So, I am not on MCDM's Patreon, so I don't have access to the playtest rules for their new, still-unnamed RPG. I pledged some money on Backerkit to get the rules PDFs when they come out, but unless I throw some more money their way to become a Patron, I'll be getting their playtest stuff second-hand (unless they throw the test open to the general public, which could happen but will probably only come later in the process - for a game that isn't due to come out until 2025).
In a previous post, I talked about the impressions I got from the video of James Introcaso (MCDM's lead designer, and kind of second face of the company after founder Matt Colville) running an encounter for two guys from The Character Sheet.
There are many videos talking about how this game might be particularly appealing to people who have only played 5th Edition, and while that's technically not true for me, it is close to the truth, as my experience with other TTRPGs is limited.
(Incidentally, I'll likely be digging deeper into Stillfleet in the coming year, but need to finish reading the core rulebook.)
Still, what others have identified is that MCDM's game seems aimed at doing a better job than 5E does at being the sort of game that 5E players want to play - in other words, to shed the vestiges of older D&D editions that Colville believes are only there for the sake of nostalgia, and instead embrace the style of story-forward, heroic adventure that today's D&D players are into.
As a contrast, Colville argues that D&D began its life as something more akin to survival horror - a dungeon was a dark and terrifying place where death lurked at every corner, and where having ten-foot poles to trigger traps before you stepped into that particular hallway was crucial, and where tracking rations and torches was part of the challenge of surviving the dungeon's challenges.
Players these days, though, are looking for a chance to fight monsters in epic encounters and as part of a cinematic narrative, and he feels that there are several ways in which 5E, and indeed most D&D-derived RPGs, fall short of this.
In my mind, there are two key things that distinguish the game from 5E - they aren't the only differences, but they're what I think are the real cores of how this game should feel different.
The first is the removal of attack rolls, which has a few cascading effects:
The good thing is that, no matter how your turn goes, you'll at least accomplish something. That said, there are exceptions: for example, Banes, which are kind of the equivalent of disadvantage, require you to reduce your rolls (including damage rolls) by a number of d4s equal to the banes (you might get one from being webbed up and another from being poisoned, or something). Thus, if you have a very unlucky roll, you could wind up subtracting so much from your damage to reduce it to zero - say, if your attack usually hits for 2d6+3, and you roll snake eyes, but then also have two banes and get a 2 and a 3, that means zero damage. But that's pretty rare (people who have tested the game say that at this stage it's rare to get a net boon or bane that's more than 2d4 - any boons you get cancel out a bane, and vice versa).
The idea here is to remove the frustration of waiting fifteen minutes to come around to your turn and then missing with your attacks. And that appears to be working.
But there are a couple things this also requires you to re-think.
Monsters also don't have to roll to hit - which means player health will be dropping constantly. Now, classes each have their own Triggered Action, and some of these can help you avoid damage. A Tactician, for example, can halve the damage they take from an attack, or the damage a nearby ally takes. They can also spend 1 Focus (and we'll get into these resources in a bit) to further reduce that damage with a roll (I believe it was something like 1d6+3, which might be based on their Might score - bumping it to 4 could mean some more damage reduction). In other words, it's possible to reduce that damage to zero with lucky rolls. But, like a reaction, you only get one such triggered action per round, so it becomes a tactical choice on when you want to use it - probably best to save it for if the big scary boss monster hits you.
The other implication of this is that, with no more concept of Armor Class, armor doesn't actually make you harder to hit anymore. Instead, it becomes a flat increase to your Hit Points.
Mathematically, of course, AC is basically going to put a (below-1) coefficient on the damage you take on average - if your AC is 18 and the monster has a +7 to hit, that means that more or less you'll be taking 50% as much damage. You could just give yourself twice as much health and would take, on average, the same amount of time for the monster to knock you to zero HP.
If attack rolls were the only way to take damage, that is.
See, I think there's room here for mechanics that can make up for this, but in 5E, you can have a character who is better-equipped to handle different kinds of attacks. In my long-running game where I played an Eldritch Knight, he was extremely well-equipped to face off against foes that made attacks, as I could boost his AC to 27 with the Shield spell - a creature with a +9 to hit would only be hitting me on a roll of 18 or higher. But his Dexterity was 10, so something like a Fireball or a Red Dragon's Breath would usually do full damage against me (this is why I also had Absorb Elements, but that would be less useful against something that did, say, Necrotic damage). But my friend's Monk, of course, had a lower AC (even with Bracers of Defense he probably only had an AC of 18 or 19) but when that Fireball came, he'd be extremely well-equipped to handle it, with a high chance to succeed on the save and, thanks to Evasion, taking zero damage when he did.
In other words, there's some nuance that is lost here.
But I think there are ways to add this back in.
For example, the Tactician's Parry Triggered Maneuver/Action/whatever is, I believe, based on weapon attacks - I don't think you can parry a spell. I could imagine the Elementalist (who seems to be a kind of Wizard/Sorcerer analogue with a focus on stuff like fireballs and lightning bolts) has a Triggered Action that deflects or otherwise reduces incoming magical damage, you might find different heroes shining in different scenarios - which is good for a game with classes.
It should also be noted that not all Triggered Actions are defensive - the Fury (MCDM's Barbarian analogue) instead gets to attack back against the foe that hit them - which should account for significantly more damage dealt. And, of course, killing the enemies faster is a tried-and-true way to reduce the overall damage you take.
Also notable is that your Recoveries, which are the main way you regain hit points and seem to be the one major limiting factor on how long you can go on adventuring without resting, will heal you for a flat 1/3 of your maximum HP. And when you consider that, raising your HP is, in fact, more or less identical to reducing the damage you take, because we can kind of think of damage purely in terms of the fraction of your health that is reduced. (This is not the case in D&D, where healing is stuck at relatively flat rates - a standard Healing Potion is always going to heal you for 2d4+2, which is about 7, regardless of whether you're a level 1 Wizard with 8 HP or a level 10 Barbarian with 105, meaning that the relative value of damage reduction - such as via Rage - will vary greatly depending on your healing-to-HP ratio).
What we have yet to discover is how AoE damage will affect this, and also how things will look at higher levels.
2d6 takes the place of the d20 when it comes to resolving checks and such in this game, but it's also the standard damage of attacks, whether with a longsword or a dagger. In the Backerkit sample Tactician, we see that their Basic Attack, called "Precise Attack," deals 2d6+Reason damage (Reason is essentially Intelligence, and Tacticians automatically start with 3s in Might and Reason, and can choose two 2s and two 1s to put into the other four stats.) If you pick "Cleave" as a Stratagem (a menu of options for special attacks that Tacticians get at level 1) you'll deal 2d6+MGT (Might) damage, which, we'll note, is the same damage as our Precise Attack given that we have 3s in both stats (though Cleave will also hit a an additional nearby enemy for damage equal to our Might, and it also generates 1 focus - which makes it seem strictly better than Precise Attack unless I'm missing something).
Now, it appears that the Shadow (Rogue equivalent) is also doing 2d6 plus some modifier - and these modifiers can be altered by Kits, which come with their own special abilities (though these can only be used once per encounter).
As of yet, the only testing that has been available to the public is at level 1. And, frankly, this level 1 stuff looks quite exciting and interesting. But I don't really have a great sense of how things will scale. In addition to Boons and Banes, we'll also be seeing Impact Dice, which are d8s - meaning that with two impact dice, they're now contributing more on average to your damage than your base 2d6. The system so far appears to only use d4s, d6s, and d8s (meaning I really need to invest in some of those pill-shaped d4s). But I don't know how damage is going to scale up at higher levels - I'm not sure the designers have even cracked that yet.
Moving on, though:
The other big signature mechanic for this game will be the different resources used by each class. We saw Tacticians use Focus, Shadows use Insight, and Furies use Rage. We can also pretty confidently guess that Talents will use Strain, but likely it will work differently than it does in their 5E version of the class.
In I believe all three of the testable classes, these resources go away when combat ends - meaning that they only play a role in combat. Then again, this is a combat-heavy system. What I've seen praised about this is that it does make for interesting choices in a fight. In D&D's attrition-based resource system, the first round of combat is usually the one in which the most exciting stuff is happening. The "Nova" is a popular strategy that takes my aforementioned "killing enemies faster is a great way to reduce incoming damage" to its logical endpoint, ideally burning through resources quickly to wipe out half the foes in a fight and make the rest of it go much easier.
Heroic Resources are designed to make this kind of play less likely. Insight, for the Shadow (the Rogue equivalent,) is generated, I believe, by using certain Insight-generating attacks. Assassinate, one of the core Insight-spenders, costs 5 Insight, meaning that you'll need to take some time building up to it before you can let loose with this big attack, which I think adds two impact dice to your damage (so 2d6+2d8+some modifier).
So, already this requires some ramping up, meaning that the fight gets more exciting in the later rounds. I also think that by using resources that go away when combat ends, you're incentivized to unleash your big moves to finish the fight off - if all your Insight is going away at the end of combat, you'll want to blow your big Assassinate ability even if it's just on that last surviving Kobold. And that means that you're not conserving and doing minimal damage just because you want to save your big stuff and figure one monster isn't going to be dealing much damage to you.
By letting resources drain at the end of combat, as well, it doesn't incentivize keeping a monster alive to torment long enough to build up resources for the next fight.
Instead, accruing Victories empowers you for future fights. Each time you complete a combat encounter, or do other various victorious things like solving a tough puzzle or navigating a deadly trap, you get a Victory. These will then let you start off future fights with some resources (likely for most classes, an amount of your resource equal to your Victories, though with the Talent probably reducing your Strain by that amount), and have some passive benefits as well. In other words, your Shadow might have to wait a long time to use their Assassinate ability during the first fights of an adventure, but once they're deep into it, they might be able to pull one off in the first round.
This will incentivize seeking out more monsters to fight. But I don't think that's entirely a bad thing: This game is not about dungeon-crawling. You might have a dungeon to explore, but the combat encounters are more likely to be set-pieces than random encounters meant to drain your resources.
The tension, thus, becomes between going into battles with a bunch of victories, or retreating in order to rest and regain Recoveries.
Now, another note that was mentioned in a roundtable by the Knights of the Last Call is that these resources also sometimes come with passive effects. One of them, who played a Fury, noted that Rage gave a passive damage reduction for each point of Rage they had - which created a tactical judgment for them to make - they had an ability called Whirlwind, which cost a bunch of Rage and deal damage to multiple enemies. But was it worth losing the damage reduction they had from the Rage?
And I think this is the sort of decision that's interesting to make - risk versus reward.
Where I think this does remove some tension, though, is in combat-versus-noncombat uses of resources. As an example:
In D&D, if I'm playing my Wizard, and I have the Fly spell, it might be a good idea for me to use it (or something like Levitate) to fly up a shaft and tie a rope off at the top that will allow my party to ascend the shaft. I spend a spell slot to do so - one of my precious resources - that could otherwise have been, say, a Fireball. But I've made the strategic choice to expend one of those slots. Perhaps if I hadn't, my allies would have risked failed Athletics checks to climb the shaft and taken fall damage - even if the slot meant I didn't have the Fireball to kill all those Mud Mephits we encounter later on, it might wind up being better overall for the party.
With all resources (or at least the ones we've seen so far) so combat-focused, I wonder if we'll lose some of the tension in out-of-combat situations.
We also don't really know how magic classes are going to work. I suspect they will use similar Heroic Resource systems. Will we see a giant selection of spells, or will each class get its own bespoke magical abilities that are no greater in variety than the Stratagems of a Tactician.
I honestly don't think the latter scenario would be so bad - one of the problems with D&D, in my opinion, is the vast versatility that any spellcaster gets over any non-spellcaster. Indeed, the way that 5E does spells also creates a lot of overlap in class capabilities. Oh, you can Detect Magic? Cool, so can nearly any other spellcaster.
It's early days on the MCDM RPG. And I do think that my overall impression has been positive. I could very much imagine running this game for my D&D players, and so far at least, I think that (at least at level 1) the game system doesn't seem too overwhelmingly complex. It looks like you'll have some real decisions to make, but with a curated list of options to make making those decisions fairly well-informed. Again, we'll have to see how higher levels look, and perhaps if things are this complex at level 1, we might need to be worried about how much an additional nine levels will pile on complexity.
Still, I think a great deal of effort is being put into the feel of the game, and I suspect it will be very satisfying.
