Let's Talk About "Intended Playstyle"

[aramis erak]

In my experience (and outside of Revised Sorcery), dice pools with more than 6 or 7 dice in them from skills, FoRKs and help, aren't that common. But Obstacles above 3 aren't that uncommon. Hence why I think that, if you don't have Artha, you're not really going to succeed.

In play of both BW and Torchbearer 2e, I find that the use of Fate to open up 6s is particularly important.

No argument about artha, but I've had in my BW, BE, and MG games quite a few times with 6d to 8d pools - especially with a 5d skill, a fork, 2 helpers. It's not that hard to get a skill 5 if one is focused on getting it in BW, BE, or MG. In BW and BE, it's even in reach as a starting skill.
So it's possible to hit those high pool tasks. Ob6 has been, ironically, EXTREMELY common in Circles rolls. (It's just too easy to stack up those Ob mods on Circles.) Number one reason for complicated success when I was running BW.

Note that MG has a fairly wide range of Ob defined by the difficulty lists; 6 is not that hard to find.

For others: Mouse Guard (MG) uses the same concepts as BW, but does advancement differently, has only one conflict system, very different character gen. It does advancement by (Level) Successes and (Level -1) fails, so it's advancement is actually easier, tho' it also lacks one of the three kinds of Artha (calling the remaining Fate and Persona as "Rewards" instead of Artha). It also has a scene budget (WWAM: Wilderness, Weather, Animal, Mouse), it's mission based, and a roll limit (one roll per scene, may be everyone once per session and may be a conflict once per session, at least if run RAW. I've routinely had Ob (the Target Number/Objective) in the 5+ range, and seen skills hit 8d in a campaign.
One of the dirty tricks is to not
Circles: the ability of the character to run into the people they need to run into.

 

[Aldarc]

I don't know what to tell you. That is not what it means in the context of games. It means that it demands very specific play.

Going back to December, you had scarcely heard of "opinionated" applied to games, and now you're trying to tell me what it means like you've always known? lol

 

[zakael19]

I was gonna say, I seemed to remember @Reynard running in to this in my responses about Draw Steel! wherein I specifically use "opinionated" to mean "the author(s) have strong opinions on what they think is cool and fun about TTRPGs and built their ruleset to support that with no concession to genericness."

Eg: if we have a continuum of currently published "opinionated design in high fantasy rulesets," Draw Steel! is over here on the left in "very opinionated" (the implicit setting bleeds through all aspects of design, the authors make no concessions in the rules to "do whatever you want" etc), 5.5e is somewhere in the middle (generic, but the core of the game will resist you moving away from the core "high fantasy" design without a lot of work), and Daggerheart is over on the "pretty freaking generic" side (very little inherent stuff in the mechanics, easy to abstract away much of the flavor).

 

[Reynard]

I was gonna say, I seemed to remember @Reynard running in to this in my responses about Draw Steel! wherein I specifically use "opinionated" to mean "the author(s) have strong opinions on what they think is cool and fun about TTRPGs and built their ruleset to support that with no concession to genericness."

Eg: if we have a continuum of currently published "opinionated design in high fantasy rulesets," Draw Steel! is over here on the left in "very opinionated" (the implicit setting bleeds through all aspects of design, the authors make no concessions in the rules to "do whatever you want" etc), 5.5e is somewhere in the middle (generic, but the core of the game will resist you moving away from the core "high fantasy" design without a lot of work), and Daggerheart is over on the "pretty freaking generic" side (very little inherent stuff in the mechanics, easy to abstract away much of the flavor).

I am not sure I agree about Daggerheart. The system pretty tightly maintains the intended playstyle, and the specifics of the classes and domains make it harder to rebrand than it should be.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I am not sure I agree about Daggerheart. The system pretty tightly maintains the intended playstyle, and the specifics of the classes and domains make it harder to rebrand than it should be.

Should it be easier to rebrand? Daggerheart seems to have a pretty specific intended playstyle. What's wrong with that?

 

[cranberry]

A lot of TTRPGs are built around the assumption that the players are the good guys.

Blades in the dark assumes the opposite, and I love it!

 

[zakael19]

I am not sure I agree about Daggerheart. The system pretty tightly maintains the intended playstyle, and the specifics of the classes and domains make it harder to rebrand than it should be.

I see your contention and don't agree with it, in that it's way easier to run all sorts of varied settings and "if you're this, it means this here" stuff compared to even 5e. So long as you agree that magic exists, or technology that resembles magic, you have a massive amount of flex because of how relatively flavorless most of the abilities are compared to say the core Divine/Arcane magic lists of classic D&D.

It's not pure generic, but within the bounds of "high fantasy / high magic" stuff it's way closer.

 

[Reynard]

I see your contention and don't agree with it, in that it's way easier to run all sorts of varied settings and "if you're this, it means this here" stuff compared to even 5e. So long as you agree that magic exists, or technology that resembles magic, you have a massive amount of flex because of how relatively flavorless most of the abilities are compared to say the core Divine/Arcane magic lists of classic D&D.

It's not pure generic, but within the bounds of "high fantasy / high magic" stuff it's way closer.

Interesting. I think a Seraph is significantly more specific than a Paladin and harder to reskin as some setting specific holy warrior type.

note that none of this is really a criticism of DH. I am just arguing against the idea it is more generic than D&D.

 

[zakael19]

Interesting. I think a Seraph is significantly more specific than a Paladin and harder to reskin as some setting specific holy warrior type.

note that none of this is really a criticism of DH. I am just arguing against the idea it is more generic than D&D.

DH has:

• No skill list that constrains the sorts of actions the game tests.
• Deeply reduced mechanics (your example here? look at what the Seraph actually does - clears HP, has a dice they can use as a reaction to modify outcomes, adds range to a weapon, can fly. So easy to reflavor all that away from anything divine; there's no Oath even making a fig leaf towards some sort of inherent flavor).
• Little mechanical representation of the intended play style (eg: there's no XP! so no way to tie XP to playing a character in a certain way; story above all! / "consequence is story" means there's no baked in consequences; etc)

Compare to Draw Steel!

• Exhaustive skill list that tells you what characters in this game can be explicitly good at
• Very detailed mechanics that combine with the abilities to go "if this, then that" both in and out of combat.
• Direct mechanical representation of the intended play style: Victories -> XP pipeline, but also boosting class resources; Victories as rewards for overcoming obstacles via Montage (which likewise suggest a play structure).
• Classes that have inherent abilities very difficult to reflavor away from the design.

etc

 

[Reynard]

DH has:

• No skill list that constrains the sorts of actions the game tests.
• Deeply reduced mechanics (your example here? look at what the Seraph actually does - clears HP, has a dice they can use as a reaction to modify outcomes, adds range to a weapon, can fly. So easy to reflavor all that away from anything divine; there's no Oath even making a fig leaf towards some sort of inherent flavor).
• Little mechanical representation of the intended play style (eg: there's no XP! so no way to tie XP to playing a character in a certain way; story above all! / "consequence is story" means there's no baked in consequences; etc)

Compare to Draw Steel!

• Exhaustive skill list that tells you what characters in this game can be explicitly good at
• Very detailed mechanics that combine with the abilities to go "if this, then that" both in and out of combat.
• Direct mechanical representation of the intended play style: Victories -> XP pipeline, but also boosting class resources; Victories as rewards for overcoming obstacles via Montage (which likewise suggest a play structure).
• Classes that have inherent abilities very difficult to reflavor away from the design.

etc

Note that I did not say anything about Draw Steel.