If you were able to design your own version of D&D, how would you do it?

[generic]

If I were to design the next edition of D&D, then it would look somewhat like 5E, but would incorporate the changes enumerated below:

1. The collapse of saving throws back into will/reflex/fortitude.

2. The inclusion of the Mystic class (preferably renamed the Psion) in the standard class array.

3. The "propping up" of feats. This works in conjuction with a few of my proposals that lie immediately below.

4. The collapse of the Fighter and Barbarian into one class with subclasses and sub-subclasses.

5. The collapse of the Ranger and Rogue into one class with sub-classes and sub-subclasses.

6. The collapse of the Wizard and Sorcerer into one "arcanist" class with subclasses and sub-subclasses.

7. The inclusion of more detailed weather rules.

 

[5ekyu]

I think this conversation is headed off the rails, but maybe it will circle back to the topic soon.

As far as 3d6 vs d20, there have been a lot of discussions over this. I have personally applied this to a 4e campaign I ran online for two years, so I can offer some additional perspective based on actual experience as opposed to speculation and theory.

First, I only made the most minimal changes to the system. The math wasn't tweaked, so characters and monsters used the same bonuses, defenses and DCs were largely untouched except where I adjusted for regular DM fiat. (i.e. increasing or decreasing the challenge). Another factor I considered was only to apply this rule for the characters, not the monsters. I'll explain this soon.

Aside from that, the only other change was how to determine critical hits and this is where things began to deviate from the norm. I decided that rolling doubles was too frequent, but doubles of a certain value or higher was acceptable and flexible. Most attacks required double 6s, but for special weapons with a higher chance to crit, double 5s (or 4s) could also trigger a critical hit.

Before the 3d6 was adopted, however, we used the normal d20. Encounters were taking a very long time due to a number of bad rolls by the players. They were also frustrated from wasting all their encounter or daily powers due to a bad roll. This was particular for 4e, but the same could be said for other editions. Missing an attack or failing a saving throw too many times can be disheartening after a while.

After the change, however, combats went quicker. Those little bonuses to add +1 or +2 were more signifcant, which encouraged more teamwork and assisting others. The monsters retained the d20 to keep the swingingness in favor of the players instead of working against them, and still gave a sense of threat. Somehow, that struck a balance between probability and predictability. Things were improved.

What I learned from that experience was that there was much more that could have been done, and eventually the system would need to be adjusted. You can't just replace one mechanic the whole game is built around and not expect to hit a couple walls. We only dealt with what affected the current class and race options, and we only got to level 4. But that small segment of play and the results we got from that minor adjustment showed a lot of promise. It essentially changed our enjoyment of the game for the better. That, I think, is what this topic was about. What changes work for you. So if d20 doesn't work for you, no one has any right to tell you that is wrong.

Based on what you wrote, you de facto weakened most nonsters by giving them lower ACs by making the odds of the pcs hitting tbeir AC and saving against them better. Then, u left the PCs fine as they were.

Shoulda shortened combats quite a bit. More if the special 3d6 crit gave more than 5%.

To accomplish much the same on,d20, just add +2 to the PC hit chance and maybe give them 19-20 crits.

"So if d20 doesn't work for you, no one has any right to tell you that is wrong"

Absolute agreement... Preferences and tastes are subjective.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

No. It's all pointed at the d20. You can't do much with it. Roll a single die and compare it to a predetermined value. That`s it. It's not a good mechanic; it just happens to be a convenient one that everyone is familiar with. Even though it has the greatest potential for undermining player choices by rolling too low. It reduces actions to a simple game of chance.

There's a lot that you can do with a d20. For example, you could calculate the distance between the pre-determined value and the actual value, giving specific degree of success or failure based on how far above or below you ended up rolling. Of course, doing so would mean sacrificing the greatest strength of the system, which is that it is fast and easy to determine a result.

The part about undermining player choices is tangential to the dice mechanics. As far as 5E goes, I would blame that more on Bounded Accuracy than on the d20 system. It would be trivial to build a d20 system where the strength of your choice completely overpowered the randomness of the die, but it would involve letting a specialist character automatically succeed in situations where most characters would automatically fail.

The part about it being a simple game of chance, well... I suppose, if you place the emphasis on the "simple". Every die mechanic is a game of chance, which will yield somewhere between 0% and 100% chance to accomplish any action. In that regard, the d20 system is notable because it's easy for a player to see exactly what those chances are (although the same is true for a simple percentile system).

Alright, so that could happen in any system. But a better system would have less probability for something like that to happen in the first place. Not that it wouldn't be entertaining if it did, or that it never should. But that entire scenario was based solely on the roll of a wildly fickle die result that ignores everything about the character choices.

I think this is more on the mark. Because a d20 uses flat 5% granularity, either something will never happen, or it will happen at least 5% of the time; and you make a lot of checks in every session, which means you're going to roll a 1 or 20 multiple times per night. It's nice to be surprised, occasionally, but the d20 system makes those surprises far too frequent (if they happen at all).

 

[Lanefan]

For me, the issue with the d20 is the same thing is the strength of the d20: too much randomness.

Sure, it's cool and exciting that there is a 5% chance of virtually anything being possible. However, sometimes it's nice to have a little bit of a curve so as to make a character's skill and a player's choice a little bit more meaningful than flat random chance. (Yes, I'm aware that's a statistical oversimplification, but that's the core of the issue.)

Except a character's skill and-or choice is - or can very easily be made - meaningful by the bonus or penalty applied to the roll, and the consequent change in the odds of success.

DC 11 = 50% chance of success if rolled flat. But if the character's skill and-or choices puts +4 onto that roll, now you've got 70% chance of success. A 20% change in the odds is a big deal over the long run.

Though, it's not a mechanic which exists in a vacuum; the heavily-linear (and vertical) nature of D&D levels (and their associated numbers and maths) also contribute to some of what bugs me the most about D&D. Despite being quite a bit more super-heroic in feel, I think 4th Edition actually did the best at mitigating this; the power curve between levels was less drastic than 3rd Edition. I rarely ran into issues (as I occasionally did with 3rd Edition -or Pathfinder) where I suddenly needed to do a significant rewrite of my campaign because gaining one or two levels meant that the PCs went from struggling against a type of creature to being able to steamroll an encounter. (To be fair, I think some of the ways that 4E "fixed" this created arguably worse problems in other areas of the game, but that's a matter which I've slogged through in various other threads already.)

4e did have this right, after a fashion; they just started at too high a power level. If that system could be tweaked such that what's now a 1st-level 4e character could be about a 7th-level character, with 6 'new' levels placed below it such that 1st-level beomces barely better than commoner, it'd be on to something...at least in that regard.

On the surface, 5th Edition appears to do well (and for a portion of the game it kinda does), but there are areas in which the idea of "bounded accuracy" apparently meant something very different to the designers of the game than what I thought they had meant during the previews. Somehow it simultaneously manages to be both too easy and too difficult, which brings us full circle to the "swingy" nature of the d20. In many instances, the randomness can be fun, and there is certainly a level of excitement which comes from rolling a lucky crit or surviving because the DM rolled garbage for the BBEG's attack. It can be fun, and I've often enjoyed it myself. However, it can also be somewhat bothersome in that it's difficult to make decisions from the perspective of the player or the character. There is little consistency to what constitutes a viable threat and what doesn't; similarly, there is little consistency to whether I can count on my skills and abilities to work or not work.

Well, that's part of the fun - you can do all you like to push the odds but nothing's ever guaranteed.

And there's nothing wrong with failure. There's nothing wrong with the game being frustrating sometimes - it makes the eventual victory or solution feel all that much better.

 

[Argyle King]

Well, that's part of the fun - you can do all you like to push the odds but nothing's ever guaranteed.

And there's nothing wrong with failure. There's nothing wrong with the game being frustrating sometimes - it makes the eventual victory or solution feel all that much better.

I don't expect things to be guaranteed, but it's nice to be able to look at a situation and make choices from a perspective which has some level of cerebral consistency. (A side issue related to this is having fluff and crunch produce stories which are consistent with each other.)

For example, the expectation that a giant fire-breathing monster like a dragon be dangerous is something that both myself as the player and what my character sees as an in-game entity can use to inform choices and decisions.

If there is an absence of some underlying understanding of how the world works and/or an absence of viable information upon which to base what I, as the player, choose to do, I see that as an issue. Similarly, if my choices (and the underlying mechanics which represent them) are completely absent of similar elements, I see that as an impediment to my ability to mentally buy-in.

This shouldn't be taken as meaning that I am opposed to deviations from the norm. Subverting an expectation can be a powerful tool for storytelling and lead to great things. I support doing that. However, I would also say that being able to subvert an expectation is impossible without some manner of expectation first existing. If Randomness or differentness becomes the standard underpinning of choice and action, I'm not sure I see the value of that as a core feature of designing a roleplaying game in which a shared narrative exists (or is to be built) among a group.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

The 3d6 was officially introduced as a variant rule in Unearthed Arcana (3.5 Edition). It included a sidebar from the designers, which best summarizes the effect it can have on the rules of the game:

BEHIND THE CURTAIN: THE BELL CURVE
In general, this variant leads to a grittier D&D game, because there will be far fewer very good or very bad rolls. Not only can you no longer roll 1, 2, 19, or 20, but most rolls will be clustered around the average of 10.5. With a d20, every result is equally likely; you have a 5% chance of rolling an 18 and a 5% chance of rolling a 10. With 3d6, there’s only one possible combination of dice that results in an 18 (three sixes, obviously), but there are twenty-four combinations that result in a 10. Players used to the thrill of rolling high and the agony of the natural 1 will get that feeling less often—but it may be more meaningful when it does happen. Good die rolls are a fundamental reward of the game, and it changes the character of the game when the rewards are somewhat stronger but much less frequent.

Game balance shifts subtly when you use the bell curve variant. Rolling 3d6 gives you a lot more average rolls, which favors the stronger side in a combat. And in the D&D game, that’s almost always the PCs. Many monsters—especially low-CR monsters encountered in groups—rely heavily on a lucky shot to damage PCs. When rolling 3d6, those lucky shots are fewer and farther between. In a fair fight in which everyone rolls a 10, the PCs should win almost every time. The bell curve variant adheres more tightly to that average (which is the reason behind the reduction in CR for monsters encountered in groups).

Another subtle change to the game is that the bell curve variant rewards bonuses relatively more and the die roll relatively less, simply because the die roll is almost always within a few points of 10. A character’s skill ranks, ability scores, and gear have a much bigger impact on success and failure than they do in the standard D&D rules.

 

[Argyle King]

It's worth pointing out that I'm not advocating for 3d6. (Though, 3d6 is the primary method used in other games I play.)


I had advocated for 2d10 in previous posts. 2d10 still has a curve, but it's not quite the step that 3d6 would be. I see 2d10 as a viable middle ground between what 1d20 produces as results and what what 3d6 produces as results. 2d10 also has the benefit of still retaining (mostly) the same number range as 1d20.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Sure. The principles are the same when comparing a single d20 vs any multiple dice used to replace it. There's just a lot more discussions and research done specifically with 3d6. Point is there are some benefits and changes for losing the d20 if someone wants to explore those options. The game won't fall apart (or stop being D&D) without it. Cheers!

 

[Lanefan]

One idea - and I just now thought of this and thus it has exactly zero playtesting or math analysis to back it up - might be to use d% instead of d20, and in order to to give a bell curve always read the dice such that you take the result closest to 50. Thus, if you've a 1 on one die and a 5 on the other that'd be 51 (no matter which particular die the 5 was on). The range would be reduced such that in effect it's be a bell-curved d-90, as anything with a 0 would by this method become a multiple of 10 rather than '0x' as the multiple of 10 will always be closer to 50.

The advantage of this is simple: more granularity, thus giving more range and-or options for any given roll. Along with this comes a greater range of possible bonuses/penalties - a +1 here doesn't mean nearly as much as on a 3d6 or 2d10 curve; but you can still have it, or +2 or +3 or whatever. +5 would be more or less the same +1 on 2d10 but still worse than +1 on 3d6.

The tricky part would be training ourselves to read the dice the right way to make this work.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I could go on all day about tweaks I'd make to particular classes and spells on the individual level, but let's focus on the system level.

Ability modifier = score - 10. Make smaller scores and smaller differences between scores matter more. This also lets you use your flat scores as a "defense" or "passive roll" and the math will be fair. For instance, your AC might just be your Dexterity score, before modifiers.

Scores above 15 are hard to obtain and less necessary. Not every fighter has to be at the absolute peak of human(oid) Strength potential. This is because...

Bring back MAD, or its benign cousin, Multiple Ability Potential. Reward a character in salient ways for having a high score, no matter which score, no matter which class. Let a fighter with 15 Str and 13 Int do cool stuff that a fighter with 18 Str and 10 Int can't.

Advantage dice stack. I keep running into this when I design for 5e: advantage is a simple and elegant mechanic, but I have to find other ways for features to provide benefits because I don't want to obviate players getting advantage in the regular ways. For instance, no rogue feature should give advantage to attack rolls unless you want a rogue with it to no longer use stealth and cunning. So away with that system. Just let them stack.

Steal the three-action system from Pathfinder 2. It's clean, it's easy to understand. And I can think of a lot of things to do with it that are probably beyond the scope of this thread. Stay heck away from most other things PF2 is doing, though.