D&D (2024) What could One D&D do to push the game more toward story?

[kenada]

In PbtA, the results are 41.67% fail, 41.67% mixed, and 16.67% success. You could easily swap out DCs for the rough equivalent for that in D&D. Say 1-8 = fail, 9-16 = mixed, and 17-20 = success. Or tack on a degrees of success with 5 lower than the needed DC and 5 higher than the needed DC.

My homebrew system is a D&D-like with a PbtA-influenced resolution mechanic. I’ve explored various dice pools (2d6, 3d6, 1d20, etc). There was a lot of appeal for using the d20 this way (unifying between attacks, saves, and skill chrcks), but the distribution of results is weird compared to PbtA or FitD. Your chance of a mixed results never changes until you push failure completely off the chart (of possible outcomes).

The obvious solution is switching to a non-uniform distribution (like how I’m currently planning to use 2d10), but rolling d20s is a big part of the D&D culture. I don’t think replacing d20 rolls would be received very well. It might be better to do like Pathfinder 2e and keep DCs while adding degrees of success.

 

[Incenjucar]

Storytelling is a skill and a motivation, not so much a mechanic. The DM and players need to give the game room to breathe, while avoiding busy work combat. Put more weight on choices so players have a reason to care about them. Build relationships between PCs and NPCs and give them reasons to care.

 

[Reynard]

The most important thing a set of game rules can do to promote narrative constructions in play is to not have binary outcomes to rolls the players make. There is a grab bag of terminology here -- consequences, success at cost, degree of failure, etc -- but they all come down to interpreting die roll results in the most interesting way possible. The problem with D&D is it generally asks players to make a lot more rolls than games built to be narrative.

 

[Aldarc]

Emphasis mine.

I think you could layer Aspects on to D&D without a whole lot of effort, and could easily change Insiration into fate points. Not that I think that is going to happen -- I'm just saying you could play D&D with that feature of Fate and it would work fine. But then, underneath the aspects, Fate is a pretty trad game engine.

Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge was a huge influence on Aspects in Fate and Distinctions in Cortex. Jonathan Tweet likely had a hand in 13th Age's backgrounds, which are an Aspect-like approach to skills and ability checks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Riffing on the other similarly titled thread...

I keep hearing about how modern D&D is a collaborative storytelling experience and how story trumps all. But then I look around to actual story games and they look nothing like 5E.

So, with the new edition, I wonder: what rules tweaks could the designers do to the 5E chassis to make it work better as a storytelling game?

The biggest issues with 5E as a good storytelling game is that whatever story happens is either an accident of the dice or must be imposed by the referee and/or the players rather than being naturally emergent from the mechanics. The closest we have to story-based mechanics in 5E is inspiration, and it is, at present, anemic. But, more often than not, the mechanics tend to get in the way of story rather than support it. You want to run an epic boss encounter, but the action economy and a few lucky crits could mean the fight's over in a round or two. You want a big scary bad guy, but forgot to write immune to stun and charm in their stat block, so your big bad gets to just stand there and drool while the PCs wreck their face. You want to play a cool, badass, heroic character but you have to roll a d20 to accomplish just about anything...no matter how unimportant. But that all makes for a boring story.

I think if D&D is going to be a storytelling game it should have some actual story-focused mechanics in the game. Provide primers on scene structure, act structure, how scene-and-sequel works, character motivations and arcs, picking scene goals, plot points, long dark night of the soul, save the cat, kick the dog, twists...you know...actual storytelling guides. A good primer on improv would be great, too. It should have metacurrency that can actually alter the story (for players and referees). It should maybe cut back on the pointless bookkeeping, too. Characters in stories die when the writer needs them to, so hit points are a waste of time to track. You rarely see characters in stories going to the bathroom or eating, so there's really no point in having the rules for food and water in a storytelling game. Come to think of it, everything in a story serves a purpose, whether plot- or character-based. So, in theory, the only things that should be in the game are story-focused mechanics. Everything else is superfluous.

Thoughts?

Well, there are two responses to this post that seem like they are potentially useful.

The first is fairly 'nuts and bolts'. My feeling is that the easiest practical change would be to simply rework the 'making a check' system (by which I refer to basically all tosses of the d20 by the players). Have the player state an INTENT along with a course of action. Success indicates the character's intent is accomplished. Failure indicates something else happened, possibly the character got a version of what they wanted, maybe with consequences, or that their intent was not achieved at all. The GM can frame this how they want in that case, but in the former case the player's course of action is effective. This is not sufficient to make a story game in and of itself, but I think it is a necessary component, at least assuming the system still closely resembles 5e in other ways.

On a more theoretical level, I've not played a story game which does what you suggest, exactly. I mean, many story games include some sort of 'meta-game' that does include some of the elements you suggest, but others don't mention any of those things, and yet they are story games. I mean, most such games (all the ones I'm really familiar with at least) include scene-framing processes of some sort. So, I think it is not demonstrated that mechanics related to story, as such, and not to 'things happening in the plot of the story' (IE world-facing mechanics, albeit perhaps framed in meta-game terms) are strictly 'all that is required'. In fact I think such a game would be somewhat anemic.

I used to run a lightweight diceless story game, PACE, now and then. There are no mechanics that relate to anything 'in game' at all. In fact the game makes no assumptions of any sort about genre, etc. Its mechanics purely deal with "who gets to say how the next conflict/obstacle turns out." It also presents the structure of scenes, and presents rules for how character traits can be used along with 'plot points' to do the deciding. Honestly, while its certainly usable, the game is quite anemic overall. Its fine for a quick one-off, but the lack of actual rules governing how world and story relate can make it pretty hard to run. Blades in the Dark OTOH is much clearer, the game has a lot of things which make it flow, and none of that exists in PACE. So, I posit that an infrastructure focused on generating and 'activating' the fiction is at least really handy, if not completely vital.

 

[Reynard]

Well, there are two responses to this post that seem like they are potentially useful.

The first is fairly 'nuts and bolts'. My feeling is that the easiest practical change would be to simply rework the 'making a check' system (by which I refer to basically all tosses of the d20 by the players). Have the player state an INTENT along with a course of action. Success indicates the character's intent is accomplished. Failure indicates something else happened, possibly the character got a version of what they wanted, maybe with consequences, or that their intent was not achieved at all. The GM can frame this how they want in that case, but in the former case the player's course of action is effective. This is not sufficient to make a story game in and of itself, but I think it is a necessary component, at least assuming the system still closely resembles 5e in other ways.

Isn't this pretty much exactly the way it is laid out in the DMG?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There are many things that they could do, but I don't expect the new edition to go into them. There are many games out there that have strong mechanical story support, but these games are also really different from the D&D experience. From Fate to Blades in the Dark to Swords of the Serpentine to Dungeon World there are a lot of games out there. The problem is that they approach things quite differently to traditional D&D because they were designed in response to D&D and to do things that it didn't do well.

What could be done, it to separate the different pillars of play in execution. If you've seen the game ICONS, it uses a D20 combat system matched up with the Blades in the Dark skill system and it works pretty well. With the concept of "pillars" of the game that we heard about during the playtest for D&D Next, this is something that could really work.

But, I think everyone knows that won't happen, since it would be a massive change to the game and not something that current casual players would easily adopt. I remember saying that the notion of adventures that didn't require combat to solve would be a massive shift in the game, but it turns out that they were just bolted on to existing mechanics, that don't serve them really well.

What I think will happen: I think the next DMG will have a few 1-2 page modules that attempt to offer some mechanical support for more "story" approaches, so you might have the shell of a mystery mechanic or a social conflict system. I'd say that will be about it.

Doesn't 4e D&D kinda put this answer to death? lol. As we have played it, there's no doubt it is a story game, and also no doubt that it is a close relative of both 3.x and 5e D&D in an overall mechanical sense. I expect you are right though about what '5.5' will bring, my expectations of WotC are basically zilch, lol.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

Riffing on the other similarly titled thread...

Thoughts?

Hate it. Not what I want in D&D. I don’t want mechanics that push or force story in D&D.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The most important thing a set of game rules can do to promote narrative constructions in play is to not have binary outcomes to rolls the players make. There is a grab bag of terminology here -- consequences, success at cost, degree of failure, etc -- but they all come down to interpreting die roll results in the most interesting way possible. The problem with D&D is it generally asks players to make a lot more rolls than games built to be narrative.

I feel like you need INTENT though, a resolution system that is focused strictly on the action you take doesn't capture that, and is much more limiting to the GM. Not that I disagree with you that at least a 'success with consequences' isn't going to also help a lot.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Isn't this pretty much exactly the way it is laid out in the DMG?

Well, the 5e DMG makes some fairly vague statements about various things, which are then contradicted in other places, so I am a bit skeptical that it has anything coherent to say, really. I mean, there are statements about things like only making checks for things that 'matter' or where 'failure is meaningful' and such. Those are good, and I would argue something along those lines, a process/criteria which tells us when to bring out the dice, is certainly an element that games need. Honestly 4e is a bit weak here too when you stray too much out of the encounter-centered model (IE if the characters wander around exploring and making unstructured checks, 4e doesn't really give a ton of guidance about that).