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.
'Nother few ideas...
1) Less Heritages/Races
Yeeeah I get it. People like having a lot of variety in their heritages. But I find it mostly winds up in making the game a neverending cavalcade of animalfolks with a few planar entries along the way. And since every heritage has their own unique language, it dilutes the languages into a soup of nonsense where no one bothers to speak anything but common unless they're secretly talking trash with the one other person in the party who shares their language, or they meet an Elf King or something and the barbarian starts spouting Shakespearean English with iambic pentameter.
Languages are -fun- to play around with, when there's only a few to learn and you can be reasonably sure several of them will come up at different times in a campaign.
Though, to be clear, I'm just talking the core book. Individual Settings can, and should, have unique heritages for the setting. But Warforged and Changelings shouldn't become a core race on every world just because they're nifty in Eberron, you know? And I don't envy WotC's incoming attempts to bust Dark Sun wide open so everyone can play their favorite kitchen sink species....
I kinda wanna do a core set of heritages and then do the wider subraces thing more like A5e does with...
2) Cultures
Yup. Elves in the Underdark are Elves with an Underdark culture that gives them the stuff that makes them mechanically Drow. And you can also do it to Dwarves and then they'll be Duergar. And Gnomes for Svirfneblin. Etc etc etc. But also stuff like High Elf Culture for a Human to be a part of, too. Smaller number of heritages, broader quantity of cultures, more mix n' match ability.
And a fun thing for culture? It helps determine your lifespan. Oh, sure. A human has a life span that's shorter than an elf. But a human raised in high elf culture is gonna live a lot longer than a human raised on a farm. Similarly, an elf in a cosmopolitan city will live longer than their orcish neighbors in the same town, but not so long as the high elves of old. Call it diet, medicine, magic, whatever you like. I just think that's a fun thing.
Especially when elves raised in Goblin and Orc cultures die -really- young, but have a great time until then!
So heritage has a baseline life expectancy, and then culture extends or shortens it from there.
3) Languages
And, of course, the languages will be tied to the cultures! All the humans raised in Elf Cultures speak Elven. Or maybe something like "Ellowyn" as the elven language. And then the "Common" language is a regional/national thing. Wherever your game is set, that nation's language is the 'main' language, plus your cultural language. And, hey, however many points of Int mod, more languages.
But just to be tricky? Picking a non-Heritage culture (Like Circusfolk or Cosmopolitan) gets you a second regional/national language choice for your culture, rather than a heritage-specific language. Fewer languages, greater overlap of utility in having a given language.
Have a dedicated language for a few classes, too. Liturgical for the Clerics and Paladins. Druidic for the Barbarians, obviously. Thieves Cant certainly can... And then the language of the Arcane for the Mystical Types. But... not Draconic. More of a dead language that people don't use to communicate, anymore. Not something you swap to in order to negotiate with a giant rampaging firelizard.
4) 3 Up 3 Down for Stats.
10, 15, 10, 15, 10, and 15 are your starting stats. Roll 1d8. Add it to the 10, subtract it from the 15. Do it to the next set of 10 and 15. Then the last set. Congrats! There's your stats! It's possible to start with three 18s! And you'll also have three 7s. Every character has a total of +6 attribute modifiers. If you roll three 1s your stats are 14, 14, 14, 11, 11, 11. Three +2s for a total of +6. It gives the party the possibility of having a wide variety of stats, but keeps them overall balanced against each other.
The downside is that your friend with the hot dice that roll solid 18s for character creation (that may or may not be loaded with a tungsten plate) will have to slum it with the rest of us plebs, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Of course, you can do 4d6 drop the lowest if you wanna. This is just the core stat generation method.
5) Multiclassing and Feats
Rather than being a Rogue 4, Barbarian 6, you'll just grab feats that grant you class abilities in addition to what you've got from your current class. Maybe get 5 feats over the course of leveling, and you can choose between grabbing class-feats or general feats.
It means balancing the multiclass feats against each other, and then the general feats against them... but I think it's plausible. I hope.
1) Less Heritages/Races
Yeeeah I get it. People like having a lot of variety in their heritages. But I find it mostly winds up in making the game a neverending cavalcade of animalfolks with a few planar entries along the way. And since every heritage has their own unique language, it dilutes the languages into a soup of nonsense where no one bothers to speak anything but common unless they're secretly talking trash with the one other person in the party who shares their language, or they meet an Elf King or something and the barbarian starts spouting Shakespearean English with iambic pentameter.
Languages are -fun- to play around with, when there's only a few to learn and you can be reasonably sure several of them will come up at different times in a campaign.
Though, to be clear, I'm just talking the core book. Individual Settings can, and should, have unique heritages for the setting. But Warforged and Changelings shouldn't become a core race on every world just because they're nifty in Eberron, you know? And I don't envy WotC's incoming attempts to bust Dark Sun wide open so everyone can play their favorite kitchen sink species....
I kinda wanna do a core set of heritages and then do the wider subraces thing more like A5e does with...
2) Cultures
Yup. Elves in the Underdark are Elves with an Underdark culture that gives them the stuff that makes them mechanically Drow. And you can also do it to Dwarves and then they'll be Duergar. And Gnomes for Svirfneblin. Etc etc etc. But also stuff like High Elf Culture for a Human to be a part of, too. Smaller number of heritages, broader quantity of cultures, more mix n' match ability.
And a fun thing for culture? It helps determine your lifespan. Oh, sure. A human has a life span that's shorter than an elf. But a human raised in high elf culture is gonna live a lot longer than a human raised on a farm. Similarly, an elf in a cosmopolitan city will live longer than their orcish neighbors in the same town, but not so long as the high elves of old. Call it diet, medicine, magic, whatever you like. I just think that's a fun thing.
Especially when elves raised in Goblin and Orc cultures die -really- young, but have a great time until then!
So heritage has a baseline life expectancy, and then culture extends or shortens it from there.
3) Languages
And, of course, the languages will be tied to the cultures! All the humans raised in Elf Cultures speak Elven. Or maybe something like "Ellowyn" as the elven language. And then the "Common" language is a regional/national thing. Wherever your game is set, that nation's language is the 'main' language, plus your cultural language. And, hey, however many points of Int mod, more languages.
But just to be tricky? Picking a non-Heritage culture (Like Circusfolk or Cosmopolitan) gets you a second regional/national language choice for your culture, rather than a heritage-specific language. Fewer languages, greater overlap of utility in having a given language.
Have a dedicated language for a few classes, too. Liturgical for the Clerics and Paladins. Druidic for the Barbarians, obviously. Thieves Cant certainly can... And then the language of the Arcane for the Mystical Types. But... not Draconic. More of a dead language that people don't use to communicate, anymore. Not something you swap to in order to negotiate with a giant rampaging firelizard.
4) 3 Up 3 Down for Stats.
10, 15, 10, 15, 10, and 15 are your starting stats. Roll 1d8. Add it to the 10, subtract it from the 15. Do it to the next set of 10 and 15. Then the last set. Congrats! There's your stats! It's possible to start with three 18s! And you'll also have three 7s. Every character has a total of +6 attribute modifiers. If you roll three 1s your stats are 14, 14, 14, 11, 11, 11. Three +2s for a total of +6. It gives the party the possibility of having a wide variety of stats, but keeps them overall balanced against each other.
The downside is that your friend with the hot dice that roll solid 18s for character creation (that may or may not be loaded with a tungsten plate) will have to slum it with the rest of us plebs, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Of course, you can do 4d6 drop the lowest if you wanna. This is just the core stat generation method.
5) Multiclassing and Feats
Rather than being a Rogue 4, Barbarian 6, you'll just grab feats that grant you class abilities in addition to what you've got from your current class. Maybe get 5 feats over the course of leveling, and you can choose between grabbing class-feats or general feats.
It means balancing the multiclass feats against each other, and then the general feats against them... but I think it's plausible. I hope.
W'rkncacnter
Hero
to be fair, the dialogue for that fight could be extremely funny. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU LEARNED HOW TO SUMMON A FIRE STORM BY KILLING A MINDFLAYER?! HOW ARE THOSE EVEN RELATED?! THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW SPELLS!"
In any setting where XP is granted by killing goblins or accomplishing goals, every Wizard School will have a headmaster who passes out daggers and staves and says "RIGHT! If you want to learn magic we need to go kill some goblins."
"But Master, shouldn't we study magic?"
"HAH! No. You'll never learn magic that way! You need to quest to learn spells!"
If only there were some way to make leveling up a Downtime activity, rather than the explicit and exclusive result of killing people and monsters or finishing quests...
If you do not want a 5 minute workday, they you need to change the design of the game. D&D as it stands is about resource management over a number of encounter which is a "day". You can narratively change that and say you had 6 encounters in 2 hours, and now the characters have a long rest which takes 1 hour. That is fine. However, most players whine about not resting after every encounter.
Conan 2d20 resets hp (whatever it is called there) after every combat. What if combat is designed with fully recovered players in mind? Then there need to be fewer spell slots, and less powerful ones. It can be done. But then the resource management mini game is no longer part of the experience.
Conan 2d20 resets hp (whatever it is called there) after every combat. What if combat is designed with fully recovered players in mind? Then there need to be fewer spell slots, and less powerful ones. It can be done. But then the resource management mini game is no longer part of the experience.
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