Battle Magic

CORE20 originally started as a set of homebrew rules for D&D 3.5, and even though the current playtest version of the game draws a lot of inspiration for 5e D&D (and even 4e D&D) in its approach to play and its language, the mechanical guts of much of the ruleset is set on a firm foundation of third edition — the first “modern” version of the game’s venerable ruleset.

One of the things 3e did that I loved unreservedly when I first dug into that edition in the heady days of the early millennium was a rethinking and drastic expansion of the place of magic items in the game, and specifically magic armor and weapons. AD&D (both 1st and 2nd editions) worked with a limited slate of armor and weapons imbued with specific types of magic. Elven chain mail, plate mail of etherealness, a sword +2 (dragon slayer), or a sword +1 (flame tongue) were all treasures that a player might expect their character to seize as a reward at some point. And if you’ve never looked at AD&D but those magic items still sound familiar to you, it’s because 5e’s setup for magic items looked back to AD&D for inspiration, with a relatively small number of types of armor and weapons with fixed properties.

I don’t find that approach as much fun as I found 3e’s approach, though. And thus was CORE20’s approach to magic weapons and armor born.

Armor and Weapon Features

Magic armor and weapons are a mainstay of the game for most CORE20 campaigns built around the fun of seeking out and fighting evil that must be vanquished through combat. In a world filled with monsters and suffused with magic, it makes sense that the breadth of magic available to heroes willing to stand up to evil should be pretty vast. As such, CORE20 borrows from D&D 3e the idea of weapons and armor being bestowed with magical properties that cover the widest possible range of utility. The baseline property for armor and weapons is the magical bonus that improves your character’s defense rolls and attack rolls, respectively — and which runs from the common +1 to the extremely rare +5 in CORE20. But that bonus-based boost is almost always the least interesting thing of all the things your hero’s armor or weapon can do.

Part of the reason I loved 3rd edition D&D’s approach to magic armor and weapons is the way it lends itself to customization. And given that fully customized characters is the foundation of CORE20, being able to customize armor and weapons is a powerful tool for players building characters and GMs building out the magical world through which those characters move. Sometimes armor or a weapon has a single specific function. Etherealness armor or a greatsword of defending both do what you’d expect. But armor and weapon features can be combined in any number of ways, with the increased cost of multiple features boosting the item’s rarity (and thus determining both how likely the GM is to give it out as treasure and how difficult it is for a character to create or commission it). 

This approach to magic armor and weapons creates a fertile foundation for a mainstay of fantasy — the hero known for unique weapons or armor wielded only by them, as opposed to every tenth adventurer having elven chain and a stock flame tongue longsword. So if your master thief has a hankering to build part of their reputation around the sanguine imprecation energy lash rapier they flourish in battle, you’ve come to the right place.

The table above and the table below detail the features available for armor and for melee weapons. (Similar tables in the CORE20 Magic Grimoire break out the features for shields, thrown weapons, ranged weapons, and ammunition.) Write-ups for a number of my own favorite features (including a few features new to CORE20) follow.

Selected Armor Features

Charging

This utilitarian armor is solidly made but features a dull finish. While you wear charging armor, any successful charge attack you make deals an extra 2d6 bludgeoning damage.

Transmutation; unusual; cost +750 gp

Feral

The face of this shield is scribed or engraved with the image of talons or claws. As a minor action, you can perform a command signal to have the shield make a melee attack against a creature within 5 feet of you. The shield has an attack bonus of 10 + your Strength modifier and deals 2d6 slashing damage. You can use this feature three times per day, regaining all expended uses when you finish a long rest. 

Conjuration; common; cost +400 gp

Ghost Guard

Armor or a shield with the ghost guard feature shimmers ethereally under bright light. While you wear it, this armor or shield protects you against incorporeal creatures, negating the advantage an incorporeal creature has on attack rolls against you.

Unlike most physical objects, armor or a shield with the ghost guard feature can be picked up, moved, and even worn or wielded by an incorporeal creature. While using the armor or shield, an incorporeal creature gains its full defensive bonus, and can still pass freely through solid objects.

Transmutation; unusual; cost +800 gp

Morphic

A suit of armor with the morphic feature appears to have the texture of cloth when first touched. When you perform the armor’s command signal as a standard action, it changes shape and form to assume the appearance and feel of a set of clothing of the same scope and coverage as the armor (so that a hauberk or breastplate becomes a shirt, armored leg pieces become leggings, a helm becomes a hat, and so forth). 

The armor transforms into the same set of clothing each time, whose appearance is set when the armor is created. The armor retains all its usual properties (including defense bonuses, weight, armor hindrance, and so on) and any magic bonuses and features while transformed. 

If you remove any piece of the morphic armor, that piece reverts back to its true form until it is donned again. The truesense special feature reveals the true nature of the armor while it is transformed.

Transmutation; unusual; cost +2,300 gp

Warding

This armor gleams with a faint glow each time you are struck in combat, hinting at the protective power it holds. When you are hit by an attack, you can use a reaction to give yourself advantage on subsequent defense rolls until the end of your next turn. You can use this feature three times per day, regaining all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

Abjuration; common; +750 gp

Selected Weapon Features

Brilliant Energy

This weapon appears to be composed mostly of light, appearing translucent even though its heft is solid. When you use a brilliant energy weapon to attack a living creature wearing armor or bearing a shield, that attack bypasses those protections to focus its power on the corporeal essence of your target, imposing disadvantage on the target’s defense roll.

This feature can be applied to melee weapons, thrown weapons, and ammunition.

A brilliant energy weapon can’t harm undead or constructs, and can’t be used to damage any object. The weapon always has the glowing feature, but its light can’t be deactivated.

Transmutation; unusual; cost +800 gp 

Defending

This weapon feels especially sturdy in the hand. While you wield a defending weapon, you can use a free action at the start of your turn to focus its magic on defense at the expense of offense. Until the start of your next turn, you have a d4 bane on attack rolls with this weapon and a d4 boon on defense rolls.

This feature can be applied to melee weapons.

Abjuration; common; cost +200 gp

Energy Lash

Traces of energy of a specific type — acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder — appear to flow out of this weapon each time it hits in battle. While you wield an energy lash weapon, you can use a standard action to perform a command signal and choose a creature within 30 feet of you. A bright tendril of magical energy erupts from the weapon to reach out for the target. Make an attack roll as if you were making a melee or thrown attack with the weapon. If the attack hits, the target takes 4d6 damage of the weapon’s energy type. You can use this feature once per day, regaining its use when you finish a long rest.

This feature can be applied to melee weapons and thrown weapons.

Evocation; common; cost +300 gp

Imprecation

This weapon feels strangely cold when first handled. Whenever you score a critical hit with this weapon, you can impose a curse of your choice on the target, as if they had failed a saving throw against the bestow curse spell.

This feature can be applied to melee weapons, thrown weapons, and ranged weapons.

Necromancy; common; cost +700 gp

Nimble

This weapon feels unnaturally well balanced when first handled. A nimble weapon can be wielded more easily when making multiple attacks, with a two-handed weapon treated as a one-handed weapon and a one-handed weapon treated as a light weapon for the purpose of determining that weapon’s bane on attack rolls. A nimble weapon isn’t considered a different weapon for any other purpose, and none of its other statistics or features change.This effect can be applied to one-handed and two-handed melee weapons.

Transmutation; common; cost +200 gp

Sanguine

This weapon’s tip gleams faintly even in the absence of light. When you hit with an attack using a sanguine weapon, you can use a free action to have the attack drain the vitality of the target, who takes a −1d4 penalty to their critical points. You can use this feature three times per day, regaining all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

This feature can be applied to melee weapons that deal piercing damage.

Necromancy; unusual; cost +500 gp

Subtle

This weapon is dull gray in color, and seems to disappear when not directly observed. Whenever you use a subtle weapon to attack with advantage, the attack has favored damage.

This feature can be applied to melee weapons.

Illusion; common; cost +50 gp

Anything Goes

An idea that gets relentlessly beaten into a player of an advanced age with experience playing multiple editions of D&D (which is to say, me) is the idea that in D&D, certain characters get to do certain things, and everyone else is out of luck. Now, that’s not a terrible thing per se. D&D is a game of archetypal fantasy. That’s what it does, and it does it well, and building an archetypal character means that at some point, you end up putting a box around what your character can and can’t do. But as a result of having played within those boxes for many years now, I wanted CORE20 to do things differently.

The Old Ways

AD&D had an array of rigidly enforced limitations on actions and activities built around the game’s class structure, where if your class didn’t say you were allowed to do something, you simply couldn’t do it. Party needs to get up a wall with no handy protrusions for a grappling hook? Better hope you’ve got a thief who can climb up first and drop down a rope, because no one else is allowed to climb without one. Armor and weapon proficiencies were class locked as well, to the point where it became a fun metagame to try to guess what class an NPC might be based on what they were wearing. (“Leather armor… longsword… darts… looks like a thief. Wait, that’s a bastard sword. And he’s got a shield, too! Thieves can’t use bastard swords or shields! Assassin!!”)

D&D 3rd edition did a better job of allowing characters to wear whatever they liked and do whatever they wanted. But it replaced the rigid compartmentalization of AD&D with a rapturous love of making it as hard for characters to do things as possible. Want to trip someone in 3e? Go for it! But unless you take the Improved Trip feat, it takes your whole action, and your target gets to attack you first, and it’s just a flat Strength check, no bonuses for combat skill allowed. Oh, and if you fail the check, they can trip you back, no action required. 

Want to grapple someone in 3e instead? Seriously, don’t. Just… no, please don’t.

D&D 5e did things quite differently than 3e, but still held onto that sense that being able to do certain things was the province of certain character types — and if your character didn’t fit that bill, too bad. Want to play a rogue who uses handaxes? Not an option out of the box. Want to try just straight-up tripping a foe in hand-to-hand combat in 5e 2014? Better make sure you’re playing a battle master fighter, a monk following the way of the open hand, or a totem warrior wolf barbarian. Want to do so in 5e 2024? You can add the rogue to the class list, and the goliath can send foes prone regardless of class, and you’ve got your choice of five weapons with the Topple weapon property. But it’s still a process of saying, “Only characters with X can do this thing, and everyone else is out of luck.”

Just Try It

A central philosophy that CORE20 jumped on right from the get-go of deciding to rebuild D&D as a game with no classes and no levels is the idea that any character should be able to try to do anything they want. No limitations, no exceptions, no caveats. Because without classes, the game gets rid of the baseline sense of: “Well, it makes sense for this type of character to be the only one who can do X.”

Spellcasting is obviously an exception, insofar as one doesn’t want anyone to be able to whip magic around without the appropriate backstory and training. But if you’ve got feat slots to spend, there are plenty of ways to get your magic on without building a full-on caster. Additionally, animyst domains and druidan creeds are another option for a magic-dabbling character, letting anyone drop three feat slots to gain access to unique magical traditions drawn from the older eldritch forms that predated spellcasting.

“My Wizard Uses Their Glaive to Trip That Dude!”

Baseline weapon prowess is a good example of CORE20’s approach to characters being able to do what they want. Your character can pick up any weapon with no training, using ability modifier alone to make attacks and deal damage. In mechanical terms, you won’t be particularly good — and in game terms, the impression you create in combat while wielding a weapon you’ve never picked up before probably won’t be very pretty. But there are no nonproficiency penalties, no restrictions against wizards or rogues not using certain weapons, and so forth. You can spend feat slots to get better at combat with a particular weapon, but you’re not especially bad with any weapon just because.

Combat maneuvers are another central example. Anyone can try to trip a foe in combat (or to obscure their vision, or make them back down, or grapple them, and on down the list), with no arbitrary penalties, special training, or weapon mastery required. A reasonable modifier in one of the two ability scores backing up the skill check that your combat maneuver is based on is helpful. But all you truly need to try to put an opponent on the floor — whether as a precursor to getting an edge on an attack or to flee the fight at speed — is the will to try to do so.

It’s important to also note that CORE20’s free approach to combat maneuvers is built on the foundational idea that skill checks in the game eschew any concept of trained or untrained use. You can improve your aptitude with skills using lineage traits and feats, but every character has a chance to try to recall arcane lore, spot trouble at a distance, or pick the lock on a set of cheap manacles using a hairpin.

Archetypes-R-Us

Your character doesn’t need to tick some set of correct archetypal boxes to try to do cool things in CORE20. In the absence of the classes-as-archetypes model that’s been at the heart of D&D since its inception, every CORE20 character effectively gets to define their own archetype, whether that’s a fun variation on a standard heroic type or something completely unique. 

So whether you’re playing a classic melee-focused warrior, a book-learning wizard, a scoundrel with lockpicks in every pocket, or a character you could never build with any traditional class-and-subclass combo, you never need to ask the GM, “Am I allowed to do this?” Because the answer is always “Yes.” And with the game built around the idea that every d20 roll is a sliding scale of success that feeds the unfolding story, your character always has a good chance to make something happen as a result of “I’m going to try this.”

(Art by Matt Morrow, from The Lazy DM’s Forge of Foes)

The Bonus Situation

As talked about in “Chapter 5: Playing the Game” in the Playtest Players’ Guide, CORE20 uses three different mechanics to represent the benefits a character can earn on skill checks, attack or defense rolls, or challenge throws or saving throws — bonuses, boons, and advantage. None of these are concepts new to the game, but the way the game makes use of them evolved out of multiple years of the alpha playtest — and from my matched states of dissatisfaction with how complicated bonuses were in 3.5e D&D, and how advantage in 5e D&D doesn’t really work as a one-benefit-fits-all attempt to replace bonuses.

Typed Bonuses

The 3rd edition of the D&D game was a genuinely remarkable attempt to codify the baseline mechanics of 2nd edition and 1st edition AD&D into a modern, more logical ruleset. The thing I admired the most about 3e (and specifically the 3.5e update which is the version of 3rd edition most people know) was how the underlying math of the base attack bonus, base saving throw bonuses, hit points, spell damage, and much more was lifted directly from AD&D. The presentation was very different — and much improved — even as the numbers crunched exactly the same way. But across all the many areas where 3rd edition excelled at evolving two-decade-old rules into a more robust setup, its solution for handling bonuses might have gone a bit too far.

One of the problems of AD&D was that bonuses to your d20 rolls all generally added to each other. This meant that savvy players could pretty easily power-game their way into ridiculous modifiers with the help of spells, magic items, and judicious choices of class and ancestry. But 3rd edition solved that problem by creating named types of bonuses, with the idea that you couldn’t stack or add together multiple bonuses of the same type — you only got to use the better bonus. For example if your armor gave you a +2 armor bonus, you couldn’t add the +1 armor bonus from a magic item like bracers of armor.

It was amazingly straightforward! Except for the small issue that 3.5e came with seventeen different types of bonuses: Alchemical, Armor, Circumstance, Competence, Deflection, Dodge, Enhancement, Insight, Luck, Morale, Natural Armor, Profane, Racial, Resistance, Sacred, Shield, and Size bonuses. [Pauses for breath.] Oh, and the rules were just kidding about not being able to stack bonuses of the same kind, which you could do sometimes but not at other times. 

Anyway, it was complicated.

Free-Range Bonuses

The first two versions of the CORE20 alpha playtest rules — version 0 in 2010 and version 1 in 2013 — were effectively the core feat setup of the game layered in on top of the D&D 3.5 ruleset. As such, the earliest CORE 20 campaigns hewed to the typed-bonus line with all its weird complex simplicity. Starting with version 2 of the rules in 2014, though, we tried a little experiment where we kept the setup of 3.5e but lost typed bonuses. Everything in v2 was just a bonus, and all bonuses stacked, working with the idea that without regular class-based increases to attack bonuses, saving throw modifiers, and so forth, stacking bonuses wouldn’t be as unbalancing in CORE20 as it was in 3.5e.

This change worked as intended, letting things like the bonus to defense modifier from the shield of faith spell and the bonus to defense modifier from the protection from evil spell (both deflection bonuses in 3.5e) add together. But inevitably, through version 3 of the alpha playtest (2016 to 2019), the problems of free bonus-stacking in AD&D made their way into the game, giving characters the opportunity to stack up combat modifiers in ways that were just a bit too sweet.

The Dice Have It

Porting the roll-two-d20s-and-take-the-best advantage mechanic of D&D 5e into CORE20 was something I’d thought about right from the point when I was working on the 5e core books in 2013 and 2014, alongside version 2 of the CORE20 rules. And even though I rewrote a few sections of those rules a couple of times to incorporate advantage and see how it felt, I always went back to bonuses. I loved advantage as a mechanic, and thought the idea of replacing a ton of numerical bonuses with an extra die roll was a great fit for 5e D&D. But 5e is a game that flattens its math drastically compared to the 3.5e ruleset that CORE20 was initially carved out from, meaning that CORE20 works a lot better with a wide array of bonuses that would break the math of 5e in short order.

Boons (along with banes, their penalty counterpart) originated in the excellent game Shadow of the Demon Lord by Robert J. Schwalb — one of the best game designers of all time, and one of the first designers I got to work with directly when I started working in RPGs in 2004. A boon or bane is a smaller die that you roll alongside a d20 and add to (or subtract from) that d20 roll. Interestingly (to me, anyway), D&D 5e kind of uses the idea of boons and banes, but doesn’t name them as such. Spells like bless, features such as Bardic Inspiration, and many more places in the 5e rules see players adding the roll of a d4, a d8, or what have you to a d20 roll, but 5e doesn’t go the extra distance to make boons and banes a consistent mechanic.

As with advantage, I liked the mechanics of boons and banes a lot when I first read them. And I especially liked what I’ll call the “tactile memory mechanic” that boons and banes create. For me, as I know is true for many players, remembering short-term bonuses is really, really hard. Anytime I have two or more bonuses that I need to remember, it’s inevitable that at least one of them will be forgotten when I’m totaling up a d20 roll. But with a boon, I set the extra die down next to the d20 and I’m good to go. I might forget why I’ve got the boon if enough other stuff is going on around me, but I’ll still remember to roll it.

Rule of Three

A parallel realization that popped into my head while thinking about how to fix the too-many-bonuses-stacking situation that version 2 of the CORE20 rules had created was that D&D has always had two different types of bonuses. Not in terms of what bonuses apply to, but whether they apply permanently or for a fixed, usually short, period of time. Thinking about that idea some more led me to the understanding that the second category of temporary bonuses can actually be subdivided again, into bonuses that endure for multiple rounds or more, and bonuses (almost always combat focused) that benefit a single roll and then are gone.

So it was that while playing version 3 of the CORE20 alpha playtest, I realized in a fit of inspiration that even though boons and advantage individually weren’t quite what the game needed, using both together could create a flexible mechanic that would streamline the mechanical underpinnings of the game. Version 4 of the alpha playtest thus rolled out the system of benefits that’s at the center of the CORE20 rules today, splitting up the modifiers that can be applied to d20 rolls into three distinct categories, each with a distinct use — bonuses, boons, and advantage.

Bonuses, Boons, and Advantage

Having three categories of potential benefit to juice up your d20 rolls in CORE20 (and, of course, the inverse three categories of potential downside to drag down your rolls) is meant to make it easier to understand what type of benefit you’re dealing with, and to quickly develop an instinctive sense of the tactile mechanics of rolling with banes and rolling with advantage. 

Bonuses in CORE20 are fixed. They’re always permanent. When you have a bonus, it sticks with you as long as whatever provides the bonus is with you. Boons (added to CORE20 rules with Rob Schwalb’s generous permission) are short-term benefits that last for a fixed period of time, usually a number of rounds or minutes. Advantage is a one-off benefit that lasts only for a single roll (or in some cases, as with flanking in combat, for a single successful roll). 

With boons replacing short-term bonuses, the worry about too many bonuses stacking is gone because you don’t add multiple boons together — you roll them all and use the highest roll. So the more boon dice you have, the greater your odds of rolling the maximum benefit. And as an aside, rolling boons and banes in CORE20 is a great excuse to use your extensive collection of backup dice alongside your main dice, especially as a GM.

Narrative Shift

I mentioned in the previous CORE20 design diary that in a 5e game I’m a player in (with an amazing GM and a great group of fellow players), my elf druid once failed a saving throw against being stunned in the first round of a fight. It was a magical effect, with a DC 12 saving throw each subsequent round to shake it off. And I rolled 11 three rounds in a row, effectively sitting out an entire combat because I missed hitting a target number by 1.

Now, I’ve had problems with the rigid pass/fail ability check, saving throw, and attack roll setup of standard D&D for a long while now. Going back to 3rd edition, in fact, and the adoption of the universal “roll a d20 and try to roll high” core mechanic. Previous editions with combat tables and THAC0, and rolling high with a d20 but rolling low on percentile dice or 3d6, set up a rather nebulous sense of what success actually meant and felt like. But 3e with its d20-roll foundations and a robust skills system gave players a much stronger sense of: “Well, I failed by 1 again…” 

Still, in all my years of being mildly annoyed at “Almost succeeded!” and “Failed miserably!” having exactly the same in-game effect, I don’t think any single moment of play summed up the problem as well as that fight did.

How It Plays Out

Introducing the sliding scale of success for skill checks, saving throws, and attack rolls changes the mechanics of the game for sure. If you can succeed with complications on rolls that would be failures in D&D, you succeed more often. If characters — and monsters — are dealing damage or reaping other benefits from attacks that would usually have had no effect, fights go faster. And even if the characters and their enemies are hitting with complications at about the same rate, so that there’s no real difference to the outcome of the fight, that fight feels more dynamic. The sliding scale of success creates a sense of combat as a range of active possibilities, rather than the hit-miss binary possibility that’s been foundational to d20 games for so long.

As an example, consider a combat encounter that took place in one of my CORE20 games a few weeks ago. This was a fight against a malevolent trapdoor spider — the monstrous spider of the Playtest Creature Compendium, with some extra hit points courtesy of the creature having learned how to use the spellmarks of cure light wounds they’d found on the bodies of the travelers they’d been waylaying for months. 

Here’s how the start of round 1 played out:

• The party’s sidekick creature springs into action and gets a hit with a complication. Because this companion deals practically no damage, the players collectively decide that they forgo damage in favor of distracting the spider by the ferocity of their attack — and giving the spider disadvantage on their next attack roll, just as the more combat-focused characters enter the fray.
• The spider, up next with two attacks, gets a miss and a hit with a complication. The latter makes a big narrative difference, because a single creature making a stand against a full party who misses completely in any round can drastically undercut the level of tension and threat.
• One character hits with their single attack — but what lets them hit is the disadvantage the spider has on their defense roll. The sidekick’s initial attack feeds into an attack two turns later, affecting how the combat unfolds.
• Another character misses the spider, then gets a hit with a complication. The damage they’ve rolled is pretty weak, though. So rather than dealing half damage or working up a complication that would hinder the character, the player decides to forgo dealing damage in order to throw the spider off balance, imposing disadvantage again on the spider’s next defense roll.

All told, across three rounds of an exciting combat, the characters racked up eight hits with complications. Which is to say, eight attacks that would have been outright misses under standard d20 rules. The spider managed to turn four would-have-been-a-miss attacks into hits with complications, keeping pressure on the characters as opposed to missing four times out of six. And by dealing half damage each time (because monstrous spiders aren’t particularly imaginative), they kept the threat level high in an otherwise easy fight. 

Twists and Turns

On top of everything else, a Magic check late in the spider fight made by a character activating a failing bead of force was also a success with a complication. That meant that even as the potent damage dealt by the bead’s force field finished the spider off, a pulse of eldritch energy spilled out of that force field to deal half damage to each character nearby.

It was fun.

The straight-up pass-fail mechanic of D&D and other d20 games makes the story told in combat pretty simple. You hit or you miss. You deal damage or you don’t. But the sliding scale of success in CORE20 makes for more compelling combat narrative. Missed attacks, failed saving throws, and tanked skill checks absolutely still happen in CORE20. But having them not happen as often helps to alleviate the sense of combat being a waste of your time if the dice aren’t quite working as well as you want them to. 

Moreover, the rarity of full misses in combat — especially for characters making multiple weapon attacks per round using the Rapid Attack or Rapid Shot feats — makes turns totally lost to missing feel narratively interesting in their own way, just because they’re so unusual. Because as with fiction, swinging between crushing failure and smashing success with no real intermediate states of accomplishment rarely lets a story feel as exciting as it should.

• 

Questions about success with complications or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

Art by Dean Spencer

It’s Complicated

As befits a game built on the foundations of D&D from the 3.5e and 5e System Reference Documents, CORE20 plays an awful lot like D&D. When I’m talking to people who ask, “Well, how does X work in the game?,” the answer is very often, “Just like you’d expect it to.” That’s why I try as much as possible to not talk about the stuff you already know the game can do (let you be heroic, use magic, fight monsters, et al.), so as to focus on what’s new and different and interesting. And at the very top of the new/different/interesting flow chart for the game — alongside freeform character building with no classes and no levels — is CORE20’s narrative-focused setup of achieving successes with complications.

Success with complications is written up three times in the CORE20 Playtest Player’s Guide, describing the slightly different approaches taken on the topic for skill checks (“Measuring Skill Success” on page 104 of chapter 6), saving throws (“Measuring Saving Throw Success” on page 246 of chapter 9), and attack rolls (“Measuring Attack Success” a bit later in chapter 9 on page 265). One thing to acknowledge for when you play your first CORE20 sessions is that thinking about success with complications will take a bit of time. It did so for me when I first formalized those systems, even after thinking about them for quite a while. It did so for the CORE20 alpha playtest players in my home games. When I’m running intro games, it takes a bit of back and forth to initially explain to players how the system is meant to work.

Decisions, Decisions

Deciding what a specific complication on a skill check, saving throw, or attack roll might look like requires some thought, and it’s okay if this process feels a bit strange to you — because thinking this way is something you’ve likely never done before in a d20-based game. However, once you get into the flow of how the sliding scale of success in CORE20 is meant to feel, it takes very little time for it to start to feel natural. And if you’re anything like me, going back to the standard pass/fail state of stock D&D and other d20-based games can quickly start to feel a fair bit… well, not natural. 

(An aside: In a 5e campaign I was playing in earlier this year, with a great GM and a fabulous group of players, my character got stunned and had to make a DC 12 Wisdom save at the end of each turn to shake it off. I had a +6 Wisdom save mod! And I still rolled an 11 three rounds in a row. In CORE20, the first of those rolls would have ended the effect, with the added bonus of something else interesting happening. In D&D, not so much.)

One of the things that can make players wary of mechanics that involve coming up with complications on the fly is that it can feel like it’s going to be difficult to come up with things that are different every time. I’ve heard more than a few players new to CORE20 say that not yet knowing the mechanics of the game well enough makes it difficult to come up with different mechanical options for complications whenever an attack roll gets almost close enough. So it’s important to understand that you absolutely don’t need to come up with novel options for every single complication, nor do you need perfect mastery of the rules of the game to make complications work.

But What Does That Look Like?

Combat is the area where success with a complication can feel most alien to first-time CORE20 players. And the best way to work around this is to not worry in the slightest about the mechanics of what a hit with a complication might look like. Rather, focus on the story, describing how your near-miss turns into a hit narratively, and only then working with the GM to figure out the mechanical impact. 

“I make contact, but my blade can’t all the way through their armor.” If I’m your GM, I’ll probably suggest that the complication on your attack is that you’re going to deal half damage.

“I hit so hard that I end up slipping.” Even as you deal full damage, that bit of narrative can cover lots of options, from being slowed until the end of your next turn to falling prone from the follow-through of your own attack.

“I end up getting way closer than I wanted to.” That could be a hit that deals full damage to the foe and 1d4 bludgeoning to you as you take an armored shoulder to the face. Or it could be a hit that deals no damage but leaves the foe scrambling to get away from you, imposing disadvantage on their next defense roll.

“I come in hard. They scramble to get out of my way, and just barely make it.” That might be an attack that deals a measly 1 point of damage, but which leaves the target dazed until the end of their next turn, or slowed, or weakened. Any minor detriment that you suggest as a player and that the GM signs off on makes a perfectly acceptable lesser substitute for a full wallop of weapon damage.

Then, after you’ve worked through the narrative of a few different ways to hit with a complication, you’ll inevitably discover that some of those ways become your favorites. And when they do, just use them each and every time if that’s what you want to do. I’ve seen players whose combat-focused characters always hit hard go with half-damage for every hit with a complication — especially when those players are looking down at high rolls on the damage dice for sneak attack or ruthless attack. I’ve seen other players whose damage output isn’t great make consistent use of dealing no damage on a hit with a complication, in exchange for throwing a foe off balance to impose disadvantage on their next attack roll. That way, the damage the character missed out on has a solid chance of being more than made up for by the next hard-hitting ally who steps up.

Getting Up to Speed

When D&D 3e first dropped, one of the biggest challenges for me as a former AD&D 1e player was dealing with skill checks, because the skill system as 3e codified it had never been a part of the game as I had played it. Remembering that all characters could make skill checks, trying to decide which skill check was the best one to cover a specific activity, trying to remember DCs and adjustments — all of it took time at the table. But even by the end of my first session of 3e, thinking about and making skill checks felt natural. CORE20 treats the success of the d20 roll quite a bit differently than D&D does. But it won’t take long for the sliding scale of CORE20 success in combat to feel natural, especially if the story of your character’s complications is your focus.

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Questions about success with complications or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

Art by Dean Spencer

The Ways of Minor Magic

CORE20 can be played any way you like (as befits a game where your characters can do anything you want). However, the baseline of the game, as expressed in the rules of the Player’s Guide, reflects the expectation of a high-magic world. High magic doesn’t always mean powerful magic, though, and one of the most interesting ways to reflect the ubiquity of magic in the world is to play a character who dabbles in the minor magic of 0-level spells in addition to their main adventuring vocation.

The nature of the magic you can tap into through 0-level spells — orisons for animys magic, cantrips for arcane magic, and incantations for druidas magic — is wide and varied, and reflects a lot of the familiar themes of 0-level spellcasting in various editions of D&D. But rather than limiting characters to level dipping into a spellcasting class, tapping a magic-focused subclass that gives you more spellcasting than you want, or choosing an ancestry with a limited range of spellcasting talent, CORE20 offers three different approaches to letting your character get their minor magic on.

Traditional Build

3 Feat Slots

The path to traditional spellcasting in CORE20 calls for taking the Eldritch Spirit, Spellcaster, and Spell Power feats for a chosen sphere of magic — animys, arcane, or druidas. (All three of these feats are part of “Spellcasting Feats,” starting on page 322 of the CORE20 Playtest Player’s Guide.) If you channel arcane magic, you might also want to take the Arcane Blood or Toughness feats to deal with the critical point penalty imposed by taking the Spell Power (arcane) feat, representing that the power of arcane magic doesn’t play nice with the life force of a mortal caster.

Eldritch Spirit and Spellcaster grant you access to spellcasting power and the ability to cast 0-level spells. Spell Power then gives you the spell points that fuel your spells. Even though 0-level spells have no spell point cost and can be cast at will, you can cast those spells only while you have 1 or more spell points remaining. Once all your magical potential is exhausted, you have no power to draw on.

With this build, you need to purchase your starting 0-level spells and any 0-level spells you learn later. But because spells can always be freely learned in CORE20, there’s no limit to the number of 0-level spells you can master as long as you have the opportunity to seek them out. And because high magic is the CORE20 baseline, most campaigns will be filled with such opportunities.

Natural Magic Traditional Build

One Lineage Trait, Two Feat Slots

As a nice alternative to the traditional spellcasting build, you can take the natural magic lineage trait (part of the “Lineages” chapter starting on page 22 of the Player’s Guide), then take the Eldritch Spirit and Spellcaster feats for a chosen sphere of magic. As above, those feats let you cast 0-level spells. Then the natural magic trait lets you ignore the need to have spell points in reserve to cast those spells, granting you an innate reserve of magical power. (Though natural magic appears in chapter 4 of the Player’s Guide as a human and a kobold trait, characters can take traits from any other lineage if that fits your concept and backstory.)

Primordial Caster Build

Two Feat Slots

Primordial magic channels only arcane power, and in an older and rawer form than spellcasting (detailed starting on page 383 of the Player’s Guide). But if arcane magic is your jam, primordial magic (modeled very much after the magic of the 3rd edition D&D warlock) is a most efficient way to cast. When you take the Eldritch Spirit (arcane) feat and the Primordial Caster feat, Primordial Caster automatically lets you learn a number of cantrips — and at no cost, unlike for traditional spellcasting. However, you can’t learn any additional cantrips or swap out known cantrips for new cantrips (unless you want to later continue along the path of gaining access to more powerful primordial magic).

Spelltouched Build

Two Or More Feat Slots

Taking up the path of a spelltouched caster represents an innate ability to channel eldritch power, unconnected to any spellcasting tradition or training. To create a spelltouched character (as talked about starting on page 380 of the Player’s Guide), you take the Eldritch Spirit feat for a chosen sphere of magic, then take the Spelltouched feat for each cantrip you wish to cast. A spelltouched build is the lowest-cost way to be able to cast a single cantrip, if one specific flavor of minor magic is the best fit for your character’s story. However, if you want to cast three or more cantrips, the spelltouched approach becomes more expensive than the other options.

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Questions about magic or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

Art by Dean Spencer

Complex Choices

Over the next half-year or so, I suspect there’s going to be an awful lot of talk on the topic of complexity in d20 gaming, as the new rules for D&D 2024 are rolled out in previews and with the release of the Player’s Handbook in August and September. I haven’t worked on the new version of the game, so my thoughts on that topic are the same as any other fan’s, and sourced from the same previews that everyone else is seeing. But I’m in agreement so far with the sense that a lot of people are getting of 2024 being a more complex game than 2014 5e — which, though it was definitely a step back from 4th edition and even D&D 3e, was a fairly complex game in its own right.

I don’t think there’s a single general take on complexity in RPGs that’s the correct take. There are lots of complex games that are awesome. There are lots of simpler games that are awesome. There are lots of games of both types that are lackluster.

What I think instead is that the most important part of any complexity discussion in RPGs is the question of whether you get to choose how much complexity you want in your own version of the game — versus whether a game is complex on a level that you can’t ignore even if you want to.

So Many Options

The CORE20 RPG, as you know if you’ve checked it out already, is a hefty game. The Playtest Player’s Guide is a heckin’ chonky boi, as the kids say. But even though there are plenty of complex options within those Player’s Guidepages, the freeform nature of character building in the game means that you only need to grab onto as much complexity as you want to. And that’s a big part of the philosophy behind CORE20.

The decision about what kinds of feats you want to take sets the baseline complexity for your character. Not just in the sense of what you want your character to do, but in how you want to do it. For example, being good in combat can be a solid baseline goal for any warrior-type character. But one warrior accomplishes that by focusing on the Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, and Weapon Prowess feats, banking the best possible bonuses to attack and damage rolls to create a straightforward bruiser. Another character accomplishes that by taking Ruthless Attack, Deadly Critical, and Lunging Strike, creating a fighting style that relies on always seeking advantage on attack rolls, hoping to score critical hits at every opportunity, and using a minor action to target foes beyond their reach.

Both characters are equally effective in combat, but they’re effective in different ways. More importantly to the players creating them, one character requires a certain amount of focus in combat, always watching the battlefield for positioning options and thinking about whether a minor action is best used for seeking advantage or striking at a distance. The other character just gets to beat down whoever they want, over and over again.

The Range of Complexity

The CORE20 ruleset has a very specific focus on creating fun games that turn away from the traditional hack-and-slash nature of d20 fantasy. But because combat is in and of itself a pretty complicated part of the game (and because like many other players, I myself find fighting monsters a lot of fun), let’s look at some combat feats that do a pretty good job showing the scale of complexity available for a combat-focused character.

Weapon Focus, Weapon Specialization, and Weapon Prowess

Mentioned above (and part of “Attack Feats” on page 268 of the Playtest Player’s Guide and  “Damage Feats” on page 272), these are the baseline feats for weapon combat. Granting a bonus to attack rolls and damage rolls, they represent the most straightforward approach to fighting, letting you hit more often and more effectively each and every time. These feats are the simplest choice for combat feats because… well, they involve no choice. You select these feats, and they just work.

Sneak Attack and Ruthless Attack

Representing a slight increase in complexity, these two feats (part of “Damage Feats” on page 272) boost your damage output when you have advantage on your attack roll. Both feats are straightforward in their mechanics, but their increased complexity comes from how a character using them has to think a little bit tactically to gain their benefit. The choice you make when taking these feats is whether you prefer a larger damage bonus some of the time, as opposed to a character who trusts to Weapon Prowess to deal solid damage all of the time.

Rapid Attack and Rapid Shot

For most combat-focused characters, being able to attack multiple times with a standard action makes great sense. But taking either of these feats (part of “Multiple Attack Feats” on page 297) adds a degree of complexity by introducing a bane on attack rolls — a d4, a d6, or a d8 that you roll and subtract from your attack roll, depending on whether your weapon is light, one-handed, or two-handed. The bane represents the idea that by making multiple attacks, you sacrifice some of the accuracy that comes with a single focused attack in the same length of time. It introduces the complexity of deciding whether it’s better under certain circumstances to focus on just one attack with a better chance of hitting, as well as the complexity that making multiple attacks limits how far you can move on the same turn. (“Multiple Attacks” on page 296 talks about how all that works in CORE20.)

All that said, characters who fight with light melee weapons have an option to get rid of some of the complexity of multiple attacks by taking the Two-Weapon Attack feat. Doing so reduces the size of the bane die for your multiple attacks — or in the case of light weapons, eliminates the bane entirely. (Choosing an option that increases the complexity of your character, then being able to invest feat slots to decrease that complexity, is a thing that crops up a lot in CORE20.)

Potent Shot, Power Attack, and Raging Attack

These three options (all part of “Combat Style Feats” on page 304 of the Playtest Player’s Guide) represent the higher end of complexity for combat feats. Potent Shot and Power Attack both use the same model of imposing a d4 bane on your attack rolls in order to have your attacks deal favored damage — rolling the damage die twice and using the best roll. Raging Attack follows a similar model by granting you a d4 boon on attack rolls and favored damage on weapon attacks, but imposing a d4 bane on defense rolls — making you hit harder in combat at the expense of becoming easier to hit. The complexity in all three of these feats comes from needing to think round-to-round about whether their benefit is worth using, based on your sense of how easy your foes are to hit or how difficult a time they’ll have hitting you.

Starting Simple 

The examples above demonstrate one of the baseline paradigms of CORE20. Just like you get to decide exactly who your character wants to be without any restrictions imposed by class mechanics, you — not the game — get to decide how mechanically complex you want your character to be. And unlike with class-based d20 games, starting with a simpler character concept when you’re playing your first CORE20 sessions doesn’t necessarily lock you into a simple concept forever. As you get more comfortable with the rules and options of CORE20, you get to decide if and how you want to increase the complexity of your character, to best fit the way you want to play the game.

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Questions about character building or anything else in CORE20? Email CORE20@insaneangel.com or join us on the CORE20 Discord server and ask away!

(Art by Dean Spencer)