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Winning each round allows the characters to remain hidden. I need to work on the format, but at the start of the round you make a group Stealth check to cover how quiet you are being. The idea is to move away from a single check determining how the entire encounter turns out.

I think this is an area where player expectation and mathematical reality collide. I've run games - specifically Shadowdark - using DC 8 as the baseline. My experience was that anything less than a 10 is seen as some sort of failure. There's a weird pattern where people, even those who aren't...

This is definitely a factor. I think tradition - 3e used five point increments - plus the ease with which people handle multiples of 5 makes this the most popular way to do it. And by popular I mean - playtesters just liked multiples of 5 better than everything else.

When in doubt, give the players a little more information than you think they need.

I'm focused on the 5e SRD for now, as that's the system I am most familiar with. In terms of D&D Beyond, if that ever happened it would be pretty rad. But that's getting way ahead of myself!

No discord yet. Honestly, this entire thing was kind of an accident. I was setting up the Patreon for when I eventually did something in this space. I had no idea it would get any attention, but here we are! So, with Discord I want to take some time to make sure I'm doing it right. It'll be...

Very similar! I liked Arcane Unearthed so much that I took a job working on it full-time way back in the day!

Hmm, sounds like a great topic for my skill series!

To be clear, that is the case. I spent almost four years on Magic and have no view into D&D releases beyond what's been shown to the public.

I'd like to keep the pieces I build compatible with the 5e SRD. If you look at the Challenge Point system I'm working on as a CR replacement, it's designed to function with any creature and give you a baseline point value based on CR. The idea is to build modular systems that complement and...

The series on skills will be free, the Psion is at the paid tier.

Yes! This is the kind of thing that might unroll from this approach. A costing mechanism, as I learned while working on Magic, is an immensely powerful tool.

Thanks for the support anyone! I was very pleasantly surprised to see that I already have subscribers and backers. Thanks so much! In terms of owning stuff, it basically means that I could not take stuff released by WotC and try to revise it without their permission. Since I was an employee...

Fantastic point - we have seen TTRPGs grow tremendously due to streaming, I think because of exactly this. Once you see someone DM, you now have a model. The Yo Yo Ma analogy breaks down because there is a technical aspect to music (how to physically use an instrument, read music, etc) that you...

General thought based on observations from a few folks in this thread - I think this system could support multiple ways to build encounters. Warhammer literally has this. There are three ways you can build armies, one of which is traditional points, another has much fuzzier point values, and the...

One of the things that I loved about designing Magic cards was how much pressure it put on creating interesting effects beyond creature numbers. For TTRPGs, I think we sometimes focus too much on stats rather than on the effects a creature is using. TCG design is very much the opposite.

Wow, that is a great point. The nice thing about that approach is we can treat it as a threshold: For party X, keep below totals point Y to avoid character deaths, go above Y for potentially lethal encounters. That feels simpler and elegant. Thanks for breaking down the character death rate like...

Keep in mind that the total points for an encounter is based on PCs. So, given that CR is meant to represent a single creature that can fight four PCs and reduce their resources by around 25%: 10 points per character * 4 for four characters = 40 points total A CR X creature should take out...

I'd like to vary CP for both monsters and characters. I'm tackling monsters first, characters will come later. In terms of still using CR, I see it as a bridge to what everyone is already using. If you have a book that uses CR, you can get a rough estimate of points. The creatures I'm designing...

Yes! One thing I like about a points based approach is that it's much easier to dial difficulty up or down. For instance, theoretically you could have a different point budget per character based on their effectiveness. That would also help you identify which characters are more powerful in...