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!
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