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Pysker Update and a New Game
🕑 Added 2024-03-06 17:48:46 +0000 UTCHey all!
Quick update on the psyker character class. I'm a little behind schedule with various responsibilities stacking up that threw my roadmap off a bit. Here is the current plan:
1. Finish the class to level 10. I'll do that for Friday.
2. Start making lots more powers. That'll be the focus for March.
Getting level 1 to 10 done, and powers in a good place, sets the table for levels 11 - 20.
Questions or concerns? Drop 'em here!
Now, to the heart of the matter - I'm working on a 5e variant! Attached to this post is a first draft of a character class built using this game engine. I'm calling it the Odyssey engine.
So why a new engine? A few reasons.
Odyssey is built on a basic premise - it should be fun and easy to make classes and content to stretch the core 5e engine to new genres. 5e is a fairly compact game, but it requires a TON of content to stand up a new game.
The game's 20 levels are a massive resource hog. You need to build out a lot of content for each character. The DM needs a massive amount of creatures, magic items, and other content to support a campaign that stretches out that long.
Worst of all, it's common knowledge that most campaigns fizzle out at around level 5 or so. It's amazing when you get a group together regularly and play for a few years. But, for most groups, that's an aspiration rather than a reality.
Moreover, the core math behind 5e has a number of significant leaps in its level progression. Content fades out over time. Monsters and spells become less and less relevant as characters level up, putting a designer on a content treadmill. You basically have to design four games to produce a single, 5e game, to capture each tier of play.
And, again, most groups play through the first few levels of the game and stop. That's a lot of wasted effort.
Odyssey arose from the realization that 5e's math could be refactored to produce an engine that hits the highlights and makes design much easier. It does this by stretching the math for levels 1 to 5 in 5e across 10 levels. Character progression is shallower, but (hopefully!) still satisfying. Even better, since the game uses the same math, just stretched out, all of your 5e spells, monsters, and other content for levels 1 to 5 works as written. The math fits into the game, as long as you account for two levels in Odyssey equally one level in 5e.
So, attached is the knight character class. In my vision for Odyssey, the class rather than the subclass is the basic unit of design for players. You make lots of classes to fit your genre and your world.
A final note on skills. I've (for now!) replaced skills with backgrounds. Each background is a narrative description of what your character knows. If your background gives you an edge on a check, you add your proficiency bonus to it. If your background is close but not an exact match, add half your bonus.
I chose this path to avoid building a massive skill list to account for every genre. A designer merely needs to describe a background, and that serves as your skills for the game. For instance, in a science fiction game one of your backgrounds could be Robotics Expert. You're good at messing with robots, and get half your skill when dealing with other, related technology, such as computers or machinery.
So, that's what I'm working on. Take a look at the knight and let me know what you think.
Comments
Swiss Calavera
I don't know if I'm really a target demo for this cause I usually quickly level my players to 5, and then play in the 5-10 range, playing that 10-15 in more committed campaigns. But I do that cause I like the extra player options and way cooler monsters at those levels, so maybe this addresses that. The one thing I would like here is for HP to start at 16 or higher. Levels 1 and 2 in 5e feel like their own tier of play, a tier 0 almost. To me they feel like tutorial levels due to low complexity, and if my players aren't totally new I always start them at level 3. Ironically though those "tutorial levels" are also the most lethal in the entire game, a couple of hits can kill, it is one of the few points where Massive Damage can insta-kill, and you don't have access to resurrection magics yet. So I could see myself playing this for the added player choice and what looks like it will probably be faster paced rounds (a hopeless dream I know). But levels 1 and 2 here still look like they would suffer from feeling massively different in their lethality. Unless you are planning on using static monster damage to control lethality? I love the backgrounds instead of skills choice as well, but that is from an experience DM perspective. I have a lot of trouble explaining this type of very open ended gameplay to new players. Even players I have had for years still struggle to think outside the box when it comes to things like Divine Inspiration cause they just don't know what it could even do for them, so they never use it. Question wise, are you looking to take Con out of the equation for HP and just use static HP scaling? If so would there be any reason to have Con, or are you looking to rework the entirety of stats for the system?
Michael Sixel
I'd argue 5e didn't have enough hit points at high level. A high level pay can kill bbeg in two rounds fairly often. I reckon we'll just disagree here
Marshall
The falloff after earlier levels is hard to compensate for with a system change, I would wager. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that it was because of the system, it was always for a reason such as scheduling, boredom, player incompatibility, or it was designed to end at that level. Higher levels are just harder to run too, so you need to be experienced and know how to plan an efficient campaign. I think lack of guidance on the latter is to blame for a lot of the issues. The early dropoff and how to address it is always something I’ve wondered about. Looking at an incredibly popular game like Baldur’s Gate for example, ~90% of players completed the intro, ~50% completed the first 1/3rd of the game, and ~20% of all players completed the entire game. If Larian said, “hey, people don’t play past the first x levels, so let’s not waste too much effort past that,” I believe it would be much lesser for it. Does that apply to other games too? More than likely. I do like having more narrowly focused classes, I find that works much better than “you are fighter” or “you are druid” and guides the player as to what they should be roleplaying a lot more. It does mean it has to be campaign or setting specific sometimes, but I think that’s fine instead of trying to make every class fit in every setting. The main worry I have about that is that it requires designers to be more inventive, since instead of being able to fill certain levels with abilities automatically, you must fill every level or just duplicate abilities between classes instead of having to think of something new for every level. One thing I do like about the knight immediately is that the hit points are much more constrained. Hit point inflation is a problem in 5e and lowering how much you get on level up helps that. Tying backgrounds to skills I don’t really know about. That puts a lot of pressure on the DM to properly adjudicate it and I can see it turning into “mother may I” situations. I feel that skills are baseline normally good enough and campaigns or settings can add or adjust as needed. I appreciated them being a separate part of the class since you could have some interesting combinations that way. I do think guardian is pretty creative, that’s an interesting ability that allows you to “tank” without some sort of mind controlling effect on the attacking creature.
