Challenge

This is a pretty big one.

In this author's opinion, D&D 5e is, well, too easy. It's balanced around the assumption that the PCs will fight many, many encounters per unit of rest. And yes, if they do, things get pretty tough. Five orcs and a hobgoblin isn't much of a fight, but 10 rooms with the same orcs and hobbo will wear down the ol' HP and spell slots.

However, this entire paradigm seems to be predicated on the idea that D&D is a video game. In such a case, the repetitive nature of such combat wouldn't be too bad--it might take 10 minutes to clear those 10 rooms of orcs, then press the "long rest" button, roll some dice, etc, new day.

But this is a tabletop game, and those 10 fights are going to take 3 sessions, which could mean perhaps 15-20 hours spread out over weeks or months. Some PCs have startingly few abilities to use, so they might spend those hours swinging the same one axe, or casting the same one cantrip over and over and over...not fun. IMHO.

So the proposal is this: make combat much faster and deadlier, primarily by increasing damage and other lethality across the board. In general, these changes will make the same encounter harder than vanilla 5e, but the assumption is that fewer encounters will be necessary for PCs to clear the same content and gain the same rewards.

Implementation Concepts

Alpha

files
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  • (cur)
  • Aspirations
  • Challenge
  • Counterspelling, Dispelling, and Metamagic
  • Freeform Initiative
  • Freeform Magic
  • Mana
  • Mixed Success
  • Origins
  • Simplified Point Buy
  • Simplified Range
  • Simplified Skill Selection
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