D&D General D&D 6e ala Steampunkette: Structural thoughts
- Thread starter Steampunkette
- Start date
MichaelSomething
Legend
Are you designing purely for yourself, for everyone to use, or just Enworld??
Right now it's designing because my brain got stuck on an idea at 3am and acted like a disobedient puppy, endlessly savaging the idea while I yell "Put it down!"
So... further thoughts.
1) Crits as Maxed Damage Values
When you crit, you max out the damage of your attack, then roll it a second time and add that on top. This ensures that crits are meaningful and strong. No more rolling minimum damage on a critical hit. It also makes sacrificing gear to be a much more important choice, since you can negate some of the damage. I figure NPCs must always take the maxed out damage value, and players must always take the rolled portion of the crit. Just so that even if someone negates a player crit it's still a solid hit, and if a player negates a crit it's much more valuable.
2) LaserLlama's Primal Surges
Sincerely top shelf game design. The concept is sound, but the mechanics are going to need some tweaking. The utility of Wild Shape is overall much higher than the other options, so they all need a light revamp to bring them into line. Things like having Elemental Eruption persist for several turns as an obstacle in the environment, or allowing the druid to put their Verdant Growth onto an enemy, keeping them perpetually trapped in difficult terrain that moves with them.
3) Variable Rests as Core
I mentioned it upthread, but it deserves expanding on that long rests and the like should probably depend on the situation and story. Yeah, it's easy to say a Long Rest is always 8 hours but then you get into the 5 minute adventuring 'day' with people taking long rests after every encounter, so the system has to be adapted that 'oh, but you can only get one long rest in each 24 hours!' to account for it and on and on and on... And then some stories are -meant- to be fast paced. If I'm running a dungeon delve that's big and dangerous I don't wanna have to deal with the players taking 8 hours of long rests and hour long short rests. Give them a breather to recover for Shorts and an hour at most for Long Rests. And then there's the grueling overland travel, or characters recovering from Fatigue or Exhaustion or whatever. Give them the Frodo Treatment where their long rest was a week in Rivendell while the rest of the party fretted over their survival. That stuff is dramatic and interesting!
4) Streamlined Encounter Design
With classes getting fewer spell slots for combat use, and other spells shifted into noncombat functionality, running Wizard NPCs is gonna be a lot easier... But also NPC action options can also be streamlined by using things like general combat maneuver rules like A5e does. Slap a "Combat Maneuver DC" onto a Hobgoblin Warrior and it's grapple is now just a Strength Save rather than opposed rolls and stuff. Tadaaaaah. Same thing for Disarming a creature of a weapon, or tripping them, or whatever.
1) Crits as Maxed Damage Values
When you crit, you max out the damage of your attack, then roll it a second time and add that on top. This ensures that crits are meaningful and strong. No more rolling minimum damage on a critical hit. It also makes sacrificing gear to be a much more important choice, since you can negate some of the damage. I figure NPCs must always take the maxed out damage value, and players must always take the rolled portion of the crit. Just so that even if someone negates a player crit it's still a solid hit, and if a player negates a crit it's much more valuable.
2) LaserLlama's Primal Surges
Sincerely top shelf game design. The concept is sound, but the mechanics are going to need some tweaking. The utility of Wild Shape is overall much higher than the other options, so they all need a light revamp to bring them into line. Things like having Elemental Eruption persist for several turns as an obstacle in the environment, or allowing the druid to put their Verdant Growth onto an enemy, keeping them perpetually trapped in difficult terrain that moves with them.
3) Variable Rests as Core
I mentioned it upthread, but it deserves expanding on that long rests and the like should probably depend on the situation and story. Yeah, it's easy to say a Long Rest is always 8 hours but then you get into the 5 minute adventuring 'day' with people taking long rests after every encounter, so the system has to be adapted that 'oh, but you can only get one long rest in each 24 hours!' to account for it and on and on and on... And then some stories are -meant- to be fast paced. If I'm running a dungeon delve that's big and dangerous I don't wanna have to deal with the players taking 8 hours of long rests and hour long short rests. Give them a breather to recover for Shorts and an hour at most for Long Rests. And then there's the grueling overland travel, or characters recovering from Fatigue or Exhaustion or whatever. Give them the Frodo Treatment where their long rest was a week in Rivendell while the rest of the party fretted over their survival. That stuff is dramatic and interesting!
4) Streamlined Encounter Design
With classes getting fewer spell slots for combat use, and other spells shifted into noncombat functionality, running Wizard NPCs is gonna be a lot easier... But also NPC action options can also be streamlined by using things like general combat maneuver rules like A5e does. Slap a "Combat Maneuver DC" onto a Hobgoblin Warrior and it's grapple is now just a Strength Save rather than opposed rolls and stuff. Tadaaaaah. Same thing for Disarming a creature of a weapon, or tripping them, or whatever.
Bae'zel
Hero
I've been doing this as a house rule for a few years and players loved it. Avoids those anti-climactic minimum damage crits that seem way too frequent.
For NPCs and monsters though, I just double their average damage to keep things speedy. A crit from some monsters are very scary (had a boss who dealt 22 slashing damage per hit... 44 damage is nothing to laugh at, although thankfully the Barbarian was tanking it so that definitely saved the party).
Oh, for sure, this would slow things a bit by rolling NPC damage... but I also intend to rein NPC damage in pretty significantly to avoid that kinda thing. And it definitely incentivizes negating enemy critical hits.
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