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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8467244" data-attributes="member: 71699">Great post! I agree about monster HP. I am cautious of over-rewarding alpha-strike gameplay, where a combat participant has a reasonable likelihood of downing an opponent in one hit if they go all in. 5th level might not be the watershed for that, but it is somewhere around there.It's not so much that I am wholly against that gameplay - I've enjoyed it in other settings - but I think of it as a choice for your campaign. Were I to prefer that extra vulnerability, and given my immersionist preferences, I'd work it into my campaign setting and that would take it in a different direction.That all said, I am keeping an eye on this and actual play is usually the strongest indicator. Have you play of the 5th level cut-off, say at the point those characters are late tier 2 or tier 3 equivalent?Interesting! Do you mean that a character can spend an inspiration during a rest to recover HP as if it were one of their HD?Yes, I agree that the sum of feats from PHB, XGE and TCoE, plus the higher tier features of each class and subclass made available as picks as if they were feats, would provide enough choice. The secondary challenge for design is that giving players the ability to freely sequence those features leads to a very large number of combinations and permutations. E6 (or E5 in your case) might envision a dozen to one score picks from perhaps around 80 options (feats + features). Supposing we don't care about sequencing as much as we do combinations, then its 80! / 20!(80 - 20)! which you can see is a pretty large number.One of the motives (and pay offs) for D&D's commitment to class tables, and something that was I think fairly well shown by the many early RPGs that experimented with freeform characters choosing from lists of powers, is that constraints are a virtue when it comes to delivering a balanced and playable game to your audience. The point being of course that D&D class and subclass features have been balanced under the constraint that they can't be picked from freely. The results are therefore unpredictable, meaning that my playtesting resources would be unlikely to be up to the task of solving for balance. Conversely, so long as I use the pre-balanced parts of the game system without too much alteration, and focus on changing the smallest number of dimensions necessary to deliver the experience - which I believe comes down to HD/HP, PB, and the class power watersheds - then I get the most impact for effort.I like a great deal of what you say. The contention that I would offer back to you is that once we go from theorycrafting to a mod intended to be resiliently useful to a large number of players, what do you think the fewest possible changes are to deliver the E6 experience? To my reading, many posters see the customisation as the most exciting part of E6. I am not in the camp. I see the vulnerability and heroes-not-super-heroes as being the heart of E6.</blockquote>

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