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.

Yu-Gi-Oh! is a Bad Game (But Doesn’t Have to Be)

This is a really long post…

As a person who plays games for a living, I take them pretty seriously. And usually, I can check my emotions at the door about a game; the fact that I dislike a game does not make the game “bad.” Whether or not I like a game is a matter of personal aesthetic, and I’m willing to recognize that. To be fair, there are a bunch of games I like that aren’t good. I’m quite fond of Exalted, for instance, and for all that I laude the Game Master’s Guide, 7th Sea, as a game, kinda sucked.

There are a few games, though, that are both Games I Dislike and Bad Games. They’re pretty few and far between, honestly. FATAL. Racial Holy War. That role-playing game about the bishonen boys with sea anemones for penises. All three of these show up on any Worst Role-playing Games Ever Published list. The Star Wars collectible card game is on my list. Steve Jackson’s non-collectible Burn in Hell was atrocious. Most of these games, though, don’t have a huge fan following, either because they are bad, or because whatever cross-market synergy the designers were trying to build never really got off the ground. (For example, I love Star Wars, and I love collectible card games, so a collectible card game about Star Wars has to be the next best thing to perfect, ne?)

Yu-Gi-Oh! is the beneficiary of one of the most successful cross-market synergy campaigns ever created. There is an animated series based on the already-successful manga, there are video games and toys. There is really no better way to tap into their target market than to toss a cartoon at it. Chaotic tried the same thing, and for a while the game was wildly popular (the game was kinda meh, and the production schedule mishaps kept it from attaining any real popularity).

So Yu-Gi-Oh! is wildly popular. In the mass market, it’s the most popular collectible card game in the world. Sadly, being popular does not make the game good.

Understand that my issues with Yu-Gi-Oh! have nothing to do with the game’s rules. Honestly, if the game were played as it was originally designed, it would be pretty solid. The rules are simple and elegant, and the strategy has the possibility of real depth. I remember being pretty impressed with the game when it first came out (back when there were a lot of creatures with no abilities, and trap and spell cards were the tits). There are some things that strike me as entirely arbitrary (monster levels, for instance; you could simply separate monsters into three different levels: normal, tribute, double-tribute, and be done with it), but none of those things are enough to break the game in horrible ways.

No, the issues I have with Yu-Gi-Oh!, the reasons I think it is a bad game, are these:

1) Card and Set Irrelevance
2) The Banned List
3) Game Speed
4) Solitaire

1) Card and Set Irrelevance

In any given pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, there is a miniscule chance that you will open a card that is good. This isn’t to say that the card you open is amazing or jaw-dropping, just good. I sell packs of Yu-Gi-Oh! in my store, and I cannot count the number of times I have found entire packs of cards just sitting opened on tables or counters, nothing having been taken from them because even the rare card in the pack isn’t worth anything. This is a problem frequently encountered in eternal-format card games. Only two or three cards released in an entire set of Yu-Gi-Oh! are any good. Out of over a hundred cards per set. And sets are released every three months or so.

Imagine how many trees have died to produce cards people aren’t even using in their decks.

And it’s never the commons that are any good. It’s always the rarer-than-rare cards, the so-called Secret Rare or Ghost Rare. You might find one of these cards per box. Which means that twenty three other packs of cards are a complete waste of paper, foilwrap and money. When each booster pack costs $5, that turns into a lot of cash, fast.

And older sets are completely irrelevant now. There are boxes of the earliest sets that have one or two cards that used to be good but aren’t anymore that will sit on a shelf forever. Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon packs are worth almost nothing save the nostalgia value of opening a pack and seeing a bunch of monster cards with no effects and trap and spell cards that simply aren’t very good. Entire sets of cards have been obsoleted, making the eternal aspect of the game completely ridiculous.

2) The Banned List

When I play Magic: The Gathering, I play Limited formats or Type 2 (Standard). I like having a smaller, more stable card pool, and there hasn’t been a time in recent memory that they’ve had to ban a card from Standard (skullclamp being the example I can think of). Having a limit on the number of sets allowed in a format means that there are fewer ridiculous synergies to look out for when publishing new cards, so the development team can focus on rooting those synergies out, and then worry about longer-winded formats later. You can work on balancing a set against itself and the most recent iterations of the game.

Yu-Gi-Oh! solves synergy problems by banning them. When a particular card or deck becomes too powerful, the players who have invested in those cards and decks no longer get to play them. Sorry, Monster Reborn, you’re just too good. Bye bye, Judgement Dragon, you’ve appeared in too many decks. Oh look, Lightsworn is getting too powerful, let’s ban half the cards on the list. I don’t even play Yu-Gi-Oh!, and this pisses me off. People pay for those cards, people search for them for months, just to have them torn from their fingers because the card is too good. At least with a rotation, you can plan for it; you can see that a set is going to be leaving the format soon and sell the cards that will no longer be legal for that format. Or retire them to a casual-deck pile. Or set them aside for a different format that you play.

3) Game Speed

Last year, there were three or four decks that could kill you on turn one in the Yu-Gi-Oh! metagame. That is terrifying. That isn’t a game of strategy, that’s a game of chance. A couple of weeks ago, one of my customers went to the Canadian Nationals. He finished third, and told me that the deck that had beaten him did so on the first turn of games one and three. This was after a huge banned-list update that had gotten rid of all the previously discovered first-turn-win decks in the game.

A first-turn win is the first indicator of a broken meta-game, in my opinion. Even at its slowest, Yu-Gi-Oh! sports a consistent turn-three win strategy. It’s too fast. There’s no time to strategize, it really comes down to whether or not you’ve drawn the cards that will allow you to “go off” on the earliest possible turn. I don’t need to worry about attack or block positions, what traps or spells you’ve set, or what you have in hand. If my deck goes off, I win. If yours goes off first, I lose. Which brings me to point four, and my biggest issue with Yu-Gi-Oh! as a game.

4) Solitaire

One of the biggest reasons I think Burn in Hell is a bad game is that it rarely effects your opponent’s side of the game. You collect your bits, you make the best sets you can, and your opponent does the same. You strategize and plot and plan, sure, but you do it independent of your opponent’s actions. A good game needs to be interactive on all sides. I need to be able to effect what my opponent is doing in a meaningful way, set them back, make them lose the board advantage, make them ditch cards from hand, or from the top of the deck. And they should be able to do the same sorts of things to me. In a game like A Game of Thrones, there’s a lot of that; the whole game is about interaction with other players, from the job I take at the beginning of the new round (“Oh, sorry, you needed to be the Hand this turn? Oh, and look at that, you’re supporting me…”) to stealing Power from an opponent’s House card and then beefing it up with Renown. Every part of the game involve some level of player interaction, and that is what makes A Game of Thrones so incredibly deep as a game.

Magic is actually a pretty poor example for this, because combo decks don’t really rely on interaction at all, and combo decks are a long, proud history in Magic. When your deck goes off, you sit on one side of the table playing it through, doing whatever it is that wins you the game, and your opponent just sits there and takes it for a while. One of the most gracious thing I’ve seen a Magic player do is start running their combo, look across the table to their opponent, show the opponent their hand, and then ask: “Do you need me to play this through?” It wasn’t asked as a snotty remark, it was a concession that watching a combo deck explode in your face fucking sucks. There’s nothing fun about watching someone play solitaire while there’s nothing you can do about it.

Every good deck in Yu-Gi-Oh! is a combo deck. It is designed to kill you regardless of your own actions. It has answers to all of your actions, so that you don’t even get to make them. I watched a guy recently throw down a combination of cards that removed everything his opponent had on the table and then swung in for lethal damage. Just to make sure his opponent had no answer. On turn three. If that were a Magic game, his opponent would be pissed, and rightfully so. When a Dragonstorm deck goes off, and a million things happen on one side of the board on turn three, and someone loses, it’s a piss-off. But what makes these two decks different is that the Magic deck was legal for a couple of weeks before the key cards rotated out of the format. And as soon as the deck was in the meta-game, for those few weeks people developed answers for it. Dragonstorm didn’t take the Worlds because it was amazing; it took the worlds because no one saw it coming. It was a masterful metagame call. In Yu-Gi-Oh! it’s just the state of the game.

So how do you make Yu-Gi-Oh! good?

Anyone who frequents my store and plays a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! has already heard me rant about this, and it’s nothing I haven’t been saying for months. The first and most important fix is that the organized Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments need to branch into multiple formats that focus on different releases for the game. The organized play that is currently standard should stay; there will always be people who love playing in eternal formats, and there’s nothing wrong with them. But for those players who are new to the game, or those who are looking for strategy that goes deeper than “My deck goes off, you lose,” having a smaller card pool makes the game a lot more entertaining. It slows the game down, as well, because the crazy one-turn-kill synergies exist spread out across a bunch of different sets from all over the Yu-Gi-Oh! timeline. My personal suggestion has been “Go two years back.” The cards that have been released in the past two years, those cards are legal in the narrower format; this includes all of the new booster sets, the new starter decks, the new premium packs, what have you. If it’s been printed and sent out in the past two years, you can use it. For a slightly broader format, go back five years.

Where the organized play goes, the casual play will follow. Though, to be honest, casual players will play whatever the fuck they want anyway, with no thought wasted on what’s going on in the tournament scene (past: this is a good deck, so I will thief it).

Konami needs to rethink the way their sets are released, as well. Each set needs to have something to offer to whatever decks they want to support from now on. If Gadgets are going to be a thing, every set is going to need to see some Gadgets. If Lightsworn is the new hotness, having some Lightsworn cards in each set doesn’t seem like a terrible idea. But it’s more than deck archetypes, too. The Magic guys have figured out what players want from their game, and they try to provide those things in spades. There are cards for guys who love smashing face, and cards that need some creative thought to break into something good. There are cards for people who love to lock their opponents down, and cards for people who want to stop that from happening. When you know what your players want, and you design your game’s expansions around those things, the sets you produce become a lot more cohesive. Also, understanding the new formats is important so that you can design cards for each of them; giving the eternal formats a bomb (for the sake of funny, let’s say there’s a new Toonworld printed that is strictly better than the current Toonworld), the narrower formats aren’t going to be able to use it effectively, which is fine, but you need to provide the narrow format guys some love, too.

And having a healthy testing/development team together to make sure that the cards aren’t broken before you release them is a much better strategy than simply banning the cards that are too powerful. When a card like Judgement Dragon is able to take over the game because it is simply that good you probably shouldn’t have released the card in the first place. This happens occasionally in every large-format card game (Bitterblossom, I’m looking at you…), but the chances of it happening are far reduced when you limit the synergies available in most organized play events. Fully testing your cards before you send them out to the public is a good way to trim down an already glutted banned list, reducing the number of cards that cost $700 two days ago and are now just a chunk of foiled cardboard.

Mixing a narrower format with better set design increases card relevance, too. When I open a pack of Legend of the Five Rings cards, there is something relevant in that pack for nearly everyone. Honestly, though, L5R is a bad example of card relevance; a lot of people only play in a single clan, and if you don’t get any good cards for your clan in that pack, it was a useless pack for you. It’s still more likely to be good than a Yu-Gi-Oh! pack! This is because commons and uncommons are relevant in L5R in ways that they are not in Yu-Gi-Oh!. The number of good common cards in Yu-Gi-Oh! in the whole history of the game is drastically close to zero. The few that are “good” are often barely playable, and will more likely than not be replaced by a Ghost Rare that does a better job of whatever it was the common did. Making each card relevant is important in a collectible card game, because it increases the chances that the metagame will need to account for it. If every card in even a single set is relevant to the most common format, then the number of deck archetypes will explode.

Honestly, people should be able to play a game directly out of two packs of cards. I should be able to sit down with two packs and play a game of Yu-Gi-Oh! against an opponent who has done the same thing, and have a good time doing it. This is the narrowest of all possible formats (barring playing out of a single pack, which in Yu-Gi-Oh! would be impossible because of the size of a pack). When you can have fun playing out of fresh packs of cards, your game will probably be good.

*For the record, I don’t own the copyright to anything except what I’ve written on this post. Every game I’ve mentioned belongs to someone else, and I am making no threat to their copyright at all.

Bringing it All Together

This is the third and final of my Player Type articles.

Timmy, Johnny, Spike.

Diamond, Spade, Heart, Club.

Real Men, Role-players, Loonies, Munchkins.

All of these thing boil down to a few key motivations for why people play role-playing games. While these are, of course, not very detailed, to encompass the reasons we play as inclusively as possible, they can’t be. The way I figure it, role-playing has the following things to offer:

It’s a game: Gamers are playing to play the fucking game. They want to roll dice and make strategic choices. They like the intellectual challenge of the game, and want to beat it.

It’s a story: Storytellers are here to tell a story that is completely, ridiculously awesome. They want to advance the plot, engage with the non-player characters, involve themselves deeply with the game world and make choices based on what will produce the best story.

It’s a simulation: Simulators want our game worlds to adhere as closely to the real world (or what the real world would be with the speculative fiction elements included) as possible. They want to come up with solutions to their problems that are founded in common sense, and they want to engage in worlds as detailed and nuanced as our own.

It’s a way to socialize: Socializers want to get together with their friends and hang out. And role-playing games provide a context for doing just that. A lot of people, especially the wall-flowers and the table-talkers, are just there to chill out and eat snacks.

It’s an outlet for fantasies: Fantasists have things that they would love to be able to do in real life, but can’t. They want to swing swords and sling spells and fight crime and fly blimps. Role-playing games provide a framework that is safe, interactive and fun in which they can do just that.

This Ain’t no GNS, Kids

Some people may look at the top three tiers of this categorization and find similarities to Ron Edwards’ GNS Theory. Personally, I’ve always taken exception to the idea that GNS applies to players. I don’t think you can really be a “Gamist.” I think that a particular situation in a particular role-playing game session can be gamist, but that a person who plays the game for the sake of playing the game is a gamer. The difference is subtle, but the implications are pretty intense.

A gamer is no more likely to respond positively to a gamist situation than any other player. The particular situation may or may not appeal to the gamer’s specific motivations for play, and he or she may space out when certain gamist situations arise, or perk up and pay special attention for others.

See, none of these motivations occur without some overlap. If I play a game because I a) like to play games and b) have some pretty intense power fantasies in which I am a hulking brute of man-strength, then gamist situations involving diplomacy and stealth aren’t going to appeal to me as much as gamist situations involving combat.

I’ve been talking about gamism a lot, though. Let’s look at narrativism, for a moment, just for some variety. It’s possible for a player whose key motivation is storytelling to have no interest in the above-mentioned diplomacy/stealth situation, too. If that player is telling a Shonen-esque story of growing-in-power-to-defeat-great-evil, well then shit, she’s probably got some power fantasies in the mix. Or, if the situation in which the diplomacy is held doesn’t mesh with the internal consistency of the game world (“Why would the captain of a starship be engaged in negotiations with a hostile alien force? She should be on the ship, where she’s needed. This makes no sense…), we may have a simulator on our hands.

So each of these reasons for play happen in different amounts for each of us. I think we can build a relatively universal system of player archetyping if we assume that each of us resonates with two of the five motivations listed above more than the others. Myself, I would say I’m most inclined towards storytelling and gaming, with my focus being much more solidly on storytelling. I’m a 70% Storyteller, 30% Gamer. Everything else informs the way I play to some degree, and if I wanted to get deeply involved in it, I could.

Kris Hansen’s Stats:
Storyteller 50, Gamer 20, Socializer 15, Fantasist 10 Simulator 5.

What the above does (something I’ve never seen another player archetype system do) is provide us a way to talk about player tendencies, actions and motivations while addressing the individuality of the player. Not everyone is going to value Storytelling as much as I do, and not everyone is going to focus on Fantasies as little as I do.

Moreover, it gives us the opportunity to shift and change and grow without needing to shoehorn ourselves into a specific player archetype. We don’t need to worry about whether or not we’re a Real Man or a Munchkin; we can admit that we’re 60% Gamer and 40% Fantasist, and be done with it.

Another thing this system does is makes space for a group of players that are often seen as peripherals to the game. Socializers are there to have fun and hang out with their friends. Sometimes, they’ll do the crazy, just to get a rise out of people. Sometimes, they’ll annoy other players just for the reaction they get, but the real motivation behind these behaviors is the desire for socialization within the context of the game. This is where we get our “Loonies.” This is where the “Casual Gamers” come from. They’re not here to play the game, at least, they’re not here for that as much as for the social outing.

So How do the Other Systems Fit?

Rosewater’s Archetypes

What Rosewater’s built as far as player archetypes goes is amazing for Magic: The Gathering, and the driving goals behind his psychographic writings is part of what inspired me to do this in the first place.

Timmy is here to experience something. He wants to feel something. He’s probably going to identify most closely as a Fantasist and Storyteller.

Johnny is here as a form of self-expression. He wants to show you something you’ve never seen before. He’s mostly going to be a Gamer and Storyteller.

Spike wants to win. He doesn’t care how he does it, he just wants to win and make sure everyone knows he did. He’s most closely associatied with Gamers and Fantasists.

The Munchkin File

Sadly, it’s a little impossible to take the Munchkin File seriously in regards to modern gaming. I don’t remember gaming in the 90’s being that much different than today, so I can’t even be sure it was a valid discourse on gaming “back in the day.” Still, it’s interesting to see them as extreme examples of other archetypes.

Real Men are manly men, the sort that jump in front of buses to save babies. Fantasist and Gamer.

Role-players are here to tell a kick-ass story, and to step into the role of their character. Storyteller, maybe as high as 90%, with any subtheme, really.

Loonies are here to do the wacky, and do it often. They’re trying to get a rise out of people. Socializer, maybe as high as 90%, with any subtheme, really.

Munchkins are extreme fantasists, but they achieve their fantasy goals through manipulation of the rules, putting them firmly into the Gamer category, too.

Bartle’s Archetypes

The interesting thing about Bartle’s archetypes is that most of his observations apply equally to my own archetypes. The biggest difference between his archetypes and my own is the inclusion of self-expression desires and fantasy. It’s also interesting to note that there are two types of Socializer in Bartle’s breakdown.

Spades want to explore, want to delve into the core of the game world. Simulators are analogous.

Diamonds want to win the game. They push to achieve the game’s set goals, which makes them analogous to Gamers.

Clubs are extreme Socializers, using the social aspect of the game to annoy other players. On the opposite end of that scale, Hearts play to enjoy the company of other players, which means that they are _also_ sozializers, but express it in a very different way. I believe that the focus on socializing and the lack of storytelling or fantasist behavior may have something to do with the nature of MUDs as a role-playing platform.

Laws’ Archetypes

Laws talks about a lot of archetypes in his book, but most of them are covered elsewhere. The ones we’re looking at specifically helped inform the archetype scheme I’ve developed here.

Storytellers and Casual Gamers as archetypes were both integral in building the breakdown we have here. Casual Gamers, especially, are difficult for die-hards to understand, but when I looked at the similarities between Casual Gamers and Bartle’s Hearts, it sort of clicked in my head.

Specialists are a type of Fantasist. Their fantasy involves playing a very specific type of character, over and over again. The character they play is likely a manifestation of something they wish they had in real life, hence its repetition around the table. Specialists are intriguing to me, from a psychological perspective, but I don’t really have the time or expertise to go into it too deeply here. I’ll leave that for people with some of that there book learnin’.

Munchkins, Laws and a Bartle

This is the second part of my essays dissecting the “Player Types” that circulate in gaming circles. Today, I’ll be taking a look at the infamous Munchkin Files, Robin Laws’ additions to those files, and Richard Bartle’s suit-based ideas on player motivations.

The Munchkin File

The Munchkin File breaks players down into four key archetypes. Whether this is to be taken seriously or not is up to some debate, as the archetypes are as ridden with holes as Rosewater’s psychographics when it comes to RPGs. The archetypes are: The Real Man, the Real Roleplayer, the Loonie, and the Munchkin. Players are supposed to fall into a range of these character types as described thus:

The Real Man

The tough macho type who walks up to the attacking dragon and orders it to leave before he gets hurt.

The Real Roleplayer

The intelligent cunning guy who tricks the constable into letting you all out of prison.

The Loonie

The guy who will do anything for a cheap laugh, including casting a fireball at ground zero.

The Munchkin

Need we say more?

Well yes, actually, we do. Munchkins get a bit of a bad rap in the role-playing community. They are, to go back to Rosewater’s terms, Spikes. They play to win, and are willing to use whatever resources are available to them to do so. If that means twinking a character to hit for 600 damage at a range of 50ft at-will for the rest of the game, well… Okay, let’s do that.

For those unfamiliar with the term (I’m sure there are at least a few), a Munchkin is a player who derives entertainment or a sense of self-worth from creating powerful characters in a role-playing game. The more powerful the character, the better. It’s usually a term of derision, but we won’t be using it as such in this article, because the object of the article is to understand the motivations behind play.

The problem with the above archetype distinctions is that they are pretty exclusive of other kinds of play. Where would a player who likes to build twinked-out Charisma machines fit in – especially if that player uses the high Charisma to power some intense role-playing scenarios? More to the point, where would the average player fit in?

Still, from this, we can garner some interesting ideas as to why each of the above archetypes wants to play a role-playing game. The Real Man has something to prove, wants to get into the thick of it, and loves combat encounters. The Real Roleplayer’s wants to act, wants to create interesting stories through word and action. The Loonie is looking to get a reaction from the other players. The Munchkin is looking for a power-fantasy outlet. All of these drives exist, and I’ve seen players who exibit these traits to one degree or another, but I hardly believe it to be a comprehensive list of player motivations. Even the Five Gamers only picks up for those looking for an intellectual challenge.

Robin D. Laws

Robin Laws knows a lot about games, and he knows a lot about Game Mastery. He wrote a really good book on how to not suck as a Game Master, and if you’re serious about becoming a more adept GM, it’s something I would highly recommend you pick up. It’s worth every fucking penny.

Mr. Laws adds a few archetypes to the mix, in particular the Specialist, the Storytellers and the Casual Gamers. A specialist is the type of player who plays the same character type over and over again, regardless of game type, sometimes with the same name as in other games. The personality rarely changes, the general abilities stay roughly the same, the set-dressing never differs. Storytellers are in it for the plot, and they’re willing to put their characters through hell to get it (these are, for the record, my favorite types of players to Game Master for). Casual Gamers show up to play once in a while, like the game and like he people playing it, and when it’s done, they put it away.

The thing I like the most about Mr. Laws’ archetypes is that so few other writers touch on them. To bring it back to Mr. Rosewater’s archetypes, a Specialist is a sort of Timmy who is in the game to experience one particular thing. They like being the assassin or the brawler, and will be that character in every game they play forever. A storyteller is very Vorthosian, in that the flavor is all that really matters for them, and experiencing that flavor is important.

The casual gamer… Well, she’s a harder creature to pin down. What motivates a casual player can be difficult to understand for those of us so deeply immersed in the hobby that we plan games, play in them on a regular basis or, gods forbid, read blogs about it. What brings her out to the table every third session to eat nachos and swill Mountain Dew with the rest of the group?

I think the next set of archetypes will answer that a little more clearly.

Richard Bartle

In 1996, Richard Bartle put together a lengthy article on the types of players who play in Multi-User Domains, or MUDs. This article summarized a huge debate on his own MUD’s forums on the topic of “What do people want out of a MUD?” While that may seem a bit removed from table-top role-playing, I think that the archetype work he put together can, like the archetype work on Magic: The Gathering, be used to shed light on our hobby in a way we haven’t really looked at previously.

The things that he posits a game-player wants are:

1. Achievement within the game context
2. Exploration of the game
3. Socializing with others
4. Imposition upon others

Each player is going to have these drives to one degree or another. Everyone has goals they want to achieve within the game, and everyone sits down to play a role-playing game to socialize. The amount of each that a player desires from a game creates an interesting scale on which one can place oneself.

Personally, I rate myself thus: achievement, socialization, exploration, imposition, with achievement being the highest and imposition the lowest. You will likely rate yourself differently.

When you throw percentages into the mix (I’m 34% achievement oriented, for instance), you get a much more accurate idea of what sort of gamer you are.

Bartle’s essay has graphs, and examples of the style of play you might see in a MUD from a particular type of player. We aren’t going to do that here. What is more interesting is his association of player types with suits of cards.

Diamonds: Go for the goals of the game, whatever those are.

Spades: Explore the game world.

Hearts: Hang out with other players.

Clubs: Play to have an effect on other players.

I think part of what I like about this delineation is that it’s easy to grok. In many ways, that’s what drew me to Mr. Rosewater’s archetypes in the first place, was the idea that you could easily describe the tendencies of a group of players with a single word. If the player you are speaking about wants to win, and will do everything in his or her power to do so, that player is a Spike. Awesome, that’s easy to figure out. He or she is also a Diamond. Or, depending on your definition of the goals of the game, a Munchkin.

Part of what role-playing games need is a unifying language that describes underlying player motivations. Some published products have attempted to make that happen (see: the Game Master’s Guides), but the definitions they give for player motivations are surprisingly limited and inflexible. What I aim to create here is a language through which we can better understand why our players do the things they do.

Psychographics in Role-playing Games

This is the first of three articles I’m writing on the topic of Player Types. This first will be a look at Mark Rosewater’s Magic: The Gathering psychographics, and how they apply to Dungeons & Dragons (and, perhaps, any other game).

When you’re trying to sell games for a living, it’s pretty important to try and figure out why people play games. That’s part of the reason I love reading Mark Rosewater’s articles over at Wizards of the Coast; he talks at length about why people play games, and how we can get people to play them more. A lot of that comes from a design perspective, which I appreciate, because it gives me a bit of an inside look at the motivations of the person in charge of making Magic lack suck. 

But Magic is not a role-playing game. It really should be a role-playing game which is a thing I’ll talk about in a future post, I’m sure, but it’s not actually a role-playing game. It’s a card game, and the reasons people play card games are pretty different from the reasons we play role-playing games.

Or are they?

Timmy, Johnny, Spike

Rosewater posits that there are three key psychological demographics (“psychographics” to marketing and buzzword folks) that play Magic: The Gathering. He has named these psychographics Timmy, Johnny and Spike.

Timmy plays the game because he wants to experience something. In the world of Magic: The Gathering, that means he wants the rush of throwing down a huge creature and beating face with it. He wants to take one look at a card and go “HOLY CARP I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THIS!!!” He’s looking for the Wow Factor of a card or a deck or whatever.

In Dungeons & Dragons, the idea of “experiencing something” opens up in a huge way. Each situation in a role-playing game has the opportunity to evoke emotion. And, honestly, that’s always been one of the biggest draws to the game. The idea that a game can affect you in the same way that a novel or a television show might is a powerful motivating factor in playing it. I have seen people cry during sad moments in a role-playing game. I’ve never seen that happen at a Magic tournament.

(Well, that’s not strictly true, but it had nothing to do with a sad moment in the fictional game world and was instead the result of having lost a game to that person’s significant other during a tournament…)

Johnny plays the game as a form of self-expression. In Magic, this is through creativity in deck design. He puts the pieces of the puzzle together in a way no one else has, and even if the deck doesn’t win, as long as it pulls off that one amazing trick once it still pulls it off and gives him a story to tell later.

In Dungeons and Dragons, we have the opportunity to tell stories as part of the game. And a lot of players take a special sort of delight in doing so. Personally, as a GM, I love crafting elaborate plots through which my player characters navigate. I love creating fleshed out, interesting worlds in which to play. I especially love giving my players interesting non-player characters with whom to interact. I am, in nearly every way possible, a D&D Johnny.

Another incarnation of this would be the person who has tried out every crazy build for every character class and race combination with a billion different feat choices. Sometimes that’s the domain of a Spike (trying to build the character that wins), but a lot of the time, the combinations aren’t great. Sometimes you build a goliath earthsong warden with optimized everything. Sometimes you build a drow paladin airship captain with a boomerang (+1 Dex! Woo!). But if a Johnny gets to tell great stories with the character (or about the character later), then it’s all good.

Spike plays to win. In Magic, this means finding the best decks, playing them against the best decks, finding ways to beat the decks that beat your decks and learning to optimize your own play to the point that you never, ever fail at Magic. For Dungeons and Dragons, this falls a little more into the category of the power-gamer. They trawl online boards looking for character optimization options that will help them live longer, fight harder, kill faster and rake in the experience points.

But as in all things D&D, there is more than one way to “win.” You win if you do your job better than anyone else could. You win if you did the coolest thing anyone had done that night. You win if you’re the guy who gets all the spotlight time. You win if you got the most loot. There are a lot of ways to win at Dungeons & Dragons, and a lot of ways to consider yourself successful.

Also, because D&D is a cooperative sport (most of the time), it can be difficult to actually say you’ve won the game. Honestly, I think of all the Magic psychographics currently catered to in Dungeons & Dragons, Spikes are the ones left in the dust. That’s part of the reason I’ve established Warp One’s first D&D tournament, a three-on-three contest of skill and brute strength. It should be a blast.

Melvin/Vorthos

The two newer pseudo-psychographics, Melvin and Vorthos, also have a place in the Dungeons & Dragons equivalence discussion. Melvin, for those who haven’t read the Magic: The Gathering articles (linked at the bottom of the post), is a player who likes the crunchy number bits of a card, the rules, the interactions and turn sequences and the like. Vorthos is all about the flavor of a card, what the card feels like and looks like, how it interacts with their idea of the fictional world in which the card interacts.

Melvin exists in Dungeons & Dragons. We call him a rules-lawyer at his most extreme, but to be fair, it’s a major motivating factor in why he’s playing the game. He isn’t being a dick about the rules to be a dick. He’s being a dick about the rules because he really, genuinely cares about the rules. This is the sort of player who loves when a new edition comes out, or a new game, the sort of guy who will rummage through Savage Worlds or Mouse Guard and steal rules from them to use in a D&D game, or vice versa. Melvin loves rules, loves systems, and loves playing with them until they do exactly what he wants them to do.

Vorthos, too, exists in Dungeons & Dragons. He’s read every Forgotten Realms novel, and is prepared for any eventuality, knowing who to talk to and where to go to get things done. He can be hell on a plot sometimes, or he can be an amazing boon to your campaign, a driving force that brings your party where they need to be as often as possible.

Or, he’s the guy who has pored over every map in every world book ever produced for every edition of the game. He knows the GDP of Zilargo, their major exports, their major imports, and how many gnomes it takes to build an airship. Again, this guy can be both a boon and a detractor from your game, depending on how much you want your players to know before hand.

The problem with labelling these guys as psychographics in terms of a role-playing game is that flavor and mechanics, while motivating factors in playing, are not the core reasons people will play. I will not play a game of… well, anything, if the only reason to play it is to experience the flavor of that game. I could just read a book and get the same experience. And I certainly won’t play a game just because the rules look pretty kick-ass. There has to be some other draw for me.

I am, however, both a Vorthos and a Melvin. I love rules, I love tinkering with them and making them up on the spot, I love house ruling things that I don’t have rules for, I love stealing rules from other games to use later, or hijacking a rules system to play a game that I think that system would be better for than the one it’s using. But I also love flavor. I pore over Eberron books, not because I need a new feat for my drow paladin airship captain, but because I want to. I love the history of the world, the nations, the people who move and shake within it. It’s lonely fun at its best.

Your Psychograph Can’t Hold Me!

The problem with these psychographics is that they aren’t completely inclusive of role-playing game motivations. For instance, I can’t figure out where a player who wants to annoy other players (or the GM) fits into the psychographics. Or the guy who only wants to watch and will roll dice when needed. While Mr. Rosewater’s psychographics give us a good launching-off point from which to explore the profiles of role-playing gamers, they don’t cover quite enough ground to be wholly useful in figuring out our players’ motivations.

So in my next post, we’ll be looking at the profiles other folks in the games industry have put out for role-playing gamers. In particular, I hope to be dissecting The Munchkin File, Robin Laws’ archetypes, and Richard Bartle’s exploration of MUD players.

Join me next time, when I won’t be biting Mark Rosewater’s style!

Until then, may your graphics be as far from the psychos as possible.