This is extremely tentative - I literally just had the idea in the last hour while having lunch.
The first thought that came to me was how Curses in D&D are kind of disappointing. They are mechanically distinct from other magical effects, but only in that there are other spells (Remove Curse, mainly) that can dispel them. If anything, this means a Curse is actually less of a problem than other kinds of magical afflictions, which feels utterly wrong.
I was thinking about how in Dark Souls, getting cursed required you to go through a pretty involved process to cleanse it, and the notion was that a Curse could never just be eradicated, only transferred to someone else. Even the items you could get to cleanse them were technically a person's spirit who was just taking on that curse. True to the game's themes of entropy, on a long enough timeline, everyone would be afflicted with this curse, which feels very, you know, curse-like.
But that got me thinking about how it would be cool to have a D&D-like system that could handle curses in this way.
I've long been drawn (as documented in this blog) to the idea of Monster-Hunters in a world of Gothic Horror. In my homebrew setting, there is a group called the Nachtjagers (and then I expanded this to an older branch in another kingdom called the Night Hunters - same term, just in English) who play that role of secret monster-hunters who go village-to-village fighting monsters. It's actually not too dissimilar to The Witcher in concept - this is an archetype that goes way back. And while Van Helsing from Dracula is not precisely this archetype in the novel, he's been portrayed that way in reimaginings (like the Hugh Jackman movie from the late 2000s where he looks like Solomon Kane, although to be fair, Van Helsing is Dutch and Kane's a puritan who might have adopted Dutch fashion while there in exile from England - I don't know actually when Kane's books take place).
Anyway, it's just scattered thoughts for the moment, but I think this would be a bit more than just a 5E hack. Here are some concepts I'd want to build around:
1. Borrowing Draw Steel's "Everything Hits"
I really like the idea that there's no Null Result in Draw Steel's combat, but I also think that the Power Roll is not the only way to implement this. In D&D, after all, we have damage rolls, and I think you could play around with those rather than standardizing to just three potential results.
2. A Focus on Fighting Individual Monsters
Monster-hunting as a subset of the dark fantasy genre does really tend to focus on a single, interesting monster. It should be a shocking reveal when there's more than one of them. There can be exceptions, of course.
But not only are they usually only fighting one monster at a time, I think that a monster fight needs to be a really climactic effect. If you figure that a monster hunt should be the rough equivalent of an adventure, that means you'll want to potentially allow the party to spend multiple sessions going after an individual monster. This, then, inspires two other pillars:
3. A Focus on Hunting, not Just Fighting
Every character must have some skills that contribute to tracking down the target, with different classes having different methods of doing so. There needs to be interesting gameplay related to finding the target, and we might actually have to reinforce that mechanically, like you need to earn a certain number of "tracking points" to actually find where you can fight the monster.
4. Deathblows
This, I think, would be the radical change compared to most RPG combat systems. I think we'd use Stamina in place of HP like Draw Steel does, but we are really going to reinforce the notion that Stamina is merely your ability to keep fighting. If you are knocked down, you're basically out of the fight but kind of just have the wind knocked out of you.
I think that actually killing a creature (whether a monster, NPC, or PC) would require separately taking a moment to get the killing blow. And this moment would require dice to be rolled to determine if you successfully kill it.
A failed Deathblow would probably net the monster some Stamina, but just enough to give them the opportunity to flee. Certain class abilities might give you a better chance at successfully executing a Deathblow, and maybe other class abilities could mean that a Monster that survived a Deathblow is easier to track and maybe is less likely to survive the next. Monsters probably wouldn't have abilities that make it harder for PCs to survive Deathblows (especially because, given the genre, we probably aren't going to have any kind of resurrection mechanics).
Deathblows could also help give iconic monsters some of their iconic features - you can't Deathblow a vampire unless you have a wooden stake to drive into their heart, for example. Likewise, you might not be able to Deathblow a werewolf without a silver weapon.
The actual mechanics of the Deathblow are something I don't quite know how I'd handle - I think potentially it's that you need to do some minimum amount of damage in a single attack (or turn - we could count someone stabbing a monster a dozen times in quick succession as one collective attack). Each monster could have a Deathblow threshold that needs to be met, and certain player abilities might add to the damage of their Deathblows, or perhaps make certain types of damage count as higher when used for a Deathblow.
5. Thematic Classes
Part of why we'd want to build a new system is to ensure that we don't fall into the same genre conventions as D&D. I think like Draw Steel, we'd also want class design that gives just as much versatility and options to martial characters as it does to spellcasters.
I have three spellcaster concepts in mind:
A Witch who deals in natural magic, with a very mud, blood, and thorns aesthetic.
An Esotericist (that might be a mouthful, Mystic could work better. Alchemist could also work, but we're leaning more toward the esoteric traditions than the "beakers and bottles" aesthetic). Oh, Occultist is probably the best: this is the archetype of the person who employs deep and forbidden magic, with hellfire, rune circles, and dark tomes as their aesthetic.
Inquisitor would be the "divine" spellcaster, with a really harsh fire-and-brimstone aesthetic using searing light and white-hot silver.
For "martial" archetypes, truthfully we're probably talking roughly the Fighter, Ranger, and Rogue in broad terms. But I think we'd have some different terms:
Warrior is probably our only heavily-armored (remember that everything hits, so this would mean lots of Stamina) class fighting with big medieval weaponry, and I think their tracking capabilities are more about keeping morale up on the move.
Hunters (a name that might need to change if the game were just called Night Hunters - I'm between that and Deathblow) are all about special techniques and knowledge about monsters, and likely would have some mechanic where they can prepare special poisons for their weapons, or if that doesn't work mechanically, they might have a lot of abilities that impair the monster (slowing it, reducing its damage, etc.)
Assassins are your quick, nimble, and sneaky monster hunters who likely fight with daggers or other small weapons, and probably have very high mobility.
6. Thematic Stats
I like the flavor of using alternative stat names - while I think Draw Steel kind of goes contrarian in its insistence on calling everything something else (Strength is fine - though as someone whose first class-based RPG was WoW, Agility does actually feel kind of better than Dexterity) here we're narrowing the tonal focus of the game and would want the stats to reflect that.
For example, Brutality would be the stat for raw physical power - Warriors would likely want to focus on this, but I'd also want the stats to be appealing to more than one class. Cunning would probably be the spellcasting ability for our Occultist, reflecting, yes, cleverness and forward-planning but with a somewhat sinister vibe. Will might be what an Inquisitor uses - a raw channeling of one's power and conviction upon the world.
We don't have to have 1:1s for all the classic D&D stats, and I'd even be kind of curious to play in a space where some classes might want to split their stats a bit, like how in Soulsborne games you sometimes would rather have 40 Dex and 40 Int instead of 80 Dex.
Maybe we can design class abilities that scale with two stats, but in a limited manner - if you're going for more of a melee Inquisitor build, you might want to have 3 Brutality and 3 Will, while if you're going for a pure spellcasting build, you'll want to have a full 6 Will (the numbers are made up here, but I imagine we'd want to just make the scores whatever you add to your rolls).
Like, say we've got an ability called Purge the Wicked, which deals holy/radiant/whatever we wind up calling it damage. Say it does 3d6+Will. Then, we have another Inquisitor ability they can pick called Searing Brand, which does 1d10+Brutality (max 3) physical damage and 1d10+Will (max 3) fire damage. If you have 6 Will and nothing to Brutality, you'll be doing 16.5 on average with Purge the Wicked and only 14 with Searing Brand, but if you're split between the two, you could potentially do an average of 17 with Searing Brand.
7. Relatively Flat Levels
I think it was wise for both Daggerheart and Draw Steel to compress to just 10 levels. The legacy of 20 levels in D&D has left a lot of campaigns ending well before the level cap.
I think this game has an even lower level cap. Like, probably 5.
The reason is that, while we do want our players to be fighting scarier monsters as they get more experience, the core tone of the game is for them to be these rough-and-tumble killers for hire, not superheroes. If any of the characters gain the ability to fly, it's going to be very limited, and probably just one person (the Witch, most likely).
I wouldn't want the power escalation to get to the point where the party can just teleport across the globe or phase through walls. A monster that is extremely dangerous at level 1 should still remain a threat, even if it's a more manageable one, at the cap. At no point should a vampire be a trivial encounter (to be fair, that's the kind of monster I imagine being beyond the players' capabilities until the later levels, like 3 at the absolute earliest.
8. Extensive non-combat mechanics
I always get a little wary of complicating non-combat situations with a bunch of mechanics. At least with my players, naturalistic roleplay tends to be what we want to focus on when we're not looking at minis on a battle grid.
I was, thus, pretty skeptical of Negotiations in Draw Steel. I have yet to actually run one (or even see it in play) but I will concede that its solves some issues, like preventing players from just brute-forcing social encounters after failing a ton of charisma checks.
Actually, I think I wouldn't have a "Charisma" equivalent stat (beyond Will, being only roughly equivalent) in order to make it feel like players don't feel they need to be a certain class to be the party face and interact with NPCs.
What I think would really need to be robust would be a system for detective work.
I'm tempted to adopt something like the Time Clocks in Blades in the Dark - while we'd mostly want to situate the monster hunt as a narrative thing, we'd also have an underlying numerical system to track how close the party is to finding the monster.
9. Resource System
I definitely like the Draw Steel Heroic Resource system, but that really truly only functions fully while in a fight. Out of initiative, the use of Heroic abilities is kind of kludgy. I'm tempted, then, to borrow ideas from Daggerheart, where combat and non-combat situations operate along similar lines.
But that might be a later consideration.
Ideas are Cheap. I'll be honest, I'm kind of getting excited about this concept, but I also know it would be very difficult to put it all together. If I could figure out at least an initial core dice mechanic system (I actually don't hate ability modifiers and proficiency bonuses with a d20 - just that it wouldn't be so common to roll d20s in combat) and put together a rough level 1 for some classes and a monster, we might see if we get any traction.
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