Expansionism -- Part 3: Redux

As you might guess from the title, I've done a couple posts on this topic in the past. More recently, I've been focusing in on the need/desire to have more subtypes available for character customization, and to have those more mechanically tied in with Power Sources. To that end, I went about mocking up some possible candidates, drawing largely from some of the ideas I had touched on in the past.

Previously, classes had been structured a couple different ways. In one setup, some subclasses amounted to "mandatory combat roles" (with actual roles being mechanically optional upgrades) while other subclasses were... more or less a proper class, but jammed in with another class, under one set of shared mechanics (or at least a shared class die.) Archetypes were another layer of optional customization that existed over top of all of these, and were class-specific; in the 2018 rules, these were referred to as Specialist Classes.

I bring this up because basically what I'm looking at doing is to bring back a 4th form of class customization/subtype; subclasses and roles will remain, but Specialist Classes are going to be split into Archetypes and Domains, both of which will expand in number. However, your class will specify whether it uses one or the other -- but usually not both -- so effectively, either an archetype or a domain will be used to "fill" the Specialist Class "bucket" within your class' progression.


Filling in the Grid
One thing I'll throw out there right off the bat, is that I've decided to associate each Skillset with one Power Source.

• Arcane: Subtlety
• Divine: Presence
• Martial: Athletics
• Primal: Detection
• Shadow: Infiltration

Probably the mechanics of that will be implemented something like this:
When you gain a Power Source at 1st level, you add its associated Skillset to your class skill list, allowing you to take training with that Skillset. When you gain a Specialist Class (Archetype or Domain) you gain a rank in the Skillset tied to the Power Source of that Specialist Class.

One other specific quirk that I've settled on, is to allow some of the existing Archetypes (from the Fighter/Bard/Adventurer class category) to instead be used as subclasses for their current classes, while also functioning as Archetypes for certain power sources -- thus allowing other classes to also gain them.

Anyways, here's what I have in mind, for the various Specialist Classes; whether or not this changes, will depend on how well I can implement these ideas:

Arcane
Domains: Enchantment, Divination
These will be derived from the existing Sage 'schools'
Archetypes: Skald, Psionic
Psionic is the first instance where I'll have to do some research and build out some new mechanics. I think some sort of 'power point' mechanic is a useful, fun little extra thing to staple onto existing classes, without making an entirely new class, or slate of classes (or Power Source, for that matter.)

Divine
Domains: Life, Devotion
So we already have some Life domain mechanics being used on the Cleric and Paladin; I'll just have to expand that out to give mechanics that'll fit for the other classes that will have access to Divine Domains. In terms of flavour, the 5e D&D Paladin's Oath of Devotion seemed the most in-line with the power source, so I'm going to see what I can mine from that inspiration.
Archetypes: Avenger, Runepriest
Here, I'm going to try and get a good mix of 4e D&D's Avenger with 5e D&D's Oath of Vengeance. Similar to the Psionic, I think the 'rune state' mechanic is something fun that could be stapled onto traditional Divine classes, but also Fighter or other Martial classes.

Martial
Domains: War, Leadership
It just seemed logical to move the War domain over here, from Divine. Leadership is where I want to implement my idea for a "Lord archetype" which would get 'followers' (likely, minions) to aid them in combat.
Archetypes: Brute, Soldier
These will be taken from the existing Fighter archetypes.

Primal
Domains: Blood, Stone
Here we're going to be taking the existing Guardian totems, and will have to tweak and smooth them out to fit the various class dice.
Archetypes: Scout, Elementalist
Scout is already in the designs (for the Adventurer class) and I thought that could be spread around a bit; in 5e it's used as a Rogue archetype in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, as well as a Fighter archetype in Unearthed Arcana form. Elementalist might be a little bit trickier to pull off, but I wanted that sort of "primal sorcerer" idea, as it was used in 4e's Heroes of the Elemental Chaos.

Shadow
Domains: Trickery, Death
Trickery is going to mostly be a re-skin of the 'Misdirection' Sage school, but may borrow from the 5e equivalent. Death Domain is still very much up in the air, since there is wide swath of source material to draw from, and I haven't settled on anything specific yet.
Archetypes: Vampire, Revenant
Again, Vampire is one of the more unique (but very niche) classes, from 4e's Heroes of Shadow; I think we can boil down the core mechanics of the class (as well as the Vryloka race, from the same book) and get something to layer onto our Archetype-using classes. As for Revenant, I still have some reservations about how to implement it mechanically, but I think this would be a welcome addition, if done right.


Piecing Together the Puzzle
Now that I'm finally (I hope) done shuffling around which classes are part of which categories, what I've decided to do is fundamentally expand the customization options for each category, using these new tools that we have at our disposal. Here's how I see that rolling out:

Category 1: Cleric, Sage, Guardian
 - Uses existing subclasses
 - Can take any Domain, regardless of Power Source

Category 2: (Skill Specialists) Acrobat, Rogue, Ranger
 - Uses existing subclasses
 - Can choose Archetypes, based on their Power Source

Category 3: (Generalists) Fighter, Bard, Adventurer
 - Uses existing class archetypes as subclasses
 - Can gain Roles
 - Can take any Archetype, or pick a Domain specific to their class slate*

Category 4: Paladin, Spellbinder, Druid
 - Uses existing subclasses
 - Can choose one Archetype and one Domain, both based on their Power Source

Category 5: Warlord, Occultist, Barbarian
 - Can take certain class-specific archetypes as subclasses**
 - Can gain Roles
 - Can choose Domains, based on their Power Source


*Fighter domains would be Martial; Bard domains would be Arcane; Adventurer domains would probably differ depending on the subclass taken.
**Warlord subclasses would be likely be Skald, plus any Divine or Martial archetypes; Occultist subclasses would likely be Psionic, Elementalist, plus any Shadow archetypes; Barbarian subclasses would likely be Runepriest, Scout, plus any Martial archetypes.


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This post is already running a bit long, so I'll try and touch on Power Source distribution another time. It's obviously inter-related, with having them now closely linked to class customization.

Next post should be up on May 5th, so get in touch before then, if you have other suggestions for discussion topics.

Kill and Reroll (2020)

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post, is that with the new skill mechanics, one thing you can do to speed things up is to always roll both 'percentile' dice, instead of just 1d10. Having a clear ground rule that the "1s" die functions as the natural result, and the "10s" die is used for advantage, this allows both dice to always be rolled (one of them being disregarded, if advantage is not applicable) without any confusion, or possibility of messing with the probabilities (as well as preventing cheating, whether intentional or by honest mistake.)

I bring this up in today's post, because with the new skill mechanics happening to share dice with the monster roll mechanics, it might be helpful to backport this kind of utility from the former, into the latter.


Circa 2018
As I go back and look at the baseline monster mechanics from the 2018 version, a couple things stand out. First, the basic guidelines for how to modify the 1d6/1d10 roll:

Untrained: Use the higher of the two results
Trained: Use the stacked value of the two results
ExpertiseMastery: Any 1s rolled can be treated as the maximum value on that die
Advantage: If the result is a tie, treat both dice as their maximum value
Disadvantage: Cancel out Advantage on the roll, or use the lower of the two results

However, going through the document a little farther, I noticed that the 'Untrained' expression is only used a couple times: for the damage output of Standard monsters, and for skills. Well, if we suppose that monster skill checks will now function in line with player skill checks, then we can remove this particular definition, and simply specify (as a function of the monsters themselves) that Standard monsters should roll both dice for damage, but only use the higher result.

The other thing that sticks out is the fact that minions function off of their own separate guidelines (albeit using the same shorthand and the same roll, and only for rolling skills):

Untrained: Use the d6 result
Trained: Use the lowest result
ExpertiseMastery: (unchanged) Any 1s rolled can be treated as the maximum value on that die
Advantage: Treat the check as a success, if the result is a tie
Disadvantage: Cancel out Advantage on the roll, or use the d10 result

Now, the intention with this is essentially to make minions worse than other monsters at skill checks; if an encounter budget gives the DM a handful of minions at the same cost of one Standard monster, this allows the monsters to effectively get, say, 5 grapple attempts for the price of one -- which potentially leads to dogpiling, and would just seem unfair to the players. I think my intial idea was to have them simply use "roll under, d6" as their mechanic, so I may yet go back to that. (I instead tried to incorporate the monster roll, in some form.)

Another idea I'd been recently considering, would be to have minions use a flat d20 for skill checks, as sort of a simple, no-nonsense solution. But the success rate starts off a little higher than that of 1d6+1d10, so it would have to be modified in some way to reduce that, thus losing any elegance in the process. One idea in relation to that, was to add the minion's number of Hit Dice (HD) to the DC, increasing it from 10; that produced a situation where lesser minions were better at skills than greater ones, which is counter-intuitive.

However, something else clicked in my head at that point: what if we use the minion's current HD as its skill ranks, and simply have minions (by default) roll the d10 with disadvantage? Since this would mean that minions would no longer use their HD as a 'target number', the cap on minion HD could also be raised a little bit (from 4 to 5, likely not much higher than that.) Alternatively, the cap could be lowered to 3, so that their skills ranks are in line with the player defaults.

It could probably be argued that minions don't need to be given a half-dozen different skill gradations (as they receive in the existing designs) and how keeping it that way would just create more things for the DM to keep track of. So it's helpful to be able to reduce some of the clutter. On the other hand, it may be important for distinguishing different types of minions from one another, such as lurkers vs. bruisers, for example. With that in mind, maybe the distinction could be that such enemies could "buy off" the disadvantage on the d10, for their signature skill(s).


The Biggest Problem
What I found to be a major stumbling block, was trying to figure out the monster interaction with "Positioning & Debilitating effects" which impose advantage or disadvantage, since monsters did not use d20 rolls. With the percentile roll paradigm in mind (springing forth from the new skill mechanics) it might make sense to simply have those modifiers applied only to the d10 roll, for monsters.

This would enable us to unify how Advantage modifies the roll, for all types of monsters (since the standard monster roll and minion monster roll in the old designs interact with Advantage effectively the same way, for skill checks.) It also means Advantage now functions the same as it does within the new skill check mechanics for PCs (which, as we've established, utilize the same dice rolls.)

This also frees up the design space of what happens if the roll is a tie. Ties could be used for adding special effects to attacks, or recharging abilities -- just as a couple of examples. Or the simple perk of "treat both dice as their maximum value" could be made the sole domain of specific monster types, such as Elites and/or Archenemies. As a side note, we could also have special triggers for when either the d6 or the d10 rolls its maximum value.


Drawing Conclusions
So effectively, what I think we've come up with is something like this:

Damage Rolls:

• advantage/disadvantage are applied to the d10 roll
• Mastery can be applied to both dice
• Special effect/recharge on a tie(?)
• Standard monsters use the higher roll as damage; minions and swarms do auto-damage (based on current HD)

Skill Checks:

• advantage/disadvantage are applied to the d10 roll
• Mastery can be applied to both dice
• Special effect/recharge on a tie(?)
• Minions have skill ranks equal to their current HD, but default to having disadvantage on the d10 roll (maybe with further disadvantage resulting in outright 'action denial' w/r/t using that skill)

When we compare these to each other, we can see that they almost completely overlap, with just a few exceptions for specific monster types. I much prefer this to the previous setup, where minions tried to use the same jargon, but with different mechanics. It also plays a lot nicer with the (admittedly more player-facing) core mechanics of the system.

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I've been working on mapping out the new subtype/specialist classes, in the background. So while writing actual mechanics for those will be a big process, I've mostly ironed out what's going where. That will likely be the topic of the next post, on April 24th.

Skill Upgrade (2020)

As I mentioned at the start of of this posting season, skill design is the one area in which I have been able to make significant inroads -- to the point that I have contemplated playtesting these revised skill mechanics on their own; if you feel so inclined to try them out with your group, please let me know how it goes :)


Redrawing the Grid
Only a few minor changes were made, in terms of the setup of core skills:
 - Break Objects is now STR/Infiltration, instead of STR/Athletics
 - Animal Handling was removed, and changed to a Knowledge skill
 - WIS has been removed, and remaining skills put under INT
 - Influence skillset was renamed to "Presence" (to better reflect the removal of Animal Handling, but also so that each Skillset now starts with a different letter, for easier abbreviation.)

What this does is create a grid consisting of five Attributes and five Skillsets; symmetry is always nice to have, and 5 is a good number, since it also happens to be the number of classes per slate. It also cleans things up a bit, with each skill 'intersection' now consisting of no more than two skills. If there's one quandry that has arisen out of this, it's the realization that INT seems like a batch of skills that normally might be limited to a small number of classes -- I may have to just own it as a quirk of this particular system, and build lore from those mechanics.


Re-education
The setup of, "which Knowledge skills were tied to what Power Sources," has been a niggling problem since the conception of tying them together in the first place. I had mostly settled on having two skills for each, but it never quite lined up perfectly; when it came to actually doling out skills specifically to classes, the limitations were laid bare. So in addition to adding Animal Handling as a Primal knowledge skill, and combining History and Geography into one (since I felt neither were particularly weighty, individually) eventually I settled on having three skills for each Power Source: one unique skill, and two shared skills.

Going back and forth between my "Knowledge Skills by Power Source" tab and my "Power Sources by Class" tab, this eventually helped to greatly streamline the distribution of the latter, ensuring that classes had better access to the skills that seemed to best fit, thematically. Just as an example, I felt that classes like Paladin should be able to have Medicine without needing the Primal power source, and that classes like Druid should be able to have that skill without needing the Divine power source (since a skill like Royalty & Nobility doesn't really seem to fit, for a hermit...) The easy solution was to give the Medicine skill to both of those power sources.


Mechanical Crunch
The decision to move the math away from d20 was a direct result of me trying to fulfill the request for more gradations of skill competency. The previous designs (which have basically been in place since "Beta 4" days) boiled down to: d20; d20 with expertise; d20+d6; d20+d6 with expertise. There's a pretty sizable mathematical gap between those middle two expressions, and in order to bridge the distance, the d20 would need to somehow morph -- and it just can't.

What I had been tinkering with was some sort of disadvantage/normal/advantage scale, applying to both the d20 and the d6. Toying with that a little bit revealed essentially two things: that the d6 would always need to be added (except if the d20 had advantage) and ...that advantage on the d20 would be too powerful. This produced a really clunky and unintuitive structure (d20 w/ disadvantage or normal + d6 w/ disadvantage/normal/advantage) but it also sucked from a tactile perspective, as I discovered through the process of absentmindedly rolling these dice, to pass the time at my D&D games.

So I decided to start testing out other dice, and one of the obvious choices to go with (after trying a few permutations of solely using d6s) was 1d10+1d6 -- which I had used in my 'previous' project, as well as for the 'monster roll' in TNP. As it turns out, a straight 1d10 roll roughly mimics the math of a d20 with disadvantage, and (likewise) a d10 with advantage approximated a straight d20 (if a d6 was added on, in both cases.) After some further number-crunching, I decided to use a "best 1 of" dice pool for the d6, instead of disadvantage/normal/advantage, with advantage on the d10 coming from skill training.

This creates a setup which is fairly easy to grok: rank 1 is 1d6, rank 2 is best 1 of 2d6, etc., with ranks being gained by upgrading skillsets or attributes. Potentially, ranks could be increased even further (rank 4 for sure, anyway) without breaking any math -- so that creates another design space which can be played in. I initially wanted to keep "expertise" in some form, but realized that within a DC10 paradigm, it was a bit too powerful of a mechanic, when applied to a d10 roll (as apposed to d20.)


Mastery
I had (probably as far back as any playtesting I've done/feedback I've ever gotten) been thinking of alternate names for expertise, and mastery was always one of the contenders. The change in skill mechanics warranted not only a name change, but a change in this mechanic itself. In short, the point of expertise was to get the effect of being able to reroll 1s (although mathematically it's better than that) without having to actually reroll 1s (and slow down gameplay at the table.) But, a realization came to me when I was tinkering with methods for rolling stats in D&D; without going off on too much of a tangent, I realized that "infinite rerolls" is less of a slowdown, when applied to an activity (such as rolling stats) that doesn't take place very often.

Generally, in most tabletop RPGs, one skill check can encompass a large part of a non-combat encounter (or possibly even multiple linked actions, rather than just one.) As such, non-combat is generally resolved with fewer rolls than combat. If we apply the previously-stated logic, we can assume that allowing for rerolls in non-combat (i.e. skill use) should be acceptable, particularly if it fits within the desired mathematical parameters -- and in the case of using 1d10+1d6 for skills, it absolutely does. (As a side note, "Combat Mastery" will probably continue to function exactly as the old expertise, so "Skill Mastery" will be delineated as its own thing, in the rules text.)

For core skills, skill mastery is obtained by having training in both the attribute and skillset tied to a skill. Since the intersection of an attribute and a skillset is now limited to two skills (and with establishment of a default, that characters have training in a combination of two skillsets/attributes) this sets an effective cap for skill mastery, as well as a baseline from which to expand, for more skillful characters. For power sources, mastery functions a little bit differently, granting a minor bonus to all associated knowledge skills (if the player chooses to focus on boosting one skill as high as possible, or if they choose to double-down on a power source, rather than branch out.)


Implications
With effectively "borrowing" the old monster roll for our new skill dice, it's probably time to re-evaluate whether the monster roll mechanic works well. Looking back at it, I've found the implementation a little kludgy, and now might be the time to streamline the mechanics a bit, so that they work a bit more harmoniously on both the player-side and the DM-side.

Another question that all this begs, is whether skills used in combat should apply Skill Mastery or Combat Mastery (or leave it to the gamers' discretion.)


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Hopefully I'll get some time to do a little more design work in the near future; no time off work for me, during this extended lockdown, unfortunately.
I don't really have a topic set for the next post (April 14th) so feel free to send in your suggestions.