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

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Nobody claims genre logic is realistic or always even plausible. However, I would argue that the science of cosmology and the cosmic horror of HPL Mythos are very different things. Cosmologists are not revealing truths which completely undermine their everyday reality (unless maybe you want to interpret Schlock Mercenary as an interpretation of Dark Matter as malign alien entities lurking all around us, but that too is fiction...). I think if one of these guys opened some ancient book, repeated Ea! Ea! Eog-Shushush! 5 times and a congeries of irridescent globes filled with tentacles and eyes started materializing around them THEY WOULD GO MAD!

 

[prabe]

I think if one of these guys opened some ancient book, repeated Ea! Ea! Eog-Shushush! 5 times and a congeries of irridescent globes filled with tentacles and eyes started materializing around them THEY WOULD GO MAD!

Who wouldn't? Seems the only rational response ...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Again that is a definition of cosmic horror, but I was explicitly referencing my experience from reading HPL, not someone else's definition, posibly even the standard definition, of cosmic horror. The sanity mechanic in CoC didn't make me feel like we were playing a HPL story and that is what I want in my "cosmic horror," and that is what I was able to achieve with my D&D 5e hacks.

I mean in the story Call of Cthulhu a person literally rams a ship into Cthulhu, after seeing the rest of his group destroyed by it, and then escapes.

PS The adventure I ran for my group was an interpretation of Call of Cthulhu were the events happen in a more linear fashion (not through flashbacks) to the protagonist (players).

I don't recall that this character, in his present state where he's narrating, is exactly mentally stable! lol. I mean, its hard for a game mechanic to perfectly capture the various things that authors depict in fantasy which is not bound by any rules. I'm sure we can all come up with simple examples, for any RPG, of how core genre material conflicts with its signature mechanics here and there.

 

[prabe]

I'll just note that the framing of the original post and the title doesn't seem entirely congruent with that. If all you want is advice within one system, why even bring up other systems in the context? Especially given the title?

That's a reasonable question, and one I'd normally suggest you pose to the OP, but I gather there's some Ignoring going on, which means you can't. I will say that I always understood the OP the way I said, and the OP has responded to indicate I understood them correctly.

I genuinely wish I could give you a better answer than that. Sorry.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Wrong. Speaking as someone who has studied Cosmology (PhD Astrophys) I can tell you that there is no reason to suspect a comprehensible explanation is at all likely, ever. The best we can do is develop models and try and understand those. And even those tell us that nothing we understand as real, is.

At the risk of getting far off topic... ALL OF SCIENCE consists of NOTHING but 'building models'. There is NO SUCH THING AS 'fundamental understanding'. We understand gravity and electromagnetism ONLY as "there are these equations that predict what happens." Sometimes we can tie certain things together and create a bigger/more accurate model (IE we can unify the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces into a single theory of relativistic quantum field theory). That doesn't give us any sort of 'deeper' understanding in the sense of WHY. So, in a sense I am agreeing with you, but no actual cosmologist worth his salt is expecting anything more than that. In fact our epistemic model pretty much asserts that there IS NO SUCH THING as 'ultimate meaning' (here science echoes the Prajna Paramita's core statement "empty empty, totally empty").

Cosmic Horror operates more at the level of ultimate meaning (or in this case ultimate incomprehensibly foreign to human thought processes). Sure, you can imagine that is the actual nature of the cosmos, but science inherently cannot either support or deny it.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Mispelling of present. The rest is fine. If motte and bailey aren't something you're familar with, then you have an opportunity to learn something. It's a type of early fortification, the motte being a fortified hill and the bailey being an area before the motte holding homes, workspaces, and crops defended lightly, usually with a stake wall. When attacked strongly, the bailey was abandoned and the defenders fell back to the motte.

In rhetoric, the motte and bailey is an argument tactic where the bailey represents a broad claim. When attacked, the fallback is a narrower, simpler version of the argument that is harder to attack. Here the bailey is that you shouldn't be recommending ither games to posters asking how to do X in a game. This is weak for many reasons. The motte is to narrow this to existing D&D games where the poster only wants to do a short arc in their current campaign. Much less objectionable, but not tge starting argument. Once the attack has tampered off on the motte argument, and posters have perhaps moved on, the position creeps back out into the bailey. Rinse, repeat.

This is a pretty despicable false accusation. My position hasn’t changed at any point. When others get into specifics I have sometimes joined them in the tangent, other times not, but I always circle back eventually as the tangent gets more and more acrimonious to the actual arguments I made on page 1.

I never claimed, anywhere, at anytime, that it’s rude to suggest other games.

 

[dave2008]

OK, but FOR ME, I don't see how 5e maps well to Mythos cosmic horror for instance. PCs are powerful competent adventuring 'heroes' in 5e. I mean, aside from being level 1-3 they are pretty potent, always have a lot of resources to call on, magic, etc. They aren't really easily going to feel threatened. Obviously you could just make all the Mythos horrors level 15+, but that just makes the problem worse, because the PCs won't really face them until THEY are up to high levels, at which point they are even less like a typical Mythos protagonist. Its also a bit hard to see how most/many PC class characters are going to be surprised and horrified by cosmic secrets when they are already wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, eldritch knights, etc. Mythos magic is very different in feel from D&D magic too.

I mean, I think you can do something that can be qualified as 'Cosmic Horror in D&D genre', but it will lack signature elements of classic CH genre material. OTOH it isn't like HPL is the last word in the genre. Even stuff that references the Mythos, like Laundry Files, does spin it a bit different in some respects (the Laundry Files protagonists are certainly a lot more competent and successful than any HPL character, though August Derleth did presage this sort of scenario a bit).

I guess I'm saying I have mixed feelings about what to even call it, and there are MANY systems I would base a Mythos game on long before I would pick 5e.

I think there are many ways to do it. I have only done it once in 5e and that was a homebrew lvl 1-5 adventure based on the short story Call of Cthulhu. It ended with the party facing Cthulhu at level 5 (Cthulhu was CR 34+) and a TPK (the max total HP & BHP a PC could have was around 23 and Cthulhu did 84 average damage on an attack, so a hit = death). There was no magic (no one has magic in the story) and the characters had firearms, knives, improvised weapons and their wits. When there was fighting (not often) it involved cultists, a few fish people, a tentacled abomination for good measure, and of course the Great Cthulhu itself.

However, I can also see a way you can do it with more traditional D&D.

 

[dave2008]

I don't recall that this character, in his present state where he's narrating, is exactly mentally stable! lol. I mean, its hard for a game mechanic to perfectly capture the various things that authors depict in fantasy which is not bound by any rules. I'm sure we can all come up with simple examples, for any RPG, of how core genre material conflicts with its signature mechanics here and there.

Sure.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Obviously you could just make all the Mythos horrors level 15+, but that just makes the problem worse, because the PCs won't really face them until THEY are up to high levels, at which point they are even less like a typical Mythos protagonist.

Why would the PCs have that much control of the situation? Stuff is happening. If they ignore it, it’s not going to just sit there waiting for them. What’s more, they aren’t going to go dungeon delving to level up while their whole region of the world is being directly, existentially, threatened.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To add to my post just upthread: I think different people have different opinions about whether it's good or bad that a system should have a rule like roleplay your fear. Personally I don't object to that sort of rule as long as it is clear when it is invoked and it is fairly clear what counts as following the rule.

Well, ideally it would be something like 'roleplay your fear, or expend 1 point of precious resource X to avoid becoming afraid.' That puts more teeth into it and makes it more of a choice where the player has some power over it, even if the actual definition of 'roleplay your fear' is no more clearly spelled out. We now know what sort of a 'cost' this fear has, and players aren't stuck doing something they don't want to.

Somewhat similarly, in our Classic Traveller game we take it for granted that people whose PCs have low or low-ish INT will do their best not to play their PCs as overly clever!

A game like 4e D&D, though, is different and doesn't impose these sorts of demands: the function of INT in 4e is to affect certain ability/skill checks; and the main constraints on roleplay are conditions and effects, not rules like roleplay your fear. Different systems work differently!

I've always favored the 4e-like handling of these things, generally speaking.