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.