If you had a chance to read over the first draft of Odyssey, you can see that I've dropped damage types from the game.
Instead, I'm using a system of tags to describe objects in the game. Weapons are labeled as bludgeon, blade, and so on.
If it's important that a creature interact with these, it could have a feature like this:
Brittle: If this creature ta...
2025-02-05 19:33:29 +0000 UTC View PostHey everyone! Today I've uploaded the working draft of Odyssey. It has mostly complete rules for characters.
To make a character:
Determine abilities
Pick a race
Pick a background
Pick a class
And done!
If you want to do a live playtest before I share the monsters, you can use D&D creatures. Assume that a...
2025-02-04 15:01:37 +0000 UTC View PostHey all! In doing some tinkering with the math behind 5e and Odyssey last night, I came to a funny discovery.
Odyssey takes the math behind levels 1 to 6 in D&D and stretches it out across 12 levels. The first two levels are the apprentice levels you've seen in the classes, then the remaining levels run from 1st to 10th.
Here's a funny thing I noticed:
A 3rd level ...
2025-02-01 14:14:29 +0000 UTC View PostToday we're taking a look at monsters with a sample orc stat block and the core rules for the new action economy for creatures.
I wanted to show off what a monster stat block looks like in Odyssey. If you've followed me here for a while, you are familiar with the basics. A few notes:
At one point I condensed the six stats down to three, but found in play that I was constantl...
2025-01-30 20:52:10 +0000 UTC View PostThey call them roleplaying games because, like an actor, you play a role. Unlike an actor, you might speak in character, or you might describe what you say or do, or you might speak in the third person. At the root of it, though, is the idea that your character has their own personality.
A TTRPG should provide some guidance on what that means. My experience is that a nice structure goes a...
2025-01-28 21:23:03 +0000 UTC View PostDo you like have hard mechanics for roleplay, softer structures that are more suggestive for players, or no guidance baked into the game at all?
Let me throw out some examples.
A hard roleplay mechanic enforces character actions. Let's say you have a Greedy character trait. When you have the chance to make money, you might roll against it. If you give in, you either have to be greed...
2025-01-27 14:00:16 +0000 UTC View PostWork has been very busy lately. Over at Chaosium, we're pushing our new game over to a closed beta, so it's been keeping me busy this week. But, I had time to put together the basic equipment rules and the rules for creating ability scores.
I'm also behind on comments and will catch up on the monk discussion over the weekend.
I've always loved the idea of random character creation, ...
2025-01-25 16:07:27 +0000 UTC View PostAs I worked on the core four classes, I also wanted to make sure that the core game could support lots of different character types.
I've also been thinking a lot about bonus actions and actions. One of my objections to both is that they create a constrained design space that forces all classes to fit into them. You get your main thing (your action) and a minor thing that modifies it (bon...
2025-01-21 13:00:14 +0000 UTC View PostBased on feedback from the spells I posted a week or so back, I wonder if we need saving throws on spells. Removing saves would do two things:
It would force the design to create spell effects that have clearer balance. Since the spell automatically works, it would have to be balanced assuming that it always fires off. That would lead to much weaker status effects which, frankly, ...
2025-01-18 13:15:16 +0000 UTC View PostHey all! A few weeks back I shared the design for the mountain dwarf, and paid backers got an early peek at the sylvan ape. Today, those two are back along with the wood elf and human.
This design is just the base stuff you get from your race, with background and destiny filling in your other two pieces. Those elements have shifted a bit.
Background represents learned skills and cul...
2025-01-16 23:56:14 +0000 UTC View PostMagic in Odyssey is meant to capture the feel of D&D without the rules overheard and crunch. My approach is to lean on the DM to adjudicate corner cases and handle creative spellcasting. This touches on my core conceit for this project:
TTRPGs are about conversations between players and DMs. The more they talk, the better. The rulebook provides the structure for those conversations by...
2025-01-13 16:24:05 +0000 UTC View PostA good game starts with a good vision. If you don't know where you're going, you can never figure out if you are making progress. In game design, this leads to constant redesign, bloated projects, random changes in direction, and projects that run way over schedule and budget.
I've worked on a LOT of games over the year, and every failed project shares the same basic trait: the project ne...
2025-01-10 14:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostHey all!
Looking back over the past year, I worry that I'm not providing enough value to paid subscribers. So, I am thinking about starting a monthly, digital 'zine with TTRPG content. Does that sound appealing? Let me know in the comments. In addition, I've fired off a poll to get a sense of which games people would like to see content for.
The three systems below are the ones I ha...
2025-01-10 05:44:07 +0000 UTC View PostI've been thinking about a way to incorporate morale into 5e. The B/X system works well enough, but I wanted something with a few more knobs. Two of my current campaigns are set in cities, and it would be nice to give the players a clear game plan they can use to drive off rather than massacre their opponents.
These morale rules are designed to capture a few things.
I've been thinking a lot about humans and their role in fantasy, thanks in part to Eva in the comments. Nailing down humans goes a long way to figuring out races. I also have a science fiction game using this engine on the backburner, and I've tried to think about what would make humans stand out in the galaxy.
I've always loved that fantasy settings resist having a god of humans, or at l...
2025-01-03 14:00:13 +0000 UTC View PostIn D&D 5th edition, abilities and proficiency provide the basic building blocks of a character. They tell you what you are naturally good at and provide a baseline for your competence. Skills then layer on top, giving you the chance to shore up a weakness or specialize in a specific area. Overall, I think the system works well.
But on the other hand, I keep going back to the this:
... 2025-01-02 15:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostHey all!
I had a ton of fun answer Forest Green's questions about the rogue, so I decided to pull the questions from the last two posts and answer them here. I also think that answering questions in a format that emails them to everyone is probably more helpful. Let me know if you like this approach. It'll be in addition to my regular content drops.
Mountain Dwarf and Miner<...
2025-01-02 06:27:19 +0000 UTC View PostHappy New Year everyone! To ring in the New Year, here's an early look at the mountain dwarf and the miner background.
Going all the way back to the 1990s, I have this little tradition of doing something creative when the New Year rolls in. When I was younger and had the energy, stamina, and freedom to hit a New Year's party, I observed it the next morning. These days, I create something ...
2025-01-01 08:22:37 +0000 UTC View PostI posted a fighter a while back, but I've since revised it to streamline it significantly. The fighter had a mix of actions they could always use and a limited-use, die driven option. The die felt like a good tool to manage accuracy and spikes of damage, but my prior design also had special abilities tied to it. That felt like a bit too much.
I also went back and added some more maneuvers...
2024-12-31 14:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostUser Forest Green very thoughtfully dropped a bunch of great questions about the rogue in the comments. Since I think a lot of folks will have similar queries, I'm dropping them here as a separate entry.
Also, I'd like to highlight how awesome it is to get questions. I can't always get to them, but they are a huge help in refining a design. Game design is a little like science, in that to...
2024-12-31 02:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostMy first long-term D&D character way back in the days of B/X, was a thief. I loved the character's special talents and potential to land deadly sneak attacks. I also liked that the class was a challenge to play. Poor AC and low hit points meant that you had to be quite careful in how you approached the game.
Over the years the thief evolved into the rogue, and its unique skills became...
2024-12-30 16:00:12 +0000 UTC View PostToday, as a Boxing Day treat, I have the first draft of the cleric class. A few notes on it:
I've recast all of the cleric's spell as effectively bonus actions in 5e terms, but I don't use the bonus action mechanic. Instead, this design steals a piece from my earlier fighter. The class grants a special action. When you use it, it gives you multiple picks from a list. You can bash ...
2024-12-27 00:02:55 +0000 UTC View Post"Spell points add nothing to D&D except more complication, more record keeping, more wasted time, and a precept which is totally foreign to the rest of the game." - Gary Gygax
I love that Gygax hated spell points. It's wild to me that spell slots have persisted in the game for 50 years. While spell slots have plenty of fans, game designers these days avoid the concept. Other than D&am...
2024-12-23 16:00:14 +0000 UTC View PostWinston is one of my favorite Overwatch characters, so let's add apes to D&D.
Here is a preview for paid subscribers of how I am going to treat races and backgrounds in Odyssey (that's the name of the game).
I'd like to shelve both race and background together, and use a term other than race to account for things like golems, androids (for when I do the science fiction game I ha...
2024-12-21 14:17:36 +0000 UTC View PostThere are two basic schools of thought when it comes to TTRPG system design.
The first approach, embodied by games like GURPS and D&D 3e, believes that a game system is a silent, third partner at the gaming table. The DM and the players both use the rules in the same way. While they have different roles, they both follow the same rules.
I remember a designer telling me once that...
2024-12-20 14:52:07 +0000 UTC View PostI have a goal for my re-tooling of 5e: make all of the alignments sensible choices for players. Here's my hack at it, along with languages that give some sense of where I want to take the implied setting.
Alignment indicates a creature’s place in the metaphysical order. In a world where magic is real and the gods peer down upon the world of mortals, one’s standing in...
2024-12-17 17:58:01 +0000 UTC View PostI hate exhaustion in D&D 5e. It's a total hack. Let's fix it!
On the other hand, I love the death save mechanic. It's a lot of fun. Let's smash them together and see what happens.
I also ran a poll on X that showed a very interesting divide between how much healing a long rest should grant. 52% wanted all their hit points back. That's a lot, but 48% didn't.
That's the kind...
2024-12-12 17:43:59 +0000 UTC View PostA good TTRPG rule set is easy to use at the table, meaning that players and DMs don't have to look up many rules in play. The game flows from a limited set of core mechanics that, once learned, are easy to apply to any situation that emerges.
That sounds great, but like many things applying it to excess can hurt your design. If you have too few mechanics, play might feel flat and repetiti...
2024-12-10 14:37:08 +0000 UTC View PostThe last time my Tuesday group played, the characters went shopping for magic items. The campaign takes place in a big city, and I love rolling on tables, so I allow the players to buy items. The catch is that they have to roll on the item tables to see what is available.
I've never been a fan of how irrelevant money and treasure is in D&D 5e. That's by design. Coming off of 3e and 4e...
2024-12-03 15:07:00 +0000 UTC View PostYou might remember that several months back I posted about the Odyssey engine, a revision to the core 5e rules that aims to streamline the game for DMs while adding some more depth for players. I'd been tinkering with the game in the background for a while without being all that happy with the end result. However, the insight that I could take the ability bonus to damage, strip it out of the co...
2024-11-30 17:47:48 +0000 UTC View Post