5 Floors Down: a tactical, dungeon crawling TTRPG

[Meta]

Hi everyone, hope you're all well.

I am designing a TTRPG that I hope scratches the itch that other games haven't. This is my very simplistic website: https://5floorsdown.com/.
You can download the 2 PDFs you need to play. It still needs a lot of tweaking; this is its first day out of friends and family alpha testing.

A couple of quick design choices I've made:

Classless - Every character chooses a starting point on a huge skill web. It's still a little smaller than Final Fantasy X's sphere grid, though.
Movement matters - I've always felt that one square was usually as good as another in DnD. I've tried to add more terrain, and more abilities that use it.
No hits/misses - Attacker gets a lot of colored dice, defender rolls less. Even if you're unlucky, you will usually not completely whiff. Usually.
Combat heavy - Not a lot of space is devoted to resolving non combat encounters. The bulk of the game will descending in to a nigh infinite dungeon. Or pouring over the skill web trying to maximize your pathing if you're anything like me.

I'd love to hear any feedback you have, here or on the discord server that is linked on the website and that I'm using to keep myself organized. I can also answer any questions you might have, especially if you think it will help you decide if its worth the time to give my manual a read or not.

Thank you for any time you spend on 5 Floors Down, and I hope you find some enjoyment in it.

[JNAProductions]

Path of Mastery NEEDS better formatting. As-is, it's a confusing spiderweb of abilities, with no clean way of navigating it.

I can't even tell where it starts!

Will look over the system itself momentarily, but that's REALLY discouraging to picking it up.

[Meta]

Path of Mastery NEEDS better formatting. As-is, it's a confusing spiderweb of abilities, with no clean way of navigating it.

I can't even tell where it starts!

Will look over the system itself momentarily, but that's REALLY discouraging to picking it up.

Ahh I should add a legend on the same page as the path itself. The starting points are the 8 golden nodes. There's a small ring that they form to create a sort of beginner's area. Players start at level 5, so that should keep the amount of data to soak in fairly small at first.

EDIT: Website has been updated with a new version of the path that includes a legend at the top left.

[Just to Browse]

Feedback on the skill tree: I'm noticing a large number of build paths that involve just pumping stats really hard. Have you checked if players like this setup? It looks like there's a high chance that the optimal builds will involve some significant amount of stat-pumping, whereas the fun builds will involve buying several cool abilities. I assume the placement of inner circle abilities is meant to mitigate that. How well has it turned out in playtesting?

I am very wary of this sprawling, asymmetrical sphere grid. Games like FFX can afford to do this because they have a UI built for it. I can easily see my players getting put off immediately just looking at this. It may be better with some dedicated time spent formatting it, but I'm not sure it's a good solution for tabletop RPG advancement in the first place.

Presentation / readability: I strongly recommend converting this to HTML content, or at least optimizing the PDF. It is set up in a strange way where the text isn't treated as text. I can't highlight it or ctrl-f, and each page loads agonizingly slowly. I also think your skill tree should be downloadable as a large image... my poor computer sounds like it's trying to take off into space when it loads all those shapes and text boxes on a single page, and half the time I zoom in it has to reload every object again which takes forever.

The low spacing and lack of formatting make this quite hard to read. Important game statistics, game anecdotes, and your average rules text all use the exact same font and formatting as any other piece of text. The font eats a lot of whitespace -- that combined with the 2-column format and the liberal use of sidebars makes a lot of pages too dense to comfortably read. The abilities are information-dense boxes with minimal text and liberal use of references, but get bogged down with italicized flavor text which varies between truisms, catchy one-liners, or actual world flavor. Alltogether the document is just way too hard to follow, and it's my biggest barrier to understanding what is going on.

You also have the occasional section (like p46-51) where the formatting goes completely whacky, and a single column seems to get placed randomly across the page. You could avoid a lot of this if you just put your text on your website.

Missing Content: There doesn't appear to be a single piece of terrain for this game. Based on your post and the wording in the game, terrain is meant to be a huge part of gameplay. But aside from a few pages of simple writeups, there doesn't seem to be any guideline for how to actually design dungeon floorplans or integrate terrain with specific monsters. Monsters don't even come with their own premade terrain boards or any proper guidance on how to use terrain to tailor an encounter.

Game Scope: This game seems like it should just be focused on fighting enemies in a roguelike dungeon forever, but you frequently drop the idea that the DM can make this game significantly larger. There's a bit about players going outside the labyrinth and participating in government, there's a bit about making a giant story arc (that somehow intersects with constant dungeoncrawling?), there's a bit about making loot extra special somehow. But it's all extremely vague. I have no idea how I could DM a game about governmental politics, given that every 5FD mechanic (except some simple skills) is hyperfocused on combat.

It gets frustrating. There are so many references to activities you could do with your players, but no tools with which to actually do those activities. Why include those as story suggestions if the game doesn't have any meaningful way to let DMs execute on them?

Design choices: The roguelike premise, complicated skill tree, combat focus, and randomized looting makes me think this is closer to a video game than a TTRPG. The runthrough also gives me the vibe of something that can be run with pregenerated dungeons, instead of asking DMs to come up with unique dungeons for their players. This is especially true given how much content in the game is currently dedicated to prewritten enemies... Is a premade adventure module at least planned? I'm not sure how much feedback you can realistically integrate with the game, because I don't have actual adventure content to test with (and as noted above, the guidance for how to generate that adventure content is tough to use).

In addition, a ton of this looks like it is set in stone already. For example: as far as I can tell, Lore is useless during the prep work stage because all the actual tactical information comes from Survival, and preparation in general doesn't seem useful for an experienced player. The current one-dimensional system of prep work alongside the heavy emphasis on looting & tactical combat make me think this game is perfect for a pre-combat minigame. So I want to suggest a method of letting players prepare for enemies before they fight them. But I'm not sure I can recommend a separate subsystem for prep work, thanks to a handful of factors:

• Other mechanics in this game are already heavily taxing players' cognitive load
• It looks like a common assumption is that players will run through many combats in a session
• You have already written an enormous bestiary, and you would need to cram an entire subsystem into hundreds of pages of monster entries.

I honestly don't think there is room in this game for a prep work minigame. Similarly, I don't think I can give you any systems-level feedback on your game because you already have a full bestiary built on top of it. As a reference point, D&D 5e wasn't at your level of written content until their 5th round of public feedback, at which point they had four fleshed-out adventures so players could easily playtest the game.

[Meta]

Feedback on the skill tree: I'm noticing a large number of build paths that involve just pumping stats really hard. Have you checked if players like this setup? It looks like there's a high chance that the optimal builds will involve some significant amount of stat-pumping, whereas the fun builds will involve buying several cool abilities. I assume the placement of inner circle abilities is meant to mitigate that. How well has it turned out in playtesting?

I am very wary of this sprawling, asymmetrical sphere grid. Games like FFX can afford to do this because they have a UI built for it. I can easily see my players getting put off immediately just looking at this. It may be better with some dedicated time spent formatting it, but I'm not sure it's a good solution for tabletop RPG advancement in the first place.

Presentation / readability: I strongly recommend converting this to HTML content, or at least optimizing the PDF. It is set up in a strange way where the text isn't treated as text. I can't highlight it or ctrl-f, and each page loads agonizingly slowly. I also think your skill tree should be downloadable as a large image... my poor computer sounds like it's trying to take off into space when it loads all those shapes and text boxes on a single page, and half the time I zoom in it has to reload every object again which takes forever.

The low spacing and lack of formatting make this quite hard to read. Important game statistics, game anecdotes, and your average rules text all use the exact same font and formatting as any other piece of text. The font eats a lot of whitespace -- that combined with the 2-column format and the liberal use of sidebars makes a lot of pages too dense to comfortably read. The abilities are information-dense boxes with minimal text and liberal use of references, but get bogged down with italicized flavor text which varies between truisms, catchy one-liners, or actual world flavor. Alltogether the document is just way too hard to follow, and it's my biggest barrier to understanding what is going on.

You also have the occasional section (like p46-51) where the formatting goes completely whacky, and a single column seems to get placed randomly across the page. You could avoid a lot of this if you just put your text on your website.

Missing Content: There doesn't appear to be a single piece of terrain for this game. Based on your post and the wording in the game, terrain is meant to be a huge part of gameplay. But aside from a few pages of simple writeups, there doesn't seem to be any guideline for how to actually design dungeon floorplans or integrate terrain with specific monsters. Monsters don't even come with their own premade terrain boards or any proper guidance on how to use terrain to tailor an encounter.

Game Scope: This game seems like it should just be focused on fighting enemies in a roguelike dungeon forever, but you frequently drop the idea that the DM can make this game significantly larger. There's a bit about players going outside the labyrinth and participating in government, there's a bit about making a giant story arc (that somehow intersects with constant dungeoncrawling?), there's a bit about making loot extra special somehow. But it's all extremely vague. I have no idea how I could DM a game about governmental politics, given that every 5FD mechanic (except some simple skills) is hyperfocused on combat.

It gets frustrating. There are so many references to activities you could do with your players, but no tools with which to actually do those activities. Why include those as story suggestions if the game doesn't have any meaningful way to let DMs execute on them?

Design choices: The roguelike premise, complicated skill tree, combat focus, and randomized looting makes me think this is closer to a video game than a TTRPG. The runthrough also gives me the vibe of something that can be run with pregenerated dungeons, instead of asking DMs to come up with unique dungeons for their players. This is especially true given how much content in the game is currently dedicated to prewritten enemies... Is a premade adventure module at least planned? I'm not sure how much feedback you can realistically integrate with the game, because I don't have actual adventure content to test with (and as noted above, the guidance for how to generate that adventure content is tough to use).

In addition, a ton of this looks like it is set in stone already. For example: as far as I can tell, Lore is useless during the prep work stage because all the actual tactical information comes from Survival, and preparation in general doesn't seem useful for an experienced player. The current one-dimensional system of prep work alongside the heavy emphasis on looting & tactical combat make me think this game is perfect for a pre-combat minigame. So I want to suggest a method of letting players prepare for enemies before they fight them. But I'm not sure I can recommend a separate subsystem for prep work, thanks to a handful of factors:

• Other mechanics in this game are already heavily taxing players' cognitive load
• It looks like a common assumption is that players will run through many combats in a session
• You have already written an enormous bestiary, and you would need to cram an entire subsystem into hundreds of pages of monster entries.

I honestly don't think there is room in this game for a prep work minigame. Similarly, I don't think I can give you any systems-level feedback on your game because you already have a full bestiary built on top of it. As a reference point, D&D 5e wasn't at your level of written content until their 5th round of public feedback, at which point they had four fleshed-out adventures so players could easily playtest the game.

Thank you for all the feedback, I will try and answer questions in the order they were asked:

I haven't been able to playtest large amounts of builds, and I hope to hear about and see more in action if people are interested in trying the game. I can say the builds I recall my friends being most interested in were maximizing damage for fireball, very tanky archon, and maximizing zombies with master of puppets.

I'd love to eventually have an online character builder and tracker to help with the skill tree, but for creating characters, it is designed in a way to minimize the mental taxation to start. There are 7 species, 8 starting points. That's the most choice to begin the game. Once you have a starting point on the path, you'll have 4 node choices. Each choice you make for the first 5 levels (starting level) only unlocks one more on the tree. You can't quite get to the center or outer areas until level 6 at the earliest. I agree that it does look daunting though.

I can try to upload the skill tree as a PNG to see if that helps. I'm not entirely sure what to do about the text, but I would guess its because I used Scribus (a free sort of Publisher) and the text is all in boxes on my end. I thought about cutting flavor text altogether, and had placeholders for a long time, but thought some players might enjoy it enough to be worth the line. Will cut if needed. What would be the biggest aid to helping you read it more easily? It's probably cold comfort to you, but I think I mentioned on the discord that hiring an editor is step 1 if the game garners a following.

The information on terrain is on pages 120-123. It covers a couple different kinds of terrain, damaging or not, simple or not, which is then touched on again at the start of page 128 - running the game. There's brief talk about how to design your own as well. Simple damaging terrain being good to go with just 1-2 damage types and 1-5 damage. As for increasing the scope, I talk about it a bit more in the running the game section and that's where I have some examples for how skills can be used to resolve out of combat issues. I could move it up to where the Skill section is, though it is a DM facing thing, I could add more in running the game, or I could drop it altogether.

I'm not very good at making maps but I could try and add visuals to the example scenario 1 listed at the back of the book. I tried to describe things while still letting DMs make some choices, but I could try a map.

Lore/Survival - I did try and walk a bit of a fine with Lore giving more narrative information and Survival more tactical. I could see that being somewhat skewed in usefulness. I suppose I'm imagining some groups that will look for non combat solutions from time to time, and Lore could be pretty helpful there.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read through, the feedback is very much appreciated, and I plan on uploading a .png as soon as I finish this post.

EDIT: Going through and adding some black borders to the sidebars to hopefully help a bit.
EDIT 2: Grey borders added to help readability. Added version number to the manual as well.

[Meta]

Addressed all the comments so far, mostly through trying to reword for clarity. Biggest update is the manual now being searchable. Hope that helps people navigate significantly.

Edit: First scenario map for the tutorial session is complete! Very pleased with how it turned out.

[Meta]

It has taken a bit longer than I hoped, but I've made a good number of changes to the manual and uploaded a v.2. The big reason I think this deserves an update, or bump in this case, is that the tutorial scenario is now complete and I've added 7 pre-generated characters. Now you can try the game out without any prep work other than learning the rules, and players who were daunted by the skill tree have a place to start.