Systems and Encounter Design
Game Master
2017-current, on and off weekly campaigns, over 15 new players introduced to the game.
HellFire System
A gunslinger demon system I wrote and tested over 3 months at my table of 4 players.
The HellFire world is one where the doorways to the 9 hells have cracked. Demons pour into the forest at night. Gunslingers are paid to take them out, and some of them begin to resemble the creatures they fight.
Combat
The system is built around wounds and resolve.
Anything that deals damage to you will wound you. 3 wounds and you die.
But if you can see the damage incoming, you can burn resolve to avoid taking the wound(s).
Different weapons require different resolve to avoid the wound.
5d4 resolve to avoid a shotgun, 1d20 resolve for a rifle, 1d6 for a revolver.
martial classes start with 10, and gain 1d10 per level. At low levels, gunshots nearly always lead to a wound. The world of HellFire is very deadly to newcomers. But occasional veterans show incredible resolve.
These damages are also balanced with the cost of ammunition, and amount of bullets that can be in a gun before needing an action to reload. Along with misfire stats, and qualities like “Loud” that give away your position.
Surprise attacks gained an immense amount of power in our playtesting, as it's a guaranteed wound if you hit the target, so I leaned into it and observation became a core statistic. It also influenced the Grim class, glowing eyes giving away positions, closing them hides you but blinds you.
There are 2 layers of Combat Stealth:
Unnoticed. The target creatures have no idea your location.
Unseen. The target creatures know your location but cannot see you. If you change the angle you are from the target creature without being seen, you become Unnoticed.
Melee attacks always hit, costing either resolve or wounds. The only luck is exactly how much resolve is lost, 1d4+4 for most weapons. With characters making multiple attacks, averaging 13 resolve needed per turn to avoid a wound.
Gunfire does involve some luck. Whoever hits enough shots first wins the exchange.
Cover and sightlines became very important, so I spent more and more time on map layouts with this system than on D&D. Inching boxes of cover on maps, making alleyways tighter and adding back doors and windows.
Leveling
Classes leveled up with a skill-tree like system.
There were “open skills” which any player could attempt, such as tripping an enemy, but required a die roll. And “closed skills” which required choosing them in leveling up, such as "Assassin - deal two wounds to targets when you are unnoticed.”
Skills could also be “solidified” during level up, either increasing your odds of success when attempting them, or outright mastering them to not need a roll.
Grim class
Magic takes, it does not give.
This class worked on Corruption, the more corrupted the soul, the redder your eyes became.
“RedEye” was a stat that determined your spellcasting power, but also made your character far darker and more sinister.
A selection of the corruption effects, though there was an effect at every level:
Corruption 1. Your eyes are permanently red. Marking you as a Grim.
Corruption 3. Your head is often filled with whispers, gain disadvantage on all notice checks.
Corruption 6. Your eyes glow a luminescent red. You must close your eyes to be able to make a stealth check.
Corruption 7. You are obsessed with gunpowder and cannot willingly leave any behind. Someone in your group must take it.
Corruption 8. You are drawn to demons. When seeing one, you are immune to any fear or propulsion effects from them, and cannot willingly move further away from a living demon that you can see.
Corruption 10. Upon entering a non-Grim civilization, you must roll 1d6. On a 1, you cannot leave the location until you have killed someone. Your character is excited about this.
Corruption 11+. You become an NPC controlled by the GM. You abandon society and join the demons.
Simplified D&D
My goal with any new players is to get them to understand the feeling of TTRPGs with as little friction as possible. To do this, I strip away many systems that add complexity and don't contribute to the core feeling of these games. Proficiencies, languages, hit dice, all add significant explaining time, but don't run core to the experience, and so are easily cut entirely.
For example, since I choose the difficulty classes (DC) for any roll, I can simply lower the DC for the rogue picking locks compared to other characters doing the same. This mathematically emulates proficiency without the player needing to track it.
It's also important to me that players feel a sense of ownership over their character. So wherever possible, I like to have them create their character.
To keep this process simple, I use an exaggerated version of skill arrays: +4, +3, +2, +1, -1, -2, which they can put in any skill. These larger numbers with -2 and +4 at the extremes allow players to quickly and clearly see the difference between a physical class and a magical one.
Then I simply give them feats from a class that matches those skill distributions. If they have strength and constitution as their highest stats, I give them barbarian features. If it’s wisdom, they get magic spells.
This whole process takes only a few minutes per player and gets them into the meat of the game without a repeated: "don't worry about it, this will make sense when we start.”
Custom Classes
With a heavily narrative table, my players always wanted to explore creative character designs. But the available classes rarely could support their specific wants. It has become common practice for me to create fully custom classes for any player with a clear idea of what they want to play.
Features would be wholly unique to their character and would be created only when they are gained, not ahead of time.
Characters could find themselves inside the game and change directions for what they wanted to grow into. And players found themselves getting far more invested with characters that reflected their unique expressions.
Even characters who wanted to be similar to an existing class, such as one player who wanted to be a tactician barbarian, I created variations on classic features to express this new outlook.
Instead of rage, a state of losing intellectual skill and gaining physical damage resistance, we gave the barbarian a “Focused” state, where they could choose at the start of each turn to apply an effect on a creature in melee with the barbarian, imposing one of the following:
Disadvantage on any attacks from the creature against anyone but the barbarian,
All attacks against the creature from the barbarian are at advantage,
Or all attacks from creatures other than the barbarian are at advantage.
They are either distracting the creature causing allies to hit harder, or defending their allies, or going all out on attacks.
These sorts of personalizations made characters feel unique and personal, and created greater investment and engagement with my players.
Death Mechanics
A problem I noticed with the current mechanics for 0 HP in D&D, where characters are knocked unconscious and must roll death saving throws, counting successes and failures, is that it caused players to simply sit out of the game for a long time, and if they did die, it rarely felt narratively satisfying.
Instead of having players roll death saving throws, I created a new condition, “Wounded”
Wounded players are forced prone and have only one action during their turn: no movement or bonus action.
They can use their action to attack, cast spells, or move at half speed without provoking attacks of opportunity.
The wounded state ends whenever a player is healed by any method, or if they complete a short rest.
Any damage taken while in the wounded state kills the player.
With this change, the player is almost always killed by something. Instead of withering away from rolls, it's the final blow of an enemy, or fire engulfing the room, or a spell gone wrong.
Death is slightly more likely within this system, but in compensation, the player has more agency to protect themselves. Gaining an action to drink a healing potion, cast healing on themselves, or simply flee.
In practice, this caused my players to react to deadly combat situations with a more realistic lens and exercise more caution. They report the wounded state feeling more risky than the D&D unconscious state, and it aligns with my narratively focused campaign.
Custom Encounters
I design around the strong players I have created.
Playing with the space players can walk through, shoot through, and how the fight can change over time.
I had a combat at the top of a mountain where a griffon tried to grab the players and instead of doing normal attack damage, just dropped them off the side of the cliff.
I telegraphed this attack by having it do the drop attack on their horse pulling the cart first, stranding them in place and displaying the threat.
The players hid under the now stationary caravan, delaying the attack, so I had the griffon try to tip it.
I knew one of the players had Feather Fall, a spell that prevented falling damage, so I targeted that one when possible.
The downside of the cliff for the Griffon is that it was always in sight to be shot at. It only dropped one player with Feather Fall before dying.
In retrospect, the caravan as cover was more effective than I intended. It might have been interesting to create an area of effect, such as the griffon flapping its wings and throwing ice around under the caravan, but the game we tend to enjoy is more grounded than that, and the fear of the combat was effective despite the damage dealt being low.
