D&D Mechanics Inspired by Divinity: Original Sin 2

With the recent announcement of development of the game Baldur's Gate III, I found out about Divinity: Original Sin 2, made by the same company. It doesn't take place in the D&D universe like Baldur's Gate will, but its cooperative, turn-based, roleplaying style is very reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons, and just while playing through the game lately, I've been inspired by some of the game's mechanics that could be useful in a homebrew D&D campaign. I also was able to see existing D&D mechanics in a new light, which may help me be a better Dungeon Master.

Skill Checks

Divinity finally helped me understand how passive checks work. When your character is walking around, if their Perception skill is high enough, they'll sometimes exclaim "I've found something!" and notice a pile of dirt that can be excavated to find a chest with an item in it, or sometimes an interred hostile skeleton or something.

Before, I thought it was cheap that if someone had a passive Perception of, say, 18, they'd just automatically notice everything all the time, but that's not how it works in Divinity. In the game, there's one crucial factor involved in making this mechanic work: proximity. You still have to walk around to notice things near you. You don't enter a room and immediately reveal all the secrets in it. As a DM, I should reward players with high passive Perception for looking more closely at things. If a player with a high enough passive Perception walks right next to a secret door, for instance, I should mention that they notice something off about the wall, or an odd seam in the stonework or something. That's another thing that's important: Discovering or noticing things is not the same as knowing things. Just because you find a secret door or you notice a trap on a door with the Perception skill doesn't mean that you have the right Investigation skill to figure out how to utilize that new knowledge. This knowledge from Divinity: Original Sin 2 will help me reward perceptive players without revealing too much too easily.

Moral Dilemmas

I was amazed at how well Divinity weaved moral dilemmas into its storyline. In some quests, there doesn't seem to be any way for a happy ending. And I like that. It makes a game seem much more serious, and more importantly, it puts very meaningful responsibility on your player character. So many times in Divinity I have spoken to one character and had a very clear quest laid out before me, and then when I encounter another character on the other side of that quest's conflict, another point of view is brought to light and I question which person I should trust. It probably takes effort to write up quests like this, but how amazingly satisfying would it be to see your players stop in their tracks ready to kill the boss and realize the boss may have been framed and the quest giver has been playing the characters this entire time?

Beyond the roleplaying and story aspect of moral dilemmas, I also would enjoy implementing "degrees of success" into my quests more, keeping in mind a best-case scenario reward and a worst-case one, and degrees in between. For instance, a king tells you to go save his daughter from a dragon. You could end up killing the dragon and accidentally getting the daughter killed too, ridding the kingdom of the menace and the beloved heir; or with more effort you could possibly end up taming the dragon and saving the princess, thus gaining a powerful draconic ally to guard the kingdom territory. That's a bit of a trite idea, but I'm sure it could inspire better ones.

Perhaps an easier exercise would be to simply get better at creating interesting NPCs with shades of gray in their motivations and personalities. Is the enemy you're seeking in this quest the one who killed all the elves? No, but they created the war machine that did. Does that make them worthy of death? Suppose they know who to really kill if you spare them? What if in order to gain the artifact that will kill the big bad boss, you have to kill an innocent guardian who has sworn an oath to protect the artifact from absolutely anyone, or sacrifice the safety of innocents who are already using the artifact?

If I can get good at this method of thinking, I think I'll be able to create much more memorable conflicts that really affect player characters for many months after they make the decisions surrounding them.

Socketed Runes

This is a mechanic that was in TitanQuest and Diablo probably other games before them, but I hadn't thought much about it in terms of D&D until I played a game that had both this mechanic and a resemblance to the roleplaying game itself. In Divinity, runes of varying elements and power levels can be found, as can weapons, jewelry, and armor that have sockets in them. The runes can be placed into the sockets to imbue it with new properties and bonuses.

Because both runes and sockets need to exist, implementing this into a D&D campaign would require a bit of work, but I think it could be an excellent way to reskin magic items. What if instead of finding a +1 mace, you could find a socketed mace, or maybe it could be called a runed mace, and then you could also find (or more exciting yet, enchant!) gems or runes that you could place into the mace's socket to grant it a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls? Depending on whether you go with Divinity's rules or TitanQuest's, removing a socketed rune could be a simple process, or it could require the help of a specific magical NPC who would either need to destroy the weapon or destroy the rune in order to free up space to rearrange the enchantments. Or it could be like the Sigil Stones on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion that just straight-up permanently enchant an item. I think I personally would go with maybe requiring a jeweler's kit (and proficiency to use one) and a short or long rest to remove the rune so it could be relocated or sold or replaced. This adds a level of versatility to an adventuring party. If the main damage dealer is wearing a runed longbow and finds a +2 rune, they can replace their +1 rune in the longbow and give it to another member of the party, who can in turn enchant their runed warhammer with a +1 bonus. And with even bigger enchantments, like a holy avenger rune or whatever, a paladin could turn his favored flail or pike into the legendary weapon instead of being limited to just a sword.

Divinity also has a mechanic where you can add "frames" to runes to grant them additional power, but I didn't find that very interesting. I guess some way of upgrading the runes, or in actually making an item into a "runed" item could be fun, as could coming up with an actual system of what runes did what. You could just have the four elemental runes, or runes representing more abstract ideas like order, chaos, evil, and good; or just straight up pick a real runic alphabet like the Fuþark and have fun translating their effects into armor, weapon, and accessory powers. I'd have to think harder about that to make a satisfying system for my own campaigns, but it's definitely a fun idea to consider.

Origin Characters

Like D&D and other roleplaying games, Divinity gives you the option of being whatever race and class you want to be. But it also gives you the option to play as one of several "origin characters"—characters who have a direct connection to the campaign's past and future storyline. As fun as it is in all roleplaying games to come up with a character to roleplay as, I can't think of a better way to get invested in a campaign's storyline than having your character's personality set up beforehand for you. The work has all been done for you in terms of your character's motivations, goals, and flaws, and the DM already has a storyline—complete with NPCs your character has previous relationships with—all set up for you to explore.

Divinity only limits your character's race. It has a suggested physical appearance for the character (except for things essential to the character's story, such as the skin color of the Red Prince), as well as a suggested class, but you can change either if you want, subtly changing the character's identity to your preference. I think this is probably the best way to do this in a D&D setting, though I would lean slightly toward more limits, since the fun of origin characters comes from fitting an initial mold but having the option to break it later. I'd probably just limit the class choice slightly... perhaps with a choice of three classes and no direction on subclass, just so if you were a retired soldier you didn't inexplicably start the game as a sorcerer or a warlock. But then again, that creative limitation could flip back to produce a very fascinating storyline... I dunno.

I suppose that technically, any character can become an original character if the DM works closely with that player enough to establish a rich storyline and destiny based on that character's background, ideals, bonds, and flaws; especially if the DM gives a few choices or points of worldbuilding during character creation so that the player can weave themselves into the narrative they're just learning about. But I think it could also be fun to start a campaign (especially for players new to D&D) by providing players with the option of choosing a premade character rather than making a new one from scratch. This would definitely require some trial and error though... I never regretted my choice as I played the characters Beast and Ifan ben-Mezd on Divinity, but in a longer-term campaign in D&D, maybe I would. I'm guessing it mainly depends on the quality of the origin character's storyline (up to the DM, of course), and the type of player choosing that character.

Background Significance

This leads me to a similar point that plays a part in Divinity: background tags. Depending on the tags that you start the game with and unlock later on in the game, you can approach situations different ways that can radically alter the outcome of the encounter, or provide additional information. For example, a character may come upon a crying child, and if they have the [JESTER] tag, they can try and cheer the child up with humor, or a [SCHOLAR] character can try to use logic to cheer the child up. Some tags, like [HERO] and [VILLAIN], are earned based on your actions in the game.

The closest translation to this in Dungeons & Dragons is character background, which I've decided should be a much bigger element in my campaigns than it previously is. Sure, a background provides great campaign and motivation material for quests, but I've largely ignored the more boring or less mechanical features of backgrounds, instead focusing more on the character's class to determine how people see them. I think this has been a huge mistake. I realize now that I should put a much stronger emphasis on backgrounds when planning out adventures. Admittedly, this would be easier when planning out a specific module, since I could set up NPC encounters long before any of my characters have chosen their backgrounds to avoid bias, but there's nothing stopping me from simply keeping all the existing backgrounds in mind and giving equal attention to each when creating NPCs and other situations that those backgrounds could affect.

A character with the noble background should be able to completely bypass the otherwise arduous process a non-noble character would have to take in order to get an audience with someone of higher station, and the same level of power should be allotted to all the other backgrounds in some situation or another. This seems harder for characters like hermits or urchins, but it probably doesn't have to be if I think about this harder. And honestly, a way to combine this and my goals related to origin characters is to simply know the campaign setting well enough to make custom backgrounds for it.