Thanks for your comments DND_Reborn!
By "options available as lore" do you mean fluff?
Yes. They're all mechanically the same: they grant Advantage on the Roll, when tapped by the PC's narration.
But some Powers do also have specific in-world effects. E.g. Read Languages does simply allow the character to read languages! (Besides being used to grant Advantage if used narratively for a Roll.)
I think a series of rolls maybe would be better. Even that would remove a lot of the time devoted to combat, but keep it interesting enough to make it worth while. Otherwise, with a single roll, if you want to follow "typical" D&D the players should only "lose" maybe 10% of the time, often with severe consequences.
I've been looking at the 4E Skill Challenges. A simplified version of that could work for encounters which are supposed to be moderately difficult, or for a Boss encounter.
In any case, "mook" encounters should be resolve in one roll.
I am failing to see how fluff will be impactful without mechanics. Otherwise, they are just "things about you" and "things you can do". Is that your thrust?
Right, the fluff grants Advantage, when referred to by the player during a Roll. That's the mechanical impact. (Besides Powers which also have a specific narrative effect or utility, e.g. Darkvision.)
Other than that, it's "things about you." Yep, that's what stories are made of!
5E (anyway) is already fairly math-lite IMO, so I am not sure how much lighter you are thinking here. Could you provide an example?
5E is math-lite / number-lite compared to 4E and 3E. But it seriously still makes my head spin. I've been DMing since 1983 (BECMI), and have DMed 5E for a couple years, but even last weekend, it evoked stress for me when I need to call out and write down Stealth and Initiative rolls. Or how folks have to remember to add Proficiency or not. Or remember their spell DC. Or the petty "bean counting" of doling out XP and coinage droplets (who cares?)
Yeah, 5E is more streamlined than most previous editions, and I know there are optional rules which address some of these things (e.g. milestone advancement) but it's still very numerical. Honestly it's a strain for me.
Does this include AC, HP, and Level?
AC and HP: Not sure. Still working on that. I'd only include these for "D&D aesthetic reasons", if at all.
Level. Yes. In my draft text, the characters go up a level after every Session. They gain a new Power every other level. The levels are grouped into Tiers of 10 levels each. But Levels and Tiers are almost entirely fluff, though I may use them to calculate a sort of challenge rating (compared to the party's Level/Tier), to determine how many Successes are needed to complete a Battle.
There's a maximum of ten Powers (or maybe twenty Powers), so that the character sheet doesn't get untidy. Yet there's no limit to number of levels (30, 100, etc). You can switch out a Power between Sessions, and in that way, evolve your character with more higher-level Powers (which are still fluff). You eventually get to Epic level Powers (fluff), and fight Epic and Legendary monsters, but the Powers still just grant Advantage!
Like in Tinyd6, there's no statistical power curve in SD&D. Even Epic levels of play still use an unmodified d20, with Advantage or Disadvantage.
Frankly I would think this is overkill and only fun for people who might enjoy drawing. Having a character sheet with slots for writing things down (if you had enough "boxes" you could use them I suppose) on an outline of the PC would be better and more functional IMO. If you think about the PCs with slot systems for encumbrance, that would be a fair starting point--just make the slots large enough to draw something if you wanted to?
I realize it sounds eccentric, and may not be essential to D&D. But I've found that it helps the player "own" and remember what Powers they have. Even a stick-figure, hastily scribbled, pencilled-in symbol which took 5 seconds to draw (e.g. a firey ball for fireball) provides a quick visual handle.
The draft SD&D character sheets do have a slot for writing in the name of the Powers (and Equipment), along with a box to draw a symbol or illustration for each.
SD&D has "dramatic encumbrance."
Everyone has 10 slots for Equipment. It doesn't matter how strong the PC is. Boromir and Aragorn could've theoretically carried a lot more gear than the Hobbits, but Sam is about the only Fellowship member who we see actually use gear (e.g. pots, pans, rope).
"Coin" counts as one slot. No coin amounts are noted in SD&D adventures. PCs only carry Coin if they choose to use a slot for it. All normal gear can be automatically acquired when in town.
(Though since SD&D values "lore", we'd tend to enhance the existing classic adventures by providing illustrations of exactly what the coins actually look like...e.g. Karameikan coins found in the Caves of Chaos. Or Neverwinter coins used in Phandolin. But just as fluff.)
In the draft text, a player can spend an XP (SD&D's name for "Inspiration") to narrate a flashback which explains how they actually brought any piece of normal equipment with them.
SD&D values tidiness.
Since this [races] is still simply fluff material, sure. Or players could adhere to traditional D&D definitions of racial traits if they wanted to.
Exactly. The racial traits (=Powers) from all editions are compiled for each Race, so that a player knows what Powers are archetypal for that Race. But they're free to mix and match. Yet the Powers are still sourced from a specific Race. So if a Character chooses Darkvision from the Dwarf Power list and Fire Breath from the Red Dragonborn list, they are a Half-Dwarf/Half-Red Dragonborn. It's not totally willy-nilly: it's not like Dwarves have fire breath in SD&D, unless the DM creates/approves a Dwarven lineage in their world that has that Power (e.g. "Fire Dwarves" or something).
BTW, though the term "Race" is aesthetically D&D, if an official replacement term for "race" has started to appear in D&D products, SD&D might go with that. Since "Race" is becoming passe. Maybe "Lineage." (Since in SD&D, the Ravenloft Lineages are mechanically indistinguishable from "race", and serve the same purpose. "Species" (from 3E Savage Species) is another option.
Since most of D&D is combat-centered, really the big thing you would need to develop is a way to translate various encounters from all editions of D&D into SD&D. Frankly, I could envision anything from super-complex to insanely simple.
Right. It'll depend on what SD&D looks like. Though I do want to keep in mind what is included in monster stat-blocks which appear in xD&D adventures, since this might inform the design of SD&D.
IME "rolled up" worlds don't work so well, but perhaps SD&D would come up with a viable system for doing it.
Well, the chart would ideally reverse-engineer the principles which were actually used to craft Blackmoor, Oerth, Mystara, Toril, Krynn, Athas, Eberron, etc.
And, from the start, would inculcate the principle of placing whatever adventures (you happen to own) on the map, in the vicinity of the adventurer's hometown. And building the campaign from that seedpoint. An adventure-driven approach.
Really, from a mechanical standpoint, the various adventure sites found in, say, the Lost Mine of Phandelver, could've been placed on a blank map. Only where the terrain, vegetation, and travel distance actually matters that would be noted (i.e. the ruins of the village of Thundertree should be near to a volcano, but far enough from the adventurer's hometown that that town was not affected by the ash.)
And SD&D would explicitly encourage the DM to modify or replace any proper names [NPCs, place-names, deities] found in the published adventures.
Since this [graphic design and layout] would be the final stage, you can pretty much do it however you want to format it, but for the sake of sanity please make it better organised than history has given us.
I'll try!
drive.google.com
