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

[prabe]

I am curious but how many of the protagonists in H.P. Lovecraft's stories actually go insane. I'm not well read on his stuff (not a fan of cosmological horror as it does nothing for me in the horror department) but I feel like I once read somewhere that this is a very exaggerated trope when it comes to his stories and even moreso with stories about the mythos that he didn't write.

Characters other than the narrators (in first-person) go insane pretty frequently. The narrators themselves usually either just catch a glimpse and come away scarred but functional, or they suffer a break they barely remember. In either event, HPL tends to try to imply things that violate our general understanding of reality--non-Euclidean geometry is a big one, IIRC.

 

[loverdrive]

non-Euclidean geometry is a big one, IIRC.

And this one drives me insane in real life. Just... Ugh.

 

[prabe]

I've always thought combat rules were so granular and detailed because it is the area of the game where character death is most likely to be an outcome.

I've seen the thought that in games where combat is more detailed than other resolutions (like skill use) it's to make dying (and killing) harder, or at least slower. I don't think that argues much with your point, here.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Characters other than the narrators (in first-person) go insane pretty frequently. The narrators themselves usually either just catch a glimpse and come away scarred but functional, or they suffer a break they barely remember. In either event, HPL tends to try to imply things that violate our general understanding of reality--non-Euclidean geometry is a big one, IIRC.

But anyone who has studied cosmology already knows that our understanding of reality is bollocks!

 

[prabe]

And this one drives me insane in real life. Just... Ugh.

Yeah. It's practically a trope.

So, obscure-ish American legal reference coming ...

There's a city called Euclid, Ohio, which happens by precedent and stuff to be the source for one sort of zoning (urban planning, deciding what can be built where). There are places that use different systems for that, which are called "Non-Euclidean Zoning." My wife deals with legal writings in her job, and every time that comes up she gets a giggle.

 

[dave2008]

Counterfactuals are not usually illuminating to an example of play. I mean, he could have played Trail of Cthulhu, too. What-ifs are not where you want to go, here.

That said, the Madness rules in the DMG are abjectly terrible. They are non-integrated, incoherent rules that fight the rest of the system instead of adding to them. I mean, they add to existing things on the GM's whim, are based off of WIS and CHA saves which means that melee classes are gimped while those that dabble in the arcane are stronger against them -- an inversion of the tropes. Further, the impacts are either negligible or incapacitating, and not much between. Finally, all of the "permanent" madness effects tie into the BIFTs and are totally ignorable -- there is no teeth at all to enforce them. So, what you end up with using the Madness rules are trope inversions, effects that are either incapacitating or ignorable, and then only in the short term. And the effects that are incapacitating are all tightly tied to the combat engine.

This is what happens when you try to slap a poorly conceived rule on top of 5e. You find out that what appears to be the big problems, like permanent insanity, are actually unenforceable in the rulesset and the only effects you have that have teeth are tied into the combat rules.

I wonder if the new Stress mechanic will change your opinion? I'm guessing it will not.

 

[Aldarc]

But anyone who has studied cosmology already knows that our understanding of reality is bollocks!

Sure, and people who studied medieval history knows that most medieval fantasy is bollocks too. Or we could even talk about the things that the cyberpunk genre got wrong about the internet and such. But there is nevertheless genre tropes that we may expect will be included in play regardless of their accuracy.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You seem to be saying that if, during a 5E campaign, a whodunit emerges from play, then the table is violating a core assumption of the game (if fighting things won't help you solve the whodunit), dismissing 80% of the system, and plausibly not using 5E. Am I understanding you right?

You are not. If a cosmic horror arises, and you're moving entirely into that genre, then you're ignoring 80% of the ruleset. I mean, I kept typing Cosmic Horror. How does that get swapped into Whodunnit?!

My own campaigns tend toward dark and creep stuff, as well, though not explicitly Mythos. I'd have to talk to the players to see if they thought the overall shifted to Horror, or if they thought it still felt like 5E, or if they thought the tone shifted from arc to arc. I suspect it's harder to manage actual Horror once the characters get past a certain level--and I suspect different people define that "certain level" differently.

Of course, I don't see 5E as explicitly insisting that combat always be a good option in an adventure/situation.

But, it does, according to the ruleset. You have to alter the base assumptions of the game to change this, and all you do then is say that combat is still an option, but you should better weigh the risks. The point is that whatever you meet can be defeated in combat, if you're lucky, strong, smart, or can get enough help on your side. This is pointedly against the concept of Cosmic Horror, though. You cannot fight Cthulhu at all.

I think some people think of 5E less as a flavor and more as a foundational thing. Like, since you brought in flavor as a metaphor, I'll use expand it into a cooking metaphor. I have one basic recipe for meat with a pan sauce: The basic recipe is to season steaks with salt and pepper, cook them in butter, saute some shallots, deglaze with whiskey then broth, then mount/finish the sauce with Dijon mustard and cream. I can spin that approach bunches of different ways: I can change out the meat, or the seasonings (my own riffs on Indian, or jerk, or Cajun, or Old Bay, or Mexican ...) or the deglaze, or swap out the shallots for something else, or finish the sauce with something else. If I season pork chops with a funky tropical coffee rub, cook them in vegetable oil, saute onions, deglaze with rum, and finish the sauce with hoisin sauce and peanut butter, I'm still doing the same things but I'm making a radically different dish. I think some people would look at the ingredients and say it's something entirely different; I think some people would look at the process and say it's mostly the same.

I disagree that the 5e recipe is as changeable as your example. 5e has a very strong flavor -- the D&D genre assumptions are baked in. You can change some of the spices and get a different flavor, but you're still playing D&D.

 

[Ovinomancer]

It's a philosophical issue, but I think the cosmic horror genre simply has that wrong. The universe being unknowable and incomprehensible is something cosmologists deal with all the time, without going insane. They just stick all the weirdness in a box and go on with their lives.

No, they don't. Cosmologists deal with a universe they do not yet understand, but not something that cannot be understood by man. This is a key difference in concept -- Cosmic horror is not something that can be understood or comprehended one day, through study and science, but instead something that is antithetical to human understanding. We cannot, ever, comprehend Cosmic Horror. It's not something we don't understand yet.

 

[Necrozius]

I've been toying with the idea of having a Sanity-like HP system. Based off of one of the "mental" stats (Wisdom, Int or Cha, or maybe just by adding them up to make a pool of points). It could be whittled down like regular HP when first encountering certain types of monsters, suffering Psychic damage (instead of hitting HP) and when getting the Frightened condition. When dropping to zero Sanity Points, you could get permanent "injuries" like the optional rule in the DMG but reworked to be more about cognitive (mental and emotional) rather than physical.