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)

Taking Things to the Next Tier

After last’s week’s release of the player-facing components of the CORE20 ruleset, this week sees the rest of the full CORE20 playtest go live!

http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest

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

On the other side of that link, you’ll find an extradimensional space on Google Drive that holds:

• The full CORE20 Player’s Guide, featuring all the rules of the game for players and GMs.
• The full CORE20 Magic Grimoire, collecting the many spells and magic items of the game.
• The CORE20 Creature Playtest Package, featuring more than 180 foes, allies, and folk of the world from the eventual CORE20 Creature Compendium. The creature package comes in a regular and low-color version, and the introduction section explains why.
• The CORE20 Playtest GM Guidelines, providing a brief overview of what a GM needs to run the game, and explaining why those guidelines aren’t the full CORE20 Campaign Guide.
• A form-fillable character sheet.
• A free starter adventure.
• An About the Game doc talking about how we got here.

Carried in the wake of this tsunami of material, the CORE20 playtest is officially underway! What you’ll find in the playtest folder is everything you need to play CORE20… well, forever, really. Even without the full Creature Compendium and the Campaign Guide that’ll eventually provide guidance and advice to GMs about encounter building, campaign design, and more, the Player’s Guide and the Magic Grimoire contain all of the game. For free. Everything. Honestly, a bit more than everything (see the note in the About the Game doc for more about that).

As I mentioned in the previous CORE20 update, I’ve been working full time in RPGs for twenty years now. I’ve worked on a lot of amazing stuff over that time, alongside a lot of amazing people. But of all the things I’ve worked on, CORE20 means to the most to me. Thank you for letting me share it with you.

(Art by Xavier Beaudlet)

Game On

Today’s preview of the CORE20 RPG is a big one! Because it’s… well, most of the CORE20 RPG!

The full versions of the CORE20 Player’s Guide and the CORE20 Magic Grimoire are available for download right now:

http://tinyurl.com/CORE20Playtest

The “About the Game” PDF in the playtest files folder sets up what’s in those two books, and features the intro you’re reading right now. But it also has additional info about the game and some of the goals of the playtest process. The playtest package of wondrous foes and foils, allies and NPCs from the CORE20 Creature Compendium will be following next week, along with a quick GM’s overview of the game. And there will be some free starter adventures dropping soon after that.

I’ll be talking more on this very blog in coming weeks about the development of the game, what inspired it, how it’s changed (drastically in some cases) over ten years of play, and so forth. But one thing I can address here and now is the question of why I’ve done all this. And the answer to that, quite simply, is that CORE20 is a game I’ve wanted to play for most of my life, and it’s a whole hell of a lot of fun.

CORE20 is built around the framework of d20 fantasy, so it’ll feel familiar to anyone who’s ever played d20-era D&D, from 3rd Edition through 5th Edition. But it’s different. CORE20’s narrative-focused mechanics turning d20 rolls from a state of static pass/fail ennui into something more dynamic are meant to shoot shared-story fuel straight into the heart of the game. A foundation of freeform character building lets you do things as a player that class-based games sometimes struggle with. It lets you do things that class-based games simply can’t do. It lends itself to a wide range of play styles, including the option of running low-combat campaigns where you aren’t forced to just ignore your character’s default battle prowess. Rather, you get to swap the battle prowess you don’t need for things that are more important to who your character is and what you want them to do. 

I’ve been working on Dungeons & Dragons (alongside a few other RPGs) for twenty years now. Everything I’ve ever worked on has taught me something about the game that I didn’t know before. Every person I’ve been fortunate enough to work with has shown me new things about how this amazing hobby and its amazing design space have evolved. I know that fantasy RPGs are different for everyone. I don’t presume to know how you play, or the things that make the game the most fun for you. 

But after forty years of playing and after twenty years of working on the game, every single thing that’s ever made the game the most fun for me is in CORE20 somewhere. And I’m very, very proud and happy to share it with you.

(Art by Xavier Beaudlet)

Opus Arcana

While partaking of the excellent Eldritch Lorecast last week, I listened to the team talk with increasing degrees of lament about the chronic lack of a solid magic item crafting system in D&D. Different approaches from different games and game systems were discussed at some length, along with the different goals that characters and players often have for magic item crafting. (For those interested, that discussion is here.)

In the end, the consensus was that there are simply too many different approaches the game can take to magic item crafting, and all those approaches typically fall flat at some point. It was then left to the uber-talented James Haeck (who I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked alongside on numerous projects) to comment that there’s likely no way to ever make everyone happy with a magic item crafting system unless there’s a genius game designer out there who can thread that needle.

And, well, here I am. 😀

Chapter 8 (Player's Guide) and Chapter 2 (Magic Grimoire) Excerpts — Magic Item Crafting Preview

CORE20 has a fairly straightforward and extremely usable approach to magic item crafting, because that approach is built on a number of straightforward and usable foundational steps. At the base of the process is the idea that in the game, characters have ways to earn income during downtime that are tied to their skills. The wages that a character can earn week to week during downtime are synced up with the wages earned by NPC hirelings in the game, with most characters’ advanced state of skill use letting them easily pull down expert hireling wages whenever they’re not actively adventuring.

The rules for crafting mundane items are in turn tied to the rules for earning income. The game’s crafting rules are built around the idea that instead of earning a certain number of gp working for someone else, a character can instead create weapons, art objects, armor, alchemical substances, and more at half cost. Effectively, a character crafting an item pays half the item’s typical market cost for raw materials and overhead, then provides their own labor for free.

Building on the rules for mundane item crafting, magic item crafting functions in exactly the same way — albeit at a higher level of artisanship and specialized knowledge. Creating magic items involves the labor of master crafters, magic users, and the item crafter, but when all those artisans come together, they do so using the same rules for crafting mundane items. (The thing that allows crafting magic items to use the same rules of in-game economy as crafting mundane items is the way that magic items fit properly into the overall economy of the CORE20 game world, as talked about in a previous update.)

At its heart, the CORE20 system is a game focused on letting characters and players do whatever they want to do as heroes in a high-magic world.  Making it easy for characters to craft magic items as part of downtime, making use of their own skills and of the connections with other characters and NPCs derived from their adventures, is just another part of that.

(Art by Dean Spencer)