D&D Mechanics Inspired by Assassin's Creed: Origins

 

I'm back, and yes, I will continue these Assassin's Creed mechanics posts until I can't any longer! Assassin's Creed Origins took quite a change from the previous games in the series. The game plays much more like an RPG, with gear of different rarities, a complex talent tree, and leveling up. It also pairs the freedom to explore an open world with classic dungeon crawlers through Egyptian pyramids. These mechanics gave plenty of inspiration for ways to improve your D&D DMing.

Location-based Adventuring

I never really understood how West Marches-style D&D adventuring could work until I started exploring in Origins. Pretty much every previous AC game has things like regions, districts, or other demarcated areas, each with varying levels of difficulty, but Origins's simplicity of objectives and focus on exploration stands out. Scattered throughout Egypt, there are lots of locations you can visit, each with its own mini-objective that grants you some bonus experience if you complete it:

• Garrisons (with three levels of difficulty), heavily guarded locations where you have to assassinate commanders and steal treasure, and sometimes free prisoners
• Treasure locations, which are nice to look at and shrouded in mystery, and have a hidden treasure somewhere to find. They can be anything from an abandoned camp to a villa to a sunken trireme.
• Viewpoints, trademark high-altitude locations that act as Fast Travel points after you synchronize with them.
• Papyrus locations, religious areas that have a hidden papyrus. The papyri have riddles that lead you to valuable hidden treasures.
• Beast lairs, where predatory beasts are gathered, led by an alpha beast that you have to kill
• Tombs, mini-dungeon crawls that ends with a stone tablet that gives you an ability point
• Stone circles, which unlock a unique item if you visit all of them.
• Hermit locations, places to rest. (Honestly not very fleshed out)

This system of naming specific locations of interest within difficulty-based areas is a perfect way to make a West Marches-style D&D campaign, or at least an open-world one. Rather than letting your players wander around aimlessly, give them rumors about specific locations and what they might hold, hint at collections that can be gathered if a certain number of specific locations can be found, and give them variety of the types of enemies they can encounter. Having some set categories of location types in mind for your campaign can make it easier for you as the DM to plan them out, but you'll still be able to give them plenty of variety in terms of flavor. A "garrison" type location could indeed be a fort, or it could be a camp, a warship sailing along a river, or simply a building complex that is off-limits to everyone not belonging to the complex's faction.

I imagine this system would also make it easier to describe exploration as your players adventure. Rather than saying "you travel north for two days," you could describe them passing specific locations, tying them together like a flow chart. And I would certainly reward my players with bonus experience points for exploring locations like these to their fullest.

Quest Variety

One change in Origins I was really impressed with was the variety of quest types you are presented with. In previous games, it felt like quests were always "assassinate this person," "steal this item," "eavesdrop on this conversation," and, well, "assassinate this other person." While the objectives of the quests in Origins felt similar from time to time, it felt like every one of them was unique and explored different aspects of the good you were doing for quest givers. If nothing else, I encourage you to play Assassin's Creed Origins for new ideas for quest hooks that go beyond the norm. Some of my favorite side quests that stand out are:

• A man is scammed by a woman who makes him drunk, marries him, and then demands a "virgin's tax."
• Children in the city see you leap off of a tall building, and soon more children gather and follow to watch you jump off other high places.
• Trinkets from your home town are being sold in another city, but the trinkets and souvenirs are clearly fakes.
• Evil smells are issuing from tombs, and the culprit turns out to be the embalmers' suppliers who are diluting their natron with sand.
• The sacred bull of the temple is sick, which is seen as a bad omen; but the truth is that a blackmailed servant is poisoning it.
• Elite bounty hunters called phylakitai are hunting you down.

Many of these side quests had several layers to them, and it was a lot of fun to think how I could use some of their twists and hooks in my own games. And it wasn't just the side quests either. The main quest line has a unique way of organizing your targets, in that you begin by hunting down 5 bosses, then 4, then 2, then the final boss. It's a fun way of spacing out the difficulty of the targets, making it clear to the player what their objective is, adding variety to tracking down each one, and unfolding a layer of storyline with each assassination.

Boss Battles

The only boss battles that occurred in previous games (that I can remember) are the final encounters with the end villain who had gotten hold of a Piece of Eden, and possibly the elite ship battles on AC: Black Flag. But Origins introduces some honest-to-goodness boss battles in the form of giant avatars of the Egyptian gods Anubis, Sekhmet, and Sobek, as well as a couple of other battles with the chaos serpent Apep and four war elephant battles. Apep's battle is more of a test of your bow-aiming abilities and not really translatable to D&D, and the war elephant battles are mostly just really hard enemy fights, so I'll focus on the battles with the god avatars.

These battles are epic and yet beautiful in their simplicity. Each fight begins with a gargantuan animal-headed god rising out of the ground. The fight begins and cycles through a few simple stages before the god is destroyed. If you run, your progress on the fight resets. Otherwise, you win a legendary item. If you beat all three bosses, you get a legendary outfit as a trophy.

D&D 5e did not have very memorable boss fights until they introduced the concept of Mythic creatures, which regain health and fight with new powers after they are defeated the first time. The key to the fun of these boss battles in AC Origins, as well as boss battles in D&D, is these different back-to-back stages. Here is a sample of the stages of the god Anubis in Origins. Each new stage begins when his health is reduced by about one-fifth:

1. Anubis stands in the middle of a damaging aura of necrotic smoke, unreachable with melee attacks. Instead, you can only damage him by shooting at the glowing sphere of energy on his chest. In this stage, the god periodically sends flaming hyenas charging at you, which disappear if they take any damage, but damage you if they run into you. He alternates between sending these hyenas and creating an area of blinding sand that you have only a couple of seconds to avoid before it hits.
2. The glowing sphere on Anubis's chest disappears and he is invulnerable for a time. During this stage, he creates five zombie anubite minions to attack you, and he is not attackable until these zombies are destroyed. To make these fights more difficult, he creates walls of fire and bones to surround you and stop you from fleeing. The bone walls can be broken with attacks.
3. Anubis returns to Stage 1, but with a higher frequency of the attacks, making it harder to dodge the hyenas and sand explosions.
4. He returns to Stage 2, but he also sends out the flaming hyenas to harass you as you're trying to defeat the minions. Sort of a combination of Stage 1 and 2.
5. Stage 1 begins one final time, with the frequency and damage increased, and he also summons a pack of hyena minions to fight you. When his health is depleted, any remaining hyenas disappear and he dies in a dramatic flash of light.

I love the design in these battles and I'm anxious to try my hand at implementing stages to boss fights in my own games. I like the idea of having two battle types within the boss battle, cycling between them, but with each return to a cycle coming with a more difficult twist. Then at the end you can combine the two stages together for a truly epic finale. Stages is what makes Zelda boss battles so fun, after all. An easy way to do this with an existing monster in D&D would be stages like this:

1. Confidence. The monster fights normally, without Legendary or Lair Actions. It doesn't fear the player characters at this point and feels mostly like it's toying with them.
2. Annoyance. The monster hides, puts up a shield, withdraws, flees into a deeper chamber, or becomes otherwise inaccessible, and sends a wave of its minions to fight the player characters. It's annoyed at this point, and wants the player characters gone. If it loses a few of its smaller minions, oh well. That's what they're for anyway.
3. Anger. The monster is angry now. All its minions have been destroyed! It gains legendary actions as it fights the players again.
4. Fear. The monster is starting to realize what it's up against at this point, and starts pulling out stops. It withdraws and sends maybe a pair of higher-level minions, its elite guards, at the player characters, and Lair Actions begin.
5. Madness. With all its minions destroyed and its lair at risk of being looted by these adventurers, the monster goes crazy. It attacks the players with increased fury, maybe gaining the Reckless ability as it attacks with Legendary (and maybe even Mythic) Actions and Lair Actions till its death.

The trick in D&D would be to make a fight feel deadlier and depleting their resources over time without making it impossible or exhausting. I think I would probably give bosses' hit point pools (I say pools plural, because let's be honest: for truly epic battles, players would have to kill a creature multiple times, and against single creatures at high levels, this isn't even a problem, especially if it isn't always using its Legendary Actions) a range instead of a specific value, so that I could gauge how determined my players were before I went on to the next stage. As far as XP rewarding would go, each stage would count as its own encounter without a rest in between, so it'd be easy to make it fun, rewarding, and epic.

Weapon Fighting Styles

There has been some talk about this online already, but the weapons in D&D 5e are boring. Bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage may as well be called "physical damage" for how often they are shamelessly grouped together, and the differences between the weapons that you can wield often come down to these damage types, damage dice, a handful of property options such as Reach and Heavy and Finesse, and gold price!

The weapons that Bayek in Assassin's Creed Origins can wield, from khopeshes and scepters to spears and heavy axes, each have their own unique tactics and combos, which is something I would really like to add to D&D. Here's a sample of their differences:

• Swords. Balanced normal weapon.
• Twin swords. Fast, but with a short reach and inability to wield a shield.
• Sickle swords. Like swords, but they have a chance to spin enemies around and expose their defense.
• Heavy blunts. Slow, but with a long reach and devastating damage when they hit. 
• Heavy blades. Slower than swords, but balanced for reach weapons.
• Spears. Very long range and combos damage multiple enemies around you, but lower damage.
• Scepters. Medium range and good speed.

The weapons in the PHB compared with these are pathetic. You may as well just say you're wielding "a weapon" and just choose a damage type. I would really like to see some bonus properties to the weapons in D&D that would make one a better choice for a specific build, specific situations, or specific enemies. First off, here are some ideas for damage type changes that will make them at least somewhat important of a choice when choosing a weapon:

• Bludgeoning Slam. When you score a critical hit with a bludgeoning weapon against a creature, that creature must succeed on a DC 15 Strength saving throw or fall prone and be pushed 5 feet horizontally to an unoccupied space of your choice. If this damage is done with a ranged attack, the target is instead pushed 5 feet directly away from you.
• Piercing Wound. When you score a critical hit with a piercing weapon against a creature, if the creature has blood, it must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or gain a bleeding wound. It takes piercing damage equal to one roll of the weapon's damage die at the start of each of its turns until a creature uses its action to staunch the wound with a DC 12 Wisdom (Medicine) check, or until it receives magical healing. Wounds dealt in this way can stack.
• Slashing Cleave. When you score a critical hit with a slashing weapon against a creature, up to two creatures of your choice within the range of the weapon must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw or take damage equal to one roll of the weapon's damage die. If this damage is done with a ranged attack, this extra damage is instead dealt to creatures within a line extending from you through the target.

With those changes in place, here are some ideas I have for changing the existing weapons in the PHB. Note that I've changed the simple/martial status of a couple of them:

Simple Weapons

• (NEW) Brass knuckles. Changes unarmed strike damage to d6.
• Blackjack. Club with the Finesse property.
• Dagger. Advantage against grappled targets.
• (NEW) Garrote. Two handed weapon, no damage. If the target remains grappled by a garrote for a number of rounds equal to its Constitution modifier, it drops to 0 hit points but is stable.
• Quarterstaff. You have advantage on Shove attacks if you are holding the staff with both hands.
• (SIMPLE) Shortsword. Piercing OR slashing damage.
• Sickle. On a hit, you can attempt to Shove as a bonus action if the creature is your size or smaller.
• Spear. Has the Reach property.
• Dart. Can be poisoned as a bonus action instead of an action.
• Sling. Assuming you are on land and rocks are present, you can reload a sling with a nearby stone as a bonus action.
• Blowgun. When you make an attack with a blowgun while hidden, you remain hidden.

Martial Weapons

• (NEW) Bola. Thrown (range 20/60). A Large or smaller creature hit by a bola is grappled until it is freed, and it must immediately make a DC 10 Strength saving throw or fall prone.
• (NEW) Billhook. Halberd base. On a hit, you can Shove that target as a bonus action.
• (NEW) Chakram. Thrown (range 30/120), 1d6 slashing. On a miss with a thrown attack, make a second attack with disadvantage to see if it bounces and hits a different creature within the weapon's normal range.
• (NEW) Estoc. Rapier with slashing damage.
• Flail. On a hit, you can attempt to Shove as a bonus action if the creature is your size or smaller.
• Glaive / Halberd. Piercing OR slashing damage.
• Lance. Two-handed weapon that is one-handed when mounted. Advantage on the attack if you move at least 20 feet toward the target.
• Maul. You have advantage on Shove attacks.
• Morningstar. Bludgeoning OR piercing damage.
• Pike. On a hit, you can attempt a Grapple as a bonus action if the target is your size or smaller.
• (NEW) Repeating crossbow. Light crossbow without the Loading property.
• Trident. When you throw this and hit a creature, the hit becomes a critical hit.
• Whip. Slashing OR thunder damage. Has the Light property. On a hit, you can grapple the target instead of dealing damage. As a bonus action, you can pull them 5 feet toward you or make them drop one item they're holding.
• Hand crossbow. Can load as a bonus action.

Also, I think there should be a Buckler, which acts as a shield that adds 1 to your AC, but you can use it while holding two-handed weapons (and versatile weapons wielded with two hands).