“Rules as Written” (or, Hate the Playa, not the Game)

Posted on 13 September, 2013 by Law

I was loitering at my friendly local gaming store (patronize it with money!) lately, and a conversation sprouted about play styles. Specifically, we discussed a particular style of play formed around building powerful characters and having them do powerful things. Some at the table discussed some animosity to this style of play, a position I can understand. Eventually one participant pointed at me and said something to the effect of “I know this guy has the same reaction I do to the phrase ‘rules as written’ in a non-ironic context. It makes him want to reach across the table and throttle someone.”

Hang on now.

“Rules as written” (often abbreviated RAW) has gotten something of a bad rap over the decades. On its face it just means that we’re talking about the information as it exists in the book, distinct from house rules or our interpretation or the designer’s intent. Following the rules as written is a fairly important part of any gaming system; if we ignore the rules and allow wizards unlimited spells per day or let monsters move and still take a full attack, we have a different game than the one presented. Rules give us an ostensibly stable framework on which to build a game.

I’ve had plenty of occasion to say “rules as written” in a non-ironic context. I’m a DM. It’s our job to read the rules, interpret them within the framework of the vision we share with the players, and use them to keep the game running. If a player asks “Can I do X? The rules are unclear.” I’m as likely to rely on “How are the rules written?” just as much as I am “How ultra sick awesome would this be?”. Because if I wanted everything to be all awesome all the time, we’d go outside and play make-believe. Throwing out the rules is something that needs to be considered carefully if sometimes quickly, and keeping in mind how they’re written is important to keep everyone on the same page.

But that’s how DMs read rules. That’s probably how game designers read rules, too. Players are different, at least some of them. The stigma around RAW isn’t because DMs are tired of using the system they choose. The stigma is because there are players, a (probably) small but vocal subset, who wield the rules like a bludgeon. They don’t use the rules as written, they abuse the rules as written.

I own a copy of Complete Adventurer, a rulebook with options for skill-based characters in D&D 3.5. In this book is a prestige class named the vigilante, which is pretty much exactly how it sounds. A vigilante gets a certain number of spells per day of different spell levels. Somewhere along the line, the typesetting in that table broke.

An ordinary person would look at this and say “Ah, the typesetting broke. The second character in the ‘3rd’ column belongs in the ‘4th’ column.” A designer or editor might say “…frick.” But the sort of player who abuses RAW instead says “Awesome! A vigilante gets twenty 3rd-level spells per day at L7, and thirty-one at L8! Too bad they don’t get any 4th-level spells, but that’s a trade I’m willing to make.”

This is an extreme example, though not one so extreme that I haven’t seen it posited. When citing RAW, the speaker is trying to be free from intention or interpretation. Sometimes it’s helpful and clear. Other times it’s an excuse to exploit a loophole, error, or unexpected design consequence. The latter is the sort of behavior that inspires DMs to physical violence.

Since I love examples, imagine a character who threatens a critical hit on a roll of fifteen or higher with a scimitar. This is core, so it shouldn’t sound that unusual. You can even dual-wield them with the right build. But there’s also a fairly mundane feat that gives a character a free attack whenever they roll a critical threat with light maces. There’s a weapon enhancement in another book that lets scimitars count as maces. Using a prestige class in a third book, the critical threat range of maces (which are scimitars now) triples. In short, sixty percent of the character’s attacks generate a free attack, which in turn can generate another free attack, and so forth.

If this sounds powerful, you’re right. If it sound ridiculous, you’re exactly as right. And I see the appeal of building it as a thought experiment, or for a one-shot where everybody comes in with similar builds. One of my most fun characters sprang from a similar thought experiment, after some tweaking. But if you read the above and thought about how great it would be in a normal campaign, you are provably wrong.

See, a character like this is fun for one and only one person at the table. Nobody wants be in a party where they have to watch the critlomancer roll dozens of attacks, stretching their turn out far longer than anybody else’s and monopolizing the campaign’s combat time. Nobody wants to be in the party with the wizard who solves every problem effortlessly. Nobody wants to be in the party where the rogue runs off and slits the enemies’ throats before anybody else can interact with them.

It’s a DM’s job to step in and say “This character is hurting the campaign, the other players, and the mood at the table”. And it’s here where RAW gets its bad name, when a player’s primary, often sole, defense is that the rules allow it and thus they can’t be doing anything wrong. In this argument, cheating is a moral offense but actively harming other real, breathing, within-melee-range people is natural and expected. As far as I’m concerned, any position that manages to violate Law #0, Law #1, and Law #4 at once is provably wrong.

I can’t understand the sort of people who play cooperative games like D&D this way, in the same way that I can’t understand Twilight fans or I can’t understand not liking Sonata Arctica. I don’t even know how to approach it beyond forcing the player to acknowledge it. I’ve met people who played this way, at least when they started gaming. Some have developed into players who build living characters with faults and hard-fought triumphs, so I know such a transformation is possible. But I’ve met far more people who can’t or won’t accept that there are D&D tables where it’s not appropriate to wantonly abuse rules for a personal power trip. Those people are conspicuously not invited to the sorts of games our circle plays. It’s possible that given sufficient elucidation, cajoling, or alienation (in order of preference), this crowd might see how their fun comes at the expense of others, but until then I expect their gaming opportunities to dwindle smaller and smaller.

“Rules as written” isn’t a bad phrase, and it doesn’t have a bad meaning. It’s a victim of guilt by association. As the biggest arrow in the quiver of negative, selfish play, it’s subject to a Pavlovian reaction through no fault of its own. Instead of condemning the words, we need to return the concept to the DM’s toolbox. The next time you get a chance, use RAW non-ironically and start bringing it back into civil parlance. Until we do, it will remain the rallying cry of the players who have co-opted it for a very different type of D&D. The rules as written deserve better than players who abuse them.

Posted in DMing | Tagged | 3 Comments

DM Mentors

Posted on 7 September, 2013 by Law

Gnome Stew had an article recently on the concept of the GM Confidant, which is a GM that assists another GM with the campaign without actually participating. A confidant is there to discuss ideas, add to existing concepts or create them wholesale, and otherwise expand the GM’s horizons beyond what one person can manage. Plots, monsters, world-building, NPCs, anything can be bounced off a confidant to get another side of it.

It’s a neat idea, though one of the comments pointed out my biggest concern with it:

The challenge is, once you have a confidant who understands all those things, you’ll want to make that person a player in your game! My few confidants have all been people whom I would include in my game except there’s some deal-killer: they live too far away for a F2F game, they have a family commitment on the night of the week we play, etc.

There’s another concern that a confidant with a sufficiently strong personality will override the actual GM, essentially running the game by proxy. That might be me seeing hypothetical problems that can’t actually occur, but my view is probably colored by my first-blush opinion of the GM confidant, which is that it shared a lot of ground with something I’ve been mulling over lately.

All told I haven’t been GMing for too terribly long, a bit under a decade. I’m not one of the old hats who have been running D&D since the red box. Still, even in the time I have, I’ve seen a startling number of people whose first campaign was their last campaign. Some completed their DM debuts, but most burned out long before the story reached any sort of conclusion. I don’t know if it was the pressures of coming up with something new and fresh every week, or the trouble in coordinating the game without being able to sit back for a few minutes like a player can, or the hazard of trying to kill people within melee range of them, or what. I expect it was some combination of all of these, along with other stresses I’m missing.

Which led me to thinking: what if there was some way to spread out those stresses so they didn’t fall as heavily and as immediately on the DM? What if there was a way to put some onus on somebody more experienced at handling it, long enough for a first-time DM to find their voice?

For those of you who haven’t read the title of the post, I’m talking about a type of GM confidant called a DM mentor*. A DM running his or her first campaign would invite another DM to act as their confidant, helping with fleshing out ideas and filling in any holes that may exist (and need to be filled). But a mentor goes beyond just discussing the creative bits of the campaign. A mentor also helps with the mechanics of DMing itself: challenge level, pacing, time management, personality management, all the bits that books like the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the GameMastery Guide think they can teach but that really have to be learned.

I think the mentor should play in the campaign with the explicit expectation that they’ll provide guidance during the session and critique afterward. This also allows them to push things a little harder; if the players get to stagnation or boredom or frustration or arguing and the DM isn’t sure how to respond, the mentor can react live rather than talking about it later.

This is why I worried about the confidant overriding the original DM, because they’re a warm body at the table that even the DM is looking to for guidance. A mentor has to go in knowing that they’re acting in an advisory capacity, not to challenge the DM but to foster their ability to make decisions. I’m pretty sure that if your confidant undermines your confidence, that’s ironic. Over time the mentor needs to pull away, gradually becoming an ordinary player once the DM gets their footing.

The GM confidant is a good idea, but it’s more for experienced GMs who already know how to run a table and just want another creative voice helping to build their side of things. Conversely a DM mentor is only for new DMs who want a little help making sure their first campaign isn’t their last. Not everyone needs one, but I wish I’d had one when I put my first campaign together and I wish I’d been one for some of the one-and-done DMs I’ve met. Maybe then I could have become their confidant a few years down the road.

* – Please forgive the GM/DM disparity. This is a blog about D&D, after all.

Posted in DMing | 1 Comment

On Inspiration

Posted on 2 August, 2013 by Law

Left Oblique and I go back and forth a lot on what systems, players, DMs, and gaming in general are and should be. A lot of it comes down to simulationism versus narrativism, but it’s not always that clear-cut. One conversation we had recently was about what a system allows players to do versus what it encourages players to do. There are bits and pieces of my side of the discussion all over the blog, and the most relevant post from LO’s side is here: Why system matters (a brief example)

There’s a particular section I find somewhat prophetic:

The key is deciding first what kind of experience you want to have at the table, and creating rules that support that…instead of saying, “We need to discard D&D and make something new that encourages role-playing”, all [the designers] need to do is decide on what they want the core of the RP experience to be and add sufficient rules to support it. Consider the “bonds” system from Dungeon World, for example. You could lay this over the top of any edition of D&D to give the players incentive to have their characters interact in complex ways, without otherwise changing the rules.

Compare that to last week’s Legends and Lore, where Mike Mearls brings up a system called “inspiration”. In short, inspiration is binary: you either have it or you don’t. When you role-play, the DM can grant you inspiration, which you can use for a +2 to some roll that is related to your role-play (or isn’t; it’s a little vague).

Inspiration fades quickly (“Don’t I know it” says my inner writer), so the incentive isn’t to sit on it until a crucial moment. The most mechanically advantageous use of inspiration seems to be getting it and using it as rapidly as possible, which means acting in character as often and as thoroughly as possible. Alternatively, you can get inspiration by “bringing the game to life, keeping the action moving, or otherwise making the game more enjoyable for everyone.” It’s not just a bonus for roleplay, it’s a bonus for being a good person at the table.

And that’s kind of my problem with it, and with LO’s stance on it as well. The system itself is fine and does the job it’s designed to do (I imagine). My concern is that we live in a world where it’s necessary.

I’ve played with and DMed for plenty of people in my career. I’ve seen players who treat their characters as faceless bundles of stats, players who run roughshod through games unaware of or unsympathetic toward the way they affect the game for other people, and players who actively cheat for reasons I haven’t been able to understand. I’ve also seen players who treat their characters as living, breathing people, players who sacrifice their own experience for others, and players with respect for the game and the people who play it beyond a simple “we’re on the same team” aesthetic. And I’ve seen a startling number who combine both, like players focused entirely on the stats, ignoring any opportunity for in-character actions or growth, who are still a joy to have at the table. Similarly, I’ve seen players fully immersed in their characters who were still unlikeable drags. The point is that players are a disparate group hard to categorize into any meaningful bundles.

But one of the most common attempts is to put players on an axis of stats versus…well, versus not-stats. I’ve seen this described as role-play versus roll-play, talking versus combat, acting versus numbers, and any number of definitions that don’t fully explain each side or accept the possibility that somebody can do both at once. My personal favorite, perhaps because it’s the most pithy, is quiche versus cheese. But in order to use the least loaded words we can, let’s take a page from Dice of Doom and call them “left” and “right”.

The far left doesn’t need an inspiration mechanic to encourage them to participate in the role-playing aspect of a role-playing game. They do it because it’s entertaining or fulfilling. Good role-play, like good play in general, is in the short term its own reward. In the long term it connects the player to others with the same ideals, which leads to a better time all around. That’s not to say that this mechanic isn’t for the left as part of 5E’s “something for everyone” high concept, but I can’t see inspiration pulling somebody over the fence. It’s not for them.

Which makes it easy to say that the inspiration mechanic is for the far right, to encourage role-play by giving it a tangible reward, but I don’t see that either. The right will find a way to use or abuse any and all systems available regardless of their intent. If acting in-character gives mechanical benefits, fine. But it doesn’t change that we’re still dealing with players who only have respect for role-play when it gives them numbers.

As I see it, inspiration is for the people in the middle. These are the players who either don’t have a strong opinion on this scale or who actively try to stay between extremes. Many of these players are new, or at least that’s the explicit intention behind 5E. Inspiration is there to push these players toward the left, because the designers know that the books themselves have a focus on rules that leans to the right.

My argument is that the focus on rules isn’t a bad thing. The deep, heart-of-hearts core of a role-playing system is only to provide a method for conflict resolution; beyond that it’s all people sitting around a table and playing make-believe within the restrictions of that method. D&D has lots of ways to resolve lots of conflicts, usually using dice, and that’s what the rules do. But it’s up to the DM and the players to decide what conflicts are worth resolving, often using methods beyond the rules, and that’s role-play. I don’t see how adding rules for non-rules enhances the non-rules.

Say that I have a fighter. He has a bond with the cleric, and he gets a +2 whenever he’s doing something to help the cleric. This will encourage him to help the cleric, yes. To an outside observer, it’s more clear that the fighter is protecting the cleric. But a player on the left will help the cleric regardless of whether there’s an incentive. A player on the right will do it only because of the incentive. Everybody is still acting the way they always were. We’ve added something to the system to encourage role-play, and nothing has actually changed.

All that’s happened is that we now have a “reminder” for people in the middle. It tells the player “Ah, I’ve decided that my character should act this way, and there’s an opportunity to act this way.” It’s no different from dedicating a section of the character sheet to bonds or goals or allegiances. The rules benefit is completely ancillary to the aim of the mechanic, which is to encourage role-play. But role-play for the sake of stats isn’t role-play at all, or at least it’s not a role-play I want to see encouraged. It’s just a means to an end, and that end is exactly what role-play isn’t.

So we are teaching some role-play to players who are new to the game or don’t have a strong opinion. But we’re teaching them to expect a reward for it. When that happens, there’s a chance that we’ll instill a love of role-play, but there’s a greater chance that they’ll see role-play without rewards as something not worth the effort. I don’t want to see role-play become just another feat choice or optional system to be ignored, and presenting it that way isn’t doing anyone any favors.

Posted in Commentary, DMing | 3 Comments

Making Death Interesting

Posted on 28 July, 2013 by Law

I’ve died six times.

Given the amount of time I’ve been playing D&D, it’s a little surprising that I’ve only died six times. One was from a TPK during the first session of a campaign, and I decided that maybe that DM and I weren’t going to be a good fit. One was from a paralyzation spell that allowed no save followed by a coup de grace (if you want to hear this story, check it out at I Podcast Magic Missile when it becomes available). The other four were in campaigns run by the same DM. I’m still in his campaigns, so he must be doing something right.

On the other hand, I’ve killed characters lots* of times during my DMing career. So maybe I owe karmically.

The point is that I’ve seen a lot of character death, and I’ve seen a lot of ways to handle it. One of my favorites from a player standpoint is reincarnate, which brings a character back to life in a new body. New voice, new fingerprints, probably new ability scores, and especially new race. I had a sorcerer die and come back as a bugbear, which is an unambiguous improvement. It convinced the character that he was something special, opened role-play opportunities, and provided numerical bonuses in a way that made the character more fun but didn’t touch his core competency (blowing things up) or threaten the roles and intents of the other characters.

In a campaign I was running, I killed a different sorcerer. He was an ifrit, a fire elemental race, and he used fire spells appropriately. Upon reincarnation he came back as an oread, an earth elemental race. It was a slight penalty because his spells weren’t as damaging, but he took to it with gusto by only learning new spells that he could reskin as earth-based. The character’s power level changed laterally, but it gave flavor to the character and made him more than just the explosion sidekick.

On the other side, one of my characters rose from the dead spontaneously after a few days. She was a fledgling god, so death was just an inconvenience while she waited for a new body to be built from nature stuff. The party waited for her by a tree for a little while, and she popped up with her equipment and went on her merry way. Favorful? Very. Convenient? Somewhat. Interesting? Not terribly.

Even reincarnate isn’t perfect here. A Strength-based fighter who comes back as a bugbear has a huge benefit over one that comes back as a halfing. A cat burglar who changes into a centaur is in serious trouble. In both cases, being a monster can have long-term repercussions that make for interesting role-play, but not when it comes at the expense of the character concept.

(Note to self: play the hard-drinking, surly, axe-shield-and-full-plate elf with a backstory that includes being reincarnated from a dwarf and shunned from his or her community. Bonus points if they’re a cleric of a dwarf god who has no idea when to do with the character. Alternately, the curious trickster orc alchemist who used to be a gnome. Take that, ethnonormativity!)

But on the other hand, I feel that there needs to be some penalty at all. 4E’s raise dead allows you to revive a character with a ritual and sufficient payment, and the only result is that they take a −1 penalty to d20 roles for three milestones. Depending on the campaign, this could take years (unlikely) or one day (also unlikely, but less so). The rules recommend two milestones per day, so on average a player is right as rain two days after dying. The cost does increase by a factor of ten at each tier, but income increases by a factor of twenty-five. Pathfinder’s raise dead is only slightly better, giving you a −1 or -2 penalty that lasts for at least a week, more if you can’t afford to fix it, but the cost is trivial for high-level players. At least 3E docked you a level.

If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because I discussed character death exactly one year ago, but I think it’s a topic that deserves extra mention. It’s the sort of make-or-break event that can determine whether a player enjoys the game and how the campaign will continue. An expensive, automatic revival says something different about a campaign than a free revival that requires an extensive quest. Given how my campaigns lately have been running, I’m starting to lean more and more away from the quest solution, since that requires that the campaign itself take an immediate backseat so a new quest can happen before everybody gets to play again. Instead, I’m liking the fast revival with permanent or semipermanent side effects.

One of the neater ideas I’ve found came up recently in a guest article on Gnome Stew, What Damage Means. It suggests that players come back from the dead without any fancy magic, but with some sort of permanent mental or physical flaw based on the manner of their death. The character didn’t really die, you see. They were beaten to within an inch of their life and survived, though not undamaged. For example, a player killed by a fireball develops a fear of fire, or a hatred toward evokers, or full-body scarring, or a vulnerability to future fire damage. It means the players gets back in the game quickly and without a huge expenditure, but they’re changed somehow and get the chance to play somebody who’s had a brush with death.

I tried this once a few years ago. I had a player who died to a cold spell, so I offered them a change to come back with (what amounted to) vulnerable 5 cold. Since this was in a nicer era of my DMing style, I also gave them resist 5 fire to compensate. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the player had a hissy fit at the very concept of dealing with the long-term penalty, and we ended up scrapping the whole idea. I think a lot of players would be fine with the idea of taking the flaw, especially if they can go on some quest to remove it, but there are some people who will reject the entire notion, especially if it’s not made very clear beforehand that this is how death will work.

Which makes for an interesting point. It’s generally proper to inform the players that the rules of death are different from rules-as-written, but it’s not always appropriate for the characters to know. Not everybody has had a near-death experience, and if the rules are applied inconsistently (or appear to be inconsistent: “My father and the campaign villain were in the same train crash. How come the gods only helped the evil one?”) it creates uncertainly in the character’s minds. It makes the world a bit more mysterious, and as long as it’s not overused (Hello, X-Men!) it gives you an out to bring back players and NPCs when it’s good for the campaign or story.

This is as good a place as any to mention out that the Eight Arms setting (now) has a three-death limit. Die once, you can come back. Die twice, you owe Death a favor or come back wrong somehow. Die thrice, clearly fate has an opinion about you. There will be a interesting and logical reason for this as soon as I come up with one.

* — Two in Hyrule, three in the Monster Campaign, two in Wrath of the Cosmic Accountant, one in the Tower Campaign, and six across all Eight Arms campaigns. Add five if you count the planned TPK in the Monster Campaign, subtract one if you think almost-killing the robot doesn’t count as a death. I’m not counting Delve Night because I couldn’t even guess how many players I’ve killed there. Probably millions.

Posted in DMing, House Rules | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Ultimate Campaign

Posted on 3 July, 2013 by Law

Ultimate Campaign is a curious book. It almost doesn’t feel like a book at all, but rather a bunch of small books all put together with the only unifying theme being “these things are kind of neat, but fully optional”. This makes it both disjointed and expansive, such that there’s something for everyone but it’s hard to argue that everything in the book is useful to any single person.

I guess what it most feels like is Unearthed Arcana, high praise indeed, but that book flowed from option to option in a logical way. The chapters in Ultimate Campaign mostly escalate from the small-scale to the large, but it’s not always clear how things fit within a given chapter; Chapter 3 is especially egregious given Paizo’s tendency to list options alphabetically rather than logically, which makes it slightly easier to reference but much harder to actually read. Interestingly, Unearthed Arcana feels more organized, but Ultimate Campaign is more organized. I’m not convinced I like it more.

Since it’s really four books, I think it makes the most sense to discuss it as four books.

Chapter 1: Character Background

There’s a lot of the Hero Builder’s Guidebook in here (note: this will become a running theme), but it’s a lot more expansive. It starts with a description of how to go about creating a character backstory, though much of the chapter is table after table of potential background information: homeland, family, childhood events, class background, and so forth. There’s another very large section with new traits, which will excite people who like traits, and story feats, which are awesome.

At first glance I saw all the tables the same way I saw them in the HBG, which has something of a bad reputation in our gaming circle: a crutch for players who can’t come up with a history on their own. But Paizo has this covered:

Use this tool to inspire creativity rather than as hard-and-fast rules to mandate rigid and seamless character backgrounds. Though the generator provides many foundational details of a character’s background, it takes some creative thought to massage the specifics together.

When read as a play-by-play for character backstories, it’s neat if overblown and it’s awfully helpful to players just getting started. When read as a series of seeds for potential character ideas, it’s a lot more interesting and helpful for players of all experience levels.

Chapter 2: Downtime

There’s a lot of the Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook in here, with a healthy dash of the downtime mechanic some of you may recognize. Most of the chapter is downtime, with activities ranging from “craft mundane items” and “rest” to “lead your kingdom” or “recruit for your own organization”. There are risks and rewards for each action and events that make life more interesting than rolling a d20 once a month.

I’m a little torn on this chapter. I like the idea of downtime on its face because it encourages players to be active in the world rather than sitting around waiting for adventures and it gives them challenges that can’t be overcome by judicious application of fire and shouting. In my reading of it, though, I found more than one way to game the downtime system to get myself a fairly startling amount of return on investment. In the hands of a clever and/or unscrupulous player, there’s a lot of opportunity to mise out reward beyond what the game really expects. But that’s largely true of anything in Pathfinder that a player approaches with gusto, so I don’t think that kills the chapter. In fact, it’s probably why most random events are detrimental rather than beneficial.

The part of the chapter that resembles the Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook gets a pass, mostly because that book is awesome but partly because this version does away with stronghold spaces and allows room size to be within a range. Turns out not all bedrooms are exactly two hundred feet square. Who knew?

Chapter 3: Campaign Systems

There’s a lot of Unearthed Arcana in here, with a focus less on changing magic, classes, races, and other core parts of the game and more on adding pieces that weren’t there before. It’s largely about giving optional rules to things that are usually done freeform: bargaining, forced alignment changes, exploration, playing young people, and so forth. Only a few things really warrant standout mention.

First, retraining. For some reason this mechanic had to wait until Player’s Handbook 2 to be introduced into 3.5E while 4E was sensible enough to make it part of the Core rules. It means that a player isn’t married to a choice for their entire character life, which subtly encourages them to try new things rather than taking the most mechanically advantageous option at all times. If you’re one of those players who does take the most mechanically advantageous option, you can switch out something good at low levels in exchange for something better at high levels (also, if you’re that type of player, maybe this isn’t the blog for you).

Second, reputation (and I guess honor, which is like reputation with an alignment restriction). This is a great idea, applicable to most campaigns, with real actionable causes and usable rewards. There’s even a piece of action points (the 3.5E version) where players spent prestige to do things ordinary characters can’t do. Think about that: it lets you trade in past awesome for present awesome! It’s something like the best optional rule Paizo can fit on six pages. And it should never, ever, be read by players. It’s a fantastic tool for DMs that should be done entirely behind the scenes, with players only partially aware of the neat things they can do once they’re famous enough. If you’re not planning on running a campaign, do me a favor and skip pages 180 to 185.

Chapter 4: Kingdoms and War

There’s a lot of Heroes of Battle in here, at least in the second half of the chapter. Mass combat is something we’ve been messing around with for a while now, and we’ve come up with three or four different ways to handle is. Paizo’s mechanic is about as good as any (and not just because it’s real close to mine), though it seems to need a lot of setup and math before a session to make things run smoothly at the table.

The mass combat feels a little like “We didn’t know where else to publish this”, because the chapter itself is about founding, managing, expanding, and defending a kingdom. This isn’t about being an agent for royalty locally or abroad; this is about being the ruler of your own kingdom and all the problems, limitations, and opportunities that provides. The rules are startlingly thorough given the amount of leeway they allow, and there isn’t a lot I wanted that they didn’t cover (there’s even a small bit on building your own capital city.) I feel this chapter actually works best when it’s in the player’s hands since so little of it requires the DM’s direct intervention, but there’s a ton of room for discussion and decision making, typically done without an ounce of rolling.

I don’t think Ultimate Campaign is a book that every player should have. I do think it’s a book every gaming group should have, probably in the DM’s hands. There’s a lot of great stuff it it, but it’s not something I see players perusing on their off time or referencing too much mid-game.

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On the Magic Item Compendium

Posted on 25 June, 2013 by Law

Oh Lordy they’re doing it again.

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On Legendary Monsters

Posted on 22 June, 2013 by Law

Vagrant Story is a video game from a million years ago, back when Square Enix was just Square. It details the adventures of a young man with ridiculous hair and 76% of a pair of pants as he explores the area under a city and hits skeletons with a telephone pole. I didn’t actually play it, and anybody who did probably figured that out one sentence ago.

The reason I mention it is its battle system. Ashley could approach an enemy and attack a startling number of times, landing a dozen hits before an enemy can even respond. The limiting factor is that each attack lowers his accuracy and defense. Swinging once or twice means Ashley’s probably fine, but swinging a hundred times means most of the attacks were worthless and Ashley has armor made mostly of wishes. The exact balance isn’t fully relevant; what matters is that Ashley’s attacks were likely to vastly outnumber his opponent’s.

During Delve Night we began exploring this style of character in 4E. Our takeaway was that Ashley was really, really fast, but whenever he exploited his speed it caused problems. The first time we tried it, Ashley was the actual enemy and he got a full turn immediately after each player. His accuracy penalties ended up not being sufficient for balance, but we continued refining the mechanic over time. It turns out that an ordinary enemy with Solo-level hit points and the Ashley Riot mechanic is pretty close to a Solo’s power level even without changing its powers to the sort a Solo normally has. It also means that the creature gets less powerful as PCs are knocked out, because it gets five attacks per round against five PCs but only two attacks against two PCs.

It’s a delicate mechanic that has a pretty serious chance to kill a party unless handled well. We’ve had our share of TPKs caused by it and an equal number of skin-of-our-teeth encounters. But it makes a monster with the mechanic feel very special, and it adds a level of challenge sufficient for even overpowered characters with jaded players.

I told you that story to tell you this one.

A recent Legends & Lore managed to bring up both something that I love with all my heart and something I hate with the passion of a thousand suns. It’s about the Legendary mechanic, the idea that there are certain creatures that are inherently boss monsters, more powerful than everything else even at their own power level. It’s similar to the Solo mechanic from 4E, but harkens back more to an early design version of it to make monsters that aren’t just heavy but also legitimately challenging.

This idea is really, really neat. In short, Legendary creatures have a certain number of times per day or per round that they can opt not to play D&D. They can act on other player’s turns, ignore effects, bypass player abilities, and so on. It means that both normal characters and overpowered characters, the type that exploit the ruleset, don’t harm them as much because the ruleset doesn’t apply to them in the same way.

Even before the Ashley Riot mechanic this is something we’ve toyed with a lot. For example, monsters generally shouldn’t have an ability that says “once per day as an effect that requires no action, regain all your hit points” because all is does it double the length of the combat. But for certain bosses (or even the occasional mook) this makes sense narratively. It’s the cleric who gets her second wind and chooses to fight despite her failing body, or the fighter who sheds his collapsing armor and rejoins the combat as a nimble swashbuckler, or the robot who intentionally overrides its safety limitations. Unless the players are on their last legs and can’t survive another round, it’s a fun story idea to make a boss feel more like a boss.

On a smaller scale, I’ve been known to arbitrarily give this power to a monster mid-combat:

Fix it fix it fix it! (no action, at-will)
Trigger: The monster fails a saving throw against an effect at the end of its turn.
Effect: The monster succeeds on the saving throw and loses one action point.

A lot of the time I’m willing to give up one potential action later if it means I can shrug off an effect now. Every once in a while I really need that action point later, and I’m sure to point it out. The players like seeing me spend the action point and knowing they’ve cost me a resource, but at the same time I don’t have to spend another round stunned, immobilized, or otherwise uninteresting.

But this is something I can decide on the fly based on the pace of combat, the status of the players, and the mood at the table. It’s great for a subjective in-the-moment assessment of play, but it gets to be a problem in the objective design:

The specific mechanics can range from a free pass on saving throws to dictating outcomes of attack rolls or checks, but it does so in a limited manner. The deck is stacked in a legendary creature’s favor, but the game is not completely rigged. You can eventually stun one, but only with a persistent effort.

This may look like a paragraph, but it’s actually one sentence repeated three times (even repeating the same sentence structure):

This monster is going to cheat, but we promise it’s interesting.

Cheating within the rules isn’t the problem it sounds like on its face. Heck, most feats are acceptable ways to cheat. Your hit points are always defined by level, though Toughness lets you violate this. Your initiative is always d20 plus your Dexterity modifier, but Danger Sense or Improved Initiative violate this. It’s a small-scale built-in cheat, which doesn’t make it much of a cheat at all and in fact makes it a design decision.

The problem is that it’s too easy to go overboard when you’re free-forming monsters. It may be flavorful, but the players who expect the game to work a certain way might not appreciate that the monster gets to ignore their armor just because he’s great. If I spend two rounds trying to poison a dragon and he completely ignores it, what I have I spent two rounds actually doing? Should I keep trying it, or should I give up on it and try something else? What if my character is poison-based? There’s a fine line between “challenge the players, not the characters” and “frustrate the characters and the players”, a line that the Legendary mechanic is designed to toe.

As an example, look at the dragon linked in the article. The fact that it can uses its breath weapon every round is only the beginning of its power. Four times per round, it can make a tail attack at the start or end of another player’s turn. Combined with its normal three attacks per round, this means that the dragon can make seven attacks between the healer’s turns, and this dragon in particular specifically attacks the weakest party members first. This can be incredibly dramatic, forcing the players to fight hard and survive by the skin of their teeth. It can also kill a player before their first turn, so that players sits around while everybody else suffers the same fate one by one. This dragon (and as far as we know most if not all legendary creatures) has a built-in Ashely Riot mechanic, which is enough to make me very worried.

D&D is built with a slight edge to the players. When that edge shifts, it makes for interesting, fun design that comes dangerously close to annoying, terrible design.

And that dovetails into the part I hate: the example is a dragon.

My distaste for dragons isn’t exactly a well-kept secret. The explicit conceit that all dragons are legendary is another just another brick in the wall between D&D as designed and interesting gameplay. See, all dragons in the world have the ability to violate the action economy or ignore even the strongest abilities of players. It’s a thing that happens because dragons are great, and they’re positioned obviously and solely to be the movers and shakers in any and all campaigns. This is a trait all dragons get not because they’re experienced (like elder elementals) or commanding (like fiend lords) or chosen (like a monster welding an artifact), but because they’re dragons, and the word “dragon” is a sufficient explanation on its own regardless of age, power, or accomplishment.

It’s an even more irritating version of the “all dragons are solos” design in 4E, which required that a dragon was always encountered alone and must be a serious fight, because there’s no possibility that a dragon in and of itself could be uninteresting. The best thing about dragons is that they’re subject to the only template in 4E that makes a creature weaker.

Dragons are positioned to be big scary monsters that DMs want to throw at players and that players want to meet, befriend, or kill. If every dragon uses the legendary mechanic as dangerously as the example, there’s a very good chance that dragons will cause TPKs. This is especially true for the inexperienced DMs that 5E is designed to court, but TPKs are rarely fun or interesting even in the hands of experienced DMs. There’s a dangerous confluence between “Dragons are great, and you should use them.” and “Dragons have a high chance of causing a frustrating play experience.”

In limited doses the legendary mechanic is a really neat idea, giving some structure to the freeform way we’ve been using to make combat interesting (a running theme in 5E). But it’s startlingly close to giving DMs a justifiable way to kill their players by ignoring the D&D’s built-in assumptions and ruleset, and that’s a real iffy design goal.

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Underpowered: Healer

Posted on 19 June, 2013 by Law

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 Law

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 Law

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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