#ace plays 5e

[probablyacerpgideas]

"I'm- I'm gonna try and hit him with the hilt of my sword cause killing the other guy was an uh-oh!"

-the fighter

[dykebeckett]

new tav alert

this is dadani she’s an eldritch knight and her goals are to collect huge weapons and peg gale

[utilitycaster]

Daggerheart Character Build thoughts!

I am actually out at work and haven't checked the version that's since come out, but I did participate in the character build beta, and the NDA is officially lifted, so here's my thoughts from that! It's definitely limited since I just made a L1 character and didn't go through gameplay, though I surmise about some aspects of gameplay.

Overall, it clearly seems to be made by people who love a lot of things about D&D 5e but wanted both more flexibility and more simplicity, which is difficult. I think they succeed.

To that end, it takes away some of the crunchier aspects (precise positioning, exact amounts of gold) and I think for some people that will be a problem, and that's valid, but ultimately this game wants to both allow for interesting mechanics in and out of combat while also not being terribly math/map/resource management heavy. It is a hard line to walk; most systems either go hard crunch or go entirely gooey.

The dice mechanic (2d12, Hope and Fear system) is fantastic; look it up but I think it handles mixed successes more gracefully and interestingly than a lot of games.

The playtest was not super clear on armor and evasion choices (or indeed what evasion means; it seems to be sort of initiative but sort of dex save, or maybe more like the Pathfinder/old school D&D varying ACs by scenario?). It was much, MUCH clearer than D&D on weapon choices (part of why I play casters? Weapon rules in D&D are annoying and poorly explained and many people rightfully ignore them) so I'm hoping this becomes clear when there's a full guide rather than just the character creation info.

The character creation questions by class were fantastic and in general, and this is a theme, this feels like it guides people towards collaboration. FWIW I feel like D&D has that information, but the way it's presented is very much as flavor text rather than a thing you should be doing. Daggerheart makes this a much more core part of creation. The Experience mechanic is particularly clear: you better be working with your GM and really thinking about background, rather than slapping it on as a mechanic.

The other side of character creation questions is that it really encourages engagement with the class, which is something I've talked about. I think either subversion for the sake of subversion, or picking a class for the mechanics and aesthetic but not the fundamental concept, will be much harder to justify in Daggerheart, and I think that's a good thing because when people do that, their characters tend to be weaker.

The downtime is designed for you to write hurt/comfort fanfic about and this is a compliment. There are a number of mechanics that reward RP, particularly one of the healing mechanics under the Splendor track. I feel like a weakness of D&D is that when you try to reward RP it's really nebulous because there's not actually a ton of space to put that - you can give inspiration, but, for example, the empathy domain Matt homebrewed actually feels kind of off because it's based on such fuzzy concepts amid mechanics that are usually more rigid. Daggerheart comes off as much cleaner yet still RP-focused, and I'm excited to see it in action.

A judgement of Candela and I suppose Daggerheart might be that it's designed for actual play. I've mentioned before that I know people who are super into the crunch and combat and numbers of TTRPGs and are less story-oriented, and again, that's valid, but actual play is just storytelling using a ttrpg and so yes, a game that encourages RP while also having mechanics to support that and influence it is an extremely good goal. I am not an actual player, but I do like D&D games with a good plot and not just Go Kill Monsters, and I want to play this. (I also have some real salty thoughts about how if you modify an existing game for AP purposes that's staggering genius apparently, but if you make your own game how dare you but that's another post).

And now, the classes/subclasses. I am going to sort of use D&D language to describe them because that's a point of reference most people reading this will understand, but they are not one-to-one. A couple notes: everyone can use weapons and armor. HP is not totally clear to me but it seems to be threshold based - everyone has the same HP to start but people have different thresholds and armor, so the tank classes have the same amount of HP but are much harder to actually do damage to.

All classes are built on a combination of a subclass and two domains. There are 9 classes and 9 domains. This technically means that if you wanted to fuck around and homebrew you could make up to 36 classes (27 additional) by just grabbing two domains that weren't otherwise combined, which is fun to consider for the potential. Anyway I cover the classes and briefly describe domains within them. You can take any domain card within your domain, regardless of subclass.

There are six stats. Presence, Instinct, Knowledge, and Strength map roughly to Charisma, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Strength. Dex is split into Agility and Finesse; Agility covers gross motor skills (jumping, most ranged weapons, "maneuvering") and Finesse finer ones (lockpicking and tinkering, though also it does cover hiding). The really big wins are first, no CON score, so you don't need to sink stat points into something that grants no skills but keeps you alive. The second one is that the "hybrid" classes spellcast from their physical stat. This is fucking fantastic. The thing about ranger or paladin or the spellcasting subclasses of rogue and fighter in D&D is that if you don't roll pretty well you're locked into the core stats and CON and nothing else. (This also doesn't have rolling for stats: you assign +2 to one stat, presumably your main, and then distribute two +1s, two 0s, and one -1.)

Your HP, Evasion, and Thresholds are set by class, and there's a core ability; the rest is all from the cards you take for subclass and domain.

Leveling up is very much based on taking more domain cards (abilities) but has a certain degree of flexibility. It's by chunks: in leveling up anywhere levels 2-4, you can, for example, increase your proficiency by +1 once, so if you wanted to do that at level 2 but your fellow player wanted to wait until level 4 and take something else at level 2 instead, they could. It allows for more min-maxing, but also everyone has the same level up rules and differs only in the abilities on the cards, which is very cool.

Bard: Grace (enchantment spells) and Codex (learned spellcaster stuff; the spells available are definitely arcane in vibes) based, Presence is your main stat. The two subclasses map roughly to lore-style stuff and eloquence. Core class ability is sort of like inspiration but not entirely. It's a bard; I like bards a lot, and this is very similar vibes-wise to your D&D bards. If you like D&D bards you will like this.

Druid: Sage (nature spells) and Arcana (raw magical power spellcaster stuff), Instinct is your spellcasting/main stat. The two subclasses are elemental but frankly cooler than circle of the moon, and a more healing/tranquility of nature focused one. I really think Marisha probably gave feedback on this one, because the elemental version is really strong. You do get beastform; it is quite similar to a D&D druid under a different system, as the bard, but the beastform options are, frankly, better and easier to understand.

Guardian: Valor (melee tank/damager) and Blade (damage). Strength based for the most part (Valor mechanics assume strength) though you could go for like, +2 Agility +1 Strength to start. This is barbarian but like. 20 times better. It is, fundamentally, a tank class, and it is very good at it, with one even more tank-focused subclass and one that is more about retaliatory damage. You do have a damage-halving ability once per day, but really guardian's questions are incredible. I think Travis and Ashley likely gave feedback. Also rage doesn't render you incapable of concentration as that doesn't seem to be a thing, so multiclassing seems way more possible (you are, I think, only allowed to do one multiclass, and not until you reach level 5 minimum, which I am in favor of). Yes, you can be a Bardian.

Ranger: This is what I built! It is based on Sage and Bone (movement around the field/dodging stuff) and it is Agility-based, including for spellcasting, which is a MASSIVE help (as is, again, the fact that CON isn't a thing.) The subclasses are basically being really good at navigation, or animal companion. Most importantly to me you can be a ranger with a longsword and you are not penalized; Bone works with either ranged weapons or melee.

Rogue: Midnight (stealth/disguise/assassination spells and skills) and Grace-based. Yes, rogue is by default a spellcaster, which does help a LOT with the vibes for me. One subclass is basically about having lots of connections (as a spy or criminal might) and the other is about magical slinking about. Hiding/sneak attack are also streamlined. I will admit I'm still more interested in…almost everything else, but I think it evened out a lot of rogue weaknesses.

Seraph: Splendor (healing/divine magic) and Valor. This is your Paladin equivalent. It is strength-based for casting, again making hybrid classes way less stressful. Questions for this area also incredible; you do have something not unlike a lay on hands pool as well. Your subclasses are being able to fly and do extra damage; or being able to make your melee weapon do ranged attacks and also some extra healing stuff, the latter of which is my favorite. Yasha vibes from this, honestly. Single downside is this is the only class where they recommend you dump Knowledge. I will not, and I never will. Now that I don't have to make sure CON is high? I am for REAL never giving myself less than a +1 Knowledge in this game.

Sorcerer: Arcana (raw nature of magic/elemental vibes) and Midnight based. Yes, sorcerers and rogues now share a vibe, for your convenient….less enthused feelings. Instinct-based, which intrigues me, and the core features are in fact really good. The two subclasses are either one that focuses on metamagic abilities, or one that is elemental based. I would play this for a long-running game, though it's not my favorite, and I can't say that for D&D sorcerer (except divine soul).

Warrior: Blade and Bone, and the recommended build is Agility but you could do a strength build. Fighter! One subclass is about doing damage and one is about the hope/fear mechanics core to the game that I have NOT talked much about. I will admit, the hybrid martials and Guardian are more interesting to me but you do have good battle knowledge.

Wizard: Codex and Splendor. Wizards can heal in this system; farewell, I will be doing nothing else (jk). Knowledge-based, and you can either go hardcore expertise in knowledge, or be a battle wizard.

Other scattered thoughts: healing is not as big a deal here; there is no pure cleric class! There is also no monk, warlock, or artificer. There is not a way to do monk as a weaponless class really though you might be able to flavor the glowing rings as a monk weapon and play a warrior. Wizard, meanwhile, with the right experiences and high finesse, would allow for some artificer flavor. Cleric and Warlock are the two tough ones and I will admit those are tricky; I feel like you'd have to multiclass (which you cannot do until level 5) between perhaps seraph and a caster class and you're still going to come off very paladin.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Simpler Monsters = Faster Combat

Been thinking a lot about different ways to tune 5e the way I want it, and I was inspired by a recent chat about how bullshit CR is as a mechanic to ponder over how d&d does its monsters in comparison to other games.

What fundamentally slows combat down (both at the table and during prep) is the mechanical assumption that the monsters/baddies/npcs controlled by the DM have to function on the same mechanical framework as player characters: standard/move/bonus/reaction action economy, HP, AC, Damage numbers etc. While some of this is in the name of game balance, we can all admit that it's clunky as hell and could stand to be overhauled.

In a lot of ways d&d monsters are the way they are (huge stat blocks, a pain to modify/homebrew) because of the old wargaming/competitive/adversarial days of play, specifically in that every monster had to have a canon range of stats so that the DM coudn't "cheat" in the party's favour or against it. I think the pursuit of good gameplay has largely evolved past this obsessive need for objectivity over the past 50 years.

Once you run enough d&d you realize that monster stats don't actually matter. The baddies need enough offence to threaten the party and enough defence to hang on long enough to make the combat interesting, with the actual spice of the combat being tactics, goals, and special abilities. For several levels during an ongoing campaign (lvls 6-9) I swapped out traditional monster HP for gnomestew's "10 good hits" system. None of my players noticed the change, and suddenly my prep/running the session became 1000% easier because there were way less numbers to take care of.

Over the past couple years I've branched out into games using the PbtA and FitD systems, which run the combat encounters through the same gameplay framework as they do skill resolution. Fighting a demon to the death is mechanically the same as escaping away from an avalanche, and while this game design is quite elegant, I want to preserve d&d combat as the tactical miniature skirmish minigame that it is.

I think I'm going to start work on a combat hack, something that will let you port in any vanilla or 3rd party monster you'd like for theoretically any CR range. I'm going to wrap in some of the developments made by the 5e successors (daggerheart, mcdmrpg etc) along with my own ideas about how to make the system run smoother.

[thydungeongal]

I think that 5E having fanbase that mostly doesn't want to play it is good, actually.

If they really outnumber people who want dungeon combat game, wotc can allow themselves to do a total reboot - make 6E a basically different game, keeping only six stats and foundational systems like d20+stat modifier and AC and HP and classes, but otherwise make a very lite-weight game suited for recreating actual play experience with found family or whatever 5E players want (I don't play 5E).

It's a decision that would benefit everyone. Wotc will profit off new players because they are already trapped in their ecosystem, and even if already avid 5E players don't want to buy new books, newcomers will. 5E players will get a game they actually want. Oldies who don't like it can just move to Pathfinder or OSR, so they won't be deprived of games. Hell, wotc may even start their official line of OSR with new settings and adventures and easily get a share of that market as well!

Like, D&D as it is already suffers from incompatible legacy that can't be thrown out without enraging fans, and if this continues for too long it will collapse. But this way it can survive by transforming into a game that 2020s fandom wants.

Games Workshop pulled way riskier move with Warhammer and ultimately succeeded, I think hasbro can do this as well

Thing is, I don't think WotC will ever do it, because they have pretty much managed to cultivate an audience that is so incurious about game design that they think D&D not supporting the type of gameplay they want isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Ultimately, as I have said before, D&D held hostage to nostalgia because it has to adhere to a certain shape of what D&D "has to be," and even though it's actually one of the worst games for supporting plucky found family heroic narratives people will insist it's good for that because the people in question don't think of D&D's rules in terms of incentive structures and genre emulation, but instead as just "stuff" that the game has which means that the game can do the "stuff." Basically, many of these people think of RPG rules in terms of the shape of dice being rolled, instead of the behaviors that RPG mechanics can actually incentivise and how rules actually shape narrative.

I do agree that D&D not being the game most of its players want it to be is good in some way, but not because I think WotC is ever going to address that contradiction: it means that the aforementioned incurious players who genuinely don't care about game design are kept captured within WotC's walled garden, but at the same time those people who do genuinely care about games producing specific narratives will have to look to reconcile that contradiction elsewhere. We just have to keep throwing Molotov cocktails inside of WotC's walled garden to make people aware of the fact that they live in a false paradise.

[teecupangel]

Yes public answering is allowed.

Take your time, I know I am not the only one with asks.

Desmond Miles, Malik Al-Sayf, Kadar Al-Sayf, Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad, Leonardo Da Vinci and Ezio Auditore all playing Dungeons and Dragons pre canon (pre AC.) Desmond has no idea who his friends are cause he didn't pay attention to history lessons and drowned out his father after awhile of his bloodline importance speeches. Kadar is the Dungeon Master/Storyteller. Malik and Altaïr play Paladin and Cleric respectively. Ezio pretty much plays himself, charming flirt. Leonardo, plays powerful characters since he feels powerless often. His friends enjoy Desmond's company that when he goes missing they step up to find him. And Desmond's mind is blown after viewing Altaïr's memories that he figures out who the other two are.

Once again take your time.

Okay.

What if Altaïr is in a forced sabbatical?

Maybe it’s similar to what happened in 1191 where Altaïr’s actions led to the death of someone. Maybe it’s because he deliberately got between their team and the Brotherhood under William Miles.

If you want to keep Clay alive, maybe he saved Clay and that led the Templars and the Assassins into almost recognizing him so they’re all lying low.

Altaïr being not allowed to leave the house is his punishment XD

Malik is an inch away from actually strangling the man with the lan cable for his computer because a bored Altaïr is an annoying one and Kadar took a part time job because he’s that bored.

Kadar met Desmond because his part time job is a delivery man for a specific brand of alcohol that Bad Weather keeps on stock.

Kadar recognized him immediately as William miles’ runaway son and befriended him because he’s curious.

Their friendship leads to Desmond admitting he’s curious about DnD but doesn’t have friends to play with. Kadar invites him because he has online friends that he actually plays DnD with (one of those friends being Rebecca and, if you want a watch_dog reference, Wrench) so he gets the others to play DnD as well because they’re all varying degrees of noobs.

Also, this way, Altaïr would actually have something to do XD

Before Desmond gets there, Kadar makes them promise not to talk about anything Assassin related because Desmond is the first actual offline friend Kadar has made that wasn’t part of the whole ‘we sorta got reincarnated/transmigrated into the future but we’re not gonna talk about that I guess’ thing.

(I’m using http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/ for character info and I am absolutely not sure if they’re already available by 4e XD)

Unorganized Notes:

Kadar uses 4e rules but is fast and loose with them (because I wish to give them 5e but 5e was relased in 2014 TTATT). Leonardo makes the minis but Kadar makes the maps (he does check online for references). It’s his own campaign but his online DnD group helps him (he actually plays a Rogue online named ‘Altair’ without the ‘ï’ because he’s still a fanboy)

Everyone agreed Rogue is off-limits because they might all choose Rogue and also to not tip Desmond off so no one is a Rogue. Desmond screws this up by actually picking Rogue. Desmond actually goes for Assassin Rogue because he loves irony XD His backstory is that he left a cult of assassins as a child and is trying the adventurer life. Everyone just feels a bit awkward when he told them that backstory but Desmond just breezed through that so it was just for a moment XD

Malik is an Oath of Vengeance Paladin who share the same deity as Altaïr. In-game, this is because Altaïr is a Cleric on a mission to appease their god and Malik is there to keep him in check. Out of game, Malik wants to be the one to finally annoy Altaïr this time around and this backstory gives him an excuse to do it.

Altaïr is an Arcana Domain Cleric who is on a mission of redemption as ordered by his deity. The reason why he’s in a road of redemption is unclear and it’s clear that Altaïr has no respect for his deity. In-game, everyone who worship the same deity call him their god’s ‘Chosen’ and he hates it (Kadar absolutely loves to ham out the worshipping of the 'Chosen' XD). Out of everyone, he’s the player who is absolutely min-maxing his character.

Let’s be honest, we’re all expecting Ezio to be the Bard and he is. He even plays the guitar because, according to him, it’s better than a minstrel's lute, whatever that means. Absolutely a School of Swords Bard that has the highest Charisma stat among all of them. He’s the designated leader and the one who pulled everyone together into this weird group of adventurers. He may or may not be a noble who ran away from home.

Leonardo is an Artificer. While Artificers are already available as a class in 4e, their specialties were officially created for 5e but fuck it, let’s say it’s a modified Artificer class because Leonardo should be an Artillerist Artificer. If you don’t want the Artificer class because of how questionable it is possible for 4e, my alternate suggestion is Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer for pure magic destruction or Great Old One Warlock (unli Eldritch Blast). He plays Ezio’s character’s long suffering childhood best friend who joined the group because Ezio ‘begged’.

The campaign may or may not be a chosen one absolutely not wanting to do his mission as said chosen one and being dragged along by his god approved babysitter and a misfit company (the twist is Altaïr's mission is to actually find their god's child that is supposed to save the world... it's Desmond. Desmond's the god's child. The cult he's from is worshipping the same god as Altaïr but Desmond, Altaïr and Malik don't know it. Kadar thinks he's made such a good plot twist XD)

(I left their races ambiguous for you to play with. I personally would suggest making Altaïr a kenku for the lols XD)

[adainesfroggieboggy]

i want to post the homebrew mechanics i made for my apocalypse au so bad. i don't know or care if they'd work in a campaign, i've never played bc i have no friends to play with, but it's very fun to run battles for this fic.

i'd like to preface this with the fact that there is no magic in this world. no area of affect spells, no greater restoration.

the characters are not low-level in these combats, so the swarm was something like 250 zombies in the first one, and they didn't really have a set hp. Instead, if they hit, the damage was halved, and that many were killed. (ex: 10 damage kills 5 zombies, most characters here have weapons with longer reach, so it didn't matter if they weren't within 5 feet) official rules give zombies an ac of 8, but i eaised it to 13. i had a barbarian, ranger, and a rogue in this, and raising the ac was great because my guys were rolling extremely well. i wanted the swarm to be effectively endless because the goal here is not to kill every zombie, it's to get. out. there were three zombies per five-foot square, so every attack would increase movement.

the zombies acted on the same initiative and could only move five feet per round. they attacked every character within reach. upon a hit, the character makes a dex saving throw to avoid/redirect the bite and if they fail, a con save to resist being turned. if they fail both saves, they have until their next long rest to remove the infected limb.

i got some of this "Scarier Zombies in D&D 5E" on youtube from Zee Bashew and the rest is mostly homebrew. it wasn't meant to be a session in a game, so i really fucked around with it. i'd use his rules with their hp max if actually running a game, which is 22. obviously, i started them all with 2 hp, just didn't deal with having injured zombies because in no world was it possible for me to keep track of it with so many on the board.

and there it is! i'd love to attempt this in an actual game, but i think there are some things i'd make more true to d&d rules if i did. reach would matter more, so the damage halving would have a max, but for range weapons? you wanna shoot through five zombies at once? so sick. badass. i think i'd come up with a mechanic for that, maybe surpassing the ac in increments of one or two per zombie.

[monstersdownthepath]

Not monsters, but spells.

As a person who loves to play spellcasters - especially wizards - I wanted to ask your opinion on the offensive cantrip spells, acid splash and ray of frost, specifically.

They just seem so … useless. I get that unlike manufactured weapons, they use touch AC to hit, but 1d3 damage that never changes or increases at all? Seems rather weak. Low-level wizards who run out of spells are effectively reduced to walking encyclopaedias. 5e cantrips scale with level, but naturally 5e monsters are also generally tougher.

What’s your thoughts? Are those cantrips useful? Could they be stronger without being game-breaking for spellcasters?

------

If they seem useless in battle, that's because they are! Most of the time, attacking a creature with cantrips is strictly worse than just using a crossbow or similar.

Operative word: "Creature."

Now, say, if you wanted to freeze a drink or a small amount of hazardous fluid (such as a vial of poison), burn a rope, clear out a patch of hazardous mold, burn off a leech, clear out webbing, or do something similar to that, you'll be glad you had them. There's also niche uses against monster abilities, such as an entanglement being destroyed by "any amount of Fire damage" or a bloodsucking creature being forced to let go if it takes any Acid damage, in which case suddenly your useless cantrips are saving you time, effort, and bigger spell slots.

Cantrips are also... well, training wheels for low-level caster, both in and out of story. By the time your Wizard or Witch reaches 8th to 10th level, their spells should be changing the tides of encounters with singular casts. If they ever get anywhere close to the point where offensive cantrips are starting to look good, you know things are getting bad. Getting to that point reveals the trade the caster has made when they selected their class; their candle slowly burns down over the course of the day, but the martials are still going strong. It's the balancing factor, really; 5e's cantrips are stronger because spells are less numerous.

also, there's something to be said about cantrip damage needing to be low because of the specific interaction it has with Arcane Tricksters Sneak Attacks...

[onslaughtsixdotcom]

Heartbreaker vs. Craphack

The difference between a heartbreaker and a craphack is, you think a heartbreaker will be finished.

I started using the word "craphack" a few months ago to talk about my in-progress fantasy d20 elfgame. (This is a separate project from CRAWL, which has entered a process of hibernation. Its no longer in active development.)

I had a lot of names for this thing. It really started when the OGL shit hit the fan and I was already seeing how affordable low-run booklet prints were. The idea of creating a booklet with a bunch of my house rules and favourite tables, and getting it printed, became a kind of cool idea. Simultaneously, WotC quickly jettisoned a bunch of the coolest ideas for 5e 2024. Initially I was like: well, let's compile those ideas and I'll make a home game out of what I liked.

I called this document 5e Killer. This stems from a phrase I said in early 2023: If you are a major TTRPG publisher and you aren't already working on your 5e Killer for release in Fall 2024, you're fucking up.

I am not a major TTRPG publisher. But why not do my own? At least for my home game.

Somewhere I got pissed at the limitations of "sticking to 5e." I also realized I was just tinkering with it. I did finish a version of this doc. We are playing my 5e game with it now. (I do not like the changes 2024 5e, or any other base ruleset, has implemented. I like this setup enough.)

But, this wasn't "done." Many core problems I had with 5e were still sort of there. Unsure of how to solve them, I backburnered it and began looking at other systems. Perhaps I would find someone else's heartbreaker and be able to modify that, or find a perfect beginning point I could launch out of.

I spent most of 2024 experimenting with other ideas and doing other projects, including converting my Dungeon23 megadungeon to OSE, writing it up, and running the Kickstarter. I spent a month and a half making an OSE house rules document and compilation in anticipation of printing that out, both for home use and convention play. While doing this I actually started to solidify some more ideas about what I liked and what I wanted out of...all of this.

While doing this, little bits and pieces have always come into focus. I now have a canonical equipment list for basically all fantasy games going forward. I have a d100 magic item list and I'm slowly working on d100 spells (although Skerples may yet beat me to the punch). And, I found Outcast Silver Raiders, a game I initially called my "forever game," about three weeks after I made my first document compiling info for the latest version of my craphack.

The craphack doesn't exist except in my head. There are like 8 versions of half formed thoughts, in Discord self-messages and Affinity Publisher projects and Google Docs. They are, if anything, a dialogue with myself, wherein I repeatedly ask: What do I want out of the game?

I like the idea of hit die as damage die; weapons shouldnt have variable damage.

I like the idea of saving throws existing separately from skill checks, existing separately from attack rolls.

I like having lots and lots of classes and ancestries. About 10 each is a sweet spot for me.

I like games where you always roll high to succeed. I am not a fan of roll under.

Likewise, I like the DM being able to set a difficulty class/target number for the player to hit, even on skill checks. Some doors are harder to open than others, some locks are harder to pick than others. (The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic exists and is brilliant, but I prefer to use it for situational bonuses: this is an objectively DC15 check but if you do a thing you can have advantage to maybe do it easier.)

I like monsters having simpler statblocks than players do, with their primary stats being hit die and number, AC, and what they can do on their combat turn. I can make them do anything I want outside of that. I'm the DM.

Somewhere I have a table of every monster "type" and their average 5e stats and I want to expand on that to create basically a monster Rosetta stone for this game, combined with established and working power sets, so that I could easily create monsters on the fly during sessions without having to prep them.

I don't mind even the most mundane classes (like fighter and thief) having a few "special abilities," like 5e Action Surge or whatever. But IMO 5e gives you far too many of these, and worse, has too many options. (For my "forever game," I don't think I want subclasses.)

I like OSR vibes for mechanics, but people played heroic games with these same systems for 15 years, and anyone who says otherwise is fucking kidding themselves.

I like and use miniatures but also sometimes use theater of the mind for some encounters, especially against solo non-boss monsters. The system should easily support both.

I like individual initiative. I think there's still some improvement on my "everyone rolls a d6, if the monster beats any players they roll first, btw lower is better" system. I also wish I could use the Initiative Clock but I think it's a little too fiddly.

We don't need bonus actions or minor actions or anything like that. Too much design. You can move and do one other thing.

I like having a defined list of spells and at least semi-Vancian magic with spell slots. I am open to not having spell slots, but spellcasters should still pick from a list of pre-defined spells. No Knave, Cairn, bastards.-style "combine these random words to make a vague spell and work with the DM to figure out what it does" nonsense.

It's REALLY easy to see where all of these ideas sort of overlap and become relevant to how I imagine playing the game and the flow state that I desire. It's rules that don't get in the way and give all players an equal amount of cool shit they can do on their turn besides attacking. It's also easy to see how many games are outright thrown out by what I am imagining: no Cairn, Knave, OSE, Shadowdark, 5e, Five Torches Deep, etc. etc. (The only one that actually does hit the mark is, appropriately, Outcast Silver Raiders.)

So, where does this all coalesce? As I move around pieces and think about this, it might never coalesce. When I was on Take Flight, Cat and I talked about the idea that you might never finish The System, and That's Okay. It can be the old car that your dad tinkers with in the garage every other weekend and says, one day I'll get it all fixed up, I swear. It's his hobby, the same way game design can be your hobby--even if you are also a professional game designer with other projects that definitely are moving forward, being published, that you're doing the work on.

But my craphack exists and I swear one day I'm definitely gonna finish it, for sure.

[thepleasuregoblin]

Thinking about the Bladesinger wizard from 5e. What a cool concept with a terrible execution.

Ok so first off you don't get your wizard specialty until 2nd level so at first level you're just a normal wizard. At 2nd level you get light armor proficiency and proficiency with one one-handed weapon. You also get a Bladesinging sort of stance you can go into, more on that in a sec.

Now naturally since the high concept of Bladesinger is a front-line(ish) wizard, you're gonna try to maximize your AC. You're still a wizard after all, so your best bet is not to get hit. The light armor proficiency helps with this a little, studded leather gives you 12 + dex. However the Mage Armor spell gives you 13 + dex, so I guess you're saving a spell slot at least. You also get to add your int bonus as long as you're Bladesinging. Assuming a very lucky character generation with 18 int and 18 dex you can have up to a 21 AC at 2nd level. Pretty dang good, but unlikely that you'll pull that off.

Now on to Bladesinging itself. If you're smart you went with a rapier and prioritized dex (after int) so you can actually hit something. It works basically like a barbarian rage without the crash, and has the restrictions you'd expect: can't wear medium+ armor or shields, ends if you're knocked out. Also it ends if you make a two-handed attack, which is frankly wack. The bonuses you get are: add int bonus to AC (pretty good), add 10ft to your speed (not bad), advantage on acrobatics checks (cool I guess but why), and add your int bonus to concentration checks (you're gonna need it).

All these seems very neat at first, your wizard can hop up and chill with the fighters, you know, save some spell slots and do... Less damage than you would with cantrips, and die in a couple rounds cause you still have d6 hit dice and even 21 AC isn't going to stop you from getting hit like. 5-10% of the time at least.

The later features are barely worth mentioning. Extra attack at 6th level, at 10th level you can use a reaction burn a spell slot to reduce the damage by 5 x the slot level, and that one could actually be pretty handy, but kind of a hefty cost, especially since some spells will do better at defending you than this feature. Finally at 14 you get to add your Int bonus to melee damage while in Bladesong. That does let you put out some pretty solid damage with your weapon, but you still have to be in melee, and your 20+ AC is gonna do you even less good at 14th level than at 1st.

Overall, just play war wizard. Or eldritch knight. Or multiclass wizard/fighter. Or, preferably, drop 5e entirely and make a magus or something in pathfinder.

[thecreaturecodex]

Sphinx, Astrosphinx

"astrosphinx" © Weasyl user "xdrake", accessed at their gallery here

[Commissioned by @strawberry-crocodile. The astrosphinx is from Spelljammer, but hasn't gotten updated in the 5e Spelljammer box set. Maybe that's because they're super destructive in the original text--it refers to them living on lifeless asteroids because they immediately kill anything that fails to answer their impossible riddles. That makes them seem kind of one-note, and the commissioner asked me to make them more able to interact with other creatures. My idea was to make them malevolent game show hosts. Feel free to draw inspiration from Jigsaw, darker and edgier versions of the Riddler, and Sam Reich on Game Changer.]

Sphinx, Astrosphinx CR 10 CE Magical Beast This creature has the body of a lion, and its head is the skull of a ram. A third golden eye is open in its forehead. Its wings, mane and the tuft of its tail are covered in luxurious fur that glimmers with starlight.

An astrosphinx is a mad sphinx capable of flying between worlds. Although they do not talk about their origins, some sages suspect that astrosphinxes arise not through natural birth, but as a metamorphosis when a sphinx delves too deeply into mysteries of a cosmic nature. All astrosphinxes are, by mortal standards, completely insane. Like many other sphinxes, they enjoy riddles, but their riddles are typically nonsense—“what is the speed of blue?” and “how loud is down?” for example. Playing along may mollify an astrosphinx for a while, but it rarely finds the answers of other creatures acceptable in the long term, and responds to spoilsports with physical violence.

Astrosphinxes typically open combat with a breath weapon, a soporific gas. If all of their foes are knocked unconscious, the astrosphinx may take the time to cage their captives, or put them into diabolical traps that torture creatures to death in increments. If their prey remains active, they usually follow up with a blast of chain lightning, followed by melee attacks. Although an astrosphinx’s natural weapons are deadly enough, their dewclaws are flexible enough to act like thumbs, and some carry oversized weapons into combat as well.

An astrosphinx loves to subject other creatures to its riddles, whether they want to play or not. Most astrosphinxes have a dungeon complex rigged with traps and torture implements, sometimes staffed with lesser creatures that have agreed to serve the astrosphinx in exchange for room, board and their lives. Astrosphinxes act as deranged quiz-masters, subjecting their captives to trivia contests, word games and their obtuse riddles, increasing their torment by inches when they fail to answer correctly, and dialing up towards lethality if people refuse to play along. Some of these complexes exist in air pockets on asteroids floating through space, so even surviving an escape becomes part of the challenge (and sometimes a part of the challenge that the astrosphinx encourages).

Astrosphinx          CR 10 XP 9,600 CE Large magical beast Init +5; Senses darkvision 60 ft., Perception +11 Defense AC 24, touch 10, flat-footed 23 (-1 size, +1 Dex, +14 natural) hp 133 (14d10+56) Fort +13, Ref +9, Will +9 Immune confusion and insanity effects SR 21 Offense Speed 40 ft., fly 60 ft. (poor) Melee 2 claws +19 (2d6+6), bite +19 (2d8+6), gore +19 (2d4+6) or masterwork Large greatsword +20/+15/+10 (2d8+9/19-20), bite +17 (2d8+3), gore +17 (2d4+3) Space 10 ft.; Reach 5 ft. Special Attacks breath weapon (60 foot cone, sleep 1d6 minutes, Fort DC 21 negates, 1d4 rounds) Spell-like Abilities CL 10th, concentration +16 Constant—see invisibility 3/day—chain lightning (DC 22) Statistics Str 22, Dex 13, Con 18, Int 16, Wis 11, Cha 23 Base Atk +14; CMB +23; CMD 34 (38 vs. trip) Feats Blind Fight, Hover, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Martial Weapon Proficiency (greatsword), Multiattack, Power Attack Skills Bluff +16, Craft (traps) +15, Disable Device +13, Fly +5, Intimidate +16, Knowledge (any one) +13, Perception +11, Sense Motive +8; Racial Modifiers +4 Craft (traps), +4 Disable Device Languages Aklo, Common, Sphinx SQ madness, no breath, starflight Ecology Environment any land or underground Organization solitary Treasure standard (Large masterwork greatsword, other treasure) Special Abilities Madness (Ex) An astrosphinx uses their Charisma modifier on Will saves instead of their Wisdom modifier, and are immune to insanity and confusion effects. Only a miracle or wish can remove an astrosphinx’s madness. If this occurs, the astrosphinx gains 6 points of Wisdom and loses 6 points of Charisma. Starflight (Su) An astrosphinx can survive in the void of outer space. It flies through space at an incredible speed. Although exact travel times vary, a trip within a single solar system should take 3d20 hours, while a trip beyond should take 3d20 days (or more, at the GM's discretion)—provided the astrosphinx knows the way to its destination.

[greyias]

In addition to being stuck on My Time at Sandrock these past few weeks, I've also been distracted by what basically amounts to "blorbo from my head". I was trying out something to see if it would possibly work as a way to run some 5e Waterdeep modules solo so I could pretend to have some post-epilogue adventures with Ari and Gale (long story short: no, it doesn't work well for that, the search continues!).

Despite it not working out for my intended purpose, I did get a little pulled into the story that wound up emerging, and got very attached to the randomized character I was playing.

This is Eliana (or rather, the best representation I could make of her in BG3). She is a level 3, half-elf bard. She has a whole whopping 7 AC, and her spell list consists of such combat bangers like "disguise self", "minor illusion", "faerie fire", and "charm person".

The other three party members are all rangers.

She has a -1 to her intelligence, but consistently rolls a 5 or lower on almost every INT based check (which seems to be about half of the checks she has to make). She introduced herself to her future boyfriend by continually pretending he and one of the other rangers were having an illicit moonlight affair.

Her charm person spell failed once during an encounter on an enemy and she rolled a Nat20 on deception to still convince him to hand over a box containing a potentially world ending McGuffin during combat. She has a rapier but didn't draw her weapon and do damage until like 75% of the way in. She talks to trees, not because it's an inherent ability or she's really into nature, but because it just seems polite at the time. (Sometimes they even talk back... sort of.)

She's befriended a random dire wolf and was nearly murdered by a cute little tabby cat. She disguised herself as the BBEG to interrogate a bunch of cultists who were trying to capture her. She has somehow managed to weaponize the Light cantrip.

Her mortal enemy is a door.

seen here, plotting said door's demise

She is utterly ridiculous and I love her.

So, of course I had to bring this powerhouse into BG3 for an honor mode run.

She did surprisingly well for the tutorial, but then she and Shadowheart forgot to have weapons equipped when walking into the first post-prologue fight and I got a very rude awakening when facing off against the Intellect Devourers. Poor SH died while Eliana ran like the dickens. I tried to alt-f4 to start the encounter over but the game was like "haha nice try" and saved as it was shutting down. After leaving poor SH to her doom, she went and found Gale and Astarion, remembered to equip a weapon, and got vengeance on the little pesky brains and revive my poor suffering cleric girl (who will soon be respecced into a poor suffering ranger girl once we find Withers, as well as the rest of the team).

I'm almost tempted to take bets on how soon this honor mode run is going to end. There is no way they're getting to Act 3 with that enabled. Probably not past the Grove even.

[wearesorcerer]

Since posting the results of the healing spell poll, something's been bugging me: would D&D settings besides Dark Sun develop CPR?

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation requires an understanding of cardiology and the pulmonary system. These are not givens. To understand how the body works, you need to practice dissection. There is a taboo against handling and dismembering corpses in almost every culture; it took other pressures in favor of scientific advancement to get past these taboos and to a basis for medicine beyond basic pharmacology ("this plant does this to people!"). Even the germ theory of disease took centuries to gain sway after its inception.

This is partially because of how humans treat tradition and partially other biases.

But if you have a competing mechanism for healing which doesn't require elaborate bodies of knowledge, would you ever develop those bodies of knowledge? We're not talking isolated scholars with obsessions or hyperfixations, we're talking societies creating repositories of knowledge and establishments that support the creation of further knowledge.

To put it another way: you can't make a Heal/Medicine check to use CPR if the only record of CPR is in a dusty tome written by someone called "the Mad" 300 years before you were born, which is now either shelved in some collector's library of rare books or else at the bottom of a dungeon, in either case forgotten. The knowledge has to be transmitted. And if you have revivify available, it's not going to be.

"But revivify is a powerful spell! It's hardly common!"

In which universe are you playing?

Greyhawk is the standard for magic levels in D&D, as it has been since it got adopted as the standard setting. It's not low-magic by any stretch of the imagination. 5th-level characters are all over, so revivify should be fairly common.

Forgotten Realms has always been high magic and it's the current standard setting. (5e players are probably unfamiliar with the setting's earned description in earlier editions: "Pick up a rock: +2 AC! Pick up another rock: +1 on saves vs. poison!") You can expect revivify to be in wide use in the Realms. The same should be true of any other setting in Toril (Al-Qadim, Kara-Tur, Maztica, etc.).

Eberron was supposed to be low-level but magic-pervasive, which didn't quite work out. Canonically, high-level characters are few and far between; mechanically, there's a lot of Eberron-specific material that requires high-level play. Revivify could easily appear on a Lesser Mark of Healing, given what else appears on Lesser marks. The Lesser dragonmarks aren't that rare, either; each of the guilds/houses is built around their use.

This raises other questions about how the presence of magic might dampen (or enhance) the progress of knowledge in any given field, but I'll leave it at just healing magic. How much would we know and not know about medicine if we could cure diseases and mend wounds through faith in the gods alone?

[utilitycaster]

speaking of jasmine bhullar, she and brennan had a great convo about min-maxers and i was wondering what your own thoughts on min-maxing were? i'm new-ish to actually playing dnd and i still worry about making myself a problem to the dm as opposed to an asset.

First off as someone who enjoys Adventuring Academy but never has the time to watch the full episodes, thank you for bringing this up - I watched just the debate, and it was incredible and hilarious.

This is a good question. I am 100% in agreement with Jasmine here and she said it better than I could: min-maxing simply means that you read the rules to D&D and decided to use them to your advantage. Reading the rules to D&D is great and everyone should do it (in fact, this a reliable way to be an asset to the DM: know how your character's abilities work). There are a few cases where it sucks but most of those aren't actually due to min-maxing so much as shitty player behaviors that can occur in min-maxers.

I think one reason people dislike min-maxers is that the stereotypical min-maxer builds a character who truly can't do anything except for massive damage, and that does kind of suck, but I also think that that is really hard to build in 5e. You're going to have some other abilities. I think it was much easier to truly min-max in 3.5e, and perhaps in older editions you could really break things (in fact, having listened to some pathfinder 1e actual plays, I know you could).

There is also, as Jasmine points out, a false assumption that min-maxers aren't interested in RP or won't do it. This is very clearly untrue and a few examples off the top of my head from Actual Play that are debatably min-maxed are: Deadeye Cybin (played by Brennan, natch) in NADDPod (damage dealer); Laerryn Coramar-Seelie of EXU Calamity (optimized for survival, especially against non-magical foes); Caduceus Clay and Deanna Leimert of Critical Role (both optimized to be healers, incidentally); Orym and Vex, also of Critical Role (optimized to have a stupidly high perception score), Theo Gumbar of A Crown of Candy (optimized to tank and have a stupidly high AC). These are all fantastic characters with profound RP scenes who happen to also be really, really good at a narrow band of things, but they're also not just good at that. Many of them also can serve as the brains or the face of their party; many have utility spells far beyond their area of specialization.

Another reason people dislike min-maxers is they have a reputation for being ungenerous - for swooping in and stealing the spotlight. The above characters, played by some of the most generous people in actual play, show that's clearly not the case. Also, to be honest, a spotlight hog doesn't have to be min-maxed. It's just a shitty "hey, hey look at me" player. I think attention hogs might be a bit more inclined to try to build a character who is really really good at something (again, usually damage more than say, healing) but that doesn't mean that everyone who builds a gunslinger is here to steal all the glory.

Specialization also isn't bad! The reason D&D is a game where people are in a party is because not everyone can do everything! There are a small handful of characters who are a utility knife who can basically do a little bit of almost everything (Keyleth, Fjord, Moonshine) but they are the exception rather than the rule. Barbarians, for example, are a class that usually is structured around tanking and doing damage. This is fine! You probably don't want a party that's all barbarians because it is useful to have healers and ranged attackers and people who can sink all their high stat rolls into the mental side of things because they don't live and die quite so much by their physical stats, but it sure is nice to have a barbarian in the mix to balance out the glass cannon wizard, isn't it?

If you show up to a table where there is a clear gap in party composition (eg: healing) or there's a clear story the GM wants to tell (eg: very social, requires a lot of diplomacy) and you decide not to fill it because you are too busy building Guy With Stealth Bonus of +20, then that's a problem, but that's ultimately a failure to collaborate. Min-maxing for something that doesn't really help the party is simply the way in which you happened to fail that compromise.

I'm sure there are edge-case, dark corners of D&D Reddit builds that do suck, but honestly most of them suck in that they are actually not good (eg: coffeelock). Your typical case of dumping one stat to max out on another? totally normal, totally cool.

Anyway to get to the part of your question regarding not being a problem: you probably aren't! You're thinking about how to not be a problem to your DM, which people who are problems tend not to do. However, the big takeaways of the above are 1. read the rules of your character and 2. build a character who fits into the world. In the session zero, build a character who has a reason to be doing the things the DM outlines in broad strokes, and who complements the other PCs. If you do that, then it doesn't matter if you min-max or not.

[thehomelybrewster]

Ability Scores in 5e & Other RPGs

This little rant is inspired by a post by a blog named The Angry GM, titled "Your Ability Scores Suck" as well as a post titled "8 Abilities - 6, 3, or 4 Ability scores?" by DIY & dragons, because those two articles and my past few months of looking at various TTPRGs have led me to some insights into my own philosophy in how I like TTRPGs and how I feel about 5e's Ability Scores.

So let's look at how a couple of RPGs handle ability scores or their equivalents. Namely I'll look at D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2e, The Dark Eye (4th Edition Revised), CAIRN, and Pokémon. Yes, Pokémon is relevant to this. And it'll actually be the second game we'll discuss, but the first obviously has to be...

D&D 5th Edition

D&D famously has six ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. In most situations the exact ability score no longer is that important, however, since from 3e onwards d20-based checks have become the near-universal input you play D&D with. This means that instead the ability score modifier is key, which ranges from -4 to +5 for most player characters.

Now while these six scores might seem pretty equal, players have quickly figured out that certain ability scores are more desirable than others, unless you play specific classes.

Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom are for example the three most common saving throws. 109 out of the 361 spells in the Player's Handbook force a saving throw using one of these three ability scores, while Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma only have 24 spells. Thankfully every D&D class gives proficiency with two saving throws, one of the three major ones, and one of the lesser ones (and certain subclasses as well as the monk get more saving throw proficiencies, but that's besides the point).

Additionally, when it comes to skills, and thus out-of-combat usefulness, Strength only has one skill tied to it by default (Athletics), while Constitution has none. Charisma has four skills to its name, Dexterity three, and both Intelligence and Wisdom have five.

Now the DIY & dragons article mentions that there are effectively three axes you have to cover with your ability scores: physical vs mental, force vs grace, and attack vs defense. That leads to eight abilities total. In 5e, using what we know about the game, we can make some great deductions.

For one, Strength is almost exclusively concerned with physical force attack, while Constitution nearly exclusively covers physical force defense. Dexterity meanwhile fully covers physical grace attack, as well as physical grace defense, since it affects AC and is used for Stealth, as well covering evasion-type saving throws. Dexterity is incredibly powerful in 5e, arguably the most powerful ability score.

On the mental stat side, the lines are less clear. All three ability scores can be used for offence, though Intelligence, being the casting ability score of only wizards and the generally utility-based artificers is the least offensive of the three. Still, its association with wizards means it probably is best associated with force, because fireball. Charisma easily can be sorted into grace and is mostly offensive, and Wisdom straddles the line between force and grace, but is also both clearly offensive and defensive.

As you can see, Intelligence & Wisdom & Charisma are rather ill-defined, a point also made by the The Angry GM article, but mechanically Wisdom is universally useful, while Charisma is either super important (because you're playing either a Charisma caster or a face-type non-caster, such as a rogue), or can easily be sidelined/dumped. In fact a lot of tables seem to disregard or minimize Charisma when it comes to roleplay, my tables have definitely done that. Mostly because you don't want to have players not participating in roleplay encounters because they don't have at least a +2 in Charisma and several skill proficiencies in that area.

Speaking of proficiencies, for skills the maximum you can add is +6 or +12 if you have expertise, while with saving throws the maximum proficiency bonus is +6, so with saving throws in particular, a +5 for a saving throw from that relevant abilty score is a massive defensive boon, though it's often less relevant for skill checks.

This knowledge, as well as the known issues with Intelligence-based skill checks often being seen as gate-keeping plot relevant information, leads to the realization that Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma are the three most frequent "dump stats", with the latter two in particular often having implications in out-of-combat situations, while Strength is a "safe" choice for full spellcasters.

Now let's think about how other games handle this... Let's begin, as I threatened in the beginning, with...

Pokémon

Pokémon famously uses six so-called base stats for its collectible creatures: HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense, and Speed. Using the system described by DIY & dragons, Attack and Defense clearly map onto the physical, and Sp. Attack and Sp. Defense clearly onto the mental. There is no distinction made between grace and force. HP is a universally defensive stat, and Speed is both offensive and defensive.

Naturally, Pokémon doesn't involve dice rolls. These stats are used for formulas and comparisons. But you can already see that Pokémon, at least since Special got split into Sp. Attack and Sp. Defense starting in Gold & Silver, has a clear division of these stats, with it being clear what they do.

Now due to the mechanics and the goals of Pokémon, an individual character (read: the actual Pokémon) doesn't need to have balanced stats. Largely also because these stats only affect combat, the main mechanic of these games. Any out-of-combat activity present in Pokémon games in fact uses distinct stats, completely distinct from the base stats of the Pokémon. These can then be discarded/put into the background when that out-of-combat activity, such as Pokémon Contests, is removed from subsequent releases.

Now let's look at a D&D-related game that has a different approach to ability scores, because it provides a stepping stone to look at different RPGs...

Pathfinder 2nd Edition (Pre-2023 Revision)

Pathfinder, being a game spun out off the 3rd Edition of D&D, also uses the six ability scores that D&D uses: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.

Just like with 5e, Pathfinder associates certain skills with certain ability scores, and just like 5e, Strength and Constitution are connected to only one and no skills respectively.

Still, that's just part of the bigger picture. Pathfinder 2e, just like D&D 3e, doesn't use ability scores as saving throws. Rather it uses three distinct saving throws that are tied to ability scores. Those saving throws are Fortitude (Constitution), Reflex (Dexterity), and Will (Wisdom). These are, for the keen-eyed, the same ability scores that are the primary saving throws in 5e. This means that defenses are covered exclusively by these three ability scores, and of these Constitution remains purely defensive, while Dexterity and Wisdom also have offensive capabilities. Still, the offensive power of Dexterity is lowered because in general it cannot be used to increase your weapon damage, contrary to how 5e does it.

It should also be noted that both when it comes to skills and saving throws, the calculations for rolls are very different than in 5e! If you are proficient with a skill or saving throw, you add both a bonus equal to your degree of proficiency (from +2 to +8), as well as your character's level, to the roll, in addition to your ability score modifier. This leads to massive bonuses, especially since magical effects can be added to that, too. Of course Pathfinder uses a sliding scale to determine difficulty classes and has a degrees of success system, but with that knowledge, the -4 to +5 you add to your rolls will matter less than 5e's ability score modifiers do. In general, as long as the modifier is at least a +1, it's fine.

This has actually led to Wisdom being considered a dump stat for many Pathfinder players, and that especially applies when playing with one alternate rule that I want to highlight.

In the Gamemastery Guide, the Alternative Scores variant rule splits Dexterity into Dexterity and Agility, merges Strength and Constitution, and makes Charisma rather than Wisdom the relevant ability for Will saving throws. That variant rule acknowledges the power of Dexterity and the relative weaknesses of Strength and Constitution, but somehow strengthens Charisma further. I don't have any numbers or insight on how popular this alternate rule is, but given what I know about Pathfinder 2e character optimizers, I wouldn't adopt the change to Will saves if I were to run this variant rule myself.

Still, the knowledge of these three saving throws puts us nicely into the realm of indie RPGs, which have really run with this. So let's look at one as an example.

Cairn

This lovely little game written by Yochai Gal has been a well-supported indie darling and is currently in a playtest for a 2nd edition.

Cairn uses three ability scores: Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower. It also uses a d20 roll under system, contrary to 5e and Pathfinder. This means that you aim to roll below your ability score, rather than adding a number to a d20 roll and seeing if you can meet the difficulty class threshold.

They are also, in combat, mostly defensive. Strength in combat mostly concerns surviving blows. Dexterity is used to determine if you move before the enemies and for escaping combat. Both Strength and Dexterity can be used for saving throws against certain spells. In combat Willpower is necessary to cast spells without suffering penalties.

Offensively none of the three ability scores are that important. They don't add to damage, they aren't important for making attacks, or anything of the sorts. Spellcasting outside of dangerous situations usually doesn't involve die rolls either.

This makes the three ability scores very balanced, but it also gives them comparatively little meaning. They are your protection from harm. Including out of combat. But Cairn doesn't know skill checks whose failure state isn't "nothing happens". If player characters have no pressure, they succeed. Especially if they have useful equipment for it.

Using the DIY & dragons blog post as reference, Strength only represents physical force defense, Dexterity only represents physical grace defense, and Willpower represents mental grace and force defense.

So, let's look at a different roll-under system, one that might provide additional inspiration for game designers...

The Dark Eye (4th Edition, revised)

The German TTRPG The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge) is old, almost as old as D&D, and in its design its often as an antithesis for D&D. It's incredibly math-y, has a generally less heroic (but also categorically "good") playstyle, and is a class-less (kinda), level-less system. To ensure I know what I'm talking about, I'll focus on the 4th edition, which has by now been superceded by its own 5th edition, because that's the one edition of it I actually played.

DSA (its German acronym which I will use for brevity's sake) uses eight attribute (!) scores:

Courage, Cleverness, Intuition, Charisma, Dexterity, Agility, Constitution, and Strength.

Each of these eight attribute scores affects the character directly. Heroes have base values (melee attack, ranged attack, parry, initiative) that are calculated by adding together set combinations of attribute scores and dividing the sum, most often by 5, to determine those base values. For brevity's sake, let's look at two of these base values: attack and parry. Attack is calculated with Courage + Agility + Strength, while parry is calculated using Intuition + Dexterity + Strength. Both use two "physical" attributes and one "mental" attribute.

Similar rules also apply to calculating how much your character can withstand, be it through their general vitality (which is equivalent to hit points), their endurance (mostly used as a resource for athletic feats), and their wound limit, all of which can be used to defeat characters. Even the amount of astral points, the spellcasting resource, is calculated using your attribute scores. Every attribute is used at least once when calculating these eight values, with only Cleverness, Charisma, and Dexterity being used only for one of these eight fundamental character traits, with Charisma being the least important, because it is only used to calculate astral energy points, which are irrelevant for characters that don't know spells.

Furthermore skill checks in DSA are made by rolling three attribute checks in a row and then using skill points to modify the results if necessary. Skills use either three distinct attribute scores (e.g. Cooking, which requires Cleverness & Intuition & Dexterity), or two attribute scores (with one being used twice, e.g. Perception requires one Cleverness check and two Intuition checks). Simple attribute checks where you use only one attribute are rare, with heavy lifting often being the key example for it. There are also loads of skills in DSA, with the character sheet per default having twenty four skills, with more being common on most characters.

As you can hopefully see, all eight ability scores are used very often and impact your character greatly. They are furthermore more clearly delineated than the D&D standard, however they also don't map onto the DIY & dragons parameters for ability scores, despite having eight of them!

Conclusion

What can we learn from this? Well, honestly, draw your own conclusions. The six ability scores of D&D and Pathfinder are not the "be-all and end-all", that's for sure. You really need to think about what your game wants to do.

Is it just combat-focused? Then all ability scores should matter in combat and to (roughly) the same degree!

Does your game consist of multiple gameplay elements? If yes, then they should all be accessible and fun for players even if their base stats are "bad" in one aspect, while still allowing for specialization of player characters.

Generally, there is no "one size fits all" solution, and this rant hasn't even gone into ambiguity between different terms, the implications of specific terms and associated thresholds, or the exact history of ability scores in D&D before 3rd Edition!

Anyway, I hope this was legible, fun and informative.

[thydungeongal]

Hi! I'm thinking to run a weird west game. I've tried Dogs in the Vineyard but found the narrative focus didn't have enough crunch. I've heard of Deadlands but my previous experience with a Savage World system was a bit shaky. I'm most familiar with 3.5e and 5e, Pathfinder 1e, and just picked up Lancer.

Please can you suggest any crunchy systems that would fit with weird west themes?

So, I can think of at least three crunchy western RPGs but I have not had a chance to play any of them and two of them are out of print. Also, I am uncertain how well they would adapt to a weird west setting, but here goes:

First up, the one that is in print: Aces & Eights is a Western RPG by Kenzer & Co. whose main claim to fame is that it is crunchy as all hell. Gunfighting consists of laying out a shot clock (a type of crosshair template) on top of an enemy silhouette and then an attack roll results in the shot itself moving into an appropriate spot based on the roll. It kinda sounds cool as hell but as stated I haven't had a chance to play it, and I'm not confident in how well it translates to the weird west genre.

Next up is Boot Hill. Now, I don't know a lot about Boot Hill, but I know that it is a crunchy and deadly wild west game published by TSR, and the AD&D 1e DMG actually has guidance on how to convert characters between the two games, so one option you would have would be to run Boot Hill and just convert supernatural stuff into it from AD&D 1e! This would probably be pretty bad, but I have to admit that it does sound kind of fun.

Third option, and this one is also sadly out of print, would be Outlaw baybeee!!!! Outlaw is actually a setting for Rolemaster/Spacemaster 2e that adapts the extremely crunchy system full of lovely stupid tables into the wild west. Outlaw is pretty much just Rolemaster in the wild west and it even gives a bit of advice on how to run a western campaign with fantastic elements. Not a lot of advice, mind, but you could literally just smash spell users from Rolemaster into Outlaw and be done with it.

Anyway, that's all I can offer, sadly. I'm unfortunately not very knowledgeable of western or weird west games.