Black Flag So What's In Kobold Press' BLACK FLAG First Playtest?

Black Flag, the codename for Kobold Press' new open TTRPG, announced during the height of the recent OGL controversy as an open alternative to 5E, has put out the first playtest packet. It's 12-page document of character creation rules. So what's inside?

The introduction summarises character creation, defining 5E concepts like level, hit dice, and so on. It introduces the game as being backward-compatible with 5E.

Black Flag -- like Level Up: Advanced 5E, and Ancestry & Culture--divides the 5E concept of 'race' and 'subrace' into inherited and cultural elements. Black Flag goes with the terms Lineage and Heritage.

It goes on to present the Dwarf, Elf, and Human, along with a choice of two heritage traits for each--the heritage traits for dwarf, for example, are Fireforge and Stone. Elves get Cloud and Grove, while humans get Nomadic and Cosmopolitan. You can choose any heritage for your lineage, though. These are analogous to 5E's 'subraces', although the inherited/learned elements are separated out -- Cloud Elves are a lot like High Elves, and Grove Elves are a lot like Wood Elves, for example.

Following that are two backgrounds -- Scholar, and Soldier. They each give the usual array of proficiencies plus a 'talent'.

Magic, martial, and technical talents are essentially feats. You get a talent from your background, and can substitute an ability score increase for one.

The playtest feels to me much like a 5E written in their own words, but with 5E's 'race/subrace' structure replaced with 'lineage/heritage', the biggest thing being that the heritage (what was subrace in 5E) is cultural.

As a disclaimer, I do of course publish Level Up: Advanced 5E, which shares the exact same goal as Kobold Press' project (BTW, check out the new A5ESRD site!) It will be interesting to see how the approaches diverge; while both are backward-compatible, they already have different ways to handle what 5E calls race -- Level Up has you choose a heritage (your inherited species, basically), and any of 30+ cultures (learned stuff from where you grew up). Black Flag goes with lineage (again, your inherited species), and a choice of heritages for each lineage. And the bestselling 5E book Ancestry & Culture on DTRPG, uses those terms -- so there's plenty of options to choose your heritage/culture, lineage/heritage, or ancestry/culture!

Whatever happens, the future certainly contains a choice of open 5E alternatives!

 

[Parmandur]

Where do you stand between say additive dice pools versus counting successes dice pools versus best result dice pools versus multi-use dice pools (to hit and damage at the same time, for example)? All compared to dX+mod v TN, I mean.

Gotta say, my Familiarity with any pool system is theoretical more than practical, though I really like the idea of the providence pool variant from the 5E DMG.

 

[cbwjm]

I quite like the school specialisation feat, brings in some of the old school feel to spellcasters. It also looks like maybe they'll be revamping the wizard subclasses since the feat includes the current ribbon ability to halve the cost of copying spells.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

They've mentioned doing dice & making it as easy as possible for folks to make them at a couple points.

Yup they have, from the beginning. None of their suggestions/solutions have been remotely realistic in terms of competing with the large amounts of high-quality dice that 95% of gaming groups possess.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I have a dream that someone will make a set of 5E books that center on single-species game play. Dungeons & Dwarves, for instance (although that name would get you sued, for sure), where they just go deep on a single group, with the expectation that no one in a campaign will be anything but a dwarf or whatever, but offering enough variety within that type so that players still have a lot of fun choices.

By remaining compatible with the CC SRD, dwarf (or elf or gnome or goblin) lovers get both a standalone game experience but also hefty sourcebooks to bring back to more traditional games.

I wish they would make specie as important as the class for character building, from mundane biological features to being magical/fated paragons of your specie. Same with Background.

 

[Retreater]

I have a dream that someone will make a set of 5E books that center on single-species game play. Dungeons & Dwarves, for instance (although that name would get you sued, for sure), where they just go deep on a single group, with the expectation that no one in a campaign will be anything but a dwarf or whatever, but offering enough variety within that type so that players still have a lot of fun choices.

You could call it WoD - World of Dungeons.

 

[Retreater]

I got an invite to an online playtest group from a friend of mine who's a professional game designer (and a great GM to boot).
Obviously, I'll give it a fair try, but I'm really waiting for some big changes.
If this is "Pathfinder 5e" I don't see that working great. Unlike the circumstances during the creation of Pathfinder, D&D is still going to be supporting the basic 5e structure. And 3.5 was a real mess that needed substantial clean-up (IMO) - 5e is in a different state in 2023.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You could call it WoD - World of Dungeons.

World of Dungeons by John Harper

Simple, quick, dungeon-crawling action

johnharper.itch.io

 

[Marc Radle]

Playtesting Tips For Kobold Press​

https://koboldpress.com/playtesting-tips-for-kobold-press/

 

[Nathaniel Lee]

It's not fundamental changes. It's the inevitable "small" changes that will add up.

Much like the 3.0 to 3.5 changes. Technically 'backwards compatible', but different enough that most groups just moved whole hog to the way 3.5 did things. It was just easier for most groups to move on, rather than trying to keep reconciling the two slightly different rules sets. The same with PF1 vs. 3.5...

I think it really depends on what those small changes end up being. If we look at this first document, for example, none of the changes proposed within break any sort of compatibility with 5E. They have class-specific talents, and so does 5E. They take a singular "race" artifact and split it into the concepts of heritage and lineage. Thus far, every change that they've proposed would be backwards compatible with 5E. It would take zero effort to build a character that utilizes classes from 5E and heritage/lineage/background/talents from Black Flag, and they've even made it clear that you can add a feat to your 5E class-based character to align them closer to the slightly increased power level of Black Flag classes.

We don't yet have any real idea of what the Black Flag classes will look like. If they use the exact same class progression as 5E, then I don't see compatibility being a significant challenge. The only thing I'd be concerned about is maybe if some subclasses might get reduced in power from one or more of their features being invalidated or otherwise made redundant. By contrast, One D&D's classes are flat out not compatible with 5E subclasses. They claim that there's going to be some system to "convert", and that's a concept that I feel starts to indicate that compatibility is not fully there. If we don't need a Black Flag to 5E "conversion" system, then we've got solid backwards compatibility. It's way too soon to say whether that's what we'll actually get.

 

[Zaukrie]

Playtesting Tips For Kobold Press​

https://koboldpress.com/playtesting-tips-for-kobold-press/
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While I appreciate all this, and it is awesome, ignoring obvious typos / copy paste issues is tough. That kind of thing (esp. if you don't own much KP stuff and know how good they generally are) is really hard to do, as it indicates a lack of attention to detail (which is kind of important when designing classes).