First Impressions: Player’s Handbook, Fifth Edition

I haven't been posting a lot on this blog, mostly because I've haven't been as involved in the tabletop gaming community since my son was born. I've been playing a lot of League of Legends, and failing at it rather spectacularly. You can read about that here.

But I picked up the new Player’s Handbook at Warp One today. I am always interested in a new edition, even if I'm not particularly hyped on playing it, and Fifth is no different. I haven’t delved deeply into it yet, but I figured I’d set out my initial impressions.

The front cover of the book features a female adventurer in an action pose fighting some sort of bone-clad giant. Very cool. The logos are clean, the typeface very legible, and the borderless art makes the whole

cover look very modern while retaining a distinctive D&D feel. The only issue I have with the design is the small red splash in the bottom left where they put “Dungeons & Dragons” when they could have just put that at the top of the cover where the D&D logo is.

The content background is a skeumorphic parchment deal, the sort of thing you expect from any fantasy role-playing game with any production value. Chapter breaks are full-page art pieces and maintain the level of quality I expect from Wizards of the Coast. There are a lot of great examples of race and gender diversity, which is nice to see.

The book’s chapter layout returns to the terrible Third Edition style. Building a wizard will require you to keep three different pages bookmarked as you reference between them. Combat rules exist between your spellcasting classes and your spell lists, as a particular point of ugh. The overview of character creation is brief and to the point, and seems to assume a level of familiarity with role-playing games and how they work.  

The integration with Faerun really shows through in the Races section, where the tropes from that setting are very apparent. To quote the section on dark elves: “Were it not for one renowned exception the race of drow would be universally reviled.” It does not make allowances for settings like Eberon (in which drow are the mysterious denizens of darkest Xen’Drik), but instead fully embraces the Forgotten Realms as its assumed setting. I’m not a fan of the Forgotten Realms books, which may make this point stand out for me more than others, but it lacks some of the versatility I expect from the game’s basic setting. Greyhawk is generic enough a setting that any basic fantasy tropes can be crowbarred in without much work, where I feel

like the Forgotten Realms requires a level of specificity that reduces the game’s reach.

The return of the half-orc and half-elf as crossbreeds, rather than as fully established races in their own regard, is a step in the wrong direction, I feel.

All of the Third Edition classes are in evidence, along with the addition of the warlock. The omission of the warlord class is notable. It’s difficult to really speak to things like class balance or niche protection without really delving into the game, but it seems to take a more Third Edition approach to both at first glance (which is to say little of either).

The lack of skill lists is a conspicuous departure from previous editions. Instead, players select a background, and that background provides access to skill proficiencies. Those proficiencies add a bonus to ability checks in situations where the skill would be relevant.

The equipment chapter is massive, with charts and descriptions for more stuff than you’ll probably ever need. Weapons, armor, adventuring gear, containers, tools, mounts and vehicles, and trade goods are all in evidence. There is a section on living a certain lifestyle. There’s even a section for “trinkets” which are simple items with a dash of mystery thrown in, to be used as possible adventure hooks or to add character to a player’s belongings.

Multiclassing is a two-page matter, now, and is much simpler than Fourth Edition multiclassing was.

Feats are back and seem more flavorful than in previous editions. Some of them are just “You’re pretty good at wrestling,” but others add new and interesting levels to the game. Lucky allows you to spend a small pool of points to roll another die if you roll poorly. Some of them increase your abilities by a point. One lets you give your party temporary hit points by speechifying at them. One gives you a bonus to use certain tools or skills. They’re interesting, and again would require a deeper delving into the book to really analyze.

There isn’t really anything sparkly or new in the Playing the Game or Adventuring sections of the book. Basic rules for rolling dice and movement and the like. Combat is quick and dirty in a Second Edition sort of way. No miniatures are needed, but I still generally like playing with them to keep track of stuff like who is flanking whom. Mounted combat gets some love in the last part of the chapter.

Spells have specific shapes again, and there’s a cute graphic of a gnome pointing at a chalk board with a cone, cube, sphere and cylinder on it. I’m assuming those same shapes will be used for stuff like dragon’s breath, as well. The spell list is three and a half pages long.

The replacement of the Astral Sea as it was envisioned in Fourth Edition is probably one of the most egregious mistakes of this edition so far. The Astral Sea was an incredible concept for adventuring at a multi-planar phase of a character’s career, and while Fourth failed in Paragon in a lot of ways, the Astral Sea was not one of those. My games will likely retain it, because it’s just too good to not use. The cosmology in general has gone back to a much more drab and boring place, which is a shame to see. The retention of the Shadowfell and Feywild make the loss of the Astral Sea all the more disappointing.

The sketches of the Conditions in the appendix are all basically perfect, and I appreciate that there are some critters to fight in the back of the book, though I don’t feel that it makes up for the wonky release schedule of a core book every month. I really liked being able to buy all three core books at once in the form of a boxed set on release, and I was under the impression that the new edition would be released the same way.

Initial Conclusions

The book is pretty and well designed, even if the chapter layout is something of a misstep. There are some things from Fourth Edition I feel are missing without good cause, while a lot of the choices made in the game’s design seem intent on bringing things back to a Third Edition place, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. There is plenty of interesting design space, but the basic setting being one as notable as the Forgotten Realms feels like it might be holding some of that potential back. There were some choices made that seemed a little too safe, and others that seemed very strange. It feels like Dungeons & Dragons, but it also feels like it doesn’t have anything new to say. 

Plot Blocks

This was written two years ago, and it wasn’t the thing I was hoping it would be.

So I wrote this. It’s what I was hoping it would be. Having read it over, it feels a lot like what skill challenges were really trying to be.

SIFT: A Free One-Page Role-Playing Game

So, I’ve been pounding my face against the keyboard for the last little bit trying to put together a role-playing game based on Avatar the Last Airbender. There’s a 4E hack for the series, but I don’t think that the D&D treatment really hits on what Avatar was about, so I’ve been trying to mash together a version that hails to some of the better narrative-centric role-playing games of the past little bit.

But, I’ve got writers block, mostly in the sense of “I don’t want to work on this project right now.” And partially because my work doesn’t exist until I show it to you.That’s part of why I started a blog in the first place, was to get writing for an audience instead of just putzing around on a project, not finishing it, and not caring because fuck it, no one was ever going to read it anyway.

So rather than languish in my feelings of “Writing conflict resolution chapters suuuuuuuuuuuuucks,” I decided to write a new game in the meantime. It’s just one of my little one-page role-playing games, and it’s here for your enjoyment. It’s a military-mystery game based on an alternate reality game.

The ARG itself was sort of poorly put together and didn’t make a ton of logical sense, but the people who were invested in it were invested to the hilt. I have some pretty hefty criticisms of it, and those criticisms were eventually responsible for my leaving the game, but this isn’t really the place to air those. In the role-playing game, a United States military operation has recruited civilian help to crack codes and gather intelligence on an important mission. This more-or-less mirrors the ARG (where the role the civilians played was much less clear). There is something crazy going on somewhere in the world, and it’s up to one agent, one strike team and a group of asshats from the internet to stop it.

If you’d like to take a look at the game, you can find it here.

If you’d like to take a look at the source material, you can find most of it here.

If you’d like to take a look at the source material for the source material, you can find it here.

Flavor in Game Design

I read an article talking about how Monte Cook is wrong to suggest that giving a dwarf with an axe a +1 bonus to hit because dwarves love axes. Story, the article said, is not tied to giving bonuses for stereotypical racial traits, and in fact make it more difficult to build characters outside of those stereotypes.

Except, the person who wrote the article didn’t even really bother to read what Mr. Cook was saying. Cook wasn’t at all talking about story. He was talking about flavor, and those are two very different things. Story is certainly a part of flavor, it is the thing that carries the weight of a game’s narrative, whether it’s a role-playing game, a board game or chess. The story of chess is very simple, and mostly implied, but it’s there. More important, though, the flavor of chess is has nothing to do with that implied story. Knight, pawn, bishop, queen. Each piece is named for a figure of medieval Europe.* This flavor is divorced from the story of “You are a commander. You meet an enemy on the field of battle.” The two are not one and the same. See, I could make a game with all of the pieces from chess with a totally different story, but it would still have chess-like flavor because of the nature of those pieces.

Flavor allows us to make assumptions about a game. If there are dwarves in your setting, there are some concessions you need to make to people who know what dwarves are. In some cases, you’ll need to strictly adhere to the tropes of the dwarven people. In other cases, you’ll run counter to those tropes. But in both situations, you need to be keenly aware of what those tropes are, what people are expecting from your inclusion of this flavor, and how to cater to or subvert those assumptions.

What Cook was suggesting was not that story should be dictated by +1 bonuses to hit with axes. What he was asking is “Should the fact that dwarves stereotypically like axes be reflected in a game’s mechanics? How closely should the tropes of the epic fantasy genre affect the design of a game with that genre’s tropes?” And it’s a fair question, one that begs to be answered by Ron Edwards. System matters, and how a system ties to the flavor of the game is an important point in how the game will be played. The systematic concessions made to setting determine the texture of the game, how it feels in your mouth while you’re chewing on it. This is one of the biggest reasons I’m worried that the Assumed Setting of Fifth Edition D&D will be the Forgotten Realms. I believe that any system designed to specifically cater to the Forgotten Realms as a setting will by necessity play more like Second Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

And while I love me some Second Edition D&D, I’m not really looking to play something that feels like it right now.

So, to answer Cook’s question: Should flavor determine mechanics? Yes. How much should it do so? As much as it makes sense in your design. I mean, I don’t know what you’re cooking up yet, so I can’t really speak to any given set of mechanical curiosities. I don’t even know if we’re looking at a top-down or a bottom-up design yet. In a top-down design, it makes a lot more sense to try and capture the flavor of the game mechanically. In a bottom-up design, you’ll be looking much more closely at how you can crow-bar the flavor to the kick-ass mechanics you’ve built.

Which actually makes me wonder how much thought has gone into the overall design philosophy this late in the game’s design. From what I understand, there is already a playtest-ready version of the game floating around. If we’re confused about fundamental design questions regarding the depth of flavor’s influence on the rules, color me slightly concerned.


*Yes, even pawn. Etymologically, it’s linked to the word pedonem, or foot soldier, in Anglo-French.

Six-Page Dungeons & Dragons

So, in the first iteration of this project, I made a one-page version of Dungeons & Dragons. It is a version of D&D that would fit on a single page in a novel, or roughly 250 words. This time, I wanted something a little more robust, something that could cover as much of the D&D game as I could while still restricting the amount of space in which I had to design. What I came up with was a version of the Dungeons & Dragons game that fits on a half-dozen novel-sized pages. You can find it below.

Interestingly, much of the space is taken up by character creation. I’m coming to believe that character creation is one of the most important aspects of the Dungeons & Dragons game, and that a great deal of that importance comes from customization, and a good deal of that customization comes from what the characters are able to do. Anyway, as per the last version, I’ll let the design speak for itself.

Creating a Character

Attributes: There are six attributes in this game. Each relates to a different sort of challenge that your character might come across during the course of a session. Those attributes are: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. The scores for these attributes are determined randomly by totaling the roll of three six-sided dice.

 

Attribute Modifiers: Each attribute has an “attribute modifier,” which is the number added to rolls when you are making a check. If your attribute is between the values listed in brackets, your attribute modifier is equal to the value listed to the left of the brackets.

 

(16-18) +2
(13-15) +1
(9-12) 0
(6-8) -1
(3-5) -2

 

Choose a Class: There are four classes in this game, Cleric, Fighter, Mage and Rogue. Each is good at different sorts of things. Pages 2-5 describe each class in depth.

 

Buy Gear: You have 100 gold with which to buy gear. There is a chart with sample equipment on it later.

 

Cleric

Clerics are priests and healers.

 

Hit Points:

· First Level: 1d6+Constitution Score

· Per Level: 1d6+Constitution Modifier

 

Bonuses: None

 

Armor and Weapons: A cleric can only use non-bladed weapons, and can wear any armor.

 

Turn Undead: With a prayer, a cleric can make undead creatures disintegrate. A cleric can destroy up to 1d4 of these creatures per every two levels.

 

Healing: With a prayer, a cleric can heal the wounds and illnesses of their allies. A cleric can heal 1d6 hit points, plus an additional hit point for every other level, starting with level 2.

 

Monastic Knowledge: Clerics know a lot about a lot. Ask a question to which you would like to know the answer and roll a d20 (+1 for every other level, starting at the second). If the result is 18 or higher, you have read something about your query, and can (sort of) remember it.

 

Fighter

 

Fighters excel at stabbing things to death. Their abilities and bonuses reflect this.

 

Hit Points

· First Level: 1d10+Constitution Score

· Per Level: 1d10+Constitution Modifier

 

Bonuses: +1 to hit every two levels, +1 to armor class every two levels, +1 to saving throws every two levels

 

Armor and Weapons: A fighter can use any sort of armor or weapons, including magical varieties.

 

Feats: Every second level, beginning at level 2, a fighter gains a “feat.” A feat is a once-time-use resource that allows the fighter to do something that would be impossible for a normal person. Spending a feat provides an automatic critical hit (double damage), and may have lasting effects in the battle at the Dungeon Master’s discretion.

 

Critical Hit: When a fighter rolls a natural 20 to hit, it automatically hits and deals double damage.

 

Mage

 

Mages use magic spells and call on the forces of darkness to defeat their foes. They are generally quite weak.

 

Hit Points

· First Level: 1d4+Constitution Score

· Per Level: 1d4+Constitution Modifier

 

Bonuses: +2 to saving throws every two levels

 

Armor and Weapons: Mages can only use staves or daggers, and cannot wear armor.

 

Spells: Mages get two spells at first level, and an additional spell every other level starting at level 2. A spell is a once-a-day resource that allows the mage to call on the forces of magic for aid. The effects of the spell are largely left up to the DM, but the more powerful the mage, the more powerful the effects of that mage’s spells should be. Spend some time fleshing out what your mage can and cannot do with your DM. Your spells should have descriptive names.

 

Rogue

 

Rogues are excellent at finding hidden things, disarming traps, and fighting dirty.

 

Hit Points:

· First Level: 1d6+Constitution Score

· Per Level: 1d6+Constitution Modifier

 

Bonuses: +2 to hit when the enemy has been hit by another ally. +2 to hit if you act before your enemy in the initiative order. +1 to hit for every third level starting at level 3.

Find and Disarm: Rogues are very good at finding hidden objects. Declare that you are searching the room and roll a d20 (+1 for every other level, starting at the second). If the result is 18 or higher, you find any hidden compartments, doors or traps in the room. If you find a trap, you may roll again, and a successful roll disarms the trap.

 

Fighting Dirty: When you hit an enemy that has already been hit by one of your allies this turn, you deal an additional 2d6 damage.

Rules:

When making a check: Determine which attribute makes the most sense for the check you are attempting to make. Roll a d20, and add the appropriate modifier plus half your level. If the result is greater than or equal to the difficulty number set by the DM, you succeed. If it is lower, you fail.

Initiative: At the beginning of combat, all combatants roll a d20+Dexterity. Each participant acts in order of highest-to-lowest initiative score.

AC: Your AC is equal to 10+(Dexterity or Constitution, whichever is higher)+(armor).

Combat Turn: During your turn you may move up to six squares (or 30 feet) and either attack or use one of your class abilities.

Death: When you reach zero hit points you die.

 

Going up a Level: When you reach a number of experience points equal to your current level multiplied by one thousand, you go up a level. Your DM will tell you how much experience you’ve gained for any given session of play, but you should usually gain about 10% of the amount of experience you need to gain a level during a session.

Equipment

 

Armor

Type	Bonus	Cost
Heavy	AC +4	60gp
Medium	AC +3	30gp
Light	AC +2	15gp
None	AC +0	0gp

Weapons

Weapon	Damage	Cost
Longsword	1d8	10gp
Shortsword	1d6	5gp
Battle Axe	1d12	15gp
Hand Axe	1d4	3gp
Dagger	1d4	1gp
Bow & Arrows	1d6 (range 100ft)	10gp (arrows 1gp)
Spear	1d6 (range 50ft)	1gp

 

Misc. Gear

Gear	Price
Ten foot pole	1gp
Ten days iron rations	5gp
Caltrops	2gp
Hammer and pitons	3gp
Rope 50’	1gp
Sacks	2gp
Waterskin	1
Tinderbox	1
Mirror	1
Flask of Oil	2
Lantern	10
Torches (10)	1
Wine (1 liter)	10

 

Magic Items

 

There are two types of magic items: simple and wondrous. A simple magic item is simply a magically enhanced version of a typical item of the same type. So, a magic sword is just a sword, but better (typically providing a bonus to strike or damage). Magical armor is just armor, but better (providing a bonus to AC). For every bonus of +1 to either hit or AC, or +1d6 to damage, a magic item costs 1000gp above and beyond the price of the item itself.

 

Wondrous items are items that are incredible in some way, like a sack that is bigger on the inside than the outside, or a ring that makes you invisible (and then calls the ire of the Dark Lord of All Evil upon you). Those sorts of items are much more rare and generally priceless, the creation of magics far beyond the understanding of current mages. You will typically only find wondrous items in the treasure troves of monsters, and the DM will tell you what those sorts of items do.

 

Monsters

 

Monsters have stats something like those of a player character, but much more simplified. The only things you really need to know about a monster are its AC, hit points, its bonus to hit, and any sort of special abilities it might have. Below, you will find a few monsters you and your friends can fight.

 

Skeletons
AC 14
Hit: +1 (1d6+1 damage)
Hit Points: 10
Special Abilities: Unless pounded into dust, a defeated skeleton will rise again in 1d10 rounds with 2 fewer hit points each time. A skeleton can cause a character to fear it, making that character run away as fast as it can every round for 1d4 rounds unless the target makes a saving throw.

 

Goblins
AC 16
Hit: +2 (1d6+1 damage)
Hit Points: 5
Special Abilities: A goblin can make a saving throw as a reaction to being hit. If it makes the save, it is missed instead.

 

Orcs
AC 12
Hit: +2 (1d10+4 damage)
Hit Points: 15
Special Abilities: Orcs feed off of violence. If an orc kills a character, it may make an immediate attack against another creature beside it.

 

Kobolds
AC 18
Hit: -1 (1d4 damage)
Hit Points: 1
Special Abilities: Each round, if a kobold is still alive, it can call for help. 1d6 more kobolds come to its aid.

 

Ooze
AC 5
Hit: +1 (1d4 damage)
Hit Points: 10
Special Abilities: If the ooze is hit by a magical weapon, another ooze appears beside it.

The Simplest D&D I Could Make

I made a one-page fantasy role-playing game.

Today I tried to do the impossible and got it mostly okay. I wanted to boil down Dungeons & Dragons to its most absolute basic. I wanted to design a version of the game that could be printed on a single page in a standard-sized novel, or 250 words. I think I did an okay job of it. I haven’t play-tested it, I haven’t even bothered to edit it, really. I just wanted to answer, for myself, what the essence of Dungeons & Dragons is. This is obviously super-simplified, and it would take at least a half-dozen pages of equal size to really sum up what Dungeons & Dragons should be, but this has helped me find my focus for what I think the game really is somewhat.

For instance, the game below doesn’t have any races in it. No elves, dwarves, halfings. Just the four core classes from the Basic Boxed Set. It also doesn’t have any feats, skills, backgrounds, themes, or other extraneous bits of crunch that make the game take up more space than it absolutely needs to. Are these things important to playing Dungeons & Dragons? I don’t think so, not really.

Still, I’ll let the game speak for itself some.

D&D in One Page (250 Words):

 

Roll 3d6 for each of: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Constitution. These are your attributes, or attribute scores.

 

Beside each write: (3-5) -2; (6-8) -1; (9-12) 0; (13-15) +1; (16-18) +2. These are your attribute modifier numbers. They are important.

 

Choose a Class: Fighter, Mage, Rogue, or Cleric.

 

Fighters have 1d10 plus their Constitution score hit points. They get to add half their level (and at least 1) to their rolls to hit enemies and their armor class.

 

Mages have 1d4 plus their constitution score hit points. Choose a number of spells (you or your DM decide their names and effects) equal to your intelligence modifier plus half your level.

 

Rogues have 1d6 plus their constitution score hit points. They get to roll a die to find traps or secret doors, or disarm traps. They add half their level to this roll.

 

Clerics have 1d8 plus their Constitution score hit points. They can heal an ally for 1d6 + half their level a number of times per day equal to their Wisdom modifier.

 

You have 100 gold with which to buy gear. The DM determines prices for gear, and what that gear does.

 

Rolling Dice: Determine which attribute makes most sense (DM chooses) and roll a d20 and add that attribute modifier. If the result is equal to or greater than ten (or in the case of combat, their AC), you succeed. If lower, you fail.

 

At 0 hit points, you die.

I don't own Dungeons & Dragons, and I’m making no claim to their rights, here. Obviously the game written above is only my interpretation of the simplest, most incredibly basic version of the game that can be distilled from thousands of pages of work by people far smarter and cooler than I am.

But if I were to build a modular game, it would be from a skeleton like this. It’s basically compatible with First Edition D&D, it has no mechanics that conflict with Third or Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons (with some tweaking for difficulty class and hit point total  stuff), and it’s about as elegant as a system can get. Give me a few days and I’ll pound out a 6-page version of the same game, as modular and simple as I can.

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.

Mini Anger

It's like Hors D'oeuvre Rage

So, we got in our order of Pathfinder Battles miniatures today. We don’t get to sell them until the 11^th, but I got to take a look at them and I have to say, I’m not particularly impressed. It seems that the good folks at Paizo haven’t learned much from the mistakes Wizards of the Coast made in their own miniatures lines, and in fact are moving further from a model that would actually be useful to the consumer. 

The product is a single random miniature per box, at $5 a pop, or a larger miniature for $7. The paint job is mediocre, the sculpts are passable, and the price point isn’t terrible. What rankles is that they’re a single random miniature per box.

Game Masters, the people who are known to buy the most role-playing game product, do not want random miniature packs, guys. As a person who stands behind the counter at a game store, I hear this refrain constantly. As a Game Master myself, I understand their lament. Game Masters don’t want random anything, they want a sack full of painted goblins. They want a sack of Generic Evil Dudes. They want a sack of zombies.

That last is great, because it’s a product that actually exists, one that was rather popular. It wasn’t for role-playing games, though, it was (unsurprisingly) for the board game Zombies. And they had their shit figured out, guys. They made a sack of zombies, and they sold a bunch of them. Then they made zombie cheerleaders and zombie dogs and zombie clowns, and all of those sets sold really, really well. They weren’t even painted, and they flew off the shelves. 

And it’s not all that difficult to understand why. A sack of themed dudes is invaluable in a role-playing game. It means you can buy a single product and be ready to sit down and play. It means that you can throw down with a bunch of similar baddies. If you’re going to randomize your miniatures, why not make it like Chessex’ Pound o’ Dice? Throw a bunch of random dudes in a sack and sell it as a separate product.

Players don’t want randomized miniatures, either. A player wants to find that One True Miniature that perfectly captures his or her character, that one miniature that says “Olgreth.” And buying a crapload of randomized boxes is frustrating, expensive and generally futile. He or she ends up with a bunch of miniatures he or she is never going to use. 

So the product we actually need, the product we would actually use, is three different products.

The first is a quarterly-released Sack o’ Dudes, a 100-pc. bag of plastic miniatures around a theme. You only need about 5 different types of monsters to make that worth it. Here’s your list for the first three years: Sack o’ Goblins, Sack o’ Orcs, Sack o’ Elves, Sack o’ Dwarves, Sack o’ Warriors, Sack o’ Mages, Sack o’ Cultists, Sack o’ Victims, Sack o’ Zombies, Sack o’ Kobolds (dragon-type), Sack o’ Oozes, Sack o’ Generic Evil Humans. You’re welcome.

The second is a painted miniature with Pathfinder branding that has a single miniature in it packaged like the pewter miniatures currently produced by Reaper. Those miniatures will be the player character miniatures, the Big Bad miniatures, the I-will-only-need-one-or-two-of-these miniatures. Clear plastic in the front, cardboard in the back, pre-painted plastic miniature in the bubble. Put out two or three of these every month. I already bring in the Reaper Pathfinder miniatures, and I would happily put a pre-painted, plastic alternative right next to them. And people would gladly buy both. Some people like painting, and others want something they can use out of the box. Providing both of those groups with good options is just good business.

Finally, the third product is something akin to the D&D Beholders and Dragons sets. A single-purchase item for a miniature or set of miniatures that is fucking incredible. I want Colossal Red Dragons again. Or a Jabberwock. Or a Bandersnatch.

This isn’t rocket science, and I’m really dismayed that this product went all the way from design through to my storefront without someone pointing out that randomized miniatures for role-playing games had been tried, and failed. And when someone puts out a miniature line that actually makes sense, you can bet that’s where my money will be going.

Game Stuff

I feel like I need to remind everyone that this is ostensibly a game blog. I talk a lot about my travels, and people seem to be generally interested in those things, but I started this blog to talk about games and gaming, and I’ve been pretty lax on that for a long time. This entire vacation I’ve avoided talking about anything game-related, with the exception of how Alcatraz is wicked-cool from a dungeon perspective.

So today I’m going to go over every day of this vacation and talk about how that day’s events can translate into an in-game event. Good? Excellent.

Chapter Eight: Fighting the Ocean

The following stat block is for the the Ocean. As a bad guy. Because everyone should have an epic slapping match with the wild blue, yeah? Yeah.

The Ocean			Level 40 Solo
Gargantuan natural animate (aquatic, swarm)			XP 555,000
HP 1893; Bloodied 947 Regeneration 20 (if the Ocean takes cold damage, its regeneration deactivates until the end of its next turn.) AC 51; Fortitude 58; Reflex 48; Will 55 Speed 6 Immune fire, acid, disease, sleep; Resist 20 primal; Vulnerability 25 cold Saving Throws +5; Action Points 2			Initiative +25 Perception +30
Traits
O Wave Aura • Aura 1000
Creatures that start their turn within the aura take 20 force damage and ongoing 15 drowning damage (save ends).
Standard Actions
C Battering Waves (force) • At-Will
Attack: Close Burst 50 (Targets: creatures in burst); +43 vs. Fortitude
Hit: 2d10 + 17 force damage.
C Tsunami (force) • Recharge 5 6
Attack: Close Burst 100 (Targets creatures in burst); +43 vs. Reflex
Hit: 2d10 + 17 force damage and the Ocean shifts 20 squares.
C Sea of Blood (force, necrotic) • Encounter
Attack: Close Burst 100 (targets creatures in burst); +45 vs. AC
Hit: 2d10 + 17 force and necrotic damage and the target takes 20 ongoing necrotic damage (save ends).
First Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 25 ongoing necrotic damage (save ends).
Second Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 30 ongoing necrotic damage and is slowed (save ends).
Third Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 40 ongoing necrotic damage and is helpless (save ends).
Move Actions
Shifting Tides • Recharge when bloodied.
Effect: The Ocean shifts 20 squares and makes a Battering Waves attack at any point during the move. .
Minor Actions
To the Horizon and Beyond • Encounter
Effect: The Ocean spends an action point and gains 600 hit points and shifts 20 squares.
Skills Endurance +38, Intimidate +38, Nature +35
Str 33 (+31)	Dex 27 (+28)	Wis 30 (+30)
Con 36 (+33)	Int 27 (+28)	Cha 36 (+33)
Alignment      Languages —
© 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This formatted statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

Chapter Seven: City Parks

Parks as we currently understand them are a relatively new thing. Originally, rich nobles would own large plots of green space for game hunting. It wasn’t until the late 1800’s that landscapers were commissioned to build public parks in the interest of creating areas for relaxation and exercise. Philanthropic industrialists and landowners often gave parks as gifts to the public, though many were also built through public subscription. The best parks, and those with the most innovative designs, have proven very robust and have continued to adapt to meet the needs of those who use them today.

Most of the societies we use as backdrops for games have technology roughly on par with that of medieval Europe. Parks during this time would be game parks primarily, though the high levels of magic and industry would certainly make parks a realistic inclusion in those games. In a medieval fantasy game, you might find your party asked to aid in the building or designing of a park with particular needs (we want to preserve the local indigenous Flargbargle population, but not have them interact with visitors, you see…), or using a park as a location for adventure. Parks are, in many ways, quite like classic dungeons. There are branched paths, awesome conflict locations, and lots of places to hide. They could also be an area near the party’s home base, and a constant source of trouble, should those Flargbargles decide to get out and light things on fire.

For more modern games, from the Victorian-style leanings of steampunk-inspired worlds to the 1920’s Cthulhu weird horror games, parks are an awesome way to shake up the scenery some without leaving the urban textures of the setting. Some parks may even serve as a source of inspiration for adventures in these milieus. As an example:

This is Birkenhead Park. It is one of the more impressive parks created by Mr. Joseph Paxton in 1847. It is, according to the good folks at Wikipedia, the first publically funded civic park in Britain. It inspired landscape architect Frederick Olmstead to incorporate many of its elements in New York’s Central Park and Sefton Park in Liverpool.

It is not well known for its links to the paranormal, other areas Paxton created are. The Crystal Palace has been the home to a number of strange goings on, the Conservative Wall is likely haunted, and the Emperor Fountain’s charm is the site of at least a dozen cult rituals.

Birkenhead Park is no different, except that it is perhaps more subtle. Locked away in a secret crypt somewhere in this park is an amulet that, when combined with its counterparts in Central Park and Sefton Park, will release the Demon Azzulat from its prison beneath the Conservative Wall. Paxton knew this, and made sure to incorporate keys to recapture the demon hidden in his various works. Now a cult has begun searching for the amulets, and one has already been found. It’s up to you and yours to stop them.

Chapter Six: Cultures Within Cities

I think one of the greatest problems with role-playing game descriptions of places is that we tend to lump things together in a strange way. This country is where the evil-bad sorcerers live. This kingdom is like Iowa, but with more wizards. Everyone in this duchy has a pet that is also their soul that is also their source of Power. It’s not unlike the Star Wars planet problem. Hoth is the icy winter planet. Dagoba is the swamp planet. Coruscant is the city planet. It’s all rather silly, because for a planet to bear human-like life, that planet needs to have diversity, but for the sake of easy storytelling, it’s just a lot simpler to have your whole planet made up of a single thing. So instead of journeying to the swamp, you journey to the swamp planet, and that makes enough sense to us as far as internal consistency is concerned that we don’t really think about it.

But planets have a lot of things going on in them, and as gamers we have a lot more opportunity to check those things out. I mean, we have hours and hours to explore the various aspects of a planet or, in a fantasy setting, a city or country.

San Francisco is a city made up of a bunch of smaller cities. Chinatown, for instance, boasts the world’s largest ethnic Chinese population currently living outside of China. The Castro has a totally different feel to it than Market street, and Nob Hill is a very different place from Fisherman’s Wharf. Each of these neighborhoods is tied together by proximity, language (mostly), government and the like, but hanging out on Castro street eating lunch is a very different experience than hanging out on Sutter street having lunch.

I hope this chart helps.

The Neighborhood…

1. Is filthy mess
2. Is clean as a whistle
3. Is entirely vegetarian
4. Is incredibly conservative
5. Is incredibly liberal
6. Is owned by thieves
7. Is owned by industrialists/wizards
8. Is owned by noblewomen
9. Believes in a local religion very strongly
10. Believes in a local religion more than usual
11. Dislikes a local religion more than usual
12. Dislikes a local religion very strongly
13. Likes a minority group more than usual
14. Dislikes a minority group more than usual
15. Will riot at the slightest provocation
16. Will riot with the right motivation
17. Is incredibly peaceful
18. Requires incredible motivation to riot
19. Is paved with local rock that is hard to find elsewhere
20. Is paved with rock that is hard to find here
21. Has more shops than usual
22. Has less shops than a community of this size requires
23. Has a strong police presence
24. Has no police presence
25. Has unique architecture
26. Speaks a strange dialect
27. Speaks a language different from the surrounding neighborhoods
28. Eats a food different from the surrounding neighborhoods
29. Includes a group of people normally outcast in this society (goblins, elves, the Amish)
30. Produces a specific food better than anyone else in the world
31. Produces a specific food that no one else really likes, but is very popular here (onion cakes)
32. Hates a group of people normally included in this society
33. Has a horrible pest problem
34. Has a horrible disease problem
35. Is more hilly than the surrounding area
36. Is less hilly than the surrounding area
37. Is more swampy than the surrounding area
38. Is completely barren of vegetation
39. Is completely overgrown with vegetation
40. Is composed of a racial group that is a very tight-knit community
41. Is composed of a racial group that is warring within itself
42. Is mostly vampires
43. Has a lot more children than adults
44. Has a lot more old people than young people
45. Has a lot more young adults than old people or children
46. Is artistic
47. Is Spartan
48. Is Sparta
49. Requires a strange mode of transportation to reach it
50. Requires a resource that is difficult to find in the local area
51. Has a local group of heroes and disdains outsiders
52. Is actively recruiting a group of heroes to represent and protect it
53. Has a local group of monsters and disdains outsiders
54. Is actively recruiting a group of monsters to harrass and bother it
55. Eats a sentient humanoid race as a delicacy
56. Eats a sentient humanoid race as a staple
57. Has a school for wizards at its heart
58. Has a school for fighters at its heart
59. Has a school for bards at its heart
60. Is the university district
61. Is the college district
62. Is the theatre district
63. Is the financial core
64. Centers around a dock, port or gate
65. Is home to a bird sanctuary
66. Is the most commercial district and thus attracts the most vagrants
67. Has a ridiculous number of magic item shops, some legit and others fake
68. Has a horrible reputation but is actually a nice place
69. Has a great reputation but is actually where a lot of murders happen
70. Has a great reputation and is a really nice place, but a lot of murders happen there
71. Is a great sea-serpent/gryphon/unicorn watching spot
72. Is controlled by a local cult
73. Is controlled by a local comedian
74. Is controlled by a local chef
75. Is controlled by a player character’s mother
76. Is a gambling district, full of well-run casinos
77. Is a gambling district, full of run down cheat-houses
78. Is a gambling district where the gambling isn’t for money
79. Is the best place in the country to buy work pants
80. Is the best place in the country to buy magic weapons or armor
81. Is the worst place in the country
82. Has the best public education in the city
83. Has a public education system that is terrible, but one plucky teacher is making a difference
84. Has a public education system that is misinforming its students
85. Has no public education system at all and is proud of that thank you very much
86. Has a taboo about shoes
87. Has a taboo about kangaroos
88. Has a taboo about sloughs
89. Has a taboo about schools
90. Has a taboo about imperfect rhymes
91. Is more sexually open-minded
92. Is more sexually closed-minded
93. Is incredibly boring
94. Is known for its hair styles
95. Is known for its unique fashion sense
96. Has a unique power source
97. Has its own mayor, town council and bylaws
98. Has an alderman that is an animal (not anthropomorphic, just a bear in a fez)
99. Is missing
100. Is a lie

Chapter Five: Expanding the Dungeon Epiphany

Dungeons in medieval Europe usually happened in towers, and for good reason. A tower is hard to escape, easy to guard, and manages to make a lot of concerns like ventilation and sunlight (needed to keep prisoners relatively healthy) from becoming actual problems.

In the modern era, we have perfected dungeons. There are no dungeons ever created that are more horrible than the prisons currently occupied by Cuban criminals. It has taken centuries of dedicated work and design to create conditions as horrible as those we expect modern convicts to live in, and that is a pretty terrifying thing.

As I’m sure you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m one of those bleeding heart liberal types that believes we should be aiming at rehabilitation and lowering the instances of reoffending rather than punishing criminals for their immoral deeds. I don’t believe that punishment at all helps us as a society. I believe that the system as it stands creates better criminals, not people ready to re-enter the work-a-day world.

But if you want a truly terrifying dungeon (and who doesn’t?), one that is built to house people and not Precious Stuff, here’s how you do it:

The cells have to be small. Very small. Claustrophobically small. A 5’x7’ cell leaves room for exactly nothing. You have a bed, a metal table and chair that are built into the wall, a toilet and a small shelf for personal effects above that toilet. You keep your clothes in a trunk under your bed.

The regimen has to be brutal. Shower twice per week. Go outside twice per week for recreation and exercise. Work your ass off six days per week at whatever shit job the prison has been commissioned to do. Fifteen minutes to pray on Sunday. Not Christian? Not my problem.

The punishments have to be severe. And when I say severe, I don’t mean “Beat you with sticks,” severe, I mean “Damage you psychologically for the rest of your life,” severe. The Hole is bigger than your average cell, but it doesn’t get any light, it doesn’t get any fresh air, it gets just enough to keep you alive, and you stay in it 24-hours a day. That may not seem like much, but it fucking gets to you. I stood in the Hole for a minute, maybe two, with the door wide open. It scared the shit out of me.

The prisoners are not people. They are prisoners. They get no rights. They get three meals a day, they get to be clean and healthy. Everything else is a privilege.

Also, if you wanted to run a prison scenario in your game, I would highly suggest adapting Vampire’s morality system and applying it to behavior. If you’re on your best behavior, you gain Privilege. When you break the rules, you get punished, and that punishment slowly breaks you, turning you into a monster.

Morality	Crime
10	Thinking about breaking a rule
9	Minor, unnoticed rule break
8	Injury to another (accidental or otherwise)
7	Minor smuggling (cigarettes, food)
6	Major smuggling (utensils, weapons)
5	Intentional damage to prison property or the property of another inmate
4	Impassioned crime (manslaughter)
3	Planned crime (escape attempt, murder)
2	Casual, callous crime (serial murder, torture for a purpose)
1	Perversion or heinous act (mass murder, torture for entertainment)

Punishments depend mostly on the sort of crime committed and whether or not the inmate is caught doing it. They could range from having to do an extra bout of cleaning duty to a week in the Hole. Most of those at 5 or below end up with extended sentences, from a few more years to a couple of decades.

Chapter Four: What Makes a Good Game vs. A Good Genre Game?

I think my scale of “What Makes a Good Comic Book Movie” works for games, too. There are games that are just really good, solid examples of gaming. And there are good Fantasy Heartbreakers. And good Space Opera games. But they aren’t necessarily the same thing; a fantasy game can be a good game without being a good Fantasy Game. Take Mouse Guard, for instance. It’s a fantasy game, for sure. You play mice with technology roughly equal to that found in the middle ages. It’s a really good game, one of the best role-playing games I’ve ever played. But it isn’t a very good fantasy game. There are no spells or orcs or trolls; just a bunch of animals. It’s not very tactically deep, which good fantasy games have at their core. It’s got a really solid narrativist slant towards character advancement that I like quite a bit, which puts it more into the realm of Good Indie Game than Good Fantasy Game. In short, it’s a really good game, but it’s not a very good fantasy game.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, I’d put D&D 3.5. It’s not a very good game, really. The rules are clunky and fit together in strange ways. There are things that make exactly no sense at all (grapple rules, anyone? item creation?) but nothing about the game really shines, except maybe how easy it is to put a new skin on it and call it something else. But no matter what sort of flavor you put on it, Type III D&D is a fantasy game at its core, and it’s a damned good one.

So what’s the difference?

Good Games are games that push the envelope, do things that games haven’t really done before, or find new and interesting ways to do things we’ve just sort of taken for granted. Nobilis does things with diceless play that exemplify what role-playing games without randomizers can do. Mouse Guard does new and interesting things with turn structure and conflict resolution. The Dramatic Unisystem rocked a really solid dramatic editing system. The Gumshoe system solved a really simple, but pervasive, problem in investigative role-playing. These are things that are revolutionary and powerful, and they’re the sort of innovations that shape the direction of gaming for many years.

Good Genre Games don’t need to be good games. They don’t need to innovate, they don’t need to do things differently or break new ground. They have to instead typify the genre they are attempting to emulate. RIFTS is not a good game, but it is a good genre game, and that is part of why it is as pervasively popular as it has been. Don’t Rest Your Head is a really good horror game, but it doesn’t really do anything innovative or definitive for gaming. It’s just a fun game about getting sleepy, then getting scared, then going crazy. I think perhaps the best example of a Good Genre Game is Exalted. The game itself is shit. The system is just a bastardization of what White Wolf has been doing for decades, the mechanical side of the game is entirely busted and the writing is poorly at best. But it captures the genre of over-the-top Shonen anime better than any game I’ve ever seen. Better, even, than Big Eyes, Small Mouth, which fits in the Good Game category.

And there are certainly games that fall into both categories. Dread, for instance, does something for horror games I’ve never seen before (actually instilling some sense of fear in a game) through a mechanic that I’d never seen used before (a Jenga tower), while perfectly capturing the essence of horror fiction. It is both a Good Game and a Good Genre Game.

If only there were more of those.

Chapter Three: Mixing it Up – Travel Wise

The intrepid heroes must travel many days by horse to reach the dungeon of Kazaakh’Thuul wherein lies the evil lich Bastaard the Badguy.

Or.

The intrepid heroes travel a day by horse, trading in their mounts for coin to pay for the ferry to the next village and hopefully enough for passage by airship or railcar across the mountains before renting camels to cross the sandy desert for six days to reach the pyramid of Kazaakh’Thuul wherein lies the evil lich Bastaard the Badguy.

Travel is boring. We tend to gloss over it because sitting in one spot for three hours mostly sucks, and we don’t want to describe the incredible ennui we experience while moving from point A to point B via sitting around doing nothing. It’s a lot more exciting when travel involves kicking the crap out of stuff while you’re moving, right?

Except that travel offers some interesting opportunities in role-playing games that we don’t often think about. As an example, take my first ride on a ferry. While it certainly doesn’t compare to the experience of walking on a castle’s battlements, it was cool to be able to finally ride on one. For some people, this isn’t a big deal at all; they take ferries every day. But living in landlocked Northern Alberta, riding a ferry was pretty awesome for me. Moreover, it gave me a chance to interact with my travelling companion in a meaningful way (and in a less meaningful media-in-my-eyeballs way), and to have a few interesting experiences regarding ferry coffee and bad café food. It was pretty great.

And most real travel doesn’t happen in one travel mode. You can’t get to most places by plane, you have to get close and then take a ferry, boat, or train and then drive or walk the rest of the way. People didn’t take wagons from one side of the continent to the other while settling Canada and the USA; they took trains, rode horses, took wagons, walked, climbed, forded rivers the hard way… There are very few occasions when one form of travel will get you where you’re going, and you’re going to need to mix and match.

How this interacts with your game is sort of up to you. You could easily just pass your players an itinerary that shows them how they get from one place to another and ask what they do during each stage. You could provide a few options, and have some interesting features plotted out for various points during various journeys. Provide situations in which the player characters have to interact with one another, because nothing else is going to happen for a while. Give the player characters an opportunity to find the magic in a form of travel they’ve never experienced before. I mean, riding a ferry isn’t a fantastic experience, but for me, it was a big deal, because it was my first time. Has your half-orc barbarian ever ridden an airship before? Probably not, so what is he or she feeling?

Chapter Two: When the Students Come to Visit – On the Topic of Mentors

We went to visit N’s school while we were in Comox, and that gave me a bit of a strange nostalgic feeling about visiting my old teachers whenever I came back to the town I graduated in. Every once in a great while, I’d stop by the school to visit Mr. D or Mr. F or Ms. W, and it was always sort of a strange experience. I mean, they’d done their job, right? They taught me enough to get me through finals, and now I had passed my finals, and was arguably an adult.

The trip got me thinking about a player character’s mentors. I’m coming at this from a very D&D-oriented viewpoint, because in D&D one of the big blanks in character creation is social areas. Every D&D character’s parents are dead so that you never, ever have to interact with them. No one was ever taught how to do their jobs, they just know, or they went to faceless schools and never had any favorite teachers or instructors. No one has ever served under a commanding officer, they were just in the army.

Mouse Guard rocks mentors in a very real way. There is, in fact, an entire chapter in character creation devoted to the mouse that taught you what you know, and there are plot hooks deep in the concept. When we were making our first round of characters for Mouse Guard, one of my players found that he liked his character’s mentor more than he liked his own character, which is, in my opinion, the definition of a great supporting character. It reminds me Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Anthony Stewart Head is easily the best actor in the series, and his character is incredibly believable, fun, scary, amusing and just a little sexy. He is, in nearly every way, more interesting than the titular character, which makes him a great background character, and adds a lot of depth to the series.

So what happens when you go back and visit a mentor who has taught you everything you know? What sort of relationship is that? There’s a pretty solid relationship gradient, from “still trying to teach you things,” to “why are you bothering me? figure it out on your own…” But trying to figure that relationship out before you ever have to go back and meet your mentor is going to add a lot to the interactions you have with him or her.

Also, mentors serve as great plot hooks. Roll a d10

1. Your mentor is in trouble. Some horrible bad thing is trying to get to the player character by doing naughtybad things to people that character cares about. Go save!
2. Your mentor is in trobule. Some horrible bad thing from the mentor’s past is coming back to haunt her, and she cannot deal with it alone. She needs your help!
3. Your mentor is in trouble. Whatever nasty badness your party is already dealing with has decided to make him a focus for whatever evil plot they’re trying to pull off.
4. Your mentor has hired you. She needs you to find a dingus of great power from the nastiest dungeon in the area, and can’t do it herself because of that back injury from a few years ago.
5. Your mentor has hired you. He has a rival in town that is likely doing naughty things, and he would like you to look into it.
6. Your mentor has hired you. She’s double booked herself with jobs and needs you to take one of her obligations off her hands.
7. Your mentor has become a villain. He has holed up in a castle in the middle of nowhere and is sending minions out to do bad things on his behalf.
8. Your mentor has become a villain. She has obtained a mystical artifact of some power and is using it to wreck havoc on everyone and everything around her.
9. Your mentor has become a villain. He has begun building an army to take down the current reigning whoever of the whereplace.
10. Your mentor is in trouble for becoming a villain and is hiring you to deal with her public relations problem.

Chapter One: Family Ties

Most characters in a role-playing games don’t value family at all. Chances are your character is a single child of deceased parents who raised him or herself on the mean streets of disconnection and neglect. Which is, honestly, very lazy of you. Most people don’t bother fleshing out their character’s family life at all. I know I sure don’t, but I’ve come to terms with my laziness. When I do, it’s usually as an aside, or a cute character quirk, but most of my characters don’t have attachments to people, because those really seem to get in the way of adventure.

Which I guess is sort of the point of this section. Family is just going to get in your way, and that’s a good thing. Knowing how your parents are and what they do for a living, knowing where you have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, and cousins is going to make adventuring a little tough. I mean, look at all those potential Bad Guy Targets. Moreover, what happens if you don’t really like most of your family?

I grew up pretty privileged in that I actually get along with my mom and dad pretty well. My brothers are both wicked people. I don’t really have a lot of contact with my extended family, but I know who they are and what they’re about, generally. Most of them are Mormon (I am not), with the exception of J, who converted to Catholicism when she married her beau. Most have big families, with the exception of T, who came out of the closet a few years ago and whose son is still dealing. Most are well adjusted, with the exception of DL, who held his children hostage in a motel with a vacuum attachment, once.

See, and this is the sort of thing your character can bring to the table if you have a chance to broaden out the family history beyond whatever is on your character sheet. Who is your Aunt Betty? What’s she about? What does she do? What’s one story you could tell about her that would make the rest of the table go “Wha?”

As an example, I’m going to flesh out a character’s uncle, and then leave you a blank template to copy/paste and use at your leisure.

Name: Uncle Bartlebus
Occupation: Thatcher
Hobby: Music. Bart’s had a lute in his attic for years and every once in a while he’ll bust it out and play a few songs from when he had longer hair and a grudge.
Physically: Bart’s a huge guy, and strong. Thatch is heavy, and it goes on roofs. Age is starting to show around the temples, though, and some wrinkles have begun to show up around the eyes.
Mentally: Insecure and a little attention-grabby. Immature. Wishes he’d gone along with a travelling musician’s troupe when he was younger but has a wife and kids to look after now.
One Story: That time he drove the wagon too fast and lamed the horse two days out of town, and we all had to hitch a ride with some strangers who we were convinced were going to kill and eat us.

Name:
Occupation:
Hobby:
Physically:
Mentally:
One Story:

Fill this out five times, and you have a rough skeleton of a family going.