Looking for a more narrative, less combat-centric alternative to D&D

[Magean]

Hey all,

I've had a talk with the other GM in my group of players and we both agree that we're getting tired with D&D's focus on combat. It takes a lot of prep and play time and ultimately, it's not our preferred part of the game. Especially past lower levels, since large amounts of HP make combat last even longer and also create a well-known interpretation problem. How do you describe massive, successful attacks that nonetheless leave their target above half her total HP? You can't have them be a graze, nor actual wounds either. Anyway. There's also a somewhat jarring discrepancy between heavily structured combat and the lightly structured rest of the game: social interaction, exploration, mystery-solving... typically boil down to one or a couple d20 rolls whereas combat has detailed mechanics.

So, we're looking for a game system that puts more structure on the off-combat parts, and has much more fast-flowing, perhaps more abstracted combat.

However, we don't plan to abandon our current campaigns. I'm running two Eberron campaigns, I like that setting very much and I've invested a lot of time into reading about it, to the point that I've reached the grok threshold. I don't intend to learn a new setting. Meanwhile, my friend is running Out of the Abyss and we're eager to continue the campaign.

So, we need something that broadly supports D&D tropes. In my case, I'd be interested in a system that meshes well with Eberron's fantasy pulp-noir feel: perhaps a comics-originated one? Then, we would adjust the details later. For a start, we could simply hybridize our gaming, importing foreign mechanics into D&D to get the feeling.

So far, I've two ideas in mind:

• Genesys' narrative die system (with home-made dices or digital simulation), which forces more intricate interpretation and improvisation
• Dungeon World, because DW is often quoted as an alternative to D&D, even though I so far have failed to understand what it does so specifically (I've never played PbtA games)

And I'm turning to you for input on the matter.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Umbran]

If you like swords and sorcery, you might look at Swords of the Serpentine. It is based on the GUMSHOE engine, but the point spending system has been adjusted away from just getting informtation, and turned more towards doing awesome cool things.

The print version is not yet available, but if you preorder, you get the pre-layout pdf version of the rules immediately.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Fate Core would probably be a good alternative, although it is very different in mechanics from D&D it should be quite practical to run Ebberon or other D&D settings with it. No classes, but there are skills, and the aspects is a big part of describing characters and making combats more dynamic. Descriptive wounds too.

 

[Magean]

If you like swords and sorcery, you might look at Swords of the Serpentine. It is based on the GUMSHOE engine, but the point spending system has been adjusted away from just getting informtation, and turned more towards doing awesome cool things.

The print version is not yet available, but if you preorder, you get the pre-layout pdf version of the rules immediately.

I heard about Gumshoe in an Alexandrian piece. I thought of it more as a Cthulhu-mystery dedicated system, but the derivative you linked to could do the job, indeed.

Fate Core would probably be a good alternative, although it is very different in mechanics from D&D it should be quite practical to run Ebberon or other D&D settings with it. No classes, but there are skills, and the aspects is a big part of describing characters and making combats more dynamic. Descriptive wounds too.

Ah, yes, Fate, that's another big name I've often read without knowing what is was about. I'll check that.

Thanks to you both!

 

[Ovinomancer]

Hey all,

I've had a talk with the other GM in my group of players and we both agree that we're getting tired with D&D's focus on combat. It takes a lot of prep and play time and ultimately, it's not our preferred part of the game. Especially past lower levels, since large amounts of HP make combat last even longer and also create a well-known interpretation problem. How do you describe massive, successful attacks that nonetheless leave their target above half her total HP? You can't have them be a graze, nor actual wounds either. Anyway. There's also a somewhat jarring discrepancy between heavily structured combat and the lightly structured rest of the game: social interaction, exploration, mystery-solving... typically boil down to one or a couple d20 rolls whereas combat has detailed mechanics.

So, we're looking for a game system that puts more structure on the off-combat parts, and has much more fast-flowing, perhaps more abstracted combat.

However, we don't plan to abandon our current campaigns. I'm running two Eberron campaigns, I like that setting very much and I've invested a lot of time into reading about it, to the point that I've reached the grok threshold. I don't intend to learn a new setting. Meanwhile, my friend is running Out of the Abyss and we're eager to continue the campaign.

So, we need something that broadly supports D&D tropes. In my case, I'd be interested in a system that meshes well with Eberron's fantasy pulp-noir feel: perhaps a comics-originated one? Then, we would adjust the details later. For a start, we could simply hybridize our gaming, importing foreign mechanics into D&D to get the feeling.

So far, I've two ideas in mind:

• Genesys' narrative die system (with home-made dices or digital simulation), which forces more intricate interpretation and improvisation
• Dungeon World, because DW is often quoted as an alternative to D&D, even though I so far have failed to understand what it does so specifically (I've never played PbtA games)

And I'm turning to you for input on the matter.

Thanks in advance!

Honestly, and a tad bluntly, your issue in your first paragraph about hitpoints has a good chance that a lot of Dungeon World isn't going to sit well with you. Dungeon World is chock full of similar situations, where you have to take broad and undetailed resolution mechanics and create a specific fiction with them. It also means that you can't prep like you do with D&D -- the game will fight you very much if you try. Your statement about having grokked the Eberron settings would lead me to believe that you view setting as immutable once the GM has an understanding of it, and Dungeon World works much better if everyone, including the GM, finds out about the setting as you play. This is because DW allows players to effectively require the GM to create setting details about things the players want to exist from time to time. And you shouldn't negate this because you've already decided about that thing. That works in D&D, but not really in DW. It's a very, very different beast than 5e, and you'll need to pretty much abandon your plans in play to successfully make the switch.

That said, DW is a fantastic game, but then so is 5e. They do things differently, which is pretty cool. But, given your firm statements about what you want above, I wouldn't recommend DW.

I have zero experience with Genesys.

 

[Umbran]

I heard about Gumshoe in an Alexandrian piece. I thought of it more as a Cthulhu-mystery dedicated system, but the derivative you linked to could do the job, indeed.

There are a couple of Gumshoe games that take on Cthulhu mythos. But there are a bunch of other genres - investigators uncover vampire-conspiracies (Night's Black Agents). Troubleshooters after a beneficent galactic republic has fallen (Ashen Stars). Teen mystery solvers (Bubblegumshoe). Time travelling agents trying to defend the timestream (Timewatch), and others.

Most previous versions of Gumeshoe have been focused on mystery solving and "procedural" fiction, in which there's a general procedure for characters to go about dealing with whatever the conflicts in the series are - cop shows are procedurals, as was a lot of Star Trek, for example. They work on the assumption that the act of finding clues is not the itneresting bit - putting together the clues and figuring out what they mean is where the entertainment is.

In Swords of the Serpentine, the authors take some of the same mechanics used for investigation, and make them more action-oriented. And "action" is broad here - not just combat.

 

[Big Bucky]

Blades in the Dark is sort of an offshoot of DW and is superior in my opinion. It is very much a “fiction first” game. Although it really works best with a Peaky Blinders/the Wire type of criminal empire building campaign.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Blades in the Dark is sort of an offshoot of DW and is superior in my opinion. It is very much a “fiction first” game. Although it really works best with a Peaky Blinders/the Wire type of criminal empire building campaign.

You can mod it to different genres (disclosure: I'm a huge Blades fan), but unless you recreate the tight interaction of the factions, you lose a huge amount of the game. Blades works as beautifully as it does because it leverages the tensions and relationships between factions against PC tensions and relationships to drive new fiction. Blades is finely tuned by having everything constantly be in tension. If you don't recreate that, by, saying trying to use the rest of the Blades ruleset to run an stock Eberron setting, it's going to fizzle like a damp match.

 

[Ovinomancer]

So, here's something to think about. Different games do things differently. That's obvious. Some are close, and do similar things, some are really far apart. You need to make sure that when you play a game, you're playing it how it was meant to be played (at least at first, you can modify it, of course, but you should know the baseline first). Again, this is kinda obvious.

What gets less obvious is when you want to do things like take your existing setting and port it into another game. Doing this is usually asking for trouble. Settings tend to take the play goals and focuses of the game they were created for and bake them into the setting. If you try to port it to a game that works differently, you've got a setting with baked in assumptions from one game that you're now trying to use in a completely different game. That's going to cause problems.

Eberron has a huge amount of the base assumptions of D&D baked into it. Sure, it's different from other D&D settings and is fairly unique among D&D settings, but it's still got D&D as it's foundation. Trying to take that setting, outside of very high level tropes (and not all of them), and port it into another game is going to cause issues. If the game is similar to D&D, then the issues will likely be small and can be papered over. If the game isn't that similar to D&D, or has a few big differences in core assumptions, then you'll have trouble.

If I was looking for a different system to handle Eberron, I'd be keenly examining the assumption sets of both. Honestly, if I were to recommend a game where you kept most of the Eberron setting but changed the focus of play away from combat and had strong resolution systems for social and exploration play, I'd recommend FATE. FATE has large assumption difference from D&D, but the way FATE encodes that is through descriptive tags. This works well with many settings because it's pretty trivial to turn a setting assumption into a descriptive tag for a character or scene. That said, FATE may not at all be what the OP is looking for.

 

[Fenris-77]

Savage Worlds does a good job of D&D and there an Eberron conversion book for it. I'm going to playing in a SW Eberron game starting this week and the feel is there but it gives you other options. Swords of the Serpentine would be awesome too, I love the game, but it would be more work on your end to convert stuff.