5e D&D’s bounded accuracy is supposed to keep attack rolls, DCs, and other numbers in check, allowing monsters to stay relevant longer and decreasing the gap between proficient and non-proficient characters. In a 2012 blog post, WOTC’s Rodney Thompson said this:

Nonspecialized characters can more easily participate in many scenes. While it’s true that increases in accuracy are real and tangible, it also means that characters can achieve a basic level of competence just through how players assign their ability bonuses. Although a character who gains a +6 bonus to checks made to hide might do so with incredible ease, the character with only a naked ability bonus still has a chance to participate. We want to use the system to make it so that specialized characters find tasks increasingly trivial, while other characters can still make attempts without feeling they are wasting their time.

Accuracy, saving throw bonuses, and skill checks are certainly more bounded than previous editions, which generally handed a fighter up to a +20 bonus to attack rolls over 20 levels, plus whatever they got from raised ability scores. Similarly, in previous editions, a character’s best saving throw/defense bonus increases by about 10 or more between levels 1 and 20.

In contrast, 5e’s proficiency bonus only increases by 4 points over 20 levels (or 10 points with expertise) plus a few points from increased ability scores. That seems like a lot less, right? But in my opinion, it’s still not bounded enough, and that’s a major reason that the game falters at high levels.

attack bonuses

In 5e, attack accuracy is not the main problem with increasing proficiency bonus. Every character gets their proficiency bonus added to their attacks. It’s a given. Therefore, a character’s proficiency bonus could really be anything and it can work fine against appropriately-leveled monsters, as long as the monster’s AC is raised to compensate (generally through some arbitrary amount of “natural armor”). When added to attack bonus, proficiency bonus is nothing more than a lever you can use to determine how to treat mismatched opponents. The higher the proficiency bonus scale, the more you’re nerfing low-level monsters. If you want tenth-level characters to be threatened by groups of CR 1/2 goblins, you want the game to use a low proficiency bonus; if you want heroes to cinematically hack their way through dozens of goblins, you want a high bonus. That’s a stylistic choice for your game and it’s not broken either way; it just tells a different story.

Increasing attack bonuses, then, are fine, because they’re across the board. The problem with 5e’s proficiency bonus is that it also increases skills and saving throws. At high levels, these increases make it hard to keep tension in the game.

skills

Skills are generally not as important for character survival as attack rolls, but inasmuch as skills are important, you want them to work. At high level, the gap between a skilled and unskilled character becomes unmanageable. A 17th-level rogue might have a +11 in Stealth without having any particular stealth-based feats, class features, or magic items, and a cleric of the same level might still have a +0 in Stealth. And that’s before Expertise, which brings the rogue to +17! You can’t meaningfully challenge these two characters with the same obstacle.

The issue also causes problems with monster design. Do we want a +17 stealth rogue (with a minumum stealth roll of 27 due to Reliable Talent) to auto-succeed on stealth checks versus nearly every monster? If not, we’re forced to give a high Wisdom plus proficiency (or double proficiency) in Perception to many high-level monsters. Without those hacks, stealth scenes (or rinse-and-repeat rogue sniper tactics) are auto-successes devoid of drama. With boosted Perception scores, sneaking becomes nearly impossible for the group. This is not what we want as DMs. Perhaps more so than nearly any other type of scene, stealth scenes should be tense and suspenseful, with the chance of catastrophic failure in the offing.

How do 5e’s skill increases compare to earlier editions? In 3e, without trying very hard, a level 20 rogue’s Stealth bonus could be 30 points higher than a cleric’s: a 3e rogue’s fumble is far better than a cleric’s crit. In 4e, the a level 30 rogue’s Stealth bonus might be 15 points higher than the cleric’s. Is 5e more bounded than that? For the most part it is, with most skill bonuses topping off around +11 or so. However, a rogue with expertise in Stealth can have a bonus that rivals a 4e rogue’s bonus; with Reliable Talent, they can even approach a 3rd level character’s total. More than anything, Expertise is the problem here, sending skill bonuses out of bounds.

saving throws

Saving throws are similarly harmed by an increasing gap between proficient and nonproficient scores. While you can easily raise monster AC to stay competitive with climbing attack bonuses, you can’t do the same with every saving throw to keep up with PCs’ spell DCs. The Wisdom saving throw is particularly vital. There are so many “I-win” spells with Wisdom saving throws that every high-level monster, in order to be able to stand on its own, needs one or more of the following: a high Wisdom score, a Wisdom saving throw proficiency, spell resistance, or legendary resistance – no matter what the monster’s story is – just to deal with the wizard’s DC 19 polymorph or similar spell. (Such save-or-lose spells are pretty inexpensive for a high-level wizard. A level 17 wizard can toss off a polymorph every turn for 9 turns!)

There are scattered “I-win” spells with non-wisdom saving throws, too, so most high-level monsters are built with tons of save proficiencies, which is kind of a hack. (What do I consider a hack? Any monster stat block feature that is not tied to a story feature. What’s the story behind a purple worm, with 8 Wisdom and no Perception proficiency, having a Wisdom saving throw proficiency? It’s just there to wallpaper over a crack in the math.)

Saving throws are just as unsatisfying when employed by monsters against high-level characters. What’s a fair DC for a devastating monster attack that causes petrification or a similarly significant effect, considering the high-level cleric has a +11 Wisdom save and the rogue has a +0? Any DC that offers the rogue a decent survival chance is nearly an auto-success for the cleric, and a challenge for the cleric is a near-certain failure for the rogue. It really would work better if, as a monster designer or DM, you could set a DC that caused tension for both characters (despite the cleric’s better chance of success).

How does 5e compare to earlier editions in different characters’ gap between saving throw bonuses?

Despite 5e’s bounded accuracy, it’s really no better in this regard than most previous editions. Consider TSR D&D up to 2e. While some classes were better at some saving throws than other, they all improved as they leveled. For instance, in 2nd edition, a 20th level cleric was really good against Death Magic… but the most vulnerable character, the thief, was only 6 points worse. In 3e, this gap went up: a 20th level cleric’s Will save might be 15 to 20 points better than a rogue’s. 4e tightened this up: a cleric’s Will defense might be 10 or so points better than a rogue’s, just as in 5e. In other words, 5e’s bounded accuracy hasn’t tightened up the saving throw , and in fact it’s pretty much on par for most editions.

a high level problem

If you mostly play the game at low and mid-levels (level 10 and below), bounded accuracy problems rarely come up. At level 5, the difference between a rogue and cleric’s Wisdom save, or a wisdom-based skill bonus, might be +0 versus +7. A medium DC of 15 is a non-foregone challenge for both characters.

It’s no coincidence that D&D’s “sweet spot” is up to around level 10. After that, with increasing primary ability bonuses and proficiency bonuses, plus performance-enhancing class features, the gap between the proficiency haves and the have-nots becomes an increasing obstacle to exciting play.

flattening proficiency bonus

What if we kept the game in the sweet spot? Let’s set the proficiency bonus at a good value – say +3 – and never change it. (Am I crazy, or was this the case at some point during the D&D Next playtest?)

Changing proficiency bonus to +3 gives skilled characters a tiny bit of extra power at low level, when they’d normally only have a +2 proficiency bonus. Fine! A +2 bonus is a bit of a small, fiddly bonus anyway for 5e. And a fixed +3 bonus across all levels allows for more focused designs for monsters, traps, and other challenges. A trained, high-level rogue’s Stealth check is reduced to +8 (or +11 if we still let expertise double the proficiency bonus to +6), and a cleric’s spell DC is reduced to 16, which means that even a lowly purple worm can have a small but non-trivial chance to spot the assassin or shrug off the polymorph. In turn, the DC of the purple worm’s Tail Stinger attack can be set so that it threatens both the level 17 fighter (Con DC +8) and the rogue (Con DC +2. No one dumps Constitution, right?)

Of course, monster design would need to be rebalanced around these lower proficiency numbers. High-level monsters could lose about 2 points of natural armor, for instance, and CR 15+ monsters wouldn’t all need four or more save proficiencies. Overall, high-level combat would work better, with fewer design kludges and guaranteed-success or guaranteed-failure rolls.

would this break the game?

Game design is like putting a fitted sheet on a bed. Every time you tug on one corner, another corner is in danger of popping off. If we flatten out proficiency, what are the unintended consequences going to be? Will we break the game?

Well, obviously, at levels 5-8, there will be no consequences (proficiency bonus is already +3). In fact, from levels 1 through 12, there will be minimal consequences (we’re only talking about a +-1 change at most). The change becomes meaningful at around level 13, where we’re dropping proficiency bonus from +5 to +3.

The likely consequence is that groups of low-level monsters become slightly more dangerous to high-level characters. Their attack bonuses and saving throw DCs will be relatively closer to those of their higher-level opponents. Conversely, solo monsters are nerfed, since they don’t get the same boost as hordes of weak monsters.

I think the way to go here is to institute a change D&D badly needs anyway: increase the hit points and damage of high-level monsters. To scale D&D monsters, you have two knobs you can turn: you can increase attack roll/AC, and you can increase damage/hit points. Let’s do more of #2. (This is something I suggested for 4e as well.) In 5e, low-level monsters, like goblins, do too much damage relative to their supposed challenge rating, and high-level monsters deal too little. Instead of increasing linearly, monster damage and hit points can be a tad exponential. High-level characters have so many game-breaking powers that there’s no challenge otherwise. This is a change D&D monsters badly need – let’s just go ahead and make it.

If we boost high-level monster hit points and damage, will there be unanticipated consequences to that change as well? Sure. But given the many problems of high-level play, the risks inherent in making big changes are minimal. High-level play is broken anyway and only works if the DM carefully massages it. My proposed changes won’t fix every problem, but I think they’ll help a lot.

Now is there any chance that proficiency bonus will be flattened in 6e/One D&D, as I advocate for?

No.

6e is clearly tying its wagon to the proficiency-bonus star. Character abilities are becoming more dependent on this number, with nearly every character power being usable a number of times per day equal to the character’s proficiency bonus. The designers clearly envision this number rising as characters gain in level: it’s how nearly every playtest power scales. I’m sure proficiency bonus will remain, as it is now, +2 to +6.

Oh well. Maybe in 7e.

With the Dungeon Delver’s Guide kickstarter finished at over $200K, I want to talk about the authors’ contributions. I tweeted all this but I want to have it all together on a less hard-to-search platform.

William Fischer designed some of our most devious high-level traps, including the sinister Hourglass Room. He also did the Palace of the Amber Prince dungeon, which was featured in this article: https://www.enworld.org/threads/dungeon-delvers-guide-three-page-dungeons.691141/ William is also the book’s lead editor and spot writer. Every passage in the book is the better for having William on duty.

Will Gawned did a bunch of monsters for us, but what I want to highlight is not his excellent monster work but his mycelial heritage, one of the most charming in the book. A small, cautious people, they speak in reedy whispers and sing quiet, beautiful songs. I love these little folks and want to protect them! The mycelial is featured here: https://www.levelup5e.com/news/dungeon-delvers-guide-the-mycelial-and-the-ratling

Cassandra Macdonald has her fingerprints all over the Dungeon Delver’s Guide. She contributed traps, class archetypes, magic items, and monsters, but most of all she designed dungeons. Three of our three-page dungeons–the Rotten Underbelly, the Serpent’s Maw, and the Orden Barrow Mound – are hers. But her grossest–and therefore best–contribution has to be the decomposer druid, an archetype that is all about spreading disease, harvesting energy from corpses, and turning into a swarm of rats or bugs. This archetype will slither, fly, and/or bite its way into your heart.

Rory Madden contributed our fighter archetype, the dungeoneer, and our rogue archetype, the shadow stalker. More than that, as our resident char-op expert, he reviewed all of the player-facing material–classes, spells, equipment, and so on–for balance. Sure, he caught all the game-breaking stuff before it went out in the world to plague Narrators, but he also provided an underrated function that every player should appreciate: he told us when we were being too cautious in our design. Why include a game element unless it’s big and fun? If you play some really wild DDG characters, thank Rory.

Sarah Madsen designed some new-standard dungeon monsters, like the slime mold. One slime mold can become two, and four, and eight when it wants to lay down serious damage to multiple opponents, and merge back to one when it wants to engulf and dissolve its prey. It combines the worst features of a gelatinous cube, black pudding, and mimic into one slimy nightmare. What’s more, it’s smarter than most oozes, and each shares a psychic connection with its siblings.

Peter N Martin is an all-positions player in the DDG–someone I turn to whenever I need some creativity spilled out onto the page. He wrote two high-level dungeons, including one in which the players can get a subterranean submarine! He also contributed a ton of archetypes, traps, magic items, random dungeons, cultures, and monsters. If I had to feature one of his contributions, through, it would have to be the great job he did with the equipment section. So much of the DDG’s amazing equipment – including most of the cultural equipment – came from Peter’s pen. Check out this preview (https://www.levelup5e.com/news/dungeon-delvers-guide-lets-go-shopping) to see his living, squirming abolethic equipment, including the sleepless mask and the parasite launcher.

Mike Myler is a Level Up rock star and I knew I couldn’t do an A5E book without drawing on his design chops and system knowledge. Mike anchored the heritages section, designing the motley, oozefolk, and rockborn heritages, as well doing a bunch of work on cultures and archetypes. If you like customizing your character, you’ll love the motley. Identified by their disparate collection of beastly body parts, motleys have a ton of heritage features to choose from, each with real mechanical weight. Want a prehensile tail? Simian arms? A cheetah’s legs? Claws? Gills? You can (and should) run an all-motley adventuring party in which each character looks, and plays, unlike any other.

Morrigan Robbins is one of the deepest thinkers on DDG – literally. She designed Underland, the creepy, dreamlike cave world deep under the earth. I love how steeped in classic literary fantasy and horror it is and how it differs from other approaches to underground ecosystems. You can read all about Underland here: https://www.levelup5e.com/news/dungeon-delvers-guide-welcome-to-underland

Brandes Stoddard is an excellent and prolific designer I’ve long admired and I jumped at the chance to work with him. He contributed “The Old Number Ten Mine”, a claustrophobic underground adventure that exemplifies the DDG ethos. It’s a survival puzzle set in a collapsing mine. Rather than being a combat meat grinder, the adventure is cleverly designed to allow just as much, or as little, combat as the players desire, and the final challenge isn’t a wicked monster boss but the earth itself.

Lydia Van Hoy had the steep challenge of designing an archetype for a new class, A5E’s Marshal. The Expedition Leader is designed to support and guide a teams of underworld adventurers into the subterranean unknown. As Lydia says, “the best expedition leaders also have experience leading them _out_” (a much rarer skill). The Expedition Leader’s Commanding Presence feature helps allies communicate in code, travel quickly as a team, perform synchronized attack combos, and spot and survive traps (a must-have skill considering the other contents of this book!)

I said I would just mention the designers, but there are a ton of other people who made this book! We used EN writing by Walt Ciechanowski, C. Richard Davies, Mike Myler, and Anthony Pryor. We are deeply grateful for Phil Glotfelty’s tireless consultation on accessibility issues. I also leaned on Peter Coffey, writer and TRPG Talk podcast cohost extraordinaire, as an editor and consultant.

Frank Michienzi, the graphic designer, had to solve a lot of layout challenges to pack this book with all the stuff we wanted to fit on every page. Thanks for consistently coming up with great layout ideas!

The art director Michael McCarthy did a great job zooming in on the look we wanted and marshaling our terrific artists: Erik Davis-Heim who did the amazing cover, Rafael Bejnamin our lead artist, and all the other amazing internal artists: Jacob Blackmon, Dana Braga, Marcel Budde, Mark Bulahao, Mathew Burger, Meshon Cantrill, Jeremy Corff, Ellis Goodson, Scott Harshbarger, Rick Hershey, Jori Hollander, Herman Lau, Yihyoung Li, Rita Marfoldi, Indi Martin, Savage Mojo, Dan Nokes, Alba Palacio, Fabian Parente, Claudio Pozas, Deanna Roberds, Gui Sommer, Julio Rocha, Phil Stone, Egil Thompson, Melissa Tillery, Jen Tracy, Kim Van Deun, Vinicius Werneck, Peter Woods, and Xanditz

We couldn’t make this book without all the work done by Jessica Hancock, the business manager, and Xin Lewis, the publishing administrator–and of course Russ Morrissey the publisher and the mastermind behind A5E!

And finally, my heartfelt thanks to the thousands of kickstarter backers who turned this book into a real, physical thing that will grace gaming tables all over the world. May you delve deep and return to tell the tale!

It’s happening!

Dungeon Delver’s Guide is now available to Kickstart! If you back it today, you’ll have the PDF in your hands in a month.

I’ve been working and testing Dungeon Delver’s Guide for years and I think it advances the state of the art of D&D dungeons. It lets you prepare a dungeon fast, or even run it on the fly, and still have it feel like you worked on it all week. Plus it’s stuffed with DM/GM goodies like traps, magic items, and monsters, and player goodies like new equipment and stats to play as my beloved ratlings.

Go forth and delve!

D&D 6th edition (or One D&D) (or 5.5?) is a go! You can get the first playtest packet here.

Although the packet ranges over races and feats and more, while reading the packet, I laser focused on one thing: the new grappling rules. Partly because I’m not that interested in dnd races and partly because, as a frequent DM and monster designer, grappling is one of the rulesets that I’ll actually need to know. Plus grappling is one of the areas in the playtest packet with lots of sneaky changes from 5e.

For old-school players, grappling is a bit of a joke, synonymous with “needless complexity.” If a 1st edition or 3rd edition fighter player announces he is grappling a monster, everyone at the table groans. Every D&D edition reinvents grappling, trying to fix the broken or inadequate design of the last. 6e continues that trend.

Designing grapple rules is tough! For one thing, most people have a good visceral idea of how unarmed combat works, so you need to stay somewhat true to reality. For another thing, grappling is something you can do any time you want – in 4e parlance, it’s an at-will power. You can’t declare that people can grapple only x times per long rest. That means it needs to be perfectly balanced with melee attacks. You can’t make it weak or it will never get used (or only get used as part of an annoying specialized character build using special feats). You can’t make it too strong or all the melee classes will use it every turn, which changes D&D combat in a bonkers way.

In my opinion, grapple is a bit on the weak side in 5e, without the addition of special character abilities to back it up. In 6e, have they hit the mark? I’m not sure without more playtesting, but I’m leaning towards “this looks pretty fun.”

The 5e Rules

In 5e, you initiate a grapple by making a Str (Athlethics) check contested by the target’s Str (Athletics) or Dex (Acrobatics) check. Then, to escape, a creature must use its action to repeat this contest. That means that, especially at high levels where proficiency bonuses get high, a grappler who is trained in Athletics is at a huge advantage against someone who is untrained. Most monster are never going to escape from a creature with proficiency (or god forbid expertise) in athletics. They’d be dumb to even try, since it uses up their action to do so. HOWEVER, being grappled doesn’t really do much on its own, except stop a creature from moving away from their grappler.

The 6e Rules

In 6e, everything about grappling has changed! It’s now an attack roll just like any other: an unarmed melee attack, with proficiency bonus, against a monster’s AC. On a hit, the monster is grappled.

The effect of grappling has changed too. It used to just restrict movement. Now a grappled creature makes all attacks with disadvantage, EXCEPT those against their grappler. Grappling now has a huge effect compared to 5e, where being grappled was really not a big deal. It’s very reminiscent of the 4th Edition fighter’s Mark ability, which incentivized monsters to attack the fighter.

At first blush, this seems too powerful. A fighter or monk with a super high Armor Class can grapple a creature and then tank very effectively, putting a serious debuff on the enemy while using their high AC to avoid the monster’s attacks. Imagine locking down a legendary monster or other boss this way! Since you can grapple a creature one size larger, a Medium fighter can grapple some pretty big adversaries.

However, this big boost to grapple comes with a big nerf. Whereas in 5e you had to use up your action to try to escape, in 6e it’s now something that you can do automatically at the end of your turn, after taking your normal actions. And it’s a Str or Dex saving throw instead of an opposed check. That’s a big advantage to the grappled creature. They don’t need to waste their turn to escape a grapple, AND more creatures (and characters?) have a Str or Dex saving throw proficiency than are trained in Athletics or Acrobatics. AND, since it’s a saving throw, legendary creatures can succeed automatically using legendary resistance (assuming legendary resistance is unchanged in 6e.)

Taken all in all, it’s an interesting change. Grapple is faster and easier to use (just an attack roll instead of a fairly complicated opposed roll that’s unlike the rest of D&D’s combat rules). Its bite is worse: at the least, it probably means a turn of attacks with disadvantage. And it’s harder to lock someone into a permanent grapple, so it seems less abusable.

Of course, the devil is in the details. Will other abilities built on top of it – like monk abilities – make it too powerful? We’ll see.

Of interest to fans of grappling: the playtest packet also includes the Tavern Brawler feat, which we should check for grappling synergy. Nope, nothing there that breaks grappling wide open. Tavern Brawler has two features about punching, one about shoving, and one about using furniture as weapons. We’ll have to wait to see if there’s an updated Grappler feat.

When should I grapple?

Assuming I’m a tanky character with high HP and/or AC, when should I grapple? Always? Sometimes? Never?

It seems to depend on your level and number of opponents. At level one, you’re giving up your only attack, so the reward (shutting down one enemy’s movement and nerfing their attacks for at least one turn) better be worth it. You only want to do this if you’re fighting a single opponent, or a boss monster that makes up most of the combat’s threat. You’re not going to want to give up your turn to grapple one of three identical goblins.

At high level, grappling looks more and more attractive. If you’re a fighter or monk with three or more per turn, you’re only giving up 1/3 or less of your damage output in exchange for shutting down an enemy. (And grappling is specifically written as part of the Unarmed Strike rules, making me think you’ll be able to do it as part of a Flurry of Blows.) As long as you can find a boss foe that’s small enough to grapple, it becomes a better and better deal. It might even be worth doing against a non-boss foe: it’s probably worth a single one of your attacks to basically remove an enemy from the fight, especially if you have driven your AC to astronomical heights (pretty easy at high level). Added to that, your grapple might become more and more effective as you gain levels. Your proficiency bonus keeps climbing as you gain levels, and monsters that aren’t proficient in Dex or Str saves are going to have a difficult time escaping you.

So that’s a worry. Grapple looks fun and fairly balanced at low level, but will it become a no-brainer at high level?

One more question: Can multiple creatures grapple you at once? I have this question in 5e too actually, but it becomes more important in 6e where grappling has more of a mechanical effect.

A fighter faces a horde of goblins. They try to pin him down with weight of numbers, using multiple grapples. Once a goblin has grappled the fighter, can a second goblin do so? If so, against whom does the fighter have disadvantage: everyone? Everyone but the two grappling goblins?

Not sure of the answers to these questions, but I’m excited for a playtest.

EDIT: For completeness (in case you thought this post wasn’t a complete enough discussion of like five sentences in a playtest packet), someone pointed out that, since grappling (and pushing) are attack rolls, they can be used for opportunity attacks. This is a huge upgrade for tanks and defenders who want to defend their friends, specifically for multiattackers like fighters, rangers, and barbarians. (It’s an upgrade for monks too, though not as big because they could already use Stunning Strike on an opportunity attack.)

For high-level multiattackers who divide their damage among several attacks, getting a single extra hit from opportunity attack really doesn’t change the battle equation much. HOWEVER, stopping a creature’s movement does! It’s really what you want out of an opportunity attack. And now you have two options to stop an escaping monster’s movement (or escaping player if you’re a sadistic DM).

-You can grapple the foe, completely shutting down their movement as well as giving them disadvantage on attacks. However, since this attack probably takes place during the target’s turn, and they make a save vs grapple at the end of their turn, the grapple may only last for a fraction of a turn.

-You can knock them prone. They can then stand up, but it uses up half their movement so they won’t be able to get far. And if they’ve already used up half their movement, then they can’t get up from prone until their next turn, which means that everyone makes attacks on them with advantage and they make attacks with disadvantage for one full round – which is pretty much game over for nearly any monster. If a monster has used up half of its movement already, knocking a creature prone is an incredibly powerful play.

As a side note, I’m on board with the grapple on an attack roll, but I don’t love the rule that you can knock down a monster with just an attack roll. In the 5e Monster Manual, an ogre has an ac 11. An ettin has an ac 12. Both are incredibly easy to hit, which means they’re now incredibly easy to topple over, even though they’re big strong meaty enemies. In the 6e MM, maybe both monsters will have higher AC to account for the knockdown rule, but that means that this rule is distorting monster stats to prevent this kind of exploit. I’m fine with grappling as an attack roll, since you can use a Str save to escape a grapple; but the current push rule doesn’t make any use of the defender’s strength, so the mechanics don’t match the story.

I’ve been talking a bit about my book Dungeon Delver’s Guide which is being published by EN Publishing. Well, it’s done and the kickstarter is launching later this month!

Get notified on launch!

(I’m crossposting this post about my Dungeon Delver’s Guide from enworld, because why not have all my D&D theorycrafting writing together on my D&D blog? The original article is here.)

You’ve baited your story hooks. You’ve got your dungeon map. Now what do you put in all those rooms?

Creating an adventure’s worth of interesting features at once can be challenging. You may encounter writer’s block, or find yourself filling each area with repetitive challenges. (A dungeon where every room contains hostile monsters is one of the most common ruts to get stuck in!) In these cases, it can be helpful to have a checklist to make sure you have varied adventure elements: something for the puzzle solver, something for the story lover, something for the combat fan, and so on.

In Dungeon Delver’s Guide, we introduce a new tool for adventure design: the NODES system. Although we apply it to dungeons in this book, it’s applicable for any type of adventure design. Your scenario comes alive when it’s filled with Novelties, Obstacles, Discoveries, Escalations, and Set-pieces.

Novelties

Novelty is the driving force of tabletop RPGs. Every dungeon should offer something that the players haven’t seen before in the campaign, or a twist on a familiar idea. (Don’t worry: your dungeon idea doesn’t have to be totally original—just new to your game table.)

One of the best ways to introduce novelty into your game is with a fantastic vista.

I want to share a post I wrote for enworld: “It’s a Trap”, an adapted excerpt from Dungeon Delver’s Guide, which I’m writing for EN Publishing. It’s a continuation of my thoughts I’ve posted on my blog here.

Check out “It’s a Trap” here, or, if you don’t feel like clicking, just read it below.

It’s a Trap!

In EN Publishing’s upcoming Dungeon Delver’s Guide, we’re giving you every tool you need to build story-driven, atmospheric dungeons. And that means we have got to get traps right. Today I want to share the book’s trap-building philosophy, along with a few of the more than a hundred traps you’ll get when you Kickstart the book later this year.

Traps are a defining characteristic of dungeons. But too often, they feel like an arbitrary tax on the characters’ hit points. Done poorly, traps cause play to bog down as paranoid players poke and prod every door and passageway for unseen dangers. For these reasons, GMs and Narrators are often advised to use traps sparingly, or even steer clear of them entirely.

Throw that advice out the window!

Making choices and exploring the unknown are what make a dungeon fun. Telling players that their passive Perception has caused them to trigger, or avoid, a trap offers them neither choice nor the opportunity to explore. Traps are most fun after they’re discovered but before they’ve been neutralized. Should the rogue disarm the device? Should the wizard cast a spell? What does that inviting-looking lever do? With uncertain but probably dire outcomes on the line, every success and failure feels earned.

Just as combat tests both a character’s abilities and their player’s tactical skill, good traps allow for multiple solutions. A character invested in high Perception and Investigation, trap-specific abilities, and a set of thieves’ tools should be able to disarm any trap they encounter. At the same time, a clever player should be able to bypass the same trap simply by paying attention to their surroundings and playing a hunch.

Making a Dungeon Delver’s Guide-style trap is pretty simple to do. You can make traps fair and fun if you remember to telegraph every trap.

Telegraphing Traps

Players can’t see through their characters’ eyes or hear through their ears. As the Narrator, it falls on you to supply them with the information they need to make choices for their characters.

Besides the sensory information your descriptions provide, the level of detail you offer gives your players valuable information. The more details you lavish on a given location, the more important that location seems. This can work against you, such as when the players read too much into an offhand detail and as a result waste time investigating a random piece of furniture. But you can make it work to your advantage, as well. An area containing a trap or other hidden feature should be described with specificity, so that your players know it’s intended as a location they should explore, and not just an empty space that needs to be traversed on their way from A to B.

If possible, a location’s details should relate to the trap that it conceals. You don’t need to give so much information that you completely reveal the trap, but you should offer enough that the players can make the connection after the fact. If a trap has claimed the lives of previous explorers, there may be bones or other remains nearby—possibly charred if the trap creates a fiery explosion. If the dungeon’s denizens know how to avoid a trap, or need to visit it frequently to reset it, they may leave footprints. A trail of footprints that ends abruptly tells another story entirely! A good clue instills caution and increases tension, but doesn’t necessarily tell the players how to proceed. Instead, it asks a question: what do you do next?

What happens if you don’t telegraph danger in any way? Players learn that every location, no matter how seemingly insignificant, might harbor another such trap. Thus, their only sensible course of action is to examine every door, room feature, and length of hallway. The game can become a slow-paced grind.

Solving a Trap

Once a trap has been discovered, the real fun begins. How can the adventurers bypass the trap without triggering it?

Nearly every trap can be disabled with an appropriate ability check or two: characters with thieves’ tools proficiency, high Perception scores, and trap-sensing class features will get their chances to shine. Many traps can also be bypassed or disabled without a check. For example, pressing a hidden button might automatically disable a deadly device. Similarly, a character might use mage hand or a 10-foot pole to trigger a trap from a distance, staying clear of the trap’s range.

Our traps’ descriptions specify actions and spells that let a creature automatically avoid a trap’s dangers. Players might also think of other ways to bypass a trap. Based on how appropriate the solution is, you can decide that it doesn’t work, requires a check, or automatically succeeds. For instance, the description for a hidden pit trap lists avoiding or bridging the pit among its possible solutions. Casting fly and floating over the trap isn’t mentioned, but such a solution should automatically succeed. Walking over the pit on a tightrope, on the other hand, might require an Acrobatics check.

Want to try out some Dungeon Delver’s Guide traps? Here are some examples. These use Level Up’s Exploration Challenge format. To run them, you need to know the following:

Every ability check made while investigating or disarming a trap uses the DCs listed at the top of the trap description. The number before the slash is for solo checks, while the number after the slash is for group checks.

Attempting to disarm a trap can result in a critical success or a critical failure. A roll of 1, or a group check in which everyone fails, is a critical failure, while a roll of 20, or a group check in which everyone succeeds, is a critical success.

The italicized text, the description of the room, is the “telegraph”—the hint that something might not be quite right. You can read this text aloud or paraphrase it.

Reverse Gravity Trap

1st tier (constructed trap)

Challenge 4 (1,100 XP); DC 15/14

The walls are covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. On the ceiling, metal spikes hang down like icicles.

Gravity is reversed in this room. An unsecured creature or object that enters the room triggers a Failure. (Note: If this room contains creatures, they stand on the ceiling.)

Exploration. A Perception check or an examination of the bookshelves reveals that the books are shelved upside down against the tops of their shelves. The ceiling is 30 feet high. The bookshelves look easy to climb.

Books. As an action, a creature can make an Arcana or Investigation check to scan the bookshelves. On a success, the creature notices a spellbook (containing levitate or another 2nd-level spell) on a shelf across the room.

Spell Effect. This is a transmutation effect created by a 7th-level spell. A successful dispel magic disables the trap.

Possible Solutions

A creature can make an Athletics or Acrobatics check to climb along the bookcases. The check is made with advantage if the creature is upside down (i.e. right side up relative to the room’s gravity).

Critical Failure or Failure. The creature or object falls to the ceiling. Creatures that can levitate or fly don’t fall. The room’s ceiling is 30 feet high, so a creature that falls from the floor takes 10 (3d6) bludgeoning damage from the fall. A creature that takes falling damage also takes 10 (3d6) piercing damage from the spikes on the ceiling.

Once on the ceiling, a creature can move around the spikes safely but treats the area as difficult terrain.

Success or Critical Success. The creature moves through the room safely until the end of its turn.

Reverse Gravity Trap Variant: Random Gravity Trap

This room is identical in appearance to the Reverse Gravity Trap except that it has an upside-down door on the wall adjoining the ceiling.

Roll initiative. Each round on initiative count 20, gravity reverses direction. Each unsecured creature and object in the room when gravity changes falls up or down, as appropriate. Creatures take falling damage and spike damage when falling up, and falling damage only when falling down. A creature holding onto the bookshelves when gravity reverses must make a Dexterity saving throw or lose its grip.

Once a creature has noticed the location of the spellbook, the next two successful Arcana or Investigation checks reveal the locations of other valuable books, each containing a spell, information, or a Boon or Discovery.

Sword Guardian Trap

2nd tier (constructed trap)

Challenge 6 (2,300 XP); DC 16/14

A black metal statue stands in the middle of a hallway. The statue depicts a woman with four arms and the lower body of a snake. The statue holds swords in three of her hands; the fourth holds out a basket in your direction.

Pressure plates cover the floor within 5 feet of the side and rear of the statue. Stepping on a pressure plate or jostling the statue triggers a Failure. The pressure plates are disabled while the basket holds at least 10 pounds of weight.

Floor. An Engineering or Investigation check, or an examination of the floor, reveals that the floor next to and behind the statue is composed of pressure plates. The statue can be approached safely from the front.

Statue. Any investigation of the statue reveals that the words “Pay Your Respects” are engraved at the bottom of the basket. A character that makes an Arcana or Religion check recognizes the statue as a marilith, a type of demon. An Investigation check, or an examination of the statue, reveals that the marilith has articulated arms.

The statue is an object with AC 19, 75 hit points, and immunity to cold, lightning, fire, piercing, poison, and psychic damage. Damaging the statue without destroying it outright triggers a Critical Failure.

Possible Solutions

A creature can make a thieves’ tools check to disable one pressure plate or one of the statue’s arms.

A creature can make a Strength check to break one pressure plate or one of the statue’s arms.

Critical Failure. The statue makes three melee attacks, each with a different arm. Each arm attacks with a +7 bonus, has a reach of 10 feet, and deals 9 (2d8) slashing damage on a hit.

Failure. As a Critical Failure, but only one arm attacks.

Success. One pressure plate or one arm is disabled. Disabling three pressure plates or arms triggers a Critical Success.

Critical Success. The trap is disabled.

Sword Guardian Variant: Sword Guardian Riddler

The message at the bottom of the sword guardian’s bowl is a riddle. An appropriate item placed in the bowl disables the trap; other items do not.

“Golden head bearing a crown, golden tail up or down.” The trap is disabled if one or more gold coins is placed in the bowl.

“Born in fire, formed in water, polished silver, end in slaughter.” The trap is disabled if a weapon made of iron or steel is placed in the bowl.

The Unusual Nature trait in Monsters of the Multiverse is a replacement for the old Undead Nature, Celestial Nature, etc, traits in previous monster books: these are all of the traits that allow a creature to not need some combination of food, drink, rest, and air. This trait used to be tucked away at the end of a monster essay; now it’s been moved to the stat block.

Talking with alphastream about the new trait has got me thinking about more problems I have with it. These are all minor quibbles, but minorly quibbling is a proud D&D tradition.

Its placement – in the essay or in the stat block – is not actually an easy call. As a piece of monster information, it’s neither fish nor fowl. It doesn’t really belong as a subhead in the essay because it’s technical rules text, not expository text. And it doesn’t really belong in the stat block because it’s not about combat – at least most of it isn’t. In the heat of combat, you might need to know whether a creature breathes, but you’ll never need to know if they need to eat. It makes a bit more sense to me to put the trait in the essay rather than the stat block, just because a lot of monster entries contain one essay and several stat blocks so you’d avoid repetition. But I can’t really fault WotC much for the placement of this trait as the trait is written now: it’s a proud nail either way.

Here are my two bigger objections to Unusual Nature.

It’s inconsistent. If it’s important enough to put into stat blocks, it should actually be in more stat blocks. Just going through the Monster Manual, does a dao need to breathe, or does it asphyxiate while phasing through the earth? does a modron eat (and if so what)? does a salamander or magmin need to drink even though mephits don’t? does a blight, death knight, fungus, or gibbering mouther need sleep? Demons and devils don’t have any such feature for some reason – do they really need all of these things? The pattern continues in Monsters of the Multiverse. An alhoon is an undead mind flayer lich and doesn’t eat brains: why doesn’t it have Unusual Nature? Elementals don’t need to eat or drink, but phoenix, elder tempest, and air elemental myrmidon do? Not only does a water elemental myrmidon need to breathe air, it doesn’t even have the Amphibious trait – it drowns in water! Same with the leviathan. The retriever, a robot spider construct, needs to eat, drink, sleep, and breathe.

My guess is the lack of these traits is not actually causing anyone problems – no one, except a theorycrafter or a nitpicker like me, has ever been troubled about whether a death knight or gibbering mouther is thirsty or tired. In that case – if their lack causes no problems – maybe we don’t need these traits at all. If a creature doesn’t need air or can breathe water, that seems worthy of going in the stat block. A creature’s need for sleep, food, and drink seems like an interesting aside that can be mentioned in passing in the essay if you need to fill up column inches, or else ignored.

My other problem with Unusual Nature is maybe more subjective: it’s not poetic. “Unusual Nature” is just an unlovely name for a trait. As a label, it is content-free. Every D&D monster has an “unusual nature” of some kind, and so do a lot of animals, especially ones from Australia. Wombats poop cubes. A trait’s name should say what it does, and “unusual nature” doesn’t say anything about what this trait actually does.

I think if I wanted to come up with a catch-all name for the old “undead nature”, “construct nature”, “elemental nature”, “ooze nature”, and so on, I’d use this:

Immortal. The creature doesn’t die of old age. Additionally, it doesn’t need to [any one of sleep, eat, drink, or breathe, depending on the monster]

That’s really what all of the Unusual Nature creatures have in common, and what the trait is grasping for I think. Undead, oozes, constructs, and celestials don’t really age. The fact that they don’t need various forms of mortal sustenance are side-effects of their immortality.

I’d extend this Immortality trait to fiends too. Sure, Graz’zt might like a gobbet of mortal flesh and a nice glass of Chianti, but I don’t know that he needs it to live. I don’t think that bearded devils travel with bedrolls so that they can sleep when they’re away from their beds, and I just bet that Juiblex doesn’t drown. Hell, I might give Immortality to some or all fey creatures too.

Besides, Immortality is a word to conjure with. It says something about the monster’s story in a way that “Unusual Nature” does not. And it could be used as a keyword. Spells and monster could key off immortality. Maybe a ghost’s horrifying visage can only age mortal creatures, and all the spells that list “celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead” can just say “immortal creatures”.

Heck, while we’re adding this new trait to a million monsters, let’s add “and its attacks are considered magical.” Then we can get rid of all that force damage. Two for one sale on Monsters of the Multiverse fixes!

I don’t know about you, but my mental image of gold coins isn’t based on, say, my experience with the Roman aureus or Spanish doubloon, none of which I’ve ever seen. It’s based on those chocolate coins, or Hanukkah gelt, that come in the little mesh bags. So when my players find a cache of gold coins, that’s what I’m mentally giving out.

Those things are pretty massive for coins. Just how much would they weigh if solid gold?

Here are some 1 1/2 inch-diameter coins from Party City that weight .183 ounces each. It’s hard to nail down the mass of chocolate and I found varying estimates, but like many plant-derived things I think it weighs 60 pounds per cubic foot, the same as water – compared to 1200 pounds for gold. So gold is just a shade off 20 times heavier than milk chocolate.

That puts one solid gold coin, with the volume of a 1 1/2-inch chocolate gelt coin, at 3.66 ounces, or almost a quarter of a pound. Which is insanely heavy… the weight of more than 10 D&D gold coins, and more than twice the weight of Gary Gygax’s often-mocked 1e weight of 1/10 pound per coin.

At 1/10 the volume of a gelt coin, D&D gold coins are way smaller than I picture them. They’re much more accurate and close to the sizes of real Earth gold coins… but the coins of fantasy imagination are bigger than the little nickel-sized gold coins of history like the Spanish doubloon.

Here is my incontrovertible proof that D&D coins are bigger than nickels. No one could dispute this totally reasonable take.

See! Airtight reasoning, and not off the deep end at all!

Now let’s pretend that D&D coins are big, thick, 1 1/2-inch thick coins patterned after Hanukkah gelt. We’ll scale down to the relatively restrained Gygax 1/10 pound per coin. Get those bags of holding ready: a 60,000 coin trove would weigh 6,000 pounds. That’s a 10-cubic-foot pile, not really enough for a dragon bed, but enough to nearly fill up a mimic. That’s a bit more like the D&D treasure of my imagination.

There you go: in Pauls & Dragons, coins are big, delicious-looking, heavy hunks of gold like Hanukkah gelt. It costs 15 gp – one and a half pounds of gold – for a 3-pound longsword. Kind of a crazy economy – but at least the coins are delicious.

The other day I did some Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse math to figure out whether monsters’ Challenge Ratings had been adjusted. Today I’m switching gears to look at the new monsters from a different angle.

As a lot of people have noticed, one of the big changes in Monsters of the Multiverse is in the damage types dealt by monsters. Force damage, once a rare damage type, is now everywhere. A lot of other melee attacks – poisoned fangs, lightning swords, and so on – seem to do just poison or lightning damage now instead of a mix of physical and energy damage.

Partly, this may be to solve a problem that occurs when monsters fight monsters. A lot of stock 5e monsters that deal bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage – “nonmagical” damage – need a way to affect creatures that can’t be hurt by nonmagical weapons. Rather than apply a “Magic Weapons” trait to each high-level monster, these new monsters now deal force or other energy damage instead of nonmagical damage. Of course, like any change, it pulls on various other threads of the game, changing the value of, for instance, items and class features that grant resistance to piercing, bludgeoning, slashing, and force damage.

I thought it would be fun to count up monster attacks and see which damage types reign supreme in the Multiverse. Are bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing useless now? Is force now a force to be reckoned with?

Here are the number of monsters that deal each type of damage, out of 260ish monsters total, in Monsters of the Multiverse. I’m not counting spell damage here: since monsters with damage-dealing spellcasting creatures are rare, that won’t make too much of a difference. You can compare this to the data from the Monster Manual that someone compiled in 2014. (Ideally I’d also compare the new monsters against their old versions to see what changed instead of versus different monsters from the Monster Manual. But after crunching through the new book, I can’t yet face doing the same thing again to the same exact monsters in Volo’s and Tome of Foes. Maybe I’ll get to that after I recover from this round of data entry.)

One kind of surprising finding: sure, at 52, force is way up from 12 force-users in the Monster Manual. But the real champion here is PIERCING. There are more piercing monsters than bludgeoning and slashing monsters combined. More than half the book’s monsters deal piercing damage.

If you’re trying to decide between features that provide different resistances, and you’re using Monsters of the Multiverse to predict the way the Monster Manual 5.5 might go, you can divide the damage types into 3 tiers. Piercing resistance, though rare, is in a class by its own. It even makes you consider an item like the cursed armor of vulnerability, which could grant resistance against piercing in exchange for vulnerability to bludgeoning and slashing. Still not a good deal, but better than you might think.

Below piercing, there’s a tier for medium-common damage types: the already-mentioned bludgeoning, slashing, and force, plus necrotic, poison, and psychic (which gained a ton of ground: only 11 monsters deal psychic damage in the Monster Manual.) In this tier, force is the next most common type after bludgeoning and slashing.

The last tier is for the rarely-seen damage types: cold, lightning, radiant, and, surprisingly, fire, at only 24 (less than 10% of the monsters). For fire, that’s a drop from about 15% of the monsters in the Monster Manual. In other words, apart from poison, the “big five” chromatic dragon breath weapon types are not really generally useful. This is a big change from the Monster Manual, where, after the weapon types, the Big Five were all in the top 6.

Drilling down

This all seems like a reasonable surface reading, but could we perhaps be led astray by confounding variables here? Like, force damage is very common among fiends. Does that alone account for its prevalence? If you’re not going up against the hells, is force resistance still valuable?

Here’s the chart from above with fiends removed from the count.

Force is bumped down, but it’s still in the middle tier of usefulness, about as common as poison. Force resistance is still quite useful, although it’s beaten handily by psychic. In general, the chart looks pretty similar with or without the 40+ fiends in the book.

Do some damage types become more common in high-level play? This question was actaully one of the main reasons I started this analysis. If you’re choosing a damage resistance as a class or race feature, are there some “traps” that are only useful at low level or vice versa?

Jeez, look at piercing at Challenge Rating 0 to 4! It has everyone beat by a mile. I would expect claws would make make slashing damage compete better, but at low CR, where a lot of monsters only have one attack, that attack may be a bite. Besides, the Monster Manual might contain more of the basic types of monsters with claw attacks.

Poison is also quite well represented. Force damage is rare.

At CR 5-10, around the “sweet spot” levels, the damage type distribution looks a lot like the overall damage distribution, with the difference that poison has really tanked. A star at level 1, it now looks like a trap choice. Conversely, psychic and force damage have really surged.

At mid-high levels, bludgeoning beats out piercing as the most common physical damage type, as the creatures at this level tend to be Huge creatures that swing outsized fists, tails, and tentacles. Piercing and slashing are hanging in there, but force, necrotic, and psychic damage have almost caught them.

At epic level, the nonmagic damage types, piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning, disappear into the pack. Here’s where force damage makes its move. Of the 25ish monsters of CR 17 or higher, 20 deal force damage. At this level, investing an attunement slot into a brooch of shielding, an Uncommon item, is probably a good move. On the other hand, a barbarian that gains resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage isn’t getting as much bang for their buck. There are a total of 11 monsters that deal B, P, or S damage, with bludgeoning continuing to be the strongest option. All in all, about half as many monsters deal the nonmagic damage types as deal force damage. I bet this trend continues when the Monster Manual is revised. If you’re interested in D&D’s end game, that’s worth keeping in mind.

It might be worth looking at one more chart. Are fiends confounding us again? What if you’re fighting epic non-fiends?

There are only 10 non-fiend monsters of CR 17 or higher in Monsters of the Multiverse. From this small sample, it seems that force is tied with bludgeoning, with 4 of 10 monsters dealing each damage type. There’s only one slasher, and piercing is now nonexistent. Is this your king?

Takeaway

My big takeaway is: people are right, bludgeoning/piercing/slashing are nerfed and force is boosted in Monsters of the Multiverse – especially at high levels. But also the other damage types are rerolled a bit: the dragon-breath types are not well represented, and psychic damage is huge now too. If psychic damage were a stock, I’d say buy it now.

Here is an excel with my raw counts, if someone wants to slice up the data otherways, or add the data from Volo’s and Tome of Foes.