D&D 5E Why not Alternity? (Or, will or how might WotC do SF?)

[Grendel_Khan]

If D&D had well-written guidance on how to adjudicate social skills and their limitations and so on, like say, Dungeon World, and when to roll and when to just RP, this would be a non-conversation.

This really seems like the crux of it, to me--the sense that D&D is just essentially perfect as is, and any retrograde design elements or major gaps in its ruleset are actually very good, smart, and intentional, and also who needs power windows in your car when you have these awesome cranks for rolling down the window by hand?

 

[Mind of tempest]

This really seems like the crux of it, to me--the sense that D&D is just essentially perfect as is, and any retrograde design elements or major gaps in its ruleset are actually very good, smart, and intentional, and also who needs power windows in your car when you have these awesome cranks for rolling down the window by hand?

cracks are more reliable, power windows faster, this would work much better with something like airbags.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This really seems like the crux of it, to me--the sense that D&D is just essentially perfect as is, and any retrograde design elements or major gaps in its ruleset are actually very good, smart, and intentional, and also who needs power windows in your car when you have these awesome cranks for rolling down the window by hand?

Yeah and as I'm pretty old, I'm old enough to remember discussing D&D on the internet in the 1990s, and thus remember "it was ever thus".

People said the exact same thing about 2E and various issues it had, back then, i.e. "it's perfect as is, that's not a problem, that's intentional design!" (it definitely wasn't intentional lol, not in the way they meant). The whole "it's fine and intentional" thing is pretty much a moving target from edition to edition, and literally any badly designed, retrograde or missing rules elements can and will be claimed as "intentional" sooner or later. Sometimes it was even true that bad design was intentional - the infamous "trap feats" of 3E, but even then, that didn't make it "not bad design".

It's like, sometimes there's a case for more simple rules, or, if something occurs rarely and/or is a sort of "corner-case" thing, no rules at all. That's not what's going on here though. We have rules, just with little/no guidance on how to actually use them or what the limits of their "normal" usage might be - in contrast to a lot of other skills, I note. It would be very easy to add such.

cracks are more reliable, power windows faster, this would work much better with something like airbags.

Quite. But this is the eternal problem with metaphor and simile - it's never quite right.

(The temptation to add a bad simile to the end of that sentence was pretty extreme but I avoided it!)

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Maybe it arrives sooner we could guess, but not in the way we are imagining. There are rumors about a cyberpunk version of Kamigawa, one of the worlds of Magic the Gathering. Kamigawa Neon Dinasty. Somebody said if Magic: the Gathering survives two Kamigawa then it will be eternal.

 

[Mistwell]

I still miss Star Frontiers.

 

[dragoner]

I think it will be Star Frontiers if they do it, and iirc, they did move to protect the IP.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Maybe it arrives sooner we could guess, but not in the way we are imagining. There are rumors about a cyberpunk version of Kamigawa, one of the worlds of Magic the Gathering. Kamigawa Neon Dinasty. Somebody said if Magic: the Gathering survives two Kamigawa then it will be eternal.

can you explain as I do not get it?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This really seems like the crux of it, to me--the sense that D&D is just essentially perfect as is, and any retrograde design elements or major gaps in its ruleset are actually very good, smart, and intentional, and also who needs power windows in your car when you have these awesome cranks for rolling down the window by hand?

Man, some of y’all will really go to any lengths to ignore the idea that people just prefer things that you don’t prefer.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

That guy meant if WotC "survived" Kamigawa, and the franchise isn't punished by the fandom with a second "Kamigawa" event, with high risk to be not a true success, then Magic: the Gathering will enjoy a long future, despise some "no-so-good" events.

Now I have got other of my crazy theories, but I don't remember Fantasy-Flight-Games publishing too many titles of RPG but Legend of Five Rings, and the Star Wars RPG hasn't got new sourcebooks since any time. Maybe we will see a Star Wars d20 again.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It most definitely is. But then I never said you can do without all player social skills, just the aspect of social skills described in the post I was responding to i.e the idea that in a system without social skills it is the charisma of the player that matters.

Unlike turning on the charm, being able to articulate a basic approach to argument and conversation is not something that you can play a social character without. Not if it matters at all what gets said. (And it's also a far lower barrier to entry)

Having expertise in Persuasion but being really clueless as a player doesn't really get you very far.
"Can I roll to persuade the lord?"
"Of course you can. How are you trying to persuade him?"
"?"

This may be ok I guess if all the social scenes are pit stops between combat (but it kind of gives the lie to the idea that you can play a highly capable social character without some kind of player skill in the area, as you're not really getting that fantasy), but in any kind of game with lots of social intrigue the precise things that get said are going to matter. They have consequences and they are part of the fiction. You can't do without it.

I've played in games with really socially awkward characters who play characters with high social skills. It usually doesn't go very welll. If they don't know what approach to take, then others will just basically do all the talking through them.

Really, if making social play easier for the player who doesn't have great social capabilities of their own, the key skill is not Persuasion or Deception, it's Insight. This is because Insight or skills of a similar nature are scaffolding skills, they can give you hints. eg "He looks like he's tempted to do what you want but he seems afraid", is a hint that you might want to say something to try and bolster his courage or reassure him.

I'll just note this is just as true about combat tactical choices, yet people are perfectly happy to just go "I aim at [Opponent X] and roll my hit." And people get really soggy when that isn't practical.