Designing Races: Building a Better Boneman
Hello again, everyone. Thank you for the great response we’ve seen for the Wakeful already! It’s good to know our work is appreciated, so thanks for that. If you’re feeling generous, feel free to support our efforts on Ko-fi. Also, be sure to follow us on Twitter so you get updates on our work as it comes out!
Today, I want to talk about how we created the wakeful, and what drove them toward the state they ended up in. Hopefully it’ll give you some insight into how we test player races, and how 5E balance informs even the little details of the game’s design.
The wakeful began as a part of a larger project I’ve been working on for a long time now, a massive city-setting, in which the wakeful are created in the aftermath of a calamity early in that realm’s history. As a result, the first major step in making them for Cubicles was to write the lore as realm/setting neutral, so that a DM looking to use it wouldn’t need to work in too much background adaptation to make them appropriately fit into whatever game they would be running.
In addition, since they already existed in a fairly complete form within the setting I’d written, writing the wakeful as a player race was more like adapting them than it was like writing something new. Instead of deciding what to make and what it ought to be able to do, I already knew exactly what a typical wakeful skeleton was capable of, and just needed to translate it into the rules of 5E.
The most delicate balancing act for the race was the Reassembler feature, since it makes fundamental changes to one of the biggest parts of how DnD establishes tension: risk of death. Part of the way player options are designed differently from monsters is to preserve that feeling of risk; generally, monsters have high durability and steady damage, to seem fearsome but to minimize surprises for the DM, while players are generally less durable with higher, more chaotic damage options, so that they feel powerful, but like every move is a gamble, and a wrong move could get them killed. The line I wanted to draw was to preserve the wakefuls’ indefinite lifespan, while still letting them be meaningfully hurt and disposed of, preserving that sense of risk. The solution I came to was dormancy, meaning that while a wakeful can never be permanently destroyed, they can still ‘die’, and in a way that can take them out of the game same as any other character, in practical terms. Few parties can afford to wait a few hundred years for their friend to simply wake up, so the consequence is usually the same.
Most of our testing was centered on the first part of Reassembler, namely wakefuls’ advantage on death saving throws. While few things interact with death saves in any way, and I think for good reason, this felt like a special case. In our tests, it was strong, but never made the wakeful unkillable. They still failed a reasonable number of death saves, and they still took two automatic failures whenever they were attacked while at 0 hit points, which is an important rule to keep in mind. The more difficult Medicine DC to stabilize them is meant to act as a balance as well, since DC 16 is much harder to consistently succeed on, as opposed to the normal DC 10. Together, I think they make the wakeful interact with danger differently in a way that’s interesting, rather than just getting to not worry about being hurt.
One part of the wakeful ‘death’ rules that was cut for simplicity were alternate resurrection rules. Since Wakeful do not actually die when they fail their third death saving throw, resurrection magic such as raise dead wasn’t originally intended to be able to return a Wakeful from dormancy. The dormant condition was meant to act more like an extended comatose state, and so a spell like greater restoration would be more appropriate for bringing them back to ‘life’. If you want to use my original rules for this race, I recommend the following:
Rousing the Crypt
To return a wakeful from dormancy requires a casting of greater restoration or similar magic, which causes the target to wake up after 1d4 hours with half of their hit points and half of their Hit Die (both rounded down). Rather than the usual material component, a greater restoration cast in this way requires 300 gp worth of chalk, limestone, or marble, which the spell consumes. Alternatively, a lesser restoration spell can gradually restore a dormant wakeful to consciousness. When cast for this purpose, the spell reduces the wakeful’s dormancy period by 10 years, plus an extra 1d4 x 10 years for every spell level above 2nd. When cast in this way, lesser restoration requires 50 gp worth of chalk, limestone, or marble, which the spell consumes. A wakeful whose dormancy is reduced to zero in this way wakes up after 2d4 hours, with all of its hit points and Hit Die restored.
Add that feature to your wakeful’s racial features if you want the full experience as I intended it, but feel free to toy with the numbers there. Wakeful are not meant to be any harder to resurrect, just different, so keep that in mind as you tailor them for your table.
Most of the other features were made with flavor in mind first. I loved the idea that wakeful could augment and specialize their boney bodies over the years, and used the subraces as a way to begin to explore that, mostly in the Catacomb Scholar and Grinning Skulldugger. The Ivory Dilettante then followed after, as an intentional generalist, so that the subraces were not so boxed into “books” or “knives”. No plans at the moment for more subraces, but there’s certainly room. We’ll have to see.
That’s all I have for you this time. We’ll have another piece of homebrew for you to chew on next Monday, so stick around for that. If these design articles inspire you to write your own brews, let us know! We’re always eager to hear from the rest of the DnD community, so don’t be a stranger.
-James the Snickering Ghoul