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

[Lanefan]

Let's try to start over. 5e offers no support for heists. Other systems do. What say you?

Curious: how, in your view, does 5e not support heists?

I mean, it has several classes that have built-in skills and abilities that would suit heisting; it has rules that allow for detailed resolution of various elements within a heist (e.g. climbing, lock-picking, etc.); it has guidelines for mundane-but-essential elements such as encumbrance and loadout, and so forth. After that - as with any RPG - it comes down to what the GM and-or players want to do with it.

What 5e doesn't support is Blades-style Flashbacks; instead it rather forces the players/PCs to do their planning up front, but to me that's a feature rather than a bug.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Curious: how, in your view, does 5e not support heists?

I mean, it has several classes that have built-in skills and abilities that would suit heisting; it has rules that allow for detailed resolution of various elements within a heist (e.g. climbing, lock-picking, etc.); it has guidelines for mundane-but-essential elements such as encumbrance and loadout, and so forth. After that - as with any RPG - it comes down to what the GM and-or players want to do with it.

What 5e doesn't support is Blades-style Flashbacks; instead it rather forces the players/PCs to do their planning up front, but to me that's a feature rather than a bug.

There's nothing on how to run a heist, what challenges to set up for a heist, or any interesting consequences. The skills you note are present, yes, but how do I apply them well to run a heist?

All of this ends up being ad hoc by the GM, running on whatever structure the GM comes up with, with no support for it in the rules. Meanwhile, if I want to run a combat, I have detailed rules on how to do so, but also on how to build a combat encounter, assets to use in that encounter, and even support on how to build out a day's worth of combats. Where is this kind of support for heists?

 

[Hussar]

There are more things to borrowing a mechanic from one game to another than superficially copying some of it. Blades is a very tight ruleset -- every part of it is deeply intertwined with the other parts. This means it's hard to just rip a mechanic from it, because a large part of how that mechanic actually functions is relegated by other parts of the game. I dislike this rip, it fails to really grasp the concepts in Blades, and doesn't really add much, I think, to D&D, except more wily-nily-ness.

100% agree.

 

[Lanefan]

There is a flip side to this. Because of it's lack of broader mechanics, AD&D forces you to constantly make up rules. "How far can I jump?" "Can I swim?" etc. etc. For someone coming in new to AD&D, it's bewildering and, for the most part, non-transferable from table to table.

Second bit first: if I'm kitbashing something it's (usually) just for my game, thus tranferability from table to table isn't a concern.

As for making up those various rules: sure, you make 'em up once each, after which they become part of the game system. Do this long enough and you get to where I'm at, where pretty much the entire game from top to bottom has been either tweaked or overhauled.

 

[tetrasodium]

Curious: how, in your view, does 5e not support heists?

I mean, it has several classes that have built-in skills and abilities that would suit heisting; it has rules that allow for detailed resolution of various elements within a heist (e.g. climbing, lock-picking, etc.); it has guidelines for mundane-but-essential elements such as encumbrance and loadout, and so forth. After that - as with any RPG - it comes down to what the GM and-or players want to do with it.

What 5e doesn't support is Blades-style Flashbacks; instead it rather forces the players/PCs to do their planning up front, but to me that's a feature rather than a bug.

If anything he's understating how bad 5e is at them. I've run heists with one group a few times as one off thing somewhere in a campaign, but those were successful largely due to me & one of the players having relevant security experience (ie datacenter security & pentesting). Without that experience in the GM & a player who knew enough to take point directing the party as some kind of mastermind/chessmaster type leader who deeply understands them it would have gone hilariously bad each time. Even one player deciding they had a better idea than the plan would have wrecked it. There are systems designed to support heists in various ways, but d&d lacks any rules to provide support for a gm/player/group lacking relevant enough personal experience

 

[Hussar]

Curious: how, in your view, does 5e not support heists?

I mean, it has several classes that have built-in skills and abilities that would suit heisting; it has rules that allow for detailed resolution of various elements within a heist (e.g. climbing, lock-picking, etc.); it has guidelines for mundane-but-essential elements such as encumbrance and loadout, and so forth. After that - as with any RPG - it comes down to what the GM and-or players want to do with it.

What 5e doesn't support is Blades-style Flashbacks; instead it rather forces the players/PCs to do their planning up front, but to me that's a feature rather than a bug.

Just to add to @Ovinomancer's point, what is the reward for talking your way past the guard? How does one choose a difficulty for that? If my group is sneaking past several guard points, do I require individual stealth rolls from every PC or a group roll? How many times?

Having seen just how bad 5e is at any sort of sneaky stuff in play, I can attest to how bad 5e (or any version of D&D) is at doing a heist.

 

[Hussar]

Second bit first: if I'm kitbashing something it's (usually) just for my game, thus tranferability from table to table isn't a concern.

As for making up those various rules: sure, you make 'em up once each, after which they become part of the game system. Do this long enough and you get to where I'm at, where pretty much the entire game from top to bottom has been either tweaked or overhauled.

Two things though:

1. We cannot assume that someone asking the question of how to fix X has your level of experience. Most people don't have decades of experience with a single system.

2. Because your kit bashes are only for your game, they don't really work as advice to other people, which is the point of this thread.

Yes, "Make **** up" is a solution to problems, but, it's not a terribly helpful one.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't really feel this relevant to this thread, but that has never stopped me before!

However, I am curious what is the support for heists that Blades in the Dark offers? I looked at Blades in the Dark recently and I don't remember anything in particular.

Now, I think the PF2e VP system could be used to support a heist scenario as could a skill challenge system in 5e, though I would probable mod the VP system which I think is conceptually better.

I’ll have to check out the PF2 system.

 

[Lanefan]

There's nothing on how to run a heist, what challenges to set up for a heist, or any interesting consequences. The skills you note are present, yes, but how do I apply them well to run a heist?

Well, truth be told there's also nothing much given on how to design and-or run any other kind of adventure. Heists are not unique here.

Adventures of any kind are generally left to the GM to design, maybe using cues from published adventures past and present (though I'll quickly concede there's few if any examples of published D&D modules featuring heist-like scenarios, so GMs would be a bit more on thier own here).

All of this ends up being ad hoc by the GM, running on whatever structure the GM comes up with, with no support for it in the rules. Meanwhile, if I want to run a combat, I have detailed rules on how to do so, but also on how to build a combat encounter, assets to use in that encounter, and even support on how to build out a day's worth of combats. Where is this kind of support for heists?

I don't see a heist and a combat as being on the same level of granularity; in that while a combat can be an element within a heist (or within any other type of adventure) it's exceedingly rare that a combat is the whole adventure in itself.

 

[Lanefan]

The entire concept of Blades in the Dark is that you are criminals in a haunted city clawing your way up the power ladder. Heists are fundamental to the game. The are enabled and supported by the whole ruleset. You can't do a dungeon crawl, or a wilderness exploration with Blades -- it has no support for these things.

That's just it though: a flexible system that can do all these things (and more!) well enough is to me immensely preferable to a system that can do one or two things perfectly and other things not at all.