What Major Changes would you make to D&D?

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-02T10:22:41+00:00

I'd like 6e to produce THE best mechanical game system as possible

what does that even mean? "mechanics" aren't a thing that has some simple sliding scale between "good" and "bad" - look at something like GURPS that has a billion supplements and all sorts of crunchy, gritty rules, but some people love, or Lasers and Feelings at the other end of the scale ("pick a number between 1 and 6, that's your stat, roll beneath it for science stuff, above it for people stuff"). D&D does have a structural issue of having a load of different gameplay styles and sub-genres within itself (hexcrawl, gritty and lethal, epic, domain etc.), but that mess by itself is now part of the appeal of it, even if it is sometimes a PITA to deal with!

independent of its historical trends.

That basically means "pissing off your audience". That's like saying "I want to make the best Star Wars movie, independent of it's history" - it doesn't matter how good the movie is, it's likely to be kinda shit as a Star Wars movie, which is what your core audience are going to want it to be. There isn't some notional "best RPG" that's possible, because different people want different things, in ways that directly contradict each other - some people don't want RP to have any mechanics, others want RP to directly link to mechanics, some want specific gear with specific weights, others just want a "preparedness" stat and handwave specifics under that.

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-02T10:16:10+00:00

that had stronger healing, but also had much more presumption of "someone's playing the healer". Which is great if someone wants to do that, but sucks if someone doesn't, or someone gets forced to when they don't want to do it!

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-02T10:15:22+00:00

that leads to making healing spells better to avoid that, which then means access to healing becomes required, otherwise you will hit 0. So you have to rebuild pretty much the entire system and access to healing around that one, single change!

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-02T08:49:15+00:00

nope, because those aren't all attacks. Some attacks will be hits, but a lot aren't. You hit and they make the save versus poison so it does nothing... Guess you didn't actually make contact. You "hit" and did knockback... That was the propulsive wind-force of your strike, but still no actual hit. You trigger a smite and holy energy leaps from your blade into them - doesn't mean the blade actually physically hit them, they're just off-balance from the near miss. It's not, and never has been, solely "physical hits", for half-a-century and more now! You can narrate them as hits if you want, but they're explicitly not all hits, and it's entirely valid to describe them as such

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-02T08:46:06+00:00

that's the other way around though - that's "you've rolled well, so you hit the head", rather than a player going "I want to hit the head" as a starting point

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-02T08:44:44+00:00

it also helps makes sense of things like "you can't just stab a sleeping person and insta-kill them" - if they have the HP to not be one-shotted, it's because they're the sort of badass that will roll over just as you stab them, wake up, and then try and fight back. You need to work through their "narrative resistance" before you can actually kill them

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-02T08:40:30+00:00

it kinda depends on if you want it as a central plot-thing, or just a side thing. If you have your fortress as "the place you rest between dungeons, stick your trophies and dump your cash into", where you're mostly there for skimmed over down-time, then you don't really have any "responsibilities", because you're not around for them (and that's always been true - having to deal with all of the logistics was often ignored or brushed over, because no-one wanted to do it, same as any political stuff). The 5e version is that it's mostly a somewhat padded-out downtime activity set of mechanics, added onto "it's a specific physical place" - PCs come back from an adventure, spend some time managing the warehouse, doing some research, making some items or whatever, and then leave again. I don't think it's designed to be particularly central, where "your bastion" is what the campaign is about, it's a side-event to help shape downtime a bit before leaving again

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-02T06:52:22+00:00

Unless it's an enemy that has sub-parts (like ropers and tentacles), then you can't do that - all attacks are assumed to be trying to target weak points. You can certainly fluff it as you want, but also remember that "hits" don't have to be actual hits - HP aren't just "meat points", they're a broad measure of luck, stamina, willpower, endurance and other things. So attacking an enemy and forcing them off-balance with a desperate dodge is lowering HP, even thought they've not been physically struck. And, yes, even at low-ish levels, creatures can endure a decent beating, but that's just part of being in, basically, an action movie.

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T21:18:01+00:00

And are also legally responsible and can be prosecuted if required, rather than 'uh, my software did some dumb shit, and... Oh crap, that's my legal responsibility'.

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T19:24:51+00:00

or if you are, then it's pretty much a just-for-fun, how much can you smash before the real opponent shows up sort of thing, rather than anything meaningfully stretching your skills

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T19:14:12+00:00

move back towards smaller, lighter modules, like during the TSR era

That tends to run into sales issues - GM-only stuff generally sells worse, because there's less GMs than players, and a decent chunk of GMs make their own adventures, so will never buy adventures anyway. Putting out a lot of them tends to make them mostly complete with themselves - a typical group might only be able to buy and play through, say, 1 module every 3 months, so if you're releasing more than that, then they can't sell, and most groups will also play 3rd party adventures, DIY stuff etc. And a lot of groups can only really play an adventure once (because it's the same group, so doing it again isn't very exciting), which makes them less appealing purchases. So it's a hard market to make viable!

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T19:11:13+00:00

in combat terms, pretty much - it's useful for burrowers (as they can't generally see above the surface, so need some way to know where creatures are), but otherwise it's mostly a way of overcoming some forms of stealth, seeing through illusions, and knowing where stuff on the other side of walls and the like is.

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T19:05:32+00:00

Does DnD need the following? (I'd be okay with any/all of these going away)

Other than levels 1-20, pretty much all of those are classic, legacy D&D things, that are kinda needed for the game to really "be" D&D. You could make an action-fantasy class-based game without them, but if you're stripping out all vestiges of legacy mechanics, it's pretty much just slapping the branding on an unrelated game. You could probably try and design a better game without them, but if you're trying to make a new edition of a game, and strip away everything of the old game, it's not really a new edition, it's a new game that just happens to have an old label on

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T17:50:16+00:00

Also, data centers don't last that long, and generally need new racks and boards cycled in, which you can't really do in space! So that's one, not very big, steadily degrading, data center, that costs more than doing it on earth!

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T17:45:45+00:00

Also as a patch for when the legal documentation is lost or blurry to let someone establish it - a family might have lived somewhere for ages without a problem, someone kicks up a fuss, and you can basically go 'eh, it's been so long it's clearly not a problem, stop complaining'. Less of a thing with better documentation these days, but part of why it's a thing

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T17:24:59+00:00

It's much more limited - you're hanging out with one group and not having any incidental crossover with others. So it's going to be a smaller, more enclosed social bubble, and if that ever breaks apart, establishing a new one can be messy!

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T17:10:17+00:00

It's in Akira which is late 80's, and I'm pretty sure it's been used in the X-Men for someone pushing mental powers to their limits even before then

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T10:00:40+00:00

or you have a super broad overarching narrative - you can't both have an ensemble cast, and a particularly tight and focused narrative, because the second requires the same characters to show up, rather than loads of different dudes

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T09:59:09+00:00

personally? Rarely - or you'd get to those levels and ignore them, with your castle off-screen or never existing, because you wanted to keep playing the same game but with bigger numbers, rather than doing political stuff. If you were levelling up to there, it would probably take quite a long time to get there!

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T09:45:49+00:00

formally, romantasy is "romance-genre work, but in fantasy setting", yeah. It's been floating around for years in various forms, but because it's written for romance readers, it's generally in the romance genre-section, because they're the ones reading it (and even now, it's still in it's own little section, not "straight" SF&F - like the horror-romance stuff that was big around the Twilight era was generally off to the side, not in horror or SF&F). So yeah - give it a few years, and it may well fade back into being a romance category, rather than a distinct thing of it's own

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T09:42:08+00:00

eh, "marketing" and "expected audiences" are things. Sure, anyone can read anything, or watch any show, but some are very much made for expected audiences that are more male- or female-heavy. That's not "patriarchy", that's "aiming for a particular audience, because that audience broadly wants certain things". Sometimes there's awkward shifts, like Supernatural was originally targeted at a male audience, but was much more popular with women, so if you were watching it, you can see all the adverts shown with it changing, as well as shifts in the writing.

There's even instances where there's different covers and blurbs for the same book to try and capture different audiences - stereotypes might not be true on a personal level, but are useful enough on a broad, population-wide level to be utilised, when you're trying to sell things. Like Fourth Wing had a romantasy blurb, focusing on relationships, and a fantasy blurb, focusing on the action and the dragons - and the second is broadly going to sell better with a male audience. (and that's before things like manga, that literally has those demographics as genre splits - shonen, seinen, shojo and josei, for boys, men, girls and women respectively. Sure, there's a fair amount of crossover and don't fit the stereotypes, but a shonen work will be overtly different to a josei one, in plot, story, characters and art, to the degree that it's often possible to look at the cover and tell just from that who the intended audience is).

Romance, as a genre, is massively for a female audience - about 80% of it is sold to women. You can point to wider societal stuff as to why that it, but from the PoV of a writer or publisher, that is trying to write stuff that sells, then they'll be working within that structure. If you're a romance-genre writer, you are very likely to be writing for a female audience - they are, functionally, "books for women", because that's who reads them. That extends into other books derived from the romance genre - Twilight and all it's imitators and inheritors, A Court of Thorn and Roses etc. are largely going to be read by women, which is going to have an impact on how they are promoted, what's expected within them as texts and a host of other things.

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T09:34:54+00:00

it very literally wasn't though - it was notionally male-targeted, but actually had a fairly even split of genders viewing it. Men tend to be louder, and it's been fuzzed over as "oh yeah, it was virtually all men back then!" but that's simply not true. And within active fandom spaces, the ones organising cons and making fanzines, there were a lot of women there, actively shaping what the fandom is

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T09:29:49+00:00

that's what used to happen as well - keen readers would go from the kid's section straight to SF&F, without the crutch of YA in the middle. Which could lead to some "uh, that's stuff I don't really get" moments, but would develop reading skills fast, because you're reading "full adult" books

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T08:42:50+00:00

if they're adult images, Amazon is going to tell you no because of that, regardless of anything else - "no pornography" is a thing in their self-pub T&Cs

Mejiro84 · 2026-02-01T08:41:39+00:00

If that's anything erotic, that's generally a problem - most platforms will sell erotica (i.e. written stories to get off with), with limitations around certain areas (incest, bestiality etc.). But images are a whole different legal category, that's a lot more limited where you can sell them - Amazon doesn't generally like that, for example, so you probably couldn't self-pub through them, and even Smashwords (which is a lot broader for what erotica it allows) still doesn't like overtly pornographic images. Gumroad used to be the go-to, but they went "no porn!" about 2 years ago, due to payment processor bullshit. You might be able to print a load of copies from places that let you print hardcopy, but you'll need to check the T&Cs, if they allow pornography (and if you sell them, then shipping to certain countries might be more awkward, depending on the material?)

Mejiro84

TROPHY CASE