Underpowered: Healer

Posted on 19 June, 2013 by MssngrDeath

It’s been said that the most important resource in D&D is actions. This is mostly, but not entirely, true, and not just because this belief happened to pop up around the same time the 3.5E warlock was published and it was the only thing that convinced the masses the class wasn’t overpowered. Certainly, most characters and monsters have the same number of actions, which makes any variance an obvious benefit or penalty. But generally when a character runs out of actions the only consequence is that their turn ends. When a character runs out of hit points, however, they generally lose all actions and often don’t get to play for a significant amount of time. This is why the seven party roles only have one truly mandatory role: healing.

It stands to reason that a class based on manipulating hit points better than anybody else would be very powerful, perhaps approaching the power level of a class based on manipulating actions. (I realize that smart people actually rank the power level of a class by its ability to solve a wide variety of problems quickly, but we’ll get to that later in this post.) So when I see a class so good at healing it’s literally named “healer”, I expect something at least on par with other spellcasting classes. It’s unfortunate that, instead, it’s terrible.

In Core the big healing classes are the cleric and the druid, in that order. Let’s compare these to the healer:

Healing Class Comparison
Cleric Druid Healer
Hit Dice d8 d8 d8
BAB Fair Fair Poor
Skill Points 2 4 4
Class Skills 10* 13 11
Weapons Simple Some simple, scimitar Simple
Armor All Medium, shields Light
Restrictions Alignment Alignment, no metal Alignment, no metal or shields
* – Certain domains get more class skills.

Roughly comparable, maybe a little weak. But the meat of a spellcasting class is the spellcasting. Let’s look at the raw spell power of the classes by levels per day. That is, if a class can cast a 3rd-level spell twice per day, that’s six levels of spellcasting. (Here, a 0th-level spell is .5 spell levels.) How do the above classes compare?

Spell Levels Per Day
Cleric Druid Healer
L1 3.5 2.5 5
L5 18.5 12.5 24.5
L10 61 46 70
L15 145 109 170
L20 243 198 240

That’s a pretty clear win for the healer. So what’s the problem with them again?

Spells Available Per Level
Cleric Druid Healer
0th 12 13 9
1st 25 20 8
2nd 32 26 7
3rd 31 22 7
4th 23 17 5
5th 24 19 7
6th 26 18 5
7th 18 13 3
8th 17 11 3
9th 11 10 3

Ah.

The healer can do very little, but they can do it a lot. The most powerful classes in D&D got that way by offering options and utility, something the healer lacks. Add in that only the cleric and druid get support in later books, like the Spell Compendium, something that Wizards was very bad about for non-Core classes in 3.5E. It’s starting to be clear why the healer gets no love.

It’s possible that its special features would save it, but they’re just as lackluster. The healer gets thirteen special features. Nine duplicate a spell; their primary motivator is that they don’t have material components, so the best thing going for the healer right now is its ability to save players money. The other features are a slight bonus to healing, a feat (Skill Focus (Heal)), an animal companion that heals, and the ability to heal without provoking attacks of opportunity. There aren’t new things, they’re just ways to do the same thing more loudly.

Is the healer the best healer in 3rd Edition? Yes, by a wide margin. But where there’s nothing to heal, a healer putters about being ineffectual. They can’t attack, they can’t defend, they can’t affect the battlefield, they can’t harm monsters (except undead), they can’t buff, and they can’t even flank because their armor is tissue paper. It’s a class based around sitting on your hands until an opportunity occurs, then responding to that opportunity in the same way you respond to every similar opportunity. They can’t even prepare their non-healing spells more than once or twice because that takes away valuable slots for healing. It’s not a class for PCs, it’s a class for the NPC run by the computer. This is why nobody plays it, because there’s nothing to play.

What would make me be a healer? There are a lot of things we can do, but let’s start with what we can’t do, and the big one is add to their spell list. We may be able to consider newer spells on a case-by-case basis as long as they pertain to healing hit points or removing status effects, but that makes for a long post. We can’t give them additional utility spells or damaging spells of any kind. Throwing a ton of problem-solving abilities at the healer would make them real overpowered real fast, and it violates their high concept of being a healer. Rather than get into a debate of what utility spells are and aren’t appropriate, I’d rather ignore the whole thing and assume their spells are set in stone. We’ll have to make them interesting some other way.

For starters, I think they shouldn’t prepare spells. I think they should cast spontaneously, with their whole spell list as their known spells. The Miniatures Handbook predated Complete Arcana and the Player’s Handbook 2, where the warmage and the beguiler ran on this mechanic. With such a small spell list, I don’t see a compelling balance reason that the healer couldn’t do the same. And it makes the class a lot more versatile when players can remove fear five times rather than watching the party run away because they prepared cures instead. It means we can also get rid of all those spell-duplicating special features if we really want, but the healer needs all the help they can get so let’s keep them for now.

I guess that it does make it harder for them to use metamagic feats, and those can be real useful. But that doesn’t convince me. Healers cast spontaneously, with their entire (limited) spell list as their spells known. Now players don’t have to worry about preparing the same spell list every day and can respond to broader situations.

Second, they need something to do in combat besides heal. One idea is to give them control effects, like the Pathfinder witch or the pacifist cleric in 4E, and we could go that route and make things real easy on ourselves. But again, a healer’s high concept is “make people feel good”. They shouldn’t get any serious offensive ability; that’s not their job. The abilities that suit the healer are more defensive:

Healer’s Blessing (Su): A healer can focus her magical energies to assist allies in less obvious ways than raw healing. At 2nd level and every four levels thereafter, a healer can choose one ability from the list of blessings. No blessing may be chosen more than once. Unless otherwise noted, using a blessing is a standard action that does not provoke attacks of opportunity.
A healer can use any blessing she knows at will. All blessings are magical and a healer cannot use them in an antimagic field.
Redirection: As an immediate action, a healer can draw an magical effect from an ally by drawing it to herself. If a healer succeeds on a saving throw against a spell and her ally fails, she can choose to instead fail the saving throw and allow her ally to reroll the save.
Shield: A healer can use the aid another action to increase her ally’s Armor Class from a distance of 30 feet.
Stabilization: As a free action, a healer can stabilize an ally within 30 feet.
Transference: A healer can transfer a held charge for a cure spell to an ally. As part of the same standard action as casting a spell, the healer can allow an adjacent ally to hold the charge instead of herself. That ally can then touch a target to cast the spell. This follows the same rules for holding a charge. The healer can cast another spell while her ally is holding the charge for her cure spell. Once a healer has transferred a charge to an ally, she cannot transfer another charge to the same ally for 24 hours.
Ward: A healer can touch an ally to give them temporary resistance against an energy type of her choice. This resistance lasts for one minute or until it prevents an amount of damage equal to the healer’s class level. The healer can choose a different energy type each time she uses this blessing.

I’ll admit to being inspired by Pathfinder here, what with the “choose an ability from a list every X levels” mechanic that’s in many of the Pathfinder base classes, but a few 3.5 prestige classes work this way. It’s not brand-new ground.

This gives a healer something to do just about every round, preventing allies from taking damage and healing them when they do. None of these abilities attack or hinder enemies and none directly help the healer herself, which fits with the fluff of the class.

The only real balance concern I had was with the transference blessing. I know it’s a corner case, but I was worried about a healer/monk combo fighting undead. The healer can fight undead by casting cure spells, but she’s lousy at it because her attack bonus is so low. With transference, a healer could give a cure to her monk ally (or an unarmed fighter, or an animal companion, etc.), who then punches an undead with a much higher chance of positive energy damage and a much lower chance of putting the healer in danger. It’s like giving the healer the same attack bonus as the monk in that situation, which isn’t the intent. So an ally can only hold a charge once per day, for an emergency heal when the ally can reach someone that the healer can’t.

Third, I’d get rid of the unicorn, because screw the unicorn. It’s not underpowered or anything, but it limits the class to certain archetypes. Unicorns only associate with “good human or elven maidens of pure heart.” So why are they mandatory for a class that’s supposed to be for all races, genders, and lifestyles? The best thing about the unicorn is picturing it arriving when a rugged, male dwarven healer reaches L8. It could burst majestically through a stained-glass window, sunlight streaming around its glowing mane and a chorus of angels heralding its entrance, approach the confused dwarf, then shrug and say “Look, I was promised a lovely elf. I’m no happier about this than you are.”

…That’s actually a really neat idea, the healer and unicorn who resent being chosen for each other. But still, it shouldn’t be hard-coded.

If we really want the healer to have a companion, play up the friend-to-all-animals shtick that they have in their fluff description. Let them substitute Skill Focus (Heal) for Skill Focus (Handle Animal, Knowledge (nature), or Survival). Then give them a ranger’s animal companion. It lets them have a friend, mount, or meat shield depending on what they want without over-complicating things. Given how bad healers are in combat, they might even be fine with the druid’s animal companion.

I’m really torn on the alignment restriction. The healer’s code states that they must always heal allies and good-aligned creatures. This means that a healer can waltz mindlessly through a crowd of the sick and dying as long as she knows they’re merely neutral or evil. I’d rather play the lawful neutral government healer, tasked with keeping all citizens alive for pragmatic reasons, than the lawful good healer who’s uppity about only healing people walking a virtuous path. Remember, most NPCs are neutral. But the whole point of the class is to provide “pure solace and remediation”. Allowing neutral healers would require relaxing their concept a bit, and no matter how tempted I am I think that’s better handled on a case-by-case basis by an individual DM than by issuing a blanket change.

I’m still not convinced that this makes a healer fun to play, but it makes a healer more fun to play. There’s a lot of work to be done by a player, making sure they they’re involved and interesting out of combat because their in-combat role is still fairly limited. The important thing is to make sure that the healer is an option to be considered rather than discarded without sacrificing the feel of the class, and I think the above changes make it viable.

(Note to self: try playing an evil healer in thrall to a lich, who has ordered him to kill various undead who won’t submit to the lich’s rule. The healer joins a party and continually goads them into taking out high-level undead while he keeps them alive and destroys the undead himself whenever necessary. It’s a character with built-in conflict, secrets, and allies that could easily become enemies if he turns on his patron.)

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On Downtime

Posted on 13 June, 2013 by MssngrDeath

It’s not often that I have the opportunity to defend something in 5E, but the downtime system merits special attention. It’s the first mechanic I’ve seen where the startlingly supportive comments are approaching or beyond 50% dissent. This surprises me.

Of all the complaints I’ve heard about D&D in the years I’ve played it, the most common is that it’s too focused on combat, especially miniatures-based combat, at the expense of non-combat mechanics. Classes are balanced around fighting first and everything else second. 4E was especially heinous in this regard, with all classes turned into slightly-different versions of each other and all narrative elements left fully up to the players, and the fanbase revolted. So when Wizards designs a system to deal with the explicitly non-combat downtime in a way that fits with the standard D&D rules, why it is so strongly decried?

Why are there shouts of “This shouldn’t be reduced to rolling or skills!”, and where were these people when players were clamoring for rules for adjudicating non-adventuring roleplay?

Why are there shouts of “This will ruin the narrative!”, and where were these people when D&D was lambasted for forcing players to form their own narrative?

Why are there shouts of “This should be the DM’s job!”, and where were these people when the official message boards were full of players complaining about DMs who couldn’t handle non-combat situations and DMs, especially new DMs, who were looking for guidance?

If you’re going to bash D&D for being combat-focused, then bash D&D for focusing on something other than combat, maybe you’re the unpleaseable fanbase that prompts such changes in the first place.

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Campaign Writeup: The Eight Arms and the Empire of Sin

Posted on 11 June, 2013 by MssngrDeath

The Eight Arms and the Empire of Sin is the fourth campaign to end in the Eight Arms universe. After their escapades in dwarven lands left the Eight Arms persona non grata, the crafting team is sent to the Wild South as part punishment and part comeback. In short order they find themselves under attack by strange creatures who kill especially sinful locals, which leads them into a plot by the king of desert giants and the mysterious prophet who caused him to change from an immoral leader to a paragon of virtue.

Here’s what I learned from running this campaign:

  • Remember what I said about disparate character abilities? This campaign was that post turned up to eleven. I got a lot of experience in using, creating, and modifying monsters to be a threat to the party haves but not an instant-kill to the party’s have-nots, with varying degrees of success.

  • Pathfinder is real bad at boss monsters. At one point in this campaign a summoner managed to knock a campaign villain from 100% health to 15% on the first initiative pass of a fight, which is just the most egregious example of many across both this and my other ongoing (?) Pathfinder campaign. I don’t remember bosses being this easy in 3.5E, though that may be my 4E experience clouding my memory. It’s clear that if I want bosses that last more than two rounds I’ll have to write a mechanic for it.

  • Terrain is kind of wasted in Pathfinder. I’m used to doing terrain for 4E but players and monsters aren’t as mobile in Pathfinder, mostly because full attacks are a thing. Often the players didn’t use the full map provided and only rarely did they interact with the terrain unless it was part of the battle, and any choke point was thoroughly abused by both sides. I think I internalized this more than recognizing it explicitly because I can see how my maps got less and less complex over the campaign while nobody batted an eye.

Given the option, here’s what I would change:

  • I should have brought in more western tropes. The campaign’s high concept was “The Wild West”, and we did eventually have a bank robbery, a cattle drive, and a defend-the-ranch scenario. But we never had a shootout, a meeting at high noon, or an encounter on a train (among other things), and the only proper posse was organized by the party. Since it’s unlikely that I’ll run another Wild West campaign in short order, that’s a lot of missed opportunities.

  • Speaking of missed opportunities, I should have done better foreshadowing, especially of the campaign twist. It’s a lot harder to foreshadow when you only have vague ideas about what happens in the end and let the players fill in everything in between. I found that I basically had to remember my goal in every interaction, which took me a while and consumed a thread in my brain that I really could have used elsewhere. I guess this is largely a limitation of player-driven plots, especially in long campaigns.

I still have a file of ideas for Eight Arms campaigns, but it might be time to retire these characters for a bit. Mostly I’m glad I got the sinspawns and rakshasa out of my system; I’ve been wanting to run a campaign with those guys since I read about them. Desert giants, especially the nerfed version I used, less so.

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Published Adventures

Posted on 1 June, 2013 by MssngrDeath

My opinion on published campaign settings is documented and correct (because it’s my blog and I can say things like that). But published settings go hand-in-hand with something that I’ve never discussed: published adventures. Stargazer’s World talked about them recently, which I heard about when the Haste Podcast brought it up.

In general I don’t have as dim a view of published adventures as I do of published campaign settings. Yes, they’re still impersonal, resistant to modification, and occasionally nonsensical, but in smaller doses. It’s a lot easier to tweak something in an adventure to fit your party and style of play than it is in a larger setting. If I want to change the shopkeeper in an adventure so that he’s a former caravan driver that the party knows from a few arcs ago, I can do that without having to worry about whether this changes that particular NPC’s relationship with the evil cult in another sourcebook. The reach of the material is understandably smaller, so changes cause fewer world-rending ripples.

But I think there’s something deeper here. Stargazer’s World lists the following four issues:

First is that they often lack a helpful summary of the adventure for DMs who can’t read the whole thing beforehand. DMs don’t pick up published adventures because they’re the last bastion of modern creative writing; they pick up published adventures because it’s worlds faster than writing an adventure of their own. But this doesn’t have anything to do with the adventure itself, just the way it’s presented to the reader. It’s a problem that merits attention but not something that damages the at-the-table enjoyment of the DM and players beyond the extra minute it takes the DM to look something up.

Second, they’re badly organized. Again, this isn’t a problem with the “adventure” as much as with the “published.” It’s rare that I pick up any sourcebook and think “this was organized very well and everything is easy to find”, which is why my DMG and GMG have sticky notes on the inside covers with a list of my favorite tables and their page numbers.

Both of these points cause problems, but even an adventure with no summary and bad editing is still sound and usable. If a DM has the time to read the adventure and find where things are, these are alleviated if not eliminated and the session can be saved. Campaign settings don’t really have these problems because it’s assumed that the DM and players will read and internalize the information before running a session or even designing characters.

Similarly, the fourth point (I’m skipping ahead a bit here) is that the adventures have through-the-roof railroading. Again this is irrelevant to campaign settings because they’re more like (overwrought, persnickety) sandboxes. A campaign setting that railroads is an adventure rather than a proper setting.

The third point is where there’s finally some overlap: nonsensical adventure design. D&D doesn’t have a lot of historical or geographical basis to violate, but there are a lot of places to get things wrong. For example, an adventure that requires the players to travel through a forest during a rainy night was written by somebody who has never been in a forest during a rainy night. Dungeon maps are particularly bad, even without getting into a fight over dungeon ecology; actual strongholds have things laid out in specific ways because they work, and I can’t wrap my mind around maps that look like they were designed for adventuring first and actual use second. This is something of a pet peeve of mine from way back when I started video gaming, before we expected things in games to look or act like things in the real world, and I could hammer out an entire post on which games got it wrong, which got it right, and which couldn’t decide.

This is especially egregious because I tend not to use published adventures except for cherry-picking ideas, monsters, and maps from them to use in my games. I used to maintain a repository of adventures to use as inspiration for a session, then file off the serial numbers and tweak it to fit with what I wanted. A missing summary, hard-to-find stat blocks, and railroading often didn’t bother me because they weren’t relevant by the time I got through with plucking out the bits I wanted. But a lousy map is an unusable map, and an adventure with enough unusable elements is an unusable adventure.

This also let me get past the one thing I could think of that consistently irritated me about published adventures: the level recommendation. Adventures have to make certain hard-coded assumptions; an adventure that has the players exploring a pyramid has little or no place in a metropolis until the DM does some fancy (and often awesome) footwork. There’s nothing that breaks flow quite like reskinning a tundra adventure into a swamp and forgetting that there’s a combat based around fighting on thin ice. But the intended power level of an adventure is harder to adjust. An L5 party can go through an L4 or L6 adventure without a problem, but an L9 adventure will ruin them and an L1 adventure is far too easy. Usually the plot and flow themselves can be preserved unless they requires that the players have or lack some particular ability. However the monsters, traps, and challenges are unsalvageable and often need a complete redesign, which defeats the point of using an adventure at all.

A long time ago I tried my hand at writing adventures specifically designed for this type of “take the good, drop the rest” style. The idea was to provide a map, some monsters, and some loot, then largely call it a day. I wrote some brief justification for why the players might be exploring this particular map, but it was largely up to the DM to provide the fluff and the hook. That way the DM could grab the session, trust that the numbers are fine, and spend their limited time just coming up with some storyline that worked with their players, setting, and style. The adventure itself allowed for almost any location and used only SRD monsters to minimize the amount of flipping around. It even had encounters and challenges appropriate to a ten-level range, so DMs could use it at L1 or L10 (or, if they were like me, adjust the difficulty based on how well or poorly the players were doing).

I think this actually gets past every problem: The summary is irrelevant and there’s no railroading because there’s no hard-coded plot, the organization is simple because the important information is in the existing books, it’s too simple to have anything nonsensical, and it’s accessible to a variety of campaigns. If there’s any interest, I might go back and dust it off, maybe update it for Pathfinder or 4th Edition. I’ve learned a fair amount about session design in the last six years; maybe I can spruce it up some.

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Designing Interesting Classes (or, Why Nobody Plays a Samurai)

Posted on 23 May, 2013 by MssngrDeath

As I look at races, classes, prestige classes, and other things (but mostly classes, since they’re the biggest deal) for Underpowered, I’ve found myself wondering more and more why I think these options need help. It’s true that I don’t think they’re very good mechanically, but there are a lot of options in D&D where I don’t like the mechanics and don’t see a need to retool them (Hello, 4E bard! What fun we could have had together!). To get some perspective on this (and to fill time while I rewrite the half of the article I lost on the healer class from the Miniatures Handbook), I started looking at the classes that I thought were fine, figuring there was something there I could extrapolate.

Well, it turned out that was easy. The classes that were fine were the ones that people played. After all, there’s a reason people play some classes and not others. But what have I seen people play?

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m not counting any times I saw the character in one-shots, PvP sessions, or Delve Night, unless the player made a conscious decision to play that character consistently. In short I’m only counting ongoing characters, not see-how-it-works trial runs. I also need to point out that this evidence is purely anecdotal rather than an analysis of every D&D character ever played, but I work with what I have.

Here are the classes I’ve never seen in 3.5E:

  • Dragonfire adept
  • Factotum
  • Healer
  • Marshal
  • Ninja
  • Paladin (I know, right?)
  • Samurai
  • Spellthief
  • Spirit shaman
  • Swashbuckler
  • Warlock
  • Wu jen

Here are the classes I’ve never seen in 4E:

  • Ardent
  • Assassin
  • Runepriest (though I’ve seen a hybrid)
  • Warlord (though I’ve seen a hybrid)

It’s a little telling that of those four, the only one that isn’t a healer came out during Essentials. This says to me that either people really like the other three healing classes or really hate these three.

But here’s the kicker: 3.5 only has a few more classes than 4E. 3.5 had the core 11, 3 each in the first four Complete Whatever books, 2 each in the Miniatures Handbook and Heroes of Horror, and 1 each in Dungeonscape and Dragon Magic, a total of 29. 4E had 8 each in the first two Player’s Handbooks, 6 in Player’s Handbook 3, 2 in Heroes of Shadow, and 1 each in the Eberron Player’s Guide and Neverwinter Campaign Setting, a total of 26.

I’ve been playing 4E for four years now, and I’ve been playing 3.5E for more than ten. I’ve had a much longer period to see 3.5E characters than 4E characters. So why is it that I’ve seen 85% of the classes 4E has to offer, but only 59% of 3.5E’s?

From the standpoint of how the classes are built I think there are a few possibilities. It’s possible that base classes in 3.5E were just that: bases. The real meat of a character is the choices made later, like feats, spells, items, and so on. For many characters, their prestige class was what really made them special and the base class was just a way to get there; Complete Warrior alone had more prestige classes than 3.5E as a whole had base classes. There’s a reason my decision to play a single-class fighter in a recent campaign was something of a coup. In this respect, 3.5E provided so many options that no two characters looked the same even if they had similar starting points, because what they did was so much more important than how they started.

It’s also possible that these classes are just so bad that nobody wants to play them. Why would somebody play a spirit shaman when a druid can cast the same spells and get wild shape? Why would somebody play a runepriest when a hybrid cleric/fighter has more healing and more defense? With this assumption, 4E’s tight hold on power balance affords a much higher likelihood that any given class will be fun to play without breaking the game wide open.

But I think both of these just look at part of the picture. A lot of players are trying for a prestige class or looking for a class that isn’t weak, but these are both means to the same end. A player picks a class because they think they’ll have fun with it.

Looking at the list above, I can see why these classes generally weren’t popular. Three of them are strongly Eastern (ninja, samurai, wu jen), which doesn’t fit with a lot of fantasy archetypes, and people sign up for D&D because it’s high fantasy; it helps that they’re just retooled versions of core classes with less long-term support. The spellthief’s usefulness is highly reliant on the DM’s favor. The paladin has a hard alignment restriction that limits the characters who can play it. The spirit shaman is based on an obscure creature type. The swashbuckler’s high concept is better satisfied by a rogue or ranger. The warlock…okay, I’m stumped here. The warlock is awesome. The other four classes aren’t helped by being from obscure books, but are still strongly and unbreakably dragon-based (dragonfire adept), reliant on a player’s strong rules knowledge (factotum), incapable of most participation in combat (healer), or built around making other people look better (marshal). For most of these classes, there’s a pretty good reason why a player would look at them and decide, quite simply, that they weren’t fun to play.

It’s not possible to explain in a single blog post what players want to play. Large companies have entire departments devoted to learning the ways that people have fun, and they still can’t always get it right (Hi, Square Enix!). Some people like classes because they’re better mechanically, some because they fit a pre-existing concept the player wants, some because they work with the system in neat ways, and some even because the art was awesome and got them interested. I think that to be interesting and thus playable, a class has to fit at least one of these requirements, and the more the better.

As an example, take the 3.5E samurai. It’s not as good mechanically as a straight fighter. It does have a unique high concept, scary Eastern fighting guy, but one that doesn’t fit with D&D’s core storyline. It does have an interesting mechanic, but one that doesn’t actually work as expected. And the iconic samurai, a dwarf, doesn’t know how to hold a katana. It fails on all counts. (For homework, open the same book as the samurai, Complete Warrior, and explain why the dark hunter prestige class also fails all four requirements).

Now let’s take the redesigned samurai. It’s roughly on par with the fighter, or at least with other non-magic classes. Its high concept is still restricted to something not like D&D, but it’s expanded to allow for other interpretations and allow players to file off the serial numbers. Its interesting mechanic actually works beyond the small window of the original design. The art…okay, the art’s still bad. But three out of four is a lot better than zero, and my stick figures wouldn’t improve anything.

Of course this extends to things that aren’t classes. The bullywug was underpowered, it had no interesting mechanics, and its art would have been improved if they’d used screenshots from Bucky O’Hare; all it had going for it was a concept that the player-ready version opted to ignore. The redesigned one has a mechanic no other race has (or even approximates), its concept is front and center, and its power is back up to the level of other races.

In general, though, a race should be a fairly small part of a character, while a class or prestige class is part of the three-word description you use to explain the character to somebody else. It colors your decisions, informs your build, and at least partially determines your party role. Having an interesting class is worlds more important than having an interesting race.

It’s with this mindset that I’m looking through books, trying to figure out what it and isn’t a candidate for Underpowered. There are a lot of things that nobody’s playing, and sometimes it’s hard to determine why. There are plenty of perfectly fine options that through happenstance haven’t made it to my table (seriously, the paladin). The question is figuring out what’s good but unlucky, what needs a small tweak, and what needs a total overhaul.

If you have any ideas, feel free to drop me a line.

Posted in Game Design, Underpowered | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Freedom vs. Structure in Class Design

Posted on 17 May, 2013 by MssngrDeath

The 5th Edition Q&A for last week got me thinking. In an increasingly rare case, it wasn’t about how I’m upset with how the game is shaping up, but rather that Wizards is taking an approach to the design that merits discussion:

…the important thing to know about a subclass is that it’s not about mechanics, it’s about the archetype. That’s why we want to look at things like “Knight” for a subclass, not “Defender;” the word “Knight” puts a face on the subclass and describes its place in the world.

This is in keeping with what D&D has tended to be over the years, a late-medieval western-Europe version of high fantasy with all of its associated tropes. It’s important to Wizards that each subclass, like the classes, paragon paths, prestige classes, etc. before it, be some role within the world. These options then give the players the chance to play this role in their unique (or, if the character optimization boards are any indication, ridiculously specific) way. In this sense, it makes a lot of sense to have subclasses named “Knight” or “Gladiator” or what have you.

But something about this felt a little off, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until somebody in the comments said it for me:

I think saying “Knight” when you mean “Defender” is a bad idea. Putting the face on our characters is our job, not yours. I’d rather have the mechanics straight forward and then I can say “This guy is a knight, because he defends the weak.” Remember, D&D is simply a mechanical guide to loop a groups imagination together…keep mechanics free from “loose labels” and “options”, just paint it out loud without hiding behind other terms, and we’ll handle what’s a Knight and what isn’t.

This also makes sense. A “fighter” is a rough model* of a character’s mechanical abilities, one that can be modified with feats, skills, items, selections within the class, and other choices. The way a player runs his or her character also affects the model, in the same way that a character wielding a trident feels different from a character wielding a longsword even though every single other option may be the same. But players expect that “fighter” is just a starting point and the character is defined by the other choices they make, the roles they fill, and they way they’re played. If that’s the goal, why is it that subclasses are explicitly intended to define the character rather than just give a slightly modified foundation on which a player can build?

It’s a fairly common debate, freedom versus structure. On the one hand, a class named “defender” gives players the option to put any spin on it that they want within the limits of the class. They could use that class to build a noble knight or a holy paladin or an armored warlord. The system gives the loose rules so that everybody agrees on what they’re doing, but it’s up to the player to take those rules and use them to envision a character. On the other hand, a class named “knight” brings forth an image immediately, and it lets others know exactly what sort of character this is down to their party role and something of their personality. It doesn’t makes sense that the knight, the paladin, and the warlord all share the same set of abilities, and defining them differently lets each shine on their own without all feeling like the same thing.

There’s not one good answer here. There are players who like the freedom of taking “defender” as a skeleton and building their own creature. This is why there are classless systems, a lot of them. There are also players who want to understand something about a character without hearing their entire backstory. If I say that my party contains a vampire, an ex-slave gladiator, a ballroom dancer, and Tony Stark, there’s no way to know anything about the characters’ roles, their system, their personalities, even whether they’re a group at all (hint: they are). To some players, that’s great. But D&D is specifically and totally about a balanced party and it’s designed for players who expect that.

There’s also a learning curve here regarding shared language. One of the stated goals of 5th Edition is to let the system be simple enough for any age or experience level; it’s why skills and feats are fully-optional mechanics. A new player might not know what a “cleric” is, but a “knight” means something and gives some direction regarding what they do and how they act. I saw this a lot during Delve Night, both in the characters brought to the table and the ones we provided. Handing a player (or describing your character to other players as) “Donald of Kent, a ghost possessing a suit of armor” leaves a lot of unanswered questions, but handing the player “a shardmind defender and ranged striker” at least gives them something they can understand even if the specifics are slightly different. The freedom to design something without a class is great, but it runs the risk of confusing and alienating people new to the system.

Then again, if you’re looking at it from a “get new players” perspective, you also have to take into account that people may want options you haven’t presented. A “defender” is vague and provides little direction, but it works as a dwarven fighter, a feudal-era samurai, a modern soldier, a space-age warrior, or any number of characters. A “knight” is really just one thing, a knight. If the system provide so much structure that it’s restrictive, players won’t be able to play the characters they want unless there are more books with more options. Ask anybody who’s played 4E and wanted to build a Dex-based character that wasn’t a striker. That concept wasn’t something the designers thought of and released (until Essentials, where we got a ranger who could be a controller as long as he loves archery), so it doesn’t exist no matter how much somebody might want it.

I like freedom, so it appeals to me that there’s a “defender”, a generic idea that lets me tweak it to fit whatever character I want. But given how easy it is to reskin things now that I’m used to it, I can do the same thing with a “knight”. The difference is that a “defender” tends to expect that I’m mixing-and-matching traits until I have what I want. This means more options for me, but it greatly increases the chance that there are combinations of abilities that break the game wide open; the solution to this from a design standpoint is to either playtest everything to the hilt (prohibitive; I learned this in World of Warcraft) or provide only the limited options you’re certain are balanced (boring; I learned this by reading Unearthed Arcana). A “knight” expects that I have everything from the following list, whether or not it fits my character concept. In a recent comment I described how frustrating it is that I love the cavalier except for the non-negotiable mount, and I’m not the only one who feels this way.

It’s kind of a moot point for D&D, a system that has always had classes and likely always will. They’re not going to stick to a generic fighter / rogue / magic-user set of classes, they’re going to present any number of things that fit with the lore and seem different enough from each other. I don’t much care which way they go as long as it’s interesting. Building interesting classes, however, is a lot harder than it looks, and that’s something I’ll discuss in a future post.

* — I really want to use the word “archetype” here, but that has a specific meaning within Pathfinder. In fact, it’s the equivalent of “subclass”, and this post didn’t need to get more confusing.

Posted in Game Design | Tagged | 2 Comments

The Bartle Test

Posted on 12 May, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Tycho said this recently:

In order to play a game with someone, more often than not, you usually have to be playing the same game. That probably seems like something you wouldn’t have to enunciate, but not everybody likes to do the same stuff, let alone has spent their lives building the skillset required to perform pixel-accurate jumps.

There are something like a trillion ways to define types of gamers. One that’s gotten some play in this blog is GNS theory, or the idea that gamers can be divided into gamists (who like to win), narrativists (who like to tell a story) and simulationists (who like to play in a world that makes sense). I’ve discussed it briefly a couple of times, but for a better analysis there are a bunch of places you can go.

I don’t buy the idea that there’s some trinary variable in a gamer that determines what they like. Instead imagine a triangle, with one style at each point, and I think a person falls somewhere inside that triangle’s area. Perhaps they like narrativism and simulation equally but don’t have much respect for gamism, or whatever. So that makes it a little difficult to sit down and say for a fact “system X is for people who like style Y”, because that could mean that system X is lousy for people who are only partially Y. I suppose that for the purposes of figuring out how gamers identify and forming a launching point for discussion, it’s perfectly fine.

But I didn’t start in role-playing games. I joined my first D&D campaign in 2003, relatively recently. I have, however, been playing video games since about 1989. A lot of my worldview is based around video gaming, whether I’m building worlds (Is this a place I want to interact with?), characters (Is this a character that will still be fun at the end of the game?), monsters (Does this guy have something that makes him memorable but not frustrating?), even plots (Is there a point here where a player would be fine putting the controller down and never coming back?). Heck, even my first D&D book was the Monster Manual, which I picked up because it had parallels to a game I was playing at the time. There’s an anecdotal blog post in that story.

The amount of overlap between gamers (pen and paper) and gamers (video) is a lot closer than one might expect, evidenced by the fact that these groups of people share a name. Before I had ever heard of GNS Theory, I was already looking at my characters, players, campaigns, et cetera through the lens of a different theory: the Bartle Test.

Very roughly, it comes from the idea that different players want different things from games, even from the same game, and it presents a way to determine roughly what a given person wants based on two axes: action vs. interaction, and game world x other players. It gives designers a simple, shared analysis to consider how players are playing the game, and it gives them some guidelines on how the different types interact and how to foster or deter each group. It’s designed for multiplayer games so it wasn’t hard to extend to tabletop gaming. There’s a more evolved three-axis version, but I initially internalized the two-axis version, so it makes sense to start there. It also comes with an easy-to-remember naming system based on playing card suits.

A spade wants to interact with the game world. Bartle calls them “explorers” because they’re interested in testing the limits of the game itself more than testing the people who populate it. In a MMORPG, these are the people who find the easter eggs, who notice when NPCs refer to each other or share similarities, who understand the lore behind the game. At the table, these are the players who want to know about the world and the campaign background, who like NPC conversations, and who actually think about things like “how does the ecosystem in this dungeon work?”.

A heart wants to interact with the other players. Bartle calls them “socialisers” because he’s British but also because these are the players who form social networks regardless of the game around them. In a MMORPG, these players join guilds and adventure with their friends. At the table, these are people who are there because it’s a fun sort of social outlet, and often the system or campaign isn’t as relevant as the people who attend.

A club wants to act on the other players. Bartle calls them “killers” because this usually manifests as some sort of PvP, though it can also manifest as currency manipulation, changing the world in ways that affect other players, and so on. At the table this can appear as the unlikeable backstabber, and as such there isn’t a lot of support for it in systems like D&D. But in systems where conflict between players is expected and encouraged (Paranoia, for example), clubs can thrive.

A diamond wants to act on the game world. Bartle calls them “achievers” because their goal is triumphing over the game in a way that produces rewards. In a MMORPG, these are people who work toward the best gear or get all of the achievements. At the table, they’re players who want to know the plot so that they can resolve it, because finding a problem and fixing it is most rewarding.

There’s a lot of room here for different player types to exhibit the same behaviors, which is fine. For example, a diamond might design an optimal combat build to defeat encounters more easier, a club to show up or kill other characters, and a spade to explore what the system can do. A heart might benefit from a game rule that rewards player interaction, but so might a diamond who uses it for a mechanical advantage. Everybody but a club might enjoy dungeon exploration and everybody but a diamond might enjoy quick one-shot sessions.

The thing I really like about it is that is provides some sort of semi-objective measurement (valuable for any DM who’s ever noticed that players have a harder time vocalizing what they want than vocalizing what they don’t want) but also puts preferences on a scale rather than a hard identification. Unlike GNS, there’s no “I’m a heart”, but rather “My primary focus is heart, but a close second is diamond and I really don’t like club”. It gets past the issues I’ve seen where a player might, for example, claim to be a narrativist but play like a gamist, because it acknowledges that a person can enjoy two things but allows them to express those likes as something understandable and comparable rather than vague guesswork.

It’s important to note that, like any such analysis, this is a tool rather than a hard definition because every player has each role in some measure. A heart can enjoy beating a dragon; it’s just more fun beating it in a party. A club can enjoy playing D&D with a group, but they’ll prefer exerting their influence on the NPCs and other players. Rather than telling you exactly what type of gamer you and your players are, it gives you a framework to understand the sorts of things you might enjoy and use that to figure out what sort of game you might want to play.

You can take the Bartle test here.

Posted in Game Design | 5 Comments

On the Talkative Tavernmaster

Posted on 7 May, 2013 by MssngrDeath

The problem with providing any sort of advice on DMing is that inevitably you’ll come across something that can’t be explained in a thousands words via a blog. I would love to give tons of information on how to actually design and run a session on the fly, or bring NPCs to life, or make interesting monsters, but a lot of things are going to be DM- and group-specific. A great idea for one set of people may not work for a second and may not even make sense to a third. Even if I can say something sufficiently universal, what’s the best way to explain it given the limitations of the medium?

It’s not that I’m not trying, of course. It’s just that for every good way I can think of to explain something or provide suggestions to budding DMs, I can think of ten bad ways to do the same.

Take, for example, last week’s Forging the Realms.* The blurb on the front page was this:

Creating a quick cast of nonplayer characters is something DMs have to do from time to time. This week, Ed [Greenwood] provides you with a way to do this that allows you to add more flavor to your campaign—and he does so with an extended example that you can immediately use in your game.

Try reading that extended example. I dare you.

I get that DMing is hard. The Haste Podcast talked about it just last week. Anytime Wizards, or really anybody, can come up with a way to help DMs present an interesting world and story to their players, it’s a welcome bit of information to new and experienced gamers alike.

But you know what’s not the way to do it? By telling players that the best way to flesh out a village is by writing a sixteen-paragraph, 2800-word essay and reading it to them verbatim.

First, it’s way too long. Players don’t like sitting around while a story is presented to them. They like interacting with the story and being part of it, and this includes interrupting NPCs if it looks like they’re going to rant for a while. There’s a reason that the huge, grey-backed, italicized text for room descriptions has fallen out of vogue, and it’s because it’s deeply boring. Part of the reason I can’t stand published campaign settings is because they’re impersonal, resistant to modification, and occasionally nonsensical, and this this all of the same bullet points. Give the players some direction or landmarks or leads, then let them ask questions and explore things at their own pace. A fleshed-out setting is great, but the campaign is about the PCs.

Second, it’s way too detailed. There is a part in the essay (because that’s what it is, an essay framed in the context of a conversation with monologue from a tavernmaster) where the speaker describes the floor of local church, not because it holds treasure but because he’s describing things like the players are viewing them. At another point he describes the wagonmaster, as though the characters really want to talk to a wagonmaster but it didn’t occur to them to ask for one specifically. It’s less of an introduction and more like a rambling tourist’s guidebook. There’s no conceivable way that a player can retain all of that information, and there’s barely a chance that the DM can when it comes up later.

Third, it takes way too long to write. This isn’t a problem if you use the “extended example” Wizards provides (and it means that most of the town and its significant NPCs were designed by somebody else, so if that’s your thing, good for you), but if you’re making one for your own town then you’re in for a long bit of work. Not all DMs are authors at heart and they won’t enjoy feeling that good DMs have to put everything into one long speech. I am an author at heart, and I have a campaign wiki exactly so I can put this information into logical, linked places instead of giving it out all at once. If people could pound out 2800 words of session preparation whenever they wanted, NaNoWriMo wouldn’t be a thing.

And this is all for a “tiny wayside hamlet”. Imagine a town with an actual government, or a city with competing groups and a criminal element. I would imagine that larger settlements need multiple like essays, each describing a different culture. A tavernmaster could spend sixteen paragraphs just talking about the people, places, and relations in the dwarven district. Factor in that players are well within their rights to walk ten minutes in another direction and get a similar speech with completely different information from a merchant district, and things quickly go bananas.

It’s Wizards’ job to get people interested in the products they sell, and that includes making even the little roadside stops in Forgotten Realms into the launching point for a mini-campaign’s worth of adventures. I get that. But the way to do that is not by telling DMs to create a boring, complicated, one-and-done dissertation on each hamlet their players could visit. It will, as the article suggests, help DMs to make NPC into “real people”, but there’s no universe in which Wizards could actually expect that it will work “in a hurry”. The better way to do it is to create all of this as notes beforehand, then let the DM disseminate that information as the players ask and discover it.

I realize that it doesn’t do much good to lambast somebody else’s town-generation strategy when I haven’t produced one myself. Mine is usually “play the NPCs as they come and hope real hard that it’s interesting”, but that’s not exactly useful advice. I’m working on putting together something quick and easy to use now.

* — I need you to understand exactly how sparse D&D news is that I find myself commenting on *shudder* an official campaign setting. Seriously, the only information we got last week on 5th Edition was that subclasses exist, which would be news if they weren’t already in Pathfinder (as archetypes), and both previous editions of D&D (as [alternate] class features). Decade-old information isn’t really news.

Posted in Commentary, DMing | 6 Comments

On 5th Edition Advancement

Posted on 25 April, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Aaaaaaand themes are gone.

When 5th Edition was first a thing (in a playtest I didn’t play that may never have actually happened thanks to an NDA), there are a few things that were awkward but that really excited me. I like having a bunch of different builds of a base class, something I got used to in 4E and Pathfinder and wholeheartedly endorse. I liked having static DCs, something that 4th Edition failed at with its “hills get steeper” mechanic. I liked having static attack and defenses, so that a CR 3 monster isn’t a total joke by the time the party is L6.

But the neatest addition by far was a theme, something that all editions of D&D should have, forever. The idea was that you had a class, but that wasn’t really your whole character. You were also something else that was relevant in some way to adventuring. For example, you were a fighter and you hit things really hard. But you were also an alchemist who was good with potions, or a farmer who knew how to handle livestock, or a spy who was good as disguises. These weren’t tied to classes, so an acrobat could be an elven rogue or a dwarven wizard. It made characters different and interesting and it showed that your entire life wasn’t defined by your feat list.

Over time, a lot of the things I liked about 5th Edition have been whittled away. Before, the worst offense was that escalating bonuses came back (Wizards says they’re trying to prevent this while increasing the ways players can do it, so yeah). But in this week’s This Week in D&D, it became clear that themes had been replaced by backgrounds. These represent a character’s past rather than their present, so all of the bonuses and abilities are conferred at L1.

That is, you were a farmer, but now you’re a fighter so you can never improve at farming. That is, unless they introduce farming feats, except that feats aren’t allowed if the DM doesn’t like them. If they do, training in farming comes at the expense of training in weapons, or spellcasting, or whatever else you have. It’s designed to be a small but direct decrease in power for the sake of personality, and suddenly we’re back to a world where power and personality are at odds. Before, themes and classes could live in harmony, both improving and changing as the character advances. Now every fun option is at the expense of an option that keeps the character alive.

On the other hand, perhaps this isn’t required. Wizards is making it clear that they don’t expect characters to always take the “best” option. They want a game where a character can still be competitive even if they’ve neglected most of the powerful feats. Which means that a character who has selected the best feats blows the game wide open by being too far beyond the expected curve, and we’re back to the balance problems of every other edition.

I liked themes, a lot. I liked them in 4th Edition too. Seeing that they’re going away for backgrounds, a mechanic that by definition is backstory rather than something that can and should be a focus, is another note in the “5th Edition isn’t for me” column.

Don’t even get me started on the notion that skills and backgrounds are “a DM’s tool” rather than a player’s. I’m starting to become convinced that 5th Edition isn’t for players at all.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | 1 Comment

Obsidian Portal Reforged

Posted on 23 April, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Just a general name drop: the Obsidian Portal Kickstarter is ending soon. It’s a tool I’ve used before so the prospect of improvements excites me a bit, and there’s the opportunity to get a discount on premium membership in case you’re planning on running a campaign in the next year.

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