Custom Campaigns & Skill Challenges (2023)

I was recently asked what the guidance would be for campaigns that are not randomly generated, using a deck of cards. It's actually quite a simple bit of reverse-engineering.

The number of encounters remains the same:

• level 0: 4 encounters
• level 1: 6 encounters
• level 2: 8 encounters
• level 3: 10 encounters
• level 4: 12 encounters
• level 5: 14 encounters

Now, the general idea with the deck of cards is that all numbered clubs (9), all face cards (12), and both jokers (2), will all be combat encounters, with aces (4) being "wild" (i.e. they can be any type of encounter.) If the aces are treated as combat encounters, this results in 27 out of 54 cards being combat -- exactly half of the deck. When I've asked around in the past, this seems to be roughly the ratio that most game groups shoot for: half combat, half ...other stuff.

Conveniently, since each level is budgeted for an even number of encounters, you can just... make half of them be combat encounters. Or less than that -- totally up to you! The other thing is that without using cards to prescribe which monsters to use in your combat encounters, you can just... use whatever you'd like. This is made easier by the fact that the budgets for the different types of monsters are based off of the number of PCs in each combat encounter:

For each PC in a combat encounter, include one of the following:

• 1 Elite monster, or;
• 2 Standard monsters, or;
• 10 HD worth of Minions and/or Swarms

If you choose to have the "boss" of your campaign be a solo monster rather than an archenemy, so be it. The monster guidelines are meant to ensure that either will be a sufficient challenge for an entire party of (typically) 4-5 PCs. This customization option also lets you drop your "big bad" in wherever it's dramatically appropriate, rather than leaving it to the deck to turn up a joker.

That all being said, the framework for how non-combat encounters are "scored" is something that I have yet to nail down. The basic idea is that it would scale based on the card number and/or the number of encounters for that level. The followup question then becomes, is "completing" a non-combat encounter a question of successful skill checks, or merely attempted skill checks? Is it some ratio of successes vs. failures?

Interestingly enough, if we look at the 4th Edition DMG (page 72-73, ish) it spells out the 'complexity' of skill challenges, in a table -- which conveniently happens to map very closely to the encounters per level, stated earlier in this post; essentially, a "complexity 1" challenge requires 4 successes before 2 failures, a "complexity 2" challenge requires 6 successes before 3 failures, and so on. 

Now, the book goes on to say that you can adjust the DC down to lower the "level" of the challenge, or reduce the maximum number of failures to increase the "level" of the challenge; the 4e DMG bases the level of a skill challenge off of "the moderate DC" for skill checks, at the party's current level. Since TNP uses a static DC10 for skills, we can essentially rule out adjusting the "level" of a skill challenge by lowering the DC of the checks involved. This also seems to rule out the possibility of reducing the maximum failures, because... that only increases the "level" and not the "complexity" -- i.e. requiring 4 successes before 1 failure (instead of 2) would only increase the "level" of the challenge by 2, not the "complexity."

My first thought is something like this:
At level 0, you do 2 skill challenges; one requires 2 successes before 1 failure, one requires 4 successes before 2 failures.
At level 1, you do the same 2 skill challenges, but also add a 3rd which requires 6 successes, before 3 failures.
...and so on in that fashion.

So, ultimately, the number of encounters for a given level would indicate the highest number of successes needed, for a skill challenge at that level; the maximum number of failures would be half of that number... which would also (typically) be the number of non-combat/skill challenge encounters, for that level.

This would mean at 5th level, you would end up doing 7 skill challenges, needing a total of 14+12+10+8+6+4+2 = 58 successes (so an average of 8 successes) -- because requiring 14 successes each, for all 7 skill challenges seems... well, obnoxious.

This also maps out for us how many successes and failures would be needed at each level, if we simply wanted to average the difficulties of the skill challenges at a given level -- or even combine multiple challenges together. If nothing else, I feel like this is at least a playtest-worthy framework.

Now, with that all being said, there is nothing to stop a DM from freestyling their campaign, and using some kind of story/milestone progression, rather than strictly using combat and non-combat encounters for leveling. But the intent here is to provide a meaningful guideline (as well as a definitive endpoint) in order to help beginners to run their campaigns.

The other thing to consider is timing. A given encounter may not necessarily take an entire gaming session to complete (and particularly not the non-combat encounters.) However, with 52 weeks in a year and 54 encounters in a campaign, the hope would be that a bi-weekly gaming group (and certainly a weekly gaming group) could complete a single campaign by the end of one calendar year. A mix of monster types, as well as being able to sprinkle in recurring archenemies, should allow a campaign of this length to include smaller and larger arcs, and also meaningful build-up and payoff for the main quest.

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I'll aim to have the next post written up about a week from now; check back around June 6th and it should be published.

Damage Rolls (2023)

One thing that derives out of the new ethos for bonuses, is the necessity of keeping the dice for attack rolls and damage rolls separate from each other. This is a little unintuitive for me, since I tend to roll them both together (when I'm playing D&D) to speed up play just slightly.

Since class dice are used for the functions of both attack bonuses and base damage, it's important to know which dice are for what, when you're physically rolling them. One thing I wrote into the most recent draft of the rules is that it's a good idea to have at least two trays to roll dice into, in order to help facilitate this.

In one of my recent posts, I hinted at possibly removing the advantage mechanic from base damage. If we were to take it a step further, allowing mastery on base damage to apply to extra damage, this would make it possible for all damage dice to be rolled together -- without the need to delineate between the types of damage rolls. Since base damage is always going to be 1 or 2 dice, but extra damage can be from 1d6-5d6 or 1d10-3d10, the application of mastery separately to each expression seems valuable, to keep damage from spiking. On the other hand... does it really make sense to have "mastery on extra damage" as a separate mechanic from "mastery on base damage"?

The most likely application of mastery on base damage would come from combat mastery; this is attainable from positional mechanics (like targeting prone creatures in melee) as well as status effects (a.k.a. debuffs, conditions, etc.) such as a target being Incapacitated. So where would mastery on extra damage come from? This seems like an obvious bit of design space for class features (much like mastery on initiative bonus, for example.) It's just a question of whether having separate instances of mastery for the two damage types is worth the added overhead; there would be something of a 'quality of life' improvement if the damage could all just be rolled together, and have mastery apply to everything.

The problem with this is that it creates an exception to the general rule, whereby mastery on a given type of roll does not extend mastery onto the bonus dice for that type of roll. This is particularly important for saving throws and skill checks (where there is the potential to stack multiple dice bonuses) because adding mastery would significantly skew the math, in unintended ways.

There's also an argument to be made for not allowing mastery to apply to extra damage at all. In short, the mechanic changes the average damage on a d6 from 3.5 to about 4.33, and on a d10 from 5.5 to 6.4; this means that the average damage on 5d6 is over 2 points higher than 3d10, once mastery is applied to both. Again, this 'solution' would still mean extra damage ends up being the 3rd roll in the attack sequence:

Attack roll + bonus dice -> base damage -> extra damage

It might also be the case that the break between calculating base damage and extra damage has some value -- sometimes the extra damage might just be overkill. It's probably worth mentioning here that since monsters such as swarms and minions have a number of "hit dice" (rather than "hit points") they actually take damage based on the number of damage dice inflicted on them, rather than the exact value of the dice rolls. So, if you hit one of these creatures, you only really need to know whether your base damage does 1 or 2 dice of damage, and how many dice of extra damage you would apply (as well as any bonus dice which are able to be used to deal damage) -- effectively only needing to physically roll the attack die and its bonuses.

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Check back for another post, between the 25th and 28th of May.

Monster Math (2023)

A while back, I took a look at the previous monster mechanics, and went about streamlining and updating them a bit. Oddly enough, I tend to put more of the monster mechanics down in blog form, than in my actual notes, so it's often a case of compiling everything into one location to really get the ball rolling.

Way back in the 2018 draft of the monster mechanics, the monster roll (1d10+1d6) was modified by a handful of tags:

• Untrained: Use the higher of the two results
• Trained: Use the stacked value of the two results
• Expertise: 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

As with the rest of the designs, obviously "Expertise" has been renamed to "mastery." And since standard monsters were really the only ones using the "untrained" expression for damage, this tag is going away. The "trained" tag (if kept at all) is going to function as the "If the result is a tie, treat both dice as their maximum value" mechanic, while advantage/disadvantage are only going to apply to the d10 component of the monster roll, bringing thm in line with skill checks.

Since monsters effectively only make one roll for attack and damage, this roll is considered their attack roll, for the purposes of whether disadvantage would apply (i.e. in the case of status effects, such as being Incapacitated.)

Every monster will need to be given a skill rating with each of the combat skills, as well as an initiative modifier. Since initiative will be sticking with a d20 roll, the obvious way to handle monster initiative would seem to be bonuses of either 1d6, 1d10, or 2d6. Because most combat skills fall under STR or AGIL (with perception being the outlier) it stands to reason that tmonsters should have their skill stats done strictly by attribute, rather than attribute and skillset.

There are two special rules for minions, regarding skill usage:

• Minions have skill ranks equal to their current HD, but default to having disadvantage on the d10 roll
• If an effect imposes disadvantage on a particular skill check, minions may not use that skill

As I've mentioned in previous posts on the monster mechanics, this is so that it is harder for minions to "dogpile" other characters, such as by massing grapple attacks. (Likewise, miinions cannot make ranged attacks if they are adjacent to one or more PCs.)

Beyond that sort of stuff, the monster mechanics haven't been changed a whole lot.
So far, I'm sticking with the same encounter budgets as before:

For each PC in a combat encounter, include one of the following:

• 1 Elite monster, or;
• 2 Standard monsters, or;
• 10 HD worth of Minions and/or Swarms

Solo monsters are meant to function as a combat with phases/stages, or a creature with multiple llimbs (such as a kraken or a hydra.) It could also be a dragon with various attacks (breath, tail, claws, etc.) where defeating each limb of the dragon disables the associated attack.

The final monster type is the "archenemy" which serves as the final boss/recurring villain of the campaign. Generally, they should take the encounter budget for an entire party of 4-5 PCs, but function more or less like an elite monster, rather than a solo. Their main perk is the ability to shake off debilitating effects, or limit the use of certain abilities. This is based of the foundation of a robust keyword system, covering mechanics such as healing, summoning, sustaining/concentration, forms, etc.

The monster mechanics and the campaign-building card mechanics go hand-in-hand, for obvious reasons; it's probably still worth testing and fine-tuning some of the monster stuff, but really nailing down the campaign mechanics will be a big focus going forward.

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Next post will be 7-10 days from now, so check back then!