It's not always about what mechanics a game has. Sometimes, it's about what mechanics a game doesn't have.

I just described just about all of them; you tell me.

Yes. It's not about "hey, D&D has all of those features".

Great, but D&D has a magic system, a combat system, HP, an enormous skill system, feats, and all this other stuff that doesn't matter and gets in the way. It has a social skill system that isn't productive for conjuring the finely-tuned atmosphere Cthulhu Dark leads to.

but I didnt hear any mechanic except the sanity one, and DnD HAS that. so.. what else?

if i take what you said

we could start a DnD campaign right now

i could give you my name, and what i do

You're kinda missing everything Magician and I are saying.

use the sanity score

You know all that other stuff D&D has? It's not useful and gets in the way of this story.

ignoring something doesnt really require any effort though

Even the remainders aren't useful for our purposes, and need changing.

why use another system entirely?

@Nemenia Have you ever used another system?

outside of DnD, pathfinder and Mutants and Mastermidns

if pathfinder counts

Why did you play Mutants and Masterminds?

@Nemenia You can try and play Risk on a chess board. But it may not be a good fit.

it covers superpowers, which DnD has nothing like

We play different games because different games are tuned for different experiences.

D&D 4e was tuned for kick-ass heroic fantasy, unplug all the stops.

Cthulhu Dark is tuned for a feeling of hopelessness and despair in the face of insurmountable opposition.

Dogs in the Vineyard is tuned to have you explore deep, unpleasant parts of your own psyche and confront unpleasant questions.

but HOW does it do that

im not understanding your explanations

what, definitely, makes them different

definitively*

Fate is tuned to have you play competent, proactive people leading dramatic lives, who fail regularly on the way to success, and for whom each failure contains the seeds of that future success.

like fate

fate is a great example

@Nemenia The combination of mechanics and lack thereof all contribute to that different experience.

you have the fate die

the invoke system that happens upon failures and successes

the new skill checks related to different sections and the create-your-own resources

i see the DIFFERENCE

You can say "but I have a damage tracking mechanic, and I have a dice rolling mechanic and stat system in D&D, and now we have Inspiration too, why do I need Fate" - great, but the exact way each of those mechanics was designed in D&D, and what other mechanics are present or aren't present, leads towards an enormously different product.

but they work differently

so how do they work in Cthulu Dark

Mechanics of a game (rules) create Dynamics (how rules are applied) create Aesthetics (how game is played). If you have detailed Mechanics for fighting, you will have players engage in them frequently, creating the Dynamics of solving issues by fighting, creating the Aesthetics of murderhobos.

i have characters in my campaign that barely ever fight

but they're still enjoying themselves

(summary of the MDA framework of game design).

@Nemenia The combination of Cthulhu Dark's mechanics, the lack of ones which aren't there, and their place in the context of the broader (tiny) system creates that particular experience. It's extremely elegant, and it's the kind of thing you have to experience to see the difference. I'm not going to be able to explain to you WHY different arrangements mechanics produce different experiences, they just do, and it's because they are designed and chosen for those experiences.

@Nemenia I will posit that they would enjoy themselves much more in a different system, perhaps Fate.

alright so

think about it like htis

treat it like a sales pitch

if i were trying to convince my DnD friend

that they would like Fate better for their RP experience

what would i say to convince them

I'm not going to do that myself.

@Nemenia Oh. This? I've done this.

My friends were playing a campaign where the funnest parts were outside of combat. I learned about this fancy Fate thing. I told them hey, let's play this, it's pretty cool, it's really interested in non-combat stuff and in fact treats it with about the same weight as the combat stuff, and I think it'd be great for the game we're trying to play here. So they said sure, alright, and we tried Fate out.

i would need more then that to convince him. like you said. trying out new systems is hard for alot of DnDer's

And it went very shakily and, actually, rather poorly because we played Fate as if it was D&D and immediately got into a fight and focused very much on our mechanics rather than having anything like an interesting story to tell and explore, so the game wasn't great, but we came out of it realising that yeah, Fate was pretty different, and I did more research and explored it more with the people here and came back a few weeks later and approached them again and suggested we do something more.

(By contrast, BESW's played a game of Fate Core wherein they were babysitting a girl whose toys were haunted and would come alive at night-time, and a good chunk of the session just concerned bringing new furniture into the house and helping them set up an air conditioning unit. They found it pretty fun.)

lol

While we were all together one night, I suggested we talk about what kind of story we might want to tell. We decide on playing in a sort of 1600s-1700s world as part of a Hellsing-type organisation, hunting the supernatural elements of the world and keeping them secret and the dangerous parts gone.

BTW, if i dont answer, i've passed out in my chair

The thing I find the most compelling about Fate is that it makes the story matter. Think of Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride, for instance. "You killed my father, prepare to die" has no weight in D&D, no impact on the mechanics. Your character can say that, but it won't help. In Fate, that's the most important thing.

why

?

Because you turn that into an aspect. You turn everything that's important to the story into an aspect. Emotional state of characters, past events, current weather, whatever. And those are used in the mechanics.

As for Fate, here's the write-up of my impressions of the system, maybe it'll be useful to you or your friend, idk.

For my part I'm not going to try to pitch Fate to anyone or construct a marketing pitch for it.

There isn't one. Or rather, there isn't just one.

If Fate is a good system for a story my friends and I are trying to explore, I'll tell them so, and I'll tell them what makes me think that.

In my case, it didn't take much, because they recognised it.

We enjoyed D&D 4e's setting, but for all of us, combat was the least interesting part, and the rest had very little mechanical support. Combat was fun, but a bit of a slog. When we found a system that didn't care all that much about combat as a means to success, and provided enormous sweeping support for loads of other stuff we were interested in, we were immediately interested.

For me as the GM, I was also attracted to Fate's low amount of prep. D&D is something that involved a lot of pre-planning, and I was spending so much time on the prep I couldn't even let them dive into the proper campaign first. I started them on an introductory island which was kinda rushed. Fate on the other hand allows me to come up with just about anything exceptionally quickly, so prep is minimal and fast. It embraces not knowing everything, and not having everything planned out.

I can fly by the seat of my pants so well that one night, just to find out what it was like, I ran a session with no prep whatsoever. We had our setting and characters established. We sat down together, I told them to tell me what kind of story they wanted that night, and I ran it for them. We went with a story where they were hunted by some enormous beast that was supposed to be imprisoned, but they'd found its cage busted open.

It pursued them across the countryside, over a chasm, destroyed the bridge they were on, and they eventually built a log trap down the side of a hill and triggered it, killing the thing.

Aside, nowadays, I'm at a point where I could portray that pretty differently too - like the thing not dying, and also being portrayed as, perhaps, pitiable, and the harming of it regrettable. I could introduce a lot more subtleties into the mix and make it far more engaging.

And I also know that giving a thing 4 stress boxes will still make it pretty trivial to annihilate, and that in such a situation there's many different options available than saying they killed it.

(@Nemenia @Miniman Sorry for crashing the 5e party. Um, again.)

(Also that reaction earlier where I felt insulted... More or less I was busy expressing something super good about a game I really like, and got a response which just wholly shot me down and dismissed everything I was trying to share. Did not feel good.)

@doppelgreener Doesn't bother me in the slightest, and I do agree that it's important for people to be aware there are other options than D&D out there.

Dice for the Dice God! Games for the Game Throne!

@Miniman OK, phew.

Still, I'll do my best to catch myself next time I might be sending the discussion off topic.