cashew | Game design thoughts

(Am sick, so brain rambling.)

D&D and TTRPG design thoughts

So my issue with modern 5e design (because older D&D is much closer to a wargame's focus on resource management and supply logistics) is that the TTRPG sphere has moved into the, what a lot of people like to call, "cinematic" gaming style. In other words, people want imagine their characters doing cool stuff rather than crawling dungeons and poking every rock with a ten-foot pole. Now, to be fair, there are definitely still groups that enjoy the dungeon crawler game and are happy doing some fantasy grave robbing, but I would posit the majority have moved on from that particular feature and want to do more "cinematic", aka fast-paced big shiny confrontation, types of storytelling.

And some don't want to do any wilderness exploration at all and would much rather be running around in a city doing some urban fantasy mysteries.

And while, yes, there is an argument to be made for playing a new system, there is also the reality of D&D dominating the market share. And frankly, when you look at the relative comparisons of the slightly more popular TTRPGs that aren't D&D, it's still D&D adjacent style games. By which I mean they are games focused on combat, such as Pathfinder.

In other words, the TTRPG hobby is still very firmly leaning into the combat pillar. (Reference:Three pillars of engagement.)

So, given this situation, it's not surprising that D&D still focuses the majority of its rules on combat or combat adjacent activities, such as managing income for upgrading equipment. However, in the modern era where the majority of the roleplaying focus is on what the character would like to do, having rigidly limiting rules that still pulls on the wargaming tradition of resource management really hinders the fun of social storytelling games.

Plus, it feels too much like doing taxes and keeping an accounting book rather than playing a narrative game. There is a reason why a lot of the math stuff have been off loaded to videogames, where resource management sims have grown into its own genre.

I guess what I'm trying to say is D&D needs to de-accounting-fy its design philosophy. Earning gold to buy loot is an engagement cycle best left for videogames. The nature of tabletop (which means having to calculate manually rather than having the math happen in the background) means having less math provides a better paced narrative, and the decision making isn't as explicitly a matter of trying to find the best probabilistic odds, instead it becomes more about the narrative and character logic.

But D&D is still a combat game, only more and more it's about big flashy moments and not about nitty-gritty resource management. As such, D&D desperately needs to streamline how it handles combat, from the bottom up.

-Class-

5e D&D (both 2014 and 2024 versions) has too many poorly conceived classes with too much role overlap. As such, I think D&D should go back to the drawing board and re-think its fundamental core archetypes.

At its roots, combat of D&D is broken into 4 roles: muscle power, brain power, deus ex machina, logistics.

- Muscle Power

The combat style of Muscle Power archetype is "I punch the problem into submission". A lot of people take this to mean dumb brute force, but anyone who's actually participated in physical activities recognize that there is a lot of technique involved in leveraging one's physical prowess to secure victory.

No, Muscle Power simply means the fantasy is a competent combatant who can leverage one's fighting experience to gain the upper hand. That means having quick reflexes, thinking ahead of time, making the most of cover and flanking opportunities, etc.

So the Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, Rogue, Monk, and even Paladin, should really be lumped into the same group.

My proposal is Fighter remains the core class, with the rest being subclasses: Barbarian - the ragey fighter, Ranger - the ... ranged fighter, Rogue - the sneaky fighter, Monk - the agile fighter, Paladin - the holy fighter.

All fighters need to have a minimum of 13 Strength. And depending on the subclass, Constitution or Dexterity can be added to the hit, damage, and defense calculations. For example, Barbarian should get a defensive boost from Constitution, Monks should be able to add Dexterity to their damage roll, etc.

Also, all three physical attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution) should contribute to the combative competence depending on the style of fighting. For example, Barbarians should have extra to hit boost from Strength, while a Thief should get bonuses from Dexterity. All weapons should be Strength based, with light and ranged weapons getting a bonus from Dexterity, so we can erase this idea that you can be physically weak yet still manage to use a longbow.

Finally, we need to give each subclass their own resource to tactically manage. Most of them have already been built in, with rage for Barbarian, sneak attack for Rogue, blessed strikes for Paladin, Ki/Focus for Monks. It's Rangers who seem to be missing a real identity, to which I propose giving them maneuvers.

- Brain Power

Brain Power is the group in which I classify the Artificer and certain sub-classes of Rogues and Rangers. Rather than use overwhelming power, the idea is to out maneuver the opponent, using traps, poisons, terrain, tools, etc. In other words, the guerrilla warfare types. It's not about taking out the army, but rather cutting off the supply lines.

For this group, I propose the game clarify the class identity and recognize they're fundamentally playing by a different set of rules. Either cut this style of confrontation out of combat, or make combat two fold, where these classes have a different goal than the "reduce HP to 0" that face the Muscle Power group. While enemies are engaged with trading blows, the Brain Power class is tasked with achieving a separate objective involving sabotage. If they don't finish their task within, say, 5 rounds of combat, the combat is lost. If the party can't thin out the enemy, the objective still fails. This forces the party to figure out how to cooperate on combat in ways beyond "reduce enemy's HP to 0".

The other alternative is to establish two forms of combat and clarify that Brain Power types simply aren't going to have as much fun in a Muscle Power type of game, and vice versa.

As D&D currently tries to solve the problem by spreading the Brain Power archetype across all the Muscle Power archetypes to try and bolster their flexibility results in an unfortunate situation were some core classes straight up don't get any traits/features to help while other classes are still competent in a Muscle Power game whilst being able to excel at the Brain Power game.

...and I haven't even gotten to the magic stuff yet...

- Deus Ex Machina

Despite the name I picked, I actually enjoy magic users and like playing with magic in RPGs, but the way D&D designed their rules, magic is effectively a Deus Ex Machina. And in the case of the Cleric class, the description is actually quite literal as the Cleric's capstone ability is to call on their god for personal favors. So.

The problem with the Deus Ex Machina archetype is that rather than keeping the magic limited and focused on being an alternative solution, magic keeps getting pushed into the category of "better solution". Videogames solved the problem by making it so that magic has very limited use. Sure, you can cast a giant fireball at the enemy to reduce their HP, but fireball does zero damage to structure or a locked door, so you're still stuck with looking for a key to unlock the door like every other mundane fighter. Except you also don't have the HP and armor to back you up through the hordes of enemies you have to mow through to find the key.

OK, I'm veering off topic. The point here is that D&D wants to both be purely mechanical but also narrative in how it handles magic, which leads to magic becoming this all powerful yet also oddly specific weirdo system. Firebolt can set objects on fire, but not the clothes you wear, so you can't get extra burn damage from the spell when used in combat.

And honestly, I don't have a good fix for this. The usual strategy is either everyone is magical or everyone isn't. Having "some magical" while the others are "mundane" makes it pretty much impossible to truly balance unless you severely limit the magic to be not much more than just Quality of Life upgrade rather than a nuke that turns the tide of battle mechanic, which is how the Deus Ex Machina archetype treats magic. Which brings me to the next archetype.

- Logistics

Effectively, this is the group that solves the Quality of Life issue, or what I consider are combat logistics. This is the group called on to answer the logistical questions such as:

How do we bring enough water and food for the expedition?
How do we heal now that we've got injured party members?
How do we carry back all this gold we stole from the dragon?
How do we sneak past the all seeing eye of the Big Bad Evil Guy?
How do we remove the curse from the evil artifact that we accidentally touched?

Et cetera.

This is the group that's not meant to be engaged in the actual combat itself, but rather are dedicated to solving the logistics of combat. This is where the wargaming roots come in, because so much of wargaming is dealing with supply line logistics and not about each individual shot fired between units once the battle starts.

Going back to wargaming and de-emphasizing the impact of combat and refocus on the accounting game of logistics isn't really a viable solution and is clearly not the direction D&D wants to head toward. In which case, I suggest that the supply line logistics get streamlined and simplified and, like the Deus Ex Machina stuff, get folded back into the combat oriented classes.

Lower the power of magic, make magic and mundane attacks do the same thing but flavored differently, and prevent magical solutions to non-combat based problems during character and narrative moments. Get rid of utility spells and keep only the magic damaging spells, which rely on the mental stats (Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma). Magic damage should scale at about the same rate as physical damage, with the only difference being some monsters are weak to magic while others are resistant to magic. This way, everyone gets to engage in combat while still having about the same amount of utility outside of combat.

If D&D simply cannot get rid of the power magic fantasy, the other solution is to significantly decrease the role of magic in combat. Make it prohibitively costly to use a magic spell. Increase casting time for all spells to something that only makes sense in a long drawn out combat that requires a nuke option, and give magic users significantly less magical resources. Even just making spells take two turns to cast rather than one turn means adding so much more tactical decision making by the party. Do we have the magic spell user waste a turn trying to get off a powerful nuke spell or do we try to tough it out until we're out of combat and heal up with a powerful restoration spell?

If magic users are limited to a small list of 20 spells and only have enough magic to cast 2 or 3 spells per day, then they'll have to rely on good old physical weapons most of the time and try to figure out when they should be using reality altering magic. And if they blow their daily allotment of magic on combat, they face the possibility of not being able to use their Deus Ex Machina solution when it comes to the logistical side of things.

-Level-

I'm gonna say it right now, there are too many levels in 5e D&D. Which is ironic given there's even more levels in 3/3.5e. But we're back to that issue of this is a tabletop game and thus all the calculations are manual. The numbers start to get out of whack pretty quick once we get into the 10th level up. I think this is the one place where I agree with OD&D and AD&D. Characters should really only get 10 levels.

Every time a character levels up, there should be significant mechanical advantage so that each level up feels like a genuine milestone.

Level 1: Introduce basic resolution mechanics. (Attack, damage, Armor Class, Attributes, Movement, Action Economy, etc.)
Level 2: Start introducing class-specific mechanics. (Weapon mastery bonuses, extra attacks, and spell slots.)
Level 3: Introduce sub-class mechanics. (Resource points such as rage, wild shape, channel divinity, inspiration, etc.)
Level 4: Introduce complex interaction mechanics. (Picking new features/traits that boosts a specific style of play.)
Level 5: Major upgrade to lower level mechanics. (Characters should have maxed out attribute/stats/whatever at this point and have access to the full "core" kit for the rest of the game.)
Level 6: Introduce new augmentation factors. (New class/subclass/features that is meant to interact with the previous class/subclass/features introduced in the game.)
Level 7: Inject exceptions to previously established rules. (Give new options for alternative uses of the previous subclass resource points. Introduce resistance and immunities to encourage unconventional solutions to problems.)
Level 8: Expand rules to include multi-classing options. (I genuinely think multi-classing should only be allowed after getting fairly far in a single class first from a design perspective. It helps preserve class identity, which is the whole purpose of having a class-based advancement system in the first place.)
Level 9: Throw in all the advanced mechanics. (This is really less about character progression and more about combat complexity, where things start to get complicated and the primary objective should fully shift away from "bring HP to 0" and set a whole new goal to test the optimization of interaction levers.)
Level 10: You Win.

There's really no reason to drip-feed the level progression. Yes, this requires further slimming down the game mechanics, but I really do think that a lot of the "tactical" thinking D&D is supposedly promoting really aren't all that tactical, simply because D&D isn't built with opportunity cost in many, many of the options (especially when it comes to spells). And in a roleplaying game, opportunity cost is the only reason choices are interesting.

Therefore, fewer levels and more opportunity cost trade offs for each decision should in turn make the game more "brainy" as people keep wanting it to be.

-Lore-

OK, this section is going to be real quick. I fucking hate D&D lore. Look, I appreciate how much of D&D lore affected RPG as a genre. HP, Armor Class, defense/offense stat, physical-v-mental split, etc. It's all very classic. But the actual story of D&D even to this day is still very much steeped in settler colonialist framework of "take the enemy's resources and make it our own". It's simplistic, it's dumb, it's poorly thought out, it's racist AF.

I wish D&D mechanics can be separated from the lore, and many people have been able to do that. However, so much of the lore is baked into the game's mechanics at this point that I think this might be impossible. Heck, the very fact that there even is a martial-magical divide is steeped in the lore of how magic works in the world of D&D.

Unfortunately, I can't see a way to fix it. Other than "go play a different RPG", but that's not going to happen because...well, historical momentum and all that.

Anyway. Frustrated with how much TTRPG is dominated by a system that has so, so many flaws, and yet at the same time...it is so iconic that if you want to play a TTRPG, you're going to see D&D fingerprints everywhere.

Honkai Star Rail - quick thoughts

And speaking of lore... Well, what can I say? It's been a while since I've dipped into HSR but what I've read has not filled me with much enthusiasm. Such is the unfortunate fate for those of us who have a tendency to prefer side characters. It's really a bit dispiriting to see HSR drop the opportunity to push more Chinese-cultural framing into their storytelling. If you can't rely on a Chinese company to incorporate Chinese themes, then...well.

And I'm also a bit annoyed at the Wuxia/Xianxia genre becoming the international "representation" of Chinese culture. Mostly because for me, I always found the political imperial dramas (such as the Three Kingdoms/Water Margins in the classics and 《汉武帝》/《唐太宗李世民》 for the more modern representatives) to be more defining of Chinese media. And I don't mean that it has to be a period piece, but political maneuvering and machinations always makes its way into most Chinese stories, regardless of whether the story is modern or a period piece or futuristic science fiction.

So I was really hoping to see more political machinations, deal making, treaty negotiation (but y'know, on a stellar level given HSR's sci-fi setting), yet we keep getting the same old same old "adventurers on a journey and beat up baddies" type of story. And the abandonment of the traditional aesthetic for the bog-standard "Western" aesthetic when it comes to basically well...everything.

Anyway, am disappointed in HSR. Not sure what else to really say at this point.