Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 9847278" data-attributes="member: 6993955">D&D and other dungeonesque games are an interesting use case. If we look at D&D or most OSR games and posited a well-developed city setting, like that of Blades with lots of strong theme and strong factions, I think that you could probably run a very similar game in a very similar way. Cities are over-populated by possibility compared to wilderness exploration or dungeon crawling. The factions, populace, and all the other elements are always right there for the taking in a way that makes wonderful sense. I think that makes it much easier for Blades to run the way it does. Dungeons and the wilderness by comparison are much emptier of possible game elements. You can still make great use of factions of course, but the setting is fundamentally different. In D&D and OSR games both of these are seen as empty in a way the city is not. You can describe the wilderness, or the dungeon, in evocative terms of course but that detail doesn't jump up and do work like the game elements in a city do. I think the GM here has far less options that work as consequences that also don't (eventually) stretch verisimilitude. D&D has always seen the wilderness especially as 'empty' in a way that a city is not. The game elements, rather than making up the fabric of the setting itself, are foes and hazards that appear to challenge the group. That is a very different situation, and I think Blades would have to work awfully hard to do it as well as a good map and key OSR hexcrawl does.I think that for the topic at hand that there is one real difference between these two cases. In Blades the players are aware of almost all the setting elements in the book (generally speaking) - all the wards, the inhabitants, the factions, much of the conflict and I think that Blades works in part by leveraging this player awareness. A big chunk of what frames the inclusion of a new element on a failed roll is all of these things that the players already know about and which thus help explain and contextualize that new element. That, plus the over-populated possibilities of the city generally, make Blades work very well. Dungeon and wilderness games by comparison (generally speaking) posit a much larger set of unknowns and a much smaller set of knowns than Blades does with the city of Doskvol. This makes the inclusion of new elements on a failed roll a lot more complicated, both for the GM and the players. The GM has fewer fictional handholds to frame its introduction and the players have a much flimsier understanding of the setting at hand with which to contextualize those new elements.</blockquote>

Verification