Earlier in the week I posted some rules for Gritty Healing & Survival in 5e. These work for group looking for that kind of long-term resource management and play. However, it leaves a bit of a gap when it comes to healing spells and magic. In fact, most gritty mechanics suffer from the problem of setting up a system for persistent injuries, then introduce magic that lets you skip past it. Also, it suffers from the problem of turning the cleric into the heal-bot for a party, making sit out of the action during encounters to heal everyone later. So having some way to align the leaning mechanic with the core idea of recovery as a central design principle is important. Without it, you end up with the same effect as healing overnight but force the healing PC to burn all their resources and sit most encounters out.
The heroic playstyle of 5e D&D is a lot of fun, but it’s focused on the encounter for resource management and pacing. Sometimes players want to break things up with more of a gritty or survivalist style. This means adding gameplay elements that focus on attrition, strategic resource management, mitigation, and lean into the fragile nature of health. In other words, it extends gameplay into longer term campaign elements, rather than containing it to individual encounters. As a result of Matt Colville’s recent twitch hangout, I was inspired to write down my own thoughts on gritty rules for 5e.
I’ve had a few conversations in the passing months about average values on dice and how that relates to hit points in 5e. Word of warning, this is about to lean hard into some nerd stuff. However, as esoteric as this may seem, it directly effects monster design and play frequently. The biggest impact it seems to have is when people try to anticipate the outcome of a roll, worse if they design a rule around it. Also, this can result in either getting player hit points or monster hit points wrong when using average results. The solution isn’t as complex as this is going to make it seem, I’m just laying out the specifics so it’s all apparent.
Our site migration is now complete! This should mean a much better and faster experience for everyone visiting the site. You will have noticed it’s been a bit quiet around here and this has been the reason. The previous wordpress site was just too slow and solutions to make it faster were either too expensive or as difficult as switching hosts. Given this is a content oriented blog and doesn’t need a lot of scripting, I decided to switch over to building the site on Jekyll and hosting in Github Pages.
Like most 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons DMs, I’m constantly tinkering with the rules in hopes of improving the experience at the table. But it takes a bit of time and testing before I consider an idea worthy of officially adding to my game. As such, I’ve been testing out some ideas on Twitter for feedback. These are the various rules I’ve thrown out for feedback during up through the end of April 2021. After a time, if they seem worthwhile I’ll officially add them to my own house rules list.
Handling failure is something people seem to struggle with in 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. When to fail, what happens when you do, and how to keep the game moving are constant topics of discussions. In my view, Progressive Failure and Rising Tension is a very useful technique, but it’s just one of many in the DMs toolbox. As a discussion topic, people often seem to misunderstand the role of failure in RPGs. Worse, a small sub-population has begun to take terms like ‘failing-forward’ to mean failure shouldn’t be possible. So taking a moment to consider the options and tools available can make even failure a fun experience in TTRPGs.
Failing to Fail
I recently started aggregating some data I’ve gathered about spells from 5e Dungeons & Dragons. Primarily, this has been for fun and to see if I’d find anything surprising or interesting. Additionally, I wanted to get some numbers to help me assess additional spells or subclasses for my home game. So I hope you’ll find this fun and interesting yourself and I would love to hear any observations you have.
Taking down monsters in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons is arguably what you will spend the most time doing in game. Defeating a creature isn’t just a matter of damage, as many monsters will also have Weaknesses (W), Resistances (R), or Immunities (I). Monster with a particular weakness takes double the amount of damage from that type of attack. Likewise, a foe with resistance will only take half the amount of damage from that particular damage type. And in some cases, an enemy that is immune to a particular effect will take no damage at all from it. Therefore, understanding resistances can be a critical element to surviving as an adventurer or planning as a DM.
Many monsters in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons list a language in their stat block. Aside from its ability to hurl insults in combat, sharing a language can open options for lore or negtiation during play. But which languages to most monsters speak and understand? This isn’t an easy question to answer because DnD does not provide their monster stat blocks in an easily parsable format. So I found The Great DnD 5e Monster Spreadsheet online, cleaned up the data and began to parse out some of the the answers.
I greatly enjoyed my recent interview on the podcast, Thinking Critically: A D&D Discussion. We talk about agency in games in all it’s many forms, what agency is and isn’t, where it ends, how it’s traded, and how it interacts with game mechanics. I highly recommend the podcast for anyone running tabletop RPGs of any kind.