Homebrew

To Modify an Existing System or Not to Modify an Existing System

Sorry folks, this is going to be a long one.

For me, this is the ages old question, a query that haunts me in my most melancholic moments as I consider how, or even why, to move forward as someone who designs things for me, and potentially others, to derive play from.

Modifying an existing system could be considered one of the foundational elements of our entire hobby. There are few that create new and innovative mechanical structures from which we derive our fun, and although I would like to be one of them, there are doubts and questions that hold me back. This is also not paramount, I am not demanding of myself that lofty title, “originalist,” or anything of the like. What I am seeking however, is a set of rules that codify all of the interesting elements of a P&PRPG so that we, as players, can clearly distinguish our progression along any of those paths that we pursue.

A path of progression clearly delineates when we are moving forward and when we are not, and this distinction is of utmost importance in a game. In the games I have played, especially those recently, when I level up, it feels hollow. (And yes, this is a me problem, I completely understand that.) How did my character obtain these new abilities? Where do these new spells come from? Why do I hit better now than I did 10 minutes ago, or yesterday? These questions of course lead me to another question: did my character actually progress?

Well, in the most basic sense, our characters progressed along the path of fighting. Even if one of the abilities indicates that we can do something other than fight better, most of those are designed for the fighting bits. The reason I am looking for mechanical systems that delineate and describe things other than combat, is because they are also interesting, and I would like to see how my character can progress along those paths.

More on Social Mechanics

There are many reasons I want social mechanics in my game, or a game that I am playing. Social interactions are some of the most complex interactions that we, as humans in a mundane world, ever have, and we have them all the time. The list of factors is astounding; cleanliness, affiliation, appearance, mood, demeanor (whether or not we are showing our mood), hunger (hangry anyone?), etiquette, language, dialect, intent. As I have stated before, the rules determine, or heavily influence, how players engage with the game around the table. Limited rules around socializing can leave the small details in the wind, and having no rules allows for the verisimilitude to be completely thrown out.

If my character is an expert courtesan, negotiations and introductions should be a path along which they make progress. But what does that progress look like? Is it just a simple number growing larger and larger over time? Is it new features and abilities tailored to the council and court intrigue experience? Do they learn how to seduce the orc, embracing them on the ledge of crumbling bridge rather than shoving them to their ultimate demise?

The Mechanical Hierarchy

One of the first lessons I learned from dissecting 5e, attempting to learn how it is formed and what all of its organs do, was the concept of a mechanical hierarchy. This idea was also gleaned from some other reading I did, but my first major project really pounded this idea into my head. The basic rules of a game should be simple and clear. These are the laws of the game, and thus, the game world. Unless you are trying to create a different experience, something “way out there,” it is best to start with rules that are analogous to what we know as players, as people. The more the game world resembles our own, from the core, the easier it is for us as players to embody characters and make decisions that make sense in the fiction of the game world.

If your character is an elf, a bipedal humanoid with similar sense and motile capabilities, then picking up a cup of coffee is something we don’t need to try to understand or unpack. We simply state our character does it as it is a thing we understand innately. The rules here, which most games do not explicitly state but implicitly include, is that our biological form is similar enough that we can infer basic movement, sense, and interaction capability.

Once we have these basic rules, our foundational laws, we can then start layering on additional, often smaller, rules. These additional rules are where we can start deviating to create the fantasy, heroic, or supernatural elements of the setting, the true separation from our real world.

The elf has superior eyesight to the human, allowing them to discern more detail in low lighting conditions. This is something humans can only do with technology, and given the state of technology in a fantasy world, that capability for us is not present. Once again, it is something we can understand, just a little stretch that our imaginations can easily grasp. You know how you don’t see so well when the lighting is low? Well, your elf character doesn’t face that hindrance.

As we build a mechanical structure for our players to understand our game (and the game world), each additional tier of rules breaks one or some of those that came before. An elf can see better in darker conditions, while a dark elf can see in total darkness. The first rule broke the implicit rule of being hindered by dimness, while the second rule broke the following by allowing a dark elf to see in the dark altogether.

Modification of Existing Rules

As a completely amateur game designer, I struggle with the idea of creating my own rules set, a daunting task, or using an existing one to get my feet wet. The benefits of using an existing system are plentiful; it’s already out there, people already understand and interact with it; I just have to modify the bits and pieces I don’t like while the leaving the rest intact; it allows me to stay in the shallow end of design while I learn. But then I run into another problem.

How many modifications does it take before I am essentially making my own system? If I start from something, then modify it so much it looks nothing like the original, was there really a point to me using it in the first place? Should I have just started on my own? With all of the content and ideas and discussions I ingest around game design and P&PRPGs, will it ever really be my own or just a distillation of different things I like from different sources?

And here is the big question: am I overthinking all this nonsense and just distracting myself from having a fun time creating something at all? Probably, but I’ll wait to hear back from my therapist on that one.

Probably the biggest reason I have focused more on modifying an existing system is that I know that system. I spent a few years digging into all of its nooks and crannies to figure out how to fit my friends ideas into his game so him, and the rest of us playing it, could have more fun. It also feels really good to own something, to have that little part of this wider experience be yours. My friend wanted this piece to be his, and together we created that, and he loved it, and the rest of us loved it, and that feels really good.

Working from an existing system allowed us to keep the rules we wanted, which were the main rules, we didn’t get rid of anything. We just created a new system, stapled it on the top, and kept moving along. And it worked. That was the whole point. The existing system didn’t do what we wanted, so we filled the gap, and I learned many things and had a lot of fun along the way.

Creating Something New

This is possibly the hardest option. Or maybe not, maybe by looking at all the polished systems out there and comparing what ideas I have I am sabotaging myself right out of the gate. Maybe it would actually be easier to ignore what I know is a P&PRPG and create the thing I want to see. Creating something new comes with the burden of developing ideas to fill in all the spaces players expect to be present. Character options, rules for interacting with the world, guidance for theme and atmosphere, as well as an understandable foundation of systems.

Starting from scratch allows the design to go in any direction. This is both a boon and a curse. One of the problems I have had in the past is bloat, a concept I have heard the most about in the video game space. Oh, look at this cool thing, I want to add it in! And before you know it, the weather system is a massive chunk covering dozens of pages and, in reality, would be of no use to anyone as the arbiter will obviously ignore it for ease-of-play.

And yes, I wanted an intricate system for determining weather, how it interacted with the ground, and what it would do for a traveling party. This excessive structure allowed for forecasts and complex magical and mundane interactions to determine how the skies were behaving in the hopes of making the world more exciting and challenging. Every time I see those notes today I just sigh and wonder what is wrong with my brain.

Building from blank also allows new avenues to be explored. I determined years ago that I wanted a system that represented mastery in a tangible fashion for the players, including the arbiter. When a novice rolls a larger die and a master rolls a smaller one, that tense excitement could make or break a session, and I really believe that it is a viable concept. The iterations for tracking mastery have mostly revolved around numbers growing larger, which is not bad, the most obvious case being that so many games use it. But I think there is a different way, a new avenue, and using an existing system would not afford me the opportunity to explore it’s potential, because I can’t find a game that uses a shrinking margin of possibilities to track progress.

My Homebrew

This leads me to the ideas and concepts I have had that I would like to introduce to 5e. Whether they should become a true homebrew, possibly even a rules set that I release, is yet to be decided, given the vast scope of changes it could eventually lead to.

The Importance of Ability Scores

Ability scores, for a few generations of D&D, have grown stale. Once you generate them, you derive your modifier from them and never really interact with the scores again. My solution to this actually came from another problem I was trying to solve, Hit Point Mountain. As characters level and the adversaries scale with them, their abilities may become more powerful, but the slog just gets more drawn out. This leads to epic battles where the outcome can sway between one side and the other, but it can also just be a race to see who can subtract the numbers faster.

Another problem I was having was the delineation of damage. At it’s core, the different damage types work the same. Each damage reduces hit points, and that’s all. You may have resistance to fire damage, but at no point will any amount of fire damage set your clothes on fire. My solution for the damages also collided with my solution for Hit Point Mountain.

The solution: get rid of Hit Points. The damage types now determine which ability score takes damage upon a successful hit. Fire damage is applied to Charisma, horribly scarring the body and making your confidence dwindle. Each of the damage types diminish the different ability scores, having a number of knock-on effects: ability scores are important again, combat is more lethal, no more Hit Point Mountain, and the types of damage you deal becomes a tactical choice. For players fighting the undead, it has been a given that they would use blunt weapons to shatter bones and crush skulls, but with this addition, those choices have far more weight.

Healing & The Wheel of Time

The Wheel of Time is one of my favorite series of books. I spent quite a bit of time in that world and I absolutely loved the implementation of magic, lore, and the ancient world. An idea I could not get away from was how magical healing worked; the recipient of the healing magic would become exhausted, almost as if their stores of energy were used to implement the healing they received. The way it was often described made me think that the healing magic simply sped up the natural healing process, using the bodies energy at an accelerated rate, making the healed pass out and awake with a great hunger. Healing has a cost. There was even an instance when the limits of healing were revealed: a character was grievously injured, they had very little energy left, and the healing taxed their body so much they died from the process.

So how would healing tax the body of the recipient? Exhaustion is a mechanic I think went under-utilized in 5e. When I think of poison or life-draining effects, exhaustion seems to fit perfectly with those concepts. So, each time someone is healed with magic, they take a level of exhaustion. This makes the concept of healing more dangerous, but it also lends it more significance. Magical healing will keep you alive in a horrible situation, but just long enough to hopefully escape that situation and get somewhere you can really rest and recuperate.

Limited Use & Energy

One of the immediate problems with 5e was the implementation of rests. The design of the system wasn’t bad, but the use of, I would call it borderline abuse, was the constant power drain and long rest pattern that was appearing. If there is one thing that has broken my immersion at a consistent rate, it is this. The party gets into a small fight, a bunch of players pull out their best abilities, we lock the door, long rest, and do it again.

My idea to fix this was an energy system. Each character has a number of Energy Points equal to their Constitution score which they can spend on features or spellcasting or whatever. A number of choices would drain this pool: traveling, prolonged effort, limited use features, and maybe even adding small bonuses to this or that could be paid for by spending more energy. Energy would be restored by eating food, drinking water, resting, or engaging in relaxing activities.

The system was designed so that the character would have the maximum amount of energy while they are within civilized areas, settlements and the like. Being away from warm beds and hot food would take an initial toll, traveling and exploring would take a toll that could be restored by camping, and combat would take the final toll that would force them to be smart about how they spent their energy or eventually retreat rather than repeat the above cycle.

With this new system characters like wanderers and rangers would have advantages, able to keep the most energy while in the wilderness, and other classes would have diminishing returns or be able to channel their energy into spells and the like, giving each class a unique way to interact with it. This system would fit perfectly with the healing system in that you would need to reserve some of your energy for the end of the fight in case you needed to be healed. If you sustained a lingering wound and blew all of your energy to escape, the healing magic may drain enough of your energy to kill you, but the time required to recover naturally would put you in danger of dying in the dungeon or the wilderness. Tough choices lead to creative roleplay and astounding outcomes.

Physical Limits

During the creation of my complex character sheet, I noticed some verbiage that I had never seen before in the nooks and crannies of 5e; Physical Limits. The purview of physical limits was something I interacted with regularly, things like carrying capacity, lift/push/pull limits and the like. Most of these were Strength. But some of them also extended from Constitution, such as how long you could hold your breath, how long it would take for you to suffocate, and number of days it would take to starve to death.

Most of these rules only ever came up in the context of wilderness exploration and survival, modes of play that have been left by the wayside to rot for a few editions now. But they were still there. This concept got me thinking about a few other problem areas I would like to address, namely how fast everyone is.

SPEED

Everyone knows that how far one can move in a given amount of time is different from person to person. The parameters are largely defined by physical fitness, the length of the stride, and the training involved. The fastest person in the world could move at somewhere around 34 feet a second. In a typical D&D round, 6 seconds, this would equal 204 feet. The closest any character could come to this, in a fantasy magical world of heroic feats and legendary tales, was 60 feet, using their movement and a dash action. If you were one of the characters with enhanced speed, then of course this would be more, but it was few and far between.

With the concept of physical limits being determined by your ability scores, I could utilize Dexterity to determine a character’s speed. For a medium creature, specifically a humanoid, we could start with the D&D baseline of 30 feet. The human standard we start from is the assumption that 10 is the average score. So, a score of 10 Dexterity would grant a speed of 30 feet a round. Easy, 3 feet per point of Dexterity for a Medium sized humanoid. We decrease this to 2 feet x Dex score for Small creatures, and 4 feet x Dex score for Large creatures. If a race or class grants a bonus to speed, we have multiple options: increase their Dex score, alter their Dex score only when it comes to determining their speed, utilize the size differences (such as a Medium creature counts as Smell when wearing heavy armor).

EYESIGHT

The ability of a character to see has long been an abstracted concept within these games. I get it, it’s extremely difficult for the arbiter to cover everything the characters would perceive and it’s even harder for a rules set to break down how well they can see and in what conditions. The Perception skill, which is based on the rules for the Wisdom ability, determines how well a character can see. Then we introduce rules for the level of light, broken down into 3 categories, and how that affects sight. For the most part, Wisdom has determined how well a character can see, but then there is the concept of targeting, which is largely disconnected from how well they can see.

For the most part, targeting is handled in two different sets of rules. Targeting for ranged attacks is handled in the weapons section, which gives ranges that any character can reach with a ranged weapon they know how to handle. Handling a weapon is more a matter of trained coordination as opposed to how well they can perceive their target, so we will leave the matter of weapon handling for time. Targeting with a spell also glazes past the idea of how well a character can see, focusing instead on the requirements for spells.

How the players interact with these rules is almost entirely different. When a player asks what they can see, the arbiter often has them make a Perception check, rolling a die to determine what their character can see. Again, the player rolls a die, introducing a variable outcome, for what they can see. In normal light, people can see anything that is visible. Whether they notice it or not is an entirely different topic, but I think we can start to understand why this is a problem. If I am actively looking around a room for hidden things, why would I not be able to see them if they are visible?

In an attempt to add some verisimilitude to the game, and potentially handle some of these issues, I decided that targeting would be handled by Wisdom. Your Wisdom score determines how well you can see, and thus the range at which you can designate something as a target, and the range at which you can see something, but not clearly enough to target it. Wisdom is used to govern our characters’ perceptive abilities, so now I am codifying it so that characters with high Wisdom can lean on those rules to avoid introducing variable outcomes when it comes to visible things.

NEW ABILITY DETERMINANTS

Now that we know how far away we can designate something as a target, we can then determine how far away we can attempt to hit something. A distinction this game gets wrong, in my opinion, that I have discussed before is whether Strength or Dexterity influences ranged or melee attacks. I come down that Dexterity should be a determinant of melee and Strength of ranged. So now we can move the range of a ranged attack to the Strength ability score, much as we did for speed and Dex or Wis and sight.

The quality of the bow is also an influence on how far an arrow can be shot, which introduces a progression path for equipment, something I have wanted for D&D for a long time. A bow of moderate quality can handle a maximum Str (in the real world this is the pull poundage of a bow) of a moderately strong character, say a 12. If a character of superior Str applies their whole Str score, say a 14, to pulling this bow and trying to get more range out of it, they risk breaking the bow. Another complex choice for a player that has consequences and variables, more fun!

Strength now also determines how far a character can accurately throw an item that is designed to be thrown, with a simple rule of halving that distance for something that is not designed to be thrown. A number of feet that is multiplied by the Str score, as is done with so many other Physical Limits. Constitution can be the determinant for attacks with a blowgun using these same rules, and Dexterity becomes the primary for melee, maybe even adding additional attacks if your character is extremely dexterous.

The Death Spiral

One of the primary arguments I have read when it comes to hindering a character based on their level of injury is the Death Spiral. This concept is more of a warning for designers, and it is a fair warning. The Death Spiral is when a character has their combat prowess diminished by their failure in combat, and initial failures lead to an increasing risk of failure, which eventually grows to such a proportion that they can only fail before their ultimate demise.

The example would be that a fighter takes a hit in combat and has their Dexterity reduced. Their Dexterity determines how well they swing their sword and how much damage they deal, so a reduction from being hit means they can hit less often and deal less damage, and are more likely to be hit again, reducing their potential even further until they die.

Linking my character’s combat prowess to their abilities, as well as their health (after getting rid of Hit Points), is a dangerous concept that could lead to the Death Spiral. Except for one thing; no creatures have Hit Points anymore. When the fighter carves 8 Strength from the dragon, that dragon has their combat prowess diminished as well. This overall redesign leads to much deadlier fights, and much faster. Duels in the medieval period could be decided in one blow. With how many points our heroes will have in their abilities, one blow is unlikely, so they are still getting the better deal here, but the point is that they will feel that damage and be more determined to mitigate any further damage they could take with a desperation that any real person would feel.

The Spiderweb of Game Design

All of these changes ripple out from their areas of the game structure and end up in corners one may not expect. Changing how the targeting rules works will fundamentally change spells. Melee and ranged weapons being based on different abilities alters the core features and structures of classes, feats, and even some of the races. Another concept that has bogged me down in the past is how intricate this web is, with each little change reaching out and having affects on the whole that I completely did not understand or anticipate and, sometimes, did not even know how to deal with.

This spiderweb also is a big hindrance when it comes to me thinking of making my own system. An existing system, especially one I have spent years making rules changes and alterations and additions to is one where I better understand the web, but making my own has become overwhelming in a much faster fashion.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I think I will be grafting some sort of frankenstein social interaction rules to 5e. This will be in addition to the rules changes I have listed above, as well as an assortment of other changes I would like to make, and maybe I will even do away with the whole class system and move features to be dependent not upon level, but upon skill progression. I already want to change the experience system to be mark-based, where failures lead to marks which are a type of meta-currency that can be traded with a trainer for increases in that skill. Then I can link all of this together and realize at the end that I have changed 5e so much that it isn’t even 5e at all anymore. Then I can call it my own, despite having used the scaffolding to tear down the house and build a boat.