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

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'll agree with that. I think that some of the 4e reactions are good. But there are just too many of them when about half the PCs come with an encounter reaction power or two. 5e took things too far in the other direction; disadvantage for ranged attacks is fine, but all it means for the casters is they use the save-spells rather than the zappy spells that roll to hit. You shouldn't be able to have an enemy in your face and throw a fireball 50' away with no penalties.

Well... there is another way of thinking about this. It is going to take N attacks, roughly, to defeat your enemies. Does it matter which rounds those come in? If you build a ranger that has tons of reactions, all you did was front-load your damage output into the first 2-3 rounds of combat! That is NOT going to slow things down, contrariwise it will SPEED THEM UP! What slows things down is when you present the combat in a boring way, and its basically static, and it isn't all that important a fight, so half the party gets up to go get a slice, take a leak, and grab another beer. NOW the reactions are a bad thing, but it wasn't reactions that made it so. It was bad adventure pacing.

Now, you can go ahead and fault 4e for wanting GOOD adventure pacing, though I think you should want that anyway at your table. So, maybe its combat system is a bit less forgiving than some in that sense. THIS is what I have eliminated in my own game. I mean, it would have to be played by a lot of tables to validate that, but I think I have... lol.

5e just sort of removes a lot of the interesting parts from combat generally. Yeah, its faster, but as-written, and using the monster designs that come with the game, it is not that much fun... Certainly less so than 4e. Also I honestly haven't found MY fights to be faster in 5e, but then I don't run a lot of the sorts of fights other people do...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That is not true. The 5e DMG has advice on using multiple checks to resolve a situation and advice on degrees of failure and success at cost. I mean it is in one of the core books of the game. The book that explains to DMs how to run the game tells them that one failed check is not a catastrophic failure.

Yeah, but that's light years from what you get in other games. Sure, it is good advice, but a bunch of it is optional or at least 'not the core way to do things', and even if you say "well, lets do a group check" there's not a lot of structure around what success, failure, or level of either one, that exists. I mean, 5e has bits and pieces, but it isn't a coherent system. A game with a design similar to BitD will deliver on "narrative sequences which hinge on many tests of skill" with much greater reliability. Beyond that, MOST action in a wide range of situations can be structured that way. Or you can have a couple of other paradigms to cover less structured situations. BitD has downtime that is structured to a degree for instance. So does Dungeon World, though it is more simple in that game. In fact, even Traveler, going back to 1977, has a pretty fair amount of this, although it is more primitive and less general purpose.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The system is designed to channel players into role playing certain stereotypes. And the system generally rewards violence.

Not especially. Tradition, habit, and player boredom are the only reason I can see for a Barbarian to do that. The system doesn’t tell Barbarians to have severe ADHD (I say this as someone with severe adhd) and break stuff when they’re bored. That’s 100% a player decision.

Okay. The OP is just silliness and can be safely ignored. No discussion is necessary at all, because it's silly. Discussion done.

Or.. is it only you that has this power?

Okay.

 

[Manbearcat]

That's dave. I don't think using the page 242 of the DMG rules is actually particularly beneficial, so broadly agree with you, though people acting like they don't exist is unhelpful.

However, have you actually read them? The way your post is phrased it suggests to me that you haven't. I agree in very broad terms with your general point that using them doesn't necessarily improve the situation, however, I think your suggestion that they actually further cloud the waters and actually make things worse is borne out of ignorance of what is being suggested on page 242.


I'm with you on this sentence until you get to "hides it more from the players". I don't see that as justifiable on the basis of what is actually being suggested on page 242. I can see why you might guess that though.

I'd also suggest that I'm not really buying the apparent underlying notion that D&D is peculiar in the players having limited tools to assert fiction and the DM deciding what happens on success/failure. I would say that the vast majority of successful RPGs on the market are like D&D in this.

If we look at DriveThru's top sellers for example (ignoring supplements/modules):

1. WWN - like D&D (does have more heist-friendly rules though due to multi-dice skills and Execution attacks).
2. Dune - Totally honestly I have no clue. It's 2d20 system, and it sounds like it's the same as D&D, but I could be wrong.
3. Hard-Wired Island - Like D&D only it's clearer that the DM has options, which by your logic is worse than D&D - specifically failure = GM picks between outright failure, success-at-a-cost, or a bargain, which seems to be exactly what you're condemning. Yet this is regarded as a narrative-friendly, player-friendly modern system.
4. SWN - See WWN.
5. Cyberpunk Red - Like D&D.
6. Blades in the Dark - As discussed at terminal length!

We could go on.

I think the problem is this. I want to do 2 Flashbacks! I'll pay the Stress!

FLASHBACK 1:

Its 2012/13.

I and others are taking extraordinary pains to explain:

• 4e Skill Challenges
• How Change the Situation, Say Yes or Roll the Dice, Cut to the Action, Genre Logic, Success With Complications, and Fail Forward undergird them

That was orthodox 4e Skill Challenges. Stock. Its in the text even if a little bit opaque here and there (which DMG2 9 months after release removed all the opacity and RC formalized everything with perfect transparency). It was never a dice roll exercise linked by freeform roleplaying where nothing interesting happens and/or the GM can just do whatever they want and the players can never infer what a failure looks like; which is what the detractors said it was. There was a lot of shifting sands under player's feet metaphors (people in this very thread said that when I went in excruciating detail over my giant Gorge in the Badlands Skill Challenge as it emerged from one of my sessions of play) by the huge crowd who (a) loved Naturalistic/Process Sim Logic, and (b) who hated Genre Logic/Fail Forward/Success With Complications. There was a lot of utterly mistaken Fail Forward is actually just GM deploying Illusionism to keep the story of the Skill Challenge "online!"

FAST FORWARD TO PRESENT DAY

Now, some of those same 4e detractors who adamantly argued with me in those threads are now advocating for Fail Forward and Success At a Cost in 5e! And Fail Forward isn't even in the non-basic 5e D&D! Its ONLY in the Basic PDF. And Success At a Cost is only an optional module! Its not stock/orthodox. And the spread of failures its on is vanishingly remote compared to the spread of a dice roll; failure by only 1 or 2 (PBtA is 3 and its waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more bounded in dice and bonuses than 5e action resolution). And Degree of Failure as its written and exemplified isn't helpful to our cause here. The way it is written is an incoherent mish-mash of Success With Complication - the first example and basically some kind of instantiation of Blades Position/threat level (the second example being like the difference between Blades Controlled and Desperate Position). On a (Controlled) failure, you just don't get what you want. On a 5+ Failure (Desperate), things really suck!


FLASHBACK # 2

Its 2 years after 5e's release; late 16.

I'm going over a big session of 5e that I GMed (some of the same participants in this thread were in that thread). Its level 17 so endgame w/ a Rogue, a Wizard, and a Fighter as the PCs. I GMed this game probably once every 3-4 weeks impromptu when the primary GM who conceived of the game would flake out (this was for a group of 12-14 year olds and the dad of one of the kids was the primary GM).

When I talked about using Success With a Cost when running the game in that thread (and in other threads of that era) it was roundly disliked. There was a lot of "EZMode" epithets and even people mistakenly thinking using it is actually an episode of GM Force deployment (its patently not).

People_were_not_using that module. If they were, they were awfully quiet about it...keeping their heads down or something because WE DON'T KINDLY TO THAT INDIE CRAP AROUND HERE! They number of people who were actually using it while running 5e had to have been vanishingly small.


MODERN DAY 4.5 YEARS LATER?


I don't know? Maybe that has changed. I haven't been on the 5e forums much since my mega DC 30/35 thread in 2015 got eaten by the ENWorld fail that year and then that big thread I involved myself in a year later (as I write above).

---

Moral of the story is I don't think the general appraisal in this thread of @Hussar 's and @Ovinomancer 's positions is fair or accurate.

One game (4e) featured these techniques as stock, required-for-play (you literally cannot run Skill Challenges without Success With Complications and Fail Forward). Yet, they were roundly and massively hated by the vocal ENWorld userbase; misused, underused, not used at all. I mean most folks just didn't use Skill Challenges at all because they hated all of this! And they let us know about it CONSTANTLY (folks commenting in this thread these years later).

The other game (5e) doesn't have Skill Challenges (therefore Fail Forward and Success With Complications aren't required), doesn't have Fail Forward as a technique in its primary game, and its Success With Cost module is profoundly bounded compared to the resolution spread and, again, is only a module. Its not stock. Its not required to play. And, if late 2016 is any indication and the way 4e was roundly hated for these exact features, its usage is profoundly minority/deviant among the 5e userbase!

Further, the game is overwhelmingly about Rulings-Not-Rules and informed by an AD&D 2e/early 3e ethos (where none of that stuff existed).

You add all of that up, and Hussar's experience with GMs doesn't feel like he's being a baby. He's in the world, in the wild out there, dealing with GMs who run games where if you fail at a Stealth check...the jig is up. Its curtains on the sneaky Spec Ops portion of play. Bring out the big guns and go to work.

That anecdote does not remotely seem deranged or crazytown from where I'm sitting. Given what I've written above, my experience with 5e GMs/players in the wild, my experience on ENWorld, my experience with the backlash over 4e (which a big part was exactly these techniques that we're now championing for 5e)... I would be shocked if Hussar's anecdote is this deviant thing.

Cultural inertia matters.

Massive backlash to techniques inside a decade ago matters.

Whether something is stock or an optional module matters to how often it will see daylight across the distribution of all tables playing a game (and BY GOD do we all know this because 2012-2014 playtest was TRENCH WARFARE over what should be stock and what should be modular! Huge swathes of people endlessly fought on these boards saying "if x is stock in 5e...I WON'T BE PLAYING IT!"


So I think, in light of all of that, the appraisal of Hussar's and Ovinomancer's positions are a less charitable/accurate as it pertains to how 5e is played "in the wild" (hell, even on here to be honest with you...unless there has been this indie revolution within the last 5 years for 5e that I'm unaware of...could be...I've stayed away from the D&D forums).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I was waiting too damn long for my steak and I thought of a game where, uhm, planning and executing a heist sounds cool to me. Don't think I'd count it as an RPG though.

So, the GM (or whoever we may call her, maybe, the House? Idk) has a pool of points to spend on security measures of the heist mark, cameras, turrets, whatever. The players have a similar pool of options for their preparation -- acquiring termite, helicopters and whatnot. Maybe also include casing here, so they can spend points from their pool to ask questions.

Then, execution. Let's see whether their plan works, and if not, whether they'll still succeed.

Kinda pretty much exactly what you are describing Diceless too! And just a couple pages long. Very simple system, but I think it would do a basic heist quite well.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Am I wrong in assuming there may have been moderation action in this thread? Because a couple people's posts seem to have exceedingly unclear referents here...

If you have someone on ignore, or someone is ignoring you, then you will not see their posts*, and you will not see other people quoting them. Which means that if something looks unclear, it could be because they are quoting someone you can't see (because of the two-way ignore function).

*The exception, I believe, is thread-starters.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If you have someone on ignore, or someone is ignoring you, then you will not see their posts*, and you will not see other people quoting them. Which means that if something looks unclear, it could be because they are quoting someone you can't see (because of the two-way ignore function).

*The exception, I believe, is thread-starters.

I suppose they could have me on ignore, but it seems most likely to be the OP if so, and I can see the first post.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I suppose they could have me on ignore, but it seems most likely to be the OP if so, and I can see the first post.

You can always see a thread-starter. So even if the OP has you on ignore, you will see the first post, but not any subsequent posts by the OP in the thread.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You can always see a thread-starter. So even if the OP has you on ignore, you will see the first post, but not any subsequent posts by the OP in the thread.

Ah. That likely explains it, then. Thanks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think they must have learned some lessons from the giant problems in 3e where they went from being dangerous at both melee and ranged in AD&D to hell on wheels at melee but shockingly weak at range because their Dexterity scores were all crap compared to their Strength scores. You may want to pin the ogre down to reduce the danger he represents, but it's too costly for too many other cases like rock-throwing giants for it to be a system structure.
Though, in this case, you still end up reducing the ogre's offense because he probably doesn't have unlimited javelins...

This is another of those "4e basically solved this problem" things. Any given attack is based on a power, which could key off any stat and do whatever at melee/range/area/zone/etc. A monster can be good at every range, good at only ranged, or good at only melee. Each monster role will typically dictate that, though there are always some exceptions and there's no RULE or subsystem that makes soldiers bad at range for example (though they typically aren't potent outside melee). So, for example, a typical ogre is a Brute, high damage, low defenses, possibly a bit low accuracy, poor to non-existent ranged attacks. Pinning it down and pounding it at range is thus an excellent strategy (as is any other form of kiting, slow is a good condition to use too). Obviously this requires tactical thinking and situation, and team coordination. Likewise a tactiporting Eladrin ranger has obvious utility as an artillery monster killer, port past the front line and get in its face. Here 4e's OA rules are nice, that guy is boned unless he can shift away from you before attacking. Clearly a character that is a specialist in this would also like stuff that prones or immobilizes/dazes opponents. Also a fighter might work well in this role since he can punish anyone who ignores him and inflict a mark. 5e simply lacks all of this, its combat system is pretty lacking by comparison.