5e Minus... A Lot

Have you seen the movie Ford v Ferrari? My favorite sequence was watching the Ford team strip down their car, removing weight while simultaneously finding a way to add a more powerful but also lighter engine.

As a thought experiment while working on laundry over the weekend, I thought about what 5e would look like if you went back and ripped out every non-essential element from a character.

This is how I defined non-essential and essential.

• Is it important for ensuring that the character's stats let them keep up with the monsters they fight? It's essential.

• Otherwise, it's non-essential.

That approach led to a bunch of changes to the game.

• A background gives a character skills, but they are not balanced by the specific skills. Thus, each class can just allocate extra skills of the player's choice.

• Backgrounds also include a feat. We can replace that feat by giving every character a pool of rerolls they can use.

  • At this stage, we've removed backgrounds as a game element.

• Feats have always been optional, but we can just formally replace them with ability score improvements.

• Species is mostly power neutral. It's more flavor than anything else. If we cut it down to one, useful piece of flavor we can write the rest off as non-essential.

• Class features go through a rigorous culling process to declutter the character sheet. This leaves us only with impactful features.

Math-wise, I stuck with the Odyssey approach of stretching the game's math. I expanded levels 1 to 5 to cover levels 1 to 10.

This opened up a lot of dead levels in character progression. It also cuts out a ton of levels that subclasses normally contribute to.

So I came up with an idea, an optional rule that lets players take a subclass that they can apply to any class. I standardized the dead levels across all classes, then took a stab at creating a subclass that delivered features on that schedule.

A subclass in this scheme can't deliver core math or powerup a character's damage output, as it needs to remain mathematically neutral in the game. However, that still leaves a ton of space for flavorful and fun options that don't just drive up damage numbers.

I then shifted over to the DM side of things and dumped most of the game's existing structure in favor of something new:

• Characters gain a level when they earn 10 XP.

• Encounters - combat, exploration, or interaction - are worth 1 to 3 XP.

  • 1 for easy, 2 for tough, 3 for deadly or high stakes

  • Each PC gains the encounter's XP (1 to 3).

  • Monsters have a point value based on their CR and the party's level. You get 2 points per PC for a moderate encounter, 4 points per PC for a hard one, and 6 points per PC for a deadly one.

• Treasure is also allocated with points. An encounter delivers treasure points per PC equal to its XP value.

  • A treasure point has a higher GP value as level increases.

  • Magic items are worth multiple treasure points.

• Short rests are dead. Instead, PCs earn a recovery for every 3 XP they earn. A recovery recharges a class feature and restores hit points.

• Long rests now take a week but reset everything. Eventually, downtime will be part of that week so a long rest is also tied to characters' advancing their side projects and ambitions.

Otherwise, I used a lot of rules from Odyssey - cover gives a flat AC, obscurement limits line of sight, initiative is rolled each round. I also kept Odyssey's dropping ability scores and dividing ability bonuses into trained and untrained. All saving throws are trained checks in this hack.

The nice thing is that by hacking the 5e characters, monsters, and magic items into Odyssey, I can save a bunch of time and preserve 5e mathematical compatibility. That should give me a strong baseline for new classes and design going forward, which should make playtesting much easier.

Speaking of playtesting, skill challenges and the threat timer aren't in this rules doc yet. I want to do some more testing with them before I attach them to the core.