Zendikar as an RPG Setting
On how a setting inspired by D&D wouldn't actually work in the latest D&D edition.
(Tags: roleplaying-games)
The worst thing to come out of WotC owning both the biggest Trading Card Game on the market and the biggest Tabletop RPG on the shelves is the fact that in an effort at cross promoting, there now is a bunch of official D&D sourcebooks adapting settings from Magic the Gathering that have nothing to do with D&D and that would be best served by other systems, in the form of "Plane Shift", a bunch of supplements each focusing on a different Magic the Gathering plane.
What’s wrong with Plane Shift itself?
Let’s start from the fact that these are NOT, and I repeat, NOT meant to be a way to fulfill the fantasy at the basis of MtG itself – you’re NOT meant to play a Planeswalker through these supplements. They are supplements to play a campaign or short adventure on MtG planes without any interference from the main MtG plot and no signs of what makes Magic the Gathering what it is.
On the mechanics side, not even basic hacks that have been commonplace in the “Playing MtG in D&D” homebrew scene like using colour as alignment are introduced, presumably to guarantee compatibility with everything else WotC publishes, as if people buying a book should mean they get to use all of its content at every occasion without selection for mechanical or thematic reasons.
I’ll avoid talking at length about the fact that the Vancian magic system makes no sense for MtG, for we already established that these supplements are meant to play characters from the plane itself and not planeswalkers, and I also don’t believe mechanics necessarily need to ever perfectly simulate what happens in the fiction.
What’s wrong with Plane Shift: Zendikar?
This one is interesting. First of all, Zendikar was pitched as the “Adventure Plane” back in the days of the first Zendikar block, and was meant to be inspired exactly by the kind of fantasy experience that D&D (and other “Dungeon Fantasy” RPGs) delivered at the time. The kick was, obviously, the introduction of Cosmic Horror elements in the form of the reawakening of the lovecraftian creatures known as the Eldrazi and the ensuing battle against them led by powerful planeswalkers.
So, what’s wrong with this one? In principle, nothing. This looks like exactly the kind of story you’d want to tell with D&D, a world of adventure filled with terrible monsters and unknowable enemies. Except… it’s not.
You see, according to 5e’s own core rulebook, the game relies on three pillars: combat, social interaction, and exploration. It covers combat extensively, and social interaction can be easily reduced to freeform improvisation with occasional usage of the Skill system, but exploration has zero mechanical support. There’s no mechanics relating to discovery, no mechanical incentives to discover stuff. In a sense, if you’re looking for a game based around exploration with occasional combat and not much formalized social interaction, you’re almost better off playing with no “system” at all and resolving conflicts with compared d6 rolls. And, guess what, Zendikar is a setting meant for exploration with occasional combat and not much formalized social interaction.
In a sense, this is actually one of those situations where 5e streamlined the core experience out of itself. In a ploy to simplify rules and remove formalized procedures to make the game easier to grok, they ended up creating a system that relies very much on rules and game structures to deliver its core experience, but also has no way to model what it claims is a core part of the experience through those same rules.There’s effectively no difference between using 5e or any other non-exploration-focused system to play a Zendikar campaign.
Does this make D&D 5e completely useless for playing Zendikar campaigns?
No, it doesn’t. At least, not necessarily.
You can play campaigns that revolve around fighting the Eldrazi, or focused on the more combat side by doing invidual, mapped-out dungeon crawls. But the core premise of Zendikar is NOT “uberpowerful denizens of the plane defeating the Eldrazi”, it’s “Exploring strange landscapes and discovering artifacts and technology, while avoiding the dangers of both the environment and the Eldrazi”, and at this, D&D fails spectacularly, by virtue of being a “proactive” system where the main narrative revolves around “punching” any and all problems that may arise.
What systems would’ve actually delivered the experience Zendikar goes for?
The first to come to one’s mind is Monte Cook Games' Cypher System: it has a mechanical incentive for discovery and exploration, and its flagship product, Numenera, revolves exactly around “Exploring strange landscapes and discovering artifacts and technology, while avoiding the dangers of the environment” – but it’s clearly not the only valid option. Dungeon World, with its "Play to find out what happens" approach, the narrative-focused mechanics typical of PbtA, and its low-prep, high-improvisation mindset, is also a good candidate for modeling the world of discovery and exploration of Zendikar while still remaining attached to the "Dungeon Fantasy" aesthetics and narratives Zendikar itself is inspired from.
For campaigns that want to focus more on the "dungeoneering in a deadly world", it seems weird to not opt for a retroclone like Swords and Wizardry, or even just outright using older editions of the game that are meant to focus on exploration and dungeon crawling.