D&D, The Classic Car of Role-playing Games

I was having a chat with Friend Ian and Friend Zak about Dungeons & Dragons today. Mostly, we were looking at how to make a better D&D, which seems like a pretty difficult thing to do. See, they made a pretty great D&D when they put together Third Edition. While it wasn’t elegant and seemed to lack focus, the game was well loved for its incredible flexibility, it’s adherence to the game’s roots, the much streamlined system (when compared to Second Edition), and a community-first approach (the OGL in specific) that really made the game shine.

One of the things I’ve been talking about a lot lately is tech constriction. Basically, it works like this: when White Wolf created Vampire: The Masquerade, they had a really cool goal – “Make a story-based horror role-playing game” – but they didn’t have the technology they needed to make that goal a reality. You see this a lot in early attempts at narrative-heavy role-playing games, with my favourite example being Skyrealms of Jorune. They did the best they could with what they had, and what they managed to squeeze from the systems of the time was pretty spectacular. It didn’t really lend itself to story-telling horror, but it did provide a cool avenue for Awesomer than Thou “superheroes with fangs” role-playing, and a lot of people really dug on that.

When a bunch of years passed, and it was time to look at relaunching the game, the technology available to the designers was significantly advanced to be able to handle more narrative games. But, rather than build a game that leveraged that new tech, they built a game that was a lot like the first version with some streamlining and some clever twists.

No one liked it.

Now, I personally prefer the New World of Darkness to the Old World of Darkness. But I don’t look at a game with the same eyes that most folk do. I look at games with the eyes of a designer and a retailer, and I can really appreciate the direction they were attempting to drive their line. But it didn’t work for most of the fans of the original game because it was “too different.” Imagine the shitstorm that would have come if they’d actually scrapped their whole system and designed one that was actually well-built for telling stories of personal horror.

This is tech constriction. When you publish a popular role-playing game, there is an expectation that future editions of the game are going to be very similar to that game. And that’s fine, it’s an understandable expectation to have, but it really ties designers hands when building a new edition of a game. If you don’t innovate, the game becomes stagnant and no one appreciates the new edition. If you innovate too much, it doesn’t “feel” like the previous editions of the game, and people get upset at having their expectations dashed.

Fourth Edition D&D suffered from innovating too much. The game took a new and unexpected direction, moving from comfortable simulation-heavy role-playing into a much more game-centric focus, and that move was jarring to a lot of people. I thought it was a brilliant move myself, because Wizards of the Coast has already exemplified simulation-centric play with Third Edition, and indie games have filled the niche for narrative games to the brim. Still, it wasn’t enough like previous editions of the game, and people railed against that.

So what’s the answer? How do you build a better edition of Dungeons & Dragons? How do you build a version of D&D that holds true to everything D&D is about, how do you utilize new technology without alienating your core audience?

In Friend Ian’s opinion, the solution is to exemplify the old tech, to give players a reason to love the old busted tech. The comparison he made is that, right now, D&D is a clunky jalopy held together with tape and hope, but what it needs to be is the shiny, perfectly restored classic custom. The 1967 Cadillac Eldorado. The 1971 Barracuda. Shine the old rules up, make them really count, and focus on those things that make D&D what it is.

Levels

Most modern role-playing games aren’t using levels as an advancement system. The vast, overwhelming majority of games designed in the past ten years are designed with point-allocation systems, or a system by which use directly affects advancement. Some games, notably Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, use parallel advancement, by which I mean the character does not become statistically better, but instead grows in personality and that new personality changes how the player will play their character. (If you haven’t read Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, I suggest you go buy it immediately, because it’s incredible).
Levels are archaic and they tend to make about as much sense as Save vs. Magic Wand. Why does gaining X amount of experience make me universally better at everything I’m good at? Wouldn’t the skills I’m not using fall behind those I’m exercising constantly?

But that’s part of this exercise, right? Making all that is old new again. How do you make levels matter more? The team at D&D next have flattened the curve, making each level less statistically important while opening new choices and options for your character. We’re still not really sure what that looks like, exactly, but it’s probably a strong step in the right direction. I need a reason to want to be level 13 as opposed to level 12. So give me those reasons. Give me something at every level that makes me go “What? Really? Really?” Give my fighter a castle at level 10. Let my warlord field armies at level 6. If my mage can’t lift an island out of the sea and build a tower on it at level 12, there’s no reason to be a 12th level wizard.

Now, these are obviously just spitballing, but seriously, if you have to do levels, and each level is supposed to be an achievement, you need to make every level a really big deal, and make them something I want to work towards. And that doesn’t just mean cool new attack powers. You need to build systems that are going to make those levels sweet. Like I said, let the warlord field an army, because at level 6 that’s something you seriously need to consider occasionally. Don’t get me wrong, that should definitely cost something. You shouldn’t be able to field an army just because these 13 orcs are kind of fucking with your day without it costing you a small fortune. But we’ll get to wealth in a minute.

Hit Points

Hit Points, even as the abstraction they’re made out to be, are sort of dumb. Like many of the weirdest mechanics in role-playing, hit points are a holdover from their wargaming roots, and in a larger-scale combat scenario, they make a fine abstraction of a unit’s ability to take damage and continue to function. A few people die, but it’s not enough to hinder performance. A whole bunch of people die, and the unit dissolves into a scattered rag-tag barely capable of hindering a healthy military force. Even in this case, I think it’s something of a stretch, but if you’re talking large-scale, unless a general dies, your armies should keep ticking away without too much difficulty if they take some casualties.

As a measure of an individual’s health, hit points are utterly ridiculous. Let me illustrate with an example. When you’re slicing something that you’re about to cook, and you cut yourself, what’s the first thing you do? If you’re not acting like a huge tough-person, your reaction is very likely “stop everything you’re doing, cover the wound, swear a lot.” This is a normal reflex, and everyone does it (unless they’ve been trained not to, and even then, if you’re not in a scenario where the training fits, you’re still probably going to jump, cover and grumble). This is a shock reflex. In small amounts, shock will keep you alive. In a rough situation, it can kill you.

Another illustration! I was watching a great video of a Krav Maga instructor talking about self-defence. I don’t remember much of the video, but there was one thing that really stuck out for me. “No matter how well trained you are, no matter how many martial arts you learn, a fifteen year old with a knife can kill you.” This is a paraphrase, of course, and I have no idea who the original instructor was, but it’s a really interesting point when talking about how much damage a human body can take before it dies.

A lot. And not much at all.

You’d be surprised what you can live through, and you’d be equally surprised what can kill you. People have survived falling a thousand feet without a parachute. People have survived being shot a dozen times. People have survived horrifying animal attacks and stabbings and hangings and getting hit by lightning three times. And a fifteen year old with a knife can kill you.

So how do you make hit points cool? How do you make hit points jump out at me and scream that they need to be a part of a game’s design? Well, D&D Fourth Edition did some things very right with hit points, but didn’t quite hit the mark. First of all, Fourth Edition gave you a lot of hit points compared to other games, because you’re supposed to be a badass. Second, the minion rule was a brilliant stroke that told a very simple story: minions are unimportant; they are mooks that you don’t need to worry about, and shouldn’t feel bad killing; and by extension, the player characters are goddamned heroes because they take a beating and don’t die like normal people.

Hit points have been sold, typically, as an abstraction for health, and I think that’s the wrong track. They’re not an abstraction for health, they’re not an abstraction for ducking and dodging and defending yourself and getting worn down (because if that were the case, they would have an affect on your abilities as they depleted). They should be an abstraction of how badass you are. When you take a hit point of damage, you get a wicked Bruce Willis cut on your chin. A single stream of blood runs across your forehead. Your armour dents, your sword chips, you get that single line of red cut across your cheek that is a dire insult to your honour and must be addressed.

If you want to make hit points matter, it’s imperative to make them an important part of the game by utilizing them in both flavour and mechanics. Wizards came close to this with the idea of marking a “bloodied” value, a mechanical middle-point to your hit points. Where I think they failed in this endeavour is making the bloodied value really mean something. As it currently sits, being bloodied is something you complain about to your healer and your healer zaps you with some healing. Being damaged is, at current, universally bad. This leads to a proliferation of healers and the horrible “five minute work week” that Game Masters have to constantly struggle against.

I want fighters to be rewarded for getting damaged. I want to see paladins and warlords at the hottest when they’re cut up and bruised. I want to see player characters getting pushed to the line and then coming back in a big way. Incentivize getting hurt. Make me want to jump into the fray and get bashed around a little, because I’m at my strongest when I’ve been tossed around a little. Add another tier of damage (Broken, 1/4 total hit points) that unlocks the big moves, the big bonuses, and huge damage.

And reverse that for wizards and sorcerers and warlocks and the like. They don’t want to get hurt, they’re not jumping into frays, they need to be protected while they’re slinging their spells or those spells are going to be less effective at Bloodied and catastrophically weak at Broken. It’s not easy to concentrate when you’re bleeding out. We’ll talk more about that when we get to classes.

Gold and Wealth

Once upon a time, you got an experience point for every single gold piece you acquired. Seriously. It was a big deal to find a dragon’s hoard, because that meant you were probably going to hit your next level (not that levels really meant anything beyond an achievement unlocking; see above). Gold mattered to the mechanics of the game in a very real way, and that meant that adding up all of your gold pieces was actually sort of fun.
Most modern role-playing games have done away with recording every penny on your character sheet.

More popular in the current stretch of games is an abstracted “resources” or “wealth” stat that you can use to purchase items you want or need. A few games still keep track of individual credits (Shadowrun, for instance), but if your character sheet has a “resources” score on it, the game is probably new school.
Greed is huge in D&D. The First Edition cover is famously a pair of adventurers prying a gem from the eye of a statue they probably shouldn’t be fucking with. Adventurers are in the game for the gold and the experience. But more recent editions of D&D have turned wealth into a way to get that magic item you want than an ends unto itself.

I say, bring back the gold/experience track. Make people crave gold itself because it makes you rich and helps you out mechanically at the same time. Add your current gold pieces (not your silver, not your copper, not your electrum, but your GOLD pieces) to your experience. Keep a separate track for experience from gold and experience from adventuring, and add them up at the end of each session.

Perhaps more importantly, change the economy of magic items. In specific, take the gold piece cost off of them, because magic items should be damned near priceless. No more the +1 sword, because that shit be whack, yo. More on that when we discuss “equipment.” But, seriously, make it impossible to walk into Ye Olde Magick Shoppe to buy a +2 dagger of slaying. Make buying magic items difficult and incredibly expensive. Make buying potions difficult and incredibly expensive. Make it clear that a peasant could never, with a thousand years of toil and saving, afford a simple +1 ring of protection, because players will think twice about dropping their experience count to buy one, and we want that tension in the game.

Then make it matter in the flavour. I live in Canada, so I think I have a better understanding of this problem than some of my southern compatriots. We have yellow dollar coins in Canada. We call them loonies, because we’re funny that way. The picture to the right is a stack of loonies. That’s $17, which isn’t a ton of dough. Each coin is about an inch across. What you’re looking at is a literal handful of money. You could fit seventeen dollars more-or-less comfortably in a single hand. Now, for the sake of our discussion, let’s say you and your crew take down a juvenile red dragon. Looking at the D&D 3.5 stats, a juvenile red dragon is a CR 7 creature, and it usually has three times the treasure of a normal creature of the same level. A normal treasure at seventh level would be 1d12x100gp. I’m going to roll a d12 now. Came up ten. A normal encounter would have 1000gp sitting here, but this is a dragon, so it’s triple that at 3000 gold pieces.

That is 176 handfuls of coins. That’s actually more coins than I can imagine with any sort of accuracy. And you’re going to stuff that into some sacks and drag it home? Man, I’ve had a pocket full of loonies before, and it’s not comfortable. Trying to drag home my share of thousands would make me a grumpy dude.

Moreover, where the hell are you going to keep all of this money? You can’t just carry it around, because it’s thousands of fucking gold pieces. You have to keep it somewhere, and if a young dragon couldn’t guard it from four asshats like your party, how are you going to make sure that the money stays yours?

Alignment

I love the words “alignment system,” when applied to D&D, mostly because it doesn’t really exist. Early on, it seemed like a good way to figure out whose team everyone was on. Are you part of the chaos team or the order team? Good or evil? I have a spell to find out for sure.

Later, it became a flavour point. A good character acts in different ways than an evil character at least some of the time, and the guidelines set out in the books tell you what sorts of things people in each alignment do. But boiling complex ethical questions down to a nine point grid is always going to be problematic. Moral relativism is entirely ignored for absolutism, which in itself is problematic because the D&D morality system assumes that the absolutes can be found in North American cultural values.

Democracy and personal freedom are not “good” in a society that values adherence to a strict code of conduct and absolute loyalty to one’s liege lord. Indeed, encouraging democratic rebellion eschews the divine right to rule entirely and in such a society would be a heinously evil act of treason. But, because we largely live in mostly democratic nations, we assume that democracy is good and tyranny is evil.

Still, it’s a hallmark of the game, and one of its most clearly recognizable symbols. There have been internet memes built around it. People like it. With Fourth Edition D&D, it was made to matter even less than in Third, with spells no longer affecting specific alignments and alignment restrictions being removed from even the clearest example of them (a paladin can only be Lawful Good). Fourth Edition also stripped the system of Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil, assuming that Evil is the Lawful version and Good is of the Chaotic sort unless otherwise specified. Where once there were some minor systematic overlaps in alignment, there are almost none, now.

To make alignment important, to make it a focal point of the game’s system, will require something of an overhaul of the way we look at alignments in general. While I desperately hope we never see alignment restrictions ever again (I mean, a paladin is just a warrior for the cause of a god, yeah? There are evil gods. You don’t need a separate class for that.), I think that bringing back alignment-specific effects would be a solid step in the right direction. This should be especially true of the “holy” classes like clerics and paladins, who should deal damage typed to their alignment. Demons should be forced to occasionally take 10 points of “good damage,” while angels should eat “evil damage” for dinner once in a while. In fact, the more closely related you are to a specific alignment, the more damage you should take from its opposite. Make a whole bunch of creatures that are vulnerable to Good Damage. Keep radiant and necrotic damage, because both of those are awesome, but don’t use them in place of damage.

Alignment specific bonuses should be applied to gear, as well. Magic the Gathering has this shit locked down, because card colour is basically alignment. One of the cycles from the newest core set gives a creature a strength and toughness bonus for being the right alignment, and also provides an ability typical to that colour’s effects. That’s cool business, and could easily the be ported over to role-playing games.

For the record, Neutral shouldn’t get a damage type. It’s also the stupidest of the alignments, and one of the few areas in which I agree with Kevin Siembieda is that “selfish” is a much better description of that alignment set.

Vancian Magic

There are two things I hate about Vancian Magic. The first is the forgetting of spells at inconvenient times (like right after I’ve cast the damned thing). The second is the idea that the level of the spell is not the level of the person casting it. Both of those problems got fixed in Fourth Edition, and it’s one of the things people complain about the most readily. “My wizard is too effective. He should be way more horrible than this,” say the grognards.

A lot of people have talked at length about Vancian Magic and why it’s good and why it’s horrible. I’m not going to retrace over that conversation. Instead, I’m going to try and find a way to make Vancian Magic the best magic it can be.

First of all, going back to levels a bit, if I’m going to lose my abilities after I use them, those abilities are going to need to be really cool. And they’re going to need to be way cooler at every new level. Now, when I say that a spell needs to be cool, I’m not suggesting that it needs to do way more damage or whatever, it just needs to do something that is awesomely flavourful and also useful. Some damage-dealing spells are great, and you can’t build a Vancian magic system without staples like Magic Missile or Fireball. But I need a reason to cast spells that isn’t combat. Or if it is in combat, it shouldn’t be roughly as effective as the ranger’s arrows. A mage’s spells need to do something weird and cool. At first level, it’s not enough to just throw some force at a guy and have him get knocked back a square. I want to throw a mystical orb of glowing green power at him and have his face covered in three fighting squid for a turn. At tenth level, I should be able to turn a castle into a peach that I can carry around in my pocket for a day. At fifteenth level, I should be able to rearrange continents into shapes that please me, and damn the ecological considerations. At twentieth level, I should be able to carve my own face into the moon, where I will smile upon those who make me happy and scowl angrily at those who’ve wronged me. And my scowl should cause your genitals to turn into sea anemones that whistle annoying songs all the time.

Seriously, the whole concept of magic in D&D needs an overhaul. Magic shouldn’t be a tool, it should be fucking weird. It should do weird things more often than it does Magic Missile. If you have to have fireballs, have those fire balls carve the runes of my future into the bodies of my enemies, easily readable by wise bison and children, but not by me. If you have to do rope trick, have the portal cut a hole in the meat of the world where we will be warm and safe, but marked forever by our crime (thank you to 7th Sea for that one).

This is what magic is, it’s filled with strange flavour and weird concepts that can’t possibly be replicated by current technology.

And it’s really time that wizards, sorcerers, warlocks et al get different flavours of magic. When a wizard casts a spell, it’s refined, perfect, as pristine in form as it is in function. It’s focused, simple, elegant, but lacks power, flair, or pizazz. When a sorcerer casts a spell, it’s wild, weird, doesn’t really know what it wants to be until it’s finished, and might not go off properly at all. When a warlock or a cleric casts a spell, it’s not a spell of his or her choosing. No, the choice is left to his or her benefactor, which makes a warlock’s spellcasting effectively political.

Make magic cool and weird again. And build the powers of the people who use it with some thought to what sort of magic they wield.

Classes

I like the freedom of a point-buy system, and I love the flavour that comes pouring out of a lifepaths system like Burning Wheel. I absolutely adore the Aspects of FATE and the similar traits of Dogs in the Vineyard. I don’t really dig on classes all that much, because they restrict the focus of my character to whatever settings were determined best by the folk who wrote the class. They certainly have their uses, and they increase grokability in a big way, but what they gain in recognition from the players is lost in a lack of flexibility and real customization.

Classes in D&D need to be rethought from the ground up, I feel. Each class needs to find a unique way to interact with each facet of the game. Fighters need to fight, but they should also get better at fighting the more beat up they get and they should get better at their skills while they’re in combat and their equipment should be at its peak in the middle of a brawl. A wizard casts spells, which is neat, but they’re not well suited to combat and should do their best to stay away when the swords swing. They are, however, incredibly useful in a library and their skills get much more relevant when they have a rich pool of knowledge from which to draw. Their equipment works best in universities and labs and their feats give them all sorts of bonuses to knowing stuff. Thieves steal stuff, and sometimes that means getting your hands a little dirty, but the less you’re noticed the better. They get better at fighting when the chips are down, but they look their best when everything is going their way. Their skills work best in silence and darkness; they don’t perform well under bright lights, or when anyone has noticed them. They are incredibly useful in cities and do their best work in dark alleys. These are simple things to talk about, but making them matter in the course of play can be a lot more challenging. Situational bonuses should be built into characters to exemplify what it is they do, where they do it best, and how they get it done.

Make fighters better at what they do when they’ve had the crap kicked out of them.
Make wizards better at what they do when they have some time to think and a cup of tea,
Make thieves better at what they do when they’re on the rooftops and in the alleys.
Make clerics better at what they do when they’re facing down the enemies of their church.

Give people a situation in which they are better at doing the things they do, and encourage players to work to those strengths. Reward your players for doing things outside of combat that their characters are good at (except fighters, because fighters excel at combat, hence the name). Build role-playing hooks into your characters from the get-go. Build abilities that encourage non-combat situations and enhance exploration. Instead of looking for four basic ideas of what player characters do, look at what each class does, find a way for them to excel at that thing in different circumstances, and build the class around that. Let’s take a look at the fighter and the ranger, for instance.

The fighter fights. Fighters are at their best in combat. The fighter gets better at things the more damage he or she has taken. The fighter’s skills get better when in a fight. The fighter’s equipment thrives on combat and combat situations. Fighters look their best when they’ve been beaten up.

The ranger hunts. Rangers are at their best in the forest. The ranger gets better at things as he or she fells enemies. The ranger’s skills get better after a fight. The ranger’s equipment thrives in the wilderness. Rangers look their best when they’re travelling.

These are very different character builds for two martial style characters. Neither is magical, both of them “fight,” but these are two completely different sorts of characters who excel at very different things. The fighter doesn’t care if he or she’s in a forest or a cave; he’s going to fight and fight well. The ranger cares about where he or she is, but only cares about fights after the fact. Building classes this way provides a lot of avenues for archetypes that haven’t been explored a lot, and can help in finding the specific niches between similar characters (wizards and sorcerers for instance).

The wizard casts spells. Wizards are at their best surrounded by books. The wizard gets better at things as his or her resources improve. The wizard’s skills get better while preparing to cast a spell. The wizard’s equipment thrives in places of learning and knowledge. Wizards look their best when well-rested.

The sorcerer casts spells. Sorcerers are at their best when celebrating. The sorcerer gets better at things as his or her emotional investment gets more intense. The sorcerer’s skills get better when surrounded by strangers. The sorcerer’s equipment thrives on new experiences. Sorcerers look their best at parties.

Obviously these are just examples, but they build character classes in a direction that creates cool and interesting niches and ties characters to the situations in which they find themselves, which I think is much more important than making sure the party’s meat shield is sticky enough to pull aggro.

Kill all of the classes in D&D. Build them up from scratch. Look at what they’re good at, look at where and how they want to be good at it, and find ways to represent those preferences mechanically, and you’ll end up with characters that are much, much cooler in the long run.

Obvioulsy, all of this is just my opinion (and, to some extent, Friend Ian’s). But by sanding the rust off the chassis and rebuilding the transmission, D&D might have a lot of life left in her. Rather than looking at ways we can redesign the Mustang, why don’t we see if we can make this one pretty again?

I Wear Black Robes Now. Black Robes are Cool.

Yesterday, I published a post about how I want some more equality in my D&D. Everyone was with me about the depiction of female characters and representing a greater spectrum of skin tones in the art. Where I seemed to lose people was in the idea that people with disabilities could be cool. Apparently, to be worth looking at in a piece of game art, you must be able-bodied, hale and healthy.

My buddy Raistlin here disagrees.

See, Raistlin isn’t exactly Mr. Healthypants. He was a sickly kid, got picked on a lot, and grew up to take a test that destroyed his body and made him a physical wreck of a man. He was weak, he was slow, he had a wracking cough for which he took foul-smelling medicines and which often had him spitting blood into a handkerchief.

Then – and this is important – he killed the Dragon Goddess of Evil. By himself.

Now, maybe that doesn’t mean a lot to you. Maybe, like my friend M, you think that Raistlin was a creepy wimp, undeserving of respect. Maybe, like my friend J, you think that Raistlin belongs in the written fluff of the game, the novels and the short stories, but people like him shouldn’t appear in the art. Personally, I think Raistlin is one of the most beloved characters from the early era of D&D fiction because he is a kid with disabilities, an underdog who came back and proved to be the most powerful of his companions despite his afflictions. He found ways around them, found strength in them, and in so doing became a total fucking badass.

I’m not saying that we should have rules for multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy in the game. I just see no reason why a character with one of those conditions couldn’t be a total badass in the context of the game’s art. I just see no reason why there shouldn’t be an image of a kick-ass wizard with Lou Gehrig’s (I think we can all agree that Stephen Hawking is the most badass wizard in the world right now).

The arguments brought forth so far are thus: people who are differently abled would be terrible player-characters in a role-playing game; it is already difficult to find cool pictures of player character options in the books and that the inclusion of differently abled individuals reduces the number of cool pictures available; D&D isn’t about the real world, it’s about idealized visions of yourself; and the effort would lead to trivialization and mockery. I’m going to address these things one at a time, but so far as I’m concerned, the only actual argument, the only thing on that list that is not veiled ableism, is the concern regarding trivialization.

There are two assumptions made in the first two arguments that are deeply disturbing to me: “the differently abled are entirely incompetent,” and “the differently abled cannot be cool.” These assumptions are, honestly, at the heart of ableism, and it makes my heart hurt to know that some folks’ knee-jerk reaction to inclusion of the differently abled is to assert their inability and apparent lack of awesome. It is deeply upsetting that these sorts of assertions normally go entirely unchallenged.

It is entirely possible for a differently abled individual to be entirely, 100% fucking incredible. It happens all the time, and you are well within your rights to punch anyone who says otherwise directly in their genitals.
The issue of trivialization is one that I’m sensitive to, though apparently not as keenly as I should be (I was taken to task for a few remarks that were trivializing, and I don’t mind admitting I’m feeling sheepish about that today), and it is an admittedly difficult thing to work through. The issue doesn’t really revolve around the post as it was written, as I was specifically speaking to the art of the game and purposefully avoiding talking about the game’s text, but on re-reading I can see how it could appear I was discussing adding differently abled characters to the game in a text/rules sense.

The path to addressing inclusion of the differently abled is a bit treacherous, as there’s disagreement within the communities of the differently abled about how the topic should be treated, and any action taken on it is probably to offend someone. That doesn’t at all mean that we shouldn’t make the effort, though, and it is imperative that we get incredible people working on it. While it is going to require some tricky public relations work, I think that including anyone and everyone in your game is always a worthwhile endeavor.

Why Fourth Edition Died

So, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition has been announced, and the news has struck the sort of reaction I expected it to. People are hoping for this feature or that. Others are expressing their dismay at the fact that a new edition is coming so soon on the heels of D&D: Essentials. Yet others are suggesting that this heralds the end of Dungeons & Dragons, that a new edition will make the already split RPG community even more fractious. There are yet others that have met the news with incredible, soul-crushing apathy. So, there’s that.

To be honest, I’m not even really sure what to say about the development. I could talk about how much 4E and Essentials stuff I have on my shelves right now. Or I could talk about what I want to see from the new D&D. Or I could talk about what I think would be the best possible direction for the game to take (which is quite different from what I want to see, truth be told). I could talk about a lot of things, but I think what I’m going to talk about today is design space, design philosophy, and why Fourth Edition failed.

See, we wouldn’t need a Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons if Fourth Edition was given the sort of design team it deserves. And by that, I don’t mean folks like Monte Cook. Mr. Cook is an incredible designer and makes good game, and for that I think he deserves a stalwart salute and as many dollars as the industry can throw at him. Under his guidance, Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons revitalized the industry, but his is not the sort of hand a design like Fourth Edition needs. Fourth Edition needs someone like Mark Rosewater. Fourth Edition needs someone like Keith Baker. Fourth Edition needs someone like Kenneth Nagle.

You will note that all three of those names are attached to people who design cards. Two of the, Rosewater and Nagle, are Magic: The Gathering designers. Baker is responsible for Gloom, which is incredible and does something no other card game did before he came up with it. This isn’t to say that I think Fourth Edition needs to be treated like a card game, far from it. It needs to be treated in a way that only men of this design tack can treat a game.

The problem with Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, arguably the biggest problem that any edition of D&D has ever faced, is that the people who were designing it didn’t know a goddamned thing about Design Space. I’m not talking about James Wyatt or Mike Mearls. I’m talking about the Matt Sernett’s of the world, the Rob Heinsoo’s. The guys who make Power books and the guys who put out new campaign settings. The people who are the life’s blood of a role-playing game production.

See, Wyatt and Mearls put together a hell of a game. Say what you will about it, it is impossible to deny that the thing was well designed. There are hundreds of moving pieces, thousands of possible combinations, just in the first book, and those things come together beautifully. In many ways, the core Fourth Edition was like the first Magic: The Gathering set, or Gloom. It did things no one had ever done in role-playing games before, and it made an incredible show of it. What’s more, the framework left behind by that first book was amazing. There was design space all over the game, and it was waiting to be plumbed by talented designers. The first showing we had of that was the second Player’s Handbook, where we started to play around with how powers fit together, and how classes were built. There was an incredible and untouched plaza of design waiting to happen around races, with racial feats and racial powers barely touched. There was room left open for the creation and invention of magic items, and the powers framework lent itself to customization beautifully. There was a ton of space in the way monsters were put together (so much so that I found myself drawn to concepts like the Fourthcore Bestiary because of innovative aura designs – understand that for a moment… AURA designs; one tiny little speck in the whole of the game). Seriously, though, let’s take a look at some of the things that weren’t properly explored in Fourth Edition’s brief history:

POWERS

We saw a lot of books filled with powers, and one book that actually did something neat with them. Having loads of powers doesn’t make for customization, having powers that work in strange ways makes for customization. Understand that the only interesting powers in the whole of the game were those in the Player’s Handbook and those in the Player’s Handbook 3. The originals and the _only_ set of powers that were at all different or strange. One could argue for the powers from Essentials, but seriously, fuck one. The powers presented in those books were half-assed concessions to the players lost in the Pathfinder Exodus, and nothing more. If you wanted to make powers interesting, here’s a one-sentence answer to the problem: Magic cards are still interesting.

Seriously, and this is incredibly important, Magic design is where the D&D crew should have looked for more interesting power designs. Not the cards themselves, mind, but the philosophy behind those cards. Magic cards constantly break the rules of the game they’re played in. That’s the whole point of the game. What the designers of D&D tried to do was create a homogenized environment in which none of the powers effectively broke the rules, and that’s really the wrong way to build a game that’s made out of a bunch of crazy powers. You need each power to break the rules of the game in an interesting way that helps you win that game. Then you need to do the same thing to the monsters they’re fighting.

Moreover, there is an element of randomness in Magic: The Gathering that D&D really could have used sometimes. It had this when wizards were forced to memorize their spells each day, because the wizard would try to guess at which spells were going to be needed and prepare those ones in advance. Magic solves this by randomizing your hand. D&D4E solves it by not solving it at all. There was no need to pore over your powers, because after a short nap, you’d have them all back again, right as rain. This isn’t the way to go into this territory at all. There is nothing about this that’s suspenseful or fun. Sure, players like getting all their powers back at once, but what the players want and what is good for the game is seldom the same thing.

The design space here is mind-boggling. Off the top of my head: a whole list of Encounter Powers that could be made better by giving up a Daily; Encounter Powers that take two full rounds to use; Daily Powers that change when in certain circumstances (underground, flying, in the sunlight, whatever); a list of At-Will powers you can give up using for the rest of the encounter to make way better; a list of At-Will powers that are as strong as Daily powers, but use up the character’s healing surges as a cost; Lifetime powers, powers that can only ever be used once, ever; uncontrollable powers that go off in certain circumstances, but the player has no control over them; come-back powers that allow you to do incredible things for the cost of an action point; counter-powers that allow a player to stop another player or NPC’s powers from going off as an immediate interrupt; mind-drain powers that steal another character’s powers for a turn, or treat that power as spent; dramatic powers that allow you to influence story events in subtle (or, for dailies, not-so-subtle ways)… Seriously, this is just what I came up with in the time it took me to write this list… I’m sure some of them have been done, or variations on them, but I know a bunch of others have never been touched, and that’s a damned shame.

RACES

One of the things I was most looking forward to in the creation of D&D4E was the promise that races were going to get a lot more attention than they had gotten previously. Elves could be wicked-cool at being rangers, sure, but they could also be wicked-cool at being, y’know, Elves. And I rather liked that idea, being one of those strange kids that enjoyed playing D&D when Elf was a class. We were promised feats, Paragon Paths (which is sort of a suck concept, but I’ll get onto that in a bit), epic destinies, and I thought this was going to be a big deal when they were talking about it.

Turns out, it was just one more path towards optimization, when it could have been so much more. Again, the amount of design space left open by more focus on races and their interactions is staggering. One very simple answer is to make race-specific classes using some of the design space we have available in the POWERS section, but that’s hardly where the buck stops on racial design space.

I mean, design isn’t just a matter of rules, however much that may be unapparent from the way Wizards of the Coast has handled it. A lot of it comes from flavor, and rather than focus on any given flavorful concept (even their own Points of Light flavor, the thing they’ve touted around for so long without actually exploring it at all), the Fourth Edition answer has been Add More Races. Which is problematic, because there are only so many places one can go in that direction, and this trip has ended with People Made of Crystals, which is fucking stupid. And no, the right answer doesn’t lie in making subraces, because the gods alone know I can’t put up with another Kender. No, the answer lies in making interesting and powerful cultures for the people of already established races, and building off of that.

Eberron proved this in Three Point Five. You take elves, just normal everyday, boring fucking elves, and you give them a continent that they rule, and suddenly we have the Undying Court and crazy Inca-inspired magic, and weird-ass traditions and rules that affect elves still living in Khorvair. And we haven’t changed elves at all. They’re still elves, they still have the same bonuses and flaws, they’re still the same elves we know and love and/or hate, nothing has changed about them, but they are entirely, completely different. Same goes for Baker’s treatment of the Drow. Same goes for Weis and Hickman’s decision to put dwarves on horseback and have them ride around nomadically. Same is true of every human culture in every fantasy setting ever written.

And it sort of looked like backgrounds were going to be how this worked itself out, but they backgrounds were generally pretty lame unless they were overpowered schlock from a single campaign that wormed its way into the Character Builder. And then themes looked like they were going to get this figured out, but themes never took off the way they should have. To be perfectly honest, themes are the sorts of things you want in a core book, not a campaign setting, and they’ve never really gotten the spotlight time they deserve.

CLASSES

This is one of the most prominent complaints about Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons in my store: it’s not as customizable as players want it to be. Your fighter has a type, and deviating from that type usually means that you are going to be crippled in combat. There are a few good generic powers for each class, but the best usually focus around the template’s specific niche abilities. And that’s just bad game design, guys.

I’m going to, again, look at Magic: The Gathering as a good example of how to do much the same thing. See, the point isn’t to make certain abilities work better with certain templates, the point is to make a bunch of abilities that work on their own, and have a level of synergy that make it desirable to play those things together. I can build a green deck out of whatever the hell I want, but if I’m trying to ramp into a host of big beaters, I’d best be looking for some Llanowar Elves and some Birds of Paradise, ne? There is nothing saying I can’t play Birds of Paradise in any other deck, I certainly can, but if I’m looking to ramp mana, I put birds in my deck.

The same is true of powers in D&D. Every power should work well on its own and do something valuable that the rest of the party can build on, but if you build synergies into your powers, your players will find those things on their own, and they will build their characters according to whatever build they want to make.

The funny thing about this is that it changes exactly nothing. You’re still making templates for your fighters, you’re just not making the powers exclusive to those templates and letting the players suss them out for themselves.

Moreover, there are a lot of things you can do with the class system that simply were not done. Again, I point to racial classes. Again, I point to the way powers were never filled out the way they should have been. And I also point to the fact that there has never been a martial controller. And I also point to the fact that there is a nearly endless number of possible combinations of power-types and class archetypes. They’ve covered the basics, sure, and having an endless number of classes isn’t really all that important, but having a lot more customizability in your classes and having those class combinations rotate around the niche system you’ve established would go a long way towards building a much more playable, designable game.

And with themes, paragon paths, and epic destinies at your disposal, you have a lot of room to build in extra customization as you build your game. Paragon paths in particular were an unplumbed font of design space that could have really changed the history of the game. Prestige Classes defined Third Edition D&D, and the amount of effort that went into creating a whole bloody host of them is evident in the fact that there’s a whole bloody host of them. The number of prestige classes available to a player of 3.5 D&D is “too many to choose from.” Paragon paths, not so much.

And Epic Destinies… Oh man, would I have done the Epic Destiny entirely differently. That may actually require a different post, so let’s not talk about that just yet. Let’s just say “FATE,” and move on.

SKILLS

One of the biggest advances Third Edition D&D made to the game was the introduction of a universal skill system. It wasn’t pretty, and it definitely had its problems, but it made the game flow in a totally different way than any edition previous. And while I don’t think that the introduction of the skill system made Fourth Edition any better (I actually think it made it quite a bit worse), it was a damned fine piece of gaming tech, and I understand why they kept it around.

Having played a bunch of First Edition D&D this year, I think they made a rather incredibly horrible mistake by including skills in the game at all. I often tell people that I think Fourth Edition D&D plays more like First Edition D&D than any edition between them, and I still think that’s very true. The difference, the place where I find Fourth boring, is between battles. In First Edition D&D, you had to be on your toes, you had to be thinking, you had to move carefully from room to room and solve all sorts of insane problems just to survive. And that doesn’t involve much in the way of skill rolls from anyone but the thief, and most of the time your thief isn’t good enough to make any of his or her checks anyway. Skills, as they are presented in Fourth Edition D&D, are a crutch used to hand-wave away problems solving and role-playing. In Third Edition, they absolutely made sense, and they added something great to the game. In Fourth Edition, all they did was make it dull.

And the designers couldn’t have possibly known that going in, and I don’t at all blame them for the choice of including a skill system, but I don’t think I will ever play with skills as they are written in Fourth Edition ever again.

Again, this idea might require an entire post to talk about in any sort of comprehensive way, so I think I’m going to move on to…

FEATS

When I first wrote this, I actually completely forgot about feats, which should give you an idea of how important I think they are to the Fourth Edition of D&D. Like skills, feats were a defining feature of Third Edition D&D. They were, in a word, incredible. In many ways, they allowed you to do things that were, in Fourth Edition, performed via powers. Cleave and Great Cleave were powerhouses of efficient fighting. The meta-magic feats gave magic-users a powerful advantage. Feats meant something to Third Edition.

In Fourth Edition, they’re basically an afterthought, which is a damnable shame, because the amount of design space opened up by feats is insane. I mean, when you break feats down, they’re just a talent tree, with feats building off of other feats to create more powerful combinations down the line. The only feats worth taking half the time, though, were Toughness and the Wintertouched/Lasting Frost combo.

And that is really, deeply stupid.

Like much of what I’ve been talking about today, feats are a layer of character creation that provides a powerful range of customization tools that can be used to make your game better. It’s these layers that add to the fun of building a character, and they’re the sort of thing from which an entire path of feats can be built. When utilized properly (providing actual, wicked-ass bonuses to the people who take them) bonus/flaw systems can be incredible.

What I guess I’m getting at here is that every layer of the D&D game has a bunch of really wicked design space that is laying open for us to tinker with. Class, race, skills, feats, themes, backgrounds, whatever. And the fact that it hasn’t been tinkered with in any meaningful way is really deeply disappointing.

COMBAT

Combat in Fourth Edition D&D is a fucking mess.

I say this with all the love in the world for the designers and the game itself: it is a fucking mess and needs heavy reworking to make it marginally playable. This is especially true of any level over 12, which is entirely disappointing because much of the system was designed to solve the Sweet Spot problem. Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition’s sweet spot is levels 1-10.

Combat takes too long. Characters, both the NPCs and the Player Characters, have too many hit points. Figuring out tactics and powers is a time consuming and mind-numbingly dull process. After twelve rounds, even interesting bad guys become a slog and I have players checking their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

There are a few problems with combat in Fourth Edition, but none of those problems are problems of Design Space. Still, they are worth mentioning in the context of “this is what killed Fourth Edition D&D,” so I’ll be taking a brief look at them.

I’m going to make this as simple as I can: when you make a game, include all of the things you need to play in the box. If your game needs dice, include dice. If you game needs miniatures, include miniatures. If your game requires a grid map, you’d best include a grid map. The creeping reliance of Dungeons & Dragons on miniatures is perverse, commercialistic and sad. You didn’t need miniatures to play D&D1E, and you could certainly get away without them in D&D2. It was in D&D3, with the invention of “flanking,” that the miniatures stopped being a good tool and started being a necessary element of play, and Fourth Edition continued this trend with a gusto that bordered on sinister. As a games retailer, I often found that this increased my sales, but not of Dungeons & Dragons product. Chessex got a lot of money from the lack of production inclusion in D&D, and Reaper made most of the rest, especially after Wizards pulled the plug on their miniature lines.

Moreover, miniatures do not make the game more fun.

Maybe I’m in a minority here, but I have always found my imagination is plenty capable of determining what is happening with a crew of wererats, and I find that putting them on a board in front of me dulls the imaginative blitz of combat. Also, fiddling with toys takes time, and the largest factor against D&D combat is that it takes entirely too much time already. Give me a sheet of graph paper and my imagination any day.

Of course, this does reduce one of the branches of power design that was horribly abused while making Fourth Edition: movement and combat advantage (which are, in reality, the same fucking thing). I’m okay losing that space for the sake of a cleaner, faster D&D experience.

Changing gears: we don’t need this many hit points. Killing player characters  is very difficult in Fourth Edition, which is okay. I get it, we’re supposed to be heroic adventurers, not meat for a grinder. Except that without a threat of player character death, combat becomes dull, an exercise in whittling a monster down to zero. Killing player characters more often is not a bad thing. Your players will thank you for combat encounters that take less than an hour.

And one more time: DO YOUR MATH!!! Paragon tier is a mess. Epic gets even worse. And the Monster Vaults only helped marginally. Do your fucking math, guys, figure out how much time it’s going to take for a level 12-14 party to kill a level 13 solo, because I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that it’s longer than your ideal play flow.

SMALLER GRIPES

Item creation is stupid. The economy is wrecked. Character Builder software is basically necessary. And the alignment system is stupid.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

This seems pretty obvious to me, but I’m going to spell it out anyway.

We need a very simple, very basic version of Dungeons & Dragons. Abilities, race, class, basic combat powers, hit points, armor class, non-armor defenses… go! I want to see a core Dungeons & Dragons that is so incredibly simple I could teach it to an eight year old in under a half hour. These will be the core and most basic rules of the game, the rules everything else is designed to break.

Then we start in on the options. Hundreds of powers. New races, new classes, new racial classes. Themes, integrated from the beginning of the game. Backgrounds that are good for more than a +2 skill bonus. Feats that actually matter. A skill system. An expanded skill system for things like “profession” and “craft” skills. Magic items that are interesting and strange and setting-defining. A variety of spell/attack/power systems. A couple of interesting morality systems. Fill your boots with optional content, but leave the core of the game as simple, pristine and clean as possible.

Then explore the optional design space ad infinitum.

And I think this is maybe the most important thing in the world: invite your players to do the same. One of the shining achievements of Third Edition D&D was that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people working on the game at any given time, and that meant that there was an enormous glut of product available to anyone who wanted to find it. I have a book about African adventuring that is both brilliant and terrible (and Eurocentric and insensitive and empowering and informed). That would not have existed, that _could not_ have existed without the framework that the OGL provided for creating new and interesting content. I want to see that sort of exploration go into the newest version of Dungeons & Dragons, and without a specific invitation from the Guys Upstairs, we aren’t going to have it.

Glitterdust

So in looking through the new Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, it occurred to me that this blog's namesake spell did not make it into the list of Wizard class abilities. I'm sure they're saving it for the Bard (whenever the new Bard makes an appearance; I hope they take a page from the Wheel of Time RPG and make them more like Gleeman and less like a Warlord with spells...). Still, I can't let the place go without it's spell, so here's my take on it:

Glitterdust - Warlock/Wizard/Bard Attack 3
You raise your hand, and a fine silvery dust falls through the air. It clings to everything it touches, even eyes; it makes the invisible seen, and the seeing blind.
Daily * Arcane, Illusion
Standard Action - Area burst 2 within 10 squares
Target: Each creature in burst
Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex
Hit: The creature is blinded (save ends).
Effect: Creatures in the burst that are invisible become visible and cannot become invisible again until the end of the encounter.