Never made a mini game of it but my last Cleric would go fishing in downtime/when making camp so he could cook stew and make sandwiches for the party (yes removal of sandwich privileges was used as a teaching tool for wayward allies).
This is a small take from video games, but for when I run games with XP, I try to award players it for all sorts of things. Use a stealth skill well? XP! Discover a new place? XP! Have an interesting RP interaction? XP! Finish a lengthy quest? XP! Help a cat? XPPPP!!! I find that letting players associate everything they do with being awarded XP, it incentivizes all sorts of playstyles and approaches instead of just Kill Everything!
Ironically, video games got this from D&D. According to the Rules Cyclopedia: "In the game, there are five normal ways for player characters to acquire experience: 1. By Role-Playing Well. 2. By Achieving Party Goals. 3. By Defeating Monsters and Opponents. 4. By Acquiring Treasure. 5. By Performing Exceptional Actions."
@@GreenThingonTV Yeah, good call. Those rules have been in D&D since it branched off of being a Chainmail expansion into its own thing. Back in AD&D 2e days (the version I played the longest so far), they had class specific bonus xp for doing what your class does. Warrior classes for defeating opponents, wizards for researching spells, etc. And that version has a built in punishment for players being jerks. "Third, experience points should not be awarded when a player is being abusive to others in the group or attempting to use his abilities at the expense of others. Player characters should cooperate to succeed. " That rule came up a lot in high school games.
@@jjkthebest Also covered by 2e. "Second, there must be significant danger. No character should get experience for using his powers on a helpless victim. A fighter does not gain experience for clubbing a shackled orc. A mage does not gain experience for casting a house-cleaning cantrip. A thief does gain experience for opening the lock on a merchant's counting house, since it might be trapped or magical alarms might be triggered. "
Enemies telegraphing big attacks! Specifically, enemies using the "ready" action, waiting for the players to do an action like entering melee range or using magic, then they attack Or the enemy can plan to attack a certain area that the players are in and if they don't move they get hit If your players are engaged in the fight and figure out what trigger the enemy is looking for they can avoid some damage
@@SkarmoryThePG The new Fire Emblem game has enemies that telegraph big aoe attacks. It works partly because the area is usually where your units will be damaging the enemy from, so you have to decide if it’s worth it to stay in and keep dealing damage or pull back to prevent casualties. So it could work in D&D as long as you make a reason why your players might not want to go to the trouble of avoiding the attack. It’d make it super satisfying for your players to make the decision to go all in with damage and successfully kill the big bad before the spell goes off too.
The Nivxm Cyclops uses its reaction to counter attack a magical attack. You could homered such an attack into any monster. You could also telegraph powerful magical attacks, give hints like "you feel the air around you warm " before a fireball.
Into the Breach and Slay the Spire are turn based games built completely around this concept, showing exactly what the enemies are gonna do next turn (damage-wise at least) unless you can put a wrench in the works It's a really cool feeling when these enemies are straight up "unfair" in terms of pure numbers, but just with that knowledge you're able to puzzle your way into winning anyway Honourable mention to Druidstone, it does something very similar with having basically no RNG, but doesn't _technically_ show exactly which thing enemies are gonna attack... you just know the exact damage and range the attack has and that they're utter bastards who will always focus the most inconvenient target for you
@@metallsnubben They're also built -completely- around the concept, and single player games - there the gameplay is to prioritize multiple telegraphs with your limited options.
Peasant Punch is a favourite among the boys when the carnival rolls around - the Strong Man of the Carnival offers a cash reward for anyone who can punch him so hard that he gets winded.
On the relationship scale, it could also be fun to have an NPC like you less if you are always just agreeing with them. They really like arguing and if you disagree with them then they go up on the scale.
@@TheKnoxydude The situation I used the most is the one in the movies Rio Bravo/El Dorado. The PCs come to the help of a friend who is some sort of lawman (sheriff, chief constable...) in a town and he's fallen to hard times (he's a drunk, cursed, addicted, was severely wounded) in the middle of a thorny situation (two families fighting, a high profile prisoner that someone important wants freed and others want killed)... I don't give a solution to the PCs, just an evolving situation and let them deal with it.
Video game music is actually great for D&D. The music is built with the player’s actions being the focus in mind rather than driving a specific scene like in a movie. That means that usually there isn’t some major complicated melody going on, but something that sets a tone instead :)
Also helps telegraph when a more emotional moment is coming up and they don't need to be super on guard. Easy to end up with people checking for traps just before their own wedding and stuff. lol
We just started our first DnD campaign! The recruit idea is pretty amazing. We are running a prebuilt campaign, the Lost Mine of Phandelver and, no spoilers, we ended up recruiting a goblin we likely should have just questioned and killed. We bought him armor, some cloths and some musical equipment cause he was staring longingly at a flute. He is now a pseudo party member, the DM is just controlling him as a low level and semieffective bard banging on his wittle goblin drum. But having him be one of our agents out in the world would be super interesting!
I really like the idea of the “shield” (pillars of eternity used “endurance”) being the first line of defense. Maybe some classes could call it luck, others call it will, etc., but maybe that is what can be restored on a short rest or a long rest, whereas the actual health takes longer or more resources to recuperate
@@shadesofgray9 if it were me, I would just say that a person has 1/4 of their health as “shield” or “endurance” (round down). Those become health pools basically, so if the “endurance” runs out, then health points start being taken. The endurance points can be healed in a long rest or healed with hit dice on a short rest, but healing health requires a full day rest with medical care, a week without medical care (at least one person with medical training available). That’s off the top of my head, but I would be willing to try it out.
@@shadesofgray9 just to make it interesting (in addition to the previous post), the “medical care” person might have to have expertise in medical knowledge, requiring a doctor or a party member with expertise. No rolls needed though.
I created something similar that is by no means perfected that I called Combat Stamina. The idea was simple; replace HP with combat stamina (CS) and when your character got "hit" you would spend an amount of CS equal to the damage the attack would deal to avoid the damage. This would help narrate the combat a bit more, as spending the CS meant you have to explain how you avoid the attack. It goes much deeper than that but is too long to explain here.
Wasent there something in modern d20 ? your HP get depleted as you narrowly dodge an attack and if you run out you take the damage on your Con stat as you take the hit this time
Great video Dael! So many of the struggles I've had with different player types and what they each find fun has been solved from stealing ideas or taking lessons from video game development talks/keynotes/postmortems. There is so much to learn from that world of games and vice versa.
@@GoblinLord thanks man. I did know that I re read my comment and got the co fusion though. I meant to ask. " Is that a reference of something Link said?"
I love the relationship scale and actually implemented it in my games a while ago, but I did not use one based off dragon age. I took a cue from Fire Emblem instead. F = enemies D = dislike C = neutral B = friendly A = close S = oh, they banging. And instead of math, which I have neither the attention span nor time for, I just tick it up or down whenever they have a bonding moment or get into a fight.
Regarding your “shields and HP” idea, I know that Starfinder has a Stamina, then HP system that works in much the same way you described, with the Stamina being easier and faster to recover and going away before the actual damage to hit points.
In the world I'm designing, I'm going to be using charisma as a source for the "stamina." Less borrowing from a video game, and more drawing from RWBY's idea that the power of the soul working to protect/heal you. Still trying to figure out how to break that down, mechanically, but it should be fun once I test it out.
@@cristotheranger4263 That's pretty cool. You could make it an option to use your CHA bonus adding to your hit die when you roll for hit points. Maybe not the dpeth you're looking for but an easy fix.
Awesome video as always!! Modding TTRPGs to be our person "perfect" experience with our friends and parties is the best example of our the GM/DM can use mechanics as a form of creative expression. It also helps more games be different experiences. I really like Five Torches Deep's Load and Durability system. It abstracts weight based on str score, its are 1-5 Loads, and makes over carrying interesting. Durability is a great way to add to Load. Similar, it has a 1-5 point system, and basically is the health of your armor, shields, and weapons. And if they hit zero, they break, and lose their protection or damage mods, but still are weighing you down. I got super deep into it on our channel -but a major thing about Durability and Shields, is that as a reaction, you can choose to use a shield to block an attack, and you can choose to have it sacrifice 1 Dur, 2 Dur, or break out right. But the only way your weapons and armor lose Durability points if they receive or cause damage from a Critical Success or Failure. "HP = how many peasant punches you can take" best soundbite -Cmike
On inventory I like the Pathfinder 2E way of doing it. Items have a Bulk value to represent their weight and size with default carrying capacity being 5 Bulk. So you end up with jump a few bulky items as it's whole numbers only, no fractions or decimals. However lots of smaller things like torches are considered Light and it takes 10 light items to equal 1 bulk. So you don't bother unless you have more than 10/20/etc to add them. Then there are items like chalk which are negligible which means you don't track them at all. It makes things so much easier as you just quickly look at the big ticket items then a quick check of if you got a lot of light items and view your total. None of that spreadsheet math of weights in D&D.
One thing that I love to use that I got from Fallout: New Vegas, and adapted from Stars without Numbers, is the factions game and the PCs places in it. Each of the factions in the world has their own agendas and relationships with one another, and take actions each month or so, causing the tide of power and influence to change. It really helped make my world feel more alive and give me easier hooks to dangle for my players. It also had them take some consideration when it came to taking on certain quests that they may curry favor from one faction or another. My favorite moment is when the players went to visit a library far off, but found the city engulfed in civil war and the library destroyed, something that I had alluded to for a little while, but which had completely shocked the players who had taken their sweet time getting there. Time yields to none.
I've been trying to steal boss ideas from World of Warcraft. The fights are designed for a party of players and there's a bunch of boss fight tropes they like to use: The Don't Stand in the Fire boss: The safe places to stand in the arena changes at the start of every turn, forcing players to keep on the move (and risk taking Opportunity Attacks) to avoid taking damage. The Romeo and Juliet boss: Two bosses have to be killed on the same turn, because if one dies before the other, the other one heals them. Make it a Lair Action and maybe have them heal for less each time if the party keeps not managing to kill both of them. The Ornstein and Smough boss: Two bosses fought simultaneously, but when one dies, the other becomes stronger and gets more abilities. The Achilles Heel Armory boss: A boss that can only be damaged significantly by a certain spell/weapon/catapult that also happens to be kept nearby. This lets your players get their hands on super powerful abilities that can only be used for the one fight. The Enrage Timer boss: A boss that gets stronger every turn until it becomes unmanageable, forcing players to burn resources quickly or die. The Kill the Healer boss: The boss has flunkies that heal or otherwise buff the boss' abilities. The party needs to prioritize killing the minions before the boss. The Tank Swap boss: The boss puts a stacking debuff on whatever player they're attacking (maybe -1AC per attack), and after so many stacks, the player needs to fall back and let another player take over. The Hot Potato boss: The fight has some kind of ~Thing~ that needs to be passed from player to player and kept out of the hands of the enemy, but holding onto it for too long has detrimental effects on the player, so one player can't hoard it the whole time. You could really keep this up all day, there's so many good Boss Fight design ideas.
Was great seeing two of my favorite RPG personalities chat on dimension 20. As a DM with a love a literature and mythology, it makes sense that both Brennon and you appeal to me so much. Didn't realize until that interview that you both have such similar backgrounds.
Watched this video with my brother who is our current DM, friday afternoon here in Europe, and he enthousiastically began taking notes halfway through for our new sky-pirate campaign. Cool!
Great video as always. I've been doing the NPC reputation mechanic in my games for a while now. One thing that's really important in the TTRPG setting (vs. the game) is that when you piss off Anders, you get instant feedback that your reputation with Anders has suffered by 5. There's no reason that a player HAS to know that unless the character they're dealing with is the sort of person who will immediately prosecute a grievance. I made a little character tracker handout for people to make them start thinking "this person I met who is a named NPC... what do they think of me? Would they put themselves in harm's way to help me, or would they warn other people away from assisting me? But like so many things -- what the PC thinks they know might not be reality! They might think an NPC is totally on their side when in actuality they are letting that revenge dish get nice and cold before serving it.
I like the idea of major towns having teleportation circles. And the way the magic works, you have to have gone to that place to be able to use a circle to get there. So that takes care of the requirement to go there first.
@@MonarchsFactory Never realized that connection, but all the better! A fast travel system like that also, I think, gets the party wanting to travel to new places so they can add it to their list of menus options. Or heck, getting the party wizard to learn the spell so he or she can make their own circles to add to the network.
Quite a few good ideas here! Awesome video :) On the 'shields as a health mechanic' thing, have you played/seen any of the 40k ttrpgs? Rogue trader etc? They use a similar armour mechanic to one used in a lot of games (fallout new vegas comes to mind) - damage reduction. so you take 10 damage, but you have 5 armour so you only take 5. but if that gun had armour piercing bullets maybe you take 9 damage, or full damage, and so on. Probably one of the crunchy systems I found I liked better and felt a bit more 'real'...
RE: The "Shields before health" idea... The Ironclaw system works that way to some extent. Armor, shields, and your "body" stat contribute toward a thing called "soak," which is where you roll dice to see how much damage is negated from an attack you just suffered. It's not exactly the same thing because there's no real HP system in the game, just statuses (1 point of damage after soak = hurt, 2 = afraid, 3 = injured, 4 = dying, and 5 = dead), but the concept of your shield, armor, and outright character toughness taking the brunt of the damage before your character is wounded is the same. By the way, it sounds brutal, but numbers are low and every PC gets one layer of plot armor per day where they can negate a killing blow, so it's not TOO bad. Recovery is the harder thing to deal with in the system due to the low-magic setting, so it takes days to recover if you're injured.
How do you not have _at least_ a quarter million subscribers yet?? Your content is amazing, and one of the few that makes me say "OH SHE POSTED GOTTA WATCH IT NOW" every single time I get a notification
SO COOL DAEL. here's an interpretation of "overshield" hp mechanic that could work with d&d as is: level 1 hp is "CORE" hp. on level up, core hp raises by your con mod, the other hp gains (from your class) go into "TEMP/OVERSHIELD/MORALE" hp. so then, "temp hp" (which is not actually temporary) now represents all your combat willpower, your superficial wounds, and your tiring. all "damage" is drained first from your temp hp. it can be replenished by all standard means (magical healing and hit dice now represent bolstering your will, heartening you to continue). any damage beyond temp hp that dips into CORE hp represents actual physical, lasting damage that you have sustained, it can only be healed by a "gritty realism" long rest of 7 days, or by other extreme methods of healing (perhaps involving quests). a reduction to 0 CORE hp could represent a lingering injury based on the damage or attack that brought you there, with in-game consequences. normal healing at 0 CORE hp would restore only 1 CORE and the overflow would be temp. i look at all of this provoking flavorful roleplay, so that a strike that damages CORE hp would be a significant thing and could lend flavor to combat descriptions, as the PCs try to struggle on through their wounds, rather than the "fighting with full power until suddenly unconscious" that the current system implies. THANKS FOR THE INSPIRATION DAEL!!
As the game designer who worked on the Assassin's Recruit gameplay (among other things, some less popular :o) It made me really happy that it was something that stands out for you in Assassin's Creed: Revelation. Funnily enough, I am working on some homebrew rules for one of my DnD campaigns where my players, as part of a group of mercenaries, can recruit new members and, eventually, send them on missions to further increase the power and influence of their group. I used some of the rules from Stronghold and Followers as the base, but I am changing and adding a lot of new things. It isn't fully tested yet, but my players are pretty excited to have that little game during their downtime. They also like the opportunities to find and convince people to join their Mercenary group.
For the abstract carrying capacity, you could even have rules like 1) if your Strength score is very high or low you lose or get a column of the grid; 2) if you buy a very costly backpack it might expand your grid; 3)you can have smaller grids (even 1 or 2 squares) representing pouches or bags
Regarding HP, I've actually been exploring a new system that I'll be trying out in my next game to help the feeling of health in combat. Basically, a character's health is just 5 + ConMod; your hit dice are something you spend to reduce incoming damage by dodging/parrying/getting lucky, and only the damage that actually gets through to your health is a true hit. You no longer know your max HP in advance, but it averages out to roughly the same - for example, a Lv. 5 Fighter with +1Con would normally have an average of 37 HP (10+4d10+5). With this system, that fighter would have 6 health and five [1d10+1] rolls (average 32.5) for a total average of 38.5 points of damage they can take. The best benefit of this, though, is that it can give the players the feeling that they're reacting to an attack. Normally, the enemy either hits you or misses you, and there's nothing you can do about it (you can narrate as if you parried or dodged, but it's not the same). With this, the enemy can either totally miss or "potentially hit", and then the player can decide how they're reducing the damage -- maybe they'll parry it all aside, or maybe they'll mostly dodge but let it graze them for 1 point of health. The main balance change will come with healing, and I'll have to play with these to figure them out for sure. Short rests normally regain hit points based on hit dice, so I'm thinking for ease a short rest will simply replenish half your hit dice and no health. Cure Wounds will now replenish one hit die and 1 health per spell level - so it can only HEAL you a little bit, but it does help give you a second wind (it's also now a bit weaker for d6 classes and stronger for d10 classes, which I think is good). I'm thinking a long rest would replenish all hit dice and 1 health - this also can help with the idea that if you're *injured*, a long rest may not fully heal that wound.
I really like the recruits/squires idea! Not only does this mean that the party can take care of more things because of their influence, but it also allows for far reaching name recognition. "Those guys are the bosses of the team that saved us from the gelatinous cube!" Instant superstar status.
the shields vs. health thing actually *is* something that I'm putting in my own game, funnily enough, though I sort of stole it from a bunch of TTRPGs that already exists. basically once you run out "HP," any further damage is done directly to your ability scores, and directly lowers the probability of success on your rolls. not an original idea, but an effect one to be sure.
The "recruits" system sounds similar to what was attempted in 2ed after characters hit level 9+. Had one group of players get to that stage and it was pretty fun! Especially when one player started a cult!
By the time my group finished playing Kingmaker, they had a catapult based kobold parachute regiment, a clan of giant bug taming faerie creatures, a dwarf general that just fell in love with their chief bug wrangler, five Ettercaps (one was convinced he was a living rock thanks to the party tiefling), a small tribe of Hobgoblins living in a former elven temple they cleared out and turned into a casino, so many varieties of giant I don't even remember them all, a Chuul the kitsune gunslinger literally intimidated into working for them, and an awakened Tyrannosaur that the Dwarven war priest accidentally brought out of the dream realm
The first edition of star wars d20 had a health/shield paradigm. you had a number of wound points equal to your Constitution and if you lost one wound you were wounded (and you could be knocked out by failling a con save), while vitality points worked like traditional dnd hit points, and were described as your ability to turn hits into glancing hits. Might adopt it for my next dnd campaign.
10:00 I like the talk about hit points, and the inspiration from videogames when talking about them. Some TTRPGS like Lancer and an element called "structure" where a player has a number of structure points that is like a number of health bars. So long as a player is within the first health bar their mech's (it's a mech game) ability to function is the same as if it was at full health, but once a mech takes structure damage by depleting the first health bar it goes to another health bar and the mech is in worse shape and cannot function as well. If this were but into DnD terms what you could do is instead of going unconscious when you go below one hit point you roll a saving throw, a success means that the player is at one hit point and functions normally but a failure means that the player goes to full health (minus any extra damage carried over) but loses some functionality until they get healed from their crippling condition. When applying this to players it creates a greater emphasis on strategy other than "make sure the damaging player always has at least one hit point and make sure a designated healer player stays away from danger". When you give your villains structure points it means your villains will be at full strength at the start of a fight so players will want to have something to weaken them before the fight starts, instead of just "how do I make the villain die as quickly as possible?". This is all options to make the game more tactical and get players and DMs to think about more status effect other than just damage but if you prefer to think of hit-points as they are in vanilla dnd that's totally valid too.
Love the relationship scale! I remember an incident in Critical Role campaign 1, Vox Machina was talking to someone who, from Matt's description was second or third in rank in the Ashari village and Marisha, in character, dismissed them like a servant in the middle of the conversation. That sort of shit should absolutely have consequences for the players.
I missed this video when it came out, glad I caught it after all. My personal inspirations: Souls games for boss mechanics, often hard to directly transpose to turn based combat but it gives ideas, Resident Evil for puzzles, they are usually simple but very nicely intertwined. And the mother of all: Witcher 3 for side quests, monsters, the oils (that give a nice consumable to reward the PCs with) little non-quest notes on the bulletin boards, priceless. I'm currently playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and am keeping an eye on the quests and mechanics I could shamelessly steal for my game.
Hacking TTRPGs is my default state when I'm not doing anything else, so this was a very relatable video. Lots of cool ideas, I'll have to rewatch later and take notes!
The abstracting of carrying capacity is a big one I've also been puzzling out. To be fair I haven't had a chance to test it out on my players, but basically my idea of it would be that all their starting equipment and any reasonable adventuring equipment is a freebie, but any special equipment or (more importantly) treasure has a certain size point value associated with it. Sort of like you said, small is 1, medium is 2, large is 3. So a treasure hoard of gold pieces might be a large hoard, but they could split it up and only take a small piece of it. I don't know if I'd use an actual grid, though the tetris aspect of that is appealing. I think the only other thing I'd add to the idea is that I think characters with more strength should still get at least a little more space to carry stuff, since they can lift a lot more. Also, just in general, excellent video! I really liked this one!
For translating the grid system to irl - I imagine pulling out an old set of legos, and using pieces or creations to physically represent your items and stuff them into a bag. This is a more cumbersome option and treads into the realm of LARPing but I think it could be a cool little option. For anyone who loves their models and tokens, they could give beads and tokens to represent currency.
I was just talking to a friend about some homebrew as a first time DM. I have several encounters planned around using the mechanics from WoW dungeons and raids because they were so visually entertaining!
This was actually really cool, I hadn't thought to use any of this. A system that really uses a lot of these concepts (relationship scale, and then the shields (called vitality)). I really liked the AC apprentice thing, as well as the abstract carrying capacity. If I build an RPG I will definitely look back at this
PF2 kinda has that inventory/backpack system. Not exactly how you described, but your character can carry X much "Bulk" based on their Strength, and items are each a certain amount of Bulk based on how big/heavy they are. Works really well in my experience.
I like the inventory idea! If I were running it I'd give people a baseline amount of inventory space and reward high STR players (since it's often dumped) by giving them an extra row or column of inventory space for each point over ten. Calling attention to the inventory and engaging with it as a minigame also encourages players to collect and use items. Once you create a barrier to hoarding, players have to be more mindful of what they bring with them. Adds an interesting dimension to gameplay without getting bogged down in numbers.
An excellent explanation of "health/HP" came from one of the Uncharted devs. Nathan Drake can't take 30-40 bullets. He dies after a couple. The screen going red (health) shows depletion of his "luck". Grazes, near misses, etc... but the last couple of round actually connect and he dies like any other person, or like the enemies he murder-strafes. In the case of the video game, hiding behind the chest high wall let's him take quick looks around, process what's happening and, essentially, replenish his luck/awareness. Always stay for the post credits scenes in Dael videos. Always.
Loved the discussion about retainers, passing off gear and sending them off on missions. I play an evil cleric in a Pathfinder game and my character is working on establishing an Assassin's Guild. He just took the Leadership feat and level 1 followers started showing up. His two favorites, a brother and sister (fighter 1 and rogue 1) are both going to become clerics as the gain levels and with be getting most of my characters hand-me-downs. Also, I mentioned to the GM that I would like them to do little missions, like in the ACKS rpg, and he was cool with the concept. In order to help him with ideas, I am going to buy him Waiting for the Raven videogame. It puts you in charge of a cell of a secret society that is infiltrating a city. Might give you some more ideas for those little missions, Dael. Thanks for all of the creative thoughts. Always a pleasure to watch your videos.
Watching this video: Grid inventory! That's on Mausritter. Retainers, that's hirelings from Mausritter. Factions! Of course they're on Mausritter hex maps. HP is hit avoidance and then damage is applied to your stats, that's Mausritter! That little free game is an RPG design masterpiece 🥰
Pathfinder2e has a mechanic similar to shields using stamina. However, what I think makes this more useful than other messages saying similar things is they have guidelines and an entire alternative set of abilities which they set aside to actually suppport this in the system which wasn't built around it, so it's actually very useful for trying to take a system like 5e and make something like shields/stamina work without getting too fiddly. Examples of things I would do based on that: Con mod goes to HP, and hit die goes to stamina (or vice versa) Short rest only restores stamina (Also helps with the perpetually resting party) Temp HP is really just treated like temp stamina. (Avoids some confusion here) Feats like leadership, or adding in some of the feats from PF2e for stamina, like Rally, which is made to restore stamina. These are nice supports you can steal.
One thing I want to add in a future campaign is an arena similar to the Totomostro from FFXV. Having the players bet and possibly control a set of creatures against other creatures would be a nice change from the life and death stakes normal combat presents usually. Also, by using creatures already battled, the knowledge the players retain from those battles may give them an advantage in which to choose during a matchup.
Veins of the Earth had a grid inventory system that gave you more item slots for positive modifiers in your STR, CON... even INT (smarter so you pack things better)
The main example I know of the carrying capacity thing is Resident Evil, particularly 7. Those games also make everything a tight fit so you have to think carefully about what you’ll need (RE uses resource management in general as the primary form of tension).
Thanks for all your great generous content. 2 things, have you played Renowned Explorers: International Society, great fun, excellent with kids, and a clever 'combat' encounter system like paper rocks scissors but aggro, friendly, deceptive. Recommend it. 2nd, do you crack yourself up editing? Love to see a vid of all the clipping floor doofs.
One of the old D20 versions of Star Wars RPG definitely used that shields/health thing, only I think it was called vigor - which worked like normal HP, and then your health was what really put you in the dead book.
I really loved Payday, Left 4 Dead, and Vermintide. They are great examples of a co-op group going around completing objectives, and I learn a lot from the objective examples. If everything was just "these things want to kill you but if you kill them first then they win" it would get dull fast. Have the players carry a large cumbersome object to the altar while skeletons raise around them. Have them break their way through a barrier only to unleash a barrage of enemies onto themselves. Ask them to complete any kind of task under any kind of extra stress can feasibly be a great encounter!
I find that it's usually possible to convey what hit points "actually" are narratively, and I do that in a similar way to how people often use "bloodied". Any damage that someone (NPC or PC) takes up to half of their max hit points are near misses, desperate evasions, or only very incidental damage, e.g. "You swing your broadsword down at the orc and he only barely lunges out of the way, causing you to just barely miss cleaving him in two." An outright miss I will make more explicit: "You take a swing at the orc but misjudge the angle and he deflects the blow with his axe, letting out a rough laugh." Once someone gets under that 1/2 threshold, however, they start taking "Real" damage. Blows start connecting, blood is drawn, and they are visibly beaten down and injured. "The orc tries to parry but you slip under his guard, burying your sword in his hip." This way, you preserve some cinematic tension, filling an encounter with dodges, parries, gaining and losing ground, and finally, a few decisive killing strikes. But again it's more a narrative patch than a mechanical one, and the exact threshold is totally up to you as a DM.
For the shield& health split, I'd recommend Tephra: the steampunk RPG. It has hit points that represent stamina or something like that, and wounds that represent... wounds. Hit points are completely recovered in a breather of five minutes, while you need weeks of downtime to heal wounds.
I had a campaign set in Eberron back in the 3.5E days. Aa "healer" was necessary back then but I didn't want any single player getting stuck with that role. Everyone had two characters but would only use one of them during any mission that they were sent on by their patron. The non-mission PCs got half XP regardless. This idea was taken from the X-Men video game.
Some other good examples (IMO): - Dragon Age: Inquisition War Table missions (akin to your idea for retainer missions) - DA:I's Forces / Secrets / Connections method of organizing and focusing influence - XCom 2012's simple "Blue/Orange" two-tiered action system - Mass Effect 2 Loyalty Missions - Civilization pops working the territory around an MCDM Stronghold
As someone who recently had my party battle a monster I completely ripped off from Shadow of the Colossus and who is currently laying out a Zelda style dungeon puzzle (e.g. go to A flip lever so you can go to B to flip lever so that you can cross bridge to C) this was awesome. Might be difficult to enact some of these mid campaign, but I LOVE that inventory system and the recruitment mechanics! Thanks Dael!
Great vid! The new Talisman rpg from Ulisses Spiele has a neat ablative armor mechanic, whereby you can do a quick, partial repair after a combat but have to pay a pro to have it fully repaired. And some OSR games, like Mausritter, have started using slot-based encumbrance too.
They already have the hit point shield separation. In Pathfinder and 3.5 there was a vigor and wounds system. I’d suggest checking it out if you’re interested.
I've adopted the shield health idea for the health a set of RPG rules I'm making. The first half of health represents stamina and energy and comes back on a short rest. Instead of taking actual damage you are blocking the attack, but you do so in a way that knocks the wind out of you. The second half of the health is actual body health and it takes either magic or a long time to heal.
My favorite version of Shields Before Health was in the game Demonwars: Reformation. Characters had very little HP, but damage was always rolled at the same time as the attack and if it would be a hit, you could opt to spend points from a pool of Balance to avoid the attack. As you sacrifice your footing and positional advantage you avoid damage, but become easier to hit going forward. It then became a resource you could spend on other special abilities or restore to allies, all in a tight risk/reward game. Lots of cool ideas in that game, wish it got its second book.
D&D 3e had an option of "Vitality and Hit Points" rules, with Vitality basically being "Shields", and representing a character's active defenses at dodging and parrying attacks, until it runs out, at which point they suffer actual damage. And Critical Strikes just bypassed Vitality entirely. The mechanics had Hit Dice rolled to see how much Vitality you had, while your actual Hit Points were locked at your Constitution Ability Score.
I stole so much from the mass effect trilogy for my campaigns. Having a bunch of culture and secret history to pull from is really helpful for building a homebrew world.
Great video! I like the idea of letting players fast travel to a location after they have been there before. Also the grid system for inventory, I haven't done much stuff with inventory and that seems like it would be easy to implement. One idea I have taken from videogames is the concept of weapon upgrades. The pc's can pay to increase the damage die of their weapon by 1 increment, like d6 to d8, and it gets progressively more expensive each time. Doing more damage makes the pc's happy, and it gives them something to spend their gold on. I give the monsters hit points that are on the higher side of the stat block average to compensate, so it doesn't really unbalance things.
Regarding inventory (and it could apply to equipping underlings too) Seth Skorkowsky on youtube did a video on it and he posted in the description the backpack sheets that he and his friends have used for a long time. It was love at first sight when I saw those. With the "shields before health" thing, anyone interested in that might want to look up the Wounds & Vigor system in Pathfinder because it works a lot like that but with certain things like crits able to bypass the "shields" part. It seems like a pretty solid system, and would at least give some solid ideas for how to make your own similar system.
Thank you for correcting people on HP being hit points rather than health points. Personal pet peeve of mine - losing HP is you being worn down *before* the injury, getting worn to the point you take that *real* damage.
I love this video. I often apply videogame concepts to my games narratively or to create a structure for the session. I also have many beloved rpgs that I have found inspiration for.
Regarding the Shield system, Starfinder kinda implemented something similar with Stamina+Hitpoints system, where stamina is easy to recover and hitpoints are very hard to recover. You always take Stamina first.
i think settlement building rules from games like Fallout 4 would make a great framework for a Fantasy or Post Apocalypse game. Not so much the ingredient gathering but the idea of planning and constructing a community and attracting merchants that supply you to protect the people. I think if the burden of tracking food and water bothers you as a GM you can construct a HUD for food and water, just a spin wheel showing hours unfed or unslept or whatever you're tracking that you reset whenever the party takes care of themselves.
re: the Assassin's Creed organization minigame. I've ran a space pirate campaign where the player's crew got to the size of a small fleet, and we did that sort of delegating organization-running thing a lot... also inspired directly by Assassin's Creed Revelations!!! Black Flag has a ship-centric variant as well. It was a great way to catch up with the NPCs from session to session, get the fleet some resources, and *specially* do some worldbuilding at corners the main party hadn't yet been into, maybe activating a plot hook or another via NPC that the players would go check out for themselves later, or having these operations cause unintended ripples in the setting (which I guess you could do with a more Dragon Age Inquisition war table type thing, but that's way less fun than all the pirate recruiting and having each deckhand have a name and a suggestion of a personality). It's a great mid- to late- game addition imo
The underlings idea could be very fun, maybe even have a RP heavy game based around this, where you are the head of a small organization trying to gain power by being there in important events and sending your guys to do stuff. Or in the middle of a large hierarchy where you need to do some stuff but most of it is done by those below you and your main struggle is to climb up.
Bonus on the hp thing: I use Vigor and Health, Vigor is a lot and Health doesn't level up BUT when you hit 0 Vigor in combat u gain a special power tailored for that pc specifically! I call it Death March
D&D 3e had something like the shields first rule as an optional rule in Unearthed Arcana, it divided HP into Wounds and Vitality, with wounds representing your actual physical health. It wasn't perfect in practice - crits went straight to Wounds, making for a very swingy combat, but I've been wanting to use something like it for a long time. My personal take for 5e would be that your level 1 HP are Wounds, and all further are Vitality. You can only damage Wounds once you've depleted the target's vitality. Hit Dice in short rest maybe only heals Vitality. And I'd maybe change Healing Word to only affect Vitality, to give Cure Wounds more meaning. Something like that anyway.
Dael, you need to check out Blades in The Dark, it does most of the things that you talk about here. Abstract inventory? Before a heist you specify how much gear you're carrying, each point of "load" allows you to bring one point of items. You choose what you brought retroactively during the heist, your character had days to plan this thing and you only have about 10 minutes at most. If it's anything outlandish you handle how you got the item in a flashback scene, otherwise you just take it from your available items. Shields then health? you can bring armor as an item, and it can be abstract too. A bribe can work just as well as a buckler to defend you from harm in some circumstances. One point of armor blocks one harm, and classes each get a special ability that can be used to spend special armor to negate non-harm consequences too. There are also two different kinds of health; your character gains "stress" from fighting back against consequences without armor, but you also have "harms", which are injuries that character has sustained from consequences. So BiTD doesn't just have shields, it has multiple flavors of shields. Reputation trackers? Not as granular as your system, but there are other trackers in the system you can use alongside them if that's what you're going for. The tracker goes from "-3" to "+3", with each number representing a point at which they reach a new tier of love or hatred for your group. The higher you go, the more they're willing to help you, with "+3" being the point where they become an ally and actively go out of their way to benefit your group. Equally, negative status makes them more inclined to hurt you, with "-3" being the tipping point at which they go to war with your crew. In the book it's mostly factions that are mentioned, not individuals, but there's plenty of space to add them. There are also "contacts" which serve a similar purpose for individual players. Contacts can either be a friend or a rival; friends provide a bonus if you can make use of them in a score, rivals generate extra complications if they get involved. Recruits and hirelings you can send on missions? Cohorts are explicitly for that purpose. They are gangs and experts whose power scales with the tier of your crew. They can be sent to do things on their own, used to boost your rolls, enable group actions, and some provide secondary benefits like acting as a doctor for your crew, or literally being demons with demon powers. There are also the contacts and allies I mentioned previously, you get a bonus if you use them to acquire an asset, and a temporary cohort is a valid choice for one. In my last campaign, there were many times when a friend was goaded into going to prison on behalf of the crew. Only thing you mentioned that BiTD doesn't handle is fast travel. The core setting of Duskvol is a singular city, so there's no major distances to travel across. Getting to the site of a score or back to your lair is just instantaneous in most situations, only becoming a thing that takes time if people are tracking your crew for whatever reason. So it kinda has fast travel, but only in the way that all travel is fast if you never have to travel. I have now realized you're probably not going to see this comment, but I have the PDF version of Blades free to access in my Google Drive. John Harper won't mind me sharing that with your mod team on Discord, he actually put a notice in the book granting permission to print it and redistribute it.
Best thing I took from videogames to my TTPRG are "multi phased (boss) fights", "grunts" and "objectives": "Multi Phased Fights" means that a fight isn't just "Intitiative - Attack - Damage - Done" but more like "Once you bring the boss to X% hp, he will retreat > now it become a chase > the players corner the boss, he calls in reinforcement they players have to fight first to reach the boss" Grunts: Low-Level Enemies "Cannonfodder" who are not killed by dealing X hitpoint damage but killed by "two hits (or one critical)" - this allows players to shine while bashing dozens of enemies to get where they want to go (e.g. the boss). "Objectives": give players special objectives they have to reach to finish an encounter instead of "slay all enemies"
I’ve actually used the shield thing before, and it worked great. How I ruled it was that “shield” was physically exhausting to keep up, so players would only have it actively on during combat. Outside of combat it would only take effect if a player said they activated it, and it couldn’t last longer than 10 minutes. This worked great, because traps or surprise attacks would seem more deadly, because they usually attacked hit points directly. It also helped that player’s hit points only went up by their con mod, and they only got back hp equal to their con mod during a long rest. Shield would fully regen during long rest
For my 'fast travel' I use it mixed with random encounters. Based on when they leave and where they are going I have different charts I made up with orcs, goblinoids, beasts and the like. I let them use a travel modifier if they have a scout type in the party and little things like that
I think a really easy way to Incorporate shields then health is just to let the players know that's how your narratively going to interpret Hit Points. There doesn't need ti be a mechanical element to make that significant in their minds. Maybe if incorporating something mechanically helps to drive it home like the mechanics from your Injuries table but you take your damage threshold and add a caveat of like *Major Injuries can only occur if the damage brings you to or below a certain % of health. Something like that but minor injuries can still happen unchanged. I think that kind of highlights what people enjoy sometimes enjoy about lower levels and carries it along to mid level and possibly higher levels.
A modern setting 5e adaptation game I run has "armor first, then health" in a way. Contemporary kevlar/ceramic body armor isn't meant to be re-used; when it absorbs a bullet or what-have-you you're meant to have to replace it. In my game, taking significant damage typically represents your body armor absorbing hits, although you might be suffering minor narrative injuries like bruising and fractured ribs underneath it. If you go down, your body armor is rendered damaged and after the scene is over won't provide armor protection anymore until it is replaced. At that point, you are obviously much more likely to be hit and the hits are narrated much more dangerously. We also have major injuries when you go down by more than -10 HP, so being more likely to go down and suffer injuries reinforces the idea that you've "depleted" your armor's protection.
@@MajorHickE None of them have access to mending, but even if they did, it wouldn't matter because we're talking contemporary ballistic weave and ceramic body armor. The fibers in ballistic weave stretch and deform when they absorb a bullet, and ceramic plates spall and splinter when penetrated. Both are well outside the capacity of mending to repair.
If you don't know about this already, you should totally look up OSR, Old School Renaissance. It's a movement within the DnD group, where people are bringing back the original versions of DnD - either by rewriting the rules to be more clear and in all one book, or by writing their own games to have that feeling of old school play. A lot of their ideas can easily be ported from one system to the next. I bring this up because they have the same thoughts as you - a "healthy disrespect for the official rules," as Questing Beast stated in one of his reviews of OSR adventures (he's the only OSR UA-camr I've gotten into so far). In one of Questing Beast's videos, he reviewed a game that used the grid idea for carrying things. He also is a fan of having rows of squares and your access to those squares will depend on your strength and gear (like, if you have only belt pouches, you're not carrying much).
For shields I’d like to have them roll to block the attack if it hits instead of count towards AC. Then the shield has an assigned number of damage it can absorb. That way the 50 ft dragon can still knock you to the ground even if you block with your shield while a sword strike can be easily parried. You could pair this with assigning a number of damaged absorbed to armour as well.
there better be a fishing minigame in here
A wise man once said "a campaign is only as good as its fishing minigame"
farcry 5 was a great fishing game, it also had a really good open world fps mini game
@@alpharius7216 red dead redemption 2 was also a great fishing game... not sure why the western setting though.
Never made a mini game of it but my last Cleric would go fishing in downtime/when making camp so he could cook stew and make sandwiches for the party (yes removal of sandwich privileges was used as a teaching tool for wayward allies).
I made a maze from the back of my cereal into an in universe labyrinth. I'm not sure how would i make a fishing minigame tho...
This is a small take from video games, but for when I run games with XP, I try to award players it for all sorts of things. Use a stealth skill well? XP! Discover a new place? XP! Have an interesting RP interaction? XP! Finish a lengthy quest? XP! Help a cat? XPPPP!!! I find that letting players associate everything they do with being awarded XP, it incentivizes all sorts of playstyles and approaches instead of just Kill Everything!
Ironically, video games got this from D&D. According to the Rules Cyclopedia: "In the game, there are five normal ways for player characters to acquire experience: 1. By Role-Playing Well. 2. By Achieving Party Goals. 3. By Defeating Monsters and Opponents. 4. By Acquiring Treasure. 5. By Performing Exceptional Actions."
@@GreenThingonTV Yeah, good call. Those rules have been in D&D since it branched off of being a Chainmail expansion into its own thing. Back in AD&D 2e days (the version I played the longest so far), they had class specific bonus xp for doing what your class does. Warrior classes for defeating opponents, wizards for researching spells, etc. And that version has a built in punishment for players being jerks. "Third, experience points should not be awarded when a player is being abusive to others in the group or attempting to use his abilities at the expense of others. Player characters should cooperate to succeed.
" That rule came up a lot in high school games.
@@GreenThingonTV Interesting. I have only run 5e and played some 3.5, so that is something I did not know!
I tend to use the opposite approach. You only get xp for doing special things. No xp for killing random wolves or grunts.
@@jjkthebest Also covered by 2e. "Second, there must be significant danger. No character should get experience for using his powers on a helpless victim. A fighter does not gain experience for clubbing a shackled orc. A mage does not gain experience for casting a house-cleaning cantrip. A thief does gain experience for opening the lock on a merchant's counting house, since it might be trapped or magical alarms might be triggered.
"
Feel like the Assassin's Creed franchise has stabbed you in the back? Is this ironic? I can't tell.
The relationship scale bit is funny because the DMG has that but no one remembers to use it
Enemies telegraphing big attacks!
Specifically, enemies using the "ready" action, waiting for the players to do an action like entering melee range or using magic, then they attack
Or the enemy can plan to attack a certain area that the players are in and if they don't move they get hit
If your players are engaged in the fight and figure out what trigger the enemy is looking for they can avoid some damage
Lovely idea, doesn't work as well in practice due to the turn based nature. Players catch on too fast. Can still be useful!
@@SkarmoryThePG
The new Fire Emblem game has enemies that telegraph big aoe attacks. It works partly because the area is usually where your units will be damaging the enemy from, so you have to decide if it’s worth it to stay in and keep dealing damage or pull back to prevent casualties. So it could work in D&D as long as you make a reason why your players might not want to go to the trouble of avoiding the attack. It’d make it super satisfying for your players to make the decision to go all in with damage and successfully kill the big bad before the spell goes off too.
The Nivxm Cyclops uses its reaction to counter attack a magical attack. You could homered such an attack into any monster. You could also telegraph powerful magical attacks, give hints like "you feel the air around you warm " before a fireball.
Into the Breach and Slay the Spire are turn based games built completely around this concept, showing exactly what the enemies are gonna do next turn (damage-wise at least) unless you can put a wrench in the works
It's a really cool feeling when these enemies are straight up "unfair" in terms of pure numbers, but just with that knowledge you're able to puzzle your way into winning anyway
Honourable mention to Druidstone, it does something very similar with having basically no RNG, but doesn't _technically_ show exactly which thing enemies are gonna attack... you just know the exact damage and range the attack has and that they're utter bastards who will always focus the most inconvenient target for you
@@metallsnubben They're also built -completely- around the concept, and single player games - there the gameplay is to prioritize multiple telegraphs with your limited options.
"How many paesant punches can you take?" could be a pitch for a great side quest
I think that "peasant punch" needs to be a card in a tavern brawl card game.
Peasant Punch is a favourite among the boys when the carnival rolls around - the Strong Man of the Carnival offers a cash reward for anyone who can punch him so hard that he gets winded.
On the relationship scale, it could also be fun to have an NPC like you less if you are always just agreeing with them.
They really like arguing and if you disagree with them then they go up on the scale.
Yeah, was thinking. Some like arguing or competition or even someone easier to push around.
IIRC Sten was a bit like that in Dragon Age Origins, hew wanted you to have an actual conversation with him, not just agree.
06:15
"I'm hacking it! It's what I do in my free time. I can't be stopped!"
Sombra?
I steal them from classic Western movies from before 1960, since no-one watches them anymore. And there's a wealth of plots and situations there.
That sounds like a really cool perspective on it, not a source of inspiration for D&D I've ever seen done before. What are some examples you've used?
@@TheKnoxydude The situation I used the most is the one in the movies Rio Bravo/El Dorado. The PCs come to the help of a friend who is some sort of lawman (sheriff, chief constable...) in a town and he's fallen to hard times (he's a drunk, cursed, addicted, was severely wounded) in the middle of a thorny situation (two families fighting, a high profile prisoner that someone important wants freed and others want killed)... I don't give a solution to the PCs, just an evolving situation and let them deal with it.
Video game music is actually great for D&D. The music is built with the player’s actions being the focus in mind rather than driving a specific scene like in a movie. That means that usually there isn’t some major complicated melody going on, but something that sets a tone instead :)
Also helps telegraph when a more emotional moment is coming up and they don't need to be super on guard.
Easy to end up with people checking for traps just before their own wedding and stuff. lol
2:02 Fast Travel
3:35 Carrying Capacity
6:18 Relationship Scale
8:41 Shields then Health
11:05 Recruit and Influence Missions
"How am I already sweating?" a question I ask myself every day.
We just started our first DnD campaign! The recruit idea is pretty amazing. We are running a prebuilt campaign, the
Lost Mine of Phandelver and, no spoilers, we ended up recruiting a goblin we likely should have just questioned and killed. We bought him armor, some cloths and some musical equipment cause he was staring longingly at a flute. He is now a pseudo party member, the DM is just controlling him as a low level and semieffective bard banging on his wittle goblin drum. But having him be one of our agents out in the world would be super interesting!
Opens with "Hello Humans!". That's rather presumptuous of you xD
I really like the idea of the “shield” (pillars of eternity used “endurance”) being the first line of defense. Maybe some classes could call it luck, others call it will, etc., but maybe that is what can be restored on a short rest or a long rest, whereas the actual health takes longer or more resources to recuperate
I can see the healing implementation being fitted in, but how to retrofit the damage side into dnd 5e?
@@shadesofgray9 if it were me, I would just say that a person has 1/4 of their health as “shield” or “endurance” (round down). Those become health pools basically, so if the “endurance” runs out, then health points start being taken. The endurance points can be healed in a long rest or healed with hit dice on a short rest, but healing health requires a full day rest with medical care, a week without medical care (at least one person with medical training available). That’s off the top of my head, but I would be willing to try it out.
@@shadesofgray9 just to make it interesting (in addition to the previous post), the “medical care” person might have to have expertise in medical knowledge, requiring a doctor or a party member with expertise. No rolls needed though.
I created something similar that is by no means perfected that I called Combat Stamina. The idea was simple; replace HP with combat stamina (CS) and when your character got "hit" you would spend an amount of CS equal to the damage the attack would deal to avoid the damage. This would help narrate the combat a bit more, as spending the CS meant you have to explain how you avoid the attack.
It goes much deeper than that but is too long to explain here.
Wasent there something in modern d20 ? your HP get depleted as you narrowly dodge an attack and if you run out you take the damage on your Con stat as you take the hit this time
Great video Dael! So many of the struggles I've had with different player types and what they each find fun has been solved from stealing ideas or taking lessons from video game development talks/keynotes/postmortems. There is so much to learn from that world of games and vice versa.
Dael: we should take stuff from video games!
everyone: *cheers*
D&D 4e: "well, EXCUUUUUSE ME"
Link reference? That voice lives rent free in my memory
@@alextrollip7707 can't give a link but it's from the animated legend of Zelda cartoon from I think the 80s-90s?
@@GoblinLord thanks man.
I did know that
I re read my comment and got the co fusion though.
I meant to ask.
" Is that a reference of something Link said?"
I believe "well, EXCUUUUUUUSE ME" was part of Steve Martin's stand-up routine back in the 70's.
Fun thing about the Halo energy shields, I'm pretty sure Combat Evolved was the first video game to implement a recharging 'health bar' in that vein.
Combat Evolved changed so much about the video game industry, it's honestly the goat
I love the relationship scale and actually implemented it in my games a while ago, but I did not use one based off dragon age. I took a cue from Fire Emblem instead.
F = enemies
D = dislike
C = neutral
B = friendly
A = close
S = oh, they banging.
And instead of math, which I have neither the attention span nor time for, I just tick it up or down whenever they have a bonding moment or get into a fight.
Regarding your “shields and HP” idea, I know that Starfinder has a Stamina, then HP system that works in much the same way you described, with the Stamina being easier and faster to recover and going away before the actual damage to hit points.
You know I JUST got done writing a comment about the d20 star wars rpg having something similar.
It's really good at empowering groups without healers too.
In the world I'm designing, I'm going to be using charisma as a source for the "stamina." Less borrowing from a video game, and more drawing from RWBY's idea that the power of the soul working to protect/heal you. Still trying to figure out how to break that down, mechanically, but it should be fun once I test it out.
@@cristotheranger4263 That's pretty cool. You could make it an option to use your CHA bonus adding to your hit die when you roll for hit points. Maybe not the dpeth you're looking for but an easy fix.
@@alarin612 Maybe. Perhaps with a bonus based on total character level?
Awesome video as always!! Modding TTRPGs to be our person "perfect" experience with our friends and parties is the best example of our the GM/DM can use mechanics as a form of creative expression. It also helps more games be different experiences.
I really like Five Torches Deep's Load and Durability system. It abstracts weight based on str score, its are 1-5 Loads, and makes over carrying interesting. Durability is a great way to add to Load. Similar, it has a 1-5 point system, and basically is the health of your armor, shields, and weapons. And if they hit zero, they break, and lose their protection or damage mods, but still are weighing you down. I got super deep into it on our channel -but a major thing about Durability and Shields, is that as a reaction, you can choose to use a shield to block an attack, and you can choose to have it sacrifice 1 Dur, 2 Dur, or break out right. But the only way your weapons and armor lose Durability points if they receive or cause damage from a Critical Success or Failure.
"HP = how many peasant punches you can take" best soundbite
-Cmike
Getting a bit of Banner Saga vibe from the Armour/HP section, which is always a good thing!
On inventory I like the Pathfinder 2E way of doing it. Items have a Bulk value to represent their weight and size with default carrying capacity being 5 Bulk. So you end up with jump a few bulky items as it's whole numbers only, no fractions or decimals. However lots of smaller things like torches are considered Light and it takes 10 light items to equal 1 bulk. So you don't bother unless you have more than 10/20/etc to add them. Then there are items like chalk which are negligible which means you don't track them at all. It makes things so much easier as you just quickly look at the big ticket items then a quick check of if you got a lot of light items and view your total. None of that spreadsheet math of weights in D&D.
02:02 Fast Travel
03:36 Abstract Carrying Capacity
06:00 Relationship Scale
08:43 Shields, then Health
11:06 Recruit and Influence Missions
One thing that I love to use that I got from Fallout: New Vegas, and adapted from Stars without Numbers, is the factions game and the PCs places in it. Each of the factions in the world has their own agendas and relationships with one another, and take actions each month or so, causing the tide of power and influence to change. It really helped make my world feel more alive and give me easier hooks to dangle for my players. It also had them take some consideration when it came to taking on certain quests that they may curry favor from one faction or another.
My favorite moment is when the players went to visit a library far off, but found the city engulfed in civil war and the library destroyed, something that I had alluded to for a little while, but which had completely shocked the players who had taken their sweet time getting there.
Time yields to none.
I've been trying to steal boss ideas from World of Warcraft. The fights are designed for a party of players and there's a bunch of boss fight tropes they like to use:
The Don't Stand in the Fire boss: The safe places to stand in the arena changes at the start of every turn, forcing players to keep on the move (and risk taking Opportunity Attacks) to avoid taking damage.
The Romeo and Juliet boss: Two bosses have to be killed on the same turn, because if one dies before the other, the other one heals them. Make it a Lair Action and maybe have them heal for less each time if the party keeps not managing to kill both of them.
The Ornstein and Smough boss: Two bosses fought simultaneously, but when one dies, the other becomes stronger and gets more abilities.
The Achilles Heel Armory boss: A boss that can only be damaged significantly by a certain spell/weapon/catapult that also happens to be kept nearby. This lets your players get their hands on super powerful abilities that can only be used for the one fight.
The Enrage Timer boss: A boss that gets stronger every turn until it becomes unmanageable, forcing players to burn resources quickly or die.
The Kill the Healer boss: The boss has flunkies that heal or otherwise buff the boss' abilities. The party needs to prioritize killing the minions before the boss.
The Tank Swap boss: The boss puts a stacking debuff on whatever player they're attacking (maybe -1AC per attack), and after so many stacks, the player needs to fall back and let another player take over.
The Hot Potato boss: The fight has some kind of ~Thing~ that needs to be passed from player to player and kept out of the hands of the enemy, but holding onto it for too long has detrimental effects on the player, so one player can't hoard it the whole time.
You could really keep this up all day, there's so many good Boss Fight design ideas.
This is me, learning I can't copy text from the UA-cam app. Screenshots it is! 😅
Thank you for this write-up, seriously!
Was great seeing two of my favorite RPG personalities chat on dimension 20. As a DM with a love a literature and mythology, it makes sense that both Brennon and you appeal to me so much. Didn't realize until that interview that you both have such similar backgrounds.
Watched this video with my brother who is our current DM, friday afternoon here in Europe, and he enthousiastically began taking notes halfway through for our new sky-pirate campaign. Cool!
Awesome video. The relationship/retainer system is something I've been implementing in my Rime of the Frostmaiden game, I love this!
Also: Why do you hate AC Revelations? It's one of the only ones I haven't played so I'm curious
Great video as always. I've been doing the NPC reputation mechanic in my games for a while now. One thing that's really important in the TTRPG setting (vs. the game) is that when you piss off Anders, you get instant feedback that your reputation with Anders has suffered by 5. There's no reason that a player HAS to know that unless the character they're dealing with is the sort of person who will immediately prosecute a grievance. I made a little character tracker handout for people to make them start thinking "this person I met who is a named NPC... what do they think of me? Would they put themselves in harm's way to help me, or would they warn other people away from assisting me? But like so many things -- what the PC thinks they know might not be reality! They might think an NPC is totally on their side when in actuality they are letting that revenge dish get nice and cold before serving it.
I like the idea of major towns having teleportation circles. And the way the magic works, you have to have gone to that place to be able to use a circle to get there. So that takes care of the requirement to go there first.
Ooh, it's also a little star gate-y! Like you now how to teleport but you need the address
@@MonarchsFactory Never realized that connection, but all the better! A fast travel system like that also, I think, gets the party wanting to travel to new places so they can add it to their list of menus options. Or heck, getting the party wizard to learn the spell so he or she can make their own circles to add to the network.
Quite a few good ideas here! Awesome video :)
On the 'shields as a health mechanic' thing, have you played/seen any of the 40k ttrpgs? Rogue trader etc? They use a similar armour mechanic to one used in a lot of games (fallout new vegas comes to mind) - damage reduction. so you take 10 damage, but you have 5 armour so you only take 5. but if that gun had armour piercing bullets maybe you take 9 damage, or full damage, and so on.
Probably one of the crunchy systems I found I liked better and felt a bit more 'real'...
RE: The "Shields before health" idea...
The Ironclaw system works that way to some extent. Armor, shields, and your "body" stat contribute toward a thing called "soak," which is where you roll dice to see how much damage is negated from an attack you just suffered. It's not exactly the same thing because there's no real HP system in the game, just statuses (1 point of damage after soak = hurt, 2 = afraid, 3 = injured, 4 = dying, and 5 = dead), but the concept of your shield, armor, and outright character toughness taking the brunt of the damage before your character is wounded is the same.
By the way, it sounds brutal, but numbers are low and every PC gets one layer of plot armor per day where they can negate a killing blow, so it's not TOO bad. Recovery is the harder thing to deal with in the system due to the low-magic setting, so it takes days to recover if you're injured.
How do you not have _at least_ a quarter million subscribers yet?? Your content is amazing, and one of the few that makes me say "OH SHE POSTED GOTTA WATCH IT NOW" every single time I get a notification
I just noticed that Skulduggery Pleasant book behind you - I loved that series growing up, and I've never encountered anyone else who knew about it!
SO COOL DAEL. here's an interpretation of "overshield" hp mechanic that could work with d&d as is: level 1 hp is "CORE" hp. on level up, core hp raises by your con mod, the other hp gains (from your class) go into "TEMP/OVERSHIELD/MORALE" hp. so then, "temp hp" (which is not actually temporary) now represents all your combat willpower, your superficial wounds, and your tiring. all "damage" is drained first from your temp hp. it can be replenished by all standard means (magical healing and hit dice now represent bolstering your will, heartening you to continue). any damage beyond temp hp that dips into CORE hp represents actual physical, lasting damage that you have sustained, it can only be healed by a "gritty realism" long rest of 7 days, or by other extreme methods of healing (perhaps involving quests). a reduction to 0 CORE hp could represent a lingering injury based on the damage or attack that brought you there, with in-game consequences. normal healing at 0 CORE hp would restore only 1 CORE and the overflow would be temp. i look at all of this provoking flavorful roleplay, so that a strike that damages CORE hp would be a significant thing and could lend flavor to combat descriptions, as the PCs try to struggle on through their wounds, rather than the "fighting with full power until suddenly unconscious" that the current system implies. THANKS FOR THE INSPIRATION DAEL!!
As the game designer who worked on the Assassin's Recruit gameplay (among other things, some less popular :o) It made me really happy that it was something that stands out for you in Assassin's Creed: Revelation. Funnily enough, I am working on some homebrew rules for one of my DnD campaigns where my players, as part of a group of mercenaries, can recruit new members and, eventually, send them on missions to further increase the power and influence of their group. I used some of the rules from Stronghold and Followers as the base, but I am changing and adding a lot of new things. It isn't fully tested yet, but my players are pretty excited to have that little game during their downtime. They also like the opportunities to find and convince people to join their Mercenary group.
For the abstract carrying capacity, you could even have rules like 1) if your Strength score is very high or low you lose or get a column of the grid; 2) if you buy a very costly backpack it might expand your grid; 3)you can have smaller grids (even 1 or 2 squares) representing pouches or bags
Regarding HP, I've actually been exploring a new system that I'll be trying out in my next game to help the feeling of health in combat. Basically, a character's health is just 5 + ConMod; your hit dice are something you spend to reduce incoming damage by dodging/parrying/getting lucky, and only the damage that actually gets through to your health is a true hit. You no longer know your max HP in advance, but it averages out to roughly the same - for example, a Lv. 5 Fighter with +1Con would normally have an average of 37 HP (10+4d10+5). With this system, that fighter would have 6 health and five [1d10+1] rolls (average 32.5) for a total average of 38.5 points of damage they can take.
The best benefit of this, though, is that it can give the players the feeling that they're reacting to an attack. Normally, the enemy either hits you or misses you, and there's nothing you can do about it (you can narrate as if you parried or dodged, but it's not the same). With this, the enemy can either totally miss or "potentially hit", and then the player can decide how they're reducing the damage -- maybe they'll parry it all aside, or maybe they'll mostly dodge but let it graze them for 1 point of health.
The main balance change will come with healing, and I'll have to play with these to figure them out for sure. Short rests normally regain hit points based on hit dice, so I'm thinking for ease a short rest will simply replenish half your hit dice and no health. Cure Wounds will now replenish one hit die and 1 health per spell level - so it can only HEAL you a little bit, but it does help give you a second wind (it's also now a bit weaker for d6 classes and stronger for d10 classes, which I think is good). I'm thinking a long rest would replenish all hit dice and 1 health - this also can help with the idea that if you're *injured*, a long rest may not fully heal that wound.
The retainer missions thing reminds me of the errands you can send characters on in Final Fantasy Tactics. Definitely a neat suggestion for retainers.
Great example! I love FFTA
I really like the recruits/squires idea! Not only does this mean that the party can take care of more things because of their influence, but it also allows for far reaching name recognition. "Those guys are the bosses of the team that saved us from the gelatinous cube!" Instant superstar status.
the shields vs. health thing actually *is* something that I'm putting in my own game, funnily enough, though I sort of stole it from a bunch of TTRPGs that already exists. basically once you run out "HP," any further damage is done directly to your ability scores, and directly lowers the probability of success on your rolls. not an original idea, but an effect one to be sure.
The "recruits" system sounds similar to what was attempted in 2ed after characters hit level 9+. Had one group of players get to that stage and it was pretty fun! Especially when one player started a cult!
Love that for them!
By the time my group finished playing Kingmaker, they had a catapult based kobold parachute regiment, a clan of giant bug taming faerie creatures, a dwarf general that just fell in love with their chief bug wrangler, five Ettercaps (one was convinced he was a living rock thanks to the party tiefling), a small tribe of Hobgoblins living in a former elven temple they cleared out and turned into a casino, so many varieties of giant I don't even remember them all, a Chuul the kitsune gunslinger literally intimidated into working for them, and an awakened Tyrannosaur that the Dwarven war priest accidentally brought out of the dream realm
The first edition of star wars d20 had a health/shield paradigm. you had a number of wound points equal to your Constitution and if you lost one wound you were wounded (and you could be knocked out by failling a con save), while vitality points worked like traditional dnd hit points, and were described as your ability to turn hits into glancing hits. Might adopt it for my next dnd campaign.
10:00 I like the talk about hit points, and the inspiration from videogames when talking about them. Some TTRPGS like Lancer and an element called "structure" where a player has a number of structure points that is like a number of health bars. So long as a player is within the first health bar their mech's (it's a mech game) ability to function is the same as if it was at full health, but once a mech takes structure damage by depleting the first health bar it goes to another health bar and the mech is in worse shape and cannot function as well. If this were but into DnD terms what you could do is instead of going unconscious when you go below one hit point you roll a saving throw, a success means that the player is at one hit point and functions normally but a failure means that the player goes to full health (minus any extra damage carried over) but loses some functionality until they get healed from their crippling condition. When applying this to players it creates a greater emphasis on strategy other than "make sure the damaging player always has at least one hit point and make sure a designated healer player stays away from danger". When you give your villains structure points it means your villains will be at full strength at the start of a fight so players will want to have something to weaken them before the fight starts, instead of just "how do I make the villain die as quickly as possible?". This is all options to make the game more tactical and get players and DMs to think about more status effect other than just damage but if you prefer to think of hit-points as they are in vanilla dnd that's totally valid too.
Love the relationship scale! I remember an incident in Critical Role campaign 1, Vox Machina was talking to someone who, from Matt's description was second or third in rank in the Ashari village and Marisha, in character, dismissed them like a servant in the middle of the conversation. That sort of shit should absolutely have consequences for the players.
I missed this video when it came out, glad I caught it after all. My personal inspirations: Souls games for boss mechanics, often hard to directly transpose to turn based combat but it gives ideas, Resident Evil for puzzles, they are usually simple but very nicely intertwined. And the mother of all: Witcher 3 for side quests, monsters, the oils (that give a nice consumable to reward the PCs with) little non-quest notes on the bulletin boards, priceless. I'm currently playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and am keeping an eye on the quests and mechanics I could shamelessly steal for my game.
The NPC's feelings towards you reminds me of the friendship graph from Flight of the Conchords
Hacking TTRPGs is my default state when I'm not doing anything else, so this was a very relatable video. Lots of cool ideas, I'll have to rewatch later and take notes!
The abstracting of carrying capacity is a big one I've also been puzzling out. To be fair I haven't had a chance to test it out on my players, but basically my idea of it would be that all their starting equipment and any reasonable adventuring equipment is a freebie, but any special equipment or (more importantly) treasure has a certain size point value associated with it.
Sort of like you said, small is 1, medium is 2, large is 3. So a treasure hoard of gold pieces might be a large hoard, but they could split it up and only take a small piece of it. I don't know if I'd use an actual grid, though the tetris aspect of that is appealing.
I think the only other thing I'd add to the idea is that I think characters with more strength should still get at least a little more space to carry stuff, since they can lift a lot more.
Also, just in general, excellent video! I really liked this one!
For translating the grid system to irl - I imagine pulling out an old set of legos, and using pieces or creations to physically represent your items and stuff them into a bag. This is a more cumbersome option and treads into the realm of LARPing but I think it could be a cool little option. For anyone who loves their models and tokens, they could give beads and tokens to represent currency.
I was just talking to a friend about some homebrew as a first time DM. I have several encounters planned around using the mechanics from WoW dungeons and raids because they were so visually entertaining!
This was actually really cool, I hadn't thought to use any of this. A system that really uses a lot of these concepts (relationship scale, and then the shields (called vitality)). I really liked the AC apprentice thing, as well as the abstract carrying capacity. If I build an RPG I will definitely look back at this
PF2 kinda has that inventory/backpack system. Not exactly how you described, but your character can carry X much "Bulk" based on their Strength, and items are each a certain amount of Bulk based on how big/heavy they are. Works really well in my experience.
I like the inventory idea! If I were running it I'd give people a baseline amount of inventory space and reward high STR players (since it's often dumped) by giving them an extra row or column of inventory space for each point over ten. Calling attention to the inventory and engaging with it as a minigame also encourages players to collect and use items. Once you create a barrier to hoarding, players have to be more mindful of what they bring with them. Adds an interesting dimension to gameplay without getting bogged down in numbers.
An excellent explanation of "health/HP" came from one of the Uncharted devs. Nathan Drake can't take 30-40 bullets. He dies after a couple. The screen going red (health) shows depletion of his "luck". Grazes, near misses, etc... but the last couple of round actually connect and he dies like any other person, or like the enemies he murder-strafes. In the case of the video game, hiding behind the chest high wall let's him take quick looks around, process what's happening and, essentially, replenish his luck/awareness.
Always stay for the post credits scenes in Dael videos. Always.
Loved the discussion about retainers, passing off gear and sending them off on missions. I play an evil cleric in a Pathfinder game and my character is working on establishing an Assassin's Guild. He just took the Leadership feat and level 1 followers started showing up. His two favorites, a brother and sister (fighter 1 and rogue 1) are both going to become clerics as the gain levels and with be getting most of my characters hand-me-downs. Also, I mentioned to the GM that I would like them to do little missions, like in the ACKS rpg, and he was cool with the concept. In order to help him with ideas, I am going to buy him Waiting for the Raven videogame. It puts you in charge of a cell of a secret society that is infiltrating a city. Might give you some more ideas for those little missions, Dael.
Thanks for all of the creative thoughts. Always a pleasure to watch your videos.
Watching this video:
Grid inventory! That's on Mausritter.
Retainers, that's hirelings from Mausritter.
Factions! Of course they're on Mausritter hex maps.
HP is hit avoidance and then damage is applied to your stats, that's Mausritter!
That little free game is an RPG design masterpiece 🥰
Pathfinder2e has a mechanic similar to shields using stamina.
However, what I think makes this more useful than other messages saying similar things is they have guidelines and an entire alternative set of abilities which they set aside to actually suppport this in the system which wasn't built around it, so it's actually very useful for trying to take a system like 5e and make something like shields/stamina work without getting too fiddly.
Examples of things I would do based on that:
Con mod goes to HP, and hit die goes to stamina (or vice versa)
Short rest only restores stamina (Also helps with the perpetually resting party)
Temp HP is really just treated like temp stamina. (Avoids some confusion here)
Feats like leadership, or adding in some of the feats from PF2e for stamina, like Rally, which is made to restore stamina. These are nice supports you can steal.
One thing I want to add in a future campaign is an arena similar to the Totomostro from FFXV. Having the players bet and possibly control a set of creatures against other creatures would be a nice change from the life and death stakes normal combat presents usually. Also, by using creatures already battled, the knowledge the players retain from those battles may give them an advantage in which to choose during a matchup.
"I can't be stopped." Nor should you be!
I came for the video game tropes being re-assimilated into TTRPGs, I stayed for the "in our tabletop games!" shimmy. :D
Was made aware of your channel because of the 'Adventuring Academy' podcast -- been on a binge ever since! Great stuff here!
Veins of the Earth had a grid inventory system that gave you more item slots for positive modifiers in your STR, CON... even INT (smarter so you pack things better)
The main example I know of the carrying capacity thing is Resident Evil, particularly 7. Those games also make everything a tight fit so you have to think carefully about what you’ll need (RE uses resource management in general as the primary form of tension).
Thanks for all your great generous content. 2 things, have you played Renowned Explorers: International Society, great fun, excellent with kids, and a clever 'combat' encounter system like paper rocks scissors but aggro, friendly, deceptive. Recommend it. 2nd, do you crack yourself up editing? Love to see a vid of all the clipping floor doofs.
One of the old D20 versions of Star Wars RPG definitely used that shields/health thing, only I think it was called vigor - which worked like normal HP, and then your health was what really put you in the dead book.
I really loved Payday, Left 4 Dead, and Vermintide. They are great examples of a co-op group going around completing objectives, and I learn a lot from the objective examples. If everything was just "these things want to kill you but if you kill them first then they win" it would get dull fast. Have the players carry a large cumbersome object to the altar while skeletons raise around them. Have them break their way through a barrier only to unleash a barrage of enemies onto themselves. Ask them to complete any kind of task under any kind of extra stress can feasibly be a great encounter!
I find that it's usually possible to convey what hit points "actually" are narratively, and I do that in a similar way to how people often use "bloodied". Any damage that someone (NPC or PC) takes up to half of their max hit points are near misses, desperate evasions, or only very incidental damage, e.g. "You swing your broadsword down at the orc and he only barely lunges out of the way, causing you to just barely miss cleaving him in two." An outright miss I will make more explicit: "You take a swing at the orc but misjudge the angle and he deflects the blow with his axe, letting out a rough laugh."
Once someone gets under that 1/2 threshold, however, they start taking "Real" damage. Blows start connecting, blood is drawn, and they are visibly beaten down and injured. "The orc tries to parry but you slip under his guard, burying your sword in his hip."
This way, you preserve some cinematic tension, filling an encounter with dodges, parries, gaining and losing ground, and finally, a few decisive killing strikes. But again it's more a narrative patch than a mechanical one, and the exact threshold is totally up to you as a DM.
For the shield& health split, I'd recommend Tephra: the steampunk RPG. It has hit points that represent stamina or something like that, and wounds that represent... wounds. Hit points are completely recovered in a breather of five minutes, while you need weeks of downtime to heal wounds.
I love the relationship thing and the travel once fast travel from thenceforth
I had a campaign set in Eberron back in the 3.5E days. Aa "healer" was necessary back then but I didn't want any single player getting stuck with that role. Everyone had two characters but would only use one of them during any mission that they were sent on by their patron. The non-mission PCs got half XP regardless. This idea was taken from the X-Men video game.
Some other good examples (IMO):
- Dragon Age: Inquisition War Table missions (akin to your idea for retainer missions)
- DA:I's Forces / Secrets / Connections method of organizing and focusing influence
- XCom 2012's simple "Blue/Orange" two-tiered action system
- Mass Effect 2 Loyalty Missions
- Civilization pops working the territory around an MCDM Stronghold
As someone who recently had my party battle a monster I completely ripped off from Shadow of the Colossus and who is currently laying out a Zelda style dungeon puzzle (e.g. go to A flip lever so you can go to B to flip lever so that you can cross bridge to C) this was awesome. Might be difficult to enact some of these mid campaign, but I LOVE that inventory system and the recruitment mechanics! Thanks Dael!
Great vid! The new Talisman rpg from Ulisses Spiele has a neat ablative armor mechanic, whereby you can do a quick, partial repair after a combat but have to pay a pro to have it fully repaired. And some OSR games, like Mausritter, have started using slot-based encumbrance too.
They already have the hit point shield separation. In Pathfinder and 3.5 there was a vigor and wounds system. I’d suggest checking it out if you’re interested.
I've adopted the shield health idea for the health a set of RPG rules I'm making. The first half of health represents stamina and energy and comes back on a short rest. Instead of taking actual damage you are blocking the attack, but you do so in a way that knocks the wind out of you. The second half of the health is actual body health and it takes either magic or a long time to heal.
My favorite version of Shields Before Health was in the game Demonwars: Reformation. Characters had very little HP, but damage was always rolled at the same time as the attack and if it would be a hit, you could opt to spend points from a pool of Balance to avoid the attack. As you sacrifice your footing and positional advantage you avoid damage, but become easier to hit going forward. It then became a resource you could spend on other special abilities or restore to allies, all in a tight risk/reward game. Lots of cool ideas in that game, wish it got its second book.
D&D 3e had an option of "Vitality and Hit Points" rules, with Vitality basically being "Shields", and representing a character's active defenses at dodging and parrying attacks, until it runs out, at which point they suffer actual damage. And Critical Strikes just bypassed Vitality entirely. The mechanics had Hit Dice rolled to see how much Vitality you had, while your actual Hit Points were locked at your Constitution Ability Score.
I stole so much from the mass effect trilogy for my campaigns. Having a bunch of culture and secret history to pull from is really helpful for building a homebrew world.
Great video! I like the idea of letting players fast travel to a location after they have been there before. Also the grid system for inventory, I haven't done much stuff with inventory and that seems like it would be easy to implement.
One idea I have taken from videogames is the concept of weapon upgrades. The pc's can pay to increase the damage die of their weapon by 1 increment, like d6 to d8, and it gets progressively more expensive each time. Doing more damage makes the pc's happy, and it gives them something to spend their gold on. I give the monsters hit points that are on the higher side of the stat block average to compensate, so it doesn't really unbalance things.
Regarding inventory (and it could apply to equipping underlings too) Seth Skorkowsky on youtube did a video on it and he posted in the description the backpack sheets that he and his friends have used for a long time. It was love at first sight when I saw those.
With the "shields before health" thing, anyone interested in that might want to look up the Wounds & Vigor system in Pathfinder because it works a lot like that but with certain things like crits able to bypass the "shields" part. It seems like a pretty solid system, and would at least give some solid ideas for how to make your own similar system.
Thank you for correcting people on HP being hit points rather than health points. Personal pet peeve of mine - losing HP is you being worn down *before* the injury, getting worn to the point you take that *real* damage.
I love this video. I often apply videogame concepts to my games narratively or to create a structure for the session. I also have many beloved rpgs that I have found inspiration for.
Regarding the Shield system, Starfinder kinda implemented something similar with Stamina+Hitpoints system, where stamina is easy to recover and hitpoints are very hard to recover. You always take Stamina first.
Shields then Hit Points is something that I really like in TTRPGs like RuneQuest and Shadowrun so that was a good one to see.
i think settlement building rules from games like Fallout 4 would make a great framework for a Fantasy or Post Apocalypse game. Not so much the ingredient gathering but the idea of planning and constructing a community and attracting merchants that supply you to protect the people.
I think if the burden of tracking food and water bothers you as a GM you can construct a HUD for food and water, just a spin wheel showing hours unfed or unslept or whatever you're tracking that you reset whenever the party takes care of themselves.
The Middle-Earth RPG she mentioned is called "The One Ring"
I got it off humble bundle at one point. It waa super interesting.
Haven't been able to play it yet though.
Cheers
re: the Assassin's Creed organization minigame. I've ran a space pirate campaign where the player's crew got to the size of a small fleet, and we did that sort of delegating organization-running thing a lot... also inspired directly by Assassin's Creed Revelations!!! Black Flag has a ship-centric variant as well. It was a great way to catch up with the NPCs from session to session, get the fleet some resources, and *specially* do some worldbuilding at corners the main party hadn't yet been into, maybe activating a plot hook or another via NPC that the players would go check out for themselves later, or having these operations cause unintended ripples in the setting (which I guess you could do with a more Dragon Age Inquisition war table type thing, but that's way less fun than all the pirate recruiting and having each deckhand have a name and a suggestion of a personality). It's a great mid- to late- game addition imo
The underlings idea could be very fun, maybe even have a RP heavy game based around this, where you are the head of a small organization trying to gain power by being there in important events and sending your guys to do stuff. Or in the middle of a large hierarchy where you need to do some stuff but most of it is done by those below you and your main struggle is to climb up.
Bonus on the hp thing:
I use Vigor and Health, Vigor is a lot and Health doesn't level up BUT when you hit 0 Vigor in combat u gain a special power tailored for that pc specifically!
I call it Death March
D&D 3e had something like the shields first rule as an optional rule in Unearthed Arcana, it divided HP into Wounds and Vitality, with wounds representing your actual physical health. It wasn't perfect in practice - crits went straight to Wounds, making for a very swingy combat, but I've been wanting to use something like it for a long time.
My personal take for 5e would be that your level 1 HP are Wounds, and all further are Vitality. You can only damage Wounds once you've depleted the target's vitality. Hit Dice in short rest maybe only heals Vitality. And I'd maybe change Healing Word to only affect Vitality, to give Cure Wounds more meaning. Something like that anyway.
Dael, you need to check out Blades in The Dark, it does most of the things that you talk about here.
Abstract inventory? Before a heist you specify how much gear you're carrying, each point of "load" allows you to bring one point of items. You choose what you brought retroactively during the heist, your character had days to plan this thing and you only have about 10 minutes at most. If it's anything outlandish you handle how you got the item in a flashback scene, otherwise you just take it from your available items.
Shields then health? you can bring armor as an item, and it can be abstract too. A bribe can work just as well as a buckler to defend you from harm in some circumstances. One point of armor blocks one harm, and classes each get a special ability that can be used to spend special armor to negate non-harm consequences too. There are also two different kinds of health; your character gains "stress" from fighting back against consequences without armor, but you also have "harms", which are injuries that character has sustained from consequences. So BiTD doesn't just have shields, it has multiple flavors of shields.
Reputation trackers? Not as granular as your system, but there are other trackers in the system you can use alongside them if that's what you're going for. The tracker goes from "-3" to "+3", with each number representing a point at which they reach a new tier of love or hatred for your group. The higher you go, the more they're willing to help you, with "+3" being the point where they become an ally and actively go out of their way to benefit your group. Equally, negative status makes them more inclined to hurt you, with "-3" being the tipping point at which they go to war with your crew. In the book it's mostly factions that are mentioned, not individuals, but there's plenty of space to add them. There are also "contacts" which serve a similar purpose for individual players. Contacts can either be a friend or a rival; friends provide a bonus if you can make use of them in a score, rivals generate extra complications if they get involved.
Recruits and hirelings you can send on missions? Cohorts are explicitly for that purpose. They are gangs and experts whose power scales with the tier of your crew. They can be sent to do things on their own, used to boost your rolls, enable group actions, and some provide secondary benefits like acting as a doctor for your crew, or literally being demons with demon powers. There are also the contacts and allies I mentioned previously, you get a bonus if you use them to acquire an asset, and a temporary cohort is a valid choice for one. In my last campaign, there were many times when a friend was goaded into going to prison on behalf of the crew.
Only thing you mentioned that BiTD doesn't handle is fast travel. The core setting of Duskvol is a singular city, so there's no major distances to travel across. Getting to the site of a score or back to your lair is just instantaneous in most situations, only becoming a thing that takes time if people are tracking your crew for whatever reason. So it kinda has fast travel, but only in the way that all travel is fast if you never have to travel.
I have now realized you're probably not going to see this comment, but I have the PDF version of Blades free to access in my Google Drive. John Harper won't mind me sharing that with your mod team on Discord, he actually put a notice in the book granting permission to print it and redistribute it.
Best thing I took from videogames to my TTPRG are "multi phased (boss) fights", "grunts" and "objectives":
"Multi Phased Fights" means that a fight isn't just "Intitiative - Attack - Damage - Done" but more like "Once you bring the boss to X% hp, he will retreat > now it become a chase > the players corner the boss, he calls in reinforcement they players have to fight first to reach the boss"
Grunts: Low-Level Enemies "Cannonfodder" who are not killed by dealing X hitpoint damage but killed by "two hits (or one critical)" - this allows players to shine while bashing dozens of enemies to get where they want to go (e.g. the boss).
"Objectives": give players special objectives they have to reach to finish an encounter instead of "slay all enemies"
I’ve actually used the shield thing before, and it worked great. How I ruled it was that “shield” was physically exhausting to keep up, so players would only have it actively on during combat. Outside of combat it would only take effect if a player said they activated it, and it couldn’t last longer than 10 minutes.
This worked great, because traps or surprise attacks would seem more deadly, because they usually attacked hit points directly. It also helped that player’s hit points only went up by their con mod, and they only got back hp equal to their con mod during a long rest. Shield would fully regen during long rest
For my 'fast travel' I use it mixed with random encounters. Based on when they leave and where they are going I have different charts I made up with orcs, goblinoids, beasts and the like. I let them use a travel modifier if they have a scout type in the party and little things like that
I think a really easy way to Incorporate shields then health is just to let the players know that's how your narratively going to interpret Hit Points. There doesn't need ti be a mechanical element to make that significant in their minds.
Maybe if incorporating something mechanically helps to drive it home like the mechanics from your Injuries table but you take your damage threshold and add a caveat of like *Major Injuries can only occur if the damage brings you to or below a certain % of health. Something like that but minor injuries can still happen unchanged.
I think that kind of highlights what people enjoy sometimes enjoy about lower levels and carries it along to mid level and possibly higher levels.
A modern setting 5e adaptation game I run has "armor first, then health" in a way. Contemporary kevlar/ceramic body armor isn't meant to be re-used; when it absorbs a bullet or what-have-you you're meant to have to replace it. In my game, taking significant damage typically represents your body armor absorbing hits, although you might be suffering minor narrative injuries like bruising and fractured ribs underneath it. If you go down, your body armor is rendered damaged and after the scene is over won't provide armor protection anymore until it is replaced. At that point, you are obviously much more likely to be hit and the hits are narrated much more dangerously. We also have major injuries when you go down by more than -10 HP, so being more likely to go down and suffer injuries reinforces the idea that you've "depleted" your armor's protection.
Do your players all having Mending or do you have a way to keep them from cheesing the broken armor?
@@MajorHickE None of them have access to mending, but even if they did, it wouldn't matter because we're talking contemporary ballistic weave and ceramic body armor. The fibers in ballistic weave stretch and deform when they absorb a bullet, and ceramic plates spall and splinter when penetrated. Both are well outside the capacity of mending to repair.
If you don't know about this already, you should totally look up OSR, Old School Renaissance. It's a movement within the DnD group, where people are bringing back the original versions of DnD - either by rewriting the rules to be more clear and in all one book, or by writing their own games to have that feeling of old school play. A lot of their ideas can easily be ported from one system to the next.
I bring this up because they have the same thoughts as you - a "healthy disrespect for the official rules," as Questing Beast stated in one of his reviews of OSR adventures (he's the only OSR UA-camr I've gotten into so far). In one of Questing Beast's videos, he reviewed a game that used the grid idea for carrying things. He also is a fan of having rows of squares and your access to those squares will depend on your strength and gear (like, if you have only belt pouches, you're not carrying much).
I love Questing Beast!
For shields I’d like to have them roll to block the attack if it hits instead of count towards AC. Then the shield has an assigned number of damage it can absorb. That way the 50 ft dragon can still knock you to the ground even if you block with your shield while a sword strike can be easily parried. You could pair this with assigning a number of damaged absorbed to armour as well.