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

[billd91]

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.

And which 5e has also solved. You preferred 4e's solution, I prefer 5e's.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

The problem for me is, he seems to be saying those DMs are running D&D right and that he runs D&D that way. If that understanding is correct, then your understanding is wrong, and he absolutely is being completely ridiculous. Certainly he's misrepresenting D&D 5E's rules as a very simple matter of undeniable fact. And I don't think it's wrong for anyone to point that out.

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).

I feel like you might be slightly overstating how people felt about skill challenges honestly. I saw a lot of people who weren't running 4E saying they were a good concept but didn't like the math and stuff, and I saw way more complaints about the math (which died down after they got revised) than any conceptual elements.

 

[Campbell]

@Thomas Shey

I think there's a lot of subjective judgements about which genre are worthy of emulation that goes into what we lump in the "focused" column and what goes into the "flexible" column. For example Monster of the Week that emulates stuff like Buffy and Supernatural gets seen as less focused than something like Monsterhearts that emulates dark supernatural romance like The Mortal Instruments, Teen Wolf, and Vampire Diaries. Modern D&D's challenge oriented party based heroic fantasy action adventure gets to be in the flexible column while Blades in the Dark's crime fiction gets labeled more focused. Their underlying genre are not more or less specific, but the popular genre get to be "flexible".

I like the action adventure stuff. Having a ball doing it in Infinity right now, but it's fairly obvious that it's just seen as the norm.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But what's confusing me here is that you seem to be saying they're putting things into this sort of quantum state where the player doesn't know what's going on, but if I look at the rules suggestions on page 242, that doesn't appear to be the case:

Here's a cut-down take on them I found:

"SUCCESS AT A COST: ...When a character fails a roll by only 1 or 2, you can allow the character to succeed at the cost of a complication or hindrance. Such complications can run along any of the following lines... A character fails to intimidate a kobold prisoner, but the kobold reveals its secrets anyway while shrieking at the top of its lungs, alerting other nearby monsters.

DEGREES OF FAILURE: ...A character who fails to disarm a trapped chest might accidentally spring the trap if the check fails by 5 or more, whereas a lesser failure means that the trap wasn't triggered during the botched disarm attempt... Perhaps a failed Charisma (Persuasion) check means a queen won't help, whereas a failure of 5 or more means she throws you in the dungeon for your impudence.

CRITICAL SUCCESS OR FAILURE: ...rolling a 1 on a failed attempt to pick a lock might break the thieves' tools being used, and rolling a 20 on a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check might reveal an extra clue."

So I don't see how "success at a cost" makes the game worse. Can you explain that? "If you fail by 1-2 points the DM may give you a choice to succeed with a complication or hindrance". The only issue I see is the "may"? Otherwise this is a similar approach to a lot of games, including BitD, and can absolutely be factored in for.

Degrees of failure I'm also not really seeing how that's different either, apart from you knowing the fairly consistently, if you fail by 5 or more, the DM will go for a worse result than less than that. Again this seems like something you can account for.

Critical fail/success I loathe but there's no question there - you can absolutely account for that, I've played games in which this is used.

You say that unless the DM is consistent they muddy the waters, but I think that's a pretty straightforward matter, and if the DM is inconsistent, you're already playing like this to some extent, just based on his whimsy. The only real potential issue I see is if the DM didn't always apply them to rolls. Like if some of the time they did, and other times they didn't, and I mean apply them at all - like one roll a fail by 1-2 was success-at-a-cost, next time is was straight fail, and so on. That would be unhelpful, but also nearly inconceivable to me.

You also mentioned "fail forward" as one of these options and it isn't. I'm not sure why you mentioned it - isn't that just a principle of design? And one that applies to D&D even w/o page 242?


Oh definitely. And confusing the issue is that with PtbA at least there's still quite a bit of "ask the DM" or "the DM will tell you what to roll", which can slow down how they re-understand the system, ironically probably helps PtbA's popularity as it's less of a "system shock".


It's not an appeal to popularity, my point is one that you agreed above - most games take a D&D-ish approach. Hence a lot of the criticism of D&D specifically even though the the issue is a broad/general one with systems taking that general approach feels a little misguided. I guess maybe it's a point more important to me than others? Like, I see two general issues in this thread:

1) Issues largely specific to D&D which make it ill-suited to integrating or emulating genre stuff.

2) Issues broadly applicable to all DM-centric RPGs that make them ill-suited to emulating specific genre stuff

Maybe I'm the only one who cares lol. But I think it's relevant because a lot of people dismissively saying "D&D doesn't support heists and is bad at them!" would start feeling real uncomfortable if they had to say the same about Shadowrun or Cyberpunk, even though they have nigh-identical issues.


Literally the argument you've made about D&D's page 242 being bad appears to apply completely to Hard-Wired Island, except maybe Hard-Wired Island is worse, because if the player fails in HWI, they have no idea if the DM will go with total failure, success at a cost, or a bargain, rather than the numbers determining it. So "right back atcha" with the "how is this a challenging statement"? If you are saying HWI is bad for the same reasons page 242 is bad, okay, but that's an interesting opinion.

Just a general observation: A lot of RPGs are not that great and only work well by dint of the GM and players really having to work out their own solutions to the problems. I found this to be true of Shadowrun, it really is a wonky game that is HARD to get to work well. I don't know the games that were in your 'list of popular games', but I would say that 99% of what makes games popular downloads is genre and related stuff, not "how much do other game developers/GMs rate the sophistication of the rules." We here in a thread like this are pretty focused on these issues. Still, the points @Ovinomancer et al make are quite valid. Games that follow better principles will run better in the majority of cases.

I'm also a bit skeptical that the methodology works. I mean, I have literally never heard of any of the games in your list, except maybe Dune, and I have never heard of anyone playing any of them outside of online conversation. The games I see being PLAYED are stuff like the newest Star Wars game, several PbtA variants, BitD and its variants, as well as stalwarts like Traveler, 3.x D&D, 5e D&D, and Path Finder 1e (I think it is a bit early for 2e to have got much traction yet out there).

I guess the upshot of this is, that if I were to want to produce an improved process D&D, I would pick some of these things 5e has sort of sprinkled in as options, rationalize it, introduce a process that makes it work consistently, and make it the core mechanics. I guess this could be accomplished as a "this is an alternative" supplement or something, but I think it would be better if the game also assumed it as the core and worked it into the other material.

 

[dave2008]

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.

I gave facts, you gave opinions. Opinions are yours, facts are for everyone.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think the boredom factor is very real and serious, both in terms of setting up the heist beforehand (see every full session of prep before starting the actual shadowrun in Shadowrun) and making it run smoothly. This is why I'm drawn to some of the mechanics in BitD, like using flashbacks to retcon elements of the heist prep in-the-moment. Any system that uses meta-currency can adopt that mechanic without any real work.

Endless planning is fun for some groups, but if it's not fun for even one person, one time, it becomes a huge drag (in my experience) and leads to moments like that random assassination you described. And sure, the reason the movie Heat is a movie is because it kicks off with a crew member killing someone for no reason. That's the catalyst for the whole story. But a bored PC throwing an inexplicable tantrum rarely leads to that sort of interesting narrative sequence, in part because RPG etiquette sort of gets in the way of the rest of the party doing what they should--immediately murdering Mr. I-Was-Bored (or trying to). So if someone does something dumb everyone basically has to shrug it off, and that's rarely good for the story.

I just haven't seen this behaviour in adults.

Ever.

And I'd be very surprised if I did. And it might well lead to someone not being invited back. Because we all saw HEAT when we 17/18-ish, and guess what never happened ever again after we all saw HEAT lol? I literally only just realized that, that's hysterical. Nobody wants to be Waingro. Because their PC would end up like they try to do Waingro, and no chance he'd get away from a group of PCs.

I'm leery of "not fun for even one person" arguments because there's very little in any RPG that's equally fun for everyone, and people are very dodgy in how they apply those arguments. Few people would say that if three people in a group enjoy RPing a ton, and one is "meh" on it and one is bored by it, the group shouldn't do lengthy heavy RP. But your logic seems to suggest they shouldn't.

I think the boredom factor is very real and serious, both in terms of setting up the heist beforehand (see every full session of prep before starting the actual shadowrun in Shadowrun) and making it run smoothly.

I think this is overstated when dealing with adults. Kids, absolutely, 100% fair.

And it's not really just boredom that's the problem - any approach which people are resistant to can cause players to act out via their PCs. The same guy who wouldn't follow plans, wouldn't allow people to RP, either - he'd just shoot people in the middle of negotiations. But again this is really fascinating, after we watched HEAT, that never happened again...

Is HEAT the cure to this behaviour lol? Waingro is truly obnoxious character, nobody wants to be a balding, bad hair, bad beard, dumb psycho.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Just a general observation: A lot of RPGs are not that great and only work well by dint of the GM and players really having to work out their own solutions to the problems. I found this to be true of Shadowrun, it really is a wonky game that is HARD to get to work well. I don't know the games that were in your 'list of popular games', but I would say that 99% of what makes games popular downloads is genre and related stuff, not "how much do other game developers/GMs rate the sophistication of the rules." We here in a thread like this are pretty focused on these issues. Still, the points @Ovinomancer et al make are quite valid. Games that follow better principles will run better in the majority of cases.

I'm also a bit skeptical that the methodology works. I mean, I have literally never heard of any of the games in your list, except maybe Dune, and I have never heard of anyone playing any of them outside of online conversation. The games I see being PLAYED are stuff like the newest Star Wars game, several PbtA variants, BitD and its variants, as well as stalwarts like Traveler, 3.x D&D, 5e D&D, and Path Finder 1e (I think it is a bit early for 2e to have got much traction yet out there).

I guess the upshot of this is, that if I were to want to produce an improved process D&D, I would pick some of these things 5e has sort of sprinkled in as options, rationalize it, introduce a process that makes it work consistently, and make it the core mechanics. I guess this could be accomplished as a "this is an alternative" supplement or something, but I think it would be better if the game also assumed it as the core and worked it into the other material.

lol methodology!

Since when did I become a college professor or something? That's pretty high-falutin'!

I'm pretty sure I just listed what was welling on DriveThru RPG right now. That's not really "methodology" unless I've been writing "thesis" with these posts and stuff lol. Thank you for fancifying me though! But I will say your "what I've seen played" is even less viable as evidence than listing stuff from DriveThru, because that's pure totally unsourced finest-quality anecdote.

As for D&D, I think it'd be pretty easy to fix, but no-one has the balls to kill the recently-developed sacred cow of rolling a d20 for skills. There's no reason it shouldn't be something saner like 2d6 or 3d6 or 2d10, but good luck convincing people of that. Add in that and a few mechanics which enable players to assert fiction just a TINY bit more than they can (some of which have been mentioned in this thread) and you'd be in a much, much better place.

Totally agree re: Shadowrun and genre being why most games are played. But I think that also strongly applies to a lot of modern games, including some PtbA ones, which are overrated-as-hell because they're a specific genre. I'm looking at you, Monster of the Week and Urban Shadows (though Urban Shadows 2E may be good, I dunno). But Urban Shadows for sure was only as successful as it was because genre.

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't know anything about Shadowrun (other than the Meat Salsa Rule, which a friend of mine tried to explain to me with a helium voice), but Cyberpunk, while being pretty bad at Ocean's 11 style heists (and it kinda doesn't encourage these -- cyberpunk as a genre, after all, is about people who are in way over their head), at least, doesn't have a problem with HP bloat -- if someone spots you, you put a bullet from a silenced pistol between their eyes, and then desperately try to find a way to dispose of a body. In D&D, no one except Assassin rogue can reliably get rid of a guard.

Also, I don't think that Cyberpunk fanboys who for some reason think that it can handle everything (if we include an option of houserulling it beyond recognition) are as vocal as D&D fanboys.

The big difference in the group's ability to cast a net & act beyond their immediate location though hacking security & telecom systems or remotely calling in hail mary's. Security cameras & surveillance tends to exist in a semiquantum state where the hacker can go look at something & get some details about a remote location possibly even influencing it before getting there, If things go sideways likewise can call in drones from a contact or even take local actions to trigger an alarm/distraction elsewhere like making a generator overload on the other side of the compound or whatever to give guards & such a problem far away from the players & their goals. The range increments/targeting mechanics also reward certain types of planning more than d&d's drone strike type sharpshooter ranges & targeting mechanics.

Yes it often results in combat at some point, but the players have a lot more they can do to influence the path to combat & shape the terms even while riding a rail towards everything going to naughty word in the plan. In d&d by contrast it's pretty much just a matter of riding the rail passively until the crash happens & combat starts

 

[Neonchameleon]

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!

Honestly yes it does. Pretty seriously and for multiple reasons.

1. Which round you do things in matters for how fast the enemy goes down, front-loading how fast you bring the enemy down. Encounter interrupts might have been overtuned - but an encounter interrupt + an at will should only be doing the damage of a normal encounter power if not slightly less
2. There is always a hand-over time cost for a new player taking their turn.
3. There is possibly a new round of analysis paralysis when someone finds what they were planning to do on their turn isn't now possible because their character or their target is somewhere else.
4. It forces more concentration for some players who aren't that invested but might miss their interrupts.

Am I saying that having reactions and interrupts is a bad thing? Good grief no. But I am saying that it is something that comes at a cost, especially for single use abilities. How much of a cost depends on the preparation of the players concerned, and one interrupt can cost anything up to as much as two extra player-turns (one from the interrupter who now gets a turn and one from the interrupted who needs to restart their thought processes). At its best with a provoked fighter interrupt it could be trivial - I've seen both.

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.

Agreed. But I'd say the near removal of forced movement is more of an issue.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't know anything about Shadowrun (other than the Meat Salsa Rule, which a friend of mine tried to explain to me with a helium voice), but Cyberpunk, while being pretty bad at Ocean's 11 style heists (and it kinda doesn't encourage these -- cyberpunk as a genre, after all, is about people who are in way over their head), at least, doesn't have a problem with HP bloat -- if someone spots you, you put a bullet from a silenced pistol between their eyes, and then desperately try to find a way to dispose of a body. In D&D, no one except Assassin rogue can reliably get rid of a guard.

Also, I don't think that Cyberpunk fanboys who for some reason think that it can handle everything (if we include an option of houserulling it beyond recognition) are as vocal as D&D fanboys.

SR fanboys were absolutely more vocal than AD&D fanboys about this in, say, 1994, but back then there were a lot more SR fans and insanely fewer AD&D fans (as proportion of the community). I know because I used to be very much part of that community.

As for Cyberpunk, RT Talsorian just turned Interlock, 2020's rules, into a mediocre generic RPG (ruining combat in the process) - FUZION - and then tried to make it run every genre under the sun. The results were sufficiently bad that literally the only game my group has ever rejected after only one session was a FUZION game.

But the main difference is that there are probably 100 D&D fans for every Cyberpunk fan.

In d&d by contrast it's pretty much just a matter of riding the rail passively until the crash happens & combat starts

This tells us a lot more about how the groups you've played with approached stuff than how D&D works, frankly, contrary to what you seem to think.