“Don’t you leave him, Samwise Gamgee”: Inspiration as Camaraderie in D&D

“Camaraderie” by Magic the Gathering artist Sidharth Chaturvedhi

Camaraderie, friendship, and love are quintessential themes of the fantasy adventure genre. This goes back at least to The Iliad: Achilles is content to sit out the fight against the Trojans until his dear companion Patroclus is slain by Prince Hector of Troy. Achilles’ world-shaking rage is awakened, and Hector’s fate is sealed.

In the grandfather of D&D, The Lord of the Rings, the fellowship of the Ring quickly grow to be a tight-knit group (Boromir excepted). Merry and Pippin begin as close friends, and that bond strengthens them in their many hardships. Conversely, Legolas and Gimli don’t see eye to eye (ba-dum-tiss!), but their common travails nevertheless forge a trust that transcends their familial feud. And then, of course, there’s Frodo and Sam. From their earliest steps, where the quote in the title symbolizes this relationship, their love and devotion to each other seem to be the only things carrying their small Hobbit forms through the oppression of Mordor.

In D&D literature, the Heroes of the Lance on Krynn, the Companions of the Hall in the Forgotten Realms, and nowadays Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein of Exandria are replete with siblings, comrades, and lovers that inspire equal parts heroism and foolishness. Whether its the Majere twins in Dragonlance or the half-elven twins of Vox Machina, or the found family of misfits that is the Mighty Nein, the line between family and adventuring companions is often blurry, a dynamic that breeds the kind of trust you need to risk life and limb next to someone in a dungeon day in and day out.

“The new Rogue’s got our back, right? Right?”

It’s a core part of so many fantasy adventure stories, and a lot of fantasy TTRPGs include something that reflects that bond: you’re not just 3-6 strangers who happen to be fighting monsters in the same room, the trust you’ve built helps you focus – you’re not worried about being stabbed in the back – and to push yourself – you are all that stands between your companions and death! My favorite implementation was in The One Ring by Cubicle 7.

In The One Ring, every character has a small pool of meta-currency called Hope that you can spend to add extra bonuses to rolls. In addition, there is a shared “Fellowship pool” equal in size to the number of companions in your fellowship which can replenish 1 spent Hope per Fellowship, if at least half the group agrees (if half the group does not agree, you can still take the point, but you also gain 1 Shadow). Finally, one of your adventuring companions is your “Fellowship Focus,” and any Hope you spend to directly help or rescue them is restored to you, if the attempt succeeds, but if they are wounded or slain, you take 1 or 3 Shadow, respectfully.

So, when Anthony Joyce (@Thrawn589) and M.T. Black (@mtblack2567) called for ideas on incorporating love of all kinds into D&D, I half-remembered The One Ring mechanic and described it (wrongly) on their posts. I said Fellowship points were the meta-currency, and spending them to help your Fellowship Focus gave you it back, but if your FF was slain, you took Despair and couldn’t use Fellowship points. Black, in particular, was a big fan and took that and ran with it:

M.T. Black’s Camaraderie rule, from his Twitter post

This is a great optional rule that instantly inspired a lot of ideas for me. It’s also a much better implementation of Inspiration than the forgettable default Inspiration rules.

First, I think there needs to be some limit on uses of the inspiring comrade bit. I first thought of limiting it to 1/SR, but I think the limiter from TOR is better: the camaraderie point is replenished only if the action succeeds, as your spirits are lifted as you see your inspiring comrade escape a terrible fate or succeed at their endeavor. If it fails, the point is not replenished, as your effort did not change your comrade’s fortunes at all. If you and your inspiring comrade are fighting a monster together and using camaraderie on every attack roll, the pool will be depleted before too long. But then, using it up when you’re fighting the big boss is exactly the point: when we face extreme challenges, that’s when those bonds must flex the most to share the great burden.

Next, while reading a related thread I noticed someone posted a similar ability to inspiring comrade called Bond from the Quest TTRPG:

In particular, the second and third bullets are extremely flavorful and part and parcel of the trope we are aiming for. I’d say the third one is partially covered by the base inspiring comrade mechanic, so out of a desire to keep moving parts to a minimum, I would just add the second: When you are separated from your inspiring comrade and they face grave danger, you sense that they are in peril, no matter where you are.

Finally, I would re-introduce some consequences when your inspiring comrade falls, but not just negative consequences. The death (or otherwise permanent loss, like being plane-shifted with no means of return, etc.) of your inspiring comrade should be a big gut punch; there’s a raw wound in your soul that shuts down all other social bonds, and the possibility of warping your focus to exclude all else and consider only your loss. Rules-wise, you are Isolated and must make a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw or become Anguished, which you can choose to fail if desired. Both end when you complete a long rest.

What’re Isolated and Anguished? New conditions that interact with camaraderie rules, because I like to make things complicated:

Isolated: An isolated character cannot use camaraderie.

(Having the isolated condition separate also allows other triggering events that might make someone isolated. That gets into inter-party conflict, which is kind of verboten in 5e, but hey, optional rules are optional rules. I’m willing to put it out there and see how it goes.)

Anguished: An anguished character has advantage on all attack rolls and saving throws against the enemy or enemies that led to their inspiring comrade’s death. They have disadvantage on all other attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks.

Grieving for a fallen comrade

What does this look like? It means the Barbarian Achilles can use camaraderie to gain advantage on an attack against the Dark Prince Hector who is attacking the Fighter Patroclus, his inspiring comrade. If that attack succeeds, the camaraderie point comes right back. When Patroclus dies or is teleported to a torture chamber in Carceri, never to return, Achilles can’t use camaraderie anymore, but he can choose to fail the save against his grief (or just fail it) and get advantage on all attacks and saves against Hector and his minions. He slays Hector, but when the party go to negotiate with Hector’s surviving brother Prince Paris, Achilles is still anguished and has disadvantage on his Persuasion checks. The negotiations devolve into more bloodshed. Paris fires the fateful arrow that crits on Achilles’ heel.

Another example: Frodo and Sam have maximized their use of camaraderie; they fight Gollum, hide from Nazgul, and persuade Faramir, together. When Shelob the Spider stabs Frodo and prepares him for eating, Sam fails a Wisdom (Perception) check and believes he is dead. Sam chooses to fail the Wisdom save and becomes anguished, giving him advantage on his attack rolls and saving throws against Shelob. With that, he is able to wound her with a critical hit in the abdomen. As she slinks back, he runs up to Frodo again, and the DM tells him to make another Wisdom (Perception) check. Being anguished, he rolls with disadvantage and fails. The DM tells him he hears no heartbeat. Frodo truly seems dead. Their players are chuckling, because they know Frodo is just unconscious.

OK, that last example was a bit of a stretch, but I think the concept here is solid.

I put together all the above, renamed some things to my liking, and put it on Homebrewery. I think just having the rules out there would point many tables in the direction of thinking about building the team and inter-party relationships. But tell me what you think: is this too heavy-handed? Too abusable? Too foreign of a design, a bad port of material that’s clearly from another game?

Inspired by this, I expanded into a probably over-ambitious ruleset that adds limits and consequences to inspiring comrades, as well as give effect to intraparty conflict. #dnd #dnd5e #ttrpghttps://t.co/1HmnTXUOx5 https://t.co/7bEy1OmuTg

— Ric Stubbs (@Stubbazubba) September 20, 2020

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

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.’