the designer's creative agenda is only valuable if you believe that there is a right way to play games
This sounds a lot like it's arguing that we should only have a single, universal set of mechanics for games, shorn of all thematic elements lest something about the dice you roll or the stats you use imposes some arbitrary, vaguely-defined restriction?
I'm sure there's nuance somewhere in those three hours, but from the conversation here it sounds like a lot of philosophical hand-wringing over the idea that the book is going to slam shut if you don't follow it to the letter.
I think you need to watch the video.
I also don't think D&D's dominance makes it less important to be critical of the alternatives to D&D.
I also don't think that D&D is a "threat to creativity" - Vi makes the point (quite well) that restricting player actions to the "If > Then" statements of a PBtA Move allows for less creativity (RAW) than the "roll the stat you think fits when it seems appropriate" approach used by other games (like 5e).
They're also critical of the Playbook approach, which I think is less of a problem; one of the conceits of a PBtA game is that you're not your own character, the way you are in other games; you're an exemplar of an archetype. A Hammer in Avatar Legends is the background and the personality and the class am rolled up into one, but "fighter" is what you do, not who you are.
In that context, the saying "your character wouldn't do that" isn't necessarily wrong, because you're supposed to be playing to a type - though I understand why it chafes, and why that kind of RPG isn't for everyone.
restricting player actions to the "If > Then" statements of a PBtA Move
By my understanding of the PbtA philosophy, that's not really how Moves are intended to function. They're not a menu of the possible things you can do, they're a list of the consequences of certain actions. A player is supposed to just describe their actions until something meets the condition to trigger a Move.
Moves aren't actions a player takes, they're how the fiction reacts.
That's maybe how it's supposed to be, but it's not really how Root frames them. Root: The RPG seems to think it's a board game manual, rather than an RPG book, and everything you do (certainly everything the GM does) must be a Move.
As above, however, I'm perfectly happy to take what bits I like of the thing and build my own thing with it - Vi even basically says that being able to modify, ignore, or houserule stuff is the best thing about RPGs in the video (which maybe undermines the point of making the video a little, I feel?).
When Vincent Baker made Apocalypse World he was thinking about Videogames. He thought of the character choices as being like when you are flicking through the character options in Borderlands or Gauntlet or Golden Axe and the Moves are what your buttons do. That was tempered in practice though by the game focusing its attention on the Conversation and having Moves only trigger as required by the conversation.
I don't think Vi's problem is with Moves though. Firstly it's with game designers thinking it's their job to make players do things. That works in Half-life 2, but but RPGs aren't ribbons of set pieces connecting the start with a pre-written ending. This is compounded by the fact that these designers are using the techniques and language of behaviour modification. Which is fucking awful.
Moves come into it because Root uses the language of moves to lay claim to everything which happens during play. I haven't read them myself but I believe this started with Masks and had continued through that branch of PbtA games.
This leads to the bigger problem that Vi highlights with games like Root, that they are doing minimal work to help players play a good game while also claiming that any enjoyment they have while playing is entirely thanks to the text.
I would upvote that if I could; I think because I'm a relative newcomer to TTRPGs (and an even newer-comer to non-D&D RPGs) I'm sort of ignorant of a lot of the history and developmental stuff.
I can also see, in myself, the marketing success that Root is - I mainly bought it because I'd heard good things about the board game (but know more TTRPG people than I think I could convince to play a big, complicated asymmetrical wargame) and liked the art; and any of the stuff I'd be focusing on in any game I run will mostly be that board game stuff - the factions, the "woodland at war" framework, and the aesthetic.
I've been having fun getting my blog moving again. Today's post was about as much work as the previous six put together, but I think it was worth it. https://ominosity.wordpress.com/2024/01/11/linear-rolls-bell-curves-or-dice-pools-the-best-rng-distribution/
That was really interesting! I'm honestly a little shocked by that first graph.
Glad you liked it! I've never met anyone who knew the 3d6/d10 thing.
It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out. First which systems the shows go with them which systems hold the audience's attention.
Both MCDM and Daggerheart look more interesting to watch than 5e from what little I've seen, but then there have been hundreds of more interesting games out there for the previous ten years too and that didn't stop everyone watching 5e AP.
Does anything actually matter if only Daggerheart has Critical Role?
Both MCDM and Daggerheart look more interesting to watch than 5e from what little I've seen, but then there have been hundreds of more interesting games out there for the previous ten years too and that didn't stop everyone watching 5e AP.
Does anything actually matter if only Daggerheart has Critical Role?
With the best will in the world, 5e's dominance of the AP market has fucking nothing to do with the quality of the system and everything to do with brand dominance.
There's an AP podcast that I listen to on occasion that's run by some guy I used to go to university with. They did an episode using the Alien rules that I listened to a while ago and it was really interesting seeing them explore a space beyond.
DH being the CR system of choice seems like it might actually be able to put a dent into it. The system (what we know of it) seems interesting, lighter than 5E and I would be staggered if campaign 4 isn't run in it.
In addition to dice, Daggerheart’s card system makes it easy to get started and satisfying to grow your abilities by bringing your characters’ background and capabilities to your fingertips.
I'm always a bit wary when RPGs start introducing cards to proceedings.
That sound you hear is the arse falling out of the D&D actual play market.
As for the Actual Play market, I'm not sure how well it's gonna go for smaller outfits to shift away from 5e. It's fine for Critical Role and the McElroys I'm sure – they have as many, if not more, people following them for the cast as for the mechanics, but they also don't have to worry about discoverability. How many startup podcasts only grow an audience because they showed up in a search for "D&D"?
(A friend of mine ran RPG streams on Twitch and used to get complaints when he was playing a different system but using the "D&D" tag, and although I'd guess podcasts are less likely to experience false advertising accusations; not having a built-in chat helps, I imagine, but the drop-off rate could be quite high.)
While big, cult-of-personality APs are undoubtedly responsible in part for D&D's uptake among its audience, I'd also wager that a lot of the appeal of these things is watching a campaign that could happen at your table, using the same rules you're familiar with.
I think if the D&D AP market was going to start jumping ship, it would have done it a year ago with all the OGL stuff. There have been plenty of new RPGs - many with bigger, more recognisable names or IPs attached than Critical Role - and there isn't anything like the same volume of AP content for Alien, or The One Ring, or Avatar Legends, or Dune, or Star Trek Adventures, or Star Wars, or…
Critical Role brought a lot of people to 5e, but it's not solely responsible for its success by a long shot. And in a market where you're trying to stand out, just following CR onto their thing might just look like bandwagon-chasing.
My prediction (for what it's worth) is that Daggerheart is going to have a huge launch, but a short tail, as CR fans leap onto it, then slowly drift back to the game they've spent five years and hundreds of dollars on.
Here's a sentence I never expected to read, let alone write: NASA has released a TTRPG adventure, The Lost Universe.
A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth’s timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge?
This adventure is designed for a party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters and is easily adaptable for your preferred tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system.
NASA’s first TTRPG adventure invites you to take on a classic villain (while also using and learning science skills!) as you overcome challenges and embark on an exciting quest to unlock more knowledge about our universe.
Session number 10 of Dragonbane, and our first PC death!
They'd been fighting a horde of undead attacking a tavern (a heavily reworked Road's End Inn) and two of the characters ended the previous session on 0 HP. The Mallard Mariner managed to Nat 20 (crit fail in DB) his first death roll, so was sitting on 2 failures out of the gate. The next two rounds, he succeeded the death rolls, putting him two for two, but didn't succeed at an attempt to Rally until that third round… only to get another crit fail on his final death roll and fall face-first into the swampy ground at the back of the pub. RIP, Brad Bird.
He spent the rest of the session rolling up a mad old elf mage, which will be everyone's first experience with the magic system. His stats are absolute god-tier stuff (and he rolled them in Roll20, so I know they're legit) - the dice gave him an 18 and two 17s to play with! Hopefully he won't overshadow the rest of the party too much, but he's definitely a bit of a glass cannon; 11 HP won't last long if he doesn't keep his distance from monsters…
He spent the rest of the session rolling up a mad old elf mage, which will be everyone's first experience with the magic system.
The magic in Dragonbane is… idiosyncratic. There's lots of it I like – spells taking WP to cast instead of spell slots, with WP being a recoverable resource in the middle of a fight (or even burning your health), and the flexibility to up-cast almost every spell in the game – but it's annoying to learn new spells (so far our mage hasn't managed it at all, partly because her school isn't used by any of the teacher characters in the Misty Vale).
I do think I got my head around it a little better writing up a homebrew Necromancer school for an NPC to use, but without the clear progression of, say, 5e or 13th Age's spell levels I worry casters can feel "stuck" with their starting spells for a long time.
The party already have the grimoire from the Temple of the Purple Flame, so he can start to tinker straight away; learning a new school of magic is completely brutal, though. One of the other characters nearly took Magic Talent as a new Heroic Ability, but a week of downtime for each attempt? And you only get your base chance in Int if you succeed? Side-speccing into Animism is not very viable.
I've had a merchant show up with some scrolls, though the party hasn't managed to scrounge up the gold for any of them yet (or his other wares, including a ring I'm very excited for them to get).
I haven't done much with magic items yet - are you homebrewing stuff, or working with what other players have put together? I don't feel like I quite know where to pitch that kind of thing yet.
Homebrewing, mostly – I've been looking mostly at Heroic Abilities and spells to figure out a starting point. Having "spend X WP" as a cost to trigger an item makes them potentially very powerful but at the trade-off that it might stop you doing something else later, which I really like. I have a ring of invisibility (based on my favourite crap superpower from a bad anime show) but it costs 4 WP to use per Stretch, which would eat through some characters' resources very fast.
Cloaking Ring
While wearing this ring, you can spend 4WP as an action to make yourself invisible to a single target. This effect lasts for one Stretch, until you make an attack against the target, you are hit by any attack, or you choose to end the invisibility (not an action), whichever happens first.
While invisible in this way, the target cannot make ranged attacks against you, its melee attacks against you are made with a bane, and your dodge rolls to EVADE its attacks are made with a boon. Your first attack roll against the target while invisible is made with a boon, but ends the invisibility, whether successful or not.
For spell-like effects I might make it slightly more costly or less powerful to avoid stepping on a caster's toes, but since magic item effects wouldn't generally be up-castable it's probably not as big a concern.
The open playtest docs are out for Daggerheart.
I've only skimmed it so far, but I'm not particularly excited by anything it's doing.
First impressions: I don't like the cards, there are too many metacurrencies, and overall I can't help but feel like it's designed primarily to look good on an OBS overlay.
It's a really awkward mix of narrative stuff from the likes of Fate and Blades in the Dark, with a dice mechanic that feels different for the sake of it, and all the tedious bookkeeping of 5e.
That certainly matches my impressions from the youtubelol videos I've watched.
I only took a very quick look so far - my usual foray into a new RPG system of building a dwarf cleric - and this:
different for the sake of it
seems to about sum it up. First impressions are of an over-fiddly reskin of D&D with nothing particularly interesting or different except - "look! We can sell you card decks every time we release a new class!"
EDIT: It strikes me much the same as the MCDM RPG, in fact - it's someone trying to make "their" version of D&D. In the long run, I don't think either of them will make a dent.
A large part of the problem, I suspect, is that they're going to struggle converting the D&D audience to a different-but-similar system (ask Pathfinder how that's going), but they're not doing anything different enough to get the non-D&D audience.
They'll presumably sell a lot of books to their existing fanbases, but I wouldn't bet on either making a big splash outside them.
The more I read of Daggerheart, the more I can see the scars of what they've just stitched together from other games; it's got Momentum/Threat from 2D20, terminology from PBtA, some other stuff that has a similar shape to parts of TOR2e and FF/Edge Star Wars, and they're trying to smuggle it all in under the skin of D&D.
They're definitely going to struggle to convert people, as you say - most of the people who are going to jump on this (I assume) are likely to be folks who got into D&D via Critical Role, rather than broad-taste RPG nerds who are used to trying out new systems. They'll sell an Imperial fuckton of books (and cards, lest we forget), but I don't see it having a long tail. Most folks - even the diehard Critters - I would expect to drift back to their comfy old 5e games within 6 months.
Related: Does anyone have any idea (even anecdotally) how well Candela Obscura did?
I've skimmed the intro and the character generation and it mostly reminds me of 13th Age so far. Which is to say a better organised and more focused D&D alternative. It's fine. It's definitely not exciting.
I also think that having to mark a point of Hope or Fear almost every time you roll the dice is going to get old fast.
Turns out the adventure is a faster way to understand Daggerheart.
I think they will regret that they made the generation of Hope and Fear entirely random when Hope and Fear are the points which drive so much of this game.
I think the D&D crowd will not like how few options it has. There are so many classes and subclasses and ancestries in 5e now and 5e players love their pick&mix character builds. Daggerheart PCs are all going to look very similar. 13th Age is the same, it's the downside of making a simpler but still well-defined RPG, so I do get why they did it, I just don't thing the 5e crowd will like it.
I'll be curious to see how the damage system is received. I can see the sense in it from a pacing perspective but I wonder it people will find it unsatisfying as it soaks up damage rolls as turns them into very similar results.
There is nothing about this game which excites me.
As for Candela Obscura, I don't think anyone cares. It's Blades in the Dark with no threat. I think anyone who might have liked it already has Vaesen or Blades.
Yeah, I did get very Vaesen vibes of what I read about it.
So I got the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle starter set today, we are going to try and have a go during Easter.
As someone who has never played this before. What else might I need or what advice would you give me before we start?
Are you running it, or a player?
If you're running it, don't worry about making the "wrong" call. Good DMing is largely vibes-based, in my experience, and it's usually better to do what seems like the most fun or interesting choice. Also, don't call for a roll if you don't have to, or if failure isn't interesting. If there's a reasonable chance a PC knows something, for example, just give them the info instead of rolling History to see if they remember.
If you are GMing and new to the system you might want to run through a simple combat yourself before you actually start. I'm sure it'll mostly be pretty familiar from videogames though.
Yeah GM-ing it. My missus and kid are going to be the players.
I have found the new players vid on YT that is actually really good, sounds daft but I hadn't considered making my own notes etc
Yes, I'd definitely recommend making your own notes, to highlight what you think you'll need or is particularly important to remember. And don't be afraid to change parts of the adventure to react to things your players do - or incorporate your own ideas if you think they're better. My favourite published adventure is Curse of Strahd, and I've still made massive alterations to it.
Especially if you have a party of just 2, don't be afraid to pull punches sometimes. I don't mean fudge rolls (necessarily), but monsters don't always have to be mindlessly brutal. A lot of prewritten adventures have (or assume) fights to the death, but I often have enemies flee or surrender if things are going badly for them, unless there's a reason for them to be particularly zealous. This can give good narrative/RP, too - do the party let the fleeing goblins escape? If they do, how might that affect the next group of goblins they fight? If a cultist surrenders, can you trust the information he gives you?
One piece of advice I've heard when running for very new players is to not let monsters crit before the party reaches level 3. Low-level D&D can be very swing-y, and a crit can easily one-shot a level 1 character.
Is there a good online store for figures and maps? Think that would help the little one.
For maps, unless it's a big set piece that needs a lot of detail, a decent sized whiteboard (A3 is good, but you can make do with A4 if you don't mind redrawing stuff) is fine. I went through a period of taking ages doing up maps in DungeonDraft, but I found it makes me less likely to describe things if there's a really detailed map, which leads to forgetting to call out important things.
Lego figures make good player character minis, plus they're customizable. Again, unless it's an important boss monster or something, I tended to just mark NPC positions with pretty basic circular tokens.
Or you can print or draw your own images, and use something like these: https://amzn.eu/d/ikdxdGA
It's Conpulsion this weekend in Edinburgh. I forget if anyone is near enough to make the trip these days. I'll be running a couple of games and holding a panel about weird/old/underappreciated RPGs
Brendan Lee Mulligan has been vicariously causing controversy over on Twitter after someone posted his opinion that D&D isn't a combat game and he doesn't want detailed rules for stuff outside of combat.
A large contingent of roleplayers-on-twitter seem to have taken this personally and have been explaining the many ways that this is clearly wrong and if it isn't wrong it surely only applies in Brendan's specific situation because he and his players are all professional improvs. In their opinion, I'm sure.
My friend Sam Sorensen seems to have spent all of yesterday discussing/arguing with all of the storygame/narrativeRPG side of Twitter. Partly in support of his friend who posted Brendan's thoughts with no inkling of the attention it would attract, but also to share his theory that RPGs are not games. I have found his argument persuasive and mind-blowing.
By the Suitsian definition games are activities we choose to do which have a goal and rules which make completing that goal inefficient. So like, you choose to play golf, the goal is to get the ball in the hole in as few hits as possible, and the limitations are that you have to start far away and use these sticks to hit the ball.
From golf to football to chess to Warhammer to Gears of War this definition fits. It explains why people pay and what games are. But I can't apply it to RPGs. Sam tells me this is because RPGs don't come with goals; players need to bring their own goals.
This is going long… I'm moving to my laptop.
Wasn't the Suitsian argument part of that Root RPG video you posted a while back?
I'm confused by the logic behind "D&D isn't a combat game, but only needs rules for combat"? If the only rules are for combat, then it is, by definition, a combat game, and the RP side is effectively homebrew.
I think I agree with the rest, though; I don't really want crunchy rules for non-combat stuff, either. As much as I like The One Ring, for example, the mechanics for Councils seem unwieldy and overly intricate, turning "ask for help from a major NPC" into an extended skill challenge where the dice are more important than any arguments the players might make. And if you compensate for that by altering the difficulty/target number/DC based on what the players say, then you may as well just jettison the dice and vibe it out anyway.
Have you ever heard of Frame Theory? RPGs exist in three simultaneous states.
The table (Primary/exogenous) - this is the players, rules are things like "Tidy up spilled drinks. Bring dice we can read."
The system (Game/endogenous) - The stuff in the rulebooks. To hit rolls, skill checks.
The fiction (Fictional/diegetic) - The shared hallucination.
None of that should be controversial, but what Sam made me realise is that all the things which I don't enjoy about more "narrative" RPG systems are when rules from the system level overrule the fiction level. Stuff like Fate points or burning your stats in Cypher RPGs. Clocks in Blades or the Doom pool in Marvel Cortex.
This fits with the generally accepted academic definition of RPG, which states that players can only influence the fiction through their PCs. As soon as I am shuffling points around or considering clocks instead of threats I've lost my character's point of view, I am no longer roleplaying.
So I'm convinced. RPGs are not games and storygames are not RPGs.
The real epiphany though was when I realised that you can play games you bring yourself within the RPG sandbox. "Lets steal a Star Destroyer" is a great goal for a game within any Star Wars RPG, but it's a goal that the players&/GM set for themselves, likely in the fiction, but it could also have been at the table level. If it's in the rulebook at best it's a suggestion.
I'm still thinking it all through, but it feels like a genuinely useful way to approach WTF we are all doing at the table.
@Ninchilla D&D chooses to define how combat works and leaves everything else fairly vague. This doesn't actually say anything about how you are going to use the rules at your table. You can run a political game, you can run a dance contest, you can run a combat arena dungeon. Only one of those games is "about combat".
This is because D&D isn't a game, it's a toolbox. the game is what you make at your table. If you choose to run a combat game with D&D then you have a lot of tools. If you choose to run a political game then you don't have many.
Some people would argue that that means D&D expects you to run a combat game, others would say that it just means that since people can die in combat those rules need to be more defined, more fair. I don't think it really matters what Wizards expect you to do with it, the decisions you make at the table overrule any intent of the designers.
I feel like skill checks in social encounters/RP are mostly about giving the GM an excuse to say "no".
But it also depends on the game – with something like Blades in the Dark's rules for position/effect, which can be adjusted based on narrative/RP situations, having a player roll Consort has a much broader range of outcomes than the (traditionally viewed as) binary success/fail of a Charisma check in D&D, and more importantly that's a known element that the player can use to decide their approach to a situation.
Maybe your contact is only able to provide Limited information regardless of the strength of your arguments, but they're trusted so you're in a Controlled position that makes "failure" less of a setback. Or you can try to Command that guard, which would have a Great effect but is a Risky or even Desperate option. Plus you can take a Devil's Bargain, where you accept a known negative consequence for an additional die, making your current situation easier but your longer-term situation more difficult.
And more importantly, that narrative positioning and effect ruleset works equally well for any kind of opposed action, whether that's social or combat, and even for multiple degrees of opposition.
Which I think is maybe where something like D&D – or Dragonbane, which is arguably even less flexible with its lack of adjustable DCs – struggles, because rules as written, or at least as commonly understood, there isn't the same room for degrees of success or variety of opposition.
The thing is, everything you just listed wrt Blades can happen in every other RPG, just as part of the fiction.
When someone considers jumping from one roof to another in a city chase, defining how wide the gap is and how long the drop is, is setting position and effect. When you try to convince your contact to help you with some sensitive information and the GM says "He's still wary after you got caught last time," that's equivalent to limited effect.
Position & Effect isn't anything new. People have always had discussions about what a roll is likely to achieve and how bad it will be if you fail. The innovation with Blades is that it called it out, it's a good example of naming something which people were already doing without realising. What I don't like about Blades' version is that it only has three setting on each axis, RPGs can be far more analogue than that.
The same is true for different approaches. Even 5e has Persuade, Intimidate and Deceive.
I don't think it really matters what Wizards expect you to do with it, the decisions you make at the table overrule any intent of the designers.
Absolutely this.
…rules as written, or at least as commonly understood, there isn't the same room for degrees of success or variety of opposition.
There are a handful of cases in D&D where effects have a worse outcome if you fail a DC by 5 or more - see the ghost's Horrifying Visage, for example. There are also places in some adventures where multiple DCs are listed for, say, a Perception check, with more info provided for meeting the higher DCs. It's not widely used, though, so I agree that the game leads players (and DMs) to presume a binary outcome to any roll, even if that doesn't have to be the case.
Have you ever heard of Frame Theory?
This whole post is a case of that thing where it's putting into words what I already kind of felt but never articulated.
It's Conpulsion this weekend in Edinburgh. I forget if anyone is near enough to make the trip these days. I'll be running a couple of games and holding a panel about weird/old/underappreciated RPGs
I am gonna be there on Saturday hooray.
