DCC, 3.5E, and B/X Numbers

When I first got DCC, I assumed the game was "tuned" around OSR and B/X numbers regarding attack bonuses and hit points. The game is more tuned around 3.5E-style numbers, hit points, and attack bonuses. I use the fire giants of three games to compare values with:

• DCC Attack Bonus: +22
• OSE Attack Bonus: +10
• 3.5E Attack Bonus: +20

The attack bonuses, minus multi-attacks, are comparable. They are baseline double B/X.

• DCC average hp: 80
• OSE average hp: 51
• 3.5E average hp: 142

D&D 3.5E hit points are around double what DCC gives. Compared to B/X, OSE has about 1.5 times the hit points.

• DCC attack damage: 4d10+10, 32 average
• OSE attack damage: 5d6, 18 average
• 3.5E attack damage: 3d6+15 (3 attacks), 26 average, 78 maximum total (52 realistic)

The 3.5E damage maximum is deceptive since it assumes that last +10 attack hits, so it is closer to 52 for two attacks. So DCC is in the middle, with 1.5 times less and more for OSE and 3.5E.

• DCC AC: 17
• OSE AC: 15
• 3.5E AC: 23

AC values are closer to B/X on the low levels, but ancient dragons in 3.5E and DCC are around AC 40. AC is too high in 3.5E by about five points for DCC.

Don't enter this realm if you are afraid of math!

So if you convert from OSE, double the attack bonus, multiply attack damage, and hit points by 1.5 times. AC is about the same. If converting down from 3.5E, use the same attack bonus, halve the hit points, reduce damage by 1.5 times, and AC is about 70% at the lower levels, and for boss monsters, they are about equal to 3.5E.

Low-end 3.5E monsters are okay with DCC. A 3.5E orc is AC 13, +4 attack, and 2d4+4 damage. An OSE orc is AC 13, +0 attack, and 1d6 damage. A DCC orc is AC 11 (you could armor them up, too), +1 attack, and 1d8+1 damage.

This is why I like the first edition and B/X games like OSE. Even AD&D 2nd Edition started increasing monster hit points, but nothing beats the original game's flat numbers and lower modifiers. Every version of Wizards D&D has been on a hit-point inflation track for the last 25 years.

DCC is a 3.5E game since the dragon AC numbers can scale up to 40, and the hit point and damage numbers are higher than OSE. If you are converting from 3.5E to DCC, use a 50% hp, -5 AC, half-damage attacks, and if monsters have multiple attacks, dice chain them down from the d20. DCC being aligned with 3.5E makes sense since Goodman Games published so many 3.5E modules.

DCC can replace all of my third-edition games since it is essentially a replacement game that is more old-school focused and isn't as structurally broken as D&D 3.5E. I enjoy DCC more than I do 3.5E, but I still have my 3.5E books out, while 4E and 5E sit in the garage. Having my 3.5E books out means I can play them apart or together as an option, and the DCC and 3.5E combo gives me the best of Gonzo and Wizards D&D on my shelf, and the games work together well.

Bounded Accuracy is Fragile

I picked up the monstrous Tales of Arcana 5E Race Guide, and this is a unique and fun book that gives you hundreds of 5E races to play with. Some are silly, and I would not use them as-is, but this book is unparalleled as a font of imagination and creativity. Many of them are handy and inspire me to use them as characters or NPCs. I like this book as a "default race guide" for a D&D 4E-style of a world where anything goes.

All of them are skinnable and hackable, so if you wanted a race of winged beast-men you could base them on a satyr, drop one of those abilities and give them wings (which start at gliding, can level up with feats). So the choices here are infinite, given a bit of creativity and imagination. Robotic demons? A race of intelligent mice? Cloud people? A jelly slime? Pick something close and start swapping abilities. This book is excellent for sci-fi too.

When I started to use them in 5E, I noticed they were slightly overpowered. Just barely enough to make them stand out from the default race selections. Then I noticed how just a few ability score points here or there, and a couple critical special abilities easily break 5E.

If I used this as my book for a campaign, it would be an all-or-nothing book for that game. Everyone picks from here, or no one does. Use these versions of elf, human, and dwarf, please, since they are more balanced than the default 5E versions. The default picks are more powerful than the choices with most 5E games. I see why you must make things fair when comparing them to other choices in this book.

I had to take a step back. B/X did not break this easily. Even in AD&D, the game handled that fine when I had a character who rolled three 18-ability scores. Thanks to bounded accuracy, 5E is tuned so tightly that it breaks when you give a character a few extra ability score points. Most modern tabletop games are like that, including Pathfinder 2.

Give one character a +2 STR and cold immunity because he is a yeti, and the game goes to hell. Other players get jealous. The rules break. Sick damage is being done. The Yeti WWE body slams a white dragon. It is fun for a few sessions, but the piling-on becomes apparent as you level. 5E was just not designed to handle this.

With many expansion books, you accept the broken nature and hope everything balances out. With enough broken content, everything is balanced, right? It is funny since things that would not break other games do in 5E. Giving up on balance is a game balance strategy in 5E.

And then, for fun, I used these races as-is to create Castles & Crusades characters. Most abilities can be written down and used as-is, and ability score bonuses fit right in. I had a few ground rules:

• If a race gives proficiency in a 5E skill, it gives a flat +2 bonus to those activities in C&C. Acrobatics skill would be a flat +2 to acrobatics checks.
• Bonus actions are not supported; those abilities must be used as an attack action.
• If a race gave a cantrip ability, that could be used once per day per level.
• Tool proficiencies grant a +2 at actions used with that tool.
• Instead of granting advantage, give a +3 to that roll. A disadvantage is a -3.
• Wings need the optional Advantage system (CK Guide) to be used to upgrade them instead of feats or just auto-upgrade them every 3-4 levels.
• Spell damage from 5E should be halved as a general rule. If scaling is mentioned, add a die damage per 2 levels, starting at 3rd, like magic missile. Any 5E spell converts this way.
• For "feats," use the Advantage system out of the CK. Humans start with two.

A few minor tweaks here and there, and all of these races can be used with C&C or any B/X version of the game. And the ability score modifiers do not break the game. They have a giant race that raises STR by four, and in C&C, even if I did a 4d6 and dropped the lowest, that would be a 16-18 STR on average or 20-22 (+4 or +5) at worst.

That +5 modifier is not a big deal in C&C, where a level 10 fighter gets a +10 base to hit. It is a good modifier, but it is not breaking the math. In Old School Essentials, that modifier is even better, but it likely won't break the math there, either.

The game handles it. All B/X and 3.5 games before D&D 4 handle this easily, and the character may be a little powerful, but they don't break the game at level one or twenty. Castles & Crusades eats these races up; sure, you have a host of resistances, a cantrip per day ability, and can glide with wings, but you only have 8 hit points at level one and an AC of 11-15.

Like 5E, if I were using this book for C&C, all races would come from this book, or none would.

Castles & Crusades is not hard to hack into a rules-stable, retro 2.5E version of 5E. It feels like B/X, yet it has a 5E flavor. The gameplay is high-speed without too many rules, and legacy cruft slows down a combat round. The action economy is simple, one action (attacks allow a half-move). C&C is built as a hacker's game, and you can do a lot with it, even emulate 5E pretty nicely.

5E: Old Windows

Even official D&D content has this problem.

5E has this problem.

It is like an old version of Windows where installing a game could wipe a part of your computer's registry and break your entire computer. Nothing is protected from anything else. If you add a piece of hardware, it could break a program. If you uninstall a program (and remove it), it could wipe out files something else uses. Once something is added to the system, it can never be removed. You are stuck with your "Bonsai web helper spyware" until you reinstall everything.

With 5E, the amount of "exploiter content" is way higher than I ever expected, and it seems design teams use certain game features to add power-gaming features in expansion books that break the game, feeling, balance, and flavor so hard my head spins.

Even official Wizards books do this.

And few want to fix this or even admit it exists since it would break their power gaming builds.

And call out books that break the game.

But it is your table! You can do what you want!

Microsoft eventually realized that the same arguments for Windows were unsustainable in support costs alone. So many unofficial add-ons plagued the system and "Windows improvements" that they needed to lock down parts of the OS just so they would have a system that worked for most people.

This isn't an argument against expansion material or 3rd parties.

I love expansion content.

It is just that 5E has built-in dongles (bonus actions) that make it way too easy to slip in extra attacks and the ability to throw the game way out of whack. I have come to expect the "natural weapons as bonus action attack" thing to pop up in expansion races, and it feels like it doubles the per-turn damage.

Races without it pale in comparison when serving as front-line fighters.

It is just D&D has gotten to be such a mess, even with a few expansion books (even Tasha's), that the game feels horribly broken internally. Multiclassing in 5E is horrible; the system is not even thought through, and I see nothing being done to address this. Unless you ban it outright, class identity is dead, and everything becomes a mess of class and power gruel.

One D&D will not fix this. It will create 2014-2023 D&D and 2024-2027 D&D camps. They are forking their game, selling both versions, and expecting consumers to figure it all out.

The D&D clones feel they will do a better job "being good stewards" to the 5E system than the company that built the game. I like Advanced 5E and Tales of the Valiant, and they are perfect "clean room" versions of the game where you can ban all the junk and find a little sanity. I can see why people leave for Shadowdark, OSE, C&C, DCC, PF2, and other games - class identity still exists.

It is strange to see Old School Essentials as a "truer version" of 5E where characters have more power and hold it longer, but that is where my thinking is headed. That d8+2 longsword attack for a fighter holds more power as you level, just because the monster hit points are linear in B/X and not exponentially scaled in anything beyond 2E.

And that d8+2 longsword is the same damage in 5E as in OSE.

An ancient red dragon has 60 hit points in OSE and over 550 hit points in 5E.

In OSE, one hit from that sword on that dragon means a lot more.

Your power is retained longer and remains potent until the end of the game.

In 5E, they need to pile on attacks, bonus actions, and modifiers to artificially raise that damage up to the scaled hit points, but martial classes will never match casters, so why bother? Post 3rd edition, D&D introduced scaling to the game and screwed up the math, and they have been trying to fix it for 23 years and have never gotten it right. They are now on their 6th edition of the game since then (3.0, 3.5, 4, 4 Essentials, 5E, and One D&D), and they still haven't fixed the problem.

OSE sits on my shelf, saying, "You can waste money on new 5E books, but my math will still be right. See you next edition!"

5E needs a rethink of the entire concept of classes, class identity, power, and accumulating power. Classes are more "what disadvantaged position do you start in" rather than something with an identity. At this point, 5E would be more internally consistent if it were a superhero game, and you point-bought your powers.

5E: Doing the Math

The average goblin in 5E is as follows:

• AC 15
• 7 hp
• +5 to-hit for 1d6+2
• Bonus Action: Disengage or Hide

In A5E:

• AC 13
• 10 hp
• +3 to-hit for 1d6+1
• Bonus Action: Disengage or Hide

In Old School Essentials:

• AC 13
• 3 hp
• +0 to-hit for 1d6
• -1 to-hit in sunlight

In Castles & Crusades:

• AC 15
• 3 hp
• +1 to-hit for 1d6
• 20' move

For reference, let's use a longsword with a +2 modifier, which does 1d8+2 in all of the above systems.

Generally, 5E doubles the hit-point scale of B/X and keeps damages roughly the same. They make up for this in bonus action attacks, multi-attacks, and caster cantrips. Even among 5E versions, you see tweaks; some 5E versions feature many bonus action attacks, so they tweak the hit points and AC to even things out. Base 5E goblins are tougher to hit but can go down in a solid damage roll. A5E goblins are meant to stay around for two turns but are easier to hit (more per-roll satisfaction for more prolonged combats).

B/X and C&C? Goblins die quickly, more so in OSE. C&C does make them slower than most parties, which allows the unencumbered to out-move them (and run away).

5E = more attacks per turn for less damage.

B/X = fewer attacks per turn for more damage.

Part of the 5E "secret sauce" relies on raising the hit points of monsters, raising the AC and to-hit modifiers, and making the average turn more complicated through multiple attacks, bonus action attacks, and lots of "false choices" per turn. Your damage rolls at low-level, compared to B/X, are relatively the same, such as a d8+2 for a longsword.

I would rather be a fighter in OSE than 5E and one-shotting those goblins in a single hit on an AC 13. With a +2 damage modifier, there is no way they survive one hit. In 5E or A5E, they stick around to do damage and cause trouble.

5E "keeps you busy" with lots of turn make-work. Your damage output is lower, but you have more choices per turn. They are ultimately false choices since if your damage was greater, you would not need to do all those bonus actions and "extra turn thinking." Also, 5E raises monster hit points since there are typically fewer creatures per fight than in B/X or C&C; since everything is so much more complicated in 5E on a per-turn basis, the rules are designed for "less is more."

In B/X, since the monster hit points are low, you are more potent than in 5E.

When you level up in 5E, you feel more powerful than B/X but are still weaker since the scale of monster hit points goes up on an exponential curve. You also get overloaded with everything you must do during a turn to keep that damage output high.

As you level up, you start stacking extra attacks and damage on your turn actions, and the monster hit points start scaling to keep up. In B/X, they do not, and the hit point scale is linear; 6 HD is 6d8 hit points. So our goblins in 5E have the hit points of 2 HD creatures in B/X.

I have been playing 5E lately, and the amount of things I must do to keep a character's damage output high is about twice what I need to do in B/X. More decisions per turn, keeping track of those bonus actions, and managing more resources and choices per turn.

C&C and OSE are two very different games at higher levels. OSE sticks closer to the B/X damage scaling, whereas C&C resembles a mix of the tougher AD&D 2E and 3.5E creature hit points.

• OSE Ancient Red Dragon = 13 HD (59 hp avg), AC 20
• C&C Ancient Red Dragon = 34 HD (221 hp avg), AC 32
• A5E Ancient Red Dragon = 23 HD (448 hp), AC 22
• 5E Ancient Red Dragon = 28 HD (546 hp), AC 22

As you level in C&C, they start adding more secret sauce damage and hit bonuses, so the game is more like modern games (5E, PF1, PF2, 3.5E) than many people give it credit for. It does the whole "secret sauce" thing but keeps the hit-point scale regular at low levels. C&C is like a mix of B/X and 5E.

Also note your attack modifiers in C&C can scale to epic levels, whereas in OSE, they are kept to the B/X limits. This is important to remember when converting content.

So yes, your power level with that 1d8+2 longsword in OSE stays higher than in any other games discussed here. Before 5E's bounded accuracy, there was B/X math, which is still superior in balance. One hp of damage in B/X means 10 times more than in 5E and holds its value much longer.

Note that in C&C, casters do not have "laser pistol" cantrips where they can shoot every turn. Cantrips are minor effects and are spent when cast. There are no short rests in C&C. So the casters are more like traditional B/X casters in a lower-magic setting and must rely more on darts (1d3, 20/40/60') as their ranged weapon attack. Also note that ranged weapon damage is not modified by DEX in C&C, and only STR modifies melee damage.

In C&C, this is what wands of magic missiles are for. That "laser pistol" style attack is something you buy or find and pay to keep charged up. One of the problems with 5E's "personal power" mentality is that it makes magic items and gear builds less critical. Gold matters in C&C and old-school games, especially if magic items are for sale. A party could blow through half a million in gold easily.

Shocking, I know, especially coming from 5E, where gold gets worthless.

If I want more melee or ranged options for my mage in C&C I will multiclass (or class and a half it). The base mage is kept very focused in design for a reason. C&C is a game where you multiclass the heck out of your characters to get precisely what you want. In 5E, you are limited to subclassing, and multiclassing adds more complexity than it should (with subclassing the multiclass).

There are some character types in C&C I just can't build in 5E, and the game would never be able to handle. The old-school multiclassing in C&C is unique, so the game's base classes are streamlined.

Oh, and in C&C, the multi-class options are fantastic. If I pay the XP, I can have a character with all the powers of two classes at the maximum level. I can play a 24/24 ranger/mage to the maximum level and have both the full powers of a 24 mage and a 24 ranger. I will need around 8 million XP, but it can be done. A 24/12 class-and-a-half is a better option, and you ask if your character is more ranger or mage and go.

Epic-level C&C characters are far more epic than 5E, easily. This is that old-school AD&D story stuff where characters have flying castles and armies of Djinns riding red dragons.

I find myself busier in 5E combat turns than in OSE or even C&C. Playing solo, a lot of choices need to be made for each character for 5E, and the turns take a while to play through. I see a lot of 3rd party material in 5E abusing the bonus action for extra damage, slipping in an extra attack, and doubling your damage output.

Even when playing B/X modules with 5E, I am cutting down the size of encounters considerably. OSE and C&C can handle large fights easily.

5E Math

A part of me feels ability score mods are too powerful in 5E, and they are thrown around for little reason other than to get characters to a certain baseline of damage. A good example is finesse weapons, which allow a wielder to replace their damage modifier with DEX instead of STR.

Proficiency? Add your mod to a skill roll.

Mods are passed out like candy.

I have never seen a game so focused on modifiers as 5E. As a result, the hit point and damage scale of this game are double B/X. Comparing monsters between editions hit dice/points are about doubled, but due to the game's bounded accuracy rules, ACs are way too low at higher levels compared to B/X. You need to figure the max proficiency bonus in 5E is +6, and in Swords & Wizardry, it is +13 for a fighter at the 20th level. So doing the math...

5E HD / 6 = AC adjustment for B/X (positive)

So if a monster has 20 HD in 5E and you want to use it in B/X, give it an AC bonus of (20/6) = +3, halve the hit dice for B/X and give it 10 hit dice. For attack bonus, recalculate that as a fighter of the same level in B/X, and either halve the attack damage or recalculate it by a melee weapon or similar attacks from monsters that level.

The math works in reverse too, so if you have a B/X monster you want to use in 5E...

B/X HD / 3 = AC adjustment for 5E (negative)

So your 12 HD monster in B/X should lower its AC by 4 points to be more in the bounded accuracy strike zone and double its HD to 24. Double all attack damage, or use similar attack damage from monsters closer to the original. Base to-hit bonus off a similarly leveled fighter, plus ability score mods.

DMs Can't Crit

You give the first-level character normal D&D starting hit points, and you double monster attack damage, and no wonder monster critical hits at low level are insta-killing PCs at too high a rate. You look at the 5E goblin attack damage, which is 1d6+2, for an average of 6 points damage (12 on a crit). If you got rid of the DEX finesse weapon mod and left it at 1d6-1, which is more in line with B/X, that is an average of 3 points of damage (6 on a crit). So Wizards says "DM's can't crit" as the solution in One D&D.

So they make another rule to patch the issue.

They completely broke the damage and hit-point scale of 4E by tripling the values, and they only half fixed the issue with 5E when they went down to a double scale. The original B/X math is fine, and it works, even without the "bounded accuracy" fix, which wasn't needed because the +30 and +40 to-hits were a broken part of 3 and 3.5E, which broke the game in many other ways they are still trying to fix. 

I love the game, but the math is atrocious compared to the original editions.

The B/X Math is Good

They mess with the damage and hit point scales - and the to-hit modifiers - to break compatibility with B/X, and frankly, B/X had the math right in the first place. Gygax and Arneson knew those dice, they knew to keep hit points low, and they knew that out-of-control damage and ability score modifiers would completely break the game. And the more you mess with it, the more rules you need to throw on there to fix the mess you made.

If you have a leaky pipe, do you hire the plumber who replaces the pipe with a new pipe the correct way; or the one who ends up using 20 pipes and six rolls of electrical tape?

3.0 and 3.5 introduced non-linear hit-point and damage scaling to higher levels, and that was a terrible thing. At the 5th level, you started opening up multi-attacks (and you still see this in 5E with action surges), and then you saw monsters at that level start to creep up in hit points. Back in B/X, this was a linear scale, 8 HD was about an 8th-level creature (depending on special attacks and defenses), and that worked fine. When introducing a non-linear scale to monster hit points, you need to invent new artificial rules like challenge rating - and patch and patch again to try to tell people how to balance encounters.

The original B/X math is the finest in all of fantasy gaming.

Monsters

An ancient red dragon in B/X can have 60-90 hit points and still be an end-game boss monster. A sword that does 1d8 is still a threat to that dragon. You give the dragon 300-600 hit points, and that sword is a joke. And then, you need to start throwing multiple attacks and damage modifiers on the weapon. Special conditions. Scaling damage with class abilities. And what was once a simple x + y = z formula turns into 3x + (10+y) + d(3b + 4c) - e = z formula.

In 4E, the ancient red dragon had 1,390 hit points, and the sword was a toothpick. Most powers in 4E were also toothpicks, including the dragon's own attacks. Combats took hours. And Wizards tested and approved these numbers. Yes, that team is not there, but it just goes to show you the groupthink the organization falls into, and they still make these mistakes (Tasha's unarmed fighters vs. monks, Spelljammer, etc.).

You go back far enough, and those issues do not exist in B/X.

They made some fundamental mistakes, and they have always kept up the non-linear scaling of monsters and damage as you go up levels. Even in B/X, your epic fighter gets one attack, like a +3 STR mod and a +2 sword, for a 1d8+5. No, that does not change as you go up levels, but your to-hit gets better, so you are landing more hits - one attack per turn. With editions past 3E, you see abilities increasing damage and also multi-attacks per round.

And those mods stack with every blow landed. Some estimates of 5E character DPS have 20th-level characters averaging 100 hit points damage per round (or more for some builds). Our epic B/X fighter is still averaging 10 points at level 20, but versus a 88 hit point ancient red dragon, that is pretty darn good.

I know, but that is boring to never increase in DPS! The damage scaling has been the secret sauce of D&D since 3.0 and is the main addition Wizards made to the rules. Before 3.0, we were focused on stories; after 3.0, we were focused on character power. And it comes at the cost of complexity - both in rules and balancing encounters.

B/X

This differs between the White Box style games (Swords & Wizardry) and modern B/X (Old School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord). I like the idea only fighters get damage bonuses from STR in the old editions, as it makes fighters unique. I have a feeling there are too many house rules in modern B/X that were introduced back in the D&D era (BECMI and others) that made the game easier, like giving every class the STR modifier to damage.

'But still, even allowing those house rules, the B/X math is far better than the scaling, non-linear, plus mod-heavy system we have in the modern game.

Less math, reduced modifiers, and lower numbers = a simpler game with fewer rules and, honestly, a better one.

Tunnels and Trolls: What is an Average Character?

The question of, "what is an average character for T&T?" comes up in my mind because I need it to balance encounters. Remember, the formula for monster rating is:

MR Attack Roll = (MR/10)d6 + (MR/2) adds

So a MR of 50 nets a 5d6 + 25 combat roll (at full strength). Now the question is, what is an even fight? The answer is a character with an attack roll of 5d6 + 25. That would be a character with a 5d6 longsword with the following attributes:

STR: 20
CON: 20
DEX: 19
SPD: 16
LK: 18
IQ: 10
WIZ: 10
adds: +25

But wait, if this is an version 8.0 warrior, they will get an extra 2d6 for their warrior bonus (at level 2), but for a rogue this would work. For a level 2 warrior, we would need to knock an average of 7 points off STR, DEX, SPD, and LK to get that magic +25 to adds with that 2d6, so I would say something like this:

STR: 20
CON: 20
DEX: 16
SPD: 16
LK: 14
IQ: 10
WIZ: 10
adds: +18 (+2d6 warrior bonus)

So this is a "good build" for a level 2 character. You may have noticed I kept the warrior's STR and CON the same, and the other attributes that contribute to personal adds are 60-80% of the character's highest score, let's say 75%. Stats that aren't important for the character, in this case WIZ and INT, are left at a value of 10.

Parties

Now for parties, you will be totaling up the entire damage output for the group and pitting that against a monster with a significantly higher MR. Let's say your party was five of the above characters, three warriors, a rogue, and a mage. Even though rogues and mages don't have the warrior's bonus dice, you could use the warrior's numbers because mages and rogues have magic that is a significant adder to damage per turn. So let's say our party comes out to about this:

25d6 + 125 or an average of 213 points of damage

RPG Algebra!

So now what? Algebra, that's what. We need a formula that tells us, given a party's average damage output, what is an MR that gives them an equal challenge?

213 = (MR/10 + 1) * 3.5) + (MR/2)
213 = ((MR * 0.35) + 3.5) + (MR/2)
213 - 3.5 = (MR * 0.35) + (MR * 0.5) - 3.5
209.5 = (MR * 0.85)
209.5 / 0.85 = (MR * 0.85) / 0.85
246.47 = MR

And, a MR of 246 is 25d6 + 123 (average damage 211), so bingo, we have our formula! Let's 1/x this "minus 3.5 and divide by 0.85" thing and get something we can multiply by, okay? Who ever said you wouldn't use algebra in real life? Seriously, you can solve a lot of your life's problems with a little math. So we have this magical formula:

50-50 challenge MR = (average party damage - 3.5) x 1.174

Let's test this! A party that does 15d6 + 25? Average damage is 78, so the MR would be 78 x 1.174 = 88. A MR of 88 does 9d6 + 44 damage, or an average of...76. It comes out very close. Let's try a party that does 30d6 + 400, or 505 points of damage on average. MR is 590, or 60d6 + 295, or an average of 505 points of damage from the monster's side.

This is a formula you can use on the fly while the party is inside the dungeon. Simply throw some easy fights at the group, secretly write down some of the total damage outputs during the combat, and multiply up to get a good 50-50 fight for the next room. You can modify the MR up or down 10-20% to make it a little harder or easier, but remember a 50-50 fight means the players will lose the battle 50% of the time just given straight dice rolls - so this will be a tough fight.

One of the beautiful things about this formula is that no matter what house rules you are using, no matter what level the party is or how many people they have, it adapts as long as the dice and adds formula for MR is not changed. If you give your warriors more or less adds, your party doesn't use a lot of damaging magic, or you have custom spells that do special damages - all you need to know is average party DPS (which you can get in the first few turns of battle) and the formula works.

It is also simpler and more exact than D&D's CR system, since this is real math and hardcore statistics. Subsequently, this system is also a lot more harsh and unforgiving.

Don't Adjust Too Far!

Also remember the bell curve. You don't want to push encounters too far away from the midpoint, because let's say you set MR to 50% of the calculated value for a simple fight. For our example, that is a MR of 46 for 4d6 + 23, or an average of 37 points of damage. If the party is doing 78 points a turn, that is a difference of 78 - 37 = 41 points, and there is no way 4d6 will ever let that monster to roll higher than the party. You might as well forget about this fight unless it is a one-on-one with a single person.

Let's lower the MR by 10% to 83. That is 8d6 + 43 for an average of 71 points of damage. A 71 to 78 fight with 8d6 damage is good, it gives the players an edge while still letting the monsters possibly getting a hit or two in.

If I were to err, I would err on the side of 10 or 20% higher MR, because remember as a monster takes damage, the monster's adds from their MR drops (but not their dice). After a few hits, those adds will drop our critter below the party's average damage and change the tide of battle. You may want the fight to start off with the party taking damage, the party begin clever through a spell or stunt, and then the party gaining the advantage after the monster takes a couple hits.

Have Armor? Increase MR!

If the party has a lot of armor you may want to go 30% or 40% above the rated MR just so the monster's damage output can blow through that armor and get some hits in. Do A 50-50 combat encounter once and then decide if the party took it on the chin or they took it on the helmet, and then decide from there.

The 50-50 number only applies on the first combat turn, and it says who will take damage first. As the battle goes on, one side will fall. But sometimes, the side that gets damage in gets an immediate advantage, and you may want that to be the monsters to put the party back on their heels a step in order to get some crafty play going.

Craftiness is a Player's Right

It is an important point, since this formula does not take into account crafty players who will make stunt SRs, use spells to take foes out of the fight, and use other clever tactics to weaken the enemy. But that is the players' right and part of the fun of the game. In a first-turn 50-50 fight they will need to be clever to win, and this fight may drain a good amount of their resources, so this is a good tool to use to judge encounter difficulty during play.

If a party wins an unfair fight through wits and cool stunts, that is a very good thing, and a memorable moment. If it is too unfair, it is un-fun. If it is too easy, it is also un-fun. So you want to be able to find that middle spot for MR, and know if your players can defeat that with ease, or they have trouble with that battle. Your players may be so good you may multiple party damage by a higher factor, such as 1.3, in order to determine a challenging MR for them.

It depends on the party, the players, the house-rules, the gear, and a lot of other stuff - but it all ends up in a number you can write down and use to build the next challenge for them. If MR 92 was a blow out and these players are good, maybe behind that next door is a MR 122 ogre, and the party finds itself knuckling down and getting clever to push this brute over and grab that sack full of silver coins.

EDIT: Slight math fix to the formula to account for MR 10-19 = 2d6 instead of 1d6 (MR/10+1 = dice).

Level Systems and Escalating Hit Points

I got into this discussion the other day with DarkgarX, so here goes.

He absolutely hates level systems and escalating hit points. He doesn't like these systems because he feels it makes things that should be dangerous, meaningless. Your sense of threat and scale get thrown out the window. Who cares about a gun pointed at your character's head when it only does 1d8 damage to your 60 hit points?

I know, there is the coup de grace (coo-day-grahs) rule, and this should handle it as a GM ruling. But still, he has a point when arrows and bullets are flying, and characters are laughing off damage.

Yes, heroes are supposed to be heroic.

I feel part of this comes from the "max hit points per level" house-rule, and I am cooling towards using that in my future Pathfinder games. I am leaning towards the PFS average HD + CON hit point rule:

HP (1st Level) = Maximum HD roll + Con Modifier

HP (2nd and Higher Levels) = Average HD roll (1/2 rounded up) + CON Modifier

If it is good enough for organized play, it is good enough for me. So a fighter with a +2 CON bonus has the following hit points at the following levels:

1. 10 (max hp for the d10 HD) + 2 = 12
2. 12 + 5.5 (rounded to 6) + 2 = 20
3. 20 + 6 + 2 = 28
4. 28 + 6 + 2 = 36
5. ...and so on, +8 per level, and so on (sans in the optional +1 hp/level favored class bonus)

With maximum HD per level, the level 3 fighter has 36 hit points (and level 4 is 48), so the average hp/level system knocks a level of toughness off low level characters, and by 10th level the difference is 84 hit points to 120 hit points, or about 30% less for a fighter. Is it enough of a difference to matter?

I feel it is. At 84 hit points, taking a d8+2 damage hit is going to matter, because I could lose 8-10% of my hit points in that one strike. Enough of those, and my hero is going down. At 120 hit points, I have about 40 hit points to give, which is on average five or six more d8+2 hits my fighter has to give.

• At average hp/level, it's 12 average d8+2 rolls before my fighter falls at level 10
• At maximum hp/level it's 17 average d8+2 rolls before my fighter falls at level 10

Too many hit points too quickly breaks the game, and the rate they are accumulated feels like the problem here. Do those free five hits for a level 10 fighter break the game? I feel they do. If you figure 10 fights in an adventure, that is 5 x 10 = 50 free d8+2 hits in combat for that fighter for the whole adventure. What was once a balanced game of resource management becomes making sure those free hits get recharged and reset every fight. That is a huge amount of power given away for free because we like a "max hp per level" house-rule.

With less hit points, damage means more. Healers have to pay attention and use healing spells more often to maintain that safety margin - so healers mean more and healing is more powerful. Defenses that could stop attacks mean more. The monsters are more challenging. Fights are closer. The numbers aren't so out-of-control feeling anymore, or not as bad as they used to seem.

As a player, is max hp/level a good thing? Sure! Everybody wants to be invincible, and everyone wants the best character the rules allow. But max hp/level is not right. Statistically, average hp/level is closer to the balance the game designers intended; and all of a sudden, all of the game's math starts to make more sense. The danger returns. The calculations for CR start to work out a little better. Those "free hits" every fight dry up, and your margin of victory becomes tighter.

I would even say for the average monster, the same is true. Keeping the hit points of monsters down speeds up fights. It makes damage mean more. It doesn't turn the game into a DPS race where maximizing is the key to victory just because you want to reduce a massive pile of hit points to zero in the quickest amount of time possible. D&D 4 had this problem for us, where even low level fights were this massive hit point grind where the party sat there trying to finish off goblins with 30 or 40 hit points with special powers. Even D&D 5 feels a bit hit point happy for us, and I like the older, d8 scale, 1 HD orc sort of 4 or 5 hit point rabble monster. To compare:

• Pathfinder Orc = 6 hp, 1 HD
• D&D 4 Orc = 1 hp (minion) or 66 hp (4 HD, Orcs start at level 4 in D&D 4)
• D&D 5 Orc = 15 hp (2-ish HD, but HD are not really used for monsters in D&D 5)

You have to factor in the damage scaling Wizards has put into play in D&D editions above 4 in those numbers, since to differentiate the game from D&D 3.5/Pathfinder, characters do more damage in the new versions of the game. Still, I like the Pathfinder Orc the best, a longbow could take one out with a solid hit, and it's another minion down (without needing the D&D 4 minion rules).

Do I like tougher Orcs? Yes, on general I do, but not to the point where the balance and scaling of the game world feels out of whack and like a video-game. To compare, 6 hp in a d4 hit die and 2 hit point commoner world is a tough foe, and a 36 hp level four fighter is as tough as six of those Orcs, or 18 common men. Those numbers feel right to me, not DarkgarX though as he is still saying it's too many hits. That d8 longsword is a powerful weapon, and still dangerous to when used against that level 4 fighter, and deadly to the 6 hp Orc.

In D&D 5, it's gonna take at least two or three hits to dispatch that Orc. In D&D 4, it's going to take a good majority of the game session. The opposite is also true. In Pathfinder, the Orc is the most deadly wielding a d8 longsword. In D&D 4, he is the weakest comparatively to the damage of that weapon listed in the book.

Scaling matters. Keeping your numbers down matters. Less means more. The original AD&D numbers and old-school ratios are good and what original D&D is based on, and I feel changing the number and damage scale hurts the game. Pathfinder is the closest to this original "keep it down" scale (minus the multi-attacks at later levels), and it keeps that low hit point and hit die feeling of danger intact. It is easy to want to succumb to "more is more" and give everyone free hit points - but I feel it breaks the game. Even the post D&D 4 scaling does the same thing in my feeling.

Less hit points mean more danger, and more danger is more excitement and a good thing.

Bounded Accuracy vs. Simulation

For over 40 years D&D has had an issue with the to-hit system. At first, they had giant AC versus level tables for each class; then they switched to a system where different classes had different to-hit bonuses at maximum level, and they metered out the to-hit increases every level. It meant if you weren't a pure fighter, forget hitting anything at maximum level because all the monsters at max level were balanced for a fighter's attack bonus.

D&D 3 and Pathfinder follow the sort of design theme of great classes (fighters) get +20 at max level, sucky classes (rogues, clerics) get +15 at max level, and really sucky classes (mages) get a +10 at max level. Mind you, if you are fighting an AC 30 monster, great classes will hit at 50% of the time, sucky 25%, and really sucky will be like "5%, why even try?" Of course, mages will be flinging spells, so that 5% never really matters. Feats and proficiency make the difference, and one had to take into account damage output, but the base system is still set in an assumption of some classes are better than others when hitting a target. There is also a multiple attacks thing here with high attack bonuses, so damage output is linked in.

D&D 4 sets everything on a sliding scale, using 1/2 your level plus your ability score DRM to give you your attack bonus. You must have a high ability score, maintain it, and have the recommended magic items for your level to "keep up with the Joneses," aka the monsters. If a monster was 4 or more levels above you, forget it. If a monster was 4 levels below you, you could care less about them. It was a very MMO feeling game that was balanced "on the levels" and had a flat balance.

D&D 5 preserves the flat MMO-style balance, and puts everyone on the same to-hit chart, but makes the maximum bonus a +6 for everybody. Everything else, monsters, magic items, and combat, has been realigned to fit within this new model. This is called "bounded accuracy" and it is the central design premise behind the new D&D, to get those numbers back in control and make everyone feel they can contribute. There are plenty of problems with this, such as the lowest-level monsters being able to hit high-level heroes (in the context of this system), and high-level heroes still having a high miss rate that still feel unsatisfying for many. The system also breaks with mass attacks and does not scale well with larger groups or attacks that add conditions on hit (poison).

Then again, it feels like they have been wrestling with making the abstract AC and level-based to-hit system for 40 years and they still haven't got it right.

Abstract Accuracy

It is difficult to criticize the D&D to-hit system because it is intentionally abstract. You can get into a long argument with other players and fans of differing editions, and all you will be doing is arguing over is if mauve or thistle is more "purple." Because the system is so abstract, the designers need to carefully "code" AC and attack bonuses in with each edition to make the game work. In computer programming speak, D&D's combat system is spaghetti code and a mess of special cases, and it needs to be hand-tuned any time they move to a new edition or they make a new expansion or book for the game. The AC and to-hit numbers have to be directly balanced against the monsters from level 1 to 20, or everything breaks down.

In D&D 4, it did not feel like the later levels were as well-playtested, and things felt like they broke down the higher level you went. There were so many erratas and rules changes over the life of that game it spun your head, along with a second version of the monster manual coming out in Essentials that changed the math again. Every monster manual changed the math, and it hurt the experience for us.

Simulation Games

Contrast this with a more simulation based game with a less abstract system. If my fighter has a 60% chance to hit with a sword, it doesn't matter if I am swinging it at a level 1 goblin or a level 30 dragon, I am still making that piece of metal strike that other shape no matter what that other shape may be, 60% of the time. The effects of what happens will vary greatly upon what I hit and the personal power I have, If I am as strong as a hill giant I will expect to splatter the goblin and hurt the dragon. If I am as strong as a human, I expect the goblin to take a wound, and the dragon to laugh and say he didn't even feel it.

Most of the time. Exceptions and great rolls always exist.

You can give a rogue and a fighter the same to-hit, and work out the differences with powers, techniques, and ability scores. You can do away with abstract levels and subjective armor class values entirely. You can rate armor on protection, and let the dice fall where they may because you created a simulation system where things in your world work a certain way.

Your characters exist within themselves, not in the context of a carefully balanced level system.

Level Systems

Now, level systems are great because they let you change the math and put out a new edition. The only exception was AD&D 2nd Edition, where they cleaned up the original AD&D rules and improved the presentation greatly. They really didn't change the math, but they streamlined it and created the "I don't understand why nobody gets this" THAC0 system, but I guess many had a problem with it. THAC0 (to hit armor class zero) was easy enough to understand, but they should have made AC increasing and flipped those around, and just said to-hit is your base plus target AC, like they did in 3rd Edition.

Negative AC in AD&D sucked, and it was likely nobody ever thought ACs lower than zero were ever needed. Explaining negative AC felt like explaining THAC0 to the uninitiated.

But part of the problem with an abstract system is linking level to to-hit, especially when it starts blowing out your dice range. Having a +20 to hit at 20th level, plus ability DRMs, plus magic item bonuses, plus feat modifiers, plus situational modifiers can get you to a final to-hit bonus of +30 or more easily. On a 1-20 scale, a +30 makes the entire number range of your randomizer meaningless. You are rolling between 31 and 50, and trying to hit an AC of 42.

The mind boggles, the numbers are so high, and the DC and AC numbers are again on that meaningless, super-high if +10 is better than give me another +20 MMO number scale that never ends.

Bounded Accuracy is the New Coke

I am not convinced D&D 5's bounded accuracy does much to solve the problem of D&D's abstract system other than change the numbers again. There were some D&D and Pathfinder mods (E6 most notably) which put a level cap of 6 on the game, and this appears to be where the bounded accuracy idea originated from. E6 is a laudable game modification for D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder, it assumes that 6th level characters are the most powerful in the game world and lets the monsters past that be the world's "boss creatures" and teamwork is needed for beating them.

You throw out the entire upper three-quarters of the game to do so, but it does get that sense of scale and challenge back that D&D loses when a thief levels past the power of an adult red dragon. Where D&D 5 and E6 differ is that in E6 there is a huge world out there more powerful than any single hero could ever be. In D&D 5, every hero can be a level 20 monster some day, yet they still need level 30 monsters out there that are even more powerful than that.

But limiting everyone to the same to-hit chart and capping it at +6 (plus mods)? Really, none of my players really like advancing that slow, and it feels like a grind. Your hit-points go up normally, so you have these hundreds of hit point monster characters walking around with a +3 or a +4 to-hit, and your sense of heroic scale is all skewered. I would prefer the level cap to six to a slow grind to twenty and a +6 when I get there.

Yes, bounded accuracy makes the numbers meaningful again, no question.

But I feel you give up too much. High level characters lose their sense of "being good" and the harsh d20 and its variability stomp all over a modifier range that starts at a +5% to-hit bonus and ends up at a +30% to-hit bonus for epic characters. Even with ability score mods and magic items it doesn't go much higher, and high level characters feel like they are just talented normals. It feels like you are just fooling with the numbers again instead of fixing the problem.

Wonderland

It all feels like D&D's power curve has been messed up since the original box set that level capped you at three, yet the monster lists had 9 or so hit die dragons. Sooner or later, you could level past those dragons, and we entered a strange fantasy land where we needed bigger and bigger challenges to overcome. D&D has always had this "videogame in pen and paper" feeling to me, where of course characters are entitled to incredible amounts of hit points and power, and the sense of scale between normal people and high level characters reaches absurd levels.

D&D 5, despite bounded accuracy, I feel does not address this problem, as the higher levels in that game still entitle characters to massive amounts of hit points and damage output that boggles the mind compared to a first level character. The difference between high-level and low level has not changed, only the dicing model has gotten flatter and everyone can hit each other now.

It still feels like a videogame to me. I feel that a dragon like Smaug out of the Hobbit is beyond the power of any single hero in that world, and any hero could ever be. In D&D and Pathfinder, this isn't the case. I get this World of Warcraft feeling where characters are driven primarily by advancement than story, and personal power is the name of the game. It isn't down, it doesn't feel realistic, and the abstract system keeps you from ever understanding or balancing it because it is so carefully tuned and system-wide teeter-tottering on the sum balance of its parts.

If you disagree with two-handed weapon damage and change it, you break the rest of the game.

Abstractionification

It isn't D&D or Pathfinder that is at fault, I feel, it is the abstraction and the magnitude. Once you abstract one piece, you have to abstract everything, and then the balancing act begins. Level based to-hits and ACs that could mean everything from a high dodge to tank armor along with out-of-control hit points and damage make the entire system feel more like an ever-higher level Facebook game requiring more time and clicks than something that models reality.

If there was a D&D game out there that got it right in terms of comparative power and the weak against the impossible, I would be all over it.

I want games that make me fear the dragon, not know that someday I will out level it. I want games that give me a basis in reality, rather than hand wave it away and apply an arbitrary number to it. This is likely a personal preference thing with me and my players, and I try my best at explaining it, so don't feel bad or get angry if you enjoy these games. These are systems that within their own spheres, work, and they are tuned to work well.

But they don't feel real, they feel like videogames.

But a character with 200 hit points when a normal person has 5? I lose it. I can't relate. That number is meaningless in reality, and really only has a place in electronic gaming to me. Same thing with wildly high to-hits, damage outputs, or world-ending spells. It is an unrelatable world-crushing Superman to the common-man Batman.

It is having it all versus being a hero without.

Taking a 10 and 20

D&D 4 and D&D 5 mostly did away with the concept of taking a 10 or 20 on a skill roll, yet this still lives on in the Pathfinder game. The concept of the "take a 20" mechanic is this:

If I spend so much time at the task that I iterate through every possible roll, I will at least roll a 20 once in those tries and succeed.

So you trade time for certain success. With taking a 10, you choose to take an average roll. You can check out the rules here on the d20 SRD. We have always had a couple problems with the entire take a ten or twenty mechanic, so here it goes.

Statistics 101

First off, assuming you will get a 20 in this period of time would have driven my statistics professor crazy. He would have come right back at me and said "you could roll 100 times, or even 200 times and you are never guaranteed a 20 in that sequence, the probability goes up, but it is never a certain thing." With taking a 10, there is no such thing as an 'average' roll on a single test. The average on one test is the roll, whatever that may be. Again, my statistics professor would have called BS on both these mechanics.

But Really, in Play...

I don't have the same problem my statistics professor has, because I know these rules are shortcuts to simplify and speed up play. Take a 10 though, yeah, I still have a problem with that since it feels so nonsensical.

First off, taking a 20, the real reason this bugs me is because D&D 3 and all variants accept the fact that you can retry all skills indefinitely. Forever. You can buffalo your way through any skill check by rolling again, and again, and again until the end of time. If you imagine this with a social skill check trying to convince a king to lend you his magic sword, it goes something like this:

"Can I have your magic sword, my king?"
"No."
"I need it to defeat the dragon, may I have it sire?"
"No."
"My chances of rescuing the princess would be greatly increased-"
"No."
"Can I?"
"No."
"Can I have it?"
"No."
"Can I?"
"No."
"Can-"
"No."
"Can I? Can I? Can I? Can I? Can I? Can I?"
"No."
"..."
"No."
"Can I?"
"Okay, take it."

Like any interaction with a three-year old, it assumes the DC you set for any task is merely an annoyance for the players to brute force their way past. We grew up with atomic "pass-fail" skill checks. If your thief blew his lockpicking roll, that was it, that lock could not be picked until the thief raised their lockpicking skill and knew some new tricks to try again. The concept of taking a 10 or a 20 to get automatic success felt alien at the time 3E was released, and truthfully, it still feels strange to us today.

Roleplaying, the Great Second Chance

Yes, there are certain times you should be able to make a second attempt. Let's say you are trying to make a persuasion roll and blow the first one. Normally, that should be it, the person refuses and you need to find another way. However, the player is clever and changes their tack with a second offer, roleplaying out a great 'other reason' why the person should go along with the plan. As a referee, I would allow a second check, but at a penalty since this person is already negatively inclined against this persuasion attempt, and second chances should be rare. But it was a great reason and fit within roleplaying, so it should be allowed for fairness. A third try? At that point you are begging, and I would disallow it, or put such a penalty on the attempt you would have to be a saint with a blessed d20 to succeed.

The king would give you a funny look though. Really?

But yes, great roleplaying should be the basis on which second tries are allowed. There is a limit, of course, but this feels right to me.

Pass-Fail Improv

Pass-fail tests. I love them. If players fail at something, they need to have backup plans or think of another way around, or use another skill. As a good referee, I am not going to tell them to pack up their character sheets, the adventure is over, goodbye and see you next week if the party can't pick a lock. There will be another way in, or the players may be clever enough to figure a way around it. Knock on the door. Climb on the roof. Smoke em out. Something. Just please be more creative than giving up and telling me you take a 20, because I won't let you. that one shot you had was the sole cumulative effort of all you knew, and that was the once shot you had. You rolled a 3 and blew it. Try something else.

As a DM, don't put your adventure in that situation either.

I find players are more creative, start buying backup skills, and become more involved when I use pass-fail tests with them. They understand that moment will not come again, and they make plans in case it fails. They can't sit there and burn time for automatic success, because that's not the way the world works. You can't take a chemistry test until you pass it.

In a movie, when a hero attempts to pick a lock and fails, that is usually never revisited again. The brute in the party kicks it down. The smart kid hacks the computer. Someone tries the window and finds it open. Someone asks, "Is there a back door?" Another character pulls out a welder. Dramatically, it feels right.

Everybody Wins but Nobody Cares

Somewhere, I believe rules like this slipped in because a dungeon master somewhere let his or her players bully them into making successive rolls until they caved in. The player, whoever it was, sat at the table believing that roleplaying was just like a videogame, and you could press that "use skill" button and roll the virtual dice in the CPU again and again until they succeeded.

Player: "What? Come on! I keep trying!"
DM (sighing): "Okay, roll again."

No. Seriously? Life isn't like that. you can't show up at the job interview the next day after they told you to get lost. Your skill roll at this one task was it, and your character gives up trying because it isn't possible. No matter how you feel as a player, you need to figure out another way forward. maybe you shouldn't have skimped on the skill, maybe the task was to tough, or maybe it was just bad luck. Regardless, in that game world, your character failed, and you as the invisible hand of the player must chart a new course and find a new way.

If you roleplay a second chance, I'll give you that. Don't expect it to be easy, and you better have a new angle to come at this problem, but I am fair and love creative play.

Death, the Great Exception

Death is always a great exception to the rule. If your party is fending off a goblin horde, and your thief is trying to pick that lock so everyone can escape, I will let you try again and again until you all fall to goblin blades or get that blasted door open. There may be increasing penalties as each attempt fails. This also feels right. I generally allow in-combat checks as long as there is a chance of grave danger ever present and threatening to strike every turn. In a movie, one character picks the lock while the rest hold off the horde, and everyone is screaming at the thief to get it open.

Out of combat, there is no pressure to succeed, and no life-or-death consequence (yes, even in the grand sense where the princess is behind the door and needs to be set free). With a constant and real threat, yes, I generally allow second chances, and really, this falls under the above "roleplaying" exception for second chances. You are under fire, and need to get the door open. Your character gets second chances because the pressure is on and the adrenaline is pumping. The danger of failure is real. You will succeed. Maybe.

It feels right. It feels dramatically correct and it also reflects real life experiences. Once the threat passes, the pressure is off, and whatever that last check was stands.

Another Exception, Skill-Ups

Let's say your thief fails and comes back to that same lock later with a higher skill level. Yes, I would allow a second check since you learned some new tricks. Or maybe a long amount of time passes, like weeks, then yes, a fresh try could be allowed. This is also being fair, while still staying strong on the pass-fail result of the original check.

This has Always Been How We Played

Really, this has always been how we played roleplaying games. We let the original skill check stand, fail or succeed. We only allowed second chances though creative roleplaying. Players always found another way around, or understood they needed great skills and redundancy of skills and plans to avoid being put in a bad situation by an unlucky skill check.

Taking a 20 felt so lazy to us. It felt like skills checks were inconveniences to play. To us, skill checks were play. Taking a 10 meant nothing, I mean, in what sense could you say "I do an average job" in the chaos of the universe and dungeon crawling where anything could happen?

Even when we play Pathfinder, we disallow taking a 10 or a 20. I would rather just DM fiat "no roll needed" for those simple tasks than to allow a buffalo-through assumption of videogame-inspired try-fail-repeats at my table. If a skill check is that simple, really, why roll? Yes, 3E and Pathfinder say "roll if failure is important and has consequences", but to us, every roll is important and has consequences - because any roll important enough to make at the table should be that important.

The Level System

This one started over coffee. DarkgarX mentioned to me that once levels were put into the game, the dynamic of the game changes from story to advancement. The feeling goes from "what am I doing in the game world" to "how can I get points?"

Now, admittedly, this is a pretty negative view of level-based games, but it is an interesting "advancement dynamic" that I am sure is present in all games. Everyone wants to do well, and everyone wants to get levels or skill points in a non-level based system to get rewarded at the end of the night and advance their characters. So this pressure is present in any game system with an advancement system present.

But do levels change things?

Levels, the Elephant in the Room

I always found it funny that levels are the one thing you can't talk about in-game in-character, yet in D&D they control everything, from character power to spells to monster hit dice. My Pathfinder world design, Realms of Proteus, tries to do away with that and allows in-game characters to speak freely of their level and stats, so there is a fun bit of power and meta gaming going on there, but for the most part we use euphemisms, "seasons" or some other sort of relative explanation of power and strength.

But do levels change things? Is the primary focus on hit-points and levels a factor in making the game more mathematical and cut-throat?

In a pure story-based game, you have this outward focus on how your character fits into the current story and overall game world. Your stats can be increased, and the focus of improvement is to allow your character to better be able to influence the story. A higher persuasion skill lets you persuade more NPCs, and thus your influence over that story grows. You can think of story based games as a fight to control the ever-shifting narrative between the players and the referee-controlled NPCs.

Levels. Hit dice. Tactical combat. Damage per turn. Whiff rate. Condition spells. Attacks of opportunity. Advantage and disadvantage. Here we go with traditional D&D style level based games, and a whole host of hard mathematical statistics comes into play. Not only do you have to be good at controlling the narrative, you have to be able to know how this hard math works, and master the combat rules. Levels make this easier, but also complicate things as you go up.

Levels vs. Narrative

Do levels fight the narrative push and pull? They certainly distract from it a bit, because all of a sudden you are not purely worried about narrative influence, to do good and control the narrative, you need to master the combat system too. You need levels to get better at this system, because roleplaying matters little in raising combat power. You need XP to get better, and you need to defeatefoes and solve problems.

Note how D&D type games lump problem solving and combat in the same pile of XP. If you solve problems with roleplaying and get XP, you get better at controlling the narrative (roleplaying skills), but you also get better in combat. You could have a 20th level character who just got roleplaying XP in their career and never touched a weapon, yet this person would be a better fighter than 99% of the people on the planet. You could have the inverse, a combat-only barbarian who never spoke a word being a diplomatic master negotiator at the narrative-influencing social skills just because of their level.

I think it is this connection between the ability for a high-level character to influence the narrative and the "let's have combat for XP" part of the game that troubles me. In a purely story-driven narrative game without levels, all you are doing with advancement is ticking up the skills you want. If you just want to be a talker, all you buy are social skills. If you just want to be a fighter, you work on fighting skills. Levels remove that granularity and ability to specialize, now yes, there are more social style classes in the D&D style games, like bard or thief, but those classes typically force you into a skill-monkey role and take away your ability to excel at combat.

D&D's classes make those choices for you.

You want to fight? Be a fighter! You want to be a fighter who excels at narrative control and social situations? You are out of luck, roll a rogue or a bard. Yes, as a fighter you can put skill points and feats towards social abilities, but typically (Pathfinder is a good example), the more skill-point heavy and social-focused classes are going to have an easier time of buying these feats and skills.

In D&D, King Arthur is King Arthur because he can kill very well, not because he has the skills and social power over the kingdom's narrative that a king should have. There's a disconnect there, and a simplification that I feel makes pure-story based games focused on the narrative a better choice for pure roleplayers than D&D style games.

Levels vs. Storytelling

I have had pure roleplayers at my table who played D&D 3-5 because that's what our group played. I always felt bad for them because they could care less about this mess of combat rules and gaining levels, and they just wanted to have fun. We did a good job accommodating them, but the game we played (D&D 4) required an attention to builds and rules that I felt turned them off to the whole game. We had some that loved the battle chess aspect, and we still like this part of the game, but the combat and level rules felt like an artificial limitation put over the game for players who were more interested in narrative control than "kill for treasure and XP."

If your players are more concerned with mathematical concerns and tactical battles, D&D works better, and I will go as far to say that D&D 4 works the best for players who want a Warhammer style figure tactical combat experience. D&D 5 tries to bring the story back to the table, yet it still has the baggage of a tactical game based on resource management, and a level system that connects narrative control and combat ability into one lump sum of XP. D&D style systems also pre-choose your character's lifetime ability to perform narrative control and combat contributions from game #1 with your choice of class.

Yes, you can switch careers and multiclass in mid-stream, but King Arthur is not a bard nor a rogue.

Answers?

I don't feel there is a good answer for this in the modern D&D style games. Again, we are hit with the abstraction of the class and combat systems, and this limits our choices. Of course fighters are the ones with the swords that never think their way out of a situation. The game assumes "fighters fight" and gimps their skills and gives them the best damage output and choices in swinging swords. I would love to see a D&D system "off the rails" that let people be people, reward skills used, and got rid of the abstract class and level system entirely.

Yes, Legend, Runequest, and other games do this, and they do it well.

There is a choice here of how much control you feel you should have (as a player) over your control over what happens at the table. If I choose to be a social character, I don't want my choices limited to, "well, pick a social class and suck at combat for as long as you have that character." If for a couple sessions I want to improve combat skills, let me improve combat skills. If for some others, I want to be the master of parlay, let me do that and improve my social prowess.

This is not about being a "fan" of a game, I collect them all and love reading them, so count me in as a fan for them all, as my shelves will attest. What this is about is taking a look inside yourself and asking, "am I getting rewarded for the things I want to do at the table?" Does a game force you into a role that later on you may regret or limit your contributions? Yes, a good referee can adjust things and give chances for everyone to have fun, but if your game takes a turn for the political, can your combat-focused character adapt?

It is again about understanding what each game does best, and finding games that fit your view of gaming and how your contributions are rewarded. We have moved beyond the "network effect" where every game has to be a modern version of D&D, and we are moving into an era where games are designed around a almost niche "way it plays" and the reward and contribution systems are designed to fit that game. You see this in videogaming with indie gaming. The big-box games are always there like the Call of Duties and D&D games, but a huge market is developing for custom and unique experiences that are off the level system tracks and as diverse as the players in our hobby.

Epic Characters are Broken Characters

One of the areas of most roleplaying games that makes we wonder is the design of epic-level characters. These are typically high-level characters in the last 25% of the game's progression path. These are the earth-shaking superheroes of the world, iconic characters in their own right, and ideally, what players strive for their characters to become. Too often, game designers are content to just let high-level characters to be broken, the rules not tested or designed for high-level play, or they let the game's math drift off into this area where the number ranges are so high the original dice mean little. What's the point of rolling 1d20+30, when most tasks in the game are 'beat a 20-25'?

D&D4 was notoriously playtested less than it should have at the higher levels, the game fell victim to multiple cheats, stun locks, and other cheeseball tactics that spawned endless errata. Our group hit multiple issues with high-level balance, some classes falling off the power curve, and changes invalidating builds far too often, and it hurt our group's interest in the game. To be fair, the game was designed to have high-level play, the rules and monsters support it - it just wasn't playtested that well. The fact they needed to re-balance monsters constantly tells you something, they never found that sweet spot in play until the game's end.

Most of the 3.x D&D games, including Pathfinder, cease to be fun after level 7-8 or so, and a lot of players in our groups shared that view. The games devolve into abstract high-level math, and around this point, wizards and other spell casters take over the game, so the pure fighting class players lose interest first, followed by the caster players later on. The game just wasn't designed for high-level play, and extending the system just leads to an escalation of numbers to the point of absurdity. The old D&D 3.x Epic Level Handbook has skills and modifiers shooting all the way up to 1d20+100, and at that point, you are so far out of your original dice range things get silly.

Some of the old percentile games never scaled well either, games like Top Secret and Star Frontiers had percentile ability scores that were hard to figure out when they got into epic ranges. In Star Frontiers, if a robot has a strength of 500%, his melee skills would be something like 250% + 10% times skill level of 1 to 6. How does rolling a 205% chance to hit work? Similarly, characters could have scores of 110%, 130%, or more with some experience expenditure focused on one area.

MMOs hit this problem with no end in sight. In World of Warcraft, you could have a 60th level character doing hundreds of points of damage per hit, and then a 90th level character doing tens of thousands of points of damage in a single hit. Compare this to a first level character doing 1-10 points per hit and you'll get a good sense of scale. Some day, we will have DPS ratings being calculated in the millions of points of damage in a single hit. There comes a point where everything becomes relative, and the numbers matter little. In a way, this hasn't changed much from the old SNES RPG days where a character takes 9999 damage, the maximum they support, and dies - although the numbers have gotten much larger.

Okay, yeah, complaining is nice, but what do you do about it? A lot of these games do not understand that high level play should be different than low level play - and not just by the size of the numbers. There comes a point in every game where the game needs to change, and the game could change again at another point. World of Warcraft used to understand this, and in some games like Everquest, it still applies. In these games, certain classes have game-changing powers unlocked at certain levels, and the class' role changes. Where MMOs fail in this is that the gameplay does not change. typically, it is another dungeon with slightly more powerful monsters - maybe some new special powers are used on your group.

A game needs to know the breakpoints where the game changes, and support this. D&D4 tried to do this with tiers of play, where they tried to set expectations of what characters at different tiers of play should be doing and going. It led to a strange situation where 10th level characters were out plane-hopping, and this hurt the dedicated worlds, such as Eberron, Dark Sun, and Faerun. The game did set expectations well, but in reality, it didn't really do too much more than offer some special tier classes and more powerful monsters.

The math has to work too, and you have to set caps you can live with. If you have a game based on a 2d6 skill roll, what does it mean to have a +10 modifier? Epic doesn't have to mean broken math, especially when you take the time to design that high level experience. It is a different thing if you intend your game to break at high levels, that is a different thing, and also something we used for SBRPG1. An open-ended game where the math will break is a different beast than a close-ended game where the math breaks at the high levels. In the latter, the designers should have tweaked that high-level play experience to b fun without broken and strange math.

A lot to think about today, and also issues we are hitting in the design of 7dRPG.

Blowing Out the Polyhedral Dice

A funny observation about D&D4. In order to create a unique number range for their game, which I suspect has to do with breaking D&D3's OGL number ranges, they increased starting hit points and damages to very high numbers. Starting goblins and other first level creatures have 20-40 hit points, which in previous editions only had 1-8 hit points. Weapon and power damages similarly went up to compensate (but not by the same magnitude).

Now all is well and fine with those ranges, but it begs the question: why use polyhedral dice anymore? If your base hit points are so high, there is no real practical difference between a 1d6 weapon and a 1d8 one. With that many hit points, you might as well rate weapons on the number of d6's or d10's they do, and simplify everything to use d20's and one other dice type.

It is a legacy of the original Chainmail game, where every weapon did 1d6, and the adoption of polyhedral dice, which allowed some weapon variation. Later games (AD&D, etc) tried to balance lighter weapons, such as the dagger (by making it faster), to mixed results. We've house-ruled the lowly 1d4 dagger ourselves as well many times to make it more appealing. But overall, the 1d4 dagger remains a potent weapon against monsters that have little more hit points than it can roll, and combined with a double-damage sneak attack, the weapon becomes quite deadly.

Once hit points reach uber-high levels, the difference between weapon dice fades away, and the hefty ability score damage bonus comes into play (especially with D&D3's multiple attacks per round). It's like this in D&D4 as well, as you start looking for fixed damage adders from feats and other bonuses to raise your damage per round against these giant chunks of hit points.

D&D4 had to bring the monsters down a little in toughness in Essentials, but the hit points still remained high enough to make the unique polyhedral dice wane compared to the character card powers. Keeping the original dice ranges is one thing the OGL and other old-school games do right, they preserve the power of the polyhedral dice, and keep the math down to manageable levels.

In old-school D&D, it was common for a dragon to have 60 hit points, by D&D4 that grew to over 600. Beyond the chore of whittling that huge number down, choosing a 1d8 sword felt a lot better against the old-school dragon than the newer one. Think about blowing out your dice ranges when crafting your own game, and preserving the feel the dice give you with their unmodified rolls.

Relative Balance vs. Absolute Balance

Game balance comes in two forms: relative and absolute. Now, we are talking about balance between the player characters and their opponents, the raw combat power vs. combat power with everyone going all out. Games are notoriously hard to balance, but the method of rating opponents matters a whole lot here.

Relative balance assumes the PCs and the 'monsters' are rated on different systems, such as D&D4, Aftermath NPCs (not PCs), basic D&D monsters, and D&D3.5 (monsters only, note this qualifier). The game system rates opponents on a different set of scores than player characters, often because the complexity of rating a monster as a PC would be so high as to be prohibitively complicated. These games tend to never be balanced correctly, since there will always be a difference between what characters can get away with and the limited set of powers monsters have. Balance is achieved through play-testing different combinations of player builds and monster ratings. This usually takes a long time and many patches to close loopholes, fix monsters, and adjust power levels. These games also have a better 'play feel' - since the experience is engineered to be fun and play perfectly.

Absolute balance assumes the PCs and monsters are rated on the same system, if a player finds an exploit or power combo, it is perfectly legal for the monsters to use it too. D&D3.5 PCs, SBRPG, Traveller, most of the TSR boxed games, and any other game that lets the referee spin up monsters using the character generation rules. Balance in these games is easier, since what you are balancing is one system - characters vs. characters. A lot of sandbox style games have this balance, with everyone playing on an even keel, all designed with the same system. These games are typically more difficult to play than relative balanced games, since the monsters are playing with a full set of powers and abilities. Victory goes to the smartest and best planned parties, rather than players being assured a balanced experience.

We recently had an issue with this in George's Project Delta BYOB miniatures system, where the monsters were rated on a relative scale for simplicity, and the characters started to blow them out scenario after scenario. We are moving towards a more absolute system for monsters, and the game is playing better. We play-tested a higher-level scenario, and the problems started to show themselves. We still want some of the relative ease-of-play and balanced feel, but the relative balance bug bit us, and we've had to re-tool the whole monster system to adjust.

DDO: The 2H Weapon Simulator?

George and I were playing Turbine's DnD Online the other day, and he rolled up a 2H fighter, and me a noble paladin with a shield and longsword. DDO is pretty good about sticking to the DnD3 ruleset, so it was cool to see the rules being used in a real-time, practical form.

George's 2H fighter started owning any adventure we went in, doing 40 point crits with his mighty 2H axe (20/x3). My crits were only about 17 or so with my longsword (19-20/x2), so I felt slightly confused by the matter. He min-maxed, and bought as many crit enhancements as he could, while I stuck to a more standard RP-build. After a while, I switched weapons to a 2H axe as well, and started dishing out my own 40-point crits regularly. I walked away with the feeling that in order to do well in the game, I needed to switch to a 2-hander, and wail away.


The trouble with an MMO is it is too often about the numbers game. DnD3 enshrined this, and many MMOs worry about DPS, mitigation, and a whole host of other numeric statistics. Numbers games are fun, but a big part of the draw of tabletop gaming is imagination and creativity. Old-school games get this, and in many of those, combat is not the smartest option, and it is even discouraged. No XP for monsters, XP only for gold; so if you get that 500gp ruby sitting on the wall behind the ogre, you get 500xp - no matter how you do it.

This sort of "exploit to win" design theory is discouraged in tabletop games, where balance is paramount, character builds need to be viable, and exploits are bugs that need to be worked out of the game. DnD4 had regular and voluminous "patches" to the rules for balance and exploits, which in the first version of the game would be unthinkable except for clarifying something written unclearly. DnD3 still has the exploits built into the game, as those are considered to be "good builds" and the secrets of doing well.

And that brings us back to the two-hander DDO builds. In a more-balanced game like an MMO, this would be an exploit, since this is the primary way you do damage, and it would "take away" from the viability of other weapon types - after all, something has to be done for longsword and shield wielding fighters, right? In a "favored build" type game, this is one of the secrets to discover, and you do well by playing along. In old-school games, who cares really? Combat is the last option, and it is all about figuring out how to get that treasure with as little risk and resource usage to the party as possible.

Target Numbers versus Challenge Levels

While looking out at the clouds today, this thought came up:

"Dice + Modifier >= Target Number"

or

"Dice + Modifier - Difficulty >= Fixed Number"

SBRPG chooses the latter method for two reasons. One, difficulty is directly rated on level, which is equivalent to character level. A level 5 thief picking a level 5 lock has a base 50% chance of success (without ability modifiers). Ability scores bend the curve, allowing you to do better with better scores. The second reason is successes depend on the amount the roll beats the fixed target number. It is easier to do some math during the roll to keep the number range down, so calculation of the degree of success is easier.

The first method sets a target number, such as 25, and lets players add up modifiers and their roll to reach it. It is a simpler system, in that it does not require the subtraction step, but it is a bit more obscure in that the target number does not mean much. Of course, TN = Level + 10 in SBRPG-terms, but the mechanic seems more prone to made-up target numbers than real level-based difficulties. The system is also prone to blow-out at the high end, since there is less of an urge to cap the target number. Finally, calculating successes requires more math, for example:

The dice roll is 12
The modifier is 7
The problem level is 5
The fixed number is 11+

12 + 7 >= 16, true; a total of 19 - 15 = 4 successes

or

12 + 7 - 5 >= 11, true; a total of 14 - 10 = 4 successes

In the 11+ fixed number, you take 10 off the difference to determine successes. The second method of "knocking 10 off the roll" to determine the level of success is easier math than (roll minus 10+PL). Why is the success number so important?

Success measures the level of the job performed. In the above example, let's assume this was the level 5 thief picking the lock. The job was done at a level 4 of a result, at or near the thief's level of 5. We can assume this was an average job result for a level 5 thief. Let's say the thief only rolled one success, that would be more like how a level 1 thief would have picked that lock - it would have been a messy job, taken a while longer, made a lot of noise, and so on. If the thief rolled high, say an 18, and got 10 successes, that would tell you the thief did that job as efficient, fast, and quiet as a level 10 thief's average lockpicking attempt- smooth, quick, and quiet.

SBRPG has a whole "skill level versus problem level" mechanic, and using successes as "result level" gives the dice rolling system a nice tight, immediate, and X vs Y = Z feel.