NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6247403" data-attributes="member: 6688937"></blockquote>I definitely think there's something to this. I actually just posted some similar thoughts in another thread.I think your last paragraph is the "answer" to the previous paragraphs. Fate and MHRP, both use their freeform and narrative nature to allow players to leverage all kinds of character traits in a much wider array of circumstances than D&D typically does, and much more reliably. Additionally, doing so relies on their creativity! At least in my experience, that effectively eliminates the balance and "interesting" worries. It may introduce a concern for some aspects of niche-protection, though. At least for me, these games feel very slick and effective, and often make any edition of D&D or the games that function like it feel very clunky by comparison. Others disagree and call them "hippy-dippy".I just ran my first session of Dungeon World last night, and I ran 13th Age a few weeks ago!<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Basically, I see 13th Age as a 4e "lite" version of D&D, with a few nifty extras tossed in. That "lite" is in quotes because some aspects of the game are actually fairly cumbersome when compared with Fate, Cortex+, or Dungeon World...okay very cumbersome in comparison. I can't see that it would have any particularly unique advantages in escaping the concerns it would inherit from earlier D&Ds. However, it seems to have avoided re-introducing any of the older ones that 4e addressed (I think). Having only run Dungeon World the one time, and with it being very different mechanically, I'm a little more hesitant to talk overmuch about it. However, I suspect that it is extremely dependent on the DM adhering to the agenda presented in the rules. Failure to do so would introduce a very lopsided narrative, and possibly break the game. Generally speaking, it does not have the same depth of freeform flexibility as Fate/Cortex+. However, its mechanics very much function at the same kind of story/narrative level, with a dash of D&D-isms to make it feel like home. In DW, you don't "use" or "activate" your characters "moves" by name. Instead, when you tell the DM what you are doing, he may tell you that it triggers a move. That means that you roll the dice (usually adding a stat mod) and follow the directions for that roll. So if the DM says "The huge spider lunges at you with legs and fangs flailing, what do you do?" You might say "I dive roll underneath it trying to avoid its fangs!"--which would trigger a Defy Danger roll that might avoid the damage with success. But you might say "I swing my sword and try and lop off one of those legs."--which would trigger the Hack and Slash move that determines who deals damage to whom. Many moves include choices or tradeoffs in the results, almost all of which deal with the direction the fiction takes, rather than strictly mechanical bits. So you might have to choose: did that spell you just cast put your friend in danger, burn you out, or attract unwanted attention? If you rolled poorly, you might have to choose two.Could you introduce the D&D issues you mention into DW? I suppose so, but I think you'd have to be pretty intentional about it.[/QUOTE]

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