D&D 5th Edition VSRD

[Fall]

Copy and paste error more than likely. I thought I had removed that.

It likely got copied down there when I added the digestion control part of that sentence to the optional rule area or something.

Fixed it now!

[MasterGryph]

Ah, I see.

There's only one other minor issue that catches my eye. I'd suggest adjusting the description for Digestion Resistance to mention how digestion damage could have multiple damage types, though it's not necessary to mention which ones.

[Razgriz]

As far as I know, no one has, but it shouldn't be terribly hard to accomplish either, as the two systems are very similar. You really only need to let one 5e feat provide two vore feats from the VSRD, or smack two feats together, or double their bonuses, and then change the wording of a few feats or traits that increase specific bonuses, like morale, to just general ones, since 5e doesn't have any of that stuff.

I kinda wanted to adapt the VSRD for 5e and make some other general changes some time ago, but I am still far from ready to try my hand at DMing, so I left that by the wayside.

Mh, well the primary issue for converting from 3.5/PF to 5e is that the former is very feat-heavy, whereas 5e is class-heavy. Lacking a CMD/CMB, you need to adapt the rules to 5e grapple rules, then perhaps alter digestion damage, then look at social eating. So on so forth. It may be easiest to make a "sub-class" that you level alongside a normal class that gives you access to feats. Or, go the similar route of x feats per y levels.

Anyhow i'd be curious to see how it develops.

(maybe stupid) Thoughts:
*As for digestion damage, seems pretty low? 3d8+3 at level 9, for example?
*Small preds RIP
*Wouldn't AC 20 stomach be terrible later game? Or vs Monks?
*1/10th HP on stomach? Monks will be pretty OP vs preds lol
*Seems very CON heavy.

Corrections?
*For desperate struggle, do you mean "natural crit" or something?
*most 5e feats give a stat bonus. Perhaps some more feat groups need it?

Additions:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/irzka2t2j2vin ... 1.doc?dl=0
check this out for some more ideas. Goo person, revival abilities, digestion damage, full-tour, so on. I know your tastes are endo, but perhaps you could continue your work and make a VSRD everyone can enjoy?

I'm liking it so far.

[Fall]

Mh, well the primary issue for converting from 3.5/PF to 5e is that the former is very feat-heavy, whereas 5e is class-heavy. Lacking a CMD/CMB, you need to adapt the rules to 5e grapple rules, then perhaps alter digestion damage, then look at social eating. So on so forth. It may be easiest to make a "sub-class" that you level alongside a normal class that gives you access to feats. Or, go the similar route of x feats per y levels.

Anyhow i'd be curious to see how it develops.

(maybe stupid) Thoughts:
*As for digestion damage, seems pretty low? 3d8+3 at level 9, for example?
*Small preds RIP
*Wouldn't AC 20 stomach be terrible later game? Or vs Monks?
*1/10th HP on stomach? Monks will be pretty OP vs preds lol
*Seems very CON heavy.

Corrections?
*For desperate struggle, do you mean "natural crit" or something?
*most 5e feats give a stat bonus. Perhaps some more feat groups need it?

Additions:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/irzka2t2j2vin ... 1.doc?dl=0
check this out for some more ideas. Goo person, revival abilities, digestion damage, full-tour, so on. I know your tastes are endo, but perhaps you could continue your work and make a VSRD everyone can enjoy?

I'm liking it so far.

Firstly, thank you for your feedback! I'm currently playtesting the VSRD a bit once a week and it has a good bit of polishing up that could be done.

As far as feats go, I'm leaning more toward leaving that open to the DM running the game. I like the way the game feels without any additional feats given, but I can see the appeal in a vore-centric game allowing extra feats for everyone chosen from the vore-based selections.

I'm looking into altering some of the numbers, but it is a tricky thing to balance.

To address your (perfectly reasonable) thoughts:
- Digestion damage currently scales to a total of 6d8 at level 20. Adjusting the rule so you gain an additional d8 per three levels would increase this total to 8d8 at level 18.
- Small preds eating bigger prey is outside of my tastes, but I can come up with an optional rule for it.
- As far as AC goes, you have to keep in mind that swallowed creatures have disadvantage on their attack rolls. On average, this equates to about a -5 on a D20 roll and this can be immensely painful for low-level characters on the wrong side of a set of jaws. A previous incarnation of the document used 15 + Con mod, but I found that it was way too high for low-level characters to survive: especially when combined with disadvantage. I am weighing other options to replace that system that will allow it to scale better. One possibility is changing the formula to 10 + proficiency bonus + Con mod, which can result in a total AC of 21 without magic items. Add disadvantage onto that and that becomes a pretty hard number to hit.
- This is the biggest problem predators face currently. The way that the swallow whole ability is designed for most monsters is that they have to make a Con save after taking 1/10th of their health in damage. The DC of this save equals 10 + Con mod, which means that it is always a 50/50 unless they have proficiency in the save. Considering that most monsters with this ability have a huge pile of hit points, this works alright for them. A better way of doing this might be to link it off of the character's proficiency bonus. Perhaps the bonus multiplied by 5?
- When I look at the way monsters' swallow whole abilities work, they are based entirely off of Con. Thinking about it, that makes a good deal of sense considering what the stat represents. The system also places a whole bunch of emphasis on Strength and Dexterity thanks to Athletics and Acrobatics, respectively.

Your concerns:
- Roughly, I mean a natural roll on the dice: no modifiers. The feat doubles your chances at escape in that manner by allowing a natural roll of a 19 to count for the struggle action instead of only a 20.
- I'm liking where the feats are at right now, but I also have some bias. Are there any that you thought were particularly weak that needed a stat-bonus to boost them? Most of the feats in the PHB don't give a bonus, but I am open to suggestions!

I'll give that document a look-over and see what I can adapt from it. That is a different version of the Pathfinder VSRD than I had access to.

[Fall]

I have done a good deal of work towards a second version of the VSRD to add more content and alter some of the numbers. Before I finalize anything, I have some potential changes I'd like opinions on.

- Changing the stomach AC calculation from "12 + Constitution modifier" to "12 + proficiency bonus + Constitution modifier" for player characters only. Adding monsters' proficiency mods would be pretty intense as they scale higher than the player version. This change should make players have tougher stomachs as well as make the Constitution stat less important. Keep in mind that a swallowed creature is considered restrained and therefore has disadvantage on attack rolls. A level one character's maximum stomach AC is 17. Assuming a monster has a +3 to hit, the monster has only a 12% chance to actually hit. Assuming a +7 to hit only raises those odds to 30%. Disadvantage is powerful!
- Changing the amount of damage prey has to do to a stomach in one turn from "1/10th health total + Constitution modifier (minimum 1)" to "5x Proficiency bonus + Constitution modifier" for player characters only. Keep in mind that this damage must be dealt using a light slashing or piercing weapon. This means that a 1st level character would have a 10 hit point threshold (minimum) and would be more likely to die than to heave up their prey, but the threshold would scale upward, reaching 30 (minimum) at level 17. This change combined with the disadvantage and the fact that taking this much damage does not force you to immediately release the prey (as it forces you to make a Constitution save to avoid releasing the prey) should hopefully balance things out a bit.
- Changing the struggle action to also give resistance to digestion damage on a success in order to help balance out the raised challenge of escaping through attacks. At least you can attempt to debuff your predator and halve the damage you take in the process.

Another question I wished to pose was how in the world do you handle goo-creatures? Do they wear normal armor and weapons? Do they use special, goo armor and goo weapons? If the latter, do those prevent easy-absorption of prey?

I was trying to find a way to adapt the goo-based feats of the Pathfinder VSRD, but have run into trouble with the logistics of how a goo-creature works.

I am still considering making digestion damage scale faster or raising the damage overall, but am not convinced it is necessary. A tenth level character can do 4d8 + Strength or Constitution mod (likely +3 at this point) (average 21) damage to all creatures currently in its stomach in addition to its normal actions. They also have the ability to take the digest action and inflict that damage again, allowing for 8d8 + 6 (average 42) damage to possibly multiple eaten creatures.

A level 10 Barbarian's action economy choices look like this (Assuming Strength 16, no feats):
- Option 1: Make two attacks at a +7 bonus for 1d12 + 3 damage each (without rage). Make two additional attacks. Assuming these attacks all hit, they deal an average of 38 damage total.
- Option 2: Attempt to grapple a target and ingest them on the first turn. Attempt to swallow on the second turn and make an attack against another target using the profile above. Assuming this is all successful, the swallowed creature takes an average of 21 damage and another target takes 9.5 damage.

From turn three onward, the Barbarian automatically deals an average of 21 damage to the swallowed target and can continue dealing 19 average damage to another creature. This is in addition to the control effects of having a creature swallowed, which is particularly devastating to spell-casters. That said, the Barbarian missed out on an average of 7.5 damage across the first two turns by taking option 2, but it would only take a single turn to make up almost three times that lost damage.

This is, however, assuming that all of the Strength (Athletics) checks were successful to eat the target, which is far from a given, but even partially succeeding at these checks is applying some control effects to the target. That is also assuming a lack of feats, which could change the action economy of that a bit.

Thoughts, anyone?

[Netjak]

I like the digestion damage increase, as in the grand scheme of things, it is still not all that much damage. The stomach isn't considered as a magical weapon, so if you aren't making the damage psychic as Fall is in his game, a lot of enemies will have resistance against the bludgeoning damage, if not the acid damage half of the gut. And of course, while there are feats, like great-weapon master which really boosts the damage of normal weapon attacks, there aren't really any so far to properly buff your digestion damage. So more feats could probably be warranted, though of course, nothing is stopping a player from asking their DM to design a new feat for what he/she wants to do.

Onto the goo-conundrum, I would leave it vague and up to the DM to decide how to handle it, as letting a player play a slime character would break a lot more things than just armour. After all, what would be stopping them from just squeezing in through a key-hole in a door to surpass it, or slip down through the cracks of a wooden flooring to the floor underneath. Personally though, I would have slime characters have lower base AC as well as gaining less of a benefit from armour, a small negative modifier to hit with manufactured weapons, but also resistance to non-magical slashing and piercing damage, while vulnerability to fire and lightning damage.

[Fall]

When considering damage, keep in mind that these same rules currently apply to monsters attacking you as well.

That said, I do think that raising the damage from "2d8 + 1d8 per five levels" to "2d8 + 2d8 per five levels" would help some. The resistance to nonmagical damage is a problem at higher levels, but would be a great place for DM's to introduce a magic item. Introducing a feat to cover that would make that feat a tax/must-have, which at that point means it might as well have been included for everyone as tax-feats feel really crappy as a player.

In the Pathfinder VSRD, goo characters had the compression ability, which only allowed them to compress to 1/8th their size (counting as squeezing). For a medium creature, this would still be far too large to pull really serious shenanigans like what you've described while also keeping the flavor of the thing alive. A six foot tall creature could only compress through a space of nine inches or larger.

I think that resistance to non-magical slashing and piercing is nicely offset by the vulnerability to fire and lightning. The lower base AC is something that would cancel out the benefit of the compression-ability, but I'm not a fan of the negative modifier to hit on top of it. I get where it is coming from, but I would like to try to keep the number of modifiers introduced to an absolute minimum.

Of course, it is ultimately up to the DM to determine what is best for their players and their game!

[Netjak]

Perhaps one could write up a quick potion that strengthened the imbiber's digestive track, letting it count as a magical natural weapon, as making it a waistband or something that would require attunement would be a hefty price to pay for a magic damage tummy.

And I had totally forgotten that the compression ability was noted down in the Pathfinder VSRD, which do seem to limit their slimey-power to a nice extent, which probably would mean that I could have been less mean to the slimepeople with my proposed downsides to them. Instead of doing the reduced chance to hit with manufactured weapons, which I guess would be a bit of a class-limiting bummer, one could have it so that a humanoid character that would first need to grapple the enemy, could skip the grapple, and instead go right to the ingest step when the prey is a slime, essentially just drinking it up? And of course, if they didn't wear armor, slimepeople should be able to engulf other creatures, essentially ingesting them without needing a grapple first, but instead of trying to escape, their prey could do an opposed strength check, and instead attempt to drink up the slimeperson from within, reversing the swallowed condition with two successful maneuvers.

[Razgriz]

Mh, well the primary issue for converting from 3.5/PF to 5e is that the former is very feat-heavy, whereas 5e is class-heavy. Lacking a CMD/CMB, you need to adapt the rules to 5e grapple rules, then perhaps alter digestion damage, then look at social eating. So on so forth. It may be easiest to make a "sub-class" that you level alongside a normal class that gives you access to feats. Or, go the similar route of x feats per y levels.

Anyhow i'd be curious to see how it develops.

(maybe stupid) Thoughts:
*As for digestion damage, seems pretty low? 3d8+3 at level 9, for example?
*Small preds RIP
*Wouldn't AC 20 stomach be terrible later game? Or vs Monks?
*1/10th HP on stomach? Monks will be pretty OP vs preds lol
*Seems very CON heavy.

Corrections?
*For desperate struggle, do you mean "natural crit" or something?
*most 5e feats give a stat bonus. Perhaps some more feat groups need it?

Additions:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/irzka2t2j2vin ... 1.doc?dl=0
check this out for some more ideas. Goo person, revival abilities, digestion damage, full-tour, so on. I know your tastes are endo, but perhaps you could continue your work and make a VSRD everyone can enjoy?

I'm liking it so far.

Firstly, thank you for your feedback! I'm currently playtesting the VSRD a bit once a week and it has a good bit of polishing up that could be done.

As far as feats go, I'm leaning more toward leaving that open to the DM running the game. I like the way the game feels without any additional feats given, but I can see the appeal in a vore-centric game allowing extra feats for everyone chosen from the vore-based selections.

I'm looking into altering some of the numbers, but it is a tricky thing to balance.

To address your (perfectly reasonable) thoughts:
- Digestion damage currently scales to a total of 6d8 at level 20. Adjusting the rule so you gain an additional d8 per three levels would increase this total to 8d8 at level 18.
- Small preds eating bigger prey is outside of my tastes, but I can come up with an optional rule for it.
- As far as AC goes, you have to keep in mind that swallowed creatures have disadvantage on their attack rolls. On average, this equates to about a -5 on a D20 roll and this can be immensely painful for low-level characters on the wrong side of a set of jaws. A previous incarnation of the document used 15 + Con mod, but I found that it was way too high for low-level characters to survive: especially when combined with disadvantage. I am weighing other options to replace that system that will allow it to scale better. One possibility is changing the formula to 10 + proficiency bonus + Con mod, which can result in a total AC of 21 without magic items. Add disadvantage onto that and that becomes a pretty hard number to hit.
- This is the biggest problem predators face currently. The way that the swallow whole ability is designed for most monsters is that they have to make a Con save after taking 1/10th of their health in damage. The DC of this save equals 10 + Con mod, which means that it is always a 50/50 unless they have proficiency in the save. Considering that most monsters with this ability have a huge pile of hit points, this works alright for them. A better way of doing this might be to link it off of the character's proficiency bonus. Perhaps the bonus multiplied by 5?
- When I look at the way monsters' swallow whole abilities work, they are based entirely off of Con. Thinking about it, that makes a good deal of sense considering what the stat represents. The system also places a whole bunch of emphasis on Strength and Dexterity thanks to Athletics and Acrobatics, respectively.

Your concerns:
- Roughly, I mean a natural roll on the dice: no modifiers. The feat doubles your chances at escape in that manner by allowing a natural roll of a 19 to count for the struggle action instead of only a 20.
- I'm liking where the feats are at right now, but I also have some bias. Are there any that you thought were particularly weak that needed a stat-bonus to boost them? Most of the feats in the PHB don't give a bonus, but I am open to suggestions!

I'll give that document a look-over and see what I can adapt from it. That is a different version of the Pathfinder VSRD than I had access to.

Looks like you've thought a lot about it and perhaps i've given you some more things to consider. ^_^ which is good! Thanks for the response.

As for my thoughts on where bonuses could go, I may have to do it another time. Pretty tired right now.

Also, I know digestion isn't your thing, but its infinitely easiesr for a DM to pick up a rule set if its a complete one thats my logic for asking you to move outside of your comfort zone. (afterall you won't be playing any of it - just giving it a skeleton?)

[Fall]

I am taking a hiatus from working on this as life has gotten busy. However, I did work up a second version of the document and will include links below as well as in my opening post. I have also gone ahead and made a version of the document that uses the lethal rules by default.

Nonlethal VSRD (with updates highlighted):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13n3 ... sp=sharing

Nonlethal VSRD:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f_2 ... sp=sharing

Lethal VSRD (with updates highlighted):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RJm ... sp=sharing

Lethal VSRD:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tw2 ... sp=sharing

Thank you all again for your suggestions and feel free to make changes as you see fit!

[redfearnmatt]

So is anyone playing with this yet? Because I am up for a game.

[voryure]

I doubt I could run it but I'd be up for playing.

[Razgriz]

i'd be up for playtesting! :3

[redfearnmatt]

I could *potentially* run it, but no guarantees right now.

[Sylvira]

I would definitely be interested in giving this a try as well.

[Killjoy364]

the interest is there but the problem is usualy people to dm for the game.

[Razgriz]

could always do a play by post, rather than live session? Might be easier for all.

[voryure]

I'd been assuming play by post here on the forums

[Killjoy364]

it would depend on the time zones for everyone but if the game will be played here then play by post is the best bet.

[LightningLord2]

Reading through this a bit:
-The limitations to vored prey make not only swallowing, but grappling in general viable for a suitably built character actually. Previously, the pred's stomach was a huge blind spot because they could no longer attack their prey.
-Preds deal their prey psychic damage? Are you sure that's correct?
-Damage is really high at first level and quickly peters out.
-Cheeky Moon Druids can explode their preds with a Bonus Action wild shape.
-Also, the Experienced Prey feat once more makes it suicidal to attempt eating your opponent.
-Fix Food Chain's save to a Wisdom Save as 5e overhauled the saves. Not to mention that just getting advantage on vore-related checks on a failed save is extremely weak for a fifth-level spell, especially since it already takes your action - make it a Bonus Action or a 2nd/3rd level spell and we're good.
-Vorportation is a more useful version of the above, having the same saving throw error as the above.