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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 9237665" data-attributes="member: 11760">I think the designers 100% have an idea in mind of what sort of game 5E supports. That they don't say so up front seems disingenuous and it leads people to become invested in a narrative that I don't think WotC itself believes -- that 5E is the best system to run any kind of fantasy RPG game.You could technically enter your Kia Soul in a Formula 1 race and could walk away saying that you successfully raced in the Grand Prix just using the car you already owned. But I don't think anyone would say it was the most effective tool for the job. And conversely, taking a Formula 1 car to the grocery store or to pick your kids up after school would likewise be a profoundly disappointing experience.I own and run several fantasy roleplaying games and can, in theory, run the same adventures in all of them. But running a high-chaos, high-lethality pirate adventure in 5E requires creating nautical rules and twisting a bunch of dials to change the default play experience to be more dangerous and more random. I could definitely do it, but at a certain point, I will have invested more time in remaking 5E than I would in very briefly teaching my players how to play Pirate Borg.Similarly, anyone familiar with 5E rules isn't going to buy that a dungeon crawl is going to be a gritty and terrifying experience unless I do a lot of modifications to the core game. And since most of those modifications would be making it look like Shadowdark, I could just use Shadowdark, which is my preferred game for those kind of gritty experiences.On the other hand, if I wanted to run a high adventure game with heroes who would go from zeros to heroes and would go on to save the kingdom, the world or even the multiverse, Pirate Borg and Shadowdark would be terrible choices for them. It's extremely unlikely the characters from the first session will be around by the end and will likely have been replaced many times over, meaning that what motivated those characters -- who are almost certainly strangers to the final party -- likely won't motivate the characters at the end. I could twist a bunch of dials to make Pirate Borg or Shadowdark characters more robust and make leveling up more satisfying and give players the ability to help shape PCs into the characters of their dreams -- or I could just play 5E, which already is set up to do that.Different games can be good at different things without diminishing any of them. Chess is a terrible version of competitive crosswords and Scrabble doesn't have deep strategy. But no one would seriously insist that chess is the only board game anyone ever needs or that it can represent every style of board game, if only one was willing to draw the map of Candyland on the board or create scenarios where players have to uncover who murdered Queen's Bishop.It was a very late rulebook for 3E, and probably not a big seller, but I wish 5E could take some inspiration from the Rules Compendium and just talk about this stuff, ideally in the PHB, but certainly in the DMG, even if it's in the context of "we're going to show you how to do horror in D&D, but just so you know, our feelings won't be hurt if you wanted to grab a copy of Dread to use with your Halloween game this year."</blockquote>

Verification