Hecate Thinks about 6e D&D

In 5e there is almost nothing devoted to this, the renown system is the closest we get, and, to be honest, it doesn't make sense. If you do something to gain power with the faction of law and order, how does that not (generally at least) affect your standing with the faction of criminals? Also, when you're thinking about a settlement, be that a hamlet, or the capital, what keeps it alive? What makes it tick? If you can start to answer that, you can start to make your settlements feel alive. This isn't going to descend into economics, that really doesn't work for me, although if it is your cup of tea, go for it. My academic background is as a biomedical scientist, and then as a microbiologist, so I tend to think of hamlets, villages, towns and cities as broadly analogous to living things. I'm not going to deep dive here either (although personally I often do, if it's a campaign setting that's going to last for a long time) but if you think about what your bod...

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 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 unde...