Onslaught Six

This post began life as an attempt to redesign the Ranger for 5e. I’m still going to do that, but it diverted to an explanation of my wilderness hexcrawl procedure, which I don’t believe I’ve ever shared online in full.

I am on record as saying “exploration” is everything the players do that isn’t talking to people or fighting monsters, but for the sake of this, we’re going to focus on wilderness “exploration” and parts of the game that use that.

So to do that, we need to talk about what this looks like in my game and at my table. All overland travel in a dangerous area is on a 6 mile hex grid, and we engage in the “gritty realism” rest variant when we use it. This means a short rest is 8 hours overnight, and a long rest is every 7 days/short rests or if the party spends 24 hours within the same hex (which also puts them back on “normal” resting; unless, of course, they travel outside that hex again). Again, this is a “dangerous area,” which is most of the parts of the world that adventure takes place in. If the players are travelling a long distance that isn’t the focus of the adventure (for example, they travel weeks from the city of Dawnharbour to the city of Steelhaven) then that can be handwaved; they’re sticking to roads and not worrying about it, because the Adventure is not The Travel.

When the party travels through hexes, we determine their planned route and weather. This determines how many hexes they can go through. The party can travel 24 miles per day through normal terrain, which equals 4 hexes; difficult terrain like swamps, deep forest or mountains may reduce this to 3 or even 2 hexes.

For each hex, the players roll what I call “Advancing d6s.” This means they roll, in order: 1d6, 2d6, 3d6, and finally 4d6. This produces several results, between 1-6, 2-12, 3-18 and finally 4-24. This corresponds with this simple table:

The d6 table is landmarks such as burial mounds, obelisks, etc. The d8 table is several encounters that are not necessarily combat related, such as a group of fake adventurers, a Peryton that attempts to capture a player, or a golden Fey steed appearing on the horizon. It also contains an entry called “Character Event,” which is a series of encounters built around the PCs. (I’ll go more into Character Events in a later post.) The d12 table is larger landmarks and mini-dungeons or lairs, including things like wild magic zones, dead magic zones, etc. Finally I have lists of combat encounters. Embphyrkhaksis is the BBEG of the campaign this particular table is taken from; an adult red dragon who can appear any time all four players roll 6s. (For each encounter with Embphyrkhaksis, I raise the threshold for him to abandon the encounter by 10hp; initially they just had to deal 10 damage to the dragon for him to flee, but after 4 or 5 encounters they need to do 40 or 50 damage for him to leave. Exciting!) I then arrange the encounters we rolled into the best narratively cohesive order, based on my judgement as a DM and my absolute, flawless, omniscient knowledge of what is Actually in the hexes ahead of them; I ignore results that are boring or have been used recently if there is a legitimate feature in a hex that I’ve previously determined.

At a later time, I’ll update this post with a formatted PDF of my table so you can alter it and make your own.

When the party spends the night in the wilderness, they need to set up watches. My rules assume a 4 person party using 2 hour watches. (Elves can take 2 watches and still gain the benefits of a short rest.) During a watch, they roll 1d6; on a 6, an encounter happens. The character makes a Perception check to see if they notice the encounter; this is contested against a DC equal to a passive stealth check made by the monster. (If there are multiple monsters, I use the monster with the highest bonus.) If they fail, they are Surprised, which can be really dangerous with ¾ of the party still sleeping, outside of their armour. If they pass, the party member has the opportunity to wake up the other players and put on their armour. (Realistically, this takes 10 minutes, but the start of the encounter is a little abstracted in this case.)

This is the core of my wilderness overland travel system. It’s easy to see, when it’s laid out like this, that there are several “hooks” by which the Ranger can key into to make them feel very useful in this style of campaign.

I’m working on a new DM screen, and one thing I decided is that I’d like to have the average stats for each monster type on there, to make improvising monster stats faster and easier if I need to. You could combine this with something like Monster Manual On A Business Card to quickly create a monster; you can use these stats as their saving throws while taking the to-hit and spell save DC from MMoaBC, for example.

You can also use these with something like MCDM’s Minion rules to quickly come up with minions for your battle. Suddenly need a horde of monstrosities to attack your players, but don’t have time to flip to the Chimera to alter it? Just look at the Monstrosities average stats on your screen!

Some monster types (like celestials, fey, ooze etc.) lack large representation in the Monster Manual; if someone can provide a spreadsheet with all the available 5e monsters (which probably isn’t strictly legal to distribute), I’d love to update this to be accurate!

I also have provided only modifiers instead of concrete stats, to save both space and to provide for more ambiguity between individual monsters. IMO it isn’t relevant if the average stat is a 12 or 13, what matters is that both are +1.

Without further ado:

Aberration: +2 +2 +2 0 0 0
Beast: +1 +1 +1 -4 0 -3
Celestial: +5 +4 +5 +3 +4 +5
Construct: +2 +1 +2 -2 -1 +2
Dragon: +6 0 +5 +2 +1 +3
Elemental: +2 +1 +3 -1 0 0
Fey: 0 +2 +1 +1 +1 +2
Fiend: +3 +2 +3 +1 +1 +2
Giant: +6 0 +4 -1 0 0
Humanoid: +1 +1 +1 +1 0 +1 0
Monstrosity: +4 +1 +3 -2 +1 -1
Ooze: +2 -3 +3 -5 -2 -5
Plant: 0 -2 +1 -2 -1 -3
Undead: +1 +2 +2 0 +1 +1

Hope this helps your game!

Or: Why You Should Abolish Stat Bonuses At Character Creation

I’ve been thinking about stats a lot recently.

It all started with the talk around Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, a D&D 5e supplement that Wizards of the Coast released last year.

(Well, actually, it started around January 2019 when I started my big campaign using N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God, but that’s not really relevant to the current discussion.)

Tasha’s added a new optional rule that allows you to change your racial bonuses at character creation around. There are two reasons that this was done, which I’m going to discuss under the cut:

1) There is an argument to be made that these bonuses represent biological differences between species. Some people do not like the idea that, for example, “all dwarves are 2 points higher than all elves.” This could be attributed, in some people’s eyes, to a kind of real world bioessentialism that they find uncomfortable and don’t want to see in the game.

Let me be clear: That kind of stuff in the real world is disgusting and not “realistic” or based in any kind of fact. It’s gross and if you’re here to argue for that, get off the train now.

But, I don’t think that elves and dwarves and hobbits are biologically the same species the way we think of human races. You may disagree! If that is so, please stay on the line, because this is the last time I’m going to talk about the fiction for this and we’re going to exclusively talk about numbers going forward. I’m not here to convince you that these stats should represent biology.

To others, the idea that ALL dwarves have innately high constitution, or elves are innately more lithe than a gnome, is stifling to them. Why can’t I be a “fat elf” who has low Dex, or a “dumb gnome” who has low Int? To those people, I say: Put your low numbers into those stats. If you have an 8 and want to be a low dex Elf, put that 8 in Dex. Your extra 2 Dex will instead make that a 10, which is still +0 when turned into stat modifiers. That’s still bad! But, don’t worry,

2) Getting rid of the need to synergise race and class. Let’s say I want to play a High Elf Paladin. A High Elf gets +2 to Dex and +1 to Int. Well, unless you want to build a Dex-based Paladin, a Paladin needs high Strength, Charisma, and Constitution, usually in that order. Dex is one of the stats you can actually dump, since you’re going to want heavy armour and it’s alright if your initiative is lower and Dex skills aren’t good–you probably got a Rogue or Monk in the party who can handle that anyway.

But, if I had instead chosen a Dragonborn Paladin, I would be able to have higher Strength and Charisma than if I chose an Elf. The Dragonborn Paladin will start with 17 Strength, whereas the High Elf Paladin has a maximum possible of 15 Strength.

There’s a group of players who wants to use these rules because, to them, the High Elf Paladin is “falling behind” the Dragonborn Paladin. They aren’t as strong or charismatic as another option they could have had. Decoupling the bonuses from race and allowing you to place these stats wherever you want means this player can play the race that they want to roleplay as, while their stats can be the same as the Dragonborn Paladin.

I see the argument for this. I don’t want a player to feel like they had to choose the mechanically worse option in order to play the character they want. Maybe they think Dragonborn are stupid and don’t want to be one. Maybe the Elf culture in my world is super appealing to them and the Dragonborn culture isn’t. I get that! I don’t want someone to have to play something they don’t want to. Which is where I started to think about this.

So let’s talk about why we’re here.

I think the game is balanced around starting with a 15 in your main stat at level 1.

I don’t think WotC balanced the game with rolling in mind, because it’s volatile. I think, prior to a few years ago, they tested the game using the standard array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. Point buy can also get you these numbers.

Furthermore, I don’t think they assume you will choose a synergistic race. I think they balanced the game assuming every player might not choose a synergistic race–a high elf paladin, a dwarf wizard, a gnome fighter, a Dragonborn rogue. (Sounds like my kinda party, honestly.) So you can’t balance the game around synergistic races; you have to baseline assume every player will have at least a 15 in their main stat, and that that might be the highest they have. The player who chose a synergistic race gets to have a little edge, and hopefully their fellow friends at the table don’t resent them too much for doing so.

So, I think you should ditch bonuses at character creation entirely. Why do I think this?

The CR system seems to expect it. They have to have a baseline for testing these things out; a player character starting with a 15 in their main stat will have +4 to hit (+2 from the 15, +2 from proficiency bonus). If you look at some expected monsters around this level, their stats actually bear this out–a ¼ CR Goblin has +4 to hit. A group of 4 of those will have basically the same expected damage output to a party of 1st level characters who expend no resources–spell slots, special abilities, magic items, etc. Of course, players have all those things, which throws the encounter in their favour. This is actually the expected behaviour of the game. The players should be more likely to win an encounter than they are to lose it; they’re the heroes, they’re the player characters, the stars of the show. Most basic encounters, like running across a pissed off owlbear in the woods, or two ogres who want to steal your money, or finding a camp of goblins, the players should probably have at least a 60% chance of winning without any real consequence besides lost resources (spell slots, special abilities, magic item charges or consumables, etc.).

Better level progression and room to grow. It means a better curve of progression around level 4 and 5–your to hit modifier goes from +4 to +5 at level 4 and then to +6 at level 5, where it remains until level 8 where it goes to +7. I think everyone (fighters excluded) having a +7 at level 8 to 11 is absolutely where the game should lie. I think having any higher than that severely breaks the game and makes it harder to anticipate CR and expected damage and to hit levels.

You can give the players magic items! If the players only have +4 to hit at level 1, you can give the fighter a +1 magic sword and now they only have +5 to hit. That’s…exactly as much as if they had chosen a synergistic race! You aren’t throwing the balance off any more than it already is by default.

A 15 is already superheroic. I’ve seen a lot of people arguing lately about this stuff and in my opinion, they don’t see what a 15 means. I think if you have a 15 Str and 14 Con, you are basically Brock Lesnar or Dave Batista. A 15 Dex character is 6 months of training away from being a viable competitor for the Olympic distance running team. A 15 Int character can do advanced calculus on the back of a napkin. (An 18 Int character can do particle physics in their head.) A 15 Cha character can talk most people into anything. This is what I assume. Most people have a 10 in ALL their stats. I bet you know someone in real life who has 7 Int.

You solve problem 1 up above. If the bonus doesn’t come from your biological differences from other humanoid species, where do they come from? They can’t just float in the ether. And it can’t be that your stats from the array or point buy are supposed to represent the biological differences between individuals–you have 15 Dex, you are *already* faster than other dwarves who would have a 10; you don’t need to have 17!

You can continue to use new races. In the new books, WotC has done away with the static bonuses and allows new races to place their stat bonuses wherever they want; I suspect the rereleased races in the upcoming Mordenkainen’s Multiverse of Monsters and the 2024 revised Player’s Handbook (for the assumed 50thE version of the game–hey WotC, here’s a free one: Call it 50th Anniversary Edition or 50th!) will do the same. If WotC has a revised method of generating stats that believes the game is balanced around starting with a 17, then I’m probably going to switch to using that in 2024. I don’t allow the Tasha’s optional rule in my game (I prefer the bonuses come from your biological differences from other species), so these new races have a distinct advantage over older ones. I mostly prefer the PHB races exclusively anyway, but I might decide any time in the next 2 years (or after that, if I decide 50thE isn’t for me) that I want to allow Thri-Kreen in my world, or Firbolg, or Giff, or Astral Elves–and I’d like to be able to use them without having to make up their static bonuses.

In my current games, I’m having people roll 1d6+8 for each stat. This gives a minimum of 9 and a maximum of 14; still not 15, but I allowed them to apply racial bonuses as per the PHB, with the explicit note that they were not allowed to exceed a 15. I’m still trying to figure out a rolling method that generates a range between 8 and 15 so I can finally get rid of racial bonuses at character creation entirely.

Except for humans. They’ll still get +1 to everything and can go to 16. This is so people make humans. 🙂