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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8316949" data-attributes="member: 70468">If you look at the way D&D adventures tend to go, they usually start with a complication or some kind of conflict. The engagement roll helps you generate that instead of relying on the GM to come up with something in the moment (since the nature of BitD means it’s unlikely the GM got time to sit down and decide, which would go against your [BitD] principles anyway).I agree. Some games use mechanics just for resolution or to model some aspect about a character, but others use them to create a certain feel of play, or they use them to create situations that might not arise organically (i.e., as a prompt). A game like Scum and Villainy is more like Call of Cthluhu taken to 11 than it is D&D because it pervasively uses its stress mechanics to create the feel of playing a daring outline on the fringe. Your work is dangerous, and that danger affects you. If you don’t want trauma, you have to work at it, and that ends up reflected in how things play (though the system does try to incentivize you to lean into the conceit with additional XP for playing your traumas).That seems to be the two strains of discourse in this thread. There’s the “D&D-style flexibility”, which is about the system’s not prescribing mechanics so GMs can do whatever they want. If they want to hack D&D to include stress mechanics (from BitD), they can do that. Then there’s “experience flexibility” (for lack of a better word, so hopefully someone suggests something better) where the system is built with the idea that some parts of play are being delegated to the system, and the experiences created by them are ones that are not or are unlikely to occur in a “D&D-style flexibility” environment. See also: the discussion previously regarding consensual versus non-consensual.I think there’s an assumption that the latter are more difficult to modify, but that seems true only looking at things narrowly. People have built a variety of games on top of PbtA and FitD. Bluebeard’s Bride is very different from Dungeon World is very different from Monster Hearts. It might be more difficult to do it in the moment (such as deciding to use PbtA-style conflict resolution for a particular a social challenge in D&D), but those games enumerate their principles, which should help make intentioned modification easier. It may be that some communities are less receptive to modification than others, but I don’t think it’s fair to project that back onto the games themselves. Otherwise, I’d have to concede that PF2e and its APs are expected to be run 100% RAW (no matter how awful the results), and I’m not going to do that.</blockquote>

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