Stepping Back to Step Forward

I love that Shadowdark - a quite good fusion of OSR and 5e that I happily recommend - strips ability modifiers from damage rolls.

Adding your Strength bonus to your attack and damage rolls is classic legacy D&D design. It made sense from a simulation point of view, and in AD&D the bonuses were parked at Strength 16+. They weren't meant to be the standard.

Over the years, bonuses migrated to lower scores and increased (see BECMI's +1 to +3 spread, versus 5e's +1 to +5, versus 3e/4e's uncapped bonuses).

However, 5e throws a weird little wrinkle into the mix. While weapon users still add ability mod to damage rolls, casters don't. Spells rarely add a mod, unless a caster takes a feat or class feature. Cantrips in particular don't add an ability modifier.

I think this factor is one of the reasons why low level 5e feels so satisfying. Casters kick out noticeably lower damage with their cantrips.

I've been playing around with what 5e would look like without ability modifiers added to anyone's damage. What if we removed the damage mod, but still had to account for that damage somewhere else?

The results have been really interesting, and they have forced me to reconsider what we think of as at-will damage in the 5e engine.

If we pull out the ability modifier to damage, we can roughly produce a fighter who starts with two attacks per round. Dropping the modifier makes at-will attacks cheaper (lower damage) while also increasing our damage budget.

What if we open up our budget some more by scrapping other at-will damage bonuses to the fighter and other weapon uses? If we pull away fighting styles and weapon masteries, we get even more damage to play with.

If my math is right, the ranger can make two attacks per round if they use smaller weapons, while also gaining an at-will attack from an animal companion.

The fighter gains a floating bonus they can use like a battlemaster's maneuver die, except they get it every round.

This model does require you to be careful about putting buff spells and beefy at-will output on the same character. That means that our ranger loses hunter's mark and instead gets spells that replace their attacks (cast this spell and do something instead of attacking) or focus on utility (healing, detection, etc).

From my point of view, this sealed my desire to spin up my own 5e-derived system. This small tweak to the game's core math opens up so much design space for non-casters that I can't imagine going back to the old way of doing things.

From a design perspective, it shows that sometimes questioning the most basic elements of a system can produce your biggest leaps forward. If I hadn't played Shadowdark, I never would have thought to remove the damage bonus. If I hadn't then experimented with removing it in 5e, while maintaining the game's math balance, I never would have gotten here.

It turns out that the ancient game design advice - play lots of games, question assumptions - actually works!

Next week I'll have prototypes of the classes to share. They're adjustments of the ones I showed off earlier this year. Until then, enjoy your weekend!