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.
Indie Games Are Not More Focused. They Are Differently Focused.
- Thread starter Campbell
- Start date
Jay Murphy1
Meterion, Mastermind of Time !
"And even if you have ideal-based clerics, they still use the very divine-flavored cleric spell list. You have spell like Spirit Guardians, Conjure Celestial, Divination, and Guardian of Faith. You have class abilities like Channel Divinity and Divine Intervention. De-goding the cleric would be quite a lot of work."
It is interesting how many players miss the spell creation and spell research rules of D&D and accept the included spell lists as all there is. Very rarely do you see a player or GM take the cleric class at face value and draw the logical conclusion the player is the authority on their beliefs, abilities and reality of being the singular authority of their faith. Everyone just "mails it in". For example, if a players says they are a Cleric of Ook, the divine manifestation of the Hand, and go on to describe exactly what that means they are realizing the nature of the class; an opportunity to world build unlike any other class in the game. Instead of a player thinking "oh, having someone who can heal and turn undead is a useful utility", the "what does the party need?" reflex lacking imagination muscle being exercised, the proper exercise of the cleric is to create something truly unique and creating (or interpreting existing) spells through that lens. It is incorrect to label a lack of ability as a flaw in a game.
It is interesting how many players miss the spell creation and spell research rules of D&D and accept the included spell lists as all there is. Very rarely do you see a player or GM take the cleric class at face value and draw the logical conclusion the player is the authority on their beliefs, abilities and reality of being the singular authority of their faith. Everyone just "mails it in". For example, if a players says they are a Cleric of Ook, the divine manifestation of the Hand, and go on to describe exactly what that means they are realizing the nature of the class; an opportunity to world build unlike any other class in the game. Instead of a player thinking "oh, having someone who can heal and turn undead is a useful utility", the "what does the party need?" reflex lacking imagination muscle being exercised, the proper exercise of the cleric is to create something truly unique and creating (or interpreting existing) spells through that lens. It is incorrect to label a lack of ability as a flaw in a game.
Jack Daniel
Legend
… I can't agree with this. D&D can't guarantee you Fury Road, but there's no guarantee that you won't get it either. That's the nature of trad games: for all the vaunted talk of "system matters" and abstraction and rule of cool, trad games are fundamentally simulations. Physics engines for their game worlds. They don't exert all that much control over what kinds of stories emerge from playing them.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
This is the main thing I disagree with. While the gameplay experience will be different, and each group will play D&D especially pretty differently from one another, much less two different games, you can get Fury Road in D&D . You can get a game about the cyclical nature of violence, trust, and I can’t recall the last time a D&D game I played wasn’t about how broken people can come together.
It just does all that differently than Apocalypse World does it, and one of the biggest differences is simply that D&D does a thing that some of us see as “gets out of the way” while others see it as “doesn’t support anything that isn’t explicitly given specific rules procedures in the books”, and also by way of optional rules that change the way the game plays and how players see their characters and the world, etc.
IME, making AW do lighthearted swashbucklers or teens exploring in a chain of islands, where death is going to be rare and only happen when narratively appropriate, is more work than making D&D do what you describe above. Maybe it’s a lot of work to make D&D do a thing in a way that you find satisfying, that isn’t necessarily a bar we can objectively compare anything by.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
What 5e gets right is only heavily simulating the most contentious part of a story, the combat, and leave the rest to what would be a 5 page game if combat was done the same way. Just description of play loop, each ability score and skill, and narrative-focused description of archetypes with a set of skill proficiencies each. And that is what D&D is, outside of combat. A narrative archetype with roughly 3 pillars of description (class race background), 4-8 skills, and ability scores, in a system that gives you a description of the sort of thing skills might do, but no hard codification, and a resolution system.
And that’s why 5e is very good for making a fantasy OC and then doing whatever the hell you want with it.
hawkeyefan
Legend
Not really. If someone says "I have little to no experience with X" then I can assume some amount of ignorance on their part.
I know next to nothing about GURPS. Want to know what you won't see me doing? Saying what kind of experience GURPS is designed to deliver, or how it compares to other games as such.
There's a whole lot more of structured play than just action resolution. Level has nothing to do with action resolution, nor does CR. Nor to rests.
I think maybe these things are so second nature to you that you don't see the structure?
You'd not be doing that in Blades, either.
Sure. No one is saying D&D lacks flexibility entirely.
I haven't played the One Ring, so I really can't say. I'd be surprised if there was very little that was free form. I would imagine that there's time for free form stuff in any of those phases. However, that's total speculation on my part.
Of course, with Blades there is a similar cycle of play. But after describing the cycle, the author immediately tells you that it's there to help, and not to force things a certain way.
Do you not have the adventuring day? Sure, it's not really formalized as such, but that;s the way D&D 5E is structured. An adventuring day of 6-8 encounters, with maybe a short rest or two in there, followed by a long rest. That's the cycle of play. It's not laid out in a easy to absorb graphic, but I'd attribute that more to poor design than to lack of structure.
Not at all. You claimed the D&D community is more open to homebrew, houserules, and 3PP. If that's your opinion, hey, cool....go for it. But you claimed that as truth....and that's what's poppycock.
Then tell me what game says "play this way or else don't play".
As for my idea of "significant difference" I don't think any examples you've offered yet have been that.
Sure, you can include all the games based on 5E you want. Again, I'm not saying D&D is not flexible. I said that I don't think it's as flexible as is often claimed, and that I don't think that indie games are as inflexible as often claimed.
Yeah, I don't think that's an enormous change.
yeah I’m just ignorant, again. Sure, bud.
I literally asked you a question. Maybe you don't see a lot of data that may support a different view? Is this your answer?
Are you registered to the Blades in the Dark site? Are you on their Discord? Are you on Itch.io? Are there other game sites you frequent that are not as D&D-centric as EN World?
I said I don't know your experience and then asked you about it.
Okay, this is likely the best thing we can discuss here.
What's the one specific thing Apocalypse World does?
Precisely.
Apocalypse World has a whole chapter on how to customise the game while still having AW, and how to adapt it to other settings, genres and "feels" - including examples of moves for a parkour game and examples of moves from early Dungeon World.
Not to mention that coming up with custom moves is part-and-parcel of designing Fronts (the AW equivalent of setting creation).
So asserting that AW is "a specific game" that is not amenable to adaptation or DIY or "house ruling" is just flat-out wrong and contradicted by the rulebook.
Not to mention that coming up with custom moves is part-and-parcel of designing Fronts (the AW equivalent of setting creation).
So asserting that AW is "a specific game" that is not amenable to adaptation or DIY or "house ruling" is just flat-out wrong and contradicted by the rulebook.
This is a passage found on p 2 of the D&D Basic PDF:
In the Dungeons & Dragons game, each player creates an adventurer (also called a character) and teams up with other adventurers (played by friends). Working together, the group might explore a dark dungeon, a ruined city, a haunted castle, a lost temple deep in a jungle, or a lava-filled cavern beneath a mysterious mountain. The adventurers can solve puzzles, talk with other characters, battle fantastic monsters, and discover fabulous magic items and other treasure.
As @hawkeyefan has said, D&D is premised on party play - a team of capable individuals who go on adventures together. I imagine that there are some D&D players who depart from this premise, but I don't see that as any different from someone using (say) the PC-build rules and action resolution rules of The One Ring but departing from some of its other premises.
It is true that 5e D&D has little or no structure for non-combat resolution. That doesn't make it particularly flexible in my view - it means that most outcomes are dependent on someone (typically the GM) deciding what happens next. That's a particular approach to RPG adjudication. I think it also means that changes in long rest durations are actually not all that significant to the fundamentals of play: given that it is the GM who is controlling framing and consequences, the GM can make 1 hour or 1 night or 1 week mean as much or as little as s/he wants to.
(The recovery rule in Prince Valiant is: when the GM says so, you're recovered. There is nothing I'm aware of in 5e D&D that more tightly binds the duration of recovery to the incidence of challenge than there is in Prince Valiant, except perhaps some traditions around periods of random encounter rolls.)
Furthermore, and as I already posted in this thread, I think this dependence of D&D on this sort of GM decision-making renders it not very suitable for co-/"round robin" GMing where each player plays a character but frames the scenes and adjudicates consequences for another player's character.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
But that wouldn’t be an assumption, because the person has said they don’t have much experience. I haven’t done that, and you’ve assumed ignorance because I see various games differently from you.
We are not talking about the same things. You’re also being fairly pedantic. I’ll try to start from scratch later, I think, and get out of this loop.
Nope.
You’re not. Others have certainly claimed that D&D only does one thing well, for instance.
In terms of specific actions, sure. It seems it may be the case we are using most of the relevant words in this discussion differently.
Do you not have a score, that involves a set order of phases, each with its own rules?
The adventuring day isn’t a rule. Almost no one I’ve ever seen or listened to or played with uses it, and I’ve seen maybe 6 people ever claim to stick to it online.
And in the actual rules, you can change what a long rest is, IIRC how long each rest takes, and what is regained with each rest. That changes the play loop. If I can’t regain all my spells until I rest for a week in a safe place, that is a different playstyle than if I’ll get several PHB default long rests before we go back to safety, and a different playstyle again from playing in a place that is pretty much safe, and home is down the street.
The only actual structure there is that limited resources usually all return with a long rest, unless the game is using an optional rule that eliminates full recovery rests.
Don’t be ridiculous. Perhaps I should go through every thread in these forums and find every statement you’ve ever made without explicitly saying it’s your opinion? Show me where I said any game did, first.
I can’t really respond to that without you giving an example of what you do consider significant.
First, terms like “focused”, “purpose built”, and “bespoke”, don’t mean the same thing as “inflexible”.
Second, I’ve seen no compelling argument for D&D being “less flexible than people think”, nor any real counters to the points I laid out about D&D being less procedural/prescribed than some of the games it’s being compared to.
PBTA style games’ “moves”, especially on the MC side, are more procedural than D&D’s method of determining consequence (as I’ve said before, this is mostly outside of making attacks, which are very procedural and prescribed).
Completely changing how players see their characters, how often they can do things without severe decrease in efficacy, how players view danger, etc aren’t big changes. Lol okay.
That is not how you came across.
And no, I’m not going to write my entire gaming history for you. I did as much of that sort of thing as I’m ever willing to in the last tread related to this topic.
That was a bad example on my part because I’ve played more of other pbta games than AW itself, but;
Generate a very lethal broken world by player input/choices/playbook for post apocalyptic archetypes to interact with, usually with no planning (I say usually because IME a lot of folks ignore design intent stuff like that) before the first session. A simplification, but I’m not here to write dissertations.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Well, since what I actually said was that it’s a specific game made to do a fairly specific thing, and not the completely different thing you’re saying here, that’s fine.
