As Long As We’re Talking About D&D: Things I’d Change

I was talking with someone IRL over the weekend about the glut of “new kinds of D&D” that came out over two volcano summer, and I knocked out my standard list of things about 5e I don’t love, and expressed to them (as I have previously here) that I wished one of the “revised 5e” projects had made larger changes, and my friend asked the very obvious follow-up question of: well okay, what would change then? Fair enough! I do, in fact, have thoughts there.

Note this isn’t the same as “what’s your ideal RPG”; that would look like a hybrid of Star Wars D6, Feng Shui, Cypher, Bard’s Tale, and X-Com, not have classes, be full of dice pools, and probably would be unplayable to anyone else.

But, assuming a baseline of D&D 2024 and Tales of the Valiant, and trying to keep it feeling like D&D while fixing stuff I don’t like, here’s what I’d change if I was in charge of a “sixth edition”, roughly in order:

The Combat Action Economy. This is one of those places where’s I’d make it a little more complex in order to make it simpler.

I really dislike the lumpy, multiple-sized actions each character gets in combat. You can Move and Attack, except sometimes you can also do something else? All the 21st century editions have this extra weird half-an-action, whether it was the Free/Swift split system in 3rd, or the Minor action in 4, or the worst-of-the-bunch Bonus actions in 5. And they get even stranger when you add in the various kinds of “not-on-your-turn” reaction options. Complicated, but also limiting, worst of both worlds.

I’d probably do something like Pathfinder 2 did and just give everyone 3 action points, and some actions take more than one point. And then this opens up some interesting options, like allowing faster attacks that use one less action for an accuracy penalty, or trading action points between characters, or just throttling how big an effect something has by how many points you spend on it.

A Caster that Just Uses Spell Points. And I don’t mean the weird “use spell points to make a spell slot,” I mean, “Magic Missle costs 2 points per missile, go nuts.” This was always what I liked about Psionics so much—the Psion used spell points like a grown up, and you didn’t have to worry about the wonk-ass “Vancian” system.

I really like systems where players have to budgets pools of points to spend on powers, and if you keep the numbers small enough—like you do under 5e’s Bounded Accuracy—the arithmetic isn’t too onerous. I think most classes could use a pool of “you get so many cool stuff points a day”; the Monk even already has that. Think of them as “Time in the spotlight in this fight” points. I’d replace every one of those weird pools of dice various classes have with a pool of “class power points”.

With spells especially I think there’s a whole set of cool mechanics hiding there, all of the metamagic and spell-shaping features are so much more simpler and more flexible when you can just charge a couple of extra points. Area of effect, amount of damage, range, all as multipliers of the points you spend.

My inclination would be to just add back the Psion with their own spell list and ignore the haters, but the right move would probably be to remodel the Sorcerer to work this way, and then rewrite the spell descriptions to work with either slots or spell points.

The unarmored melee combatant. This is my longest standing beef with Dungens & Dragons specifically and its descendants generally. There’s a whole set of cool unarmored archetypes—swashbucklers, pirates, gunslingers, Indiana Jones—that are dodge, parry, get out of the way fighters, and there’s never a good way to play one of those. I know there’s a whole class that has “no armor” as one of its signature things, but it comes with a lot of schtick payload, and sometimes I don’t want to play Bruce Lee, I want to play Inigo Montoya, you know?

And look, I get it. This is one of those weird, primordial Gygax things, this is a game where the defense stat isn’t called “Defense”, it’s called “Armor Class.” This is the sort of change that sounds easy, but every obvious solution is either worthless or game-breaking. The most-direct route is to make a Swashbuckler subclass of Fighter, but maaaaan, I’d sure want to be able to do that for Rogue and Ranger too, at the very least. My inclination would be to make an “Armor Proficiency” that you could take as a feat that lets you add your proficiency bonus to your AC when not wearing armor, but that feels like it has half-a-dozen unintended consequences I’m not thinking of.

Usually, I pair this complaint with the closely matching complaint that any action-adventure character, regardless of their job, should be able to throw a combat-viable punch. But, 5e24 has at least two ways that any character can become a viable pugilist, so that’s one long-standing complaint solved!

Success with consequences. I’m not a huge fan of critical fails, but I love me some “success, but with a complication.” Big shoutout to the old Star Wars d6 and the “wild die” here. There are a lot of specific cases in D&D-likes that have something like this, and there are obvious ways to houserule a solution (miss the target by less than 5?) but I’d love a formal, system-wide “so that worked, but also…” It’s funny, this seems like one of those things that basically every non-d20 system has.

Moar feats. Especially in class-based systems, I like being able to pick up extra features from the à la carte menu, it’s a great way to dial in a specific character without needing the superstructure of a subclass or prestige class or some such. My favorite house rule from the 3.x days was to give everyone a feat at every level; the initial fear was that the party would blow the roof off of the power curve, but instead everyone took the weird fun non-combat ones, instead of just taking power attack because you had to. The downside here is that you just added another 50 pages to a core book that’s already 100 pages too long.

Bards and Rangers without spells. It drives me crazy that those classes get spells; ever since the 3.x days that’s felt to me like a “doing homework on the bus to school” solution. I would add a “with spells” subclass to each, like the Fighter and Rogue have. Rangers irritate me on a purely aesthetic level, like, what, Strider isn’t a cool enough character on his own, you gotta throw spells on there too?

Bards are the one that really bugs me, though, because “play music to cause an area effect” is just begging for a cool set of custom mechanics. Bard’s Tale had this cracked 40 years ago, and everyone should go crib from that. If the Battle Master Fighter subclass gets an entire set of powers and mechanics, Bards certainly deserve one.

Don’t prepare spells. “Guess what features of my class I need today” is a minigame I can’t stand. For the classes that still have to prepare, I’d flip it around the other way, and say you can cast the spells you know at-will, but you can also have so many spells per day prepared in a quickdraw state, you can cast with half the action points or something.

And as long as we’re talking about magic users, some quick hits that I haven’t fully thought through:

• I’d gut and rebuild the warlock, and really lean into being the mirror universe cleric.
• Wizard with a sword and a gym membership needs a subclass, like a reverse Eldritch Knight. “No, I’ll save my spell points, I can handle this with my bare mitts.” (Yes, I know about the Pact of the Blade, and no, that’s not what I mean and you know it.)
• Cleric subclass that’s a little less knight templar and a little more Van Helsing.
• I’d ditch material components all-together. These either get ignored, or used to keep Wizards from doing their thing. They’re not fun, and I think the “balance” they bring is overestimated.

And speaking of ditching long-standing under-loved mechanics, I’d shove Alignment into an Optional Rules sidebar. I’ve been running D&D, in one edition or another, for almost forty years, and I’ve never cared about alignment once. The game doesn’t need it, but those alignment charts are fun. I’d ditch it all together, but it feels a little too foundational, and if it was gone the Outer Planes would make even less sense than they already do.

I’d bring back the 4e phrasing of per day and per encounter powers. Put the short/long rest stuff in an optional sidebar thing, “here’s how to adjudicate this in a non-gamy way if you really need to”; I also really like having “an encounter” be a mechanical entity in it’s own right, and not just fights, but “scenes”.

Retool the Monk. It does not escape me that the key features of the Monk—unarmed attacks, AC from something other than Armor, and multiple attacks at level 1—are all things I think everyone should get access to. Which is funny, since Monk is my favorite class! But I think spreading the “action hero” stuff out would let the Monk really lean into its own thing. Personally, I’d juice up the martial arts movie aspect of finding ways to use the environment—the Jackie Chan thing of constantly picking up pool cues, or chairs, or lose saw blades to fight or defend with. Not “doesn’t use armor” so much as “doesn’t need to carry equipment.” I really like the 5e24 Monk, I don’t think you’d have to work that hard to replace those level 1 features.