Which Sacred Cow Doth I Kill?

So many design ideas start with “Is this anything?” In the case at hand, I think there is something to this idea but also it feels distasteful to me. It just needs *something* more to make it click. 

This idea was inspired by a conversation with my friend Dwiz of the Knight at the Opera blog in which he observed, after years of considered research, that the typical 5e-head is obsessed with the 20=good, 1=bad schema. In his words,

“Complete obsession with nat 1s and nat 20s, especially treating them as crits even just for ability checks, is indeed almost universal among new players I've met, regardless of their background or previous exposure to D&D content and culture. But also, ime that's been the case since 3E, like it's seemingly just intrinsic to the d20 core mechanic.”

This, of course, is in direct conflict with the beloved (for good reason) roll-under mechanic of the P/OSR, in which rolling low is good and natural 20 is nearly always failure. (If you want more fleshed out thoughts on this subject, I wrote about the beauty of roll under and the even better “roll high, under” systems in my defense of ability scores). Is there a way I can square the circle? Make it so that your players can hoot and holler over a 20 again without resorting to the icky d20+modifiers over target number system?

The only way I see to save the 20=good sacred cow is to kill another sacred cow: high stats=good. For instance, if we instead generated character stats by rolling 2d6 with low being good and high being bad, we would have nearly a mirror of 3d6 stats, with a high score of 2 (equivalent 18) but the lowest being a 12 (equivalent of an 8). So it eliminates the dreadfully low (which I love) stats, but we can only save so many sacred cows at a time! Under this system, you succeed if you roll *above* your stat, so a 20 is once again good and a 1 is once again bad! Problem solved!

But a new problem emerges. Design is a game of whack a mole (it’s a good thing I know little about whack a mole or I’m sure I’d be trying to fix its purported game design flaws too). Now we have a Strength of 2 being better than a Strength of 10? That just feels wrong to my simple little monkey brain. Stats going from 3 to 18 isn’t as intuitive to the modern mind as they would be if they went from 1 to 10, but the idea that low=better presents the same problem conceptually as rolling a 20 on the d20 being bad. 

So like the lady that swallowed a fly, I have another solution to hopefully solve the problem from the solution to the other problem. What if we invert the stats? No longer do you have Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Charisma! Now you have Weakness, Clumsiness, Stupidity, and Awkwardness. The mood of the game changes entirely when you don’t have a Fighter with 18 strength and instead have some lout with 2 weakness. This may work better for a game where the players are a bunch of incompetent goblins rather than a group of brave heroes.

There you have it—I solved one problem and created several others. The experiment was a mistake. Perhaps some circles can’t be squared. But I can’t help but keep trying and asking “is this anything?”

By the way, Barkeep Jam has concluded and was a huge success with a ton of entries! I printed them out and they amounted to 240+ pages of extra pubcrawl gaming material. Most of the entries are listed on the Jam’s itch page for your perusal (although at least Seed of Worlds and DIY & Dragons jammed out on their respective blogs–there may be more, but I need to do further searching if so). It is going to take me a bit of time to get through them all and reach out to all the entrants with discount codes for my store and about potentially getting a few of these in print. But I wanted to assure you that it is on my radar, even if it isn’t at the top of my list at the moment (the demands of real life never cease to intrude).