Originally posted to Ko-Fi on 19 April 2024
Let’s imagine you want to run a heist in Dungeons and Dragons. What is some bits of heist media you’d like to emulate? Something like Mistborn? Or maybe Ocean’s 11? Either way, it’s easy to break the things you need down to game mechanics. You should have some big treasure, locked in a secure building, with obstacles each member of the party can interact with.
Simple, right?
As you continue to delve into the details of running this particular heist, you end up finding yourself contemplating some of the ways your players may circumvent it. First of all, you can’t really put a big treasure behind a simple locked door or vault, because someone could just cast knock and open the door. It has to be some sort of magical lock to avoid such a simple way to circumvent it. You would also consider how to handle failed Stealth checks when the party moves in and out of the bank. The current stealth rules mean that once you’re found out, you’re immediately noticed. This kind of burns all the tension built in some heist films since mistakes can be made, but the heroes still ultimately succeed. Then you imagine getting caught and how that should be a tough encounter for the party, probably unwinnable to a certain degree because you don’t really want fighting to be an option. You either successfully steal the money or you don’t.
At this point, this whole thing is a mess on top of what you already have to do to design a proper bank to ensure that the money is safe. You may search for homebrew, but that’s more stuff you have to read and buy and understand. It’s slowly dawning on you that this whole idea requires a lot more work than you imagined and you’ll either have to dedicate a bunch of time to it, or do something else this week that’s a lot easier to run.
The fundamental assumption made at the top of your endeavor was that Dungeons & Dragons could be anything you needed it to be; however, this is not the case. You can stretch and mold D&D into this heist scenario, but it’s a lot more work than building a scenario where the players beat up a beholder in a cave somewhere. You may then come to a simple conclusion, Dungeons & Dragons is a combat-focused game.
This conclusion isn’t new, no not at all, this conclusion is repeated by even large voices in the space.
“…a game less focused on fighting monsters. Which I think every RPG is less focused on fighting monsters than D&D is.” – [0:20]
“What you do vs what the system is built for are two different things. Dnd is inherently a combat focused system. The rules flex but for a game based on JA I’d still recommend a system with rules that are built to encourage science fiction space opera.” – Lin Codega
Even if you don’t trust these veterans of TTRPGs even just looking at how D&D is designed is clear enough to show that it’s mostly focused on combat. When looking at what D&D incentivizes you to do, leveling up, you got to see what provides the most experience on a consistent basis. That’s fighting monsters. When looking at the adventures that the developer sells for the system all of them have you fight monsters on a consistent basis. You’ll also notice that when you look at your character abilities, many of them have a combat use. To argue that D&D doesn’t provide at least a focus on combat as a way of resolving situations seems a little disingenuous. That said, D&D can still be a storytelling game and we can absolutely try to find ways to stretch out the mechanics of D&D while still fundamentally playing the same game.
That said, switching genres using D&D can be hard as explained above. You’ll either be trading off some of the character abilities your players receive for the sake of the narrative or you’ll have to homebrew a bunch of things so your narrative can work properly. Trying to fit D&D to all genres is the same as starting out the hobby by building out your whole world at once. Your thoughts are simply in too many places at the same time to focus on any specific part of building the world. It’s like a single person who wants to dance, sing, learn computer science, become fluent in Cantonese, and learn to fly a plane all in the span of a single year. We only have so much space and we can only dedicate so much of our time on a single subject before we are trading off the time for another subject.
What’s the solution then? Just give up and only run big dungeons full of monsters the whole time? Nay. It’s time to look at other RPGs.
Games like Traveller, Mausritter, Blades in the Dark, Root, and others have a genre focus. Each of them provides a unique experience from a traditional D&D campaign. They focus far more on exploration, roleplay, faction dynamics, and thieving. Every single one of these games is significantly less concerned about providing details for how to fight people, they are chiefly concerned with something else which means that at the expense of combat, they can more deeply explore a specific topic or idea.
This is the tradeoff you make with playing other games. You lose some of the familiarity of D&D5e and some of its codified tactical combat rules, but you ultimately end up exploring a more specific topic. If we were to run a heist, Blades in the Dark would be the system most suited for it. It has the most mechanics built around it and focuses the most on providing a gameplay experience that is most similar to the examples we talked about at the beginning. In exchange for that experience, you’ll likely be giving up a lot of the character customization and the tactical combat rules of D&D5e.
This is the truth with anything in game design, there is no one “right” decision. There is only the tradeoffs you make when you decide what your game should focus on.
Personally, I think you should pick a game which has the same focus as you do in the future.
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