Dancing the Night Away

Players perk up when the DM says “roll for initiative.” Combat is interesting not because it is violent (well, not solely); but because something critical is happening, and time (and timing) are of the essence.

I have called for initiative in situations including (but not been limited to):

• Complex traps
• Natural hazards 
• Chases
• Sudden split-second interactions where a open-ended situation (like a conversation) suddenly comes to a specific action (like an attempted escape)
• Some social encounters (although a light hand is required there)

Initiative creates or enhances the stakes of a situation. Players who are happy to wait in the background during exploration or social interaction don’t want to “waste” their turn during initiative order, and start thinking about ways to move the group’s goal forward. Everyone is focused on the action at the table.

The Cosmic Quadrille

In our long-running 5E game that wrapped last year, the characters infiltrated a magical ship on the astral plane full of strange characters from various planes of existence. They were there to surreptitiously make contact with an NPC. For various reasons, they could not contact her directly or magically.

But they could attend a formal dance in the style of classic courtly dances, where the participants (including the NPC) would frequently trade partners as the dance progressed. As the PCs joined the dance and moved from partner to partner, they had time for very brief exchanges of conversation and interaction – six seconds with each dance partner, just like a round in combat.

The PCs made checks to maneuver to pair with particular dancers, and we used skill challenge logic to decide when the dance ended, tallying the PCs successes and failures.  

An Exotic Entourage

Coming up with dancers for an interstellar, multi-planar cruise ship was particularly fun. One part Planescape, one part Troika, one part Kill Six Billion Demons, one part “miscellaneous.”

• Durota, a Fleshcrafter 
• The Void Knight
• The Salt Devil Envoy
• Scratch, a Dragonkin Figment
• Effugium, the Astral Captain
• The Planet-Headed Prince
• A Moon Elf Horizonwalker
• The Mindflayer Chiurgeon 
• A Tabaxi (Displacer-type) Bounty Hunter
• The Ship’s Chronotician
• Kalix, a Void Trader
• The Chain-Veiled Lady of Virtues
• Ollie Glabnoodle, Gentleman Thief
• A Clockwork Counselor
• A Quantum Theologian 
• The Mythical Betrayer

Normies in the Minority

D&D 5E is old enough now that it is covered in complaints and criticisms; its flanks peppered with spears and arrows, its hide pierced, its skin scarred and scabbed; yet it marches grimly on, like an immortal Dark Souls boss. Many of its wounds come from the same old fights all over Reddit concerning RAW and power level and player options. Not interesting to me.

But one of the criticisms that I’ve seen a lot that does kindle a fire in the old brain-furnace is kvetching over the creep of magic into every aspect of character creation, and the dearth of non-magical options available to players. A few barbarians, rogues, and fighters are essentially mundane, but the majority of the class archetypes within D&D 5E are explicitly magical; either including spell slots in their loadout, or otherwise featuring spell-like abilities that only make sense as magic.

Reason 1: 5E’s Power Progression

This is the obvious one. A first-level character is already remarkable by the standards of an ordinary person. A 10th-level character is a superhero. A 20th-level character is a (figurative) god.

This tightly constricts the options for non-magical PCs. Yes, we can accommodate a few people theoretically operating at the top end of normal human physical performance (fighters and barbarians) or trained and skilled to such an absurd degree (rogues) that they can keep up with their magical peers. We can fit a few Black Widows and Batmen in our superhero team. But the majority of those superheroes are going to be mutants, magicians, aliens, and (literal) gods. 

In contrast, in a low-power OSR game, it’s more practical to introduce scores of mundane classes. If damage scales slowly, or not at all, the game opens up a lot of space for the ordinary; for occupations, for race-as-class, or for humorous inversions. It’s why a Troika party can include a character with the background “sceptical lamassu,” with wings and claws and magical spells, side-by-side with a character with the background “poorly made dwarf” or “befouler of ponds.” The low scaling and indifference to power levels makes something like the GLOG work – what mundane character concept wouldn’t work under GLOG rules? 

Reason 2: Absence of Productive Ambiguity

This is the less-obvious one. Aside from the way power (and particularly damage) very visibly scales in 5E world, the resolution of those abilities (particularly in combat) is highly defined by the rules.

What does that mean? Well, compare it to a PBtA game. In the Urban Shadows in which I'm a player, characters can become quite powerful in ways that are theoretically just as dramatic as the abilities of high-level 5E characters. But instead of measuring how far their DPS has risen since level one, it’s more ambiguous. That means the game can include (relatively) normal people as characters shoulder to shoulder with vampires and wizards. It does so by embracing abstraction. 

For example, the Veteran archetype has the following move. “Too Old for this Shit!: When you get caught up in a fight you tried to prevent, you get armor +1 and take +1 ongoing to seeing yourself and others to safety.”

What is the +1 armor in this situation? D&D 5E would need to define some kind of abjuration aura literally protecting the characters. The modifier would need to be weighed and measured against other, similar powers. Magic seeps into everything. 

In a PBtA game, more can be abstracted into not just skills and training, but even genre conventions and dramatic story beats. 

And it’s not hard to go a step further beyond PBtA systems. Consider Fall of Magic, a storytelling game with no stats, no advancement, and very little randomness. The resolution of each scene is a matter of interpreting prompts, asking questions, and negotiating the details of the world with the other players. When we tried Fall of Magic, it was easy to for me to play an utterly mundane refugee, side-by-side with several more fantastic characters.

This doesn’t make story games better in my mind – I have just as much fondness for the OSR approach that (in a very broad sense) goes in the opposite direction. But it does demonstrate how 5E is always caught in a lurch between competing desires and demands, and how the prevalence of magic is one of the downstream effects of its compromises.

Every Spell is Unique

Most editions of D&D assume that the spells in the PHB are mass commodities. PCs will frequently know some of the same spells. Wizards can copy spells from other wizards’ spellbooks. NPCs and monsters cast recognizable spells. And these spells work to the same ISO strictures. A Magic Missile anywhere in the world looks and behaves just like any other Magic Missile. 

But magic doesn’t work this way in most Appendix N fiction. What if it was weirder? What if every spell was unique? 

First-Come, First-Serve

If a player builds a character and selects a spell, that spell is unavailable to other PCs. If an NPC wizard shows up and casts Fireball, that’s it – that’s this world’s only Fireball spell. You want to cast Fireball? You need to go through that wizard – defeat them in a wizardly duel, or conduct a daring raid on their tower and steal the arcane tome that holds the magic.

The Problem of Must-Have Spells

Sure, fine. But in D&D 5E, certain spells are either so good (Shield) – or so central to a class’s intended gameplay loop (Eldritch Blast) – that it’s a mistake not to take them. The book doesn’t teach them what they are “supposed” to take. Unique spells force us to confront this problem, either just accepting the wild variation in spell power level, or finding another solution…

Tailoring and Innovation

Bespoke Weird Spells. You won’t miss Spiritual Weapon if you have Whirling Leaf Screamer instead.

Magical Synonyms. Look at Magic: The Gathering card names. Think about how many times the Magic creators have had to go to the thesaurus (and beyond) to make a new version of "counterspell.” There is endless variation possible with minimal prompts.

Magic Words. Wizards wield ur-magic, shaping spells from the formless aether. This is getting pretty far from D&D 5E’s base design, but who am I to stop you? You’re a wizard!

Broken Wheel Cosmology: Dull Gods and Static Pantheons

The typical fantasy pantheon vaguely follows the mythological models of antiquity, but removes a lot of the visceral personality. The Greek pantheon was like a squabbling family, with each god struggling to gain the upper hand or advance their interests, driven by complex relationships of marriage and heredity, thick with plots, schemes, and betrayals. But D&D’s pantheons feel static and lifeless. How could we present the gods in more interesting ways within our Broken Wheel cosmology?

Demiurges

Broken Wheel gods are not world-creators nor saviors. They once were adventurers, just like the rest of us. A 20th D&D level character borders on godlike-power. The 5E DMG’s epic boons, even moreso. Godhood is simply the next step on that path, entailing rulership of a plane that the god can bend to their will, and the capability to extend their power back to the material world through their followers. They are ageless, but not deathless; and the spheres and domains they claim are subject to fierce competition from their rivals.

Pauper Gods

Attaining godhood is monstrously difficult. Losing it is a lot easier. Whether they were violently deposed in a matter of hours, or watched as their worship fell out of favor slowly over generations, these lingering spirits survive on the psychic residue of praise to other deities; the occasional misguided prayer; and the rare warlock pact, forged with some obsessive who dug their name out of an ancient tome. Dead gods are good for creating dynamic worlds, but deposed gods are better.

Small and Petty Gods

There is a lot of competition to become the god of death or the god of war. Who wants to experience immortality with a target on their back? Why not set your sights a bit lower? Perhaps a couple altars in the dungeons of the mortal world would be enough to secure the worship of a few foolhardy ratcatchers? Or perhaps a comically narrow sphere of influence will win the faith of a handful of passionate weirdos?

Genius Loci

What if a druid doesn’t represent some vague, ambient sense of “nature,” but represents that particular river or this particular mountain? What if a god embodies and is worshiped solely by a particular city-state? These choices ground the gods in the material world; even if they are not literally present, they are acting upon the geography, and can be indirectly encountered.

Immanent Gods

Most of the ideas above bring the gods down closer to the world of mortals, with recognizable, human-like desires and motivations. What if we go in the other direction? What if the gods are more like physics concepts, universal laws, or equally abstract ideas? Such gods are, I think, harder to introduce as game objects, because they are distant and unknowable. But they present an interesting challenge and a compelling worldbuilding exercise for the right game. 

The key to implementing any change is to evaluate how much it percolates at the table. Rumor and prophecy, not lore and legend. Problems and opportunities, not backstories. Setting things on fire, not set dressing.