Ah yes. Last week was busier than expected so not much got done on the old blog but I did have the chance to scribble down some notes and then sort of put them together to make more sense. Plus, I’ve been working on a version of YARC for my players and I did promise that they’d see the rough draft in December so been working on that.

As I was organizing and making handy little tables something occurred to me about Proficiency Bonuses from 5E. Sure, it’s easy but in the back of my mind it didn’t make sense. Let me explain. A 1st level Fighter and 1st level Wizard each have a +2 Proficiency Bonus with a dagger. Yes, the Fighter does have better fighting related stats but, in my mind, this works out that they each have the same amount of training. And that makes no sense. Same goes if look at Thief and another character with Stealth. Skills are supposed to the Thief’s thing, so why does everybody else get the same bonus. OK, before you go all crazy on me, I know there all sorts of boosts in 5E based on the character’s class. But this ain’t 5E. It’s my own crazy hack that’s inspired by some 5E mechanics.

So what did I do about this? Well, let’s split up that Bonus. Characters have an Attack Bonus, a Skill Bonus, and Spell Casters have a Spell Bonus. Let’s start of with Attack Bonus. Fighters get a +2. Thieves and Clerics get a +1, and Magic-Users get a +0. For a Skill Bonus, Thieves get a +2 and everybody else gets a +1. And if you’re seeing the pattern, Clerics and Magic-Users have a +2 Spell Bonus. Now, how does progress as a character gains levels? Same way as in 5E, the first +1 is at 5th Level. And there are some opportunities to increase that along the way depending on you class.

There’s another little tweak I added. Originally, there were only four Saving Throws. I had combined the Death Save ala 5E into the Save versus Poison and Disease. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that Death don’t care and it should be it’s own Save that no class get’s a bonus to but an individual character might.

And that’s it for this week. I’ve got lots more crazy notes to type up.