Level Drain

While I occasionally lamented the severely limited playtesting opportunities for Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition over the past few months, the downtime did give me a chance to pursue other projects that had been languishing.

Even better, taking a break from a creative endeavor can give your brain time to rest, so that when you revisit it you're able to see it with fresh eyes and often come up with new ideas or improvements.

Two of those ideas—and ideally improvements—involved levels and skills.

I’d already entertained the idea of ditching classes, at least mostly. Instead of a bunch of classes—some of which like the druid, cleric, and paladin don’t even make sense as adventuring classes, anyway—you would just have an “adventurer” class, and then at the start pick a couple of Talents in order to steer your character towards a sort of archetype.

The problem is that, let’s say you want to play a fighter type. You roll up your character, pick some skills, and then it’s Talent time. In 1st Edition, the fighter gets +1 to hit and damage rolls—and that +1 to hit was a big deal because only warrior-type classes got a bonus to hit at all—a hefty chunk of Wound Points and Vitality Points, and then a Talent to top it all off.

At the bare minimum, for a warrior to stand out from everyone else he needs to be at least slightly better at hitting things, to reflect his increased skill with weapons. The problem is that, even if we restrict such a Talent to a weapon category (as opposed to all weapons), there’s nothing stopping everyone from snagging that whenever.

But what if you want to play a wizard? Whelp, we’d have to design Talents in such a way that you can pull off at least a novice wizard with just one or two. And since you burn Willpower Points to cast spells, we would have wanted to set it up so that those wizard-themed Talents granted at least 1 or 2 WP each.

Worse, we’d need to design all Talents such that they are “balanced” in accordance to those options. In 1st Edition this wasn’t an issue, because Talents could be fairly limited and the class both restricted access and determined when you got them.

For example, many wizard Talents were spells. If you wanted them, you had to play a wizard or multiclass into it later. If you multiclassed into it, you received fewer Willpower Points and spell Talents at the start, so there was a bit of delay and you couldn’t just “level dip” for a bunch of stuff like you could in 3rd Edition.

So then I thought, what if you instead roll up your character and then choose an archetype, which could be a bundle of whatever bonuses and abilities we wanted, just had to make sure they were more or less balanced with the other options.

Want to be a warrior? Then you get +1 to hit, +1 to damage, +1 Defense, and +3 Wound Points. Want to be an Expert? Then you get +1 Wound Point, a bunch of extra Skill Points and Skill Mastery (which would have been +1 to all skills, or roll a 1d6 and use that of the d20 result, whichever was higher). Wizards would get Willpower Points and then access to some spells.

Then, when you level up everyone would gain the same base stat improvements—Attack Bonus, Defense, Wound Points, and Skill Points—and then you’d get some points to spend on buying Talents. Talents would be lumped into categories, and if you spent enough points in a given category if would give you a sort of focus or mastery bonus.

For example, for every 10 points spent in the fighter category would give you a +1 Wound Point, and every 15 or 20 points would get you another +1 to hit. This would be similar to how in 1st Edition staying with a class long enough gave you class-specific bonuses.

The upside is that I would no longer have to balance Talents against each other, like feats in some versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Instead I can have them do…whatever, and just make the weaker and/or more focused ones cheaper.

Even better, I don’t need to bundle, say, a “can light fires by touch” Talent with another fire-themed ability just to potentially make it worthwhile: the former can cost like 1 or 2 points, while the latter can cost 3 or more.

One downside is that it made sense for the rogue/expert class to get lots of skill points each level (or bonus skill points now and then), and with this setup we’d have to make it so that you could spend Talent points on skills, or make a Talent that gives bonus skill points, and I’m not sure if anyone would want to bother with that.

Another is that, besides having to figure out the point cost of each Talent, leveling up would still involve upping various numbers, buying skills, and then spending points on more stuff for your character.

For many players this is fine, great even, but for my wife and oldest daughter not so much, because while they like some customization they don’t like the degree you get in Red Book, as it can quickly become too much for them to track (especially if playing a wizard where you can have a bunch of different spells to track, each with various ways to burn extra Willpower to enhance).

Additionally, some Talents might have minor and/or situational benefits that you might forget about: Melissa can’t count the number of times she forgot about her rogue’s Evasion Talent, which lets you force an enemy to re-roll an attack as a Reaction.

A while back, I had the idea to change monsters so that they had stats based on what they were, as opposed to linking at least some to some degree to whatever arbitrary level that they “should” be encountered at.

For example, in 3rd Edition an ogre is Challenge Rating 3, and so is intended as an encounter for a level 3 party. There’s some wiggle room on this (even before considering character optimization and part composition), but if you go two or more levels in either direction it could easily result in a trivial encounter or travesty, depending on which side of the screen you’re on.

This meant that the ogre’s stats need to be assigned in a way so as to ensure that it’s a decent level 3 challenge, which could mean adding bonus feats, natural armor, tweaking stats, etc. In other words, the ogre isn’t necessarily as strong and tough as it is because it’s an ogre, it’s the way it is because it’s primarily intended for a 3rd-level party.

And if you wanted to use an ogre against a higher-level party? Whelp, you can always just up its Hit Dice and/or pile on class levels, thereby making levels kinda pointless because monsters just get harder the higher level you get. Kinda like in 4th Edition how you can fight level 1 goblins at 1st-level, and then at 10th-level there are level 10 goblins. Or how in Skyrim bandits get more and more advanced weapons and armor.

I think this is silly, and so for Dungeons & Delvers 2nd Edition I started writing up a monster design document where monsters would have stats and abilities based on size, modified by various factors.

So, a Medium-sized creature would have a base of 10 Wound Points. If it’s a warrior, you tack on a few Wound Points, a bonus to hit and damage, and up its Defense from 10 to 11 or 12. Oh, and its Strength and Constitution is probably at least a point or two above the base creature’s average.

If it’s a sort of veteran or champion, then you can up its combat stats by a bit again, but it didn’t matter if the party ran into it at level 1 or 5 or 10: those stats would largely remain the same.

This would of course require me to throttle character stats so that they couldn’t quickly balloon out of control to the point where they were virtually impossible to hit, had so many Wound Points that they could soak dozens of attacks anyway, and reduce spell damage so that a wizard couldn’t just drop a 10d6 firebomb on the bad guy and obliterate him in one hit, save result be damned.

Which, we’d already been doing for the most part. Due to armor-as-DR-only, we ended up removing Vitality Points and drastically reducing Wound Point gains, so instead of a fighter getting 4 + Con modifier WP each level (and then 2 Vitality), you’d only get 3 Wound Points, period, and then your Con modifier was applied once to the total.

Really, the hard part was trying to find that sweet spot to cap wizard spell damage. In the end single target stuff could dish out nine dice, but the Willpower cost skyrocketed. Plus Drain enhancement costs were all changed to random amounts, and there were additional restrictions and penalties imposed on enhancements. Still doable, especially with the right focus and material components to offset the cost.

Anyway, it ended up being a waste because we decided to scrap typical Dungeons & Dragons magic in favor of something rooted more in folklore, so spells became more subtle and time consuming, something you’d likely prepare ahead of time outside of combat (mind you, there are still some flashy spells, but they tend to require focuses to avoid taking a long time to cast and reduce the intensive Willpower cost).

But this got me thinking that if monsters don’t have levels: do the characters need them? What if at the start of the game you chose a stat array, and then spent points on skills and maybe Talents? I say maybe because as part of this setup, you wouldn’t have an auto-scaling attack and defense. Instead, those would also become skills.

I know Shadowrun did something like this, where you would assign “priorities” to things like race, stats, skills, magic, money, etc. The problem I had with Shadowrun was that, in the games I played in, it was best to focus on a gun skill and then dodge, so that you could shoot everything and avoid getting hit.

In play, this meant that for my character, after funneling enough Karma into guns and dodge, if the GM whipped up enemies so that it was a challenge for me, it was unlikely that anyone else could hit them, and their attacks would be nigh impossible to avoid. But if he created them to be a challenge for everyone else, I could blow them away with minimal effort and there was virtually no chance of me getting hit.

It’s been a while though, and the group I used to game with back then had a habit of not reading the rulebooks and the GMs liked to make up shit so that they could “win” against the players, because to them the point of the game was to kill us (or at least fuck us over as much as possible before we just called it quits because they rarely ran anything resembling an adventure with an end goal).

But in the case of Shadowrun the guy that normally ran it might have just been overly generous with Karma and couldn’t be bothered to read the books (which were admittedly complex), sooo he might not have been throwing well-designed encounters at us (and probably not using all the available options, like drones and magic). Can’t be sure though, as this would have been around nearly thirty years ago.

I’ve found myself more and more drawn to the idea of making a character that is functional at the start of the game and over the course of play, you’d get minor amounts of Experience Points which you could use to incrementally improve your character, as opposed to accumulating enough and then gaining a bunch of stuff all at once.

This would give players more time to learn how their character functions, and have much more control over how it improves or changes.

Each Skill would have a Difficulty value based on how useful it is expected to be (ie, Swords would be 4 or even 5, while something like Streetwise might only be 2). If you want to buy the Skill at +1, spend XP equal to its Difficulty. Want to increase it? Multiply its Difficulty by whatever you’re trying to improve it to. This could avoid a character just ramping up certain skills, or at least as quickly.

Not sure for Wound Points. Since there are no levels they wouldn’t automatically increase. Maybe start with 10, and then give them a Difficulty but it’s based on what you want to increase it to, minus 10, so going from 10 to 11 would only be effectively a +1 increase, instead of paying x11.

Or I can try using that Wound Level system I cooked up a few years ago. Though…not sure I want to juggle all that with a bunch of monsters.

For Talents, just pay the cost of the Talent, and as previously mentioned this setup avoids having to try and balance all of the Talents against each other. Would also give players a compelling choice if certain skills start getting too high and they don’t want to bank a bunch of XP for another skill increase.

For magic, this requires an Occultism skill at a certain point (probably at least +3) and then an Arcane Novice Talent (probably costs like 4 points), which grants access to basic spells (which have their own point cost to learn), so there would be a hefty investment to avoid the equivalent of level dipping, here.

I’m thinking everyone has a base amount of Willpower Points, and am considering letting players spend these for re-rolls and such, resist mind-affecting attacks, soak psychic damage, and/or power/activate magic items, so there’s a point to them even if you don’t have spells. I don’t want to do a storygamey metacurrency if I can avoid it, but don’t want to limit them too much because then players might forget they even have them.

Yet another upside is that I won’t have to even bother balancing classes against each other. This was an issue with the paladin, because conceptually it was a fighter plus extra stuff. In the end it ended up being slightly better at the expense of having to abide by the seven virtues, but with this setup it’s on the player to spend points to pick up desired abilities.

Finally, I think this would also be good for GMs, because now you can write adventures about whatever instead of having to concern yourself with character level. Ideally, this will encourage players to play smarter and use more tools, because now you can’t rely on levels and hit point inflation to see you through a fight.