D&D 5E What D&D should learn from a Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones)

[Jeff Carlsen]

Song of Ice and Fire does one thing well that D&D settings should adopt wholeheartedly: heraldry. By boiling down complex political organizations into symbols, it becomes easier for players to learn a setting, and to make characters with a place in it.

 

[GMMichael]

1. People (extend to races) are not identical. All elves are good, all dwarves are greedy, and neutral people are uncaring are boring. What makes GoT interesting is the "good" people all have flaws and the "bad" people all have some redeeming qualities.

At first I want to blame DMs for this, but then I realize that it IS built into the game: race descriptions, monster manual entries, and alignment. Alignment.

What 5e might take is that you don't need everyone to have overt magic to have an interesting and successful play - D&D maybe has a little too much "all classic roles must be filled" to it. A game structured so that a group of 5 fighter-types could still be different enough to be interesting and effective in game would be nice.

It sounded like they've been working on making classes more interesting. We'll see what happens. 4E tried to take away the power of overt magic by giving everyone covert magic. We saw how that went. I would like to see 5E be more playable if the party went magic-less.

And no one plays it that way. What we're saying is that character death is, in longer campaigns and on balance, best used sparingly, because it is more likely than just about anything else to lower a player's investment in the game by effectively nullifying the time they have spent playing it up to that point. D&D is a game where you want to foster player investment, not destroy it.

I've been thinking about players lately. Why should they have only one character? Some Final Fantasy games give you a suite of characters to use. What if a player got a new character sheet for every contact, cohort, or offspring he produced? Now, D&D has been a fairly hefty game for rules in the past, meaning that drawing up a character was no laughing matter. So that's one thing D&D could learn from SoIaF: make replacing characters easy.

 

[fjw70]

Song of Ice and Fire does one thing well that D&D settings should adopt wholeheartedly: heraldry. By boiling down complex political organizations into symbols, it becomes easier for players to learn a setting, and to make characters with a place in it.

Sounds like they are trying to do this with factions on 5e.

 

[Dannager]

I've been thinking about players lately. Why should they have only one character? Some Final Fantasy games give you a suite of characters to use. What if a player got a new character sheet for every contact, cohort, or offspring he produced? Now, D&D has been a fairly hefty game for rules in the past, meaning that drawing up a character was no laughing matter. So that's one thing D&D could learn from SoIaF: make replacing characters easy.

That's actually a tabletop gaming concept that I think designers need to spend more time exploring - the idea of divorcing the player from the notion of having a direct proxy in the game world. I used to play in a D&D game where each player had at least two characters, and chose one at the beginning of each "mission" to adventure with. But I don't know of many games that are building rules systems around concepts like that, and I think someone should try and tackle it.

 

[pemerton]

a big thing in SIF is the characters belonging to a well defined house, family or group. This aspect hasn't been explored in D&D with the possible exception of Birthright

It was also part of the original mid-80s Oriental Adventures.

4E tried to include non-combat encounters as skill contests, which seemed to boil down to roll-fests.

That hasn't been my experience.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Why reflect on that inside a dungeon. You do know that a world outside of dungeons (usually) exists?

That's why I had written "high lethality" mode. In D&D, exploration of characters outsiode of the dungeon, in "non-lethal" mode, would be completely independent of the rules/edition used.

 

[chaochou]

I've only watched the first three series.. but where is this 'high' lethality?

It seems no higher to me than the Sopranos or The Wire.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I've only watched the first three series.. but where is this 'high' lethality?

It seems no higher to me than the Sopranos or The Wire.

New thread: what should D&D learn from The Wire.

 

[Umbran]

It sounded like they've been working on making classes more interesting.

The class itself need not be interesting. The *characters* need to be interesting. The interesting layer may not be in the class.

4E tried to take away the power of overt magic by giving everyone covert magic. We saw how that went.

Consider that, if you're jumping off a moderator's post, he or she is almost sure to see if you make edition warring snipes.

Yes, 4e tried to shift things, and how that went was a game that thousands of people play an love.

 

[Derren]

Yes, 4e tried to shift things

Yes, but the problem was the "everyone" rather than the "covert" (and 4E magic wasn't any more covert than in 3E anyway).