D&D 5E What Makes 5E "5E"?

[Yaarel]

I see it more as an intellectual challenge than a narrative one, since my goal would be presenting an obstacle that has a logical reason for being there yet nonetheless needs to be overcome somehow if the group wants to advance past it, rather than a scene to be interacted with before we move on to the main act of this part of the story.

I consider what you describe here to be "verisimilitude", which is part of the "narrative".

But I agree, the randomness of verisimilitude is distinct from the "plot" "beats" of a story.

Maybe ideally, the randomness of a unique trap in the adventure narrative somehow corresponds to a "beat" of an ongoing story.

 

[Yaarel]

I'm late to the party and I think I have a different take on the question of what 5e is.

I wrote a longer post about what 5e is but I'll summarize it here.

5e is an open platform for tabletop roleplaying games, originating with the D&D 2014 5th edition rules but now expanded into multiple rulesets from multiple publishers. It's an open system, available in the Creative Commons for publishers.

5e, to me, means material at least loosely compatible with other 5e material. I can use a 5e monster in any other 5e game, for example. I can run 5e adventures from one publisher with 5e characters built from the core books of a different publisher. Spells, magic items, monsters – these are all compatible with other 5e systems. Some material, like subclasses, species, races, feats, and other work might take some conversion work but are also generally 5e compatible.

There are some games built off of 5e that aren't really 5e. I put Shadowdark into this category. It clearly has 5e in its bones but it isn't really compatible in any reasonable way.

Anyway, thats how I define it.

I guess the question is, how much conversion work is required before a system stops counting as "5e"? The answer seems to rely on personal taste.

I would call Shadowdark "5e-ish", even if would take work to translate a character option or monster stat from it into official 5e.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I would say that, for me at least, the biggest difference in how the game feels is

1) pc's are both tougher and more competent earlier. This is not as big a jump from 4e as it is from other editions where low-level pc's were frail and limited, but 4e also tended to throw tougher enemies at you out the gate.

2) pc's are much more independent - a group of five pc's made in isolation with know coordination is going to be effective in most contexts. In earlier editions you needed to work as a group to make the party fully functional.

 

[SlyFlourish]

That doesn't actually answer the posited question.

That’s why I said it was a different take. To me, what makes 5e 5e is its compatibility with other 5e products.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I guess the question is, how much conversion work is required before a system stops counting as "5e"? The answer seems to rely on personal taste.

I would call Shadowdark "5e-ish", even if would take work to translate a character option or monster stat from it into official 5e.

Yeah. I don’t have a straight answer for that except “not much”. At some point we’re all going to have our own definition of compatibility. I have friends I love and trust who say that 2014 D&D is not compatible at all with D&D 2024 but I disagree. There’s been a lot of change in 5e even before D&D 2024 and it still held together pretty well.

 

[Reynard]

That’s why I said it was a different take. To me, what makes 5e 5e is its compatibility with other 5e products.

Knowing that you ran a long campaign, just out of curiosity, do you think of Shadowdark as a 5E game?

 

[Malmuria]

Look, I know you didn't write it, but I really hate that Old School Primer example, because the "Modern Style" play is written in a way I've never played, nor ever seen anyone play. Like, it feels like what someone would write on the sole basis of hearing from someone else, "Yeah, kids these days just say skills and roll dice, it's not even really roleplay." It's a strawman, a caricature, and an unnecessary one to get their point across. Yes, I'm sure there is some table out there that has played that way, but it just simply doesn't hold up to paint modern players as a whole with that brush, and it makes it feel like the author has an axe to grind.

Edit: Oh, right, right above that paragraph they say specifically that they're showing off a boring / not good modern DM. They claim it's to show off the difference in how the rules are handled, but honestly, I don't believe them. If that was their goal, they should write the Old Style example in exactly the same manner, so that the contrast is accurate and clear. It's a cheap rhetorical trick.

It's hard to generalize about what 5e gameplay looks like across the whole hobby, to be sure. Though I don't know if it's such an exaggeration, given that 5e rules do offer these kind of mechanical solutions to particular kinds of problems that don't really exist in the OSR, namely through skills. Perception and passive perception being the most notable difference, but also other skills, like the cha-based skills. Re: traps specifically, the Alexandrian has a good article going over the history of how traps were adjudicated across editions. He writes

Jumping to 5th Edition, we discover both the worst advice and some good advice for running traps jammed together on the same page.

The worst advice is the mechanical structure: Passive Wisdom (Perception) checks determine whether anyone notices the trap. If they do, an Intelligence (Investigation) allows the character to figure out how to disable it. And then a Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) check determines whether they can actually disable it.

In other words, by 5th Edition the mechanical resolution of a trap has devolved into an entirely automatic sequence of mechanical interactions which the players neither initiate nor make meaningful choices during.

The broader point is that I was trying to make is that I'm not sure "rulings, not rules" really applies to 5e gameplay. Particularly in combat where spells, actions and so forth are fairly well defined as rules even if written in "natural language" (much to the consternation of many). The closest is probably something like the "rule of cool," which speaks more to the "OC" play culture of 5e as described in my previous post.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Knowing that you ran a long campaign, just out of curiosity, do you think of Shadowdark as a 5E game?

I don’t. I think if Shadowdark as a game built off of 5e. To me, a 5e game means a game compatible with the larger sphere of 5e products.

 

[Shardstone]

Fwiw, I don't thinking "rulings over rules," a phrase taken from the OSR, actually applies to most 5e gameplay as it has evolved over the years. A lot of 5e gameplay is all about parsing the rules to resolve a situation, particularly in combat, but also out of combat when it comes to task resolution. Consider Matt Finch's contrasting examples of play from the "Rulings, not rules" section of his Old School Primer:

Yeah the old style example here really does not sound fun at all. "Well, we can't do anything about it because we can't intuit the exact design the DM imagined, might as well go around and ignore it."

 

[Malmuria]

Yeah the old style example here really does not sound fun at all. "Well, we can't do anything about it because we can't intuit the exact design the DM imagined, might as well go around and ignore it."

I guess whether it's fun or not is down to personal taste. I'd imagine a good chunk of 5e players might not find that style fun, and would prefer to disarm the trap by making a dex check, which the 2014 DMG clearly indicates is the way it is supposed to be done per the rules (p. 121)

A trap's description specifies the checks and DCs needed to detect it, disable it, or both. A character actively looking for a trap can attempt a Wisdom (Perception) check against the trap's DC. You can also compare the DC to detect the trap with each character's passive Wisdom (Perception) score to determine whether anyone in the party notices the trap in passing. If the adventurers detect a trap before triggering it, they might be able to disarm it, either permanently or long enough to move past it. You might call for an Intelligence (Investigation) check for a character to deduce what needs to be done, followed by a Dexterity check using thieves' tools to perform the necessary sabotage.

But that's what makes 5e "5e," per OP's question! Less "rulings, not rules" and more "roll to resolve the task." IMO