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

[Lanefan]

No offense Lanefan, but this is you speaking from ignorance on the subject.

Directly above I gave you an example of how broad competency is enabled through play and the decision-points around limited-use resource leveraging/management and complication resisting works in the game.

But broad competency doesn't remotely mean specialization isn't leveraged.

Fighters (Cutters) in Blades are the ass-kickers and having a Crew of Bravos (Assault Specialists) amplifies this. Same thing for Rogues (Lurks), Rangers (Hounds) and Assassin or Shadow Crews. Same thing for Warlocks (Whispers), Wizard/Artificers (Leeches) and Cult or Smuggler Crews (that smuggle contraband/illicit substances/spirits).

The game has huge intersecting parts that can increase the ceiling of any given PC's best action resolution shtick and the same PC's ability to Resist Complications related to that shtick (so they're therefore better at it than others and don't have to expend resources to get to the floor and they force-multiply their allies who aren't as good as them).

TLDR; An elevated floor on competency doesn't mean specialization becomes irrelevant.

IMO it depends how elevated that competency floor is.

The post I was replying to seemed to indicate everyone could pretty much do anything, more or less, which implies they have no weaknesses they need others to cover for. I'll try to illustarte using numbers, I hope this works:

On a 1-10 scale, where 1 is utterly incompetent and 10 is the world's best, on a hyopthetical collection of skills and abilities a commoner would be, say, something like 2-2-3-2-2-2. That's your baseline - an average of 2 with one '3' which is probably what you make your living by doing - to which everything else is compared.

A typical low-level D&D adventurer might be 2-5-3-2-4-2; significantly better than a commoner at a few key things but otherwise still largely what she was. At high level she might get to 2-9-5-2-8-2 - really really good at a few things but still just what she was when it comes to other things and thus needing support in those areas.

The impression I get from what you're saying is that in Blades the characters, when compared to the 2-2-3-2-2-2 commoner, are all probably going to be 5-5-5-7-5-5 i.e. pretty good at everything and a bit better at the one thing they specialize in. This is what I mean by them each being one-man bands: the competency floor is so high that compared to the rest of the world they're each experts in everything.

Now if the game really focuses on that 7 for each character while ignoring everyone's 5s everywhere else then what you say is true; but that still means the characters don't have any outright weaknesses which, if nothing else, is a shade unbelievable.

 

[MichaelSomething]

 

[Lanefan]

I think you are not thinking of skill challenges in the sort of way that @AbdulAlhazred is.

My guess is that he has in mind something more like this or this

Just read your dinner-with-the-Baron example and yeah, that works. You spanned the skill challenge out across the whole role-played episode rather than do it all at once.

My counter-example comes from the WotC 4e module Marauders of the Dune Sea. In it, assuming the party follow the proper breadcrumbs, they reach a permanent sandstorm in the middle of a desert. I forget the mechanism by which the module informs the players/PCs that they need to enter the sandstorm in order to continue (when I ran it I had them sent in there on a broad-based mission that something's goign on in the sandstorm and important people want to know what it is), but in they eventually have to go.

The whole business of the party finding its way through the sandstorm to the small dungeon within is reduced to a single skill challenge; succeed and you reach the dungeon, fail and you're back outside the sandstorm (I think in a random direction but might always be where you started - it's nearly 10 years since I ran this) after some time has passed and can - I think - try again. Nice and fast to resolve at the table perhaps but horribly boring and a bit disconnected: the module author goes to all the trouble of providing an excellent terrain/environment set-up and then IMO rather wastes it all by reducing the passage to a few dice rolls.

When I ran this I got a lot more granular with resolving this piece; also inserted the idea of wandering monsters inside the sandstorm (i.e. the dungeon inhabitants weren't always just going to stay put), and got about a session's worth of good adventuring out of it rather than the five or ten minutes a skill challenge would have taken.

 

[pemerton]

@Lanefan, @Manbearcat

In my Prince Valiant game two of the PCs were (in their original builds) near-identical: without collaborating, two players built their knights each with Brawn 4 and Presence 3, and with 9 ranks allocated across 14 skills as Arms 3; Archery, Hunting and Riding all 1; and 3 ranks across Fellowship and Healing (one was 2-1, the other 1-2).

One player described his character as a "middle-aged knight who has achieved little"; the other player's knight was young and strapping. They therefore decided they were father and son.

That is why they travel together.

Since then more skill ranks have been added, but they still remain highly overlapping in their competences: the father is Arms 4, Archery 1, Battle 6, Riding 2, Hunting 1, Courtesie 1, Fellowship 1, Oratory 2, Healing 2; the son is Arms 4, Archery 1, Battle 6, Riding 1, Hunting 1, Courtesie 2, Fellowship 2, Healing 4.

They still travel together. The son is Grand Master of the military order that they founded; the father is Marshall. Both have married during over the course of the campaign, the younger to his sweetheart Violette, the older (established as having been widowed) a primarily political marriage to the Lady Alia, only surviving heir to the Duke of Bordeaux.

Besides the family bond between the two of them, the two are more effective than one on his own: for instance in two of their last three battles they have been successful in splitting their forces into separate units, one commanded by the Grand Master and the other by the Marshall.

Niche protection/distributed competence is not the only reason for people to work together!

 

[pemerton]

Just read your dinner-with-the-Baron example and yeah, that works. You spanned the skill challenge out across the whole role-played episode rather than do it all at once.

My counter-example comes from the WotC 4e module Marauders of the Dune Sea.

What is it a counter-example to?

I don't think it shows that @AbdulAlhazred is envisaging skill challenges differently from my example. I don't think it shows us how skill challenges should, or must, be approached.

I am not the biggest fan of travel skill challenges, but have run at least two and they didn't play like the one you describe in your post.

 

[Campbell]

Going to try a slightly different tact.

The vast majority of the pushback you see in this thread (particularly from people like me) comes down to juxtaposing D&D (5e) against "bespoke genre games" which from my perspective is just a really cute way to say indie RPGs. This concept of the narrow focused indie RPG is a pernicious one that just will not seem to die despite never actually being backed up in any substantial way. Just because something is a cultural maxim does not make it true.

It is true that indie games provide structure to areas more traditional games do not, but they also often lack structure in areas more traditional games provide it in. Things like parties, adventures, structured combat all commonly go out the window. Sure Masks cares about modeling the teenage experience and narrative tropes of superhero comics more than Champions, but Champions cares a lot (like a lot a lot a lot) about modeling the details of super powers and tactical combat. Is Masks more flexible because I don't have to deal with power charts? Masks also provides players with more freedom to emote and just play their characters than is typical of damn near any superhero game played in traditional ways.

I know I am going to get raked over the coals for this, but a lot of this comes down to not knowing what we do not know. There's a lot about the way most groups play RPGs that gets taken for granted, cultural norms that have become so ingrained we do not see them as structure. Don't split the party. Bite the hooks. Niche protection. All of it.

There's also an issue that sometimes happens because a lot of more traditional gamers only experience indie games in small chunks. They do not see the flexibility because they are still caught up in the novelty of the experience. Playing in a 1-3 session game of Monsterhearts is one thing. Experiencing a game that goes considerably longer is another thing entirely. Once the novelty wears off and you become proficient at the game it has a different feel altogether.

I think telling someone to play another game when they are looking for feedback or advice on how to hack the game they are playing is rude regardless if the recommended game is "bespoke" or not. It's really not any better if I tell to you to go play Pathfinder Second Edition, GURPS, Exalted or Worlds Without Number instead of Blades.

 

[hawkeyefan]

5E can do that!!!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You were using a private die roll as a (potential) guideline for what came next, but you weren't necessarily committed to it. I for one have no issues here at all, and nor should I given that I do this same thing probably anywhere from 10 to 50 times a session.

The problems arise IMO when these die rolls either become player-facing or player-side and thus force the table to commit to whatever outcome the die provides. The roll becomes a hard and fast determinant rather than just an ignorable guideline, and that now means there have to be hard and fast rules around it as to what the results mean, when and under what conditions the die can be rolled, etc. etc. To me that squeezes the joy out of it somehow.

I just wanted to have my cake and eat it too, and as an AD&D DM there weren't nobody to say NO to that! Yeah, if you hand some dice to the players, or roll in front of them, you probably should take it as it comes. I think in terms of 5e and skill checks there is a bit of that in play. There's little that is nailed down, but they do have a force of social pressure and just sense of 'this is how it is done.' Still, I prefer my process fully cooked, hehehe. I think I still own that DM screen though!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Except when that mechanic simply isn't granular enough to do what you want it to, and-or doesn't allow resolution at a high level of detail.

Putting something big like a bank heist or a negotiaton of trading rights into a skill challenge takes what otherwise has the potential to be a session's fun gaming and concatenates it into a few dice rolls. No thanks.

I've seen things like this in published 4e adventures I've converted and run - something (usually hazardous exploration) that would normally be done and resolved step by step in fairly deep detail is just all pushed into a single skill challenge.

OK, I mean, you may FAIL to frame your SCs well, and thus have what you later deem to be the 'wrong level of granularity'. I mean, picking the right framing is something I've been advising people on for a long time too, so no argument there. However, that isn't an inherent problem with the system. Also it kind of depends on the type and variety of action. If I was running a game full of heists (and decided it would be in 4e, for whatever reason) then I think framing each heist as an SC would be both logical and probably work quite well. I can think of other possiblities though, which experience might prove out to be better. I'd also assume such a game wouldn't be exactly like BitD, it would probably have some other non-heist related parts to it, which an SC can also handle.

Also, SCs are not 'a few dice rolls', certainly not any more than a combat is, or any more than a BitD heist is. Its an evolving fiction in which certain conflict points are resolved by chucking dice and manipulating a tally. I've had SCs that lasted 3 sessions, and many of them last an hour or more, with a lot going on in them.

I don't know of many GOOD published SCs. There are some that can work fine, but I don't think WotC really grokked it that well, even though they wrote it. YMMV. My problem is, some random unstructured concatenation of dice rolls doesn't work that well.

 

[pemerton]

Don't split the party. Bite the hooks. Niche protection. All of it.

I just gave my rant above about niche protection. In Prince Valiant it's just not a thing - every character is (by default) a knight, and if you depart from that default the focus of the action still defaults to the sorts of things knights errant do.

The third PC in our game started as a squire but has since been knighted. He is a bit different from the other two - Brawn 3, Presence 4, and skills of Arms 2, Battle 1, Riding 2, Agility 2, Dexterity 2, Stealth 1, Courtesie 2, Fellowship 3, Glamourie 2, Poetry/Song 1, Lore 2. But like them he still rides a warhorse, fights with a sword and has a suitable marriage (to Elizabeth, daughter of the Duke of York). The differences between the characters flow from their personalities (as played) and their place in the fiction - eg this third PC is the only one whose wife travels with him on his errantry.

Having elaborated on that rant, I also want to say something about splitting the party, (I'll say something about hooks if asked or provoked.)

In our Classic Traveller game, the PCs and entourage are (notionally, at least) a starship owner, his crew and other sundry hangers-on. They frequently separate: in a town, some might go and do X while others do Y; as I posted upthread about our "heist", when Imperial officers needed to be wined and dined for a week some did that, while others worked on the technical problem of deciphering the workings of an alien starship, and powering it up so it could be taken by the group; more recently the PCs were in three groups with some in orbit about Zinion on the alien vessel, others on the surface of Zinion exploring an alien installation, and another group travelling in their ship back to Novus and then undertaking various tasks there (which also involved splitting up). In our most recent session the various groups rendezvoused, but will no doubt split up again when it makes sense to do so. Even in our Alien session, when the PCs first explored the alien vessel, with no contrivance at all on either the player or GM side of things the PCs split up: different ones wanted to check out different parts of the vessel; one PC got left on guard duty where the Aliens were known to emerge while the others were doing technical work on the vessel's bridge; etc.

I haven't yet GMed a campaign where the PCs are strangers to one another, but have done that in multiple one-offs (using Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights). In one of the Cthulhu Dark sessions the two protagonists encountered one another only two or three times, but their actions were interwoven and the consequences overlapped.

The party is in many circumstances a contrivance. In Prince Valiant we live with it, because otherwise the distances between the PCs are too great for communication or interaction or even interweaving to take place. In Traveller we approach it flexibly, with the vessel rather than the mission being its focus. But the idea that nothing interesting ever happens except when these five people are ready to confront it together like a many-headed hydra is another level of contrivance altogether!