Greetings traveler! I'm Jake House and here I share my crafts, ideas, and methods of playing tabletop games. Right now, I'm most excited about Shadowdark, Crown & Skull, and Frostgrave.
Let us quest for the arcane and all things dice and dragons!
How does hardcore mode interact with healing spells? I feel like between rolling for health each day, rolling for hit dice recovery, and rolling for heals for spell slots they get every day while resting you'd end up with resting becoming just a frustrating slog of rolling dice until everyone has full resources without any meaningful decisions being made. How would you combat this as a DM?
I have used these exact same rules, but with two addendums: 1. Rests no longer recover MaxHP. (We use an injury system, where damage you take from criticals, damage that reduces your hp to 0, and failed death saves cause injuries in the form of maxHP penalties). Temples are usually needed to restore maxHP. 2. Short Rests allow spellcasters to restore 1 spellslot of their choice excluding their highest available spell slot.
I don't like the random dungeon at all. My immersion is broken when I wander into a dungeon when I pass a dragon, then a room with traps, then three rooms with goblins and then a hall with flesh eating spiders. Yech. How did the goblins get there? Why the traps there. I want story more than I want fights.
SInce there still is a to hit or save roll to overcome for the spell to have an effect in addition to the roll to cast this makes it harder and sometimes just unfair to cast spells. At least make the spell always go off and change the roll to cast to roll to retain. If you fail then you lose the spell after casting it. Just a suggestion
Well, the first problem is that modern D&D characters have to many hit points, the second is losing hit points has no real consequences until you hit zero (unless you still have to save vs massive wounds like in 3rd ed). I play GURPS (and totally prefer it over D&D any day of the week) and I never had this issue with hit points. That's because you don't get many hit points, you generally don't increase in HP in most games and when you take damage you *feel* it. Unless you have the High Pain Threshold advantage, you take a -1 penalty to all DX and IQ (i.e Int) based actions per point of injury you took up to a max of -4. If you take more then half your HP in a single hit, you need to make a HT (Con) roll or you're knocked out and out of the fight. Once you're down to less then 2/3 of your base HP your movement is halved and your ability to carry loads is basically halved. Oh and did you get stabbed or shot (damage types in GURPS also matter, getting shot sucks a lot more then getting clubbed for the same about of damage)? You're also now bleeding out unless you can get patched up real quick. Taking damage has weight and this builds tension and makes my players fight smarter or even surrender if they think they're not going to make it. You also have the option (which I use because it's a damned good idea) to have use moral to keep fights from become meat grinders. Also how armor works in GURPS makes a difference as well. Armor doesn't make you harder to hit (in fact depending on how heavy it is, it came make you easier to hit) but rather reduces damage, and this can easily turn a mortal wound into a minor cut or even a glancing blow if it's good enough. So the problem isn't hit points, it's giving them out like candy and have no downside to just eating damage. Being able to take 10 slashes for a sword before being close to death is boring, being able to just barely survive one, maybe two, hits and now having to find a way out of this while being reduced in combat effectiveness do to his injuries and exciting, make for a good story and that player will remember this and talk about for years to come.
So question. Example: scorching ray. Do you roll for spell success and to hit? Or if the spell succeeds does it automatically hit. I think it would feel pretty bad to roll success then miss the attack, and then roll failure the next turn.
Initiative has always been some thing my table struggles with and has persisted into my career as a game designer, I feel it’s such a tough one to get down because it differentiates between the preference of each table. Great video to cover nonetheless! 😊
I use the spell point system out of the DMG, but learned I had to account for the increased flexibility. For example, I ruled paladins (and other characters with smite-like abilities) could only smite once per turn since they could deal a lot more low-level smites, only going big for crits (or crit fishing and dishing out multiple big hits when they would only have one top slot under Vancian). TLDR: beware unintended consequences.
there are two systems I want to try for spellcasting. Instead of spell slots roll a Con save vs Spell DC (10 + spell's level). On success you cast the spell as is, on a fail, roll and additional Con save or gain a point of exhaustion! ... The second is cast spells by coin flippin. choose heads or tail and cast a spell. If you're lucky you cast the spell, if not either nothing happens or WILD MAGIC happens... The final is the one on the DMG that uses spellcasting by points.
Had a dm try something similar. He was the only one in the group who would dm so we had to go along with it but all the players unanimously decided none of us eould do characters that had the ability to cast any spells at all since we were against it. After a few sessions our table just decided to permanently remove magic as a player option entirely. Magic is solely the province of a select few magic beasts almost all evil or villains. Been a lot of fun the past few years
Unfortunately you cannot buy these as I made them myself. BUT! I do have a video where I show you how to make them. Look up my Indestructible Dungeon Tiles video. 💪🏼
Reminds me of a video where a guy made DND 5E combat a lot more risk reward where he drew inspiration from The Raid Redemption. I took on this idea for my campaign and now I'm doing it to you
Your blood magic reminds me of spellcasting in the original Chivalry & Sorcery where you had fatigue points that came back hourly (normally used to cast spells) and body (more akin to D&D hit points) that came back daily. If you were out of fatigue points, you could still cast magic using your body points. It was a fun system and I had never thought about how to incorporate that into 5e.
Recommends removing hit points. Explains by not removing hit points. Fails to elaborate further. Recommends removing attack rolls. Explains by not removing attack rolls. Explains by not removing attack rolls. Fails to elaborate further.
Just my two cents here: in a world where magic existed for a long time it would inevitably fall into attention of scholars and be studied with a scientific approach. It would explain why "modern" for a setting spellcasters are capable of casting spells so consistently. It is not that I do not like the idea of chaotic magic, I just believe that unless you give a strong in-universe reason against it, it would not remain as chaotic and unreliable.
My solution to that awkward narrative divide is to say that hit points are an in world thing. I usually like to just borrow what RWBY does. For those unfamiliar with the show, hunters in that world train to be able to erect a defensive aura to protect themselves from attacks. If they get hit too much, their aura breaks and can't defend them anymore.
