Sage Advice D&D

hello everyone and welcome back once more to the microworlds happy fun hour I am still Mike morals creative franchise creative director on Dungeons & Dragons and your host for the next hour Gabe retake maybe five minutes more likely take so last week we talked about play testing and the role plays in tabletop game dine tabletop game design specifically and some of the lessons we learned in play testing fifth edition D&D you know if you if you were involved in the play test back in the day which is like five years ago now there was very much an iterative process which I talked about last week there was a lot of discovery of trying to match up how the game function do versus how people wanted it to function and then what you’d expect from play test just the testing of here’s a concept is this working is this matching what we need so hello up there and shad is ever having a good Tuesday yeah dinner puppy yeah happy Tuesday back to you man time for good vibes and epic loot I like that doom Drake 13 I like that the so last week I talked a bit about just the mid basic mechanics of a play test what you can do to sort of prepare for success what you can do to think about how you want to shape your expectations and the preparation for a test and the steps behind each phase and so what I wanted to do here was show you how when in your design step how you can design for testing and this goes back to I talked about last week about really understanding what is your design about what’s the question you’re asking and how can you establish this identity within your design that ensures that the information you’re getting back from your play testers is relevant to what you want to do with the design you’re working on and I think I mentioned this last week in my experience that’s the biggest mistake I see people make with play testing they make a game they ask people to play it they ask them did you like it yes No and then okay from there we’re good they all said yes sorry the there are a lot of sort of things you can do to ensure that the information that you get back is useful the in fact I mean I can’t remember I’m gonna watch me watch me sure here we go play sings play dusting example I want to do it just a quick recap in case you weren’t here last week you just really these are our steps the also secretly want to make sure I don’t forget one in case when I’m doing this it’s like you told us to do this and you’re not even doing it so you play testing steps if you design a thing people play they give you feedback probably by pulling and then you iterate you need to have a clear vision you want to know what it is you want to design you want to know your end point so as you test you’re making progress toward that end point you don’t just end up spinning in circles your high wall means if strong visions you really know what you want to do and you’re only making changes that are really tangibly improving what you’re doing that goes back to having a good destination and you understand the role the test what’s here that we’re actually trying to solve so all those things combined when you think about it you can design with these things in mind and I found in my own design it does help because then I start to understand what it is I’m actually working on so last week we talked about rolling out this idea of a weapon master fighter a fighter whose abilities we’re on a daily schedule that’s a very fancy way of saying it’s a fighter he needs long rests to get their stuff back and you know within the game we started with looking at the brute and how the brute failed a lot of those tests it didn’t it didn’t have a really clear role its identity was very much like well it’s just it’s kind of like the champion but different players really didn’t react well to that it was we saw a lot of unhappiness with the fact there’s copying mechanics over and it goes back this concept that helped guide 5th edition it’s not perfect like we had these concepts we try to follow them you’re never gonna flawlessly follow your concepts if you find yourself doing that your concepts might be a little too loose because there’s always gonna be exceptions but in general we wanted to make things as different as possible when we’re designing them for the friends and subclasses character classes pushing them apart to provide as wide coverage as we can in the game so the what I wanted to do was show you what the weapon master and chat let me know if the text is too small I’m gonna further in bigan and on my screen here it looks like okay that’s a nice and big so I ended up coming up this idea as a Mesa bitch block work through it of moving to a fighter with more daily powers and a fighter who maybe not maybe is focused on a style of weapon and so I went back after watching the vod’s one put a blue kobold one’s funny I like it something like it at one point five times it’s just I imagine myself like a hyperactive chipmunk and I resist the urge now to speak super fast just to throw that off yeah the Oh quick question and I’m gonna get this wrong had Jace Jace lender eyes whatever probably butchering a pronouncement how was usual played test going from Marshall we actually haven’t started yet one of the things we’re having is that if you remember a couple weeks ago I said I was expecting the artificer to go into play to you a for play test this month it actually got bumped back because there were a number of races we needed to do a public test on for Ravnica that we couldn’t test some of them we could because we hadn’t announced the product yet some we could test because it was just like oh it’s a centaur that could be anywhere others like you know a a Simic hybrid is a little harder to hide and say oh no this isn’t for Abner guy it’s just I don’t know in case you want to play a Simic character in scranton realms so I we had to adjust this the schedule a bit to account for that so there’s a little bit of a backup in some of our things here but we are planning on getting to them the the Marshalls also interesting because maybe this fighter could interact with an extreme but we’ll see we’ll get to that anyways uh wolfen one why not really see the auditor now though the main thing is just attention what we find is if we do multiple surveys at once they all get fewer results fewer people filling them out so it’s best for us just to push one of the time and focus on that and be that the link that everyone’s talking about if we and I think we learned this in the fission playtested we do multiple ones it just like instead of having no whatever I’ll make up a number a hundred thousand people answering one survey if we do five we end up with like ten thousand answering the five like you just you lose a bunch of audience and they’re more dispersed so the I don’t know the numbers all thought my head so the but that’s that’s Charlie the trend we’ve seen so when we push out one at a time so the weapon master here so one of the things in designing this was if you if you understand playtesting in its role my experience is it allows you to be a bit more pushing the boundaries with your design you a little more daring because you can you can retrofit things after the play test to bring them more sort of back down to earth but that’s only possible if you understand the play test and what role it’s gonna play and so what I want to do is walk you through some of this design and we’ll do some design on screen to because there’s nothing says fun like watch me mess with Excel and neck screw upward and have to redo things that’s how I think of designing on screen is built but hopefully it seemed I hope it’s entertaining the so I kind of show you here what the questions are and how that might shape the design keep in mind this is not at at a text it’s not been templated to fit the full language of fifth edition but this is this is a good starting point because I want to do something very different with the weapon master because we already have the battle master so weapon master is a name are not the bat it’s probably not gonna stick but it’s just it works it’s good enough right now it’s a little too close to battle master but I wanted to do was was give a really distinct way to use these abilities that felt very different from what the other fighters were doing and we’ll see if I did that so the what we have here is a class that uses martial exploits if you’re familiar with fourth edition that’s what we call the fighters abilities and I think the the martial characters overall use the word martial exploit so here we’re repurposing a term that maybe you’ve heard before and this comes in at third level and what it does I’ll just go down to the table and I think that the table looks big enough my screen like said Chad if it’s not big enough and begin our change of Derek’s sword sage could be a possibility but didn’t quite feel right for some of the characters I was picturing so but man I’m not very naming things the so what we’re looking at here is the fuel for this character class so we got our level column right here so we go from levels 3 to 20 because you come into the sub class at 3 the number of paths you have access to I’ll get to that in a second but essentially you can think of your paths is your power sets uses it’s pretty straightforward how many times can use this ability and then each time you use the ability it gives you a number of exploit dice to spend now this is something already that I’m not confident in because this is looking kinda like this the the dice the battle master gets so already though I feel like mechanically this could be really fun and interesting but I know one of the things I’m gonna want to test for is our people okay with this looking like something they’ve seen before the brute showed me that reusing mechanics does not go over well that doesn’t mean I just don’t do that what it means is I have to be aware of it and I have to understand that if I’m tinkering with something that looks similar to what’s come before I need to be aware that that’s something I need to test and so it will kind of see as we go forward like I don’t know if I quite did this but there’s the intent here what I really need to is make sure that my test is focused on proving out that this approach is not just fun to people but interesting to them and feels distinct enough this might fail that test right off the bat now walk you through why I did it this way there are ways which we don’t need to do it this way but I just felt as a 1 through in my mind how I was thinking this would work this felt like an be a fun way to work and it can make the abilities you’re using feel really distinct the okay just gonna check real quick the okay cool so I don’t see any burning questions up there but the so if there’s why feel free to repeat but I don’t see anything oh I got a couple questions see how a casting slots for a fighter I’m not sure if that’s a question there or not I’ll get back to it if you sorry if I’m missing something but and I’m gonna try to hit on questions that apply to here rather just more general system questions Twitter is the best place to have a general question about fifth just on twitter i’m at mike Murrells alone word so what we have here is a system where when you use an exploit as the default what I wanted to do was build in a default a thing where hey I just wanna use an exploit just what does it give me and that was one area where I felt this would feel a bit distinct from the Battlemaster it might not be enough and a bit distinct from spell casting and so the idea is the generic use of an exploit is when you make an attack now don’t worry there are with those some that don’t require you to make an attack but those are the exceptions when you make an attack you can you can choose to use your exploit roll the dice your exploit along with your attack so I’m rolling my D 20 and I’m rolling some number of D sixes if your tech misses you can use one or more of the exploits dice results as a bonus to your attack if the attack hits apply any unused dice as a bonus to your weapon damage roll so the idea is I have two six adders my exploit dice I’m at third level I’ve just entered this thing I take a swing I decide to use it I roll my D 20 along with my dice if I miss I can convert one of one or both of those dice into an attack bonus to ensure I hit maybe s to one because I think I came close then if I do hit I get those dice as a bonus to damage I wanted to just make something that was just a basic use case so that within my paths that are essentially my power sets I didn’t have to worry about constantly giving you just a basic thing when you’re just like I just need to hit this person hard right I’m a fighter on this this character I’m fighting a troll we know the trolls really beaten down I just need to finish this troll I don’t need to redo that design a bunch of times because I just I don’t think there’s much of value there and saying here’s eight ways to just hit something harder if you’re going to hit something harder like more harder than what this provides for you I wanted that to be a feature of a path rather than just be something which only certain paths got this is essentially when you’re designing things like this if you remember if you’re here last week this table essentially translates where the eldritch Knights spell slots into raw damage and then makes it you know has a prettier presentation we never want to put players in a position of they are unable to do essentially they’re their standard damage output because we just haven’t given given them that that option solicits someone just I just wanna hit someone hard I can do that I want to ensure I hit I can do that now the so that just kind of builds at our basic use case I’m gonna skip wave the blade and superior fighting style but I will point out is if you scroll down here I didn’t bother with the 15th and 18th fellow abilities yet because at this stage in testing I have a very foundational ability I need to prove out so the next I don’t need to design the entire class because the entire subclass because there’s no point in doing the 15th and 18th abilities yet if this exploit dice mechanic does not work that’s going to affect the rest of my design and I suspect at higher levels I’m going to want to tinker with these if it does work then great I know I have a solid foundation I can go ahead and add some more design to me that’s a good I like that practice I like doing that because I think not only does it save you some time but it also forces you to think about your your design again in turn in terms of the test what’s the question you’re asking and if you’re asking a question try not to put much more of your design on top of that question make it dependent on that question unless you absolutely have to it saves you some work but it also gives and it gives you some flexibility you know it’s it’s always rough to throw out work right no one likes to do something that have to throw it away so why bother with that pain point if you can dodge it again if you notice you’ve been along some of the play tests we’ve done for new character classes we often I think we with the the was the mistake and is now the scion only started like levels 1 to 5 then went to 1 to 10 then then 1 to 20 and you need to prove the foundation first before you build on top of it now if this is something for a nerf that I kinda I probably would just go ahead and build out the rest of the class but if this is something like you know showing you as far as and the ideal path would be you deck it a bit more iteration here this is much more like how we proceeded with the fifth edition design then it is the the you a path where the system set so we want to give you a full piece because it’s rare that a subclass demands multiple public tests so the let’s see what else we got here I heard that that was the mistake that became the mistake but the so let’s jump down I worked up two paths and I wanted to I wanted to have a couple pre-built so I kind of show you what I’m intending and then and then we can build one on screen how what I often do when I’m building a new thing that requires multiple parts is I try to build the simplest versions first well suppose version first like that that’s like your your easiest use case so you build that and then I try to build something that’s maybe a bit like maybe I don’t wanna say it stretches as far as the system can go cuz you probably don’t know what that looks like your first pass but you at least try to say I want to build something that feels a lot different so I can I can kind of understand the flexibility and I can also make my first play test as useful as possible so I’m not only looking for do you like this I’m also looking forward do you like the style of it do you like the creative direction for it so we have the past of the sublime way the subline way is something I I pulled from the book and Einhorn’s from 3/5 that was a book that gave fighters a lot of different fighting styles okay I work in that book so I like some of this stuff for me and so I worked up two paths and I want to walk you through the structure of them so one of the paths first time I did was pass the stone dragon the stone dragon path focuses on brutal power and overwhelming toughness it focuses on use focused twice it focuses on – what – hidden weapons most of these exploits require you to attack see here’s what I do is just delete this we don’t need that sentence most of these exploits require you to attack the two ended what melee weapon or versatile may the weapon you wield into hands wars the stone dragon we’re often cruel destroyers they fight with the subtlety and irresistible force of an avalanche they subtly it’s kind of good rope there they’re punishing attacks render their enemies at mobile allowing them to then take careful aim for one final executioner’s blow so really just wanted to DPS yeah look I just wanna hit you hard it’s a pretty simple expression one of the things we’d want to test here is is this restriction flavourful or is it bogus as some designers would say the requiring you to use a 200 weapon essentially it gives us a distinctive identity you can think of the character who chooses this as someone who wields a big weapon some savage that would say you’re needlessly restricting player choice here this is another example of in addition to a question we might ask what your general happiness with this ability we might ask a very specific question of do you feel that this restriction is interesting or do you get stupid alignments for paladins I can’t remember from the fifth edition play test we had two alignment restrictions I think at one point we did and it was something we saw a lot of pushback to and we I think had a specific survey question about so the but typically what I like to do in it if I know I’m play testing again what I focus on what are the questions I want to ask this is a good question to ask rather just not do it like I’m worried people might not like it so let’s get rid of it it’s a useful question to ask because it provides a lot of direction for your future design if it turns out people like this a lot then that tells me I want to focus my design on more sort of restrictive but flavorful restrictive abilities if people don’t like it I know to back away from that and really this is a matter of the reason you do this is twofold first it adds flavor it gives characters a distinctive identity what that also does is the second point it simplifies the class quite a bit because it means is a player coming in rather than having to look at all these paths I can just focus on the ones that really reflect the weapons I use and then those will give me flavorful interesting things I probably know if I’m a two-handed weapon user I like dealing damage a more DPS than defense so these if these effects will fit in with that but again sometimes you know do they just depends on where things settle in my experience is typically players like things that are very obvious like I’m an archer versus I fight in close combat otherwise that they prefer flexibility and so that might be enough but again so it’s something which now also unbalance would have to understand what I’d have to think about is do I want to ask this question along with all the other questions if this is too much job what you want to go ahead and cut it knowing I just don’t have the bandwidth to test for this and everything else those are kind of things need to think but again being aware what you’re testing and understanding why you’re asking those questions is important so then we go through here how these abilities work so the idea behind them is if I choose this path I get all the benefits listed under it which in this case I’m scrolling really quickly don’t worry I’ll go back and walk through them we have adamantine bones colossus strike jaws of the stone dragon mountains grasp and sweeping legend this is an area where I don’t know if I’d actually wanna try to test this and that is our five things here is that too many do I need to gate them more as designed right now you talk about camp here I choose the path the way this is written I get all these abilities at once let’s take a look at the general text here and I can kind of walk you through how these things are working I realize I sort of just skipped over that so I went straight to here when let’s see so basically each path Ms sublime way features unique take on combat mastery many but not all require you to wield certain weapons to use their exploits so that’s another case where I’m testing that so I make sure I make it obvious like the players understand what they’re getting into when you use a marshal exploit remember we have a standard use which is just I expend it roll the dice add attack bonus anything left goes to damage you can choose to use one of the special exploits listed under one of the paths you know so here I’m really designing for flexibility and again this is something where I wanted to differentiate it from the battle master but making you feel like you had more options and you had more flexibility in what you could do rather than having a sort of a tight cluster of trick so you could use again and again you’re trading repetition for breath so essentially the encounter recharge being I can do this more consistently you choose the special exploit when you decide use a marshal exploit what isn’t captured here is some of these allow you just as an action bonus action do a thing some of these abilities required to roll fewer dice when using a marshal exploit you cannot use an ability that reduces the total dice you roll for an exploit to less than one such abilities beyond your skill so this is as I wrote this paragraph this might be an argument in favor of Nod just giving you everything upfront there might be some level gating we need to add but I you know so it’s something we have to think about I think and it’s not to me that’s not a great question to ask in a play test because really you’re asking players you know it’s not really this really doesn’t really hit on the feel of a thing it doesn’t really fit hit on the identity of it in the game it’s very much almost like a bookkeeping exercise and generally speaking if you’re gonna gate something you’re really think of it in terms of just how many things may putting in your character sheet that maybe you’re saying that big Naurang so that’s also another argument against you know how many of these things I want to give you I need to decide that ahead of time I don’t want to try to test that because I also feel that’s kind of thing and testing is a it players aren’t necessary very good at self diagnosing that they might use very general language like oh this is confusing it was overwhelming I had trouble tracking things that might point to a lot of different sources and so as much as possible your sort of user console you want to try to get that as lockdown as possible I think that was one of the trickier things to solve the fifth edition play test it required us to do a lot of sort of cross-referencing of individual data points to figure out where was that know where was that sort of friction coming from and and that led us to really dramatically where these trying to make the game simpler especially in combat so so kind of note to self this is not something I necessarily a test I really need to think about this as a designer and resent something that’s closer to finished and then we give you your DC calculation eight plus proficiency plus strength modifier you could argue that maybe this should be different maybe it’s intelligence by just for you to start with strength just because I’m writing this out and something good to think of but again this is something that I don’t necessary want to try to test this because I think that is getting to a level of detail that’s a lot of players are going to notice the table they’re just going to give you general unhappiness and then diagnosing might be harder than I want again this is a case right to think about the test a lot as I write this and I really understand what it is that I’m testing I already have some pretty heavy things I’m testing I don’t want this noise creeping in and throwing off my results so we got here any questions see well game fandom DM will we see a class that uses more of these exploits with this fighter subclass and being the subsystems equivalent to the lodger tonight yeah and I think that’s one of the ideas here is that if we would do this this is something we could add stuff to later in a print let’s say we put this in a printed product we would probably republish the subclass like the core mechanics which luckily aren’t like extensive like a page of text if let’s say we’re doing setting or world specific or campaign specific paths so okay so that’s the basically how these things work so let’s take a look at the path of the stone dragon so what I want to do is make makes one very simple so adamantine bones is essentially a way in which you can to reflect the sort of stone dragon like toughness and brute power this way you can convert one of your martial exploits to temporary hit points so it basically says when you expend a marshal exploit when attacking with a 200 weapon blah blah blah after blowing the dice select one or more of them you gain temporary hit points equal to their total plus or constitution modifier and this is a case where you can also activate this ability as a bonus action so if you’re not in a fight or you’re not attacking someone you can still bonus action roll your dice you gain temporary points equal this would be plus constitutional on fire so this is a pretty basic ability that’s just translating your damage output into temporary hit points which are basically equivalent the Colossus strike you swing we’re up in an upward arc catching your phone in the chest and setting them flying across the battlefield so that’s an example of one where I’m chiming I am trading Dyson for an additional extra effect the so you expend a marshal exploit when attacking this is one where does make sense but its own because it’s part of an attack after rolling the dice you can select one or more of them and disregard the results you’re basically dropping out some damage no you’re probably gonna drop the dice that rolled like ones and twos but the system doesn’t try to account for that interesting feels kind of nice as a player in a Maximizer for each dice elected you push the target five feet in a straight line along the ground if you’re taught kids this is just basically hit someone with overwhelming force you do your damage and you push them away and then jaws of the stone dragon I just get this one instead go to mountains grass because there’s actually a combo I built and built into this here mountains grass says when you expend a marshal exploit when attacking the target speed is reduced by 5 feet per die applied as a bonus show up ins damage roll now keep in mind the oops and weapon rolls damage lock and roll doesn’t have damage it’s the weapons damaged roll so this is one where it’s actually free I just apply this I’m not spending any my dice I’m just counting them up and reducing your speed by 5 feet it lasts until the end of your next turn then there is jaws of the stone dragon now this doesn’t quite work yet I realize with mountains grasp I think the 5 feet per die doesn’t quite work out but this is something where I had to maybe just change to be the saving room and you get immobilized when you expend a marshal exploit when attacking a creature that cannot move or with a speed of 0 you gain additional +2 bonus for die used as a bonus to up individual so this is the idea that I if I mobilize someone I hit them really hard right now this isn’t quite working because at low levels I can maybe only do like a 10 foot speed penalty so again this is something where I need to make sure I’m not like serving up things that obviously you want to say work together I wrote this one first then had this idea all let me add this one in it’s important to go back and make sure for instance in this case what I’d probably say is the here I can just go over here and grab this language oops what costs drink I obviously grab this and just say expend it one or two dice probably two dice and force the creature make a sink there or be speed zero for around so just capture this and this build up mechanic you’ll see there’s another one that uses this I think actually uses applies it more correctly the so when you expend a marshal exploit which hacking after rolling the dice you can select one or more with them in dis and you can select at least two of them look at me trying to hit the CA collect two of them and disregard their results and this is just the idea by this is the big brutal fighter you know you’re connecting with these heavy weapons I you basically trapping people the I give the Avalanche to tumble down and people that can’t get away once you have them in your grasp you start pummeling them heavily one thing that does come up is since this does require two-handed weapons it doesn’t mean I can’t grap I can’t base each weapon fight to grapple and then once your speed 0xr gotten your Apple and hit you with a weapon from a bunch of bonus damage if we did move away with from the two-handed weapon thing we have to consider what you know how does it interact with it is it okay the cuz I believe you can do up in fight to grapple I’d again that something I have to look up as they refine this and their final effect this is kind of a template for something that might be an AoE textile effect is its sweeping bludgeon when you expend a marshal exploit when attacking with a treated weapon blah blah blah after rolling dice you can select one or more of them and disregard the result for each die selected and pick a creature within reach of your attack doesn’t have to be the target of your attack it’s just some other creature each chosen creature must make a string saving therapy not approved this is this does not translate the attack into an AoE because we already are dealing with fighter who is the best class of getting additional attacks and so I felt like I didn’t necessarily have to let you trigger an AoE in place of an attack I’d also be worried that it with multiple attacks you could trigger multi lay us and really slow the game down so chances are if I was to do an AoE thing it would be its own separate action that would require you to expend an exploit but I wasn’t quite ready to get there yet I felt like this one would work pretty well because if I did have multiple attacks on my first attack I could sure I could trigger this knock a couple people prone then I might then attack a prone person yeah but probably my initial target I want to try to knock pro in so I could and then the in adults make sure the timings right on this so that’s something which doesn’t make sure was correct the and then if I have a second attack I’d fall up and hit a prone person and then just do full damage to them the so yeah that that’s something where like I thought about making an AoE but I chose not to so the yeah key thing I mentioned is an option providing style this is a way which we could potentially insert it is have a path that is like basically a pugilist and that’s also kind of why I like this structure because as I thought about it it could kind of pull in a few of the different fighters that right now we don’t quite support especially we paired it with a fighting style that made unarmed fighting flavorful for a fighter like that pugilist I guess the word he used as opposed to the monk which is more like a martial artist so this is basically the structure we’ve got a lot going on here and this is when you look at this one of the reason another one of the reasons why going back after this table you know I talked about how I didn’t design a 15th and 18th availability because I have so much stuff going on that again I want to try to design is the smallest amount of work possible in order to start testing this because I just have conceptual questions here I also have a lot of design questions like is that too much within one path when you are at high levels I’ve projected you’re gonna have five paths if that’s five abilities under each it’s 25 abilities you can potentially apply at any moment ten times you know because the open deal 10 uses that could potentially be overload even if a player who want something a little more complicated it might just be too much to track so these are like sort of big questions I need to answer in terms my user interface and again I’ve got to answer those before I go to test because that kind of complexity can be very murky and very hard to distant from the overall you know reaction to the mechanics the so I want to show you in contrast the the starts to make can do I keep them and can’t use artery fighting style through and weapons I actually I can’t remember I think it says specific you can because I think it says they’re arranged weapons you know I can always forget that that’s like a Crawford level like discussions like when do traits apply to weapons and when do they don’t they always apply and because the classic thing and the irritating thing rolling his eyes is like hey man I’m swinging my throwing axe and it’s a ranged weapon so I get this bonus in melee right and you I would actually argue it doesn’t really matter whether you were getting this bonus in melee or with a ranged weapon but it what it does it does break immersion but like hey I’m a superior Archer which means I’m really good at fighting with hand axes in close combat like that just yeah it’s kind of thing where just starts messing up the sort of understanding of the conceptual understanding a player might have of a mechanic because of its name alright um I want to take a quick look oh no I want to take a look at the other school I made so if this one was real mud look I just wanna give you a chance like really hurt people and maybe a way that feels kind of tactical and maybe a little interesting and do some kind of control I keep them close to you then is the path in the Shadow hologram the shadow Harlequin which I wanted to make a very distinct much more about being clever much more about being fighting with light weapons and being sort of a controller but what I did right here and this is where I think I might go overall what the design is so I’ll read the text this is what I do the shadow Harlequin path is a school of artful swordplay and mesmerizing flourishes its practitioners attack of foes mind and body nuvaring their foes into tactical blunders with cunning faints and sudden surprising moves shadow Harlequin typically fight with light agile weapons such as rapiers and short swords but oops but their talents are useful to almost any work so the idea here was to create a flavor and say this is typically what happens but if you want to have a giant axe and use these abilities I’m not going to stop you and that’s probably where I to end up with this just again to pull something off that could potentially cause static MyPlate and I have to undertake to myself kind of goes back to the high wall don’t want to die on this hill I think this is so important that I really will not want to put a lot of work into it and frankly no I don’t think it’s that important I’d have to make sure that this is an it does not interact with grapple an odd way so I’m not like you know versatile up in one hand offhand attack trying to grapple you hey I’ve got your grapple now we started hitting it my other weapon stuff like that but I I can solve that I’m not too worried about it but let’s take a look at the Harlequin because the the first one when I throw out here is coming forth to dance and I would just admit this this sort of theatrical approach just was a good excuse to give like cheesy names to these things but I allowed the cheese so come forth it is my head in the way no it’s not today your weapon moves in a lazy hypnotic pattern luring your foe to blunder ahead and walk into your trap so here’s an example of an ability and this is gonna require a little smithing on my heart part again you don’t play test wording that’s definitely do not think you can like especially an established system like word this I’ll just cobble something together the player testers will give me feedback no that’s where I like a like a fellow designer and it’s how we think of editors here they’re essentially fellow designers they’re just sort of their their medium is a bit more the language and the implementation rather than the concept you can’t crowdsource that you need an expert it’s like you know yeah I wouldn’t want a crowdsource like my dental surgery I had want the most experienced expert you know doing that rather see it’s 100 people try and someone will get it right the and that’s kind of a good way to think about testing is like crowdsourcing things where it is the value of having lots of eyes rather than having one expert sort of eyes it’s saying like rather than having Stephen King write a horror story which is you know he’s a really talented great author let’s have a hundred people write horror stories because you know for whatever reason we’re trying to get a sense of like you know whatever there it’s the volume is it’s our new award in that case maybe you’re looking for like a new writer or a new approach we know what Stephen King can write we don’t want just another Stephen King story we want something new and different so we’re gonna have like an open call so send in your writing samples we’re looking for something new and this is a case where with your writing the wording you’re not looking for something new you’re looking for somebody an expert in what you’ve already built who understands your system to build new infrastructure to support things so with all that said this means before I send out come forth through Duns for testing I’d want to be make sure this is something I want to talk to Jeremy and make sure that our wording is correct but here we have directionally as an action expended Marshall exploit and select a creature that you can see within 15 feet of you the target must make a wisdom saving throw if it fails it moves up to 15 feet closer to you you then make a single melee attack against it using your Marshall it exploits dice what’s going on here is what I want to say is you know hey it’d be silly to say you attack a creature then make it move closer to you because I think people tend to look at the steps in which you do if missing mechanically has the steps in which it plays out in the game so it’s kind of goofy to think hey this guy’s good 15 feet away from me so I’m gonna swing my sword at him clearly I’m gonna miss Clewes 15 feet away I’ll look he walked up closer I get to know hit him right so it’s just the the idea being how can we make sure this mechanic is flexible enough that I can apply it a number of different ways in this case our test case is I can spend the exploit do a thing then make my attack what I want to make sure is that this effect is not so strong that you necessarily need to lose dice over it I might have to say you know we do using your Marshall exploits exploit with one fewer die I might say that just but I think it isn’t free but it lets you basically alert someone in so again this is being more straightforward manipulation we’re using the wisdom saving thorough rather than a strength or Constitution once all about messing with someone’s mind yeah blue kobold 120 pulls are the best they are there’s nothing like being a fighter who’d like make someone come closer this one is a little bit more cutting dialogue kind of flavorful this idea of the agile warrior so you’re pretty good at making reactions as a rule I don’t like putting reactions into the game they slow things down tremendously especially if they are open-ended actions open-ended reactions we try to really limit them we found in testing they slow the game down ridiculously I brought combat to a crawl excusing an open-ended one might end up with everybody’s action monster a character with the player with the open-ended reaction going okay does anyone need this yet for exam let’s say I’m a character and as a reaction I can heal you when you take damage we kick in the door to the room and there’s a dozen kobolds okay great they’re gonna fire arrows at us so the DM rolls the 12 dice normally that might not take a lot of time to resolve but now it’s like okay wizard do you need healing yet do you need healing it cleric unis healing you basically every attack you end up asking a question and it makes things go really slow so but I did want a reaction here except felt like on flavor for this sort of agile character I also just like the idea of cutting dialogue if this exchange of blows is a dramatic play let your rejoinder be its final act I felt probably felt prouder of that than I should good and this is pretty simple as a reaction when a creature makes them melee attack against you so this is your chance to throw some extra dps out there it’s saying look you detect you get to make a counter-attack you could spend a marshal exploit and make a melee weapon attack against that creature you can select one of the dice rolled and add it to your AC against the targets attack this also got a side got in the sense that the shadow Harlequin character is pretty it’s a JAL’s weapon master in the sense are very fast and you could do a quick Perry and counter-attacked getting across that feel the rapier of the short sword but again this is something you can imagine a character doing this with an axe you know why Limit that why and why not let the player kind of create their own story or explain this out the player who’s looking for Direction finds it the player who wants to be just I want to make up something in cobble it together can also do that too and essentially what you’re just doing is you’re letting someone get an extra free attack obviously the cost of their reaction so they wouldn’t get an opportunity attack and then dramatic exit so this is similar to the structure I had for the attack where basically there’s the speed reduction you’re overly dramatic strike distracts your opponent allowing you to slip away from their grasp when you expend a marshal exploit when making a melee weapon attack you can move up to 5 feet without provoking opportunity attacks after your attack / exploit die rolls myth you know move that here so there we go so and I move that they’re just so because this is an important thing about as far as your distance the after the attack is timing this is magnitude put the magnitude next to the thing it’s amplifying rather than after when it happens so yeah so five feet without provoking opportunity tax per exploit I rolled after your attack so there you go and this allows this sort of agile swordsman to get out of to get out of trouble note that it’s all opportunity attacks not just going to swear were you attacked so you can make an attack and then get it get out of Dodge you might need to make the attack move away and they attack someone else if you have multiple attacks so so that’s the basic structure we have here and what I’m hoping you see here is I feel like shadow Harlequin with the tight selection maybe this is a little too further part maybe I need to build on come forth to dance and have more just direct mind control type things and then maybe put these into a more defensive like I foil your attacks and get away and I as I said that I instantly think that that might be the right direction because I think having tightly grouped thematic things will make choosing these easier while still giving you that sense of flexibility it also means I’m really leaning into the benefit I have of having just a standard way to spend these things I just want to hit you harder or I want to change making sure I’m going to hit I just have a standard use of these abilities that anyone can use it’s also super important that this one be work that this would this work that goes back to my next point when I talked about the study of the minimum viable thing working through this I might actually be tempted to test this only say at levels 1 to 5 like get it get it tested up until the first level the fighter has multiple attacks maybe a little bit higher or we’ll see I had let me think about it but I really am seeing now as I walk this and explain it to you and talk about it there are three pillars that must be rock-solid for this subclass to work and again this is all about when you’re testing understanding what is it that you need to test I need to ensure that this basic mechanic works that’s number one boom this mechanic works then I need to make sure that my my standard way of using them also works it’s possible people might like the dice but not like the standard thing they all get the thing that everyone gets that doesn’t work that’s weakening the rest of my design because my third pillar these specific paths they rest on that they rely on the player having just a standard way to burn one of these things to get extra accuracy and damage they’re not trying to supply that they’re just applying the flourishes that live on top of it if the first one Falls the other two go down with it and the first one stands and the second one Falls it pulls the third one down with it I proved out my first two pillars now I can just focus on getting the paths correct and that’s where a lot of them my iteration is going to take place this goes back to the idea of having a clear destination a clear question I understand what I’m what I’m trying to move toward if I get a lot of negative reactions to this that tells me my first place I want to go look and really focus my analysis on is that initial concept of the exploit dice does this feel unique enough it’s gonna really help my searches and those common fields I’m gonna have thousands of comments I can’t read them all well okay I could if I wasn’t married didn’t have a kid didn’t have a job then I could read them all the our job other stuff to do but what it means is now I can do searches right I can go through and sort those comments I can take a look and say okay I got say a thousand comments let’s do a quick search how many times does Battlemaster show up how about a master she look like 30 times well that’s three percent of my commenters are saying battle master it actually is probably tip of an iceberg where a lot of them are thinking about it but maybe not just writing the words battle master and then I can start understanding what I’m testing so again when you’re designing think about your play tests think about the question you’re asking think about why you’re doing things and think about what’s the feedback you’re looking for they can prove out the utility and value of what you’re doing in both it’s a mechanical identity and what you’re doing and it’s in World identity in terms of who was doing this and again that’s very specific to two subclasses it also does apply to monsters though a monsters identity should be reflecting its abilities another discussion we designed monsters last month you can go find the archive on YouTube so that’s we’re looking at here now what I want to do yeah dead in seconds about a master will get mentioned know when it’s true we know it’s gonna come up right I can guarantee you that some percentage of players are going to talk about it and so now we have to understand what they’re we have to understand of it’s saying all this looks distinct is this look too much and then we design from there so get understanding that web of that foundation and how the pieces Connect is critical to making forward progress with your design and a play test I’m gonna take a quick moment and what we actually what’s already a quarter oh so I guess we won’t be necessary doing a lot of design on camera I hope this has been useful you know I know typical weeks we’re doing a lot of design but I’m hoping that kind of walking you through my thinking is helping understand how things end up next G fact share DVI vex feedback in the fighter I will put the word Battlemaster 10,000 times then thank you just get the giant cell um people have I think that the the most amusing you please don’t oh my god now it’s gonna challenge okay I’m here to see what people do with it we had someone I think put it in erotic short story in the comments once it wasn’t about one of us thank God it was just this sort of like yeah you know and I just you know it does it’s just was it’s kind of like oh that’s interesting we’re getting hundreds of thousands of people filling out a form and you never know what they’re gonna put in there yeah a game Bentham DM this is last episode of grill informing my future survey filling hopefully in terms of what you’re talking about and not just dropping in no mission erotica for us to enjoy cool so let’s take a look at the other so I’m already gonna stink you know what I think I have those pillars I don’t think I necessarily detest a level seventh or tenth ability but I wrote them so loose I’ll talk about them a little bit I initially thought I could test up to tenth you know but as I walk through this I can see especially I worked on the the paths last night in today and it’s inching his path the stone dragon I did first then path the shadow Harlequin I did sided later and I could kind of already see my kind of thoughts coalescing it often helps to walk your with through your design with someone else I do find actually is useful in the stream because it does make me start asking questions and rethink things from a different angle I think sometimes if you read something versus speak about it it actually fires off different parts of your brain least for me and it makes me think of it from the bagels oh that is one thing though okay this is a question that come up a bunch of times do you as a designer tell your testers your design intent I’ve heard a lot of opinions about this I don’t I think it’s almost like a 50/50 split but the my opinion is as a designer you do not you do not tell your testers your design intent because that’s cheating you’re gonna shade them toward trying to find that explanation rather than requiring them to find it I strongly believe the design should speak for itself if I have to tell you what my design intent is that means my design has failed to me would be like saying a chef has to tell you oh this was I was using you know I really wanted to evoke the feel of Thai cooking but crossed with with with Mexican cuisine if I need you to tell me that and I ate your dish and I had no idea it was time X confusion I think your dish didn’t work where does he tell me that ahead of time you’ve primed me I’m probably gonna start seeking out and what could have been a model which is what I want to know is a designer I want to know that it’s muddled I don’t want you to like you know I’m not looking for a design that Pat’s you in the back I’m looking for a design that kicks my ass right I mean a play test I don’t mind if a play test kicks my ass because that’s just saving ass-kicking when we’ve released the actual product and it turns out everyone hates it so I’d rather take your lumps and testing that’s the safest place to take them you’d rather you know it’s like training for an app you know for sport you know you’d rather do those wind sprints so you have you know your your energy in the fourth quarter of a basketball game then skip them then when you’re playing the actual game you’re lagging behind you can’t keep up with other team take your lumps and testing so that’s why I don’t like talking about the design intent with the testers I think that’s cheating now that’s a very strong opinion I have how the designers would disagree they would say that that’s a clear conversation you’re having with their testers and you’re trusting your testers to set aside that information and then they now know where where they’re going with their tests but for me I just feel that’s wrongheaded I think you don’t want the testers to know where it’s going your text has to provide that for them or your games it’s a video game if it can’t if it’s not doing that then I think that’s actually a enormous fault and they and the work itself but again you all get different opinions on that so anyways I’ll get off my soapbox put it aside and tell you about way of the blade so start so what I want to be was dropping something that spoke to like non-combat things there might be a better way to do this once we get the the paths sorted out but this is a starting at seven level you blend your martial talent with the softer skills needed to navigate the world if you are holding a weapon when you make a strength athletics dexterity acrobatics or charisma intimidation check you gain a bonus to the role equal to half your proficiency bonus you use your weapon to assist in your checks that just pull vaulting to the staff using your sword in your balance or menacing an enemy with your bloodied flail I have to admit I kind of actually love this mechanic I find it really this is the kind of thing I love designing it’s I feel like it’s pretty direct and simple but it has a really flavorful effect in the world I was tempted to say you get your full proficiency bonus but I thought that felt like a little like I think I’m giving you your full proof of proficiency bonus if you had to select one of these three rather than getting all three I think you get all three and a half or want it full we’ll see the way of path of the way fun times so yeah this is something where I think about now this is a good example for testing it’s a little hard to actually ask that question so probably what I would do is pick one that I thought was the riskier choice and go with that which might mean you’ll pick pick one of these and maybe expend this to the list a little bit and say you’re really good at that one holding a weapon the one thing I like about that direction is a bigger magnitude effects I prefer it means this is more of a character’s signature thing I prefer to give characters things that are like really obvious signature abilities or the other players will notice rather than a smaller bonus that comes up more often but might get lost you know another player might not understand you’re getting a bonus to your strengths athletics check because your your pub all thing with your halberd whatever it puts a little more pressure on the player to describe it whereas a big check like when you know when the fighter is like okay I can activation check oh yeah you know it’s a Devore fighter with the eight charisma and he busts till like a 23 well how’d that happen right so I kind of go either way I think for testing this is a tricky one to test but that’s also why it’s the seventh level ability it’s more aimed at like hey and extra kind of cool little toy rather than super class defining that’s another thing another tip if something is hard to test try not to make it a central element this is not a pillar of the subclass it can go a little off the rails but it’s not affecting those three core pillars and then we go to gonzo town with superior fighting style you know I kind of like the idea if this guy’s mean the weapon master and maybe if I get a name change to say look you’re just better with weapons than other fighters and especially if this was getting tied back to some of the paths like the I imagine we’ll have a ranged weapon attack path so this just takes your fighting style you can either gain a second fighters fighting style which we know people don’t like some well you didn’t like just getting anyone how about making your old one better this just replaces one you already have with a better one for being 10th level so our tree goes up to plus 3 bonus rather than plus 2 with your TAC rolls superior defense says you also now get that bonus to all your saving throws that might be a little too small maybe needs to be +2 again that’s not something I want to try to test it’s just to find a slice so I need to be pretty smart about making sure I get that right up front really what I’m testing here is just things our concept of this dueling gives up to a + forward bonus true damage rolls superior great weapon fighting extends the die roll rear wall to 1 2 or 3 and superior protection is you can use your reaction to protect the guy and then you get make an opportunity attack I actually like that too because it meant then on my opportunity attack it could trigger a use of an exploit to really to put put some some guy down so oh and then super superior to everybody this is a tricky one because whenever we do 2 up and fighting enhancements we have to we say feats aren’t core but we’ve gotten we get the feedback so often that hey this is just repeating a feat especially with 2 weapon fighting because I think if you liked weapon fighting you kind of feel like you need that feat to make it work so this was just an additional +1 buzz to AC the idea was you’re getting closer I’m gonna stay see if you take the feet it would also stack with that and give you a +2 bonus daysy so that was the idea there to kind of thread that needle so these the one argument against doing this from a testing standpoint is this is a lot to process and test for 1/10 of a class feature that’s not not one of our three foundational pillars that we’ve established so that would be the aggregates doing this it might work as something but then again I don’t know where else we’d use this so I’d have to kind of think about you know this is also not the case – we’re doing a phase testing helps if I’m testing levels 1 to 5 which this is probably good argument favor of if I test out one levels 1 to 5 and improve up my three pillars then I can now come in with another flourish that might take a sub class that’s succeeding from good to great or from great to fantastic where if I get this right players like I have this really cool new mechanic I can only get here it’s fun and flavorful let’s see live in the happy world where our three pillars work then they go just really cool I get even yeah cuz I’m the weapon master I get a superior fighting style my fighting style is better than other fighters Fighting’s now and that can be that this is when we talk about polish this is polish right polish is this exact like I’m getting to like second tier things and I’m making them awesome because my first here is just fantastic now I can make my second tier so let that quality bleed deeper into the design and again you can get that if you have good clear path for testing it means you’ll have bandwidth in time to start testing deeper elements that you might not be able to be able to put as much time in to improve out so this week was a lot of me talking it’s long a lot to work through this is I kind of intentionally want to do something a little more complicated to show you the ins and outs and to give you a sense of like your testing approach can and should inform your design approach to me testing is a necessary part of any commercial game design if you’re designing something just for fun you don’t take it this seriously but I’m clearly I’m designing this cuz it’s my job to get it right so having the the test portion inform how we approach the design portion that really does at the end of the day that that that polished segment that’s what benefits the most and if I was to look back at fifth edition and say why are we in a world now where 5th edition has just been such a really great success such a big community sprung up around it you know it’s orders of magnitude bigger than the past couple editions of D&D had been I think it’s because we were able to test deep enough into the game to really add a level of polish that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise without the the duration of the test the depth in which we’re able to test and having great people on staff like it came along stream would have managed their testing thing where she was able to hit a lot of the work and managing that data for us and helping us structure our test I think it was a big advantage that we had over prior work we had done somebody cuz we just kind of learned the hard way you know I’ve worked on game since the late 90s that this is a tool if you have a chance to use it definitely use it especially if you’re doing something on you know something for sale so I hope that was useful design super broken stuff there’s a place where some people like super broken stuff like you may build an Atari game around it but probably not D&D so um I hope that that was useful um what I’ll probably do next week I’ll kind of I mean I’ll do a Twitter poll to see if people want to see this finished out what I’d like to do is do a little more design and then actually do maybe just throw up my own little survey that I’ll just share on Twitter and get people to like give me feedback on it so you can kind of see like oh like what is the feedback on this I don’t think I want to go through the full process because as I mentioned our unearthed Arcana schedules a little crowded right now because we have the Ravnica stuff and then we have the run stuff coming up so I’ll probably just see about just doing my own little quick SurveyMonkey survey or something like that sharing this design on Twitter somehow maybe just three images or something and then you know I’m not gonna get anywhere near as many responses I’d get for a full survey but I think it’s still be useful to see what the reaction is and then how it might then influence the next round of testing so I think I think that’s what I’ll try to do so it’ll just be a matter of timing and see how quickly I can get it up so okay yeah don’t delay everyone yes M Torres X we’re not gonna deliver and game fend of BM yes to Twitter so yeah the the yeah so and I see there’s a couple of questions I didn’t get you feel free and hit me hit me up on Twitter with those kind of questions I have been pretty busy lately so I might not be able to get to something the O attacking it real good I will say any chance to get more unearthed or Canada for a bit while it’s packed you know like say what happens there as we start it starts hurting our our surveys if we because really what the ueo it drives the e way is what we need for future design and then the rate in which we can put play test surveys out and still maintain a good lesense good level of responses and engagement if we did too many we find it just starts spewing it just starts spreading players too thin okay so no in project rails everyone in Ravnica those subsets no typically found it’s pretty much the same core of really motivated people who want to test basically everything so the I think if these were separate role-playing games would make more sense but yeah it’s so far that’s we found interesting just ends up spreading things too far but I can completely sympathize with wanting more stuff first have to i wanna i want my wrap like a book I’m pretty excited about it in my ever on book 2 which already had but you know it’s where we’re finding it as we go so anyways thanks so much for tuning in I what I’ll do is probably announce the survey will see all the timing goes follow me on twitter follow me on Twitter it’s just a big ad follow me on Twitter lose our the benefits of follow me on Twitter you get pictures of like cats and I retweet random stuff no I’ll probably throw it out that up there and I’ll probably announce next week well good let’s do this I’ll get a summary together and next week during the hour I’ll put a URL on screen and I’ll tweet it out so you guys we can start surveying and what I’ll do for next week is either do a little more design of this on screen or maybe pull it another thing that would be interesting to test just so you can kind of see how again testing can inform design then I think that’ll bring us to a good stopping point to do some other work and then circle back as we get clay test feedback coming in alright thanks everyone and enjoy the rest of your afternoon and I’ll see you next week

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