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?

The Ghost of D&D Third Edition

Wizards of the Coast announced yesterday that they were going to be re-releasing the Dungeons & Dragons Three point Five core books. I’m sure there are a lot of people who are tickled pink by the news, and as a person who sells D&D books for a living, I’m certainly not against having the version of the game people want to play on my shelf. But it seems like a strange marketing choice to me, especially with D&D Fifth Edition currently in the pipes.

When the PDF battle was at its highest pitch, I came out swinging for the minority opinion that it would be deeply silly of Wizards of the Coast to release digital copies of earlier editions of the books. There’s a pretty vocal group of people that are suggesting that it makes good business sense to have all of the various versions of D&D available at once; they’d like to be able to buy First Edition core books and modules and things, and so they assume that there is a sufficient audience to warrant those books’ continued availability. And while that might actually be true, it doesn’t address the fact that Wizards of the Coast is a company that survives primarily by publishing books you don’t own, and that to continue to be successful, they need to be able to sell new and interesting material. You’re quite a bit less likely to buy something new if you can still get the thing that is familiar to you. Pathfinder proved this in a big way, by continuing to support the most recent version of D&D while Wizards of the Coast did its best to kill it so that D&D Fourth Edition could be successful. Pathfinder is a continuous best-seller, not just in my store but in many others, while Fourth Edition languishes under poor reviews and the persistent clarion shriek that it’s “Just like World of Warcraft.”

And it’s not because D&D 3.5 is a better game than D&D Fourth. It isn’t a better game than D&D Fourth, though they are radically different in scope and tone. It’s a different game from D&D 3.5, and different isn’t something people, and gamers especially, deal with very well. This fear of change is exactly the reason that D&D Fifth is going to have the same six attributes that the game has had since the beginning of the hobby. It’s the reason Vampire the Requiem is largely vilified when it is just better at what it sets out to do than any version before it. It’s one of the big reasons RIFTS books continue to sell like crazy. People generally don’t like to do new, different, weird things, and the games we play need to account for that trend if they want to be popular.

It doesn’t take a marketing genius to see that this is a catastrophically silly move on the part of the company. All of the potential issues that come from releasing PDFs of earlier editions exist here (piracy only marginally less so), with far greater impact on future sales. At this point, putting out a 3.5 Player’s Handbook both detracts from your current line and actively supports a game that has been gnawing away at your player base. This cannot possibly be anything more than a desperate grab for popularity in a beauty pageant Wizards of the Coast has already lost. It stinks of fear and distress from a company that has made a number of critical marketing mistakes in the past few years. The small gains to be had from re-releasing a sure-seller are certain to cause problems in 2013, as the marketing machine for D&D Fifth starts rolling out in earnest.

If you absolutely must try and sell older versions of a game, it makes much more sense to at least package those older versions with the edition you’re currently trying to make a market for. Put out a new core set for all four editions of Dungeons & Dragons when Fifth Edition hits stores. When you buy a core set, you get one Fifth Edition book packaged in with it. First Edition comes with the Player’s Handbook. Second Edition comes with the DMG. Third Edition comes with the Monster Manual and Fourth Edition comes with a setting book for whatever the assumed setting of D&D Next is. At least that way, if you sell an old edition of your game to people, they’re getting the thing they want and a pretty decent incentive to give your new game a try. I mean, hey, we’ve already got one of the books, right?

Expanding Thoughts on the Death of Fourth

SKILLS
I think I might have caught some people a little off guard with my statements about skills in my breakdown of why I believe Fourth Edition failed as a commercial undertaking. I suggested that, while a unified skill system was a great idea for Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons, I felt that the implementation of that same system in Fourth Edition D&D was a huge mistake. Here’s why.

Fourth Edition D&D plays a lot like First Edition D&D in that the focus of the game is on combat encounters. Fourth Edition departs from First Edition in its handling of non-combat aspects of the game. Where First Edition took a very hands-off approach to the less-than-fighty bits, Fourth has evolved the intricate skill system put in place during the Third iteration of the game, and I believe that’s problematic in how the game delivers on its focus. See, if you’re looking for the essence of First Edition D&D, if your goal is to build a game that feels more like First Edition than any edition since, you need to make the players’ decision-making count more than their skill checks.

See, when you’re playing a game of First Edition D&D, you don’t have skills to fall back on, and you’re forced to go through dungeons terrified of everything. You have to poke the pile of stones because it might be the home of a carrion crawler. You have to make sure you’ve explored every nook in the room, or you might miss out on some keen treasure, and that’s not as simple as rolling a perception check, that requires describing what it is you’re doing, and if you miss something, the DM has every right to just sit on his or her hands and giggle. This paranoia, this creativity, is part of what gave the First Edition game a lot of its oomph. Soon enough, you had a party decked out with ten foot poles and a bunch of critters to check the halls for you (we preferred gnomes, because we’re bastards).

The only character in a First Edition game with skills was a thief, and oftentimes those skill scores were so incredibly low you couldn’t depend on them. If you had the ability to try picking a lock two or three times, your DM wasn’t rolling often enough on the wandering monster tables.

Fourth Edition’s skill system, in particular the Skill Challenge system, allows players to bypass fun in favor of more dice rolls. I have had a few situations in which Skill Challenges were genuinely good, but the vast majority of the time, they’re just multiple-success skill checks with some extra description attached, and no one’s really having a good time because the real fun is the fightin’.

There is no compelling reason why the skill system as it currently exists in D&D Fourth Edition needs to be in the game at all. In Third Edition, it was solving a problem, and the multitude of skill checks in that system made sense and worked with everything else we knew about the game. In D&D Fourth Edition, it seems to be a dated holdover from a previous game, tacked on with little regard for why it’s even there.

The problem that was solved in Third Edition was that, in a system that could do absolutely anything, a system needed to exist that would accommodate non-combat issues as they cropped up. In Third Edition, they invariably would crop up and skill checks made for a solid tool to help deal with them. Third Edition was a game without borders, really, a game where you could move from world-spanning politics to dungeon crawling in the space of a half hour, and you’d need a diverse toolbox to be able to appropriately deal with that.

When D&D Fourth Edition shifted its focus to a more combat-centric model, it lost much of the need for an intricate and detailed skill system. What you did between fights was rarely as important as the fight itself and would often feel like unnecessary filler, the boring bits between stabbing and more stabbing. The thing that held the stabbing together. The skills that would have made for an interesting addition to D&D Fourth Edition were removed because of their seeming unimportance: profession and craft skills, things that would have given your characters something worth doing outside of their kill-stab-rest-kill-stab routine, were left off the skill list. Why? Because those skills didn’t really contribute to what the focus of the game was meant to be: skulking around dungeons, beating up monsters and taking their stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s room for skills to exist in D&D Fourth Edition in a meaningful way, I just don’t think that the system they used was the system that best fit the return to dungeon-crawly goodness. It felt like an afterthought, and while they certainly streamlined the system and fixed some glaring issues with it, they were still using the system in an environment in which it made very little sense.


FEATS

My problem with feats in Fourth Edition D&D is that, compared to powers, they are utterly and completely forgettable. There aren’t many feats that stand out and go “Hey, look at me, I’m something flavorful, interesting and complex that will help you define your character in a cool new direction,” which is a direction that would have made them far more playable, would have opened more design space, and would have made the system feel like a natural addition to Fourth Edition instead of a tacked on Third Edition afterthought.

Feats suffer from much the same problem as skills in that they were brought into Fourth Edition design with no real concept of where they were going to fit, how they were going to make the game better. In many ways, feats read like generic powers that are… well, bad. Some of them are so necessary you’d might as well not make a character without them (the expertise feats), while others are so distinctly bad that I sincerely believe they were included to pad the page count.

In Third Edition, feats were what powers are now. They were the cool tricks that made your character distinctive and awesome. In Fourth Edition, there’s really no need for them. Even necessary feats like the expertise feats can be fixed by adding a ubiquitous +1 to hit somewhere in character progression, and then we don’t need them anymore. There isn’t a problem in Fourth Edition that feats (as they exist) fix, and that makes them feel lame-duck and dated. If feats had been interesting, flamboyant expressions of character, they would fix a deep problem Fourth Edition has, but as they are, they’re flat, boring and entirely underwhelming compared to their big brother, powers.

A better system would have been a point-buy Merit and Flaw system built into the core of the game. These have existed in role-playing games for decades, and they provide an interesting direction for character personalization that D&D Fourth Edition was desperately hoping for. The problem comes, again, from the strange homogeny that Fourth Edition sought in its design strategy, the idea that nothing in the game can break the rules. Merit and Flaw systems are ripe for character optimization junkies, because they provide tools with which to fiddle for the best possible combination of Merits that Rock and Flaws that Don’t Matter. It would have been a difficult design to fit into the vision Wizards of the Coast apparently had for the game, but creating a homogenous merit and flaw system that added something different and interesting to the game would have been a far cry better than copying a watered down version of a system you’ve already obsoleted with other designs.


AUTOPSY

It seems people are confused as to why I believe Fourth Edition died. I thought I made it pretty clear, but I’m going to reiterate my point as clearly as possible for my readers, just in case:

Fourth Edition died because it stopped selling books. It stopped selling books because the designers of the game were no longer publishing anything that was at all interesting. I feel that this is a failing on the part of the designers to exploit the cavernous amounts of design space available in Fourth Edition D&D.

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.

What Wizards is Doing Wrong, Part 86x10²³³

We all love to rag on Wizards of the Coast for fucking up our amazingly wonderful awesome incredible game. And to be fair, they fuck up a fair bit. Not enough that they’ve gone out of business, mind, but enough that they’re hurting us, and enough that they’re hurting their market share. According to ICv2 (which is brilliant), the good folks at Paizo are a close second in the role-playing game market, and they’re selling a game that Wizards of the Coast invented. Anyone looking at this should be able to understand the problem pretty quickly: Paizo is making nearly all of its money off of an intellectual property developed by their direct competitors, and they’re doing it legally, and it’s eating a healthy stack of Wizards’ lunch.

Most of the time, I don’t give business advice to the folks at Wizards of the Coast, because they’re supposed to know what the fuck they’re doing. These are some smart folk, the best and brightest that the gaming world has to offer. They’re supposed to understand that there is a very simple solution to this problem: they need to sell what Paizo is selling, and they can make more money selling it than Paizo can.

Back when 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons came out, a lot of people were pissed off that the company was replacing the best role-playing game in the world with some new, weird thing. They complained and they argued and there were some solid edition wars going on, but eventually most of the 2nd Edition folks came around to the new way of doing things. Why? Because they had no choice. It was getting harder and harder to find Dungeons & Dragons material for the edition they liked the best, and this new version was still Dungeons & Dragons, right?

This Edition War has a different flavor, though. There’s a new factor, and that factor is that you can still find material for the version of D&D you like better. You can still find 3rd Edition support from the folks at Paizo and their allies, and that means that the grognards of 3rd don’t need to eventually filter over to D&D4. I think what Wizards was hoping for was that the Dungeons & Dragons name would carry through for them, that people would rather play “Dungeons & Dragons” than “Pathfinder.” And to a degree, they’re right. I get a lot of waffling in my store. I have a set of the three core rule books for 3.5 sitting on my shelf, and it’s priced at a whopping $275. I don’t think I’m going to get that much for it. Yet. But eventually someone is going to come down to my store hoping to find some D&D3.5 core books, and I’ll say “Well, there’s Pathfinder over here…” And they’ll let me know that $275 is a steal for the Dungeons & Dragons name on the edition of the book they’re looking for. But a lot of people walk away, think about it, talk to their gaming buddies, and decide that they’d rather pick up Pathfinder than 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. The name means something, but if it’s the same product in a different wrapper, a lot of folks are going to buy. If it’s the same wrapper around a new, different product, they’re not so sure. Obviously, this is doing Paizo fairly well.

If Wizards wants to capitalize on this shitty situation, the solution is pretty simple. They need to open up their backlist. They need to put the entire collection of 3.5 D&D books on the idevice book apps for a dollar a piece. They need to print black-and-white perfect bound versions of the core books and put them back in circulation at a much lower price point than Pathfinder’s core book (say $25; it works for Palladium). They need to put 2nd Edition and 1rst Edition books up as .pdf files for free, and run that site on advertising packages. The most expensive part of making 3.5 D&D is paid for; all Wizards needs to pay for right now is reprinting and inventory, and both of those things are super-cheap compared to the loss of market share Paizo is currently representing.

Then they need to change how they’re doing 4th Edition entirely. Their focus is currently divided between online content and published content, and that hasn’t been doing them any favors. My coworker Ian and I were discussing the myriad ways Exalted and White Wolf have been sucking donkey balls for the past few years, and one of the ideas he put forth sort of struck home with me. Wizards of the Coast needs to put out two different versions of Dungeons & Dragons. On one side, they need printed product to support their organized play initiatives and to get most of their new playerbase involved. People become involved with D&D because someone passes them a book and says ‘This shit’s great, let’s give it a go.’ People need to have a thing in their hand before they become properly invested in the product you’re selling.

But Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a product as much as it’s an idea. It’s information, and if nothing else has been proven in the last few years of gaming, it’s a fluid idea. It’s a living idea, and the print medium is not best suited to that sort of document. Wizards should by all means continue to publish print books, but only the print books that fucking matter. Core rule-books. Setting information. Monsters. Things you need to sit down and play with your friends for a few hours.

Then they need to publish the most comprehensive online role-playing game experience ever attempted. They need to build the Google+ of role-playing games: huge online database with every word of every book, organized, searchable, integrated with a new character builder, an adventure designer, a monster-builder. Every power, every character, every dungeon tile, every sentence, all living in the cloud. The game’s errata occurs immediately. Characters are updated as the rules are. Player-built content lives side-by-side with official data so that every player can draw from every other player that uses this new set of tools. Online chat with video and audio capabilities, as well as an online table built in java allow for online play. Charge us more money for an actually robust online game, and we will gladly fucking pay it.

What problems does this solve? It means that product printed a year ago isn’t out-dated, it’s just the introductory product and it doesn’t represent the game as a whole. It means that errata can happen at the drop of a hat when something is proven to be broken. It means that you no longer have to pay scads of cash to publish high-quality book when you can pay less money by far to have a game that constantly reproduces itself, constantly updates itself, and never goes out of print. It means you stop having to deal with distributors, because you can send the logins that grant you access to this new and wonderful game to the same people running the D&D Encounters and D&D Dungeon Delve initiatives (which means that people who don’t have credit cards can still buy and enjoy your online offerings). It means you make more money, you spend less money, you increase your market share substantially, you make a lot of players much, much happier with you, you stop dividing your attention between print and online media, and you have improved the public opinion of your company with a huge division of the folks who currently hate you.

If someone at Wizards would like to hire me to fix their busted shit, they can reach me at friggert@hotmail.com. I’m not cheap.

Encountering D&D: Recurrance and Fortune

Dragon Magazine used to have this kick-ass series of articles about the Adventure Paths that were running in Dungeon Magazine that same month. The format was, admittedly, quite different from the D&D: Encounters format, in that the Adventure Paths tended to focus on an entire story arc rather than a single encounter, but I think there are cool things to be learned from D&D: Encounters and the way the good folks at Wizards have put together their initiative. Encountering D&D is a weekly article that discusses the coolest points of each week's session.

One of the cool things about this chapter of Keep on the Borderlands is that it's bringing back elements of previous encounters, depending on how those elements were handled in earlier chapters. In Encounter 5-17, both Moxulhar and Vermastyx play a part in the unfolding battle, assuming you let both survive. In this week's Encounter, Ferdinand Ronnick is back, again assuming you let him live Way Back in the Day (Chapter 2).

For an adventure designed for beginning players, this is a surpassingly next-level Dungeon Mastery maneuver. Chris Simms is not an adventure designer to be fucked with, ladies and gentlemen; this guy knows exactly what he's doing when it comes to making your adventures cohesive and interesting. Sometimes, game masters forget about things like this; bringing back story elements from the Before Times is a great way to give your world and your story some cohesion. And having the villain from the first couple of chapters come back as an underpowered ally later is a quick-and-dirty way to show some character growth and development, things that most role-playing games lose in a haze of Cheetoes and Mountain Dew-flavored Monty Python quotations.

Other Things to be Learned From This Encounter:

Sometimes, the bad guys aren't just sitting around waiting for you to come in and kill them. Sometimes, as you're killing bad guys, more bad guys show up. Sometimes, there are huge waves of bad guys waiting in the wings, and if you don't kill them quickly enough, you are going to get overwhelmed. And sometimes, the answer isn't just stabbing the bad guys to death; sometimes you need to get creative and find a new way to stop them from showing up. Close the portal, block the cave entrance, drop a house on their way in, pile the bodies in front of the door, light a huge cart full of horse dung on fire and roll it up to the gate. This sort of thinking should be encouraged. Give players who come up with these sorts of ideas bonuses to doing whatever it is they're trying to do.

One thing I would suggest to budding adventure designers, though, is this: Provide more than one victory condition. If knocking down Benwick's house is the only way to stop the onslaught of bad guys, then there should be a few ways to make that happen. The catapult is one, how about setting the house on fire as another? Pushing a cart in front of the door and guarding the windows? As with any situation that has the potential to completely overwhelm the player-characters, there need to be a variety of ways to keep that overwhelming from happening. I actually had to tell the players in my second flight to get the catapult after the house; they completely ignored the clues and were happy to just bash in heads ad infinitum.

From My Table to Yours:

When it was finally brought to the players’ attention that the catapult could be used to destroy the house, and thus stave off the waves of bad guys that were flooding in through it, I decided that the guys on the walls manning the thing were going to be having a smoke break, talking about their kids and the state of the Lord’s marriage. There are times when I like to infuse little modern bits like this into my games. It gives completely useless side characters some depth, gives your world a bit of a relatable edge, and gives you the opportunity to throw some humor into your gaming.

Dragging people around in nets was way less productive than I wanted it to be. I think next time, I’ll be making drag attacks like that deal damage, like getting hauled behind a horse or something.

Fortune Cards

Before Playing With Them:

I got in a preview box of D&D Fortune Cards in the mail this week. One of the perks of being the games manager at a FLGS is that Wizards of the Coast sometimes mails me stuff for free, and then I get to try it out and see how it goes. Yesterday I opened two packs of them, and I will be giving a pack each to my players at D&D: Encounters tonight (we haven't actually played yet, as of this writing; I will write a short review of how they played after the second flight is done). My initial thoughts on the product:

1) It has fewer options than I am immediately happy with. You get one card in your hand at any one time, and that card is determined randomly (you shuffle your deck then draw one). The chances that the card you pull is going to be useful are pretty low. At first look, I'm thinking that a hand of three cards would add utility to the product without over-powering it.

2) Monsters don't get cards. Whenever you add utility to player characters without adding equal or greater utility to the monsters they're fighting, you are making encounters easier. While I'm all for a certain level of ease in the Encounters initiative (re: Dark Sun), I think that this season has been generally underpowered and have had to make adjustments to make the challenges more... well, challenging. My monsters will be using Fortune Cards, but will stick to the one-card-in-your-hand rule to keep it balanced (as more monsters have access to the DM's hand, making it more likely to be relevant).

3) The back of the card is pretty. The face of the card is not. The card-front looks like it was designed by the same guy who designed the Vangard card-frame for Magic: The Gathering, which is my least favorite of the frame designs in that game. From the company that puts out card designs like the Future Shifted cards or the Planeswalker frames, the fortune cards lack 'production value.'

After Playing with Them:

1) Do these actually add anything to the game? One of my players complained about the increased amount of system required to use the cards while they didn't actually change the game all that much. The most positive reviews the cards got were "They were useful sometimes." One of the Game Masters for the first flight remarked that the encounters would need to be scaled up significantly whenever the cards were used, as the occasional power-up was still enough to make tonight's Encounter a cakewalk.

2) People forget about them. This is pretty similar to the major problem facing Ongoing Damage. No one remembers that the mechanic exists until about halfway through their turn, or even after their turn is over. Doing things like this at the beginning of your turn seems to go against the grain of the game; the play-flow of D&D 4E seems oriented todwards Standard/Move/Minor -> Bookkeeping -> End of Turn Effects. Players (and DMs, including myself) consistently forget about Auras, Ongoing Damage, and now cards, because all of those things seem like they should live in the middle or end phase of your turn flow.

3) It works better with more options, but also bogs the game down. We tried both the one-card variant and the three-card variant, and both versions of the rule (the former is the official, the latter is something suggested to me by my rep at Wizards) bogged the game down considerably. People read the cards, and that takes a few seconds. They also have to consider how the card is going to interact with their plan for the turn. In a game where combat already takes for bloody ever, it seems strange to want to bog the game down as much as the cards do. Moreover, the cards seem to slow the speed of choice to a crawl, so much so that I actually had to start counting down when players were taking too much time to come to decisions.

4) It would work better with starter decks. The random nature of the packs is meant to get people collecting them, like the Gamma World cards and, before them, Magic: The Gathering cards. Honestly, though, the cards would have worked better in a themed deck, especially as an introduction to the product. The cards were all over the damned place and were rarely any help to the players holding them. When they were a help, they helped out a lot, but those occasions were few and far between. How much better would it have been if a defender could choose the Defender Deck, and have a boost that was going to work well with his or her abilities? Even if the individual cards drawn were less than useful, at least they would tie into what it is that role does, ne?

5) They don't cost you anything. There is absolutely no reason that you should not be running a deck of these cards beside your character. To use a card does not cost you an action. It does not in any way impede any of the functions you previously enjoyed. I think this is a major error on the part of the cards' designers. Every card should cost something to use. A card can cost an action, hit points, healing surges, movement, a status effect. Make the choices difficult. Should I give myself a +2 bonus to all of my defenses in exchange for being dazed (save ends)? Whoever designed these cards should be forced to read this article [ROSEWATER ON DECISIONS].

6) People are not going to pay for these. They are going to print them out and put them into card sleeves the exact same way they do with Power cards. There will be an online database of them, and you will be able to write up a whole deck of the little bastards, print them, and use them in your games. Which is a damned shame, because nothing sells better in brick-and-mortar stores than game accessories, usually. Wizards of the Coast keeps making accessories that suck, though (re: Power Cards).

Editions Solve Problems

When a game comes out with a new edition, it’s an attempt by the developers to solve problems they see with the current edition. This isn’t just a thing we see in Dungeons & Dragons, but in every game system ever published in multiple editions. Even in a game as system-independent as Palladium Fantasy, there are edition wars (which is ridiculous, since you need to house-rule the whole game, in either edition, just to make it playable).

Matt and I got into a discussion last week about the edition wars. He’s a new D&D player, having never played editions one through three-point-five, and he’s of the opinion that previous editions are fatally flawed. This is, for the most part, true. It’s no less true of the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons, though; they’re just flawed in ways that are very, very different.

See, third edition D&D solved a lot of pretty intense problems. It cleaned up combat in a huge way, it solidified skills as a part of the dice-roll mechanic that combat was based on (making the system as a whole much more cohesive), killed negative-value Armour Classes, put most of the core classes into a single book, gave character classes something more interesting to grow into (thereby giving players goals to build towards as they played), provided a framework for determining how challenging an encounter should be, gave creatures stat blocks that were on par with those of a player character… The list of problems third edition fixed is huge and more than a little intimidating.

But a huge contingent of players hated it. They hated it because the system they had already worked. They hated it because it changed so many things that they loved (“No! Not my THAC0!”). They hated it because it made some classes more powerful and other classes less powerful than they liked. They hated it because of all the new rules. They hated it because it simplified things, dumbing the system down. They hated it because they had already bought so many second edition books. Basically, for all of the reasons players today hate D&D Fourth Edition, other players hated D&D Third Edition.

And that’s natural. People resist change. Change usually means uncertainty, and to our reptile brains, uncertainty means greater potential risk than whatever it is we’ve been doing and grown comfortable doing. It’s an instinct.

But people got over it, and they started playing third edition, and when 3.5 came out, people continued to buy it because, though it was a change, it wasn’t such a huge change that people couldn’t stomach it. People got comfortable playing 3.5 D&D. They learned the rules, they bought new books, they made characters and played campaigns and it was good.

But 3.5 wasn’t devoid of problems. I think a lot of people who are on the 3.5 bandwagon are missing this very integral point: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 was not perfect. It wasn’t even close to perfect. It was good, and it worked, and it did the things we needed it to do, but it was not a perfect game system. There’s no such thing.

Third edition had problems. The magic item creation rules were obtuse and almost impossible to understand, certain aspects of combat would bog down encounters in a huge way, the classes were designed to be fun at different levels, meaning anyone who wanted to play an epic-level fighter was in for a really rough ride past level 12, levelling was completely uninteresting and mechanical, multi-classing meant that everyone could, if they wanted, be good at everything (and often were), classes overlapped on another’s niches in a huge way, the economy was completely fucked, the power-level of even low-level spells got pretty ridiculous sometimes… The system was a mess. Unhindered third party support meant that nearly anything could be in the game, which made the game ridiculous very, very fast.

Fourth edition solved a lot of these problems. Item creation became streamlined and simple, combat was laid out much more specifically and became a lot easier to understand, classes were balanced against one another through every level, multi-classing was made far less attractive while the game strived to protect niches within a party, power level was matched more evenly against the encounters the party would face and the the economy, while still fucked, was fucked in a very new and interesting way.

But Fourth Edition isn’t devoid of problems. A lot of the people on the 4E bandwagon miss this very integral point: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is not perfect. It isn’t even close to perfect. It’s good, it works, and it does the things we need it to do, but it is not a perfect game system. There’s no such thing.

Magic items are uninteresting and common, skill challenges are difficult to understand hard to explain (not to mention the math on them is completely off), the economy sucks in many ways worse than that in 3.5, the feats are pedestrian and boring, the game focuses primarily on combat, solo combat encounters are a sloggish mess, status effects are almost impossible to keep track of without some secondary product, miniatures are entirely mandatory… There are a lot of problems here.

Fifth Edition will likely address a lot of these concerns. There’s no announcement out that it’s coming or anything. We’ve only had Fourth for a few years now, and I can’t see WotC pissing people off that badly by tossing a new edition out so soon. But someday, it will come. And when it does, it will solve the problems of gamers ten years from now. It won’t be a solid answer to problems we had three years ago, which will mean some people will be steadfastly against the new edition. But people will buy it, and play it, and it will be a fun game.

Myself, I’m already looking forward to it.

Undermountain Encounters 4 and 5

The 4th Edition Undermountain Revival

I was waiting for Ian to get me an encounter before I was going to post another one, but I needed something to write about today, and he’s had like, two weeks to make that happen. So I’m doing another one. Room 4 in the original Undermountain campaign didn’t have anything in it. Room five had a bad fight. So “Encounter” 4 isn’t actually much of an Encounter.

I guess one of the problems with old school Undermountain is that sometimes it’s horrifically boring. The two rooms coming up are pretty good examples of that. One of them is empty, except for a couple of loose cobblestones, and the next has a pretty mediocre fight against two bugbears, and the life history of a whole party that probably never made it through this room in the play-test. The second room, in particular, insults my sensibilities as a Game Master. I mean, I can deal with a flavor room with some random treasure. But room five of Undermountain is so obviously a tribute to a lost party that it hurts my brain just to think about it.

I think the worst part of it is that the party isn’t even all that interesting. They’re just a bunch of dudes who died fighting some fucking bugbears.

These encounters aren’t much different from the originals. I needed to share the pain…

Cobweb Room

The floor of this area is strewn with
stony rubble, and gray, dust-shrouded
cobwebs hang from ceiling to floor,
blocking all view of what lies within.

This room is basically empty. There are no creatures, and whatever may have made the webs is long gone. The rubble on the floor ranges in size from tiny pebbles to fist-sized chunks. If you put all of them together (a task that will take a good long time), the stones form a statue of three human warriors standing atop a rounded hump of stone. Each faces outwards, and is holding a short sword; the statue is well-crafted, but beyond broken. It might be worth as much as a few silver to a collector who would want to reproduce it.

If a character makes a DC 20 Perception check, he or she will notice a couple of loose flagstones, under which they’ll discover the skeletal remains of a human hand and a sack holding eight gold pieces. The coins are stamped with the Hammer and Anvil of the trading dwarves of the Sword Coast.

Chamber of Death

In this chamber, many bodies lie -
both human and those of tall, armored,
hairy creatures with long ears
and fangs. Only two figures move in
the room, searching among the bodies,
grunting and snarling to each other.
One breaks off and raises its head to
look your way!

The two creatures are bugbears, a warrior and a shadow walker. The bugbears will attack ferociously, seeing themselves as outnumbered and outgunned, their only hope of survival resting in a strong and immediate attack. If the player characters start to beat face (bloodying them, or killing one), the bugbears will simply try to fight past them and flee. They will only fight to the death if the death in question is that of the player characters.

If the bugbears do manage to escape, they will begin stalking the player characters (+12 stealth), and waiting until the party is weak or asleep to attack again.

Bugbear Shadow Walker		Level 5 Lurker
Medium natural humanoid		XP 200
Initiative +9                          Senses Perception +3; low-light vision HP 49; Bloodied 24 AC 19; Fortitude 17; Reflex 17; Will 16 Speed 7 Action Points 1
m Short Sword (standard; at-will) • Weapon
+10 vs AC; 2d6 + 3 damage
M Blur of Movement (standard; recharge 5 6)
The shadow walker shifts up to 8 squares, and can make 2 short sword attacks at any point during the move. The shadow walker must attack two different targets. On a hit, the shadow walker slides the target 3 squares.
Shadow Walk • Illusion
When a shadow walker moves 3 or more squares on its turn, it becomes invisible until the end of its next turn or until it attacks.
Predatory Eye (minor; encounter)
The shadow walker deals 1d6 extra damage against the next target granting combat advantage to it.
Alignment Evil		Languages Common, Goblin
Skills Acrobatics +9, Athletics +9, Stealth +12, Thievery +10
Str 14 (+4)	Dex 17 (+5)		Wis 12 (+3)
Con 13 (+3)	Int 13 (+3)		Cha 11 (+2)
Equipment Leather Armor, Short sword

 

Bugbear Warrior		Level 5 Brute
Medium natural humanoid		XP 200
Initiative +5                          Senses Perception +4; low-light vision HP 76; Bloodied 38 AC 18; Fortitude 17; Reflex 15; Will 14 Speed 6
m Morningstar (standard; at-will) • Weapon
+7 vs AC; 1d10 + 7 damage
M Skullthumper (standard; encounter) • Weapon
requires a morningstar and combat advanage against the target; +5 vs Fortitude; 1d10 + 7 damage, and the target is knocked prone and dazed (save ends)
Predatory Eye (minor; encounter)
The bugbear warrior deals 1d6 extra damage on the next attack it makes against a target granting combat advantage to it. It must apply this bonus before the end of its next turn.
Alignment Evil		Languages Common, Goblin
Skills Intimidate +9, Stealth +11
Str 20 (+7)	Dex 16 (+5)		Wis 14 (+4)
Con 16 (+5)	Int 10 (+2)		Cha 10 (+2)
Equipment Hide Armor, Morningstar
© 2009 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This monster statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

 

Terrain Features

Corpses: Each square occupied by a corpse counts as difficult terrain.

Pile of Skulls: The pile of skulls provides partial cover (-2 to ranged attacks against a character with cover), and count as difficult terrain.

The corpses, recently slain, are those of seven bugbears and five human men. The skulls are likely trophies kept by the bugbears. The men were all novice adventurers, much like our heroes, trying their fortune in the most dangerous dungeon in the world. Feel free to come up with some adventure ideas.

The original adventure gave you a bunch of history on each of the corpses, and a detailed description, but I’m not going to do that here. Personally, I think the Black Banner Band was one of Ed Greenwood’s crews, or maybe the party of a play-tester or something. There is a LOT of detail, let’s put it that way.

 

The total amassed treasure in the room is as follows:

• 6 pp 37 gp 25 sp 32 cp
• A glowing dagger +1
• A ritual book with Spider Climb and Tenser’s Floating Disk
• Three day’s rations
• A silver holy symbol
• A mace
• Four daggers
• A broad sword
• A short sword
• A battle axe
• Hand axe
• Three bloodstones, worth 50gp each
• A set of thieves’ tools
• 70ft climbing rope
• gold ring worth 3 gp
• brass buckle worth 2 cp

Picture by this guy: Benwootten