An Idea For A D20 Combat Point Pool

Something I’d considered on more than a few occasions was to change Dungeons & Delvers into a classless, skill-based game. Basically, you’d have an Adventurer, and then spend points on various stats and skills, as well as Talents and such.

Conceptually I’d prefer this method because then you have truly organic, flexible character creation and advancement: you can be a fighter with various skills, maybe just a bit of magic, or a wizard who really knows how to swing a sword because you had to learn that since you can’t always rely on magic.

Fortunately, Dungeons & Delvers has very flexible multiclassing, and there’s a lack of rigid level-based math, so you can get away with being, say, a fighter with only a level or two in wizard. Something I like to point out is that Melissa’s highest level character was some combination of rogue, ranger, and wizard, and there were no “balance” issues.

What’s stopped me is partially trying to devise a formula for improving stats and skills, as well as assigning a point value to Talents, but mostly it’s that in a skill-based game players will logically gravitate towards increasing whatever stats and/or skills will help them stab or shoot things to death, as well as avoid getting stabbed or shot to death.

When I played the d6 version of Star Wars, I would focus largely on I think the Blaster and Dodge skills, only bothering to increase Grenade when I was able to get my hands on thermal detonators, plus I think I had Blasters at something like 12 or 13d6 and it was getting really spendy to keep upping it.

In Shadowrun my go-to was a human street samurai archetype that specialized in the Uzi III since I liked the way it looked, with a smartlink, wired reflexes, and whatever other cybernetics I could get without running out of Essence and dying.

In both games it got so bad that, were the GM to try and throw something at us that could challenge my character, basically no one else could touch it. I guess one way to look at it is 3rd Edition’s math: monsters are designed something along the lines that a fighter fighting something of an equal Challenge Rating has around a 50:50 chance of hitting it, meaning that barring a specialized build and/or buffs everyone else with a lower Base Attack Bonus is screwed.

This is why in Dungeons & Delvers global damage bonuses aren’t options to choose from, but baked into the class: if Damage Bonus +1 was a Talent, then every fighter is going to take it, so why make it a choice at all?

There’s a reason why in 4th Edition people kept suggesting just giving characters the Weapon Focus and similar +x to whatever feats for free, because as the game was they were basically “feat taxes”, something you had to choose in order to keep your numbers up.

(Personally I would have just removed them, along with many other feats, and moved away from hyper rigid level-based math…which is what we did in Dungeons & Delvers.)

So, for now, Dungeons & Delvers will remain level-based and you’ll get your Attack, Defense, Damage, Magic, and Saving Throw bonuses, as well as extra attacks and such at specific levels (it also serves as a reward for sticking with a given class long enough).

For example, currently a 1st-level fighter gets +2 to hit, and has a base Defense of 12. This is because wizards get +0 to hit and have a Defense of 0, and I wanted rogues to be in the middle with +1 to both, because it made sense for a rogue to be a bit more capable in combat than a stock archetype wizard.

Attack Bonuses scale faster than Defense: fighters get +1 to hit every level, but Defense goes up something like every 3 levels. This is because in playtesting we had fighters with Defenses so high that they were nearly impossible to hit, and even if an enemy landed a blow their Armor reduced it to nearly nothing, anyway.

This was also when we had fairly high hit point inflation, so even after like a half dozen fights they were still doing really well without any sort of healing.

Anyway, something I’ve considered is that, instead of a separate Attack and Defense Bonus, you’ll get something like a Combat Pool. So instead of +2 to hit and Defense, you have, say, 4 points in your “combat pool”, and at the start of each round you allocate them between your attack and Defense.

This would replace a mechanic for fighting offensively and/or defensively, as well as the “total defense” action: you’d just have your character adjust his approach on a round-by round basis, based on what he is fighting, as well as how the fight is going.

The other mechanic I’d considered was to have set attack and defense modifiers (probably lower than they are now), but then give you points to allocate when attacking or getting attacked. It would make the most sense to use points before results are determined, but the d20 is pretty swingy and unless there are a lot of points to go around I can’t see it being consistently helpful.

So, I think just placing modifiers into both stats for an entire round would have a bigger impact and avoids storygaming metacurrency nonsense, though as a hybrid approach you could have a set attack and defense bonus, and then allocate a smaller amount of points between then.

For example, a fighter could have a +1 to attack and defense, and then each round allocate 2 points as desired between the two.

A few things to consider:

Many attacks have added effects if you exceed the target’s Defense by 5 or more points. Actually, every attack deals bonus damage per 5 points, but a lot have some other effect, such as increased Armor Penetration, Bleeding, knocking enemies Prone, etc. So there’s a benefit to having a high attack bonus.

Conversely, this is also why it’s good to have a high Defense, as enemy attacks often have some added effect.

Some weapons have an Accurate trait that adds a bonus to hit. Masterwork weapons also grant a bonus to hit. These wouldn’t be able to be moved to defense.

Finally, some wizard spells utilize attack rolls. Not all of them, just the single-target stuff like Bombard and Scorching Ray. These could certainly benefit from a wizard dumping Defense to focus on offense for a turn at least.

The downside could be assigning points when the GM is using lots of monsters, but I can just see you saying that all the goblins are just using the same distribution, except for maybe the ones with bows who are focusing on offense, and then only really worry about juggling points with the leader.

So, maybe not as big of a deal as I initially thought.

We also have a pretty neat parry mechanic that I wouldn’t be sure what to do with. How it currently works is that, when attacked, you can reduce your Attack Bonus by one until the end of your next turn, increasing your Defense by 1 against that attack. Some weapons have a Defensive trait, which increases this for free as well.

Not sure if we’ll go this route, just a random idea I came up with today.