Class, Ancestry, Background — Choose Two, Drop the Other

Old-school games sometimes leverage the concept of race-as-class (also known as ancestry-as-class). An elf or a dwarf could be a character choice functionally equivalent to (and exclusive of) a class like cleric or magic-user.

Later editions of the game separate ancestry and class as distinct categories on separate axes; classes are defined by advancement, while ancestry is (usually) inherent and unchanging. But ancestry-as-class maintains its appeal in some OSR systems, as it simplifies character creation and makes it easier to “play up” what is distinctive about a non-human character. And other games have tried to find a happy medium between these approaches.

In that spirit, here’s an alternative way to split the difference between modern and old-school; pick two out of three among ancestry, class, and background, and just drop the third.

Ancestry and class, but no background. This is already implicitly pretty common in D&D. D&D 5E’s backgrounds are one of its better game design structures, but many players pay them little heed. They choose a background at character creation in order to pick up an extra proficiency or two, then forget about them soon after. Ancestry plus class, with no background, just formalizes this implicit choice. Whatever this PC did before the dungeon, it isn’t relevant to their new life of adventure.   

Both are dwarves, but their backgrounds are very different.

Ancestry and background, but no class. This is something like ancestry-as-class in old-school play, but with a background to give the character some more texture. Part of the appeal of ancestry-as-class is that it can take powerful abilities like darkvision, underwater breathing, or even flight and cordon them off from complementary class choices. Adding a background helps distinguish one dwarf from another, and give them a bit more personality. It’s easier to put some more mechanical weight on backgrounds too; one can extrapolate from the flavor text and ribbon abilities of the 5E backgrounds and imagine ways they would be more prominent in play without classes sucking up all their oxygen.

Class and background, but no ancestry. Obviously a character still has an ancestry. This choice simply means it isn’t mechanically relevant. In old-school D&D, this is something like what a human fighter or human wizard was; it was just taken for granted that humans were a “blank” in terms of ancestry, and possessed no special powers. But in modern play (or in games that mix play styles), that is worth reconsidering, because those games have tended to give humanity some mechanical heft (for example, a bonus feat in 5E). It takes a little extra work to reason out what an elf with no elf powers or a dwarf with no dwarf powers looks like, but I think it is possible. For example, a class-plus-background character may nominally be a dwarf, yet does not possess signature abilities like darkvision because they grew up on the surface, or in a subgroup of dwarves who otherwise just don’t naturally have darkvision.

The 5E Megadungeon: Death, Magic, and Cats

Last week: Running a Megadungeon Campaign in D&D 5E

Last week we covered darkvision and laid out the factors that make 5E insufficiently lethal for typical megadungeon play. Now lets discuss some solutions.

Tailor monsters to make them punch harder, but also die faster. Tweaking monster stats is categorically easier than getting PCs to buy into house rules that lower their own character’s powers. In addressing a common complaint with 5E that combat tends to drag on, I’ve found it helps a lot to make monsters hit harder, but be less tough. With some relatively modest adjustments, it is easy to cut an eight-round slogfest down to a tight three-round nailbiter. Monsters leave a bigger dent in PC HP totals, but PCs also have the satisfaction of taking them down before the battle gets boring. 

Cap leveling up somewhere between levels 8 and 12. D&D 5E is tuned around the first two to three tiers of play. The second tier ends at level 8 and the third ends at level 12. The game is fun in the fourth and fifth tiers, but parts of it break down, and it is certainly not suited to megadungeon play. I ran several hundred sessions of 5E in a game that went from level 1 to beyond level 20, and while that campaign worked for location-based play at low levels (including quite a bit of time in the Caverns of Thracia), it was essentially obligated to transition to scene-based play at high levels.

A megadungeon campaign really needs to stay location-focused for its duration, and the easiest way to make that happen is to agree at the outset to cap the PCs’ level. You can choose where you want to cap the level based on which dungeon-bypassing powers you really want to limit. A series of posts from the early days of my blog attempts to catalog which 5E powers bypass dungeon obstacles at various tiers.

This will take some buy-in from the PCs, but make the case that it is required to run a cool megadungeon in 5E. Capping progress doesn’t even require an explicitly old-school perspective. The idea of “E6” D&D (which caps progression at level 6) came out of the crunchy 3.5 D&D world all on its own. And maxed out PCs can become powerful figures in the local area, engaging in domain-level play. If the players still aren’t convinced, a megadungeon campaign isn’t right for them anyway.

Limit where the PCs can rest. The average modern-style party will gravitate toward a simple gameplan: Fully unload on any antagonists they encounter, then pass out on the spot for eight hours. There's some variance based on group composition – a minority of classes in 2014 5E are optimized around short rests – but most 5E groups will have a majority of long-rest-oriented PCs like wizards and paladins who want a solid eight hours of sleep so they can once again go supernova on the next monster that looks at them funny.

You are going to have to disabuse them of the idea that it is OK to rest in the dungeon. For a lot of players, it’s going to take some convincing.

Out of character, tell the players that resting in the dungeon or the surrounding wilderness is highly dangerous. Have NPCs reiterate this in-character. Ultimately, the PCs will attempt it anyway, and you should adjudicate consequences firmly, demonstrating how hard it is to get a good long rest in the dungeon. Of course, if the players take clever precautions to secure a long rest in the dungeon, reward them.

Finally, if you don’t think this will be enough to motivate your players, discuss a house rule at session zero that long rests are simply impossible inside the dungeon. I’m trying to be conservative with the house rules here, but this one may be worth it. 

Leverage time and antagonists against long rests. If resting in the dungeon isn’t practical, most PCs versed in modern-style play will pragmatically come up with an obvious fallback solution; retreat quickly to safety after every combat encounter. This is not really a bad thing; smart OSR PCs will keep avenues of retreat open as well. 

But retreating after every fight will slow the game to a crawl. Fortunately, both old school games (strict time records and faction play) and story games (clocks and fronts) offer some tools to incentivize modern and trad players to play differently. 

Establish antagonist NPCs and factions early, and then telegraph to the players how they are advancing their agendas every time the PCs take a long rest. It may help to present the PCs with antagonists right from session zero. A good example is the conceit used in Electric Bastionland and other games; have the party start with a shared debt they have to pay off. It could be one of the powerful factions in the town, or in the dungeon itself. The important thing is that the debt-holding faction both has a reason to be  antagonistic toward the PCs and methods for creating time pressure. 

Magic is ridiculously abundant to the point where you solve most of the normal OSR challenges with cantrips that half the party have.

I agree with this in a general sense. Cantrips are one of my least favorite parts of 5E, and they trivialize many parts of the game that old-school play emphasizes. 

But the problem is really limited to a small subset of cantrips. The biggest use-case of cantrips is essentially providing a DPS floor for full spellcasters in combat. I don’t enjoy this design decision, but it fits with how modern play handles combat, and we don’t need to change combat much to empower the megadungeon experience.

The genuinely concerning cantrips are the ones that trivialize challenges outside of combat. If I was running a megadungeon in 5E, I would modify or rule out a few cantrips:

• Light and Dancing Lights would be the obvious ones to ban or nerf by “promoting” them to first level, per the discussion of visibility and darkvision in the previous post.
• Mage Hand should probably receive the same treatment, given how useful it is for manipulating traps and doors without risking oneself. It may still be worth the spell slot even if “nerfed” to first level. If a player is interested in the Arcane Trickster archtype (a rogue subclass), you may need to negotiate with them how to interpret this adjustment, as Mage Hand is baked into that archetype’s core powers.
• Guidance is not causing a problem for a megadungeon specifically, but it is bad game design, so I would probably ban it if I was cutting other spells anyway. 
• Minor Illusion is a consideration, although strictly adjudicating it can denude it of its worst applications. 

The rest of the cantrips in the 5E.2014 PHB are not really disruptive to megadungeon play. Non-cantrip spells are a resource expenditure question, and are essentially covered by the time pressure tools discussed above. Sure, having access to Fly or Dimension Door can subvert some dungeon challenges; but these are precious spell slots if we cap the PC's level somewhere between 8 and 12. 

So yeah, a 5E group is going to move through the megadungeon more quickly and suffer fewer casualties than an equivalent old-school group. But they're not going to trivialize a well-run megadungeon. 

Cat People???

Running a Megadungeon Campaign in D&D 5E

A post on the 3d6 Down the Line Discord expressed skepticism that the Arden Vul megadungeon could be run in D&D 5E. 

And I get it. D&D 5E would not be my first choice for a megadungeon either. 

But I have run a lot of 5E with an OSR mindset, and I believe I could run a megadungeon in 5E with (relatively) modest house rules and campaign assumptions, if for some reason I decided to do so.

All points below are in the context of the 2014 5E rules. I do not own the new 5E books, but understand they do not deviate far from the 2014 rules, so I expect this approach would broadly work there as well. I also anticipate that most of the same ideas would apply to the 5E-compatible systems that have come out since 5E was released into the Creative Commons.

Below are the four issues that the post identified, addressed in turn.

Everybody Has Darkvision

I agree that darkvision is over-prescribed in 5E, and that darkvision can undermine old-school exploration by removing the question of visibility. But a serious part of the problem is that a lot of players and DMs don’t even follow 5E’s rules as written, and assume that darkvision is a more potent ability than it actually is.

D&D 5E’s rules allow creatures with darkvision to see in darkness as if it were dim light. That means disadvantage on Wisdom (perception) checks and an inability to see colors. Darkvision is better than nothing, but it is no substitute for a proper light source, particularly when checking for traps or keeping an eye out for secrets and treasure. I also remind players that whenever they are within the area of a source of light – whether from an ally, the environment, or an NPC or monster – that light prevents the use of their darkvision until they move out of the light. When I explain all of this to 5E players, they often choose to use light, even if they don’t “need” to, treating darkvision as more of a plan B, or an option for stealthing apart from the group.

Monsters face the same limitation. Whether an intelligent monster decides to rely on darkvision or use light typically reflects its level of confidence in its place in the dungeon hierarchy. Those confident in their control of the space use light. Those fearful of discovery favor the darkness.

Of course, an intelligent monster with 120’ darkvision will rely on the darkness more often than a creature possessing typical 60' darkvision, because it expects that it will have an edge. Creatures with tremorsense, blindsight, and similar abilities actually can functionally “see” in darkness as well as they can in light, so they do work in the way that many players think darkvision works. Creatures with those senses actually will completely skip light, for the most part. This makes them significantly scarier opponents in their native environment than creatures with mere darkvision.

If I was going to go further in houseruling this issue, I would take darkvision away from elves, and leave it to just the gnomes, dwarves, and tieflings. But even without altering the ancestry rules, darkvision can be brought into check simply by following the rules as written strictly.

It’s Impossible to Die in 5E

Let’s start with two easy caveats. First, simply removing 5E’s playculture presumption of level-appropriate encounters solves part of this problem. Even the most optimally constructed low-level 5E characters are not going to last long if they arrive at Arden Vul and beeline for the lair of Craastonistorex, the old and powerful green dragon. Once the players realize that difficulty is dictated by where they go and what they do – not what is appropriate for their current level – they will act more prudently.

Second, at very low levels, the problem isn’t really that pronounced anyway. Low-level PCs in 5E are much tougher than B/X or OSE characters, but they can still go down after just a few hits. The death saves system usually gives them a few chances to survive, but a deadly dungeon can kill many PCs outright through massive damage from falls and traps. In combat, monsters can also opportunistically focus on downed characters and quickly finish them off. Remember that any source of damage to a character on death's door equals a failed death save. Lowly goblins or kobolds become much scarier when they drag a downed PC away into the darkness, rather than “fighting fair” and engaging the PCs who are still standing.

But beyond those two caveats, I acknowledge the issue OP raises. At about level 5, 5E PCs get a lot stronger, and they don’t slow down from there. PCs in 5E at middle to high levels create a series of interrelated issues for DMs who want to run a megadungeon game that cares about exploration, time, and resources. I believe there are at least four interrelated issues that cause problems here:

• 5E PCs have massive amounts of HP
• 5E PCs have a lot of resources to replenish HP
• Both play culture and player powers make it unlikely that PCs will get lost, captured, or otherwise separated from safe locations where they can rest and recover 
• Modern play culture presumes little or no time pressure, so choosing to rest does not come with an inherent cost

A few different adjudication techniques and house rules can solve a lot of these problems. We'll cover those next week.

Next week: Death, Magic, and Cats

Power Can Come With a Cost for Every D&D Class

What does power cost the players in your game?

Consider the druid and their emblematic wild shape ability. D&D 5E players shift between forms with the gleeful ease of Beast Boy from Teen Titans. The D&D “Honor Among Thieves” movie includes a scene where the druid rapidly shifts from form to form in the same manner, and this scene, like much of the movie, is very much shot using superhero logic, not sword and sorcery logic.

That’s all well and good for a game that wants a superheroic tone. But what if we want a darker or more weighty feel? Consider the following:

As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one’s self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear’s shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.

-“A Wizard of Earthsea,” Ursula Le Guin

Incorporating this idea immediately changes how wild shape feels as a druid ability. Can we build power-with-a-cost into each of the 12 classes in 2014 5E? Let’s find out. This is a concept only, and definitely does not attempt to balance these costs against each other.

Druid. The Earthsea example above guides the way; it’s just a question of which criteria informs the cost. How long the character stays in animal form is an easy one. But it could also weigh how often the PC assumes the same form. That could disincentivize just falling back on the same few animal forms over and over again. Another type of cost would be to scale it against the power or unusual nature of the animal in question. Transforming into a dog is relatively safe; transforming into a tyrannosaurus rex seriously risks the druid’s ability to hold onto their humanity.

Warlock. This is the easiest to do given how naturally the fiction of the patron implies that being a warlock should mean power-at-a-cost. The rules don’t really support it mechanically, but I believe many 5E games have informally steered into this aspect of the warlock. Critical Role’s second season delivers on this fiction, without any explicit mechanical hook obligating the players to do so. A patron could grant and retract powers in relation to how much the PC is fulfilling the patron’s desires. It could even be the basis for milestone leveling in the right game. 

Sorcerer. This one also emerges organically from the fiction. A character’s bloodline provides their power, but they do not master magic the way a wizard does; they are riding the tiger. Simply allow sorcerers to go into the red on sorcery points, and bake in some risk of their powers going haywire. It’s easiest to visualize for wild magic sorcerers; the wild magic table provides plenty of room for a cockup cascade. But it’s not too difficult to come up with consequences for the other bloodlines as well.

Wizard. Wizards seek spells through study and knowledge, but the modern game has gradually given them more and more control over their spell selection, such that finding a scroll in a modern game is not nearly as exciting as in an old-school campaign. In a game that much more strongly incentivizes wizards to learn spells diegetically, it is much easier to provide a cost. Transcribing a spell to the spellbook carries risk, and not just the risk that transcription will fail.  Will it take longer to transcribe?Will it be an unreliable variant of the spell? Or could it be something worse? Is the spell like a living thing, a malevolent entity now making its home in your spellbook? 

Bard. Relative to the other full-casting classes, the bard’s spellcasting seems to come with the least implied risk, labor, and commitment, so let’s not focus on their spells. Instead, consider bardic inspiration. It’s interesting that in 5E’s oops-all-magic approach to character abilities, bardic inspiration is actually a non-magical effect, which implies a world where mundane motivation can propel people to greatly improved performance. Bards could themselves endure wild swings from excessive exuberance to sinking depression that mirrors the swingy outcomes their inspiring words produce.

Rogue. The costs for the rogue are the most obvious in some ways, but also the hardest to implement due to modern play’s promise that players are free from many kinds of social restraint. Some kind of reputation or "heat" mechanic would serve as a natural cost for a rogue. Ideally it would create risk in the same places where many of the rogue’s abilities shine, i.e., cities and other bastions of civilization. 

Cleric. Modern D&D has gradually shed many of the restrictions that once characterized classes like clerics. Simply bringing back some of those limitations would produce a cost that would go along with their power. Use Knave 2’s relic system for inspiration.

Paladin. The paladin is like the cleric, but their complication is less of a personal relationship with a particular divinity. Instead, they are defined by oaths and quests – socially mediated principles, whether as shared aspects of chivalry with other paladins, or a more personal code. D&D 5E’s oaths are all upside, a collection of archetypal powers; but they do include tenets that imply restrictions or downsides that would limit the paladin’s power or constrain their actions in interesting ways.

Barbarian. This is another class that once featured more costs and restrictions, but they too often constrained the player’s choices rather than presenting interesting drawbacks. A barbarian who blindly attacks allies in a frenzy -- or abhors magical items -- fits the fiction, but it doesn’t make for interesting play. Instead consider a barbarian who must decide, when they initiate a rage, how long they will rage; and rule that they can't retreat until it is over, even if they overestimated the length of the fight.

Fighter. As the “most straightforward” martial class, it is difficult to apply costs to fighter. The second wind and action surge abilities suggest endurance, so allow the fighters to tap into those resources more aggressively, with exhaustion as a consequence. This kinda steps on the toes of the berserker barbarian… but I’ve never actually had a player choose the berserker barbarian, so that would be a theoretical problem more than an actual one for me. 

Monk. This one is also challenging. To separate the monks from the fighters, we can imagine monks overclocking not on actions or HP, but on defense and maneuverability. Consider tying costs to more extreme usages of slow fall or evasion abilities, or even lean into the diamond soul ability by allowing them to spend ki points to pass otherwise-failed saves, with a penalty to future saves proportional to how emptied-out their chi pool is.

Ranger. The hardest of all? A ranger could lose their civilized self, but it’s hard to imagine it as severe as the druid’s transformation. If we presume that many rangers are loners whose mastery of the wilderness came in relative isolation, we could make their ability to navigate and survive progressively harder the more people they are trying to guide or protect. 

Counterspell Hacks for More Interesting Worldbuilding

A few ideas for hacking Counterspell in D&D. I can imagine more extreme alterations and I'm sure there are games that have experimented more broadly, but I'm keeping this post relatively close to the rules as written.

You Can Counter Any Spell You Know

D&D has occasionally tried to model knowledge of the spell as part of the countering process, but it usually just adds another annoying ability check to a process that is already disrupting the normal flow of gameplay. Instead, just say that no roll is required if you know the spell that you're trying to counter. You just counter it automatically.

This more closely models a lot of Appendix N fiction that inspired D&D. If you try to attack a wizard with a spell they have already mastered, they’re going to laugh in your face. This gives wizards a much more concrete reason to hoard knowledge and keep spells to themselves, to ensure that they are the only ones who know a particularly useful spell. 

This also incentivizes PCs to learn about their opponents before fighting them. Knowing a wizard’s spell list in advance is a big part of fighting them; by avoiding casting spells they know and prioritizing spells they don’t. 

Many D&D systems offer spell research systems, but my experience is that few players take an interest in them. The official spells in the book are too enticing, and the idea of creating new spells is too open-ended and abstract for a lot of players.

But what if we're using this option? And the PC is trying to fight an evil wizard who knows most of the same spells as them? Suddenly, coming up with their own new spells is a much more appealing option for prevailing. 

You Can Counter a Spell of a Lower Level

D&D 5E.2014 already partially models this idea by allowing Counterspell to automatically counter spells of the same level or lower, plus a roll when Counterspell is used to counter a higher-level spell. We could simply remove the option to roll and say that Counterspell either works automatically, or not at all. In other words, Counterspell cast normally can counter a first- through third-level spell. Want to counter a higher-level spell? You have to use a slot of that level or higher to do so.

This obviously nerfs Counterspell, but I don’t have a problem with that. It’s already one of the most powerful spells in the game. What’s good for the magic goose is also good for the gandermancer, so this change would also help players frustrated at seeing their high-level spells counter-spammed by enemy wizards.

You just know this guy is going to Counterspell you. From Ena: Dream BBQ

You Can Counter a Spell of the Opposing School

I’ve written before that the schools of magic are an underutilized source of worldbuilding in D&D. What if those rivalries define what a wizard can counter? This gives some mechanical teeth to an interesting worldbuilding feature.

If limiting Counterspell to only these rivalries makes the spell too niche, we could simply say that on top of the normal language of Counterspell, countering a rival school's spell counts as if it was done with a slot two levels higher than what was actually used.

Combine All Three

You could create a system where the baseline is that a third-level slot can counter a first level spell, but if the caster knows the spell, that reduces the cost by one, so that they could use a second-level slot. Same thing if they are a member of an opposed school. But countering a spell of one’s own school would add a level, making it more difficult. 

I don’t really recommend this, because it’s crossing the line from “reasonable homebrew” to “oops this is a new magic system.” But go where your heart takes you, wizard.

When Is a Nerf Actually a Buff?

When is reducing the power of a character’s ability (“nerfing” it) actually making it stronger, in the context of a specific campaign or game concept? When the original character ability solves a challenge so completely that GMs simply stop including that challenge in the game. A nerf to such an ability returns that ability to relevance.

I ran a multi-year D&D 5E game from first level to well beyond 20th level. D&D 5E uses banded accuracy to control the runaway escalation of bonuses and modifiers that plagued previous editions. Banded accuracy works pretty well through the first 10 levels, but D&D 5E kinda falls apart beyond that point (although that can actually make the game more interesting). The following examples are all based on the 2014 version of 5E; the principle is less likely to occur in OSR or story games, where there’s less of a presumption of power balance. But the underlying idea is worth keeping in mind for all games.

For example, rogues at 11th level get an ability called Reliable Talent, which effectively puts a floor on their proficient skills. With Reliable Talent, the Expertise ability, a pair of thieves’ gloves, and a maxed-out Dexterity score, the party rogue in this game rolled dexterity-based skill checks ranging from the high teens to the mid-30s. 

For skills like stealth, this was manageable, because there was always room for enemy countermeasures. The highest stealth roll in the world won’t negate the effect of Alarm, a first-level spell that can be cast as a ritual. And an individual character with very high stealth tends to separate themselves from the group in ways that create interesting situations. 

But what about skills that have less prominent counter-play? What about picking locks? When designing locations for the party, I struggled with how to lock the damn doors in a way that was ludologically meaningful. This was the theme of several of my earliest posts, about how quickly a mundane locked door ceases to be a meaningful barrier in D&D.

Lockpicking in Hillsfar (1989) 

I had the following options, none of them great.

1. I could leave locked doors out of the game entirely. Not realistic, and would negate the ability the rogue had invested in building up.
2. I could inflate the DCs, preserving the challenge. But it would be transparently obvious that I was doing so artificially to “counter” the unbounded scaling of this particular ability.
3. I could leave locked doors in the game, but bypass the wasted time of rolling, and just say the rogue succeeds unless there is a trap or other complicating element. 
4. I could nerf the rogue’s skill to bring it back into line with the bounded accuracy system.

At the time, I went with a combination of options 1 and 3. I was never entirely satisfied with how those played out. I think option 2 is simply wrong. Option 4 was hard to consider for an ongoing game, but was… interesting.

Let’s consider another example. Paladins in 5E can easily cure non-magical diseases. On paper, this is evocative and makes sense. In practice, this means that most 5E games don’t bother to include non-magical diseases in their scenarios. I had a paladin in that 1-20+ 5E game as well, and the ability to cure non-magical diseases came up… two or three times? Not nothing, but it was very rare.

So what if we nerfed the paladin’s ability? How could that possibly be a buff?

Because if the nerf allows disease to matter in the game, the paladin will actually have opportunities to use the ability.

Imagine a campaign setting dominated and defined by a widespread, highly contagious plague. Even if the GM nerfed the paladin’s ability to cure diseases, relative to the 5E base rules, a player might get a lot more use out of that ability in a situation where the challenges include the presence of disease everywhere. 

There are more possible examples. The 2014 5E ranger famously has exploration- and survival-oriented abilities that, uh, basically trivialize traditional RPG exploration and survival. Getting lost and getting hungry are uninteresting challenges in a 5E group that includes a ranger (or to some degree, a character with the outlander background). Weaken that ability… and the ranger, counter-intuitively, becomes more useful and interesting, because navigation and survival are real dangers in a game where the ranger doesn't trivialize these challenges.

There are probably other examples, but this is enough to say – consider instances where nerfing an ability will actually make it more relevant to gameplay. If this is session zero, discuss it with the players. If you’re hacking a game in progress, talk to the players and see what abilities they have that they rarely use. You might be surprised how readily players will sacrifice a bit of on-paper power to ensure the DM can actually create opportunities for them to use those unique abilities.

Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

Last week: The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E Playstyles

To summarize last week's post, PCs in 5E and other modern games are free from social and political norms, institutions, and rules. And that freedom is more essential to the appeal of modern play than any particular combat loop or class power.

Examples are easy to find. Take Critical Role, one of the most prominent examples of modern-style play in the 5E age. Both the first and second seasons of Critical Role feature parties who violated laws, disregarded customs, and generally acted like real shitbirds. The characters were, to varying degrees, misfits and scoundrels. But they never faced the consequences that misfits and scoundrels would face in an OSR game. If they died, their deaths were dramatic and tragic, not mundane and tragicomic. And when they succeeded, their success was epic. Success wasn’t just a haul of gold to spend carousing in town. Both of those campaigns ended with world-spanning quests to save the world. OSR PCs who flaunted social and factional constraints the way Critical Role PCs would not save the world; they would die, quickly and unceremoniously.

Running 5E with an OSR mindset, I was constantly reminded of how many “get out of jail free” cards 5E characters had. That could be literal jail; at all but the lowest levels, most 5E PCs have a range of skills that trivialize mundane incarceration. But it also applies figuratively. Factions simply cannot hope to constrain PC action in a modern game in the same way they would in an OSR game.

Dragon by Millennium Hand

And this distinction is not unique to modern vs. OSR play. A huge part of PBtA-style games, and other story games, is tools baked into the core of the game that explicitly create leverage and seed consequences for disregarding social rules and laws, or for recklessly standing in opposition to powerful factions. Faction play is still useful in 5E; if nothing else, factions have numbers and time on their side, so they can act against PCs even in modern-style play, because those PCs simply cannot be everywhere all the time. But it takes a lot more work to make it happen.

Listening to 3d6 DtL’s Arden Vul podcast, I was repeatedly struck by how the idea that “the world reacts to your actions” created situations that the players could at best hope to endure, not overcome. When a dragon shows up and makes demands of the party, it is not a dramatic cutscene. It is not a preview of a boss battle a dozen sessions down the road, in which the PCs will almost certainly prevail. The dragon is orders of magnitude more powerful than the PCs, and if they don’t understand and appreciate that, they will die, suddenly, ignominiously, and deservedly.

To turn the question around, I have also found that modern-style players can adapt quite quickly to OSR play. When I run Knave for players who have no background or investment in the OSR, they very quickly grok the danger their characters are in, and intuit the risks of acting in defiance of the world they find themselves in. They start asking more questions, thinking further ahead, and generally taking the world and its factions seriously. Give a player a character with 2 HP and a rusty knife, and they don’t need you to explain styles of play to them; they figure it out very quickly all on their own.

The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E playstyles

I ran D&D 5E for years with a behind-the-scenes OSR mentality. There are a lot of good reasons to apply an OSR mindset to a game for players with a modern (or “OC” or “neo-trad” or whatever) playstyle. Even if the players have no idea what OSR means, applying OSR principles to prep and adjudication creates a more immersive, convincing world, with more challenging obstacles and more rewards for creative play.

But systems matter, and not every OSR principle can apply to a modern game just because the DM has internalized the Principia Apocrypha. The idea that “the answer is not on your character sheet” is not going to translate when the system itself is very loudly and consistently telling players that many answers are, indeed, right there on their character sheets. And there’s no easy way to undo the super-heroic power level of PCs in modern play, without hacking 5E into a different game.

When talking about the modern style of play, as opposed to other cultures of play, we often focus on fluid, action-packed combat, where characters have specialized roles and neat action loops. And that is part of it. Certainly that’s a big part of D&D 4E and (to a lesser degree) D&D 5E. It’s part of Pathfinder. And it’s part of the new crop of games that rose in the wake of Hasbro’s self-inflicted OGL debacle.

Giant Pot-Tomb Demon by Andrew Porter

The Real Fantasy Behind Being Superman

So everyone understands that modern play features superheroic PCs who fight more like the Avengers, rather than fighting like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. But what is also interesting (and comparatively less-discussed) is how modern play changes gameplay outside of combat. Superheroes remain a good point of comparison to illustrate the difference.

A key part of the appeal of superheroes is their ability to act unilaterally, as individuals, without negotiating with or deferring to society’s rules. This expression of independence can be simple and direct. A heroic vigilante acts in defiance of law enforcement… but in a way that the audience mostly views as moral and correct. 

But it can also be a less literal form of unilateral activity, of defiance. I will posit that so many superheroes can fly because the idea of freedom from the law of gravity is a form of rebellion against law itself; in other words, flying is not a common fantasy because of something intrinsic to the act of flying itself, but because the act of flying is fundamentally a rejection of the rule of gravity.

Freedom is what really defines the power fantasy that many people explore when they first dip their toes into TTRPGs. A kid playing their first superhero RPG doesn’t want to be Superman so they can lift a bus over their head, so much as they want to be Superman because nobody can tell Superman not to lift a bus over his head.

Next week: Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

A Random Generator Is Worth a Thousand Hours of Prep

One of the games I ran this year involved adventurers hopping unexpectedly from plane to plane. While prepping for the game, it quickly became obvious that this was not something that I could prep in the same way I would prep a megadungeon or a scene-based mystery.

So how do we produce interesting planar content without prepping dozens of worlds in exhaustive detail? How do we make sure characters “get” each plane they visit? Especially when they’re not spending much time on each one?

Planes of existence in a fantasy world are exaggerations of the “natural” world (the prime material). They are defined by their defiance of rules or expectations we have about the regular world. To boil it down to a very simplified binary, it helps to think about the two sides of what makes a plane different from the normal world.

Concepts that epitomize the plane. Something inherent and fundamental to the place that defines it. It should usually be immediately obvious and prevalent throughout the plane.

Concepts that are antithetical to the plane. Something that is against the plane’s nature. It should either be prominent for this reason, or conspicuous in its absence.

It’s important to think about both aspects. It’s all well and good to say the elemental plane of fire is epitomized by fire. It’s hot. Fires raging, smoke, lava, and so forth. But that’s not enough. Think about near-absolute absence of water. What does the air feel like as a consequence of that? What is the weather like? Are native creatures violently allergic to water? Or is it a precious treasure to them? Possibly some of both, living side by side?

Let’s put this in motion with some prompt tables. 

What are the local landmarks? What captures the eyes of the visitor?

Epitome

• A castle, city, or other built structure. It’s composed of the essence of the plane, or its structure and function is defined by the presence and abundance of that essence.
• A mountain, body of water, or other superficially “natural” feature. It behaves in a strange or exotic way that reflects the essence of the plane.
• A vortex, portal, or other magical, extraplanar juncture or aperture. Its presence indicates the permeability of the plane, as well as its adjacency to affiliated planes. 
• The site of disaster or change characteristic of the creative or destructive forces of the plane.
• Valuables that are rare on the prime material plane are abundant here (e.g., valuable gems on the elemental plane of earth). 

Antithesis

• The absence of something we take for granted in the normal world (e.g., no fire on a frozen or entropic world).
• A concentration of a rare resource, whether precious or merely exotic (e.g., an oasis on a desert plane).
• A structure, object, or feature that was native to another plane, but was moved to this plane, intentionally or accidentally. Its original nature has been warped or changed by this plane.
• Something removed or exploited and taken elsewhere, leaving tangible absence in its place.
• Something antithetical to this plane, but reshaped by the epitomizing forces here.

What is going on there? How is the situation ripe for adventure?

Epitome 

• The plane’s essence is difficult to understand or interact with, or otherwise defies material plane logic. 
• An event (natural or social) is occurring that restricts or slows visitors’ ability to travel and explore.
• A power from a sympathetic or aligned plane is trying to influence, ally with, or absorb the plane.
• Political, commercial, or social activity focuses on a commodity or treasure that can only be grown, made, or refined in the unique environment of the plane. 
• A gift or creation of the ruler or power on the plane, unique to this place and never taken off-plane, has been damaged, compromised, stolen, or otherwise altered. 

Antithesis

• The antithesis of the plane, something that would be expected in the prime material, is totally absent. Natural laws may be distorted to account for its absence.
• The antithesis of the plane is imprisoned, contained, rationed, or besieged.
• The antithesis of the plane has been memorialized, shunned, sanctioned, or put on display.
• The plane’s enemies or natural opposites are invading.
• Magic is altered in some fundamental way by the absence of something that would normally power, channel, or enable it. 

Who is nearby? Factions? NPCs? Monsters?

Epitome

• Natives of the plane, whose nature is linked to the essence of the plane. They are not merely planar loyalists; their very understanding of the cosmos is defined by the epitome of their plane.
• True believers, either in the ruler of the plane, or the nature of the plane itself. They either transmigrated here after death, or traveled here by magical means.
• The ruler of the plane. Whether a demigod, demon-king, or something stranger.
• Created creatures made of the essence of the plane by archwizards, gods, or others who use the plane’s essence as raw materials.
• Creatures from allied planes who have come to visit, trade, or evangelize. 
• Guardians, persecutors, or judges of the epitome, who seek to destroy, expel, or dominate the antithesis. 

Antithesis

• Creatures trapped here, either intentionally by denizens of the plane, or those stranded by accident.
• Creatures that are valued or respected because – due to their antithetical nature – they can do things or provide value that native denizens cannot. 
• Invaders from an opposed plane who have come here to destroy or conquer part or all of this plane.
• Explorers seeking to secure the epitome of the plane for use as an antithesis on their own plane.

What hazards, traps, or dangers are here?

Epitome

• The essence of the plane is hostile or otherwise dangerous to travelers. Simple actions like movement, breathing, or eating and drinking may be difficult.
• An out-of-control or escalating expression of the epitome is becoming more extreme over time.
• The landscape or physical properties of the plane are changing in a way that defies material plane laws.
• Traps, barriers, or other intentional dangers have been established to keep planar visitors either from accessing sensitive areas, or out of the plane entirely.

Antithesis

• A forced merger or overlap with an opposed plane creates violent or unpredictable interactions.
• Open conflict between factions or individuals over antithetical elements. Multiple factions may seek to recruit outsiders. Innocent bystanders may be caught in the crossfire.
• Remainders of a long-ago planar conflict between epitome and antithesis persist to the present (e.g., metaphysical minefields).
• Weapons deployed in the plane broadly attack a weakness or vulnerability inherent to the epitome of the plane, endangering anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. 
• Something hazardous was placed here for containment or safekeeping, because the nature of the plane itself or the behavior of its denizens can suppress, control, or monitor the antithetical thing.  
• Something stolen from an antithetical plane, which is disruptive or wrong in this place.

Here is our random generator that incorporates all these bits into just four prompts. We can adjust it some more going forward; maybe we want the epitomes to be several times more likely than the antithesis.

https://perchance.org/whatishappeningonthisplane

Bonus Table: How Did You Get Into This Mess? (d12)

1. A wizard did it. A spell was cast upon you. It went wrong.
2. A wizard did it (the wizard was you). You tried to cast a spell. It went wrong.
3. Portal passenger. You wandered into a portal and now you’re here, wherever here is.
4. For science. An experiment went awry. Whether you were an experimenter or a test subject doesn’t matter now.
5. Trapped! A nefarious entity created an inter-planar trap. Congratulations, you have sprung that trap.
6. Hot pursuit. Something is chasing you across the planes. You don’t know what it is, but it seems to be accelerating and salivating.
7. Left behind. You were hired for some specific job or expertise, but the person who hired you left you behind. 
8. Cursed! Whether it happened to a distant ancestor long ago, or to you personally last week, the terrible curse has sent you hurtling between worlds.
9. Debt. You owe such a vast amount that when a particularly dodgy character offered you an especially suspicious way to get out of town -- really, really far out of town -- you took it.
10. Transmigration. You died. While your soul was on its way to the afterlife, it took a wrong turn, and you are now lost. Depending on where you were destined to go in the afterlife, this may be either relatively good or relatively bad news for you.
11. Prison break. You were trapped in Tartarus, a demiplane, or some similar extraplanar confinement. You're free now but you didn't plan too far beyond your escape.
12. Sole survivor. You were part of a highly larger team that was intentionally traveling the planes. You're not in a good situation now, but you wouldn't trade places with your recently deceased companions.

Ah 5E, Here We Go Again

After a year of running other games, I was asked to run D&D 5E again. While I have one big problem with 5E as a system, and many more particularized complaints with specific mechanical executions, I think 5E is a decent system. I have run hundreds of sessions with it. Thousands of hours. If I hated it, I would have found a way to get off that train. I said that I wasn't sure if I would run it again, but I'm not surprised that I am. My desire to run D&D outweighs my disdain for any particular D&D system. I have voted with my feet.

All that said, I am skeptical of the implicit presumption that 5E is the default choice for fantasy TTRPGs. When I have run other systems, with cleaner, more concise mechanical designs and ludological execution, I’ve been consistently impressed with how quickly players – whether versed in 5E, or entirely new to TTRPGs – grokked the system. I’m skeptical of the common belief that seems to exist in the TTRPG world, that 5E is the natural starting point for fantasy games, and players can then opt in to other games after they have tried out the industry standard. I don’t usually write about the 💿🐴 on this blog, but a kerfuffle over a popular actual play streamer’s defense of using 5E for games that don’t strictly fit its explicit and implicit system is instructive on this question.

I haven’t watched Brennan Lee Mulligan’s games, but I’ve wondered about the “5E as universal system” idea in other media that I have followed. I’ve been an on-again, off-again listener of the Adventure Zone, the TTRPG wing of the McElroy brothers’ podcasting family. They’ve run a variety of campaigns, some lasting dozens of sessions, and have shown a commendable willingness to experiment with different systems.

When they announced a campaign titled The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula, I thought “Ah, interesting! What system will they use? The Dracula Dossier… or something homebrewed, but still set in Night’s Dark Agents? If not, Urban Shadows perhaps? Undying? Maybe even a Vampire the Masquerade game, steering into (but also dissecting) the ‘90s edgelord reputation of that storied game?”

No. They chose D&D 5E, for… some… reason. It’s strange, because their style of play, and the podcasting format itself, really lends itself to PBtA and other story games. And the best Adventure Zone moments really sing with PBtA energy. Listening to their 5E episodes really grates my bacon, as the players, versed in PBtA play culture, wander around spamming 5E skills as if they were playbook moves. Every time someone on the Adventure Zone says “I’d like to make an Arcana check” without first framing their character’s actions in-fiction, a fairy flies into a bug zapper.

So the McElroys keep coming back to 5E. If they’ve explained why in an interview or blog post somewhere, I haven’t seen it, just like I haven’t seen that degree on Travis’ wall. I only know that it is a pain to listen to an engaged, creative, often laugh-out-loud actual play group struggle against the system they chose to play.

You Had One Job

Last year I played in a Delta Green game where a scientist PC failed something like three consecutive rolls that were solidly in their character’s wheelhouse. They had something like an 80%+ chance to succeed, and beefed it each time. The GM did what they could to soften the blow, and the player was a good sport about it, but it was surely a little frustrating; especially because it was a short campaign, with just a handful of sessions, so each character only had a limited time in the spotlight.

It seems like skill-based games (whether percentile or d20) always struggle with some of this (although I have not myself run Delta Green; so what follows is general advice, not DG-specific). Some games can include a meta currency to ensure a success, or otherwise subvert the capriciousness of the dice. But it’s hard to completely escape the feel-bad vibes when the dice push back strongly against narrative expectations.

The best time to fix this problem is before the dice are rolled. In D&D, where the application of skills is almost always subordinate to the discretion of the DM, I practice pausing before calling for a roll and asking myself “would it make the most sense for the character to simply succeed at this?” This is a no-brainer for many experienced GMs; but I had to work to learn it, so there must be a lot of people out there who know nothing about this procedure. If I can share this with at least a few people who were once like me, and simply don’t know, I will be well pleased.

It Just Works

Running D&D 5E years ago, I called for a dexterity (acrobatics) check with a modest DC, as several PCs tried to hurdle over a barricade during the thick of combat. When it was the monk’s turn to try, something in my brain clicked, and I thought “it would undermine what we know about the characters and the situation for this character to fail at this particular task.” So I simply ruled that the monk would succeed without a roll.

Other instances followed logically. The ranger, tracking ordinary quarry in normal conditions, simply succeeds. The cleric with a low intelligence score doesn’t need to roll the intelligence (religion) check to answer a common question of doctrine; they simply know.

This form of adjudication also solves the common verisimilitude “problem” of the wizard with 8 strength succeeding in knocking down a door after the barbarian with 18 strength fails… which is only a “problem” because D&D 5E teaches DMs to blindly follow a skill resolution procedure, rather than adjudicating the action based on a common-sense understanding of the situation.

OK, this is probably a no-brainer for someone familiar with FKR games or other diceless adjudication systems. But I would expect the median RPG player, who comes up through D&D 5E or another popular system, is going to find it quite radical. 

The “One Job” Troupe Game

Thinking about this prompted an idea that is really not an original idea at all, just a restatement of what is already implicit in the “it just works without a roll” guidelines included in many good games.

A class, background, or job does not gate off certain skills. It merely distinguishes between the characters who must risk the dice to do something, and those who can simply do it. The scientist still must roll the dice to shoot a gun, climb a wall, or hide from the monster. But they don’t have to roll to do the science, unless the circumstances are highly dangerous or unusual. 

This concept really shines in a game focused on troupe play, where players are considering which of several characters they should bring to a session, rather than signing up for one type of character and playing that single character for the whole game. Choosing the right character with the right background or job for the present situation defines the stuff they’re going to be able to do without depending on the dice.

Your PC with the “fishing boat captain” background is perfect for exploring the haunted coastline. They can navigate and explore the channels and inlets of the sea without a single check. But if they have to argue before a congressional subcommittee for the passage of the Ghost Fish Preservation Act, they’re going to be rolling the dice, because public speaking and legislative advocacy is well outside their skillset. Would you have rather played your lobbyist this session, and rolled the dice while exploring on the boat? It creates interesting decisions.

Knowledge Is Power, France Is Bacon

What do you think of the “Know Your Enemy” ability in D&D 5E.2014? If you are familiar with the game, and yet still respond to the question by saying some variation of “the what ability?” I don’t blame you. 

“Know Your Enemy” is the 7th level fighter (battle master) ability, allowing a character to observe or interact with a creature to learn if that creature is better or worse than the fighter across several statistics and other criteria.

Know Your Enemy: Starting at 7th level, if you spend at least 1 minute observing or interacting with another creature outside combat, you can learn certain information about its capabilities compared to your own. The DM tells you if the creature is your equal, superior, or inferior in regard to two of the following characteristics of your choice:

• Strength score
• Dexterity score
• Constitution score
• Armor Class
• Current hit points
• Total class levels (if any)
• Fighter class levels (if any)

This ability stands out from 5E’s heavy emphasis on combat and ability checks. While the parameters of the information feel overly prescribed, its focus on transparently delivering information without requiring a roll of the dice could almost work in OSR.

I have run thousands of hours of 5E, including a player taking a battlemaster character to 10th level, and this ability came up… maybe once? If even that?

I did hack a version of it for a rogue (thief) character, as a bonus “feat” based on in-game achievements and training. That worked out like this:

Superior Case: If you spend at least 1 minute observing or interacting with another creature outside combat, you can learn certain information about its resources compared to your own. The DM tells you if the creature is your equal, superior, or inferior in regard to two of the following characteristics of your choice: 

• Dexterity score
• Intelligence score
• Charisma score
• Perception skill modifier
• Wealth currently on their person
• Total wealth

I thought this was a neat fiction-forward ability… but it got about as much airtime as Know Your Enemy did. Players in 5E only have so much mental capacity to remember all the things their characters can do, and the rhythm of the game tends to push them toward combat and ability check-relevant class features.

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

In another system, abilities that allow PCs to learn about antagonists before fighting them could be extremely powerful. In a game where knowledge is power – and going into a fight blind can be a death sentence – such abilities would be used all the time. But D&D 5E’s predominant play culture implicitly assumes that PCs can go into almost any fight cold, with no planning or prior information, and expect a winnable, level-appropriate challenge. 

I recently ran an Electric Bastionland one-shot, and while prepping, I noted that the Bastionland book goes to great lengths to emphasize that gathering information about antagonists is one of the most important things the players can be doing. If you start fights without a good sense of what you’re facing, you’ll get pasted.

And it was true! Trespassing near Hog Hall without much sense of who their antagonists could be, my players took some heavy hits from Musty the Mock Badger. But when they fought Abyss, they lured the robotic monstrosity into a trap, and prevailed. Some of the other monsters in the adventure drive this point home even more explicitly; the Ash Wraith (which my players wisely fled from) simply can’t be harmed by normal weapon attacks. The game does not bake in a mechanical solution to the Ash Wraith, as a 5E module would. The players have to figure it out. And the more information they have in advance, the better their chances.

Knowing Is Half the Battle

A different kind of game could put knowledge incentives at the center of its mechanical execution.

Consider a game where the level of danger in each situation is opaque. Sure, anyone can tell that the dragon is more dangerous than the goblin. But if all (or almost all) of the antagonists are humans or human-like creatures, with relatively few obvious indicators of their combat ability, it's less clear. And  moreso if the PCs themselves are relatively weak. A game focused on one-on-one duels between essentially normal mortal warriors would be a good example. 

You enter combat with a finite pool of dice. You can use them all at once, or one at a time, to execute attacks and actions. Combat is measured not in rounds, but in dice. It ends when your dice pool is empty. The antagonist attacks in response to each use of the dice, no matter how many or how few the PC rolls.

If the PC has little or no knowledge of their opponent, they may need to use these dice one at a time, in a series of probing strikes, to figure out what works and what doesn’t. This gives their opponent a lot of opportunities to hit back. But if the PC knows exactly what works on their opponent, they can use all the dice at once, potentially ending the fight before it really begins.

In such a system, it would be difficult for players to miss the value of learning about their opponents before fighting them.

“Cursed” Magic Items From My Game

Last week: Auditing the Cursed Items of 5E D&D

I took a dive deep into my notes from the 5E games that I ran from 2017 to 2023 and came up with some interesting examples of "cursed" magic items, along with retrospective notes on how they were received. 

Storm Heresy Amulet (Magic, Amulet, Thunder, Lightning, Cursed). While attuned to this item, the wearer gains a +1 bonus to saving throws. They also gain resistance to fire and cold damage, as well as vulnerability to thunder and lightning damage. The item is cursed and cannot easily be removed or de-attuned.

This was one of the few items I found in my notes where the cursed status actually worked somewhat like how 5E's rules suggest, and prevent the wearer from de-attuning. In this instance it was applied to make it harder to swap item in and out, depending on the dangers faced. Note the +1 to saving throws makes the item compelling even if a PC expects that the resistances and vulnerabilities will be a wash.

Octopus Statue (Magic, Creepy). This small statue is clammy to the touch, and your breath smells faintly of seawater as long as you carry it. Once per day, if you roll a natural 8 on an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you may reroll. You must use the new result. Each time you use this ability, tally one Coleoid Point.

Here’s a different drawback. The negative consequences of the item aren’t known until after considerable use. This one provides a nice bonus with a drawback of accumulating “points,” the effect of which is unknown… until the player accumulates too many. The player who found this item used it pretty judiciously, and never collected enough Coleoid Points for anything terrible to happen. If I recall correctly, it was either going to make them a were-octopus, or expose them to Aboleth influences. Possibly both!

Crown of the Dead (Magic, Necrotic, Attunement, Headgear). A creature attuned to the crown can assert control over a skeleton or zombie within 60 feet and issue commands to it as a bonus action. The wearer may control additional skeletons or zombies, but must make a concentration check at the end of each turn with DC = 12 + X, where X is the total number of undead controlled. The attuned creature takes on a semi-incorporeal appearance, is vulnerable to radiant damage, and has disadvantage on attack rolls, as well as Wisdom (perception) checks that rely on sight, while in sunlight. If the creature is reduced to 0 hit points while attuned to the crown, it dies immediately, without making death saving throws.

I count this one as a miss. Controlling low-level undead is fun, but that’s a lot of drawbacks. I like the flavor that using it keeps the wearer closer to death, but most 5E players are not willing to play so fast and loose with their characters' fates.

Frogkind Frock (Magic, Cloak, Attunement). The wearer of this cloak can breathe both air and fresh water. They must spend at least one hour per day immersed in water or mud or suffer a level of exhaustion that is not removed until they spend a long rest in water or mud. The wearer cannot de-attune from the cloak as long as they are exhausted.

This one did see a little bit of use, and I like the flavor of conditional de-attunement, but it’s a lotta work for one payoff (breathing water – and freshwater only, at that). If I were to do another pass at this one, I would give it another frog-related power like BIG JUMPS or a stretchy tongue.

Brass Eyeball (Magic, Attunement). While attuned to this item, a character can see anything that the eye can see. The eye has hardness 5 and 20 HP. If destroyed, the attuned person's eye is also destroyed.

I think this one was also met with a resounding “nope!” from the PCs. While it is potentially quite useful, attunement in particular might have been too much of an ask; after the PCs found more unambiguously positive magic items, it was easy to discard stuff like this, and not have to worry about big conditional drawbacks. This would resonate a bit more in a high-lethality old-school game, where the risk of death and dismemberment is so much more up-front, and the risk inherent in a double-edged magic item like this would seem much more reasonable. 

Abyssal Chain Belt (Abyssal, Fire, Attunement). This belt is made of broken halos linked together to form a chain. While attuned to this item, your strength increases by 2, to a maximum of 22. You have resistance to fire damage and 60' telepathy for purposes of speaking to fiends, who can act as if they have cast the Detect Thoughts spell on you while within 30'. Once per day, you may use a bonus action to ignite your hands, dealing an additional 3d6 fire damage on the next successful unarmed strike, grapple, or shove in the ensuing minute.

This one was a hit; one of the more daring players wore it for a good chunk of an extended campaign. Characters will go through a lot of trouble for a standing stat bonus, and giving fiends the ability to mindread the wearer led to some interesting situations. This has some of the same energy as the Demon Armor from the last post, but in a way that creates more interesting choices. 

Ancient Hourglass (Magic, Expendable, Transmutation) When you break this small hourglass and inhale the air from the empty half, you stop the flow of time for as long as you can hold your breath. The effect ends early if one of your actions or any effect you create during this period affects a creature other than you or an object being worn or carried by someone other than you. A Timekeeper will hunt you down in 12 days, 12 hours, 12 minutes, and 12 seconds to punish you for your crime against chronality.

Cursed items are mostly associated with gear that the player is expected to hold onto for a long time, but the same principles can apply to expendable items as well. Stopping time is powerful (and I like the Dragonball Z idea of holding one’s breath to stop time). The eventual price of using this item is serious (the Timekeeper is a no-joke enemy).

Auditing the Cursed Items of 5E D&D

Last week: Discourses on Cursory Curses, and Better Ways to Tempt PCs with Terrible Power

Armor of Vulnerability

This armor grants resistance to one of bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage, but vulnerability to the other two types of damage. While it could come in handy in narrow situations, it’s a net loss for the average combatant. 

Tempting the PC: Tweak the armor to grant vulnerability to only one damage type instead of two. It becomes something like a lesser version of the Armor of Invulnerability, but is still quite powerful. This makes the armor a tempting tradeoff, and introduces an additional tactical dimension, where a PC might seek to avoid a monster dealing the damage in question.

Breaking the Curse: For some reason, this item’s description notes that the Identify spell will reveal the curse. That’s contrary to the general rules for curses, which indicate that Identify doesn’t reveal a curse. It’s fine for a specific rule to supersede a general one – that’s part of 5E’s basic design. But I have no idea why this particular distinction was made for this particular cursed item, as it doesn’t serve any particularly obvious purpose.

That aside, we need to make it much harder to get this accursed armor off. Say the armor can only be removed while the character is on the brink of death. This can be done slowly the conventional way, if the wearer can be kept alive long enough; or quickly, as a single action, with the Remove Curse spell. Treating Remove Curse as the spell to cast in the right conditions, rather than a general panacea, helps a lot.

Berserker Axe

The axe grants +1 to hit and damage, and an increase of 1 HP/level. But the drawback is enormous; a range of penalties, particularly a clause that forces the PC to attack at random on a saving throw, including nearby allies.

Tempting the PC: The advantage of the weapon should be much greater. The HP gain is legitimately tempting (in my experience, 5E players always want more HP). But players also hate losing agency over their character, so I think we would have to offer something more tempting. We don’t have to invent something out of whole cloth; weapons like the berserker axe are, of course, a familiar trope in fantasy media. Offer the PC effects like these, that greatly amplify their effectiveness in combat, and they will have to think long and hard about passing on the power.

Breaking the Curse: Let’s pick something that shows the character’s patience and control winning out. Passing the Wisdom saving throw three times in combat without attacking another creature breaks the axe’s hold on the wearer, allowing them to discard it.

Deck of Many Things (Euryale Card)

I am not sure if this one counts, as it’s not an attuned item, but I mention it for completeness. Euryale is one of the cards in the famous Deck of Many Things; most cards are beneficial, but a few are negative, and this one is pretty nasty, hitting the PC with a permanent -2 to all saving throws. Something a little spicier than a generic saving throw penalty might be more interesting, but it’s certainly a strong penalty, and the PC will feel cursed.

Tempting the PC: No change required. The risk/reward proposition of the Deck of Many Things is tempting enough already.

Breaking the Curse: No major change required here either, as the condition is suitably high (only the magic of a god or another specific card in the deck can fix it). That said, the DM should make solving it through a god’s magic suitably difficult; a cleric should not just be able to spam Divine Intervention until the curse goes away. 

Demon Armor 

This is actually pretty appealing to a low-level character capable of wearing heavy armor; plate +1 is nothing to sneeze at, even if the other abilities (fluency in Abyssal and some unarmed strike damage) don’t come in handy often. The drawbacks, while situational, are severe (disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws versus demons). 

Tempting the PC: 5E loves to give out unarmed attacks, particularly as features for various ancestries; but with rare exceptions, most classes want characters to use weapons or magic, not unarmed strikes. Replace this ability with something that grants fire damage or a similar benefit to the character’s weapon attacks would be a nice upgrade. As with the berserker axe, there are more tempting examples in other media; Berserker Armor is a more compelling example than the rather modest benefits here, or the cursed armor from Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine (see second paragraph under “Grim and Grotty” here for an idea).

Breaking the Curse: Remove Curse appears again here, making the armor trivial to remove during rest, as long as the group has access to a cleric. Add a saving throw with an escalating DC based on how long the character has worn the armor, or how many times it has saved them from damage, to make it scarier to wear. For extra spice, perhaps a devil (as the sworn enemy of demons) could help a character remove the armor. Of course, dealing with devils brings its own complications…

Shield of Missile Attraction 

OK, this one is weird.

The shield offers resistance to damage from ranged attacks (that’s good!), but it’s also cursed (that’s bad). But it can draw fire away from your allies (that’s good!)... and it sends those attacks at you (that’s bad).

Many shield-carrying characters are tanks who want to take hits meant for squishier party members anyway. And the resistance means they’ll take less damage when those attacks do get past their superior AC. Moreso than the other cursed 5E items, this one is pretty close to being more obviously upside than downside. The biggest drawback is probably that the shield wearer will sometimes interfere with allied fire. My longest-running 5E group included an archer who was constantly sniping at enemies in melee with their allies, so this certainly would have come up as a problem.

Tempting the PC: Expand the range so that the shield covers a bigger area; 10’ is arbitrarily small. If you want to make it really spicy, change it from “ranged weapon attacks” to “ranged attacks” generally. At higher levels, ranged weapon attacks come up a lot less as most enemies are either melee heavies or employing magic (if you’ve ever played (or DM’d for) a 5E monk, think about how the Deflect Missiles ability came up less and less as they reached higher levels).

And please change the name. The coldly clinical and overtly descriptive name of “Shield of Missile Attraction” is a weirdly literal holdover from early D&D (it may even go back to Gygax himself, as he oscillated between evocative names loyal to Appendix N fiction, and names that sound like they belong on the cover of a user manual).

Call it the Shield of the Bloodied Defender of Grix or something fancy like that, and give it a backstory about a martyred paladin who died pierced by 999 arrows while holding off an army so his allies could escape.

Breaking the Curse: Find the remains of that paladin who first bore the shield and remove the Arrow of Hero Slaying still embedded in his remains to free his soul. Rather than just allowing the PC to drop the shield, give it an added ability to choose whether to attract or pass on any given attack.

Sword of Vengeance

This one is a boring +1 sword that piles on a bunch of restrictions, principally forcing the PC to repeatedly attack someone who damaged them. Restricting a character’s choices isn’t as fun as the designer’s think it is. In an authored narrative work, this can be a powerful tool for telling a story. In a game, this is frustrating and boring for many players, especially when their character is forced to do the same thing round after round. RPGs are about making choices. Be very wary of things that give players few or no choices.

Tempting the PC: This one is a close cousin to the berserker’s axe, and the same kinds of improvements apply. Give the sword some additional powers, like adding a Vampiric Touch on a finishing blow, or a movement bonus that kicks in when the sword’s wielder is pursuing an enemy that damaged them.

Breaking the Curse: This one actually says “You can break the curse in the usual ways.” Yaaawn. We’re beating a dead zebra at this point, but there should not be “usual ways” of dealing with curses, like something on your to-do list between picking up dry cleaning and mailing some letters. The ways should always be unique. 

The Sword of Vengeance offers a slightly more interesting alternative in that PCs can use the Banishment spell to expel the vengeful spirit. It’s cool that the players get a “clean” +1 sword out of the deal, but a one-time casting of a fourth-level spell isn’t that high of a bar to clear, and a +1 sword gets discarded pretty early in 5E’s high-powered adventuring world. To break the curse, a PC should have to investigate who the spirit was in life, learn why it sought vengeance, and do something to right its wrongs (or perform a compensatory action elsewhere in the world). Much more interesting. 

Axe of the Dwarvish Lords

Finally, we have an artifact. It’s suitably impressive, encompassing the effects of several lesser magic items that are quite good on their own.

Tempting the PC: No problem here. This is an artifact, a +3 weapon, with a whole suite of useful abilities. It’s suitable as a final gear upgrade for a tier 4 PC finishing a 1-20 campaign.

Breaking the Curse: The curse here is more interesting than some of the previous entries; it transforms non-dwarves to make them gradually more dwarf-like in appearance. This certainly tells a more interesting story than a -1 to some rolls, but is a non-factor for a PC who doesn’t care about character aesthetics. A more interesting curse might involve playing into the folklore aspects of mythological dwarves; an insatiable lust for gold, or a desire to carve great works on the sides of mountains, or tunnel into the depths of the earth. 

Despite the epic magic involved, Remove Curse still does the job just as well. Artifacts like the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords include instructions for their destruction, so consider simply saying that the only way to break the curse is to destroy the axe (or something similarly difficult). That will make a PC pause before running wild with this epic weapon.

Next Week: “Cursed” Magic Items From My Home Game