As a personal organizational tool and to enhance clarity for the reader, here are some general thoughts on design philosophy.

1.1 Complexity

In my experience D&D tends to play best at early levels. Once characters advance past level eight, the volume of features, equipment, magic items, and conditional bonuses becomes difficult for most players (myself included) to manage. Turn length increases, key abilities get forgotten, and decision fatigue sets in. As a GM, I’ve even designed encounters around specific class features only to discover that the player simply lost track of them.

Delver’s Deep aims for a different balance. Even at maximum level, a character should fit cleanly on a single letter-sized sheet, with stats, traits, and equipment presented in a way that is immediately readable at the table.

Balancing complexity is a challenge for any design project. The design goal high is relatively high game complexity but low character complexity. The system should provide a wide pool of options and build paths, but each individual character should only need to manage a small, curated set of mechanics. I believe this will preserve tactical depth and replayability while keeping gameplay fast and interpretable.

1.2 Choices and Tradeoffs

Meaningful choices require meaningful tradeoffs. When features or items offer strong benefits with little or no downside, characters tend to drift toward broad competence: good at everything, exceptional at a few things, and lacking any real weaknesses. This pattern often intensifies with expansions or late-stage content, where new options are introduced with enough raw power that it becomes disadvantageous not to use them.

Power creep is a long-standing challenge in TTRPG design and I doubt I will be the one to solve it, however, the goal here is to ensure that every character has a defined weakness or exists as a deliberate jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I find that deliberate character weaknesses promote teamwork, situational awareness, and tactical decision-making in play. By contrast, characters with no vulnerabilities face little risk, and the game can easily become a sandbox to break things in (I have been guilty of this behavior as well).

The principle is simple. Every major choice should come with a tradeoff and no option should be universally optimal across situations.

1.3 Risk

I think that one concept that is significantly missing from modern D&D is the aspect of real risk. In some sense the first couple levels are the most engaging part of the game because every combat encounter carries with it the threat of real, permanent character death. In my experience on both sides of the table, the most engaging and exciting sessions I’ve been a part of occur when the chips are down, everything is on the line, and the risk is real.

Despite my criticisms, I love D&D and have spent thousands of hours with it. But its story-forward structure makes frequent character death difficult to support. A “meat grinder” campaign often isn’t fun, yet removing risk altogether diminishes tension. Death becomes a temporary setback at best, and true threats often require narrative intervention to remain dangerous.

Delver’s Deep embraces risk as a core part of the experience. Every combat encounter should carry the possibility of character loss. To facilitate this I envision two playstyles:

Roster Mode (Randomized). Roster Mode treats the party as a living roster rather than a fixed group of heroes. All characters are randomly generated, and the players select from whatever individuals the world produces. Characters become tools in a broader campaign where survival is the real progression system and the game is more tolerant of character death.

Heroic Mode (Player-Chosen). In Heroic Mode, character creation shifts back toward traditional tabletop RPG expectations. Players choose and build their specific characters, selecting ancestry, background, and class with intention rather than randomness. In this playstyle I would encourage a bit more care with respect to combat design to reduce the chance of character death.

1.4 Magic

I’ve never been fully satisfied with Vancian magic. While it has deep historical roots in tabletop design, I find it often turns spellcasting into a kind of spreadsheet simulator. Players are expected to memorize long lists of spells, track rigid spell slots across multiple spell levels, and pre-plan resources with an almost clerical level of detail. Instead of feeling flexible and powerful, magic becomes bookkeeping.

For Delvers Deep, I want magic to feel both more flexible and more impactful, even if that means simplifying it. I’d like to shift focus from spell-list micromanagement to meaningful decisions: when to cast, where to cast, and how magic reshapes the battlefield or narrative moment. The tradeoff is that the average caster will have access to a lot less spells then they might get in a traditional tabletop experience.

Overall, the goal is a system that preserves the drama and potency of fantasy magic without drowning players in accounting.

1.5 Running the Game

Another criticism of D&D is that there is fairly limited support for DM’s to run the game. Even some of the prewritten modules are little more than a framework with some general plot points that require significant effort from the DM to rewrite into a usable product. It takes several years of experience and a very deep knowledge of the game to develop the skills required to create challenging, but too challenging, combat encounters that can fit within the narrative framework that drives the game in D&D. Embracing random generation as the method for designing bounties and extended delves will take some of the effort out of running the game for the gamemaster.

Anyone who has uncovered a deck of many things by accident at low levels could tell you that totally random tables do not make for a contiguous game experience. While that zaniness is often fun, it usually peters out within a session or two. As a design philosophy, I think it will be best practice to include a system of weighted tables and guidelines that will help the game master create content quickly, while maintaining a sense of world design and reasonable combat design. A tall order, but nothing can be done without trying.

1.6 Inspiration

I’ll openly admit that I am heavily inspired by games that I love. In general a typical campaign setting in Delver’s Deep will share a similar feel to a typical D&D magical-medieval world, although I tend to lean towards dark realism. I highly admire the extremely tactical and low-fantasy combat gameplay of Battle Brothers, and I want to implement a fatigue system inspired by that game. Also, I love Darkest Dungeon’s stress and madness system, as well as Giffyglyphs work to adapt some of those concepts to D&D.

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1.7 Summary

In summary my goals for this project are:

• Balance overall game complexity with the goal of simplicity
• Ensure that most choices come with a tradeoff
• Balance character design such that no one character can be too strong at everything. Most character should have a core strength and a core weakness
• Implement a flexible but simple magic system.
• Provide a system of generating content that maintains a sense of continuity while reducing overall burden of prep work. Also include realistic advice for gamemasters

Next up… Premise and Structure

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