Hecate Thinks about 6e D&D

I’m not, in this instance, talking about doing away with levels. I’m not really talking about changing the pattern of XP for each level either. I’ve discussed removing levels before , and while I stand by that discussion, I don’t think it’s going to happen. There are ways to make levels more evenly spaced, in terms of xp and while that’s an interesting meta-discussion about game design in and of itself, it’s not really vital to designing 6e. What I’m talking about here, instead, is properly discussing how 6e awards xp. In 5e, you either award xp for combat encounters. The DMG advises, for non-combat encounters, that you compare the event to the combat encounter table and award experience on that basis. That isn’t quite verbatim, but that is the total guidance you get. The alternative approach is just to set chapters, in effect, milestones in the official parlance, and at each point award the characters a level. Each of these approaches has issues. Milestones are good if your party f

In 5e, if you are proficient in a skill, tool, vehicle or instrument you add a level based proficiency bonus, and if you get expertise from somewhere (there are a few sources, but the best known is rogue), you double this. You get proficiencies from some races, all backgrounds, and a variable number from your class. You occasionally get some from your subclass. You can also get them from feats, such as Skilled  and UA skill feats as well. It's incredibly rare to get more after third level, except from feats. In 3e/3.5e, skills worked rather differently. At every level you had a number of skill points to spend, based on your character class and Int modifier, and if you bought class skills you got +1 per point you spent, non-class skills gave you +1 per 2 points you spent. So a bard would get +1 per point in Speak Other Language and Perform say, while a Monk might get it in Acrobatics, Tumble and Religion and a Wizard in Arcana and History. You could focus down and improve the same s

I'm not a huge fan of initiative in D&D. In fact, in the game I run, we use a simplified system that does away with rolling for initiative completely, more on that later.  In my time, I've been a LARPer, done reenactment combat and martial arts, albeit soft martial arts (taijiquan, baguaquan and hsingyi) and formal sparring rather than full on competition. But in all of those, I can tell you initiative isn't really a thing, there's more a feel of momentum, the tide is running with you or against you, whether that's a massed battle or a spar - and that it can fluctuate, ebb and flow, rapidly. On a more personal note, it's my feeling that if you have fixed initiative, as we do in D&D, at least a subset of people tend to turn off, then as their turn comes around they start to pay attention again. This leads to the DM having to explain the situation to them at the start of their turn so they can decide what to do. Sometimes that's inevitable, with the D&

A disclaimer. I really don't think this will fly.  Not that it's impossible to write such a system for an FRPG, RuneQuest did it, Warhammer kind of did it, GURPS Fantasy (and others) certainly did it. So you can certainly write coherent and successful FRPG systems that don't have character classes and don't have levels.  However, would they be D&D? If you think of D&D, what do you think of? If you're of a certain age, you might think of the satanic panic. Or the cartoon show. But typically you think of a party with a fighter type, a thief type (now reframed as a rogue), a divine caster type and an arcane caster type. If you're a bit less informed you go fighter, thief, cleric and wizard, a bit more informed you might say something like well it could be paladin, monk, druid and sorcerer instead, but you still think of those four roles. If you've played 5e, you might erase the cleric for a bard or a second combat character, and call them by their subcl

If we're honest, conditions in 5e are a wee bit of a mess. They look like the last last hangover from 3.5e with complex interactions and, unlike practically every other bit of rules, you have to look them up in a table instead of it being printed in the stat block, spell description, class feature or similar.  You want to know about a door, every time the rules tell you. A creature has multiple attacks with saving throws, every single time, there is the saving throw DC - even though it's the same for all of them. If the creature is a spell-slinger it often reprints a summary of the spell's effect (which is sometimes different for a monster than a PC).  When it comes to conditions though, the target is stunned. The target is charmed. The target is frightened. The target is poisoned. The target is grappled. The target is grappled and restrained. And so on. Unless you happen to know them from memory, off you trot to the table and look them up.  So one of the changes I'd ma

Yesterday's Post  produced a lot of comments, this post is going to try and address some of them. People are wary of healing cantrips . I have to admit, I am too. I played with some other approaches. I considered, for example, Healing Word  doing d10+Wis modifier (other casting stats are allowed of course), and the minimum you could roll being the target's Con modifier. If we assume that the average Con modifier is +3, this would shift the average healing done by a Healing Word  at first level to 8.8, and 6MP. You can still, just, make this a cantrip, so... we might adapt the rule so if the casting cost is less than or equal to your casting modifier (max 5), you get it free. Cure Wounds  goes up to 11, and 6MP too - the range in Healing Word  is still attractive though. I didn't suggest this yesterday, because it makes the rolling more complex, and you could have other approaches, like if you're proficient in Medicine, add your proficiency bonus, never roll under your W

Minor Healing Spells - Cure Wounds and Healing Word Under the model laid out yesterday in my post on magic points  it's pretty clear, if it wasn't already, that healing in 5e is underpowered. Cure Wounds  and Healing Word , at least in their current first level forms would look more or less like cantrips if ported over directly. The +Wis modifier to their healing actually lifts them to cost 4MP and 5MP respectively, which, with the "spells that cost less than your casting modifier to cast" makes them free to most casters in the 5e paradigm by 4th and either 8th or 12th level depending on whether you take a feat or or not.  In a world with a functioning magic item economy, where buying either a Pearl of Wisdom +2 or an Ioun Stone of Wisdom is also a reasonable goal, you might sensibly expect a cleric, druid or bard around 6th level to be casting first level Cure Wounds  free, and from 4th level Healing Word  would be free.  I am, however, not particularly a fan of this

We're all familiar with the spell slots system. If you're a primary caster, you start with 2 first level slots at first level, at third character level you add two more second level spell slots and so on, basically at every odd character level, you get to cast another higher level spell. At various levels you get to add more lower level slots too. It gets a bit weird with your high level slots and you don't get tenth level spells and so on, but there's a neat pattern. Semi-casters, like paladins and druids, get a different progression, where they get spells later and slower. Warlocks are technically full casters, but get a different progression and rule system, but they access their spell levels on the full caster progression.  There's also an issue. Some spells of a given level are just better than others. Take, for example, Fireball and Lightning Arrow . Both are third level spells, both are AOE damage spells. It seems reasonable they should have similar effects.

While spells are not the core of every character it's arguable that magic, and spells in particular, are one of the pillars that make D&D what it is. Of course magic, along with fantastical monsters, is part of what makes a fantasy game, rather than a historical or pseudo-historical one. But, just as much as crawling through a dungeon and fighting a dragon, a wizard casting fireball is one of the iconic images of D&D. You can slice and dice your categories of spells however you like, schools of magic, or heals, buffs, debuffs, DD, AOE, etc. Mostly, I'm not going to touch those spells, in general terms for 6e. I'm not saying that the rules text for the 6e Fireball spell will be identical to the rules text for the 5e Fireball spell, but you'll still have a big bang, save for half damage, AOE fire spell that you'll recognise.  I also like cantrips. I remember the days when a first level wizard cast Magic Missile (their only first level spell for the day) th

In 5e, magic items are handled in a rather weird fashion, with Xanathar's offering a bolt on market system for magic items and the scaling for items being distinctly odd. This system also offered attunement for items, with limited slots and, seriously weird crafting rules. 5e also brought a change from the highest limits being +5 bonuses to the highest limit being +3 bonuses. Compare that to 3e/3.5e (hereafter 3e). In both of these feats offered PCs a tool to create magic items for themselves, although it would mostly be NPCs, and every item had a carefully calculated price.  What I'm proposing is that 6e brings through, with suitable changes, is a version of those 3e crafting rules from the start. If you want a +3 Holy Avenger, that will have a price, and that price will determine how long it takes to craft. However, I'm going to take a couple of things from 5e.  I have no problem with the top end bonus being limited to +3. You can, as you will know if you're familiar

Before we start, let me just say again, this is not what I really expect 6e to look like. I'm expecting a system with stats, rounds, d20 rolls, levels and so on. Most of the rest of what I'm going to write will centre around a system that looks like that. But what if... That's what this post will focus on, and sections of future posts will look back at this. Making your Rolls I've touched on this before, but all rolls will use 4dF. These are fudge die, essentially d3, but labelled +, 0 or -. You add a modifier and try to beat your target number TN. Thus far this is the same as d20+modifiers to beat the DC. Because we're really messing things up here, we're going to have strong successes, moderate successes, weak successes and failures. You do three bits of maths per roll, you take your modifier as a base, get +1 to it for each + you roll, if that beats the TN, one "success", if the modifier without plusses makes it, that's another, if the modifier

The Creature Economy Since the very earliest days, D&D has had a middle-weight combat system. You roll a d20 against the AC in some target number that depends on the armour they're wearing (the precise mechanics have changed but the underlying idea hasn't) and if you're successful you roll damage, they subtract that from their HP. When they hit 0, they're hors de combat and dying in some way. Again, the precise mechanics around that have changed too but that basic outline applies to every version. Every thing on the battle map has a turn, every character, everything they summon or animate, every monster that the DM throws at you, all using the same rules. Now compare that to RuneQuest, which is heavier. In RQ, you have an attack skill, a parry skill (and a defence skill actually), an armour value and both locational and total HP. When you attack, your opponent parries. If you hit and they don't parry (or you hit and beat through their parry) you roll a d20 to de

Since the days of AD&D you've had race and class that you can choose. Way back before that, for old fogeys like me that remember it, Elf and Dwarf were essentially a character class you chose to play. I think what 5e does with race is interesting, although I'm going to propose some changes, but first up, I'm going to change the name. They're not races, they're species. And I'm going to call them that. If a bunch of White Supremacists lose their knickers over this, tough. I'm going to look, in at least some species, at more interesting things to do with sex and gender too. Sexual dimorphism isn't the only rule on the planet, just because it's the most common. And in a fantasy world, Trimorphism, asexual reproduction and more should be out there I think. Gender fluidity - we see this in various fish and amphibians for example should be there too. Some will say that's just window dressing, but to communities where that matters, having it built