Some 5e Pet Peeves

I very much like 5e, and am looking forward to starting up my first full campaign in a couple of weeks. That said, there are a few things that bug me. Not enough to abandon the game, you understand, but enough to set my teeth on edge. For example:

• The Character Sheet: I spent a couple of frustrating hours at the week painstakingly entering the PCs for the new campaign into the PDF form character sheet. And my overwhelming impression after doing this is that I'm very glad I didn't spend hours whipping up an auto-calculating form from the sheet. Because the official 5e character sheet sucks. Some things that are quite important are in a teeny tiny space, some things that are unimportant have huge amounts of space, there's no space at all for some key things (such as weapon keywords), and the spell sheet is carefully designed to have too much space for Wizards, Bards and the like and not quite enough for Clerics and Druids. It's just annoying.
• Why are Wizards Proficient in Weapons: In days of yore, the various classes had different attack bonuses (BAB, or THAC0, or attack matrix, or whatever), and there was also a penalty associated with not being proficient with the weapon. In that model, it made sense that Wizards could be proficient in a weapon - they would thus avoid the penalty but still not be particularly good. But 5e has replaced the attack bonuses with a unified Proficiency Bonus, which by rights therefore should apply to "those things the class is good at". Characters who aren't proficient don't suffer a penalty; they just don't get the bonus, and so don't get anything. And under that model, then, Wizards really shouldn't have any weapon proficiencies, any more than Fighters should be proficient in magic. It's not what they're about, so why is the Wizard as good as the Fighter with a quarterstaff?
• Armour: Similarly, I'm a little peeved that 5e threw away one of the advancements of 4e, and switched back to having many different armours in each category, some of which are quite clearly than the others. 4e had it right on this one - all the Light armours should be equivalent, as should the Medium ones, as should the Heavy ones (and then differentiate with other traits for those with custom armour). This would also allow them to tie the armours into the same Proficiency Bonus mechanism as everything else: Light gives the bonus, Medium x2, and Heavy x3.
• Alignment: I've complained about this before. Now it has been removed from the mechanics of the game, and especially since Traits, Bonds, Ideals, and Flaws do it better, it's time to remove it from the game entirely.
• Multiclass hit points: 5e has the same flaw as 3e here, in that characters get max hit points at 1st level and then a lesser amount thereafter. This means a Wizard 1/Rogue 1 is different from a Rogue 1/Wizard 1. Fortunately, this is an easy one to fix, if it ever comes up at all.

Still, just a few annoyances, which is good - and nothing like the mess that was multiclass skill points for 3e...

Firefly: Broken Wing

Last night's game was the seventh "Lost Episode" and was the eighth session I've been involved in this year. It had many successful elements and was a good game, without being a classic.

The plot centred around our old friend Atherton Wing who, disgraced following the duel with Mal and blacklisted by the Companion's Guild, found himself ostracized from polite society. In order to buy his way back in, he contracted with the unregistered former Companion Rose, and things seemed to go well for a while. Until, that is, Rose betrayed him by stealing a large amount of money and, more importantly, some embarrassing documents. And so Ath found himself in need of someone to pose as a dire enemy while at the same time having a perverse sense of honour that would allow Ath to trust him. Of course, such people are vanishingly rare, so the list of candidates was short: Mal Reynolds.

The first success of the night, and perhaps the biggest risk, was that I decided to assign Atherton Wing as one of the potential PCs for the evening, and to recommend that he, Mal, and Inara were the best choices for the episode. The players proceeded to latch onto this, leading to some of the most amusing roleplaying of the Lost Episodes. Which was great, of course. (The risk there was that the players might not have run with it, and I'd have found myself painfully short of material for the evening. Lucky that didn't happen.)

The other character at the centre of this story was Rose, a former Companion turned con artist. However, Rose was a rather more sympathetic foil than Saffron, in that her motivations were driven more by previous pain than by simply wanting advantage. This led to the key scene of the session, after the Crew had captured Rose, and Inara was sent in to deal with the rogue former Companion.

It's fair to say I have some issues with Companions in the 'Verse. Largely because my touchstone for them is the Geisha, and my touchstone for them is "Memoirs of a Geisha". (Of course, "Memoirs..." is fiction, but so too are the Companions so I don't think that's a huge issue.) And I found that film hugely difficult to watch, it being a happy and romantic film... that is largely about child abuse and prostitution. (Consider: the lead character is adopted at a young age, taught art and music and dancing, and then has her virginity sold to the highest bidder. I found that to be hugely at odds with the overall tone of the piece.)

I've been giving the Companion's Guild some thought recently, as they are a key part of this year's Christmas Game ("Memoirs of a Companion"). This week's game served as a little bit of a testbed for some of those ideas, including the character of Rose, and it all seemed to go pretty well.

The other big risk associated with last night's game (and indeed with the "Christmas Game") is that it did touch on some difficult material. Rose's backstory, and the abuse therein, raised a particularly worrying flag.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how this game worked out, and most especially in light of my disappointment with the previous "Lost Episode". Though I'm definitely going for a lighter tone with the next one! And I'm also reasonably happy I've got a handle on how to present my material for the "Christmas Game", which is good to know. So, a success!

My next session will be the first part of "Eberron: Dust to Dust", then I'm hoping to get a chance to actually play something for a change, and then it's "Bucking the Tiger", the last of the "Echoes of War" pre-gen episodes for the game. October is going to be a busy month!

Chaotic Good

I don't really intend to use alignment again in my games. Fortunately, 5e makes it really easy just to drop it, as the game gives alignment absolutely no mechanical weight (while also offering a different method to set up a character with some sort of code - Ideals, Flaws, and Bonds). So, unless I happen to go back to 3e, I doubt this will be anything more than a theoretical discussion again.

That said, alignment is still such a big (and divisive) part of D&D's history that discussions about what the alignments mean persist. On Wednesday we found ourselves having one such discussion, specifically about the Chaotic Good alignment, which one player characterised as a "Robin Hood"-type, and also as "you're good, but you can do whatever you want".

Well...

The first misconception there is "you can do whatever you want". While that's true, it's also true of all the alignments - it's important to note that alignment is not a straightjacket. Though, of course, if your stated alignment doesn't match your actions, your stated alignment should really be changed...

The other issue, and it's a common one, lies in the roles of Lawful and Chaotic alignments. Here, the names are rather unfortunate - this isn't about obeying the law or not. Rather, it's about the entire concept of laws (and systems, heirarchies, and all that stuff). The Lawful character believes that such structures are, in general, a beneficial thing (in the case of an LG person, because he feels they're a social good; in the case of an LE person, because he feels they're useful to him).

Conversely, the Chaotic character believes that such structures are a harmful thing and should be removed (again, in the case of a CG person, because he feels that such things actively harm others; in the case of a CE person, because they get in his way).

Consider, for example, a badly-written law - one that doesn't do what it was intended to do or one that applies unfairly. In that situation, it's entirely reasonable that the Lawful person will reject that law but, crucially, he will work to replace it with a better one. The Chaotic person, on the other hand, will work to remove the law entirely.

But it's also important to remember that the nine alignments are all, necessarily, very broad. That's inevitable, really - if you're going to categorise the entirety of human action into nine buckets, those buckets have to be pretty huge (or maybe everyone's just Neutral...).

So a 'mild' Chaotic person might seek to reduce the impact of laws (and heirarchies, and the like) on people's lives, while an extreme Chaotic person may seek to remove every instance of laws, no matter how benign. Conversely, a 'mild' Lawful person may seek to tighten the laws to improve matters, while an extreme Lawful person may seek to codify every possible situation.

Naturally, sanity lies somewhere in the middle.

(It of course didn't help that BECMI D&D only had Lawful and Chaotic alignments, and didn't codify Good and Evil. In practice, this had the effect that Lawful = Good, while Chaotic = Evil.)

Oh, and the other other thing is that we've all pretty much been doing alignments wrong ever since D&D was published. Forget everything that is written about behaviours and values, because that's dross. Alignment, as originally intended, was nothing more (or less) than a set of team shirts. By which token, Lawful Good = "America! Fuck Yeah!". Which presumably makes Chaotic Good "Oh Canada"...

Start of a New Campaign

Last night saw the start of my first full 5e campaign, "Eberron: Dust to Dust", which is expected to meet once a month for the foreseeable future. My thoughts after the first session:

A Good Group

The group consists of five players, which is a full complement, and which is the number I had hoped for. I've played with all of these players before, and there are no problem personalities amongst them, no obvious clashes that I can see, and they all have the nice habit of turning up when and where they say they will (which is distressingly rare amongst gamers). Which is all to the good.

In terms of PCs, we have a Warforged Fighter, a Dragonborn Cleric, a Forest Gnome Wizard, and two Bards - a Tiefling and a Changeling. Thankfully, Eberron is extremely cosmopolitan, so I don't see any issues with the group not including any humans or in it being a wide variety of races. So that's all to the good.

And the players all seem to have latched on to the role-playing aspects of the game rather well - whereas past groups might have seen me despairing over a lack of Traits, Bonds, etc, or finding it like pulling teeth to detail the Anchor NPCs, this group were readily able to provide that material. Good stuff.

Character Creation in 5e

Character generation went very well, despite this being a new system for almost everyone. I did feel a little sorry for one player, who turned up with a fully-detailed PC, but he didn't seem to mind. Otherwise, it was just a matter of working through the steps, which are rather less involved than even core-rules-only 3e.

I particularly like the Backgrounds for 5e, which allow for some nice detailing of the character (and also allows players to either enhance or play against their other character choices - you don't get unduly penalised for playing against type). And I also like the use of Traits, Bonds, Flaws, and Ideals, which inject role-playing aspects right into character creation (and, given the way we're handling Inspiration, should also tie into the game itself).

So I was well pleased with that.

Woefully Under-prepared

The one concern I have with this campaign is the question of how much to prepare. With "The Eberron Code", I had a clear beginning, middle, and end for the campaign before I started, and quite a few of the steps along the way. I just don't have that here.

However, with the relative failure of "Star Wars: Imperial Fist", and also the collapse of "Lost Mine of Phandelver", I don't want to put a huge amount of effort into the campaign until I know it has legs.

And so I find myself somewhat under-prepared for what's ahead. I know how the campaign starts, I have a rough idea of how it might end, and I have many of the antagonists pencilled in (including immediate, mid-term, long-term, and secondary opponents). But I don't have anything like the sort of detail that I feel makes for good mysteries... and I do love a good mystery or three.

Still, that's something I can work on over the next little while. And I'm very happy with the way things have begun, so I don't really have anything to complain about. Which is nice.

Rolling Hit Points: Some Options

For a very long time (actually, since point-buy ability scores became standard), my biggest bugbear with D&D and D&D-like systems (PF, SWSE, and similar) has been rolling hit points. The major reason for this is that for the entire 3e-era I only ever rolled a '1' for hit points. (I should note two key caveats to that: firstly, and most importantly, that was actually very few characters over very few levels; secondly, it's a streak that ran from the release date of 3e to the release date of 4e, and which has finally been broken in a 3e game.)

It can be fun playing a character with minimal hit points and trying desperately to keep him alive despite a critical weakness. But it's absolutely not fun after the first such attempt. Consequently, hit point rolls became the one and only roll one which I would cheat - if the DM absolutely insisted on random rolls and didn't institute some sort of a minimum and/or reroll (which was extremely unusual), then if the dice came up a '1' that would quickly be... massaged.

It was always interesting just how angry that made some posters on ENWorld. :)

As with ability score assignments, I went through a whole bunch of house rules for hit point generation in 3e, before finally settling on one that I liked. One of the issues I had was that the "max hp at first level" interacted strangely with the multiclass rules, so that a Rogue 1/Wizard 1 was rather better off than a Wizard 1/Rogue 1. (This applied to the skill point assignments as well, which is why that's my go-to example.) So I had a table with some correcting logic that was just really confusing and served mostly to make a teeny tiny adjustment just to fix the issue.

In the end, I settled on fixed hit point assignments based on class: classes with a Poor BAB got 3 per level, classes with Medium BAB got 5, and classes with Good BAB got 7. (Which meant that the Ranger effectively "moved up" to the same as Fighters, while Barbarians "moved down". That was a feature, not a bug.) In particular, though, the "max hp at first level" was replaced by a flat +5 bonus for all characters. So a 1st level Wizard got 8 (3+5) hit points, rather than the standard 4, while a 1st level Fighter got 12 (7+5). (Again, a feature, not a bug, as was the fact that characters thus had significantly more hit points than the average of the dice roll.)

Anyway, 5e...

The stated rule in 5e is that at each level the player gets a choice: either take the average (rounded up) for the class, or roll your hit points. Per the rules as written, there is no provision for rerolling or an imposed minimum on the roll, or anything like that - if you roll, you have to live with the consequences.

All of which is absolutely fine by me. Faced with that, I would always choose to take the average so I'd be happy. For those players who really want to roll, well, the option is there too. And over the course of a campaign it will come out more or less the same anyway (you're slightly better off taking the fixed value, but only by a tiny margin).

So I'll be going with that. I do have to note that of course I expect players to play their characters in good faith. So if you choose to roll, be it hit points or ability scores, you're expected to play the resulting character without undue complaint, without cheating, and without busily 'suiciding' the character. (But, these days, I really don't expect that to be an issue. It might have been with past groups, but not now.)

That said, I do have a couple of variants I've been bouncing around for a while, which I think it may be worth adding here...

Reroll Per Level

I forget where I first saw this one, but I'm pretty sure it's not something I came up with. But here it is:

Whenever you gain a level, reroll your entire hit dice. If the result is equal to or less than your current hit point maximum, you instead gain 1 hit point. If the result is greater than your current hit point maximum, you instead take the new total.

For example, suppose a 3rd level Fighter (no Con bonus) with 21 hit points reaches 4th level. At this point the player rolls 4d10 for hit points for the new level. If the result is 21 or less, his hit point total instead increases to 22. If, instead, he rolls 31 then his new total increases to 31.

The effect of this is to 'smooth' the hit point progression over time. If you happen to roll badly at one level, then it's much more likely that your score at the next level will be higher, and so boost your total. Conversely, if you roll particularly well at one level, it's much more likely your next level (or two) will see much smaller gains. Over the course of the campaign, characters should tend towards the average for their class, but do so fairly organically.

Reroll Per Long Rest

I'm pretty sure this one is mine, and it's also specific to 5e.

Characters start an adventure with the maximum possible hit points for their class. (So a 3rd level Fighter starts with 30 hit points, plus any Con bonuses.)

Each time they take a long rest (and they have taken at least 1hp damage), reroll the entire pool of hit dice. If this is less than or equal to their current hit points, then they remain at their current hit points but their maximum is reduced to their current level. If the result is equal to or higher than their maximum hit points, their maximum is reduced by 1, and their current hit points rises to this new maximum. If the result is between their current and maximum hit points, then their maximum is reduced to the total rolled, and their current rises to this new maximum.

For example, if our 3rd level Fighter had 30 hit points but has taken damage to reduce him to 15. He takes a long rest, and so rerolls his entire hit dice. If the result is 15 or less, then he remains at 15 hit points, but his maximum is likewise reduced to 15. If, instead, the result was 30 then his maximum would be decreased to 29, but his current hit points would increase to 29. Finally, if the result was 22 then both his maximum and current hit points would change to 22.

Obviously, when the characters take a "between adventures" rest, their maximum hp totals go back to, well, maximum. (In game, that's probably something like "take a week off".)

The effect of this is that characters will gradually become more and more beaten up as the adventure progresses - they will start with a very high maximum hit points, but this will gradually reduce as their injuries take their toll. I think it's actually quite an elegant solution to the "long rest heals everything" issue in 5e - yes it does, but it also redefines that 'everything'. It also has the consequence of discouraging injured characters from casually taking a long rest (and likely reducing their maximum total). Though it does encourage a gamist artifact where the group really should exhaust their available healing before taking that long rest (to mitigate the loss). I'm not sure that's really an issue, especially stacked against "long rest heals everything".

Having said that, it's also sufficiently complex that I'm not going to bother using it!

He's Dead Jim!

Unlike a lot of RPGs, D&D (and Pathfinder) feature characters returning from the dead fairly often. Indeed, so common is this, especially in 3e, that "the revolving door of death" became something of a joke.

Conversely, characters returning from the dead has generally been quite rare in D&D-related fiction. In the original Dragonlance trilogy, Riverwind was returned in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene. In the Drizzt saga, Wulfgar returns from the dead in a long-teased development, and Salvatore has recently reincarnated all of his old heroes for a new edition. And one of the most recent Pathfinder Tales saw a lead character dying and coming back (in what was actually quite a clever plot development, I though - a curse that lasted as long as the character lived).

As time and the editions have gone on, the effects of dying and coming back have become progressively less extreme. In 1st and 2nd Edition, death reduced your Con score by 1 point permanently (in an edition where boosts to ability scores were vanishingly rare), and there was a percentage chance you wouldn't survive. In 3e you automatically came back (unless you chose not to), but lost a level. Because of the way the XP rules worked, at least in 3.5e, you would eventually catch up, but could spend some months behind. Pathfinder changes this to apply permanent negative levels (which can be removed, so not really 'permanent', although that is costly). 4e introduces a non-permanent penalty that gradually reduces as you reach "milestones", while 5e has a non-permanent penalty that reduces through resting.

None of which I actually have a problem with - being dead (and so out of the game) for the time involved should really be punishment enough, without also permanently being behind the rest of the characters in ability. And dealing with mismatched PC levels was a major pain for the DM in 3e, PF, and 4e anyway. So better to avoid the issue, IMO.

However, from a storytelling point of view, I really don't like the notion that character death is little more than a speed-bump, easily dealt with and then forgotten. I'm very much in favour of its handling in the "Star Trek" movies, or even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", where a character can come back but they are inevitably changed by the experience. Note, though, that 'changed' doesn't have to mean 'weakened'.

So...

Step One: Roleplay It

Just because the character is out of the action doesn't mean the player is out of the game. When a character dies, the group should discuss the next step - does the player bring in a new character, or will they seek to bring the old one back? In the latter case, the DM and the player should play out a few 'afterlife' scenes, interspersed with the action of the majority of the group. There shouldn't be many of these scenes, since it's one PC versus the rest of the group, and because you don't want them to be dead for very long (real-time) anyway, so just a few: maybe an introduction to the afterlife, some meetings with old friends/enemies/ancestors, and then the call to go back.

Step Two: The Character Rebuild

When the character returns, he doesn't have to come back as-is. Instead, the player should be given the chance to do a rebuild of the character, with almost everything up for grabs. As far as I can see, the following items should remain unchanged:

• The character's race, unless the character was reincarnated rather than raised/resurrected.
• The character's background, unless this is changed to a "post-death" background.
• The character's ability scores should remain broadly the same - a minor adjustment is fine, but not more than 1-2 points in any direction. (And if the ability scores are to be changed, he should use the point-buy system to do it.)

But pretty much everything else should be up for grabs. If the player decides the change some feat assignments, or his sub-class, or even his class, that's probably fine - the character has just gone through a life-changing trauma, so maybe his Paladin is now suddenly a Fighter (or the reverse), or he now has a different Bond or Ideal.

But there is one caveat: the player should be required to change something.

Post-death Backgrounds

5e has introduced an interesting new customisation option called the background, representing what the character did before he became an adventurer. (Actually, it was 4e that introduced the mechanic, and of course they're not exactly a new development. But 5e brought them into the D&D core for the first time.) Which is all to the good.

What the "character rebuild" step above allows for, though, is the option of introducing some new backgrounds, for characters who have died and been reborn. It's not unreasonably, after all, to assume that for some characters their "back from the dead" moment might come to mean more to them than their long-ago background as a rat catcher or whatever.

I propose, therefore, the introduction of at least one new background for characters who have died and returned. (I'm not sure if it's better to have one background with a choice of features, or several backgrounds each with a single feature.) This would reflect the character's post-life experience, and his reaction to coming back: maybe he's now world-weary and wants to die again, maybe he was compelled to return by unfinished business, maybe he's horrified by what lies in store and will now refuse to die (again), maybe he realises now that life is sweet, or whatever.

Problem is, now I need to write up this background, which may then never be used...

Ties that Bind: The Anchor NPC

For my upcoming Eberron campaign, I've asked each of the players to detail an "anchor NPC". This is a non-player character who has some in-built connection to the relevant PC, and who has some reason to attend the same party as the PC at the start of the campaign.

(It should be noted that "some in-built connection" is deliberately vague, as is "some reason to attend". The NPC could be a friend, relative or lover of the PC, or s/he could equally be an enemy, a rival, a bitter ex, or whatever else. And the NPC could be there for a reason directly connected to the PC or indeed for an entirely unrelated reason - which could be as simple as "I had an invitation".)

The reason for wanting this anchor NPC on the scene is that something bad (TM) is going to happen at the party which will trigger the first adventure in the campaign, and while that event will proper the PCs to direct action, it will be more interesting if they care for some NPCs so that the story isn't just "how to we get out of this" and turns into "how do we rescue (or not) these other guys as well?"

It will, of course, be my intent to use some or all of these anchor NPCs later in the campaign, in various capacities - some will be allies, some may be enemies. Of course, some may not survive the first adventure!

My goals for this first adventure, then, are two-fold:

1. Meld the individual PCs into a somewhat-coherent group. This shouldn't be a big issue, since the players will hopefully do that well enough.
2. Prepare the anchor NPCs for world-building use.

And it's worth noting that one of my players has suggested an angle that is very interesting, and something I most likely would never have considered on my own. Which is extremely cool, and one of the great advantages of the tabletop RPG form. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this campaign.

Campaign Links

One of the things I try to do when running games set in the same universe is to try to keep them consistent and have them occasionally interact with one another. This actually started way back when I was running a lot of Vampire games, where occasional characters introduced in a "Dark Ages" game might pop up in a modern-era "Masquerade" game.

More recently, I had intended to introduce a prophecy near the end of my "Star Wars: Imperial Fist" campaign and then just leave it hanging - only to finally deal with the resolution in a future Legacy-era campaign. But when "Imperial Fist" didn't quite work out, I dropped both the planned prophecy and the planned future campaign. A shame, but perhaps for the best.

The benefit of doing this is that it serves as something of an Easter egg for players who happened to play in both games. The connections won't actually matter, but they're a nice touch. This is especially useful if the end of the previous campaign changed the world in some way - in most cases, the game then ends, which means the player never actually sees the result of their victory. But by connecting the next campaign, they do. (The downside, of course, is that it's harder work than just resetting everything.)

As it happens, I now find myself building two sets of links simultaneously - once for the "Firefly: Lost Episodes" game and once for "Eberron: Dust to Dust".

The Eberron campaign links back to two previous campaigns. From the "On Tracks of Lightning" game we have the re-establishment of the lightning rail across the Mournland and the defeat of the Lord of Blades. From "The Eberron Code" we have the journey of the Cerulean Swan to the north and, later, the cleansing of the Silver Flame. (Awkwardly, the chronology of "Dust to Dust" starts somewhere near the end of Act Two of "The Eberron Code". I'm planning to move the timeline forward rather briskly though!)

For Firefly, the link mostly comes in the form of a character I'm about to introduce in a Lost Episode who I intend also to use in a flashback in the Christmas Game. But more on that when the time comes...