Indie Games Are Not More Focused. They Are Differently Focused.

[Campbell]

A score in Blades is pretty much anything your crew does together where there's risk involved. It might be a heist. It could also be having dinner with the heads of two gangs to convince them to work together. In one game we had a literal tea party as a score.

The structure of play is literally do stuff, rest and recover, do stuff with free play available for when you are doing stuff on your own, are attacked, etc. It's pretty damn loose.

 

[hawkeyefan]

A score in Blades is pretty much anything your crew does together where there's risk involved. It might be a heist. It could also be having dinner with the heads of two gangs to convince them to work together. In one game we had a literal tea party as a score.

The structure of play is literally do stuff, rest and recover, do stuff with free play available for when you are doing stuff on your own, are attacked, etc. It's pretty damn loose.

Right. It's just the fact that Harper chose to label these phases that makes folks think of them as far more concrete than the absolutely similar elements of D&D and most games.

Adventure followed by downtime.....most RPGs have some sort of cycle that maps to that.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's a brand with a multiverse of in-house settings. Not entirely sure how that's different in concept from Fate Worlds or Cortex Prime Spotlights or Worlds of the Cypher System, etc. which are all meant to show sample settings that attest to the ability of the respective systems to run games in different types of settings. But yeah, D&D's multiverse mostly just showcases 5 shades of fantasy adventure using mostly the same monsters, archetypes, etc.

Right. I enjoy some of the different settings of D&D....mostly those that feel like the do something beyond standard fantasy. I dig Dark Sun and Plancescape and Ravenloft generally......the rest are all pretty interchangeable to me. I know others look at it differently, and I can understand that there are distinctions between Dragonlance and Greyhawk....but I just don't think most are all that meaningful. Certainly no more meaningful than what you can just instill into the game as you play it.

For the third party games, I can't commit as strongly. I think I've only played a handful, and maybe read a few more. A lot seem to fit my above take on the official settings, but I'm sure not all do.

I've read and run a one shot of Whispers in the Dark, which is pretty much Call of Cthulhu but with 5E rules, and with the Mythos replaced with a more general cosmic horror approach. They made some tweaks to the game to allow for weapons and gear circa 1900, and of course they adjusted the classes and such to suit the genre. So that's a bit of flexibility right there.

Did the game play as well as Call of Cthulhu or similar game? Hard to say having only run a one shot, but my gut says most likely not. Beyond familiarity, there didn't really seem to be any advantage to using the 5E rules as a base.

We could even look at hacking and flexibility within a game subset. For example, if we were to look at Dungeon World, we could find a tremendous amount of homebrew classes/playbooks that have been hacked for the game. There are also customized versions of pre-existing playbooks. We could also point to hacks of Dungeon World: e.g., Freebooters on the Frontier, World of Dungeons, Urban Modern Fantasy (Dungeon World's Urban Arcana), Homebrew World (a one-shot version of DW), and Stonetop.

Right, absolutely. These games actively promote hacking. I forget if DW has a section devoted to it (I think so, but don't recall off the top of my head) but I know Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark both do.

Plus, looking at something like Apocalypse World and Dungeon World.....the game promotes the creation of the setting as you go. It's designed with that in mind. With D&D, you can do that.....but it's not really how it's set up. And you don't need to look too far to find people who will insist that you have an entire world "created" before you even begin play. The default expectation is that you use a setting that has been determined ahead of time, whether crafted by the GM or a prepublished setting of some sort.

Even with Blades, where there is an expected default setting of Doskvol, so much of the particulars are intentionally blank or vague so that things can be determined in play.

Mostly a privileging of "medieval" adventure fantasy over modern teen drama fantasy.

Yeah, each game is like a different take on the horror genre. Neither seems particularly less niche than the other.

But if I wanted to run something like Castlevania though, I would possibly look at Worlds of Legacy - Rhapsody of Blood, which is a gothic action RPG that focuses on more Belmont style families over successive generations dealing with BBEG of the castle.

Right, and I think this is where a lot of the problems come up. Many folks would look at that example and say "This game is designed with a very narrow focus" because it has a pretty clear theme. And I wouldn't really disagree with that.....as you say, they're going for the Castlevania adventure-horror type of vibe.

But for some reason, Ravenloft is somehow not as niche.....when it's the same vibe.

Can Ravenloft be used to produce something different than a Castlevania style setting/game? Of course.....and those who play it know that. Can a game like Rhapsody of Blood be used to produce something different, too? I haven't played it but I have played other Legacy games, and I feel pretty comfortable that it most likely can.

 

[Umbran]

I've never seen anybody posit such a position.

In this thread, I have, so...

Is it really so surprising that different games, selling to somewhat different markets, are going to have different qualities that lend to different uses? This is a hard-sell argument?

 

[Staffan]

Huh? Fate has been around much longer than Dresden Files. Fate 1st edition was published in 2003. Dresden Files which uses Fate 3rd edition was released in 2010, but Fate 3rd edition was already used in Spirit of the Century which was released in 2006.

I'm almost certain I saw a recent tweet from Fred Hicks where he mentioned he built Fate specifically to use to license his friend's books. I could be misremembering it and it was actually Evil Hat that was started with that purpose, though. That doesn't mean that that was the first thing the engine was used for or the first thing the company published, but rather that that was the goal.

Either way, they did get the license for Dresden Files in 2004 or 2005, even if the game wasn't published until 2010.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think there is ONE KIND of flexibility. There is 'mechanical flexibility', are the rules tolerant of alteration in a strictly mechanical sense. In that light D&D, as an example, is certainly reasonably flexible. It has fairly high level generalizations like AC, HP, levels, and ability scores. (Speaking only of classic D&D) you can certainly alter these things. There will be many minor impacts in some cases, but each rule pretty much covers one small niche area. It may become largely irrelevant (IE if you have 'D&D In Space' you won't use a dungeon level based wandering monster rule much) or it might be 'broken' (IE if you don't have a STR score then you need a new rule to lift gates) but since each rule is pretty much stand-alone it is just a matter of playing and fixing these things. The GM has absolute sway anyhow, so none of the details are critical. Traveller is a fairly similar design, though a lot more of the rules tend to work together, the core mechanics don't really care.

<snip>

When we thought of using Traveller in other genres and such, we found that you simply had to discard most of the MATERIAL of the game anyway, except maybe basic tech 6- firearms and such. It can form the basis of spy games and such, but there's little impetus, since you pretty much have to start over with nothing but the skill system, ability scores, and a few core rules that are not exceptionally better than many other games mechanically.

I'm really unclear what the measure is of "flexibility".

I mean, I can take AW - characters have Cool, Hot, Hard, Sharp and Weird - and I can resolve action based on 6 or down, fail; 7 to 9, make a choice about what it cost you to get what you want; 10+, succeed. With that, I can resolve a pretty wide range of action declarations! Add in a few special abilities - a Thief can use Sharp rather than Hard to make a melee attack if the target is unaware of him/her - and I can run a D&D-ish game if I want. I think this is basically how DW got started!

I've used Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP to do supers, Viking fantasy and LotR. I haven't tried it for Star Wars, but I think it could be done - the Annihilation event book shows how to do spaceships, and instead of the Doom Pool you have the Dark Side pool!

Of course a Star Wars game will set aside a good chunk of the MHRP powers - size change, or stretching, isn't a big part of Star Wars - but that's no difference from using the D&D stats-and-resolution chassis but ignoring most of the spell lists.

I think most RPGs have a resolution system that flows from the PC build system that can be pushed beyond the core conceits of the RPG as published.

 

[pemerton]

looking at something like Apocalypse World and Dungeon World.....the game promotes the creation of the setting as you go. It's designed with that in mind. With D&D, you can do that.....but it's not really how it's set up.

This goes to a point I made upthread. Can D&D be played "GM-less" ie players all playing a PC but taking responsibility for framing and consequence-narration for each others' actions? I think the reliance on pre-established setting puts real limits on this.

 

[aramis erak]

Can you point me to actual play accounts of a 5e D&D game involving two players playing two PCs and simultaneously GMing for one another? The only accounts of this I've ever heard, as far as D&D play is concerned, involve random dungeon generation along the lines of Gygax's DMG Appendix A - which doesn't really involve simultaneous GMing so much as outsourcing the content generation to the charts and relying on the resolution processes alone, without GM judgement, to decide what happens next.

my friend Aaron and I did that mode in BX using dungeon geomorphs in 1982... when we wanted to D&D but couldn't get Brian, Brice, John, or Andrew in.
The thing that made it work was the monomaniacal fixation on combat and wenching. (think about the era... The Conan movie being the closest thing to an Appendix N entry either of us had read. I was reading A Wizard of Earthsea about that time, too.)

D&D, given the rules coverage we had (hand copied multiclassing rules and higher level XP and spell tracks, but used with Moldvay), only covered reactions in brief, and covered combat and searching... so we stuck largely to what was covered.

Essentially, in 1982, D&D was a dungeon penetration press-your-luck game for us. And it worked fine in "shared GM mode" in that playstyle. We only got story by playing modules.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What I was mostly speaking to upthread is that in my experience the vast majority of people who play only D&D likes do not see the constraints they are operating under because they do not feel constraining to them. They like the game their playing. They don't have the same experiences that someone like me has because they have never really broken with more typical play processes. I say this is someone who spent years trying to make D&D fit my purposes. "I fought the law and the won" type experiences.

I think trying to analyze games, especially ones like D&D that have such strong cultural traditions as if they were not a strong culture of play in effect is deeply flawed. It's punishing other games for explicitly stating the stuff D&D leaves implied. I have experienced what happens when you try to bring in techniques from other games and D&D players are not ready for it. I have experienced a culture of play that is generally fine with some minor house rules, but trying to change the expectations of play has been pretty damn difficult.

I have also put in the reps running Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Dogs in the Vineyard, Sorcerer, Monsterhearts, Masks and others for lengthy periods of time (multiple 6+ month games). I have seen how flexible these games are over long periods of play. It takes a lot of reps too. When the game is novel it can be easy to get drawn into just what's different about it. Once you have become really practiced at the skills involved which are pretty different you get to see how flexible the games really are.

I have also seen that while you might play a game set in post apocalyptic wasteland using D&D like procedures that just does not result in anything that comes close to the type of stories we get to experience when playing Apocalypse World because the games promote completely different views of the characters. The D&D type procedures are just not going to focus on the cyclical nature of violence, trust issues, and how broken characters can come together in the same way. D&D type procedures might get you Beyond the Thunderdome, but they won't really get you Fury Road. Both are awesome. They're just different.

I feel safe in saying that 2e taught me what the limits are of what will work in D&D, which are pretty hard limits even in its own preferred genre. 4e allowed me to see how you could approach the EXACT SAME GENRE in a completely different way and how different the results will be! I mean, we sort of literally weren't quite sure what to make of that game on the first day we played it, but then light dawned over trad manor and the entirety of the flexibility of narrative focused and player focused play became super apparent.

Traditional D&D is a very fun game, but IMHO (outside of 4e if you play it as I did and some others did) it is not a really super good game for trying to introduce even PLOT. It just isn't, not even 5e, which suffers from exactly the same limitations that 2e and 3e did. Procedural 'dungeon' crawling works quite well, assuming you recover something akin to 1e's exploration rules. You just cannot reliably drive a story forward. It can 'happen', sometimes, but it is super not consistent, even for me. Both the mechanics and the material don't easily adapt to most other genres, and then there's that story thing again, most genre are really about what happens to the characters and how it happens, but you really do need some tools for that. Even 4e has a hard time doing something that isn't D&D. I did see one very kick ass Star Wars game run with it (just wild amounts of reflavoring everything, no rules changes at all). Not 3e nor 5e can pull that off.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But if I wanted to run something like Castlevania though, I would possibly look at Worlds of Legacy - Rhapsody of Blood, which is a gothic action RPG that focuses on more Belmont style families over successive generations dealing with BBEG of the castle.

4e should do an awesome Castlevania. I binged the series on Netflix a couple months ago. It is SO 4e it isn't even funny. Just straight up rolls right out as-written.