This week’s Legends & Lore continues the in-depth look at the design goals of D&D Next, this time with an emphasis on the basic rules. The most interesting bit here is that the design team is aiming for three different levels of rules: basic and two unnamed others. This week is all about basic, so I bet we can all predict what the next two weeks of Legends and Lore are going to be about. The basic rules, as Mike invisions them at present, looks like this: Ability scores (rolled) Race (chosen) Class (chosen) Specialty (not chosen) Class abilities (not chosen) Notably absent are skills, or at least any character sheet mention...

This week Mike’s talking about something that Adam and I recently talked over quite a bit for Dungeon World, the Cleric’s Turn Undead ability, so bear with me if I use more examples than usual from my own design. That’s partially because, with the exception of games that actively emulate D&D, I can’t think of many that have something like Turn Undead. Part of that is down to the fundamental issue of giving classes core abilities that make them more powerful against one type of creature. The incidence rate of that type of creature then becomes a game design issue in the hands of the designer or the DM since using...

Magic systems are a dime a dozen these days. In this week’s Legends and Lore Monte talks about Vancian magic in D&D and, thankfully, some other ways to do it. Monte already covered the first two thoughts that I had on the topic: the close relationship between early D&D and pop culture sources, plus some different approaches to magic in games. There are still a few other options when dealing with magic beyond what Monte mentions, so let’s take a whirlwind tour. First stop: Mortal Coil. This approach is so far gone from D&D that it probably isn’t a great choice for that game, but it’s also maybe the most...