When you were presenting I had an interesting idea. Max agility bonus in armor should be limited by Str. A high strength char would need e able to use their agility in armor than a weak one. Doing this means building with any two of the three physical stats is viable while giving different play style and flavor.
This armor system is not as simple as you may think. A simple armor system that breaks the ‘AC mechanic’ is armor systems that simply absorb damage prior to getting to your HP pool.
I'm really liking DC 20, but have a slight issue to the armor system. The "traditionalist" in me thinks that wizards & sorcerers shouldn't get armor. The idea that wizard robes give the same protection as leather armor for a bard or rogue doesn't seem right. Might just have to be an "at my table" rule.
Plus 1's matter more in this system than others. Normally it's just the difference between damage or no damage. This system, it could spell the difference between damage, no damage, or more damage.
I'm so proud of Dungeon Coach, he's gone from accidentally using the D&D names for DC20 stats to accidentally using the DC20 names for D&D stats. What progress!
If by agility checks you mean every test with agility this will be annoying, not only because heavy armor is not that impairing to the movement irl, but because the characters with agility as their dump stat are gonna get the worst of this, which apparently goes against the point of your changes
Greatly agree with health changes, I was worried the wizard and fighter health differences wouldn't feel right at the table especially at higher levels
Second suggestion: Have you thought of making the system use hexagons instead of squares for movement, creature placing, calculating spaces and whatnot? I know it may seem counterintuitive at first, but after watching Hexagons are Bestagons (by CGP Grey not a plug or anything), I'm sorta convinced that they may end up making for a more dynamic battlefield. Would love to hear your opinion on that if you've already given it any thoughts! Although even if it may end up being more fun overall, I'm sure people may strongly reject the idea, since it may look very unfamiliar to them.
I am loving how DC20 is shaping up! My only criticism is that movement being measured in "spaces". This has been a problem when trying to describe a character or explain mechanics to people when introducing them to DC20. Whilst working for physical battle maps, I find that it really affects the theater of the mind play. Its hard to describe a character moving 5 "spaces" but easy to describe them moving 30ft or 10m as people already know these measurements. This also breaks the immersion of the characters existing in a world rather than a game that's broken up into discrete chunks like minecraft. It feels like the game is incomplete without a physical board to look at which goes against the philosophy of creating cool moments as it would be instead dependent on what the map looks like rather than the collective storytelling that it can help position. Even if there was a conversion between them (eg 1 "space" = 6ft = 2m), the mental effort of converting between them would create unneeded mental effort, possibly slow down gameplay and create another barrier to play for new people to the system and TTRPGs. Also wouldn't measuring in the number of spaces limit how big of a map you could make, reducing the freedom of mapping. It would mean that big maps (previously 1 square = 10ft) would need a key like: 1 "space" = 2 spaces/squares which might create unnecessary confusion for people thinking the map is half as big rather than twice as big. Avoiding this would make it harder for people to play on a budget using wipeable maps, as they would have to change the size of spaces each time they drew up a new map, making it more time consuming, less consistent and again harder to visualize what the actual characters are doing. TL;DR: To highlight the cool moments and make the game easier to visualize, movement shouldn't be shackled to board spaces and should instead be a real life measurement such as ft or m.
This is my thinking as well. I understand why it makes more sense to change ft into spaces, because that is literally what you are working with when your minis are battling on the table. But I don’t recall ever having been very confused about converting 30 ft into 6 moves on a map. I think using real world distances is more than an anachronism, it’s an important immersive detail, that keeps you thinking of a battle as happening in a real space.
I think this can be easily overcome by stating right at the start that "1 space is 5 feet" and that's it. I actually do like the change to show "spaces" because it saves you the time of calculating how many spaces you can move each turn, or else having to count your space movements going 5 by 5 each time.
Well, best advice I can give for theatre of the mind players is: don't let that stop you. Do it anyway. It's like when WotC says "don't do this with our game." Do it anyway. This entire system is a product of one man saying "I don't like how you run things, so I'll make my own rules" over and over again. Absolutely describe them as having moved 25 feet instead of 5 spaces, or however you'd like to measure it. That's some good insight you have there with theatre of the mind. Tweak it and the game will be as incredible as you want it to be.
Hey there, just coming here to give some perspective on the changes and then maybe you’ll see them a bit differently So this change is technically a BUFF to light armor (since now heavy armor is only a +1 to PD instead of of +2, making light armor better when comparing the the. Also there is zero need to light armor, because the armor amount is unchanged, the only thing we did was give LOW agility characters options and new ways to increase their PD, that’s all 👍🏼
Interesting way of handling the agility-armor debacle. I'm curious to know what the mental stats do since the physical ones seem to be extremely strong and necessary in combat? Might have to become a patreon or donate on the kickstart or something soon in order to find out. This system shows SO MUCH promise, I'm fully invested in it after watching videos about it for 3 hours. My suggestion without yet having tried the system or anything is... multiply damage and HP of *everything* by 2. This lets you better balance weapons and whatnot. Otherwise, a weapon that deals 2 damage is dealing twice as much as a weapon that deals 1. Instead, if the base weapon deals 2 and you decide that 4 is too much, you can tone it down to 3, giving you a middlepoint that currently you do not have. However you may have already found a way of addressing this inside the game in other ways that I'm not aware of as I'm just now finding out about this system.
Reinforced does not make your maximum Agility bonus be 1, means you can go with a Agility of 0 (or even less) and use whichever is your Prime as your Armor Bonus.
I don't think that's it. That just means that the maximum of Agility you can put on it, is Prime-2. So if you have 3 prime, you can only add 1 Agility. If you have 0 Agility, you wont add anything. So you basically lose 1 defense if you have a Prime Agility, but if you only had 1 Agility, you gain 1 defense. Thats it
I was thinking about Theatre of the Mind combat while playing DC20. Will TotM be usable at all? There are a lot of stuff in DC20 that uses movement with exact spaces like throwing to a wall for damage and now the armor upgrade and such. How would you play it in TotM? If that is even possible. Thanks for the video and your work :)
@@Chris3s Well I like DC20 ideas so I want to try it :) We are also mixing the styles as we need so for set piece battles I will pull out a map with grid but for something small we usually do it with TotM. If there will be no possibility to use both I am willing to play on grid everytime because I really like the DC20 as it stands now. But it doesn't hurt to ask :)
Im reaaallly not feeling these changes to armor. I do not like that heavy armor damage reduction is mitigated by going 5 or 10 above ac- Like, hitting someone in heavy armor isnt hard, but they dont have to be worried about it because they know their armor will soak some of if not most of the blow. Let the heavy armor users feel tanky by being able to mitigate some of those blows that would have hit a critical spot had they not worn plate or such! Might, or just non agility focused chars will generally be easier to hit anyways because taking agility isnt what they pictured for their character. Because youre using d20's for dice rolls, the chance of being hit 5 above can be quite common, meaning why the heck did I bother with heavy armor thats penalizing me in the first place? Kinda feels like I'll be punished for not focusing agility, idk.
There is something about armour causing limited agility bonus to PD but not disADV on agility checks and then full agility bonus to PD but DisADV on agility checks that feels really janky to me. Having disADV on an agility check means the armour is restricting your character's ability to move their body around quickly and react to things. I would argue that having a restriction on how much agility bonus can be added as exactly the same reason - the armour is restricting your character's ability to move their body around and react to things (incoming attacks). This is going to be very hard to square in my head - and even harder to explain in a way that is intuitive to new players. I hope you guys rethink this again - it's tough to get right and that is ok, we'll be patient and keep feeding back to make it the best system out there.
Eh, I think this is too complicated. Instead of having a well defined Armor Class on the character sheet I now have to check which type of Armor I wear, what my corresponding stat is, if I have PDR/MDR and then check back if the damage reaches a certain threshold and ignores my PDR/MDR. Which makes me feel bad, since a vital stat just gets ignored when I need it the most. Not a fan.
seems like a lot of adding up, at least an armor table shows it all in one go. Also does AC really need to scale with level ??? seems like unnecessary extra math 10 + Agility + Armor seems simpler.
@@TheDungeonCoach I know that on my side it also show 14$ but at checkout only it mentionned that it's CAD, hence the discount that reduces the price by half (7 CAD off 14 instead of 5USD off 10USD). @snoe101 art thou also Canadian?
@TheDungeonCoach yes. And that is not enough. The negatives far outweigh the positives. Dnd at least only gives you disadvantage on stealth checks because metal armor makes noise.
@@TheDungeonCoachIdea what if instead of disAdv on agility checks it is just a flat minus. Also give heavy armor a +1 PD base over light again. the point of heavy armor is to forgo dexterity in order to be built like a brick sh*t house. The fact that at lvl one light armor can have more PD the heavy just feels wrong. If I'm misunderstanding any of your goals in this please clarify. thank you for all your hard work and dedication much love -A random who loves your work
I’m sorry I’m disappointed in the light armor mod as none of these are good for having a high agility I want to have a character that can move with flair and style but not having a modification when most others can take it is just a bit of feel bad -~-
He specified the point of the changes was specifically to take away some of the power of the agility which generally it's the most op attribute in ttrpgs anyway...
When you were presenting I had an interesting idea.
Max agility bonus in armor should be limited by Str. A high strength char would need e able to use their agility in armor than a weak one.
Doing this means building with any two of the three physical stats is viable while giving different play style and flavor.
I do actually love this idea! Wow lol
Impressive thought!
This armor system is not as simple as you may think. A simple armor system that breaks the ‘AC mechanic’ is armor systems that simply absorb damage prior to getting to your HP pool.
I'm keen to see how it fleshes out over time but I agree at this time it feels oddly convoluted for a system that initially seems much simpler.
I'm really liking DC 20, but have a slight issue to the armor system. The "traditionalist" in me thinks that wizards & sorcerers shouldn't get armor. The idea that wizard robes give the same protection as leather armor for a bard or rogue doesn't seem right. Might just have to be an "at my table" rule.
Maybe the wizard bought robes that are laced with light weight armor fiber! 😂
Agreed, robes are not equivalent to leathers
I actually let out a little yelp at work when I saw the email of v0.6 launched yesterday! So excited my dude! Great work!
Plus 1's matter more in this system than others. Normally it's just the difference between damage or no damage. This system, it could spell the difference between damage, no damage, or more damage.
I'm so proud of Dungeon Coach, he's gone from accidentally using the D&D names for DC20 stats to accidentally using the DC20 names for D&D stats. What progress!
If by agility checks you mean every test with agility this will be annoying, not only because heavy armor is not that impairing to the movement irl, but because the characters with agility as their dump stat are gonna get the worst of this, which apparently goes against the point of your changes
Heavy has always had this property, and if it becomes too oppressive, we could easily switch it to just acrobatics checks, or just stealth
Greatly agree with health changes, I was worried the wizard and fighter health differences wouldn't feel right at the table especially at higher levels
I'm so happy about the Grit update. I'm pretty pleased to have been one of the folks calling the start with 2. 😊
This is just in time, my session 0 for the DC20 campaign I'm running is tomorrow. Keep the amazing ideas coming!
I love all of these changes! Keep up the great work! So looking forward to the Kickstarter!
Barbarians have no reason to go in AGI because they can switch Savage Defense and Jump Distance to be MIG based. Will this be changed?
DC20 is the future!!
Hahaha, these comments always get me! Thanks for that Roja!
Second suggestion: Have you thought of making the system use hexagons instead of squares for movement, creature placing, calculating spaces and whatnot? I know it may seem counterintuitive at first, but after watching Hexagons are Bestagons (by CGP Grey not a plug or anything), I'm sorta convinced that they may end up making for a more dynamic battlefield. Would love to hear your opinion on that if you've already given it any thoughts!
Although even if it may end up being more fun overall, I'm sure people may strongly reject the idea, since it may look very unfamiliar to them.
Alan, how about a future video that shows the backers how this system can be used to tell GREAT STORIES? 😉
I am loving how DC20 is shaping up!
My only criticism is that movement being measured in "spaces". This has been a problem when trying to describe a character or explain mechanics to people when introducing them to DC20.
Whilst working for physical battle maps, I find that it really affects the theater of the mind play. Its hard to describe a character moving 5 "spaces" but easy to describe them moving 30ft or 10m as people already know these measurements. This also breaks the immersion of the characters existing in a world rather than a game that's broken up into discrete chunks like minecraft. It feels like the game is incomplete without a physical board to look at which goes against the philosophy of creating cool moments as it would be instead dependent on what the map looks like rather than the collective storytelling that it can help position.
Even if there was a conversion between them (eg 1 "space" = 6ft = 2m), the mental effort of converting between them would create unneeded mental effort, possibly slow down gameplay and create another barrier to play for new people to the system and TTRPGs.
Also wouldn't measuring in the number of spaces limit how big of a map you could make, reducing the freedom of mapping. It would mean that big maps (previously 1 square = 10ft) would need a key like: 1 "space" = 2 spaces/squares which might create unnecessary confusion for people thinking the map is half as big rather than twice as big. Avoiding this would make it harder for people to play on a budget using wipeable maps, as they would have to change the size of spaces each time they drew up a new map, making it more time consuming, less consistent and again harder to visualize what the actual characters are doing.
TL;DR: To highlight the cool moments and make the game easier to visualize, movement shouldn't be shackled to board spaces and should instead be a real life measurement such as ft or m.
This is my thinking as well. I understand why it makes more sense to change ft into spaces, because that is literally what you are working with when your minis are battling on the table. But I don’t recall ever having been very confused about converting 30 ft into 6 moves on a map. I think using real world distances is more than an anachronism, it’s an important immersive detail, that keeps you thinking of a battle as happening in a real space.
I think this can be easily overcome by stating right at the start that "1 space is 5 feet" and that's it. I actually do like the change to show "spaces" because it saves you the time of calculating how many spaces you can move each turn, or else having to count your space movements going 5 by 5 each time.
Well, best advice I can give for theatre of the mind players is: don't let that stop you.
Do it anyway. It's like when WotC says "don't do this with our game." Do it anyway. This entire system is a product of one man saying "I don't like how you run things, so I'll make my own rules" over and over again.
Absolutely describe them as having moved 25 feet instead of 5 spaces, or however you'd like to measure it. That's some good insight you have there with theatre of the mind. Tweak it and the game will be as incredible as you want it to be.
I finally was able to get DC20 yesterday and I just thought this was the current version not the newest XD
Keep it up! Love these adjustments!
woah that was such a huge nerf to light armor! I think that I prefer the last version but the new grit is pretty cool
Hey there, just coming here to give some perspective on the changes and then maybe you’ll see them a bit differently
So this change is technically a BUFF to light armor (since now heavy armor is only a +1 to PD instead of of +2, making light armor better when comparing the the.
Also there is zero need to light armor, because the armor amount is unchanged, the only thing we did was give LOW agility characters options and new ways to increase their PD, that’s all 👍🏼
@@TheDungeonCoach Thanks, I didn't see it in that way... by the way congratulation for your job!
Interesting way of handling the agility-armor debacle. I'm curious to know what the mental stats do since the physical ones seem to be extremely strong and necessary in combat? Might have to become a patreon or donate on the kickstart or something soon in order to find out. This system shows SO MUCH promise, I'm fully invested in it after watching videos about it for 3 hours.
My suggestion without yet having tried the system or anything is... multiply damage and HP of *everything* by 2. This lets you better balance weapons and whatnot. Otherwise, a weapon that deals 2 damage is dealing twice as much as a weapon that deals 1. Instead, if the base weapon deals 2 and you decide that 4 is too much, you can tone it down to 3, giving you a middlepoint that currently you do not have. However you may have already found a way of addressing this inside the game in other ways that I'm not aware of as I'm just now finding out about this system.
You need to boost damage reduction for armor, and introduce weapons with the armor piercing quality.
Reinforced does not make your maximum Agility bonus be 1, means you can go with a Agility of 0 (or even less) and use whichever is your Prime as your Armor Bonus.
I don't think that's it. That just means that the maximum of Agility you can put on it, is Prime-2. So if you have 3 prime, you can only add 1 Agility. If you have 0 Agility, you wont add anything.
So you basically lose 1 defense if you have a Prime Agility, but if you only had 1 Agility, you gain 1 defense. Thats it
Armor system not as simple as I was hoping for from DC20, but not bad either
Coach, my bad if I've missed this at any point, but have you considered switching to silver as the standard coin of the economy, instead of gold?
I was thinking about Theatre of the Mind combat while playing DC20. Will TotM be usable at all? There are a lot of stuff in DC20 that uses movement with exact spaces like throwing to a wall for damage and now the armor upgrade and such. How would you play it in TotM? If that is even possible. Thanks for the video and your work :)
Yes, they will for sure be support for this!
I think it’s pretty easy to adjudicate for TotM play - it’s easier to go from concrete to more abstract than vice versa.
There are much better systems for TotM, just pick those and have a better time.
@@Chris3s Well I like DC20 ideas so I want to try it :) We are also mixing the styles as we need so for set piece battles I will pull out a map with grid but for something small we usually do it with TotM. If there will be no possibility to use both I am willing to play on grid everytime because I really like the DC20 as it stands now. But it doesn't hurt to ask :)
Im reaaallly not feeling these changes to armor. I do not like that heavy armor damage reduction is mitigated by going 5 or 10 above ac- Like, hitting someone in heavy armor isnt hard, but they dont have to be worried about it because they know their armor will soak some of if not most of the blow. Let the heavy armor users feel tanky by being able to mitigate some of those blows that would have hit a critical spot had they not worn plate or such! Might, or just non agility focused chars will generally be easier to hit anyways because taking agility isnt what they pictured for their character.
Because youre using d20's for dice rolls, the chance of being hit 5 above can be quite common, meaning why the heck did I bother with heavy armor thats penalizing me in the first place? Kinda feels like I'll be punished for not focusing agility, idk.
There is something about armour causing limited agility bonus to PD but not disADV on agility checks and then full agility bonus to PD but DisADV on agility checks that feels really janky to me. Having disADV on an agility check means the armour is restricting your character's ability to move their body around quickly and react to things. I would argue that having a restriction on how much agility bonus can be added as exactly the same reason - the armour is restricting your character's ability to move their body around and react to things (incoming attacks). This is going to be very hard to square in my head - and even harder to explain in a way that is intuitive to new players. I hope you guys rethink this again - it's tough to get right and that is ok, we'll be patient and keep feeding back to make it the best system out there.
i was wondering if for the game is there going to be a hard cover book verson for people who dont like useing the pdf
Eh, I think this is too complicated. Instead of having a well defined Armor Class on the character sheet I now have to check which type of Armor I wear, what my corresponding stat is, if I have PDR/MDR and then check back if the damage reaches a certain threshold and ignores my PDR/MDR. Which makes me feel bad, since a vital stat just gets ignored when I need it the most. Not a fan.
seems like a lot of adding up, at least an armor table shows it all in one go. Also does AC really need to scale with level ??? seems like unnecessary extra math 10 + Agility + Armor seems simpler.
Looks like the alpha PDF is still $14 in the store.
I just checked and it was 9.99
I’ll ask my website guy about this!
@@TheDungeonCoach I know that on my side it also show 14$ but at checkout only it mentionned that it's CAD, hence the discount that reduces the price by half (7 CAD off 14 instead of 5USD off 10USD). @snoe101 art thou also Canadian?
Heavy armor looks like it sucks. I get the same ac bonus but with a disavantage on every agility check? Wow! This is worthless!
You also get 1 damage reduction with possible upgrades for 2. That is the big positive there 👍🏼
@TheDungeonCoach yes. And that is not enough. The negatives far outweigh the positives. Dnd at least only gives you disadvantage on stealth checks because metal armor makes noise.
@@TheDungeonCoachIdea what if instead of disAdv on agility checks it is just a flat minus. Also give heavy armor a +1 PD base over light again. the point of heavy armor is to forgo dexterity in order to be built like a brick sh*t house. The fact that at lvl one light armor can have more PD the heavy just feels wrong. If I'm misunderstanding any of your goals in this please clarify. thank you for all your hard work and dedication much love -A random who loves your work
🙂👍🏻
I’m sorry I’m disappointed in the light armor mod as none of these are good for having a high agility I want to have a character that can move with flair and style but not having a modification when most others can take it is just a bit of feel bad -~-
He specified the point of the changes was specifically to take away some of the power of the agility which generally it's the most op attribute in ttrpgs anyway...
I hope they fix the weapons until the kickstarter.
You still haven’t finalized armor 😂😂