Mike Mearls Games

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, vers...

Layering Abilities in TTRPG Design

In TTRPGs, the intersection of the action economy and content design yields gameplay. You can think of your action economy as your fuel or energy budget. It tells you how much stuff you can do. Your content design then layers on top. It's what you can do.

Let's look at combat in 5e as an example. You can imagine a 1st level barbarian considering the following options on their first turn. Let's assume a boring encounter with a single orc.

• Move: Move up...

  2024-11-12 15:08:10 +0000 UTC View Post

System Design: Where Stuff Goes

In my last post, I shared my house rules for two-weapon fighting in 5e. I mentioned that I preferred that for the rules for dual wielding to appear in the core rules, rather than under the description of a weapon trait. Swiss Calavera asked in the comments about that. Why not put the rules under the weapons that use them?

It's a great question and prompted me to put some thought into TTRPG system design.

The Language of TTRPGs

A TTRPG system is, at its core, the language u...

Two Weapon Fighting

I'm not crazy about how D&D '24 handles two-weapon fighting. I was never crazy about it in 5e in general, but it feels like it has gotten harder to use. Here is my patch.

Two-Weapon Fighting

When you use the Attack action, you can choose to use two-weapon fighting if you wield two or more one-handed weapons. You make this choice before using any of your attacks.

• When you opt to use two-weapon fighting, pick a weapon you wield. That is your off-ha...

  2024-11-05 21:37:31 +0000 UTC View Post

Dungeon Exploration

When the characters explore a location, they seek to gain information and uncover secrets against the backdrop of an ongoing threat. In classic dungeon exploration, the characters must weigh the dangers of encountering monsters against the benefit of searching for secret doors and traps. A group that moves quickly has less risk of an unexpected fight but at the risk of blundering into a trap or overlooking a critical piece of information.

Elements of Exploration

In my games, Iâ€...

Exploration in 5e

D&D's three pillars Interaction works well in the game, and I like how the 2024 revision cleans those rules up, and combat is great as long as your encounter design has interesting monsters and accounts for the action economy. We'll get to those two pillars in more detail later, but today I want to look at exploration.

Having played a lot of AD&D, Old School Essentials, and Shadowdark over the past few years, exploration is a bit of an orphan in the current game's design. When ...

Design Revisions

I'm taking a break from monsters to loop back to subclasses for today's post. I thought it would be interesting to look at the process of revising design and how playtesting affects it.

I have two players using the a rouge subclass I designed, and it's clear that the design is not working. I didn't even need to ask for player input. I could see during out sessions that the subclass was too complex. If a player has to stop to read a subclass ability, and that pause clearly slows the game...

Monster Design Update

Hello everyone!

I've been regularly running three (or more!) games a week, testing out the new approach to monsters and some of the new subclasses. A few notes on things before we get back to our regular schedule of new monsters and other goodies:

• The math behind the monsters is shaping up well. I've run mooks, troopers, and champions multiple times and have a good feel for their hit points and defenses.

• Bosses are proving a bit more troublesome. Right now, ...

  2024-10-04 15:02:42 +0000 UTC View Post

Aspects and Monsters

If you haven't at least read the FATE RPG, I highly recommend it. Reading new RPGs is like having a deep conversation with another DM about how they run games. Someone ran RPGs and decided to encode their approach to the game in a book. The insights and ideas can help shape your own techniques and approaches.

There's even an online SRD you can use to read the game for free.

2024-09-28 13:48:55 +0000 UTC View Post

Your Encounter Areas are (Probably) Too Small

If you find that the fights you set up in D&D are dull or grindy, your encounter areas might be too small. It's a common issue in published adventures, so it's not surprising that it also crosses over to DMs running home games.

Most characters have a speed of 30 feet. When you create an encounter, start with a rough sketch of your map using 30-foot squares. You can think of these squares as worth 1 move by a character.

For each square, get an idea of what you want to put there...

Initiative, Dice, and Dramatic Tension

Timing is the best tool in a storyteller's kit. By their very nature, stories are artifacts of time. They unspool in acts, with tension rising and falling over time, before the story ends at its most dramatic moment.

Combat should follow a similar model in D&D. Initiative is the best tool in the DM's kit for ensuring that happens, and rolling dice for initiative won't get us there.

The current system is rooted in the wargame simulations that spawned D&D 50 years ago. Warga...

Static Initiative

In the comments in one of my recent posts, Swiss Calavera talked about the asymmetry of my design work here. That's very intentional. DMs need a different set of tools than players. A player manages a single character with a deep bench of spells, feats, and features. A DM manages many creatures, the environment, and the narrative. That's a lot of work.

To help with that, I'm moving to a static initiative model for creatures. If you remember the dragon stat block I posted earlier this ye...

It Came from the Swamp!

In my Wednesday game, the characters tangled with a group of frog humanoids and this fun little champion (champion = a creature worth two characters in a fight). A few things I tried with this design.

Bigger Damage: My math for creatures in my 4e-style encounter building system has been a little off. I tweaked the model to assume that a creature typically has two actions to attack during an encounter. For the third action, it is either dead to focused fire or it sp...

General TTRPG Musings

Hey all! I've started a newsletter on Substack where I talk about general TTRPG observations, thoughts on specific RPGs, and other random topics. My 5e and adjacent game design will continue here, but for broader stuff I'm using Substack. I'm not doing paid-only content over there.

You can sign up here if you...

Troglodyte Stat Blocks

I'm using images until I figure out a better way to present stat blocks, perhaps as a PDF.

In any case, I'm starting off this week with some troglodyte stat blocks I've created for my home 5e games. A few things to point out with these creatures.

Stoney Hide: I always like the idea of a creature with a chameleon-like skin, but found a bonus to stealth checks a bit dull. This design makes it difficult for ranged characters to deal with these creatures, while a...

Mistakes are Creative Fertilizer

It's Friday afternoon, which means I've wrapped up my game sessions for the week. Now it's time to take a look at which parts of my design worked, and which didn't.

This week I (re-)learned an important lesson about math and game design. Using mathematical models is a good starting point, but leaning too heavily on them has its pitfalls.

For my approach to monsters, I want to create a monster that is balanced so that X level Y monsters can face off against X level Y characters and...

Simpler Aboleth

I was asked to try tackling a more complex monster. The first critter in the SRD is the aboleth, so here is my revision of it.

I tried using an aboleth in an encounter years ago and it was deeply frustrating. It has wonky, complex mechanics that burn a lot of DM mental energy and don't do much in play. I've tried streamlining it significantly while adjusting its stats using the excellent book 2024-09-04 23:07:12 +0000 UTC View Post

Stat Block Example

Let’s see if this works, since images are not showing up on mobile. Here’s a picture of the complete, reduced stat block.

What Do We Really Need in a Stat Block?

A D&D stat block needs to find the Goldilocks zone between too much and too little information. I can think of several times in the past few months where I overlooked something during a game, or struggled to make a monster interesting for lack of options.

When I make my own creatures, I include far less info in my notes than I find in the typical stat block. Inspired by a thread over on the EN World forums, I want to do an experiment: What does a minimum viable stat block look like?...

Designing Monster Groups

In my experience as a designer and DM, the best monsters express a clear identity and a tactical challenge in their design. That goes double for monsters you expect to use in a group. Otherwise, a mob of goblins feels the same as a mob of gnolls. What’s the point of changing to a new creature if the game plays the same?

Story as Tactics

The math behind D&D is built to produce fights that last around three rounds. You can think of those three rounds as a three-act structure...

The Great Escape!

As I work on monsters, I'm coming around to the idea that the DM needs an action economy that is distinct from what the players use. Counters have worked well in play. Since 5e doesn't give monsters levels in character classes, there's no real reason to stick to the action/bonus action/move/reaction architecture aside from keeping things simple for DMs.

What's really nice about creating new actions is that we can then have them interact with conditions on our terms, rather than dealing ...

Wizard School of Chronomancy

Time is a fundamental building block of the cosmos, yet even the gods seem reluctant to tamper with its mechanisms. Chronomancers seek to unravel time’s mysteries. Few wizards embrace this school, as its history is littered with stories of mages who met bizarre or terrifying fates. One story tells of a chronomancer who was torn to pieces by invisible creatures in the middle of a marketplace. Another tale details a young mage who aged and turned to dust in a matter of seconds after making a ...

Wizard Subclass Design

Wizard subclasses are difficult to design. The 2014 PHB covers all the schools of magic, the lens D&D traditionally uses to describe a wizard’s specialization. There’s a reason why supplements after the core rules rarely added more wizard subclasses. The key themes present in D&D were already covered.

Theming Wizards

A good subclass has a good theme, but that’s a tricky design goal to hit with a wizard. Most of a wizard’s power comes from their spells. Naturally,...

Creatures and Terrain

I promised the wizard write up this week, but COVID knocked my schedule around a bit. Plus, I've been a bit obsessed with monsters. Did you know that hyenas eat their prey alive? That's creepy and something that is informing my gnoll design work.

Since my gnolls aren't done and I'm building a dungeon out of terrain tiles for my Tuesday night game, I want to talk about terrain today.

Terrain is an overlooked part of running 5e encounters. In my experience, it's easy to get caught u...

Avoiding One Shot Boss Fights

My last post gave an example of a monster feature that made it difficult to shut down a creature before reducing it to half hit points. A few commenters pointed out that such a mechanic would make all boss fights feel the same. Hammer a creature to half hit points, then hit it with spells or effects that shut it down.

Thinking about that reminded me of boss monsters from various video games, especially ones that required specific tricks to defeat them. In 4e, monster groups each had a d...

Monsters and Conditions

Intrepid reader Michael SIxel ran an encounter using the troll (thank you Michael!) and it was overwhelmed by a casting of Tasha's Hideous Laughter (sorry Michael!).

Conditions are an Achilles heel for any monster meant to take on more than one character. An overlord is meant to take on four characters, but it is possible for one spell or special effect to take it out. What can we do to avoid situations where a DM wants a fun fight, but the players options counter that?

From a des...

Monsters, Monsters, Monsters!

I’m almost done with the series on subclass design, with only the wizard to go. To let that series wrap up at the end of next week, I’m dropping in a post on monsters to balance out the schedule. It’s a little preview of the next phase of my work.

While I’ve been churning away on character stuff, I’ve also built a new approach to monsters that drops CR. CR is bad. It doesn’t measure anything useful. It scales badly. It mangles the action economy. It pushes monster design to ...

Warlock Death Pact

Death comes to us all, but some warlocks seek to begin that relationship much earlier in their lives. Warlocks who take on Death are rare. They come to this power only after an encounter with Death itself, the entity responsible for shepherding souls to the afterlife. Sometimes in going about its duty, Death encounters a soul it takes a liking to. Death might see a kindred spirit, or perhaps a mortal does some service to Death to aid it in its duties. Whatever the case, those who enter a pact...

Warlock Subclass Design

From its first appearance in 3e’s Complete Arcane, the warlock is one of those rare D&D concepts that graduated from a supplemental book into the core game. Back in 3e the warlock was cool because its magical abilities were almost entirely at will powers. It was wild in 2004 to see a class that could use magic without any limits. These days, it’s old hat, but at the time it was a radical departure from D&D’s roots.

That original warlock merged with another 3e clas...

Sorcerer Light Bearer

Light bearers are chosen, rather than made. Sometimes, the life-giving energies of the positive plane, the realm from which all life force emerges, reacts to the rise of death, shadow, and doom. Whether guided by some intellect or acting as a natural counterbalance, the stuff of that realm reaches out to mark mortals with its power. Those marked with this energy are sorcerers called light bearers. They are attuned to the power of the positive energy plane and can wield it to fortify others an...