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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 7908170" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Er...have you seen the variety of PbtA games? Monsterhearts is Teen Monster Romance (and, uh, other things teens do). Masks is budding superheroes. Grim World (which has lovely mechanics, but I don't like the fluff) is "dark fantasy" (possibly with just a little "weird fantasy" a la LotFP). The original Apocalypse World is post-apocalypse zany mayhem. I know for a fact there's a My Little Pony PbtA game, though I've never actually seen the rules myself. I've got a PbtA hack for running Shadowrun, and it looks solid. Fate is literally "whatever you want it to be," because its Aspects and Skills can be whatever the player and DM agree is reasonable. It's been used for Dresden Files (urban fantasy), Age of Arthur (semi-historical medieval fantasy), Atomic Robo (pulpy retro-futuristic sci-fi), Spirit of the Century (classic pulp fiction), Houses of the Blooded (explicitly designed to be an "anti-D&D game," that is, a fantasy RPG that focuses on all the stuff modern D&D ignores), Diaspora (hard sci-fi)...I even once looked into a game (that I can't remember the name of, now) which used Fate but built it forIt's really not. Like, really really not. The engine almost exclusively handles combat, with non-combat stuff often handwaved or reduced to a single roll. And 5e actually retreated from the one new non-combat resolution thing that 4e introduced (skill challenges).People say that D&D's scope is really wide, but you'll have to do better than Fate and PbtA above in order to make me believe it. For God's sake, in some of the "how to play" guides I've seen for Fate, they explicitly talk about playing a legit straight-up accountant. Not a battle accountant, not a Fighter who went to accounting school. Just a proper, normal accountant. And the system effortlessly enables players and DM to give that idea legs, make it actually work in the world.Both Dungeon World and Fate inherently do those things, though for some you'd have to use homebrew content, because that's core to the DW experience. Using exclusively first-party content would far too heavily limit yourself, particularly since DW itself is a piece of homebrew. Its creators loved playing Apocalypse World, but wanted something more like what they remembered of playing classic D&D (1e, I believe, but possibly OD&D).You might want to check what 5e says about classes like Bard, Fighter, Monk, Paladin and Wizard before singling out 4e in this way. Emphasis added: "Discovering the magic hidden in music requires hard study and some measure of natural talent that most troubadours and jongleurs lack." "Not every member of the city watch, the village militia, or the queen's army is a fighter. Most of these troops are relatively untrained soldiers with only the most basic combat knowledge. Veteran soldiers, military officers, trained bodyguards, dedicated knights, and similar figures are fighters." "The monks who live there [in the monasteries] seek personal perfection through contemplation and rigorous training. Many entered the monastery as children..." "Fighters are rare enough among the ranks of the militias and armies of the world, but even fewer people can claim the true calling of a paladin." "Though the casting of a typical [Wizard's]spell requires merely the utterance of a few strange words, fleeting gestures, and sometimes a pinch or clump of exotic materials, these surface components barely hint at the expertise attained after years of apprenticeship and countless hours of study. [...] The closest a wizard is likely to come to an ordinary life is working as a sage or lecturer in a library or university, teaching others the secrets of the multiverse."And that's just the ones where the text is explicit that it "requires" hard study or that these types of people are "rare." The game in general strongly indicates that it's not nearly as flexible as you're using it--which means you are deviating from what the book says. Note that I am NOT saying that you're doing it wrong or having badwrongfun: what I'm saying is, you are comfortable doing this thing in 5e, but for some reason you are not comfortable doing it in 4e, even though it is just as much a break from the official game regardless of which game you look at.(And this doesn't even touch on the whole reskinning thing. It's 100% valid, and explicitly encouraged by 4e's designers, to take whatever monster stats you've put together for a given XP budget, and call them whatever you want. You can totally have a 4e game where the party starts as children fighting oversized rats and rabid dogs, only becoming "proper" adventurers later on. In fact, with the hybrid rules, it's actually quite feasible to put together "zero-level" characters that don't even have all the "basic" stuff 4e offers, though that too is homebrew adaptation--you seem comfortable enough doing that as it is, though, so that should be no problem. Likewise, taking the mechanics of an Earthsoul Genasi and saying that that character is actually a dwarf princess of a long and storied noble lineage--an example someone once shared with me on another forum.)It's no better or worse than 5e, which explicitly isn't about "unremarkable commoners." "Adventurers are extraordinary people, driven by a thirst for excitement into a life that others would never dare lead." (5e PHB p 45, emphasis added) And, uh, I'd like to see where in 5e you can do the teeth-grit-village-destruction thing?Are you comfortable with 5e's Inspiration mechanic? Then you're already 90% of the way to Fate Points. People are granted Fate Points for obeying a "compel" (essentially, turning some aspect of their character's nature against them, as long as it makes narrative sense in context), which is almost perfectly analogous to granting a player Inspiration in 5e for going along with some contextually-unfortunate element of their Background features/BIFTs (bonds, ideals, flaws, traits). And just like Inspiration, Fate Points don't have to be spent on something explicitly related to the thing that gave them--just as you can earn Inspiration for giving into your weakness for forbidden knowledge and then spend that inspiration on a Persuasion roll to get the Mayor on board with the group's plan to save the town, you can spend Fate Points on later story elements that have nothing to do with the Compel that gave them. Instead, they're a representation of narrative weight, of "setbacks accepted on the road to success," more or less, because Fate (like DW) is fiction-primary, as opposed to D&D's mechanics-primary structure.You are entirely within your rights to say so; no one can tell you the games you should run, though I think it is good for people to provide advice and explanations where appropriate (as I attempted to do in the previous paragraph).This, however, is false. Fate can literally do anything you want it to thematically. The only way this could be true is if you only accept D&D mechanics, but your whole argument is about the theme, not the mechanics, so...I just don't see how that cashes out.You seem to be under the impression that you would have to rewrite the world in order to make it fit the mechanics, and that's....not correct. You would, instead, use either game's extensible framework to build the mechanics to whatever standard you wish. I could probably show you, if I knew more about your game, but I don't really think it's worth doing unless you really wanted to do it. But yeah, Dungeon World is literally a toolbox for building the stuff you want, and I have personally done so--my weekly game is an Arabian Nights-style adventure in a custom setting (heavily inspired by Al-Qadim and FFXIV's Ul'Dah and Ala Mhigo), but I've also played in science-fantasy, high-fantasy, gritty intrigue, and pirate-adventure themed games of DW, plus other PbtA games (same engine, applied differently) for supers, teen monster drama, post-apoc, Shadowrun, and more.</blockquote>

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