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

[Desdichado]

I got confused by the name change, hobo. How's tricks? I was reminiscing on Lash and his incompetent sidekicks myself a month or so ago. Corey reached out a few years back about doing a Lash and Ricardo comic, but I haven't heard about it since, so I suppose it's on ice.

Sadly, I haven't seen Corey around anywhere in years either. He always did seem to have a fair number of irons in the fire, so it's probably inevitable that some of them don't come to fruition.

 

[Umbran]

No. Categorically do not accept. This is—quite literally—the definition of catering to and enabling snowflaking.

Mod Note:

Let us put this another way - you are responsible for your own behavior. If you treat people poorly, start blame-throwing or becoming insulting (like with the "snowflake" comment above), there's going to be a problem.

Respect people, or don't bother posting.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Not nearly as hard as it is someone who is doing it. Oh, and "not what I said?" Nobody likes it when someone tries to "lawyer" their way out of what they clearly said by being an overly pedantic nitpicker. Talk about making communication impossible.

It's not nitpicking, overly aggressive person I've never spoken to before, the two statements mean completely different things. You claimed I said a thing that I did not state, suggest, or imply. I corrected you. Because you were wrong.

@Desdichado also touched on it while using a different term, but there is a term for engaging in that sort of behavior with an awful lot of analysis & discussion into it out there. That term is tone policing. Basically it works to derailing a discussion not going as someone likes by fshifting focus away from the message to the messenger. Like the link explains, it can be a big problem online. With that out in the open it might allow for better discussion detched from the initial argument in a way less likely to make any one feel like they are being singled out .

While tone policing is a thing, this isn't a case of it. Telling people to not be disrespectful is not tone policing.

 

[Dragonsbane]

My group switched to Cypher System by Monte Cook. It is just as good (if not better) at fantasy, plus you can play any genre. I have run Call of Cthulu adventures, sci-fi/Rifts adventures, super heroes, and recently Lost Mine of Phandelver. The system is designed right from the start to be flexible and what the OP mentioned people are looking for in Indie games.

 

[Umbran]

@Desdichado also touched on it while using a different term, but there is a term for engaging in that sort of behavior with an awful lot of analysis & discussion into it out there. That term is tone policing. Basically it works to derailing a discussion not going as someone likes by fshifting focus away from the message to the messenger.

Mod Note:
We have site rules about tone - "Keep it civil". If someone isn't up to keeping to those, or to being asked to do so, this is not the site for them.

Tone policing is incredibly problematic in some scenarios. In discussing how to pretend to be elves, it generally isn't. And, shall we add, trying to school someone about tone policing in this context (which isn't one of the problematic ones) is itself a form of tone policing, for the same reason you note above.

So, how about everyone back it down three notches, before more red text needs to be applied, okay, folks?

 

[Jaeger]

I can just add rules for that to D&D 5e, and D&D 5e absolutely can handle them without any problems.

Even 5e runs into issues if you try to rules-hack it against some of the fundamental system assumptions it was designed around.

So you...don’t use all the levels.

Like I’m not inventing something here. The first D&D game I played in was 5 or 6 levels (IIRC it started at 3 or 4, but I don’t remember for sure), with a story made to take us through those levels and then conclude. I’ve seen advice about using a single tier of play to tell a story that fits that tier in the current and previous edition of the game, and most people I know who liked 3.5 played it from level 2 to level 14 and pretended the other levels didn’t exist.

I have a campaign planned for a low magic world that will start at 1 (we usually start at 3 in a campaign that is meant to go until we retire the characters at high levels) and will not progress past level 11. I am literally reworking epic monsters to work for level 9-11 heroes because the setting and story just don’t need end-game player abilities.

You can just not use all the levels. I know it from experience, very much “in practice”.

Gonna have to disagree on this.

That is not a rules mod - it is just stopping play before the games inherent advancement progression bursts your genre bubble.

Having to cut out 1/2 to 3/4ths of the game is not a very good example of 5e handling things without "any problems".

I want to be able to play through the full 20 levels of advancement progression the game says it can do.

Not starter-set style cripple ware.

The fact is that when you do things that really mess with 5e's 20 level HP progression advancement; it has a lot of knock on effects. Because it is something that is accounted for throughout the rule system.

Retooling the full ruleset to not work that way is fundamentally re-writing large swaths of the game.

Which is defiantly not handling things easily.

5e is fairly modular and can handle a lot, so long as you are happy playing within D&D's design paradigms.

But even it has limits.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Even 5e runs into issues if you try to rules-hack it against some of the fundamental system assumptions it was designed around.

okay. If I changed HP to a damage threshold, that scales very little, and replaced monster damage with a level based chart, I'm pretty sure I could make that work. It would change the play experience, but I'm confident I could make it do so in the way I intend it to. Same if I make every attack hit, and your roll just determines damage, while AC gives damage reduction. It changes how the game feels, but it isn't hard to see how it would change it and adjust accordingly, and either use it or not based on what the play experience is most likely to be.

Gonna have to disagree on this.

That is not a rules mod - it is just stopping play before the games inherent advancement progression bursts your genre bubble.

Pretty sure you wouldn't challenge it being a rules modification if it was in place for every campaign. If I just said, for my group, 5e ends at level 12, vanishingly few people would argue that it isn't a houserule used to create a different play experience from what the core book assumes.

Having to cut out 1/2 to 3/4ths of the game is not a very good example of 5e handling things without "any problems".

I want to play through the full 20 levels of advancement progression the game says it can do.

Not starter-set style cripple ware.

That's just a preference. A perfectly valid one, but if no one at the table shares that preference, or has no strong feelings either way about it, then it isn't relevant to modding the game in terms of how long it lasts.

And you aren't entitled to getting to play all 20 levels. Every campaign that ends before level 20 isn't breaking the rules.

I'm pretty much never going to run a 1-20 game, because at some point before level 20, the story of these PCs will have concluded, and we will move on.

The fact is that when you do things that really mess with 5e's 20 level HP progression advancement; it has a lot of knock on effects. Because it is something that is accounted for throughout the rule system.

The salient question isn't whether I can easily mod the game for broad consumption. The question is can I mod the game easily for a specific story. If that means adding damage to monsters but not PCs to make PCs feel fragile, or to scoop out HP entirely and replace it with a system of graduated damage thresholds where damage over a threshold has increasingly deleterious effects, and massive damage can one-shot you out of the fight, the game won't break. It will play differently.

Average damage remains the same, stuff like DR and resistance and THP work the same, but are more important. Healing would need some kind of conversion system that can be made into a chart based on healing by level converted into "X healing has Y effect", and that would be possibly the hardest part. I wouldn't bother unless I was making a whole game based on 5e, but if it somehow served what I needed for a story, it'd be work that I'd enjoy doing enough that I wouldn't mind it. Nothing wrong with not making the same choice, but I'm not going to pretend that 5e can't handle that sort of thing just because the process would be time consuming.

Retooling the full ruleset to not work that way is fundamentally re-writing large swaths of the game.

Which is defiantly not handling things easily.

5e is fairly modular and can handle a lot, so long as you are happy playing within D&D's design paradigms.

But even it has limits.

I never claimed it didn't. You've taken a general set of statements and responded to it as if it had been absolute. Everything has limits.

 

[cbwjm]

And, I'm unwilling to accept that a suggestion to try a not-D&D game built to do a specific thing that's being asked for is rude. This is running into the assumption that D&D is a thing that can be insulted or demeaned. That's silly, but a lot of people seem to put a lot of emotional investment into it so that any suggestion it is not always good is taken as a personal attack. Which is why no amount of extra niceness makes a difference.

For truly rude posts, you should report them.

It is a little rude or tactless when it isn't answering the question answered. If the question is "I want to play a game which does X, which system is the best for it" then it's fine to tell them a different game to play, since that's the question. But if the question is "I have a DnD game which is going to have X in it, any suggestions on how to do it?" then responding that they should play a completely different system is a little rude. You've ignored the question and told them to go and play something totally different from what they want to play.

 

[Ovinomancer]

It is a little rude or tactless when it isn't answering the question answered. If the question is "I want to play a game which does X, which system is the best for it" then it's fine to tell them a different game to play, since that's the question. But if the question is "I have a DnD game which is going to have X in it, any suggestions on how to do it?" then responding that they should play a completely different system is a little rude. You've ignored the question and told them to go and play something totally different from what they want to play.

Yes, this is now the swap argument -- the problem being that the complained about replies don't really exist for this swapped in argument. They exist for the much more general one where the ask is just about doing X genre.

 

[Hussar]

There aren’t if the goal for your group is to play the same system they’ve been playing, but low magic.

And it’s not much work to get a copy of Adventures In Middle Earth and use the classes from it. None of them cast any actual spells at all, and magic items are quite rare and fairly low powered.

Works great.

ROTFLMAO. The irony here is delicious.

"I want to run XYZ." "Here's a 200+ page book of rules for doing XYZ in 5e".

How is that any different than what you are complaining about? You just started this thread complaining that people suggest you try a new game in order to run XYZ. I suggest running a game, and your first response is to hand me a new game.

Try 5e Talislanta it's a sword and sorcery world that does low to no magic with the 5e rules set.

And the irony continues. Another 200+ page game that ISN'T D&D to run my game. ROTFLMAO.