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
