#statblocks

for a while I thought there was a game that answered that question perfectly, and it was called Dungeon Crawl Classics. I don’t hold that belief now (Zocchi dice…), but we can loot an important principle from its couple of good design decisions:

1. Every player gets one really good toy. DCC’s chief virtue is that it found a way to make Fighters a fun choice, not just the choice that’s less mentally taxing than being a spellcaster, and the way they make that work is by giving the role an inherently textured core mechanic called Mighty Deeds of Arms. Instead of giving them a flat ascending to-hit bonus that’s just numerically better than the other classes get, Fighters in DCC roll a separate Deed die that scales with level alongside the attack roll and add the Deed die to the to-hit roll and damage, and if the Deed die comes up 3 or higher they also pull off a maneuver that improves their immediate tactical situation.

Swashbuckling chandelier swings, disarms, feints, coating your foe in lamp oil, and basically anything Jackie Chan has ever done besides just hit guys count as Deeds, and the only things you need to make them happen are your own imagination, GM fiat, and the will of the dice—just so long as the effect isn’t “do more damage.”

Altogether, the method requires even less bookkeeping than your standard D&D fighter, while being way more versatile and giving the player something to actively play with and find new implementations for every time their class role is relevant.

Spellcasters in DCC similarly put some wrinkles in the Vancian procedures by getting rid of conventional spell levels, turning each spell into a range of effects keyed to the results of a casting check, and letting casters burn their physical stats temporarily to pump up a single casting attempt—and that’s before we get into mutations and faustian pacts. The role falls into some of the same pitfalls it always has: spellcaster players have to juggle a lot more functions than fighters or thieves and at the top of their game they’re still going to make wilder shit happen than the other classes, though it balances out a bit by making casting itself a higher-risk affair.

The trouble with DCC’s classes is it tries to spread about 2.75 really good player toys across five classes, and when it comes to thief stuff it can’t really come up with anything all that good.

So Digression 1: What makes a really good player toy? How do we fill out those empty spaces in the party roster with cool stuff for players to use that isn’t a headache to keep track of?

In my humble onion, a good player toy needs to be flexible, haptically engaging, low-bookkeeping, and freely usable but not strictly predictable. To be flexible, a player needs to be able to apply the toy in a range of play situations—getting too attached to pre-defined mechanical effects is toxic to flexibility. A haptically engaging toy prompts the player to engage with something physically at the table to use it; die rolls are the most obvious but there’s lots of options ranging from the nifty to the balls-out bizarre.

There’s also some mechanics that I think are inherently more satisfying because the things they make you do with numbers has kind of an inherent pleasure that feels kinesthetic—I get warm, kind of stimmy feelings thinking about roll-high-but-not-too-high dice pool systems.

Low-bookkeeping toys are pretty self-explanatory; if it requires resource management or tracking multiple modifiers across different locations on the character sheet, those elements need to be doing extra work to make themselves memorable. The Goblin Laws of Gaming’s spellcasting system introduces a bookkeeping element in that you have to track your caster’s accumulated Dooms, but any caster only ever gets 3, the last one is pretty final, and they all translate into memorable moments of play.

When I say that a good toy is freely usable but unpredictable, I mean that the mechanic should tempt the player to use it often—because it’s powerful, because the results are exciting or cool—and temper that eagerness to toy with it less with anxiety over whether they’re going to blow one of their limited uses on a whiff or a no-sell when they could need it later and more with the question of whether it might blow up in their faces this time. Spellcasters in DCC or GLOG are way more equipped to cast all day long compared to their D&D brethren, and that leaves caster players in a position to have more fun with their role, but there’s always the lingering possibility a spell might pop off wrong and now you’ve got a lobster hand. Even when a PC gimmick doesn’t work in the player’s favor, it should make the next moment more exciting. Non-events are poison to gameplay.

Something to keep in mind in reference to player toys: nothing obligates you to make these toys all fit into a single coherent reference frame or “preserve game balance.” What you’re looking to do here is create what game devs over on the digital side of things call Incomparables—play elements that you can’t meaningfully “balance” because you can’t meaningfully convert one into the terms of another.

All of this is building up to point 2. Monsters are self-contained toys for the GM to play with. Like how you’re not obligated to have player toys all fit together neatly into a balanced and 100% shared language of play, monsters can and should operate on their own distinct mechanical plane, and not every monster will be able to fit within the same framework of rules matter.

By that token, I strongly encourage anyone looking to break out of the framework of play you’ll find in a WotC book to ditch as much of the content  in your statblock that carries over into the character sheet as you can. Give ‘em hit dice and hp totals, sure, give ‘em an AC rating and I won’t complain, to-hit bonuses even if you’re feeling nasty, but skip the ability scores and saving throws and proficiencies, and remember that there’s a special circle in hell for designers who give monsters big piles of feats that you have to dig back and forth through the damn book to find and make spot play decisions around (admittedly that’s not the problem it used to be back when 3e was what everyone was doing, but damned if I’m going to let anyone forget that it was a thing).

That sounds like heresy, but here’s the wild thing: there’s a whole armature of play to D&D that nobody uses and it would make the whole affair so, so much simpler if we did, because D&D is built to be a player-facing system, despite appearances. The original mechanic’s been buried under ability score modifiers, saving throws, attack rolls, and skill DCs, but it’s still there, baked into the dice and the stat spread.  Roll a d20 and compare the result against the relevant ability score; if it’s equal to or lower than the stat in question, you done did the thing. High rolls within the margin of success are better than low ones; use this to determine who comes out on top in a contested action when there’s a tie.

Bam, you’re done. That’s your core task resolution mechanic. The great thing about this is that it takes a huge amount of pressure off the GM to pin down extraneous numbers. Your monster doesn’t need an AC score, just a penalty it applies to a player’s attack check. Same with to-hit bonuses, just applied to the roll the player’s making to avoid or resist the attacks it has. Same with exceptional (or exceptionally shitty) base abilities like strength, speed, and intelligence. You don’t need to so much as think the phrase “Passive Perception.” All of that lets you pare down a monster’s statblock to a pretty spare couple of lines that you can fit on a notecard, leaving you room and time to come up with mechanical texture that’s actually fun.