Spheres of Power goes a long way towards genericizing the magic system. Spheres of Might changes the martial classes so that rather than being based on specific fictional characters like Aragorn or Conan, it's more of a skill-based system but with levels. You can read about it here: http://spheres5e.wikidot.com/

Quote from: drayakir on July 30, 2022, 10:45:54 AM
They already have that, it's called Genesys. Or GURPS. Or (as much as it pains me to admit it) Mutants and Masterminds.

But honestly, in my experience the system that we managed to successfully run:

• cyberpunk with magic
• Fallout
• Wild West with magic
• CATastrophe

is Shadowrun 4e. It's got good gunplay, it's got good magic, it's got high tech stuff, and the rules are fairly easily modifiable. Anyway, D&D is shit and nobody should play it.

> dnd bad

> suggests shadowrun

okay, you do you

Can you define what you mean by "setting agnostic" here?

D&D is more-or-less setting agnostic if your setting is: Heroic European Fantasy (or Murder-Hobo Fantasy). There's a wide range of settings possible inside of that sphere.

What D&D isn't going to do well is... Modern day settings. Futuristic settings. Any setting with gritty realism, or a niche focus on something like stealth, diplomacy, etc.

The more generic your game rules, the less it becomes a game system and the more it becomes a tabletop negotiation system (like FATE or similar things).

I think 5E is pretty setting neutral if you think of the rules as a toolkit with all options (Races, Classes, Spells, Treasure, Monsters). You remove half the options and you have one type of setting, remove the other half and you have a very different setting, use them all and you have Forgotten Realms.

Now the Coastal Wizards apparently push for all options being available in any modules and the art does provide a certain Forgotten Realms view of things but the rules as written are pretty agnostic.

Quote from: Zelen on July 31, 2022, 02:49:08 PM
Can you define what you mean by "setting agnostic" here?

D&D is more-or-less setting agnostic if your setting is: Heroic European Fantasy (or Murder-Hobo Fantasy). There's a wide range of settings possible inside of that sphere.

What D&D isn't going to do well is... Modern day settings. Futuristic settings. Any setting with gritty realism, or a niche focus on something like stealth, diplomacy, etc.

The more generic your game rules, the less it becomes a game system and the more it becomes a tabletop negotiation system (like FATE or similar things).

works with any setting as long as it fits the premise of the game, whether that be 'dungeon crawling' or 'heroic fantasy adventuring'. with current dnd people keep pretending it works for other settings than what it is made for (i saw someone use it for modern earth with no magic)

Quote from: hedgehobbit on July 30, 2022, 12:29:22 PM
That's true for the fighter, but not the paladin, thief, cleric, ranger, bard, cavalier, etc.

Cavalier, yes. Bard, perhaps. The others are fairly generic in everything except their level titles.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on August 01, 2022, 03:53:08 AM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on July 30, 2022, 12:29:22 PM
That's true for the fighter, but not the paladin, thief, cleric, ranger, bard, cavalier, etc.

Cavalier, yes. Bard, perhaps. The others are fairly generic in everything except their level titles.

Only once you've internalized D&D enough to ignored its conceits. But the cleric is largely an invention of D&D that doesn't operate like almost any priest IRL or fantasy versions of them. There might be a few historical counterparts that kinda sorta look like the D&D cleric, but they're a very specific type of warrior-priest with elements of vampire hunters lashed onto them. The stereotypical priest that could serve as a template for priests from any culture or religious tradition doesn't wear armor, have combat abilities or look like a D&D cleric at all.

Paladins are just as setting specific as cavaliers, if not more, given their Christian-like religious trappings and "Arthurian with Templar elements" feel to them. The D&D ranger is a hodgepodge of a hunter, beast master and warrior-druid, with dual-wielding (because reasons), but no ranged weapon benefits (till 3e), that sucks at all of those roles, though, at least it's closer to being truly generic than the paladin. Thieves are the only class other than fighters or wizards that are arguably truly generic, and even then they have mixed elements of cat burglars (most thief skills), tomb raiders (read languages, find/remove traps) and assassins (backstab). But those elements make the thief a more viable adventurer, so I'm happy to ignore them.

Still, not as specific as later editions of D&D, which cranked the specialized classes up to 11 (12 if I'm being specific in the case of 5e). And RE everyone saying that 5e is setting agnostic: if you can't use it out of the box without having to hack out every other class, heavily modify them or make up new ones, but the game's default setting can be played as is, that ain't setting agnostic. That's a setting-specific game that can be adapted to play other settings, just like every other setting-specific game, including Shadowrun, which was brought up sort of off topic earlier.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on August 01, 2022, 03:53:08 AM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on July 30, 2022, 12:29:22 PM
That's true for the fighter, but not the paladin, thief, cleric, ranger, bard, cavalier, etc.

Cavalier, yes. Bard, perhaps. The others are fairly generic in everything except their level titles.

I saw that the 5e Iron Kingdoms tried to turn the Fellcaller into a Bard package. There is nothing about Fellcallers that indicates spellcasting, muchless a full 9 levels of spells.

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 01, 2022, 07:27:03 AM
RE everyone saying that 5e is setting agnostic: if you can't use it out of the box without having to hack out every other class, heavily modify them or make up new ones, but the game's default setting can be played as is, that ain't setting agnostic. That's a setting-specific game that can be adapted to play other settings, just like every other setting-specific game, including Shadowrun, which was brought up sort of off topic earlier.

Yeah, fanboys say this about every setting-specific game and it really grinds my gears. They clearly don't understand the amount of work involved. Whenever a non-D&D setting gets adapted to a D&D setting, the writers always have to basically reinvent the setting to fit the D&D rules unless they go to the effort of inventing entirely new classes to support setting specific stuff... particularly magic systems.

In fact, most D&D settings don't actually take into account the effect that D&D magic would have on the setting. No, not even Scarred Lands or Eberron which were specifically created with the D&D rules in mind. Go read some D&D fanfiction written by munchkins and you'll notice that an actually smart person using the magic system quickly causes the setting to deteriorate into a weird nightmarish setting more akin to Transhuman Space or Eclipse Phase with magic than anything resembling what official D&D writers write.

D&D is basically its own genre that apes fantasy conventions but can't actually emulate anything besides itself. If you use a house rule like E6 or something than you can reasonably pretend that it evokes [insert your favorite fantasy setting] but it's not ideal compared to a system intentionally designed to emulate [insert your favorite fantasy setting]. There's also tons of 3pp that you can use to enhance the illusion, I guess.

With other setting-specific games you run into worse problems because they don't even pretend to support other settings no matter how much fanboys like to claim. They don't have alternate campaign setting books like D&D and they don't have 3pp unless you can find fan conversions via google. You're better off using GURPS or even Risus. For some genres you might be able to find games designed to emulate that genre rather than a specific setting, but these are few and far between and they're generally not going to have a supplement treadmill.

EDIT: Furthermore, "fantasy" is too vague to create a single rpg that can reasonably emulate it. There are numerous kinds of fantasy that would need specific mechanics to evoke their atmosphere.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on July 30, 2022, 12:29:22 PM

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on July 30, 2022, 09:00:53 AMThe description of "fighter" makes no mention of home culture or era.

That's true for the fighter, but not the paladin, thief, cleric, ranger, bard, cavalier, etc. And the way elves and dwarves are described presumes a certain type of fantasy, the cleric presumes a certain type of religion, alignment presumes a certain cosmology, etc. There is very little in AD&D that is generic or useful for anything other than playing in a D&D-style world.

Level limits are also flavor.

Levels are just weird. They work as a gamist convention to illustrate PC growth and make players feel accomplished for playing, but level systems don't translate well into worldbuilding. Myths, fairy tales, and pre-D&D fiction didn't worldbuild in terms of levels, so you can't retroactively apply levels to those stories and expect them to make sense. (If you don't believe me, then look at stories like Hercules, Conan, Superman, the Lord of the Rings, etc, and tell me that the character's capabilities increased wildly over time like a D&D character. In general, fictional characters capabilities stayed pretty much the same throughout their stories until around the 80s or so when DBZ and D&D taught a generation of writers that characters must go from peasant to infinity. In fact, typical power fantasy anime start out with protagonists who are already god-like and never grow or change... because showing the power progression itself is boring I guess?)

Some post-D&D stories, or "GameLit" (see below), try to abstract it and integrate levels as an in-character abstract measurement of capability similar to karate belts, e.g. using medals to indicate an adventurer's overall skill.

And some stories go straight into the weird and make levels and experience points a literal part of the setting's physics. No, not in the parodic sense you see in Order of the Stick, the writers take this completely seriously. It's endemic in D&D-inspired anime and it's common enough in fiction to earn its own genre name "LitRPG". A spin-off genre, "GameLit," is used for settings that are inspired by rpg conventions but don't literally use game rules as laws of physics.

Anyway, in my opinion the fact that monsters also level up with the PCs negates the sense of progression to a degree. You have the illusion of progression because numbers go up and new spells are learned, but since the challenges also scale with your characters then it feels like the world is more or less stagnant aside from numbers and stakes going up (DBZ is a perfect example of this in anime form). Continuously raising the stakes into infinity is a problem with a lot of fiction that desensitizes audiences. Not to mention that, supposedly, most D&D campaigns never advance beyond around 10th level anyway so the high-level content is mostly a novelty thing.

Oh, what a world.