowledge and experience of TT RPGs, I would personally suggest that one is going to come to the conclusion that D&D is one of the harder-to-hack RPGs out there, but nowhere near as bad as the most difficult.
An alternative perspective would be that virtually all RPGs are "easy to hack", and D&D is among them. Even then, it's one of the harder ones, but just probably not actually "hard" overall (though specific mechanics may be).
When we start talking about Savage Worlds, Cypher, Cortex Prime, Fate, and GURPS we are talking about systems specifically designed to be adapted to various uses.
D&D is not specifically designed for that purpose.
loverdrive
Prophet of the profane (She/Her)
By "hackable" I mean that modifications wouldn't have unexpected side effects and/or edge-cases to be addressed.
Changing the way damage works in Fate would not produce side effects, in D&D.... You'd need to look over a bunch of stuff and make sure it still works as intended.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I haven’t! I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t had a real mythos hankering recently.
Yeah, exactly. That just isn’t fun, for me.
Yep. A lot of my group just don’t join us when we play other games, but are fully down to learn one or two new mechanics to play a D&D version. One more reason on the pile that “just play this other thing” and “there are games other than D&D, you know” are just bad responses to the advise threads and comments about adding elements to D&D .
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
That was just the design paradigm of the late 80s, early 90s though. Back then, the bigger and more granular your skill list was, the better!
Skills back then were like the hairstyles; go big or go home.
loverdrive
Prophet of the profane (She/Her)
Damn, I used to be shaven in the 90s
