Biggus Geekus Game Design Livestream

I guest-starred on Biggus Geekus the day after Christmas, but for some reason wasn't able to see any comments via streamlab or whatever it's called, except for those that Joe and Randy highlighted on the screen. I can see them while rewatching the video via YouTube, and felt bad that people were thanking me for showing up so decided to respond to those, as well as a few others. 

There won't be any time stamps, because I didn't think to do that while writing this, and some responses might be made out of order, but if you watch the video and read the comments that should be plenty of context. For starters: no problem, I'm thankful that Joe and Randy even bothered to have me on, hopefully people enjoyed it, and I'm always up for talking about games, game design, and helping people with their own works.

Rolling back mostly to the start, Patrick Demo observes that the art for the Dice Pool version of  Dungeons & Delvers is reminiscent of Super Dungeon Explore. This is because while playtesting it with our daughter we used Super Dungeon Explore minis, as well as Dwarven Forge terrain because she was 7 or 8 I think at the time we started designing and playtesting it, and she really liked playing with them (she still plays with the Dwarven Forge stuff, but has since transitioned to Reaper minis and 40k).

A caveat of making the game you want to play is to also make sure that the game even needs to exist. If all you are doing is taking an existing game and tweaking a few rules, then you can probably get away with just adding that houserule and calling it good. This is partially why I don't care for Old School Essentials: from what I've heard it doesn't meaningfully transform the game, it's just AD&D cleaned up and maybe better organized.

(The other, more important reason is that having largely grown up on 2nd Edition AD&D I don't care for 1st Edition.)

Sustain Talents in 1E Dungeons & Delvers were in part inspired by the first Dragon Age computer game, though derived from warrior classes or archetypes or whatever they were called. In that game using special moves consumed stamina, I think, and if you wear heavy armor it reduced your overall stamina. Something like that, it's been quite some time.

So I had the idea that, instead of wizards casting something like mage armor and hoping that it mattered before the duration expired, you could instead "cast" it and it remains active as long as you are conscious but reduces your overall Willpower points. These created compelling choices for wizard players, where they had to balance layering lots of Sustain spells at the cost of not having very much Willpower to cast other spells.

Fladey really likes this, and I do too (our high-level necromancer had a lot of fun Sustaining an undead horde), so maybe we'll keep them, but make them Spell Secrets that require Mastered Spells, first. So you can have a spell that creates a kind of force field, and then a shield Spell Secret that lets you keep a smaller barrier active, as opposed to just picking Sustain spells right from the start, so there's another trade-off.

On the topic of spells, instead of classic D&D schools we're dividing them into elements and other themes, such as Pyrooturgy, Terraturgy, Necroturgy, and Astrallurgy. Some spells can belong to two or more categories, such as Stone Slurry being both a Hydroturgy and Terraturgy spell. These categories primarily matter for Spell Secrets and Talents that essentially mutate the wizard, such as one that gives you passive DR based on the amount of Terraturgy spells you've Mastered.

Mac Thompson took issue with a lack of clerics as an adventuring class option. 

As mentioned a few times in the video, clerics as an adventuring class don't make sense, and this became abundantly clear while trying to write a table of class-based backgrounds and motivations. I realized that fighters, rogues, and even wizards were pretty easy (money is an obvious motivator), but when it came to clerics, what, you were chosen by a god as a mortal conduit for his power, and you're using these divine gifts to root around in caves and ruins for gold?

Worse, nothing in the rules implies that any of your findings need to be donated to a church or temple, not that there are any incentives for doing so (or spreading the faith and converting others). So basically a god just grants you this power for no particular reason, with perhaps the implication that if you maybe violate an unspoken rule you might lose access to it, and maybe then only temporarily.

Dungeons & Delvers started out as 4th Edition D&D by the books, and we discarded everything we didn't like, which was almost all of it beyond the core d20 mechanic. We then took a flavor-first approach on classes, abilities, monsters, etc. This meant abandoning the nonsense pseudo-Vancian system, among other things, and 2nd Edition is just another step in that direction: since clerics don't make sense as an adventuring class, they're going to have to mostly stay home.

And I say mostly because I can see a cleric going on very specific adventures (cleansing evil, finding a holy relic, etc), though this would be on a very limited basis and so would make more sense for an NPC to tag along. But even for those sorts of adventures the cleric needn't necessarily risk his life and largely unique abilities: unless the use of one more miracles are required, he could play it safe and simply hire the PCs to do the job.

This also opens the door for non-cleric characters to be religious. They almost never are (I've seen it maybe a handful of times as a footnote at best), as there are no associated benefits except for perhaps determining what happens to your imaginary character's soul, which is likely of little concern as you begin rolling up a new guy, and this is strange in a world where it's obvious that gods exist and due to the implication that they are fueled by faith you think there would be a chance for them to intervene even for non-clerics.

Now, you could argue a case for their existence purely from a game design perspective. Most of the time characters heal slowly, at around a hit point a day, which oddly isn't affected by Constitution, nor does it scale as you gain more. So whether you have 10 hit points or 100, that 3 damage dagger swipe is going to take three days to recover from, even though for the 10 hit point guy it would be a far more grievous injury.

But, if you don't want characters to get injured and spend days or even weeks recovering (regardless of hit point total), as well as reduce the lethality of combat, there needs a way for characters to recover hit points more quickly, sometimes immediately. However clerics needn't be the answer, and they aren't even a particularly elegant one, because god-be-damned they can all have access to healing, and there surely isn't a better use for these miraculous gifts than being a heals-on-wheels for a band of thrill-seeking, often self-serving treasure hunters.

Right?

Worse, this unnecessary overreliance on healing magic is what resulted in the 5-minute adventuring day, where the party would go into a dungeon, maybe clean out a few rooms, and then head back to heal. In my experience, however, the cleric would burn through his spells healing everyone as much as possible, which would sometimes require another day spent just dicking around waiting for the chance to "memorize" more healing spells, and then a third day to get those back so we could go back in the dungeon, leveled spell slots brimming with nonsense pseudo-Vancian potential.

In Dungeons & Delvers, thanks to Vitality Points and mending potions you don't need a cleric at all, and we know this because we've playtested up to level 17, and while one of the characters was a cleric she didn't resort to using healing very much, primarily focusing on the War Domain and multiclassing into druid for Circle of Oak talents (part of her backstory was belonging to a paladin/druid Order of Thorns). Clerics with access to the Healing Domain are still quite useful since WP recovers so slowly on its own, we just found a nice balance between that and being essentially mandatory.

Plus, most aspects of a spell do not automatically scale by level. Baseline healing is something like 1 Favor for 1d6 Wound Points, with each additional Favor restoring another 2d6, but you're also capped at a number of dice equal to your cleric level (so a 4th-level cleric can only restore 4d6 per use). And at 1 Favor per level, with the total modified by your Wisdom, you don't have a lot of Favor to play with, though sacrifices can give you some more, and at higher levels you can essentially "borrow" some in advance.

Adding to all of that is increased armor DR in 2nd Edition. Where in 1E heavy and heavy reinforced armor granted DR 3, in 2E light armor starts at 3, and it scales all the way up to 10. It can still be overcome by armor penetration, as well as by sufficiently exceeding a target's Defense (though heavy reinforced armor requires that you exceed the target's Defense by at least 10 points in order to knock the DR down to 3, and 15 to overcome it entirely).

Then there's auto-scaling Defense and the fact that no one is arbitrarily restricted from wearing armor (so even wizards will wear at the least light armor, Strength permitting), which means we're pretty sure we can get away with also removing Vitality Points (we're still playtesting to make sure).

As for healing on the go, that's where mending potions come in. These are in 1E and aren't terribly expensive. The only downside is that they only restore 1 WP per round, up to however many WP you've rolled. The upside is that you can buy improved versions, which not only restore more WP, but restore them faster. Even better, these are alchemical potions, not magical, so you don't have to worry about magic item markets.

He also made a comment about contracting a disease, which I found a little amusing since in 3rd Edition and up diseases are largely minor setbacks. In Delvers they can be quite debilitating and fatal (and we included some more unusual diseases with supernatural origins, such as celestial scotoma), but you can bring along panacea potions, or even just fall back on the Herbalism and Medicine skills (cleric's need to specifically choose the Cleansing Touch miracle to remove diseases, anyway).

As for conjuring water, I'm not a fan of spells just conjuring food and water, especially early on, as like bags of holding and continual light spells it removes the need to bother planning and managing your inventory: just use magic to solve all your problems, even if you worship a god of fire and so it's strange that he would miraculously conjure food and water at your behest. We might have if anyone complained about it, but no one did, though Hydroturgy wizards can create water since it makes sense.

Of course, you can also fall back on the Hunting and Survival skills, which my wife and kids do all the time in order to save money, and eating freshly gathered/killed food ups your Wound Recovery (and more if you have the Cooking skill).

Mac also makes a comment about not playing fantasy RPGs for the realism, and I agree There are plenty of abstractions that I think are necessary either to make the game work in general, or at least work smoothly. However if things become too abstract or don't function the way they should (for example, being able to punch a guy in plate armor and 15% of the time completely ignoring it), it can hinder enjoyment. This is why we went from an AC system to armor as DR: it doesn't make any sense for, say, padded armor to completely deflect an ogre's club.

This is also why sleeping in dungeons penalizes your Wound Recovery for most classes (druids and rangers start with a Talent that negates this), and why poisons and diseases are much more lethal: it's silly that you can get poisoned and have it barely do anything, or even result in instant death like in 2nd Edition AD&D.

So, at least when it doesn't come to magic and magical effects, try to keep things as realistic as possible without bogging the game down with a bunch of rolls to resolve minor things that won't really be an issue in the bigger picture. For example, a goblin has like 4 hit points and is typically encountered in a large group: is it really worthwhile to implement a hit location and/or injury tracking mechanic?

People talking about our chickens and unfortunately my wife and our daughter incubate eggs randomly, then our daughter not only names all of them, but takes the time to hold each of them at least once a day so while I like the idea of very fresh chicken--we had some very fresh beef once that tasted considerably better than store-bought--she would, ahem, not appreciate that.

On the topic of combat and action points, the reason for giving each action an incrementing cost as opposed to spending points from a base amount is that the latter method breaks down when you try to account for magic, multiple attacks, etc. I think it would also encourage players to try and spend each point possible to avoid the perception of wasting any, which was an issue in 4E where players would try to spend their minor action even if there was no real point.

If you increment the cost players would instead try to be as efficient as possible, so that they would get to act sooner. You can also provide very granular point costs for everything. For example, getting a potion out of your pack could have a cost of 7, but if it's just on a belt it might only have a cost of 2 or 3. Drawng a sword form a scabbard could have a cost of 2, while pulling an axe or mace out of a weapon frog might be 3-4.

Bruce popped in to tell everyone to buy Dungeons & Delvers, and if it intrigues you it's 25% off until the New Year. If you aren't sure, go to Bruce's channel because he has a playlist where he has been going through most of the book page-by-page, thus far only skipping the sorcerer and warlock classes because he hates them (not our implementation specifically, but in general).

I agree with Bruce: don't level up monsters, except when it might make sense. For example, a lowly goblin should remain level 1 or 2, but a veteran warrior would be level 4 or 5. But then you don't make all goblins veterans or whatever because the party hit 5th-level: they should still contend with the normal ones. The trick here is to keep the math in a range where if a level 5 or even 10 party goes into a goblin lair, that there's still a chance they can get slaughtered.

I'm not sure what to make of his comment about clerics and band-aids (a lack of tone makes it difficult to determine if he is joking or what), as clerics were never needed in Delvers. Everyone can just rest to get some VP back or downs a mending potion now and then when WP gets really low. Bards are nice in this regard since they can grant extra VP with Song of Rest.

I have no idea what to make of the yogurt comment, but I will say that I hate yogurt (yes, even with strawberries).