Dedicated Mechanics

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not really. I don't think the combat rules in D&D do any work to promote or emulate any particular fantasy genre or subgenre. I would go so far as to say D&Ds combat rules have always been at odds with the actual genre tropes of fantasy.

Sure they do! More than any other aspect of the game, the combat rules enforce a nasty, dangerous, 'low fantasy' kind of experience of hardened delvers constantly living on the hairy edge of being obliterated by some passing horror as they grub for gold pieces in some endless underground maze. I mean, combat is not ALL of the formula, but it is a highly necessary component. Even higher level combat becomes a highly risky and much to be avoided coin toss. I would call it the first and strongest 'pillar' of the D&D genre.

To Elaborate: Imagine how 4e style combat completely alters this equation. Suddenly the PCs are the heroes, likely to triumph over any one arbitrary fight. Its night and day, and the fundamental difference is the combat system and its probability of being ganked in any given fight.

 

[ClusterFluster]

There's no need to make any mechanics for this, let alone enforce or "force" them. You're already free to award bonus XP for good roleplay, and there's inspiration points in 5th as well. If anything at most, you could use the threat clock from AW, but 4thE also makes use of the skill challenge. Make 5 failures during the heist at its most crucial moment, and the jig is up.

If all of your players read up on the heist trope (e.g. from TV Tropes) before play, or just about heist plots from SparkNotes or wherever, let them figure out how to variate on that as the situation demands. If you know what to expect from your heist adventure because you've also done your homework, you could then randomly roll from a list of famous heist complications to throw curve balls at your players.

 

[bloodtide]

Dedicated Mechanics can be really nice for a short, silly, lite, fluffy, simple game. Perfect for a one shot. Everyone wants to play a "pirate" game, so you pop out the Pirates! game. It's fun to use the Dancing Jig Dedicated Mechanic and the Swashbuckling ones too.

They really fall short for any type of serious game. All these games have to take pages of pages to try to impress everyone with there "look our rules are NOT D&D, so they are so much better", then only have a couple paragraphs for the dedicated mechanics. Having a player take a "move action one" from "page six" does not make for an amazing game. So the dedicated rules are nice, but the bulk of the game rules are not.

PLUS, dedicated rules have the focus problem. Some one only thinks about a topic one way, and they make that the focus of the whole game. Now if the game is honest about what it is, it's not such a problem. But too many games hide it, just saying how great the game is as it has dedicated mechanics, but does not let you see them.

Sadly too many too many writers just watch Pirates of the Caribbean, trip on a pizza box and write some "Pirate Disney Dancing Rules" for their Pirate game and then say it's the best pirate game forever.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Dedicated Mechanics can be really nice for a short, silly, lite, fluffy, simple game. Perfect for a one shot. Everyone wants to play a "pirate" game, so you pop out the Pirates! game. It's fun to use the Dancing Jig Dedicated Mechanic and the Swashbuckling ones too.

They really fall short for any type of serious game. All these games have to take pages of pages to try to impress everyone with there "look our rules are NOT D&D, so they are so much better", then only have a couple paragraphs for the dedicated mechanics. Having a player take a "move action one" from "page six" does not make for an amazing game. So the dedicated rules are nice, but the bulk of the game rules are not.

PLUS, dedicated rules have the focus problem. Some one only thinks about a topic one way, and they make that the focus of the whole game. Now if the game is honest about what it is, it's not such a problem. But too many games hide it, just saying how great the game is as it has dedicated mechanics, but does not let you see them.

Sadly too many too many writers just watch Pirates of the Caribbean, trip on a pizza box and write some "Pirate Disney Dancing Rules" for their Pirate game and then say it's the best pirate game forever.

OK, dude. lol.

 

[Celebrim]

I thought this topic felt familiar.

In general, I very much don't like games that tell me or limit me to doing just a particular thing. I very much like to have variety in my gameplay.

That said, a game should try to provide a minigame that supports each of the sorts of things likely to happen in its setting, and if the core gameplay doesn't support the conflict in a particular type of scenario or event well, then I prefer to have alternative rules for each scenario that is suited to the scenario, rather than trying to cover everything with a single set of overarching rules.

For example, 3e D&D has rules for turn based combat that work well enough as a tactical skirmish based minigame most of the time. The abstractions that they make as long as you remember they are abstractions are usually good enough for most events. But, they don't actually handle 3D combat such as flight particularly well, and so you have to have aerial combat as a special subsystem if it is going to come up often. Likewise, 3e D&D doesn't handle chases very well, because in a chase the problems with a turn based system are exaggerated to the point that it becomes a rather poor way to abstract things out. So it's good to have a separate system for handling chases and combat during a chase that uses slightly different rules that handle movement differently. And likewise, you wouldn't want to run a battle with thousands on each side using the same tactical rules you use in typical dungeon crawling, so you need a minigame for that.

While the use of optional minigames can get to be complex, I find it's less complex than having a single system literally trying to simulate reality, and more satisfying than having a system that is so abstract there is no relationship between the process of play and the thing being simulated.

But I am skeptical of the particular example, from Blades in the Dark. Having never played, I'm not sure how I feel about it, either as a GM or a player. Part of the attraction of playing an RPG for me is being in the moment and inhabiting the character. And if we pull a very literary device like a flashback into the narrative and disrupt the linearity of the story, I worry that would pull me out of the fiction and into the game in a way I wouldn't appreciate much. Imagining myself as a player playing the game, the mechanic comes as a bit of a shock, and I feel about it about like I feel about asking for hints in an Escape Room - I personally wouldn't do it. I want to pull off the heist using only tools that exist in "reality" and not tools that exist only in books.

The guy that taught me how to DM talked about his groups experience of B2 Keep on the Borderlands, and he said that his group turned the adventure into a heist game. He related this story to me in the mid-80's, and I can only assume the game itself took place say 5 years before when the module first came out. His group quickly decided that the Keep had better loot than the Dungeon, and spent the adventure planning how to successfully rob the bank. They certainly did not have specific heist mechanics for that, and they were doing it 40 years ago.[/SPOILER]

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In general, I very much don't like games that tell me or limit me to doing just a particular thing. I very much like to have variety in my gameplay.

That said, a game should try to provide a minigame that supports each of the sorts of things likely to happen in its setting, and if the core gameplay doesn't support the conflict in a particular type of scenario or event well, then I prefer to have alternative rules for each scenario that is suited to the scenario, rather than trying to cover everything with a single set of overarching rules.

For example, 3e D&D has rules for turn based combat that work well enough as a tactical skirmish based minigame most of the time. The abstractions that they make as long as you remember they are abstractions are usually good enough for most events. But, they don't actually handle 3D combat such as flight particularly well, and so you have to have aerial combat as a special subsystem if it is going to come up often. Likewise, 3e D&D doesn't handle chases very well, because in a chase the problems with a turn based system are exaggerated to the point that it becomes a rather poor way to abstract things out. So it's good to have a separate system for handling chases and combat during a chase that uses slightly different rules that handle movement differently. And likewise, you wouldn't want to run a battle with thousands on each side using the same tactical rules you use in typical dungeon crawling, so you need a minigame for that.

While the use of optional minigames can get to be complex, I find it's less complex than having a single system literally trying to simulate reality, and more satisfying than having a system that is so abstract there is no relationship between the process of play and the thing being simulated.

But I am skeptical of the particular example, from Blades in the Dark. Having never played, I'm not sure how I feel about it, either as a GM or a player. Part of the attraction of playing an RPG for me is being in the moment and inhabiting the character. And if we pull a very literary device like a flashback into the narrative and disrupt the linearity of the story, I worry that would pull me out of the fiction and into the game in a way I wouldn't appreciate much. Imagining myself as a player playing the game, the mechanic comes as a bit of a shock, and I feel about it about like I feel about asking for hints in an Escape Room - I personally wouldn't do it. I want to pull off the heist using only tools that exist in "reality" and not tools that exist only in books.

The guy that taught me how to DM talked about his groups experience of B2 Keep on the Borderlands, and he said that his group turned the adventure into a heist game. He related this story to me in the mid-80's, and I can only assume the game itself took place say 5 years before when the module first came out. His group quickly decided that the Keep had better loot than the Dungeon, and spent the adventure planning how to successfully rob the bank. They certainly did not have specific heist mechanics for that, and they were doing it 40 years ago.

In terms of EXPLORING your character, these flashbacks are fine. Also, they're just a tool, and honestly I don't find myself using them a lot while playing my current character, who's function is basically just plain killing stuff straight up. Now, if I was playing a 'spider' I'd probably use those flashbacks a lot to show how he is a little super genius who thought of everything. Honestly, in the midst of all the back and forth about what the situation is, and who's doing what, and what the position and effect are, the flashback thing is nothing.

And honestly, I don't find there's a big dichotomy in 'generality' between RPGs. Yes, some present a pretty narrow milieu, and might focus on it to a degree, but the FitD engine, as an example, is not really like that. It can certainly handle any sort of situation that could come up in a game like D&D. As utilized in Blades it includes a fairly milieu-specific set of playbooks and crew types, but even the supplied ones are not exactly all that weird. You have Cutters (fighters), Leeches (techies/alchemists), Lurks (thieves), Spiders (Kind of a devious Sherlock type), the Whisper (A kind of skill monkey), and the Hound (kind of the BitD equivalent of the Ranger).

The crew types are equally archetypal, being Assassins, Bravos, Cult, Hawkers, Shadows, or Smugglers. I don't really need to describe those beyond the names, you already get what they are. Now, BitD is only, in its core rules at least, focusing on 'Scoundrel' PCs, but I don't see that as any different from 5e focusing on 'heroic' PCs.

I could easily imagine creating a Delving B/X style game using the FitD engine. You'd have various sorts of parties with different overall goals and orientation, and the PCs character types would probably be slightly more diverse, but you could create this game basically just by creating a crew sheet for the party, and maybe creating a couple variations of the 'Scoundrel' style character types. Its not exactly a radical rewrite.

Now suppose you wanted to use 5e to play something close to BitD? You'd need to recreate the crew mechanics, add rules for scoping out jobs, getting intel, interacting with the Bluecoats (cops), what happens when you have to 'do time', etc. You might also want to develop at least a couple subclasses and/or feats to allow PCs to specialize a bit more on their nefarious activities.

It is thus hard for me to see 5e as somehow being a much more general game in any sense than BitD is. There is certainly nothing inherent in the design of BitD which holds it back from working for a variety of genres. Sci-Fi, Supers, JAMES BOND!!!, some kind of X-Files type game, or various sorts of Urban Fantasy. These would all be pretty easy and wouldn't require any changes to the core rules at all.

There are in fact a lot of FitD-based games:
Court of Blades: courtly intrigue
Brinkwood: Rebels against the system
Mutants in the Night: Another game of rebellion, but you are a super
Misbehavin': Prohibition era gangs
Desks in the Dark: Magical High School
MortallyBankrupt: Some kind of offbeat existential horror about reality stars
Glow in the Dark: Mad Max style post apocalyptic survival
To Boldly Go: Star Trek
Runners in the Shadows: Cyberpunk game
The Final Frontier: Another Trek RPG
Harbingers of Twilight: Game of Magic Users in a Renaissance Era world
Laws of the Dark: RP in the world of Max Gladstone (sort of Urban Fantasy I guess)
Mothlands: Post-apocalyptic Bronze Age warriors
Sea of Dead Men: Pirates!
Copperhead County: Organized Crime in the modern US South
A Nocturne: Hard Sci-Fi Space Opera ala Andre Norton from what I can guess
Blades of the Inquisition: WH40K inquisitors
Blades of New Crobuzon: BitD set in China's fantasy city
Game of Darkness: Medieval game of guilds and intrigue
Blood Red Blossoms: You protect the people in a horror fantasy Japan
Replicant or Lesbian: Bladerunner-esque sci-fi
Streets of Passion: Adventures in a fantastical Los Angeles
A Fistful of Darkness: Weird West
The Messengers: Psychic operatives fighting a war in the modern world against ancient evil
The Typhoon Atolls: Sort of a fantasy RPG set in an Earthsea-like world
No Place Like Home: Horror/Mystery
Our Lonely Worlds: Outcast supernaturals against the system
Frontier Kingdoms: Demigod-avatar magical princesses balance tea parties and giant monster attacks to grow their kingdom.
Slugblasters: Teen hoverboarders exploring other dimensional gates
Swords Under the Sun: Heroic Fantasy
Blood and Sacrilege: Vampire RPing
Children of Midnight: Witches!
Studies in Darkness: I honestly don't know how to describe this...

This is just the list from the BitD web site, I'm sure it is not even close to a complete list. Forged in the Dark has some more... It goes on and on, there are Supers games, Hard and soft Sci-Fi, Urban fantasy, Cyberpunk, Pirates, Wild West, Supernatural stuff of all kinds, Straight up dungeon delves, and on and on and on.

But this is what we've been saying: The structure of a game where the primary play loop is about the players engaging with what their characters are about, and the fiction building around that, is very inherently flexible! I almost guarantee you, with a modicum of dedicated mechanics you could turn practically any dramatic TV show online today into a FitD game (obviously some will be more compelling than others).

I suspect it is also a pretty easy system to 'drift' in terms of things like character survivability, power curve, etc. I would say maybe the most limiting thing about the FitD engine would be the fact that its dice pool mechanics only have fairly limited scalability. Since success is gated on the highest die out of N dice there's a pretty narrow range of dice pool sizes that work (from 1 to maybe 6 or so I'd say). To make a game that spanned a PC range similar to say, 4e, would probably require a bit deeper work, but I can think of some approaches that would work and not really alter the core mechanics of the system.

 

[The Shadow]

Speaking of FitD hacks... I helped playtest one called Vigil: Lights in the Dark in which you play Keepers who help recently-deceased souls work out their issues in a Purgatory-like environment so they can move on, while being opposed by the forces of darkness.

A "job" here is a Vigil - going out into the Midnight Vale to recover, rescue, or avenge souls. Meanwhile, you're trying to recover memories of your original life and Ascend to the next life yourself - leaving a star in the sky that provides a permanent boon to Keepers thereafter. It's quite a lot of fun! Dark, but not grimdark. Oh, and if you die, you "take the Long Walk" and reform at your base - it uses up one of your Downtime actions.

Point is, it's quite a long way from BitD, and has specialized mechanics to reinforce its theme.

 

[Aldarc]

Much as @Campbell and others have said, Blades in the Dark really isn't much of a heist game. It's a game about crime gangs, who may or may not perform heists. The flashback mechanics and play loop is there if you are doing a heist, making a drug sell, being hired thugs protecting someone, smuggling contraband, assassinating someone, expanding your turf, securing a sacrifice for your cult, performing a seance, etc. For what we generally think of as "heists," particularly of the Ocean's 11 or Leverage variety, then yeah Leverage the RPG is a heist game.

Imho, a Ravenloft product should not be "here's a taste of Ravenloft". It should be, "Here's how to do gothic horror in D&D, with Ravenloft as an example." Dragonlance should be, "Here's how to do war in D&D, with The War of the Lance as an example." and so on.

Right! And Nentir Vale should be, "Here's how to do a sandbox game in D&D, with Nentir Vale as an example."

I don't know how many Shadowrun adventures ended up being 3 hours of planning followed by 5 minutes of throwing the plan out and the rest of the session in a firefight. If any game needs a FitD hack, it's Shadowrun.

But that's because that is essentially what SR is about: jobs. But I don't need a heist subsystem to do one heist adventure out of an entire D&D (or whatever) campaign.

Runners in the Shadows has you covered.

 

[Fenris-77]

The explicit point of the flashback mechanic is to prevent analysis paralysis, which is very much a thing in RPGs, especially in urban settings where there are a ton of variables. It's also not something anyone needs either, that's a pretty weird way to look at it IMO. It is however really good at it's job once the players embrace it for what it is as can get over that tendency to obsess about even the smallest details. Not every game of Blades leans on it in the same way either. I've played in games where it's hardly ever been used, and other games where it gets used multiple times per session - both are fine.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, 'Heist Game' isn't really a good way to describe Blades in the Dark. You can certainly do a type of heist, it falls within the range of 'missions' that are genre appropriate to BitD. I'm sure some games do a lot of this sort of thing, but our game, for instance, is doing lots of crazy stuff. We are basically penetrating the power structure of Doskvol (maybe the whole Empire and World). I think we did a 'score' to steal stuff once or twice. Most of them were to destroy some rival, rescue an ally, forge a new alliance, or take over some kind of claim. Some of them were also straight up paid assassinations, but always taken with an eye to how they benefit us.

In the last session my character broke out of prison, and gained a new ally/cohort (also broke my children out with me). Tal Rajan dealt with the ongoing saga of himself and his two Iruvian clans with whom he now has marriage arrangements. Beaker and Co went for a crazy jaunt through the Ghost Field and fought a mega-boggle. None of it was heist-like, though there was sneaking around and such in my part. The other parts included spiritual combat, negotiation and social interaction, various magical goings-on, etc. None of it was heist-like.

BitD does use an overall architecture of play in which each session ideally has 3 phases, an initial planning phase in which the players decide what their characters will do this session, and then they prep/gather info. Next there is the actual action part of play where the characters attempt to achieve their selected goal or goals. Finally there is a 'fallout' phase where any consequences are resolved and crew advancement happens, and then the PCs undertake their downtime activities (healing, vices, long term projects, etc.). I don't recall if the resolution of clocks attached to the crew's situation get resolved as part of downtime or prep. Honestly since we play online we do both of those phases mostly during the week, then play for a session, and repeat, though our prep phase often has stuff we play out together.

Note that Prep/Downtime CAN include actions taken by the PCs. USUALLY they are 'fortune rolls', like to see how far you got on your project to create a hull (golem sort of) to hold your dead brother's spirit so he can rejoin the crew. Gathering info and supplies generally involves these sorts of checks, as does recovery/healing. It is also possible to do more 'active' stuff, generally as a set up to the start of the score phase.

So, as written at least, the FitD system will most easily handle game concepts where the PCs are a team and they episodically engage in some activity(s). It also has a number of rules related to the relationship of that group to the local power structure. This is why I say it will easily lend itself to a fair range of TV show plots. The fact that there are TWO Stark Trek hacks is unsurprising, an episodic format with the PCs being a crew, and their relations with Star Fleet being a significant factor in the plot. It practically writes itself.

But pretty much all RPGs are fairly episodic. People play in sessions, and since you want to engage a number of players at a time in the same session, a team-like framework ALMOST always exists. FitD is going to work in that sense for like 99.99% of all likely RPG concepts. You can pretty easily tie into a less episodic format by simply using the clock rules in a specific way. Like if the game is Star Trek ToS, there are basically no long-term clocks, each episode stands entirely on its own. DS9 would be quite different, you would liberally employ clocks and long term projects, and heavily employ the "how does the crew relate to the power structure" rules to handle your relations with the Cardasians, the planet, the shape shifters, whatever.