Apples & Oranges (2024)

One of the gripes I have with the design of 5e is how incongruous it is.

The example that immediately jumps off the page to me is how armor progression is essentially attribute-based for light armor users (or unarmored builds), but is money/loot-based for heavy armor users. Would it be so undesirable to just have heavy armor AC improve with STR, the way light armor AC improves with DEX?

Likewise, I find this same problem when you compare (for example) an archery Fighter build vs. a Warlock eldritch blast build. Right off the bat, the Fighter has the clear advantage, from being able to take a +2 to hit with their fighting style, and already adding +DEX to ranged weapon damage -- whereas the Warlock needs to spend "class feature currency" to gain +CHA to their eldrtich blast damage, and no comparable way to increase their hit chance.

Where the Warlock pulls ahead, is the fact that they deal force damage right out of the gate; again, the ability to deal "magical" weapon damage, or non-mundane types of damage as a Fighter comes down to loot... which in itself either comes down to plot contrivance (in the case of a published adventure) or outright DM fiat. At levels where resistance to mundane weapon damage becomes more ubiquitous, a Fighter without an appropriate magical weapon will see their damage fall off substanstially.

The odd thing about it is, the solution is already in the game, in other places; as a 6th level Monk, "your unarmed strikes count as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage." A rogue with the Soulknife archetype can deal psychic damage basically at will, from 3rd level. Likewise for Paladins, "By 11th level [...] Whenever you hit a creature with a melee weapon, the creature takes an extra 1d8 radiant damage" in addition to the push-button radiant damage they can do with Divine Smite, or other types of magical damage they can deal with their buff spells. It's also pretty easy for Wizards or Sorcerers to have at least two different "flavours" of damage from their cantrips alone.

The question I find myself asking is, what is the point of this type of design?
We saw some steps forward with 4e, such as making sneak attack not care about the anatomy of your target in order for it to work. And the distinction between piercing/bludgeoning/slashing weapons had more to do with qualifying for feats than resistance/immunity. But at later levels, this cat-and-mouse game started to creep in, where ongoing damage started at 5 and resistance started at 3, with both scaling up over the tiers of play. We also see this kind of thing in Diablo 2, where after a certain point in the patch history, all paladins became spellcasters because dealing magical damage was more effective than buffing your sword swings -- and that's to say nothing of the fact that Diablo games are fundamentally about gathering more and better loot, whereas (in my opinion) D&D should not be.

I guess at the core of my meanderings is this opinion: it doesn't work. Designing some classes (and their progression) around their attributes and class features, while others are effectively designed around the loot they find...? It doesn't work for TTRPGs. You need to pick a lane in terms of your designs, and stick with it; if a class fundamentally can't function without specific loot or gear, then those items need to be made into class features instead. And if you're going to build a resistance/immunity mini-game into your combat, it's probably best done as a mechanism by which you allow one party member to shine; the double-edged sword with that is you essentially pigeon-hole your designs around the assumption that all parties must be composed a certain way, or there will be enemies they either can't win against, or will struggle a lot harder to deal with.

This is why TNP has always been built around the concept that "all damage is created equal." This helps with a lot of the abstraction, including things like base damage dice; whether a Fighter is dealing 1d6 damage with a shortsword or a quarterstaff or a scimitar is irrelevant. When looking back at my previous designs, added damage types created additional effects, such as poison damage ignoring damage reduction from armor, or cold damage causing penalties to speed and initiative; I think this is a lot better way to handle this sort of concept, within a table-top setting.

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Next post is due up on May 5th, so check back then for more!

Filling the Toolbox (2024)

When setting out to build the mechanics of a game, I think it's important to figure out what things you want to emulate and what not to emulate.

To give an example, the 3.5/4e paradigm of using flanking to provide a +2 attack bonus (referred to as Combat Advantage, in 4e) placed an emphasis not only on precise positioning and grid-based combat, but also a focus on tactics, co-operation, and teamwork. Without this as a baseline rule in 5th Edition, sources of advantage or other dice bonuses more or less boil down to "magic did it."

When I started off working on TNP, I always sort of envisioned a system where "playing to type" would give you advantage on the action you were taking; the easiest example I can put forward would be attacking in melee as a barbarian. This ethos could also be applied to something like which skills you use; to wit, earlier versions used class dice for the skill mechanics, and some of those included replacing d6s with bigger class dice for skills that were "iconic" to a given class.

Along with advantage/disadvantage, I had always envisioned expertise/mastery as being the signature, cornerstone dice mechanic that TNP would operate off of -- but in actuality, class dice ended up being its own layer of class-specific mechanics (particularly when it came to attack rolls.) In the recent drafts, the decision was made to standardize the class dice mechanics; a d4 bonus granted by a Cleric would be the same as a d4 bonus granted by an Acrobat, or a Druid, or a Sage, etc.

This is also around the time I started to ask a question, what really are the core dice mechanics of the system? Part of what created this impetus was the decision to move away from d20 for skills. What came out of this question was the 5 core rolls (attacks, saves, skill checks, initiative checks, and base damage) and the more standardized, streamlined bonuses that applied to them (attack bonus, save bonus, skill rank bonus, initiative bonus, and extra damage.)

Another aspect of "filling the toolbox" with regards to the game's mechanics was the skill grid. I've mentioned it before, but essentially, between the core skills (aka ACIDS tests) and knowledge skills, TNP pretty much covers all of the skills included in D&D, from 3.5 onward. Not to say that I necessarily think all of those skills will be used in every campaign, but by fitting them all somewhere into the grid, you can bolt the skill system (even, potentially, without bolting the rest of TNP) onto a game or an adventure where all of those skills are assumed to be part of the designs.

One thought I've had as it pertains to the skills grid is the idea of how it could be implemented differently. For example, in an ethos where "ability modifiers" are kept to a minimum of +1, you could easily substitute those numbers for your skill ranks, with each +1 bonus adding another d6 to the dice pool; if attributes determine skill rank bonuses, then the implication would be that skill "training" (i.e. advantage on the d10 component) would be a function purely of skillsets, rather than being applicable to skillsets or attributes (as it currently is.) This would actually be an interesting way of doing things, particularly in a potential "2d6" DC10 system, described in a previous post.

I think the other big bit of "toolkit-building" in TNP relates to the status effects and conditions. I actually have already made a quite lengthy post on the decision process behind which ones to include, so I won't rehash all of that here. What I will say, is that I think perhaps these designs are a bit "over-engineered," for purpose. It may very well be that this serves as the baseline for a new system, since I keep finding myself rarely incorporating these deeply into the character class designs, any time I do a re-draft. 

Part of that is because I think of TNP as being designed more as an "HP attrition" game first and foremost. A lot of the optimization mentality in 4e was that debilities just drag out the (already lengthy) combat, essentially forcing the party to spend more resources (particularly healing resources) whereas building around higher damage helps to more quickly advance combat to its natural end-state. "Damage is king," as they say. Circling back around to what I said earlier in the post, playing to type was meant to make your character more effective (i.e. deal more damage) in combat.

The other part of it is as a response to 5e having such poorly-designed and under-utilized conditions. To wit, seemingly every spell has its own conditions, and if a spell does reference one or more of the pre-established conditions, it always builds some clunky exception(s) into it. Much like standardizing the class dice bonuses, I wanted TNP to have standardized conditions, which do the things you expect things to do, in a D&D game. To this point, while I think the 4e conditions are sometimes very "gamey" and don't always lend themselves to this ethos, I think the format and the standardization of 4e's conditions laid a good foundation for how this sort of thing ought to be done -- and that's why TNP apes this formatting so closely.

If there's one more idea I'd include in this exercise, it's the mechanics of the monster roll. As I've mentioned before, one thing I did when homebrewing monsters in 4e, was to standardize the damage expression -- rather than having each subtype of each monster race using different types of dice. The fact that the MM3 math was so standardized, made this sort of thing easy to reverse-engineer. Part of the monster-building "toolkit" is this idea of having a standardized damage dice roll, regardless of the monster type. Part of the thinking behind "using the dice for everything" in TNP (rather than having static modifiers) is that it creates a stable cap on what damage expressions can potentially be -- and nowhere is this truer than with the monster mechanics; each swing is only ever going to be 1d10+1d6, with standard monsters only using the higher die, effectively capping them at 10 damage, while elites, solos, and archenemy types are capped at 16 (albeit solos and archenemies will likely take more than one swing per round, or have access to multi-target abilities.) With the HP for PCs varying between 24 and 32, this also gives us a pretty good handle on what combat length should look like, once we account for "save" chance and come up with DPR expectations for monsters.

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A bit of a retrospective post today, but I'm also thinking of how I can move things like the mechanics forward, into future designs. So I find these little exercises in navel-gazing to be occasionally helpful.

Next post is due up on April 24th, so check back then!

Campaign Scaling (2024)

As I've recently been giving some thought to HP and reserves, the idea of doing a 'basic' and an 'advanced' version of TNP has recently popped into my head... but we'll shelve that discussion for now. A lot of the numbers for these player statistics are essentially built off of using the dice to generate values similar to those in 4e D&D, when it might be more practical to just scale things down -- say, by using a flat 10 for HP and also for reserves.

The problem that this bumps into is how reserves scale over levels, and this dovetails into a broader design discussion, which I haven't really brought up on the blog before.

In my experience, there are essentially two different ways to scale up player power in RPGs: either the PCs get stronger, and enemies stay relatively static, or the PCs get stronger while the enemies also get stronger. I would say the latter describes the previously mentioned "MM3 on a business card" ethos for 4e D&D; if your chance to hit goes up by +1 every level, but your enemies' defense also goes up by +1, then the relative math stays about the same (assuming a d20 system.) This is what I often (uncharitably) refer to as "the illusion of progress," because while your numbers go up, your ability to hit remains mostly unchanged. The flexibility of this method is that when you fight enemies of considerably lower level, the PCs should be able to absolutely dunk on them; the question that arises is whether or not this is a valuable metric, or if the challenges the PCs face should always remain relatively equal to their level.

The drawback to the alternative method is that you end up with a system where the game starts off hard, but as the PCs become more powerful, the game unintuitively becomes easier. The proper way to execute this idea is to make the opponents more challenging in other ways (generally, AoE or multi-attack, or other similar 'action economy' advantages) but this requires a great deal of mathematical crunch, to get just right. It also means gating more difficult enemies to higher levels.

The circle which I am trying to square with TNP is how the reserves per day mechanic should be handled. The skeleton idea for the card-based random campaign generation system would essentially proscribe that at starting level you would have 4 encounters, and at your final level, you would have 14 (half of which statistically would be combat encounters.) So, if the idea is that you would need to spend 1 reserve to heal up from each combat, then you only need to spend 2 reserves at your starting level, but 7 reserves at your final level. This is an inversion of the previous example, since the PCs are starting out with more than enough reserves, but at later levels they are going to be riding a fine line; whereas the expectation is that the PCs would get stronger (even though the enemies might get stronger, too) in TNP they're getting relatively weaker, since all other math is kept flat (attack, damage, HP, etc.)

What ends up happening with "reserves based on max value of class dice" is that the range of numbers has quite a bit of variance (from 4 to 12.) Using two class dice for 10 of the 15 classes helps with this, but to really mitigate the variance, we need to raise the floor for the other 5 classes -- essentially, by raising d4 and d6 to "2d4" and "2d6" when it comes to reserves. This gives us a variance between 8 and 12.

So, this begs a few questions: does the minimum need to be 8? Or is 6 enough (if the highest average number of combat encounters per day is expected to be 7)? If the variance is as small as 8 to 12, wouldn't it make sense to do something like say "everyone gets 10, period, end of story," and just save all the useless overhead? Well, for a 'basic' version, I would argue absolutely it makes sense... and sometimes what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

This is where we circle back to the idea of "reserve burning" abilities. For the sake of argument, let's say that 8 is considered to be the minimum number of reserves needed, just to get by with healing. What this essentially does (by implication) is make "d10 reserve" classes into the ones that should get 1/day reserve-burning mechanics, whereas the "d12 reserve" and/or "2d6 reserve" classes end up with the 1/encounter reserve-burning mechanics. So how would this shake out in practical terms?

Cleric (d4/d10) = 8 or 10
Fighter (d6/d12) = 12
Acrobat (d4/d8) = 8
Paladin (d6/d10) = 10 or 12
Warlord (d8/d12) = 8 or 12

Druid (d4/d12) = 8 or 12
Guardian (d4/d6) = 8 or 12
Adventurer (d6/d8) = 8 or 12
Ranger (d8/d10) = 8 or 10
Barbarian (d10/d12) = 10 or 12

If we reverse-engineer the numbers a little bit, this essentially means that any d10 class either needs to be a tankier class (expected to burn through more healing than average) or needs to have a 1/day ability; d12/2d6 classes need to be both tankier AND have a 1/day ability, OR they need to have a 1/encounter ability. It makes for some potentially interesting added design space, but it doesn't always line up smoothly. The interesting thing is that since most classes could potentially operate off of two different numbers of reserves, this also makes it possible for each subclass within a class to have some variance w/r/t reserve-burning mechanics. The trick of it is to not bump at-will abilities to being per-encounter abilities, simply because we can give a class enough reserves to do so.

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Next post is due on April 14th, so check back then!