Death by Healing

Though you can play CORE20 any way you like, as should be the case with any RPG, the game is written from a baseline perspective of the world as a place where magic is everywhere. As would be expected in a such a milieu, magical healing is everywhere. Restorative potions and spellmarks are available for purchase in the public markets of any town or city, and restorative spellcasting services can be found in healing houses, temples, and spas across the land. Even in villages and hamlets too small for healing magic to be ubiquitous, mills and communal barns might keep a potion of cure light wounds on hand in case of an injury mundane healing can’t deal with quickly enough, and experienced adventurers know that it’s not uncommon to find a healer or midwife in the smallest thorp who can cast lesser restoration in exchange for a favor.

But as players and GMs of every fantasy game with ready access to healing magic understand, too much healing magic can quickly undermine the sense of peril that comes from a life spent fighting evil and monsters. For such characters, the threat of injury and even death needs to feel real. But if healing magic is too easily accessible, that threat can quickly become hollow. As CORE20 underwent its evolution from D&D 3.5 house rules into something bigger, I wrestled with this dilemma for a long while, and eventually hit upon what seemed like a cool idea: 

If one wants easy access to healing magic but easy access to healing magic reduces the threat that’s important to the narrative of the game, what happens if you replace that threat with a different threat? And so it is that in CORE20, every character understands that making use of healing magic can eventually kill you.

Life and Magic

Focusing first on the narrative angle — because for me, that’s always the best way to approach game design — magical healing in CORE20 revolves around that idea that magic is… well, supernatural. Which is to say, magic is unnatural. And even though magical healing has the incredible power to reverse injuries in moments that might otherwise take days or weeks to heal, it does so in a way that ever-so-slightly corrupts the natural health and healing ability of the body.

In CORE20, hit points are divided into two different pools of protection — critical points and defense points. I’ve talked about the narrative and design ideas underlying critical points and defense points (and how that system is actually the oldest part of the CORE20 rules). But to precis from the “Hit Points” section of “Chapter 9: Combat” in the CORE20 Playtest Player’s Guide, critical points measure your capacity to withstand physical injury, while defense points represent your ability to turn potentially lethal damage into minor damage through defensive prowess, innate hardiness, or sheer luck.

Defense points are a buffer that protects your more important critical points from getting knocked down, with damage-dealing attacks wearing down defense points first. Critical hits are a potentially nasty exception to this, so named in CORE20 because they deal damage directly to a creature’s critical points regardless of how many defense points the creature has remaining.

When an injured character takes magical healing, that healing restores critical points first, then defense points, rebuilding your body’s physical vigor and integrity before bringing your defensive acumen back up. But whenever magical healing restores critical points, the creature receiving that healing takes a −1 penalty to their critical point maximum. The unnatural process of magical healing leaves a kind of physical deficit that can add up over time, effectively lowering critical points each time magic is used to bring an injured character back from the brink.

Critical Thinking

In most cases, the downside to magical healing feels minor compared to the benefit. For a character down to their last 3 critical points, restoring 3d8 + 5 hit points from an ally’s cure serious wounds spell is more than worth the −1 critical point penalty that spell imposes. But over time, the regular use of magical healing plays into the campaign story as a thing that characters and players need to think about. 

In the short term, the differences between the different healing spells in the game and the potions and spellmarks that channel those spells’ magic take on an unexpected importance. A potion of cure light wounds restores 1d8 + 1 hit points. A potion of cure moderate wounds restores 2d8 + 3 hit points, bestowing about the same amount of healing as taking two potions of cure light wounds. But for a character with a severe critical point deficit, taking two of the cheaper potions of cure light wounds imposes a −2 penalty to critical points, where the more expensive potion of cure moderate wounds incurs only a −1 penalty. (If a character has lost only defense points, they can chug potions or crack spellmarks indiscriminately. Only healing magic that restores critical points imposes a critical point penalty.)

Critical point damage and a critical point penalty can both be restored during a downtime rest — and only during a downtime rest. CORE20 breaks from the increasingly laissez-faire attitude that D&D has taken toward healing up during long rests over successive editions, and the long rest that heals up one hundred percent of a character’s injuries is nowhere to be found in the game. (This is a big part of the reason why magical healing is commonplace in a CORE20 campaign.) As such, anytime a character is badly injured (as represented by taking critical point damage), they get an automatic invitation to take downtime at some point in the near future. The character’s player gets to think about whether it’s best to take magical healing and later restore a critical point penalty during downtime (a relatively slow process) or push on injured and plan to later let natural healing restore those lost critical points during downtime (a faster process).

Injury in CORE20 is thus something a character is always thinking about, with each bout of critical point damage setting up the question of how best to deal with it. Short-term gain in the form of magical healing is easily had. But it comes with the long-term pain of a critical point penalty and the reduction of overall physical hardiness that represents. Critical injuries also allow characters and players to naturally embrace the idea of letting downtime play an important part in every CORE20 campaign, as an alternative to the movement toward breakneck speed-adventuring that’s become the norm in D&D over the last couple of decades. I know it’s tricky to talk about “realism” in a game about dragons and wizards casting fireball, but part of the narrative goal that inspired CORE20’s approach to magical healing was to bring back a degree of verisimilitude around the idea of injury. Characters having been beaten to within an inch of their lives is a big part of the narrative cycle of fantasy games, and having injury be something that isn’t just forgotten about after every long rest serves that narrative well.

Art by Dean Spencer.

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.

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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