MCDM, the beloved indie TTRPG developer, is working on their own RPG system that aims to bring more exciting tactical, cinematic, heroic fantasy monster-fighting than the mainstream options like D&D.
Nearly everything I've heard about the system makes me excited - I think the point of inertia is that, with almost a decade of 5E D&D under my belt and maybe a thousand dollars' worth of books for the game, along with a subscription to D&D Beyond and all the built-in infrastructure to make running and playing this game convenient, the big challenge is whether the new game will be so much better that not only I, but also my friends, will feel inclined to try out a new system.
Optimistically, I'd like to say it would be easy enough to simply continue running 5E games and also run games in this new system - indeed, that's what I hope I'll be able to do. But running a TTRPG is a big commitment.
Adults, infamously, have busy schedules, and RPGs are never the top priority (even if, as someone who is a bit of a homebody bum, it's high on my priority list). I'd also say that my friends are not necessarily all big gaming nerds - a lot of them enjoy video games, but tabletop games require a certain rules familiarity and mastery because things cannot be automated the way they are in a video game. Playing Baldur's Gate 3 is, on a mechanical level, very similar to playing a game of 5E D&D, but the barrier to entry is way lower because most of the rules are automated by the game, and on top of that you can easily play it solo.
In my mind, a game like Pathfinder needs to struggle to justify itself. At its heyday, during 4th Edition, I suspect the reason that Pathfinder was so popular was because it was a closer continuation of the 3rd Edition (or 3.5) system - it had the familiarity advantage in a way that 4E did not.
MCDM is, admirably, I'll add, boldly slaughtering sacred cows in the interest of shaking off the rust of nearly 50 years of game design. The thing most people are talking about is the fact that you won't be rolling to hit with attacks.
And that raises the first of my questions: How likely is it in a round of combat for your character to emerge unscathed?
The preview page for the Tactician (the Fighter analogue with a Battle Master emphasis) shows that a first-level Tactician will likely start with something like 40ish hit points (maybe more, as a "Kit" can add a lot). That's almost four times as much as a 5E Fighter would start out with at the same level. Now, we know that there's no attack roll, but characters can still have armor and defenses.
I think to some extent this will just contribute to piling on more HP.
After all, if you don't account for healing capabilties, having a higher max HP is basically equivalent to taking less damage. If your HP and your healing received go up, then it's truly equivalent to taking less damage.
Still, I'm thinking about my Eldritch Knight, whose modest build strategy was to severely reduce the chance he had to get hit by an attack - with a +1 Shield, the Defensive Fighting Style, plate armor and the Shield spell, he effectively had an AC of 27 as long as he had a reaction and a spell slot. So, unless there were save-for-half offensive abilities, he'd only rarely get hit (he did tend to receive a lot of critical hits, though I wonder to what extent I was just more aware of them because they made up a higher percentage of the hits he took).
Therefore: I wonder if I could build a character who, similarly, takes very little damage.
I know that in earlier designs, there would be some kind of roll for defense - you could reduce damage by rolling some dice, and even that if you reduced it to zero, you got to make a counterattack.
I believe this idea has been scrapped because it required too much rolling not on your turn, but I wonder if there will be some statistic governing the ability to reduce incoming damage.
The math gets tricky, of course: if you have a subtractive system - say, with your heavy armor you get to subtract 5 damage from each attack - that becomes really powerful when your foes are rolling, say, 2d6 (nearly half the time you're reducing the damage to zero) but becomes pretty pathetic when you're getting hit for a roll of 4d12+7 by some gargantuan titan.
A fractional system is more balanced - a Raging Barbarian taking half damage from six weak attacks by a group of skeletons and also taking half damage from the claw attack of an ancient dracolich is getting consistent value out of that feature - but if you go into more complex fractions than simply halving, the math gets a little more difficult. How scalable is this?
See, it could be cool if as you get better armor, the damage reduction gets more powerful, but while this is a common feature in digital RPGs - like how Armor works in World of Warcraft - it's potentially a lot of math at a tabletop - do you really want to have to figure out what the damage of that attacks was when you have a five-eighths damage reduction?
So, my suspicion is that we'll likely just see much larger health pools, but will not, by contrast, see monster damage scale up proportionately. In other words, players will need to adjust a bit in terms of what they consider a big scary hit - a monster hitting you for 5% of your maximum health in 5E is basically negligible - just a scratch. But because that's going to be a consistent drain rather than on occasional event, taking the 20 hits of that size necessary to be taken down is going to happen a lot quicker.
Really No Attrition?
To be fair, I think James Introcaso has already acknowledged this, but while the primary class resources are meant to build up over the course of a fight or even an adventure, it seems there will be some things that are dwindling resources. They've talked about creating a tension between Victories and Recoveries: Victories are earned when you win fights or accomplish other serious goals over the course of an adventure, and each class will have some way to capitalize on Victories. The Victories go away (and are converted to XP) when you Rest, which is meant to signal the end of an adventure in most cases, which is meant to encourage players to push on and forward.
Recoveries, however, will be another resource that you start with a lot of, and which you'll spend over the course of an adventure to regain HP and possibly some other things. These, however, do dwindle, and the idea is that if you run out of recoveries, you'll start to really have to seriously think about resting.
Now, I like that these two are in tension - it creates a dramatic and strategic choice and could solve an issue in 5E, which is that if you can afford to do so, it's usually best to rest as much as possible, usually with only narrative tension serving to keep players from resting at every opportunity (or a threat that DMs will add more monsters if the party does rest - which I, for one, am usually too lazy to do - probably should learn to rebalance encounters and have an "if they rested" version of fights, but oh well).
Heroic Resources, though, of which each class has a unique one, are said to not be built on an attrition model.
Now, we don't know what this version of the Talent will look like, but certainly the 5E talent, while not using spell slots, does for sure have an attrition-based resource system. Talents accumulate Strain, and Strain eventually puts them in a position where they have to tap the brakes on their powers or risk just straight-up dying (and on top of that they're also building up other negative effects).
But if we assume Strain is going to work similarly to how it does in its 5E version, that puts it in contrast with other heroic resources, such as the Tactician's Focus, which seems to easily build up in combat and, far from running out, the Tactician is going to get more to play with the longer they adventure and fight.
Now, this could certainly create more tension at the table - our Talent is starting to look really ragged, but our Frenzy is itching to push forward and get more Rage - but I'd really like to see how the balance is going to be struck. Will Talents feel unfairly like the wet blanket holding the rest of the party back because they need to rest and release some that strain? Or are only half the classes going to really get this feeling of having the heroic will to push on regardless of how long the adventure has gone?
The Martial/Caster Divide:
One of the deep... I hesitate to say flaws, but one of the deep issues in 5E and I think most of D&D design, is that you have this giant catalogue of spells, which are sort of the ultimate customization options for a lot of classes, and which are utterly meaningless to other classes.
Essentially, the spell list in the back of the PHB (and in rules supplements like Xanathar's and Tasha's) are a giant grab-bag of ways that your character can do unique and interesting things. Sure, some spells are favored a lot more than others, but the point is that, beyond combat, there's a core system for "various cool things you can do" that half the classes usually don't have access to.
The 5E Talent, interestingly, does not use any of 5E's existing spells, getting its own class-specific bespoke catalogue of Psionic Powers. Many of these powers look very similar to spells - with casting (manifestation) times, levels (orders,) and even schools. This allows the Talent to be nearly as customizable as all the 5E spellcasters (and potentially just as much if they released more psionic powers).
But I think that one area where D&D suffers is that the utility options of all those spells can just never be replicated for non-caster classes. A Rogue, in addition to being the stealthy, underhanded combatant, is supposed to be "the guy who can do it for you," and while things like Expertise and Reliable Talent make them really good at succeeding on skill checks, there's no real Rogue ability that lets you, say, automatically find an object nearby - even if that's flavorfully something that Rogue should be very good at. Thus, a Wizard with Locate Object can often be more effective at searching for something than a Rogue who's got expertise in Investigation.
I'd love to see a system in which classes that aren't necessarily casting magical spells still have the versatility of a spellcaster.
How is non-combat stuff going to feel?
We don't have a super strong idea of how skills and such are going to work in MCDM's RPG. I suspect that it will look pretty familiar - the Tactician, for example, is given a number of skills they can learn, and I'd guess we're looking at a similar system.
But I don't think it's something they've talked about in their design diaries.
And I think this ultimately comes down to the following question:
Can I run the same sort of adventures I run in D&D using this system?
The goal, I think, of the MCDM RPG is to do what current 5E players like to do, but better.
And to be fair, a lot of the roleplay and storytelling that has made D&D a compelling entertainment medium in the form of Actual Play shows has been pretty independent of the gameplay systems. I like tactical combat, and in a way I think that's the thing I'm least worried that this game will screw up.
Perhaps, therefore, it's silly to worry how well it will handle such things, because in theory any system that doesn't get in the way of RP will be fine.
So, then, here's my last question:
How easy will it be to customize and homebrew stuff for it?
In a Q&A, Matt Colville gave a somewhat flippant answer to whether there will be guidance on homebrewing monsters in the rules, saying that the way to build monsters is to playtest them, and that should be obvious.
But I think maybe he was thinking about that from the perspective of a professional game designer: obviously, the monsters of Flee, Mortals were tested and tweaked by lots of professionals, and the result was a beautifully polished product.
The thing is, sometimes for the story you're telling, you don't always have quite the pieces that you need. And I have made regular and ample use of the "Quick Monster Stats" in the 5E DMG to build monsters of my own design.
What we need, basically, is a similar table that can show you roughly how much HP a monster of a certain level should have, and how much damage it should typically do. This isn't a precise science, of course, but it's incredibly useful for putting together something that will challenge your players without overwhelming them.
So, I'm hoping that there is a similar chart here. I'm someone who likes genre-mixing a lot, and so if I want to make a monster that is a vending machine animated by the strange radiation of a glowing meteorite, with an attack that lets it launch a volley of soda cans at its foes, it would be nice to know if, for a second-level party, I should make it launch three cans for 2d6 each, dealing a total of 21 damage on average, or if I should decrease that damage given that I also want it to have a lot of HP.
I don't know when we'll start getting sample pages or a basic rules release, and I'm sure that this coming year I'll be focusing more on the 2024 D&D core rulebooks (and seeing if it's going to be easy enough to let players in existing campaigns convert).
But I am excited about this game, far more than I have been about things like Pathfinder 2E Revised or Tales of the Valiant.
