Hacking 3e DnD

[DenizenKane]

Okay so I’ve been trying to put together a bunch of tome like classes for 3e dnd, but I’m trying to set the balance point to a fair level somewhere below wizard level.

My design goals are:
Use the 3e and 3.5e monster manuals
Use as much as of 3e that works, but throw out all the old classes
Classplosion
Set challenges for each level to use as a guideline for class design
Create a set of encounter guidelines that allows for more interesting combat
Do away with wealth by level, and fix expendables
Create out of combat options for each class
Use many well designed resource systems
Put together an appropriate list of feats that can be given out once per session or more
Create races that are ability score agnostic
Tiered class system where everyone jumps to a domain level class at the equivalent of 3e level 9

Is this insane?

[Username17]

The 3e/3.5 Monster Manuals break down in the double digits. The number inflation is a thing you can effectively address the upper end of with scaling magic items and fixing a wealth by level patch, but the lower bound is still hot garbage.

So the Grimweird is a CR 11 Undead with an AC of 20 and 78 hit points. It's claw attacks have a +3 bonus to hit. That is not a joke. It has some summoning spells, and presumably hides behind them, but those numbers wouldn't be exciting on an enemy five levels lower. A Skindancer is also CR 11, and it has an AC of 25 and 202 hit points plus an adaptive damage reduction that makes its functional hit point total be somewhat higher than that. Its attacks are +20 to-hit. Again, this is not a joke. I didn't cherry pick those monsters, I literally just opened the book and picked a monster with a double digit CR and then flipped through the book at random until I found another monster with the same CR.

The 3e Skill system gives acceptable outcomes only for low level characters who are dungeonscout fuckups. Which for levels 1 to 4 is totally fine because that's a fun game and not an unreasonable take on first through fourth level characters. But when the player characters are getting access to spells and abilities that imply real competence and facing enemies like giants and dragons inappropriate for bumblefuck peasant heroes, it would be insulting to spend a skill rank on improving Use Rope or Swim even if doing so got you out of the keystone cops range - and it doesn't even do that.

In short, 3rd edition has problems with higher tiers that are not solved by replacing the Fighter with a character class that doesn't even get a bonus feat at 7th level. 7th level D&D, and to an even greater degree 13th level D&D does have deeper problems than the fact that the Fighter doesn't get nice things.

Although yes, it's perfectly possible to have an enjoyable game of 3e D&D at 10th level if you swap out the fighter's character class for something that isn't shit and also hand out enough equipment that they can actually fight Dragons and shit. It's still probably the best version of D&D for that kind of adventuring. It's just... that's increasingly sad as we get to double digit levels.

-Username17

[DenizenKane]

Hm, would it make sense to cap it at a level before 10, and just accept that the game stops working beyond that point, and just write all the classes to go up to that limit. Like maybe make it an e6 type hack?

[Username17]

Hm, would it make sense to cap it at a level before 10, and just accept that the game stops working beyond that point, and just write all the classes to go up to that limit. Like maybe make it an e6 type hack?

It depends on what you're after. The Giant progression works OK out to about level 13 or 14 if you fix the WBL stuff an give the fighter types some nice things and also get the mage types to not 'combo off' before then. Fire Giants are a perfectly cromulent opponent, as are Cloud Giants.

The monster books get real thin on the ground at the higher levels. What's even at CR 14 other than some outsiders and Dragons? You can't run a campaign around fighting Nalfeshnees and Astral Daevas alone. Leaving aside the fact that the Nalfeshnee is a pretty crap CR 14 opponent, the fact that there aren't really a lot of alternatives in potential opposition makes envisioning a campaign at that point difficult (the Siege Crab is a literal joke). And the 'doubling every two levels' bit also breaks down at high levels, meaning that the appropriate number of Ogres for a 12th level party to face isn't 32 but more like 50 to 100. A 13th level party is just going to be puzzled by an encounter with 16 Trolls. There's a reason that the book just straight up throws its hands in the air when asked how much (if any) XP should be awarded for enemies that come in groups larger than 12.

In my personal heartbreaker, people stop leveling up as D&D adventurers at level 10 and start progressing in prestige classes that have abilities relevant to domain management and mass combat. The armor class, hit points, and attack strength of an Iron Golem or Cloud Giant simply don't go obsolete, no matter what level you get to. That seems like a better solution than trying to get me to care about Greater Shadesteel Golems and Death Giants. And the flipside of that is that monsters like Mariliths can be scaled way back so that in personal combat you could actually face one at 9th or 10th level - and their higher tier abilities can be about being great and inspiring generals and such.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

If you go on dnd-wiki you can sort by High or Moderate for plenty of clearly sub-wizard content that goes to level 20. That said, I think most attempts at making sub-wizard content miss half the good parts of tabletop RPGs.

[OgreBattle]

In my personal heartbreaker, people stop leveling up as D&D adventurers at level 10 and start progressing in prestige classes that have abilities relevant to domain management and mass combat. The armor class, hit points, and attack strength of an Iron Golem or Cloud Giant simply don't go obsolete, no matter what level you get to. That seems like a better solution than trying to get me to care about Greater Shadesteel Golems and Death Giants. And the flipside of that is that monsters like Mariliths can be scaled way back so that in personal combat you could actually face one at 9th or 10th level - and their higher tier abilities can be about being great and inspiring generals and such.

-Username17

Does your lvl 1 to 10 basically follow what D&D3e does in terms of player powers and challenges, puzzles, monsters faced?

[Username17]

Does your lvl 1 to 10 basically follow what D&D3e does in terms of player powers and challenges, puzzles, monsters faced?

The expectation is facing rather more monsters at a time. One of the things I think 4e actually was right about is the idea that a 'level 5 monster' should be one of several monsters in a 'level 5 encounter' rather the rough equivalent of a 5th level character and intended to be fought as a solo by four 5th level PCs.

So the challenge level isn't set to the point where the team faces 'a wolf' but the point at which the team faces 'a pack of wolves.' A group of enemies that are individually weaker than members of Team Awesome Force gives more chance for players to have finishing moves and utilize their resource mechanics.

But to a first pass, the 3rd edition CR of monsters level 1-10 is where I default to putting monsters on the challenge ladder. Obviously things can be moved up and down for any of a number of reasons (including just filling holes). But for example, I can't think of any particular reason to have Phase Spiders and Trolls not be 5th level opposition, so that's where I try to put them. But the intention is that the party faces a pack of Trolls, not a single Troll.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

At what point did D&D shift away from high level badasses mowing down hordes of mooks to a small strike team gangbanging Orcus? Or is why a better question? Obviously you can do both in most editions, but I definitely feel that earlier high-level D&D had a larger scale than later D&D. It could totally have been my GMs, but when I played 3rd edition we never really fought big groups of enemies. A dozen dudes was like, the max. It's still fun, just... less heroic.
Is it a consequence of 3rd edition being much more codified than earlier editions? If it takes me 10 minutes to make an NPC as opposed to 2 or 3, then I would probably be disinclined towards larger battles.

[...You Lost Me]

Hm, would it make sense to cap it at a level before 10, and just accept that the game stops working beyond that point, and just write all the classes to go up to that limit. Like maybe make it an e6 type hack?

I would recommend capping at level 10 just to reduce scope even if you eventually want a game with a higher level cap. You want to be able to finish this, or at least create a bodged-together version that you can present at your game table. Since you're already looking at overhauling WBL, feats, and races, I think you should look for places where you can dramatically reduce your workload.

That choice would mess with your other goal of "everyone jumps to a domain level class at the equivalent of 3e level 9", so it might not be a satisfying solution. My suggestion there is to put your higher-tier classes at level 6 instead. It's a popular place to break off for players, and it's the entry point for most Tome prestige classes (so hopefully you can reuse some of the content there).

[deaddmwalking]

Is it a consequence of 3rd edition being much more codified than earlier editions? If it takes me 10 minutes to make an NPC as opposed to 2 or 3, then I would probably be disinclined towards larger battles.

I think the first thing to recognize is that in earlier editions of D&D, the incentives toward combat tended to reward fighting multiples of weak opponents. An individual orc was worth 15 XP in 2nd edition whether you were 1st level or 15th level. Fighting 100 orcs that posed no threat to you would net you 1500 XP. The way XP worked, that wasn't necessarily EFFICIENT, but especially when you were close to leveling it was an incentive.

In earlier editions, even at higher levels, characters were actually much more vulnerable than in 3.x. A high-level opponent (like a dragon with a breath weapon) was dangerous enough that you could have a TPK with some bad rolls. Fighting level-appropriate enemies as defined in 3.x wasn't as safe.

In 2nd edition, there was less focus on 'appropriate encounters' by level and more on 'appropriate encounters' by terrain. Running into a dragon at 1st level just meant you had to talk and be clever, not fight. Orcs appear in bands of 30-300; you're just as likely to encounter a full army as a band.

[Foxwarrior]

It may take ten minutes to make one NPC, but it doesn't take longer to make that NPC a hundred times. I think it's just the resolution time, my first D&D campaign, I had the players fight lots of enemies. When they were fighting twenty skeletons at like level 2 or 3, it was suspenseful and fun. When they were fighting thousands of peasant archers at level 11 (and I still thought being slavishly dedicated to the rules when they took a long time to output boring results nobody was looking forward to was a good idea) the fight was almost as bad as that time they fought a dragon in 4e. Fighting twenty guys at level 11 can be pretty bad too since they can have enough health that you might be expected to keep track of how much health each one has.

Obviously I fixed this more or less in Gempunks, mostly by just adjusting the numbers so that peasant archer attacks are more threatening and killing armies doesn't devolve into impossible bookkeeping as soon as minions get a third hit die and might survive a hit sometimes.

[DenizenKane]

Okay, so cut the game off at 10, and potentially add domain level classes.
And, make the standard encounter:
4 PCs vs 4 Monsters with CR equal to their level
Then, adjust the PCs to be more beefy.

For skills, probably it's best to do it like PF and make it a binary choice, and then unlike PF give out much more skill points to PCs.

[Username17]

If your plan is to use the monster manual largely as-is, the monsters mostly work in 3e p to about level 10. We can tell a few hilarious stories about giant fvcking crabs and holy shit spellweavers, but for the most part the 3e monsters in the 1-10 level range approximately meet their power level targets.

I would argue that the 4th edition power level targets are better targets to strive for, but 4th edition is much worse about actually hitting those targets than 3rd edition is about hitting its. A good design beats a good concept in actual practice. And it's not close.

One thing that becomes noticeable as you go up in levels is that the 4v1 standard becomes less threatening relatively speaking. That is, higher level characters have more options and more charges on their abilities. When it's four 2nd level PCs versus a CR 2 monster, that's a smaller actual bulge over team monster than when it's four 8th level PCs versus a CR 8 monster. It's four times as many PCs in either case, but in a very real way the fact that your team has three extra 8th level characters versus having three extra 2nd level characters does matter. The absolute bulge for Team Awesome Force is larger at level 8 than it is at level 2, and that does matter.

By the time you get to 10th level, you really should be facing against 2 or 3 Fire Giants rather than 1. The exact progression isn't something that I'm completely certain of, and it varies a lot based on character optimization levels. But it's pretty noticeable at 7th level that a CR 7 enemy isn't much more than a speedbump most of the time for a level 7 party (even though it's still an existential threat for a level 7 individual character).

4th edition has this much more fucked. The intended power level of an individual monster is below that of an equally leveled PC, and the development work was bad enough that monsters fall well short of even that. The monsters are deeply unthreatening in 4th edition, and as you increase in levels and numbers that becomes increasingly true. By tenth level, people were seriously suggesting increasing the number of minions by a factor of four to eight and it wasn't making much difference. But then on the flip side, monsters in 4e are also very thicc bois and it takes a long fucking time to get rid of those bastards even though the threat level is sub-basement tier.

If making a heartbreaker from scratch, trying to hit the 4e targets for monster numbers is totally reasonable. But if you wanted to take an edition of D&D and use it with minimal alteration, starting with 3e and just accepting the encounter suggestions of one 3rd level party facing one CR 3 monster is probably the way to go. Of course, that would still lead you to offer larger groups of enemies from level 6 or so, but exactly how much larger is not something that anyone has ever made really great studies on.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

I don't think 3e's encounter design problems are something you should aim to solve with a 3e hack, especially if you don't want to rewrite a ton of monster manual entries. You will need to change a lot of numbers in order for 4v4 combat to be the norm without CR = Level.

Hell, 3e already has a more-or-less functional encounter design baseline that supports 4v4 combat. You just use 4 monsters with CR = Level - 4. That setup doesn't work all the time, but it's a good enough starting point for whatever even fight you want a party to participate in. Deviations from that like recommendations for high-level parties, optimization, dangerous environments, etc can just be part of the encounter guidelines that you're already planning to write.

[Wulfbanes]

The monsters are deeply unthreatening in 4th edition, and as you increase in levels and numbers that becomes increasingly true. By tenth level, people were seriously suggesting increasing the number of minions by a factor of four to eight and it wasn't making much difference. But then on the flip side, monsters in 4e are also very thicc bois and it takes a long fucking time to get rid of those bastards even though the threat level is sub-basement tier.

DnD 4e Was popular when I started playing. The house rules that quickly spread in the society was to halve all hit points (players and monsters), and double monster damage.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Hey, I use mods that do similar things when playing a lot of computer RPGs. It's almost like people don't like shooting a guy in the head 10 times in order to kill him, and vice versa. Regardless of the medium.

[deaddmwalking]

Hey, I use mods that do similar things when playing a lot of computer RPGs. It's almost like people don't like shooting a guy in the head 10 times in order to kill him, and vice versa. Regardless of the medium.

I don't know if that's always true. In a shooting game (like Time Crisis and House of the Dead) shooting a major enemy repeatedly in the same spot to prevent taking damage and/or defeat them was the point, and games like that are popular.

I think it's more important to recognize that players want their actions to have impact on the game - and that's true in every phase whether it is Diplomacy, Exploration, or Combat.

Days or weeks of game time can be compressed into a 2-3 minute montage pretty easily when nothing happens, and even a week-long negotiation can be handled in 1-2 hours. But when the combat music starts, 30 seconds of game-time takes that same 1-2 hours (maybe more!)

If shooting the bad guy in the head 10x is what it takes to move on, then each of four player's action's is already determined for the first 2.5 rounds of combat. Individually, there contribution was minor - anyone could potentially have done that.

But if you start giving people abilities that reduce the 'grind' and increase the contribution (like 'targeted shot' and 'lightning legs' so you can Chun-Li someone's face), that 'hit 10 times' isn't quite as must of an investment and each action contributes more to the completion.

There are a lot of ways you CAN approach a problem like this, and D&D isn't always the best example, even if it is the most familiar. The thing is, a lot of solutions are 'solvable' to an optimum sequence of events.

Ultimately, you want to make every action feel significant and that usually means not repeating the same action over and over again while grinding down an enemy slowly.

[Foxwarrior]

It's almost like people don't like shooting a guy in the head 10 times in order to kill him

shooting a major enemy repeatedly in the same spot to prevent taking damage and/or defeat them was the point, and games like that are popular.

I agree, some things and their opposites are both popular.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I'm not sure if that's an accurate comparison, as I was talking about something like an RPG and not an arcade shooter. The goals are way different there, like how HeroQuest has different design goals from D&D. Even then, if I shot a regular zombie 10 times in House of the Dead, I'd call bullshit.
That doesn't invalidate the rest of your post, though.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm not sure if that's an accurate comparison, as I was talking about something like an RPG and not an arcade shooter. The goals are way different there, like how HeroQuest has different design goals from D&D. Even then, if I shot a regular zombie 10 times in House of the Dead, I'd call bullshit.
That doesn't invalidate the rest of your post, though.

I get what you're saying, and I generally agree, but I think it's important to note that shooting something ten times in a shooter game may be 2-3 seconds and with all the other things (like shooting that damn axe flying at your head) at the same time it doesn't seem like a huge investiture of time or resources. 10 attacks in an RPG is usually 10 rounds and 2-3x longer than a fight SHOULD last. But RPGs offer a lot of design space where you could take some of the things that are fun in a shooter and try to emulate them.

The considerations that limit you on this tend to be amount of table time invested, and rewarding player skill versus character skill. For example, you could kick a field goal with a paper football and see how many of those you get in 10 seconds for your turn. That could be fun - but it is strongly divorced from the actions in the game.

What breaks 3.x faster than anything else is breaking the action economy. In a lot of setups, when you have 4 PCs versus 1 BBEG, even a tough opponent can get overwhelmed. If you're hacking D&D, you might want to consider how to adjust the action paradigm in interesting ways. At higher levels of play, it absolutely needs 'moves' that allow a high-level character make multiple attacks in a quick and easy to resolve way so they can clear mooks effectively. If you do something like that right, some of the frustration that comes from having a 'single action' every 10 minutes of game time can be addressed.

[DenizenKane]

I'm going to stay with the normal CR guidelines.
Classes will go to 10, no prestige classes.

As for encounters a day, is there any advantage to 3e's "4 encounters a day" thing or would it be better to make it 1 encounter per day? So those on daily schedules don't have to have lots of spell slots.

Also, is there any advantage to Vancian over just having the caster prep around 7 spells per day?

[deaddmwalking]

As for encounters a day, is there any advantage to 3e's "4 encounters a day" thing or would it be better to make it 1 encounter per day? So those on daily schedules don't have to have lots of spell slots.

There is good reason to have a variety of encounters over the course of multiple levels. If you're assaulting a castle, you should have several small encounters - you shouldn't have 'defeating the guard at the entrance of the tomb' be the only encounter PER DAY.

If you don't give people with daily powers a refresh option, they'll want to have 5-minute adventuring days, and there probably aren't a lot of reasons that the other PCs can MAKE them get moving. So you're better off supporting a system where people get refreshes pretty quickly.

If you don't want people going nova, you can curtail how much power they have at a time. For example, imagine that a wizard could cast any spell in their spell book (ie, no prep) and every spell cost 1 magic point per spell level, and they had a number of magic points equal to their wizard level and gained one (up to their maximum every round). That means your 5th level wizard can cast a 3rd level spell in round 1 (leaving him with 2 MP before he gains one back). At that point, he could cast another 3rd level spell, but he'll be limited to 1st level spells (or 'recharging') since he spent all his MP. But 5 rounds later he's fully charged for the next fight.

[Foxwarrior]

Assaulting a castle I actually kinda prefer as a "running battle" as it were. There are a lot of enemies, and you don't want to fight them all at once, but they do want to fight you all at once. Specifically declaring that the castle is four encounters long is throwing away the castle's main strategic advantage before the game's begun.

[...You Lost Me]

I don't agree with that DeadDM. I think daily resources can encourage a 5-min workday, but they don't necessarily require it. Take your castle assault, for instance. Resting for a day may not be an option at all in that scenario unless the party wants to fight everyone in the castle all at once the next day. Encounter / adventure design plays a big role in how easy it is for players to go "nova".

That said, I don't think giving players exclusively daily abilities is a good idea. You should include a safety valve in the form of some kind of at-will / quickly-refreshing abilities that let players contribute regularly when they aren't using their dailies.

I would point to the Carthaz / Kaelik Conduit as evidence of how daily abilities can work well without leading to a 5-min adventuring workday.

[Prak]

One thing I've been sorta mulling over for a D&D hack to address wealth by level is ditching that chart from DMG for, at least, anything that isn't a combat effect and just saying "as the effect produced by going and paying a spellcaster to do it" with maybe a modest premium for reusable.

But I haven't actually analyzed that at all. So a "bag of holding 9cu'" would be, like, 450gp. And, honestly, that's probably plenty of space?