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!

 

[Nathaniel Lee]

But even in the preview packet - they already have some thing that if followed to their natural conclusion means that all past published subclass options will not be valid.

Curious what you think that is. I didn't see anything in that first playtest that seemed like a fundamental change to how 5E works, and certainly not one that would wipe out old subclasses, but maybe I just overlooked some key sentence somewhere.

 

[Rabbitbait]

I must be inhabiting a different reality, because everyone seems to be calling for this to be lighter than 5e, yet it seems to me the market is saturated with lighter versions of D&D, and 5e in particular. Meanwhile there is only one game, Level Up A5e, which goes in the other direction (and people seemed to like that).

I want a game with an insane amount of options that can interact in very wonky ways. Half the fun of roleplaying for me is when unexpected things happen, or everything goes sideways.

 

[Aldarc]

That seems to the starting point for where they were coming from, yeah, but a bunch of bizarre decisions in the recent design phases have taken it to a weird place. I really think "funky dice" are 100% going to be the touch of death for it, too, which is sad.

Colville seems like he has mostly played D&D and not many games from the past 20 years but then played the Star Wars game with funky dice and fell in love with that. But I kinda wish that he would play other games out there on the market or even being playtested: e.g., ICON/Lancer, anything by Free League, Blades in the Dark, Cortex Prime, etc. Just something that shows him how tabletop games have evolved outsides of D&D's various editions.

 

[Parmandur]

If it is going to be a cleaned up clone; then explicitly come out an say so.

I mean, they basically have done so. Bit of a gamble.co siderign how dedicates WotC seems to be to backwards compatibility, bit interesting.

 

[Mistwell]

I'll tell you what feedback I have and it's not playing feedback but editing feedback. When the cut and paste from WOTC material it's mostly fine though even some of that was done wrong. But when they write new stuff typos are frequent.

Some of it a very important and obvious typo like roll "7four d6s". or the experience point chart which repeats 6500 experience (because they messed up level 3 with 900), showing they can't even cut and past from WOTC without messing it up. For Dwarves they forgot to include the advantage to get rid of the poisoned condition (advantage to prevent getting it in the first place, but not to get rid of it if you get it). Elves can choose a THIRD LEVEL SPELL at 5th level? I think they meant 2nd level spell. And even if they only meant that, that's WAY powerful relative to a climbing speed from the other elven flavor.

Combat casting is broken - no more concentration saves. What mage wouldn't take this at level 1? Mental Fortitude is bonkers because they failed to think through the ramifications. Like you now end forcecage with a save (not escape - you end the spell), planeshift, magic jar, feeblemind, all sorts of spells now don't work the way they were supposed to work by this wording. The armored "talents" were all weirdly nerfed. School specialization is super clunky because you cannot backtrack your hit points and figure out what they were supposed to be. Polyglot is terrible, trade skills is extremely horrible, this playtest is all over the place.

That all makes me think there is no budget behind this. This document feels like one guy with iffy creator experience wrote it in a day or two, and it's not a great job. It sure doesn't look like a TEAM of experienced creators took a month to write this. This thing is a mess.

 

[JAMUMU]

If someone could take 5e and slide it along the scale towards Pathfinder2 but stop when I yell "Whoah, nelly!" then that'd be great! Barely an inconvenience!

 

[Jaeger]

OK, at the risk of a thread derail: what would be a good middle between rules-light and 5e?

Worlds without number is a good example of a 'middle ground' game of the style I'd be interested to see someone do with 5e.

A streamlining and simplifying treatment, not full rules lite.

Curious what you think that is. I didn't see anything in that first playtest that seemed like a fundamental change to how 5E works,

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...

That is why I view claims of 'backwards compatibility' as a big PR canard. (But evidently one that most RPG companies think is necessary for the player base.)

I think that Pazio finally figured the canard part out, and moved on with PF2 - which has seemed to work out for them.

Kobold needs to decide if they are going for true 100% compatibility; then do a pure 5e clone that just has some nomenclature changes, and make it actually fully backwards compatible.

If Kobold is just going to claim 'backwards compatibility' in the 3.5/PF1 sense... Then admit what you'd really like to do, and have the confidence to rebuild 5e from the ground up, actually fixing the known issues with the game that have come out over years of actual play.

 

[demoss]

Have you looked at 5 Torches Deep?

It's on my not-quite-infinite reading list.

 

[darjr]

It's on my not-quite-infinite reading list.

Oof. Same.

 

[JAMUMU]

I like what I see of B&B but I think it'd need some proper skills and a more robust social interaction system before it'd see use at the table. And more choices for each class at each level. So a different game, really.