Friday, June 9, 2023

Castles & Crusades: Dark Fantasy?

One of my favorite lines when GM-ing Cypher System is, "It's all flavor!" Do you want a comedy game? You don't need humorous rules; you just enforce the flavor of humor through the storytelling, GM intrusions, and other non-mechanical aspects of the game.

Do you want horror? Same rules; just make horror the feeling and use your rulings to enforce a horror flavor. Pulp? Same thing. Comic book? Same method. Hard science fiction? Same exact thing. A gritty post-apocalyptic game? Same thing.

It is all flavor.

This is one of those things to remember whenever someone tries to sell you "a new game" that does horror better, old-school better, pulp action better, gritty better, or any other buzzword. Your current game does it fine. 

Except if you are playing 5E, since that trends towards overpowered builds and superheroic fantasy in the spirit of an MMO. I really have to make that caveat since 5E puts a lot of assumptions on the table regarding resting, resource recovery, and multiclass build optimization that break many of the above genres.

If you are playing dark fantasy, and your mind is on the next one-level dip so you can optimize your character build and DPS, you are not playing anything other than 5E. If you are taking short rests to magically recover from grievous wounds, you are not playing dark fantasy; you are playing 5E.

There are many games I could easily make a few flavor changes and have a great dark fantasy game. With 5E, I need to return to the SRD and start doing significant operations and rules overhauls to get the concept to work correctly. The base underlying dicing and numerical systems will work, but you need to throw out all the classes, spells, feats, and resource replenishment rules to get what you want the way you want it. At that point, a new game is easier to learn than 5E is easier to unlearn.

I get the same feeling when I try to use any superhero game to play fantasy.

5E is a superhero game.

The saying "everything is flavor" applies better if the game has a neutral base. GURPS, Cypher System, Savage Worlds, and any other generic game fit the idea perfectly - the rules have a very generic flavor, and they do not assume a superheroic power level, so you must bring everything to the table. And since the power levels are more baseline human, the recovery times are more in line with reality, with tweaks to lethality available; you can tweak the dials and make the system work for anything.

Flavor? You need to add that. This is one of the nice things about generic rule systems; you can tweak and flavor them to your heart's content.

With Castles & Crusades, I see how you can play this as a dark fantasy game. Throw an insanity, fear, and corruption system on there (all ability save-based, with CL on the strength of hazard), along with a spell failure/corruption/divine anger chance (even just a crit fail on a natural one) and you have it. The rules are a toolbox and a starting point; it is your game to mod.

One of the best parts about this system is no new spells or systems to learn. I love the Zweihander game, but it isn't the "dark fantasy plus dungeon" game I want for a particular game world I am working on. I must mod that game's spell lists to make healing and recovery easier. I could still make it happen, and the professions there are perfect, but again, the rules matter less than flavor and getting to the desired result faster.

That is not so easy to mod in with 5E, and many rules and assumptions are made that fight you. Some of the better dark fantasy versions of 5E (Low Fantasy Gaming) ended up rewriting the game rules entirely to get the correct result and feel.

No comments:

Post a Comment