Having Reservations (2024)

Let's talk a bit about reserves!

I'll start by saying that the baseline assumption I'm working from for the sequel designs, is that all characters just have 10 HP and 10 reserves; 10 is a nice round number, and 10 is the default target-number or "DC" in TNP anyway. But there are other sources to consider.

One of the games that I've played with a D&D group that I'm a part of is the Warhammer Quest: Cursed City board game. This game effectively has a "wounds" system, whereby being hit twice removes one of your four action dice; for all intents and purposes, this means that the player-characters each possess 8 HP. There is no consideration given to a Constitution score or racial/background bonuses. Early drafts of TNP had all monsters function almost as minions, dealing a fixed amount of damage (usually 1 point) which is similar to how monsters in Cursed City tend to work; this allows HP to be relatively low, compared to the 30ish you would start with in modern TNP (or 4th Edition D&D) for example.

Since in TNP, "everything is derived from the dice," earlier drafts had HP as a function of a rolled class die; this was pretty quickly revised to "maximum value of your class die" (producing a range from 4 to 12) but the obvious imbalance this created led to (effectively) a flat 20 HP being added to these numbers, to even things out a bit more. Naturally, monster math and mechanics had to be completely reworked to accommodate this.

However, since the sequel is expressly not built off of class dice, we can use something like a flat 10 HP to avoid all of the complexity that got built onto the original, simple TNP framework. Likewise, rather than needing to have reserves be "maximum of 2d4/2d6/1d8/1d10/1d12" so that all classes are more or less balanced, we can just give everyone 10 reserves and be done with it.

Now, a topic that I brought up in the Discord is the idea of a "TNP version 1.1" which would fall outside of the sequel designs, and be more of "the same" game, as TNP. In particular, one thing I brought up was the (often blogged-about) idea of per-day and per-encounter abilities. So let me break this idea down a bit -- hopefully without re-treading too much ground.

Basically, if the assumption is that "one reserve = one full heal-up" then the idea becomes something like, "if you have [a maximum of] 7 combats per day, you need 7 reserves for healing," meaning any extra reserves can be used to fuel your other class features. The basic idea is that TNP 1.1 would focus around properly implementing this idea.

To wit, a class with 8 reserves (i.e. 2d4 or 1d8 as their reserve calculation) would have 1 extra reserve not needed for healing, each adventuring day; the assumption would be that these classes would have a "once per day" reserve-burning ability. Likewise, a class with 12 reserves (2d6 or 1d12 calculation) might have a "once per encounter" reserve-burning ability.

So maybe the hierarchy ends up looking something like this:

• 8 reserves: 7 for healing + 1 per-day ability
• 10 reserves: 7 for healing + 3 extra healing
• 12 reserves: 7 for healing + 1 per-day ability + 4 extra healing -OR- 7 for healing + 5 for per-encounter abilities

In this case, extra healing might be for the character to top themselves up (if they are a tanky class that is expected to eat more damage than average, and therefore needs more healing) or to spend their own reserves to provide healing for allies -- such as in those situations where monster damage outpaces expectations. I'd like to have a cleaner method, such that the "10 reserve" builds could have more flexibility, but in a "dice determine everything"-paradigm like TNP, I'd rather be limiting these kinds of things to 1/day or 1/encounter, rather than have to somehow use the dice to justify a different limit.

To take things kind of full-circle, this brings into question the "sequel logic" of just having a flat 10 reserves for everyone; as with a few things already so far in these designs, the space for building mechanics around spending reserves for stuff other than healing is effectively lost by going to a flat math model. However, it's important to remember that the TNP "reserve-burning" mechanics are actually an attempt to unify 4th Edition's healing surge resource with (if not its per-encounter resources) its per-day resources. With that in mind, perhaps the solution as it pertains to the sequel designs is to re-adopt something akin to the 4e power progression, whereby (for example) per-encounter powers are gained at odd-numbered levels, and these are what essentially fuel your "d6 pool" features. So, reserves and "reserve-burning" abilities are no longer fueled by a unified mechanic -- but the upshot is that the numbers become easier to flatten out and balance.

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Alright! So with today's post being on-schedule, the final post of the year should be on December 10th or 12th, as previously planned. 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!

Ongoing Updates (2024)

With the intention being to finalize TNP sometime this year, I do realize and appreciate the fact that it likely will need some continued updates once it gets into the hands of the general public. So, it's my intent that if/when feedback comes in, I can still update the designs even after the rules are "done."

Off the top of my head, there are a couple of potential design spaces which I don't think have been fully mapped out yet; whether these make their way into TNP or into a later RPG design is still up in the air.

One more narrow example is the proposed mechanics for the Acrobat class. Since this class is meant to cover the design space of some of the classes left out from 4th Edition D&D (specifically the Seeker, Avenger, and Assassin/Executioner) the idea was that each power source would give this class a different feature, mapped to one of those left out classes. This didn't make it into the designs yet, but since it's such a relatively small thing, I may try and include it before the system is officially wrapped.

There are two other subsystems that have a more major impact, which I would like to see fleshed out more fully in the class designs: conditions/status effects, and reserve-burning mechanics (i.e. encounter powers and daily powers.) There were a few classes where, as I was updating them, adding in these mechanics just happened to be top of mind and ended up getting included. But this was not done uniformly, and it would likely require a thorough editing pass to really update all of the classes to a design ethos that properly utilizes these mechanics. As such, this may need to be something that is trickled out through a series of ongoing updates.

Based on the previous post on the subject, it probably stands to reason that all classes could have a 1/day ability; as a starting point, that may be a good enough place to work from. I think the conditions & status effects definitely need to be worked into the monster-building advice, and there probably needs to be some guidance as to what levels along the character progression it would be appropriate to use such effects.

As for the campaign-building mechanics... while still a little rough around the edges, the basic framework seems to be "there." Probably testing will have a bigger impact on it than anything, so having something "playtest ready" is more important than having a system carved in stone.

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As an update to the previous post, I think the way to approach the skills portion of the character sheet is with something of a "workspace" whereby a generic heading for each 'dot' could be set beside each skill, in rows. So, for example, have two dots for Training, one mapped to Attribute and one to Skillset -- with the same done for skill ranks: one dot for Attribute and one for Skillset (with possibly a 3rd for feat bonuses, or similar things that might bump a skill rank beyond just those two boosts.)

This way, you don't have to necessarily make a notation of the Brawl skill being a Strength/Athletics skill, as long as you know which bonuses you have to those. As such, it would likely make sense to have a section with a list of all 5 Attributes and all 5 Skillsets, where you can fill in your bonuses to each -- or, just have those work similarly, with the "workspace" approach, i.e. you only fill in training/ranks for the attributes/skillsets that have upgrades applied to them, and the rest are left off of your sheet.

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A little bit of a short/hasty post for today; the next update is due March 3rd!

New Mechanics: Status Effects, Conditions, and Initiative (2023)

I'm choosing to not call this post an overview, because some of the information presented here isn't completely instituted into the game, and I expect some of it to change with playtesting. Where status effects and conditions intersect with initiative, is when you try to sort out the notion of "surprise" rounds or a "surprised" mechanic/condition; that will be touched on towards the end of the post.

Laying the Groundwork
As one might expect, when looking for inspiration, the first thing I did was make up a spreadsheet to help me compare conditions from 4e/Essentials with those in 5e. In my opinion, the conditions in 5e are poorly constructed and underutilized in the designs; that's not to say 5e added in a bunch of unneeded conditions, just that they didn't execute on them. (It has been hinted at that 'One D&D' will rework things to make status effects actually line up with spell effects, something I think potentially could be a big improvement.)

The short version of this comparison:

• 4e does not have a Poisoned, Frightened, or Incapacitated condition
• 5e does not have a Slowed, Dazed, Surprised, Helpless, Removed from Play, Weakened, or Insubstantial condition

Breaking down these outliers is probably a helpful place to start, in explaining why or why not to keep a condition in the game.

Poisoned: disadvantage on attack rolls and ability (i.e. skill) checks
This always struck me as weird, since such a generic debuff is tied to such a specific flavour of damage. For TNP, we're going with Exhausted as "disadvantage on all skill checks," while having "disadvantage on attack rolls" end up elsewhere.

Frightened: disadvantage on ability checks and attack rolls while the source of its fear is in line of sight, and cannot willingly move closer to the source of the fear

I feel like this is one of those seminal control-type abilities in RPGs, and I genuinely think it's pretty well-written in 5e. We're keeping Frightened in TNP, but it's beefed up to more of an "action denial" effect, rather than just disadvantage on rolls.

Incapacitated: cannot take actions or reactions
My own DM'ing experience has led me to decide pretty early on that this type of effect wouldn't be in TNP. If you want to be really mean in combat, what you can do is combine more than one action denial effect; in 4th edition, dazed (can only take one action) and prone (needing to use your move action to stand up) was a pretty good example that I came up with.
I tend to refer to this condition as "lose a turn" -- and oddly enough, the 4e condition "Removed from Play" does exactly that; Stunned in 4e does the same, and Surprised is effectively "stunned during the surprise round." Suffice it to say, there's a lot of verbiage being thrown around on a concept that I ultimately wasn't going to use. Instead, if you are surprised at the start of initiative in TNP, you are Shocked, which is similar to 4e's Dazed condition -- limiting how many actions you can take, but not denying you the ability to act, outright. The term "Incapacitated" in TNP is instead recycled as the generic debility, granting you disadvantage on attacks and saves, and granting your enemies combat mastery against you -- while you yourself are unable to gain combat mastery against enemes (that last bit was something that was ultimately added in to the Blinded effect, in Essentials.)

Slowed: your speed becomes 2, do not pass 'Go', do not collect $200
This one from 4e was pretty hard to mimic in a more-abstracted movement ethos. Effectively, this is absorbed into the Immobilized condition, which restricts all forms of movement except for teleportation or forced movement. 'Restrained' is a bit of a sticky wicket; in 5e it reduces your movement speed to 0, whereas in 4e it adds that you can only move by teleportation. Both also effectively give you a penalty while granting enemies a bonus to attack you. In the current draft, Restrained in TNP makes you Immobilized, Incapacitated, and unable to move or be moved by any means, in addition to disadvantage on certain skills (i.e. Weakened.) Grappled is essentially "Immobilized while the grapple is maintained" so as such, it seemed reasonable to make it a little stronger than just regular immobilization; in the current draft, this translates to also applying disadvantage on off-turn actions.

Helpless: you grant combat advantage

Now, specifically the only time this condition is used in 4e is when you're unconscious, although the Essentials text more or less says the DM can slap you with this if you're tied up real good, or similar. It's also the prerequisite for a coup de grace in 4e (if memory serves.) Suffice it say, we're not using this in TNP. If a creature is Dropped (i.e. surrenders or drops to 0 HP) they fall Prone -- which is an effect that grants combat mastery in melee.

Weakened/Insubstantial: you deal/take half damage (respectively)

I just never like the mechanics of doing half of anything, and having to round up or down. Effectively, hitting or being hit 50% less often mimics the same effect, and so that's where the disadvantage mechanic is a handy catch-all. Again, this is not used in TNP.

Rounding Out the List:

Now, at its core, the status effects in TNP (aside from those based on positioning in combat) are all designed off of a few basic building blocks:

• Combat Mastery
• Incapacitated
• Shocked
• [disadvantage on skills]

As said earlier, Exhausted grants disadvantage on all skill checks. Weakened grants disadvantage on Strength and Athletics checks; this effect is nested into Restrained, in the current draft. Dazzled is simply disadvantage on Detection skills; the Dazed and Dominated conditions have Dazzled nested into them. Likewise, Frazzled is disadvantage on skill checks using Subtlety (i.e. Stealth) and Communication (i.e. Intimidation); the Fazed and Frightened conditions cause the target to also be Frazzled. (Alliteration is fun!)

I also didn't want the bigger/badder conditions to simply be a combination of smaller conditions -- otherwise, you don't need to make a new condition, you can simply mix and match the smaller ones to get the same effect. So for the higher-end effects, there's also usually a little something extra:

• Dazed creatures are Dazzled, Incapacitated, and unable to see
• Fazed creatures are Frazzled, Incapacitated, and unable to hear or speak
• Dominated creatures are Dazzled, Shocked, and cannot attack or disengage from the source
• Frightened creatures are Frazzled, Shocked, and "Cannot take movement actions except to disengage from the source, or to take cover"

Beyond all this, there are things like cover, high ground (as it has been called in earlier drafts) or altitude (as it's tentatively called in the current draft), as well as being Hidden (covering both the Stealth skill as well as any magical forms of invisibility) and the 4e-staple Bloodied condition.

The trickiness with some of these is the mechanic of "players always roll" rather than enemies attacking players, bringing into question whether or not a particular condition should always apply "evenly." In other words, should an effect that grants disadvantage on saves (i.e. to players only) make the target also grant combat mastery to those targeting it (something that can apply to players, and monsters)? This uneven application can potentially lead to a double-penalty where one is not intended -- theorycrafting doesn't always catch everything, so this is where playtesting has to step in and find issues.

Surprise! Roll for Initiative
I mentioned in earlier posts that initiative checks will be it's own "thing" rather than piggybacking off of skill checks. This is because the change to skill check dice (i.e. no longer using d20) produces a flatter result, meaning the initiative numbers would be clustered together, when in practice it's better if they're spread apart. The question becomes, how do you determine who has surprise? It doesn't make sense to just go by highest/lowest initiative, but we also can't simply compare opposing initiative checks, since they are no longer skill checks.

What I'm considering is this (and admittedly, this is clunky and might bog things down):
Whenever you're out exploring, and danger may arise, each player should choose whether they're sneaking, on lookout, or taking a 'balanced' approach (snazzier terms for these, TBD.)

• If you are sneaking, you roll stealth: on a success, you are Hidden at the start of combat; on a failure, you have disadvantage on your initiative check (i.e. only the d20 component of the roll.)
• If you are on lookout, you roll perception: on a success, you gain advantage on your initiative check (again, only for the d20 component); on a failure, you are Shocked at the start of combat.
• If you are taking a balanced approach, you do not need to make a skill check; you do not gain any of the possible penalties or benefits to initative/at the start of combat.

By structuring it this way, we get the benefit of the 5e approach (where there is no 'surprise round' per se) while making it more clear as to who has the jump on who -- since it can be adjudicated on an individual basis, rather than... whatever the hell 5e is trying to do. (I find the idea of "group checks" to be a bad mechanic, just generally.) It also sort of lines up with the 4e notion of surprise, where the ambushers get a round to take limited actions, while the "surprised" get to do nothing; instead, in TNP you have the ambushers able to act fully and with a bonus (i.e. combat mastery from being Hidden) while the "surprised" are limited in their actions, and have a penalty (granting combat mastery from being Shocked). I also like the structure of having Shocked be an in-combat status as well as the one used to model surprise -- rather than 4e having two different statuses that are functionally the same thing.

Teaser:
The other application to consider is whether certain effects should be 'at-will' while others require you to burn 'encounter' or 'daily' powers -- or whether burning reserves can upgrade effects, along a certain track. It's definitely something that will need to be worked into the overall designs.

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Well, it's anyone's guess when the next post will be out; hopefully March 26th, at the lastest.

Crunch Time (2018)

As was kind of expected, playtesting showed that the game isn't fully ready to be released "into the wild."

Since the game's non-combat aspect leans entirely onto the skills, it will be important going forward to have this facet of the game a lot more thoroughly defined. The mechanics of each skill, the basic assumptions of what happens outside of combat, as well as who commands the flow of the action (and when) will need to be codified. I think it will also be important to define when and how to fall back on Attributes, Skillsets, and Power Sources, i.e. when there may not be a specific skill that covers a certain type of action.

The "monster workshop" guidelines will need more testing; there were some flaws with the theorycraft behind solo monsters, and I can only assume that the same will be true of the other new monster types. Likewise, the rules for summoned creatures need to be expanded upon -- specifically, when they should or should not be treated as "allies." Mechanically, the Ranger's animal companion needs to be reworked, since it can potentially soak a lot of damage, with no real penalty or drawback if it's killed; it can simply be 'recast' on your next turn.

Another thing that was shown to be troublesome was various passive and defensive buffs. Boosts to defense rolls can be disproportionately powerful, since a character can potentially make several of them in a round. Whereas bonuses to attacks are generally limited to Basic Attacks, which (among most classes) happen only once, on their turn. The need to balance off these different types of benefits was reflected in the updated Cleric class, which I wrote during the course of playtesting. Always-on buffs will need to have their effectiveness scaled, to match their projected frequency, or simply have that frequency adjusted to match their potency.

A few of the more basic concepts of the game need to be defined -- "Death and Dying" (so to speak) being one of them. I mentioned previously that Reserves are meant to function as out-of-combat HP top-ups, but the mechanical ability to use them needs to be cleared up a bit. Can you spend Reserves at the end of combat, if you are "dropped"? Does initiative immediately end when all enemies are defeated, or should you finish out the round (potentially letting support characters get more healing in)? These kinds of things need to be explained in the text. "Expertise" (I feel) also needs to be straightforwardly called out as simply a piece of mechanics jargon, or it needs to be renamed (because it continues to cause mental logjams with new readers/players.)

Last (for now) is the fact that I need to finish writing the remaining classes, which also means needing to crunch their damage numbers, and make sure everything balances. The class features all need to be reformatted, and the slate/category upgrades need to be instituted across all classes. The "Performance" progression needs to be ironed out and finalized; some classes being able to gain it as an option at 1st level, but with no actual benefit until 2nd level is something that needs to be fixed. "Subclass only" and "Archetype only" classes will need to have unique and interesting upgrades available to them.

Once the classes are set, they will all need to be tested, re-tested, and re-balanced; if the playtesting has shown anything, it's that things are never as close to completion as they seem, and that the devil is in the details. For the game to reach a finished state, there will need to be a lot of bug-squashing; I'm hoping I can find faster ways to identify problematic, vague, or breakable mechanics, going forward.


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Keeping with the blog schedule, the next post should be up on August 18th, so check back then.

Skill Difficulties (2018)

In the previous post on this topic (for Beta 4) I covered most of the fundamentals about how skill usage should be handled, in The Next Project; it's probably worth re-reading before diving into this post. Today I want to expand on that, get into the skill math a little bit deeper, and also touch on "free-form" skill use vs. more structured "skill challenges."

We've already set up the parameters of "when not to roll" -- if a course of action is either trivially easy, or impossible -- but perhaps that needs to be expanded on a bit, with some more crunch applied. Specifically, this means that if/when the DM is going to ask for a roll, there is going to be a chance of failure. So what does that mean in numerical terms?


Math behind the Madness

The 'Beta 4' post established the different degrees of competency that characters can have with each skill; with our universal difficulty (or "DC") of 10, this gives us the following success rates (including critical successes):

1. untrained: 55%
2. expertise: 60%
3. trained: 72.5%
4. trained+expertise: 81.666...%

What this means is that at the highest competency level, the failure rate caps out just below 20%, with the DM having the discretion to further reduce that to zero -- if they declare that a course of action simply succeeds without needing to roll.

Meaningful Results

If we look at the numbers when allowing multiple rolls at the highest competency level, the chance of failure almost immediately starts to approach zero (which, if that is the desired result, then the established rule for "trivially easy" actions should have been invoked.) So while it has always been enforced in my playtests, I'm not sure this has ever been explicitly written into the rules: the party should not be allowed to attempt the same skill check more than once, to overcome the same obstacle. If they are required to roll, it is because the DM wants there to be a chance of failure, and if failure is the result, then the party must attempt a different course of action, in order to proceed.

The example of this from the previous post would be "picking a lock" vs. "breaking a door down" -- if one doesn't work, the party can try the other (or they must simply choose an alternate path.) But the effect of the failure is that the approach must be changed, instead of just rolling the same approach until it succeeds.

Another tool we can put at the disposal of the DM borrows from 4th Edition D&D's skill challenges; a failure can mean a change in approach, or a loss of resources. In some cases, it might be appropriate to allow a failed course of action to succeed, if the player is willing to sacrifice one of their reserves to do so.

Structure vs. Restriction

If only one attempt can be made at each skill check, it also incentivizes party members to diversify their skill selections, across the group; each character should have their own area of specialization, and should only really overlap in case the party gets split up. With all of this in place, we can see how the system helps to facilitate teamwork and "sharing the spotlight" a little bit. The question then becomes whether this needs to be formalized mechanically, even further.

The way skill challenges worked in 4th Edition, it was essentially turn-based; you went "around the table" and everyone took a turn making a skill check of some sort. This, however, is counter to the best practices that came out of actual play experience, with the system. My own anecdotes line up with the advice that "the best skill challenges are the ones the players don't know they're in." 

The best way to achieve this is to put the party in a non-combat scenario with multiple different leads or threads that can be followed, and then ask them which ones they choose to pursue, and how. Giving everyone a chance to act and to have their share of the spotlight is important (as it always should be in gaming) but "gamifying" it into turns can sometimes get in the way of the scene evolving organically, or "the action flowing from the fiction."

Turn-based skill challenges should be a tool in the DM's kit, but one that is used sparingly. All characters in TNP are designed to be able to meaningfully contribute in any encounter; there should be no "risk aversion" on the part of the players, in non-combat encounters. If this is a problem that a DM consistently runs into with their group, then instituting a round/turn structure can be used to help cajole people into putting themselves out there a bit more.

Keeping Score

The next question when examining skill challenges is how you measure success -- and I'll just come right out and say, that I think this comes down to taste.

If a non-combat scene requires the party to amass a certain number of clues, the DM can weigh the numbers of successes and failures it took to get them all, and decide (based on that) whether to award XP or not -- perhaps even going so far as to penalize reserves for particularly unsuccessful outings.

Alternatively (if appropriate to the scene) failure at a skill challenge can end in combat (resulting in a similar expenditure of reserves) albeit with the express understanding that whatever knowledge there was to be gleaned from the skill challenge will be given to the players, at the end of the fight. In any case, the over-arching plot still needs to be advanced, regardless of the outcome.

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Next post

Work has been going on behind the scenes on compiling the new draft of the rules, but there haven't been any real revelations from that process -- it's just the usual, expected grind.

As always, check back in 10 days for the next update. If you have any questions or requests for blog content going forward, leave a comment below, or get ahold of me wherever you get your TNP links from.

Constitution -- Part 1: Reserves (2018)

I've been meaning to give this little subsystem a good old-fashioned number crunching for a while now, so that will be the topic of today's post.

When I first set about implementing Reserves into the designs, one of the basic intents was to provide a structure for the length of an "adventuring day." Essentially, when you run out of Reserves, you need to take a rest and replenish them, in order to continue adventuring. As with most things in TNP, I wanted to use Class Dice in some sort of permutation, to dole out Reserves. Using 4th Edition as a comparison -- 6 to 10 Healing Surges as a base (depending on your class) plus your Constitution modifier -- the easiest way to approximate that range of numbers was simply "maximum value of your Class Die."

I also wanted to have Reserves be closer to a full heal-up. I liked how 4th Edition's handling of bloodied value and surge value worked, but just as a matter of personal taste, I wanted to avoid any division or rounding in my designs (even though HP values in TNP are a lot easier to work with, in that regard.) Subsequently, I came up with the idea of having "maximum Class Die value" as effectively being your "surge value" in the sense that it was the guaranteed amount of HP you would regain from spending a Reserve. Using a d20 roll meant that this mechanic now had a ceiling, to go with its floor.

So with the onset of the 2018 Edition of the game, I figured the rules surrounding Reserves needed a closer look. Since most of the playtests only lasted a few encounters (rather than a whole adventuring day) it made sense to check the math, and ensure Reserves were of roughly equal utility between the various Class Dice. I had already figured out early on that d12 classes would need other things to spend reserves on (since they got so many) but I also had a feeling that d4 classes would not have enough "healing."

Many gamers' experience with the shortcomings of Hit Dice in 5th Edition D&D has pointed some in the direction that out-of-combat HP restoration should essentially come in the form of a pool of HP you can draw from -- and that this amount should be roughly equal for all classes. I started to look at Reserves from that angle, and crunched out how much HP you're actually able to get from spending one:

• d4 -- 4 reserves, 4-20 HP restored per = 16-80 HP
• d6 -- 6 reserves, 6-20 HP restored per = 36-120 HP
• d8 -- 8 reserves, 8-20 HP restored per = 64-160 HP
• d10 -- 10 reserves, 10-20 HP restored per = 100-200 HP
• d12 -- 12 reserves, 12-20 HP restored per = 144-240 HP

As you can see from the numbers above, there is a wide gap in the utility of Reserves, depending on your class die. So, taking that into account, I set about trying to narrow the ranges a bit. The precedent of d4 or d6 classes doubling their maximum Class Die value for both their number of daily reserves and for minimum HP recovery already exists as features for some classes/subclasses, so I decided to work from there. After looking at the numbers a few times, doubling the number of reserves for d4 classes and doubling the minimum recovery for d6 classes appears to be the way to go.

Also, if we assume an adventuring day consists of 5 encounters, and that our d12 classes will take advantage of their reserve-burning abilities in each of those, they will effectively have 7 reserves to spend on healing, per adventuring day. Similarly, we probably need to ensure d10 classes have something they can spend reserves on in combat, a few times per adventuring day; for the sake of this exercise, we'll assume it's used 3 times.

With all of these ideas implemented, we get this:

• d4 -- 8 reserves, 4-20 HP restored per = 32-160 HP
• d6 -- 6 reserves, 12-20 HP restored per = 72-120 HP
• d8 -- 8 reserves, 8-20 HP restored per = 64-160 HP
• d10 -- 7 reserves, 10-20 HP restored per = 70-140 HP
• d12 -- 7 reserves, 12-20 HP restored per = 84-140 HP

The ranges are much narrower now. We also still have the design space of "double reserves" for d6 classes and "double minimum HP recovery" for d4 classes, both available for use as class features. Also, since the amount healed skews towards the minimum, the average "daily" HP recovery for each die being used ends up being very close.

Now, I should point out that this is essentially intended (more or less) as a balanced control from which to do playtesting. It may turn out that d4 classes have enough defensive tools that they don't need to also have an equal amount of HP recovery available to them; likewise, classes with higher maximum HP values may need bigger reserves to keep themselves topped up. If these changes are found not to be needed, then we have the previous iterations to fall back on.


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So for the next post in the "Constitution" series, I'm going to talk a bit about HP -- where the numbers come from, how this compares to other games, etc. I also will touch on "Constitution as an Attribute" a bit, and why it hasn't figured into the designs (and some times when it did.) Overall, it will be sort of a hybrid "retrospective" post; there's not much that I expect to change regarding HP in the upcoming rules draft.

Once February is over, I'm hoping to get some more design work done, and the blog content should reflect that; I don't expect to talk about "Constitution" for more than these two posts.

Check back February 20th!