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

[Ovinomancer]

That is not entirely true. Madness is actually an optional rule for Sanity. It says failing a Sanity check could result in contracting a Madness. It is not a required system for the Sanity stat. However, it doesn't really give you anything else to go on either IRRC. Regardless, you are not required to use Madness with Sanity by RAW.

Sanity does absolutely nothing on it's own. This is a strange statement.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think at this point it just becomes a Sanity point loss system. Truth at this point I'm seeing a alot of broad, preference statements about the madness rules (I don't like this particular madness result) which is cool but nothing that seems wrong with the actual mechanics of it.

"If I just ignore all of the complaints, it seems fine."
Really?

 

[Imaro]

"If I just ignore all of the complaints, it seems fine."
Really?

Well what is the problem with it mechanically? Not something subjective but objectively wrong with the actual mechanics?

 

[Imaro]

I'm sorry but I'm still seeing the basic divide here as... D&D doesn't do cosmological horror in this very specific way that I like... so it doesn't work for me. Mainly I want a game with a specific process that constrains the DM and doesn't just inform play but directs it... which is IMO a playstyle issue not a rules issue. That's the real root of the problem. It's not that D&D doesn't do cosmological horror well... it's that it doesn't do it well if I want it done in a specific playstyle

When you're claiming I'm not using D&D's rules because I'm choosing when to apply them... it's not that the rules aren't doing anything for me or my game, it's that I am not using a specific process dictated by the rules to achieve my results with the rules of the game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Which, I would argue, is somewhat of a misreading of cosmic horror. Or at least, not all of it. The main essence of a cosmic horror story, from a structural point of view, is that your protagonist will always be worse off at the end than at the beginning. Which is why D&D doesn't do Cosmic Horror very well because the core essence of D&D is the level system. At no point in a Cosmic Horror story do the protagonists get a clean win. At best they escape. And, the point of playing Cosmic Horror isn't to defeat the Cosmic Horror, because you can't. The point is to see how much your character will suffer before its inevitable end.

If there was a win condition in your game, then you weren't really playing Cosmic Horror. You were playing fairly standard heroic fantasy with horror elements.

Cosmic Horror can, at times, shade into the realm of 'player victory'. That is, you can achieve some sort of narrow, local, temporary, eviction of the cosmic horror element from the setting. In The Dunwich Horror the protagonists manage to defeat 'Wilbur Whately's Brother' (a powerful Cthulhuoid Monster/human hybrid) by utilizing their knowledge of The Necronomicon, arcane methods, some firearms, and some dynamite (as I recall, I may be a tiny bit dim on some of the details, but they do win).

However, the victory certainly has a cost to their mental equilibrium. I don't remember any description of insanity, etc. but they surely don't sleep so well anymore! This is THE BEST CASE though, and Yog-Sothoth is certainly not 'defeated' in any sense whatsoever. Its spawn is destroyed, but there will be others, have been others, and Yog-Sothoth itself is eternal and far beyond any notion of 'killing' or even harming in any way. It probably doesn't even care what happened and doesn't make 'plans' or have 'goals' in any human understandable sense.

So, ultimately, all these stories have what you are describing. The characters are never winning, per se. There's no possibility of some level 20 capstone battle with the ultimate big-bad where the PCs wipe out the BBEG and then ride off into the sunset as super heroes. I think that means you CAN, to a degree, create the same sort of win conditions in a 5e adventure that you would in a CoC one, for example. However, the game is not designed to produce a story arc or campaign which is structured this way. PCs in 5e will ALWAYS get stronger. In fact the core message is a sort of version of "what does not destroy you makes you stronger." (sorry @pemerton, I know I am doing violence to Nietzsche...).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Sanity does absolutely nothing on it's own. This is a strange statement.

I have to admit, I am mystified as to why people are talking about Sanity if they mean the DMG version, because yeah, absent Madness, it does literally nothing.

I guess, you could like, make it so when you would have got a madness, you lose 1 SAN, which will create a kind of slow death spiral re: SAN, but RAW, if your stat hits 0 in D&D... you just have a stat of 0. You don't die or anything.

So you'd need to add in an extra rule that if your SAN hits 0 you lose the PC or something as they run off gibbering into the night.

 

[loverdrive]

The issue would largely be that DW characters are, regardless of how you use the moves etc., mechanical badasses. And the moves reflect that, including the default moves, which are highly focused on a take on D&D, particularly one leaning towards as sort of badassified take on pre-3E editions. The moves in DW are designed to funnel you towards a specific mode of play, which is a great deal more "power fantasy" than LotR is typically understood as - it's like everyone is Legolas and Gimli and Aragorn - and the movie versions at that.

Oh, this makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I instantly thought of Legolas and Gimli.

DW, for me, always felt like "fixed" D&D more than anything. There's definitely some pre-3E fleur, but I don't think it's that important.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well what is the problem with it mechanically? Not something subjective but objectively wrong with the actual mechanics?

He's saying it literally doesn't do anything w/o Madness and he's right.

So, you take out Madness, and RAW Sanity can't even decrease (see DMG). But let's say you have it so when you'd acquire a madness SAN decrease. But that's a new rule you're adding.

Now SAN can go down and will go down because every time it gets lower it gets more likely to decrease.

Eventually it hits zero, but RAW, nothing happens. So you'd need to have a new rule for what happens then too.

 

[Imaro]

He's saying it literally doesn't do anything w/o Madness and he's right.

So, you take out Madness, and RAW Sanity can't even decrease (see DMG). But let's say you have it so when you'd acquire a madness SAN decrease. But that's a new rule you're adding.

Now SAN can go down and will go down because every time it gets lower it gets more likely to decrease.

Eventually it hits zero, but RAW, nothing happens. So you'd need to have a new rule for what happens then too.

But I wasn't discussing them as separate entities... Maybe that's why I didn't get his complaint. I thought he had an actual issue with madness paired with sanity... but yes they are meant to be used in conjunction with each other.

EDIT: And since the beginning of this branch of the conversation I have talked about Sanity rules because they in turn make use of the madness rules... and solve his intial complaint about characters with high Wis and Cha being more resistant to madness...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The funniest thing is that a lot of the advice that is being given in this thread would have been absolutely crucified during the 4e days. "Fail forward"? DM's deciding outcomes? Ignoring process sim play in favor of more narrative approaches to the game? There are people who are participating in this thread that I KNOW argued against the inclusion of these things in 4e that are now advocating them, completely without irony.

It truly is funny. To me, this has been WotC's greatest success. The fact that they've managed to convince people who absolutely hated these sorts of things when they were included in the game with 4e that they actually like these ideas and that the ideas are completely not from 4e. The change in writing styles is such a huge eye opener.

Tell people that the mechanics should support fail forward because that's more fun and everyone and their mother will come out of the woodwork to tell you that this is not D&D and is a terrible idea. Tell people that DM's should ensure that everyone has fun at the table and leave it up to the DM's to ensure this, and suddenly fail forward is a fantastic idea totally supported by D&D.

The the greatest triumph is that the people who argued against it ten years ago are now the biggest boosters and will STILL insist that they don't like 4e. LOL

Well, WotC cleverly put some neutered form of a lot of things into 5e in a way that they either A) are very unlikely to see play in any given table, or B) don't have the sort of impact they would in a story now type of 4e play. So, you can safely recommend Fail Forward to the extent of saying "this exists in 5e, you can use it" but the people who were against it before probably don't use it, probably would not use it, and the fact that they don't grasp how ineffective and neutered the optional 5e version is tells me they are not far on the road of understanding the whole topic.

Of course, there are OTHER people, who have simply learned things! So, maybe a given poster was against something 10 years ago, but not against it now. People do change. I am personally not interested in re-litigating what people said 10 years ago. I will just assume their thinking is different now and take it at face value, though the above observation is still made, that its actual uptake and understanding are obviously limited (but again, that's a generalization, some people have changed totally).