The Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery

D&D5e’s flexibility is a marketing lie. The only people who think D&D5e is relatively flexible are people who have little to no experience with any other TTRPGs besides D&D5e (and sometimes Pathfinder). It is in fact a very specific game (as the vast majority of TTRPGs are). Its rules adjudicate high fantasy heroic warriors and wizards with swords and spells engaging in tactical battles with monsters in a high fantasy world of some kind and becoming stronger and better at battling by doing so. That’s the only kind of game D&D5e can support. This premise is of course somewhat flexible in that it can support high fantasy battles in a variety of contexts with a variety of different types of warriors and wizards and for a variety of different reasons, but as soon as the occupations of the characters in your campaign do not primarily consist of high fantasy battles and preparation for more high fantasy battles, D&D5e is no-longer supporting it. In fact, D&D5e will quickly start to hinder it, at great strain to the GM.

As you can see, D&D5e is actually quite narrow in what campaigns and/or “stories” it supports. This narrowness/specificness is not, however, what makes D&D5e a bad game. Tons of very good TTRPGs are just as narrow or even more narrow. The people who force D&D5e to “flex” despite its relative inflexibility are doing so with a great deal of unnecessary effort, particularly on the GM side of things. This effort is unnecessary because for any given campaign/adventure premise, there are likely dozens of other TTRPGs which are either laserfocused on supporting that exact premise, or something much closer to it such that it takes less effort to “flex” them into it.

Despite it being difficult and unnecessary, they keep straining themselves to bend D&D5e into shapes it was never meant to be (and holds badly) because they don’t know any better. This is where the WotC/Hasbro marketing comes in. There is this marketing tactic called a “walled garden” that basically only monopolies with money to burn can pull off. Rather than competing with your competitors to have the better product, or even just hype up your product, to attract more customers, you build an enclosed ecosystem for your customers by obscuring their view of your competitors’ products entirely. With no frame of reference for what your competitors’ products are actually like, customers will have no reason to be skeptical of anything you say or imply about your product or your competitors’.

D&D5e is actually very narrow, very poorly designed (but again, narrowness is not an element of this poor design), not simple, and not beginner-friendly at all. But WotC’s marketing machine says it is extremely flexible, well-designed, simple, and beginner-friendly. In conjunction with the walled garden, WotC’s customers hear that and think “if a ‘simple,’ ‘beginner-friendly’ TTRPG is this complicated and hard to learn (not to mention expensive), I don’t even wanna know what a complex and advanced TTRPG looks like!” This makes them scared of other TTRPGs without ever having seen them, and makes them very unwilling to step foot outside the walled garden and see for themselves. (This is also somewhat relatable to how the US government keeps US citizens perpetually afraid of foreign nations and alternative economic frameworks, and how cults and abusers keep their victims from just walking out on them.)

“D&D5e/TTRPGs can be whatever you want them to be” is a marketing slogan for WotC and Hasbro, meant to tell you that the TTRPG you pick for your campaign doesn’t matter at all, so why not just settle for the one you’ve seen marketed the most? This is how WotC and Hasbro keep D&D5e players perpetually overpaying for undercooked products or, at the very least even if they pirate all their D&D5e books, not supporting any of the competitors. This facade is propped up by the unpaid labor of hundreds of thousands of overworked GMs, who are the ones tasked by the wretched and insidious “Rule 0” with painstakingly bending D&D5e into all these different crude shapes (that another game would hold better) for the convenience of players.

That last part especially is where the cult comparison comes in. Those who do want to explore the world outside the cult and/or have seen through the lies are often trapped there still by their only relationships being within the cult. If they leave the cult, they can only do so by cutting all of their relationships and support networks off and entering the wider world with nothing. It’s a little less dramatic than that in the context of D&D5e of course, they aren’t literally losing their friends entirely, but they often are losing their gaming group, A.K.A. the big social activity they do with their friends. It is beyond count how many times I have heard someone say “I want to try out other TTRPGs, but my group only wants to do D&D5e because they think learning another game is too hard and also pointless because they think ‘TTRPGs can be whatever you want them to be’.” They try and try, but are eventually worn down until they go “Alright fine we can do a cozy farming game about reconciling with your past trauma in D&D5e. Roll Strength to pull up the carrots, I guess..” Dozens, possibly hundreds, reading this very post will be able to testify to being in this exact situation (and I urge you to do so in the tags or reblog comments).

(Also much like abuse victims and people who grew up in insular cults, many who do leave have great difficulty adjusting to the normal world, because they only know how to behave in the context of the bad situation they just left. This often manifests in TTRPGs as GMs reflexively trying to “fix” the rules of games that are actually well designed and don’t need to be fixed - or, topically, trying to squeeze “collaborative storytelling” out of games that were not meant to support such a thing, because WotC/Hasbro marketing taught them that when D&D5e doesn’t natively give you what you and your group want, it’s your fault because “a good GM could make it work.” The difficulties these maladapted behaviors result in even often lead them to giving up and returning to their bad situations.)

To summarize thus far, WotC/Hasbro marketing obscures other TTRPGs from the vast majority of TTRPG players, which allows them to imply those TTRPGs are not worth exploring by projecting the flaws of their own product onto the imagined conception of the competitors’ products. WotC/Hasbro tells players “TTRPGs are whatever you want them to be” to make their product, the design of which only supports one thing, appeal to customers who want many different things. They keep these customers they’ve lied to by encouraging GMs to do free labor contorting and rebuilding D&D5e on the fly to keep up the illusion as long as possible. People within these spaces who don’t buy into this illusion are shunned and only given the choice between continuing to prop up the lie or abandoning their social activities. People within these spaces who do buy into the illusion are liable to get very defensive-aggressive when the walls of the garden are shaken.

Part 2: “Collaborative Storytelling”

I described way up at the top of this comment that D&D5e has rules that basically only support fantasy warriors and wizards doing battles and getting stronger so they can do more battles. This is not inherently a bad thing, there are many good TTRPGs that support nothing but this same thing. (What makes D&D5e bad as a game is that it does its core premise very poorly. What makes it bad as a cultural force is how its dishonest marketing is choking and killing the industry and culture of TTRPGs.)

The other thing about D&D5e’s design that are important about this discussion is that it is s very “traditional” TTRPG, and thus very much built by the way its rules interact with each other to be a “challenge game.” A “challenge game” in this context is a game that challenges the cleverness and skill of both player and PC alike. The PC must overcome obstacles in their path through their cleverness and skill, and the player must use their cleverness and in-depth understanding of the rules to build a PC who can overcome those challenges and play them accordingly. If either is not up to the challenge, they fail, often with severe consequences to the PC. In video game terms, it is possible to get a “game over” when playing this type of game.

Where this becomes a "problem" is that challenge games are typically very, very bad at producing conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs through the default gameplay that their rules support, which is one of the main points of the original post. When people say they want/like “collaborative storytelling,” they are almost always referring to a desire for conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs.

And if this structure of game is bad at “collaborative storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story, and the point of TTRPGs as an artform is “collaborative storytelling,” then “challenge games” must be bad TTRPGs, right? Well, wrong; but that attitude is what the original post is criticizing.

They are calling a game bad because it fails to do something its rules were never written to support in the first place. D&D5e is lazily designed, but by calling it bad for failure to accomplish something that it was never built to do in the first place, they are completely writing off hundreds of much more effortfully and intentionally designed games which also fail at “collaboratively storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story because they were never meant to. This, indirectly, also only helps WotC and hurts smaller studios and designers, as well as closing the players off to experiences they might end up actually really enjoying.

The reality is “collaborative storytelling” a conventionally satisfying story with a plot and character arcs is not the only reason to play TTRPGs. Like many other artistic mediums, different TTRPGs have different experiences they are trying to present to the audience, and if the audience goes in expecting one and gets another, they will typically not enjoy the experience. It is only in TTRPGs however (due largely to the deceptive marketing described in Part 1) that there is such a pervasive acceptance of going to works within the artform expecting something they were never meant to be, and, instead of going and finding another one that actually is what you want, pushing forward stubbornly, as if trying to squeeze a novel full of twists and turns out of a math textbook.

Playing a challenge game expecting a conventionally satisfying narrative and character arcs will leave you frustrated and disappointed (unless of course the insidious “Rule 0” puts a gun to your GM’s head or brainwashes them and makes them take on the work of pulling thousands of strings behind the scenes to contort the game in real time so that that frustration never touches the players, only them). Likewise, if you play “story games” or similarly structured TTRPGs expecting a challenge, you will be frustrated and disappointed. Even if you put in the effort to "make it work," your experience with the result is significantly worsened and hindered compared to what the experience would be if you had just played a TTRPG that was built from the ground up to give that experience rather than trying to mod the game into something it's not. And here is a link to a post you (general "you," not specifically the person I am replying to, I mean anyone reading this) can click if you interpret the above passages as me saying "nothing should ever be homebrewed ever."

Part 3: I'm Kinda Just Rambling Now

I love “challenge games,” and many others do to, both for the in-the-moment thrill of them and for the unique (not usually conventionally satisfying) stories they produce as a secondary byproduct.

All TTRPGs (that I can think of) produce some kind of story as a byproduct of gameplay. Hell, most games in general do. However, just because it may produce it doesn’t mean the story is the primary purpose. It is the primary purpose of some games, but not others.

Actually I was going to go on, but I remembered I already said what I was about to say much better in a previous thread on this same post, so I am just going to link that here instead. This will explain different purposes I’m talking about.

What is Eureka For?

Eureka is for running mysteries.

Most of the tools in this book have a specific setting in mind, but we feel that the core mechanics have a very broad application. Though Eureka is written in such a way as to guide the story towards a more “noir” feel and tone, it can handle scenarios as light-hearted as “who ate the last slice of pizza?” to as grim as catching a demented serial killer before he murders his tenth victim. Sometimes, solving the mystery may even take a back seat to the investigators just trying to get out alive.

Whatever adversity protagonists could conceivably face in a modern setting can be the villain of a Eureka adventure, or even, sometimes, the hero. Though it does have its own original lore, discussed in Chapter 8, Eureka deliberately maintains a degree of setting-agnosticism to easily allow for whatever adventure someone would want to run with it.Many specific design elements are based specifically on 21st century life in the American South, but the core of the gameplay will work perfectly for essentially any adventure a party comprised entirely or mostly of normal non-superhuman people could have on the planet Earth between about 1850 and the present day.

Firstly, this is going to change who the Monster Trait characters are first and foremost. They go from.. all that shit I just said, to being the opposite of that. There is an ‘instruction manual,’ there are people in their circles who share experiences with them and who have their back. The power dynamic between them and a mundane character even within a genuine friendship is at least slightly different because they would all the more so necessarily be approaching the relationship from a position of being a monster rather than a person who happens to be a monster. Fairies are already kinda like this in default Eureka but this mod would make it the case for like most or all paranormal characters.

It would change the way monstrous investigators approach seemingly paranormal evidence in-game. It would go from “Yes I’m a vampire but that doesn’t mean I can just know this is a vampire attack - I know what my attacks look like but I’ve never really seen another vampire do it.” to “Yeah this is exactly what a vampire attack looks like when you don’t clean up after yourself like we all agreed! When we find this guy I’m going straight to the council.” In light of this I would probably alter the usage of the Blacked Out Skill to actually be a straightforward Knowledge Skill involving knowledge of paranormal society and creatures.

The Heat rules might be adapted to involve more than just mundane police, and instead start getting monster hunters on the party’s asses, more knowledgeable, organized, and possibly justified monster hunters too. Maybe it could be a separate mechanic that works almost exactly the same except called “Paranormal Heat” or something that has similar effects but only tracks actions that threaten to expose the existence of monsters to regular society. Regular Heat gets police attention, Paranormal Heat gets the attention of organized monster hunters and/or agents from the monster society trying to rein them in before they blow everyone’s cover.

There are some things I think wouldn’t change even with the masquerade setting if certain rules stayed in place. Like, well, in Eureka a Trait is not supposed to imply specific connections or relationships with certain characters or, like, let a character “know a guy” who then has to be played by the GM. That would include the vampire council. Like yes they can know the vampire council, but they would not be supposed to be able to call them up on the phone and get information about all the vampires living in this town or anything like that.

This could be an aspect of a particular adventure where the vampire council or whatever is supposed to be a group of NPCs with specific information, but that goes into, well, that.

Of course if you want to waive that rule in this ‘masquerade mod,’ go ahead, but do so at your own risk. There is a reason this is a rule in Eureka. Oh and also none of the existing adventure modules are in any way built to engage with such a setting so it would have to be a fully original adventure if you wanted any of this to matter in the context of the gameplay.

If we’re doing that, we might as well also at least partially waive the “don’t share character sheets” rule too, so that players can coordinate to like, make their paranormal characters know each other in the context of a secret paranormal society (thus necessarily knowing lots of otherwise secret information about other players’ PCs) and solve mysteries in the context of a secret paranormal society. It would probably make the most sense for them to be the same type of monster but that might depend on what exactly you consider the masquerade setting to entail.

(This also gave me some funny thoughts for various party compositions involving a single mundane character in this context. The Three Fucked Up Vampire Brides and Normal Steve. The Three Mostly Good-Natured if Mischievous Fairies and Someone For Whom This Could Be a Lot Worse.)

One more thing I don’t have time to get deeper into is that, like, certain weaknesses for the Vampire Trait may make a lot less sense without the context of being isolated monsters with no community or acceptance. The context of total rejection is pretty intrinsic to the Vampire Trait as-is. The parts I’m talking about are, like, the thing about entering homes uninvited and being repelled by holy symbols and prayer. The first one could probably be justified some other way, but the second one I’m not sure. I would be very loath to say that, like, this works because vampires are actually "abominations" even in such a setting. As a Christian myself I would not want to write anything implying that any sapient person is “unholy” or so hated by God that a holy symbol actually harms them. (And also treating holy symbols like they have literal magical power is, like, heresy/idolatry.)

And also like, TFBs just could not be part of a masquerade at all even if there was one. The vampire council would still be just as freaked out by them as anyone else.