General vs. Specific (2025)

At the risk of harping on attributes a few too many times, I think it's worth discussing whether the sequel designs should use "general" rules, and whether there can be exceptions to those.

The best examples of "specific beats general" that I can think of are both from 4e D&D. The general rule was that you could shift one square, as a Move action; the mechanic specific to kobolds was that they could instead do this as a Minor action. Likewise, using your 2nd Wind was generally a Standard action, but dwarves could use theirs as a Minor action.

Also worth mentioning in this discussion is how 4e handled class-specific combat mechanics (i.e. powers.) Most classes fell into one of two paradigms: you had one attribute which determined your attack (hit chance) and damage modifier, and had 2 you could pick from for your "effect" riders, or; you had 2 attributes used for attack and damage (depending on the power), with one obvious attribute for riders. Generally, these were referred to as "A-shaped" and "V-shaped" builds, respectively (some people would instead refer to V-shaped as "Y-shaped.")

So far in the sequel mechanics, we have a few general assumptions:

• TWF will use the lower of STR or DEX for damage mod
• cantrips will use the lower of INT or CHA for dice pool bonus
• AGIL mod will be the number of ranged weapon attacks, per round

The question I found myself asking initially is whether the AGIL stat should serve the same function for spells as it does for weapons, thus negating the temptation to add a 3rd mental stat. And then I started thinking, "well if DEX is the finger-waggling stat, that seems like it could be used for doing somatic components for spellcasting..." This ties back into what I was saying about 4e, where Sorcerers sort of had STR crowbar'd in as their 3rd (2nd?) stat; this kind of setup was particularly important, given that 4e had your defenses use the higher of two paired stats, so every class needed to emphasize one of STR/CON, INT/DEX, and WIS/CHA.

I think part of the problem is that having the dice pool stat be the higher of the spellcasting/mental stats is unintuitive to most people; the obvious thing to do is to put your big numbers in the thing you're using all of the time (i.e. your cantrip stat), but the restriction requiring the numbers to balance off of each other throws a wrench into all of that. However, if we allow for a 3rd stat to give additional attacks, that might make it easier to balance, while giving a bit more variety.

Specifically, you might be balancing a +2 cantrip stat against the ability to only attack once with it vs. a +1 cantrip stat but the ability to attack twice with it. The question then is, do we apply a "general" rule for the "cantrip attacks per round" stat, or do we make that a "specific" rule, based on class or subclass? The later seems to be preferable, because then we can also use that to reinforce which skills (if any) we would prefer those subclasses to be good at. For example, if Intimidation is a STR skill, we might actually want that to be "attacks per round" stat for Sorcerers; if the expectation is that Wizards are better at opening doors, that might point to DEX (i.e. lockpicking) as their stat.

I had previously mentioned in the Discord that a standard array might consist of something like +4/+3/+2/+1/+0 (and for the record, a +4 two-hander stat still balances fairly well vs. a +3 TWF stat, in case anyone was wondering.) This gives us a total of +10, which is nice; I had intended that perhaps a floating +1 from class/subclass might be in addition to that. However, it seems like a pool of +10 (with a subclass-specific "locked in" bonus being deducted from that that total, rather than added to it) is more likely to produce the sort of balanced array that we're angling for. In this way, I think a simple rule such as, "you cannot have more than a single +0 attribute," or "all attributes must be at least +1" will be sufficient to keep people from min-maxing their stats, without having to put an actual ceiling value on stats. It might even be the case that your +0 stat is a sort of "specific" rule, for each class/subclass.

The other exception that has been hinted at before is that the Warlock subclass might not have a dice pool stat per se, but that they can use CHA as their cantrip stat -- even if it were to be their highest mental stat, thus giving them more potent cantrips than what other classes could achieve. I think this is fairly in line with the general 3.5/5e mechanics of Warlocks. Likewise, we could have the Necromancer subclass use INT as "number of summons" that they can have under their control at any time, rather than give them a "cantrip stat" at all.

The other thing to remember is that classes like Paladin and Ranger will no doubt use "spellcasting" stats for dice pools and/or other functions, but they won't have a cantrip stat to balance off against. It stands to reason that if STR is the Paladin's "weapon stat" of choice, and CHA is their "dice pool stat" the obvious 3rd choice would be to bump AGIL (the initiative stat) -- but what if a wrinkle of the system would be that Paladins are required to use a +0 AGIL stat? That might be punishing, but it also makes things interesting by eliminating the "obvious" answer from the equation. You could even incentivize this, for example by granting a bonus to AC for doing so; this is reminiscent of how Monks are given certain unique abilities when not wearing armor in 5e, or similar restrictions that Barbarians have while raging.

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I'm running a bit behind on posting this month, but hopefully we can get back on track now.
One more post before October is out, so check back on (or just after) the 31st; the plan for November would be to post on the 10th/20th/30th to round out the year.