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

[Don Durito]

D&D can do anything so long as that anything is done in a D&D way.

 

[Hussar]

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.

Thing is, no one here is saying that.

What IS being said, is sometimes D&D doesn't do something very well. Or that sometimes, a given poster can't do certain things at their table. But, no, you certainly can run heists in D&D. You certainly could do larger scale combat in D&D. It's not something I would do, but, sure you can do it.

 

[Hussar]

Honestly, I'm not seeing exactly why a heist in D&D would be completely failed by a single die roll just because a guard happens to hear the fighter clanking by either. It depends on how the DM and players handle the revelation that the fighter was heard - which doesn't seem that different from BitD. The specific mechanics will differ, but not the fact that something happens in the environment and the PCs/DM all have choices to make about what that means.

Guard hears something and raises the alarm. Heist done, out come the swords and it ends in a massacre.

In BitD, doing that would be very, very difficult as the players have multiple options for making that not happen, as has been elucidated repeatedly in this thread.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

We must be referring to different things when we're talking about conflict resolution mechanics.

5e has robust combat conflict resolution mechanics.

5e has social conflict resolution mechanics (that are operationalized a la Wheel of Fortune...get pieces of the puzzle and then solve the puzzle).

5e, outside of those two, doesn't have any sort of general (or specific) purpose, encoded conflict resolution mechanics that operationalize conflict like 4e Skill Challenges, AW/Blades Clocks, Dungeon World's Perilous Journeys, Dogs in the Vineyard's or Mouse Guard's Conflict mechanics.

For instance.

Journeys are handled via task resolution and GM decides. They aren't operationalized like conflict resolution. For instance, this would be operationalized Conflict Resolution:

* who is the Scout? Who is the Navigator? Who is the Quartermaster?

* Scout, here is the situation. Make your Scout move and lets find out what happens. Ok, you got this result. Pick from this menu of results. Ok, here is how the situation has changed (via Danger or Discovery). What do you do with this Danger or this Discovery?

* Navigator...

* ...rinse, repeat, until you've dealt with all complications, until you turn back, or until you reach your destination.


Conflict Resolution is formal, encoded, structured procedures for resolving a Conflict. Contrast with Task Resolution and GM Decides (where its informal, not encoded, not structured and GM extrapolates based on their personal conception of the situation (a) how things unfold and (b) when Win Con/Loss Con is achieved).



Its not about me . The implications on actual play of various instantiations of Fail Forward are fundamental...objective.

Take the form of Fail Forward that I depicted above.

* You cannot lose.

* You will achieve your story win.

* The GM is basically just keeping the balls in play until they decide enough drama has played out and you get your story win.


You disagree that this particular systemization of Fail Forward is different from an alternative systemization of Fail Forward where:

* You can lose

* There is encoded structure and constraining principles which dictate how Fail Forward complications emerge and propel play

* There is a codified, table-facing Win Condition and Loss Condition.

Lets take a concrete case: The PCs, for whatever reason, must cross The Perilous Land. In 4e this would be a Skill Challenge. Now the GM does have leeway as to both the difficulty (IE level) and Complexity (1-5) of the challenge. He will also set the Primary and Secondary skills, using the process in the DMG/RC. Assuming we ar using RC's mechanics he will also get some choices along the way, like when to deploy obstacles and when to require high difficulty checks. How the fictional position of the journey evolves is also pretty much in the GM's court, though the players clearly have a strong input here by their action declarations and which resources they decide to expend (again the GM does get to decide how useful these are). The GM also gets to pick failure consequences, such as HS loss, etc.

In 5e all of the above GM discretion also exists. On top of that, there isn't an SC mechanical framework, so the GM must decide the overall weight and consequence of each action in terms of what progress it provides towards overall resolution of the journey. He's free to simply state that any given action has any sort of consequence he desires, that it fails, that it is impossible, that it requires a DC of whatever value, and then what success or failure bring. Even if the GM decides to always use skills, and to use fail forward, there's no context within which we can gauge the weight of a failure or a success, or the task's difficulty, so FF has very little material utility here. In fact, as @Manbearcat has pointed out, taking it literally and applying it consistently would seem to preclude overall failure as a possibility at all!

It is in this sense that @Ovinomancer has said that 5e 'lacks rules', and the whole notion of the value of those structures has come up.

And yes, you can construct subsystems in 5e. But such are entirely situational and still GM constructs. 4e has a GENERAL SUBSYSTEM which is amenable to all situations worthy of systematic resolution. I admit it takes some skill to use well, and here games like DW and BitD should probably be said to be better, but it at least HAS such a system, it is always available.

 

[pemerton]

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).

I think whether an RPG session will look like a work of fiction is up for grabs: I've achieved this with one-shots using Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights, and I think it can be done pretty reliably. Our Prince Valiant sessions also tend to be pretty reliable in build-up/pay-off.

And most 4e combats that I ran had a pretty solid rising-action => crisis => resolution sequence to them.

Systems that make it a bit harder to manage pacing than the ones I mentioned in my first paragraph, and that lack the mechanical support for it of 4e combat, are less likely to produce satisfactory narrative feel over the course of a given session. Some of our Traveller sessions play more like build-up or interludes or come back next week to see what happens to our heroes. But I don't think RPGing has to be hostage to premature failure or anticlimax. Avoiding the first focuses on premature, which is connected to prior conceptions of how things should unfold; avoiding the second focuses on what is at stake in the moment of resolution. One of the best discussions of this in the context of RPGing advice that I know is from Luke Crane, in the BW core book and in his Codex/Adventure Burner.

 

[jmartkdr2]

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.

The skill system is an optional rule?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But this is effectively just taking the heist and abstracting it one level without process sim details. You fail a stealth check in a skill challenge and it racks up a fail (narrating it how the group chooses) - as long as you end up with the requisite number of successes before fails - it's (some level of) a success. Contrast playing a heist scenario without the skill challenge, and you have a failed stealth check... that could still be redeemed by quickly neutralizing the guard by playing out how that's done. And it could still be a heist with (some level of) a success.

Well, in the 4e SC scenario the fiction must evolve in a way which comports with the mechanical structure, and vice versa. That is, you failed a stealth check, clearly that check was an attempt by the player to have his PC evolve the fiction in a given way "I sneak past the town watch patrol, sticking to the shadows." Now, in the 5e version of this everything is the same, except we have no idea what the valence of this action is. In 4e you failed, the guards clearly didn't literally catch you red-handed, because the SC structure says "you don't fail completely until 3 failures" but equally clearly you are FICTIONALLY closer to that point. In 5e I cannot even make a statement about what the significance of that failure is, I have literally nothing to go on. If the GM decides "OK, the guards are a bit more suspicious now" what does that even mean? How many checks must I pass or fail before the jig is up or I achieve my goal?

I don't see any abstraction here in the 4e case. I am not sure what "without process sim details" means. There are fictional details. There HAVE to be. This is quite clearly laid out in, at least later versions, of the SC rules. Every time a check happens, the fiction evolves to a new state, which is a logical consequence of the previous state.

Beyond that, the rules of 4e are also pretty loosely structured in some sense, SCs are merely one type of mechanics, and you CAN simply go 'free form' or in some situations the GM might just say "OK, the challenge is over, the fictional state has evolved to a point where further tally of success and failure on this task is no longer coherent with any fiction." This might happen if the player decides after two failures to give up and go home. Probably the GM should treat this like any other action resolution and state what the outcome will be. Maybe the SC goes to fail state, or maybe it just becomes moot. Maybe a different SC comes into play, or whatever. If we were discussing BitD things are more hard and fast, the 'score' must proceed to an endpoint, I suspect (maybe I'm wrong). In Dungeon World threats continue to evolve on the fronts engaged, so a 'doom' might come about based on failure to complete some activity, but DW structures things rather differently at this level, so comparison is harder.

 

[pemerton]

Well, in the 4e SC scenario the fiction must evolve in a way which comports with the mechanical structure, and vice versa. That is, you failed a stealth check, clearly that check was an attempt by the player to have his PC evolve the fiction in a given way "I sneak past the town watch patrol, sticking to the shadows." Now, in the 5e version of this everything is the same, except we have no idea what the valence of this action is. In 4e you failed, the guards clearly didn't literally catch you red-handed, because the SC structure says "you don't fail completely until 3 failures" but equally clearly you are FICTIONALLY closer to that point. In 5e I cannot even make a statement about what the significance of that failure is, I have literally nothing to go on. If the GM decides "OK, the guards are a bit more suspicious now" what does that even mean? How many checks must I pass or fail before the jig is up or I achieve my goal?

I don't see any abstraction here in the 4e case. I am not sure what "without process sim details" means. There are fictional details. There HAVE to be. This is quite clearly laid out in, at least later versions, of the SC rules. Every time a check happens, the fiction evolves to a new state, which is a logical consequence of the previous state.

The quite clear laying out is in the DMG 2. I think it's also laid out in the DMG, but I'm prepared to concede that, while clear, it's not quite clear!

The bigger point, which relates to my post not too far upthread about structure and constraint, is made in your first para. What does failing this check mean for my overall prospects of success? The skill challenge framework answers that question. It establishes parameters for what the GM may narrate - it can't be a fiction of total failure, if it's not the third failed check.

One parallel in PbtA systems is Perception/Discern Realities-type checks that oblige the GM to tell the player something true and useful. The GM is under constraints on what is narrated. Likewise (turning from success to failure) the basic process of first making soft moves - to set up threat/stakes/consequences - and then following through with hard moves (ie irrevocable fall-out).

The contrast with 5e seems pretty clear to me. There is no soft-move/hard-move process. There is no structural constraint on what sort of outcomes of successful or failed checks the GM should narrate. In another recent thread a 5e proponent was arguing that there is no obligation, if a lore check is successful, for the GM to provide the player with any useful lore.

This is all relevant to how, and how well, a system permits adjudication of a heist, or any other high-stakes but non-combat endeavour.

 

[Imaro]

Yes, and those stealth rules are such a wonder of ease of use and game design that no one ever has any issues with 5e's stealth rules.

Some people do... others don't. The same way you have issues hacking D&D (and assume it must be universal) but others have done it (and so it must be possible)...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Sure, I can, as a GM with rule zero authority, sort of make anything happen. Still, what was the consequence in 5e of one failure in a process of many checks? It probably guided the fiction in a bit different path. This is about all that FF can do without more structure. I mean, basically you can make up an ad-hoc version of 4e's SC rules and say "well, lets see, I think if they fail 3 checks they probably opened the hornet's nest, but if they manage to succeed on 5 first, then I'll figure it was challenging enough." Why not just have the structure to start with? I've never understood why its lack gains us anything.