Barista Roleplay

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

The colossal irony in D&D pushing "Barista Roleplay" as social D&D roleplay is that so many other games do this much better. In GURPS, I can have a barista skill and specialize in making coffee foam art. I could do baking, specializing in artisan pastries, or even gluten-free cooking. The social skills are outstanding, and the personality quirks, advantages, and disadvantages put D&D to shame regarding roleplay support in character creation.

If I wanted to do a fantasy barista campaign where we entered cooking competitions, pleased demanding customers with specific tastes, hunted for rare ingredients, and did 'light adventure' on the side - D&D would be my absolute last game of choice to do this with.

I don't have a problem with Barista roleplay. My games have been full of strange, noncombat, skill-focused challenges. The problem I have is pretending that D&D supports this play style.

D&D, and any leveled system, assumes a bloodthirsty power curve that ever increases power, ramping up combat power with every level, and it does absolutely nothing in supporting barista roleplay. The game forces combat on you like an MMO and keeps ratcheting up the power level of fights to 'keep death and violence interesting.'

In GURPS, you can play a "level one" game where combat power never increases and spend 500 to 1000 points on characters, making them the world's best baristas and god-like coffee shop owners. All my spells can be coffee-shop-focused. I don't have to spend one point buying any killing power.

My 500-point GURPS fantasy baristas will school level-20 D&D baristas like Gordon Ramsey of 20 cups of coffee. Want a castable fantasy scroll written on your coffee foam? Good luck with that; all you know how to do is fight the gods.

In this coffee shop, we are the gods.

I get what they were trying to do in those social adventures where characters played college students and baristas; the design team was trying to make non-combat adventure alternatives for the game. This is a laudable goal, but D&D is entirely unsuited for that type of play.

We quit D&D in the late 1980s because it was "just a game about killing and looting things."

It hasn't really changed.

We got bored with it then.

And One D&D is doubling down on the concept.

Note 'skill support' is not roleplay; you can roleplay anything you want and pretend the game has skills and systems to cover these situations - and that is another thing the Wizards design team does: uses roleplay to cover up the fact the game has very little for rules support for non-combat activities. This is why they made 'tool proficiencies' - to cover up for the fact the game doesn't have a comprehensive skill system, so one character could take 'coffee machine' and another could take 'mop and bucket.'

But tool proficiencies aren't GURPS skills; they are one-time +2 toggles. You can't specialize. You can never improve. There is no way to have a 22-minus skill in 'milk foam art' where you can take a -8 penalty for trying to recreate the roof of the Sistine Chapel on milk foam and impress a harsh gnome art critic who hates your shop and was forced to come in because it was raining.

You could use specialty art history skills to remember fine details that make the piece perfect. You could do a cooking artistry skill roll to prepare the saucer with the ideal display of biscotti and artful white-chocolate garnish. Your manager could make all the deals for food and ingredients fair-trade that supports local farmers - there are skills for that in GURPS, and you could always specialize them.

D&D? The module says it is fair trade! We didn't work out the deal, but, umm...

There is a world of difference between 'a module says' and 'characters actually doing it in the game.'

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Level-based games would force you to go out into dungeons to kill things to get better at your coffee shop job. In GURPS, you can head into the field and help your fair-trade farmers with the fire beetle infestation problem, but you don't have to, nor will the game force you. Deal with it another way: head to the local university, find an entomologist and lure the beetles away to a new habitat with the food they like. Yes, we have a complete set of science skills in this game.

Or use social skills and convince other adventurers to help out. Or use magic. With hundreds of skills and types of spells, there are infinite ways of dealing with a fire beetle problem other than grabbing a sharp piece of steel and stabbing things in a cave.

In D&D, you would need an 80-dollar Kickstarter book that precisely wrote rules for that coffee shop roleplay and gave you directions. If it was ever made in the first place. GURPS supports this super-specialized style of play out of the box; you don't need to wait around for or buy other books. This book would still suffer from the 'forced combat leveling' that plagues D&D. 

Still, D&D is built off the consumerist model, so the game's design teaches you creativity is purchased and only allowed if you exchange money.

And One D&D isn't making non-violent adventure support any better, as the rules fixes are squarely focused on death and combat. The MMO-power curve. The leveling experience. Whenever Wizards tries to diversify the play experience with non-combat adventures and fun diversions, they only highlight how terrible their game is at supporting that style of play. You can roleplay anything and pretend the game supports it, yes.

A5E doesn't pretend they have rules for exploration and design support for social activities - the game has them.

But are the non-combat rules in One D&D really there?

Do the rules support creative and non-violent solutions?

Or do levels only exist to make your character a better killing machine?