"You shouldn't use DnD for narrative campaigns."

about a week ago over on polygon they released an article with Brennan Lee mulgan about his most recent live play series which is called worlds Beyond number and this article created some controversy because in it Brennan pointed out that he uses 5e to run his very narrative heavy campaign a lot of people seemed very annoyed by this why was Brennan using a system for a narrative campaign that doesn't have narrative mechanics his campaign doesn't have a whole lot of combat in it so why is he using a system that was founded in the war game scene and has lots of rules for fighting this is an ancient debate going back decades called does system matter and it revolves around how much does the rule system of your game affect the experience of gameplay is it absolutely critical to pick the perfect rule system for what you want to accomplish or is it not really a big deal now for my part I think it's very clear the system does matter at least to some degree and I think most people would agree with me on that point I did a recent PLL over on uh YouTube and found that only 4% of people strongly disagree with the concept that system matters I mean everyone has their preferred system and why would you have a preferred system if it didn't make any difference so for me the real question is not whether a system matters but how much it matters and there's really a bunch of different factors that are going to feed into what a RPG session is like and a big part of that is of course the players if you have a really good group of players then that's going to help overcome any significant problems you have with a system and also if you have a really terrible group of people then a great system system is not going to help you there's also the content of the adventure itself is it a railroad where you have very little impact on what happens or is it a rich open scenario with lots of interactivity ises it full of creative ideas you've never seen before or is it a retread of things you've seen a million times in my view the people and the adventure are the most important factors of course if you're playing with a system that you don't like that's going to be a pain but generally speaking a bad adventure or a bad group is going to have a larger impact on my enjoyment but let's get back to brenen for a moment because his explanation for why he wants to use 5e to run his narrative campaign is really interesting he says calling D and D a combat oriented game would be sort of like looking at a stove and being like this has nothing to do with food you can't eat metal clearly this contraption is for moving gas around and having a clock on it if it was about food there would be some food here what you should get is a machine that is either made of food or has food in it I'm going to bring the food the food is my favorite part people say that because D and D has so many combat mechanics you are destined to tell combat stories I fundamentally disagree combat is the part I am least interested in simulating through improvisational storytelling so I need a game to do that for me while I take care of emotions relationships character progression because that stuff is intuitive and I understand it well I don't intuitively understand how an arrow moves through a fictional airspace Brennan is making a very interesting argument here something that is often forgotten about in discussions of mechanics rather than the the rules of a game being what the game is about by default there's an argument to be made that rules are in fact the opposite or at least they can be the opposite they can be what the game is not about before we dig into that though a quick shout out to today's sponsor this video is sponsored by surviving strange Holo a campaign setting and supplement for 5e currently in its last two days on Kickstarter surviving strange Holo is packed with Gorgeous hand painted watercolors by Emily hair and draws inspiration from works like Labyrinth The Dark Crystal and The Last Unicorn it even has writing contributions from Dale Kingsmill and Ed Greenwood creator of the Forgotten Realms beyond the setting you also get new subclasses and spells a bester with detailed ecologies and lots more check them out using the link in the description so how can the rules or the mechanisms of a game be what it is not about to answer that let's turn it over to Luke gearing over on his blog where he talks about mechanisms as abstractions mechanisms abstract the thing that they describe or simulate this can be done to speed up play or to make something complex more easily grasped the number of factors that go into a fight are too many to simulate or describe so we abstract buying many individual items takes time which isn't always going to be fun so we abstract abstraction requires the loss of detail the things you don't abstract are the meat of the game this is why games aren't about what their mechanisms are about or if you insist they don't have to be leaving the gap for something to be approached in more detail and Nuance gives gives that thing more Primacy this is essentially what Brennan is saying in the polygon article D and has detailed rules for combat and that's great for him because he doesn't want to have to think about combat while running the game what he does want the game to be about is emotional stories and character development because he has an instinctive knack for how to do that and he does not want rules and Mechanics for that in the game because that would actually hamper him another great example of this principle in practice is in the sci-fi horror Survival game Mothership now in this game which I've played several times you often find yourself crawling through some horrible space station hallway being pursued by an awful monster now you would think it would be a no-brainer to include stealth mechanics in a game like this it's a survival horror game however the Creator Shan McCoy has intentionally removed that aspect from the rules in order to give it more prominence he says for my part a big thing that we didn't design for in Mothership was stealth mechanics but the game is also about running and hiding we don't have rules for fleeing either here's why I love stealth mechanics MGS is one of my favorite games I also play Thief combat is punishing a Mothership hiding is smart why don't we have stealth mechanics because we wanted the most conversation around that part of the game what I mean is that it was the one part of the game I didn't want you to be able to skip over with a role I wanted this moment I want to hide uh okay where are you hiding uh what's what's around me gear Locker surgical bed ventilation shaft oh no it's coming okay the lockers okay you won't fit in with your vac suit on do you want to take it off no I need the armor the ventilation shaft all right you'll have to unscrew it is there time you can if you make a speed check no I'm hiding under the bed hiding is important so important that I want all that tension all those question and answer sessions that make these games so fun for me think about where you're hiding no my stealth is good so I find a place really think all the best stealth games do this they have Mechanics for whether guards spot you and how much Shadow will hide you but you have to make decisions not numerical ones generally does that look dark enough are they going to Walk This Way removing those mechanics from the game forced wardens to come up with their own mechanics that work for their table always great even if they add a stealth roll back in or have a conversation about one of my favorite parts of the game where are you going to hide so when you're thinking about the rule system of a game you have to consider not just what rules are there but also what rules aren't there and of the rules that are there you have to consider is this a rule that's there to skip over the boring parts of the game or is this rule intended to be fun to interact with it's simply not good enough to say this game has rules for X therefore it's about X or this game does not have rules for y therefore it's not about y rules can be toys to play with but they can just as easily be the walls or boundaries that shape the space within which gameplay happens what Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker called the fruitful void in my estimation a game like DND D 4E is a game about combat it has that combat grid it has hundreds of combat Feats and using all of your Feats and abilities at the right time and in the right combination is the thing that's supposed to be fun that's where the juice is on the other end of the spectrum you have something like original DND where the combat is so abstracted that it really feels like it's there just to kind of get things out of the way as cleanly and as quickly as possible or another way of looking at Old School D and D combat rules is that they are almost a punishment for playing the game wrong they're a kind of teaching tool you want to run into combat with a bunch of goblins and hacker them with your sword that's fine but you could be easily injured or you might even die and we'll roll a couple dice to see what happens so you don't really have control over it it's up to chance or you could take another tech and try and avoid the rules entirely work around the rules and find a way to overcome or bypass these goblins without ever having to pick up a do it's going to be a lot safer for your character you'll probably live and you'll be more successful over the long run when it comes down to it I think that Brennan's position makes sense he knows what he wants out of a game and he is using a system to help him do it he's not saying that system doesn't matter he's saying that it does because 5 has voids where he wants those voids to be and it has mechanics to help him cover his weaknesses if you want to say that a narrative set of rules would work better for him then you'd have to make the claim that its rules would serve his purposes better than the very sophisticated and finely honed set of improv rules that he has running in his head at all times he's a professional improv actor this is what he does and ultimately only he can be the judge of that well that's my take on the whole does system matter debate hope you found it interesting or at least slightly helpful if you want to help support the channel remember to subscribe to this YouTube channel and check out the newsletter and the patreon for questing Beast as well thanks for watching Everybody I'll see you next time

Channel: Questing Beast

Views: 174,701

Keywords: questing beast, d&d, d&d 5e, d&d book review, d&d books, dnd, dnd 5e, dnd adventure, dnd book review, dnd module, dungeons & dragons, dungeons and dragons, old school d&d, old school dnd, osr, osr book review, osr book reviews, osr d&d, osr d&d review, osr dnd, osr dnd review, osr review, osr rpg, old school rennaissance, old school revival, old school rules

Id: 7UIPeQ6G6hI

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024