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)

Statistical Anomaly

Creature statistics have been a very moveable feast since the earliest days of D&D. The monster stat block has undergone steady mutation through varyingly complex forms, both in the main game line and many of the games that have split off from D&D.

In the early days of AD&D, creature statistics were sparse, amounting to bare combat stats, size, and a rough intelligence rating that was the only reference to a creature’s ability scores. In the 3rd edition days, monster statistics expanded with more details but inherited a scattered flow of information from AD&D. Not until the later stages of D&D v3.5 did the concept of the organized stat block finally emerge, to be inherited by D&D 5e and many other d20-based RPGs — including CORE20.

Years in the Making!

The creatures, monsters, and other foes who fill the CORE20 Playtest Creature Package were one of the very last pieces of the game to come together. Prior to that, during the alpha playtest, I and a small number of brave GMs played the game using stock D&D 3.5 monsters updated on the fly for new rules and conditions, and with a very loose reckoning of how the challenge ratings of 3.5e translated to CORE20’s looser encounter building.

As a result, I had a lot of time to think about what a CORE20 creature stat block might and should look like. And a thing I thought a lot about during that time was how to move away from the 3.5e and 5e approach that views stat blocks mostly as a summary of a creature’s ability to kill the characters or to be killed in return.

Full disclosure: the CORE20 stat block is still mostly about combat, for the simple reason that CORE20 is a game that absolutely knows how much fun it is to fight monsters. But one of the things I thought about for a long time through the alpha playtest was how to work up a stat block that didn’t imply that combat was the only purpose of the game, and that didn’t intentionally make every potentially useful bit of noncombat information as hard to find as possible.

As such, the setup I came up with in 2023 for the CORE20 stat block starts with noncombat options, then works its way down into more-violent action options. And as I tweaked and fine-tuned a few early attempts at the setup, I realized that what I ended up doing reflected an overall general approach to how monster encounters typically play out. (The Playtest Creature Package talks about this setup as well.)

Top Down

When the characters first notice a monster, it’s often important to determine whether or not the monster notices them back — and how fast the monster moves toward the party if they do. That’s why the Senses and Speed lines are at the top of the stat block. Size is next because if a creature is moving toward the characters, the first thing they likely notice is how big or small the creature is, and how scared they should be as a result. Languages below that sets the scene for what kind of threats or parley might be in the offing before contact between creature and characters is made. Encounters then suggest what other creatures might be lurking nearby and unobserved, waiting to see how that initial contact plays out.

Below that initial section of the stat block, a number of color-coded sections then dig into the mechanics-focused interactions between creature and characters. Abilities and Skills are first up, whether the GM is setting up a social encounter or needs to tap into skill checks for combat maneuvers, characters or monsters hiding from each other, and so forth. Then, for the many times when combat is the way an encounter is meant to go, the lower sections of the stat block focus on what a creature needs to get into the fight.

Defenses are first up in the combat portion of the stat block, to highlight the idea that even in combat, it’s okay for creatures to focus first and foremost on avoiding taking damage before focusing on dealing it out. A Combat Options section follows, incorporating initiative and any other always-on combat-specific features. Sections covering Standard Actions, Minor Actions, Move Actions, Free Actions, and Reactions then make up the bulk of the stat block, setting out a creature’s round-by-round action options in order of the effort involved in using them.

Pretty Colors

The color coding of the stat block from Abilities and Skills down is another thing that developed over years of thinking about what a CORE20 stat block might look like — as a direct result of my addled brain always having found it really difficult to parse the 3.5e stat block and many of its d20 descendants. With each part of the stat block coded with a specific background color, it makes it easy to quickly focus on a specific section as one gets used to that coding. When I’m setting up an encounter, I know that yellow and a creature’s initiative modifier is the first thing I look for. When a creature’s turn comes up each round, I know to look to red first for the standard actions that are a creature’s primary focus, then glance at the green minor actions to remind myself what else they can do.

The current color presentation is focused on the playtest, and there’s a version of the Playtest Creature Package that keeps the header colors but loses the background colors for folks who find that easier to read. Though the look and layout of the CORE20 books is only in its most preliminary stages at this point, the vision for the final stat block setup is a little bit more subdued than the playtest’s Microsoft Word formatting allows. Here’s a sneak preview of that setup featuring the behir again (one of my favorite monsters), as rendered by one of my favorite artists, the amazing Jackie Musto.

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

(Art by Jackie Musto — http://www.jackiemustoart.com)

A Lighter Fighting Touch

A confession: I really love combat in D&D and other RPGs. Like, a lot. My favorite class has always been the fighter. I love the story that plays out through a character’s choice of weapons and armor. I live for the vicarious feeling of reliving every heroic tale I ever read as a kid by having that fighter character stand against evil backed by nothing but strength and steel.

At the same time, though, I love the many and varied ways that D&D can play out without combat. In the home games I run, we can routinely go three full sessions back to back engaging in nothing but roleplaying, investigation, and skill checks. And when a combat scenario looms in those home games, I get full satisfaction out of the players engaging in elaborate plans to bypass that combat, or engaging in shenanigans that get two different enemies taking each other out while the party just hangs back and watches.

Combat is fun. But because I’ve always found avoiding combat just as much fun, I knew right from the beginning that I wanted CORE20 to support that style of play. Because CORE20 is built on the chassis of the Creative Commons D&D SRD, all the ways that characters can avoid violence in the game carry over, of course. If you also enjoy that style of play, you’ll find that the work-around-or-sabotage-the-bad-guys style of play actually works better in CORE20 than it does in stock D&D because CORE20 avoids the pass/fail tedium of skill checks that can make planning and subterfuge in the game sometimes feel undramatic.

The First Rule of D&D Club

In the end, though, d20 fantasy always inevitably wants to move toward skirmish combat, courtesy of D&D’s war game DNA. So I started thinking at some point about how one might try to create options in d20 combat that were more narratively interesting than just battering your enemies into submission with weapon attacks. And in so doing, I kept coming back to the question: What if not fighting the way you’re always expected to fight in a d20 game could be as much fun as fighting?

Combat maneuvers in CORE20 are the answer I came up with to that question — a set of rules that cover grappling, tripping, disarming, and a bunch of other combat options for characters who want to do more than just beat their enemies down each and every time. Combat maneuvers were actually one of the last subsystems I wrote for the game, back in 2022 for version 6 of the alpha playtest. It’s a pretty straightforward system, combining two familiar mechanics — skill checks on the attacker’s side and saving throws on the defender’s side — to do things a bit differently than d20 fantasy has traditionally done.

You can see the breakdown of available maneuvers in the table above, and can read all the details starting on page 259 of the Playtest Player’s Guide. But the general idea is that when your character gets into a fight, CORE20 provides ways that you can finish or get out of that fight that don’t just involve treating foes as bags of hit points.

Advanced Conflict Resolution

When I finished the initial draft of the combat maneuvers system, I put it to the test with a short urban campaign that had an unusual setup for character creation — no weapon feats. Characters could take Weapon Focus once, gaining a modest +1 bonus to attacks, if a player felt naked running a hero without a sword, but that was it. For everything else, the players had to think about ways they might get out of fights — because the campaign was absolutely going to involve combat scenarios — other than responding to violence with violence. And it was a great time.

(As an aside: One of the touchstones I made use of in that campaign when talking to the players about archetypal characters who constantly get into scrapes but don’t start punching their way out of those scrapes by default were the 1970s detective shows of my childhood. Those shows featured tough, hard-edged cops and private eyes caught up in the sorts of stories you’d expect — but those heroes were limited in how much violence they could use to respond to threats by the network standards of the day. Arguably the best of those archetypes (and my own personal favorite) was Jim Rockford from The Rockford Files, who famously kept his pistol hidden in a cookie jar, and whose go-to move was to punch a bad guy as a distraction before running like hell.)

Combat maneuvers weren’t the only thing that made the campaign memorable. One character made use of spelltouched illusion ability to keep foes guessing what was real, and the game offers plenty of nondamaging spellcasting options for characters who want to avoid bloodshed. But that campaign and the campaigns that followed have all shown off how much more interesting combat can be with enemies — and the characters from time to time — upended, unable to see, momentarily unnerved, running after their weapons when they go flying across the battlefield, and much more.

Most importantly, unlike the options in traditional d20 games for grappling, shoving, and so forth, CORE20 lets you build characters who are really, really good at avoiding lethal combat in favor of dealing with combat threats in other ways. Because you get to decide exactly which things your character is good at and which things they never bothered to learn, alternative combat options can be your character’s primary forte — not just a secondary add-on to their default ability to hack and slash.

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

(Art by Gary Dupuis)

First of Your Line

Lineages in CORE20 (covered in chapter 3 of the playtest Player’s Guide) are a more expansive system than in any stock version of D&D, and have gone through a long evolution during the game’s alpha-version years (including switching to talking about “lineage” rather than “race” some time ago). The first big change expanded on the baseline setup of racial traits from D&D 3.5 (the system CORE20 was originally built out from), setting up that each worldborn lineage can provide characters with a broad range of options freely selectable by players, rather than having a single set of attributes that every member of the same lineage has to hew to. The idea was effectively to embrace the same freeform character building setup that the CORE20 rules are built on, but with the unique backstory of each lineage providing a general shape to one’s choices.

Unique Familiarity

The immediate advantage to this approach is that it dumps the traditionally bioessentialist setup of D&D races (the idea that all elves are X, all dwarves are Y, all orcs are Z, and so forth) on its head. Because as a player, you get to instead decide what being an elf, a dwarf, or an orc means to you and your character. If you’re playing an elf (as an arbitrary example) in a CORE20 game, you get to choose from among a range of lineage traits that all tie into the archetypal feel that elves have within D&D-style heroic fantasy. However, you’re not constrained within any sense that all elves in the world are slender and graceful, or are innately perceptive, or are automatically good with bows, and so forth.

If you want to play an elf who hits all those familiar touchstones, you absolutely can, because the baseline feel of each lineage through multiple versions of D&D are captured within the CORE20 setup. An elf’s resistance to enchantment magic and skill with the longbow, a dwarf’s stonecunning and improved combat prowess against larger creatures, a bugbear’s affinity for stealth and grappling — all those options are there if you want them. But whether you want them is your choice.

(An interesting side note — to me, anyway — is that CORE20 actually isn’t the only game I’ve worked on that’s made use of a broader approach to lineage or ancestry for player characters. When I worked on Arora — Age of Desolation from Ghostfire Gaming, lead designer Shawn Merwin pitched an ancestry system that’s even more freeform than the CORE20 approach, and I was able to use what I’d learned from writing the CORE20 system when we built the Arora system. That same ancestry system was then picked up and expanded on for the upcoming Ghostfire book Grim Hollow: The Raider’s Guide to Valika, which was pretty cool.)

This is Your Life

Each of the CORE20 lineages has a character’s choosable traits loosely organized along the lines of combat, magic, and the general feel of what it means to be a member of that lineage, broken out as combat traits, magic traits, and spirit traits. But in keeping with the freeform character building that’s the foundation of the game, you get to decide which of those parts of the game are important to your character. If you’re playing a gnome arcanist whose combat goals include staying as far away from fights as possible, you’re not forced to select combat-related traits that you’ll never use, focusing instead on your gnome magic and gnome spirit traits.

Even beyond the broad selection of traits that a lineage offers to your character, CORE20 also lets you freely select traits from a different lineage if those traits fit your character concept, which you can make narrative use of any way you like. If your goblin scoundrel trained with an orc weapon master for a time, the diligent ally orc lineage trait (allowing you to create a distraction that lets an ally make an unexpected attack against a foe) might be the legacy of that relationship. In my current campaign, the player of a bounty hunter character who’s a stand-up comedian on the side worked up a bit of backstory about the character traveling for a time with a gnome theatrical troupe as a teenager. Work the crowd — a gnome trait that grants advantage on Investigation or Perception checks when interacting with a group of people — is the character’s touchstone to that backstory and how time spent with the folk of another lineage shaped her.

Like everything else in CORE20, lineage is about helping you tell your character’s story. You can check out how the lineage rules do that in the playtest Player’s Guide, free to download. Chapter 3 tells you everything you need to know.

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

(CORE20 worldborn concept art by Jackie Musto)

The Sweet Spot

Level-based play has been the foundation of roleplaying games since the creation of RPGs five decades ago this year — because D&D was the first formal and lasting incarnation of the RPG, and D&D had levels. Even though there were plenty of early RPGs that took a different approach (including Traveller, my second RPG), whither D&D went over fifty years, a lot of other games have followed.

Level-based games are generally great. They provide a setup that gives GM and players a fixed framework for reckoning the relative power of the characters, the creatures they fight, and the world around both. All of that is useful, as can be demonstrated by how popular level-based games continue to be. But there’s been one chronic downside to level-based D&D since the very beginning of the game, which is that some levels are a lot more fun to play through than other levels.

The Range of the Game

Since the AD&D days when I first started playing, Dungeons & Dragons has always had a sweet spot — from 3rd level through to 10th or 12th level. This isn’t a hard and fast rule. It’s a statement of my own experience and personal preference for sure, and as a broad level band, it’s not exactly a “spot” either way. But from AD&D through to 5e, this range of seemingly ideal levels has been something that many players, not just me, have picked up on.

The sweet spot of the game is the range of levels through which D&D feels most firmly anchored to the characters who drive the game. It’s the stretch of play through which D&D and related d20 fantasy games maximize fun, minimize complication, create the best balance of risk and reward, and shape stories that feel most strongly anchored to the player characters. The sweet spot starts after the point where you get to stop worrying about one bad encounter catalyzing a campaign-ending TPK, and extends up to the point before the stakes of the game too often stop feeling personal and real.

It’s actually kind of weird that this sweet spot has been pretty much the same for players across multiple editions of the game, starting with AD&D, moving through 3rd edition, and now with 5e. But under the hood, despite each edition’s many mechanical differences, there’s a consistency and continuity to the kind of play experience that level-based advancement creates. Over four-plus decades of the game solidifying and revising its AD&D form, many, many players have identified that sweet spot and focused their play inside that level band. And because I’m one of those players, the feel of play that 3rd-level to 10th- or 12th-level D&D has long generated is the exact feel that CORE20 focuses on.

When I cranked out the first set of house rules that have since become the CORE20 system, I wasn’t thinking very much about the math of the game, because the math of the game at that early point was just the math of 3e D&D. But as I worked with the system and sketched out the first sense of how advancement by feat slot might work, I found myself guided by that long-held instinct that the game felt the most fun within that sweet spot. And I realized that in the course of working up the version of d20 fantasy that I’d always wanted to play, I could focus on that feel by addressing the two issues that bookend the D&D sweet spot — low-level characters (and in particular in 5e D&D, 1st-level characters) being way too easy to kill; and high-level characters too quickly becoming so all-powerful that the challenges they faced inevitably detach from real character story.

From Squishy to Superhero

In its earliest forms, D&D had a penchant for killing off starting characters, a style of play that’s been embraced in a charmingly retro way by newer games like Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark. But even with 5e D&D, plenty of GM advice and books (including a book I co-wrote) talk about treating the 1st level of the game as its own separate tier of play — and getting through that tier as quickly as possible to avoid characters getting splattered by a couple of bad d20 rolls.

In all versions of D&D, the squishiness of low-level characters relative to the foes they’re expected to face off against means that for many players, the lowest levels of D&D aren’t nearly as much fun as the levels that follow. And that’s why CORE20 doesn’t start at 1st level. A starting CORE20 character is still a relative neophyte compared to many of the threats they’ll face and the NPCs in the world around them. But the array of feats that a character can select with their 20 starting feat slots makes them more capable than the 1st-level characters of any version of D&D, in most cases recreating the feel of a 3rd-level character in 3.5e or 5e. And after starting within that sweet spot, CORE20 stays there.

At the other end of the level spectrum, beginning with 3rd edition in 2000, D&D expanded beyond some of the baseline paradigms that had defined the game through the AD&D years. And in the course of doing so, D&D effectively became a kind of fantasy superhero game. You were presented with a fixed progression of 20 levels of class features for all character classes, and the full expectation that rising to 20th level to become the most powerful heroes in the world was the central point of the game.

To be clear — there’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing fantasy superheroes. The original success of 3e bringing D&D back from the brink of bankruptcy proves that fact, as does the success of 5e bringing the game back from the brink of cultural irrelevance. If playing fantasy superheroes straight through from level 1 to level 20 and saving the multiverse through campaign after campaign is your jam, I love you for that. But through two decades of playing and working on D&D from 3rd edition on, I’ve thought a lot about how in the AD&D version of the game that’s the clear ancestor of 3e and 5e alike, it wasn’t always usual — or even expected — to play characters all the way up to 20th level as a matter of course.

In only a few cases did the character classes of AD&D actually have interesting class features at higher levels — and in most of those cases, those classes had a hard cap well below 20th level. Starting at between 10th and 12th level, the iconic AD&D classes got less robust in terms of their hit point progression. There was a clear mechanical cutoff point at which the world said, “Your hero isn’t going to be as good at this hero stuff as they used to be.” So in the AD&D days, it was pretty typical to play a character to anywhere between 9th level and 12th, and then retire them. Not because you had no options for continuing, but because that was the general level band at which you often felt like your character had accomplished what they first set out to do all those levels ago. That was the far end of the sweet spot.

Endgames

Even in the 5e era with a full 20-level setup and plenty of class features at the high end of the game, it’s a well-known phenomenon that most D&D campaigns end well before the apex of 20th-level play. In endless surveys and polls (including data shared from D&D Beyond at different points), a significant percentage of players report that they don’t run their campaigns much beyond 10th level. And I think the reason for that is that players instinctively recognize the special feel of the game within the level band that is the sweet spot — and the quite different feel that takes over if the game continues past that.

CORE20 has thus been built to let characters hold within that range of power where they’re strong enough to face off against the threats of the campaign, but not invulnerable. As with pretty much any RPG, the dangers the characters face off against will inevitably grow stronger. The monsters, environmental threats, and exploration and social challenges that give a party of 20-feat-slot starting characters a really hard time can typically be handled with ease by a group of veteran 40-feat-slot characters with a campaign’s worth of experience behind them. And even as that campaign continues and the characters get even more powerful, CORE20 makes it the most fun to build your character out with new features and new talents while holding within the sweet spot, rather than to simply focus on maximizing combat numbers the way superhero fantasy does.

It’s not impossible to build a superhero adventurer in CORE20. And again, if that’s your jam, the game will work with you to build a superhero adventurer unlike any that a class-based game can create. But doing so isn’t as easy or as instinctive as building a character who just stays in that sweet spot for the full length of their adventuring career — embracing the version of d20 fantasy that even many 5e players brand new to the game recognize as the best way to play.

In the next CORE20 design diary, I’ll talk more about the particulars of how CORE20 character building incentivizes staying in the sweet spot, through focusing on building characters horizontally rather than with the vertical focus that level-based games create.

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

(Art by Eric Lofgren)

The Hit (Points) Parade

I’ve talked about how the game that has become CORE20 goes back to a first set of house rules I worked up more than ten years ago. But there’s actually one part of the CORE20 rules that goes back to twenty-four years earlier than that — critical points and defense points (written up in chapter 9 of the CORE20 Player’s Guide), which were a house rule set up for my AD&D games way back in the day.

“I Can Do This All Day…”

As it does for a lot of people, the abstract quality of D&D’s hit point system has long vexed me. I mean, it works fine for the most part. It’s not broken per se. But the idea of “Well, sometimes your hit points are actual physical damage to your body, and sometimes your hit points are luck, and sometimes your hit points are your ability to parry most of a blow away” always felt a bit weaselly to me. This is a less serious problem at lower levels, when the amount of damage characters can dish out and withstand is still relatively nuanced. But by the time a 10th-level barbarian can throw themself blindfolded off a 200-foot cliff and know that the fall has no chance of killing them, things start to feel iffy for me.

Way back in 1986, the idea came to me of breaking hit points out as two different numbers — critical points representing how many potentially mortal wounds your body can take, and hit points (I didn’t call them defense points then) representing your ability to avoid mortal wounds through training and skill. That original system was a bit more complicated than the CORE20 setup (because I was young, and because the one thing AD&D really needed was more complication). But the baseline idea of having one number representing your actual health and another number representing how good you were at rolling with attacks that would otherwise mess your health up started there.

Fast-forward a whole bunch of years, and in 2004, I dusted off critical points and hit points for my D&D 3.5e campaign. An updated take on those rules was inspired by my reading (and taking the useful improvement of using Constitution score as a baseline for critical points from) the vitality and wound points system in the 3.5e Unearthed Arcana supplement, with that setup itself sourced from the d20 Star Wars RPG. Then when one of my 3.5e campaigns became the initial test bed for CORE20 (or d20 CORE as the initial house rule experiments were called), critical points and defense points were ready to go.

Critical Thinking

The CORE20 hit point setup using critical points and defense points does a whole bunch of the things in the game, all by design. Chief among those is that it makes critical hits really freaking exciting when it’s the player characters hitting their enemies — and it makes critical hits really freaking scary when it’s the enemies critting the characters. Because a character will absolutely go down when their critical points drop to 0, even if they’ve got a ton of defense points remaining, the first critical hit in a combat encounter can throw everything into upheaval. Especially for non-martial characters who don’t have a ton of critical points or easy access to temporary hit points as a buffer, a character taking a critical hit can necessitate a huge change in tactics, as that character taking a second critical hit becomes a thing the whole party needs to worry about.

Another thing that critical points and defense points do is make starting characters and lower-tier enemies more robust than the standard that D&D has long applied to low-level characters and their foes. Because all creatures have critical points built on their baseline Constitution score, that’s an average 10 hit points for every starting character and every worldborn NPC, even before monster math and feat selection build that up. Creating a 4 hit point wizard in CORE20 is technically possible, but you’d have to seriously work at it. As a result, even starting characters not focused on standing at the center of combat each and every encounter have an excellent chance of surviving their starting adventures.

Monsters likewise get a hit point boost from their default critical points. As an example, consider the lowly stirge — a creature weighing in at a mighty 5 hit points from AD&D 1e through 3.5e, before budget cutbacks reduced them to 2 hit points for 5e. At 5 critical points and 10 defense points, the CORE20 stirge is relatively weak even for a tier 0 creature (because Tiny and smaller creatures gain only part of their Constitution score as critical points). But in a combat where a 9/5 hit point arcanist takes on a 5/10 hit point stirge, both have a damage buffer that can make the fight more interesting.

One of the things I’ve long observed and been often frustrated by is that lower-level combat encounters in D&D can too easily swing wide one way or the other if all of one side acts first in the initiative order. When the characters all go first, the six foes they’re facing are suddenly three foes before the enemy side gets to act, and the fight is a rout. If all the monsters go first, half the characters start the fight bloodied or one character starts out already down and dying, and the party’s planned tactics go out the window to prioritize healing. But by having just a little bit of a hit point buffer, those sorts of first-round “Whoops!” moments become less likely.

As well, another benefit of lower-tier characters and creatures in CORE20 being a bit more robust is that it gives players and GMs options for getting out combat when one side would normally just demolish the other. Using the stirge as an example, with 2 hit points in 5e, one successful attack against a stirge slurping on a character all but automatically ends with a dead stirge. But with the 5/10 hit point CORE20 stirge, the GM often has the option to say, “You smash the stirge soundly, making them decide to take their 3 remaining critical points and fly off.” Likewise, just as starting characters being one-shot by ogres is less of a thing in CORE20 than in D&D, starting characters one-shotting bandits and cultists becomes a touch less likely unless that’s something the characters are interested in doing. In games with players who don’t automatically want to kill every creature they meet, this can be a good thing.

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

(Art by Eric Lofgren)

“And hark! What Discord follows…” — Shakespeare

Checking out the CORE20 RPG? Looking for a place to ask rules questions, get updates, or talk about the game? The CORE20 Discord is now live!

Plans for the Discord are ongoing, but we’re looking to create a one-stop space where players and GMs can stay ahead of any playtest issues and updates while sharing what they’re doing with the game. Use the invite below to join us!

https://discord.gg/NaGnNSVRDF

And regardless of whether you Discord or not, questions about any aspect of the game or the playtest can always be sent to CORE20@insaneangel.com.

Tales of Adventure

Running a CORE20 campaign? Got a party of heroes all dressed up with nowhere to go? Then check out the first of an eventual bunch of free starter adventures for the CORE20 playtest:

http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest

(If the short URL doesn’t work for you, you can click or copy the full link here.)

Have a look in the “CORE20 Starter Adventures” folder and grab Sapirio’s Secret, a tier 1 adventure entirely suitable for brand-new starting characters. The CORE20 version of Sapirio’s Secret is an adaptation of a 5e version written by Scott a few years ago, and dishes up a nice one- or two-session mix of roleplaying, humor, investigation, and combat against a group of most unusual magic-users.

More starter adventures are on their way, starting with a CORE20 adaptation of Zengran’s Game, a one-shot written by Scott as part of Fantastic Lairs.

Enjoy!

(Art by André Meister)