I'm in the middle of promoting Bright-Dark 3d6 Role-Playing Game (version 0.9). I had a goal to give the game some room to breathe, but I had a thought: What if the visitors on my blog who are here for something else are being starved of that something else? I write rants and half-cooked (yet insightful) game design essays from time to time. This post is about scaling problems in TTRPGs (like D&D 5e) and why Bright-Dark 3d6 Role-Playing Game uses small numbers and avoids big numbers.
Here's the design philosophy:
Low Numbers = Faster Game, Simpler Game, More Tense Game, and Better Immersion
Where to begin?
Hit Points
Let's start with Hit Points (HP). In 5e, first level characters begin with 8 to 14 HP, and the game encourages people to start at third level where they'll have 20+ HP. Compare this to classic D&D where characters roll for starting hit points at first level and may have 1 HP, or potentially and realistically 10 HP at third level.
Your reservations might be that 1 HP is not enough HP. I agree. But I disagree with having 20+ HP, and I disagree with adding 5 to 12 HP per level so that fighters can potentially have 100 HP at level 10.
Our ape brains are really, really good at small numbers. 10 is a good number for us to work with. Something to do with the number of fingers. 100 is not a good number for us. If I roll 1d6 for damage, and you have 10 HP, you instantly appreciate what this means. You could die in two to three hits. Ouch. You feel that in your gut. But, if you scale this up by ten, to say 10d6 damage and 100 HP, this is not proportionate. 10d6 damage is going to average 35-40 damage with less dramatic deviation. You will die in three hits, not two to three. One die is swingy-er than ten.
Damage Dice
But 10d6 is slow! You have to watch one player pause the game to fish for loaner d6's, then roll, then do arithmetic, then give them back. It's like pausing a movie to calculate the math behind the movie physics. That breaks immersion. Not cool.
100 HP is too much because the size of the dice isn't scaling up; It's just the number of dice that are scaling up. More dice = slower game. I already said this implicitly, now I'm saying it explicitly.
Infinite Scaling
This is all a part of the illusion that characters are getting more powerful. If the game is scaling up to meet your character's power, does it matter? After a while you realize that all it does is slow the game down.
You're adding complexity to the game without necessarily improving it. It's bloat. It's counter intuitive.
IF you like crunch, you might be having fun. Scaling makes the game harder to prep. There's a new meta every few levels. The GM and the players have to learn this. There's an adjustment phase whenever the new meta is reached. A new GM is constantly underprepared for the jump in power and ability. A sixth level spell can turn five NPCs inside out. "When did you... Since when could do that? Yesterday!"
Players get more powerful, and so do the NPCs. Over and over and over and over. This is the carousel of power scaling. It leads to damage sponges.
Simpler games don't have this problem. A 1d6 damage die is objective; it describes the setting. You understand that a sword, a spear, and axe, a bowshot, etc., do 1d6 damage. You understand that a large or huge creature can do 2d6 damage. You understand that a giant or a dragon can do 3d6. These numbers imply the way the world works. It's intuitive. You don't have to think about it. The game is easy to prepare for and easy to play.
Tension
Having 10 HP makes the game more tense. If you've ever played high level D&D, you know you can take some punishment. You're less scared. Players stop taking the world seriously. The kraken or dragon can't kill you in one hit when you have 100 HP. BUT if you only had 10 HP, 3d6 damage would be very scary.
If you've ever seen a player trigger an opportunity attack and say "meh, I'll just take the damage", you know what I mean. That's a game that has encouraged a playstyle where damage is too abstract and has no meaningful consequences. To compensate for this, designers try to add meaningful consequences, like an injury system. No! Bad game designer! Shame on you! The answer is simple: stop scaling the game up! You don't need an injury subsystem to reinforce danger when you only have 10 HP and everyone rolls 1d6 damage.
Once, a DM prepped a scenario where we were on a rickety wooden bridge 100 feet above the ground. I was a 9th level fighter. I had enough HP to take a fall. I could long rest on the ground. I wasn't worried.
Better Immersion
Everyone plays TTRPGs for different reasons. I like the narrative. I play to find out what happens next. Combat is the slowest way to find out what happens next. In my opinion, there is no right way to do 5e combat. The substance of the narrative is what is meaningfully happening in this scene. In combat, the substance is "we're resolving our differences with violence" and, in my experience, it takes two hours. The dramatic question is "who wins?"
For players like me who want to know what substantiative, meaningful thing happens next, if that takes two hours, that's boring. We start checking out. I start building dice towers and doodling. I'm not watching / participating in an emergent story as Klunk the Barbarian and my brave, crazy adventurer band, I'm watching nerds invoke game rules and do math.
When you roll 1d6 damage against 10 HP, things happen fast.
When you roll 10d6 damage against 100 HP, things happen slow.
That's just the way it shakes out. I have timed it. Combat turns at low levels are 45 seconds to a minute. Combat turns at level twenty are 10 minutes or more.
Conclusion
Bright-Dark 3d6 Role-Playing Game is designed so that maximum Health caps at 20 + Strength (so, 23 is the cap). Average damage is 1d6 + Attribute. Some talents modify damage too, even damage die. Critical hits add 2d6. This makes hits feel meaningful. This keeps players from getting big heads about being tough, and it keeps them in the grounded fantasy. Grounded fantasy needs grounded numbers.
Related: I have a page where I list several TTRPG posts here.
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