D&D 5E Alternate Magic System

[RangerWickett]

So the starting idea is that there are different ways to resist mental effects - stubbornness, insight, being quick-witted, being crazy, luring the attacker into a mental trap of your own, etc.

I feel like to fully do this justice, I'd want a) some quality grappling rules for real-world combat, and b) a mental variant of grappling, but both would need to be fast to resolve. You'd want to be able to make your mindscape as mechanically complex as your character's physical capabilities, and have the rules reward being flexible and having a variety of tools for different situations. (I've never been the fan of "Sure, you have a longsword and never need to switch to anything else." But I also want to avoid, "Oh, you don't have that one weapon you put all your feats into? Well, you suck and will never hit now.")

A normal person who's never been exposed to mental/spiritual magical effects basically has no mental image of themselves; they're just an amorphous sphere in a mindscape, easy to influence. Once you've had some exposure, though, you become aware that you exist on a metaphysical plane as well, and you can start to craft your self-image there. Most people just have a self-image that's the same as their real body (e.g., The Matrix's "residual mind image"), but if you devote some character resources you might

a) have a different form (or several different forms available)
b) have unique tools there
c) be able to influence others there ("I know you're not real, so I'm just going to fling you like a ragdoll")
d) have minions in the mind (like the bodyguards in Cillian Murphy's dreams in Inception)
e) make an entire mindscape landscape of your own that you can force people into

Maybe there'd be some mechanic for where you focus your defenses for a turn; it defaults to melee AC, but maybe if you think about it you could trade your DEX bonus to AC for an INT bonus to some sort of mental defense stat.

If someone tries to charm you, that might play out as you making your initial Wisdom save, and success or failure determines whether you're affected right away, but each round thereafter the victim can try to do stuff in his mind to weasel free, and the attacker might keep concentrating on the spell to try to take control. Maybe there'd be a threshold like in wrestling -- if you have the upper hand for three rounds, that resolves that spell. Either you are fully charmed for the duration, or you break free and they need to cast a new spell to try to get you again. The mental wrestling would need to be resolved fast, though, so it doesn't get in the way of the physical stakes.

WAAAAY back in 2003, Monte Cook's Malhavoc Press released a book called Mindscapes, that had the relatively simple idea that when two psychic characters met, you'd roll a d6 to determine what sort of 'mental terrain' would manifest in their shared mindscape, and each type of terrain would favor a different ability score (and each ability score was keyed to different psionic powers). I might go for something like that, but with a teensy bit more crunch. I don't need a battle map for something that is literally Theater of the Mind, but maybe escaping a charm spell requires you to navigate a labyrinth within 3 rounds, or avoiding having your soul sucked out is a metaphysical brawl with black tentacles trying to drag you toward a pit.

So yeah, the whole thing would basically be a ground-up reworking of the magic system. Hell, maybe the whole game system, though I do mostly like the ease of resolving things in 5e, the limited modifiers to d20 rolls, and how stuff like hit dice healing works.

 

[osarusan]

I really like these ideas. You're right in that it starts sounding like a reworking of the whole game system though. I'm not sure if that defeats the purpose of making it "for 5e" though... If it relies on too many new rules, the effects start to ripple throughout the whole game, and things like monsters and environments have to get reworked too. The challenge lies in finding that middle ground, where it feels like an optional module for the system that doesn't change the overall game mechanics.

So the starting idea is that there are different ways to resist mental effects - stubbornness, insight, being quick-witted, being crazy, luring the attacker into a mental trap of your own, etc.

I feel like to fully do this justice, I'd want a) some quality grappling rules for real-world combat, and b) a mental variant of grappling, but both would need to be fast to resolve. You'd want to be able to make your mindscape as mechanically complex as your character's physical capabilities, and have the rules reward being flexible and having a variety of tools for different situations. (I've never been the fan of "Sure, you have a longsword and never need to switch to anything else." But I also want to avoid, "Oh, you don't have that one weapon you put all your feats into? Well, you suck and will never hit now.")

A normal person who's never been exposed to mental/spiritual magical effects basically has no mental image of themselves; they're just an amorphous sphere in a mindscape, easy to influence. Once you've had some exposure, though, you become aware that you exist on a metaphysical plane as well, and you can start to craft your self-image there. Most people just have a self-image that's the same as their real body (e.g., The Matrix's "residual mind image"), but if you devote some character resources you might

a) have a different form (or several different forms available)
b) have unique tools there
c) be able to influence others there ("I know you're not real, so I'm just going to fling you like a ragdoll")
d) have minions in the mind (like the bodyguards in Cillian Murphy's dreams in Inception)
e) make an entire mindscape landscape of your own that you can force people into

Maybe there'd be some mechanic for where you focus your defenses for a turn; it defaults to melee AC, but maybe if you think about it you could trade your DEX bonus to AC for an INT bonus to some sort of mental defense stat.

If someone tries to charm you, that might play out as you making your initial Wisdom save, and success or failure determines whether you're affected right away, but each round thereafter the victim can try to do stuff in his mind to weasel free, and the attacker might keep concentrating on the spell to try to take control. Maybe there'd be a threshold like in wrestling -- if you have the upper hand for three rounds, that resolves that spell. Either you are fully charmed for the duration, or you break free and they need to cast a new spell to try to get you again. The mental wrestling would need to be resolved fast, though, so it doesn't get in the way of the physical stakes.

WAAAAY back in 2003, Monte Cook's Malhavoc Press released a book called Mindscapes, that had the relatively simple idea that when two psychic characters met, you'd roll a d6 to determine what sort of 'mental terrain' would manifest in their shared mindscape, and each type of terrain would favor a different ability score (and each ability score was keyed to different psionic powers). I might go for something like that, but with a teensy bit more crunch. I don't need a battle map for something that is literally Theater of the Mind, but maybe escaping a charm spell requires you to navigate a labyrinth within 3 rounds, or avoiding having your soul sucked out is a metaphysical brawl with black tentacles trying to drag you toward a pit.

So yeah, the whole thing would basically be a ground-up reworking of the magic system. Hell, maybe the whole game system, though I do mostly like the ease of resolving things in 5e, the limited modifiers to d20 rolls, and how stuff like hit dice healing works.

I like this idea as well. The one caveat is that it opens up a bag of worms that could bog down combat as the player fishes for the right reaction. Maybe the best way to approach this would be to make those different forms of resistance tied to different spell seeds. For example, within the "charm humanoid" and "illusion humanoid" lists you could select various effects along the lines of "mind maze," "charm," "psychic domination," "puppetmaster," and things like that. Each of these spells could function as a mirror of the existing grappling system, but tied to different ability scores. For example:

mind maze - you construct a mental maze that traps the victim's psyche. You make an attack roll using intelligence (insight), and they make a defense roll using wisdom (insight). As long as you maintain concentration, they have to keep making this save until they get free.

charm - this could work the way charm works now, with a wis save or view the target as a friend (or view a friend as a foe, perhaps?)

psychic domination - you try to mentally convince the character that something is true or false. You make an charisma (deception) or (persuasion) check, and they have to make a wisdom (insight) check or believe it.

puppet master - you make an Charisma check vs their Str (athletics) check. If you win, you can control their movement that round; if they win, they can use an action to break free, or act normally. You can retry the check each round you maintain concentration.

There's a lot of possibility by just recycling/reframing the current grappling rules. You can even eliminate the need for some saving throws, or just modify it so that if they fail their save, you can continue to act upon the spell each round. That way it feels more like a lingering magical effect instead of a one-off attack. You get more drama in the combat, and since it uses the existing grapple rules with just different stats substituted, there's no new mechanic to learn, making it very easy to slip into the system.

I may be alone in the world on this, but I actually like 5e's grappling system. It removes the attack rolls and boils it down to 1 opposed check. Yes, its very vague and doesn't allow for specific moves, but so is the entire combat system. It's a vast improvement on earlier editions' grappling rules which were always overly complex and very slow to resolve in-game. Mechanically, what the above translates into is that you would just make a few different spell effects that mirror existing rules but use different opposed checks to accomplish the same things; but the MP cost of those effects might be different depending on what opposed stats you use, since not all stats are going to be fairly balanced.

I definitely like the idea of swapping out INT for DEX on your AC, even attack rolls (having a telepathic bond with your foe that lets you can predict where he will move). One thing I think you want to avoid is allowing too much on-the-fly substitution of which saves/stats to use. There's a risk not only of slowing the system down, but abusing the rules. If you force enemies to save using intelligence or charisma all the time, it becomes too easy to quickly dispatch creatures by forcing them to use the uncommon saves or only relying on your strongest stats, allowing for extreme min-maxing. I would suggest forcing these into their own secrets, or making them have specific MP costs, which forces the players to treat them as a trade off for a different effect. And I would define the parameters of each spell ability specifically instead of giving players free reign to select whatever ability scores they want.

 

[RangerWickett]

Regarding the grappling rules, the system in 5e is fine-ish, except that they clearly didn't design monsters to deal with grappling. And, I guess kinda like real-life grappling, if you don't know what you're doing you're basically powerless.

In my last 5e campaign, the 8th level party crippled a marching army led by an archmage by something we came to call Operation Bloodtalon.

• Take a Str 16 bard with training and expertise in Athletics. She casts greater invisibility on herself.
• The paladin casts bless.
• The warlock contributes fly.
• The arcane trickster provides enhance ability (strength).
• An NPC sorcerer the party defeated and befriended casts haste.
• And, as cherry on top, the party cleric casts silence on a spot just next to where they'll hide.

One part of the road to the party's village passes between a river and a steep hill. The party sets up behind the hill and hides in a rope trick. They have some archers on the other side of the river. When the column has just reached the hill, the archers holler and let loose, drawing the army's attention to the other side of the river and peeling off the handful of flying beasts they have at their command. That's the signal for the party to begin. Everyone casts their spells, and the bard swoops out, invisible, hastened, and swole. She flies over the hill (speed 120), grabs the archmage rolling (with advantage) d20+d4+9 against the feeble wizard's d20+0, and then uses the bonus Dash from haste to withdraw.

From the perspective of his army, the wizard is picked up like a plush doll in a claw game and carried off. By the time he gets a chance to react he's been yanked back over the hill and into the area of the silence spell. He cannot cast anything himself, so he uselessly tries to escape the grapple. The rest of the party drops out of the rope trick. The warlock casts dispel magic and manages to take out the archmage's contingent stoneskin. The paladin, cleric, and arcane trickster kill the archmage with a combination of smites, sneak attacks, and inflict wounds (something like 9d8+6d10+6d6+11 damage).

They then drag his body out of the silence spell, and the bard and NPC sorcerer each cast dimension door to flee 500 feet with two other party members. At that point, one round into the battle, a single flying scout gets over the hill and spots the remaining two PCs (cleric and arcane trickster), but then the cleric casts dimension door too and the party is nowhere to be seen.

So yeah, grappling (and extreme amounts of planning) is OP.

 

[osarusan]

Regarding the grappling rules, the system in 5e is fine-ish, except that they clearly didn't design monsters to deal with grappling. And, I guess kinda like real-life grappling, if you don't know what you're doing you're basically powerless.

In my last 5e campaign, the 8th level party crippled a marching army led by an archmage by something we came to call Operation Bloodtalon.

• Take a Str 16 bard with training and expertise in Athletics. She casts greater invisibility on herself.
• The paladin casts bless.
• The warlock contributes fly.
• The arcane trickster provides enhance ability (strength).
• An NPC sorcerer the party defeated and befriended casts haste.
• And, as cherry on top, the party cleric casts silence on a spot just next to where they'll hide.

One part of the road to the party's village passes between a river and a steep hill. The party sets up behind the hill and hides in a rope trick. They have some archers on the other side of the river. When the column has just reached the hill, the archers holler and let loose, drawing the army's attention to the other side of the river and peeling off the handful of flying beasts they have at their command. That's the signal for the party to begin. Everyone casts their spells, and the bard swoops out, invisible, hastened, and swole. She flies over the hill (speed 120), grabs the archmage rolling (with advantage) d20+d4+9 against the feeble wizard's d20+0, and then uses the bonus Dash from haste to withdraw.

From the perspective of his army, the wizard is picked up like a plush doll in a claw game and carried off. By the time he gets a chance to react he's been yanked back over the hill and into the area of the silence spell. He cannot cast anything himself, so he uselessly tries to escape the grapple. The rest of the party drops out of the rope trick. The warlock casts dispel magic and manages to take out the archmage's contingent stoneskin. The paladin, cleric, and arcane trickster kill the archmage with a combination of smites, sneak attacks, and inflict wounds (something like 9d8+6d10+6d6+11 damage).

They then drag his body out of the silence spell, and the bard and NPC sorcerer each cast dimension door to flee 500 feet with two other party members. At that point, one round into the battle, a single flying scout gets over the hill and spots the remaining two PCs (cleric and arcane trickster), but then the cleric casts dimension door too and the party is nowhere to be seen.

So yeah, grappling (and extreme amounts of planning) is OP.

OP? That sounds amazing!! You have some brilliant players there to come up with such an amazing scheme. I love it!

I honestly don't think that sounds OP though. They all used some resources, and a hell of a dose of ingenuity to overcome a powerful foe. That's some amazing teamwork, but I don't know that you can say grapple was the deciding factor. Every one of those spells *plus* grapple was required. Without even one of those magic spells to back it up, the encounter could have gone south and turned into a TPK. And on a really poor roll (I've seen someone roll two 1's on advantage) it could have ended poorly for the bard. So I think they took a very calculated risk, and it paid off beautifully.

I don't know if there is a better way to handle grappling though. Removing it from combat and making it skill-based seems to me to be the exact right thing to do. Adding maneuvers to it would make it so granular that the system would kind of break down. I mean, a sword does d8 damage no matter what you do with it; thrust, slash, stab, whatever -- it's that same die, and the same attack bonus. It has to be abstracted that way for combat to flow. Shouldn't grapple be the same?

Now don't get me wrong, I do love me some Hackmaster, where you use different damage dice, weapon speeds, and attack rolls depending on the maneuver and position you're in... but that requires some wicked fast mental math and a team of players who love that crunch. 5e sloughed all of that from earlier editions as is better off for it. Not that such abstraction is always the best way to go, but in 5e it works really well, and I would be hesitant to add something that complicates that.

Whenever I think about adding/changing 5e rules, I tend to overcomplicate things. I love adding crunch, and coming up with new fun things to roll for. But that often turns into me falling down the rabbit hole and ending up with something that either a) is so complex it would bog down the game flow, or b) requires reworking the entire system (including every single monster) so that it no longer is D&D, but something that merely looks like it. Then I usually end up scrapping it and going with the simplest possible solution; a skill roll with advantage or disadvantage.

To me that's where grappling lies in 5e. I can't think of anything better to do with it. Adding more maneuvers -- how would you do that? A different skill roll? All the appropriate skills are pretty much covered under Strength and Dex. And the difference in skill that character A has between a roundhouse kick and a full nelson is not going to be mathematically significant enough that it could amount to any sort of numerical bonus going by the power scale that 5e uses. The closest thing I can envision is a system that works kind of like the fighter's combat superiority dice, but if you add that to a grappling system it makes the fighter's ability less significant and feels like nerfing one of the coolest fighter abilities. Advantage/disadvantage is 5e's killer mechanic. It's graceful and elegant, and you can add it on the fly without any extra work. That and swapping out ability scores based on a clever player's idea are about the only two variations that I can think of that work smoothly for grappling.

In designing a mental magic combat system that works similar to grappling, I'm not sure what you could add or change that wouldn't overcomplicate things in the way that the above ideas would break the regular grappling system. I kind of feel like the only way you could do it smoothly would be to make it like grappling is now -- opposed skill checks with occasional advantage. Maybe saving throws at the beginning to resist.

Part of me is imagining something like Inception, where you have the dream crafter designing layer upon layer of dream within a mind that is actively fighting back. It's almost like making an opposed Intelligence vs Wisdom roll every round. The art lies in describing it the right way. Same goes for a sort of domination/puppetry situation: you could make it Charisma vs Charisma, or Charisma vs Strength. Some combinations are going to be better against some classes than others. Cha vs Str will obviously work better against wizards, while Cha vs Cha would work better against fighters. Like your grappling example, which worked so well because he was using a buffed up Str vs a weakly wizard, this system would allow players to choose the best tools to overcome the situation, and then resolve them in a familiar manner with skill checks.

The point where it becomes OP is when you can too easily adjust on the fly what saving throw or opposed skill you force the opponent to use. Since most enemies have no intelligence save bonus, if you can just customize every spell to be my INT vs your INT, it becomes way too easy for the wizard to dominate any opponent. Like in your grappling example, a buffed up stat roll vs a character's weak stat ends up being almost laughably easy. So there would have to be either MP cost variations for different effects depending on which ability scores are involved, or special lists/secrets that have to be learned (and thus take up part of a character's learned list maximum) to avoid turning every encounter into something like what happened to that archmage.

(Thanks for the XP by the way!)

 

[RangerWickett]

Yeah, in normal combat grab just holds you in place or lets them drag you 15 feet or so. But when you cheese it out with expertise and buff spells, it becomes a bit too easy and makes fights start to all turn out the same. The bard rushes in, hits them, and with Tavern Brawler grabs them. Next turn she knocks them prone and they cannot get up, and the whole party dogpiles. It was amusing the first few times, but it's a little less than cinematic. You start to worry that your cool villains will fall like chumps.

I like combat to have some back and forth, to have more to it than 'I pick that guy and hope I roll high.' It's hard to have attacks that apply conditions without them being too weak, or too strong, or too fiddly. 4e honestly had a good balance for its nifty combat tricks, but the gameplay was too slow.

Something like a charm spell that limits your options but gives you a chance to fight back has some inherent narrative. More narrative, perhaps, than just two guys swinging swords at each other and chopping through 'hit points' with no physical effect until one falls down. Maybe I need to adapt the Exhaustion rules to normal combat.

Now I've got lots of ideas bouncing around, but it's midnight. Thanks for the brainstorming help.

 

[osarusan]

Don't forget that the cheesey grab maneuvers work both ways! An army of little guys can become a lot deadlier in 5e than in other editions.

I agree that back and forth is good. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes! Good night.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Regarding the grappling rules, the system in 5e is fine-ish, except that they clearly didn't design monsters to deal with grappling. And, I guess kinda like real-life grappling, if you don't know what you're doing you're basically powerless.

In my last 5e campaign, the 8th level party crippled a marching army led by an archmage by something we came to call Operation Bloodtalon.

• Take a Str 16 bard with training and expertise in Athletics. She casts greater invisibility on herself.
• The paladin casts bless.
• The warlock contributes fly.
• The arcane trickster provides enhance ability (strength).
• An NPC sorcerer the party defeated and befriended casts haste.
• And, as cherry on top, the party cleric casts silence on a spot just next to where they'll hide.

One part of the road to the party's village passes between a river and a steep hill. The party sets up behind the hill and hides in a rope trick. They have some archers on the other side of the river. When the column has just reached the hill, the archers holler and let loose, drawing the army's attention to the other side of the river and peeling off the handful of flying beasts they have at their command. That's the signal for the party to begin. Everyone casts their spells, and the bard swoops out, invisible, hastened, and swole. She flies over the hill (speed 120), grabs the archmage rolling (with advantage) d20+d4+9 against the feeble wizard's d20+0, and then uses the bonus Dash from haste to withdraw.

From the perspective of his army, the wizard is picked up like a plush doll in a claw game and carried off. By the time he gets a chance to react he's been yanked back over the hill and into the area of the silence spell. He cannot cast anything himself, so he uselessly tries to escape the grapple. The rest of the party drops out of the rope trick. The warlock casts dispel magic and manages to take out the archmage's contingent stoneskin. The paladin, cleric, and arcane trickster kill the archmage with a combination of smites, sneak attacks, and inflict wounds (something like 9d8+6d10+6d6+11 damage).

They then drag his body out of the silence spell, and the bard and NPC sorcerer each cast dimension door to flee 500 feet with two other party members. At that point, one round into the battle, a single flying scout gets over the hill and spots the remaining two PCs (cleric and arcane trickster), but then the cleric casts dimension door too and the party is nowhere to be seen.

So yeah, grappling (and extreme amounts of planning) is OP.

LOL! High level 5e party, with all it's magic, pretty much unstoppable if they can ambush you.