#dnd 3e

i’m going to talk about my dnd feelings at some length until perhaps it will become clear why i’m working on the dnd homebrew project that i am.

this post has become extremely long, so i’m hiding most of it below.

on 4/20 (no relation) of 2016, i tweeted, apropo of encountering The Fantasy Trip for the first time: 

i think The Fantasy Trip is more or less the game i imagined DnD was before i ever actually encountered its rules

before i explain that, let me give a little bit of context.

context: TFT was the ultimate precursor to GURPS, the tabletop rpg that loomed large over my high school years and still occupies a place in my heart. if you want to read more about it, here’s a dedicated fansiteandhere’s a review by a longtime player.

personal context: my first edition of dnd was 3E, and when i opened the book i remember seeing that first chapter on abilities and thinking to myself “oh, that makes sense, the game probably has some set of mechanical abilities that represent the different things different characters can do and the game is about combining those in different ways to make the character you want.” then i read about how, in dnd, ‘ability’ meant ‘ability scores,’ of which there were only six and everyone had them.

in contrast, when i, fifteen years later, opened TFT, i was confronted by exactly that: a set of completely modular mechanics that characters can have, and a very minimal set of rules for combining them. it was a moment of great healing.

dnd 3E did actually what i expected it to have, in the end, but the modular mechanical abilities were spread throughout different parts of the system, their largest concentration as feats and spells, but also attached to different races and classes. however, the non-modular class-level-based mechanics were the beating heart of most dnd characters (on a continuum, of course, from the least module-friendly barbarian up through the specialist classes into the terrifying bonus feat engine that was the 3E fighter and summiting in the endlessly variable wizard) and i felt, although i don’t think i was able to put words to this feeling until i got into GURPS years later, that dnd was too rigid and inflexible in the kinds of characters it allows you to make.

now, there are a couple of good reasons why a game would be very rigid about how it allows you to combine its mechanics:

1. some of those mechanics might combine in balance-upsetting ways. in particular, dnd (and its imitators) are cautious to keep the best combat defenses and durability separate from the best offensive abilities. see, for example: restricting spellcasters from wearing armor and penalizing barbarians and monks who do so.
   
2. allowing players to choose any arbitrary collection of abilities leads to a kind of combinatorial explosion in character builds and can be paralyzing to non-obsessive players. this creates a huge burden of knowledge, which only grows as more content is added to the game.

the second of these seems like it became a failure point for 3.5E after a while. even though the design of the game was supposed to front-load the largest choices about your character, the gradual multiplication of race, class, prestige class, feat and spell options (to say nothing of magic items!) increased the burden of knowledge to an unmanageable level. 

of course, it was still a playable game and people were welcome to filter out the parts they didn’t like or the books they didn’t know that well, but what become core pieces of the game wound up spread over altogether too many books (for example, the tiefling race in Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and the warlock in Complete Arcane). in 4E, i think the intention was to limit this by basically making all character builds basically palette swaps of the fighter/rogue/wizard/cleric quartet. as far as i’m concerned, that fell flat because the preposterous, somewhat broken variety of 3.5E was actually core to the appeal.

now, a person might read the above and think that i would hate 5E because it does exactly the things that i was upset at 3E for doing: 5E takes its pool of modular mechanics and packages them up in classes and subclasses. sure, there are character backgrounds (honestly, an extremely good addition, although i don’t think i’m thrilled with the execution) and a small pool of feats, but the mechanical bulk of character creation is bundled up in your choice of race, class and subclass. certain classes (especially dedicating spellcasters) and subclasses (battle master, the elemental monk tradition) let you dial up the complexity ceiling, but the floor remains low.

it might be that i’ve mellowed in my old age or that i’ve seen how some of my non-dnd-playing friends were able to easily get into 5E, but i really sympathize with the design decisions. the designers have two objectives in a character creation system: giving characters cool powers and not overwhelming players with options. the class/subclass structure is a good way to limit the explosion of choices and make a more accessible game.

it also makes a game that’s strictly linear in its expansion. 

ever new subclass added to the game adds exactly that: one subclass. a new spell might add a little more complexity, if it’s available to multiple caster classes, but in general each new thing adds only itself to the game, not itself plus a thousand possibilities of combination.

aside: i definitely don’t love the kitchen sink of 3.5E with all its expansions. not enough designers set about to design replacements for core material, and too many design supplements to it. although i never owned it, i really like the “variant players’ handbook” idea of Arcana Unearthed/Evolved. imo, every book that introduced new races or core classes should have offered the suggestion of what races or classes to remove from the game if you were including the new ones.

anyway, here’s the line of design thinking it led me down:

1. what if the subclasses were another layer, like backgrounds are, that gets chosen independently of class?
   
2. there’d need to be some way to make sure that classes with different core mechanics (like fighters and wizards) get different mechanics from the “same” subclass.
3. each mechanic should still be as modular as possible. The restrictions on who can have it should be at the level of the module, not the level of the ‘subclass.’
4. the ‘subclasses’ will be themed lists of features (which can have prerequisites) and spells, that characters can choose from as they gain levels.

in my original sketch, the related ‘wild’ classes (barbarian, druid, ranger) could be created by applying a ‘wild’ theme to the prototypical classes of fighter, magic-user and specialist, respectively. for this not to feel as flat as dnd 4e, the themes would need to have significant differences in the kinds of mechanics they offered. for this not to feel as overwhelming as 3E, each theme would have to be well-focused.

the state of the project now is that i’m replacing both alignment (because i never liked the dnd alignments too much in the first place) and subclasses as these ‘themes,’ which i’m calling ‘alignments.’ one alignment, for example, is based on order and protection. its spell list  largely overlaps with the cleric spell list, and its features are mostly defensive and healing mechanics. a magic-user in this theme might be able to become fairly tank-y, but they wouldn’t have the damage output of magic-users in the other themes, that don’t have the same sorts of straight survivability features.

anyway that’s the extremely involved homebrew dnd project i’m working on right now:

1. design the three template classes that will be themed by choosing an alignment.
   
2. draw up a list of mechanics i want to be modular
   
3. assign them and the list of spells to my custom set of alignments

i have designed the template classes and listed 220 different features (feats). there are five different alignments, each of which has access to 58 feats. 20 are more generic and open to characters of any alignment.

i still have to write full rules text for the feats and probably design 10-20 new spells to fill out a couple of the lists. but i’d say that i am actually very close to having a playable total rebuild of dnd 5e?

go me, i guess.