The effect looks like a regular flame, but it creates no heat and doesn’t use oxygen. A continual flame can be covered or hidden but not smothered or quenched.
There is explicit text here saying that such flames cannot be smothered or quenched (largely because it seems that this is not a true flame, but an illusory flame light source). Fine. If something is written with such an immunity, they are immune. If not, they are as quenchable as normal flames.
Suggestion: Things are only countered if it says they are.
Rules As Written (RAW) philosophy is pretty literal. If a spell has an effect, the spell spells that out in its description. If it’s not mentioned, it’s not an actual effect.
So, for example, Thaumaturgy, Gust, Windwall, Create/Destroy Water, and Prestidigitation all explicitly state they can snuff flame. Tidal Wave, too. If a spell doesn’t mention that as an effect, it doesn’t happen.
(Note that Tidal Wave and others often specify “unprotected flames” — not drawing a distinction between a magical vs natural flame.)
Suggestion: Things can be countered if the counter-spell is a higher level than the original spell.
This is inspired by the Light/Dark setup. Darkness (2nd level) notes:
Nonmagical light can’t illuminate it. … If any of this spell’s area overlaps with an area of light created by a spell of 2nd level or lower, the spell that created the light is dispelled.
So there’s (in this case) some sort of “This quashing power is equal or greater to the power being quashed, so score” effect. This is a potential problem, though, because …
Curse you, Magic Items!
Magical items (or magical features of dungeon rooms) are often written without any indication of what spell effect they use, or what they are/aren’t immune to, or what level such a spell would be. Take the case of the magical burning spears wielded by Razorblasts in the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign. The Razorblasts can turn them on or off (though it isn’t indicated how), but there’s not even instruction on what would happen if a party member picked one up and wanted to use one. Some of the Earth Cult weaponry in that module is explicitly Earth Cult magic-specific, but that’s not the case with the fire effects noted. Are they flames an attribute of the Razorblasts, worship of Imyx, or the spears themselves? Only the DM know for sure (or guesses quickly).
There isn’t even a canonical weapon rule or example to draw from for something like those spears. The Flame Tongue weapons do more damage than the spears did. The Flame Blade 2nd level spell does as well (and is a weapon substitute, not enhancement).
Based on the above, the magical effect on the spears (which was +1d6 fire) is some sort of specialized elemental 1st level effect.
Okay, so it should be arguably easy to quench them, right?
But magic fire is not the same as physical fire. If you throw a bucket of water on a torch, the torch goes out, and trying to re-light it will be a pain because the fuel (the torch) is wet. But a blade that can have a magical fire turned on — well, the bucket of water will arguably quench it, but once the water is gone, it can be retriggered, unless the item’s rules have some weird “once a day” rule.
So what does this all mean?
It means doing some quick vamping as GM when someone creates one of these conflicts.
For example, you are in a room that has magical columns that, on a command word, begin to glow with a fiery heat, doing damage to anyone nearby. The amount of damage is spelled out. Nothing else is. (This, too, is from Princes of the Apocalypse). Jackie the Cleric casts a Big Wall of Water Spell (whatever) at the opponents in the in a room with magical columns.
It should have no direct effect on the magical columns, though, because those aren’t a flame source. Color text of special effects of steam and maybe therefore vision obscuring occurs. (Indeed, “I want to cover our withdrawal by shooting a big wall of water at the magma pillars” is a Rule-of-Cool clever idea that would probably net some Inspiration.)
It also knocks out the flames of the magical spears. But as of the opponents’ next turn start, they can reignite them because the water is not existing in perpetuity about their spearheads, and the momentary spell only overrides the permanent enchantment temporarily.
What, by the way, makes damage “magical”?
Slight digression, though it’s related to the topic. Let’s say William drops a Tidal Wave on people’s heads. Is that magical damage?
I mean, obviously, manifesting a huge block of water in the middle of a room is a magical effort (it’s a magical spell, in fact), but is the bludgeoning damage produced “magical”? Or is it effectively the same as produced by a mechanical trap that dumps a similar huge block of water over people?
5e goes with the following rubric to determine if something (including damage) is magical (via the Sage Advice Compendium):
Determining whether a game feature is magical is straightforward. Ask yourself these questions about the feature:
Is it a magic item?
Is it a spell? Or does it let you create the effects of a spell that’s mentioned in its description?
Is it a spell attack?
Is it fueled by the use of spell slots?
Does its description say it’s magical?
If your answer to any of those questions is yes, the feature is magical.
So is a Tidal Wave‘s attack is considered magical for purposes of “immune to bludgeoning damage not from a magical attack?” The answer is, it seems, “Yes,” because, for example, it is fueled by the use of spell slots. Even though, yes, there is no functional difference between it and a ceiling trap that drops a similar amount of water in a similar pattern.
What about the Infamous Tidal Wave vs Fire Elemental debate?
What happens if you cast a Tidal Wave at a Fire Elemental?
This is a debate only because
Tidal Wave has a calculable volume (but weird physics and dynamics to figure out impacts on surface areas, etc.) that mean you only take a fraction of that), and
Fire Elementals have a unique vulnerability / damage accrual measured by gallon and/or depth of water.
I have seen Reddit calculations from 6 hp damage to 25,000ish hp damage from such an attack, depending on the estimated surface area of a Fire Elemental and assertions as to how TW attacks work.
Rather than a bunch of crazy calculations (which are anathema to 5e), I as the DM would likely say, “It does its normal Bludgeoning damage (4d8), which the Fire Elemental Resists. However, it does double that amount (8d8) in Cold damage because the Fire Elemental is made of fire and is vulnerable to water. Also, the Fire Elemental doesn’t go Prone because they are immunite to that Condition.”
So probably no insta-kill for a 3rd level spell, sorry, but a butt-load of insta-damage, multiplied by every Fire Elemental in the area.
A OneD&D Note
This isn’t actually confirmed, but looking at the materials released so far regarding race-based magic, it looks like those rules may address some of the above, not just because it’s all kind of confusing, but because rather than arbitrary magical effects, documented magical spells are being used instead. That’s actually a good thing. Hopefully they will follow through with clearer answers and mechanics for all this.
Widely, and properly, lauded for RP improv and fun scenarios … but not always a hit.
Our regular Friday night D&D game needed a couple of fill-ins while a chunk of the folk were out of town. So, after last week’s Killer Ratings game, I thought we finally try Fiasco.
It didn’t work out great for us, but I think that was more on us than on the game. So let’s take a look.
The Game
Fiasco is a key — and one of the oldest — player in the “RPG as Improv with Light Rule Structure” games. It’s designed to give us the opportunity to play ordinary people with big ambitions and weak impulse control getting themselves into trouble and ending up in a likely very bad place … but with plenty of dark humor along the way. As many people have put it, it’s like playing a Coen Bros. movie in the time it would take to watch one.
The newest incarnation of the game has replaced stacks of dice and lookup tables with “engine” card sets, which seems to work well. You start out with a set of “playset” cards which are used to (a) establish the general parameters of the setting (a suburban town, a shopping mall, a D&D village), and (b) start building the relationships between the player’s characters. These include some key locations, maybe some objects, and definitely some needs that will drive things forward.
Once relationship et al. cards have been played down, you have a conversation around the table about what they all really mean. That Family Member relationship, is that biological, or adopted, or ritual? That Bully and Victim card — which person is which? Who’s actually jonesing for the WW2 pistol, and why? Start fleshing out those relationships to get things started — but allow for some discovery during the game, too. I wouldn’t necessary suggest keeping secrets (others can’t play to your story if you have it hidden), but new facets of the relationships, characters, and situation should come up during play.
The scene mechanic is at the heart of the game.
Once the setting and players have been established, then we get two Acts of two spotlight Scenes per player each (so each character will end up in a spotlight Scene four times during the game, plus playing a supporting role in other Scenes). In a spotlight Scene, a player can either Establish the Scene (declare who’s there besides themselves, what’s the setting, and what are they trying to get out of it), or Resolve the scene (take a Scene devised by the other players involving their character, and determine as it goes along if it’s going to have a Positive or Negative Outcome). Scenes should last a few minutes, draw from the story set so far and the relationship elements on the board, and go from there.
Between the two Acts there is a Tilt, which brings in some new elements to make a hopefully already shaky outcome explode even more spectacularly.
At the end of Act Two, each player, based on the Outcome cards they have collected, get an Aftermath card of lesser or greater disaster, and narrates whatever happened to their character, short- or long-term.
The three playsets that come in the box (or at least my virtual box) are:
Poppleton Mall (fun and drama and maybe drug dealing and Satanism at a local shopping mall)
Tales from Suburbia (fun and drama in the burbs, with still more drug dealing and crime and infidelity simmering beneath the BBQ-friendly surface)
Dragonslayers (post-D&D quest adventurers back at the tavern, eyeing that gold they just picked up).
Playsets are not a one-and-done. Depending on the characters, the cards that come out, and the mix and imagination of the players, a given playset could be used many times — though not as an ongoing campaign, mind you (rarely, I sense, is there enough of the setting or the characters left standing after a game to make that viable).
The rules themselves are relatively simple, but was a little difficult to get a good feel for how the game actually worked without actually watching some play videos. Three I recommend:
The game also comes with a “Let’s Not” safety card, in case action starts going down directions that make any player a bit too uncomfortable.
Players are definitely urged to lean into the dark humor and risk-taking and ignoring of possibly bad consequences to decisions being made. While the story may be about the characters competing with each other (even ones that are allies), the game itself seems to almost be the players vs. the characters — trying to get folk into trouble, not in a mean way to other players, but in a way that would make a good film.
(The film model is useful in framing scenes, too. A scene should not be, “Bob goes to the store to buy milk,” because that’s boring. “Bill goes to the store to buy milk he’s gonna see Susan and decide to confront her about Pat” is a lot more interesting, and has the stakes built into it.)
Fiasco is deservedly famous for its groundbreaking use of the players and their character interactions to drive the story. It’s GMless, though “The Person with the Game” will probably need to help explain it and guide players through the first time.
Definitely something you should consider for your gaming group if you’ve not already, and if it’s a group that loves the RP part of RPGs.
The home page for the game can be found here, but it’s available in a lot of places, including as a VTT implementation on Roll20 …
Roll20 Implementation — Fiasco for VTT
The core game (with the three playsets mentioned above) runs $20 in the Roll20 Marketplace. Expansion sets of eight additional playsets are available for $35 (there is a Starter Bundle with a total of 11 playsets for $33).
As a card deck game, the Roll20 implementation should work well. It comes packaged with play mats (on the map level) for three, four, and five players (thought the spacing on the five player mat was pretty uneven).
You also get a deck for each playset, and then separate decks for Positive Outcome, Negative Outcome, and Aftermath cards.
The (tabletop-based) game rules get loaded into the Compendium (a manual step you have to take to include it), and there are some stub handouts in the Journal as an outline for differences in Roll20. Most of these have to do with the card-playing mechanics of the VTT. If you’ve not done card decks in Roll20, do some practicing beforehand to see how dealing, viewing, playing, and clearing cards actually works.
It’s not you, Fiasco. It’s me.
I actually wasn’t wowed by the rules breakout — Roll20’s compendium is not always easy to use, and their organization is not great — so I ended up copying the (limited rules) over into the Journal, broken out more logically (to me), cross-referenced, and basically supporting all the information I got from the rules and from watching gameplay videos. Took me a couple of hours, so not a huge hill to climb there for GMs who want to do similarly.
Within the bounds of Roll20’s cardplay mechanics, the game worked well. Those mechanics are sometimes a bit awkward, and limitations on what Players vs GMs can do meant I got a suggestion from a friend that I make everyone a GM. I didn’t (because I thought that would make for more potential mechanics chaos), and it didn’t bite us — but, then, we didn’t actually get a full game completed, so it may have been more of a problem later.
One element that a VTT lends itself to is scribbling notes on the board itself — character names, info about them, discovered motivations, what the cards mean in this context, etc. I highly encourage the practice.
I would also add a recommendation, if playing on a VTT, that if you don’t use video normally you find a way to do so for Fiasco. So much of the game is bound up in personal interaction that the additional “data channel” of facial expressions and the like are even more important. It can also help see if people are quiet because they are nodding off, not engaged, or just unsure what to say.
How did it go for us?
Not … as well as I would have liked. Here’s a capture of the tabletop when we got as far as we’d gotten.
Whole lotta ritual stuff going on there
One problem we had was that the game just ran too long. We took close to 3 hours to get to the end of Act One, which became problematic for our East Coast player. While I would expect (and was warned) that the game could run longer than usual the first time out, that seemed excessive. But I’m unsure that’s actually the game’s fault.
Did I talk too much, going through rules? Maybe.
The players struggled a bit with the whole Scenes mechanic: coming up with a scene idea in the first place, limiting (or not) the other players involved, identifying what they wanted (in a meaningful fashion). People tended to come up with mechanical scene ideas (“I want to get everyone together for dinner”) rather than the emotional stakes (“My family never ate together, and if I can just get my friends around the table it will all be great.”). (Again, framed another way, is the Scene worth a scene in a movie?)
Some Scenes ran on too long. If the goal is really a few minutes each, we had some that were several.
We had a bit of difficulty determining Positive vs Negative Outcomes, especially when a player was doing the Resolving, and went in wanting that result.
I have a sense that, even though we threw around a lot of great relationship ideas, we didn’t necessarily have a sufficient grounding in them by the time we started play, so that some of those encounters and ideas never paid off, and others got changed at the last moment.
We play on Friday nights, and that’s always a rough call — end of a long week and, again, one player off two time zones deeper into the night. that might have lowered the energy level for a game that really encourages energy.
Our group is mostly introverted and, to a large degree, conflict-averse. Not so pathologically that a game like Fiasco — which desires big characters and getting ourselves and each other into trouble — is impossible, but it is a bit more of a lift.
We played the Dragonslayers playset. I thought that would work well as we were doing this in lieu of D&D, but in retrospect I wonder if it added one more layer of worldbuilding that we needed to struggle through.
Ultimately, we ended up with a D&D party that was actually an offshoot of an evil cult, with a goal to raise an army of the undead for the edgelord type I was playing (we were an offshoot because, obviously, the cult didn’t want just any Tom, Dick, or Grimdar to be raising armies of the undead). I was supported in that goal (kind of?) by the cult’s recruiter/cheerleader (who had an unrequited love for me), an eager young hero recently joined to the cult, and a sorcerer and his apprentice and their one-charge-left staff of resurrection. So some real possibilities there.
And that said, we did come up with some good bits — flashbacks, and a dream sequence, all of which had some interesting elements to them. One player also made a good move and framed a scene, not as our sitting down to dinner, or doing a dress rehearsal for the forbidden ritual after dinner, but our post-dress rehearsal review around the table — which allowed us just to vamp ideas about what happened and our reaction to them.
As it was, we pulled the plug at the end of Act One, due to time and no immediate opportunity to finish the game over the weekend. Players did indicate they could see how this all (raising an army of the dead on behalf of one of the players) was going to play out very poorly for all concerned. So that was something.
Definitely want to try it again, though, maybe with one of the other playsets. With the holiday season coming up, we may get the opportunity.
The point (very generally speaking) of D&D is to make the opponent worry about death. But it’s important for players to know about the rules, too, especially as they’ve changed since editions gone by.
Death (and Unconsciousness)
It’s important to understand a bit how down-and-out damage works in 5e. There’s no such thing as “going negative” here. When you are dropped to 0 (the bottom, you can’t go lower), you fall Unconscious (PHB 292): you’re Incapacitated, can’t move, can’t speak, are unaware, drop anything being carried, fail all Strength and Dexterity Saves … and Attacks against you have Advantage, and any hit is considered a Crit if attacked from 5 feet away.
But that’s the least worry you have. Because one of two things happen:
If the damage was so massive that the extra damage (theoretically beyond 0) equals or exceeds your HP maximum, you are dead, dead, dead.
Tick-tock …
If not, then you are “just” bleeding out, and need to start making Death Saves each turn (PHB 197). If you start a turn at 0 HP and are not yet stabilized, roll 1d20.
On 10+, you succeed (a nat 20 counts as two successes); three total success, you become stable and will live.
On 1-9, you fail (a nat 1 counts as two fails). Three total fails, you are dead, dead, dead.
Note that if someone inflicts further damage on you while unconscious, it counts as a Death Save failure; a crit (which is the auto-result of a hit from within 5′) counts as two fails. This also restarts the Death Save process. And if you take damage at 0 that is equal or greater than your normal number of HP, you die.
It’s only a flesh wound!
A stable creature stays at 0, Unconscious. It will heal 1 hp (and regain consciousness) in 1d4 hours (this does not count as a Short Rest). Healing spells are, of course, welcome to accelerate this process.
Note that this technically happens to the bad guys as well; the presumption, though, is hitting 0 kills a bad guy (they either fail their Death Saves, or you go around slitting throats after the battle). Best not to dwell on it. Powerful / significant enemies might get a Death Save process.
Indeed, as people can gift each other with their Inspiration, other folk could feed their Inspiration to a dying party member (“Don’t you die on me, man! Don’t you die on me!”)
As far as that goes, anything that helps on saving throws helps on a Death Save. So a Bless spell would work, too.
Knocking someone unconscious
Whether you want to avoid being a murder-hobo, or want to interrogate a prisoner who won’t surrender, you can intentionally knock someone out instead of death on opponents. (Vice-versa, too.)
“No, I’m just knocking him out. Hard.”
You simply declare, on an attack that would have killed someone, that you are knocking them Unconscious (PHP 292) at the moment when the DM would say they’re dead. You don’t have to proclaim “subduing” damage in advance or anything; beating someone into unconsciousness is very much the same as beating them to death: it’s all in what you do after they fall down.
A foe rendered Unconscious this way is considered stable. They will wake up (healing 1 hp) in 1d4 hours. You can leave them behind, bind them and leave them behind, or change your mind and gack them. If you want to interrogate them, then you either need to wait, or use some healing magic on them.
The Time Limit is how long after death the spell can be used. Note that Gentle Repose (Cleric or Paladin, 3rd lvl spell) can extend the time limit for a raise spell by 10 days if cast within the time limit for that raise spell.
Dancing with Death
As implied under Spellcasting Services (PHB 159), these revivifying spells are not the sort of thing that you find being cranked out at your local temple, and even in a Big City they’re not a commodity service. Stolen souls, headless bodies, lack of bodies, death by fire, being turned undead, can all block some of these spells. Missing body parts can be an issue. Finding a 500gp diamond might not be easy, either. And many of these spells have consequences — limits on what they can restore (see article), being Necromantic in nature (ew), or the services that will be requested in return. (And clerical spells, esp. high level ones, have to be cast to a purpose sanctioned by the deity involved.)
Which isn’t to say it can’t happen, but don’t think of all this as the wild and wooly AD&D days when raising up dead PCs garnered as little consideration as murder-hoboing a complex (if wholly illogical) underground ecosystem.
A fun one-shot, high-improv, collaborational “ghost hunters” reality show simulation
So here’s a combo review, description, and run-through of Killer Ratings, a game by Ken Lowery.
The Outline
Players (and, to a degree, the GM) are members of a third-rate ghost hunting “reality” show, desperate for ratings salvation before they get canceled, which they figure they can get through finding the holy grail of such shows: solid proof of life after death. Luck for them, they’re going to get that proof. Unlucky for them, they might get first-hand experience in the “death” part of it …
Here’s the official IndieGoGo description:
KILLER RATINGS is a one-shot, zero-prep, rules-light tabletop roleplaying game for 3 to 5 players and a Director. The players are the cast and crew of a terrible paranormal investigation show on the verge of cancellation. The good news is you’ve secured the rights to film the season finale in “the most haunted location in America.” The bad news is the place is actually really haunted, and you may well be completely boned.
As loud, campy reality TV stars, your gift for melodrama will be all you need to wake the dead – and may well be your key to survival once the haunting goes sideways. If it doesn’t get you killed first.
In short, you play some of the worst people on earth as they blithely walk into one of the worst places on earth, and most of you won’t survive. But however it shakes out, it should make for great TV.
Killer Ratings is highly narrative and RP-driven. There are die rolls, but those mechanics are way in the background — important, but infrequent until the very end.
Instead, the group as a whole “builds” a haunted setting, inventing clues and set pieces (“Features”) that slowly, collaboratively begin to tell a story about What Happened Here and How To Summon the Ghost. At the end, of course, they realize the horrible mistake they’ve made, and flee for their lives, as the Ghost tries to take them.
The Gameplay
I started an X-Card style safety talk at the beginning of the game, which I’ve never done with any other game I’ve run — largely because some of the play-throughs I’ve watched/listened to have leaned into the horror. We never got near that point, I think.
The game rules call for figuring out the characters, first, but I decided to start with the show and the haunt/setting first, as that would provide some context for the players to be built in.
The rules have nice guidelines for coming up with a fun show title, and then I drew from the players further details (Where do viewers go to see this show? Why have ratings been so bad?). We ended up with Fiend Highway, a show on its third, faltering season on History Channel … but it’s History Channel 3, which most cable packages don’t cover.
The rules also have suggestions to collaboratively develop the setting and triggering event of the haunt — in our case, a College, the site of a Forbidden Ritual. With further discussion, the players decided that rumors on the internet told a sorority house on the campus of Holy Ghost College (originally a Lutheran-sponsored school in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest), where the sisters had tried to summon the ghost of their Founding President, in order to find where a treasure had been hidden in the place. No big deal, except one of the sorority sisters had vanished, and the survivors — who had been cleared of the place as a possible crime scene — had told conflicting tales about what happened to her, all of which seemed to be innocent …
Then I had the (four) players come up with characters within one of the five preset roles in the game — the Face (the star of the reality show), the Camera Person, the Face’s Buddy (co-star / rival / enabler), the Academic, or the Charlatan.
That netted us a Face who was an enthusiastic True Believer in a car salesman sort of manner; a gruff veteran Camera Person quietly bemused by the things they ran across; an Academic who was kicked out of the academy for pursuing fringe science about the afterlife; and a Charlatan Elvira-esque psychic, complete with deep cleavage.
(Some of this didn’t precisely align with the roll descriptions, but as it’s all just guidelines for RP, who cares?)
All characters have two attributes: Provoke (ability/willingness to stir things up, including the Haunt) and Survive (hit points, essentially). You get a total of 5, and need a minimum of 1 in each, so that means 4/1 or 3/2 in one combo or another.
The GM was Bob, the Director, out in the van keeping the recording gear running and chatting over the remote communications gear. My role there was to prompt people to find or describe information they were coming up with, provoke some conversations or reactions, and make occasional references to fiascos during earlier episodes.
After an initial arrival, description of the outside of the ΓΟΣΤ sorority house, some RP-establishing discussion with the Assistant Deputy Dean of Students who was, unapproving, there to meet them, the team went in …
Going Room to Room
Each room (and the game comes with suggestions as to what rooms one might find in a given setting) is named and initially described by the GM, complete with creepy vibe and unusual features (the game also has suggestions for these, broken apart between Act 1, the unsettling stuff, and Act 2, the actively freaky but not quite yet unbelievable bits).
That then gives the players the opportunity to interact with the room, the show, and each other: seeking camera time, establishing Features themselves, wondering aloud about what they are seeing, theorizing for the viewers, acting out any drama they feel inclined to, etc.
In so doing they are not only fleshing out their characters and the show, but beginning to build a more detailed story around the haunt — what actually happened, and why.
At the end of each room (whenever it feels like a proper amount of discovery and activity has taken place, the GM calls for a Provoke roll, to see how much each character may have provoked the Haunt into manifesting. Rolling 1d6 below or at the character’s Provoke level means a Provocation has happened. As GM, I kept track of those, comparing them to a value suggested by the rules …
And then it’s on to the next room, as described by the GM. The same sorts of activities occur, with the GM leaning into spookiness that seems to tie into the theories of the players (or the GM, if need be) as to what is going on. Once the total of end-of-room Provocations reaches the “secret” number, then the Act is over. Have the Face give us a sing-out to commercial …
After Act 1, the GM coordinates a brief discussion about (a) how the character interplay is working, (b) what the characters think is going on, and then (c) what would punch up the drama.
Act 2 works just like Act 1, only the suggested Features and Vibes are ramped up and creepier — going from weird stains on the ceiling to blood dripping off the walls. Not a bingo sufficient to make it a day, but enough to further guide the tale (i.e., inspire the players to do so), build a mood, and, once enough Provokes have again been scored, have an unmistakable supernatural occurrence. Sing out to commercials, leading to Act 3.
Between acts this time, the players finalize their theory as to what is actually going on, and where and how they are going to act to cause the Ghost/Haunt to fully manifest. That is, of course, their goal, even if we, the GM and Players, know that is a terrible idea.
In our case, the understanding of the Haunt had morphed over many rooms. There was still a focus on the spirit of the founder of the sorority, Agatha Spenser-Reede. The Face kept commenting on how poorly the place was being kept up, the strange smells, the unwashed dishes, narratively trying to provoke the Haunt. But between me and the players, we also started building a tale of a sorority gone wrong, of bad behavior and debauchery and worse. In the end, the players “realized” that the effort by the sorority girls that fateful night was to lay the spirit an angry Agatha to rest, not to summon her up. So clearly they need to find the orgy room / sex gym as the site where Agatha would be most likely to be summoned up.
Bear in mind that it’s the players who eventually put that jigsaw puzzle together. I amplified their ideas as they came up, sometimes tried to give a little extra spin in a sympathetic direction (e.g., some mysteriously marked DVDs hidden in the TV room), etc. But I was quite happy what they found, even if it veered off from my original idea.
(So Agatha was a big freak about being physically and morally clean. The idea that the current generation of sisters maybe were not, and that the haunting was all about features of filth and sin and blood, all fit together quite neatly.)
My original thought was that they were going to go to the President’s Room (so marked with a plaque), which doors they’d seen Agatha slamming shut, to find that as the place where the sorority “forbidden ritual” ceremony had been held. Instead, they found the “Workout Room,” which looked just like you’d expect, except with various supernatural trappings, indications of strange brackets and hooks and places where things could be mounted, and a shattered mirror by the dance bar behind which was a broken video camera (where the girls had been photographing either their own pornos or creating blackmail videos for fun and profit).
Blood flowing down the mirror, corner of the eye figures humping on the floor, weird distortions in the room — yup, that was the place.
The Face tried to be the center of the final provocation but suddenly started missing his rolls. The Academic was the one who tried/said something that triggered …
This is literally Act 4
… well, the giant, spectral, decayed-and-filth-ridden remains of Agatha Spenser-Reede, rising up out of the floor and chastising them as NAUGHTY GIRLS WHO MUST BE PUNISHED! And the characters suddenly realize how pear-shaped this has gotten.
Act 4 is the flight from the Haunt, retracing their steps. This time they are rolling 1d6 plus their Provoke, the high score being the one who gets attacked by the Ghost. There are mechanisms to simply take it (lose Survive), or redirect it to someone else (by sacrificing a Provoke), or just (once a game) negating it. On analysis, it’s not a particularly onerous setup, but it is designed for backbiting or selfish characters to screw with each other while fleeing for their lives.
Ew.
This act goes fast — run back to the previous room, only to find out that the spooky effects from the way in are now cranked up to 12. The running washing machines that seemed to be filled with soap and blood before? They’re now vomiting soap and blood all over the room, as the Hair Drying seats that were clearly non-operational are now bellowing flame and howling like the damned.
In our case, Paul, the Face and True Believer, actually sacrificed himself (took a hit from the Ghost with only 1 Survival to his name) in order to make sure that the video taken would get to the public. Everyone else managed to make it out, in time for a final wrap session for the episode, where memorials for Paul and descriptions of What We Learned Today were had, including a final pre-videoed sign-off for the episode by the late, great, Paul Peterson was run, with cheesy “IN MEMORIAM, 1990-2022” text video-overlaid atop it.
We hardly knew ye. Nor can we spell.
Curtain, and applause.
Good game. The mechanics worked well. There is more than enough call for the GM to improvise a constantly shifting set of next steps and story elements, while letting the players drive the plot. And it clearly would play differently with different characters and settings. Fun times.
Playing with Roll20
Killer Rating is not sold as a Roll20/VTT game, and, if necessary, it needn’t be. Everything can be Theater of the Mind, the GM can scribble notes to one side, rolling can be trust-based, and everyone could be just talking by telephone, if need be. Indeed, the trial game I found there was no sort of VTT use involved.
That said, it occured to me that in a real game, you’d have public notes. You’d have a way of easily seeing people’s Provoke and Score, identities, and, of course, clues and rooms.
So even though it is a “zero prep” game, I spent a bunch of time to prep a (reusable) Roll20 tabletop, essentially to be used as a whiteboard. I had Provoke and Survive tokens. I had room outlines — not for maps, but for notes.
Screen cap of the Roll20 board I made, with notes.
I also moved a bunch of tables and rules outlines from the rulebook to Roll20 journal entries. That made it a lot easier to juggle things and present them to players. And as people rolled for the initial setup or for various Provokes, having the die rolls up in the chat was handy (not for trust, but just for being able to reference them). I also pulled in some graphics for “And now a word from our sponsor” and “We are having technical difficulties, please stand by.”
(And I spent a few hours posting lots of “Ghost Hunter” memes to the game Discussion Board in Roll20, to set the tone and/or amuse.)
I don’t know if the players thought it was necessary, but it worked pretty well for me. Anyone could add notes to the tabletop, though only one player did (as color commentary on the way out).
What would I do differently?
I thought the game went pretty well, and I had players both telling me they were getting the wiggins at times, and that they had a good time, so I take them at their word.
There are only a couple of things I might frame or nudge a bit differently on the next go-around (which I think will happen).
First, the game really leans, for fun, on the rivalry and backstabbing of the party. “Terrible people,” the rules say. My son noted that this wasn’t necessarily the best group for that — we are all pretty consciously nice to each other (and are, in fact, nice people). There was minimal elbowing for camera time, verbal sniping, or rerouting ghost attacks in the finale (and the one that there was was (1) for a Higher Cause, and (2) blocked by the Face, who had previously sacrificed himself during an attack and so was allowed to do so).
So I would probably try to instruct the players to be a bit more aggressive — all in the name of hilarity (and to make soft provocation by the GM easier).
Second, I probably didn’t rein in Features (clues) found by the players quite enough. They were introducing supernatural elements too early. That weakened the reveal at the end of Act 1, and even a bit for Act 2. Not a huge problem, but I’d likely lay out, as I suggest people spotlight things, appropriate levels of weird. (That may be my CDO working, though.)
Oh, and I (and they) also forgot about poor Carolyne Merrill, the sorority sister whose disappearance made this a cause célèbre. She may have been killed by the first manifestation of Agatha (probably for spilling blood all over the originally-expensive rug in the President’s suite), or she might have been possessed by Agatha and used as her anchor here in the world. In either case, RIP.
And that’s a wrap
Game cover
A fun one-off, “zero prep” game. I strongly suspect it would be a very different beast, even with the same players. I really loved that the players drove a lot of the narrative elements of the game, including “Aha! That’s what’s going on here!” It’s not a matter of the GM trying to get them to guess the pre-written story, but adapting to the story as it evolves. We came out with something better than I would have thought of.
We ran about 3.5 hours, with a bio break during one of the commercials. We could have moved faster than that, if I’d pushed the accelerator — one of the big purposes of the GM here is to keep the pace going forward at a reasonable clip — but I think it was pretty okay except for the player who was two timezones later.
Overall, a good time, and I’m ready to go back for more.
Like all things 5e, WotC set out to simplify the mechanics of how people were protected out on the battlefield by various objects.
5e set up basically four conditions:
no cover / uncovered (the default)
half cover
three-quarters cover
total cover.
The first and last usually get treated separately. It’s the partial covers in the middle that are of most interest here.
It’s difficult to talk about cover separated from a battle-map. Or, rather, if you are just running Theater of the Mind, cover is a matter of the GM asserting it (or agreeing to player assertions about it) by fiat. A lot of the below will depend on working on a square grid (extensible to a hex grid, if one likes; check out the DMG pages referenced below).
The key here as to what cover a target has is counting the points on any one of their squares from any of the points in your square to see how many are blocked.
So here are the effects of cover on attacks, based on the rules here. This most often comes into play with Ranged attacks (including Spells), but
Points Blocked
Cover Type
AC and DEX Saves
Examples
1-2
Half
+2
Low wall, large furniture, narrow tree trunk, or a creature* (friend or enemy) directly in front of them
3-4
Three-Quarter
+5
Portcullis, arrow slit, thick tree trunk. Any of the target visible.
*A creature at least half as large as the target standing next to them. But … see my House Rules below.
Points Blocked: As in the diagram above, on a grid, choose a (most favorable) corner of the attacker’s space. Trace a line from that corner to each of the corners of a square (any one) the target occupies. Based on how many of those points are blocked, you can determine the level of cover.
So if any of the points are blocked, there is at least Half Cover. But also note that, even if the all the corners are blocked (e.g., the target is behind an arrow slit), if you can see any of the target, it’s in Three-Quarter cover.
Total Cover: A target that cannot at all be seen / is completely concealed cannot be targeted by an attack or spell (though some spells can reach it in an Area of Effect — Fireballs, for example). Total Cover also starts to invoke rules for Hiding and the like.
Sizes of the characters involved can affect this (Small creatures behind larger creatures, etc.).
Multiple Covers provide the most difficult cover level. Arguably shooting an arrow past four people is more difficult than shooting an arrow past one person, but the KISS principle applies. As GM you can rule a cluster of Half Covers equal a Three-Quarters Cover, but the Rules As Written say that it’s still only Half Cover.
Combat and Cover at Corners
Combat and Cover at Corners
Consider the case in the picture — Fighter and Kenku squaring off (so to speak) at an architectural corner. Do the have cover from each other?
It might seem so, especially since the Move rules for grids indicate you can’t move through such a corner (PHB 192):
Corners. Diagonal movement can’t cross the corner of a wall, large tree, or other terrain feature that fills its space.
But for combat purposes, there’s no cover, because the kenku can take his top two corners (or the fighter his right two) and see (allowing for map/grid irregularities) along the wall all the other points of the opponent’s square.
It seems counter-intuitive, but there you are. Similar rulings can be made around doorways (the three squares on the other side of a 5-foot door have no cover from someone standing in the doorway on the other side, treating walls has having no thickness).
House Rule: Proximity to the Obstacle
Proximity to the Obstacle: Rules as Written say that obstacle are obstacles. My House Rule is a little more nuanced:
The attacker can ignore Half or Three-Quarter Cover if the attacker is closer to the obstacle than the target.
It’s all a matter of perspective. If an ally is right in front of me, I can weave around in my 5-foot square to get a clear shot; if they are right in front of the target, they provide much better cover for that target.
Take three examples that I will, for no particular reason, label as William (W) and Moony (M) dealing with a Goblin (G).
The normal use case is #1, where Moony is up there whomping on the Goblin, and William is behind, shooting a bow at the Goblin. That’s pretty clear; the Goblin gets Half Cover from Moony against William’s bow shot.
Consider case #2, where Moony was right in front of William. The penalty shouldn’t count here; it’s easy in a 5-foot space for William to shoot past Moony at the Goblin, adjust to shoot over Moony’s shoulder or to one side or the other. Assuming Moony isn’t doing jumping jacks in front of William, and is of a comparable size, that makes sense.
Use case #3 — where Moony is midway between William and the Rat is a bit more dodgy (so to speak). The angle to shoot around Moony is more difficult, though not as difficult as when Moony is right in front of the Rat.
So, what’s the ruling here? 5e would treat all three circumstances as providing cover, but I don’t like that. So I’ll borrow from the 3.5e rules:
Attacker can ignore the cover if he’s closer to the obstacle than his target.
At least as applies to Half and Three-Quarter Cover. In case #1, cover rules apply; in case #2, they do not; in case #3, William would need to take a step forward to fire and ignore the cover.
Some Other Notes
Note this is one of the few cases were 5e bakes in simple bonuses (vs using Advantage/Disadvantage). Assuming Advantage gives you about a +4 on a roll (it varies), that becomes too crude a measure for this.
There is a Variant Rule (DMG 272) about the chances of hitting the cover if you miss your target. KISS, man. Also, we’ll assume that people are being particularly careful not hit their allies.
Note that the Sharpshooter and Spell Sniper feats basically do away with Cover for their user. That’s pretty cool.
Update: OneD&D
In “Unearthed Arcana 2022 – Expert Classes,” the Hide action is allowed when behind Three-Quarters or Total Cover. The Sharpshooter and Spell Sniper feats ignore Half and Three-Quarters Cover, as in 5e.
This one is pretty straightforward, but also gets into complexities from how earlier versions of D&D have done it, and how some other systems do it, too.
Cones are not 90° angles
So that’s the main thing to remember. It was a mistake we made in our first game, and an easy one to because that’s how some other systems do it (like 3.5e and Pathfinder). But not 5e.
When playing on a battle map (if you are doing Theater of the Mind, then just do what the GM says), cones are defined as:
Coming from one of the corners of your square. (If you are running on a hex map, then cones are one of the few things that are easier that way, and please look it up yourself.) They don’t come from the middle of the square. They come from the corner. This is true for most spellcasting in 5e (DMG 251), and missile weapons, and line of sight — though the difference does not stand out in most cases.
The width of the cone equals the range from that corner. So the first five feet (square) the cone is one square wide. At two squares away, the cone is two squares wide. At three squares (the classic 15-foot cone), the cone is three squares wide. Etc.
Or, to quote rules:
Starting point, as the rules put it (DMG 251):
Choose an intersection of squares or hexes as the point of origin or an area of effect, then follow its rules as normal. If an area of effect is circular and covers at least half a square, it affects that square.
A cone’s width at a given point along its length is equal to that point’s distance from the point of origin.
That comes out, I am told, as a 53° angled cone, not 90°.
Which all seems simple until you try to map it out on squares, because squares suck.
If you want to be really technical, you could use an actual cone template that is X feet wide when it is X feet out, and then pick squares that have a majority of their space included in the cone. But I find it easier to just say “Pick a single square, now pick two beyond that, now pick three along the same angle beyond that,” and let the player figure it out.
(I also have some square templates that can be dragged onto the VTT map which can sometimes help. But most cones are short enough that it’s not necessary.)
So, for example …
What does that look like, practically? Here is a simple drawing, which can be rotated in 90° increments:
So a straight cone on a square grid map. The question marks indicate a choice — pick one or the other to be in the cone (arguably, based on whichever corner you are casting from). As noted, at 5 feet the effect is 5 feet across. At 10 feet, the effect is 10 feet across (two squares). At 15 feet, the effect is 15 feet across.
Here’s another:
This one’s at an angle, and is serving double duty.
The red mage is doing a cone at an angle downward (remember this can be rotated in 90° increments, or rotated). At 5 feet, it’s 5 feet wide. At 10 feet it’s 10 feet. At 15 feet, it’s 15 feet wide.
(While cones emanate from a corner, they don’t necessarily target a corner.)
The yellow mage is shooting at a straight 45° angle down and right. This gets a bit more complex because of 5 foot increments and how you calculate diagonals on a square grid in D&D, but again, 1=1, 2=2,. 3=3
Player’s choice. As long as you are starting from a corner, following a line of some sort, and are X squares wide for an X square length of the spell cone, you’re golden.
If that’s still confusing … maybe go for non-cone spells. 🙂
Overall, good and/or interesting ideas. But let’s agree that it’s not 5e-compatible.
So we now have the second “OneD&D” playtest doc, UA 2022 Expert Classes. Interesting stuff, both because we see what they are doing with character classes (in this case, the group of classes titled “Experts”: Bard, Ranger, Rogue, and kinda, technically, Artificer).
As with my previous UA 2022 look, I’m going to break my notes up into three categories (not exclusive):
1. Huh. Not a bad idea.
2. Ugh. That is a bad idea.
3. Yeah, this is 5.5e
Just as an overview:
There are a lot of not-bad ideas in this UA. More importantly, there’s a lot of thoughtful reframing and stating of D&D concepts and rules from 5e that will help bring clarity to the game no matter where it goes.
There are still some bad ideas.
And, no, this is not a seamless backwards-compatible eternal edition of D&D. This is D&D 5.5e .
Huh. Not a Bad Idea
Class Groups: So now we’ll have Class Groups that mean more than just convenient generalizations. And that’s not a bad thing, as they actually use the idea within the rules — Feats with certain Class Groups as prerequisites, for example. It means when new Classes are introduced, they slot more easily into the rules (e.g., by knowing that Artificer is an “Expert” Class, we already know a bunch of rules that apply to it without having to write those rules out with it). And, yeah, it will also help starter groups cover all the bases.
It was an odd choice to start with the “Experts” Class Group (martials, er, “Warriors” would seem more straightforward). But, then, this lets them trot out the new Ranger, as the old one was generally considered underpowered by a lot of people.
Suggestions: I think it’s a good idea for a lot of things (e.g., Spell Lists) to be offered with suggestions as to what a given Class would most likely do with it. Especially Spell lists, I should say. Given the relative ease of swapping out a lot of those things (but even when you can’t), it reduces decision-making during character creation or leveling without actually forestalling options.
I’d recommend some guidance on Feats, too (including Attribute Bumps vs other Feat options).
Increasing Highest Level Powers: Class 20th level features are now moved to 18th Level, with new Epic Boon Feats opened up at 20th. Okay, that’s cool.
Better Bardic Inspiration: Rather than giving Bardic Inspiration to someone for 10 minutes and have them remember to use it and to do so before the GM says that a roll was a failure — the new rules suggest the Bard actively React to the failure and then give the character the extra die to roll.
This same kind of efficiency shows up in a number of places. For example, Guidance is now not a Concentration cantrip that you cast before someone makes a check, but a Reaction to cast afterward. The Bard’s Cutting Words similarly does away with the “use it before the GM announces the results” stuff, which is always a pain. This sort of thing will make these kind of bonuses easier.
Scaling on Proficiency: A number of spells and powers (e.g., again, Bardic Inspiration) use Proficiency Bonus as a modifier or a “how many times you get to use it” counter. That means the abilities will improve over time much more quickly than an Attribute modifier, though they may start out at lower numbers.
Use of Spells instead of Special Abilities: The Bard’s Song of Rest(oration) now provides access to specific healing spells (which trend upward, going from Healing Word up to Greater Restoration) that are considered permanently prepared, rather than specialized mechanics that have to be spelled out for the reader. This shows up in a number of places, and it’s a nice way of using an established effect (a spell) rather than making shit up.
Rangers and Hunter’s Mark:Favored Enemy was kind of weird and weak, much more focused on information than actual action. It helped you track, know stuff about, and understand the language of a given monster type. Now it gives the Ranger Hunter’s Mark for a specific enemy, always prepped, and without need of Concentrating. Nice, esp. when used by the Hunter subclass (which restores the lore component).
Clearer Writing: Even when rules aren’t changing, the UA present them in language that is clearer and easier to parse. There is also more Capitalization of Things to make them easier to see and key off of.
Expanded Actions: The new rules add additional Actions to the 5e list, drawing that whole Actions thing out of just being combat-focused, but providing a stronger framework. Some of these Actions won’t necessarily take place in the realm of an Initiative-based conflict (though they could),m but that’s all right.
That includes carving out “Actions” for Influence, Search, Study, even Jumping. They’re not all good, but I think it’s a cleaner way to present some of these rules.
Conditional Love: 5e had a pretty good framework for Conditions, and the new rules build on that, giving additional considerations as to how different Conditions might affect you, e.g., Incapacitation clearly breaking Concentration and impacting Initiative, which is especially important when you remember that when you Sleep you are Incapacitated. Similarly, the new Hidden condition clarifies a bunch of sealth-related things. The Slowed condition consolidates multiple places where the effect previously occurred to a single point of explanation. Overall, I applaud the effort.
Thief’s Reflexes: Rather than 17th Level Thieves adding an additional turn on the first round (which makes the whole Initiative backup even worse), 14th Level Thieves get an additional Bonus Action from the Cunning Action list.
Thieves and Magic: Rather than the vaguely-worded Use Magic Device abilities for Thieves at 13, now at there are a fixed set of bonus abilities given at 10 that make very little narrative sense, but are quite nice. (It also includes a Scrolls aspect which points to some clarification coming there.)
Double-Weapon Fighting Changes: The current rules on fighting with a weapon in each hand — which is a very cool thing that everyone wants to do sooner or later — are pretty complex, between the dual-handed and double-weapon and the etc. The pivot to having it all be enabled by using a Light weapon (or two) make it all work a bit more cleanly now, with or without the Feats that assist it. At the very least, giving it some thought is a positive in my book.
Nice bonus to the players, too, to have the second attack be part of the same Attack action, rather than a Bonus Action. I worry that’s going to create some higher-level imbalance, but it’s cool.
Searching and Studying: This is an effort to untangle the “Perception” vs “Investigation” perennial confusion. Since that baffles a lot of people (including some GMs), doing so is a good thing, especially as they formally bundle Insight / Medicine / Perception / Survival as “Search” actions and Arcana / History / Investigation / Nature / Religion as the “Study” items, pointing out their conceptual similarities and providing better guidance as to how to use them. Good.
Drawing and Stowing Weapons: This is now called out as part of the Attack action, rather than casually in the generic Use an Object one. That aspect, at least, is good. (See below.)
It’s Magic!: Rather than the Cast a Spell action, we now have a Magic action that includes using magic items. Nice added clarity there.
Barkskin!: This was one of those spells that should have been better, and now is. Rather than merely giving you a basement AC of 16, it now gives Temporary HP (which cale) and is a Bonus Action, making it more likely someone will cast it in combat. Still a Concentration spell, though, which kinda sucks.
Inspiration Exploration!: I can’t take credit here (because according to the videos, this UA was built before they had closed and started reviewing the results of the first one), but I’m tickled to see that one of the ideas they are playing with for Inspiration is giving it on a Nat 1 rather than a Nat 20. I think it would take the sting out of a flat failure (“Well, at least I got Inspiration!”), and is perfectly RPish.
Also, when you receive Inspiration (or “Heroic Inspiration,” maybe to distinguish it from the Bardic type), you can, if you already have a point in it (still the max) pass it on to another player.
Not much Help: The new rules propose only allowing Help on an Skill check if you have Proficiency in the Skill in question. I.e., the Barbarian can’t offer the Rogue Help in picking a lock if they don’t have Proficiency in that skill as well. That’s net a restriction, but it’s a logical one. I might house-rule it to allow someone to convince me that how they are Helping.
Hiding and Hidden: Without parsing things here too carefully, it looks like they are trying to clarify how and when the Hide action works, and what the Hidden condition does for you. I don’t see any significant difference per se, just clarification, which is awesome.
Influence Actions: This was previously optional RP-related stuff in the DMG, but now it’s getting PHB treatment, which I think is net-net good. A lot of these sorts of CHArisma-based things (Deception, Intimidation, Persuasion, and, nice, Animal Handling) can and should be done through roleplay, usually, but illuminating mechanics for them is a good thing, too.
That said, some tuning is called for. As written, the rules use a flat DC regardless of whether you are talking to Wembly the Aggravated Kobold, or DreadLord EdgeBlack the Master of Demons; it draws a distinction in how Hostile the Hostile Attitude is, but if DreadLord EdgeBlack is willing to humor himself listening to your request, you might stand a shot. GMs need to keep hard control over this mechanic.
Jumping Jehozaphat: The new Jumping rules seem clearer and less fiddly than the old ones. That’s good. (But see below.)
Resting Revision: It’s now explicitly called out that the first hour of a Long Rest, if then interrupted, still counts as a Short Rest. That only makes sense.
Rituals: You don’t need a special feature on your character class to cast a Ritual spell. That’s a nice decomplication.
Ugh. That Is a Bad Idea
Poof! I’m Invisible: The current hiding-related things for Rangers in 5e are a bit goofy — Hide in Plain Sight has a bunch of specialized rules with practical restrictions related to them, and Vanish is set at 14th level when it should be a lot lower. But the replacement in the new rules of a one-turn Invisible spell for hand-waving magical reasons seems silly. I like the use of spells instead of customized powers, but this is less useful than the existing rules (one turn?) and a lot less colorful.
Feats and Prerequisites: One of the things that 5e did was really flatten out Feats. After the 3e/3.5e feat trees (I don’t recall how 4e ran them), this was a refreshing way to get cool stuff, character-concept stuff, early days. The introduction of additional pre-reqs — levels, Class Groups, etc. — is starting to complicate that some. I would want to actually see how that works out, and it does have the advantage of allowing more powerful feats for higher level characters, but I’m still a bit concerned. Maybe less of a bad idea than an idea I am wary of.
Drawing and Stowing Weapons: I think one of the biggest heartburns people have in play is juggling weapons, and the way the 5e and the new rules still work, you can’t trade off easily within a turn without dropping something on the ground. I’m sure there are all sorts of good verisimilitude reasons for this, but from a player/GM aspect, it’s Not Fun. (I remain about this close to house-ruling about this.)
Movement Muddling: So there are more explicit rules for different Speed types (Climb Speed, Fly Speed, etc.). That’s cool, but rather than being able to switch out between them on a given turn like you can now, you can now only use one speed type during a given Move. That seems like it will be potentially awkward and limiting, though I’m not sure I can articulate a reason for that off the top of my head. It may be, though, a reason why Dash now doesn’t increase your Speed, it gives you a second Move.
Also, Jumping is now an Action instead of part of Movement. That seems restrictive. If I’m charging that ogre and jumping over a five foot gap along the way, it shouldn’t interfere with my laying some some swordwork on his head.
Exhaustion: Now more clearly a Condition (it was previously in a sidebar of the Conditions appendix in the PHB), which is good, it is given 10 levels rather than 5 (making it much less of a threat, given the mechanics of when it’s imposed), and basically starts subtracting the level from your D20 rolls and the Save DCs on spells you throw. That’s conceptually easier than the different effects in the current rules, but feels, maybe, a bit too smooth (and there’s no movement reduction, which doesn’t seem quite right). Maybe okay, but could use some tuning.
Resting: Long Rests, it is suggested, restore all your Hit Dice, rather than half of them. Also, any reduced Ability Scores are returned to normal. Both of those seem over-powered. This is “balanced” by still canceling out any Long Rest that is interrupted by combat, which gives the GM too many opportunities to screw around with the characters. Blah.
But, Yeah, This is 5.5E
WotC continues to insist that this is all basically the current D&D (5th Edition), but better, and that everything is backwards compatible, and so “editions” are out, and that people can still use their 5e stuff, but that isn’t a 5th Edition PHB it’s the 2014 PHB, and this isn’t a playtest 5.5e, we’re all playing OneD&D now.
Except this is patently untrue.
Okay, it’s true to the extent that this new-and-improved system isn’t a scrape, but a massive remodel. The foundation, the basic structure, most of the plumbing, is all there; they’re just replacing most of the walls and flooring and appliances with bigger, brighter, better bits.
But, let’s be real. You don’t remodel your house and put all the old furniture back in place. People with Rangers built with PHB 2014 will not want to play them as built, with the old rules. They just won’t, esp. if it’s in a shiny new campaign. And GMs probably won’t want them to, if it means one more rulebook to consult against.
And, in fact, they shouldn’t still use the old rules. New material will be written with the assumption that Rangers have Hunter’s Mark and this and that and the other thing. And it should be written that way.
Similarly, the new Feats structure only works one way or the other. Spells like Barkskin and Guidance (let alone others) are one or the other. Mixing and matching characters in an existing campaign, or bringing old characters into a new “OneD&D” game, simply won’t work.
That implies that people will update/rebuild those characters for 5.5 OneD&D. Character sheet designs will need to be changed / reprogrammed. Old modules will need errata for them to reflect that NPCs and various other challenges require updating, etc.
I get that WotC doesn’t want to scare people off by calling it a new edition. A new edition means learning new rules, new concepts, and forking over for new books. But, fergoshsakes, they’re going to be selling everyone new books in 2024 anyway, so what the heck? And in another 5-10 years, they’ll do it again.
(An interesting side note here is that the Artificer is considered an Expert class, but isn’t included in this write-up because they are only focusing on PHB 2014 material, and ignoring expansions in later books like Tasha’s and Xanathar’s. That both does and doesn’t make sense, but it makes me wonder what the final strategy is here: will the new OneD&D PHB include revisions of all the previous material? Or just the core three books? How “aged” does material have to be? Or will we then get updated TCE and XGE books, too (ch-ching)?)
(The question will always be “How does Hasbro think it can most maximize its profits?”)
This is not a rule, actually, but a design philosophy that went into 5e, which gives it a very different flavor (and advancement path) than earlier versions. If you have no interest, you can skip it, though it does answer some questions about what sort of loot you’re likely to find in treasure hordes.
It boils down to a simple questions: Should Joe Shlub, the peasant, be able to hit Conan the Barbarian with his pocket knife?
Or, put a little differently …
Earlier versions would have basically said no:
Conan’s AC should be waaaaaay too high for Joe Shlub to ever hit.
So that’s what advanced most when you rose in levels and experience: your AC (by attribute and by powers, esp. magic armor), and your To Hit to counter it (again, through advancement and through +N Swords of Incredible To Hit).
So Conan has great TH numbers, but he needs them to wrassle with the fantastic AC numbers of the Ancient Red Dragons he’s being thrown against.
5th Edition answers the Joe Shlub question with a yes.
The goal is that everyone always has a chance to hit.
So we focus, in advancement and balance, on essentially the other side of the combat equation: damage and HP, the ability to deal it out and the ability to take it.
So Conan does tremendous damage when he lands a blow … but the dragon has triple-digits of HP.
In short, what most goes up in a 5e game over time is not TH and AC (though they do slowly increase), but Damage and Hit Points. As an example, by the end of the previous campaign we were playing (which brought us to the 19-20 range), we all had a buttload of HP, and the Rogue was doing like 7d6 Sneak Attack damage on top of his weapon. Accuracy and the difficulty of hitting something, instead, stayed within well-guided bounds … i.e., “Bounded Accuracy.”
Joe Shlub can hit Conan — but it’s only ever going to be a scratch. (A mob of Joe Shlubs doing a lot of scratches, aggregating damage output higher than Conan can individually, though … can be a threat.)
WotC has managed all this by putting some mathematical limits on things. Here are some articles that explain it well (the first gets into the not-difficult math, the second into the history):
The former in particular has the basic design table that drives everything, focused on difficulty to achieve something, and keeping strict caps on it.
DC or AC
Difficulty
To Break
Armor
To Hit
5
Very Easy
a glass bottle
an inanimate object
10
Easy
a wooden chair
No Armor
a badger
15
Medium
a simple door
Leather Armor*
a troll
20
Hard
a small chest
Plate Armor**
a dragon***
25
Very Hard
a treasure chest
a tarrasque
30
Nearly Impossible
a masonry wall(1 ft. thick)
a deity
*with shield and +2 Dex modifier **with shield ***Adult Red Dragon is AC 19
This is also why Advantage / Disadvantage is so powerful. It not only simplifies the unruly flocks of plusses-and-minuses that 4e (and earlier) had, it gives a massive jump (roughly +4 in effect) to hit, but temporarily.
The bottom lines:
There is always a chance you can hit something (a nat 20, if nothing else). It can probably hit you back a whoooooole lot harder, but that’s not the point. As we’ve learned by doing, even a nassssty monster, surrounded by enemies, doesn’t have a long life expectancy (thus, even nassssty monsters are going to have minions to run interference). That’s because of the Action Economy.
Things that affect TH/Armor are going to be relatively rare and limited. Older systems handed out +3, +4, +5 weapons/armor like door prizes. In 5e, a +1 TH weapon is an expensive and relatively rare thing, available only in big cities. +2 is incredible, and unlikely to be found for sale anywhere. +3 is a thing of legends. You’re a lot more likely to find a sword that bursts into flames and does an extra 1d6 damage than a +1 sword.
This has been your Game Design lecture for today. We now return to your normal programming.
Bonus Actions are actually pretty easy, but they are not well explained in the 5e Players Handbook.
When can you use a Bonus Action?
On your turn, one of the things you may be able to do is a Bonus Action. The trick to understanding it is that you only get Bonus Actions that the rules specifically say you get. Certain rules give you a Bonus Action. You can only ever use one Bonus Action on your turn, and it can only be on your turn (you can’t use a Bonus Action in an Opportunity Attack, for example).
If you aren’t using or eligible by the rules for a Bonus Action, you don’t get one. There isn’t a “Bonus Action phase” in the turn or something. What you can do as a (single) Bonus Actionhas to come from a rule or ability applicable to your character.
Note that some spells have their casting time as one Bonus Action. These spells can only be used as a BA. Also, you cannot cast a Bonus Action spell if you have cast anything more than a Cantrip as your regular action.
Though that isn’t specified by the rules. (Source)
An Example
So, for example, my Rogue, Tener, started off with only one thing I could do as a Bonus Action (the one available to everyone): a second melee attack using Two-Weapon Fighting (PHB 195).
At second level Rogue, he got the class ability Cunning Action (PHB 96), which meant I could use my Bonus Action to Dash, Disengage, or Hide.
At third level Rogue, he got the Thief archetype ability of Fast Hands (PHB 97), which meant I could use my Bonus Action for Sleight-of-Hand, disarm a trap, unlock a lock, or Use an Object.
But I couldn’t use my Bonus Action to, say, Help, because that wasn’t a Bonus Action defined for my character. I could only do those specific actions defined for my Bonus Action in my rules.
Does everyone have Bonus Actions?
Some characters don’t have any Bonus Actions, at least at lower levels (except the option of Two-Weapon Fighting, if they choose it).
When can I take a Bonus Action?
One more thing about Bonus Actions: some have prerequisites and some have none. For example:
Cunning Actionhas no prerequisites. Whatever else I do on my turn, whenever I want in my turn, I can use the Bonus Action to, for example, Dash.
Two-Weapon Fighting says “When you take the Attack action and attack with a light melee weapon that you’re holding in one hand, you can use a bonus action to attack with a different light melee weapon that you’re holding in the other hand.” Therefore, you need to, in sequence:
(1) take an Attack action with one hand; then, later in your turn, you can
(2) use the Bonus Action to attack with the other hand.
You can do any other allowable things in between — chat with someone, Move, etc. But you can’t use the Bonus Action first in this case.
Monk’s Flurry of Blows speficies “Immediately after you take the Attack action on your turn …” In order to use the FoB Bonus Action, you have to
(1) take an Attack action, and then immediately (no Moving in-between)
(2) use the FoB Bonus Action.
The only time you get a Bonus Action is if you have a rule (usually from a class, race, or feat) that says you have a Bonus Action, and then it’s only good for what the rule says you can do with it. (And you can only do a single BA on your turn.)
Everyone has a Bonus Action for Two-Handed Fighting (allowing you to do the second attack as a Bonus Action). That’s pretty much it.
As a Rogue, your Cunning Action allows you to take a Bonus Action, but only to do a Dash, Disengage, or Hide. (This is a “restriction,” yes, but it’s actually granting you Bonus Actions that nobody else necessarily has. Similarly, if you take Thief, at 3rd level you can do a Sleight of Hand, disarm/unlock, or Use and Object as your Bonus Action on a turn.)
Can I take a Bonus Action to Help someone?
This came up early in my campaign. In short, unless you have a Bonus Action that specifically says you can Help on your BA, you can’t.
That said, “Help” (PHB 192) is a great Action for a character to take on their turn when they’re not sure what to do or if they don’t think their own attack on the BBEG will be effective, or if someone else will have a great attack.
For Rogues (again as it came up in my campaign) it doesn’t really come into play for allowing a Sneak Attack, though, because to Help for combat (giving Advantage) the Helper has to be adjacent to the target — which, if they are, means a Rogue can already Sneak Attack the target anyway (PHB 96) (though a Help would let you roll Advantage on the attack, which is not for nothing).
But, again, Help can’t be done in a Bonus Action unless someone has that specifically as something they can do as a BA.
It’s important to distinguish between an “attack” and the Attack Action.
An “attack” is when you roll a D20 (usually) to try to hit someone. Attacks may be made in the Attack Action, but they can occur at other times.
An Attack Action is one of your turn slots which may include one more more attacks in it.
Extra Attack vs. MultiAttack
“Extra Attack” is something Fighters (etc.) get as a class advantage at various times. It means that when you take the Attack Action, you can do multiple attacks (e.g., instead of a single longsword blow on the orc, you take two, or even three).
(This is different from doing a Two-Weapon Fighting (PHB 195) where the second attack is a Bonus Action).
“Multiattack” is something NPCs (and a few shapeshifting PCs) do — an animal’s claw-claw-bite, for example. It is its own Action, a Multiattack Action, not an Attack Action. Each of those attacks is usually also available separately, which is important with Opportunity Attacks.
Reactions, Opportunity Attacks, and Readying
Opportunity Attack (PHB 195) allows, as a Reaction (not during your turn, but during someone else’s), “one melee attack” when the target tries to step out of reach. Extra Attack doesn’t come into play (because it’s not giving you an Attack Action, just an attack): the Paladin doesn’t get to swing twice against a retreating foe, just once. Neither does Multiattack: when you move away from the giant bear, it can claw at you, but not claw-claw-bite.
Readying lets you take a specified Reaction (“if anyone steps in front of me, I will swing my sword at them”). . You can only Ready a single attack, not an Extra Attack or a Multiattack, because Reactions don’t take place on your turn. E.g., the Monk (PHB 79) notes that the Extra Attack is only on their turn. Ditto Fighter (PHB 72). Multiattacks are also intended only on the attacker’s turn.
Similarly, you can only use a Bonus Actionon your turn (PHB 189). A two-weapon fighter can Ready an attack (or Opportunity Attack) with their rapier, but not their Bonus Action attack with a dagger.
Avoiding damage when falling. [Old school D&D, but not in 5e]
Using Athletics vs Acrobatics
In many way, you can narratively figure out which one makes sense, and different characters might use one or the other for the same action. Consider how Aragorn (an Athlete) would do something, vs. how Legolas (an Acrobat) would do it. A crowd of orcs to get past? Aragorn bulls his way through, while Legolas tumbles and leaps and dodges past, but the final effect is the same.
In a couple of cases in the rules there are explicit options as to which you can use.
Grappling: The Grappler rolls an Athletics check vs. the Grapplee rolling either with either Athletics (think “breaking free”) or Acrobatics (“slippling free”). If the Grapple succeeds, the Grapplee can repeat the contest as their action on their turn.
Shoving: Same as Grappling, only with a push-back or push-down as the result.
Or if gymnastics isn’t your thing, consider a parkour routine; there are clearly both STR and DEX things going on there. (And CON, and INT, if not WIS, for that matter.)
To complicate things further, Abilities and Skills are not fixed in their combination. One can imagine a Strength (Acrobatics) roll being legitimately allowed, or a Dexterity (Athletics). Indeed, there is technically in 5e no such thing as a Skill check; everything is an Ability check, potentially modified by proficiency in a given Skill set.)
No huge conclusions here, just an observation about similarities and differences and what the fundamentals of two ambiguously-named skill sets are. Again, using the guidelines described above as guard rails, narratively figure out what it is that you’re doing. And, of course, note that both of these skills are good candidates for an occasional invocation of the “Rule of Cool.”
A House Rule
As noted above, in previous editions of D&D, Acrobatics could help save you from a fall by reducing its damage. That was explicitly left out of 5e, so I’m reluctant to re-insert it.
I would house-rule, though, that a successful Dexterity (Acrobatics) role might keep you from going prone after a fall, vs a DC equal to the damage you took (stick the landing!).
Bonus OneD&D Note:
According to the Character Generation playtest document, Grappling and Shoving are now part of the Unarmed Strike action — hit the target with an Unarmed Strike (D20 + STR mod + Proficiency) vs their AC.
If you were going for a Grapple, the target becomes Grappled, with a STR or DEX check each turn vs a DC of (8 + STR Mod + Proficiency) to break free.
If you were going for a Shove, you succeed.
This reduces the number of contests, but also reduces the use of Athletics and Acrobatics.
One of the 5e design mission statements was to Keep It Simple, Stupid. This KISS principle was a response to the ultra-crunchy tactical game which was 4e. I like miniatures and tactics, so I liked 4e, but it did, by focusing on numbers and formulae so much, drain a lot of color from the game. As I started up my 5e campaign, I constantly found myself running head-smack into things that 4e did that 5e did not, by design, and having to figure out why.
So what is it?
Rather than having players maneuver a blizzard of plusses and minutes on attacks, 5e tries to reduce it down to a simple set of questions for any Attack, Save, or Action Check roll:
Does the attacker (die roller) have, at the moment, an Advantage over the defender?
Does the attacker have, at the moment, an Disadvantage, compared to the defender?
Then:
If there’s no Advantage nor Disadvantage, it’s a Normal attack — roll 1d20.
If there is both Advantage and Disadvantage, it’s a Normal attack — roll 1d20.
If there is justAdvantage — roll 2d20 and take the higher die roll.
If there is justDisadvantage — roll 2d20 and take the lower die roll.
Note that (KISS) these are not additive. There is no “Super-Advantage,” and no “Well, you have one Advantage and two Disadvantages, so that comes out to Disadvantage.” There is either just Advantage, or just Disadvantage; otherwise it’s a Normal 1d20 roll.
So what impact does this have?
There are some fancy graphs out there, but Advantage is roughly a +4 on a d20, statistically. Or, as put another way, “Advantage is an enormous benefit that lands 13 or higher 50% of the time, is almost twice as likely to crit, and has 1/20th times as likely to botch.” So 5e doesn’t hand out the status lightly.
Or, put in pictures (please feel free to ignore if math makes you twitchy):
Having Advantage (blue) boosts your numbers up a lot, esp. in the middle range (trying to hit at least an 8-16); having Disadvantage (green) drags your numbers way down.
When do you have Advantage or Disadvantage?
There are a lot of conditions that create Advantage or Disadvantage (since there are very few conditions any more, except cover, that throw numbers, not Ad/Disad). A good survey can be found here:
A few common ones for combat:
Using the Dodge action during combat has any attack roll against you made at a disadvantage until the start of your next turn (if you can see the attacker). DEX saving throws while Dodging are made with advantage. (Note to GMs: bad guys should Dodge a lot more than they do.)
Using the Help action during combat can give an ally advantage in one of their own ability checks before the start of your next turn (see “working together”). Alternatively, it can provide advantage on the first of an ally’s attack rolls against a monster.
Attacking an enemy while hidden (if they don’t detect you approaching) or otherwise unseen grants you advantage on attack rolls. Conversely, attacking an enemy you can’t see has you making the roll with disadvantage.
Ranged attacks whose target is within a weapon’s long range (but not within normal range) have a disadvantage on the attack roll.
Ranged attacks (including rolled spell attacks) in close combat (within 5 feet of a hostile creature who can see you and isn’t incapacitated) have a disadvantage on the attack roll.
Attacks made while prone are at a disadvantage. Attacks at 5′ made on someone who is prone are at an advantage, but attacks beyond that are at a disadvantage.
You can spend a your point of Inspiration to make an attack, save, or action check at advantage.
Advantage also shows up as a balancer. Kobolds, for example, have a Mob Tactics ability; if a kobold is next to an ally in combat, they each get Advantage on their attack roll. Thugs and Wolves have analogous abilities. That makes them more of a threat than you might think.
How do I roll Ad/Disad?
Normal physical tabletop, just roll two D20s and pick the higher (or lower) one as need be.
The Roll20 VTT standard 5e character sheet provides multiple ways to roll advantage, set through the Settings (gear icon) on the sheet toggle (CORE|BIO|SPELL|gear):
Advantage Toggle — You’ll see a ADVANTAGE | NORMAL | DISADVANTAGE toggle at the top of the character sheet which you can adjust for each roll. [This is what I do, because I like to be sure I have all my settings right and am not throwing more dice than needed.]
Advantage Query — For each Attack/Save/Action Check roll, you’ll get as pop up window asking if you have Advantage or Disadvantage. [I find this annoying, myself.]
Always Roll Advantage — This will roll 2d20 on everything, then you can apply the roll (higher number for Advantage, lower number for Disadvantage, left-hand number for Normal). [This is a very common way people do this, and for the DM the monsters are all done this way.]
Never Throw Advantage — Always just roll 1d20; if you need to roll a second die, do it again.
So this is less rule than game design philosophy. It feels a little Inside Baseball, but understanding it is fundamental to understanding a lot of the reasoning behind the rules in 5e, and in why the game behaves the way it does.
What is the “Action Economy”?
In short, action economy means what a character (or NPC or creature) can do each turn. How many attacks can they make? How many abilities can they use? How many spells can they cast? A lot of the rules I’ve researched in here orbit around that concept of action economy.
Essentially,
the larger your action economy ⇒
the more things you can do in a turn ⇒
the more powerful you are
And that’s true for individuals, as well as for groups.
A big part of character advances are adding more attacks, more Bonus Action options, etc. Similarly, more powerful monsters have more attacks and actions in a turn (including legendary and lair powers).
All things being equal, the side that has the greater numbers of combatants has an advantage in combat, because their action economy, the opportunities they have for success in combat, is greater.
Bounded Accuracy , as one person put it, “makes everybody dangerous no matter how weak but does so at the cost of making everyone vulnerable no matter how strong.” Which means, by implication, over time a bunch of weak (but dangerous) characters can overwhelm a strong (but vulnerable) one.
PCs often have advantage in combat because encounters often have more PCs vs fewer (but individually more powerful) enemies. Sure, that monster can do three physical attacks, or maybe a big spell effect. But PCs much more often get more Attacks, Spells, Bonus Action abilities, etc., than enemies, individually or (and this is important) in aggregate. They often also get specialized Reactions others than Opportunity Attack. This only starts to partially equalize when you get up to epic creatures that have legendary and lair actions, but even there, numbers tell.
Everything you can do is part of your action economy: Actions, Bonus Actions, Reactions, and Moves. The more you can set yourself up (tactically, in a battle, or strategically, in your character design) to do something effective with all of those options in a turn, the more effective (and deadly) your character will be.
In short, the action economy is your range of actions in a round (see above), and by extension, maximizing your effectiveness by using as much of that economy as possible.
How do GMs cope?
GMs bitch a lot about this: the boss fight that’s got the arch-critter-demon you’ve had the players trembling about for months … ending with the boss going down in two rounds as the 15 attacks the party can generate per turn (action economy!) overwhelms the 4-5 the boss can.
What (just to offer notes) do GMs/module writers do in the face of this?
They add Minions! They’re not just color text — they help balance the “overwhelming numbers vs very powerful foe” equation by mitigating the former so that the latter can get some licks in.
As mentioned, epic-level legendary creatures — dragons, liches, beholders, etc. — can get legendary and/or lair powers, which basically add to their action economy (and hurt like the dickens). GMs often add these non-canonically to other bosses, too.
Do other things toadd to a boss’s action economy. One suggestion that seems to have legs is making bosses, in short, multiple creatures (with different capabilities and HP pools and initiatives) presenting as a single creature.
Split the Party. If the party can’t bring all of its power to bear — because it’s split up (by its own choosing or through an external force), or maybe because the attack vectors are limited (a narrow hallway, perhaps), it’s action economy is restrained.
The converse to all of these can be used (usually by the GM) to weaken a boss that seems too big to tackle.
I’m trying to make use of stuff I’ve written to help the community at large.
I’ve been GMing a 5e game for nearly two years now, and one of the things I’ve ended up doing is writing a lot of “rules summaries” explaining or exploring or in some cases “house ruling” on concepts or specifics that need a bit more explanation than what shows up in all those expensive D&D books.
We’re using Roll20, so I’ve been keeping those rules summaries in the Campaign Forum there for my campaign, but I think I’m going to start posting copies of them here in my blog, as a longer-term (and more searchable) resource.
A few caveats:
I tend to try to go with Rules As Written (RAW) when given a choice. When I need something more than that, I lean heavily on the RPG Stackexchange, because those folk are rules lawyers in a very reasonable fashion.
That said, this is still just me saying things, though I try to document what I say. If you, or your GM, think differently on any of this, that’s up to you and your table.
This is all going to be focused on D&D 5e — and with One D&D ramping up, all or most of this may be obsoleted (claims of backwards-compatibility notwithstanding). Caveat lector.
UA 2022 Character Origins is the first of the “OneD&D” playtest docs. My reactions to reading through the doc it fall into three categories (not exclusive):
1. Huh. Not a bad idea.
2. Ugh. That is a bad idea.
3. Yeah, this is 5.5e.
So … let’s take a look.
1. Huh. Not a Bad Idea
Simplifying Tool Proficiency and tool kits: This has always felt a bit fussy in 5e to me, to the extent that most folk I know engaged in these a little as possible. Sure, it’s unrealistic, but it smooths a bumpy area.
Orcs as Player Characters: I’m okay with that. I mean, at some point the number of intelligent races in the world starts to get a bit ridiculous, esp. if they can now all interbreed, but, hey, whatevs.
Making Backgrounds more important: I think that makes a lot of sense. I like getting a Feat out of it, at least. And getting a Language (with suggestions) makes some sense. Except … shifting the Ability bumps to this seems a bit weird, at least 3 points worth.
Level-associated Feats: Probably a good idea. While it begin to smack of feat trees from 3.5e, it does mean that trying to make Feats all fit the same level of power can be given more nuance. At the very least, it shakes up all of those “These are the best Feats to take” articles, but represents another awkward moment for backwards compatibility.
Natural 20s: I don’t think it was necessary to make nat 20s and nat 1s auto-successes/failures for everything (I know people have said it was a common house rule, but it wasn’t at our house). But it’s not necessarily a bad thing, either, so fine. (As noted below, I’d be inclined to house rule that a nat 1 gets you Inspiration, rather than a nat 20.)
Having crits only double damage on weapon and unarmed attacks (but not attack spells) is … also okay. It balances Martials vs Spellcasters a bit.
Spell groups: Narrowing the groups of spells (Arcane, Divine, Primal) is a nice bit of efficiency, at least on the face of it.
Grappling: The Grappled condition changes are interesting. I like the Disadvantage for non-Grappler attacks. It’s interesting that they’ve shifted to a Saving Throw with Dex or Str vs the Athletics/Acrobatics skill roll.
Unarmed Strikes: I haven’t done a lot with fisticuffs in the past, but the expansion here (combined with the Tavern Brawler feat) looks like some added detail that will be useful and handy.
2. Ugh. That’s a Bad Idea.
Half-races. “But I don’t wanna be a half-orc or a half-elf. I want to be an Orc-Gnome. I want to be an Ardling-Tiefling. I want to be a Halfling-Ent!” Ugh. I mean, maybe just as well that they came up with a standardized mechanic for it, but it just seems kind of silly to me. It’s not like there’s a shortage of races and demi-races already.
And, of course, that begs the question of quarter-races (“My character has a human-elf hybrid father and an orc-dwarf hybrid mother”), and how to handle them in the rules. “And so, ad infinitum.”
Muddying racial differences. This one is contentious, I know. I am very aware (admittedly from my cis-het-white-male perspective) of the very powerful arguments behind getting rid of race-based Ability Point tweaks. Human history is full of ugliness where different “races” of humans were (and by some still are) assumed to be fundamentally different from “normal,” physically and mentally. Tropes in the game that resonate to that should be examined critically, if not discouraged.
At the same time, it’s one thing to say that Black humans and White humans and Asian humans and whatever pseudo-racial classifications you want to come up with (because we are all, after all, one species) are really the same, and quite another to continuously grind away the differences to say that Dwarves = Humans = Elves. In that case, why bother having those distinctions at all? (“Bob is a sentient who happens to have pointed ears, high cheekbones, and celebrated his 147th birthday last week.”)
Or, as one consders it, why keep the distinctions you are keeping or adding (lifespan, size, appearance, old and new innate abilities) vs. getting rid of the ones you aren’t (stat increases and decreases). Especially since a number of those special innate abilities are just stat bumps in disguise (lookin’ at you, Dwarves).
Or, put another way, nobody seems to have a problem with Vulcans being stronger and smarter than Humans in Star Trek, as long as there are countervailing disadvantages. Why is it wrong for an Elf to be more Dexterous than a Human, or even, given their ages, have a higher Intelligence. I mean, nothing in the old rules actually prevented a Half-Orc from becoming a powerful wizard; it was just a bit more difficult to min-max the stats that way. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. People can do anything, but the Halfling basketball player is going to have some special, epic challenges.
In short, I’m quite fine with backing away from dictating cultural-biological absolutes (“Orcs are all evil! Evil, evil, evil! And they eat human babies, too!”), even with creatures of demonic origin (the convolutions over Tieflings are fascinating, even if they inadvertently let an actual alignment show up in one of the Lineages). But I’m also okay with saying “The physical differences we’re literally describing here are reflected in the Ability stats of characters of those races.” (Mental stats are a bit more dodgy; I’d be okay with leaving them out of the picture for races.)
Character Sizes: Small (2-4 foot) Humans? Even when we are talking about Pygmies or people with Dwarfism, that’s below average. I don’t object, it just seems an oddly specific call-out. (They also show up as an option only with Humans, Ardlings, and Tieflings; all other races are other Medium or Small only, which seems … racist? What about tall Halflings? What about diminutive Elves?)
Racial Spells: More races have literal spells that they get to use on a dailyish basis (once per Long Rest if you don’t have additional spell slots). That seems to muddy the magic waters some, giving spells to all classes. Especially with Feats that do the same thing. I’m not sure creating a more magic-rich environment is actually needed.
Ubiquitous Inspiration: Inspiration is a mechanic that seems to be quite underutilized in 5e by too many DMs. The “solution” to this in OneD&D is to make it pop up all over the place, robbing it of its RP-supporting intent.
True, it gets lost after a Long Rest now — except for uber-versatile Humans. But PCs get Inspiration from rolling a nat 20 (i.e., after 5% of all rolls). Players can get Inspiration as a group from someone with the Musician Feat. In short, everyone’s going to have and use plenty of Inspiration to gain Advantage on rolls.
That’s not necessarily bad, but I’m not sure it’s good. It certainly waters down the “Wow, that was an awesome bit of character play, so take an Inspiration,” because it increases the chance they already have some.
(Frankly, I’d house-rule-tweak at least one thing there, if nothing else: you gain Inspiration on a nat 1 — anger and determination to do better — rather than on a nat 20! That’s a very non-D&D idea, to be fair.)
Backgrounds and Ability Bumps: Are Acolytes really that much Wiser than the average person? Are Cultists that much more Intelligent? Not in my gameplay experience. I know the Ability Bumps need to somewhere if you can’t baldly do it with races, but allocating 3 points here seems a bit extreme.
Multi-Lingualism: I guess maybe it makes life easier, but everyone knowing three languages (Common, a Standard Language, and a language from your Background) does seem to be a lot of linguistic lore (and, if players cooperate in chargen, allows for covering pretty much all the languages they might need).
Long Rests: These are so baked into the game at present (even if they do ridiculous amounts of healing) that having it be interrupted by any Combat feels like a major shift.
3. Yeah, this is 5.5e.
There is a qualitative difference between characters generated under the present 5e rules, and characters generated under these rules. The two will not mesh well together, and efforts to run both types in any given campaign will lead to madness. If nothing else, automated character sheets and tools will have to choose one or the other (whether from WotC or a third party like Roll20).
By extension, that implies a difficult fit between existing 5e modules and the new system. That’s already true to a degree (just as the Genasi), but will continue to grow over time.
That does not mean the 5.5e changes are, per se, a disaster. There are a lot of good changes in the system already that have evolved it from the baseline 5e of 2014 to where it is today. All those changes in supplemental tomes (Volo’s, Tasha’s, Xanadar’s, Mordenkainen’s, etc.) have changed the game in mostly good ways.
And, to be fair, the changes discussed are not the 3.5 to 4, or 4 to 5, full-edition levels of significance. The basic underlying systems, action economy, etc., are there. But this is more than just “5e Forever, man!”
So why not bite the bullet and admit this is a new (or distinct sub-) edition? If WotC’s plans involve you buying a new set of hardcover books for “OneD&D” (and they do), then why not just call it 5.5e and be done with it? For the sake of marketing?
Because, really-truly, I guarantee that more supplemental books will come out after that. And every 5-10 years they’ll do a true-up of new PHB/DMG/MM tomes, “backwards-compatible” claims or not. If “OneD&D” in 2024 is not comfortably compatible with 5e, what will it be in 2028?
(Which argues the intent to pivot to a new direction and go to all-digital rules that you license on a regular basis. Want access to Xebulon’s Big Bucket o’ Game Mods? That’ll be $2/mo, or $20/year if you want it to plug into your official WotC modules and official WotC character generator. But I digress.)
I’ll continue to read the feedback (which is all over the map), and when 1 September rolls around, I’ll provide my feedback. If 5.5e came out like this, I would suck it up and play with it that way. But I would want WotC to admit this is not a backwards-compatible seamless evolution of 5e, from 2014 or 2022. This is something new that deserves to be recognized as such — and identified as such to WotC’s customers.
So WotC has announced what they’re doing with D&D 6e. Or 5.5e. Or, maybe … noe.
Instead, they say, we will have “One D&D,” with the whole concept of “editions” becoming instantly obsolete, because WotC believes 5e doesn’t need complete revamping, just evolution. Sort of like an OS being constantly patched, the baseline ruleset will be updated over time so that there is just “D&D the way it is today” and no need to ever, ever, roll out a new version.
How that will work with books isn’t clear. Will they keep coming out with “patch” books like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything? Or will the core ruleset be republished (and rebought) every X number of months/year. In either case, that’s different from what we have now because …?
Of course, maybe the idea is that we won’t have “books” at all, but online rules that can be slipstreamed electronically to the current text (with some sort of versioning so that you figure out what’s going on), but that you have to subscribe to …
None of that was really discussed, just three broad pillars for “One D&D”:
Ongoing updates to the current baseline 5e (ssshhh!) rules.
Expansion of D&D Beyond, the compendium toolset they recently bought.
Creating D&D Digital, apparently a 3D VTT, the pre-alpha version pictures for which look pretty impressive, and which will be both a content delivery tool (“Here’s the dungeon for this game”) and content creation tool.
Kobolds on the attack in the 3D VTT
Now, just because they are dealing with the rules on a patch basis doesn’t mean there are potentially significant things coming out beyond additional content. For example, Backgrounds are being completely revamped, to give Ability score modifiers and feats, which does sound kind of keen.
Other changes already raised: simplification of spell lists, and making a Nat 1 a miss for any roll, not just attacks.
Color me … somewhat dubious.
I get the idea that completely revamping the rules every several years is increasingly more difficult. I even buy the idea that 5e is a pretty decent platform to build on, with caveats.
But one reason why D&D is still with us, several editions on, is because audiences and tastes change. What people want in terms of crunchiness vs simplicity, hack-and-slashery vs role-playing, not only changes with an individual over time, but with the industry.
If D&D doesn’t change, in its bones, every now and then, those changes in society and audience will lead people to go elsewhere.
1974 – original
1977 – AD&D 1e
1989 – AD&D 2e
1995 – AD&D 2e Revised
2000 – D&D 3e
2003 – D&D 3.5
2008 – D&D 4e
2014 – D&D 5e
5e is already 8 years old — older than any except the longevity from the original AD&D to 2e, when the audience was much smaller. It’ll be a decade old 2024 when One D&D is planned for release.
At what point will everything start to feel a little creaky, no matter how many patches and content packages are released?
So maybe — and if how rules changes are handled is well-planned and -executed — this extends the 5e platform another 5+ years, with the homebrew variations that we have today multiplied as various rules continue to evolve and change (and the similarity on the surface to the 5e of 2014 continues to dwindle, without, somehow, breaking the “backward compatibility that WotC has promised). When will whoever owns Hasbro decide what the world needs is to put out One D&D 2nd Edition?
Playtesting for the rule updates can be found here.
Fun game from last week-end’s game day, a weird combo of “Clue” and “Werewolf.” Everyone’s an Investigator — except for the Forensic Investigator, who tries to vaguely guide the investigation.
The tableau: scenes in the middle, and four clues and weapons in front of each Investigator.
Each Investigator (one of whom is the actual MURDERER) has four possible clues and four possible weapons in front of them. The FI does a werewolf-like “Everyone close your eyes,” at which time the Murderer shows the actual clue+weapon combo. The FI then puts down a series of clue boards to describe the victim, the murder location, and three other aspects, each with a multiple-option set-up for them to choose from.
The Forensic Investigator tries to take the real Clue+Weapon combo and identify scene elements that will lead the Investigator to the Murderer. Sometimes they can be an awkward, even misleading, fit.
Once everyone has opened their eyes, each of the Investigators (including the MURDERER) looks at the various possible combos in front of each player, trying to make the match the narrative the FI has presented. This goes to a second round (with the FI replacing one of the clue boards to get rid of something that might have been misleading).
Ultimately, each of the Investigators (including the MURDERER) get to make an accusation (the clue+weapon combo). If none of the (non-MURDERER) Investigators figure it out right, the MURDERER wins.
Each Investigator is associated with a quartet of weapons, and clues.
It sounds a little goofy, but it’s actually deeply engaging, and the incredibly deep decks of both clues and weapons, and the maddengly narrow number of choices on the scene cards, makes it all a deep challenge. Of the games we played, we had both successes and failures. And wanted to keep playing.
Soooooo many weapons.
As you get more players, the number of possible things that will fit the scenes grows, making things more difficult … but the number of analyses by players grows, too, which can help in narrowing the possibilities.
There are optional rules we didn’t play with, and at least one expansion set, but even without those, this is one of those “I’m thinking of buying a copy in case the person who owns it doesn’t bring it to Game Day some time and I want to play it.”
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ — Ease of Play
⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ – Replayability
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Fun
Dwindle is a self-contained indie RPG designed to let you run an “occult cyberpunk” scenario in the dying tech metropolis of Vector City.
Dwindle cover art
VECTOR CITY used to gleam, its wireframe skylines shimmering against a perpetual pixel sunset. But the Vector’s heyday is long gone, and you — the ECHOES of this former metroscape — are left tending to the wreckage.
You’re no more special than any of the other stragglers stubborn enough to stick around; people here live hardscrabble lives full of risk and danger, and the difference between success and obliteration is as fickle as static in the wind. But without somebody to keep things running smoothly, it’s only a matter of time before the ghosts and the glitches and the corporate bastards eat away at every last bit of data and render this husk of a city entirely unrecognizable.
You won’t let it disappear without a fight.
Written by Caro Asercion, the game does a quite decent job of letting you generate characters (it can be played GMless if you like) and develop a scenario. Characters and the city are seeded (randomly, if you wish) by tables with interesting people, gadgets, goals, and problems to guide game play. There’s enough there I suspect for a number of replays before things might to seem repetitive.
One of the tables to help you build your character. Using an item from your pocket adds a die to your roll.
Dwindle’s most unique mechanic is its use of a grid to place seven dice into. The sum of dice for each row and column give you dice to roll for different actions/attributes (with bonus dice for reputation or use of a trinket in your pocket) — the highest die rolled provides a range of success or failure for the group to interpret.
The digital grid. I can see that one row means I have a Hack (modify tech) of 1 die, and the other column means I have a Heed (awareness) of 2 dice.
The trick is, those dice you rolled get removed from your grid, meaning, as the game name implies, your abilities and options dwindle over time, until you reach a situation where the highest die you roll (or, if you are at 0 dice available, the lower of two dice) scores a 1, at which point you can replenish the grid in whatever way you like.
It sounds a little complex, but it’s mechanically simple, esp. if you use the digital interface by Tim Busuttil. The main thing is figuring out when best to shoot big dice, realizing you’ll be seriously weakened until you can figure out how to replenish.
The Good
Intriguing setting, neatly set up for a variety of adventures.
Clean and pretty rule set, plus a text-only version if that’s how you roll.
Interesting attribute / rolling grid (with digital tool).
Great for a one-off / fill-in session.
Can be run without a GM.
Can be played tabletop or virtually (if you trust your players’ rolling).
The Not-As-Good
Limited replays without brainstorming some new elements for the tables.
Characters may feel a little generic, as dice can replenished in whatever arrangement you wish.
Most die results are mixtures of success and failure, making it difficult to feel an unalloyed success.
Attribute tags sometimes drive, rather than guide, the action (“I have dice left in this, so that’s what I should do”).
In the session we played, we dwindled pretty quickly, and didn’t have a lot of luck replenishing.
It’s a fine one-night stand-in when a key player or the GM can’t make it for the regular session. I’m glad we played it, and I’d enjoy playing (or even GMing) it again.
We had our kinda-monthly Game Day today, with a dozen plus friends and families breaking out games (and eating and drinking and socializing). Here’s what I played:
Runes & Regulations
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Ease of Play
⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ – Replayability
⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ – Fun
Everything about this game should be right. It’s a close cousin to “Unstable Unicorns,” but framed around magical home-owners trying to let their mythical creatures out on the front lawn, and the various objections that neighbors (other players) and the HOA (the game) raise.
The cards are cute in pictures and text, the premise is amusing, and the mechanics all feel good, but, ye gods, this game is wildly unbalanced. Five by-no-means stupid or ungamed players went through this 30-60 minute game for two hours, if not longer, and none of us were able to put more than three creatures on our lawns for more than a partial round. Other players can whack you back to square one far too easily, and if they don’t, the game (through the spinner randomizing element) will.
Quite honestly, as packaged, this game feels broken. We speculated on some straightforward ways to improve it (ditch the spinner, for one), but, honestly, if you want a game that feels like Unstable Unicorns … get that, not this.
Elder Signs
⚫⚫⚪⚪⚪ – Ease of Play
⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ – Replayability
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Fun
Another complex, token-and-card-heavy Defeating the Arising Elder Gods game. Cooperative, but could easily also be run solitaire (the assistance other characters can provide you is limited; most of what other players provide is advice on what to do next). Player Characters must engage in and defeat different rooms, rolling specialty dice and trying to match patterns, with various extra abilities provided by items, clues, and innate character abilities, all the while dealing with a ticking clock bringing the group ever-closer to the arrival of the Old One that will eat everything.
Fun times.
The game is full of fiddly bits and special rules, though the basic mechanics aren’t difficult. Lots of random elements (the dice) keep things variable, which is probably good, as it helps cover for the plethora of factors that need to be dealt with.
Not a game I would go out of my way to play again, but certainly one I’d play again given the opportunity.
Tales of the Red Dragon
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Ease of Play
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Replayability
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Fun
Fun up-to-four player game as fantasy adventurers hang out at the tavern after the big dungeon crawl, and try to drink each other under the table — interspersed with fierce gambling games. Run out of money, and you’ll be tossed out. Pass out, and your “friends” will rifle your pockets.
The rules are pretty easy (there are a few nuances that could use a bit more explanation), and the cards for each player character (priestess, wizard, fighter, rogue) provide enough color to make them stand out as separate characters. While it’s possible to be knocked out of play, it’s likely by the time one character falls, others will be close, and the game will be over pretty quickly.
This game has several expansion sets, adding additional characters and rule mechanics, which is good.
We’ve played this before, and I recommend it as a fine Game Day game.
Superrobotbear, 2-6 players, 2 hours, $10 I ran this as a one-night fill-in when my normal D&D campaign couldn’t run because of absent players. We’ve been playing in Roll20 as a Virtual Tabletop, so I wanted something that would use that. I also wanted something I was pretty sure would fit into one evening; picking a “short” D&D crawl was a recipe for it spilling into multiple weeks.
I ended up with One Last Fight, by Ethan Hudgins, released back in late 2019. Ethan describes the game as “A GM-less Card-Prompt RPG for 2 to 6 players,” and that’s pretty accurate. I purchased and ran this through Roll20, which seems like a much superior choice to buying PDFs and printing up your own copy of the game.
I say “I ran this,” but that’s not quite right. OLF is technically GM-less (I was GM as far as Roll20 was concerned, which was helpful with some card mechanics, and I knew the rules better than the players, but I tried to keep a distance regarding creatively guiding the game).
OLF’s premise is that a party of 2-6 is ending a long campaign/quest against their nemesis: slowly approaching where the nemesis is located, fighting their way in, then engaging in final battle. All of this is guided by a structured card deck built from separate decks for each phase of the approach. Twenty-five cards are dealt, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the games generally seem to take a couple of hours.
There are really two games in OLF. One is a structure for conflict resolution. Character cards have simple combat attributes, bolstered by items/treasure acquired. Those attributes represent the number of dice to be rolled vs the challenges on the Adventure Cards. The Adventure Cards are flipped from the deck, and may force a solo challenge (which can be passed on to another player) or a group challenge (faced by each individually). These could be a bad guy, a group of opponents, a trap, a challenging situation, etc.
Character card with questions, special powers, and conflict attributes. This character has one each of the Key, Crown, and (through a treasure item) Magic attributes.
So if the conflict has Swords and Magic as vulnerabilities, and I have two Swords and one Magic, that gives me three dice, plus the free one I get, so I am rolling 4d6. If the conflict shows “4 4” as the difficulty, then on the individual dice I’m rolling (sums make no difference), I have to have two dice that have 4, 5, or 6 on them.
While many conflicts have the stake of losing life vs gaining treasure, quite a number have a different win/lose effect, sometimes being a matter of “this helps the party a lot” vs “this helps the party a little.”
Conflicts get hairier as the adventure progresses, until you finally get to the nemesis, the titular Last Battle, where it is kill or be killed.
Additional variation in play — beyond the randomizing of the built deck — come from the characters chosen: a variety of archetypes with both different strengths (conflict attributes) and various ways they can break the rules, from changing die rolls to providing assistance to other players.
But that brings us to the second system present in OLF, because, beyond a solid conflict mechanic, OLF is first and foremost about storytelling.
A game can be set (as a collaborative decision) in any setting — high or low fantasy, science fiction, the Old West, spies, comic books, named franchises or generic pastiches. The cards and actions are set as archetypes, without any particular setting in mind — a character’s description as being able to tell the future could be magic, it could be psionics, it could be the Force, or it could be a powerful computer. This gets determined by the group defining the setting, and by every card — nemesis, characters, gear, and adventure cards — having a series of questions that describe the present or fill in the past.
Some of the Nemesis cards. Collaboratively answering the questions help create the game setting.
Those questions may be answered by individuals drawing the cards, or by group efforts. And while the story built by those questions and answers don’t actually affect the mechanics, they can influence how the individuals play, and, when all is said and done, the create the story that players will remember long after they recall a given die roll.
It’s those questions and answers in the end that make OLF special, from “What does this statue ask of you” to “For whom in the group would you take an arrow? Why?” to “How did you allow this enemy to escape before?” to “What does the nemesis mutter as they cling to life?” You could play without that storytelling, but ultimately they are what, to me, makes the game what it is.
And even when you reach the end, and the Nemesis is defeated (one hopes), there are final questions — the inevitable (and often most dramatic) where does you character go from here? (Or, if your character died — quite possible — how are they remembered?)
The Good
Well done storytelling prompts.
Good conflict resolution mechanic.
Pretty easy rules.
The Bad
Storytelling and conflict resolution don’t really link together.
Roll20’s card deck mechanics can be irksome.
No physical printed version available; printing PDFs would be painful.
Very indie, so not a lot of info out there about it (by no means the game’s fault).
Overall, One Last Fight is a flexible and entertaining and imagination-stretching game, perfect for fill-in sessions or killing a couple of hours. The rules setup (at least in Roll20) was a bit sketchy and disorganized, but the gaps are easily filled in; the game’s rules are picked up pretty quickly in play. It’s available on Roll20 for $10, or on the author page for the PDF version (same price).
Part of an ongoing series of 5e Rules notes.
This isn’t actually confirmed, but looking at the materials released so far regarding race-based magic, it looks like those rules may address some of the above, not just because it’s all kind of confusing, but because rather than arbitrary magical effects, documented magical spells are being used instead. That’s actually a good thing. Hopefully they will follow through with clearer answers and mechanics for all this.
