Wednesday, March 27, 2024

A Lighter Fighting Touch

A wicked-looking sword has a big red X over it, creating a symbol implying “No wicked-looking swords.”

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.

A screenshot of the Combat Maneuvers table from the CORE20 Playtest Player’s Guide. It notes the available combat maneuvers in the game: Confound, demoralize, disarm, distract, grapple, impede, shove, sunder, and trip.

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)

Friday, March 15, 2024

First of Your Line

Three essaruk stand together — a dark-skinned, white-haired woman with a prosthetic leg, who wears loose-fitting clothing and holds a lute strong across her back; an older man with pale gray skin and hair, wearing robes; and a young laughing child who sits on the linked arms of the two adults.

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 Guidefree 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 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, ...