Personality and Influence

Sylvan Shards includes a system for modeling character personalities, motivations, and influence. Why add new system elements to Dungeons and Dragons, which is already fairly complex? Adding new traits and mechanics should have a high bar, as it makes it more difficult to learn the game and the setting.

In this case, the goal is to make non-combat interactions as cooperative, engaging, and suspenseful as combat. In the base rules from the Player's Handbook, characters may attempt to persuade or intimidate someone into doing something they want. The result is success or failure. Other players may help them, but it still comes down to a single result. If your group prefers to focus on combat tactics, then the simplicity of this is an advantage as it doesn't slow down gameplay.

However, if your group is interested in thinking about strategy and tactics outside of combat, these system additions gives them an opportunity to explore other options at a richer level of detail. In designing encounters, the social interactions can become as rich, stressful, and time-consuming as combat. Experience rewards and encounters should be designed accordingly.

Further, the new system elements introduce more details about moral choices and character's worldview. During play the characters may reinforce or challenge these notions, and it can open up discussions and richer storytelling opportunities between players or with NPCs.

For some groups these systems would be a horrible play experience; for others it would allow them to explore new ways of overcoming obstacles. You don't need to include these to play the Sylvan Shards campaigns.

Alignment
Alignment is understood in a different light in this setting. The standard setting make important use of concepts such as good and evil. Certain races and creatures are aligned with these concepts. This makes it easier to make ethical decisions in combat--if a creature is evil, it can be killed. In fact, letting it live is wrong, because it will certainly kill someone else when given a chance.

To allow a more nuanced approach to this question, Sylvan Shards reframes the standard alignments and adds another: heroic vs villainous.

Moral Code
The Player's Handbook has already added backgrounds as a way to add personality to characters. This new system feature goes further to define what motivates a character.

Will Points
Will points are similar to hit points, but they represent mental energy. When will points are high the character is emotionally resilient, confident, and decisive; when low the character is psychologically fragile and easily manipulated by others. Characters can gain will points through inspiration and rest. They lose them through traumatizing experiences and magical corruption.

Influence Attacks
Characters can attempt to change another creature's behavior through an influence attack. Many characters can work together to influence a creature. These attacks create influence pools which are measured against the target's current will points. Once an influence pool exceeds the target's current will points the behavior change is successful.

Modifications to Existing Systems
There are changes to some spells and some additional class abilities as part of these system changes.

Example of Influence Combat
In this example, a group of three characters work to find out if there the gnome they are pursuing passed through the city gates. The guards aren't inclined to tell them what they want to know and try to get them to move on out of the gate area.