Re-iterating the Designs (2024)

The current designs for attack bonuses focus on the "class dice" with the bonus essentially being a non-stacking "typed" bonus. What this means is that while you might have one of each class dice bonus (and you can roll all of them) you only actually use one of these dice as your attack bonus -- the rest are used as a damage bonus.

The way I've decided to iterate on this idea (for whatever follows after TNP) is to instead use d6s for this bonus; only the highest d6 would be used as the attack bonus, but all of the d6s will be used as a damage bonus. With the designs pivoting towards d4/d8/d12 as the "weapon damage dice," I am also considering using this roll as a bonus to the attack roll, which can be used instead of the d6 bonus. The basic idea would be a stripped down version of the TNP class dice bonuses: the d4 would be added to the attack; the d8 would be added to a miss, and; the d12 would be used in place of the attack roll (and probably crit if both the attack roll and the d12 would 'hit'.)

Now, a while back, I was looking at potentially replacing the d20 mechanic with a 2d6+mod system. The interesting thing with this, is that it essentially required that all of the modifiers be positive, in order for the mechanic to produce suitable ranges under a DC10 paradigm. This sparked a connection in my brain, since the skill mechanic in TNP essentially has "skill rank bonuses" that likewise have to be positive -- but they're a d6 bonus, rather than a flat modifier.

Building off of this idea, and porting this latest d6 mechanic onto it, I got an entirely new idea rolling. Generally skill ranks were capped at 3, but in some cases it might be possible to get it as high as 4 or even 5 (particularly with knowledge skills.) In the ethos of "extra damage dice," TNP was likewise capping at 5d6 or 3d10, both with a maximum of 30 damage.

What if we devised a system where the skill rank bonus and the attack/damage bonus were keyed off of the same modifier?

For example, a +2 DEX attribute would let you roll 2d6 and keep the highest, as a bonus to your skill checks (1d10) using that attribute. However, a Rogue might also get a perk when using suitable weapons/attacks, where they would be granted a d6 'sneak attack' bonus based on their DEX attribute; +2 would grant 2d6, with the highest roll being added to the attack roll, and both dice being added to the damage. Barbarians could do something similar with their STR attribute while raging, as another example.

I quite like how this design ethos is shaping up. The one misgiving I have is whether weapon damage dice are a meaningful enough design space, or whether the whole thing could fire off of d6 and d20 alone; would we even need/want to keep d10 for skill checks?

I also think by breaking out of the "class dice" paradigm, it allows this kind of a system to be a lot slicker, more unified, and potentially run a lot faster. I think it would benefit from standardizing on something like 10 reserves for each class, and possibly even 10 HP per character (if enemy damage is scaled back accordingly) -- rather than necessitating that these things be extrapolated off of class dice, or a constitution score. This also allows for the possibility of unifying under d6 as being the bonus die for all rolls (attacks, saves, checks, initiative, and damage) rather than having a mix of d6, d10, and class dice, as in the current ethos; this seems like a meaningful quality-of-life improvement, especially if this can all be neatly tied back into attributes.

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Time for summer break! This blog should return by the start of August, or possibly sooner (as mentioned in the previous post.)

Collaborative Storytelling?

I don't know who needs to hear this, but I have some bad news for you:
D&D is not a collaborative storytelling game.

At its roots, the mechanics of D&D are that of a wargame, in most respects; the more I watch of The Players Aid, the more convinced I am of this. What this means is that it comes from an ethos of there being some amount of balance between the opposing sides, but that ultimately there are winners and there are losers. This is something which is sorted out by the rules of combat and the rolls of the dice. To wit, whether or not your character lives or dies at the end of a combat has nothing to do with what is "narratively" or "thematically" appropriate; the sport of D&D combat is the only determining factor in your survival.

Now, I've heard of RPGs where characters only die when they "want" to (such as when it is narratively appropriate, a meaningful sacrifice is being made, etc.) But I don't even need to go that far; I can point to something as simple and mechanically D&D-like as Knights of the Old Republic to give an example of the PCs basically never dying. One could similarly point to the Mass Effect franchise as an example of party members only dying when it is narratively "earned."

D&D doesn't do this at all. And I'm not even necessarily saying that it should. What I am saying is that unless a system mechanically supports character death as being narratively driven... it won't be. So, if you're expecting D&D to be a game where you build grand narratives with your party members, then at best you're likely going to have to fudge things in order to make it so.

I guess this is all to say that, you can reduce the lethality of a D&D-like game, in order to improve the longevity and consistency of a party, so that collaborative storytelling can take root... but you do so at the risk of losing any sense of stakes, or at least create the necessity of coming up with better, more meaningful stakes than just "live or die [and respawn with Jimmmmm, the Fighter, at the next town.]"

I also think that in pursuit of accessibility and simplicity, D&D fails at being a sport -- and collaborative storytelling suffers as a consequence of that. When combats seem abritrary and unfair, death seems cheap and meaningless (and don't get me started on traps). I really think in a lot of ways, that D&D has lost its direction, because it has no identity; it can't decide what it does or does not want to be, because it wants to be everything to everyone -- and fails.

And this is why I've always felt that the focus on mechanics is so important, when it comes to TNP. The combat in the game may feel more like a pro-wrestling match than an actual fight, or even a team sport -- but it should ultimately be challenging and fun, and punctuate some of the drama. The DM shouldn't have to feel like they need to pull punches in a fight, for the sake of the narrative (nor should they feel like they need to punish in-character or IRL actions with things that happen in combat.) This is why I think that the idea of a "collaborative storytelling" RPG is sort of... aspirational? Because the mechanics just have to work, if you want to have any of that other stuff just work, too.

I've never looked at systems that are purely narrative and really felt like I was playing a "game" when I did it; if anything, it felt like a "choose your own adventure" where you inevitably have very bad things happen to you (with little or no agency over them) because that's what's deemed to be "dramatic" or "interesting" or what drives the story forward: failures, shortcomings, debts, etc. It always feels weird, and unheroic. And frankly, I come to TTRPGs from the Diablo 2 paradigm, of basically being a huge badass; playing as a shitfarming peasant just isn't want motivates me, in the RPG space -- never has, and possibly never will.

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Anyway, I guess that's a topic that's been on my mind, as I play through my 5e campaigns, in what clearly is the twilight of this edition. I hope some of you are at least able to gain something from my occasional rambling post, such as this one.

Next post should be up sometime after the 25th but before the end of June; I may do one post near the end of July as well, but we'll see.

Filling in the Grid: Roster Construction (2024)

A topic that came up in the TNP Discord recently (piggybacking off of the last blog post) was how to determine the roster construction in an RPG. In my previous designs, there were effectively 6 "classes," built off of a chassis of picking whether you were a (martial) warrior or a (spell) caster, crossed with whether you used light, medium, or heavy "armaments" (effectively, armor, in a damage-reduction role.) This mapped pretty closely to the vanilla World of Warcraft classes, but was actually built off of the classes I had sketched out for a presumptive (at the time) Diablo 2 follow-up; Mage, Warlock, and Cleric being the light, medium, and heavy casters (respectively) with Rogue, Hunter(? I think?), and Knight being the warrior classes.

4th Edition D&D started off with a similar ethos to where TNP is now, so let me explain that a bit. 4e was essentially trying to take the pre-existing D&D classes, and map them onto what I refer to as "the intersection of a role and a power source." So for example, Clerics (being a holy healing class, generally) were given the 'Leader' role and the 'Divine' power source.

(As I've probably said before, power sources didn't matter much, until you get into bolting specific feat perks onto your powers; generally power sources informed what your default trained skill would be, as well as your class skills -- this being more or less what got carried over to TNP, mechanically.)

So, with the first PHB, 4e introduced 3 power sources: martial, arcane, and divine. Since the book contained 8 classes, the intention was to (more or less) have 2 classes for each of the 4 roles; famously, this didn't work out because the "martial controller" was nowhere to be found in the designs (until the Hunter subclass, in Essentials.) But the formula for how to "fill in the grid" in 4e was already taking shape; PHB2 added the Avenger (striker) and Invoker (controller) classes to fill out the divine power source, which already included the Cleric (leader) and the Paladin (defender) from the first PHB.

The 2nd PHB also codified Druid away from being a "divine" spellcaster, making the 'Primal' power source its own thing, for really the first time in D&D. The design was kind of kludgy (owed mostly to the fact that Druid is kind of a hybrid, "do everything" class insofar as it's roots in 3.x editions of D&D) so pinning Druid down into the controller role felt sort of forced; to wit, the Essentials and post-Essentials versions of the Druid took the class into completely different directions and roles.

TNP essentially came at its roster construction from the same place as 4e: taking what came before it, and trying to fit it into a defined framework -- namely, class dice. With the earliest iterations of TNP, every class was based off of a single die (either d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12) meaning that a "slate" necessarily needed to have at least 5 classes (whereas every power source in 4e ostensibly should aim to have 4 classes, one for each role.) TNP pretty quickly expanded from one slate into two, and as soon as the 2nd slate was finalized, it began spilling into a 3rd. This is how we got to the current roster of 15 classes.

With the decision to implement a 2nd class die (instead of having just one, for every class) TNP would have had to either expand to a 4th slate, or contract down to just two slates -- in order to keep the class die utilization "balanced." Instead, one slate was kept as single-die classes, while the other two were used to make up all of the 10 combinations of class dice. Similar to 4e trying to fit Druid into a single role within the Primal power source, TNP ended up with "class categories" to try and fit classes into a 'role' within their slate -- which would then make for mechanics/progression that could be mimicked on classes within the same category, on other slates. For what it's worth, I think this works very well on the 'Skill Expert' and 'Jack of All Trades' categories, but is a little shakier for the others.

So why do I bring this up?
Well, it's beginning to seem more and more likely/obvious that there will be an "after TNP" game, in my design future. That said, I think it is worthwhile to ponder, what sort of constraints or framework should be used when deciding what classes to include or exclude from the designs.

TNP has 15 classes, and with subclass mechanics taken into consideration, it tries really hard to at least cover the design space of (if not necessarily faithfully reproduce or "pay homage" to) the 40-odd classes/subclasses presented across the span of 4th Edition (the Psionic classes being the notable absence, in TNP.) Compare that to 5th Edition, where they've started with 12 classes, and more or less just built onto those (adding the Artificer and Blood Hunter, later on) mostly with things that are recognizably prestige classes from 3.5, or (arguably, such as the sprinkling in of Warlord mechanics onto the Fighter class) inspired by 4e.

You can even go back to something as seminal as Final Fantasy 1, to get a sense that 6 classes is kind of the bare minimum; compare that with the "core 4" in D&D of Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and the 5e version of "essentials" making Bard the de-facto 5th class. (You could make a case that this maps to "one class for each ability score [excluding CON].") TNP, by its nature, necessitates 5 classes being the minimum -- although if the framework is shifted from class dice to anything else, this could quickly change.

The question I'm posing to myself is, how many classes would I want, in a follow-up to TNP?
I definitely (if I haven't made it clear in my last few posts on the subject) want to make something smaller in scale, so a straight reproduction/port of the TNP roster is probably off the table. Based on everything we've gone over in this post, 5 seems like the absolute minimum, with 12 probably being the ceiling; ultimately the framework (or "grid") will likely determine what the right fit is.

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Scheduling is a bit jumbly lately, but I would expect the next post to be between June 15th-19th, with the 3rd post this month coming after the 24th. Stay tuned!