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

[Ovinomancer]

Youre very welcome.

Try this.

Look at how a Doom Pool synthesizes all the aspects of “Jenga Tower as action resolution.”

* Oh no, the dice pool is building...things are growing increasingly dangerous...more out of my control. Who knows when it’s going to “go off” and everything goes to hell <like looking at the increasingly teetering tower>.

* Player makes a move <GM deploys Doom Pool to shut down the player move and send things calamitously spiraling out of your control>. OH NO! ITS ALL COMING APART! <Jenga tower collapses and badness happens>

I think you're missing the thrust, here. What's trying to be established is a weird kind of failure equivalency. It has been said that 5e lacks mechanical support for things and it is the GM that makes it work, so the trend I see is an attempt to reduce any mechanic from another game to a similar state by forcing through that it requires the GM it make it that way, thus making all games equivalent.

This is, of course, false because the nature of RPGs requires humans to buy in and to make an effort for the game. That one game provides robust support for a thing and another provides weak support is not paticularly surprising. And that isn't changed at all by requiring players have some investment. But, this trend seems to drive towards this argument that because investment is still required, the game mechanics can't really be doing anything.

A good example is the statement that the Jenga tower doesn't do horror on it's own. True, but so what? If I'm a player doing horror the Dread mechanic supports this play extremely well. There's nothing at all similar in the 5e rules -- it's all on the GM, there.

 

[Campbell]

I don't think a 5e GM is actually socially free to do whatever they want. The specific bits of authority that a GM has from game to game differs dramatically. There are techniques, sorts of scene frames, and sorts of consequences that a GM is socially free to do in Apocalypse World that would make a typical D&D player scream bloody murder. Same applies between say Blades and Burning Wheel. I could never run Blades in the way I run Burning Wheel. The same even applies to something like Exalted or Conan 2d20 in comparison to D&D. You just do not have access to the same tools and have different sets of responsibilities to live up to.

 

[dave2008]

Well, it is fair to say that each PbtA game has a certain COLOR to it. They obviously each occupy a genre, and then within that genre they MAY invoke some specific rules that are either related to the overall genre, or provide this color. Of course some/all of it might also be provided by things like creatures, gear, etc. Surely the available moves and playbooks will form a significant part.

However, it SEEMS TO ME, that at least some of them are pretty darn general overall. That includes the 3 most commonly used games, Apocalypse World (which does post-apocalyptic Mad Max style play pretty well), Dungeon World (D&D adjacent Fantasy), and Uncharted Worlds (general Space Opera ala Foundation/Traveller/other 'harder' far future milieu).

So, I'm thinking about LotR here, for the sake of argument. D&D doesn't do this super well, despite drawing a lot of superficial details from Middle Earth lore, like many races of elves. LotR is true high fantasy. Despite addressing a scenario in which the characters traverse the land, journeying from one hazard on to another, it is NOT a very 'gritty' story. Instead it deals with personal growth, standing up against evil, personal courage, temptation, and with minor themes of redemption and obligation. Mundane things like equipment, food, finding a path through the wilderness, surviving said wilderness, etc. are all very minor peripheral parts, at best. Simply incidental plot devices. Likewise the author never really describes a living material world including all the details of people's lives and seeming LIVED IN to any great degree.

Yes, The Shire, and a bit of Bree, is brought to life, but that is about it, and mostly to contrast with the actual locations where the action happens. We learn nothing about how Bree supports itself (we can guess, there are enough details) but we have literally NO IDEA how Rivendell works, what do they eat? How do they obtain it? Where do all the materials come from for all their stuff? Is it all just elf ring magic? Likewise Lothlorien is not really depicted as any sort of realistic location you could interact with. Even Minas Tirith and Rohan (I forget the name of the town) don't really have any practical details (again, we could at least imagine some are unstated).

And this has always been the biggest problem with classic attempts to make an LotR-based Middle Earth RPG, from the days of MERP all the way down to today. Third Age Middle Earth isn't really a living world, its a stage on which to tell a certain tale, and any attempt to create an RPG which engages with ordinary everyday concerns, in any way, except as occasional plot devices, is doomed to conflict heavily with the atmosphere of LotR. I mean, MERP isn't a bad fantasy RPG, and it reproduces the MATERIAL of LotR adequately to a degree (IE you can make wizards and elves, and they do magical and martial things that sound like things that would be possible in Middle Earth) but it mostly fails on the 'color' front, the atmosphere is all wrong. This is because it fundamentally uses a play process that is pretty much lifted from RM, and ultimately from D&D (there are some differences, but it is still substantively a cousin of D&D).

Now, Dungeon World will, by default, hit some of the same issues. ME RP definitely is NOT about checking off boxes of food rations, or wandering around the countryside poking into every odd grey zone on the map. You COULD kinda make it work by focusing on fronts and whatnot that are existential threats, and playing up personal responsibility, obligation, and the 'step up and take it on' ethos of Frodo Baggins. Bonds, alignment, etc. would actually help with that. You would probably want to do away with most of the equipment rules, maybe use a model for harm that was different, and maybe alter the moves a bit. Still, you could use most of DW at some level.

5e, maybe not so much. I mean you could do a lot of the above, de-emphasize equipment and whatnot, but equipment feeds heavily into the rest of the rules, so that would take some work. Magic in D&D is definitely not Tolkien magic, so that would have to be addressed, which probably means scrapping or heavily revising spell lists and many/most classes and sub-classes.

The thing is, DW/PbtA DOES HAVE HOOKS, in fact in spades, to address motivations, methods, style, and such of the PCs and the kinds of threats and how they fit into the world. D&D just doesn't. It isn't like you CANNOT try to figure it out, but I think a fairly light revision of DW would inherently do it. With 5e it would be a matter of each DM figuring out for himself all of the above, and then invoking the correct rulings in the right way to get the flavor to come out right. It is not going to be a walk in the park, and the only sort of mechanical approach that I can see is an 'indie' Story Now sort of one where the game inherently introduces that flavor. No amount of simply presenting spells, classes, monster, and such in 5e fashion will get you there, the game simply lacks the 'language' needed to describe what makes Middle Earth tick.

My standard D&D 5e game has a very heavy Middle-earth influence and I feel we do it, or at least our memory of it, justice. However, I feel things like Shadow (or whatever it is called) in TOR or AiME actually detract from the middle-earth feel. I know you will not agree, but I think 5e does middle earth fairly easily.

 

[Manbearcat]

I think you're missing the thrust, here. What's trying to be established is a weird kind of failure equivalency. It has been said that 5e lacks mechanical support for things and it is the GM that makes it work, so the trend I see is an attempt to reduce any mechanic from another game to a similar state by forcing through that it requires the GM it make it that way, thus making all games equivalent.

This is, of course, false because the nature of RPGs requires humans to buy in and to make an effort for the game. That one game provides robust support for a thing and another provides weak support is not paticularly surprising. And that isn't changed at all by requiring players have some investment. But, this trend seems to drive towards this argument that because investment is still required, the game mechanics can't really be doing anything.

A good example is the statement that the Jenga tower doesn't do horror on it's own. True, but so what? If I'm a player doing horror the Dread mechanic supports this play extremely well. There's nothing at all similar in the 5e rules -- it's all on the GM, there.

Yup. I agree with all of this except for the first sentence.

I wasn’t addressing with the “5e can replicate this stuff” premise with my post.

My response was exclusively to dave’s “you can’t specifically systemitize horror” hypothesis (or at least that is what I inferred he was saying).

FYI TO ANYONE RESPONDING TO ME - I’ll be gone for the rest of the evening so won’t have a reply for awhile.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

D&D isn't great for LotR-type stuff either, and indeed a lot of fantasy RPGs aren't, which is why there are always LotR-specific or LotR-emulating RPGs kicking around, which tend to have a very different fundamental tone to them.

I think how you describe things in DW fiction has a MUCH larger impact on things like "how bad assed am I" than it does in D&D. DW has a rather shallower power curve, for one thing. I think it does tend more towards all the characters being 'tough' by default, but the issue is a lot less than for D&D, and less complicated or 'deep' to address. I mean, you CANNOT alter this in D&D, not really, not without basically writing a whole new variant of D&D, or using a much different one from 5e (like maybe an OSR one, or 4e, etc.). Also, I'm not sure any of the characters in LotR were wimps! They were not all equally potent combatants, but Sam put paid to Shelob, and Frodo managed to get in a couple scrapes too, not to mention the exploits of Merry and Pippin.

TLDR: GURPS talks great about genres and themes and so on, and provides a ton of material in a literary sense, but when it comes to mechanics, tradition/continuity (i.e. how earlier GURPS versions approached something, no matter how naive they were) and interoperability between GURPS material will always trump other factors.

EDIT - Particularly relevant to this thread, AFAIK GURPS has absolutely no way to approach heist as a genre that D&D doesn't. It arguably has better rules for them on a basic level (3d6 resolution, narrower range of TNs, etc.), but you'd have to run it as plan-execute, and you'd have to pretty elaborately model the heist building and guards and so on, which would be a kind of anti-support almost (worse than D&D because more work would need to go into it). This is indicative of the general attitude to genre in GURPS. Provide rules on top of the GURPS rules, but which don't fundamentally change assumptions or alter approaches. Generally GURPS leans extremely hard into simulationism (and away from gamist or narrativist approaches), and not of genres, but of this sort of unspoken "the way the world works", which is basically GURPS-world. If characters in a setting are all tough, GURPS will say "make everyone buy 10 levels of the Tough Guy advantage" (fictional example), rather than changing the damage rules, which will still be basically murderous.

SECOND EDIT - Total aside, but do you have any insight into why Champions went for this pretty complex/fiddly "squad combat" motif in its combat design (particularly stuff like segments)? I'm guessing it was before your time and my presumption would be that it came out of familiarity with various wargame-ish concepts, and as such I would characterise that as "naive" design, but perhaps the actual thing was that they wanted a highly tactical superhero game, not one that emulated the genre and its tropes and so on.

I think you have summarized GURPS perfectly. lol. It is NOT a bad game for doing a certain 'gritty' type of real-world-adjacent kind of game, and you can then tack on some of the incredible array of supplemental material to incorporate 'that one thing', but in no case can the game really adjust how it plays. In fact it is IMHO one of the LEAST flexible games in existence. BRP is not much better, but since it is a bit simpler and a bit more of a 'toolkit' you can do somewhat more with it. Both games though are pretty heavily limited by simply lacking any way to put checks into context or produce any specific sort of play beyond tweaking power levels and/or adding in a subsystem. CoC's SAN mechanic shows how BRP CAN kind of do that, but I'm not even sure you could pull THAT trick with GURPS, and CoC is still not a very good game, it just has ONE genre element that works!

 

[Manbearcat]

I don't think a 5e GM is actually socially free to do whatever they want. The specific bits of authority that a GM has from game to game differs dramatically. There are techniques, sorts of scene frames, and sorts of consequences that a GM is socially free to do in Apocalypse World that would make a typical D&D player scream bloody murder. Same applies between say Blades and Burning Wheel. I could never run Blades in the way I run Burning Wheel. The same even applies to something like Exalted or Conan 2d20 in comparison to D&D. You just do not have access to the same tools and have different sets of responsibilities to live up to.

Ok one more response.

What this post isn’t covering is how the differences are operationalized:

* Codification of procedures with encoded constraints or lackthereof.

* How profound is the assymetry in power relationships at the table (from moment to moment, particularly key moments, and broadly in the totality of play).

* Table-facing or GM-facing.

* Are there competing play priorities? If so, how does one get subordinated to the other (eg who decides that and by what principles/methods)?


All of this stuff matters (deeply). And I know you agree with this. So I guess I’m...confused by your post?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think how you describe things in DW fiction has a MUCH larger impact on things like "how bad assed am I" than it does in D&D. DW has a rather shallower power curve, for one thing. I think it does tend more towards all the characters being 'tough' by default, but the issue is a lot less than for D&D, and less complicated or 'deep' to address. I mean, you CANNOT alter this in D&D, not really, not without basically writing a whole new variant of D&D, or using a much different one from 5e (like maybe an OSR one, or 4e, etc.). Also, I'm not sure any of the characters in LotR were wimps! They were not all equally potent combatants, but Sam put paid to Shelob, and Frodo managed to get in a couple scrapes too, not to mention the exploits of Merry and Pippin.

Re: the first bit definitely, and the one thing DW does well for LotR is that monsters are pretty much always relevant but always defeat-able. I mean, DW might got too far because you know all it would take would be a couple of hobbits going "to hell with this guy" and the Balrog would be dead on the floor and Frodo going through its pockets but that could be worked around, particularly by not giving it stats.

Comparing the hobbits to DW characters pretty clearly illustrates that DW characters are way too dangerous. Even Aragon/Legolas/Gimli are barely as dangerous as DW characters, especially with a few levels on them.

And there's no mechanics to encourage people to get into all the LotR stuff. But you'd just use Fellowship or whatever instead.

Can it help, sure. But it can also help do things that are not horror. It is not, IMO, a be-spoke horror mechanic.

This doesn't make sense as an objection at all.

Bespoke has a specific meaning. Custom-made. Tailored to requirements. To claim that means it can't have other uses is to misunderstand the actual word itself, and is a failure of English comprehension frankly. You'd get a red X in English class for that sort of silly business.

I have a bespoke tailored jacket. It was tailored for me. Just because it might also fit someone else doesn't somehow make it "not bespoke". There are very few things in the world that cannot be put to another good use.

If the mechanic was designed specifically for horror, and supports horror (which you agree it does), it is a bespoke horror mechanic, and to say otherwise is merely to say "I'm using English incorrectly and I'm proud of it!". It's not a valid opinion.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I didn't say we didn't use Sanity when we played CoC, I said we didn't like it and it didn't create a "horror" feeling for us. The horror came in the form of fighting against crazy tough monsters and mostly the atmosphere created by the GM and the buy-in of the players that we were going to be horrified. The Sanity mechanic did not add to that experience for us. So, other than Sanity, what does CoC do mechanically to support horror?

Well, let me first preface this by saying, I think CoC is overall a bad/terribly obsolete 1980's vintage game system that should be retired forthwith and which I will never use again!

However, it does portray Cosmic Horror by presenting a managerie of creatures which are both horrific in aspect, almost universally lethal, and either hostile or having entirely unfathomable motives (and thus often acting in totally unexpected ways). PCs are physically MUCH weaker than all but the most trivial of monsters. Monsters have abilities (and cultists have access to them) which are entirely outside the realm of anything that PCs have (which is basically limited to the abilities of normal humans of the 1920's or maybe modern times if you play in the Cthulhu Now! module).

But I think SAN really IS an integral part of the 'flavor' of the game, and what made CoC such an iconic game.

Finally, CoC is a poor game mostly BECAUSE its process is so much like D&D! It is exactly the ways it is like old-school RPGs that are its weak point. The skill system is extremely hard to use, there is no context in which a skill operates, it is just a check called for by the Keeper, for whatever reason. Success doesn't really mean much, it just means you might be called on to make the exact same check again 5 seconds later. Or failure might not really lead to anything different from success. There's no indication of what is an appropriate consequence for failure, and being primarily a mystery type of game that EASILY leads to catastrophic fail plot stoppers and subsequent awkward plot bandaids, and characters that come across as idiots.

Making it worse, the skill system is open-ended. So there is an INFINITE LIST of skills. Many of the ones included in the game explicitly overlap to a very high degree, or are not clearly any better than your basic education or intelligence. While there is a 'levels of failure/success' rule it doesn't really clarify much either, and is often pretty much impossible to actually use. TBH the skill system is literally WORSE THAN NOTHING, and doesn't add anything to the actual subject matter of the game, quite the contrary (Mythos skill being the one exception due to how it interacts with SAN and its obvious thematic purpose). Seventh Edition's design clearly shows that Chaosium knows about these issues, they pared back the skill list some, etc. but it is far too little, and they failed to add any sort of mechanics to produce the sorts of dynamic escalating tension sort of play that happens in something like Dungeon World. A need that this genre BEGS the game to introduce.

Contrast this with Trail of Cthulhu, which does ALL of these things far far better. Its resolution mechanics are geared specifically to failing the game in a forward direction and upping the tension, and it handles mythos material and the mental effects of exposure, etc. just as well as CoC does. It is a 1000% better game. That is, it is a pretty solid 21st Century RPG design! This is really my ultimate position on this whole topic, is just that 5e is ESSENTIALLY a 1975 vintage design, with a few superficial add ons and tweaks. in the last 46 years a HUGE amount has been learned in terms of techniques to use in RPG design. Current game designs are simply a LOT stronger and deliver better play, more reliably, with less fuss. This is to be expected. Its fine to say you prefer your '57 Chevy, but trying to claim it is better than a Tesla Model S because you can run with glass packs and a 455cu in hemi head V8 if you want is missing the point entirely, the Tesla will still dust you every single time on the street, without fail.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I understand the mechanic (at least I think I do), but I don't see how that is a horror mechanic.. Can it help, sure. But it can also help do things that are not horror. It is not, IMO, a be-spoke horror mechanic.

To be clear, after some thought, my underlying opinion is the game mechanics cannot create horror. A player is always aware it is a game and the mechanics are just tools of the game. If anything, player facing mechanics like Doom Pools are even more gamist and break the horror immersion IMO.

I just had a thought that maybe the best mechanics for a horror game are lack of be-spoke mechanics. Maybe creating specific mechanics to create "horror" actually works to undermine the sense of horror.

You could conclude the opposite, that various 'flavor inducing' mechanics ARE the sauce to make horror work. This is the selling argument for SAN basically (and that it is a bit like a Doom Pool, it can go BOOM at any time). Think about 'body horror' for instance. Wouldn't a game which included mechanics that simulated the loss of capability, fear of permanent disability and death, etc. from some sort of creepy thing happening to your body ENHANCE your ability to immerse yourself in your character, and imagine what it would be like to have your arm rotting off or something? Sure couldn't hurt, could it?

 

[dave2008]

This doesn't make sense as an objection at all.

Poor choice of words. Sorry to send you of on a tangent

If the mechanic was designed specifically for horror, and supports horror (which you agree it does), it is a bespoke horror mechanic, and to say otherwise is merely to say "I'm using English incorrectly and I'm proud of it!". It's not a valid opinion.

What I am trying to suggest is that it is not a mechanic made for horror. It is a mechanic for tension or suspense. You can use those in a horror game, or Different genre, but the mechanics don't make it a horror game or even a better horror game IMO