Next Up?

I finished my work on my new character sheet at the weekend. It turned out that almost all of the effort in turning the sheet into a form lay with the Spell Sheet (so many cells!), and that there were only fairly few auto-calculations to add. I'm now happy with the results, subject to a little bug fixing that will inevitably show up over the lifespan of the sheet.

Which probably means a new edition is coming...

Anyway, the upshot of that is that I need a new project - I've worked through my old papers and scanned those, I've painstakingly drawn out some maps for my current campaign, and now I've done my revised character sheet. What's next?

(Actually, I think the answer to that is to finally codify all the many fixes I want to incorporate into the 5e chassis. There's an awful lot that I really like about the game, but there's also a whole bunch that just drives me mental, so if I can sort that out then that would probably have a significant impact on my happiness with the game. Unless, that is, I get distracted by something else.)

The Bladeless Saber

I've been giving some thought to the question of post-"Rise of Skywalker" gaming in the Star Wars galaxy. What I've come up with is a campaign idea titled "The Bladeless Saber".

The campaign would be set 100 years exactly after the Battle of Geonosis, with the galaxy enjoying an uneasy peace between the various factions - the New (new) Republic, the Remnant, and a bunch of petty dominions mostly ruled by ex-First Order warlords. Naturally, the galaxy is beginning to gear up for commemorations for the battle that saw the start of the Clone Wars, all those years ago.

The PCs would be cast, initially, as a ragtag group of archaeologists (in the Indiana Jones mould), currently engaged in a dig on an obscure Remnant-controlled world that was once home to a Jedi temple. But, of course, the Remnant are less-than-pleased about any hint of a revival of the Jedi, so there's inevitably going to be pushback.

Anyway, the PCs' eventual haul would include a handful of Jedi icons, Khyber crystals, and the like, but also an old and badly-damaged Jedi holocron that makes reference to "The Bladeless Saber". And we go from there.

I guess there are spoilers from here on out. Though it probably doesn't really matter.

Obviously, at the centre of the campaign is the question of what is the Bladeless Saber. The answer dates back to the Clone Wars, or perhaps even before - it's no secret that the Jedi were corrupted by that conflict just as was everyhting else. At some point, a dirty-tricks secret order was set up, tasked with various shadow ops - an attempt to breed their own Chosen One through eugenics, cloning of Jedi, assassinations, espionage, and all the other nasties. With the demise of the Order, the Bladeless Saber was left with neither a purpose nor oversight, and the galaxy moved on. But they survived the Purge...

Beyond that, I've only got a few ideas pencilled in, that would need to be more fully fleshed out before the campaign could actually be run:

• The campaign would be structured in three parts, acting as a trilogy of sorts. So the first part would lay out the basic conflict, the second would widen the scope of matters, and then the third would resolve the conflict in that wider scope.
  
• The campaign theme is "what we leave behind".
  
• I quite like the thought of using a droid crime-boss at some point. Probably one that takes gleeful advantage of all the various weaknesses of Organics.
  
• I have an image of a Clone Wars-era prison for captured Jedi, tucked away somewhere on an Orphan planet. (Because "life creates it, makes it grow". But Orphan planets are completely lifeless, so what would that do to the Jedi?) The PCs would probably have to go there to get information, but what do they find there...?

Alas, I'll probably never get a chance to run such a thing, and anyway I fear it's likely to be rendered moot by the next batch of Star Wars media anyway. But these things are fun in their own right.

Dungeons & Dragons 6th Edition - What I Would Do

There's no suggestion that 6th edition is coming any time soon (though with the 5th anniversary coming soon...). Nor, indeed, do I particularly want such a thing. But it's always an interesting topic to ponder.

My view with 6th Edition is that, actually, the game doesn't need wholesale changes. While the underlying flaws of 3e had been well exposed by the end of that edition's cycle, and while 4e had fallen utterly flat, 5e seems to be fundamentally quite sound. So with a potential 6e, what I would actually do is to make a myriad of small changes.

(At this point I'll note two things: firstly, these are just my current half-baked thoughts, and likely to change by the time 6e actually comes around; secondly, what I'm considering here is a new edition of D&D specifically. Given a completely blank slate, there are things that I would do very differently, but some of those changes would be to the genuinely sacred cows of the game.

The big (ish) stuff:

• Finally drop alignment from the game, completely.
  
• Likewise, drop multiclassing.
  
• Remove the upper levels from the core rulebooks. This certainly includes everything above level 15, and probably includes everything above level 12. Almost nobody plays at these levels anyway, so take it out of the books to fit more stuff instead.
  
• While I'm at it, there's a huge amount of dross in the DMG, with about 50 pages of genuinely useful material. Cut it.
  
• Add a handful of classes: the Assassin, Warlord, and some sort of Mageblade class. This completes the set of classes that have ever appeared in the (first) PHB of any edition of the game. (The Mageblade being the old 'Elf' class from BECMI.)
  
• Note that I wouldn't drop any of the existing races or classes.
  
• Rejig the subclasses a bit, aiming for at least three for each class. Wizards, in particular, probably should be divided by some other paradigm than the current schools. Also, every class should gain their subclass at 3rd level - better for new players if they don't have nitpicky subdivisions to decide on too soon.
  
• Clerics, Druids, and to a lesser extent Paladins need their spell-lists adjusted. I would vastly reduce the number of spells in the 'core' list for these classes, but vastly increase the "domain" spells granted by subclasses. These classes just have too many options to deal with, largely by virtue of having the full suite of spells to choose from.

And then there are the smaller changes, which as I said are many and varied. These fall into a few categories:

• The monsters need reworked, because too many of them are just dull. That seems to be pretty standard in the first monster book of any new edition, which is a big problem since that book inevitably includes all the most-used monsters for the game. Since 6e isn't proposing big changes, that should give some scope to apply the lessons-learned from 5e monster design.
  
• The equipment lists. Here, the main thing I want is some upgrade paths for mundane equipment, mostly to give PCs some good options for spending their hard-earned gold.
  
• Magic items. This is largely a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater - 3e had a very large set of items, often presented in a mix-and-match style. 5e replaced this with a set of specific items, chewing up a lot more space for far fewer items. But the big problem with the 3e offering was not, generally, the mix of items presented, but rather the assumption that all items could be bought or made easily. This meant that almost all the items in the DMG were ignored, in favour of optimised builds. But use the same items without that assumption, and it works rather better.
  
• There are a lot of ways that 5e seems to support some styles of game, but then undermines and undercuts them in practice. For instance the wilderness exploration rules, which provide lots of guidelines... and then make it trivially easy to bypass them. All these things are better stripped off into a set of optional modules in the DMG, so that by default groups don't need to worry about, for instance, tracking rations... but if they do want to run a wilderness exploration game where that is important, then there are rules for doing so (and that make it count). See also encumbrance, light sources, lingering injuries...

And that's more or less it, I think.