Mechanics for Mixed Heritage

The One D&D Unearthed Arcana introduced updated Character Origin rules. Almost every PHB race was revisited, but two were dropped: Half-Elf and Half-Orc. The latter was replaced with the full Orc, but the former was replaced with a new planetouched race called the Ardling. That left no half- or otherwise mixed race options.

What am I supposed to do with all this bearded, pointy-eared people art??

There is a sidebar, “Children of Different Humanoid Kinds,” that says if you want to play half-elf, half-orc, or any other combination of things, just pick one side of your parentage to determine your game abilities and then you can describe yourself as looking like a combination of both sides of your ancestry. Then average the two races’ lifespan to get your expected lifespan.

A lot of folks feel that is insufficient for a variety of reasons that I’ll leave you to find on your own. A lot of alternatives have been proposed, usually around the idea of combining traits from two or more races, but exactly in what proportion is a tough nut to crack. So I took a swing.

Mechanical Mixing

Any mixed heritage system needs to be as simple as making a few choices from a list. Spending points out of a pool to “purchase” racial traits a la carte is too involved for my casual players and the casual players that D&D is most aimed at. So, how much of what do you pick?

I went through the Races section of the Character Origins UA and gave each trait under each race a simple categorization:

  • Minor (m): A single skill proficiency, darkvision, a cantrip, resistance to a rare damage type, or a fairly situational ability
  • Major (M): Magic progression with cantrip, 1st-, and 2nd-level spells; resistance to a common damage type; or a generally powerful ability
  • Superior/major + minor (Mm): Something that exceeds the Major options in a substantial way

These are general bands of power, not meant to draw fine lines between every distinct trait. That would not enable the quick-and-dirty nature of this homebrew on a playtest doc. Are these subjective? Yes, to some unavoidable degree. No two people will rate everything exactly the same, including the designers. But we’ve got to start somewhere.

The first thing I learned is the races as written are not particularly balanced. Modularizing the races into a standardized structure like we see in the Backgrounds of the Character Origins UA would require significant changes to a number of the races. I decided against that, as that would limit the utility of the system going forward since Wizards of the Coast are unlikely to adopt my rewrite of their UA, to understate things significantly.

Instead, I built a structure for mixed heritage races that is itself standardized even though it is built out of these non-standardized pieces. The median race in the UA has about 2 Major traits and 2 Minor traits. Some have a Superior trait, but none have more than one. So I used that as the structure. Every mixed heritage PC using this will have 2 Major and 2 Minor traits, with Superior traits taking up 1 Major and 1 Minor slot, and no more than 1 Superior trait. This way, even if the UA traits are eventually revised, this structure can still be applied, I’ll just need to update the trait ratings.

So here’s my sidebar:

Children of Different Humanoid Kinds

Across the magical worlds of the multiverse, humanoids of different kinds often have children together. On some worlds, children of humans and orcs or humans and elves are particularly prevalent. However, many other combinations are possible and well represented throughout the multiverse.

If you decide your character is the child of such a pairing, pick the Creature Type, Size, and Speed traits of one of your parentages (we suggest the most distinctive). Determine the average of the two options’ Life Span traits to figure out how long your character might live. For example, a child of a Gnome and a Halfling has an average life span of 288 years. As far as physical description, you can mix and match the visual characteristics – color, ear shape, and the like – of both parentages.

For your special traits, pick two major traits and two minor traits from those listed for your character’s parentage, in any combination. In place of one of your major and minor picks, you may instead pick a superior trait. You cannot pick more than one superior trait.

For example, the Gnome/Halfling child above might pick the Gnome’s Gnomish Cunning trait (superior), the Halfling’s Luck trait (major), and the Gnome’s Darkvision trait (minor). Alternatively, they could pick the Gnome’s Gnomish Lineage trait (major), the Halfling’s Brave trait (major), the Gnome’s Darkvision trait (minor), and the Halfling’s Halfling Nimbleness trait (minor).

  • Human
    • Resourceful (Major)
    • Skillful (Minor)
    • Versatile (Superior)
  • Ardling
    • Angelic Flight (Major)
    • Celestial Legacy (Major)
    • Damage Resistance (minor)
  • Dragonborn
    • Draconic Ancestry (this has no effect itself, it only affects the Breath Weapon and Damage Resistance traits. If you take either of those, also take Draconic Ancestry)
    • Breath Weapon (Major)
    • Damage Resistance (Major)
    • Darkvision (minor)
    • Draconic Language (if Dragonborn is one of your parentages, you get this trait automatically)
  • Dwarf
    • Darkvision (Minor)
    • Dwarven Resilience (Major)
    • Dwarven Toughness (Major)
    • Forge Wise (Minor)
    • Stonecunning (Major)
  • Elf
    • Darkvision (Minor)
    • Elven Lineage (Superior)
    • Fey Ancestry (Major)
    • Keen Senses (Minor)
    • Trance (Minor)
  • Gnome
    • Darkvision (Minor)
    • Gnomish Cunning (Superior)
    • Gnomish Lineage (Major)
  • Halfling
    • Brave (Major)
    • Halfling Nimbleness (Minor)
    • Luck (Major)
    • Naturally Stealthy (Minor)
  • Orc
    • Adrenaline Rush (Major)
    • Darkvision (Minor)
    • Powerful Build (Minor)
    • Relentless Endurance (Major)
  • Tiefling
    • Darkvision (Minor)
    • Fiendish Legacy (Superior)
    • Otherworldly Presence (Minor)

Sample Combinations

So, a few examples:

  • Tanis, Half-Elf Half-Human
    • Fey Ancestry (Major)
    • Trance (Minor)
    • Versatile (Superior)
  • Fjord, Half-Human Half-Orc
    • Adrenaline Rush (Major)
    • Darkvision (Minor)
    • Resourceful (Major)
    • Skillful (Minor)
  • Koriand’r Starfire, Half-Ardling Half-Dragonborn
    • Angelic Flight (Major)
    • Breath Weapon (Major)
    • (Ardling’s) Damage Resistance (Minor)
    • Darkvision (Minor)
    • Draconic Ancestry (free)
    • Draconic Language (free)
  • Chastity Bitterburn, Half-Dwarf Half-Tiefling
    • Darkvision (Minor)
    • Fiendish Legacy (Superior)
    • Stonecunning (Major)

I don’t think these are broken, not in light of the standard Dwarf and Elf packages, at least. Maybe Dragonborn’s Breath Weapon should be superior? But maybe not. I’ll keep revising it.

What do you think? Does this make mixed heritage characters feel more mixed? None of this is set in stone, I welcome thoughtful feedback.

Let me know if you try this out how it works for you! That would be amazing.

Also, please, can we drop the word Race and use almost any synonym? Heritage, Ancestry, Parentage, Kin, even Bloodline is better than Race. Thanks.

No, no, not that kind. (Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines poster)

CIP Ep. 2: Carefully Avoiding Controversy

Stubbazubba & Chamomile proudly present the Critical Insignificance Podcast, Episode 2, attack of the new age music, in which we carefully avoid a few controversies that are simply too significant for this podcast. More importantly, we plug a little-known but much-loved RTS game with a unique twist called Majesty (see Cham’s prior heads-up on the Steam sale), and Cham briefly reviews Gone Home.

We also lay out how GMs can engineer better pick-up games online, which should be a boon to anyone running a play-by-post, play-by-email, or virtual tabletop a la roll20.net game. The tl;dr version is:

It's not what you think.

It’s not what you think.

I’m going to leave this a little ambiguous, because 1) who ever understands Bane perfectly the first time? And 2) because you should listen to the podcast, though I will say this discussion starts at 14:55.

Finally, we talk about what’s going on with the D&D movie rights; Hasbro and Sweetpea Entertainment (the studio behind this, this, and this) have concluded the trial over the future of the rights, and…well we’re still waiting for either a last-minute settlement or a decision from the judge, but either way, something is going to happen on that front. We talk about why that is and what it means for D&D fans in the near future.

Listen here:

Or download.

Like the show? Please Like and Subscribe! We love positive feedback! Have some criticism? Let us know, too. Criticism is essential to this getting better, tell us what’s not doing it for you.

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Devil in the Die Rolls

So, previously I talked about what I want to see in a new D&D, which I’m calling D&D After Next. One of my primary goals for After Next is to speed up play; I want to be able to run a full mid-size adventure in a single 2-3 hour session. D&D will never be a party game, but I want it to be something you can convince your friends to try once and actually show off how an adventure goes, complete with an ending. I don’t want D&D to necessarily be an entire evening’s project. I want gamers to play an adventure in D&D, but then still have time to play an hour or two of Smash or Halo or some other game. The TTRPG demographic tends to be a bit older; we have a lot going on. School, work, friends, family, watching hours upon hours of syndicated television on Netflix, getting on the internet and complaining about games, etc., etc. Anyways, enough of the why, let’s talk about the how.

How do you make D&D a 2-hour affair? The answer is simple; combat. Combat in D&D came from table-top wargames, and was born in era when hobby games didn’t have much competition. So combat in D&D looks and feels like a wargame, complete with complex turns, measurements that need to be accounted for, and a long list of specific effects which must be learned independently. While much of the industry has moved away from this, the poster boy for the entire genre, Dungeons & Dragons, languishes in the past because it is convinced that it just needs to recapture some elusive, mystical quality from its glory days by going back to those mechanics. I disagree; the real secret to D&D’s early success, besides the absolute lack of competition, was Gary Gygax’s salesmanship. I will save more on that for another article about marketing your game, but for now here’s my brilliant theory; what makes D&D familiar is not what makes it fun. D&D needs to be willing to re-examine some of its fundamental assumptions and discard ones that don’t help it get where it wants to be. One of those old assumptions is the complex combat, which focused on tactical decisions to the point that it takes a very long time to kill 5 kobolds.

The major contributors to D&D combat’s sluggish resolution time are as follows;

  • Initiative; rolling it and keeping track of it (or more, forgetting it and having to remember whose turn it is, and ‘oh, we skipped so-and-so, let’s go back,’ and such)
  • Turn structure; between movement and combat maneuvers and spells and free actions, swift and/or immediate actions, standard actions, full-round actions, you are going through 5-6 lists of stuff you can do and choosing one from each list to make the optimal combination. Keeping track of all these actions and phases is not difficult, but it does take time.
  • Die rolls; A bog standard attack takes at least two rolls – to-hit and damage – and a crit takes many more than that. That’s not counting Opportunity Attacks, or multiple attacks on a turn, or grappling.

These have largely remained untouched for decades of D&D’s history, and I don’t think that’s healthy.

After Next’s combat system will not be grid-based, initiative order will not be so quickly forgotten, it will have a simplified turn structure, and it will reduce the number of dice you have to roll. Let’s take these each separately.

Non-grid-based Combat

The grid was a perfectly fine way to make D&D for wargamers who had the stuff to make grids handy. That is a much smaller portion of the D&D-playing populace now, though, so we need a new way of seeing the combat. Many modern RPGs have highly abstract location systems, where there is literally no objective way to tell how far one thing is from another; it’s entirely based on how the player/GM is imagining it. When those two disagree, though, confusion and sometimes conflict ensues. So, we need an objective way of seeing everything; Areas.

Areas just mean that the environment is chopped up into different regions or zones or whatever you want to call them, and that is the finest level of positioning detail we care about. Not all areas will be the same size; an area may be as small as a narrow staircase or as large as a spacious field, and that’s OK. The borders of an area will be based on the features of the map; walls, hallways, possibly furnishings or other stones, anything that breaks up an even surface.

A character in any given Area will be able to melee against any target in that Area, no matter how many people he might walk by in doing so. The idea is that the characters in an Area are not at fixed, stationary positions, but rather are moving around in reaction to the other combatants, so you can attack who you like. Now, you still need the idea of a front-line and a back-line, so let characters in melee form up and essentially hold the aggro of a number of foes. As long as there aren’t more melee enemies on the Area than that formation can hold, the enemies can’t attack the ones the formation are protecting.

For instance, if a Wizard, Paladin, Barbarian, and Ranger are in one party, and they’re fighting a bunch of goblins, then the Paladin and Barbarian could form a line, protecting the Wizard and Ranger, and prevent goblin attackers from being able to attack the latter two. For now I will tentatively set the limit that N number of melee characters in a formation can prevent 2N-1 enemy attackers from targeting the back line. In layman’s terms, the front-line can hold off anything less than twice their own number, but more than that can get past them. So a 1-man line can hold off 1 opponent, a 2-man line can hold off 3, a 3-man line can hold off 5, etc. Of course there would be feats or abilities which increase this. That’s enough for formations now, but I have more ideas for them later.

Initiative & Turn Structure

Rolling up new Initiative every fight is really just a time-waster. It randomizes the slight tactical advantage that going first brings with it, but I don’t think it’s worth the time we waste rolling it, figuring out the order, and then forgetting it and figuring it out again multiple times per fight. So, to keep it simple, we could just make Initiative a static number. Then suggest that the players would sit in order of initiative, so we can just go around the table. That’s an option, in case you really want to speed up play. Your total initiative bonus is now just your initiative, so if Bob goes before Sally and after Paul in one fight, the order is still Paul, Bob, Sally in the next fight.

As for turn structure, we’ll lay the ground rule that a round is not 6 seconds of combat, it’s a single narrative beat, which might be 2-3 seconds or 30 seconds or more. During this round you typically get 1 significant action. Whether that’s an attack, a spell, or breaking down a door or climbing up a rope or moving into a new Area, you can do one thing this turn. Now, there’ll probably be several ways to cheat on this rule, and that’s fine; if you Charge you can move into a new Area and attack, for example. Anything less than that – switching weapons, moving around in your Area, grabbing an item (if uncontested), talking, etc., are simply free actions.

On your turn, you first resolve any on-going effects, like taking poison or environmental damage, rolling to resist a charm or other debuff, etc., then take your action, attacking or moving or whatever it may be. This way there is only one phase of the turn where you have to remember what conditions are affecting you, and the exciting part of your turn, the action, is also the climax.

Rolling the Dice

Choose your Weapon - Dice

All the above is nice, but it still falls short of really bringing a typical combat down to the 15-minute benchmark. When I’m late for something and I need to cut down on transit time, I try to speed, even though I know that the # of lights is a far greater indicator of how long it takes to arrive. If I really want to cut out chunks of my travel time, I need to cut out the number of lights on my route. Similarly, in After Next, to really cut down combat time, we need to cut out die rolls.

The easiest thing is to do away with separate to-hit and damage rolls. I don’t think damage rolls contribute that much in the first place; yes, it’s kind of exciting to roll max damage, but it’s also really frustrating to only get a 1 or a 2 on your d8 or d12. So, I think moving to fixed damage values for weapons, +STR mod, works just fine. Now this isn’t the whole story, as I plan to implement degrees of success; beat the enemy’s AC by enough and you deal more damage, so there is still some variance to how much damage you deal, but it only requires one roll.

Another problem is critical hits. I have a critical hit system that changes some fundamental aspects of the game, taking a hint or two from The One Ring, the latest Lord of the Rings RPG, which I’ll explain in the next article in this series, but suffice it to say that crits won’t take 4-6 rolls (attack roll, crit confirm roll, damage roll, damage roll 2, damage roll 3, etc.) anymore.

Those two things will cut down on resolution time, but there’s two more larger changes that will have far-reaching implications for the combat engine. First, allow what I call ‘Active Defense.’ When you are attacked by an opponent, you have the option to sacrifice your next turn to roll an attack against your assailant, opposing their own attack. These two attacks are rolled simultaneously and whoever wins deals damage and whatever else their hit does as normal, and play proceeds. This will go through 2 turns in 1, It changes the dynamics of the combat somewhat, but I think it’s a solid idea to build on.

The second game-changer is the option to jointly attack a single target. If everyone is going to attack the big troll anyway, just have them roll it all simultaneously. There are a few strings attached, namely that you can only do this on the turn of the last participating character in initiative order. So if Paul, Sally, and Bob all want to attack the dragon, they can all do so, acting on Sally’s turn (the last in the initiative order established previously), and resolve their actions simultaneously. This way you can resolve three turns in the space of one (give or take).

In addition, attacking with others will bring more added benefits. Has anyone ever played Chrono Cross? In that game, each character had special abilities that only they could perform, and when they were in the party with certain other characters, those special abilities were converted into Dual or Triple Techniques, for a big boost in power. After Next would give little incentives for attacking with other characters, since you have to use the lowest initiative score. These would be class-based, and you’ll be able to purchase different effects. For instance, a Fighter might be able to add his STR bonus to the damage of characters attacking with him, or a Warlord might give companions a bonus to the attack roll, a rogue might get an automatic sneak attack, a sorceror might change the damage others deal to fire damage or simply add fire damage on top, and a Cleric might bless or heal those who attack with him. Of course the lower level effects would be the weaker ones, and the higher level effects would be more powerful. This would accelerate combats, as you’re basically folding a lot of buffs and things into an attack action.

It sounds pretty impressively powerful right now, and it would require a lot of number-crunching in order to find the right balance points for these things, but I think that these two things would actually help the party feel like it’s working together, give a more visceral, action-packed feel to combat, and most importantly, cut down the time it takes to kill a Minotaur or a Medusa in half.

OK, this one was pretty long, but hey, resolution time is a beast right now. I wanted to cut down as much as I possibly could to leave time for role-playing and socializing, while still having relatively in-depth combats. I think these designs will achieve that. Leave a reply telling me what you think, ideas to use these new approaches in interesting ways, or problems you see rising from them. In my next After Next article I’ll be exploring alternative resource management systems for different classes, to create a unique feel for different types of characters which are all fun, not just picking a place on the spectrum between ‘Gouge my eyes out boring’ and ‘Casters: the Accounting.’

D&D After Next

Continuing on from this post.

So, what design goals do think would help the D&D After Next (D&D AN) be a better game? First, a note on what I mean by ‘better.’ I want a new edition of D&D to lower the barrier-to-entry of the hobby, to expand the market, to make new gamers, not just pander to old ones. I want it to get at the core of what makes D&D fun, not what makes it familiar.

My mantra for this project will be; does this idea make the experience cleaner, faster, or richer? If it doesn’t do one of those things, it’s not going to make it into the game.

Cleaner-

I want the game to be simpler than some of its editions, and not simply by relying on the DM to make up most of it. I want a reasonable first-time player to feel fairly comfortable playing after their first session. I want to make the DM’s job as easy as possible. I want the rules to be clear and concise, and I want them all very easy to find; preferably all in one place, or in extremely handy places – no more flipping through chapter upon chapter of text trying to look stuff up. So, I want a simpler, streamlined D&D, in both presentation and content.

Faster-

My ideal session of D&D AN would last about 60-150 minutes, and cover a complete mid-sized adventure without feeling rushed. I don’t want to have to choose between spending time with family and friends and playing D&D; besides the obvious possibility of doing both simultaneously, I want to be able to do both in the same evening. Resolution time needs to be cut down by a significant margin; combats need to be shorter without being much more lethal. I aim for a combat to take between 10-25 minutes, not 30-40. I want less die rolls per action wherever possible. I have a lot of ideas for this that you’ll see in the next post.

Richer-

At the same time, I want a richer D&D: I want tools that emphasize the story-telling aspects, and meaningful, yet balanced character options. D&D AN needs to play to its strengths, considering the competition from other hobbies, and I think the story-telling aspect is one of the big ones. D&D AN will strive to help you craft and live your character’s story, with all the thrills, disappointments, and achievements that come with it. But besides story-telling, there needs to be a great amount of depth and range of character options. I will use the principles described here and here to make balanced, situationally beneficial options. No more trap classes or feats! No more pigeonholing race + class combos! No more identical class mechanics! And not just in the dungeon; I will make meaningful non-combat rules that have depth while keeping everyone able to participate (more on that soon).

Those are my broad goals. Specific benchmarks and ways to achieve them will be brainstormed and hashed out right here, for your entertainment/enrichment. My next article will focus specifically on how much faster it needs to be and how to get there.

Please leave a reply with your comments, ideas, or criticisms! Agree or disagree? What do you think D&D AN needs to be?