Sometimes Blogging is Hard

I'm having one of those brain-fart days, where there are a million things I want to write about, but none of them want to sort themselves in my head. So rather than write out a whole huge thing for each of them, I'm just going to throw my ideas out into cyberspace and see if maybe clearing the air does me some good (the hope: I'll be able to focus on the content I want to get out on a weekly basis).

~ As of a study done in 2000* by Wizards of the Coast, roughly 19% of people who play role-playing games once a month are female. That number is abysmal, and I constantly hear men complain that they wish more women were involved in the hobby. Dismissing a woman's valid criticisms of the way women are portrayed in the hobby (by implying that, because she is a feminist, she is probably hideous) is not a great way to go about convincing ladies to game. I used to follow @DreadGazeebo. Now I do not. I do, however, have Go Make Me a Sandwich on my Flipboard now.

~ I want to write up the Bones of a Dead God setting as an actual game world at some point. I have no idea who would want to publish such a thing, and it would need a real name, but I think it's probably the most over-the-top game setting I've ever come up with, and it deserves some love.

~ Does anyone remember when I was writing up an encounter-by-encounter rehash of the old Undermountain campaign? Me neither...

~ Trying to come up with internally consistent obstacles to throw at a group of D&D players has actually been a lot less difficult than I had originally anticipated. The only problem I have at this point is that they level so fucking fast! Good gods, we're half-way through Paragon and have only just now started the major arc of the tier.

~ Magic items were a lot cooler in 3.5 than they are in 4th. What I think I'm going to try and do with the Peculiar Curios column of the blog is bring back some of that awesome; less reliance on the resource, more focus on the weird. I think there's more room in the world for a magical bard-scroll with a song on it that demons find insanely annoying, or arrows that burst into brilliant light and blind whoever they hit or face paint that turns your body into a briar of horrifying poison barbs. Or a fucking crab-tank. There's no wonder in Fourth Edition's magic items.

So that's what I've been thinking about for the past couple of days. Now I'll go see about making you a monster for Monday.

*This is the latest market information I have. If you have a newer report, I'd love to read it.

Peculiar Curios: Chicken Hut

My favorite feature in Dragon Magazine was the Bazaar of the Bizarre. Magic items are one of the things I love most about Dungeons & Dragons, and the distinct lack of kick-ass magic items in D&D 4E makes me pretty sad. Much like I miss the awesome write-ups of monsters from the 3.5 era of D&D, I miss items that have personality and history attached to them. So I’m going to be providing some of that here.

This week’s entry is one of the best-loved inventions from my home campaign. Our first Big Bad, Babagya, was, as mentioned in previous posts, Baba Yaga from Slavic myth. She was a horrifying witch woman who stole babies and ate them, flew in cauldron she rowed through the air with her broomstick, and lived in a hut that walked around on chicken legs. As the campaign progressed and Babagya began to grow away from her source material, the player characters discovered a culture of nomadic dwarves that built houses with chicken feet, and managed to win one of these amazing prizes for themselves. Since then, it has become one of the party’s favorite NPCs as well as one of their favorite items, and I kind of think of it as the mascot for my campaign.

The chicken huts are works of alchemical and magical art. Roughly as intelligent as a four-year-old human, they are capable of independent movement and don’t need to be personally directed to each destination. Simple directions will usually suffice. They allow their tenants to cross huge distances with all of the comforts of home; you can read a book while crossing dozens of miles. They never tire, don’t need to eat or drink, and are happy, willing servants of the people who live within them.

The dwarves that create these marvels have never sold one for money, though they have been known to accept challenges that would reward the winner with such a home. These challenges are never easy, and are almost always skewed in favor of the dwarves. Those few who can claim to have won a chicken hut truly deserve one.

Average Chicken Hut
Gargantuan  Vehicle
HP 400; Bloodied 200 AC 4; Fortitude 20; Reflex 2; Will 4 Speed 12
Pilot and Crew
As a semi-sentient vehicle, the Chicken Hut does not require a pilot or crew to operate. However, it does need clear and simple instructions to get from one place to another (requiring a DC 15 Diplomacy check).
Load
Fifty medium creatures; forty tons of cargo.
Out of Control
An out of control Chicken Hut bucks and flails about, causing anyone inside it to fall prone unless they make a saving throw every round. After ten rounds, it begins running in a random direction until control is regained.
Floors
An average Chicken Hut consists of a single main floor with a porch. The roof tends to be flat and shingled. A chicken hut is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Outside, it appears to be a 4 square by 4 square structure. Inside, it is a comfortable 8 square by 8 square structure.
Chicken Legs
For every ten damage the Chicken Hut takes, its speed is reduced by two squares. When its speed is reduced to zero, it moves randomly, out of control.
Alignment  Unaligned    Languages Dwarven

 

My Group’s Chicken Hut
Gargantuan Vehicle
HP 400; Bloodied 200 AC 4; Fortitude 20; Reflex 4; Will 4 Speed 12, fly 8 (clumsy)
Pilot and Crew
As a semi-sentient vehicle, the Chicken Hut does not require a pilot or crew to operate. It is smart enough to understand basic directions and get from one place to another without difficulty.
Load
Sixty medium creatures; fifty tons of cargo.
Out of Control
An out of control Chicken Hut on the ground bucks and flails about, causing everyone inside it to fall prone unless they make a saving throw every round. After ten rounds, it begins running in a random direction until control is regained. An out of control Chicken Hut in the air moves in circles at half speed. Each round, it has a 50% chance of descending. It descends 5 squares for the first 10 rounds it is out of control. After 10 rounds, it descends 10 squares per round. An out of control chicken hut that hits the ground after descending more than 20 squares is destroyed.
Floors
The Chicken Hut is a single main floor with a porch. The roof is flat and shingled, with a ballista mounted there. The chicken hut is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Outside, it appears to be a 4-square by 4-square structure. Inside, it is a 14-square by 13-square structure. The ballista can be used to make a ranged basic attack with a +1 proficiency bonus, dealing 3d10 damage on a hit.
Chicken Legs
For every ten damage the Chicken Hut takes, its speed is reduced by two squares. When its speed is reduced to zero, it moves randomly, out of control.
Resources
The Chicken Hut never runs out of food or water. Those things are magically created in the larder, pantry and ice cellar. The chicken hut can also create a great variety of objects with various levels of success. The limits of this magic have not been fully explored.
Chicken Wings
For every ten damage the Chicken Hut takes, its fly speed is reduced by two squares. When its fly speed is reduced to zero it starts to fall out of control.
Standard Actions
Claws • At-Will
Attack: +21 vs. AC
Hit: 1d10 + 11 fire damage. On a critical hit, the target also takes 10 ongoing fire damage.
Alignment      Languages Dwarven, Common

Picture Jacked from Tumblr, but it doesn’t say from whom.

Encountering D&D: Recurrance and Fortune

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

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

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

Other Things to be Learned From This Encounter:

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

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

From My Table to Yours:

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

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

Fortune Cards

Before Playing With Them:

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

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

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

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

After Playing with Them:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bestiary of Badassery: Unicorn Reskin

Sly Flourish keeps doing things I love, which is probably why his blog rocks and he’s getting paid money to design game elements while I am working in a shop that sells things he makes. One of the things he’s done recently is an “Extreme Reskinning” of a white dragon into a horrifying assassin monster. Given my desire to come up with kick-ass, innovative, over-the-top monsters for my home game, I figured I’d give you guys a peek into how I go about doing that.

Concept

I don’t usually start with a solid idea of what I want a monster to become. Instead, I pick a creature and figure out how to make that creature as badass as humanly possible. For the challenge of it, I decided to start with the single sissiest monster I could think of: the unicorn. Turns out, unicorns are only level nine monsters, which is good because my party is now higher than ninth level, and I can never use this monster against them.

First thing’s first, I take a look at the abilities. A unicorn gives it’s buddies a +2 defense bonus, attacks with hooves, charges for double damage, makes people unable to attack it, can teleport and can let an ally spend a healing surge. All in all, not terrifying, and I think a couple of the abilities are going to have to change. Since we’re looking to make Senior Sissyhooves into something badass and terrifying, I definitely think we’re going to have to rearrange the unicorn’s stat bonuses in different directions; rather than grant bonuses to allies, a horrific monster penalizes its foes. So the +2 defenses for allies is going to become –2 defenses for enemies, while the healing surge power is going to become a healing surge steal.

Throwing in Some Flava

The new abilities make the monster sort of vampiric, a leech, which is the direction I think we’re going to flavor this particular monster. I tend to flavor monsters after their abilities more than the other way around; if a monster heals its friends and gives them bonuses, it sounds like a something noble and upright (I’d go unicorn, pegasus, faerie, Great White Harts, that sort of thing). If a monster lowers defenses and then eats your healing surges, I see dark, lurking evils. The sorts of things that live under your bed and slowly suck your life from your body.

This monster, after some digging around on DeviantArt, is going to look like this:

With the creature’s identity a little more established, I can start doing the actual reskinning. I’m going to say the creature still lives on a large base, and is probably still a fey magical beast. Hit points and defenses can stay roughly the same, speed will come down a little bit to six, but the perception is going to get upgraded to blindsight; the creature lives in the shadows and sees without its eyes.

Powers and Abilities

The basic standard attack is going to become a bite attack instead of a kick. The charge is actually going to be a jumping charge (since this guy looks like he’s going to jump onto your chest and bite your face off), which will still push the target and knock him or her prone when it hits. Fey Beguiling is a nifty ability, and to add some creepy to this thing, I think we’re going to continue calling it that, but to make the same effect as the Unicorn (majesty, power, refinement), this thing is going to sing a creepy lullaby that charms its enemies.

Teleportation is a little weird for this guy, so we’re going to downgrade it to jumping five squares. And teleportation is a pretty big deal (kills grabs, removes the threat of Opportunity Attacks, etc.), so we can be a little more generous with the last ability. Horn Touch lets one of the unicorn’s allies spend a healing surge or make a saving throw against an effect a save can end. We’re going to take a healing surge away from a creature, and use it to heal this little vampirey badass. Horn Touch is an encounter, we’re making ours a Recharge 5, and we’re dropping any reference to healing surges.

Finally, instead of having Nature at a +10, this guy’s going to have a +10 Dungeoneering, reflecting many years in the Belowground and some Stealth so he can sneak up on some player characters. Our stat block looks like this:

Beneathsneak		Level 9 Skirmisher (Leader)
Large fey magical beast		XP 400
HP 93; Bloodied 47 AC 23; Fortitude 21; Reflex 21; Will 21 Speed 6		Initiative +7 Perception +10 Blindsight 10
Traits
O Weakening Field • Aura 2
Enemies in the aura take a -2 penalty to all defenses.
Standard Actions
m Bite • At-Will
Attack: +14 vs. AC
Hit: 2d6 + 3 damage.
M Leaping Charge • At-Will
Attack: The Beneathsneak leaps up to its speed as part of a charge attack; +15 vs. AC
Hit: 4d6 + 3 damage, and the target is pushed 1 square and knocked prone.
R Fey Beguiling (charm) • Recharge when first bloodied
Attack: Ranged 5; +12 vs. Will
Hit: The beneathsneak sings a halting, tuneless lullaby, and the target cannot attack it, The target must make opportunity attacks with a +2 bonus against any creature within reach that attacks the beneathsneak (save ends).
Move Actions
Horrific Leap • Encounter
Effect: The beneathsneak can jump 5 squares.
Minor Actions
M Vampiric Touch (healing) • Recharge 5 6
Attack: +13 vs. Fortitude
Hit: The target loses a healing surge and the beneathsneak gains hit points equal to one half the target's healing surge value. .
Skills Dungeoneering +10, Stealth +10
Str 16 (+7)	Dex 13 (+5)		Wis 12 (+5)
Con 13 (+5)	Int 16 (+7)		Cha 17 (+7)
Alignment unaligned Languages Elven
© 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.

Picture jacked from Loden.

Nope, I Ain’t Fourthcore

I came across the Fourthcore Bestiary about a week back, and I thought it was pretty great. The creatures were interesting (in particular, the paired Catastrophe Dragons; great concept for a set of villains), but it was more the concept of “Fourthcore,” that drew me in. As the DM of a campaign that set out to be the most brutally “Metal” game in Fourth Edition (and having failed at that goal rather miserably), there was something in the concept of “Fourthcore” that resonated with me. D&D Fourth Edition, at it’s core, is about being a fucking badass and kicking in the teeth of whatever otherworldly horrors stand in the way of continued badassery.

Tonight, I read the what the folks at Save Versus Death consider to be Fourthcore, and while I agree with much of it (over-the-top monsters; oppressive, bleak campaign settings), there are other bits that don’t mesh well with the way I play the game (backgrounding the plot; the whole concept of deathtrap dungeons). So while I would very much like to consider myself part of the Hardcore D&D Tradition, my love of plot and my distaste for dungeon crawls put me at odds with some of the central philosophy of the movement.

Instead, this is what I think the “hardcore” aspects of D&D Fourth Edition should look like.

1. Over the fucking top. D&D Fourth is about kicking dragons in the teeth and using the broken shards of their fangs to stab them to death. If you’re not doing something that is entirely kick-ass every hour or so, you’re doing it wrong.

2. Everything in the world always hates you. I take the Points of Light thing very seriously. The world is blanketed with danger and douchebaggery, with tiny little glimmers of hope shining against the darkness. When you step outside the walls of your perfectly protected city, something out there is going to try and eat you, and its chances of succeeding in this endeavor are maybe one in four.

3. Montage over the boring shit. When you need to get something done, and it doesn’t involve punching dinosaurs so hard they bleed from the ears, you get to skip over most of it with a montage. Wizards of the Coast calls them Skill Challenges.

4. Innovative crunch. Dragons that work better as a team is a good example. Fighting the colossi from Shadow of the Colossus is one of my favorites. Minions that explode (or blind, or don’t die, or are invincible, or give a dude action points, or recharge a leader’s powers when they die, or get back up two turns after they die, or look like cute widdle baby beholders right up until they eat  a wizard’s face) have made for some great encounters. Encounters on the sides of cliffs, encounters on small ledges with infinite drops towards DOOM, encounters against turned-evil player characters, encounters against well-mannered animals in fezzes, all are great. If people talk about it later and go “Aw shit, that was awesome,” it was probably hardcore.

5. Innovative fluff. Look, I get where people think that “hardcore” D&D should be all about the game, all about the fighting, and fuck all the shit that happens between the fights, but that’s not the stuff that makes my games great. The stuff that makes my games great are things like people with spiders for heads. Or campaigning across a dude’s skeleton looking to stop the end of the “world.” Or the Extreme Library. Or a mode of transportation that is a hut with chicken feet that talks to you by writing on its own walls. Or a fleet of airships dragging a city that’s been forcibly torn from its world to save it’s people from annihilation. Or a drunken rage-orgy used as a ritual to summon a god, and then trying to punch that god in the face. When you build your world to be as extreme as possible, the crunchy bits follow, and make the game a lot more entertaining for the narrative-minded of us.

This, to me, is Fourthcore. Innovative, over-the-top worlds where people do innovative, over-the-top shit to innovative, over-the-top monsters because every single creature in the entire known universe wants to eat your liver and you need to find clever ways to make them think that’s a bad idea, with flashy montages over all of the boring bits. Then again, I didn’t invent the term, so if you can think of a better term for the way I game, feel free to mention it in the comments.

Edition Love

I spend a lot of time bitching about games. It takes up an inordinate amount of my time. I’m an equal opportunity bitch, though; I’ll bitch about 3.5 or 4th Edition in equal measures, or World of Darkness or whatever indie game has my attention at the moment. Every system has its problems, and because those problems hinder us in doing something we enjoy doing (playing these games), we sometimes get hung up on what we don’t like.

In this new era of Edition Wars, this takes on a bit of an adversarial tone. If I bitch about something that I don’t like about D&D 4E, then I must be one of Those, the guys that still plays D&D 3.5. If I bitch about something that I don’t like about 3.5, then I get an earful about how Wizards of the Coast is trying to steal my hard earned dollars by releasing crap versions of the Bestest Game Evar. The Red Box Blog has decided to abstain from the conflict, instead focusing on what there is to love about each edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I figured I’d follow suit and write a post talking about the things I’ve loved about each edition of the game.

First Edition

The first version of D&D I ever played was from the Red Box. It’s not the earliest edition I’ve ever played (I spent a few years playing out the Blue Box 1E books), but it was my introduction to role-playing games as a hobby and as an obsession. I was eight years old. I’ve played a _lot_ of D&D since then, but some of my favorite memories from childhood are rubbing holes in the knees of my jeans from crawling around dungeon maps to get books (we weren’t allowed to clutter the tables).

The first thing that comes to mind when I’m thinking about things I loved about D&D 1E was the simplicity of the game. I mean, the rules were pretty arcane and poorly written, but the core of the game was very simple. The game hadn’t been bogged down with things like skills or feats or powers yet. The most complex class to play was either the wizard or the elf (who was a wizard-fighter), because you needed to keep track of those pesky spells. I mean, take a look at this character sheet for a minute:

This is about as simple as a character sheet can get. You have your personal info, your basic stats, the things you’re good at resisting, a single line for special abilities  and your THAC0 chart. On the other side, there’s a box for equipment, a box for magical equipment, a box for notes, a box for your money and a box for experience. That’s it. This was all we needed really needed to keep us gaming for over a decade.

Are the saving throws stupid? Maybe, but when they’re the only things that you ever need to make a saving throw against, it makes some sense to have a separate stat for saving against Dragon Breath. Seems to me that you’d have a different chance to resist turning to stone than you would getting wanded to death.

There was a level of creativity involved in playing D&D 1E that I haven’t seen in any edition since. You had really limited resources, and the game was designed to be deadly. That doesn’t mean we didn’t goof off and do the ridiculous bullshit every other group did, but if you fucked up, you could die. Death was a regular occurrence for 1E characters, and when you died in our games, you rolled up a new first-level character. None of this “starting off at a higher level” for us; you had to work for your level.

I think out of everything, this is the mentality that best categorizes First Edition D&D for me: the idea that you had to work for every advantage you had. If you weren’t vigilant, you fell into a pit trap and fucking died. But that also meant that players were more involved, players were paying more attention, even through the constant refrain of Monty Python quotes. They weren’t checking their Facebook or reading web-comics, they were deeply and personally involved in the game. I miss that quite a bit.

Second Edition

This is actually the edition with which I have the least experience. See, while everyone else was out playing AD&D 2nd Edition, I was still playing Basic D&D. I blame this almost entirely on the fact that I spent my early D&D days in the small town of Stettler, Alberta (Population: 5,600, including the cats). There were no game stores where I lived, and when we finally got one, I didn’t have enough money to buy the hard-cover AD&D books that were being sold on consignment there. I got in some AD&D just after high school, while the transition from AD&D to 3rd Edition was going on, but the game got kind of lost in the maelstrom of my life around that time. Which is a damned shame, because the games I did play in 2E were pretty damned fantastic.

I think the thing that struck me the most about 2E was options. I had been playing a lot of Palladium Fantasy in my hometown (I know it’s busted, but it’s the only game in town, bub.), and that was a game chock full of options, but nothing on par with what was available to AD&D. Dungeon and Dragon magazines were just starting their meteoric rise from “pretty good D&D mag” to “holy shit, Dungeon and Dragon are fucking awesome,” and the number of books, boxes, mags and online supplements that I had at my disposal for AD&D was incredible to me.

AD&D did something I hadn’t seen another game try and do before. It tried to simulate reality to the tinsiest detail. Some of that, for sure, came from the urge to immerse oneself in the game world; there was a mentality around AD&D that said that the more complex and realistic a rule, the better that rule was, because it did a better job of emulating your expectations from reality. It rarely actually simulated reality all that well, but good gods did it try. And in doing so, it created a marvelous maze of rules that were a ton of fun to delve into. AD&D 2nd Edition was easily the most arcane of the D&D games, and I loved it for that. I’m a rules junkie. I love systems. So to have a million little subsystems, each trying to emulate a different aspect of the real world in fantastic form, was a wonder to me.

This was also the testing ground for a lot of the things I’ve come to love about later editions of Dungeons & Dragons. There were products put out specifically to test new rules and systems that no one had yet tried, and that was pretty dope. Things like Arcana Unearthed brought us cantrips and early point-buy systems, a lot of the settings tried things that no one had ever tried before (what do you _mean_ dwarves live on the plains and ride horses a lot? Crazy talk!), and some of the simplest concepts (separating your class from your species, for instance) were put into full swing in Second Edition D&D.

Third Edition

Third Edition, for me, is always going to be remembered as the game that broke the games industry. I don’t mean that in a bad sense; it unified gamers in a way we had never seen before, and it brought in flocks of new gamers who learned to love our hobby. It was accessible and fun, ushered in an era of elegance and simplicity that few game systems could manage in the ‘90s, and it was marketed like something you could be proud of. I remember the first time I saw an add for D&D in a Maxim magazine; I felt like I could point at that and say “Yeah. See that dude with the sword and the bitchin’ armor? I’m like that guy.”

Third Edition brought together a huge swath of the gaming community under a single banner. It was a unifying force. It didn’t matter if you played Third Edition core or D20 Modern or D20 Rome or whatever, it was all basically the same game, and that meant that if you knew how to play one of those, you knew how to play every other one of those games as well. I recall a conversation I had with Jared Earl in the early 2000’s when I was looking to publish a game idea I’d been tossing around for a while. I wrote up a treatment and sent it to him, and his criticisms were basically spot-on (as Jared tends to be). One of the things that he said that really struck me, though, was “Why are you building your own system for this? There’s already a system for this game, and it’s Third Edition D&D. If you publish a book right now, and it’s not for Third Edition D&D, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. No one will play it, because no one will know how to play it.

Third also brought us the most flexibility we’ve ever seen out of a game system. I mean, we’d all seen GURPS, and were understandably impressed by its ability to put on a new skin whenever it wanted and become a different game, but there was a subtle difference between playing GURPS and playing D&D 3E; when you were playing the former, it was flexible, universal and fun, but when you were playing the latter, you were playing DUNGEONS AND FUCKING DRAGONS. That name carries a lot of weight behind it, and everyone who was playing role-playing games during this system’s hay-day knew how to play D&D.

It was also the first introduction to Dramatic Editing I’ve seen given space in a core D&D product. Action Points were given some space in Eberron, which was, for me, a huge fucking deal. I’ve been on this weird love affair with Eden Studios’ Unisystem for a while, and one of the things that I love about Buffy the Vampire Slayer has always been the Hero Points system. Spend a Hero Point, and something awesome for you happens. Great! When a system that was similar was published in a Dungeons & Dragons book, I nearly shit myself I was so happy. And the system was, like the rest of D&D 3E, elegant and simple.

Keith Baker’s Eberron is, in my opinion, the single greatest influence on the direction of Dungeons & Dragons since its publication. It brought us the moral ambiguity of the Pulp genre, magic as an every-day thing, magic-tech as an acceptible way to play D&D, and a darker, grittier, points-of-light-in-the-darkness feel that has carried through to much of the next edition’s setting design. D&D 3E also had the benefit of being able to draw from a HUGE catalogue of resources, in that every third party book that was ever published for Third Edition D&D (and remember that there were, quite literrally, thousands) had to clearly mark what content was available for use by anyone. Huge swaths of the material that was not available for use by others was still available for use by Wizards of the Coast, and that gave them the single largest role-playing game system that has ever been published. For flexibility, elegance, saturation of the market and sheer size, Third Edition D&D is one of the most heroic publishing undertakings I’ve ever been witness to.

Fourth Edition

Would you like to run up a dragon’s face and stab it in the eye? How about hurl someone ten feet back with the force of your ridiculously huge hammer? Call down the heavens in a fury of wind and lightning? Fourth Edition has a Power for that.

Easily the most cinamatic of the D&D Editions thus far, Fourth Edition is the edition you play when you want to stop being Gandalf and start being a bad-ass motherfuckin’ wizard, yo. Back in Second Edition, we used to think that the idea of a well-armed wizard was some hep jive. Now, if your wizard is carrying a sword, he’s fucking doing it wrong, because he can blast holes in an army with a gesture of his hand. Fighters used to stand around hitting a thing with their swords. Now, you fighter can stab a dude in the junk, hurl him at your rogue and make sure that Huge Guy with the Axe doesn’t murder you all. Your rogue doesn’t just stab people in the kidneys; your rogue stabs people in the kidneys, dances around them like she’s a fucking professional, flings them back at the fighter and mocks their mother. There is nothing in this game that doesn’t scream “I am a fucking badass.”

Wizard? Badass.
Rogue? Badass.
Fighter? Totally badass.
BARD? You don’t even know how badass your bard is.

The fights don’t quit when your wizard runs out of spells; your wizard can hit a bad guy, automatically, every turn forever. Your cleric heals your wounds by MAKING NEW WOUNDS ON YOUR ENEMY’S FACE. The fighter is a toolbox of punishment and can make sure the rest of your party stays alive long enough to do their jobs. There is not a single class that does not rock in this game.

Everyone has something interesting and powerful to do pretty much all the time, and that is fucking great.

Even the creatures are great. I remember when we were reading about Kobolds before Fourth Edition hit the shelves, and I was exclaiming over the idea that Kobolds are actually sort of terrifying. The little bastards have abilities that matter, now. They shift around, making them harder to hit, or setting them up for powerful attacks of their own. Goblins do the same things. Gnomes can fucking turn invisible. As their initiative roll. This has made combat more interesting, more intense, and much more tactical. Sure, it necessitates miniatures, but people seem to forget sometimes that this is a hobby that was built out of the miniature war game hobby. The tactical side of the game has always been better served with miniatures than without; you can still play without it, but it’s harder. Same was true of Second Edition.

And, honestly, the miniatures add something to the game for me. It is a lot more more interesting to me to see people moving around the map than just kinda sitting there doing nothing. It’s dynamic, it’s fun, it’s strategic, it involves a level of strategy and planning that previous editions have traditionally lacked, and it can add a level of complexity to the game that is otherwise conspicuously missing.

Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition is deceptively simple. It has color-coded abilities, and it has clearly laid out rules and tables. While going up a level is still strangely arcane, much effort has gone into making the classes easy to read and easy to use. Some people may see that as a problem, but for someone who has been playing Dugeons & Dragons for as long as I have (coming on 20 years now), being able to easily and quickly reference the things I’m looking for has been a godsend. It has never been easier to be a Dungeon Master than it is right now, which is a huge step in the right direction, because the more Dungeon Masters we have out there, the more groups we have playing D&D and the more we’re going to be able to spread our hobby to new and interesting people. Simplicity has it’s place, and having rules that are arcane for the sake of being arcane is not going to help us make our hobby more fun to play.

 

So there you have it. I have said nice things about every edition of Dungeons & Dragons that I have ever played. Which is all of them. ^_^ I challenge you to do the same. It might make this era of Edition Wars a little easier to live in.