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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sometimes, I wonder if anyone has ever read through the 5e DMG, or if we all just hold on to our dog-eared copies of the 1e DMG (I LOVE YOU EFREET!).

After all, it does have everything from variant rules for plot points (which allow players to do things from creating fiction to becoming the DM), to sanity (with some stuff about horror), to variant rules for proficiencies/skills (how they would be based on your background and personality that you create, and perhaps class, instead of limited to certain skills), to rules for degrees of success and failure (and complications), to hero points.

And that's in one of the Core Three books! One of the things I have always loved about the game is the assumption that people will be changing and modifying the rules.

Sure, but D&D has always been, and 5e STILL IS based on a specific process of play, which is a limiting factor on what it can do. Games like PbtA derived games, or BitD, or other types like FATE based games, or SotC based games FUNDAMENTALLY work in a different way which D&D cannot emulate (and vice versa) simply by having a few alternative rules added. I mean, yes, alternate rules for plot points and a few things like that DO provide SOME limited alteration in process. However, so much is baked into the DNA of the game that really significantly changing it is not going to fly. 4e already did that, and only in a MILD way (unless you squint a bit and read the rules in a certain dim light) and look at the reaction.

The OP asserted that D&D is very flexible and can better handle being extended to some unspecified set of things that are usually done with other games than most of those other games would handle doing what D&D does. At least that seems to be the way I would read it. I mean, obviously, if BitD for example could do heroic fantasy scenarios almost as well as D&D can, then one would not talk about D&D being an exceptionally flexible game. And while I think we have established that there are certainly ways to do a 'heist' in both games, BitD is the game which excels at heist play, just as D&D excels at heroic fantasy. In EACH CASE they have specific tones and sub-genre of these genre that they do. I'm not entirely convinced though that BitD couldn't be reframed as 'dungeon crawls' and such about as easily as D&D (5e) could be reframed to do something equally close to BitD's genre.

I mean, I'm not personally that much of an authority on BitD. So other people can hash that out, but I think realistically I'd have to see both hacks to judge which is the 'better take' on the other game.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Sure, but D&D has always been, and 5e STILL IS based on a specific process of play, which is a limiting factor on what it can do. Games like PbtA derived games, or BitD, or other types like FATE based games, or SotC based games FUNDAMENTALLY work in a different way which D&D cannot emulate (and vice versa) simply by having a few alternative rules added. I mean, yes, alternate rules for plot points and a few things like that DO provide SOME limited alteration in process. However, so much is baked into the DNA of the game that really significantly changing it is not going to fly. 4e already did that, and only in a MILD way (unless you squint a bit and read the rules in a certain dim light) and look at the reaction.

The OP asserted that D&D is very flexible and can better handle being extended to some unspecified set of things that are usually done with other games than most of those other games would handle doing what D&D does. At least that seems to be the way I would read it. I mean, obviously, if BitD for example could do heroic fantasy scenarios almost as well as D&D can, then one would not talk about D&D being an exceptionally flexible game. And while I think we have established that there are certainly ways to do a 'heist' in both games, BitD is the game which excels at heist play, just as D&D excels at heroic fantasy. In EACH CASE they have specific tones and sub-genre of these genre that they do. I'm not entirely convinced though that BitD couldn't be reframed as 'dungeon crawls' and such about as easily as D&D (5e) could be reframed to do something equally close to BitD's genre.

I mean, I'm not personally that much of an authority on BitD. So other people can hash that out, but I think realistically I'd have to see both hacks to judge which is the 'better take' on the other game.

I think there's also the (common on the internet) issue of two different conversations on the same premise:

1. Can you run a heist in DnD?

A few people here seem to be arguing that this isn't possible, but I might be misreading them. But if you post on, say, Reddit, you will absolutely get a response telling you that not only is it impossible but that the only reason anyone could disagree is because they are too narrow-minded to consider other games. This is true no matter how you phrase the question - if the word "heist" appears in the OP, someone will tell you BitD is the only possible way to play such a game.

2. If you want a heist-centered game, which is better?

Ya know, I don't think anyone here has actually argued that DnD is better, although there's a lot of argument about the degree of difference, which is probably not worth talking about online, because of how subjective it is.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It literally does!

It doesn’t matter that you think it’s okay that it doesn’t, or whatever, you’re wrong about it not doing so.

How do you bribe a guard? You use the skill system, first describing how you approach the task, and depending on that description you either succeed, fail, or make an ability check to determine success or failure, including options for non-binary results. You can also use group checks, multiple checks taken together to determine overall results (this is all a skill challenge actually is. It’s multiple rolls to create a success ladder) and which can be with different stats and skills, or you can even use the framework of downtime activities. The game provides multiple options under a pretty clear (though sometimes poorly organized and explained) framework to resolve any task, rather than trying to make a specific rule for every possible task.

The point you either keep missing or keep ignoring is the second part of the statement. The statement is, “D&D provides a framework for adjudicating tasks, and then gets out of the way to let consequences speak for themselves, or allow the DM to employ optional or homebrewed rules if desired.”

That is not a lack, or an oversight, or a failure to model anything, it is an active decision to leave room rather than making everything under the sun require the group to reference the rules. Having the tools to figure out how to adjudicate and balance whatever you want to add to the game makes it easier to add things to the game. Not by accident or incidentally, but by design. It is a feature.

But, as @Manbearcat pointed out in the post previous to yours, you really need some sort of Win/Loss conditions and/or 'pressure points'/'teeth' to work on in order to 'make it go'. This is what I mean by process of play. This stuff ALSO, pretty much, leans on the concept that players are fundamentally participants in deciding what the fiction is. Maybe indirectly, or maybe not. 4e is a bit weak there, it has a few bits, but DW/PbtA games are pretty strong in this department, albeit more by how they explain the play process than by hard mechanics. BitD is even further in this continuum with the players having explicit points of input directly into the narrative and content of the fiction.

Also, I would like to point out, that a structured win/loss fail forward type of structure is NOT incompatible with flexibility. I mean, lets just ignore SotC or many FATE and BW implementations, but look right at 4e. DMG2 contains EXTENSIVE examples, amounting to 1000's of words, along with much explanation, of how to work a Skill Challenge into a mini-game. The SC system in and of itself is quite flexible to start with, since you can go from simple Complexity 1 SCs all the way up to Complexity 5. Yes, the core rules are the same in both cases, but they can work quite differently in practice. A C1 challenge can easily depict a single simple linear scenario for example. A C5 challenge is much more of a complex setup that will likely work through various scenes. Given the sorts of 'subsystem' kind of stuff that DMG2 shows, you can pretty much tool up an SC almost any way you want. Heck, 4e does not mandate them anyway, so you can simply ignore that part of the game and you still have an entire skill system, with pressure points, which you can leverage.

I think the point is, yes 5e's approach is a conscious design choice, but I am not sure I agree that it creates some great level of flexibility that other approaches inherently lack. I mean, PbtA and its 'playbooks' also seem pretty amazingly flexible.

 

[Ovinomancer]

exactly.

I’ve seen no such comments in this thread.

But it isn’t true.

What I’m not referring to, necessarily, is mechanics which are operationalized in prescriptive detail.

The stealth rules, and the rules for adjudicating ability checks, tell you how to sneak past someone. You declare that you’re doing it, preferably also how you do it. The DM decides if there is a reasonable chance of failure. If so, you roll against the creature’s passive perception. You either have a binary pass/fail result, or use one of a couple optional rules that create more variable results.

Those are literally the rules for sneaking past someone.

No one is mad at you for saying D&D has no rules for XYZ, we are just telling you that your arguments make absolutely no sense to us. The rules are right there in the book. Being a set of rules the DM chooses from doesn’t make them any less the rules for completing tasks.

Not at all. A closer analogy, if we must speak in analogies, would be subway or a buffet, or even better a pizza place where you build your pizza step by step and then they bake it.

I'm becoming increasingly confused. I say that the way you sneak past someone in 5e is to ask the GM how it works. You disagree, and then provide an extended example of the GM deciding how it works as if it isn't exactly what I've been saying. It's like there being a stealth proficiency in 5e means 5e provides support for sneaking past someone when, in reality, your example shows multiple moments the GM is making an ad hoc ruling to even get to a point where the stealth proficiency is involved.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Weirdly I find that happens more often in Supers when I'm running it than almost any other genre except modern quasi-horror like WoD. I notice that in modern games the party gets split a lot more often than older ones - I think part of this is the ubiquity of communication devices, which make it vastly less of a hassle as you can keep everyone at the same table really easily and so on.

Its mostly an issue of resolution time per piece IME; like I said if you're up to running them in parallel, some of the problem goes away.

That said if you mean pre-written adventures, I don't think I've run a Supers one for decades, so yeah it may well be absent there.

That was primarily what I was referring to. Its a fool's game to guess at particular traits of an individual campaign, because even if you're right in general, there's always going to be outliers.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

The OP asserted that D&D is very flexible and can better handle being extended to some unspecified set of things that are usually done with other games than most of those other games would handle doing what D&D does. At least that seems to be the way I would read it.

That's not at all what the OP was saying. In fact, it's quite the opposite. To the extent that I care about what is said in this thread (which is hard to do, given it's just people talking past each other with almost no desire to understand), the OP and others have repeatedly stated that "bespoke" games (which is undefined, but I think we can understand the meaning) can be better for some "unspecified set of things," but that's not helpful to someone who is looking to play D&D.

In other words, if someone wants to have a series of "cinematic-style" heists, I would say (based on this thread and others) that BiTD sounds like fun. On the other hand, if someone says, "I was thinking of doing a heist in my D&D game - maybe something involving a Wizard's tower ..." it would be inappropriate, bordering on rude, to say, "D&D can't do heists. Suck it up and play a better game."

Everything else is just mindless chest-thumping and baiting in the form of "reasonable" Socratic questioning.

IMO, YMMV, enjoy the thread.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm pretty sure you're not even addressing my point. Why would a heist in 5e be done and failed (wilting Pac-Man noises) just because a task, even a binary pass/fail one like checking stealth vs perception, fails (or, hell, in 1e/2e or 3e, Traveller, Mutants and Masterminds, Top Secret, etc etc)? And the simple answer is, it's not. It's a complication - a guard alerted by a sound and whole bunch of different outcomes can be sparked by it depending on the decisions made by the DM and players at that time and the resources they have with them and choose to use.

And yeah, that may play out a bit differently from BitD since most older gen-based RPGs are front-load heavy when it comes to planning and gathering resources. But over in a single check? No.

Actually we don't know this to be true. It is QUITE possible, and I've experienced it many times, where exactly this sort of thing happened. The PCs expended a bunch of resources and took serious risks, and then the first time a 'check' went bad BOOM the GM blew the whole thing up, the 'alarm was raised' so to speak and all that was left was the ugly aftermath. This is because NOTHING in the D&D process of play really nails down how this is supposed to work. Yes, 5e might have a section in a separately downloadable set of rules on 'fail forward' as a concept, and provide a simple mechanic that has little integration with the rest of the system, but that is about it.

I've been on both the GMing and player side of this, and the result is that it is hard to get players to do certain types of things which they judge it to be impossible to gauge the level of risk (more complicated stuff usually). You can overcome this with sufficient time and experience in the group at the table such that they develop a shared sense of risk and reward, but it isn't just THERE to start with.

In fact the list of games you referenced parenthetically above all pretty much share this trait, with some minor variation (Traveler for example has a lot of pretty specific subsystems that are expected to be used in many common situations for its genre). Fiction focused/Narrative games tend OTOH to put the GM more on rails or give them principles, mechanics, etc. to follow which lead to fairly consistent outcomes and let the players know what is up along the way.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I think there's also the (common on the internet) issue of two different conversations on the same premise:

1. Can you run a heist in DnD?

A few people here seem to be arguing that this isn't possible, but I might be misreading them. But if you post on, say, Reddit, you will absolutely get a response telling you that not only is it impossible but that the only reason anyone could disagree is because they are too narrow-minded to consider other games. This is true no matter how you phrase the question - if the word "heist" appears in the OP, someone will tell you BitD is the only possible way to play such a game.

2. If you want a heist-centered game, which is better?

Ya know, I don't think anyone here has actually argued that DnD is better, although there's a lot of argument about the degree of difference, which is probably not worth talking about online, because of how subjective it is.

I think maybe, I did, a little, in so far as it pertains to BITD's specific mechanics jumping past the indepth planning phase in favor of the flashback system and therefore DND, with its specific item inventory list, might technically do it better if that part is important to you.

 

[billd91]

Actually we don't know this to be true. It is QUITE possible, and I've experienced it many times, where exactly this sort of thing happened. The PCs expended a bunch of resources and took serious risks, and then the first time a 'check' went bad BOOM the GM blew the whole thing up, the 'alarm was raised' so to speak and all that was left was the ugly aftermath. This is because NOTHING in the D&D process of play really nails down how this is supposed to work. Yes, 5e might have a section in a separately downloadable set of rules on 'fail forward' as a concept, and provide a simple mechanic that has little integration with the rest of the system, but that is about it.

You don't even need fail forward principles to avoid the problem of the jig being up with one failure. I think it's more of an example of clashing expectations and styles - the DM's being way to focused on the consequences of one failure or adversarial DMing rather than sticking to good storytelling or genre conventions. I won't deny that BitD has much better and more explicit guidance for GMs playing along with the players toward their goals - but the whole idea that you can't do that with D&D (or shouldn't try or whatever unhelpful advice comes along) is ridiculous.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This feels like a Jerk Fallacy argument - a dm can choose to run a total power trip, disregard the fun of the players, and ignore all the text in the books, therefore DnD has no rules.

Is there any mechanism in any roleplaying game that prevents someone from running the game in bad faith? What about any other game, for that matter?

In BitD it would be 'bad faith' (IE against the precepts of the game we agreed to play) for the GM to do something like that. In 5e there's is MERELY A SUGGESTION that you might use OPTIONAL RULES (the skill system) in a certain way. Even the suggestion provides many layers of options to the GM, and at its most complete the process lacks substantial features of resolution processes in other games. As @Ovinomancer says, this can be seen as a feature, but it is hard to argue 5e has anything like complete rules for stuff like this. It has the very most rudimentary possible implementation really that is mechanics at all.

I understand, most GMs may choose to follow certain suggestions and so you will find there is a 'typical experience', but it is far from substantially supported in rules text.