Tag: rpg

Can’t see the forest for the trees

5.5e Player’s Handbook is out and some folks are going through it. Treantmonk has a video exploring the updated version of the Ranger, and while he goes through all the features and analyzes them decently – including comparisons with the Ranger variants from 5e and the 5.5e playtest for context – he still seems perplexed by people not liking this new version. I think he’s too lost in the details to see the big picture.

Conceptually, Rangers are supposed to be wilderness specialists. Specifically, they’re supposed to specialize in ranging (travelling across a wide area) – that’s why back in 1e, Rangers weren’t allowed to own more than they could carry. That specialization just isn’t meaningful in 5.x D&D – it’s not that you can’t be good at it, but rather that the game just doesn’t care about it. In fact, it actively avoids engaging with anything like logistical concerns: encumbrance; ability to forage for supplies or even the need to do so (q.v. Goodberry); ability to replace scarce resources like ammunition (you can tell the game doesn’t care about this because if it did, spellcasters using damaging cantrips would be seen as having a significant advantage over characters using thrown and projectile weapons); travel challenges like environmental hazards and getting lost; etc. All this means the Ranger’s core concept doesn’t have any real place in 5.x D&D.

Another issue he seems to gloss over is the move to make the Ranger more of a spellcaster. This is another systemic issue in 5.x D&D: the transition to make basically every character intrinsically magical in some way, even if they aren’t a spellcaster per se. Yes, Rangers learned to cast spells back in TSR-era D&D: starting at 8th level (Paladins started gaining their spells at 9th). You know what else happened around that level? Fighters and Clerics started to gain their strongholds, with Thieves and Magic-Users not far behind. Characters in that level range were transitioning away from the life of itinerant dungeon-delving and starting to embed themselves in the world in a larger context. In the language of 5e, they were moving to a different tier of play*. Rangers and Paladins should start off as spellcasters – they should have other points of interest to their classes to distinguish them from Fighters without needing spellcasting, ideally until at least 5th level, and preferably until 9th**. But because 5.x doesn’t care about the Ranger’s core activities, it mechanics it can use to help provide a distinct identity without falling back on spellcasting.

Is there anything we can do about this? I don’t see a lot of options: either we have to houserule 5.x to care about what Rangers do and then redesign 5.x Rangers to actually do that; or we have to reduce Rangers’ design space in the game (perhaps demoting them to be a mere Fighter subclass, at which point they only need as much distinctiveness as an Eldritch Knight); or we give up and just accept a lot of feel will continue to see them as a bad class***.

* Except that none of the tiers identified in 5e or 5.5e really match up with this – the 5.x descriptions of tier 3 (almost identical between 5e and 5.5e) say things like “Other characters gain features that allow them to make more attacks or to do more impressive things with those attacks. These adventurers often confront threats to whole regions.” (emphasis added; 5.5e PHB page 43).

** I like using 9th level as a tier breakpoint because it’s when Clerics – and thus PC parties – gain the ability to revive the dead under their own power. 5.x blurs the line a bit with the 3rd-level Revivify spell, but even so I think gaining the ability to Raise Dead is a real turning point in PC power, and should be recognized in how it can transform play. A similar concern applies to Teleport in earlier editions, or Teleport Circle in 5.5e – the ability to bail out of locations without having to traverse obstacles is transformational. Assuming the group and the game care about challenges like these, of course.

*** A bad class isn’t necessarily a weak class – you could give Rangers + 10*Ranger level to all rolls, and it would make them much more powerful. It still wouldn’t make them feel like much of anything except overpowered.

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A quick test to see if a class change is overpowered

If you’re thinking of making changes to a class, you’re probably concerned about doing something that makes the class too powerful – I believe the current term is “overtuned”? There’s a quick heuristic you can use in strongly class-based games like D&D.

First, pick a benchmark class – this is a class seen as one of the more powerful ones for the game, if not the most powerful. Let’s assume we’re looking at 5e, and the benchmark class is wizard.

Second, you ask these questions:

1. Is the class I’m modifying at least as powerful as the wizard before making these changes?

2. Will the change make the class I’m modifying more powerful than the wizard?

3. Am I doing anything to reduce the power of the wizard?

If the answer to all 3 of these is no, the change probably doesn’t make the class overpowered. We can’t be too certain – a change may not make a class too powerful on its own, but may do so in concert with various build choices like feats or multiclassing combinations. But this is a good first approximation.

Incidentally, this suggests that any improvement to your benchmark class is a bridge too far, at least if that class really is the most powerful class already. For 5e, that means don’t buff wizards. Well, I’m sure the designers of 5.5e already know that…

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So, they’re teasing the new edition of D&D 

Wizards of the Coast is providing teaser videos, giving out advance text or even whole print copies to various influencers, who then go on to make their own videos. Speaking as someone who started playing in the mid 80s, I’d suggest people keep a few things in mind.

  1. If you’ve been having fun with the version of the game you’re currently playing, there’s no rush to get the new version, or to adopt it once you have it.
  2. If you haven’t been having a good time with the current version of the game, there still isn’t a big rush to get the new version. Everything we saw previewed in the playtests was fairly conservative in terms of design – changes more on par with the transition from 1st edition to 2nd edition than from 2nd to 3rd, or even from 3rd to 3.5 – which means the significant restructuring needed to deal with most people’s more serious issues probably isn’t in the cards.
    1. Need something a little more concrete? Consider all the talk about the lack of DMs for 5e. Now consider that all of the playtest material we saw was player-facing; there were literally no changes in them to give us a reason to believe the burden on existing DMs will be lessened, or that the path to creating new DMs will be improved. Similarly, the player-facing changes showed little interest in providing lower-complexity play options – feats were assumed to be mandatory and a significant part of even character creation. We haven’t been given any reason to believe the new version will do anything significant to accommodate people who it was previously pushing away.
  3. The talk of backward compatibility – the ability to keep using your old characters with the new version – is designer optimism at best. They don’t know how you’re playing the game because it’s almost impossible for them to figure out how the broader player base is even understanding their rules texts; that’s one of the problems with keeping things secret up to the moment of release. Go ahead and be hopeful it works out, but don’t be surprised if you need to rebuild your characters under the new system to have them work right.
  4. Sometimes the best thing a new version of the game gives you are things you can steal and bring back to an older version, or inspiration for other ways you might handle things. Or even just insight into design patterns you hate!
  5. Nobody’s analysis of the game text is the final word at this stage. Nobody’s. A lot of the online discussion like the story of the blind men and the elephant, with trying to extrapolate the whole of the situation from the tiny part they can perceive. But even the people who have access to the complete text of the rules don’t know how all this stuff is actually going to work when it hits the larger player base, at least partly because that’s the first time the whole thing will get a real playtest done at scale – across millions of players and months of play. Before then it’s all guesses, and the more gets changed in a new version, the more likely those guesses will be off the mark.
  6. All you can get for a few months to the better part of a year is speculation and a sense of discontent with what you already have. That’s the product of marketing, after all – unfulfilled desire. It’s probably better not to engage with all that if your goal is to enjoy gaming.
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Alignment

Alignment has been the source of a lot of unnecessary arguments across D&D’s history. It’s kind of strange – if you look back at original D&D, it was just a faction marker: shirts vs. skins (or togas vs. woad if you prefer). Its only real effects were to determine what types of monsters you could recruit – a Lawful character could ride a pegasus and a Chaotic one a griffin, but not vice-versa – and which magic swords a character could use (since back then they were all intelligent enough to have their own alignments). But that was it.

Somewhere along the way alignment became a description of a creature’s morality – or more problematically, of an entire creature type’s innate moral character, regardless of their actions. Orcs who are Evil by birth; elves who are Good by nature even when they enslave each other (that’s from an actual Dragonlance module, by the way). There’s no salvaging that.

A lot of folks just discard alignment, and while I can’t blame them I feel it’s one of D&D’s more iconic contributions to popular culture – I don’t know how many 3×3 alignment grids I’ve seen for ways to close a bag of bread or whatever, and there’s even an entire subreddit for alignment charts. I think it would be a terrible mistake to throw away that mindshare if we can salvage the concept, especially if we can do something interesting with it.

My take

Alignment is the state of being mystically connected to an extradimensional reality – in traditional D&D cosmology, to one of the Outer Planes. This connection can arise in a number of ways:

  • Being composed of the substance of that reality (for example, demons being literally made of the Abyss).
  • Powerful supernatural effects like a curse, perhaps even one passed down for generations; or a Helm of Opposite Alignment.
  • Behaving in a way that supernaturally resonates with that reality via magical sympathetic principles.
    • This last is the route traditionally assumed for alignment – that a character is Chaotic because they behave chaotically.

This proposal allows for a Hellboy-style character who is by origin tied to an infernal plane despite being completely out of sync with the ideals of that place; such a character isn’t born Evil, but they are born aligned with Hell (or just Lawful Evil) regardless of their feelings in the matter. This also allows for us to have weird objects (a rock that’s so evil just touching it will turn you into fiddler crabs!) or even places (which are strong in the the Dark Side), and corresponding phenomena for other alignments.

We still need to give alignment some mechanical definition. Let’s start with the following:

  1. A character may choose whether or not to have an alignment.
    1. If the character chooses not to have an alignment, they can simply write “unaligned” in any alignment field used to describe their character. A lot of beings are unaligned, including many people.
    2. If a player chooses to have an alignment, it never forces the player or their character to make certain choices or otherwise reduces the character’s agency or the player’s control over their character’s actions.
  2. Spells and effects which deal with alignment detect and operate on the mystical connection, not on the character’s thoughts, intentions, or historical behavior.
  3. Alignment has mechanical effects. A character
    1. Gets advantage on rolls to resist being forced, coerced, or manipulated into behaving contrary to their alignment’s ethics.
    2. Gets advantage on rolls to communicate with beings who share their alignment – they’re on the same wavelength.
    3. Gains Inspiration when they behave according to the ethics of their alignment at the cost of causing themselves non-trivial trouble.
  4. Available alignments
    1. The usual assumption
      1. There are 9 alignments, each made from a combination of choices along 2 ethical axes: Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic and Good-Neutral-Evil.
      2. Under this assumption, “Neutral” is simply a lack of a commitment along that axis, so a character who is Neutral on both the Law/Chaos axis and the Good/Evil axis is effectively unaligned. This means the standard alignment choices end up as follows:
        1. Lawful Good
        2. Neutral Good
        3. Chaotic Good
        4. Lawful Neutral
        5. Neutral (aka unaligned)
        6. Chaotic Neutral
        7. Lawful Evil
        8. Neutral Evil
        9. Chaotic Evil
      3. Each choice along an axis (other than Neutral) is associated with an ethic. A character doesn’t have to believe in the ethics associated with their alignment, but they may find it easier to adhere to those ethics in the long run – what’s that bit about the Dark Side being “quicker; easier; more seductive”?
        1. Law: the ethic of law is that things matter to the degree to which they endure over time. Transient things are ephemeral, less real (though views on this can be complex, since some transient things can be seen as part of a larger enduring whole, as with the cycle of seasons). A Lawful character will tend to adhere to traditions, plans, and other commitments even in the face of adversity.
        2. Chaos: the ethic of chaos holds that things matter to the degree to which they are present in the moment; more radical takes on this ethic claim the present is the only actual reality, with the past a ghost and the future merely a dream. A Chaotic character will tend to treat traditions, plans, and other commitments of all sorts as non-binding, or at least subject to reinterpretation in the moment.
        3. Evil: Evil’s ethic prizes the self, and more precisely self-interest above the interests of others. Evil characters aren’t necessarily unfeeling – they may like or even love some people, or feel loyalty to an organization or a larger entity like a nation or ethnic identity and therefore feel it’s in their own interests to help those people or groups – but fundamentally, an Evil character will tend to act in their own self-interest without concern for the interests of others.
        4. Good: Good’s ethic is easy to outline but hard to pin down: nobody’s interests are more important than anyone else’s, and therefore it’s only right that all parties be considered when determining a course of action. There’s still lots of room for disagreement: determining how to balance various interests against each other, especially when faced with the idea of a necessary sacrifice (for example, if there isn’t enough food or other necessary resources to go around) and even figuring out if something is considered to properly have interests of its own (does a magical construct carrying out the final orders of its long-gone creator? How about a nation-state, or an insect?). Even when faced with all these complexities, a Good character will tend to look for ways to act on behalf of others and try to avoid acting on their own behalf at the expense of others.
    2. Non-standard alignments. Some campaigns may have alignments other than the standard 9 alignments. For example, a campaign or setting might:
      1. Have the notion of an alignment of Balance (sometimes called True Neutral), whose ethic would involve trying to keep any of the other standard alignments from effectively marginalizing any of the others.
      2. Remove the Good/Evil axis and only use the Law/Chaos axis
      3. Build a completely distinct set of alignments around e.g. Aristotelian elements and the medieval humors and temperaments associated with them, so a characters alignment might be Sanguine (or Airy); Choleric (or Fiery); Melancholic (or Earthy); or Phlegmatic (or Watery).
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Revisiting Prepared vs Known Spells in 5E

Background

In 5E spellcasters either know spells or prepare spells.  These describe a selection of spells on the caster’s spell list which they can actually select for casting at a given time. The primary difference between these categories is how often this list of castable spells can be changed: a caster can change their prepared spells after completing a long rest, but can only change known spells when they gain a level (and in fact they can only replace one known spell per level gained). In either case, a character can only have a specific number of spells known or prepared at a given time based on their class.

There’s an exception to this: wizards (of course). Wizards prepare spells, but they do so from their spell books. Spell books act as bit like a list of spells known except there’s no limit on how many spells a wizard can have in their spellbook. In addition, while a wizard adds 2 spells to their spellbook every time they gain a level, they can also add spells they find in play.

So our models are:

  1. Spell list -> spells known -> spells cast
  2. Spell list -> spells prepare -> spells cast
  3. Spell list -> spells in spellbook -> spells prepared -> spells cast

Analysis

Models 1 and 2 each have their own problems. In model 1, spells known being difficult to change as well as very limited pushes players toward monotony, a pattern of selecting only those spells they think are optimal; those who are plugged into online communities of optimizers will be more likely to align with community lists of optimal spells. In Model 2, spells prepared being able to draw upon a class’s entire spell list can easily cause analysis paralysis or lead players to monotonous selections to avoid that issue; they’re also pone to power inflation issues as any publication which increases their class’s spell list immediately gives them more power that other characters don’t get.

I think we want to use a hybrid approach like the wizard’s for all spellcasters. This allows us to expand a class’s spell list without worrying about all those new spells instantly showing up for characters to use. Players will then have to filter the list of spells their character can use at all down to an even narrower list of those they’re ready to use in a given session. In effect, we’d make every caster have both spells they “know” (for wizards, those they have in a spellbook) and spells they have prepared.

Research

Spells known/prepared by class (approximate):

  • Bard: Level + 2
  • Cleric: Level + Wisdom modifier
  • Druid: Level + Wisdom modifier
  • Paladin: 1/2 Level + Charisma modifier
  • Ranger: 1/2 Level (rounded up) + 1
  • Sorcerer: Level +1, eventually slowing way down after 12th level
  • Warlock: Level  + 1 through 9th level; + 1/2 Warlock level beyond 9th level
  • Wizard:
    • Prepared: Level + Intelligence modifier
    • “In spellbook” (i.e. known): at least 6 + 2/level. Also any spells found in play

The number of spells prepared seems to be fairly standardized at spellcaster level + modifier for spellcasting attribute; Paladin uses 1/2 level because they’re a half-caster (that is, their access to new higher levels of spells happens at 1/2 the rate of full casters like Clerics, Wizards, and Bards. We can take that as our general formula, though ideally we’d express it in a way that doesn’t require learning weird exceptions for some classes. 

A wizard starts off knowing about 50% more spells than they can have prepared, and automatically gains spells known at twice the rate the number of spells they can prepare increases. Taking the wizard as a guideline, we should have characters know about twice as many spells as they can have prepared. The wizard’s ability to exceed this limit with spells found in play and transcribed intro their spellbook can be treated as a distinguishing feature of the class.

Proposed solution

Let’s add the following definitions:

  • Casters cast spells from those they have prepared 
  • A caster can prepare a number of spells for a class equal to their caster level in that class + the class’s casting attribute modifier. They prepare those spells from the list of spells they know for that class. They can change the spells they have prepared after a long rest. 
  • A caster can know a number of spells for a class equal to twice the number of spells they can prepare for that class. They can only know spells from the class’s spell list, and only those of a level up to 1/2 their caster level in the class, rounded up.
    • A character’s known spells for a class only change when the character gains caster levels in that class – a Paladin gaining Warlock levels can’t make any changes to the Paladin spells known. When a character gains a caster level, they can:
      • Learn 2 spells from the class’s spell list of a level they can know for that class
      • Change 1 spell already known from the class’s spell list to another spell known from the same list of a level they can know for that class.
    • In place of known spells, Wizards have spells recorded in their spellbooks. These are the same as known spells, except:
      • A wizard can’t replace a spell in their spellbooks when they gain a level.
      • A wizard has no maximum number of spells recorded in their spellbooks (though any one spellbook of the wizard’s might not be able to contain all their spells; they may need to have multiple spellbooks).
      • A wizard can add spells to their spellbooks without gaining additional wizard levels; assuming they have a source for a wizard spell not already in one of their spellbooks (e.g. a scroll of wizard spells, another wizard’s spellbook another wizard willing to teach them the spell) they can add the spell to their spellbook in play or during downtime.
  • A character’s caster level is defined for a specific class. Their caster level in a class equals:
    • Class level for Bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard, or any other class which can cast up to 9th level spells
    • 1/2 class level (rounded down) for Paladin, Ranger or any other class which can cast up to 5th level spells but not 6th or higher level spells
    • 1/3 class level (rounded down) for Eldritch Knight, Spellthief, or any other class which can cast up to 4th level spells but not 5th level or higher level spells
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Breaking the Build Process part 1

Modern D&D has a big focus on character building – pre-choosing all the options in character advancement to maximize power or effectiveness for some sort of imagined play experience. This isn’t something the book comes out and advocates, but the way the rules have been structured since 3rd edition seem to have really inculcated the practice in players, and new players seem to pick it up up.

I hate it. I realize D&D isn’t about to go back to handing out character power very heavily based on actions taken in play (looting magical items, recruiting henchmen, etc.), but I don’t want a character’s life basically pre-scripted. I bet minor rules changes can sap some of the energy behind the obsession with builds.

Let’s start with something simple: randomizing ability score increases and feat acquisition.

  1. Whenever you gain a level, roll 1d6. The indicated attribute increases by 1.
    • 1: Strength
    • 2: Dexterity
    • 3: Constitution
    • 4: Intelligence
    • 5: Wisdom
    • 6: Charisma
  2. If this increases the attribute to an odd number, choose a half-feat (a feat that grants +1 to an attribute in addition to other benefits, e.g. Resilient or Observant).
    1. The half-feat you choose must be one that gives an ability score boost which could match the one you got – for example, if you got a +1 to Strength you could choose Resilient (which can give a +1 to any attribute), but not Observant (which can only give a +1 to Intelligence).
    2. You don’t gain the +1 attribute from the feat (in effect, you already got it from the roll), but you do get the other “half” of the feat.
  3. At levels where you would normally get an Ability Score Increase, roll for two attribute increases. If they both increase attributes to odd values, you can take two half-feats, or one regular feat. This is the only way to get regular feats under this system.
  4. If you aren’t using feats, then in place of a half-feat you can learn two normal languages, one exotic language, or any one proficiency (weapon, armor, tool, skill, or saving throw) of your choice.

Under this system, a character will gain 24 attribute points on the way to 20th level. However, those will be randomly distributed, increasing each ability score by 4 points on average. Since players don’t control how these increases are allocated, you won’t see characters of a given class looking identical even if their initial approaches to building their characters are very similar. As a side benefit, you can try dropping the cap on PC attributes – go ahead and let them exceed 20. Since the increases aren’t under player control, they aren’t likely to actually pass that limit, and for those who do their characters will be all the more distinctive, since their accomplishments won’t be readily copied by others.

24 attribute increases will average out to 12 times when an attribute increases to an odd value. This should be expected to result in around 10 half-feats and 1 full feat on the way to 20th level. That may sound like a lot, but how many groups actually go all the way to 20th level, or even get particularly close? I’m pretty sure most groups stop somewhere around 10th level, and in that case we’re looking at 11 attribute increases, which means about 5-6 half feats, and about a 1/3 chance of a full feat. If that still feels like too much – and despite all pretense of analysis in game design, how things feel is a much better guide to group satisfaction – then there’s an easy fix: just give out 2 randomly-rolled increases at the levels ASIs (Ability Score Increases) are noted in each class description, and 1 randomly-rolled increase at all other even-numbered levels. This will result in 16 attribute increases on the way to 20th level, with about 7 half-feats and 1 full feat over that period.

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Quicker short rests with some controls

In 5E, short rests take a full hour. That’s long enough to discourage some players and entire groups from relying on them – a real problem, since a number of classes are built around the idea of getting short rests, specifically around 2 short rests per 1 long rest.

We can resolve this by saying that a short rest requires only a few minutes – perhaps 5 or 10 – but also requires the character to spend at least half their maximum Hit Dice (rounded down) on healing. This would allow characters to take 2 short rests per long rest, although there are some breakpoints: at 1st level they can take an unlimited number of short rests (but there aren’t likely to be a lot of possible abuses at that point), and at 3rd level they can take 3 short rests per 1 long. I think that’s less of an issue than short rests which are too long to get used.

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Spellcasting in 5E vs 1E

In order of decreasing significance:

  1. 5E spell slots don’t have their usage decided when they’re recovered.
  2. 5E spellcasters have certain capabilities which are inexhaustible and mechanically significant enough to displace mundane capabilities (some of these are rituals, but most are cantrips, with attack cantrips displacing missile weapons; the light spell displacing use of torches, lamps, and lanterns; and various utility effects such as mending, message, mage hand, dancing lights, and minor illusion which tend to devalue various mundane capabilities or even other magical capabilities – unseen servant is worth less when mage hand is available at-will, and the same goes for silent image vs minor illusion).
  3. 5E saving throws are dependent on the caster rather than the target and can improve over advancement faster than a target’s ability to resist.
  4. In 5E, spellcasting cannot generally be interrupted or otherwise prevented.
  5. In 1E, a number of spell parameters scale automatically with the caster’s level (range, duration, damage, etc.) while others don’t scale at all. In 5E, only cantrips scale for free; some spells can be made to scale by casting them with higher-level spell slots, but only in specific ways. Some spells can be scaled by this which don’t scale in 1E (e.g. Sleep).
  6. In 5E spellcasting abilities combines across levels in different classes; in 1E they’re totally independent.
  7. Spells in 5E generally don’t impose on the beneficiaries any costs (like aging) or risks (like system shock rolls or chances of insanity or the ire of lower-planar beings).
  8. 5E spellcasters have no critical factors that can compromise their ability to use magic – the favor of a patron deity for clerical magic, access to a spellbook for Wizards/Magic-Users.
  9. Most limitations on 5E spellcasting classes purely indicate a lack of training (Wizard inability to cast spells in armor, limited selection of weapons for Clerics) rather than an actual limitation on what they can do

This is in addition to the effects of differences in individual spell definitions (concentration duration, ability to create long-lasting effects via repeated castings, and weirdly-redefined spells like Leomund’s Tiny Hut).

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Thoughts on recent D&D playtest packets

I’m not very likely to spend any real money on new D&D products anytime soon, not only because of Hasbro shooting themselves in the foot with their OGL 1.2 power grab, but also as a result of the way they shielded staff members who enabled organized harassment of their critics years earlier. But I did get a bit into 5th edition years before I was aware of all that, and D&D has been part of my life long enough that even if I don’t put any more money into the franchise, I have a hard time excising it from my thoughts. So I’m reading through these playtest packets even though I don’t plan to play the new edition (and it is a new edition, or a half-edition – the mechanical changes appear to be more significant than the 1e -> 2e transition, perhaps moreso than 3.0 -> 3.5, but less than any step in the sequence 2nd -> 3rd -> 4th -> 5th; I think of it as 5.5e). And similarly, I don’t fill out any of the playtest feedback forms, but I still spend time writing up my thoughts, if only for my own satisfaction.

Druids

  1. The wording about losing features when you Wild Shape is terribly unclear; I have no clear idea what it’s supposed to include or exclude.
  2. All specific animal shapes assumed are basically identical except for the ability to use equipment, which means we’re likely to see a lot of apes or other primates, raccoons, or other forms that have humanlike hands
  3. Allegedly being a specific type of creature feels hollow: you aren’t really a dog without Scent, a skunk without musk, a bat without Blindsight, etc.
  4. You can be Large (unlike Goliaths?), but can’t be Tiny, which means you can’t be a squirrel-sized squirrel until other party members have been Raising Dead and Teleporting for 2 levels. If designers want to deny players an ability that seems like it should be available they ought to explain why.
  5. Elemental form is a disaster as a replacement for the ability to change into an actual elemental. Thematically, your druid was supposed to be turning into forms at the root of nature, not turning into forms which never occur in nature. Just get rid of it if it’s going to be this half-hearted.
  6. Druids are being used as the games shapeshifter character type, but the game doesn’t appear that interested in having a shapeshifter – it might be better to lean away from Wild Shape if that’s the case. I mean, if Druid is the least popular class in play, maybe there’s no particular reason to maintain a Circle of the Moon, or a Druid where Wild Shape is a major feature.
    1. Also: it feels like designers are attempting to balance Druids around Wild Shape as a combat mode, which requires throwing away a lot of the interesting parts of the class (such as taking on various animal forms for useful features specific to that animals form – a chameleon’s ability to camouflage itself, for example). I’d rather see an ability to turn into animals that’s thematically meaningful but of limited combat use than a bland combat mode.
  7. Other thematic issues
    1. Dropping the prohibition against metal armor takes away the thematic point of the Druid having Heat Metal; now that seems more like it should be a Wizard spell.
    2. Healing Blossoms is “nature” dressing on a ability that doesn’t feel Druidic.

The overall trend I see with the Druid redesign is an obsession with addressing perceived mechanical issues which neglects the thematic point of the class. There are other mechanical issues others have pointed out (the defined forms will have AC values which are much too low, for example), but I consider the thematic issues much more critical since they can’t be fixed by publishing errata with new numbers. I’m not fond of this approach to game design.

Paladins

  1. Paladins get at-will spellcasting in the form of cantrips now. At this point, why not just give that to everyone? Why not just make every class a spellcaster – maybe not at level 1, but eventually?
    1. The idea of at-will spellcasting was an attempt to make magic characters that didn’t run out of magic. However, 5e gives it not just to characters whose primary schtick is magic (like Wizards and Clerics), but also classes who have only minor magical abilities (subclasses like Eldritch Knight and Spellthief). Full caster classes are still much more powerful in terms of their magical abilities, but the ubiquity of magic class abilities makes non-magical characters stand out, and not in a positive way – for example, characters with cantrips can generally make ranged attacks without worry of running out of ammunition. I feel at-will magic needs to be either restricted only to classes who are ride or die with magic, or it needs to be given to all classes even if it gets pushed back a tier or two.
  2. Dropping previously iconic abilities like immunity to disease and strictly limiting abilities like the old detect-evil should come with a rationale – not necessarily in the finished document, but at least in design materials. Why are these changes being made?
    1. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that immunity to disease is being dropped because disease as a specific thing will be dropped and just replaced by more generic status conditions such as poisoned, or suffering levels of exhaustion, or reductions in maximum HP. Those might all be a reasonable mechanical implementation of disease effects, but I think it’s vital to immersion – at least for me – that class abilities are defined diegetically rather than just mechanically, if only because that tends to guide and inspire how players think about their characters and their place in the larger setting.
    2. I suspect the ability to detect evil is being minimized in part because recent editions have shown no idea what to do with alignment. That’s a shame – it wouldn’t be too hard to make alignment mechanically significant using existing 5e rules concepts and without a lot of overhead (and no limits on player decisions, either). I’ll have to write that up sometime…

I’ve seen a lot of other commentary about purely mechanical concerns – changes to the Paladin’s ability to smite and how that interacts with their various Smite spells, critical hits, etc. I’ll be honest: I recognize a lot of these considerations may be very significant to how the class actually works in play, but (a) they’re pretty boring to me, since they’re almost purely mathematical concerns, and (b) they mostly concern abilities which were added to Paladins in editions well after I started playing, so they seem extraneous to me; I think I’d rather see the Paladin rendered as a Fighter archetype rather than a class of its own (and I’d definitely prefer that for Rangers given 5e’s lack of concern for the thematic concerns Rangers were originally built around).

Posted on by azabaro 0

Odd Attribute Modifiers in d20 games

When Wizards of the Coast published the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons (and thus set down the foundation for d20 games) they adopted a new, standardized, open-ended schedule of attribute modifiers (as compared to the fixed-range and sometimes attribute-specific schedules from earlier editions). In order to be open-ended the modifiers had to be defined by a formula – mathematically it’s

Floor(attribute/2) – 5

In plainer language, it’s +1 for every 2 points above 10, -1 for every 2 points below 11. Simple enough, but there’s a drawback: the “every 2 points” bit (necessary to keep attribute modifiers from becoming completely overwhelming differences between characters, overriding most other differences in ability) means that odd-valued attributes are basically useless – a 13 is worth exactly as much as a 12, a 5 is just as bad as a 4. These values seem like vestigial bits from prior editions, and while the designers of 3E tried to ameliorate that by giving them some utility (defining attribute requirements for feats in terms of odd numbers) they weren’t very successful – for example, substandard attribute values don’t end up differentiated, and feats a player wasn’t considering can’t make their character’s odd attribute values meaningful.

To fix this without upsetting the apple cart (all the other design work in 3E/d20), we’d really like to give these odd attribute values a modifier that’s halfway between that of the even values that bookend them, so for example, a 12 => +1 and a 14 => +2, so a 13 => +1.5. Fine, except what does that mean? How do you add half a point to a roll? You can say something about using it as a tie-breaker, but that won’t come up very often, and even when it does there’s no guarantee the opposition won’t have an odd attribute and the accompanying tie-breaking modifier on their end of things.

How about this: let’s get to that “.5” modifier statistically. That is, instead of adding half a point to a bunch of rolls, let’s add 1 point about half the time. We don’t even need to do any extra work for this – the rule could be

When your die roll is an odd number, add 1 to it for every odd-valued attribute that would modify the roll.

As an example let’s look at a Paladin making a Fortitude save. They have a Con of 13 (+1) and a Charisma of 15 (+2), and because they’re a Paladin their Charisma bonus applies to all their saves. When they roll a Fortitude save, they’ll add +3 when their roll is even, and +5 when the number they roll is odd. On a roll based on Charisma alone (Diplomacy, perhaps) the Paladin’s attribute bonus will be +2 half the time and +3 the other half, averaging out to +2.5. This makes their 15 Charisma worth exactly half the difference between a Charisma of 16 and a Charisma of 14, and doesn’t require us to rewrite the rest of the game.

Posted on by azabaro 0