What if your PHB had actions instead of spells?

[K]

Ok, any time you cracked open a DnD PHB, you probably noticed at some point that there were spells in there. A lot of spells. Like, more than half the book and discretely broken into almost a thousand separate spell effects/mechanics.

So here is the idea: what if you switched out the spells for actions that all players could use? Rather than doing what most games do and maybe include mechanics for 40-50 types of actions crossing 4-5 subsystems, you instead fill the book with a thousand discretely defined actions/mechanics.

You make it so that the DM never has to ass-pull a mechanic ever again. You provide nearly complete guidelines to the limits of a character's abilities. You free up the DM to do the only thing they are usually good for, a decent story.

Better game or worse?

[OgreBattle]

Much better game and what a new edition of D&D would actually be.

Don't think you need 1000 discreet actions, maybe a dozen that can stack for over a thousand combinations. Reading 1000 actions is kind of increasing the spellbook problem, if I am interpreting you correctly.


My "master list of conditions and modifiers" started after I saw how Shadowrun laid things out

How many fiddly modifiers does my game have/need? The list I've got so far:

Static Modifiers (static bonuses)
Training: Untrained, trained, expert
Attribute: Various numbers
Level,: add level/2 for skills that scale slowly, add level for skills that scale steadily
Morale: Fear, courage
Elemental/Material weak/res: fire attack vs fire weak structure, silver vs werewolf
Tool bonus: High quality sword, high quality lockpicks

Positional/Dimensional
-Cover (quarter, half, total)
-Range (short, medium, long, extreme)
-Reach (giant vs dwarf, cavalry vs infantry without reach weapons, high/low ground)

Situational Modifiers (minor is a modifier, major is reroll)
A minor advantage/disadvantage gives you a +/- 2 modifier, a major advantage/disadvantage gives you a reroll. Two minors stack into 1 major.
**Not sure if I should make that two tiered or just keep it simple as a reroll...

Advantage
Positional advantage: Target is flanked or unable to move out of harms way (slippery footing, stuck)
Cognitive advantage: Target is surprised or unable to perceive you

Disadvantage
Cognitive: unable to perceive or focus on target
Physical: restrained from acting on target

Conditions

Shaken
*takes a -1 penalty on attack rolls, defense, skill checks, and ability checks.
Staggered
*takes a -1 penalty on attack rolls, defense, skill checks, and ability checks, moves at 1/2 speed, cannot run
Wounded
* a condition that happens when you have a wound
Unconscious
*fall prone
*no sensory awareness
Dead
* Is dead

Fatigued: Counts as shaken
Exhausted: counts as staggered


Mobility conditions
Checked
*Move at ½ speed towards source of checking
Halted
*Cannot move towards source of halting
Repulsed
*Must move from line of sight of source of repulsion at combat speed or greater.
Anchored X
*Cannot move X distance away from anchoring point, if point is moved you move with it
*Anchoring is caused by a physical restraint (chained, grappled) or magical effect

Physical Restraint or posture conditions
Restrained
*character grants advantage
*suffers disadvantage on attack rolls, physical saving throws, physical skill/ability checks
*cannot charge or run without risk of falling prone

Arm (tool limb) disabled
*cannot use limb for actions

Leg (mobility limb) disabled
*can only move 5ft with a move+main action

Prone
* Attacks have advantage against you at short range
* count as one size category smaller beyond short range (harder to hit with ranged attacks, easier to find cover)


Other conditions

Dominated
*Lose control of character.

Jolted
*Drop held objects

Lured
*Must move towards source of luring at combat speed or faster.

Sensory conditions
Having a sense disabled causes automatic failure in checks that use those senses. Losing one’s primary sense (for humans it’s sight, for bats its hearing, etc.) also inflicts further penalties

Losing primary senses:
*character grants advantage to physical attacks
*suffers disadvantage on initiative, attack rolls, physical saving throws, relevant skill/ability checks
*cannot charge or run without check to see if they fall prone

Blind (sight)
Deaf (hearing)
Anosmic (scent)
Numb (touch):
Confused (mental): character grants advantage to all attacks (mental included) against them

Another aspect is environmental interactions, like setting a barn on fire vs dragonsetting a castle on fire. Dropping a stalagtite vs collapsing big ben over.

[Foxwarrior]

The nice thing about a big section of actions no character can do all of (like a spell list, that's restricted by both level and class) is that you can jump into the game without reading the entire 300 page PHB. I guess there can still be some partitioning going on with a giant action section that includes detailed rules for how to use pitons correctly and incorrectly, but not quite as much.

[Username17]

Shadowrun is instructive both as a set of Dos and Don'ts. Instead of sprawling page filling bullshit, individual powers simply tell you what they do. Consider Spells, Adept Powers, and Matrix Programs: two out of three ain't bad? All of those ability sets fit into a reasonable amount of page space and cover a decent breadth of conceptual space. Unfortunately, the Matrix Programs fit into the Hacking rules that are hot garbage. But if the Hacking rules actually worked the Program list wouldn't have to be any longer.

It's entirely possible to write a set of powers for Druids to have that are theirs exclusively and differentiate them from other characters and put them in the PHB without having that fill up most of the PHB (3e) or leaving them with an incomplete and limited pool of available actions (4e). You just have to write the abilities in a succinct fashion and avoid rambling on for pages about jade circlets and bat guano.

And Shadowrun shows us that you can write these ability sets in a reasonable and compact way regardless of whether the overall system works or doesn't work. Maybe Monks are still shitty and worthless, maybe they are functional party members, but their ability set can still be conveyed in a reasonable number of pages either way.

3rd edition D&D had 13 classes in the PHB. You'd want more than that. Maybe even like 20 classes. But you can still give twenty classes a reasonable list of spells and powers if you write them in a succinct fashion. five or six pages could have nearly a hundred powers per class if you weren't such a meandering space filler about it - and that could fill less than half the book even if you did have twenty classes.

The 4e choice to have only 8 classes was inexcusable, but those classes also didn't need to be twelve pages long. You could have gotten a lot more content in a lot less space if the class and power templates hadn't literally been designed to use up as much space as possible. Twice the classes using half the page space each that nevertheless had more than double the accessible ability content seems like a fine layout for a PHB.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

3rd edition D&D had 13 classes in the PHB. You'd want more than that. Maybe even like 20 classes.

Getting a bit off-topic, but why are that many classes desirable?

[OgreBattle]

3rd edition D&D had 13 classes in the PHB. You'd want more than that. Maybe even like 20 classes.

Getting a bit off-topic, but why are that many classes desirable?

10+ power schedule mechanics of varying complexity to satisfy many kinds of players is a usual reason: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53893

[Ice9]

Also, people are going to want some choice of theme within a power schedule and vice-versa. So say five schedules, three choices of each, and a few oddballs - that's nearly 20.

[Username17]

Also, people are going to want some choice of theme within a power schedule and vice-versa. So say five schedules, three choices of each, and a few oddballs - that's nearly 20.

When you consider the combinatorials of character identity, classplosion comes on quick. So imagine that you have three questions:

• "Does your character wear a helmet or a floppy hat?"
  "Does your character cast spells or swing a blade?"
  "Does your character come from the city or the woods?"

It's easy enough to imagine people giving any combination of answers to those three questions, which in turn would in turn key out to the classes of Cleric, Shaman, Fighter, Berserker, Wizard, Druid, Rogue, and Ranger. And you could easily imagine adding a fourth or fifth binary question and getting the key out to 16 or 32 potential answers. And that's before we get into table flipping premises like the player who insists on swinging a blade and casting spells or the player who insists on wearing a floppy hat and a helmet. And further, that's without getting into second order questions like whether a player actually prefers bows to swords or what kind of spells they want to cast.

Truly, some of the niches you're going to want to offer without helmeted and floppy hatted options, or without blade or spell choices or whatever. Indeed, some of your magical options are going to be relatively stand alone - so like you won't necessarily want Necromancers or Illusionists to have nearby choices in the key. Splitting up wizards into little pieces is something you're going to want to do for game balance regardless of character concept coverage.

Which means that even at twenty classes, you're still going to have a lot of space for players to ask "But what if I..." and that means you have plenty of room for expansion material. Bone knights and angakkuq to be necromancers who opted for blades or the woods instead of spells or the city like the core rules necromancer could appear in expansion material. And that's before we get classes like the ninja and samurai who are literally just the same basic answers but with an additional question added "Are you the orientalised version of this character concept?"

The point is that any particular number of classes you choose to include is a compromise in the downward direction, and that therefore having less (or even not having more) classes than the 3e PHB feels like an insult. And it is.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

We all saw what happens with Bo9S: The neckbeards bitched to no end because fighters weren't useless enough.

For a game to "feel" like dnd, it needs to segregate players in Haves and Have Nots.

Last year when I tested my fantasy heartbreaker, even if my players had fun, some key comments showed that game was by no means a dnd substitute in their eyes... and indeed, the "mage" players complained that the table's "fighter" was doing too much stuff.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I thing I worry about is layout and ease of use. If I have a 500 page rulebook that is actually filled to the brim with rules, then my puny GM brain will not be able to contain all of that. The majority of it? Sure, if we hypothetically assume that the rules themselves are well-written and easy to comprehend and extrapolate from. To be fair, this isn't terribly different from learning a complex new system, just with more complexity. I think an SRD would work wonders for this sort of concept. And every tabletop game, but we don't live in a perfect world.

[Sigil]

Sounds like it's time to offer a box-set where each class is a deck of cards at that point.

[pragma]

Sounds like it's time to offer a box-set where each class is a deck of cards at that point.

That honestly seems like a really good monetization strategy to me. Allow players to buy in cheaper by getting a class deck. Even better, encourage them to deface it over the course of the game so that you buy in over and over.

[Sigil]

Have a basics set that has a full suite of equipment cards and generic actions, etc; but then also have individual class card sets, bestiary card sets, a GM card set, and offer a comprehensive all-in-one box set. Every player is expected to bring to the table at a minimum the basic set and their class cards.

[Emerald]

Don't think you need 1000 discreet actions, maybe a dozen that can stack for over a thousand combinations. Reading 1000 actions is kind of increasing the spellbook problem, if I am interpreting you correctly.

The 4e choice to have only 8 classes was inexcusable, but those classes also didn't need to be twelve pages long. You could have gotten a lot more content in a lot less space if the class and power templates hadn't literally been designed to use up as much space as possible. Twice the classes using half the page space each that nevertheless had more than double the accessible ability content seems like a fine layout for a PHB.

Someone actually tried to de-bloat 4e years ago by compressing and consolidating all the redundant powers for a bunch of the classes. They only got through the fighter and wizard before giving up for whatever reason (probably dying of boredom), but they did manage to get those powers from ~12 pages down to 1 page of rules and 1 page of powers apiece, and do so in a combinatoric way that led to having more "powers" overall.

Combining something like that with the "combinatoric class identity" idea seems like it might be a good approach. You make a bunch of lists of base abilities and things that modify those abilities sorted by power source (Arcane/Divine/Shadow/etc.), combat role (Tank/Buffer/Artillery/etc.), theme (Weapons Dude/Fire Dude/Holy Dude/etc.), and whatever else you think is important, then give classes access to sets of them: Marshal gets Martial/Tank/Buffer/Weapons Dude, Rogue gets Martial/Skirmisher/Sneaky Dude/Tricky Dude, Bard gets Arcane/Buffer/Mind Controller/Tricky Dude, Ranger gets Martial/Nature/Skirmisher/Weapons Dude, and so on.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

That Wizard spellcasting stuff looks similar to how I was considering handling creating Pokemon moves. Thanks for posting it. It could probably be a bit more expansive, but I like the concept.

[Foxwarrior]

A combinatoric explosion of powers is pretty neat for character customization, but bad for tactical variety. Take Fireball and Lightning Bolt for example (pretending for a moment that they do good damage). When fighting normal or electricity-immune enemies, you toss out fireballs, putting your spheres willy-nilly on large concentrations of forces; but if you encounter some fire-immune enemies you have to switch to looking for interesting starting points for lines for you to walk to if you want to blast everyone to death at once. If you know Fireball and Lightningball instead then your tactical considerations are the same in all sorts of fights.

(I'm pretty sure more people would like to play a fire wizard or a lightning wizard than would like to play a fire and lightning wizard though, but if you get rid of the proliferation of immunities it's still easier to make a lightning wizard with effects that they sometimes want attached to more and less awkward shapes in a non-combinatoric system.)

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

That makes sense, but wouldn't you want to have a variety of powers anyway? If I could make my own powers, why would I make a copy of something I already have with a different color?

[Ancient History]

I tried to fiddle something like this in Space Madness!, although I don't think I quite managed to make it work. If I ever do my long-threatened fighting game, I would literally have martial arts styles unlock new actions that you can use in and out of combat, with at least some sort of kiho or jutsu flavor in some kind of organized "design your own" fashion.

[deaddmwalking]

When you consider the combinatorials of character identity, classplosion comes on quick. So imagine that you have three questions:

• "Does your character wear a helmet or a floppy hat?"
  "Does your character cast spells or swing a blade?"
  "Does your character come from the city or the woods?"

That implies that hat type defines your character in a meaningful way.

Helmet + Spells or Helmet + Blade could be 'Martial Cleric' and Floppy Hat + Spells or Floppy Hat + Blade could be Wizard - at least, as long as the character class has options that let them develop their abilities.

As an example, our system has 'wizard' but you can take a talent that lets you cast spells through your sword and swording wizards are a thing. If you don't take that you cast your spells at range and such - but either way you're a wizard.

I think the difference between a wilderness background and a city background is a pretty silly basis for a different character. Wood Rogue and City Rogue are both rogue - you just get different sets of skills that reflect your background. The same is true for any other class. Fighter from the woods doesn't HAVE to be a Ranger - or maybe it's fair to say that RANGER doesn't have to be a different class. Either way you're a Warrior, and one has the WILDERNESS PACKAGE and one has the HEAVY ARMOR package. Either way, that does't REQUIRE they actually be called different class names.

[Whatever]

So here is the idea: what if you switched out the spells for actions that all players could use? Rather than doing what most games do and maybe include mechanics for 40-50 types of actions crossing 4-5 subsystems, you instead fill the book with a thousand discretely defined actions/mechanics.

I know everyone is in here talking about classes and combat abilities, but you clearly meant more than that. Something like this?

Persuade the King
[Social][Friendly]
The party makes a diplomacy check. On a success, an influential person (such as a Queen, High Priest, or Guildmaster) will provide appropriate aid for a given task, or against a given threat. On a failure, the target does not become hostile, but they will not provide aid and cannot be asked again until circumstances worsen.

Construct Foritifications
[Manual][Materials][Tools]
Using manual labor, or appropriate magical substitutes, the party fortifies a given location. This requires both appropriate materials (such as relevant amounts of timber, stone, or mortar), and appropriate tools (such as axes, shovels, and trowels). Success is automatic given the necessary time. The fortifications provide an Entrenchment Bonus as listed in the Mass Combat rules.

Harvest Timber
[Manual][Tools]
Using appropriate tools (such as a saw or axe), the player chops down a tree and cuts the wood such that it is usable for fires or Rough Fortifications. With a saw mill, the wood can be processed for use in any building.

[Foxwarrior]

Hat type and city vs woods seem like silly questions to base your classes on, sure, but they map to actual core D&D ones pretty well.

But in a post-Tome game, things like whether your armor is called "full plate", "mage armor", or "monk AC Bonus" are comparatively minor.

...I guess if you're committed to a No-Customization paradigm (so you can't just decide whether your character is a sneaky necromancer or horde necromancer through class option picks, spell choices, ACFs, feats, skills, ability scores, templates, multiclassing, or other such things), I think I'd make my D&D combinatorial more like this:

"Does your character use Magic Magic, Miracle Magic, Nature Magic, or Music Magic?"
"Is your character mousy or bulky?" (I almost said "sneaky" but probably everyone should be similarly good at stealth)
"Is your character selfish or a team player?" (this one's not quite right, I'm not even sure which one a minion master should be counted as)

And then only increase the combinatorial by adding new options to Magic type.

But yeah, Whatever's right, we're derailing the topic pretty hard away from the less trod ground K was probably trying to talk about. It's just harder to discuss having a hundred pages of well-defined actions because each set of a few has to go into some kind of new system (like fighting fires or being the host of a tournament) and it's all very abstract if you don't list what systems those should be.

[Chamomile]

Floppy vs iron and city vs woods sound weird because they're phrased flippantly, but "is wilderness themed y/n" is what distinguishes the druid from the wizard and cleric, the barbarian from the fighter, and the ranger from the paladin (and from whatever arcane knight class you decide to land on, there's never been a specific name or exact fluff for that one that really caught on). And that one's actually a three-way, because a lot of the city/wilderness pairs also have a temple themed equivalent, and sometimes there's a temple equivalent to a wilderness or city guy that doesn't have a city or wilderness guy, respectively.

We all saw what happens with Bo9S: The neckbeards bitched to no end because fighters weren't useless enough.

2006 was a long time ago. I'm sure some of the players from back then are still around, but not enough of them to make worrying about their response a worthwhile use of your time, even from the completely cynical perspective of aiming for maximum market penetration/profit.

[Foxwarrior]

You know, why don't I take a shot at it then...

Combat system: Killing people, not killing people.
Climbing system: Free climbing, jumping, using ropes and pitons and crampons and other things that probably end in "ons".
Object destruction system: Destroying rings of power, knocking down walls, identifying which walls are load-bearing, burning things to a crisp, shards of glass and clouds of dust flying everywhere, oops you blew the dam.
Wandering around system: Foraging for food, noticing traps, spotting ambushes, tracking.
Crafting system: Blacksmiths, carpentry, magic items, reagents.
Sneaking system: Being quiet, dashing past people
Talking to people system: I think my favorite for these so far have actually been skill challenge-like - the rolls don't matter and the DCs are made up, but instead of making one roll and being done with the chat, you have to come up with four different reasons why the person should do the thing, and it seems a lot more like a conversation that way.
Knowing things system: Remembering things off the cuff, looking things up, being used as a vessel for the DM's exposition.

You know, Gempunks has most of these things, with rules mostly available to everyone (the philosophy was that gating basic mortal actions behind class features and feats was nerfing martials, but I want your martials to be action heroes) but of course it's a Shonen/Hollywood-style world so most of the systems are pretty simple and it still doesn't eat up anything close to 100 pages on that.

[czernebog]

Some friends and I have done a little bit of design for a heartbreaker-ish system, and one thing that came out of that was the notion that questions like "wears a floppy hat or an armored helmet?" should be defined with reference to your game's setting. You can start with a set of more abstract "one from each column" sort of combinatorial grid, like:

• Social background. Characters have a primary social background that they can cultivate to develop access to resources and influence over other characters. Depending on the political factions or NPC organizations in the game, there may be more or fewer backgrounds to choose from.
  • Aristocracy: The child of new money or member of an old, respectable family. Usually has access to material resources. May have social connections to fall back on.
  • Underworld: Raised by the streets or turned to a life of crime from some other path. May have access to material resources. Usually has social connections to various strata of society.
  • Wanderer: A perpetual outsider, either by upbringing or by choice. Calls upon the legacy of this background to negotiate social challenges.
• Martial background
  • Duelist: Fights according to some sort of code in a ritualized setting.
  • Soldier: Student of logistics, tactics, and the grand melee.
  • Stalker: Hunter of big game or people. Knows how to stalk, ensnare, poison, and kill.
• Magical background. Note the RPS-like interaction (Phantasm > Sorcery > Witchcraft > Phantasm).
  • Phantasm: Bargains with or commands otherworldly creatures like spirits and demons to achieve a variety of effects. The energies of sorcery are the natural element of summoned entities, which make the unwary sorcerer their plaything.
  • Sorcery: Channels power through their own body to achieve direct effects upon the world. Raw sorcerous power overwhelms the subtle workings of witchcraft.
  • Witchcraft: Refines and manipulates magical energy invested in places and things. Only mystical tradition capable of producing magical artifacts. Phantasms are bedeviled by witchcraft, which produces a fusion of the mystical and the physical that they cannot cope with.

There could be long ability lists associated with each of these choices. Then you hang actual setting labels on them, select subsets from the general ability lists, and build classes from the result.

For example, a vaguely Arthurian-esque setting might have only one way to ground each of the social background options (aristocracy: member of the king's court, underworld: rural villager, wanderer: from beyond the shores of Albion), with more diversity for martial background (duelist: knight errant, pugilist; soldier: man-at-arms, mercenary; stalker: hunter of game, assassin of people). This puts some meat on the bones of your n-dimensional combinatorial grid, and you fill its cells by picking and choosing from the ability lists that are associated with the abstract categories. You can select abilities to differentiate between sub-category choices thematically. ("Hunters and assassins can both set snares, but only hunters are really good at tracking dragons.") You can use the setting to justify blank spots in your grid if you want to. ("This is a game about knights and knaves. You can be a royal huntsman, but I don't want to spend time coming up with a class progression for pugilists on the king's court.")

This does a lot of question-begging, in that it's a system for generating setting-specific heartbreakers, rather than an actual heartbreaker system you can sit down and play, but it did provide a way to design setting elements in tandem with play mechanics and options for PC customization. Done right, this could provide a template for churning out new setting books every 12 months. And I suppose you could use it to power an RPG generator app of some sort, which just now sounds like yet another fun project I might get started on and then never finish or bring to the light of day.

[K]

So here is the idea: what if you switched out the spells for actions that all players could use? Rather than doing what most games do and maybe include mechanics for 40-50 types of actions crossing 4-5 subsystems, you instead fill the book with a thousand discretely defined actions/mechanics.

I know everyone is in here talking about classes and combat abilities, but you clearly meant more than that. Something like this?

Persuade the King
[Social][Friendly]
The party makes a diplomacy check. On a success, an influential person (such as a Queen, High Priest, or Guildmaster) will provide appropriate aid for a given task, or against a given threat. On a failure, the target does not become hostile, but they will not provide aid and cannot be asked again until circumstances worsen.

Close.

So let's take the first example. To make it like a spell, we need to make it more specific. Let's say that that we rename it to be "Request A Knight From the King." Then we give it the same care and attention that someone gave Planar Binding

That gives us a budget of 532 words (ten for basic descriptors like Range and Duration).

With that many words, we could definitely define how our game handles requesting a knight or hero character for limited aid during an adventure, and we can do it better because we don't have to add occultism mechanics for semi-optional magic circles.

Then you basically do that for everything that people do in adventures. You can even just do Planar Binding by making it a call function to Request a Knight from the King and adding thirty to fifty words about the the flavor reskin.