There are no saving throw numbers, attack bonuses, or derived numbers, its all boiled down to a d20 roll-under system using the six D&D stats + HP and hit dice. 5e-style advantage/disadvantage as well. Classes have a few flavorful abilities, weapon proficiency is class-specific but so is damage dealt.
It borrows one of my fav mechanics from Mutant: Year Zero, which is the Usage Die. For expendable resources (like ammo, rations, torches, etc), you roll a die of a certain size when you use them, and if you roll a 1 or 2 it gets downgraded to a smaller die. If you roll a 1 or 2 on a d4, you’re out of that resource.
Here’s a big one for GMs: creatures only have hit dice and special abilities. Damage is based on their hit dice, and they don’t make attack rolls. Instead, PCs make defense rolls when they get attacked, so the GM is overall not doing most of the rolling.
Combat initiative is similarly pared down: it’s just a dexterity test, successful rolls acting before monsters and failed rolls acting after monsters.
I have pretty much explained 75% of the rules in this post, to give you an idea just how efficient the system is.
EDIT: If you want to see what folks have done with the core system, here’s an excellent collection of hacks and modifications
No which sucks ass because I just googled these things and they’re amazing.
The DM had a pretty fun system where, whenever we traveled through the jungle, or slept in the jungle, he would roll on table to if we encountered, and what.
Once it was lobster people, once it was bugs, once it was some kind of (undead maybe?) dinosaur. All real harrowing encounters that were a lot of fun, especially since, at that point in the campaign, I was the original like shrieking cowardly gith character.
I remember in one of them, I’d found this special item the day before, something like “Horn of Blowing”, and I could blow into it to produce a wind attack maybe. Anyway I take it out and use it for the first time, and it has a 1/20 chance of exploding on use, which it did, very nearly killing me and the player right next to me. The group got a real good laugh out of that biz.
they are 100% silly mothra bullshit you’d love, excellent bit of flavor. that plus the goblin catapulting settlement thing, both just truly wonderfully stupid
the ttrpg credo: bad gaming is worse than no gaming
5e is such a curious object because it is very possible to run a good 5e game and very possible to run something so bad you never want to play an rpg again, it’s so absurdly group dependent, even by the standards of D&D
Wasn’t so much the game or the group as it was me freaking out over how I was still trying (and failing- miserably!) to piece a character together while the party were tearing into the first dungeon. I don’t want to think about how I must’ve looked to everyone.
oh, character creation is generally like a 2-hour group process, or multi day (see: all of mothra’s “here are my character ideas” posts early in the character creation process). if this was like session 1 for you but a normal session for everyone else, it’s not weird that it would take you more than their whole session to do it, especially if the DM isn’t guiding you through some of the fiddly parts because they’re busy DMing a dungeon encounter.
I use an app that speeds it up by prompting me with questions so I don’t forget anything important, and another app that helps me pick spells
Forgot to mention, my first DM session went really well.
My player’s characters were:
A spoiled, philandering prince of a distant chinese-themed dragonborn civilization, cast across the sea by his father to teach him humility. (paladin, dragonborn, female player)
A man who lived in Plato’s Cave his entire life, right up until the day before this adventure started. Knew absolutely nothing about anything. (rogue, human, male player)
Horny valley-girl type cleric (sorcerer, male player, my previous DM)
Module was “A Deep and Creeping Darkness” out of Candlekeep. The module gave me enough stuff to get going, but it’s pretty sparse with what to _do_once you’re in the abandoned mining town. The enemy causes psychic visions and hallucinations to “torment” the players, which I took and ran with, to pretty positive reception.
I’d say both combat encounters I set up were a little on the easy side, due to the paladin being like… unkillable, in 5e. Only other trip-ups were them being a bit confused when I mentioned the cart they were on, and they were all like, “We’re on a cart? We have a cart?” - guess I just kind of couldn’t imagine them traveling any other way, but I should’ve set that up.
Standout moments were:
Both horny characters trying and ultimately succeeding in seducing the nerdy goblin librarian at Candlekeep.
The prince successfully seducing and bedding the elven survivor of the horrible tragedy of the distant past.
The prince and the valley girl getting initially extremely jelous of each other, then starting to flirt as the scenario progressed.
The cave guy getting sucked into a sort of customized slime creature I created and having all his armor get dissolved away, making him insanely vulnerable for the rest of the one-shot.
My DM player attempting to try a rope to a banister while the party was in a hallucination, and then asking me what happened when he moved. Since he wasn’t moving in real life, it just kinda broke my brain for a bit before I said, “as you move, the part you tried off seems to just hover next to you.” When he tried doing the next thing with the rope, I had it so the rope was just infinite (now part of the illusion), which is how I wormed my way out of that.
My DM player tearing his hair out trying to figure out how these hallucinations were happening, if it wasn’t a magical effect (it was psionic). He kinda metagames a lot.
The hallucinations.
Now these were a lot of fun. There’s nothing for them to find in this entire town beyond a few odds and ends, so, really relied on me doing something of note to pay off each of these empty buildings they were exploring.
Since they were being stalked by the psionic monsters, here’s the hallucinations I had them experience:
Prince saw his father, the king, glaring down at him from the second floor of a decrepit blacksmithing business.
Cave guy poked his head into the knot of a big, old tree, and found there to be far, far more space in there than possible. Player decided to climb in, which brought him into a deep level of the collapsed mine, where he could hear creatures skittering through tunnels above and below him. The sound I picked for these things was that of a wood frog around MA. This was hinting at these monsters being like a bug hive under the mine. He came to the skeleton of a miner (one of the ones that died in the accident), which grabbed his arm, and plunked an amulet in his hand, before the hallucination ended. He climbed out of the tree with the amulet in hand - a keepsake from the father of that elf lady the prince banged in town.
The prince throwing open a window and surveying himself in a mighty storm he had weathered in his youth, with his father placing his hand on his shoulder to snap him out of the vision.
The party finding themselves in the same cave as Cave Guy, surrounded by the chittering of these monsters. Again, hinting that there was a “bug hive” kind of thing under the mine.
They entered the Mayor’s House near the end of the session, where the game seems to want you to fight two of these monsters. Since there’s nothing particularly exciting in this abandoned house, I had an encounter trigger when they started climbing the spiral stairs from the first floor to the second floor. As they ascended, the staircase extended to infinity in both directions, with Cave Guy on the lower rung, and the two others higher up. On the battle map, I sketched out three identical squares with a space in middle, so you had 20 ft across each edge, and there were 3 levels. The players loved this bit, as they were each battling two of these monsters that merged out of the dark, and could fire spells down from level 3 to level 1 to help out Cave Guy. Once they successfully killed one of them, half the illusion would drop, so they could see the ground again. Pretty fun.
So yeah, we got halfway through the module, but it went real well. We haven’t been able to schedule a group since, due to a lot of wedding stuff going on, but, I’m excited to finish it out in the near future.
Does anyone know of a resource that has STL or VRML files for ttrpg figures? I would like to find some figures for my players and monsters to fit the theme of Call of Cthulhu, so 1920s stereotypes and something abstract that can stand in for whatever monster we’re encountering.
This is a good resource for more D&D-centric figures (you just have to sign up for a free account):
They have Hastur and some mindflayery things, and a dread gazebo, which sounds highly Lovecraftian, but it may not be quite what you need. Shapeways has a whole tabletop section, but doesn’t seem to let you filter by whether they offer free downloads of the files. Most of the stores seem to just offer prints.
