In Praise of D&D's Redundancies

 In the Player's Handbook, every class that has the spellcasting feature (and also Pact Magic, which is technically a different one) has a lengthy explanation for how you calculate the saving throw DC of your spells. It's a lot of repeated words, always following the same formula: you take 8, add your proficiency bonus, and then add your spellcasting ability, which of course is different for different classes.

This fairly substantial block of text takes up a good half a page or maybe a little more in each of the class descriptions - and it's really almost all of them because even the Rogue and Fighter have subclasses with the Spellcasting feature. Likewise, Monks get a similar explanation for their Ki saving throws. So Barbarians are the only ones without this description, meaning there's about five and a half pages dedicated to repeating this.

And I think that's a great thing.

See, I was doing some character building for Starfinder - just to help me wrap my head around it in case I ever need to help others do so. I was building a Soldier, and took the Bombard fighting style (fighting style in Starfinder is the name for Soldier subclasses) that, at least at first, focuses on grenades. The cheapest grenades - a reasonable thing to stock up on at low levels - deal 1d6 piercing damage in a 15-ft radius, and thanks to the fact that my Soldier has an 18 Strength and is a Bombarder, I can throw them an additional 20 feet, for a total of 40 feet away.

But I had to search through the Core Rulebook to find any explanation of what the saving throw DC was for those grenades. This is true for a lot of abilities - class abilities will refer to abilities forcing a saving throw, but there's no explanation there, or even in the general class description.

When I was first looking at the rulebook when I bought it initially, I actually made a cheat sheet for each class because I didn't want to have to flip back and forth through the book before I'd memorized them.

Now, part of this is certainly due to the fact that I have seven years of experience with 5E D&D and have never actually run or played Starfinder. I'm sure this would become second nature over time. Starfinder also has variable DCs in some cases. For example, the Operative (rogue equivalent) has one DC that foes must meet to succeed on saving throws against your abilities (which is 10 plus half your Operative level rounded down, plus your Dexterity modifier) but a different DC for features that have enemies make a skill check against you (10 plus one and a half times your Operative level, plus your Dexterity modifier).

Indeed, there's really no place in the Soldier class description that makes any mention of how to calculate a saving throw, despite their capstone feature, Kill Shot, requiring one. So, one needs to look to the "Key Ability Scores" section on page 58 to find that, ok, it's 10 + half your soldier level + your Strength or Dexterity modifier (whichever is higher - like Fighters, Soldiers can focus on Strength or Dexterity).

D&D, given that it separates out the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, has a bit more room, but I really think that the format here, where the book frequently reminds you how to calculate these things, is a lot more user-friendly.

Anticipating One D&D Class Changes

 The survey for the Character Origins UA previewing One D&D - the 5.5th Edition we're going to be seeing in 2024 - has now gone up. We don't actually know what the next one will be - it could be a revision of some of the items here, or possibly more Rules Glossary-like clarification and changes.

But I think the most impactful thing we're likely to see is any and all proposed class changes.

Classes, after all, are the most impactful choices you make when building your character.

What we saw with Races in the previous UA was largely an attempt to preserve the overall shape of the existing options - with the exceptions of removing the Half-Elf and Half-Orc (with the intent on making mixed heritage possible between most races, but no longer reflecting that mechanically) and the addition of the Ardling, as well as new non-Infernal legacy options for Tieflings.

If you were already using the Tasha's rules regarding ability score bonuses, in most cases you'll see only minor changes and tweaks.

One D&D is being designed to be, where possible, backwards-compatible, meaning that we should be able to use subclasses out of Xanathar's and Tasha's (and the few subclasses that didn't get reprinted in Tasha's like the Chronurgist, etc.)

What this will require is that, at the very least, classes will have subclass features come online at the same levels, most likely. Personally, I find that a little disappointing specifically for the Bard, who only gets subclass features at three different levels - 3, 6, and 14. Most classes get four, while Fighters and Clerics get five (though in the Cleric's case, the level 8 one is just one of two options that each subclass gets one of or the other).

Where I think we'll see changes is going to be more fundamentally in the general class features.

What changes do I think we have evidence that we'll see?

First off, let's talk Artificers. I really, really hope we see this class printed in the Player's Handbook so that, moving forward, they can add more subclasses and Artificer-specific spells. What I think makes this possibility ambiguous is that, in the Rules Glossary part of the Character Origins UA, when describing Arcane spells, the entry says "Bards, Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards harness this magic, as do Artificers." I could read this two ways: one is that saving Artificers for last is backward-looking and making sure that readers who might never have gotten Tasha's or ERFTLW (just "Eberron" feels too vague for a shortened name, though this isn't great either) realize that they're a thing too, or it's keeping them last because they're categorically separating it as an "other" class rather than one of the primary, PHB ones. So, really, who knows? (I mean, Jeremy Crawford for one, but I doubt he's going to blurt it out outside of an official announcement).

The only other piece of - again, pretty vague - evidence that I can note is the absence of Eldritch Blast from the Arcane (or any other) spell list. Eldritch Blast is a common choice for people who pick up the Spell Sniper feat, or Magic Initiate. But the new Magic Initiate, while arguably a lot more flexible (Shillelagh with Charisma for Paladins, guys!) can't get you Eldritch Blast because it's not on the list.

So, is Eldritch Blast gone? Hell no. It's iconic and so central to the way that Warlocks work. Barring some insane redesign of the Warlock (not that that's entirely off the table, but I'd be skeptical) I think Eldritch Blast must remain part of its toolkit.

The way I see it, though, is that as written in PHB 2014, not taking Eldritch Blast, unless you're a dedicated Bladelock (which I still think works too well with the Hexblade to try it with any other subclass,) feels like a trap. When the Warlock was introduced in 3.5e, Eldritch Blast was a class feature - cantrips were not, I believe, a thing yet, and so other spellcasters like Wizards would have to rely on things like light crossbows if they wanted to preserve their spell slots.

Making Eldritch Blast a class feature does a few things: the first is that no new player is going to forget to pick it up. It makes sure that no matter what, all Warlocks have access to their best damage cantrip and are "armed" properly.

The other thing this could do is encourage players to stick with Warlock for more levels.

Warlocks are a popular multiclass dip - they often have very powerful front-loaded abilities (the Hexblade in particular) that can be very valuable to a character with just one or two levels invested in them. One of the reasons for this is that picking up Eldritch Blast (and especially going to level 2 for Agonizing Blast, along with two short-rest 1st level spell slots) can be very valuable. And because it's a cantrip, Eldritch Blast doesn't care about class levels, only total levels when determining how may blasts it does. Thus, a Sorcerer can dip into Warlock for one or two levels, get Agonizing Blast, and then ignore Warlock and still see their Eldritch Blast grow in power.

If Eldritch Blast is a class feature, you could restrict its growing number of attacks to Warlock class levels, and thus encourage players to stick with it if they want to get their higher blast numbers.

I suppose another change that I noted in the previous post about what changes we could see to the Monk, Unarmed Strikes are a bit different. One thing of note is that an unarmed strike now seems to be something separate from a Weapon Attack (which was always confusing, given that you sort of expected all weapon attacks to involve, you know, a weapon). On top of making that a separate thing, it also folds Shove and Grapple attacks into Unarmed Strikes.

This means a lot for Monks - if we assume that Martial Arts continues to let you use Dexterity for your Unarmed Strikes, this now makes Monks a lot more effective and Shoving and Grappling. (Though keeping a Grappled target grappled might not be very easy, as the escape DC is set by your Strength.) Actually, Grappling requiring a free hand means it'll be harder for people with full hands (using a two-handed weapon or going sword-and-board, etc.) to do so - Monks might actually be the best at this, though I think it'll also give us an opportunity to see more people using the versatile property of weapons like the Longsword, Battleaxe, or Warhammer - you could attack with a Warhammer two-handed (d10) most of the time, but swap to single-handed (d8) when you're grappling someone.

This doesn't necessarily portend any specific Monk changes, but it does open some capabilities up. I also wonder if some of the Open Hand Monk's Open Hand Technique options are altered or re-written. Naturally, these combine the damage from a Fury of Blows hit with the secondary effect, whereas the new Unarmed Strikes makes you choose between one of its three modes (the first being damage,) so this is all still technically a bonus on top of existing rules. But there's enough overlap that I could see them rewriting some of this or tweaking the functionality.

Beyond this, I don't think we've got anything very solid to go on, to be honest (and even these are extrapolations of fairly minor details).

As far as radical class redesigns go, the one that feels the most plausible is the Fighter. The folks at WotC have repeatedly said that they really love the Battle Master design - it's one of the few subclasses that got expanded with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and I can imagine that WotC would want to open the door to create new maneuvers in future publications much like they do with Eldritch Invocations for Warlocks. But Eldritch Invocations are a class, not subclass feature.

The Fighter is an odd class - it's a pretty basic chassis on which you can build a lot of different concepts using feats and subclass features. There are basically only three universal Fighter abilities (four if you count their 3rd and 4th Extra Attack). Admittedly, the subclasses and the extra ASIs to help you pick up feats add a bit more, but I wouldn't be shocked if they made Maneuvers a classwide thing and then designed subclasses in the future that work with maneuvers, perhaps even providing unique ones. (Eldritch Knights could be redesigned to have a bunch of magic maneuvers either to supplement or even replace their 1/3 Caster spellcasting capabilities.)

The survey for the Character Origins UA is up for the next two weeks or so, and so I expect we'll see the next One D&D UA either when that ends or perhaps a couple weeks later. Looking forward to it!

Rethinking the Monk in One D&D

When I first got my hands on the Player's Handbook when I bought the core D&D rulebooks in 2015, I found myself surprised that some classes that I'd never been all to excited about in other RPGs were actually very exciting to me - the Warlock was probably the biggest case, but the Monk was another. I'd never been a huge fan of unarmed combatants in other games, but the Monk in D&D has so many cool things - fast movement, deflect missiles, timeless body, etc.

But as a class, they don't always perform the way you'd expect them to. There's a perception that Monks aren't really strong enough.

The extent to which this is true is up for debate - I haven't done the math, and I think the three attacks per turn for free is honestly not bad - though it falls behind the Fighter.

But I wanted to talk about my vision for the Monk moving forward.

First, let's discuss the elephant in the room - Stunning Strike.

This is the most powerful Monk ability, but that might actually be the problem. I think that WotC is afraid to make the Monk a really powerful tank or damage-dealer because of Stunning Strike's power. While monsters often succeed on their saves against it, a stunned enemy is a really insane shift in the battlefield, especially in fights with only a few monsters.

Stun means advantage on attacks and the monster cannot do anything on their next turn - a devastating blow to their action economy.

I would suggest that we rein this in - either apply something like the new Slowed condition, or perhaps give the monster disadvantage on attacks and give others advantage on attacks against it. This is undeniably a nerf, but it frees us up for the buffs that I'm going to propose beyond.

Let's talk about what we think the Monk should be best at. As I see it, the real fantasy of a martial arts master is the idea that they can face tons of opponents and never go down. Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and other martial arts stars often come off as the most badass when they trounce an entire crowd of foes - something that is extremely unlikely in a real-life scenario (fun fact, one of the mooks that Bruce Lee beats down in Enter the Dragon is actually Jackie Chan, before he was famous).

As such, I think that reinforcing the Monk's tanky-ness makes a lot of sense. Monks should be able to wade into a crowded battlefield and hand everyone's ass to them.

The first way to reinforce this is that Monks should have a d12 hit die.

Frankly, I think it's absurd that Monks only have a d8 hit die right now. They are the only class that is obligated to fight in melee (the others being Paladins and Barbarians - Fighters can choose to go for a ranged, dex build) that has less than a d10 (Rangers probably don't need a d10, to be frank.) Now, why a d12? Well, as someone else pointed out (unfortunately I can't remember who) Monks have trained their bodies more than any other class to be resilient. I realize some might say that giving any non-Barbarian a d12 could be stepping on their territory, in which case I might concede a mere d10, but I really think that a d12 makes sense flavor-wise for the Monk

The second is to give them some sort of damage mitigation. Having relatively low AC compared to a plate wearer, I think that they should have some way to survive an influx of damage.

Flavor-wise, I see this as knowing how to deflect and block attacks, not fully avoiding them, but reducing the damage and pain they inflict. Unlike the Barbarian's rage, where the Barbarian is just going into an adrenaline-fueled state where they can ignore pain and rely on the meatiness of their muscles, I think the Monk is doing this in a more active way.

The proposal I'll put forward is that relatively early on - maybe as soon as level 1, or perhaps at 2 or 3, you get a feature called "Deflect Blows." This reduces the damage you take from attacks (and maybe we'd say only weapon attacks and unarmed strikes) by an amount equal to your proficiency bonus.

The intent here is that the Monk becomes really strong when tanking large groups of mooks. A group of zombies striking at the Monk might see some of their attacks not even wind up doing anything - 1d6+1 can give you 2-7 damage, and so an average hit of 4.5 winds up getting reduced at tier 1 to 2.5 - almost but not quite halving it.

But a Monk is not as good as a Barbarian when it comes to the blows of some massive creature - a giant's sword cannot so easily be absorbed.

The exact amount absorbed would obviously be a question of balance, but this would further reinforce the notion of a Monk being a front-liner, who can stay in the thick of combat (which feels like where they should be).

Honestly, these changes would, I think be enough to really give Monks a clear role, and make them a really appealing tank for the group. But what about their capabilities as a damage dealer?

First off, it's a small change, but I might just bump all their martial arts die up a step - tier 1 give them a  d6, then d8 at tier 2, d10 at tier 3, and d12 in tier 4. This only comes out to an average of one more damage per attack.

The thing that I think gets frustrating for Monks is that your unarmed strikes cannot benefit from the +X bonus from most magic weapons. Even if you get a +1 Quarterstaff, your unarmed strikes are never going to get beyond 1d10+5. I might introduce some item that boosts unarmed strikes in the same way to help with this.

Actually, the changes to Unarmed Strikes in the Rules Glossary does a lot to give Monks new tools - they can be really effective grapplers and shovers. It strikes me, of course, that this makes some of the Open Hand Monk's abilities redundant.

Part of me wonders if Monks should just get a bit of extra damage on their hits - maybe adding their proficiency bonus (or half of it) to damage, though that might seem too similar to Rage.

The rest of the changes might need to happen through subclasses. My hope is that by nerfing Stunning Strike, one could be more generous with features like the Ascendant Dragon's breath weapon (something I think everyone was disappointed by).

Given that Monks have three stats they really want to maximize, they really don't have a lot of room for feats, which means that customizing the class is a bit tougher to do. I don't know how I'd fix that, but at the very least, the class design should come with an expectation that it needs to work without a ton of feats.

I love the Monk, and I would be very happy to see it get a lot more play in D&D. I'll be very eager to see what they come up with for the One D&D update.

The Real Question on Everyone's Minds: Dragonborn Breath Weapon Damage Comparisons (For a Level 12 Fighter)

 My longtime D&D character, in a campaign that sort of collapsed under "most of this plot is built around the story of the character played by the guy who just became a dad and can't really play regularly anymore" issues, is/was a Blue Dragonborn Eldritch Knight Fighter (Plate + a +1 Shield + Defensive Fighting Style + the Shield spell = an effective AC of 27 until I run out of spell slots).

When Fizban's Treasury of Dragons came out last year, they introduced three "new" races - the Chromatic, Metallic, and Gem Dragonborn. Lorewise, of course, the Chromatic and Metallic were just a mechanical update of the existing Dragonborn, separating them out into different races and changing the way breath weapons work along with giving each a new (and distinct) Chromatic, Metallic, or Gem feature you can activate.

So, Jax, my Fighter, got updated with DM's permission from a PHB Dragonborn to a Chromatic Dragonborn.

While the Chromatic Warding thing is cool (if a bit situational) the thing I was most excited about was the change to how the Breath Weapon works.

In the PHB, your breath weapon starts at 2d6 damage and you add a d6 roughly once per tier (though I think you get the third at level 6 instead of 5). You need to use your action to breathe your element (lightning, in my case) and then they make a Dex save with a DC based on your Con modifier, taking full damage on a failure and half on a success. For Blue dragonborn, it's a 30-ft line 5 feet wide, though for some it's a 15-foot cone. (And for Silver, White, and Green Dragonborn, the save is Con instead of Dex, as is typical for cold and poison effects).

At level 12, therefore, to use my breath weapon, I spend my action and deal 4d6 damage (average of 14) with a DC of 14 (despite being a tank, he only has a +2 to Con, though I do have the Tough feat, so his max HP is 124). And I can do this once per short rest, so practically speaking about twice a day.

With his +1 Battle Axe and being a level 12 Fighter, he can make three attacks a round, with an attack bonus of +10 to hit, and dealing 10.5 damage on each hit, for a total of 31.5 average damage if all hit. As such, to make the breath worth it for damage output, I'd need to hit three targets (and even then, the low DC means the damage would often be an average of 7 instead).

Now, the Chromatic Dragonborn, which I switched him to, works differently.

First off, the dice are simpler - it's 1d10 per tier of play, so at 5 it goes to 2d10, at 11 3d10, and at 17, it's 4d10. Damage-wise, this starts off slightly below the old version, but by level 5, you're pulling ahead. My Fighter at his level would get 3d10, which is 16.5 damage on average - a slight boost.

Next, the use of the ability is now PB times per long rest, rather than once per short rest. In practice, this means that, past tier 1, you'll likely get more or at worst the same number of uses per day (I don't think I've ever seen a D&D day with three or more short rests - indeed, I think in Adventurer's League at least, they never let you take more than one per module).

So, my Fighter gets 4 uses per day instead of, realistically, 2.

But then, the most important change: rather than a full action, the breath weapon now only takes one of your attacks. For classes that don't get the Extra Attack feature, this makes no difference, but for a Fighter in particular, this is huge:

So, Jax can now breathe as his first attack for 16.5 average damage (hopefully hitting a secondary target with it too) and then follow up with two strikes that each do 10.5 average damage, giving me, on a single target, 37.5 damage per round when I use the breath.

So, more uses, higher damage - clear upgrade. The "as an attack" aspect of this is also particularly good for a Fighter. A Paladin with similar equipment would, of course, at this level, be getting their Improved Divine Smite d8, and miss out on fully half their regular attacks. So, we'd see one breath (16.5) and one attack (2d8+6, or an average of 15). This is still a little better than two regular attacks, but not the very clear boost that the Fighter gets. We should also note that a Great Weapon build would see things a bit differently - with the Great Weapon Fighting Style, a +1 Maul, for example, would hit for 14.33 on average. Three attacks would thus be 43 average damage, compared to Breath/Weapon/Weapon, which would be 16.5 plus 28.67, or an average of 45.2 - still slightly better, but again not as dramatically (again, hitting a second target with the breath makes it much more powerful).

Now, the One D&D Character Origins UA (I told you we'd be talking about this until the next one comes out) rebuilds the Dragonborn once more.

This Dragonborn embraces simplicity, returning to the model of the PHB Dragonborn while indisputably (unless you're a very short-rest focused party) buffing them.

Perhaps to compensate for returning to the PHB simplicity, these Dragonborn have Darkvision - the catch-all that I think maybe a majority of playable races have?

But again, the way that the breath weapon works has been redesigned.

First off, it once again requires an action to use - which, again, means nothing to classes without the Extra Attack feature, but is a definite nerf to my Fighter, if I were forced to switch to this version. (Given that I haven't actually had a chance to play with the new, Chromatic Dragonborn version, I'd be very sad.)

Another change that is easy to miss is that now, regardless of your element, the shape of the breath is always a 15-foot cone, and the save for it is always Dexterity. This is, honestly, kind of a big deal for a Blue (or Brass, Bronze, Copper, or Black) Dragonborn because it is far easier to hit two or more targets with a 15-foot cone than it is with a 30-foot line (though it's also easier to avoid friends with a line).

Like the Fizban's ones, the breath weapon is now PB times per long rest, which I consider a buff.

The damage has changed as well - but now, it scales at every level. The damage is 1d10 + your level.

So, let's compare it at different breakpoints. At level 1, it's 1d10+1, or 6.5 on average - lower than the original PHB version, but higher than Fizban's. At 6 (remember, the PHB doesn't quite use tier breakpoints) it's 11.5, compared with 10.5 with the PHB version and 11 for the Fizban's version.

For my guy at level 12, it's 17.5, compared with 14 in the PHB or 16.5 with Fizban's. At at level 20, it's 25.5, versus 17.5 in the PHB or 22 with Fizban's.

So, the damage is definitely a buff. The damage range is also much narrower - indeed, the higher level you get, the larger portion of the damage is already known.

But, again, it takes a full action. 17.5 damage is definitely more than 16.5, but the fact that the 16.5 comes with two additional weapon swings makes this, to my character, a pretty profound nerf.

    And that's sort of the oddness of this: if you showed me this version of the Dragonborn with only the 2014 PHB version to compare it to, it'd be a clear upgrade. But the Chromatic, Gem, and Metallic versions out of Fizban's are a lot more appealing.

Pillaging Starfinder for Spelljammer - Ship Building and Combat

 Some day, I really want to play in a Starfinder campaign, or run one (though I'm less confident about that unless I can find a player who knows it decently). As I said in a recent post, I prefer Starfinder's take on space-based sci fi over Spelljammer's version, the latter of which dispenses with many science fiction tropes and invents bizarre new physics to justify retaining D&D's more medieval setting.

As someone who grew up on Star Trek the Next Generation and Star Wars, I actually feel like we lose something by having literal wooden sailing ships out among the stars. I don't dislike Spelljammer, mind you, but I thing the futuristic sci-fi feel of Starfinder jives more with my overall aesthetic.

One of the perhaps more controversial ideas presented in the Astral Adventurer's Guide for Spelljammer is that using ship-mounted weapons is less efficient and effective than having players simply rely on their own character abilities. The siege weapons that are mounted on ships can deal a substantial amount of damage, but their use requires multiple actions (or multiple creatures using their actions) to launch ordinance. The Bombard, which has one of the most powerful weapons of any ship with its main cannon, which deals 16d10 damage on a hit, also takes four actions to fire it - three to load and one to shoot. As a result, the damage-per-action here is 4d10, and while that's still 22 damage, which is decent, player characters can pretty early on manage more damage, and likely with a better hit chance than the cannon's +6 attack bonus would give.

5th Edition D&D puts a lot of power into the players, independent of things like magic items. Player classes are the main source of power. As such, in most cases a Wizard with no magic items versus one of the same level with a bunch are not going to be all that different in terms of power. Characters are strong.

And so I think, philosophically, the intent with Spelljammer was not to overcomplicate things by driving characters to use a ship's mounted weapons when they can just cast spells instead.

Ships in 5E have damage thresholds - for example, the Bombard's is 20, so any hit that deals less than 20 damage is simply ignored - a bullet or arrow or fire bolt just bouncing off the hull.

In other systems, including Starfinder, rather than a damage threshold, large things like ships are simply operating on a different scale. A "Tiny" spaceship in Starfinder does not fit within a 1-foot cube. And shipboard weapons are assumed to be doing about 10 times as much as a personal weapon would. But they're also aiming at something that is much bigger. So, while your shipboard laser blaster is doing 1d10 fire damage, if it were to hit a person, that'd be the equivalent of 10d10 fire damage. And if you shoot a ship for 1d10 piercing damage, you're really doing next to nothing to it.

Ship combat in Starfinder also has a different rhythm to it - ships act as a unit, with players manning different stations to perform different roles. Initiative thus determines the order in which ships, not players, act.

Players then use skills that are relevant to the combat role they're playing - piloting the ship and using the weapons involves making Piloting checks (a skill in Starfinder) while you might use Computer Sciences to hack the enemy ship computer, or Deception to harass the enemy captain into making mistakes.

Again, I haven't played the game myself, so I don't know how good these systems feel in play, but one of the things I love most about the Starfinder approach to starships is their Build Point system.

In Spelljammer, the cheapest ships are 20,000 gold. That means that it's unlikely a typical adventuring party will have the gold to buy one until well into tier 2. Naturally, DMs can make these ships available to a party early on (and can always have the party come across a windfall if they still want the party to make a purchase) but it does mean that getting a cool ship (like a Bombard) creates tension with other expenses.

To be fair, this actually helps to solve an issue with 5th Edition, which is that after a certain point, gold's more or less a scorecard. But the relatively narrow range on prices for ship means that it won't be super long before a party can afford the ship they want and not have to worry about it anymore, rather than having a progression of ships that they'll upgrade from over the course of a long campaign.

In Starfinder, ships are heavily customizable, and their progression system is more like leveling up than spending Credits (the sci-fi equivalent of gold). Rather than having any components of a ship cost Credits, instead you get BP - Build Points - that are determined by the Average Party Level. As the party levels up, they get more BP to put together their ships and can make them faster, tougher, more deadly, and generally more powerful. One can even swap out for a different kind of ship.

At its core, Starfinder wants your ship to be your party's home base, and to be a source of shared identity. Each character has their own class progression, but the party as a whole has ship progression.

Indeed, the abbreviations for some things conveniently make it clear that the ship is kind of an RPG character in its own right. Player characters have Hit Points and Stamina Points (the latter being easier to regain - one takes damage to your SP before you start dipping into your HP, and this kind of distinguishes between momentary pains versus serious injuries) while your ship has Hull Points and Shield Points, which work similarly.

I would be tempted to just pull the entire Ship system from Starfinder into a Spelljammer-like D&D game, except for the one problem: while ships have their own weapons and damage and capabilities, using things in combat requires the use of Starfinder skills, and Starfinder is built to allow these skills to progress much higher than they do in D&D.

For example, if you want to play a character who's really good at piloting, you might be a Dexterity-focused character like an Operative, take the Ace Pilot theme (themes are similar to Backgrounds) and then take feats and invest skill ranks into piloting. Your Piloting bonus might go up by 1 every single level, so that by the time you're level 10 or so, you might have a +20 or something to the skill.

The most focused D&D characters cannot, I believe, get to a bonus like that unless your DM has somehow allowed you to use multiple Manuals of Quickness of Action. A level 20 Rogue with +5 to Dexterity and Expertise in Stealth has a +17 bonus - outstanding in 5E but not terribly impressive in Starfinder.

So, I wouldn't really think that you could just fully take the Starfinder system without making any adjustments.

For one thing, D&D doesn't have the sort of sci-fi proficiencies that Starfinder uses. Here, we can see how Paizo's decision to make a similar but ultimately separate game to Pathfinder helps the game grow into its own systems.

But, if we're sticking with the Spelljammer approach and not making "Stars & Spaceships" or "Star Frontiers" (the old TSR sci-fi game that some of the Spelljammer races are based on,) how can we make this work in 5E?

One thing that might help is letting the hit bonuses on weapons scale up not with player stats, but with the weapons themselves. This is already how siege weapons in D&D are treated - a Mangonel (your classic catapult, as opposed to a trebuchet) has a +5 to hit with attacks, regardless of the person operating it.

In Starfinder, the various defensive systems increase the AC or make it harder to hack the computer's systems, in addition to letting shield and hull points increase in quantity. What I might do is, rather than have the various crew abilities rely on the player character's statistics, instead allow more advanced weapons to come with larger to-hit bonuses.

Alternatively, if we really want to muck around, we could add new systems to spend build points on (and then also probably increase the build points per level) that would increase your accuracy. Do you invest in heavier weaponry that will do 3d10 damage instead of 2d10? Or do you upgrade your targeting computer to give your weapon attacks a +8 to hit instead of a +6?

Ideally, this would scale at roughly the rate that player power in Starfinder would, but because it's all integrated into the ship's systems, you could toss D&D characters in there and still let them function.

The other alternative here would be to take Starfinder's ship-building mechanics purely as an inspiration and rebuild them with D&D's numbers and skill proficiencies in mind. This might make keeping that science fiction flavor a little difficult - perhaps instead of a computer that uses the computer science skill, you have some kind of arcane matrix that uses the Arcana skill. And then, the armor plating on your ship only raises the AC of the ship a few times - maybe taking it from 14 to 20 at the most.

To do it this way, I think the number of upgrades you would get over time would be far fewer - weapon scaling in D&D is a much flatter curve than it is in Starfinder. But I think you could still implement the Build Point system to have a ship gradually get more powerful as the party does.

What Should Be in the 5E Planescape Book? A Page-Count Breakdown

 I realize I've probably visited this topic before, but I think that it bears some looking into again.

As I've written in recent days, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space is a mixed bag. I think that the product is not necessarily what players expected it to be, and while what is there is great, it's missing a lot of the elements that I think people wanted from a campaign setting book. Apart from the Rock of Bral, there's not much "setting" to the product.

Planescape, as a setting, is arguably far weirder than even Spelljammer. But the thing that, to me, strikes me as the biggest challenge to getting the setting into 5th Edition is that there are two very big elements to the setting that could both take up an entire lengthy book.

As I see it, these elements are The Factions and The Planes.

The Factions

Ooh, check it out: I'm actually using Blogger's heading system to make this post easier to read!

One of the most iconic things that Planescape introduced was its Factions. These are massive organizations that have members spanning the various planes of the D&D multiverse. The Factions are all unified by a shared philosophy. For example, the Athar believe that nothing fundamental separates the gods from mortals, and that divine power is achievable for anyone who works hard enough at it. The Guvners believe that the universe fundamentally adheres to foundational laws that determine everything that happens, and that if one were to master all those laws, one would be omnipotent.

The Factions are found in the various planes, with bases and headquarters usually in planes that fit with their alignment - the aforementioned Guvners like the Lawful Neutral clockwork plane of Mechanus while the Athar prefer the Astral Plane, pointing to the husks of dead gods as evidence that these so-called Powers aren't all that they claim to be.

The Factions are particularly prevalent in the city of Sigil, which is the central hub of adventure for Planescape. The city is filled with portals to every other plane of existence, which allows parties to just find the right portal and go have an adventure on one plane or another and come home to relax and look for their next quest.

The original "Planescape Campaign Setting" box set really focused on Sigil and the Factions, along with a description of The Outlands, the True Neutral plane that Sigil ostensibly exists within (though one can only reach it through portals, so for all practical purposes it's its own plane.)

A 5E Planescape book could easily follow this model, maybe focusing in on Sigil as a city of adventure - I believe that the critically-acclaimed CRPG Planescape: Torment takes place entirely (or at least predominantly) in Sigil.

However, the reason I'd recommend they don't simply do this is that, well, it's very, very similar to the other "city dominated by factions defined by radically different philosophies" setting book: Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. Indeed, I think a lot of people have suggested that Sigil may have served as a major inspiration when Magic the Gathering introduced the plane in 2005 (this was after Wizards of the Coast took over D&D, so it wasn't like anyone would sue them).

I think if I weren't in the middle of a Ravnica campaign that had been going for over two years, I'd be more excited about a Faction/Sigil focus for Planescape. I don't know how popular Ravnica has been as a setting, honestly. I'm just the one who's been deep in it since 2020 (and planning for the campaign started well before).

Still, I cannot imagine a D&D sourcebook for Planescape (for a new edition and not as an add-on) that doesn't involve Sigil or the Factions. I just think that it'd probably be best if the book is not so Faction-focused as GGtR is on its guilds.

The Planes

The thing is, there's an absolute ton of stuff that Planescape has to cover, because there are 17 planes that one needs to cover - and that's just the Outer Planes! We mustn't forget that there are the Elemental Planes, and also the Feywild and Shadowfell.

2E D&D also had a bunch of quasi-elemental planes and such - but I'd leave those out and just focus on the four elemental planes. Then, I'd want to touch on the Ethereal and Astral planes (technically, Spelljammer now takes place entirely in the Astral Plane, with Wildspace being the overlap between the Astral and Prime Material.)

Breaking it Down by Page Count

That's a ton to cover, but I think there's a model that we can look at to try to do the planes some semblance of justice. Regular readers of this blog would not be shocked to discover that, yes, it's Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

Van Richten's has a number of Domains of Dread that they go into detail about, dedicating roughly 6 pages on average for each of them. These descriptions give you a summary of the vibe of the place, details about its Darklord, and ways you can make an adventure set there that feels very much "of the domain."

I think a similar model for planes would be fantastic.

Ok, so how many pages are we looking at, then?

For the Outer Planes, including all 16 on the rim of the Great Wheel and then the Outlands, that means 102 pages.

Now, let's add similar entries for each of the four main elemental planes and then also the Feywild and the Shadowfell. That gives us 36 more, for a total of 138 pages dedicated to the planes.

The Astral and Ethereal Planes are more transitional planes, and so I think you could get away with just giving them 2-3 pages each. We'll be conservative and say 2, so now we're up to 142 pages.

Now, let's go back to character creation. We're likely to get new backgrounds and feats (as seen in the Wonders of the Multiverse UA). There's also possibly a new race with the Glitchling. There is not, however, any indication of a new subclass (there are giant-themed ones coming in Bigby's, and perhaps a whole swath of new ones in the Book of Many Things).

Van Richten's has 26 pages dedicated to character creation - unless we're missing something big, that's probably more than what we need for a Planescape book to cover the background, feats, and race. But let's just make that room here. So, this puts us up to 168 pages.

Now, the Factions. The most obvious analogue here is the Guild sections in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. The full "Guilds of Ravnica" chapter is 70 pages, so an average of 7 pages per guild. However, this is more the player-facing side of the guilds. Chapter 4, Creating Adventures, is another 50 pages, with sections on how to make adventures centered around each guild.

Personally, I think that if we give the plane descriptions as cited above, there will be plenty of fodder for adventure stuff. The treatment of renown might also not be as big of a deal, and the backgrounds seem to be generic for all the factions, rather than a separate one for each. So, honestly, I think we could probably cover each faction in 5 pages a piece.

But how many factions are there? In 2nd Edition, there was a storyline called the Faction War that saw the factions leave Sigil, many disbanding or getting wiped out. So, do we just move forward in Planescape without those factions? Something tells me that, like how 4th Edition broke the Great Wheel cosmology, people would much rather go back to what came before. So, let's assume that we're going with all 15 of the original factions. At 5 pages per faction, this would take 75 pages.

So, now we're at 243 pages, and we're starting to get a pretty hefty book.

Next, we've got to talk about the Bestiary. While 5E has given us a pretty healthy number of outer-planar beings (Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes was kind enough to give us at least one monster from Pandemonium and one from Acheron, as well as plenty more demons, devils, and yugoloths,) there's lots of other weird stuff from Planescape that I'd be eager to see.

The bestiary in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica is 45 pages long. The section in Van Richten's is 33 pages. Obviously, Boo's Astral Menagerie is 64 pages, but that's an outlier (for those complaining, not entirely unjustifiably, about Spelljammer's relative thin-ness, I do think we got an absolutely stellar - pardon the pun - monster supplement). So, let's assume something closer to Van Richten's in length. That puts our page count at 276.

Ok, then what about treasure and spells? One would have to assume there are some crazy magic items out on the planes. Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, which I think is one of the most treasure-rich setting books if memory serves, has a 16-page chapter for treasure. This puts us up to 292.

Oh, and I almost forgot! Sigil! Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica dedicates 22 pages to describing the Tenth District. Eberron: Rising from the Last War spends 32 pages describing the metropolis of Sharn. These are the two most detailed descriptions of specific urban spaces in 5E, so I think we could cover Sigil in a comparable span of pages. Let's take the average and say 27 pages to describe Sigil.

Throw in, say, three pages for spells and we're at 321.

So, this would definitely put the book on the hefty side of things. But books of this length are not unprecedented. Explorer's Guide to Wildemount is 304 pages. Eberron: Rising from the Last War is 320 pages.

So, yes, by this very guesswork-heavy method, we've produced a page count that would make this the longest setting book in 5th Edition.

But honestly, shouldn't it be? I mean, Planescape is the ultimate big D&D setting. And I think I've been pretty thorough here in what a Planescape book should entail.

I don't know what to expect next year when the book comes out. I'm sure we'll start to get a better sense of it about a year from now. But I really hope that they go all-out and truly bring as much of this setting to 5th Edition as they can. Much as Ravenloft can be thrown into other campaigns by having a brief side-adventure into the Domains of Dread, many campaigns (especially those going into the higher levels) take sojourns into other planes. We saw in Critical Role's first campaign several trips to other planes - going to the Nine Hells to permanently kill a Rakshasa that had been plaguing them (and coming closer to a TPK than they ever would again,) and going to Elysium to prove worthy of their patron gods to get the power necessary to seal Vecna beyond the Divine Gate. That campaign was, of course, the original Exandria campaign, but stuff from Planescape made it into the game as well.

This could be a fantastic book, and a great one to go out on as we move on from 5th Edition to whatever they're calling One D&D. This is another setting I think there will be a lot of hype for, and I hope they can do it right.

Obviously, take all my math here with a huge grain of salt. We don't know what the book will prioritize, and indeed if it's just going to be a single book (though as I've said before, I think the decision to make Spelljammer a box set rather than a single volume feels like it constrained the product too much. 64 pages was plenty for Light of Xaryxis and Boo's Astral Menagerie, but I think the Astral Adventurer's Guide wanted about 50-60 more pages for examples of Wildspace systems. I wonder how much of that was a creative decision from the D&D team and how much of it was because of Hasbro pressure - the company that owns Wizards of the Coast.

Spelljammer vs Starfinder

 Some time ago (what is time in this apocalyptic age?) I got the Core Rulebook for Starfinder, as well as the first Alien Archive, the game's repository of creatures, with stat blocks and many rules for making the creatures within playable races.

Starfinder was created as a science-fantasy adaptation of Pathfinder, itself an RPG created after the introduction of 4th Edition D&D, intending to replicate and synthesize a D&D-like fantasy adventure RPG that hewed closer to 3.5 Edition's model, rather than the dramatic changes of 4e.

Like Pathfinder, and D&D in 3rd edition and beyond, Starfinder's a d20 system, so the very basics of it should look familiar to players who have played 5e - when you want to do something that could succeed or fail, you roll a d20, add the appropriate modifier, and the GM tells you whether or not you've succeeded. It has races and classes, feats, equipment, skills, and other familiar elements.

Spelljammer is D&D's space-based setting/meta-setting. First published in the late 80s, the setting was a flop at first, only getting a new publication... like a couple weeks ago.

What I find interesting is that the two games take wildly different approaches to the concept of "fantasy RPG in space."

Spelljammer is built around the idea of preserving familiar D&D rules as best as possible. This goes to the extent that space even works differently than it does in the real world. Space ships are literally ships that sail in space, and have open decks that one can walk upon without the need for a spacesuit.

Ultimately, Spelljammer is a setting rather than a new set of rules, and the only real modifications to what we know of D&D is how things work in that environment. If your spelljammer vessel lands on Toril, and you get out to do some adventures there, there's nothing whatsoever that is different from a Forgotten Realms-set adventure or campaign, other than that when you're done you can hop in your ship and leave the planet.

Starfinder, on the other hand, is genuinely a different rules system than Pathfinder. It's similar enough that the Core Rulebook gives you a guide to converting existing Pathfinder characters to work in the system, and also gives you the stats for the base, classical fantasy races (elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, gnomes, halflings) in the back of the book.

The distinction, I think, is that Starfinder really wants to build a futuristic setting. Skill proficiencies like Computers and Piloting place this firmly in a sci-fi, or at least technological realm.

Starfinder's default setting is, in fact, the same solar system as its Pathfinder game, except that the primary world has mysteriously vanished and been replaced by a giant space station.

Starfinder's rules are comprehensive to allow for science fiction tropes. Not only are there many different kinds of weapons, including many types of firearms that deal different sorts of elemental damage (also melee weapons that do,) but there are items like cybernetic implants and body modification and modules (some magic-based) that can be installed in armor and weapons to add various effects.

Vehicles also get extensive rules systems - there are rules for land-based vehicles, but the real centerpiece is the rules on Starships - allowing a party to customize their ship with various elements, automatically getting to install fancier upgrades as the party's average level goes up (and divorcing this system from Credits, the sci-fi equivalent of gold).

While magic and deities and planar outsiders are still very much part of Starfinder, the game leans in hard on the science fiction tropes popularized in the 1970s and 1980s onward. The ships are futuristic, and indeed the technology behind faster-than-light travel is explicitly technological and not magical (there's a god who prevents magic from being used to enter The Drift).

Comparing the two systems - one of which is not even a system of its own - shows, again, markedly different approaches.

Personally, as someone who grew up on Star Trek the Next Generation and later Star Wars (and who lists The Expanse as one of my favorite TV shows ever,) I really love to sprinkle in some true science fiction into my fantasy.

Spelljammer's approach is mostly more whimsical (though there are some truly terrifying aberrations in Boo's Astral Menagerie). The weird conception of space in it seems more like something someone in the late 19th Century would imagine - there's a certain George Melies vibe to the idea of tall ships sailing among the stars (or, as a more recent reference, Disney's Treasure Planet, which came out when I was at that age where I felt Disney movies were behind me, so I never got around to seeing it).

So, honestly, I've got to say that I prefer the approach Paizo took with Starfinder, letting players go all in on sci-fi tropes without really losing any of the fantasy elements.

But.

Starfinder, like, I assume, Pathfinder, is a really fiddly, crunchy system. And D&D 5e has so many resources at this point to build off of. It's also, crucially, a system that both I and my players are familiar with.

I've heard a lot of people on social media constantly bemoaning people complaining about things in D&D and recommending they check out Pathfinder 2e or the like. And I get that. D&D looked fairly complicated when I first started playing it, but now it's mostly instinctive to me. (Though I've been beating myself up for the past week after doing a little bit of railroading in my last Ravnica session - I'm hoping the next session will make up for that.)

But even though I'm game to try to figure out Starfinder and run at least a short campaign/adventure, I doubt that my friends, many of whom even after years playing D&D are still shaky at it (because they don't obsess over it as much as I do) would want to learn a new system.

So, what I think I'm probably going to do is try to cannibalize elements of Starfinder and work them into the limited (I think) Spelljammer game that I'm going to be running for my Sunday group (which is a "game while we're on a break from the main campaign" for a "game while we're on a break from the main campaign.")

The first, and simplest, thing to implement, is that I'm going to allow for four kinds of elemental weapons - Cryo, Plasma, Sonic, and Shock weapons will work the same as normal, except that they do cold, fire, thunder, and lightning damage, respectively (Sonic I might make rarer because there's way less resistance to Thunder damage). The weapons will cost 3 times the usual amount and are not magical items. Also, renaissance firearms are available at their normal price, but also have elemental equivalents. (Likely these items won't be guaranteed available, but I'll toss them in at shops that the party comes across).

I figure this isn't game-breaking, but can give us some sci-fi flavor. A Plasma Greataxe, for example (inspired by the Plasma Doshko from Starfinder) is a pole at the end of which is an array of jets that shoot a fan of superheated plasma in the shape of an axe blade.

I'm tempted to do a similar thing with the cybernetic implants - at least the ones that just add storage space. We'll have to wait and see how necessary those become.

Starfinder's ship-building system is very cool, but I'm going to play cautious and simply take the Spelljammer approach for now. While I was tempted to simply pull the whole Starfinder ship system into the game wholecloth, given that it's somewhat divorced from individual player power, the fact is that it does still rely on skills like Computers and Piloting, and furthermore expects the much higher progression of such skills that Starfinder grants (even at level 1, the Operative - equivalent of a Rogue - that I made has a +15 or something to Stealth, and had to hit a 21 on Stealth in order to get its "Trick Attack," roughly equivalent to Sneak Attack.)

I still really want to try Starfinder at some point, but there are so many games piled on top of one another that I have no idea when I'll get a chance to.