Listening to the Eldritch Lorecast a couple weeks ago, I heard them talking about MCDM's upcoming TTRPG, which I've been intrigued by enough to throw money through my computer at the company and backed the project for my very own pdfs of the core rulebooks when they come out in like two years.
The discussion point was "Negotiations," which is this new RPG's attempt to make important - once-an-adventure - RP moments with powerful NPCs into something with a mechanical basis. The way that Colville and James Introcaso (MCDM's lead designer) described it was that this would be like bartering with a Lich for some crucial artifact or convincing a villain's ally to step back from a grand battle and hold back their own forces.
The system, as described, uses two measures - Interest and Patience. Essentially, it breaks down "how to convince this character" into a challenge where you want to pique their interest without them losing out of patience. If the patience runs out, you're SOL and best case scenario they just stop talking to you. There are ideas here like (and I may have some of the terminology wrong here) such as Focuses - things you can bring up that would make them more likely to side with you (such as if that Lich you're negotiating with has always wanted to find a path to another plane, and you've got a lead on that) - or Pitfalls, where bringing them up can have adverse effects on their attitude toward you (like, maybe you bring up the paladin brother of said Lich with whom they've had something of a falling out).
I have not tried this, and it's something that's in development. Matt Colville has been very clear that the guiding ethos of this project is "no sacred cows," identifying this as something of an issue with D&D 5E, which, as we've seen in the One D&D playtest process, has strongly erred on the side of preserving what it can, sometimes - Colville would argue - to the detriment of the game.
But I understand, as well, some of the D&D team's reluctance to get into the nitty-gritty of "mechanic-izing" things too much.
I think that RPGs, particularly tabletop RPGs, have a strong push toward the path of least resistance. I'll confess that my own Ravnica campaign initially meant to really focus a lot on the Renown system introduced in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, but I think that system ultimately became too much to keep track of in the kind of ongoing campaign I like to run, where you could certainly break things into narrative chapters but there aren't as distinct "adventures." Do we gain a renown because we did that one project with Niv-Mizzet for a single session? Do only the Izzet members get it?
Indeed, I can imagine this is why Spelljammer ran into some issues - I think most players who heard about Spelljammer coming out were looking forward to a robust space-combat system, but what we wound up getting was essentially a little text box that said "yeah, your ships can have weapons, but they're utter crap and you should just fight hand-to-hand on the decks."
This was a bit infuriating...
But also, when I've watched streams of Starfinder, which has a pretty serious starship combat system that is very much part of the core rules, I always get the impression that that's the part that doesn't quite work as well - on foot you're basically playing Pathfinder but with power armor, laser guns, and aliens, and that's a system that just kind of works.
I think one of the issues here is that there's a feedback loop - combat in D&D feels pretty good (even if Colville and Co are looking to rebuild that kind of gameplay from the ground up) and so we see the folks at WotC really focusing on that as their main emphasis in revising the game. The One D&D playtest has been primarily about refining classes, and that refinement has really focused on the combat abilities of those classes - indeed, we've even lost some flavorful or utility features like the Monk's ability to do a solo Astral Projection spell (which is, to be fair, something that probably never gets used, but is still rad as hell).
Ship-to-ship combat has its own issues - one big problem I think it has is that if the whole party is one the same ship, there's basically a binary success or fail state. On foot you might see one party member go down or even die and realize that the stakes just got higher, but if it's just the one ship, any loss is a TPK (or the party gets captured and the campaign needs to adjust a lot to account for that).
But in a broader sense, I think that it's hard to bring in a new game system to one that people already feel is working ok.
Essentially: skill checks seem to handle most non-combat moments. Indeed, some simpler RPGs are basically just skill checks, like Kids on Bikes. Blades in the Dark and its ilk have a little more strategy built into them.
Where I think D&D becomes more satisfying is its combat - I think what I find a little underwhelming in KoB is that there's not really a way to "play well." It's fine for getting a story out there and all, and I've been having fun with our game of it. But even if, ultimately, everything's relying on the dice rolling in your favor, there are moves you can pull off in D&D that are just cool and effective. In our latest session, I realized (with some help from YouTube) that I could Misty Step through my Manifest Mind as a Scribes Wizard, and was able to get away from being surrounded on all sides by a ton of Mephits who had just bloodied me. I cast a lot of Fireballs (changed to Lightning Ball thanks to being a Scribe because half the mephits were Steam Mephits) that fight, running out of 3rd level spell slots, but it felt like a reasonable strategic choice - it was basically my only AoE spell I had prepared (we were expecting to encounter giants) and the amount of damage I did on these enormous swarms was pretty huge and would have taken our martial classes way longer to chop through (one of my Lightningballs did a total of 210 damage or something).
Now, can you build an RPG system that has the tactical satisfaction of D&D combat but simulating an entirely different situation? I think it would be foolish to say no, but I do think that it hits a bit of resistance.
I also think that there's some tension between the kinds of roleplayers you encounter. My friends are largely actors or people involved in show business in one way or another, so acting out a scene between their PC and an NPC, or sometimes just between PCs, comes pretty naturally. So there's even almost a sense of awkwardness to the idea of needing rules to resolve a scene. We'll still use Charisma-based checks, but I'm a little disinclined to use the "attitude levels" that are presented in the DMG, and instead go on what feels natural and right for a character.
But that's my play group. There are definitely plenty of people out there who are not as socially adept or even just don't really feel as comfortable getting into the headspace of another character. And having clear and objective rules for how you succeed in a social encounter might be welcome.
The question, then, is how much you want to make that a core part of your game.
MCDM seems to want Negotiations to be a big, dramatic thing that is just as high-stakes as a combat encounter, and even could award Victories (a resource that fuels abilities and later converts to XP when you rest).
The question is: will this get in the way, or will it feel fun and epic?
And will players and "Directors" (their term for GMs) just play without the system?
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